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This week, a sold-out run of the Broadway smash Come From Away is dazzling audiences at the Centennial Concert Hall with its very Canadian story of Newfoundland hospitality after 9/11.
The musical by Irene Sankoff and David Hein delighted standing-room-only audiences at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York for five years; the North American tour of Come From Away is an Equity production, starring many of the same actors who appeared in the Broadway or Toronto versions of the show.
What does Equity mean and why does it matter? It’s the Actor’s Equity Association, a union for actors that has been negotiating wages and benefits for members since 1913. In addition to guaranteeing such things as overtime, health benefits, workers’ comp, retirement savings and per diems, Equity guarantees protections such as clean workspaces and not being recorded without producer permission.
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Because producers don’t have to pay for all this when they hire non-Equity actors, these productions are much less expensive to mount and take on tour.
‘Come From Away’ is frantically paced and impeccably choreographed, but so seamlessly presented that it never feels like either. (Matthew Murphy)
Of course, holding an Equity card doesn’t automatically confer talent upon an actor, but it’s almost impossible to be in a Broadway production without one. (The legendary Patti LuPone just announced she’d given up her card, which is tantamount to announcing her retirement from the stage).
To enter the union, you have to either earn points by starring in productions at Equity-approved theatres across the U.S., be a member of a sister acting union, such as SAG or ACTRA, or score a role in an Equity production (a bit of a Catch-22, since many of these auditions, are restricted to cardholders).
Whether Equity productions are always better quality than what used to be called “bus and truck tours” can be debated (although probably not very vigorously; as one Reddit commenter put it, “All Equity actors were once non-Equity. But there are no famous non-Equity actors”), but it can’t be denied that producing shows on the cheap allows them to visit smaller markets that might otherwise be priced out of such events, and for shorter runs.
However, the pointed lack of transparency about whether touring productions are Equity or not is a grave disservice to members of the ticket-buying public, who are charged the same price whether the lead actor has a string of Broadway hits to his name or has played Jafar on a Disney cruise.
As anyone who shelled out a hundred bucks in 2019 for the very shaky touring production of Kinky Boots (more like Hinky Boots, amirite?) knows, you don’t always get what you pay for.
When the Angels and the factory’s assembly line are incorporated into the choreography, ‘Kinky Boots’ takes a step in the right direction. (Matthew Murphy)
More recently, although Cody Garcia was a bizarre delight in the title role of Willy Wonka at the concert hall, his charisma only threw the shortcomings of the rest of the non-Equity cast into starker relief.
And it’s not just a case of getting our money’s worth — when we patronize non-Equity shows, we’re contributing to a culture that devalues the work of artists to line producers’ pockets.
Do you care if a production is Equity? Do you notice? Drop me a line and let me know.
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