Off Broadway, Labor Tension Heats Up

Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out about the push to unionize backstage crews Off Broadway. We’ll also get details on the Trump administration’s seizure of $80 million that was supposed to cover some of the city’s expenses for housing migrants.

For more than a month, striking stage crews have idled the nonprofit Atlantic Theater Company, where the musicals “Spring Awakening” and “Kimberly Akimbo” ran before they moved to Broadway and won Tony Awards. The strike is part of a unionization push that could change the economics of Off Broadway, which was hobbled by the coronavirus pandemic and has yet to recover. I asked Michael Paulson, The New York Times’s theater reporter, to explain where things stand.

You write that unionization will change the economics of theaters in New York. Will unionization drive nonprofit theater companies out of business? Can nonprofit theater companies afford to pay what unions demand?

Those are all questions that different people have different answers to. This unionization effort is taking place at for-profit and nonprofit entities, but nonprofits are having a particularly hard time right now. They’re doing fewer shows. The number of shows eligible for the Lucille Lortel Awards this season is roughly half what it was five years ago. Costs have gone up since the pandemic and, if labor costs rise, that will be another financial challenge.

But the people who work backstage say the salaries they are being paid are not enough to live on. They say that just as theaters face financial challenges, so do workers, and the system needs to figure out how to pay living wages.