In an unprecedented move, the CEO of Playbill has pulled an article off its website that details abuse of front-of-house staff in Broadway theatres. The CEO, Philip Birsh, took things a step further by denigrating his writer and Editor-in-Chief calling the piece “salacious”, “clickbait”, and “exaggerated”.

Last Wednesday, Playbill published an exposé that detailed various accounts of abuse that front-of-house workers have had to endure in Broadway theatres. The abuse runs the gamut from verbal to physical. While the article doesn’t reveal details of specific theatre, it illustrates a couple of things:

1. This happens all the time.

2. Theatre organizations aren’t doing enough to help.

The article was written by Margaret Hall and was published under the leadership of Playbill’s new Editor-in-Chief, Diep Tran.

In an even more unprecedented move, Playbill’s CEO Philip Birsh decided to publicly state why he did what he did when talking to the Daily Beast.

He said, “We want people to go to the theater. This piece exaggerated the issue in my opinion. I’m a numbers guy. I know numbers. I know that the overwhelming numbers of people at the theater are having an enjoyable time.”

He went on to say that he was alerted to the article by his 22-year-old daughter, who apparently has a pulse on what’s really going on in the Broadway community, along with industry figures(I can guess who these folks were).

He went on to say to the Daily Beast, “It was a mistake, and it doesn’t reflect people’s experience of going to the theater/ Speaking in terms of clickbait, it’s fantastic but it’s not reflecting reality. It is reflecting a very thin layer of it. It’s not up to my standards. All we are missing is ‘Headless body in topless bar.”

The CEO of Playbill folks…

Now he did say that Hall could “recalibrate” the article to make it more reader-friendly, which translates to “as long as my theatre-power-player mommies and daddies say it’s okay.” I can only imagine what that version of the story would look like.

So, I’m angry about this. I’m angry for many reasons. But first, if you want to read the article in question, here it is.

So let’s get into why this angers me so much.

The first reason is that it’s a damn good article. Margaret Hall, who is also a former writer for OnStage Blog, is one of the best up-and-coming writers in theatre journalism. Having worked with her, I can say that she is not only a responsible writer but a meticulous one. She’s not specious, nor would she write anything to simply get clicks. To see her, and her work depicted as such gets my blood boiling.

Then there’s Diep Tran. She was already one of the best theatre journalists we have, and I was so excited to see she had been appointed to the position of Editor-in-Chief back in October. It was a monumental step to see someone who I admired, who happened to be BIPOC, and who is a fantastic writer, rise to such a position.

What’s even more is that I thought under Tran’s leadership, we would finally start to see the type of coverage that I had been hoping Playbill would start doing.

Now, those hopes are dashed.

To be clear, I wasn’t expecting Playbill to start publishing hard-hitting exposés that rattle the industry. That’s not the publication they’ve been nor will ever be. But I was hoping for something new and different.

And for months, we got it. Tran had done a fabulous job of bringing a new reporting style, interviewing, and industry coverage during its dullest part of the year. If this is what they could do from Dec thru Feb, I couldn’t wait to see what would happen when the season started heating up.

Well, throw all of that out the window now.

I’m also angry because Birsh, rather than being a responsible CEO, decided to publicly throw his Editor In-Chief and writer under the proverbial bus. There are dozens of ways that Birsh could have handled this, but publicly humiliating his own team is unthinkable.

In the almost eight years my blog has been live, I’ve pulled two articles due to their content. One was a review that had been written unethically. The other was one was due to legal reasons.

I have never nor will ever publicly humiliate anyone who writes for my blog. I know a lot of the owners and editors of other theatre sites, and they wouldn’t either. This is publisher 101, and Birsh has failed miserably.

I’m also furious because this once again serves as an example of how this industry covers up things they don’t want people to know about. Whether it’s sexual assault, pay equity, or abuse of FOH staff, they want you to forget all of that and will go to enormous lengths to do so.

The FOH staff of Broadway houses have suffered abuse at the hands of unruly audience members. This is fact, not fiction. I’ve seen it in person on more than one occasion.

I’ve seen audience members berate FOH staff and then return to their seats like nothing happened while the FOH staff member is left visibly shaking from the confrontation.

It’s happened, it’s happening, and it will happen in the future.

Unless awareness of the issue is brought up. Unless a publication with a wide platform publishes a story about it in hopes it will reach the right people to either provide safety for their FOH staff, install new security measures or at least tell audience members that this type of behavior isn’t acceptable.

A publication like Playbill has the sway to actually impact change.

But no. Let’s cover that up. No one wants to read that, according to Philip Birsh. He would rather protect theatre owners than theatre workers. The audience members are fantastic. Going to the theatre is magical—nothing bad to see here, back to the way things used to be.

In the end, this is a story about betrayal where the CEO of a theatre website betrays his writing team by undermining their work and publicly dragging their abilities. It’s a real shame. Margaret Hall and Diep Tran don’t deserve this. No writer does.

But if anyone would like to send Mr. Birsh their thoughts, especially those who aren’t his Broadway expert 22-year-old daughter or theatre owners, his email is pbirsh@playbill.com. I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.

Playbill CEO cowardly deletes article detailing abuse of front of house theatre staff

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