When it comes to high-priced live show tickets, it’s often a case of - to quote the Dario Fo play - ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay!’

But are rising costs of admissions simply reflecting the skyrocketing cost of living? How can live productions compete with cinemas - or perhaps more specifically, streaming platforms offering millions of dollars worth of content from across the globe, at a weekly subscription rate of less than the cost of an average movie ticket?

Hollywood blockbusters can cost between $80-100 million - unless you’re James Cameron, in which case Avatar The Way of Water and its semi-completed sequel cost an estimated billion dollars plus change. Yet we can watch these billion-dollar behemoths in our local cinema for around $20 a screening. Heck, wait a few weeks and you can watch them at home on a streaming service for a subscription of around $15 a week. And not just one movie -  but an unlimited supply of television, films, stand-up comedy specials, and even recordings of hit stage shows.

How can the live experience compete? 

In a world in which the price of bread, milk, power, and rent far outstrips the luxuries of the live arts, are theatre, dance, opera, circus and the like simply the provenance of those with enough disposable income to enjoy? 

Are the live arts nothing more than expensive wines, luxury sports cars, caviar, and designer clothes that the 99% can see advertised, but only the lucky 1% can experience?

It's not that Aotearoa’s artists and exponents aren’t trying to reach everyone. Auckland Theatre Company’s recent production of King Lear offered the increasingly normalised pay-what-you-can-afford performance, and it’s not unusual to see Aotearoa’s producers and practitioners offering subsidised, low-cost tickets for registered students, schools performances, education workshops, and touring shows.

But is that enough to compete in a world in which entertainment can be found with a few clicks via even the most basic online device?

Hamilton highlights the battle

Case in point - I first watched the hit musical Hamilton on Disney+ for a fee of $14.99 a month. With the first two months thrown in for free, that’s about $12 a month. $3 a week. Just over 40 cents a day. For unlimited shows, from Marvel and Star Wars, to National Geographic, to whatever the hell is on these gargantuan servers for consumers to watch, sample, or ignore at their leisure. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. Heck, I only joined to watch Hamilton. It was amazing.

So, when I forked out well over $150 a ticket to go and see the live show in an Auckland Arena, I expected to be blown away by the truly live experience Lin Manuel Miranda’s Broadway smash seemed to offer.

What did I get for all that hard-earned cash? 

A seat so far away from the stage that the only way to see the action was via the giant screens either side, relaying live images of the cast in enormous close-up. From my seat, so far from the stage, those giant screens resembled tiny TVs, no bigger than the mobile phones people in front of me held aloft to record snippets of the performance in a bid to show the world that they were really there, in the room when it happened.

Hamilton live was not a multimedia performance, integrating screens as part of the show, as Sydney Theatre Company achieved so brilliantly in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray at this year’s Auckland Arts Festival. No, this was no commentary on our screen-obsessed, narcissistic society.

Attending Hamilton live - way back in the “cheap” seats - was no different for me than the last U2 concert in Aotearoa stadiums, where the band were so tiny to those of us at the back of the crowd that Bono, Adam, Larry, and The Edge were only visible via the gigantic projection screens either side of the stage, relaying images of the band as they played live, so that we at the back could see they really there. Live. On stage.

The screens at Hamilton were not integral - they weren’t even part of the show. They were essential if many attending were to be able to see anything at all.

I’m told that Hamilton tickets ranged from $70 to as much as $600. The more you paid, the closer you’d be to the stage. 

My $150 ticket, plus booking fees, would have bought me a year of streaming. 

And I’m not including the cost of a $40 program, parking fees, the purchase of a beer at the bar during the interval, and so on, and on… until you finally realise the most cost-efficient way to be entertained is to stay inside and never leave again, because your device offers more entertainment than you can ever handle - an endless river of content flowing direct through the ether, straight to your sofa. Forever.

But at what price?

Experience can't be streamed

Not experiencing productions live is to reduce all art to content to be consumed via a screen. Be it an enormous 8K TV - with surround sound turned up to eleven - or your mobile phone, a laptop, alone on your sofa, or in a room with friends, it’s still not live. And that’s okay if you are watching a TV show, playing video games, or watching cat videos online. 

But to miss out on the live experience? That’s the difference between hearing Radiohead or Taylor Swift on Spotify, and seeing them live. Not in a gigantic stadium, where you need screens to see the artists perform, but someplace intimate enough that you can see them unaided by a zoom lens.

The live experience, for all its hassle and expense - the costs of travel and parking, buying a drink, queuing for the loos in the interval, putting up with the possibility that the person who sneezed next to you may have either a minor cold or full-blown COVID – all of it pales when it comes down to the live experience. 

You’re in a room, with an audience, witnessing an event, as it happens, right in front of you, warts ‘n’ all. Live And dangerous. Because anything could happen. 

Any thing. 

It’s unpredictable. Exciting. Electric.

A week or so after seeing Hamilton, I went to see Hannah Tasker-Poland perform her cabaret show The Most Naked at Auckland’s Q Theatre. 

She had to be cut out of her boot. It got stuck. The zipper jammed. She needed the assistance of an audience member, and a stage hand, to literally cut her boot free. 

Could it have been all part of the act? A rehearsed mistake? Possibly, but I doubt it. Her ninety-minute show ran fifteen minutes late as a result. The frustration of her predicament seemed real, and Hannah’s improvised attempts to lighten the mood, and excuse this wardrobe mishap as part and parcel of the show being live, served to unite the audience in releasing our shared tension as cathartic laughter. 

And so they sliced leather with a knife, as Hannah chatted, and joked with us, whilst her two zip-busters busied themselves cutting her trapped foot free.

At their concert this April in Tāmaki Makaurau’s Town Hall, British punk band The Stranglers - supported by Shihad lead Jon Toogood - finally let rip with one of their most famous songs Golden Brown, only to have the lead vocalist’s microphone, and guitar go down. The whole gig had been leading up to this song. And suddenly it was gone. Just the drums and keyboards remained. “Fuck it. That’s live music!” the singer yelled, and as if by telekinetic magic, the song was taken up by the crowd, who sang until the stage crew rushed a new guitar, lead, and microphone on stage. 

The audience roared their approval. We had saved the day. We had sung the song and the show went on, only more energized than before, because suddenly we were in the band too. Without us, there’d be no show. We got to save the day and sing Golden Brown live.

My far-removed seat from the stage of Hamilton literally distanced me from the experience of the show. Watching close-ups of actors on giant screens was nothing more than an expensive way to watch TV. 

Screens do not automatically render a live show technologically savvy. If they are not part of the show, they are just afterthoughts, inserted to ensure that those at the back can see.

What is lost is the intimacy and immediacy that live performance can give; that electric feeling that anything could happen. If seeing Hamilton taught me anything, it’s that live theatre needs to be up close and personal.

The day after I attended the world’s biggest live musical stage show, I sat in the tiny basement theatre of Titirangi’s Lopdell House, where I watched an amateur production of Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project.  

Just a few rows of seats separating me from sixteen actors in a small space. No need for screens, cameras, or close-ups. You could see the expressions on their faces, the sweat on their brows, the intensity in their eyes. And all for a fraction of the cost of those stadium show tickets.  

A day later, and I saw Sam Potter’s Hanna, and then Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie - both one-woman shows, both locally produced, professional shows, in venues that lent themselves to the immediacy of theatrical production, and both at a fraction of a fraction of the price of my stadium show experience.

Live theatre is still relatively affordable in Aotearoa. From pay-what-you-can performances, to shows with seats subsidised by arts grants, age and educational discounts - it’s still possible to see live shows that are intimate, affordable, accessible, challenging, entertaining, and stimulating.

Sure, you can watch all you want on a screen, and the budgets may be huge, and Chris Hemsworth might take his shirt off, or a computer-generated superheroine might team up with a talking broccoli in a brightly coloured pixelated multiverse of indistinct splodge... 

But what makes live productions distinct from recorded work is that, no matter how much they cost, no matter how many tricks they have up their pixelated sleeves, they aren’t live.

When it comes down to it, the Hamilton I saw via streaming on my TV at home, and the production I saw from the rear of a giant stadium, were ultimately both on screens. I’ve spoken to people who watched the show near the front, and they had a totally different experience. They saw the actors speak, sing, and dance up close. Close enough to feel the emotion, and experience the action, unmediated by a camera lens. They saw in effect a different show. They were present, in the performers’ space, and loved every minute of it.

Me? Sat at the back, I may as well have been behind a brick wall with noise-cancelling headphones on. Or better yet - back at home on my sofa watching the filmed version on TV. All the giant screens offered me in the live environment was to replace theatre with TV.

What makes live performance unique isn’t just that immediacy in knowing it’s happening right now, but that intimacy that lets your senses know that you are there, in the same space as your fellow audience members, the cast, and crew, sharing an unrepeatable experience. One that you can’t pause, rewind, or switch off.

So, don’t let the post-lockdown explosion of great live art pass you by. Grab a ticket and go. Support the arts. Entertain your brain. Experience the thrill of the live. Be it dance, drama, comedy, music, circus – whatever. 

Because when it comes to the live arts, they simply cannot exist without a living, breathing, laughing, clapping, and gasping audience. And that’s where we come in.