Alive and Well

The cast lacks superstar names, the plot is wafer-thin, and the show proved only a modest hit in New York. Yet even before its West End opening last week, Legally Blonde, The Musical, a stage version of the 2001 movie about a sorority queen turned Harvard law student, was handily repaying the investors who brought the show to London. Previews sold out. Crowds of autograph hunters formed nightly outside the theater. Advance ticket sales topped $2.5 million. Londoners, it seems, are yearning for live entertainment.

Contrary to some expectations that recession-bitten audiences would hunker down in front of their hi-def TVs, theatergoers are flocking to the West End. Provisional figures suggest that 2009 was a record year for the capital's theaters. Box-office revenues climbed 7 percent, while audiences were up 5 percent across the board, according to the Society of London Theatre, which represents more than 50 venues. "It's as good as it's ever been," says Sonia Friedman, a producer of Legally Blonde and a 20-year theater veteran. By comparison, though ticket sales on Broadway grossed more than $1 billion for 2009, a greater number of shows drew smaller audiences than in 2008.

A simple wish to escape the day-to-day gloom of recession-blighted Britain can't wholly explain the trend. Serious plays are flourishing alongside frivolous musicals. Another of Friedman's recent hits, Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, is a darkly humorous state-of-the-nation piece about Britain with a drug-dealing drunkard as its antihero. In fact, audiences seem especially partial to shows built around timely and relevant themes. Lucy Prebble's Enron is a morality tale for the times (with song and dance) that skewers '90s capitalism through the story of the Texas energy company; it opens in the West End this month after packing houses at the Royal Court in Chelsea, and is booked for Broadway this spring. The Power of Yes, the latest play by longtime establishment scourge David Hare, resembles a first-person documentary as much as a conventional play in its attempt to unravel the issues behind the financial crisis. "What you see now are plays about the recession that people really want to see when they are trying to make sense of the modern world," says veteran theater critic Robert Gore-Langton. "There is a new urgency about it."

It certainly helps that the city has been glutted with dramatic talent. "We have just never had such a great crop of directors working together in London at the same time," says André Ptaszynski, chief executive of the Really Useful Group, which owns six London theaters. "And because the quality is so damn good, there is a very real chance that if you have one good live experience, then you are going to get addicted." Canny producers have further swollen audiences by recruiting big-name stars from the cinema, including Keira Knightley, now appearing in Molière's The Misanthrope, and Rachel Weisz in A Streetcar Named Desire. Paradoxically, reality television has also played its part, thanks to a new subgenre that allows TV audiences a role in selecting the stars of big stage productions; The Sound of Music, in which TV audiences voted for Connie Fisher to play the role of Maria, is still running after three years. One survey last year found that nearly half of theatergoers were more likely to see the live show if they'd tracked the casting process on the small screen.

Of course, it's not only artistic merit that's filling the seats. The recession has largely spared the metropolitan crowd that's always formed the dependable core of West End habitués. Those who have kept their well-paid jobs have actually seen their real incomes rise because of tumbling mortgage rates. "The fact is that people who are working are better off, and in a time of apparent difficulty they still want to be stimulated or entertained," says Howard Panter, head of London's Ambassador Theatre Group. Even the unlucky who have felt the financial squeeze may now regard the theater as a consoling and relatively affordable treat at £50 a seat.

Either way, the new enthusiasm for theater is symptomatic of a wider shift in attitudes, a rejection of the pervasive materialism of the boom years. What the public wants for its cash is a real and memorable experience, not the passing pleasures of the money culture. "People realize there are more things in life than consumption and acquisitiveness," says Nicholas Starr, executive director of the thriving National Theatre. Indeed, parallel developments are rampant across the live-entertainment industry. Festivals offering music, poetry, and comedy have proliferated. Tickets for England's Glastonbury music festival, scheduled for June, sold out shortly after they went on sale in October.

And if the public is turning away from consumerism, it may also be shunning the screen-based culture that burgeoned over the past decade. "People are hankering for something more authentic," says Paul James of the Society of London Theatre. "The very ubiquity of digital has devalued it in a way. What you can't download is being with 500 other people in a room sharing a common experience." At least not yet.