The Stage That Went Dark

The Cats revival closed early. Andrew Lloyd Webber — a man whose melodies were once inescapable — warned that Broadway is "in dire danger of rivalling Hollywood's empty soundstages with increasingly dark theatres," the language you reserve for an institution, not a person. And the eulogies write themselves: streaming did it, the algorithm did it, AI hollowed out the soundstages and now it's coming for the last live room in town. All tempting. All also a way of not looking in the mirror.

Here's the uncomfortable version, and it starts by admitting the rooms aren't empty. They mostly aren't — Broadway as a whole has clawed back toward its old grosses, and plenty of nights still sell out. What's thinning is the margin: the room for the expensive, ambitious, deeply communal bet — the show that asks a few hundred strangers to commit three hours and a real ticket price to something they can't pause. That's the first thing to go. Not because no one will come, but because fewer will come reliably enough to carry the cost. And the cost is high in exactly the way the rest of our lives have decided nothing should be.

Because a theater is expensive in a specific way. It requires you to be somewhere, at a time, with other bodies, unable to skip the boring part or check your phone without the person beside you noticing. Everything about the modern attention economy is engineered to make that feel like friction — and not by accident. Solitary attention is the more profitable kind. A subscription you watch alone is easier to sell, meter, and optimize than a night that only exists if a crowd shows up together. So the market didn't neutrally offer us the couch; it spent twenty years and a great deal of money making the couch the path of least resistance. Then we walked it. We usually do.

This is the part that stings if you let it. The live experience was never irreplaceable in the way we claimed — it was replaceable, we were handed a frictionless replacement, and we took it. But what we lost wasn't entertainment. It was the commons. The stage is one of the last places a few hundred strangers agree to feel the same thing at the same time in the same room, breathing together, laughing a half-second apart, no version of the event that any of them could have had alone. That's not a delivery mechanism for songs. That's a rehearsal for being a public — for the muscle that lets a crowd of separate people briefly become an us.

We are losing that muscle the way you lose any muscle: not to an injury, but to disuse — disuse that the whole environment is tuned to reward. The dark theater is downstream of a culture that has quietly priced being-together as a luxury and being-alone as the default, because someone profits from the default. And a specific revival closes for specific reasons — capitalization, running costs, a limited creative bet — that live or die on the margin, not on some clean referendum where the audience simply didn't show. Producers don't usually close the shows that are selling out. They close the ones whose margins got too thin to survive a soft week. The economics aren't just our choices added up. They're our choices plus the architecture built to bend them.

So don't hand the streaming service the whole blame — but don't let it off the hook either. It didn't take the theater from us at gunpoint. It offered the least ambitious part of us exactly what it was already reaching for, and made that offer impossible to miss and nearly free. The algorithm isn't our warden. It isn't quite our enabler either — that word still puts the weakness in us and the innocence in the tool. It's an architecture, built on purpose, by people who could just as easily have built the opposite.

Which is the only honest question left. Not how to save one show, and not how to shame ourselves into nobler taste — moralizing has never once refilled a room. The question is whether anyone will design toward presence with the same intent the last two decades spent designing it away: price the communal bet back in, subsidize the room, make showing-up the easy default instead of the heroic exception. Because presence survives on exactly one nutrient — people in the room, together — and right now nearly every incentive we've built quietly bets they'd rather be alone.

The stage went dark because we stopped walking toward it, inside an environment engineered to make walking feel like effort. That's fixable. But not by mourning, and not by willpower alone — only by rebuilding the path.