When Broadway announces another mass-marketed IP child—I mean musical—I grieve. All five stages worth. It’s the “I guess I’ll see The Flintstones Musical: Here to Rock, with you” ego-blows of our time. Yet Broadway has always pandered. Perennially ensnaring the ones who love a title, like The Notebook. And I get it. I’m drinking what you’re lactating, oh mighty forty first to fifty fourth streets. I want & Juliet too! However I recall a time of substance. Is the Broadway of today just one girthy cop out?

I remember attending The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at the blistering age of eleven feeling enlivened. Effervescent with the dogma that people were freaks and like me! Innovative! (Up to subjectivity) Smart! (Up to subjectivity) Attractive! (Okay, way too young for that sentiment) A three-part ballad of two parents not showing up, leaving a proud child to compete for their awareness? Absolution. Anything alternative to most could be made, and starting one’s blood flood (period) at eleven was also acceptable! Now, we succumb to nondescript jukebox and adaptations deriving from books we were forced to read in middle school.

I’m just as nonplussed as you are, maybe. The feeling is an oscillating fan of cheers and the longest sighs. It is a win to know that people are engaging with theatre. Musicals and plays! Additionally, tickets aren’t just for the bouj lifestyle, it’s for all who crave wooing! Kinda. Broadway’s financial inaccessibility is well, a forever tapeworm.

The ultimate panacea is this: don’t liquidate yourself for mezzanines. Witness local work. Off broadway, off-off broadway, cabarets at your neighborhood Taco Bell Cantina! Give the looming producers a break. Their frontal lobes are receding like my Dad’s interest in spinach, “Pesticides” ya know? Yes I might have tickets to Betty Boop The Musical tonight. Yes I am part of the problem. But we can pause Broadway and experience shows that imprint. Now who’s in like Bathtub Gin for The Gazillion Bubble show next week?