Sometimes, Off-Broadway is the right fit

It is time to stop hanging crepe for the death of commercial Off-Broadway theater. A pulse has been located -- in fact, more than one.

Just a few years ago, we were mourning the loss of the best commercial Off-Broadway houses to real estate. Thanks in part to the smash success of such risky mainstream Broadway transfers as "Spring Awakening" and "In the Heights," producers were deciding to take their chances with a big-stakes gamble -- and Tony eligibility -- rather than stay in a system that cost too much for the payoff.

But suddenly, or so it seems, commercial Off-Broadway is an attractive alternative again. Other spaces are starting to fill the void left by vanished theaters and creative producers have realized that every show doesn't have to go to Broadway. Some get bigger in smaller spaces.

But first, let's define the terms. (Don't go away.) Commercial Off-Broadway is the designation for plays and musicals that must pay their own way but are too small or offbeat or specialized for mainstream Broadway. This is in contrast with nonprofit Off-Broadway, mostly institutional theater that channels profits, if there are any, back into the operation.

Most unromantically, commercial Off-Broadway is defined by size (fewer than 499 seats) and union contracts (far more modest than Broadway deals). For the last quarter of the 20th century, these were the places to find the bulk of the city's most original theater. Then "Rent" and "Avenue Q" went from the nonprofits to Broadway, and so did everybody else.

So, what changed? For starters, when Broadway box office began to slow for "Avenue Q" two years ago, the producers took the radical step of moving to commercial Off-Broadway instead of closing. When those same producers decided to revive "Rent" this summer, they once again opted for Off-Broadway.

Both shows are at the New World Stages, a sprawling underground complex of five theaters (formerly a movie multiplex) at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue. Though the behemoth lacks the charm of the lost theaters, the center is now a go-to destination for such contrasting attractions as "Naked Boys Singing," which has singing naked boys, and "The Gazillion Bubble Show," which has bubbles.

Jeffrey Seller, a producer of both shows, explains the economics. "An Off-Broadway musical will break even between $80,000 and $125,000 a week. A producer needs to sell about 2,000 seats a week with a $50 average ticket price to gross $100,000 and meet his nut."

On Broadway, however, a medium-size Broadway musical might break even at more than $500,000 a week. "A producer," says Seller, "needs to sell about 7,000 seats a week at an average ticket price of $80 to meet a $550,000 'nut.' "

Scott Morfee, who has hung in with commercial Off-Broadway since he produced "Killer Joe" by the then-unknown Tracy Letts ("August: Osage County") in 1998, tells me that "the downsizing of 'Avenue Q' and 'Rent' has been kind of awesome."

Morfee is a co-producer of the 199-seat Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village. The theater is currently home to a bright and inventive six-person, no-star hit production of Shakespeare's heretofore unlovable "Cymbeline" by the young Fiasco Theater. What put Barrow Street in the center of the commercial renaissance, however, was David Cromer's devastating environmental production of "Our Town," which ran more than a year -- longer than any revival of the classic ever.

Producers wanted to move "Our Town" to Broadway at the beginning of the run, but Morfee says, "They wanted to turn it into a star vehicle, which didn't make sense." The $400,000 production paid back its investors, but not by a lot. As he puts it, dryly but with a hint of pride, "We cleared the fence."

Victoria Lang has hung in with commercial Off-Broadway, too. On Tuesday, previews begin for "Silence! The Musical," the 2005 hit of the Fringe Festival that's described as "an unauthorized parody of "The Silence of the Lambs." The show, which has a book by Hunter Bell, a co-creator of "[title of show]," got a lot of attention during a brief run this summer.

Lang, who has booked a space at Performance Space 122 in the East Village, says, "You have to be very good with a budget and market correctly. But I've always believed in affordable shows where someone can buy tickets, buy a beer and even leave enough to buy a magnet."

Last weekend, on the other side of the aesthetic universe, New World Stages became the home of "Freud's Last Session," Mark St. Germain's talky, old-fashioned two-character fiction in which the dying atheist Freud (Martin Rayner) argues about God with midlife Christian convert and author C.S. Lewis (Mark H. Dold). The play, a surprise hit for a year in a 145-seat YMCA theater on the Upper West Side, has expanded its reach now with 199 seats.

And "Standing On Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays" opens next month at one of my favorite Village theaters, the Minetta Lane. This is an anthology of new plays on the topic by many playwrights, including Moisés Kaufman, Neil LaBute and Paul Rudnick. The first preview, Nov. 7, will be a national event with productions in more than 25 theaters around the country.

We're still going to miss the Promenade, the Century, the Variety Arts, the Lamb's Theatre Company, Circle in the Square Downtown, the Fairbanks, the Houseman, the Village Gate, Perry Street Theater and all the rest. And commercial Off-Broadway is still mostly dominated by circusy spectacles -- "Blue Man Group," "Stomp!," "Traces," "Voca People" -- that bring in foreign tourists with as few words as possible.

As Morfee puts it, however, "It is a little less lonely out here now."