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[0:17] Tonya Pinkins: Hi, this is Tonya Pinkins. I don't know what time of day it is where you are, but it is a rainy day where I am. And you are listening to me on my podcast, You Can't SAY THAT, The Show Where You Can. And I am delighted to have my guest this afternoon. Uh, she's the founder and president of Walk Tall Girl Productions, which is a New York-based boutique marketing, audience development, and group sales agency for the arts, with a special emphasis placed on theater. Please join me in welcoming Marcia Pendleton.

[0:53] Marcia Pendleton: Hello.

[0:55] Tonya Pinkins: Hi, Marcia. Now I can't remember what show we met on. Did we meet on uh Radio Golf or before that?

[1:02] Marcia Pendleton: I think it was probably before that.

[1:05] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah.

[1:06] Marcia Pendleton: Um, I don't think I was working on the show.

[1:10] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[1:11] Marcia Pendleton: Uh, but I know I did sell a lot of tickets for Radio Golf, okay as a group sales agent.

[1:17] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[1:18] Marcia Pendleton: And then it just went on from there with you recommending me to people.

[1:24] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah.

[1:24] Marcia Pendleton: And then finally, we getting to uh work together when you did it was the new group.

[1:33] Tonya Pinkins: It was Rashida Speaking.

[1:37] Marcia Pendleton: Yes.

[1:37] Tonya Pinkins: Yes, one of the things that makes Tonya difficult is Tonya usually has in her contract that she needs to sit in on marketing and people she gets to refer who's going to be the marketing person because it's important to me that people like me see me on the stage. Unlike the US policy abroad, that countries don't get to use their resources for their own benefit. I feel that as a black artist, uh, I am a resource of my community and that my resource must be shared back with my community. And Marcia Pendleton is the go-to woman in New York City to get the black audience in the theater.

[2:14] Marcia Pendleton: So let's talk about that. Because we still don't really fully have the black audience in the Broadway theater. Why is that?

[2:20] Marcia Pendleton: It's about resources, how you allocate resources. Usually, when someone like myself who does the cultural marketing, um, those resources are already allocated before we get to the table. And the way it is handled, it's usually handled through the advertising agency that also handles the marketing as well. So all of that, that pie is already cut up.

[2:50] Tonya Pinkins: Right, and they haven't really put any part of a slice of the pie for the black marketing until the show's not doing well and it's the last ditch effort that will, oh, well, let's see if we get some black people to come in and save us. Or sometimes when we're we are at the table at the very beginning, I've had the uh wonderful experience of being at the table at the very beginning, but not in control of my own resources. I've always had to ask someone else, is it okay for me to do X, Y, and C? Um, it hasn't been until recently that I've worked on some projects like MTC's Jitney.

[3:28] Marcia Pendleton: Okay, and also MTC's Choir Boy, that I was given my own budget, and I was able to spend that the way I needed to.

[3:39] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[3:39] Marcia Pendleton: That is also happening with MJ, the Michael Jackson musical. And it is wonderful to be working on Blue as well with black lead producers who understand the importance of reaching out to the of connecting with our communities very early. It's a part of the process.

[4:08] Tonya Pinkins: So why wouldn't you do that? Why wouldn't you do that?

[4:11] Marcia Pendleton: So it's wonderful not to have to explain anything, or why we need to go to this church at this point in time, or why we need to reach out to the sorority, or why we need to connect with this organization because that knowledge base is already there.

[4:31] Tonya Pinkins: Yes, but because we do want um more of things that look like us uh in other spaces, we might have to do a little educating of people so that we don't get in the room to be the people making the choices. We might have to do a little education. I have some theories about why they don't want us in the room.

[4:52] Marcia Pendleton: Um, and you know they're radical because I'm radical. So we know black people spend money.

[4:57] Tonya Pinkins: Yes.

[4:55] Marcia Pendleton: We know black people are a very viable uh client base for anything you're selling. We are consumers, we are excellent consumers. We've made Tyler Perry a billionaire, we made Oprah a billionaire, all the new cable networks, they always started with black content, and then when they built up their audience, they got rid of us and got what they wanted to do. Um what's your theory about why Broadway hasn't ever really jumped on that bandwagon?

[5:28] Marcia Pendleton: I believe they're starting to now with an initiative called Let's Do Broadway.

[5:35] Tonya Pinkins: What's that?

[5:36] Marcia Pendleton: And Let's Do Broadway. They hired I think Harriet Cole to push forth this initiative to create more interest and audiences for the Broadway community. There is also a multicultural, I don't want to call it an alliance, but it's it's a committee that I believe is headed by Steven Byrd, the producer, um, to look at the things, not to look at, but to really um explore what needs to be done in order to bring in more audiences, not just only for work that speaks directly to us, but to go to Broadway in general.

[6:27] Tonya Pinkins: If you are a theater geek, then you want to go see everything.

[6:32] Marcia Pendleton: And we go see a lot of different things, and there are a lot of people. We watch TV that we're not in. So it's not like we only go to the theater or we only see entertainment that represents us. So we need to be invited.

[6:45] Tonya Pinkins: We need to be invited. We need to be invited and speak to people about uh Broadway needs to speak to us about our common humanities. So that way it's not such a big deal if we go see Inheritance, or we go see something like, I can't wait to go see Six to hear this, to hear these women sing their faces off.

[7:14] Marcia Pendleton: And realizing that out of the six women, four of them are women of color. Three of them are black, one is Asian. And I'm saying, why aren't we being invited to see this show?

[7:33] Tonya Pinkins: And it's young women. You know, young women do young people do musical theater. And they love young people singing, they love seeing people to aspire to be like. I think you know, I my theory about it has to do with kind of like housing segregation. You know, they we know that statistically in America, when a neighborhood, no matter what the economic status gets to be two percent black, the white people move out. That's just a statistical kind of thing. It could be a multi-million dollar neighborhood. Um, and I feel like the theater's kind of like housing. You gotta be next to some people. It's only for a few hours.

[8:12] Marcia Pendleton: And I think that the theater is this place where they have designed it for their comfort. You know, they've designed it for their comfort. And, you know, if Denzel is in the room, then we know we're gonna have to be around some other people, but the rest of the time we want it to be comfortable for us, and we don't want to have to worry about being uncomfortable because you know, we're just with people who look different and smell different and eat different kinds of things, and we just the theater is our comfort place.

[8:40] Tonya Pinkins: One of the things that I remember hearing from George C. Wolfe a while back is that he wanted, he felt that the theater space should look like a midtown subway stop.

[8:53] Marcia Pendleton: There's everybody from every place. So you would be in the same room under the same roof with people that you would not normally be with. And for me, that's exciting. That's exciting.

[9:07] Tonya Pinkins: But you're brown.

[9:10] Marcia Pendleton: I mean, brown people. We we used to be people of the range of the diaspora. You know what I'm saying? That's not an unusual thing.

[9:16] Tonya Pinkins: It's not, it's it's you're you're absolutely right about that. It is not unusual.

[9:22] Marcia Pendleton: So I'm okay with that. I'm more than okay with that because I believe that that mix of folks adds something to the theater going experience.

[9:33] Tonya Pinkins: But what does not add to the theater going experience is when someone turns around and says to you, when you're enjoying a musical and you're singing along, I did not pay to hear you sing. You need to be quiet. What?

[9:52] Marcia Pendleton: Or when I went someplace a few weeks ago to watch something that a future client was doing, a woman started questioning me. I was the only black person in this little tiny studio space. And she said, Well, I go to theater all the time, and I've never seen you. Why are you here? Who do you know? And I had to say to her, why are you questioning me? I can be wherever it is that I want to be.

[10:30] Tonya Pinkins: People on a pretty regular basis. I've read stories about uh Lynn Manuel Miranda when he went to see, I think My Fair Lady, and someone in front of him thought that he was laughing too loud and let him know. So those are some of the things that we have to deal with in terms of entering a space that should be for anybody who wants to enter it because we love storytelling. And that's and that's what we that's what we see. Sometimes uh the theaters don't make it easy um to combat that.

[11:15] Marcia Pendleton: Well, there are subscribers and or their uh front line, uh the box office is the front line, and learning how to treat people, how to welcome people, uh especially if they're coming to a show for the very first time, or coming to the theater for the very first time and don't quite know how to negotiate it, especially if they're younger, uh, but making sure that people feel welcomed no matter what.

[11:45] Tonya Pinkins: Now, I like to play devil's advocate. So, you know, I'm thinking about this poor little old person who can't hear, and when they hear laughter from another culture or it's too loud, it really just gets them all fragile and very upset. Have you ever thought of like how could we make the theater a space where both groups who are very vocal in their response to things and groups who are very uh internalized in their response to things could share a space comfortably? Like what might we be able to do about that?

[12:17] Marcia Pendleton: Well, I think the some of the ways in which that you we could do that is to start with cultivation events, uh similar to the one that we had when we did uh Rashida Speaking where it was so cold that January morning but we had about 100 people in that audience and they were mostly people that look like you and I but there were other people in that audience encouraging people to come to those kinds of events where you are sitting in the room in the theater space for an hour just an hour where you have conversation and some of these things can we can can speak about uh within those conversations also making sure that um we create the space to have those conversations is it something that we go to the press with so we have someone write about how do we sit in the room together.

[13:25] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah definitely so we need to have that kind of information and why is it that you are so offended by my presence my laughter my joy my passion well that's historical that you know the images that have been put out about us say that that represents something to be afraid of or something dangerous.

[13:47] Marcia Pendleton: So we're counteracting you know 400 years of history. And it's it's not dangerous and as a matter of fact it gives you permission to let loose and have a great time. Rashida Speaking is a really good example because uh that is a show by the late Joel Drake Johnson he just passed about a month ago, and uh it concerned office politics between a a white uh woman and a black woman who were working together, and the white doctor wanted to get rid of the black office worker so he um made the white office worker the boss of the black office worker so she could keep a series of um records so that they could have a you know a paper trail of why they were getting rid of the black office worker, and the black office worker sort of turned that on his heels.

[14:36] Marcia Pendleton: For me, doing that play, um doing the play was like living the play. Like the rehearsal process was like the play itself. It was incredibly painful to be in this room full of white people trying to tell me how to be a black person. And I told them they needed to hire you, and I set up all of the talkbacks. And to this day, I still meet people who um who said they made relationships with people across the color bar because we made a space in the theater for people to ask questions that there's no other place to ask. We are such a segregated society, we forget that that New York is like the number two most segregated city in the country, and people don't work together, they don't live together.

Even at work, you can't have the conversation. So we made a space in the theater where white people could ask black people questions, and black people could ask white people questions, and that conversation continued beyond the theater. Do you think that that would help if more theaters did that?

[15:35] Tonya Pinkins: Absolutely, absolutely.

[15:37] Marcia Pendleton: Because I did witness that with um Rashida speaking. There were some people who could deal with the conversation, and there were other people who could not. But for the most part, there were people who were willing to sit still and listen and work through and be out of their comfort zone. Because it's it's hard. It's it's hard. I think it's more we make it more difficult than we have to when we because of the way this because of the way we are built as Americans, as Americans, the way that people of African descent started off in this country, and the way that uh the society has been built to maintain the status quo.

[16:34] Tonya Pinkins: Well, I she you're being so polite, you don't have to be public. This is called you can't say that you can say anything.

[16:38] Marcia Pendleton: We're talking about the fact that the world was laid out in America to make white people comfortable. And we were brought here for their comfort. This is for their comfort, and that everywhere they're they go, it's designed for them to be comfortable. We were supposed to get off the sidewalk if they were standing on it, we were supposed to not look at them because anything that we might look at them would make them uncomfortable. So they've grown up in a culture that actually coddled them and crippled them and made them kind of weak and fragile. Because if you can't, you know, uh bear the uh frustration of your own will, that is a lack of maturity.

[17:14] Tonya Pinkins: I agree.

[17:15] Marcia Pendleton: I absolutely, I absolutely agree with that. That that makes sense, and thank you for giving me permission not to be polite. It's it's that my late mother sitting on my shoulder right over here. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it. No, it's okay. But but doing things like that, um, internalizing that pain makes you sick. And it dismantles you, and it makes you dysfunctional, and it's very difficult to speak up for what you know is the right thing, for what you know that you need in order to do your job in order to be successful. Um, I have I worked on a project at one point where I told the the people that this is how much I need to do this. And they said, Well, we only have this much.

And I wanted, it was a major institution. It was non-theater, but it was a major institution. And I said, okay, I want to start this relationship, but understand this is what I need to do this. So if I'm not going to get this, this is just so we can begin the relationship. They turned around and fired me anyway, because um they said that I did not do what I was supposed to do, but I did with the You did what could be done with the resources that you said, this resource takes.

[18:53] Tonya Pinkins: Now, this will get you.

[18:54] Marcia Pendleton: Exactly, exactly. So for myself and other people like me who do this work is recognizing what our value is and saying that we need X amount of dollars to do this work, and we need to be free to do this work. I don't mind setting benchmarks to say, by this date we want to do this, by this date we want to have this done, or by saying um, this is my financial goal. I don't have any problems with that. You know, because that's good. Okay, well, that's let's not be able to do that. Let's not talk around it in case someone is listening who's too afraid to sit down and have a black person in their you know office. But let's just say uh a company that it honestly uh has a commitment to bringing uh a black audience and making them feel welcome.

Let's say it's a an off-Broadway show. And uh what do they need to do? How much should they allot? They're there it's an open-ended run. How much should they allot and where's that gonna go for them to invite us to their audience?

[20:07] Marcia Pendleton: Okay, off-Broadway uh pre-opening if they have it, if they want to do a really good job. Let's give us the real good job. A really good job pre-opening, you're gonna need $25,000.

[20:15] Tonya Pinkins: $25,000.

[20:19] Marcia Pendleton: What's good? That $25,000 gonna get us.

[20:21] Marcia Pendleton: Uh $25,000 uh gets you uh the person that creates the strategy and oversees the strategy, implements it. It also gives you entree and resources into black media that are often discounted, but people rely on those resources. People say, well, nobody reads the uh Amsterdam News anymore. That is not true. People do read the Amsterdam News and the Amsterdam News has an amazing online presence. So let's so let's talk about how our black media has really adapted to how people get their information. So it's not just the the uh actual newspaper anymore, it's the it's the online presence. Uh it's the website, it's the social media. Do they need radio? Yes. And is that a separate budget?

[21:23] Tonya Pinkins: Pardon me. Is that a separate budget?

[21:25] Marcia Pendleton: No, it you when I'm talking about this this $25,000, uh the radio can be included in that budget. And this is just pre-opening. Pre-opening, pre-opening. And with radio, because radio has excellent online presence as well, uh, the website presence, the uh social media, uh, you can often stretch that with uh ticket giveaways, um, all kinds of promotions that can be done on online. People can put you can create some kind of crazy promotion where people post stuff on the on your Instagram. Use that, use that. So I would say $25,000. So anybody who's doing a new off-Broadway show, if you really are genuinely committed to uh uh uh bringing the black audience and making us feel comfortable, $25,000 in the budget. Just know that. Now, what if we go into Broadway? What do we need?

[22:20] Marcia Pendleton: Um, maybe twice as much. $50,000.

[22:21] Tonya Pinkins: Only $50 initially.

[22:25] Marcia Pendleton: Okay, so $50 is gonna get us how far?

[22:27] Marcia Pendleton: $50 will get you um, we'll get you radio, we'll get you some. I'm not even talking about television.

[22:35] Tonya Pinkins: Okay, so we're not doing any television in the 25 or the 50.

[22:38] Marcia Pendleton: Right. Um, but if you want television, then you're gonna have to add um another 10 grand, I think.

[22:45] Tonya Pinkins: What is the 10 grand getting us for television?

[22:47] Marcia Pendleton: Um, television buys you um, it can be segmented. It's there's programming that is done with um, I can go on own with some of the programming that they have there. For instance, if they were doing uh Terrell Alvin McCraney play and uh Felicia Rashad was involved, then I would make sure that we purchased ad time locally on David Makes Man. So looking at it that way, um looking at what uh there's information available that can tell you what black people watch. Uh MSNBC, I believe that 40% of their audience is African American. So that is a great place to advertise. I cannot tell you how many times I've seen uh A Too Proud commercial on MSNBC and some other uh plays that have been that have been on the air. Even I think even Slave Play was on MSNBC, or at the very least, I saw Jeremy O'Harris on some of on some of their shows. So being able to um being being able to connect with that audience because we watch a lot of television.

[24:13] Tonya Pinkins: Now I hear black people buy their tickets kind of last minute radio. Is that still the case?

[24:18] Marcia Pendleton: That's what I used to hear.

[24:19] Tonya Pinkins: And we still buy tickets last minute.

[24:21] Marcia Pendleton: Right. We still buy so if we want to get those last minute buyers for the black people to come, where where do you need to, where do you need they need to see that ad for that last minute buy?

[24:22] Marcia Pendleton: They need to see that ad on television. They need to see that ad on any of their devices. Um your phone, your your iPad, and also on radio, it's a combination of things. It's layered. It's no one thing. I believe that when I started in in New York about 20 years ago, buying an ad in the New York Times was was the big thing.

[24:58] Tonya Pinkins: 100 grand.

[24:58] Marcia Pendleton: Yeah. And still is. But that's not how you reach the African American audience. It's a layered approach. Um when I first came to New York, people would say, well, black people don't read the New York Times. I found out that that is not true. When I was working on a show called Katna Kings, and the um the reviews were were mixed, very mixed for the show. And when I went back to talk to people that I had invited in to see the show, they would say to me, Well, did you see the Times review? Did you see the Times review? Did you see the Times review? And there were people telling me that black people in New York did not read the New York Times. And I said, Well, somebody's telling me a tale. Somebody's lying to me. Because we do.

[25:50] Tonya Pinkins: What is the value of these reviews? I mean, will a review keep a black audience from coming to the theater?

[25:54] Marcia Pendleton: I clearly you're saying that it can, but can we overcome a review? Because white critics often do not, you know, speak well of our things anyway.

[26:02] Tonya Pinkins: Absolutely.

[26:03] Marcia Pendleton: I can give you an example uh with Motown the Musical, that did not get great reviews. We didn't care. We came to see it anyway. We came to see it anyway. Um, also with um the Donna Summer musical, it did not get great reviews. Oh, I love that. Gotcha, okay. Uh, it did not get great reviews, but we came to see it anyway. Because I call it the Mama in them syndrome. You know, if my mama told me to go see it, if my next door neighbor told me to go see it, that word of mouth is is much more important because we understand the filter by which critics operate. And they will say, okay, I read it, but I'm still gonna go see it for myself. I need to make that decision for myself. And people are really um black folks get really upset when our work is slammed by white critics who do not have any idea of who we are, how we live, or how we love, have no idea what happens in our in our communities and why something would resonate with us that does not necessarily resonate with them.

That's why we need critics of color. That's why that's why we need them. Every once in a while, I will see a review, whether it's good or bad, that I think is right on the money, but a lot of times I do not.

[27:55] Tonya Pinkins: So we go and see for ourselves.

[28:04] Marcia Pendleton: That was part one of my talk with Marcia Pendleton, marketing expert in Broadway and New York Theater. Stay tuned for part two.