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[0:00] Robert Bannon: This is Robert Bannon, and before I hit the theme song and introduce the show, I want to tell you about some exciting Roundtable news. The Roundtable has a brand new website. You can go to robertbannon.com, find out all about me, find out all about the show. Brand new and now up and running with brand new Roundtable merchandise. Go to robertbannon.com, follow me on Instagram, and make sure you're subscribing to us wherever you listen to podcasts or on YouTube. Now let's do a show. Are you ready? It's the Roundtable with me, Robert Bannon.

[0:54] Robert Bannon: I love a showbiz glasses. Yeah, there we go. A little bit of blue. Oh, I love them. Thank you. These are just brand new bifocals. Yeah, I'm at that age too. I've been there a while. My first year, but the doctor was like, it's time for the B word. I said, Oh no, you're giving me bifocals. All right, here we go. Welcome to the Roundtable, everybody. My name is Robert Bannon and you're listening to us on Broadway World, the Broadway podcast network, I Heart Spotify, where artists talk about art. One of the things I do every single day as an English lead in a public school is try to talk about how words are as much art as anything else. Singers and actors and dancers and painters are artists, but so are authors.

And today we have an author who wrote an incredible book that is about the history of a lot of the things that have made Broadway and theater what it is. Do you want the inside scoops? You want to know some of the history about it? If you're a theater aficionado and you give your money and you go see a show, what does go on behind the scenes? And some of it is dramaful, controversial, political, and messy as can be. So if you want to hear all of the good intel and intrigue of power, greed, monopolies, mergers, and cartels, Spencer Weber Waller is here to tell us all about it. Welcome to the show.

[2:11] Spencer Weber Waller: Thank you, Robert. It's great to be here.

[2:13] Robert Bannon: So Spencer, what do you do? You're an author, but what do you do in real life? What do you do every day?

[2:20] Spencer Weber Waller: I'm a law professor in Chicago. I teach at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. I'm in downtown Chicago right near Michigan Avenue and the Water Tower Place where I'm talking to you today. I've been teaching here for 25 years. Before that, I taught at Brooklyn Law School and I practiced law a little bit before that. I teach mostly in the area of antitrust law and consumer protection. I also have a theater side, which comes through in some of the things that I write about. We can talk all about that. I grew up as a theater kid but not really a performer. I couldn't really sing, but I started producing shows and other types of live entertainment in college. I've always been interested in the theater.

One of the most fun things about tenure is getting to pick your projects. We can talk about it, but I started to write about the business history of live entertainment in the United States from the time of vaudeville in the 19th century through commercial theater in the 20th century and live concerts, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and all that today.

[3:24] Robert Bannon: What I loved about your book, what I was so fascinated is as a theater person, also as in education, and also someone who left musical theater school to be a poli sci major because if you can't be in show business, you might as well be in politics. The politics of business in show business. Someone told me the other day, business is double as long as the show. It's twice as much business as it is show. I never thought of that before. I found it so fascinating. So your book intrigued me and I deep dived. I loved how it's departmentalized into vaudeville and then theater and then also modern day because a lot of people are very frustrated with modern day ticketing and the monopoly that is Ticketmaster and Live Nation and all that. What made you, why did you choose these subjects?

[4:08] Spencer Weber Waller: Well, so in the pandemic, when we didn't have much to do, I was sitting around reading a book. My wife was reading a history of Broadway. It was Michael Riedel's The Razzle Dazzle, which you probably know about. And she just looked over at me and said, Hey, did I ever hear of something called the American Theatrical Syndicate? And I was like, no. And I'm from Chicago. I think Syndicate Al Capone, you know, and that stuff. But no, she was talking about 1896 cartel where six guys walked into a literal smoke-filled room and signed a written agreement with witnesses and their lawyers present and triplicate to cartelize, create a cartel covering commercial theater. They were the most powerful producers, bookers, and presenters in the country.

And I didn't know anything about that. I thought it was fascinating. And, you know, it's the pandemic and other than teacher classes, we didn't have all that much to do. So I started digging into it and this is a long time ago, but during the pandemic, I didn't have a chance to really do anything other than read and buy a few books here and there. And for one year I went in the Biden administration, so I just didn't have time to do anything. And starting around 2023, I started digging into the archives of the story. And I got really fascinated because like we started to say, this isn't the first time that live entertainment's been controlled by what we would call a monopoly or cartel. That came first with the vaudeville.

You had the Keith Albee circuit on the East Coast and you had the Orpheum circuit on the West Coast. And the dividing line is roughly Chicago, you know, and the Mississippi River. And they never really competed with each other. They sort of combined in an informal way that they cleverly called the combine. And I think that in part inspired the six guys who formed the American Theatrical Syndicate to create a single enterprise where they could really say to people, whether you were a producer or a venue, we can do business with you, but it's all or nothing. You got to work with us and nobody else. And so that and the vaudeville folks did roughly the same. And from a lawyer and a trust lawyer, former prosecutor, that set off all these bells and alarms.

And then I got deeper in the story. And as time went by, vaudeville faded away as a large-scale commercial enterprise. And you ended up having a fight in the theater industry between the American Theatrical Syndicate, the reigning kings of Broadway and touring, and three immigrant brothers whose name, the second I say it, you'll know who I'm talking about, the Shuberts. The actual Shubert brothers, Sam, Lee, and J.J., who were in upstate New York. And they started producing. They were actually clients of the syndicate at first. And they started to grow. And when they grew, and particularly when they came into New York in 1900, they became a competitor. And all-out war broke out between the Shuberts and the syndicate.

And it's not like a gangland war where people are killing each other, but they're trying to kill each other's businesses left and right. And the syndicate's weapons were the blacklist and sort of exclusive dealing clauses. And to get around that, the Shuberts began to simply buy, build, lease, borrow, beg to get theaters and started growing and growing and growing. And then, at different times, they started colluding with the syndicate. And this is all out in the open. This is not like today where if you did this stuff, it's kind of straight up go to jail if the government can prove it. This is being done with headlines in the New York Times and local papers about theatrical war, peace in the theater industry.

And so it would go back and forth, where for a time, the syndicates and the Shuberts would agree not to compete and kind of share some profits and not fight each other in a particular city like Baltimore or Chicago or Philly or Kansas City or whatever. And then other times, they were going at it, trying to steal each other's producers, performers, venues. And the Shubert strategy was originally, they were the good guys. There was David versus Goliath. And they had the open door where you didn't have to do all or nothing. But as a practical matter, if you left the syndicate, you were dead to them. And this is the story that I tell in the book. And then on top of that, it gets even crazier because around 1907, the syndicate and the Shuberts get together and try and take over Vaudeville because what they really do is book theaters and take a fee and then rent theaters and do some other things.

And Vaudeville had even more theaters than touring Broadway did at that point. And you can make even more money. So they invaded Vaudeville and created this thing called Advanced Vaudeville. And it was a humongous flop. And then for a while, they decided to go even bigger. They went back to the theater industry. But they tried to create a global syndicate or cartel, if you will, not for just the U.S., but for England and certain parts of the continent where a variety show is another theater. So this went on and back and forth. Eventually, like I said, Vaudeville just didn't survive the Great Depression and the start of motion pictures, particularly with sound. The guys from the syndicate aged out.

One who was probably the classiest dude among that group named Charles Frohman, who was a producer. He died on the deck of the Lusitania in World War I when it was torpedoed by the Germans. And I don't know if this is true, but supposedly his last words were quoting Peter Pan, which was the show that he brought over from London about how death is life's greatest adventure or something like that. I don't know if it's true, but it's a great story. But the syndicate guys, they aged out. Frohman died. The big heavy was a guy named Abraham Erlanger. He got more trusted in Hollywood. He had the rights to Ben-Hur. So he kind of spent more and more time working on the 1920s, 1926 silent version of Ben-Hur.

And gradually people died and retired, and the Shuberts were left kind of victorious, except then comes the Great Depression. They survive that. They survive the motion pictures, and particularly the jazz singer and sound and all that kind of stuff. But they were a monopoly at this point. The most talented and artistic of the brothers had died much earlier, Sam, but Lee and J.J. ran the Shubert empire. And gradually the government started to pay attention. And I'm talking about the antitrust part of the Justice Department. They first broke up the movie theaters in a case called Paramount, the same Paramount that's busy trying to buy everything today. But in the 1940s, they won a Supreme Court case breaking up the movie theaters, sorry, the movie studios, and making it illegal to have production, distribution, theaters all under the control of one or more of the movie chains.

And the minute they did that, their next target was the Shuberts because they had production, distribution, ticketing, booking, and venues. And so the Shuberts didn't have a great case. They were studying what was happening in the movie industry. They realized they were similar. They went up to the Supreme Court and they argued that under the antitrust laws, and this is the only wonky part, it's really just a side part of the book, but the wonky part is the antitrust laws only apply to trade or commerce. And they only apply to interstate trade or commerce because it's a federal law. So like railroads and oil companies are obviously interstate commerce. And no one had really specifically ruled whether theater was trade or commerce in the sense of it's not a necessity.

It makes our life rich, but it's not like food and clothes and rent. And they were making this argument. It sounds stupid today, but they made an argument to the Supreme Court, trying to keep a straight face, that when you go to a show, it's a local thing. You just go to a place. It's physically theater in the ground in Chicago. I'm going to a show tonight with my wife. It's in Chicago. And despite the fact that the production has traveled here, that doesn't make the local presentation interstate commerce. And the Supreme Court, 9-0, went, you've got to be kidding. At that point...

[12:45] Spencer Weber Waller: The Schubert's agreed basically to a breakup very similar to what had happened in the movie industry. So they agreed to sell a bunch of theaters on Broadway, a bunch of theaters on the road, they got rid of their booking office, and they had to get rid of their ticketing agency. And modern Broadway kind of was created from that moment forward. And that's part of the book, that's the historical part, and we can talk about why it still matters today. But you don't have a complete monopoly or cartel. And the reason that matters is, it's not that they're against art, it's just they're trying to make the most money possible. So in the case of Vaudeville, and the syndicate, and the Schubert's, you got the lowest common denominator.

You didn't get great art, unless accidentally they just, you know, thought they could make some money. They weren't. They had Shakespeare. Shakespeare sold tickets and you don't have to pay anybody royalties because he's dead. So that's the kind of things. And for the Schubert's, you got decades of sort of reruns, and retreads, and remounting of tired musical reviews, and even more tired light operetta, and a few other sort of hits that they had in repertoire, using old costumes, and props, and sets that were in a warehouse in New Jersey. And, you know, at that time, that direct from Broadway, it hadn't been direct or from Broadway for decades at that point. And I think that's bad for the art.

It's bad for the consumers. It's terrible for the performance, because performers, because they have to deal with a monopoly who never treated them very well in either Vaudeville, the syndicate, or the Schubert's. And I'm old enough, you know, that I wasn't around for the breakup. I mean, I was an infant. But by the 60s, where you have more than one company, you have three. You have the Nederlanders, who become Broadway landlords indirectly. And you have a company called Joe Jampson, that is now Ambassador Theatre Group, that's now being bought by Ari Emanuel. But you have three companies. And there's no evidence they're colluding. They'd be foolish to do so. The laws would apply to them. So you have three landlords on Broadway.

But you have competition. And you've eliminated the bottleneck. You know, whoever controlled the booking for all these old industries controlled who got to play where. And in the 60s, you got one of the golden ages of Broadway. It's all the stuff that I grew up with, and I don't know what you listened to as a kid. But I got to go to things like The King and I, and The Sound of Music, and Camelot, and My Fair Lady, and South Pacific's a little bit older, but you know, that era. And I think, I don't know, I think that was made possible by changing the structure of the business, so that no one person could be the gatekeeper.

[15:42] Spencer Weber Waller: I think, and these are the stories that you're going to hear. And while we're talking, I want people to know Power and Greed, Monopolies, Mergers and Cartels on the American stage is available for pre-order. You can go to bloomsbury.com, bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever books are sold. The links will be below. And the book officially hits the streets, is out on October 15th. So for you, Spencer, modern day, you gave us some history, vaudeville, touring houses, Broadway. A lot is said, there's a lot of speak of modern day Broadway, even with the three companies. The theaters are owned by these theater owners. They charge enormous amounts of rent to own these theaters, and people complain about the rising costs of the Broadway productions, which then becomes the rising cost of tickets.

So what do you have to say about the way the business works currently? What do we talk about in the book? Yeah, I'll put on my law professor hat a little bit. So, you know, in general, we like economic competition. We want to be socially cooperative and pleasant and nice to each other, you know, but we want our businesses to compete. That means having a reasonable number of options for people to choose from the businesses act independently. And, you know, Congress and the courts and most people who are in my field anyway, think that competition produces a better result for us just as human beings versus having one company having an inordinate share of the market or a bunch of people going into a room directly or indirectly like in the old days.

So, sure, of course, the prices are very high. Producers now in general are raising something like $25 million on average for a Broadway musical and a little bit less for a drama. And I think it's probably why, and I'm getting a little over my skis on this, it's probably why you're seeing a lot of really interesting dramas right now, because they cost a little bit less. If you get the right star in a good show, you can make some money and it's less risky than having to put on a brand new musical. I think it's also why producers, to some extent, like the Schubert's and the syndicate before them, are looking for things that people know about, whether that's a revival or some kind of IP thing that they can take a movie and spin it into a musical or a comic book and spin it into a musical or a drama.

I think all those things help. So the costs are obviously much larger. That's, in my view, a combination of labor costs, production costs, running costs, media costs. And I think, I talk about this a little bit in the book, that the real chance for a producer to make a lot of money for themselves and their investors is in the touring space. And obviously, they want to make money on Broadway as well. But if it's a decent show, it gets decent reviews, and it can be booked on a long enough tour, you'll make overall a profit, even if maybe the Broadway breaks even, is a little bit up, it's a little bit down. So it's not a disaster economically and artistically. You've got a chance, if you produce the right tour, that you can make some money.

And again, what I'm concerned about in my little world is, who are the gatekeepers and what do they control? And I agree with you that the three companies that control the majority of the Broadway theaters, the ones that are Tony eligible, have a great deal of power collectively. And they act in a similar fashion because they own similar assets selling to similar people, many of whom they've done business with. And I think it's interesting that Disney is the only, that I can think of, company that kind of just does it all in-house and has their own theater and just doesn't play that game. Some of the non-for-profits have their own Broadway theater, but they're not available if you're an outside producer trying to bring a new show into the market. And so I worry about that, but on its face, three companies who are not colluding don't violate the law.

[19:48] Spencer Weber Waller: And on the road, I'm concerned because to put a viable tour together, you really need access to the Broadway across America markets. There are about 70 some theaters that can host profitably, have the right kind of subscription, season, Broadway series, that can host a show for a week or more. And BAA controls one way or another, 40-something of those markets. It's not impossible. There's another network called the Independent Producers Network, and there's some just independent markets that you can cobble together. But if you really want to hit it out of the park and make it easy and have it run for the longest period of time in the most number of cities, and again, some shows come back over and over again, you need BAA.

They don't have the market share that by itself suggests they're a monopoly under the law, but if they continue to grow or if there's evidence that they're colluding with competitors, that would be a problem. And we're not there yet, but I'm kind of identifying for the reader where the current problems are in the theater space. And it's fascinating. And moving from New York and seeing Broadway change in the theater world, and being a music business major at one point, too, because I love it, and then moving to Detroit and seeing the tour life and what's done to tours and what it takes to run a tour house, and no matter who is the parent company, and also how the tours become non-ec faster, how they're trying to cut more and more razzle-dazzle of them because they're too expensive.

I think at the end, this is not Spencer's opinion, as an equity actor, it's troubling that we cut equity and the unions to protect actors, especially young actors in this country, because we deserve to get money and get paid and have a share of what's on the stage. That's just my two cents, Spencer.

[21:39] Spencer Weber Waller: Yeah. I'm very pro-union, just in general, as a human being. But on the history side, the reason that Broadway is so heavily unionized is so how badly treated people were in the 19th century, and they were equally badly treated on vaudeville, but frankly, the combine was too powerful. But monopoly isn't good for artists and performers and workers, and that's true if you were a steel worker getting shot by Henry Clay Frick when you're on strike in the, I forgot the name of the steel plant in Pittsburgh that was part of Carnegie Steel. But it's the same when you're a stagehand and you're being asked to load in and out a tour and you're not getting paid for the loading, which was really what started what became IATSE and the actors.

Equity was among the most successful unions and had a strike, and IATSE went out and supported them in 1919. And it was the Schubert's who actually led the way to saying, we had so many houses, we even had more houses in the syndicate, we need to stay open. And they negotiated the final recognition of equity, which I do talk about. And it wasn't out of the goodness of their heart. It was that they didn't make any money unless they had a show, and too many shows were being canceled. And the unions play a critical role in that. And of course, it's an important part of the cost structure today. You know more detailed than I do even about the tiered structure, depending on exactly what kind of equity contract the house, the show, and the actor ends up having.

And that's just a continuing issue. I will say that I think it's interesting that theater is among the most unionized businesses, whether you're on the costume side, or the music side, or the acting side, or the press agent side, or the company manager side. And I think that's great. I don't have the numbers at my hand, but maybe it's less than 10% unionization in the United States as a whole. And on the Broadway side, it's only the playwrights who haven't unionized. I don't want to say only, but it's mainly the playwrights who never wanted to unionize because they didn't want to be employees, and they didn't want to be doing their work for hire because they wanted final approval and control over the script.

And if the producer says, can you add a number or cut a number, they want to maintain that control. That prevented them from unionizing, but it didn't prevent them from negotiating with the producers then or now. It does raise an interesting question that if you're not a union, you have no special antitrust immunity to be saying, I ain't working unless you pay me x. If we did that and we were competitors, as I said, go to jail time. There's a law that allows all that if you're a union. But if you're not a union, it's just a more open issue, and it's never really been resolved. But you know what? Everybody's made their piece, and the Dramatist Guild is content to be in the form that it's in, and the owners are content to work with them.

And I think it's kind of cool that you have this sort of stuff on the ground despite the law on the books. Everybody's worked it out. It's kind of- I like it too. It's amazing, and they take it very seriously in theater world, and it's a big honor. I'm a teacher and an actor, so I love a union. So Spencer, for you, modern day world, we alluded to it earlier. One of the last parts of the book you talk about is something that I think affects a lot of complaints. A lot of people talk about Ticketmaster, and a lot of people talk about Live Nation, and a lot of people, in a smaller way, maybe it's ATG, and maybe it's these other big companies. You talked about Ari Emanuel, and you talk about another monopoly of people buying.

[25:30] Spencer Weber Waller: Power and Greed is a production of the Center for Autonomous Research and the Center for Autonomous Research and the Center for Autonomous Research and Ticketmaster was a challenger for a while. Ticketron was on the verge of bankruptcy. They acquired that, and there's nothing illegal or improper about that. They acquired and acquired and acquired so many things in my subtitle about monopolies, mergers, and cartels in live entertainment, and this is the mergers. Ticketmaster is what we might call a roll-up today, and they became, let's just say not the tiny struggling incumbent, they became the 800-pound gorilla.

[27:02] Spencer Weber Waller: I know antitrust can be technical, but Ticketmaster has gotten people's attention as just an everyday, ordinary kitchen table issue in a way that maybe one or two other things recently have, like the Kroger-Albertsons merger that was stopped by the FTC a couple of years ago. Grocery stores, we all would have paid more. That was on our radar. The Federal Trade Commission put out a rule that would have banned non-compete clauses in employment contracts. That got a lot of attention. I don't think anything got as much attention as the screw-up over the roll-out of Taylor Swift tickets, and that probably isn't an antitrust violation. The system just crashed because the technology couldn't accommodate 10 gazillion people all wanting tickets at exactly the same moment.

[27:50] Spencer Weber Waller: On the other hand, if you're a monopoly, you're relatively slow to embrace new technology because you don't have to. Again, I don't know technically what happened when you dialed in to get your things, but it pissed people off to a degree that got their attention and started thinking about my area of the law in a way that nobody else had. In some ways, it's even worse. In the UK, Ticketmaster attracted a lot of heat for the roll-out of the Oasis Tour, where people were in the queue to buy tickets. By the time they got there, the dynamic pricing had kicked in, and whatever they thought they were buying, the 220 English pound ticket, is now 480 pounds, kind of like the Stevie Wonder story you're telling. All of a sudden, they're on the horizon of ordinary people. For lawyers, Ticketmaster has been on the horizon, on our attention span, for 30 years.

[28:46] Spencer Weber Waller: Pearl Jam tried to do a tour in the 90s. They were essentially unsuccessful. They literally called it the No Ticketmaster Tour. They sought a $20 ticket price, 10% commission. Ticketmaster didn't do it. They tried. Even a band as hot as Pearl Jam in that era could not find alternative venues. Of course, they could have played a club or a small theater, but if you're talking about arena and stadium kind of things, they couldn't do it. This is old news if you're thinking about Broadway tours and the syndicate and an actress like Sarah Bernhardt who had to perform on a hillside tent because there was a fight. I don't remember if she was touring for the Shuberts and couldn't get the syndicate space or the other way around. We've been here before, but it gets people's attention.

[29:35] Spencer Weber Waller: In 2010, Live Nation bought Ticketmaster. That created a cradle-to-grave vertically integrated firm with substantial market power like the historical things. The government allowed the merger under various conditions. Ticketmaster has never fully satisfied the government or the court that it has complied with all of those conditions. What's happened is the government went back and strengthened the settlement agreement, the consent decree, where Ticketmaster promised to behave a second time. Finally, the Biden administration just sued them. That was the Department of Justice. You may have read, and a lot of this reporting comes from the Wall Street Journal very recently, it was the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and 36 or 38 state attorney generals. They were in trial. They were two weeks into the trial.

[30:33] Spencer Weber Waller: The federal government settled under some very alarming talk of deals in the White House behind the back of the litigation team. All this happened after my book was already closed. I was begging my publisher to let me add a paragraph in the page proofs. This is going on. The federal government says, we're prepared to settle. Nobody has to sell anything. You, Ticketmaster, have to get rid of exclusive deals with a few of your venues. You have to promise not to discriminate. You have to change your technology to accommodate other primary and secondary sellers. Go forth and sin no more, but that's like the third time. About 30 of the states or so said, no way. We're also plaintiffs. We're in the middle of trial. We're going for it. The court gives them two weeks to get their act together.

[31:27] Spencer Weber Waller: They hire a super fancy law firm to help fill the gap because the Department of Justice was the lead plaintiff. They take the case all the way to a verdict and win. What's going on now is two things. One is the judge has to decide if the federal government settlement is in the public interest. They also have to decide what should be the final verdict besides damages. What happens to Ticketmaster? Is that deal with DOJ enough or should they break them up? My history says you have a very clear answer that it's not really their fault. It's not that they're mustache twirly, Gilded Age robber barons. It's that that's what happens when you have market power.

[32:14] Spencer Weber Waller: The strong presumption should be once you're found to have violated the antitrust laws, if that holds up on appeal. The presumption is break them up like the Shuberts, like the movie theater. I think you get a better, in general, more competitive industry. It is all in the book and you all have to get the book. When the book's out, you have to preorder. We're talking about power, greed, monopolies, mergers, and cartels on the American stage. You bring up all of this. You say it's constantly changing. You talk about the concert business is a small part of the book. Maybe there's a second book. Is there ideas for more books? What is your next plan?

[32:49] Spencer Weber Waller: I'm not sure. I'm a law professor. I'm looking at a couple different things. I've done biographies before. I'm attracted to scoundrels and businesses behaving badly. I've just discovered recently there's a business guy who is both the founder of General Motors and American Airlines. Nobody really knows his name today unless you're in one of those businesses. What I've read and heard on a couple of podcasts that were really about other things is he sounds like a real interesting guy. He got in trouble for Wall Street wheeling dealing and got thrown out of the auto industry a couple times. I'm intrigued. There's no existing biography other than some kind of privately printed thing that was created for the automobile industry about this guy. I'm thinking about looking at that and some other things.

[33:47] Spencer Weber Waller: Again, depending on where we go with Live Nation Ticketmaster, what the court decides, and maybe if we find out other things about how the settlement went down, maybe that will be on the horizon as well. Ticketmaster needs to be updated, so I'm ready for your book. Come on, Spencer. Or maybe they'll let me add an extra chapter or afterword or something like that in the next edition. A practical question. As a theater-goer and as an author, when you go see theater now, after unveiling all the behind-the-scenes and the business and the good, the bad, and the ugly, does it change the way you view art? Does it change the enjoyment you have when you go? Do you still find joy in sitting in that theater and the lights going out and falling in love with the show?

[34:30] Spencer Weber Waller: More the latter. I've had the chance to invest in some shows here and there and made some money on some and lost on plenty. When I go to the theater, I went to a great performance at the Goodman Theater, which is an important non-for-profit here in Chicago. Full disclosure, my wife's on the board. It was a great show, but I'm not looking at it going, gee, I wonder if that's going to Broadway. At the moment, I'm watching this intense, acrobatic narrative dance piece that's telling this amazing story and has people in the audience in tears. Tonight, I'm going to a tour of a Broadway show and then on Friday, I'm going to a different show at Chicago Shakespeare that's a Duke Ellington adaptation of one of the Shakespeare mistaken identity comedies. I can't remember which one.

[35:20] Spencer Weber Waller: I'm still the kid who got to see The King and I with Ashley Ewell Brenner, but I love it. I obviously saw a lot more Broadway when I lived there for the 10 years when I was teaching there. Again, the touring thing is critical to the success of the industry and Chicago's an important stop on there. I talk a little bit about that on the book historically. I love it when the lights go down and the curtain comes up.

[35:50] Robert Bannon: Me too. There's nothing like live theater and that's why we have to protect it and understand what's going on sometimes behind the scenes and make it fair and equitable for voices to be heard and all people to have a chance to participate in the great American art form that is live theater or live music or live entertainment in general. It's the love of my life, as well as reading in English, which is why I want you to get the book because it combines all the things I love and if you're like me, you're going to love it too.

[36:14] Spencer Weber Waller: I love your stories. I could watch you and listen to you forever. You're fantastic at it.

[36:21] Robert Bannon: Well, thank you. It's been great to be here and chat with you. Look forward to maybe once the Ticketmaster stuff is fully resolved, we can have another chat. I want to have a talk about it because I have a lot of questions and I have a lot of feelings. I'm a big concert nerd, as big of a concert nerd as I am as a theater nerd.

[36:37] Spencer Weber Waller: Concert business is a whole big old another can of worms there. There's a whole lot to say about the way that all goes.

[36:45] Robert Bannon: Yeah, and one of the fun things about teaching and practicing, and I trust Law in particular, is in order to do anything, to teach it, to write about it, if you're involved in a case, you get to know the industries. Every industry has something interesting about it, but let's just say focusing on live entertainment is enriching to the soul in a different way. No shame to machine tools, bicycles, oil, health care. There are lots of things that are important. There's something about live entertainment, like you were saying, that makes us human and makes it special. To be able to look at it through my lens, in addition to all the business stuff, is only part of it. Part of it is the magic when you're in the audience, but it's been great to just be a peeping Tom on this aspect of it.

[37:33] Spencer Weber Waller: I love it. Robert, your joy. Congratulations on this. Shout out to everybody on your team, your publishing team, your media team. I hope you sell a ton of books because we all need to be educated and know about the history of this country and what built this business and where we're going. And my show is your show anytime, so when you have something interesting to say, you call me up and you're here.

[37:52] Spencer Weber Waller: Let's go.

[37:53] Robert Bannon: Will do. Let's do it.

[37:54] Spencer Weber Waller: Let's do it. Thank you so much. Enjoy the shows tonight and have an incredible, incredible day.

[37:58] Robert Bannon: Thanks for being here.

[37:59] Spencer Weber Waller: Okay. Take care. Bye-bye.

[37:59] Robert Bannon: Bye-bye.