At all.

Ethics Alarms has repeatedly pointed out that it is unethical to waste time, passion and civic debate on nice, hopeful, idealistic policy objectives that are literally impossible. The anthem for these positions, again as I have noted ad nauseam, is my least favorite John Lennon song, “Imagine.” Yes, I regard anyone who takes that tripe seriously as mentally-challenged and historically, economically and politically illiterate. The official political ideology of these misty-eyed utopians is, of course, Communism.

Utopians, which include at the lower levels of delusion progressives generally, persist in the belief that human nature isn’t an immutable constant and that certain principles of reality can somehow be wished away if we all close our eyes and hope hard enough. Thus we keep hearing that there shouldn’t be wars, violence, hunger—President Franklin Roosevelt, in his cynical, pandering “Four Freedoms” speech, actually said that there should be freedom from “want.” Riiiight, Franklin, like that’s going to happen.

New Yorkers, in their infinite ignorance, elected utopian (and communist) Zohran Mamdani as their mayor. The charismatic demagogue ran on all sorts of claims that various things should be achievable by government without his having any experience whatsoever in making and executing policy. Yesterday, the New York Times reports, Zohran engaged in a signature significance example of irresponsible wishcraft, handing out vouchers for free tickets to a theater festival featuring experimental works. “The shared laughter in a crowded theater, the eager debrief after a musical, the heavy silence that hangs over all of us in a drama — these are moments that every New Yorker deserves,” Mamdani said.

Got it. Everyone deserves live theater, see, so there. It costs too much, though, so “POOF!” let’s make it cheaper.

Well, I’ve actually run a professional theater company, and I fought for 20 years to keep live theater ticket prices down in the Washington D.C. area . I know a little bit about the industry and the arts, unlike Mamdani, though he was, apparently, a “theater kid” growing up. I worked hard but ultimately futilely to keep our theater’s tickets under 20 dollars, first, then 30 dollars at the end, while maintaining our productions’ quality and meeting our mission goals.

Ours was the only professional theater company (out of over 80!) in the D.C. area to admit all children (under 18) accompanied by an adult free of charge to every show. We were able to break even with this business model only because 1) Arlington County in Viriginia granted us free use of a theater space, 2) because I accepted no compensation for my 20 years service as artistic director or for directing 28 productions, and because we used part-time artists who had other means of support, only occasionally hiring Actors Equity members whose compensation was often as much or more as that of the rest of the cast combined.

It infuriates me to hear Mamdani mouth off about how theater “should” be affordable for everyone. There are only two kinds of theater that are affordable to everyone, and those are free theater, and amateur theater. Some of the latter is very good and even professional caliber (as when I’m the director), but the immutable fact is that actors, designers and theater staff have to eat, support families and have roofs over their head. In the professional theater, these people unionize—surely Super-Socialist Mamdani supports unions!—and that makes theater expensive.

The rest of the equation is easy, or should be: the only way for live theater to be “affordable to all” (because, everyone “deserves” access to live theater, meaning that there is a right to live theater and thus there must be a “freedom from wanting live theater” is for the government to subsidize actors, designers, theater staff and theaters to a massive extent.

The average upfront cost for a new Broadway musical typically ranges from $17 million to $25 million, with smaller shows or revivals costing under $10M-$15M on average and large spectacles reaching over $50 million. Weekly operating costs on Broadway can run from $300,000 to over $600,000, covering salaries, theater rent, and marketing. For the public to exercise their “rights” to experience “the shared laughter in a crowded theater, the eager debrief after a musical, the heavy silence that hangs over all of us in a drama” without having to do all that while watching sub-par, unprofessional crap, somebody other than the public has to foot the bill.

The problem is, and has always been, that “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” Governmen- subsidized art is compromised art, controlled art, censored art, and thus usually bad art. Even ten years ago, my theater company received demands from the local government that our shows reflect a committee’s priorities, like gay themes. (Live theater is largely controlled by LBGTQ+ individuals.) A Spanish language theater that shared our space received more grant money than we did even though it served a much smaller audience. Local businesses had similarly political and ideological demands as their quid pro quos for contributions. We ended up depending primarily on contributions from individuals, but mine was a small company that produced only four or five productions a year with limited runs. That funding mix won’t work for larger companies.

The fact is, and leftists are often immune to facts or are in perpetual denial, that live theater makes no sense as a business, because business and art are incompatible. It is unfair to decree that theater artists have to be paupers, and there is no way for theater to be affordable to all while allowing it to be a viable profession. And we know…we know…that when the government takes over anything, it screws it up as well as infecting it with political motives.

Mayor Mamdani, in short, doesn’t know what he is talking about, and like all utopians, is seeking to mislead the gullible, ignorant, and IQ-deprived.

And this is just the beginning…

Post Script: Another way to make “freedom from wanting live theater” reality is for increasing numbers of people to stop wanting live theater. That’s been happening for decades, and it is accelerating trend. Indeed, my Trump-Deranged theater friends are currently helping by boycotting the Kennedy Center because the name “Trump” is associated with it.