Ryan Donovan Traces the Physical Costs of Broadway’s Perfection
As Broadway prepares for the Tony Awards, where a few televised minutes can influence the fate of a multimillion-dollar production, Ryan Donovan won’t be distracted by the glitz and glamour. He’ll be focused on the sweat, tears and very real pain behind the spectacle.
Still deep in archival research for his forthcoming book, “Eight Nights a Week: How Broadway Turned Backbreaking,” the assistant professor of Theater Studies is tracing how musical theater performance has undergone a dramatic metamorphosis from charismatic showmanship into something resembling elite athleticism.
To trace that shift, Donovan has been busy combing through the collections of the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the Shubert Archive (his favorite, tucked above Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre). But while the surroundings are elegant, the material is anything but.
“I’m looking at a lot of unsexy documents,” he admits. “Correspondences between Actors’ Equity and the general managers, stage manager’s reports, business records, everything that uncovers the hidden labor — and the human cost — that made these shows happen eight times a week.”
What he’s found reads like a who’s who of Broadway icons: a note from Angela Lansbury to her director, Patti LuPone’s heavily annotated vocal notebook from “Evita,” an unreleased statement drafted for Liza Minnelli that requests a reduced performance schedule.
But beyond the star power lies a side of Broadway rarely seen by audiences, where performers dealing with chronic injuries, tendonitis, exhaustion and even hemorrhaging vocal cords struggle to sustain increasingly demanding productions.
Donovan explains that many of those pressures can be traced back to a seismic shift that transformed the Great White Way in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wearable microphones and increasingly sophisticated sound design were introduced to support performers, but while the technology expanded possibilities, it also expanded demands. Composers were now able to write in ways they never could before. Women, for example, were able to hit and sustain notes far above what earlier stars like Ethel Merman would sing.
“What happened in that era determined what we see on stage today, as audiences now expect performers to sing, dance and act at maximum intensity eight shows a week and without visible strain,” he says. “People love to go see ‘Wicked’ and hear those two leading ladies belt their faces off. It’s become a kind of superhuman expectation, where performers can’t do just one thing well anymore — the bar keeps getting raised.”
That escalation, Donovan points out, has fundamentally changed not just what happens onstage but also what performers are able to do after the curtain call. While earlier generations of Broadway stars could finish a show and still have enough physical and vocal stamina left for a life beyond the theater, today’s actors are simply trying to recover in time to do it all again.
“By the late 1960s, Broadway performers could no longer be the ‘toast of the town’ and basically had to live like monks,” Donovan says. “It’s not uncommon for modern performers to conserve their voices by remaining nearly silent during the day and avoiding social outings. That balancing act becomes even harder when rehearsals, press appearances, injuries and family life are added on top of the physical demands already waiting for them onstage.”
And for those performing at the Tony Awards, the demands are even greater. They arrive at Radio City Musical Hall early in the morning for dress rehearsals, return to their home theaters to perform the matinee, then head back to Radio City for the live performance, where they need to maintain an energy level that isn’t too big for television audiences nor too small for the people in the seats.
But have the increased demands on Broadway bodies actually resulted in better productions?
“If you had asked me five years ago what the two most exciting musicals of the 2020s would be, I wouldn’t have picked last year’s revival of ‘Sunset Boulevard’ or this year’s ‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball,’” Donovan admits. “Each of these Andrew Lloyd Webber shows demonstrate the increasingly expansive range of skills a Broadway performer needs to remain competitive — and both strip away scenic spectacle in favor of making the performer’s body the visual center of the production.”
That may be the real story behind the Tony Awards this year. Not just who wins but what Broadway expects from the bodies trying to earn the applause.
