Previously: Riedel on Broadway
Broadway Stagehands are set to strike at the end of the month, or the beginning of October. You might want to read the whole article, but the following is the gist of it.
“Wars are started by miscalculation,” says a source close to the stagehands. “I think the old-timers in the room have a sense of where things are. But all the corporate producers and trust-fund babies – who don’t even bother to learn the names of the people who work on their shows – have no idea what’s going on with the stagehands.”
The source points out that, while the 2003 strike lasted just four days, a strike in the 1970s lasted three weeks.
Should that happen this time, the produc ers will head into the ex tremely lucrative Thanksgiving holiday sitting atop a bunch of dark theaters.
So far, the producers are putting up a united front. They say they’ll hang together for as long as it takes to secure a decent deal.
But I’m starting to pick up squeaks of fear. One of the millions of producers of “Spring Awakening,” a musical that could have a tough time bouncing back after a strike, has been running around town saying the show is “too important to close.”
From the stagehands, all I’m hearing is grim determination not to be bulldozed by those “trust-fund babies” who call themselves producers.
