How We Gonna Pay for Rent?

Allan Gordon is the producer of Rent, the 1996 Tony Award winner for Best Musical. Gordon, a graduate of Harvard Law School, is involved in financing and producing film and theater ventures, both personally and through his investment banking company, Gordon, Haskett & Co. The Crimson had the opportunity to interview him by telephone about the message of Rent, theater investment and why the French don't like musical theater.

I was really interested in your bio because it seems like you've kind of leaped around: you were here for law school, then you went into investment banking, and you produce film and theater projects on the side. I was wondering if those things grew out of one another.

My first love has always been theater. I'm always fascinated with it, always involved in it, whether as a spectator or as an investor, or now as a producer. But basically, you know, in terms of the interests I pursued, I was doing business things anyhow, you know, all sorts of venture capital, stock exchange kind of things, and one of the things I did was theater.

I understand that some things you produce on your own, some with other people and others through you investment banking company. Are they really involved in the arts?

Yes, of course! I mean, it's not the arts like the Brattle Street Playhouse, but the arts in the sense that it's cinema, it's film. Things like that. That's where you get Wall Street involved in financing. You really don't have any Wall Street involvement in theater. It's primarily individuals. You have the usual, you know, corporate backing, but that's the not-for-profit, like the New York Theater Workshop, which I'm a trustee of. Very little government support, at this point. Companies which are headquartered in New York give a lot of support to the New York Theater Workshop. But again, it's not Wall Street-driven. In terms of your interest in theater, if you have an interest in theater and an interest in the arts, you tend to look at movie deals more than someone else would, and you tend to look at Broadway on a personal level before anyone else would. If for no other reason, no one else would because they're exceedingly risky. And they're very, very difficult to make money. So in one sense, anyone investing in it has a love for it, wants to be invited to the opening and be a part of the production, to say they're a part of the production, to be able to go backstage and have the joy of knowing that they helped produce it. But the money is usually not there.

It's interesting that you say that about producing, because it seems that ordinarily producing--or maybe this is more on the Hollywood end of things--is seen as very businesslike. You know, it's all about the business and not so much about people who really like and enjoy it.

If you came--well, you can see it in Cambridge, but if you came to New York and you saw, we did for example at the New York Theater Workshop, or the Public Theater--all of these are not-for-profit organizations. You would see people there of great intelligence, lovely people, first-rate, hardworking, making virtually no money. There for ten years, thirty years of work, and they are there for love. They just love it. I mean, they just barely make a living. You're not making $100,000 a year by a long shot in any of these places. You're making substantially less. And yet you have people there of high intelligence and intense loyalty to the organization, because they love what they do. And they love theater. And they pursue it. So it's very different than film, which is much more business oriented and money oriented. There's also much less money in theater by its very definition. I mean, it doesn't cost a hundred million to put up a production.... But don't get me wrong, if you don't have ultimately a business interest or some business ability, you're out of business, and there's no art.

When you go to a new place, I read that you wanted to somehow integrate the feeling of the place, like the Boston attitude. But Rent is basically set in New York. What's it like taking a play, not only from where it started, on Broadway, but also the city where it's set? How does that translate?

Everything is set somewhere. Miss Saigon, Les Mis, Cats. Most of these things are set in some time frame. And people have an interest in it. The message is universal. It may be set in New York, but it just as well could have been set in London, or in Los Angeles, but it happened to be set in New York. In terms of the message and in terms of the characters, they're easily identifiable anywhere else. In terms of the markets, all markets are local. They're all different, they put different spins on things. And in terms of your presentation and your advertising, you're reaching out to get people to come to the theater, those things are somewhat different. And we're not cloning it. One of the great things about theater is it's living, and it changes all the time; film doesn't. For example, we keep referring to the Circle Line in the play, and really when you get outside of New York, a lot of people don't know what that is....

You just try to change a few words here and there, so it has a more universal understanding, like the Statute of Liberty, or what-have-you. I mean, Robin Hood lives in the forest. In England. He's not in Central Park; so what?

So you're going to have a different cast for each city?

Well, not quite. The New York production can play for years. So it can stay at the Nederlander with the cast we have. You know, as changes go on over time, but basically the same cast. It can play indefinitely, like Cats, or something like that. It's in a more sold-out position now than it was when we opened. So that's one cast that's not touring. Touring means going to another city, with the same cast. The cast we're putting together in London, we're casting now. We think we will open there in February of next year. And that will be there for at least--we estimate between two and five years. So that's what's called a sit-down production. Usually if it's somewhere for a year or more you call it a sit-down production, because it stays in the same city. New York and London are the biggest, you'll have things run there for years and years and years. And then it's followed by Toronto, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston. And then of course you have your Melbourne and Sydney, those are big cities.... It's all cultural. It's all English-speaking. Ninety percent English-speaking, in terms of your market. You go to France, I mean, Les Mis lost money in France. It's just not in their culture. They just don't like it. They have a different lifestyle: you're sitting in the park and you're having a glass of wine and the sun is out and it's nine at night and you're not going to the theater. They just don't live that style, if you're in Paris you'd understand it. It'll play well in Germany. They like musical theater.

In German?

Yes, in German. We will be in Germany within a year-and-a-half. And we'll be in Holland. And we'll be in Austria. And we'll be in the Nordic countries, you know, Denmark and Sweden--stuff like that. They like theater. Other countries don't.

Ten years or even twenty years ago, Boston was a big city for new plays that producers didn't have enough money to open on Broadway.

A lot of them used to open on the road, now they open Off-Broadway.... Their whole idea is to have them on the road after Broadway. Or while Broadway is in existence, because that is a tremendous appeal to people. That means it made it. We sold 200,000 tickets [in Boston]. So it's been rather successful. And if things continue the way they are, we'll probably stay a little bit longer before we go to St. Paul.

Actually, I heard that people were disappointed about its being taken to Broadway because they thought that the original venue sort of fit the "feel" of it more, the sort of rundown bohemia.

First of all, I like it better at the Broadway theater. For real. The Nederlander Theater is not exactly a pristine theater. It's not the Shubert. And in one sense, it does recreate the theater downtown. It's very, very similar. I think it plays better in an 11 or 12 hundred-seat theater than a 200-seat theater. And if it didn't, I would tell you. There's no question we were concerned, when we were moving the play, that first of all we were moving it out of the area that it was born in and that it characterized. And the second thing was, it was moving to a completely different venue that in one sense was the opposite of what the play was about. But that turned out to be incorrect, the move to Broadway exposed it to a much, much wider audience and gave accessibility to many more people. In retrospect, it was the absolute right decision. I mean literally, you're getting seven times the number of people to see it. It's the same cast. And it's the same lighting people. And it's the same designers. Same set. Everything basically is the same. The environment in the theater, in one sense, re-creates the Fourth Street environment. I mean, we have the artists' paintings all over the wall; we have some sort of shabbiness, nothing is really that fancy. And in the Shubert, we have our work hanging everywhere too. The Shubert in Boston is a more refined theater than the Nederlander in New York. But it works. The truth is that people come to see what's on the stage. I mean, at some point you make yourself nuts with trying to recreate the world outside inside everything else. We're playing in Los Angeles at the Albertson Theater, which is the finest theater in Los Angeles. And I have no regrets; I mean, it's the best theater, you have parking, you have creature comforts, and no matter how much you talk about Fourth Street, people want to be able to park.

So I mean, in some sense it's a state of mind, it's not a state of reality. You want to create a certain ambiance, but 99 percent of why you're going is to see what's on the stage, you're really not going to see the theater.

Rent is a portrayal of a very modern, liberal, accepting community.

There's one or two Republicans in it. I think it's non-judgmental, and it's not promotional. It's just, it's almost a camera on a society the way it is. I think that's the reason why it appeals to so many people. Because it's not advocating that lifestyle, it's just showing the lifestyle, and it's showing a battle against insurmountable odds, it's showing unity, it's showing love, things like that. It is showing, it is a multicultural society, it's a poor society, and it's ravaged by disease and everything else. I don't think it has a political message, as such. It's a message of love. Bill Clinton was there Saturday. I went with him, and...

Did he have a good time?

Yes, he had a wonderful time. It was Chelsea's seventeenth birthday, they came last Saturday, and he was there with Chelsea and with Hillary and with two or three of Chelsea's friends. And then they came upstairs to the stage, when we dropped the fire curtain, and they spent about forty minutes with the cast and everybody else. It was just delightful. He said it was very, very powerful, he loved it and he was impressed with the impact on young kids. And Chelsea loved it. And they came to New York specifically for Broadway. It was in all the papers.

Right. And combined with this cut-rate ticket thing, it's not theater as politics exactly, but a new attitude toward theater.

Well, in terms of opening it up to other people.

Exactly.

That's why we did it. And what's interesting is that, in New York for example, most of the crowd is a young crowd for those $20 seats. And the reason is, they will start forming maybe 20 hours before the next performance. In Boston, it's more of a mixed crowd. We're getting people 70 years old, getting retired people. It's a different kind of a crowd. In New York, sometimes you'll get older people, but that's maybe in the warmer weather. So we would never abandon [the twenty-dollar ticket]. We think it's great. It's also good for the audience because anyone who buys those tickets is very enthusiastic.

I wanted to know your opinion on this quote, which I read in The Boston Globe: "Rent symbolizes the '90s generation's simultaneous rejection of bourgeois society and, perhaps paradoxically, bourgeois society's acceptance of that rebellion."

What does that mean? [laughs] In a peculiar way, based on what I see in terms of the play and the audience, to some degree that has reality. I don't know if it's a rejection of bourgeois society, it's just, they can't attain it. You know, it's really an underclass kind of situation. But there is an acceptance of what you see on the stage, which basically reflects the East Village. There is an incredible acceptance among people that you would never believe are accepting, in terms of all the different issues that are raised and the different lifestyles. There were people who came to the Boston opening virtually from every aspect of Boston society: the chairman of banks, insurance companies, major, major corporations there-- basically, a conservative group of people. And I knew a lot of them. And they absolutely loved the show. Now, had you mentioned these issues prior to the show in a certain way, I'm sure they wouldn't have even gone. Maybe that's why they moved to Wellesley, or somewhere else. But once they were there, they knew exactly what they saw, these are smart people; half of them went to Harvard, and they loved it. And they did accept it for what it was. And because, I think part of it, it's not in your face. It is what it is, and you either accept it or you don't, but it is there, and it's part of society, it's part of life.