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?"

Comments

Re:"virtual reality cannot completely take over...

[ranton]

His mistake is believing something that cannot completely take over cannot disrupt an industry. Virtual sex will never replace sex, but it will impact our sex lives. Just as porn has. If you think the sexual exploration of today's 15 year old is no different than it was in the 1950's, or even the 1990's, then you are in denial.

And VR will also affect live theater to a greater extent than movies and TV does now. It won't destroy the industry, but it will have a large impact. Lucky for them the growth of the upper middle class will possibly offset this disruption.