Robert Trussell: Kansas City’s venues not always suited for Broadway shows

This column will make some folks mad.

It will anger the people who do the complicated work of booking touring musicals into local venues. And it won’t sit well with some theatergoers, either.

But here’s the rub: Kansas City lacks an ideal venue for Broadway musicals on tour.

We get good shows and bad ones. We get big shows and small ones. And they usually play in one of three venues:

▪ Starlight Theatre, where almost 8,000 seats cover an area the size of a football field.

▪ The 2,400-seat Music Hall, the cavernous Art Deco theater in Municipal Auditorium.

▪ The Muriel Kauffman Theatre, one of two performance halls in the Kauffman Center, which can seat 1,800 and of the three most closely approximates an actual Broadway theater.

A fourth venue, Yardley Hall at Johnson County Community College, seats 1,341 and occasionally books touring musicals. But it is primarily used for musical performances.

“Broadway,” when used to describe touring productions presented in Kansas City, is really a marketing term meant to describe a style of entertainment.

Yes, many (although not all) of the productions booked into Kansas City initially ran in historic playhouses in the theater district in midtown Manhattan. But the versions we see here are at best approximations of what audiences saw in New York.

That’s not necessarily because the producers don’t go to pains to replicate the shows as faithfully as possible for the road. It’s often because the local venues are much larger than the theaters where these shows initially ran. The numbers tell the story.

“Newsies,” which will make its local debut at the Music Hall in February, ran on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre, which seats about 1,200, half the Music Hall’s capacity. “A Night With Janis Joplin” will play here for the first time at the Kauffman Theatre in March, but in New York it ran in one of the smallest Broadway houses — the Lyceum, which seats about 950. That’s almost half of the Kauffman’s available seats.

Richard Baker, Starlight’s president and CEO, deserves credit for assembling a 2016 summer season that includes at least three newer shows that have never before played Kansas City — “If/Then,” “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” and “Matilda the Musical.”

But are these productions right for Starlight?

On Broadway, “If/Then” played the Richard Rodgers Theatre, which seats about 1,300. “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” just closed a long, profitable run at the intimate Walter Kerr Theatre, which accommodates 975. And “Matilda the Musical” is still running on Broadway at the 1,460-seat Shubert Theatre.

The difference in seating capacities between Broadway houses and theaters on the road illustrate the economic reality of touring. On tour, these shows have to put a lot of butts in seats within a limited time to make their nut. You can’t do that in a small venue.

“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” which won the 2014 Tony Award for best musical, was a hit and earned its investors’ money back. It did so by filling the smallish Walter Kerr Theatre eight times a week for more than two years.

But no matter how successful a show might have been in New York, on the road it has to play to as many people as possible within a one or two-week run. That means Starlight or the Music Hall.

Many cities have venues like the Music Hall — big artifacts of the Great Depression that seem designed with political rallies in mind. Some online consumer reviews complain of uncomfortable seats and dodgy acoustics at the Music Hall, which was built in 1935.

(Starlight, which presented its first season in 1951, is one of two remaining outdoor venues presenting a season of Broadway material; the other is the MUNY in St. Louis.)

The older Broadway theaters were designed before amplified sound and generally put viewers in reasonably close proximity to the stage, even those seated in the back row or the balcony. The playhouse in town most similar to those older Broadway theaters is the Folly, which seats 1,078. It is mainly a music venue these days.

But at Starlight and the Music Hall, you should be prepared to shell out for prime seats if you expect anything like an intimate viewing experience.

Some might say: So what? So what if the venues aren’t ideal? Isn’t it enough that these shows come to town at all?

That’s a fair point. Some people can’t afford to fly to New York and pay extraordinary Broadway ticket prices. (Resale tickets to “Hamilton” can cost as much as $1,365, according to the Los Angeles Times.) A tour stop in Kansas City might be their only chance to see a celebrated musical.

But that argument fails to take into account aesthetics. Theater is an art form, after all. “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” was designed for the Walter Kerr Theatre. The set, meant to evoke an old English music hall, was a fancifully detailed piece of work. I fear most of its artistry will be lost at Starlight. So will the actors’ facial expressions.

“Matilda the Musical” is more visually spectacular and might do a better job of filling the Starlight stage once the sun goes down. (No need to belabor the most obvious problem at Starlight — that the shows begin in daylight.)

“If/Then” I haven’t seen. But theatergoers, in the opinion of your humble theater critic, would have a better viewing experience if they could take in “Matilda the Musical” and “A Gentleman’s Guide” at the Kauffman Theatre.

But the Kauffman, which is home to the Lyric Opera and the Kansas City Ballet, is under-utlized for Broadway shows. Since 2010, Theater League, which presents shows at the Kauffman, and Broadway Across America, which books shows into the Music Hall, have teamed up to offer a joint season ticket. This season Theater League is offering only two musicals at the Kauffman — “A Night With Janis Joplin” and a touring production of “Ragtime.”

I’ve seen memorable shows at Starlight and the Music Hall. But those venues work best with epic-scaled productions — “Phantom of the Opera,” “Les Miserables” or “Miss Saigon.” In other words, shows with lots of glitter, visual spectacle and impressive moving parts.

But there aren’t that many big shows. Most musicals are better appreciated on a smaller scale. Anyone who saw Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s production of “Sunday in the Park With George” at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art knows what I’m talking about. That was intimate musical theater at its best. So was the Rep’s innovative staging of the Living Room’s production of “Carousel.”

But imagine watching either show from the back row of Starlight or the upper balcony at the Music Hall. Sad to say, it would be like watching a flea circus.

This story was originally published January 23, 2016 at 2:00 AM with the headline "Robert Trussell: Kansas City’s venues not always suited for Broadway shows."