Male Nudity Good for Broadway Box-Office

Michael Portantiere explores the box-office benefits of male nudity in Broadway shows.

Nudity can be and has been used to sell the most unlikely of shows. Just recently, New York theatergoers were treated to “a daring, completely nude interpretation of Walt Whitman's epic Leaves of Grass" at The Cell on West 23rd Street. Conceived and directed by Jeremy Bloom, the show featured “a chorus of 25 diverse and fully nude performers.”

In a press release, Bloom insisted that “staging nudity in the context of Whitman's text is the most honest approach,” because "each succeeding line, passage, and turn of phrase celebrates the bare human form as an intersection of nature and industry." A more cynical observer might put it this way: If you want to have a prayer of selling tickets to a poetry reading, you’d damn well better make sure that all of the actors are naked.

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