The guy in the photo is our title character, Charles Frohman
(1856-1915). We’ll get to him in a
moment.
The chances are, Gentle Reader, that you already know as
much or more about the reasons Ed Sheeran, Macklemore, and Robert Kraft appear
in many of the same stories these days.
If you need a quick synopsis, here’s a reasonably inclusive story about the whole business.
Well, not quite the whole business, as when Sheeran
capitulated to Kraft (the owner of Gillette Stadium, where Sheeran is scheduled to perform this weekend) and dropped Macklemore from his Loop tour for the apparently
unforgiveable crime of saying “Free Palestine,” all the other supporting and
warm-up act musicians for upcoming gigs—Grammy-winning singer/songwriter
Finneas, Irish singer Aaron Rowe, the Irish band Beoga (Sheeran’s backing
band), and the Danish pop group Lukas Graham—quit in solidarity. A lengthier and more recent play-by-play of
the last couple of weeks is here.
Sheeran has been ridiculed for cowardice; SNL UK was particularly brutal. He has
argued all along that dropping Macklemore from the tour was not his call,
but was made by promoters. That’s true,
but of course there’s more to the story than that.
In his first concert since the… erm… fecal matters
interfaced the whirling rotors, Sheeran engaged in a little self-pity and even cried
onstage, but also delivered an apology, noting that “What happened in Israel
and at the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7 was horrific and compounded centuries
of Jewish pain. What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and
disproportionate.” Even that came under immediate
scrutiny, however: one critic described it as “pro-Israel, teleprompter-read propaganda” that could have been written by Kraft himself; another called it “everything you'd expect from a person in his position: equivocating,
meaningless bullshit that was most likely written by someone else.” Ouch.
OK, Sheeran is in a tough place. Curmie actually buys his story that he didn’t
want to disappoint his fans. And his
self-consciously apolitical approach is understandable, at least up to a
point. Creating a space where everyone,
irrespective of their political views, can come together to enjoy the music is
indeed a worthy goal. But there comes a
point at which that stance won’t work anymore.
And it’s certainly not true that music, or indeed any art
form, is or ought to be apolitical. Such
an argument would certainly raise an eyebrow from the likes of Woody Guthrie,
Pete Seeger, or Bob Dylan… or, hell, from Francis Scott Key, for that matter. But whereas most of the criticism of Sheeran
has come from those whose perspective on events in Gaza mirror Macklemore’s,
that isn’t Curmie’s argument. What
matters isn’t whether we agree on the content of his speech; it’s whether he
has the right to say it.
Significantly, this isn’t a Colin Kaepernick case whether the protest has nothing to do with the job; Macklemore’s political stance, agree with it or not, is part of the performance. If you go to a concert featuring Jason Aldean, you’re gonna hear some right-wing rhetoric. If it’s today’s birthday boy, Bruce Springsteen: it’ll come from the left. Both are fine with Curmie, although he obviously prefers one to the other.
Sheeran, if he had a spine, would have looked Kraft square
in the eye and said something like, “Macklemore is my friend, and he’s part of
the company on this tour. If he goes, I
do, too. I’ll apologize to my fans and
refund their money, but this isn’t about who’s right and who’s wrong in a
situation 5500 miles or so to the east,
It’s about something far more significant than a political disagreement;
it’s about free speech.”
Maybe Kraft would back down, as authorities in Jacksonville,
Florida did in 1964 when the Beatles refused to play to a segregated
audience. Maybe he wouldn’t, echoing
South African officials when Dusty Springfield took the same stance that same
year. Even if Kraft were to remain
intransigent, however, one suspects that Sheeran, whose net worth is about $400
million, could still afford to super-size his Big Mac combo even without getting more income from this tour. Either way, he’d have stood up for the cause of free speech.
We might wish that Sheeran were made of sterner stuff, but
he’s not really the villain here. It’s a
lot easier to blame someone else for a lack of courage than to exercise that
courage oneself. The real culprit would
be Robert Kraft, who is the very caricature of a corporate multi-billionaire: he’s
been smug, acquisitive, and hubristic for decades.
Don’t get Curmie wrong on this: Kraft, like everyone else,
is entitled to his opinion on international events, and to speak his truth as
he sees it. If he chooses not to accept
Macklemore’s apology for an incident a dozen years ago in which the rapper appeared on stage in what
could reasonably be described as a caricature of Jewishness, so be it. He can even choose to conflate criticism of
the Israeli government with antisemitism, although Curmie thinks that’s idiotic. What Kraft cannot legitimately do is to
prevent the speech of someone who disagrees with him, and he sure as hell
doesn’t have the right (ethically, at least) to round up a posse of his fellow
fat-cats to join in the boycott.
And now <drumroll> we’re ready to talk about Charles Frohman, a theatre manager and promoter at the turn of the 20th century. Frohman was the driving force behind an organization which pretty much dominated the American theatre scene for about 20 years. It was called The Syndicate. If, Gentle Reader, that sounds like the name of some manifestation of organized crime, well, it pretty much was… except that it was legal. And ol’ Charlie sure does look the part, doesn’t he? All those gangster movies we’ve watched for years wouldn’t lead us astray, would they?
What Frohman and his buds did was to establish a virtual
monopoly. They managed both theatre
productions and performance spaces. In
an era in which New York was not yet the epicenter of American theatre
activity, national tours were more important and ubiquitous than they are
today. The Syndicate didn’t concentrate
on big cities, but rather on the various smaller venues in between on the
railroad lines. Companies needed those
one- or two-night stops to make the tour profitable, so there would be performances
in towns of only if few thousand people.
If there was an opera house there, that was enough.
The Syndicate’s deal was that productions managed by the
Syndicate could play only in Syndicate-run spaces, and those spaces could book
only Syndicate-backed productions. At
the height of their influence, the Syndicate controlled about 1500 venues and
productions featuring most of the biggest stars of the age—William Gillette,
John Drew, Maude Adams, et al.
If you control all the venues, you can control the performers,
and vice versa. That’s the lesson
of the Syndicate. And that’s a variation
on what Robert Kraft is attempting to do by enlisting all his billionaire
buddies to help him suppress any performer who is unwilling to play his game by
his rules.
There are differences, of course. Kraft isn’t looking at small towns the way
the Syndicate did. He’s concentrating on
huge venues, both because those are the ones over which he and his fellow
billionaires can exercise control, and because the likes of Ed Sheeran, who can
fill them, knows you can sell a lot more tickets to a lot more fans and make a
lot more money for an event in an NFL stadium that seats 60 or 70 thousand than
in even a huge auditorium that seats a third that many folks.
The other difference is that Frohman and his cohorts were interested
primarily in making money. Kraft seeks, rather,
to control the narrative: who can speak, and what they can say.
And that, Gentle Reader, is much worse than just wanting to
be rich(er).
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