Shuberts’ Symphony

From the December 7 Issue of The Weekly Standard.

New York Post columnist Michael Riedel has great timing: Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway arrives just as Times Square has once again become the center of controversy in New York. Sleaze and swindling are on the rise in the form of aggressive panhandling by costumed superheroes and cartoon characters and “desnudas,” women wearing nothing but body paint above their waists. A unique New York institution, Broadway is essential to the city’s $60 billion (with a “b”) tourist industry. Many who recall the strenuous efforts of mayors Koch and Giuliani in cleaning up Times Square doubt whether Bill de Blasio, the city’s “progressive” mayor, has the gumption to keep the bad old days from returning.

Riedel, though, emphasizes the role that private sector leadership played in the revival of New York City. He has written a history of Broadway from the perspective of producers and theater owners, primarily Bernard Jacobs and Gerald Schoenfeld, who led the powerhouse Shubert Organization through most of the last 50 years. “The Shuberts” are Broadway’s largest landlord, owning 17 of 40 theaters, and they have also produced or coproduced many of the top shows in recent decades, such as A Chorus Line and Cats. Yes, it was an epic achievement how New York shed its reputation as “the ungovernable city” through improved policing, transit, and other basic services. But Riedel shows that, at least in the case of Times Square, government couldn’t have done it without the enlightened self-interest of the business community.

There have been many “battles for Broadway” throughout its long history. The first that Riedel chronicles is the Shubert brothers’ conquest of the American theater business in the early 20th century. Sam, Lee, and J.J. Shubert were born in Eastern Europe (“no one knows where exactly”) and grew up in Syracuse, New York. They endured poverty and a lack of education, and they had no background in the theater. But they overcame these and many other obstacles thanks to relentless hustle and their grasp of the central importance of real estate to their industry. They bought their first theater in 1899, and by the late 1920s had acquired a sprawling portfolio of 30 houses in New York and 30 more in other cities. They held control of bookings at 750 other houses nationwide.

Like many other businessmen from that red-in-tooth-and-claw era of capitalism, the Shubert brothers were stern characters. Bernard Jacobs explained J.J.’s ruthless behavior towards his rivals and employees by saying that he “was not conscious of the fact he was cruel or mean. After all, he grew up in a world in which he and his brothers came out of nothing.” But they proved to be committed stewards of the theater, sticking with it during the Depression even while their company went into receivership.

In Riedel’s view, “[T]here is no question that [the Shuberts] saved Broadway,” because had they sold out, many of Broadway’s storied houses “would have been torn down to make way for more lucrative real estate,” and Times Square itself would likely have been repurposed. And there may have been no Golden Age. During the two decades following the Depression, the Shuberts played host to The King and I, Gypsy, A Streetcar Named Desire, Kiss Me, Kate, and many other classics of the American stage.

But the good times didn’t last for long. The 1960s ushered in rock music and America’s urban crisis, two existential threats that reinforced each other. Trends in pop culture began to make musicals seem increasingly old-fashioned, while people with old-fashioned tastes—middle-class tourists and suburbanites—began to feel increasingly unwelcome around Times Square, “a twenty-four-hour carnival of sex, drugs, and crime.” Citywide, New York was losing the battle to preserve public ownership of public spaces. Just as the homeless would, in effect, claim much of the transit and parks systems as their own property, theater audiences had to navigate mean streets that felt like the private domains of prostitutes and drug dealers. Hits such as Hello, Dolly! (1964) and Fiddler on the Roof (1964) deepened the industry’s complacency about just how rapidly popular tastes were leaving it behind: “How square, suddenly, does Ethel Merman look singing ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ next to Jim Morrison singing ‘Light My Fire.’ ” Between 1968 and 1972, Broadway attendance dropped from 9.5 million to 5.4 million.

Ninteen seventy-two also saw Jacobs and Gerald Schoenfeld take over the Shubert Organization. They had originally been hired as the Shubert brothers’ lawyers in the 1950s. When J.J., the last remaining brother, died in 1963, he donated the company’s assets to the nonprofit Shubert Foundation. Thenceforward, no one would technically own any of “the Shuberts’ ” extensive holdings: The for-profit organization would answer to the foundation’s six-member board of directors.

The Internal Revenue Service signed off on this odd corporate arrangement in 1979, though many believed it was not completely on the level. Said one Shubert rival: “It’s like competing against Ford Motors and the Ford Foundation all in one. .  .  . If somebody gives you $100,000 a year—sure, you’ll be more likely to do business with them.” But J.J. Shubert did the theater world a service by denying full control to Lawrence Shubert Jr., the incompetent son of his nephew. Lawrence had been appointed head of the organization for continuity’s sake, but under his leadership, it fell into the red for the first time since the Depression. To save the Shubert Organization, Jacobs and Schoenfeld persuaded the foundation’s board to push out Lawrence. They would helm the organization until their deaths: Jacobs in 1996 and Schoenfeld in 2008.

Jacobs and Schoenfeld took several actions to ensure the survival of the American theater. Partly as a result of antitrust pressure from the federal government to weaken their hold over Broadway, the Shubert brothers had gotten out of producing. Jacobs and Schoenfeld started putting Shubert money behind new shows. Riedel dates the beginning of Broadway’s revival to the Shubert-backed A Chorus Line (1975), a tremendous commercial and critical success. They pushed for higher ticket prices, a controversial policy that, at least from a business standpoint, has been abundantly validated in that both attendance and the cost of seeing a show are now at all-time highs. They helped rid their industry of “ice,” the lucrative black market in prime seats that enriched theater staff at the expense of the public, who had to pay rip-off prices, and investors, who reaped none of the profits. Ice may have been the greatest Times Square scam of them all, even though it was conducted by the neighborhood’s “legitimate” businesses.

Jacobs and Schoenfeld’s efforts on the urban revitalization front were equally impressive. Local politics has long suffered from a frustrating lack of corporate involvement because of decades of mergers, acquisitions, and globalization. But the Shuberts felt that they had no choice but to engage since, as Schoenfeld remarked, “Corporations can leave the city. But the theater industry can’t move.” Schoenfeld was an early proponent of what became known as “broken windows” policing, which focuses on the sort of low-level criminal activity that was destabilizing Times Square. Schoenfeld even offered unused theater space for a planned Midtown Community Court for processing petty criminals.

Of course, many of Times Square’s problems stemmed from officially law-abiding businesses such as adult bookstores and massage parlors. The Midtown Citizens Committee, which Schoenfeld chaired and partly bankrolled with Shubert funds, pursued every imaginable legal maneuver to put the smut purveyors out of business. Shubert money even went towards private investigators to personally take part in prostitution stings. (Cops were restricted by “the police union’s no-disrobing policy.”)

Razzle Dazzle is uneven because Riedel lacks full command of his material. In his day job at the Post, Riedel writes gossip columns that are sometimes little more than notebook dumps. That works for the short form. But writing a book takes more of what John McPhee has called “the art of choosing what to leave out,” which is not easy when you’ve got a topic as rich as Broadway on your hands. Michael Bennett, the director-choreographer of A Chorus Line and other shows, was an incandescent talent, no question about it. But Riedel’s extensive discussion of his chaotic private life and father-son relationship with Jacobs, which take up almost 4 full chapters (out of 26), runs far afield of the main theme of Razzle Dazzle.

Riedel ends on a triumphal note, but the serious question he raises is this: Where are New York’s Jerry Schoenfelds today? According to police commissioner Bill Bratton, Disney and Marvel “want no part” of the attempt to rein in the current swindling epidemic in Times Square. As business leaders prepare to shell out billions on the 2016 presidential race, they might spare a thought for how much good Jacobs and Schoenfeld did at the city level while also doing well for themselves. New York’s renaissance deserves to be celebrated, but to ensure that it lasts, cities will need private engagement in public affairs during the good times just as much as they needed it during the bad times.

This piece originally appeared in The Weekly Standard.

This piece originally appeared in Weekly Standard