INFLUENCE WE?
Just in the past week or so, I’ve read three different “Influencer”-centered headlines in the New York Times: “Social Media Influencers to Speak at the Democratic Convention;” “The 2024 NBA 40 under 40 list: Top Young Coaches, Executives, Managers and Influencers;” and, most pertinently (for me): “Why ‘The Great Gatsby’ and Other Broadway Shows Are Turning to Influencers.”
Personally, I inhabit an Influencer-free environment. Still, even I can understand why all of these entities — the DNC, the NBA and the BSs (Broadway Shows) — are turning to Influencers. They’re anxious to reach the Influencers’ prey: young, and ostensibly more diverse, consumers. A perfectly natural and potentially lucrative aspiration.
I get it. I also get the level of discourse in the Influencer sphere. Most of what I see and hear translates into…well, cheerleading. Nothing intrinsically wrong with cheerleading, though I like to, at least, imagine that, when I write, I am something other than a cheerleader.
I certainly don’t want to be an Influencer. I like words. I like to assemble them into coherence.
In fact, I can’t be an Influencer. Not until I learn how take a decent Selfie. And shoot a video. And centuple my readership .
Which brings me to The Great Gatsby. I’ve already written about The Great Gatsby. It is, in my opinion, a a nondescript mediocrity of a musical, despite its sparkly costumes and scenic appurtenances. In earlier Broadway seasons The Great Gatsby would have just disappeared, I suspect. Come and gone.
The Great Gatsby is, however, lingering after latching onto Influencers as social media saviors. The show’s producers recently threw a lavish Influencers-influencing cocktail party (according to the N.Y. Times), in a spiffy attempt at attracting Influencers and, by inference, their followers, to something that they otherwise might have no interest in: A Broadway musical (a what?) based on a 1925 novel (yawn) about a passel of over-privileged white folks.
This is not a diss of The Great Gatsby as a work of fiction (it is actually my personal favorite); nor is it a dismissal of the young and/or the diverse (we were all young once, and remain ever devoted to diversity); or of over-privileged white persons, for that matter (I am in no position to point fingers).
In weighing survival on Broadway against all odds (or taste), I always think: What would David Merrick have done? Merrick (“The Abominable Showman” as someone once dubbed him) was the ultimate survivalist Broadway producer of his generation (the late-1950s into the early 1980s) and also the most dominant, because Merrick would do anything to sell his shows: Capitalize on the opening night death of his director (Gower Champion, and the musical 42nd Street); lock theater critics out of his theaters; lie every which way, to bring audiences in.
Maybe you’ve already heard this true story: In 1961 Merrick produced a musical called Subways Are For Sleeping. The reviews were lousy. Merrick was incensed. He hunted down seven strangers with the same names as NYC’s seven top theater critics. (Can you imagine? — New York once had seven working theater critics!) Merrick dragged these seven critic avatars to see Subways Are For Sleeping, after, no doubt, dining and wining them. He then procured their permission to deploy their names alongside rave quotes for Subways Are For Sleeping in a newspaper ad.
Though only one paper, The New York Herald Tribune, wound up running Merrick’s gerrymandered full-page ad, the resulting publicity kept Subways Are For Sleeping open for a respectable 205 performances (about six months).
I like to think of those seven David Merrick-fabricated opinion rakers as Broadway’s first Influencers.