A few weeks ago, while trying to suss out Ari Emanuel's $6 billion purchase of a global theater-venue company that includes seven major Broadway theaters, I stumbled upon an article that appeared to illuminate every answer I craved. "Custodians of the Cap Table," a giant piece of data journalism written by Jared Harbour, lays out the benefits and stakes of such a massively pricey deal, and speculates about what Emanuel's larger motivations might have been: His company MARI now owns the theaters and their ticketing apparatus, and more, while Emanuel's other company Endeavor owns a concierge hospitality group. Harbour wrote that the "Entourage"-famous super-agent (and brother of Rahm Emanuel) "now touches a weekend in New York in five separate transactions, with most companies only touching one, maybe two." In this profit-obsessed paradigm, Harbour contends, "a play earns its purpose by manufacturing a reason to buy everything else. It no longer is the reason why someone purchases a ticket, but instead one piece of the larger experiential puzzle."
Harbour's Substack, which he describes as covering "Broadway's broken development system, the legal architecture of the entertainment industry, and the economics of who gets to make art," is deeply researched and extremely nerdy, but offers delightfully breezy dives into the inner workings of a topic that's arcane to most of the general public. (For example: Why "Cats: The Jellicle Ball" closed so soon, an important subject for me, a Jellicle stan.)
Harbour is a young overachiever: a 25-year-old native New Yorker, he's also a dancer and choreographer; a film and theater producer who runs a company with his best friend and creative partner, Aidan Gibney; and a graduate student at Columbia getting a joint JD and master's in theater producing. We spoke about what he thinks Broadway ought to do to save itself.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.