Among the 50 or 60 fans waiting behind portable barricades at the stage door to the Plymouth Theater after the Feb. 4 performance of “Brooklyn the Musical,” there were quite a few who had been there before. For some — the parvenus — it was only their second or third time; they waited nervously, fiddling with Sharpie pens and camera phones, rereading their Playbills by streetlight. For others, the line and the show had become a regular part of their lives.
One of those was Dan Yoffe, a slight Manhattan 9th-grader who wears a gray T-shirt stenciled with the BKLYN logo whenever he attends. The cast members, emerging one by one, instantly recognized him, each taking a moment to sign his program — again.
Though Dan has been to the actual borough of Brooklyn only twice since moving to New York from Israel three years ago, this was his 10th visit to “Brooklyn,” which he had first read about on the Internet and now pays tribute to with his Web site (www.brooklynthemusical.info). Despite his familiarity with the material, he’s never tired of it. Seated near him in the theater earlier that evening, I was able to watch him bop to the bluesy score and laugh heartily at jokes he had heard many times already. With only five actors onstage, and an audience that hovers between 50 percent and 70 percent of capacity, “Brooklyn” can be astonishingly intimate.
Since repeat fans such as Dan often buy the $26.25 rush seats, some of which are in the first two orchestra rows, that intimacy can be a two-way street. The fans notice everything, including flubs, while the performers can actually recognize the fans from the stage. Eden Espinosa, who plays the title character, said she sees them “mouthing all the words and dialogue, mimicking our moves and the little `isms’ we do for our characters.”
The commercial theater increasingly relies on repeat visitors. Surveys conducted by the producers of “Les Miserables,” “Miss Saigon” and “Phantom of the Opera” suggest that 40 percent of the audiences for those long-running musicals had seen the show before. For most, that probably meant returning one or two times, to take a friend or to see a new performer in a familiar role. But among repeat customers there is a repeat elite — “Rentheads” at “Rent,” “Q-Tips” at “Avenue Q”– who demonstrate an extraordinary level of commitment. The cast members of “Stomp,” the percussion-and-dance show that has been running off-Broadway for 10 years, know one of their repeaters so well that they welcome him from the stage: “Hey, there’s Bowlegged Lou!”
Lou, a music producer and member of the hip-hop group Full Force, figures he has seen “Stomp” more than 100 times, always at full price and never alone. “I’ve spent at least $10,000, not counting the programs and CDs,” he said. “It fills me with so much joy and positivity, sometimes I feel like I’m going to cry — I know I sound like a sissy.”
Fans like Bowlegged Lou do not need a reason to feed their habit and are not looking for something different each time. The experience itself, preferably unchanged, is what these fans want; if “Stomp” or “Brooklyn” makes them feel happy, why not keep going?
A desirable segment
And now that more Broadway musicals are falling into the “Brooklyn” category — not hits, but possibly salvageable — such fans are becoming a desirable segment of the audience. Because they often transfer their affections in predictable patterns, following performers, and even themes, from show to show, they make easy targets for marketers. Many of the returnees at “Brooklyn” got there from “Wicked,” where Espinosa was a standby for Idina Menzel. And many got to “Wicked” from “Rent,” where Menzel was a featured performer.
The three shows are also connected by their big-belt, pop-rock musical idiom, their depictions of youthful angst in an uncaring world and their celebration of underdogs: East Village bohemians, an unpopular green witch and the picturesque homeless street performers of “Brooklyn.”
Of the three, “Brooklyn” is the most underdoggy in more ways than one, and that may be part of the attraction for its frequent attendees. They’re needed. With or without its many repeat fans, “Wicked” would continue to sell out the 1,809-seat Gershwin; it has reliably topped $1.1 million in net weekly receipts since it opened in October 2003. “Brooklyn,” which opened to mixed notices in October at the 1,042-seat Plymouth, usually grosses around $300,000 a week, just enough to keep its head above water. In that context, Benjamin Mordecai, the show’s managing producer, believes the repeat fans make a bottom-line difference. “I recognize we did not get fabulous reviews, and I think conventional wisdom would have thought the show would not be alive today,” he said. “But our wraps” — the total tickets sold each day for any performance — “were even stronger in January than in December, and I’m convinced that the strength behind this is the non-traditional groupies. We’re trying to make sure we’re in their faces so they keep coming back.”
Because so many of those non-traditional groupies are young, the producers have put a great deal of their marketing effort into the Internet. Damian Bazadona, who is the Webmaster for the show’s official site (www.brooklynthemusical.com) and has also worked on Web campaigns for “Mamma Mia!” and “Avenue Q,” was amazed by the fans’ response. The “Brooklyn” cast’s video diaries have been viewed some 47,000 times since the site went live in September, and the songs offered as MP3 files have been downloaded 245,000 times. “We can’t control whether people will love the show,” Bazadona said, “but if they do, we try to use the Web as a vehicle to keep them involved and coming back. Hopefully, we’re formulating a cult.” What that seems to mean, aside from Web-only rewards and incentives, is the chance, on the “My Brooklyn” page, for anyone who has seen the show to write a “review” and have her photo posted. There are now almost 300 such reviews, none using phrases like “aggressively maudlin” and “theatrical hell” that some of the professional critics favored.
Actress connection
One of those 300 reviews (“I laughed, cried and so many other emotions all-in-one!”) belongs to Ashley Pines. She’s the kind of patron the producers are seeking: a theater-mad 17-year-old girl from Long Island, sophisticated enough to make her way into Manhattan most weekends but unjaded enough to enjoy a musical that overflows with earnestness. “Brooklyn” didn’t need to find her though; Pines found “Brooklyn.” Already a fan of Espinosa, Pines saw the show twice on its second day of previews, and has since returned nine times.
Pines has only paid full price (which ranges from $65 to $95) twice; she usually buys rush tickets or uses discount coupons. “Plus, I own half the merchandise from the show”: CDs, shirts, posters, a hat. She’s even decorated her basement with ropes representing the boxing ring in which Brooklyn’s nemesis, Paradice, sings the raunchy song “Love Me Where I Live.”
It may be hard for a seasoned theatergoer to understand why a show like “Brooklyn” would attract this kind of adoration. Partly it’s because “Brooklyn” so straightforwardly seeks it; there’s not an ironic bone in its body. Besides, shows need not be great or even good to be loved; greatness may be an impediment.
With its handmade feeling and its talented but not famous cast, “Brooklyn” seems to suggest a theatrical world one could actually enter.
“To be able to actually meet one of your idols!” Pines says. “It’s incredible. It makes me feel like I’m a part of something.”
In fact, Pines, who hopes to study theatrical production in college, has become a bit of an insider, helping the show’s producers from time to time with promotional activities like bringing the authors to her school for an assembly in November. But not all repeat fans are aiming to get into the business. Susan Van Praag, who is in her mid-20s and works as a records assistant in the financial industry, has seen “Brooklyn” 12 times — mostly, she said, “when I needed to make myself feel better at the end of a bad day.”
When I asked Van Praag what she will do when “Brooklyn” finally closes, she took a breath and eventually said, “I’m trying not to think about that time.” Yoffe and Pines are worried, too — he maintains an anxiously annotated chart of the weekly sales figures on his Web site — but, at least on Feb. 4, they were compensated for the sadness of the curtain coming down by the knowledge that they already had tickets to see the show again.
