Nudes Is Good News for Broadway Box-Office

Daniel Radcliffe and other actors who doff their clothing onstage are smart enough to acknowledge that doing so helps sell tickets. Take for example Hunter Parrish, a star of the hit Showtime series Weeds, who’s currently playing the central role of Melchior in the Broadway musical Spring Awakening.

In a promotional video for the show that’s easily found online, Parrish tells his fans: “You guys gotta come. If you’re into Weeds and the intellectual writing there and the artful aspects of how that’s put together, [Spring Awakening] is quite spectacular of a show. And it’s live, and you get to see my butt. So, there you go!”

While bare butts (etc.) almost always mean big box-office, sometimes the opposite is the case. One theory for the relatively brief run of the Broadway musical The Full Monty is that straight men stayed away in droves because they were put off by the title and the ad campaign, which stressed the “naked men” hook of the show despite the fact that the principal actors were fully exposed for only about two seconds in the finale. (Even then, audience perusal of their private parts was made difficult by a skillfully designed and executed lighting effect).

Patrick Wilson in The Full Monty

Lesson for producers: If a large percentage of your show’s target audience is presumed to be straight men, ixnay on the enis-pay. Is anyone surprised that there are no naked men on view in Jersey Boys or Spamalot?

Otherwise, it’s great business sense to bring on buff guys in the buff. Funny story: Terrence Howard appeared nude at the top of the recent Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and though he was standing upstage with his back to the audience, that was enough to cause an overjoyed female audience member at one performance to shout, “This is what I paid my money for!”

If nudity has been common on Broadway over the past 40 years or so, it’s even more common Off-Broadway, in scores of shows ranging in quality from Edward Albee’s The Play About the Baby to amiable fluff (pardon the expression!) like Paul Rudnick’s The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told.

There has also been a subset of shows marketed specifically to gay men of a certain age, giving them the opportunity to see taut, young male bodies nude (or semi-nude) onstage. For a while, the Cute Boys in Their Underpants series played to appreciative niche audiences at the Sanford Meisner Theater. (One of the most amusingly titled entries in the series was Cute Boys in Their Underpants Go To France.)

But the long-run champ of this genre is Naked Boys Singing, which also wins the "Truth in Theater Advertising Award" hands down. However, it’s fascinating to note that, while this show’s audience was initially made up almost exclusively of gay men, word is that it now consists mostly of bachelorette parties!

The cast of Naked Boys Singing

Nudity can be and has been used to sell the most unlikely of shows. Just recently, New York theatergoers were treated to “a daring, completely nude interpretation of Walt Whitman's epic Leaves of Grass" at The Cell on West 23rd Street. Conceived and directed by Jeremy Bloom, the show featured “a chorus of 25 diverse and fully nude performers.”

In a press release, Bloom insisted that “staging nudity in the context of Whitman's text is the most honest approach,” because "each succeeding line, passage, and turn of phrase celebrates the bare human form as an intersection of nature and industry." A more cynical observer might put it this way: If you want to have a prayer of selling tickets to a poetry reading, you’d damn well better make sure that all of the actors are naked.

Just how much of a positive effect can male nudity have on the financial success of an off-the-radar show when word gets out? Consider Ascension, a play that ran Off-Off-Broadway in 2006.

Brandon Ruckdashel in Ascension

The three-character, low-budget production was scheduled to play for three weeks, but the run was extended and the ticket price tripled when Anita Gates reviewed it for The New York Times. Though she praised the show in general, it was almost certainly her commentary on the nudity of 23-year-old star Brandon Ruckdashel – who, in her estimation, possesses "the intense blond good looks of a young Brad Pitt with a soupçon of James Dean" – that caused all that commotion at the box office.