Peter Lathan has a blog on his excellent website The British Theatre Guide. I responded to this post, and am cross-posting my response here.
I agree with View From The Stalls that this kind of 'reality' TV is good for encouraging those who may not go and see such a musical to buy tickets and tell their friends, because they feel they have some vested interest in the creation of the production. I also agree that audiences are influenced by the choices the TV producer makes in terms of editing and such.
However, I also agree with Peter that I would rather a panel of experts chose my brain surgeon than choose him/her myself based on my serious lack of knowledge about brain surgery (and, presumably, at a time when my brain isn't working all that well).
But I do have faith that the spread of the public's ability to choose that has been generated by the current incarnation of the internet (about which music, videos, news articles, and so on are worthwhile and which are not) will also result in the public being able to make more and more informed choices due to the similarly wide-ranging amount of information made available by the very experts who have been making the choices up to now.
More than that, the experts are not always purely interested in the enjoyment-value of a song, or the informative content of a news article. In many cases, online, for the public, that's exactly how we make our decisions.
I'm not advocating a lessening of the value placed on an expert's opinion. But we must remember that the audience of a musical are an expert at being an audience. Any theatrical presentation would not be a theatrical presentation without the presence and collaboration of an audience. (There is no sound when no hands clap.)
This is the same for me as librettist having an opinion about casting, even though I am not the director, whose job it is to ultimately make a call about casting. I would be outraged if the director of a first production of a brand new show completely ignored my opinion on the characters and cast totally against what I thought I'd written. It is, in fact, fairly standard with many theatre companies producing a new show to allow me a clause in my contract that gives me right of approval over director, and I wouldn't work with anyone who had radically different ideas to mine. However, if they collaborate with me and take my intentions into consideration, I will always fight for their right to make that final call. It's a collaboration.
Andrew Lloyd Webber presumably has the ability to tell the TV producers that the way the public is voting will result in something that would actually be harmful for the production, at which point something would be done. We may not find out about it, but I guarantee you he's not investing that much money in a production and then letting the public have absolute say. Long-runners are where recoupment happens. Reality shows won't guarantee an audience indefinitely. As was pointed out, after a few months they can fire the person hired and re-cast anyway.
I was just discussing these TV shows with a friend of mine who is studying to be a musical theatre performer. He's writing a paper on the 'triple-threat' actor (one who can dance, sing and act) and I suggested that the state of arts funding is directly responsible for the kind of skills a performer requires to work in musical theatre.
When companies choose to do musical revivals to guarantee them an audience through affection and product-recognition, they produce shows that were written in an era when being a triple-threat was the norm: Carousel, The Sound of Music, West Side Story. Thus they require a cast with those abilities.
When companies choose to do small-scale productions for budgetry reasons, and have a cast of actor-musicians, they require a triple-threat of a different kind - and perhaps even a quadruple threat, unless we wish to lose dancing from musicals entirely. They cast those shows accordingly.
When companies choose to do cross-genre productions that include another performance skill (eg: the puppetry in Avenue Q or the roller-skating in Starlight Express, or even the drumming in Stomp) because the novelty of it will attract more bums on seats, they require perfomers with even more skills. Admittedly, they have production 'schools' for these during rehearsals... but if you already have some knowledge of that skill as a performer, plus you're as good at everything else as other people auditioning, who gets the part?
So, effectively, as in the old days when you learnt to sing, dance and act equally well, and to the best of your ability, the state of funding in the arts is having a direct effect on the amount and variety of work available to performers, the amount of training they have to do and skills they have to perfect, and therefore the pressure on drama schools to include as much as possible into the curriculum and hire more members of staff who are experts in more disciplines.
That money has to come from somewhere, and as per tradition in the arts because of lack of funding, the people who are the most vulnerable are hit the hardest. As Peter so rightly said: the foundation of the pyramid is the one that gets chipped away. More productions start to require actor-musicians, so actors pay money to learn an instrument that they can add to their resume. Drama schools have to charge more, so they put the fees up. Producers have to recoup their investors' money, so they ask the writers to waive their royalties. Record companies are stung by online file-sharing, so they put outrageous clauses into artists' contracts.
I don't think triple-threaters are a bad thing. I love being able to include dance in my musicals. I didn't hesitate to write puppetry into my current show, and wouldn't hesitate to write in any other skill I thought necessary to enhance the storytelling. But there are consequences of my doing that: people have to spend more money learning skills, or I immediately disbar some actors from ever being in that show, or I create a situation in which my producer asks me to waive my royalties. The consequence of my writing choices is not, and has never been, that the government offers me and my team financial support and encouragement to expand and experiment with the artform.
So what is Reality TV doing for my artform? It's expanding the popularity of it - which is fantastic. It's enabling the public to have more choice, and to potentially make an informed choice by learning what the experts on the panel say - also good, in many ways. But the fact that these shows are revivals draws in a big TV audience - and yet also forces us to produce shows that require triple-threaters, which puts pressure on the industry in many ways. Not a bad thing, except for the fact that the industry cannot, or does not, entirely support itself.
In their defence, I note that the money from phone calls into Any Dream Will Do will be used to fund a musical theatre bursery "with the intention of helping aspiring young performers to further their career ambitions in the area of musical theatre". I would imagine it's quite a lot of money.
I can't imagine it's enough to completely redress the balance.
