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Hamilton Producer Jeffrey Seller: Live Theater Is the Antidote To Digital Overload (recode.net)
As more people come online and get hold of smartphones, we are witnessing a generation that is reliant on their phones to get news, entertainment, and educational resources among other things. They watch movies and TV shows on Netflix and other services, and they listen to music on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube. Naturally, you would think that people in the Broadway theater business must be threatened that nobody will physically attend their show anymore, but that's not necessarily the case, at least not with everyone. Take Jeffrey Seller, for example, the producer of Broadway megahit Hamilton refuses to fold to the virtual reality laden world, and he has numbers on his side. From a Recode article (you can also found an hour-long podcast on this there): The success of "Hamilton," which is sold out in New York through May 2017 and will soon spread to Chicago, San Francisco and London, has convinced Seller that demand for a real, non-digital experience is stronger than ever. He said 13 million people went to see Broadway shows in the past season, and only 500,000 of those were "Hamilton" attendees. By contrast, when Seller first made a splash as the co-producer of "Rent" in 1996, he estimated total Broadway attendance was around eight million to nine million people. "Experiencing art live with friends, with family, with people we love, is so rewarding that people are searching it out amidst the digital age, in which our faces are in our phones seemingly every other hour of the day," he said.Explaining why he thinks that virtual reality cannot completely take over, in a rather crass example, Seller adds, "Do you want to have sex or do you want to have a virtual reality experience of sex?"
I can't help but think there will soon be an Instagram posting of somebody capturing a Pokemon during a performance.
Actually, I want the Virtual Reality experience of sex.
Until you've tried it, don't knock it. VR porn is the best thing ever.
And it lets you experience things you might not ever be able to do in real life, and most importantly, lets you experience it with people or characters or anything you want that is not possible in real life.
You wanna bone that hot night elf? What about that draenei? That succubus? Got a pony fetish? Wanna bend rarity over or twilight sparkle?
It's better than life for real.
"Do you want to have sex or do you want to have a virtual reality experience of sex?"
Both. At the same time.