The Broadway League, the trade organization that represents commercial theater producers and the industry’s powerful theater owners, has chosen Jason Laks, a longtime official at the organization, to be its next president at a time when the sector is still struggling to recover its prepandemic financial strength.
Laks, 52, is a lawyer who has been with the League off and on since 2012, primarily as the director of labor relations in charge of negotiating contracts with 14 unions representing the Broadway work force. Laks has been serving as the League’s interim president since February, when its longtime leader, Charlotte St. Martin, stepped down.
The League’s most well-known role is as a co-presenter, alongside the American Theater Wing, of the annual Tony Awards, which honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway. The organization represents commercial producers in labor negotiations, handles government relations for the industry, works with organizations seeking to diversify the American theater and oversees the Jimmy Awards, a national high school musical theater competition.
The League’s board of governors voted on Monday to approve Laks’s appointment.
The organization, with a $12 million annual budget and a 33-person staff, has 830 members who include not only the owners and operators of the 41 Broadway houses, but also presenters of touring Broadway shows around the country, as well as general managers, vendors and suppliers.
Broadway, which had been booming in the years preceding the coronavirus pandemic, has not fully recovered from a roughly 18-month shutdown; pre-Thanksgiving audiences this season were about 5 percent below prepandemic levels. Even as domestic and international tourism is rebounding, there has been a decline in theater attendance by New York-area suburbanites that is associated with the rise of hybrid work, a shift toward home-based entertainment consumption and concerns about costs, crime and congestion.
“I think we are doing a remarkable job of coming back postpandemic, but it’s an important moment for the industry — we’re not back to where we were in 2019, but I think our mission has to be more than to make it 2019 again,” Laks said. “We need to continue to work to grow and diversify our audiences and get people into the city to see our shows.”
Attendance is not the only challenge facing Broadway. The costs of producing shows has risen sharply, making a high-risk industry even riskier. Failure rates have not seemed to dissuade investors — there were 39 shows running during the week ending Nov. 24, the highest number in some time — but industry leaders worry about the economics.
“The statistics on profitability are more challenging now postpandemic,” Laks said. “We need to always be mindful of ways to make the business profitable,” he said, noting that Broadway employs about 10,000 people and contributes indirectly to thousands more jobs in hospitality and other related businesses.
Laks grew up in Albany and first encountered Broadway by seeing touring productions in Schenectady. He said “the first show that really got me” was “Pippin”; he also recalled taking a student union bus trip during college to see “The Phantom of the Opera,” and calling his parents from intermission at “Rent” to urge them to buy tickets, “because this was going to be something.” Now he sees theater with his wife and two daughters — recently he took his 16-year-old to see “Maybe Happy Ending,” which they both loved.
“This is my dream job,” he said. “I’m a fan. I’ve been a fan of Broadway and the theater since I was a kid, and I just remained a fan forever.”
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