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[0:00] Jeff Malone: Welcome to Half Hour with Jeff and Richie. I'm Jeff.

[0:00] Richie Grasso: And I'm Richie. And today on our Spotlight Series, we welcome a very special guest. We have author Spencer Weber Waller. Spencer, welcome to Half Hour Podcast.

[0:09] Spencer Weber Waller: Great to be here. Thanks.

[0:09] Jeff Malone: Yes. I'm going to read your bio so everyone knows who you are. So Spencer Weber Waller is the author of *Power and Greed: Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage*, is deeply involved in the Broadway and touring theater industry, having represented actors, playwrights, marketing professionals, and theater companies. He was co-producer of the 2024 Broadway revival of *The Who's Tommy* and has invested in Broadway shows and global touring productions. Professor Waller is the John Paul Stevens Chair in Competition Law at Loyola University's Chicago School of Law and is an internationally recognized expert in antitrust and consumer protection law. This story of how power and greed have controlled the business of live entertainment in the United States from the 19th century to the present day reveals the battle of power in vaudeville, live theater, and now the concert industry. The book discusses how the law has struggled to tame the illegal and anti-competitive practices of the dominant firms and monopolists who create the live entertainment we crave, but they control.

[1:06] Richie Grasso: So we just have to tell you, we read the book. We're huge fans of Broadway, of course, because we're always talking about theater that we see, tours as well, regional productions. And we're just fascinated by what goes on stage. But we also love to talk here about what's going on behind the scenes. And so many of our listeners don't always know much about what's going on behind the scenes. We've had producers on before kind of say, like, what is a Broadway producer and what are the inner workings of? So I figured it would be great to kind of just dive in and maybe clarify from your perspective and give us like the one, two, three on what is antitrust law in a nutshell.

[1:39] Spencer Weber Waller: Of course. Yeah, thank you. Antitrust law has been around since the 1890s, 1890, in fact, when Congress passed the Sherman Act. Antitrust law has been amended a few times, but it's really three simple things. One is it prohibits anti-competitive agreements like price fixing. It prohibits certain kinds of monopolies. Think about the current litigation with Amazon, with Live Nation, Ticketmaster, with Google, that sort of thing. And it prohibits mergers that harm competition or are likely to harm competition. You can think about the Kroger-Albertsons grocery store merger that was blocked a year or so ago. So it's the law that protects competition. The goal is to protect both workers and consumers from the abuse of power in the marketplace.

[2:22] Jeff Malone: And one thing I found fascinating about the book is I learned so much about that from, as you said, the 1800s and into the early 20th century, because I find that so many people think of Broadway in general as like, oh, when, you know, Broadway was starting as we know it today with recordings of *Oklahoma* and *Showboat* and those big first few musicals and plays that kind of started in the 30s and 40s. But I love how your book goes way back and tells us about vaudeville and the times before that and the Schuberts, of course, too, and how that all started with the syndicate. And so it's a fascinating history because I think it's also kind of another question I had for you, if you could clarify.

Many people didn't know that there was so much going on on the road before Broadway. There was so much vaudeville and touring. And if you could talk a little bit about what was the differences, mainly in Broadway as we know it today, versus what was going on on the road back then, too?

[3:17] Spencer Weber Waller: Well, you know, this book is about basically the business of live entertainment. And it really was a business a lot earlier than most people think. And it became a national business after the Civil War when we had a national economy. The Civil War was over. You don't have military actions going on between the North and the South. You have a national currency. You have national transportation shortly thereafter when the railroad could go all the way from coast to coast. And you have national communications, like first telegraph and then telephone. So it's actually possible to do business across the country. And at the same time, like the businesses that everyone's heard of, like railroads and oil and steel and stuff like that, there's a business of entertainment.

And it starts with a play that the two of you may or may not have heard of called *The Black Crook* in 1866. And people argue whether this really was the first Broadway musical or not. But I think most people agree that it's the first Broadway musical that became a nationwide big business. And I've read the libretto, so you don't have to. But it's apparently five and a half hours long. It had a cast of over 200 people. It was there primarily to feature several hundred scantily clad chorus girls who were supposed to appear in some other production that never got off the ground that were hired to do this. It's sort of vaguely the story of Faust. And it played on Broadway. And then it toured the country for something like 50, 60 years.

It's literally starting in 1866 on Broadway, ending around 1910 or something like that, and occasional revivals afterwards. So Broadway was a business. And back in the day, people were being schlepped around the country on railroads. And later on, airplanes obviously, but still buses today for the modern equipment.

[5:06] Spencer Weber Waller: I'm trying to tell the story of how it was a business and how a lot like the other businesses of the days, like Standard Oil and U.S. Steel, it kind of fell into the hands of a small group of men. They were all men back then. And it started first, there were two kinds of national entertainment that really mattered. There were other things like wild west shows and circuses and opera. But the two that mattered were vaudeville and legitimate theater. And vaudeville is just a variety show where the acts have nothing to do with each other. And they can be anything from a trained animal act to a magician to a singer to a comedian, that sort of thing. And legitimate theater has some kind of through line, whether it's a drama or a musical.

And different people control this industry. But what is very similar, first vaudeville, then legitimate theater. They toured because there were people who figured out that they could make the most money, not just producing and not just presenting, but being the middlemen. The people who we would call booking agents today, who could arrange the tours so that someone who produced the show was reasonably successful on Broadway wanted to tour it. They could set up the route so they would make a lot of money and the tour would go on for years. And then, same on the vaudeville side. They were just different combinations of guys. And that's the historical story that I wanted to tell, how on the vaudeville side, there was an East Coast monopoly and a West Coast monopoly, and they never competed ever, really.

And on the theater side, starting in the 1890s, after the Sherman Act was passed, six guys went into a smoke-filled room in New York, and they created something called the American Theatrical Syndicate. That's before the Schuberts. The Schuberts were like infants or kids then. And these six guys from the American Theatrical Syndicate were producers, mostly booking agents, and they owned some theaters. And they figured out that if they controlled the booking, they controlled what happened upstream and downstream. And you had to do business with them, and they were happy to take your money. But if you did business with them, you had to do business with them and no one else. And a trust lawyer in me began to go, like, that's important.

That's weird. How come the law is not doing anything about that? Why is it literally until the 1950s when all these first generation of people have long gone and the Schuberts have entered the scene that antitrust ended up trying to do anything about it? And again, that's a historical thing that got me started.

[7:29] Spencer Weber Waller: And I started working on this really during the pandemic, where I didn't really have a chance to do very much. But once the pandemic was over, I spent a year in the Biden administration. Once that was over, I could hunker down. And for the past three years, I've been digging through the archives all over the country and then writing this book that we're talking about today.

[7:48] Jeff Malone: And now what made you want to write this book around power and greed?

[7:54] Spencer Weber Waller: Well, initially, I'm sitting around just watching TV with my wife during the pandemic. She's reading Michael Riedel's book, *The Razzle Dazzle*. And somewhere in the early chapters, they mentioned this American theatrical syndicate, and that got my attention. And I kind of grabbed it from her and started looking at this. I want to learn more. And again, it's pandemic. There's not much I can do other than order a couple of books on Amazon and make a few phone calls. But that was the real start of this. And I started tracing the history both before and afterwards that we can talk about. But what really happens on the vaudeville is there's two dominant firms who more or less work together. Various people, including like William Morris, who are trying to start competing ventures, and they're kind of cut out.

And William Morris's solution is movies have started. He figures he can make more money and goes off to Hollywood and becomes William Morris in capital letters, you know, as the agent. And on the theater side, the syndicate has lots of enemies, crushes most of their competition by just blackballing them and preventing them from working in any important way if you don't do business with them. And then along come the Schuberts. And that's a story that I was able to tell, particularly once the archives reopened. And it's history. There's literally no one alive who can talk about this from a first-person perspective. I talked to people as old as a veteran producer named Manny Eisenberg, who's 96, and he's doing fine.

But, you know, he was just coming into the industry after the Schubert empire had already been broken up. So he like knew those people. But he was just even a kid when this was happening. So, you know, I got a chance to work a lot in the Schubert archives. And I began to learn the story of the Schubert brothers who, you know, were both terrific business people. At one time, the small, scrappy underdogs who took on the syndicate and won in a variety of ways that we can chat about. But they came later. They were just younger. They were Jewish immigrants, as many of the people in the story were. And they grew up in upstate New York. There were three of them, Sam, Lee, and JJ. And they were all born in the old country.

And they came here with their parents and they were raised in upstate New York and they had no money. And other than Sam, they didn't really have any particular love for theater, but they did need money and they all started working as kids.

[10:14] Spencer Weber Waller: Give me a tip. If you are drinking and eating junk food and want a quick change of pace, I'm a fan of Snickers and they lease a decrepit theater in New York in 1900. That's when the war broke out. They call it a war; we would call it competition, where they're actually trying to lease, build, renovate as many theaters as possible to get around the blacklist. When you're a monopoly, you tend to not treat people very well. I'm talking about the syndicate in this day and age. There were actors who wanted to work with the syndicate, were willing to take the chance of being blackballed, were willing to take the risk of being blackballed by the syndicate. There were producers who wanted to put on plays in their houses, and there were a few theaters around the country who teamed up with them.

They grew fast because they had to; otherwise, they'd be out of business. They offered something called the open door and they told a great story. They told the story that we're the David and you're the Goliath and we're giving people what they want at a fair price and we're not going to screw labor, we're not going to screw the actors, that sort of thing. The war is on. Most of the book is centered on this history of Broadway that's a little bit before the era that you're talking about, particularly from around 1905 to 1907 and beyond, the Shuberts and the syndicate are at war with each other, except that periodically they're colluding with each other in a way, not unlike how the syndicate got formed in the first place, but in a way that if three of us did it today, we don't go to jail for actual antitrust violations.

They got away with it for some technical reasons. I think that the real pinnacle of the story historically is when they were done fighting, when they were done colluding, they realized that they made so much money on booking that booking vaudeville for them didn't seem that much different than booking Broadway. And so the syndicate and Shuberts got together to try and take over vaudeville. So it's essentially one cartel taking on another cartel, starting a new vaudeville circuit, and they didn't have the brightest strategy. The strategy was basically hire stars at twice the price that they were being paid, or five people from Scotland and England where the syndicate didn't really have their closet.

[13:00] Spencer Weber Waller: How close do you think we came to a global monopoly, if not for some of these? I mean, were there chances that it would have become a huge global monopoly at one point? It sounds like it. They sure wanted it. And this is an era where they would talk about this stuff, like in the New York Times and the local papers, and they'd say, like, we're in the process of talking to a similar syndicate in the UK, and we're having conversations, and we just sent our lawyer over there to negotiate all this, and we're going to have $100 million, which is enormous money in 1907, global entertainment syndicate. In the end, it fell apart. They couldn't even take over vaudeville in the US because their product, which was called Advanced Vaudeville, was fine.

But the existing vaudeville circuits, Keith Albee in the East Coast and the Orpheum on the western half of the United States, they turned out a very quality product that people liked. It's what we would call brand loyalty today. It failed. It failed miserably. They lost a lot of money. The theater folks eventually settled with the syndicate. That's a less pejorative word than colluded. But they basically signed an agreement with the vaudeville people where they would go back to theater, never invade vaudeville again for 15 years. They got paid a pittance, and the vaudeville people took over some of the contracts of the better-known vaudeville acts. That made it impossible to then do the global thing.

Also, there was a big recession in 1907, so the economy kind of crashed. The vaudeville people were left alone without any serious competition. The theater people were left alone. Over time, the syndicate aged out. The nicest guy in the syndicate that everyone liked, the only one they liked, was Charles Froman, who was a producer who brought Peter Pan over from Broadway. He died in 1915 because he was unlucky enough to be on the Lusitania, the cruise ship when it got torpedoed by the Germans in World War I. He supposedly died quoting lines from Peter Pan as his last words. Who knows? Anyway, these guys aged out. The guy who was kind of the mastermind, Abraham Lincoln Erlanger. I love names like that.

They don't make them like that anymore. He went off to Hollywood to make a silent movie version of Ben Hur. Then vaudeville just kind of went away. People's tastes changed. The movies, particularly when sound came in, destroyed vaudeville. The Great Depression kind of finished them off. That's how you got the Shuberts, through a combination of being good business people and luck. Didn't end up with a global monopoly, but ended up as the last surviving national live entertainment company. They still faced the depression. They still faced the movies, but they were in on the theater side. That's where the story helped about 1932.

[15:56] Spencer Weber Waller: Talking a little bit more about your writing process with this, you got to go into the archives, especially around the Shuberts. What were some big surprises that you discovered when going into these archives? The Shubert archives are actually on the top floor of the attic of the Lyceum theaters. That's where O'Mary's playing. My first surprise was on a Friday afternoon, where I'm just looking through boxes and boxes of stuff. I hear old-timey piano music coming from the stage. I hear audience laughing hysterically. It's like four o'clock on a Friday, so I don't know what's going on. It was, in fact, the invited dress rehearsal for when Betty Gilpin was replacing Cole in the role. The folks who run the archives said, do you want to watch?

I said, sure. How? They reminded me that when Charles Froman and his brother used that space, it was originally a syndicate house. Shubert bought it many years later. They had installed a little trapdoor at the base so they could open it. It's about maybe a foot tall, so they could look down and see how the shows were going. For three or four minutes, I watched Betty Gilpin just do hysterical stuff as Mary Lincoln. I bought a ticket the next day and went and saw the whole show. That was my first surprise. It has nothing to do with the writing of the book, but that was just fun. In terms of what I learned, I learned how much out in the open all of the machinations were going on. Sam Shubert died early, by the way.

He would have shaped the organization in a very different way had he lived. He died in a train crash that many people thought at the time was a murder plot by the syndicate. It wasn't. It was a tragic accident. Lee Shubert and J.J. ran the organization in very different styles. They didn't even like each other very much. It's one thing I've got documented very clearly. They had offices across the street from each other. They would send memos back and forth or gave messages to a courier. That's one kind of surprise. Another surprise was Lee Shubert at one point owned like a third of the stock in the Keith Albee Vaudeville circuit. He bought it on the sly after one of the founders there had died and another long-time employee had died.

He bought it under an assumed name, ran everything through a Wall Street law firm. I don't think anybody on the Vaudeville side ever realized that a third of their dividends or profit distributions and a bunch of their secret information were being funneled over to, I think he used the name Harry Diamond. Only Harry Diamond was Lee Shubert. There was no Harry Diamond who was involved in this. I'm sure there's someone named Harry Diamond. There were just a ton of surprises as I went along.

[18:42] Spencer Weber Waller: Once the Shuberts were sued for monopolization by the Justice Department around 1950, I had access to a bunch of files that no one in the archives had ever looked at before because they had never been indexed and no one had ever asked to see them. They were being stored under the stage at the Lyceum. They were nice enough to bring them up. They had to look at them before they could show it to me. Again, I got access to a lot of the inner thinking of Lee's primary responsibility for the case before he died in 1953 and then J.J., what they were thinking, at least what was written down. Particularly after Lee was on the verge of settling the case, he passed away on Christmas Day in 1953. J.J., depending on what day you wanted to talk to him, he wanted to fight, he wanted to quit, he wanted to sell, he wanted to punch the lawyer for the government.

He's all this stuff. Lots of surprises. It was fun. I was there a lot in the summer and sneaking in quick trips when I wasn't teaching at Loyola here in Chicago. That was a great process. The people who work there are terrific at the Shubert Archives. They work with any scholar, even though they know in part sometimes the stories will be uncomplimentary to the foundation that bears the Shubert name that runs the archives. I found it fascinating that you end this book talking a lot about what Broadway is going through today, but also side by side with the Live Nation Ticketmaster things that are going on today. We talk to so many people all the time. I just feel like what so many people say is Broadway is expensive, concerts are expensive, all these hidden fees, Ticketmaster controls everything. It seems like no matter what beautiful, wonderful things are happening.

[20:29] Richie Grasso: Stages, people can't get past this, you know, I will say Jeff and I are two people who were lucky to get tailors of tickets for that tour. We were very, very lucky. And I felt like the luckiest person around. And then the fact that I could have sold it for I don't even know it was insane what the tickets were going on the resale of it if I but we wound up going we did it but that was just one example. I mean, I'm just curious to know more about everything you've researched up to today. You know, is Broadway versus Live Nation Ticketmaster? Are they the same? Are they different? Are they competitive in their own way in the modern day? If you could talk a little about what's going on today?

[21:03] Spencer Weber Waller: Yeah, so the last third or quarter of the book is lessons for today. And, you know, the Broadway industry was forever changed when the Shubert set, they went to the Supreme Court, they lost a nine nothing, then they settled even JJ knew that it wasn't worth fighting at that point. So when they settled with the government in 1956, the Schubert's had to sell a bunch of theaters on Broadway. They sold them to a company called then created called Jim, Jim Jampson. Jim Jampson was bought by Ambassador Theater Group, who's now being bought by Ari Emmanuel's company called Mari if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Yeah. The Nederlanders then came into Broadway, not buying from the Schubert's but buying from people who bought from the Schubert's. So the modern Broadway and the Schubert's had to sell theaters on the road, they had to sell their ticketing operation, they had to sell their booking operation and some other things.

So on the Broadway side, you have three companies instead of one. That's better. There's no evidence that they're actively colluding with each other. And no one of them has the kind of power that the Schubert's in the old days had. So it's now the Schubert's, the Nederlanders, and whatever the eventual new name of Ambassador Theater Group will be. But, you know, producers today are still worried that the rents are too high. Conditions of the leases are too draconian. They're worried about other things, labor costs and people playing video games instead of going to the theater, you know, all kinds of things. But if you care about competition, it's better on Broadway. Ticketmaster is not particularly active in the Broadway space for primary ticketing.

I believe each of the three big theater owners have their own ticketing system. I just can't remember which one is which. I know that Nederlanders do, I know the Schubert's do, and I can't remember if Ambassador Theater Group has its own primary ticketing. But, you know, the ticketing is in the live concert entertainment business. And I think one of the stories that I learned is that these are distinct slices of entertainment. I know that we all have choices how we spend our time and our leisure time and our money. But it's not that I go to concerts, too. I go to Riot Fest. I, you know, I haven't seen Taylor Swift live. But it's not like I wake up and go, huh, you know, should I go see Oh, Mary or Riot Fest?

They exist in different lanes, and they scratch different itches. So, you know, there's no business like show business and live theater is special. And so right now, the touring market, as you know, I listened to your episode with Sean Nyberg, the touring market is, if anything, you know, larger and more profitable than Broadway for a bunch of reasons. And, you know, the ticketing there, the venues control who's doing the ticketing. Ticketmaster is involved in some of those markets, I don't call specifically what cities are rich. But it's live concerts where Ticketmaster has a monopoly position. You don't have to believe me, there's a verdict against Ticketmaster where a jury found them liable for unlawful monopolization for excluding independent producers and promoters and venues and ticketing systems, in a way that's sort of the modern high tech equivalent of the story that you and I have been talking about.

And so what's happening now is a judge in New York is deciding what should be done. And this all happened just as my book was going to press. So maybe the next book will really focus on this. But a judge has to decide, do you break them up like the Schubert's? Do you break them up like the movie studios, which we haven't talked about, but they were also broken up? Or do you say, all right, just change your behavior? And I don't think that's going to be enough, in part, because Ticketmaster has on two occasions, signed settlements and earlier antitrust cases where they, in essence, promised to behave and they didn't. So that's what's happening in today's space.

[25:00] Richie Grasso: Yeah. What is your prediction on the future? I know we're getting ready to wrap up here. But I would love to know what you think Broadway looks like in 50 years from now? What does concerts look like in 50 years, if you had to take any guesses based on all your extremely wonderful knowledge of this history?

[25:16] Spencer Weber Waller: Yeah, you know, I don't know, a lot of it's going to depend on the changing technology. You know, in for most of the story I'm telling you that, you know, the new technology, radio, movies, and then television. And today we have streaming and you know, who knows exactly what what the future is going to hold. And I don't know, maybe when we can get a 3D hologram concert in our living room, maybe live entertainment won't have the same allure, but I think it'll still be there. I mean, live theater has been around since ancient Greece, if not before. So I think on the commercial side, it's honestly, it's hard to tell. Broadway is increasingly expensive and risky in ways that some of your guests have talked to you about in the past.

And it's true. A producer who puts on a good show has a decent chance of succeeding overall between Broadway and a successful tour. But those those are also increasingly expensive. Star vehicles that have limited runs, but high ticket prices seem to be doing well. Smaller things like O'Mary seem to be doing well. Certain tours that you don't just don't ever see on Broadway unless they make a stop as part of the tour seem to be doing well. And I noticed, for example, there's a tour in Chicago right now of Waitress that's been, I hear, doing well on the road, but obviously hasn't been on Broadway for years. And I believe this may be a non-equity tour. And I haven't looked into the details. So I think this will continue for quite some time.

I'm very concerned about regional not-for-profit theater. The economics are really not in their favor. That's not an antitrust or a legal thing. It's just that along the way, it wasn't the focus of my book, but something that as a fan, I go to a lot, particularly the Goodman, Steppenwolf, and a lot of the great off loop theaters in Chicago. So you know, I don't know, 50 years from now, I think 10 years from now, it'll be recognizable the way we do. And I think if the law is serious about maintaining competition in live entertainment, the way it's sort of serious in the rest of the economy, we have to be careful and thoughtful about what we do with Live Nation Ticketmaster. And we have to be careful about what we do in any company that acquires the kind of power on the road, or on Broadway that we've dealt with in the past. And, you know, I'm a kind of a break them up kind of guy.

[27:30] Richie Grasso: Yeah. And what could you hope that theater fans can take away from this? And maybe like, how could we get a little bit more involved into the law business side of this?

[27:40] Spencer Weber Waller: Well, I think so. This is designed for a general audience. There's a little law in the background, as you know, from reading the book, but it's not a legal treatise. There's not a lot of footnotes. And I'm not trying to teach you antitrust law. I'm trying to tell a story about history and the lessons it has for the biggest thing that we have going right now, which is Live Nation Ticketmaster and some issues on the road, which we don't have time to talk about, but I talk about in the book, why the touring space, particularly what cities you book for your tours, we have reason for concern. So I think Live Nation Ticketmaster, the good news is it's broken through to ordinary citizens in a way that only that maybe that grocery store merger from a couple years ago has.

And maybe the FTC in the Biden administration had a rule that would have banned non-competes in employment contracts. That also got like attention on 60 Minutes and The Daily Show and stuff like that. So antitrust law isn't just boring. It isn't just hard. It's actually important. It can change people's lives. It can change the amount of money we spend who gets it. And more importantly, the art that we see on the stage. During the Monopoly days, it was the lowest common denominator and a lot of terrible revivals and competition allowed one of the great golden ages of Broadway to emerge in the 60s and beyond.

[28:57] Richie Grasso: It's pretty cool stuff. The book Power and Greed, Monopolies, Mergers and Cartels in the American Stage is available now at the time that this episode is airing, wherever you can buy your books. We read it, we couldn't put it down. We loved it. And this episode, I feel like it's just a little splash of the many, many things you get out of it. It was wonderful. It's a great read. And it just gives you such a different perspective on this industry behind the scenes and the history of it. And I learned so much. So I'm grateful for people like you writing things like this. I think it educates us and it allows us to remember what has come before and what's to come. So definitely get your copy of this. It was wonderful. And we really enjoyed it. And we just can't thank you enough for writing this. Hopefully you're, you had mentioned earlier, maybe writing a second book at some point, whatever that is. I mean, we'd love to read more of your stuff in the future.

[29:47] Spencer Weber Waller: Well, at some point, yeah, when the dust has settled on the Ticketmaster stuff, I may go back and do a deeper dive on that. And, you know, thank you so much for having me. I'm doing a bunch of live events. And if you want to follow any of those, I have a website that's just powerandgreed.com.

[30:03] Richie Grasso: Great, powerandgreed.com. We'll share that in the description of this episode.

[30:06] Spencer Weber Waller: Yeah, we'll share the link and make sure you get your book and read that. That's awesome. Thank you for coming. That's all we have for today's spotlight series. And we thank you all so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed our conversation. In the description, we'll share more about Power and Greed and where you can learn more about this wonderful book, Power and Greed. Yes. And to our listeners, if you have suggestions for future interviews, we'd love to hear from you. You can connect with us on Instagram and TikTok at half hour podcast.

[30:33] Richie Grasso: So thanks so much for joining us today, Spencer.

[30:36] Spencer Weber Waller: Yeah, thank you so much.

[30:38] Richie Grasso: Thank you for being here. And signing off for now. I'm Richie and I'm Jeff saying tata for now. Bye.