The first most important piece of advice for anyone aspiring to be a Broadway actor seems to be, if there is anything else you’d rather do, you should do it instead. Being an actor on Broadway can be rewarding, personally, though not necessarily financially. And everyone usually has to start at the bottom and work their way up. What is the bottom for a Broadway actor? Actually, it is to be an audience member — to see as much theater as possible, to audition and be cast in everything from school plays to community theater productions, and to invest in the career before trying to make it your career.
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Thanks to public standard union contracts, we know what the base salary is for Broadway performers, stage managers, and musicians. These minimum rates are only for professionals on Broadway and are calculated by the week since, unlike other vocations who report annual salaries, artists will not necessarily be employed by their Broadway show for a full year. These figures are valid as of October 2, , and are scheduled to remain through September 29, , after which most of these rates will increase slightly. Musician pay rates comes from Local Their rates are valid as of March and are scheduled to remain through March 3, But that figure can increase depending on the particular demands of any given track. Understudying roles also comes with additional pay. There are also some other situations in which musicians may be required to assume additional responsibilities or make an additional time commitment, which can result in an increase in the base pay. Logan Culwell-Block is a musical theatre historian, Playbill’s manager of research, and curator of Playbill Vault.
Broadway and Unions
The Bare Minimum: Breaking Down Broadway Actor Salaries
On social media and through petitions, actors are aiming to mobilize members of their 49,strong union to flood an Equity town hall meeting in New York on Monday. They will demand higher compensation for nonluxury tours, which typically pay 60 percent less than the top tier. But as touring costs and other entertainment options increased, producers had a harder time making money, so they began mounting cheaper nonunion tours. And the situation has implications for audiences across the country. If, as many actors want, Equity pushes for higher tour salaries in its next contract negotiations with producers in , several producers say they will have no choice but to mount nonunion tours with less-experienced performers or to delay tours altogether. Producers sharply deny they are being greedy. Rather, they note, all but the biggest hits struggle to sell tickets, forcing them to keep costs down. The economics are complex. Most producers link actor salaries to the box office payments that road presenters guarantee. The higher the guarantees, the higher the salaries — but the problem, producers said, is that guarantees have been stagnant for years. Presenters mostly justify those low guarantees by citing uneven ticket sales. Touring salaries drew a spotlight in late December after a blogger, writing anonymously on annoyingactorfriend. Luftig told presenters that he would swallow that amount in order to get them simply to book the show, which features a black British drag queen as the heroine — a story that may be risky beyond New York.
It depends on whether the show is a union Equity production or non-union. If it’s an Equity production, then it depends on what kind of contract the show is on. There are rules governing how transportation is handled for each kind of tour. Since people are most curious about the big national tours, I’ll tell you about those. Most large national tours, especially first tours of a show straight from Broadway, are on an Equity Production Contract. The tour can travel by bus or by plane, depending on how far the tour has to go. Buses are cheaper but planes are faster, so if a tour company has an engagement in Los Angeles and they just finished a run in Boston, the actors will fly.
Joining Equity
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That actor you’re watching onstage tonight? He or she might well have skin in the game. And I speak not just of art or hunger for applause. I talk of cold, hard cash. One of the more interesting and perhaps lesser noticed changes in show business these last few years has been the transition of touring shows away from fixed salaries to compensation models based on how many seats are filled. Not so long ago, back in the glory of the early s when multiple companies of «The Phantom of the Opera» convoyed across the Midwest, most touring Broadway shows offered actors production contracts, which meant financial rewards and working conditions that mirrored those on Broadway. In fact, for your average Broadway actor especially the younger and freer varietygoing on tour with a show could mean a more attractive deal than in New York. On the road, actors got nice per diems with no obligation to spend all that money if they could stay with friends. They could live on their per diem and bank the salary. The production contract, the holy grail for actors, still exists in touring theater. But almost every other Equity show on the road — «Peter Pan,» «Priscilla Queen of the Desert,» even «Les Miserables» — operates under a different contract with a far lower minimum salary for actors.
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