When Musical Theatre Meets the Climate Crisis
- Giulia Teixeira
- Sep 29, 2023
- 2 min read
By Giulia Teixeira
Being a theater kid or not, everyone has heard of The Lion King or The Secret Garden, big musicals that are also environmental protests. About 14 years ago, New York united over 250 directors and producers, including David Stone, the producer of Wicked, to discuss the climate crisis. According to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), sustainability involves practices that support ecological, human, and economic health and vitality. Sustainability presumes that resources are finite, and should be used conservatively and wisely with a view to long-term priorities and consequences of the ways in which resources are used. However, Broadway is famous for its big and magical musical theatre productions. So, how are they connected?
In November 2008, the Broadway Green Alliance (BGA) was formed as a committee of the Broadway League. The committee began with the vision of acting as a central resource on environmental issues for the theatre community and its mission has been to educate, motivate and inspire the community to adopt environmentally friendly practices, not only in the productions, but also in their daily lives.
The Broadway Green Alliance hosts annual events, such as the Town Hall for the theater community, and goes over issues like plastic pollution and green energy in Times Square. They act on newsletters that contain eco-friendly initiatives but also make available guides and resources on topics like how to close a show in a greener manner. Many cast members have been helping to expand the BGA fundamentals, like Buyi Zama, that took pictures with BGA signs behind the scenes that encouraged company members to become greener.
The Broadway Green Alliance also counts on the Green Captain program, where the Green Captains work backstage to strive for productions and venues to adopt sustainable practices. One action from the BGA is collecting metro cards from all Broadway shows and sending them over to Nina Boesch, an artist who uses them to make collages. They also have been promoting sustainable development by upgrading of marquee and outside lights at Broadway theaters to energy-efficient LEDs and CFLs, which reduced Broadway’s footprint by seven hundred tons of carbon a year, and switching to rechargeable batteries for the microphones, an action that reduced their annual battery consumption from over fifteen thousand batteries to less than one hundred.
The BGA members are not special and developed people or anything like that, they work on things we can also do, like collecting recyclables backstage. We don’t always have a backstage to act on it, but we can do it on the streets, parks, etc.
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