Stage Musicals are expensive. Productions cost between seven and eight figures to get off the ground, and the marginal cost to distribute a show more broadly is massive. Stage productions are living breathing pieces of art that take place in a single space and moment in time, it’s part of what makes them so beautiful—but living art isn’t particularly scalable. And at the risk of coming off across as someone who cares more about business than art, this is where the stage musical falls short for me.
Years ago I watched Jeremy Jordan and Joy Woods in the Off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors. I was holding back involuntary shaking as tears rolled down my eyes during “Skid Row” and “Somewhere That’s Green”. The right stage musical can change someone’s life, but these sorts of moments are out of reach for many young people. Quality stage productions are locked behind geographic region and income. The majority of people that care about musical theater will never see a Broadway production. The reality is, high quality stage musicals aren’t for poor people. The cost to experience the art form at its best often includes tickets over 100 dollars, plus round-trip flights and accommodation expenses for the majority of people that don’t live within driving distance of Manhattan.
This economic exclusivity is one of the reasons animated musicals are so important—they are more egalitarian regarding access, and because of this, provide a larger surface area to create positive impact in young people’s lives.
Even though animated musicals have higher capital requirements, the burden on any single consumer is lower as the recouping of investment is dispersed across a global audience by virtue of its distribution method. The marginal cost for an animated production is near zero once a theatrical cut has been distributed; this facilitates scale, and scale has a direct effect on unit cost for the viewer.
Stage and animated musicals are not perfectly interchangeable, but they are analogous in the emotional need they fulfill. Each medium falters and excels in its own way, and the unique ways that animated productions excel is a service to those with less opportunity—those tend to be the people who need a moment of hope the most.
Somewhere there’s a young girl that spends every moment away from school singing along to cast recordings, but despite her parent’s support, her family doesn’t have the finances to cover the costs of seeing a Broadway show. Her parents may, however, be able to manage a ticket to the movies so she can go with her friends to see an animated production—and if they can’t afford that, she might be able to go on Disney+ and watch Idina Menzel belt her heart out in Frozen. The ability for young people to be exposed to art that has the potential to create positive impact in their lives shouldn’t be cordoned off by the unfortunate mistake of not taking care to be well-born.
And the same characteristics that create lower economic barrier to access are those that also lower linguistic barriers. Animated productions need to be translated to access international box office, which accounts for the lion’s share of revenue; the medium is capitalistically incentivized to be more egalitarian in this manner. People growing up speaking Indonesian or Spanish are just as deserving of an opportunity to experience something that could create happiness in their lives. Moana was distributed in 45 languages; the disparity of access between stage and animated musicals is jarring.
The world is already painfully full of inequities, experiences of hope shouldn’t be another.