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By Associated PressIf you're asking about a Broadway performer, odds are you won't get an answer, since actors and agents make it a point to keep their lips sealed.
NEW YORK - Compared with the millions paid to Tom, Julia and even that guy running for governor of California, Broadway salaries aren't in the same show biz league.
Yet those unattributed reports swirling through New York newspapers that Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick will each pull down a cool $100,000 a week to return to The Producers for a three-month stint could up the paychecks for the few performers who can sell tickets on Broadway.
Can we talk specifics?
Well, no.
Getting actors or their agents or producers to talk about how much money stars make is a lot harder than getting them to talk about their sex lives or their drug and alcohol problems.
"No one will speak on the record," veteran New York press agent Adrian Bryan-Brown admonished an intrepid reporter in search of exact figures on a star's - any star's - weekly paycheck.
He was right. Several producers were willing to talk but only off the record and not for attribution. Several expressed doubts that Lane and Broderick will make $100,000.
"I can't give you a primer," said Chicago producer Barry Weissler when asked how he determines what he pays stars to appear in his shows. "If Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones agreed to do Chicago as Roxie and Billy Flynn, the value of those two people would be astronomical.
"If you are trying someone unknown, Melanie Griffith (the current Roxie), and you don't know if it is going to work or not - though she is a star - something much less than that," Weissler added, artfully sidestepping a figure.
If Arnold Schwarzenegger can make $30-million for the latest Terminator flick and cast members of television's Friends can each pull in $1-million an episode, what are eight performances a week in a Broadway show worth?
Let's start with the basics. According to the latest figures from Actors' Equity, the union for theater actors, the minimum salary for a performer in a Broadway play or musical is $1,354 a week. Salaries go up from there; how high depends on how good a performer's agent is or how many tickets a producer thinks a star can sell.
Lane and Broderick demonstrated that they could sell plenty during their yearlong engagement in The Producers, which opened in April 2001. The show was the town's hottest ticket until the day they left, something not lost on the show's producers, who are negotiating with the stars to return for three months. (Lane told the New York Post this week that the two would start on New Year's Eve, and a play he was to appear in in January has been rescheduled for this fall.) Says Tom Viertel, one of the producers of The Producers: "In this instance, obviously what we are trying to figure out is how much difference Nathan and Matthew would make to the show in the months involved and try to apportion that value fairly among the show and the two stars."
And they could possibly raise ticket prices to pay them, although Viertel said, "We haven't really considered that in any great detail."
The day the ecstatic reviews for The Producers came out two years ago, top ticket prices were hiked to $100. Later, selected seats were made available - and still are available - through Broadway Inner Circle, a premium ticket agency, for $480 and $240.
In the recent past, there have been reports of stars getting between $30,000 and $35,000 a week. Among those rumored to be in that category are Bernadette Peters, now starring in a revival of Gypsy, and Vanessa Williams, who last year starred in a revival of Into the Woods.
But then, you want a star, you pay more, unless you are Joanne Woodward and can get your husband, Paul Newman, to work for scale in a revival of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, produced by a theater you run. That happened last December and January. Broadway is filled with the ghosts of star-driven shows that thrived for a while, only to fade when their big names left. Last season, for example, grosses for Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune collapsed after original leads Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci were replaced by Rosie Perez and Joe Pantoliano. It makes you wonder what will happen to Nine when Antonio Banderas departs Oct. 5.
If a show does not have big stars, it can still make money. One reason Cats and Les Miserables had such long runs is that they did not have to pay the hefty salaries that stars command. And The Phantom of the Opera is still running on Broadway, long after original star Michael Crawford's departure.