Word: theaterful
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...Valenti, who died Thursday at 85 from complications of a stroke, seemed a good fit for that antique era. A hardscrabble Texas kid who at 14 had worked as "an usher in a second-run theater in Houston called the Iris," he flew 51 combat missions for the Air Force in World War II, got a Harvard M.B.A. on the GI Bill and hooked up with a back-home politician named Lyndon Johnson. Valenti was the Vice President's press rep on a trip to Dallas in November 1963 and stood next to him on the flight back to Washington...
...School and proves she can hold her own with the eggheads. Perky, pretty in pink and packaged with the requisite mix of campy condescension and you-go-girl inspiration, the show looks poised to become Broadway's next hit. If so, it will largely be thanks to the theater's hot audience of the moment: tween and teen girls...
...particularly girls. Stars from American Idol have turned up in Broadway musicals--Frenchie Davis in Rent, Diana DeGarmo in Hairspray and Fantasia Barrino in The Color Purple (since she joined the cast, the show has set a house attendance record). Disney--which introduced a new family audience to the theater with shows like The Lion King--will soon bring The Little Mermaid to the stage. And coming next season to London: a musical version of Desperately Seeking Susan, the 1985 movie about a housewife who's sucked into the punk underworld of downtown Manhattan, set to Blondie music...
...young-girl show; niche audiences don't make hits. Yet the influx of young theatergoers to shows like Wicked is a trend producers can't afford to ignore. "We've talked about how we lost a generation who didn't think it was cool to go to the theater," says Wicked's Stone. "A lot of us have started to get that audience back. Younger people are coming back to the theater--and yet older people aren't leaving...
Well, O.K. But the merchandise in the theater lobby--pink-lettered baseball Ts, sweatpants with OMIGOD! on the rear--suggests that producers already know which sex will be filling most of the seats. And if they don't show up, the perky young women onstage won't be the only ones crying "Omigod...