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Article Excerpt
I can, within the bounds of corporate and fiscal responsibility, do most anything I want.
(Drabinsky 492)
When Garth Drabinsky wrote those words in his 1995 autobiography, he had conquered showbiz. To the Canadian media and business establishment, he was showbiz. With his productions of The Phantom of Opera, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Sunset Boulevard, and Show Boat (and with Ragtime in development), his company, the Livent Entertainment Corporation of Canada (Livent), had become one the world's leading producers of musical theatre. In 1996, Robert Crew and Dana Flavelle reported in the Toronto Star that Livent accounted for twenty percent of all North American live-theatre box-office sales. Drabinsky had transformed the theatrical market by reconfiguring the system of Broadway production with, as Crew and Flavelle describe, "a company that produces the shows and supports the shows and owns the theatres and develops new shows to put into the loop." The economic scale of Livent's theatre business was unprecedented in Canada: Drabinsky himself claimed in The Globe and Mail that Phantom had generated $340 million in box office sales in Toronto; Joseph pulled in $20.5 million in three Toronto engagements; Sunset Boulevard opened with $10 million in advance sales in 1995; and the Vancouver clone of Show Boat opened with $11 million in advance sales and a weekly gross of $1 million. Garth Drabinsky had transformed Canadian cultural nationhood by showing the corporate community that theatre could be big business and high-yield investment.
In his autobiography, Closer to the Sun, Drabinsky repeatedly emphasizes his drive, persistence, and refusal to accept failure in pursuit of his "dream." His title alludes to Icarus, who, in Drabinsky's retelling, "just gave up too soon. He should have gotten himself another set of wings and taken off again!" (430). The persona that Drabinsky constructs in the book is one of a heroic visionary who has no patience for "the weak" and "the whiners," and there are many who agreed with this self-portrayal. There is no question that Drabinsky's successes came from remarkable personal abilities and that he is an inventive entrepreneur. In a similar vein, there seems to be a connection between the risk-taking personality that enabled him to build a theatrical empire and the financial practices that opened Livent to a corporate takeover, with its subsequent allegations of bookkeeping irregularities that led to Drabinsky's dismissal in 1998 from the company he built and the allegations of fraud that have yet to be resolved.
In the controversial history of Livent, there is another narrative behind the figure of Garth Drabinsky, a narrative that replays the notion of the imagined theatre at a point when transnational capital has produced new models of nationhood. In her study of discourses of nation and the use of "culture" in the rhetoric of national policies, Donna Palmateer Pennee has identified "global capitalism's takeover of, but necessary articulation with, the nation-state" (194) in terms of a shift from "the ideological enemy of the Cold War to the ideology of capital in the onset of the Market Wars" (191). In this era of the Market Wars, Drabinsky's vision of a theatrical business that would enable Canadian producers to "conquer" Broadway enacted a nation understood as a structure of industrial production in which spectacle is both the visible display of power and the commodity by which the market is controlled. In its industrial trajectory, which crossed cultural and financial borders opened by the North American Free Trade Agreement, Livent typified the economic warfare of the late twentieth century, and like industries in other sectors, it used an arsenal of stock issues, leverages, off-shore production, tax-dollar partnerships, and saturation marketing to compete for market share.
IMAGINED BROADWAY
Drabinsky's theatrical nation was enacted in a theatre that was no less imagined than Vincent Massey's and was similarly located in a myth of authenticity. Massey had looked eastwards, across the ocean and history to a vision of European humanism; Drabinsky looked south, to a mythic Broadway that was the pinnacle of theatrical value and success. Drabinsky was by no means the first Canadian to dream of Broadway glory, but he was the first to understand that Broadway can only be conquered through the systems of production that it represents. The greatest heroes of Broadway are not the composers, directors, and performers, but the producers who marshal them.
Drabinsky did, in the end, achieve his fantasy. In his autobiography, he recalls the euphoria he felt when he won a Tony for Kiss of the Spiderwoman: "Nothing else I've won has come close to this. For the rest of my life I can always be introduced as the Tony-award winning producer. Well, that's a nice title to have" (468). When he accepted the award (the first of several), the fantasy of his imagined Broadway--a fantasy of the Great White Way and its romanticized history of the American musical theatre--captured the "real" Broadway, which is no longer an identifiable district, or a contained realm of production, but rather a domain of reception and reward. The real Broadway is wherever you have to go to win a Tony award. Just as a film only needs a screening in Los Angeles to win an Oscar, a Broadway show needs only one performance in New York to win a Tony. Like "Hollywood," "Broadway" is a moment of reception. In contemporary theatre capitalism, Broadway--the arrival in New York and subsequent recognition or failure--is the structure of value which enables the replication of the show as consumer commodity, particularly in touring markets.
Drabinsky's fantasy of Broadway developed long before he and his business partner, Myron Gottlieb, built Livent by leveraging what reporter Mitch Potter has called the "annuity" of their Toronto production of The Phantom of the Opera and the lavish theatre they had built to house it (Toronto Star, 5 Dec. 1998). Drabinsky had ventured into production in New York in the mid-1970s, and although his early efforts had been failures, he was captivated by the mythos of the Broadway producer. In his autobiography, he recalls a visit to the office of Norman Kean, who was then producing Oh Calcutta!:
Tucked away above Edison's auditorium, Norman's office was windowless, airless, and piled high with scripts, programs, and brochures. My eye went immediately to the framed show posters on the wall and, most of all, to the pictures of opening nights and parties at Sardi's. In the middle of the chaos was Norman in his shirt-sleeves, his glasses askew, feverishly working the phones. (127)
This is a legendary image of the Broadway producer, replayed through countless musicals and films, and parodied brilliantly by Zero Mostel in Mel Brook's film (and recent award-winning Broadway revival) The Producers, as huckster, pitchman, and genius. In this imagined Broadway, the successful producer is ruthless and abrasive but childlike in his sentimental love of the theatre. Coming from a business background in film distribution with Cineplex Odeon, Drabinsky seems to have been drawn particularly to a romantic narrative of the transitional period of the early twentieth century, when legendary producers built lavish theatrical palaces to house legitimate theatre, vaudeville, and film. In his preface to his autobiography, he inserts himself in this narrative by thanking "the great impresarios of the past: Zukor, `Roxy' Rothafel, Loew, Ziegfeld, and the countless others whose flamboyant, entrepreneurial spirits taught a young boy how to dream and aspire to greatness" (xvi).
Much of the commentary on Livent credits Drabinsky for revolutionizing the systems of Broadway production by developing an integrated system of show development and theatre booking on the model of the Hollywood studio system developed in the 1920s by Adolph Zukor. As Drabinsky himself writes,
In Zukor's Paramount, production, distribution, and exhibition were now merged to create a vertically integrated company that would become the model structure of the studio system: (and later the model I used when constructing Cineplex Odeon). (63)
Like Zukor and Loew before him, Drabinsky understood that the economics and productive systems of film and live theatre production and distribution were functionally the same. His heroes were the industrial magnates who had used the economic power of the film distribution circuits they built to shape the product they wanted to distribute. Like them, Drabinsky understood that while Hollywood may have supplanted the theatre as an industry, at the same time it encouraged a popular taste for spectacle that would continue to create a market for live theatre.
Cultural folklore conventionally assumes that the rise of film distribution had spelled the end of the live theatre business in the 1920s and turned theatre into a minority niche market. To a limited extent, this is true: as Jack Poggi has noted in his economic history of American theatre, the number of touring companies playing in the US declined from 239 in 1900 to 41 in 1918 (30). The decline of the theatre business was due to many factors: in addition to film, Poggi suggests over-expansion of theatrical touring companies (leading to deterioration of quality), increased labour costs, and increased social mobility as a result of the automobile. Working class audiences moved towards film for reasons of cost, novelty, and availability, and theatre owners converted vaudeville palaces to cinemas because, as Poggi points out, "from an economic point of view, the development of the motion-picture industry was ... a more convenient and less expensive means of distributing the product" (261).
In his...
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