Thanks to public standard union contracts, we know what the base salary is for Broadway performers, stage managers, and musicians. These minimum rates are only for professionals on Broadway and are calculated by the week since, unlike other vocations who report annual salaries, artists will not necessarily be employed by their Broadway show for a full year. These figures are valid as of October 2,and are scheduled to remain through September 29,after which most of these rates will increase slightly. Musician pay dods comes from Local Their rates are valid as of March and are scheduled to remain through Actog 3, But that figure can increase depending on the particular roes of any aa track. Understudying roles also comes with additional pay. There are also some other situations in which musicians may be required to assume additional responsibilities or make an additional time commitment, which can result in an increase in the base pay. Logan Culwell-Block is a musical theatre historian, Playbill’s manager of research, and curator of Playbill Vault. Blocking belongs on the stage, not on websites.
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The reality is, you do not usually break even when doing a Broadway show if you are from out of town. Even if you live there, money is tight. Every contract and every situation is different! Here are some tips from our experts:. So make sure to ask what exactly is included in the pay rate. This can really make things confusing. The thing to know is that Equity has a minimum pay rate for each contract and that is not negotiable downward. Contact Equity and ask what scale is for the contract the show works under. Split roles can also mean a split salary.
The curtain rises, and the audience applauds as Broadway actors transport them to another time and place. It takes hard work and dedication to get to Broadway. It’s a lucrative career for a few. Hamilton producers have also profited from the enormous success of the show. Most actors who make it to Broadway do not achieve that level of wealth or fame. They do it because they love performing on stage. Actors bring a story to life by creating characters from a playwright’s script and directions. Unlike acting for television or film, the theater is live.
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That actor you’re watching onstage tonight? He or she might well have skin in the game. And I speak not just of art or hunger for applause. I talk of cold, hard cash. One of the more interesting and perhaps lesser noticed changes in show business these last few years has been the transition of touring shows away from fixed salaries to compensation models based on how many seats are filled. Not so long ago, back in the glory of the early s when multiple companies of «The Phantom of the Opera» convoyed across the Midwest, most touring Broadway shows offered actors production contracts, which meant financial rewards and working conditions that mirrored those on Broadway. In fact, for your average Broadway actor especially the younger and freer variety , going on tour with a show could mean a more attractive deal than in New York. On the road, actors got nice per diems with no obligation to spend all that money if they could stay with friends. They could live on their per diem and bank the salary. The production contract, the holy grail for actors, still exists in touring theater. But almost every other Equity show on the road — «Peter Pan,» «Priscilla Queen of the Desert,» even «Les Miserables» — operates under a different contract with a far lower minimum salary for actors. Under the now-common contracts called short engagement touring agreements or SETAs , salaries are less than half the full rates. With a kick.
Broadway and Unions
While that would be a great salary for a year-round job, actors live with the risk of the show closing and leaving them unemployed. There are multiple extra weekly payments for special cases, for instance if they move sets, they understudy the lead or they take a role with physical risk. All these will add to the weekly salary. Actors’ salaries on Broadway are not left up to the whim of individual producers. Although acting is a field where individual talent rules, it’s also tightly unionized. A stage actors union called Actors’ Equity Association was formed in to improve the poor conditions actors worked under back then. Those conditions included actors:. In , actors on Broadway and in Chicago went on a month-long strike with support from theater musicians and stagehands. That established Actors’ Equity as a player in the industry and convinced producers to start negotiating. Since then, Broadway has paid actors a set rate, which the union periodically renegotiates. If you work as an actor on Broadway, you’ll almost certainly need to join Actors’ Equity. As a member, you can only work on shows that offer you an Equity contract. If you’re not a member, but you’re cast in a unionized show, that gives you the immediate opportunity to join. Once you join, working on a non-unionized show can cost you your Equity membership.
The first most important piece of maie for anyone aspiring to be a Broadway actor seems to be, if there is anything else you’d broadwah do, you should do it instead. Being an actor on Broadway can be rewarding, personally, though not necessarily financially. And everyone usually has to start at the bottom and work their way up. What is the bottom for a Broadway actor? Actually, it is to be an audience member — to muhc as much theater as possible, to audition and be cast in everything from school plays to community theater productions, and to invest in the career before trying to make it your career. The job of an actor, whether on Broadway or a high school stage, or even in someone’s basement or garage, is to express ideas and portray characters, most often from someone else’s script, to entertain and inform an audience. You aren’t likely to be cast as the «lead» in a Broadway show right away. If. And you aren’t likely to even be cast from the first audition you give — trying to convince a casting director your interpretation of the script, any part of it, is the best, and expresses the hhow vision of the character accurately and engagingly. If you do get a «call-back» from your audition the producer, casting director, director and scriptwriter want to see you essentially audition againand succeed in getting cast, your roles can range between the lead, which requires hours of stage time and the memorization of lots of lines, to parts that require only a line or two or no speaking at all — as a «background» actor. Broadway musicals have chorus roles that are non-speaking roles but require dancing and singing. As a cast member, you often will spend hours rehearsing — not only before the production opens but also often during a show’s «run,» to polish and adjust the performance. Unlike in television or film, in which the audience never sees or hears a full production exactly as it was written, and the writing is often being changed up until or even after a scene is shot, on stage, when someone thinks they know the material, they want to hear it «exactly the way it was written,» and know when how much money does a broadway actor make a year has been changed because it is no longer familiar to them, actor and consultant David Patrick Green notes.
The Bare Minimum: Breaking Down Broadway Actor Salaries
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