Upright Citizens Brigade Raises Prices. Comedy Fans Shouldn’t Laugh.
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Version 0 of 1. At the start of this year, the improv comedy powerhouse Upright Citizens Brigade Theater made a change in policy that went mostly unnoticed. For the first time since 2008, it raised ticket prices. At its four theaters on the East and West coasts, most of the 100 or so shows a week cost $2 more: It’s now common to pay $7 on weekdays, while the prime weekend shows are $12. (There are still cheaper ones, including a few that are free.) While these new prices remain a deal compared with most other live entertainment in New York, the increase represents an important shift at the Upright Citizens Brigade, an industry leader with outsize influence, not just in jump-starting careers but also in the art and business of comedy. One reason the change matters is that keeping prices low has long been the theater’s best defense of its controversial practice of using exclusively free labor onstage. While other improv centers like Second City and the Groundlings, which loom large in Chicago and Los Angeles, charge more for tickets, Upright Citizens Brigade is built on a different financial model, one that seems to promise to save money by not paying performers and charging consumers less. The reality of this bargain is more complex, particularly as the theater has grown into a mature institution. In the past dozen years, it has bought or leased buildings in New York and Los Angeles (there are training centers in both cities), emphasizing growth and earning revenue through corporate work and its school. According to a profile of the company in The New Yorker last year, Upright Citizens Brigade, whose classes have long been its profit center, has increased enrollment, teaching about 12,000 students last year. Add money from branded content and workshops (last year it trained 6,000 businesspeople about the improv technique “yes, and”) without any change in artist pay, and what becomes clear is that the theater is simply and firmly committed to not compensating its performers. The ticket price increase is also part of a general trend of rising prices in live comedy. That’s due partly to the growing number of stand-up shows in arenas and theaters, which can be as expensive as pop concerts. New York clubs have also taken advantage of the comedy boom to charge more for stand-up. The top price at the Comedy Cellar has doubled since 2000 to $24 with a two-drink minimum, while ticket prices at Gotham and Carolines have also gone up, as has the cost of movies, theater and other entertainment in this expensive city. The popularity of Upright Citizens Brigade, a key player in the New York alternative comedy scene in the late 1990s, was built partly on the idea of the $5 show. When it moved to its first permanent home in 1999, after years of playing spaces around the city, all its shows cost that much. The price stayed there for weekdays until now. (Weekend shows crept up over the years, ending at $10 for nearly a decade.) The reputation for $5 comedy (and no drink minimums) helped distinguish the theater, drawing crowds of young audiences and considerable buzz. In a 2003 interview, Matt Besser, a founder and a current leader of Upright Citizens Brigade, said he always wanted to keep the price lower than that of a movie ticket. In an era when a night on Broadway can cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars, Upright Citizens Brigade shows remains cheap. But as the institution expands, it’s worth asking: If $12 shows sell out, why won’t they bump up tickets to the still reasonable $15 next year? Why not inch toward $30 or $40? (Upright Citizens Brigade did not respond to questions about the reason for the price increase.) If this slippery slope scenario sounds paranoid, consider what has happened to the economics of live theater in New York. Those stratospheric prices also began with small increases that seemed too measly to complain about, and now they have transformed the art form into something that to many people seems inaccessible and culturally marginal. Broadway ticket prices received the most media attention, but the more disturbing shift might be in smaller houses that were once, like Upright Citizens Brigade is now, considered the affordable alternatives popular among younger crowds. According to a survey in 1981, the average ticket at Off and Off Off Broadway theaters then was $5.93 (just over $15 adjusted for inflation). Now, the prices of mainstream Off Broadway houses often approach or even exceed those on Broadway. The impact in the American theater has not been just about dollars and cents, or accessibility, or the makeup of the audience, as the playwright Arthur Miller once explained to me in an interview. The reason high ticket prices are important, he argued, is that they change what is seen onstage, as artists inevitably create work with the older, wealthier audience in mind. Stand-up and modern improvisation are younger genres than the theater, and they lack powerful labor organizations like Actors’ Equity to fight for higher pay or, depending on your perspective, to keep costs high. But some of the market pressures are the same: A huge pool of young talent willing to work for experience and the chance of a big break, a large urban audience that came to New York partly for its live entertainment, and theaters with limited capacity. Producing comedy is relatively cheap — with tiny casts and a set that can be little more than a microphone — so it will never be as expensive as theater. But it’s worth remembering that one of the great appeals of live comedy today, particularly for young people, is its cost. And if you want to understand the rise and fall of art forms, the old cliché holds true: Follow the money. |