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FOREIGN TOURISTS
the newest Broadway audience

[[Image – photo: six Asian tourists, men and women, smiled happily in front of the Edison Theatre's sign advertising Oh! Calcutta!]]

[[credit]] Metropolitan Photo Service, Inc. [[/credit]]

[[Caption]] Japanese tourists at Oh! Calcutta! [[/Caption]] ]

The nineteen seventies may well be remembered as the decade in which the world discovered America. It used to be that Americans flocked abroad to see the sights and to take advantage of low prices. But the economic realities of the seventies have changed all that. Now Europeans, Asians, South Americans, Middle Easterners, Australians are coming here in droves to enjoy our "bargain" prices and to see our sights. In New York City alone, the yearly number of overseas visitors has leaped from one million in 1968 to two million in 1978. . .and all signs point to even bigger numbers for 1979.

Early in the foreign tourism boom, the New York City sights favored by visitors from abroad were pretty much the standbys - The Empire State Building, The Statue of Liberty, The United Nations, The Museum of Modern Art, Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Chinatown. Recently, however, foreigners have added another NYC attraction to the list of must-sees. . .the Broadway theatre.

Nancy Shapiro is Manager of Special Group Movements for the American Express Co. in New York. Her job involves planning programs for overseas tour groups

coming into the city. According to Nancy, one of the reasons that Broadway didn't catch on right away with foreign tourists was because they were afraid. "A lot of them would come over here and they wouldn't want to go out on their own at night," she observes. "But once they discovered that all the horror stories they had heard about New York just weren't true, things started changing. Whereas a few years ago, just five out of fifty in a group would be interested in seeing a Broadway show, now we get more and more requests on a group basis. In fact, I think that it would be safe to say that our theatre activities have seen a 35-40 percent increase just in the last year."

Choosing shows for overseas groups is a constant challenge for Nancy. "The main thing," she says, "is that it must be a musical." Naturally, in choosing a musical for non-English-speaking groups, Nancy must take the language problem into consideration. "In general, we try to stick to shows that don't have too much talking - or where understanding the English isn't that crucial to how well you enjoy the show. We tried Sweeney Todd – but it didn't work because the English was just too difficult. On the other hand, a show like Peter Pan does well with foreign groups because it has lots of singing and dancing and the plot is something everyone is more or less familiar with." Revivals, in general, are popular with overseas groups according to Nancy – especially revivals with well-known stars: "They loved The King and I and Hello, Dolly! last season – not only because both shows were extravaganzas, but because they could go home and say that they had seen Yul Brynner and Carol Channing. . .on Broadway."

By Richard Alleman

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