As the United Kingdom shifts away from public arts funding, London theaters are losing critical support.
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Kit Buchan and Jim Barne learned that their musical was Broadway-bound in the most British way possible: standing in a nearly empty pub in London early one morning.
The two, who had spent 10 years writing a small musical with a very long title, “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York),” were in London rehearsing for the workshop of their next show when their producer, Kevin McCollum, told them the news. Even though they had been dreaming about this for years, they still weren’t sure how to react.
“Is that definitely happening?” Buchan wondered. “Is this the bit where we celebrate? Or should I be concerned?”
But McCollum didn’t exactly ease their nerves. “Then obviously we found out that the theater was cursed,” Barne said, laughing as he recalled the moment.
Broadway’s Longacre Theatre has a reputation for housing flops; in just the last two years, “Dead Outlaw” lasted two and a half months before closing prematurely and “Swept Away” and “Lempicka” both survived for only two months. Still, a curse seemed practically manageable compared to the challenges they had faced on the road to Broadway.
Like many British musicals that came before it, “Two Strangers” was developed with the help of public funding from Arts Council England (ACE), a national agency funded by the United Kingdom government that funnels public dollars to arts organizations and artists in England. Before moving to the West End, London’s commercial theater industry, “Two Strangers” premiered at regional, subsidized theaters in England. Many theaters rely on public funding in order to take creative risks on new projects without worrying about their commercial viability. But a recent redistribution of this funding, in an attempt to emulate the American funding model, has made it much more difficult for theaters to uphold that mission.
“We benefited from what you might call the twilight of public funding for those regional productions,” Buchan said. “But the kind of funding that made it possible for them to commission our show has now more or less disappeared.”
England and the United States of America take very different approaches when it comes to funding the arts. This year ACE will invest £458.5 million (about $606.4 million) in arts organizations across England. This funding works out to about £7.8 ($10.59) per capita. However, for many years the funding was mainly concentrated in London, which is not only the country’s capital city, but also the capital of the British creative industries.
Comparatively, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the public arts funding organization in the U.S., distributes $207 million annually across a much bigger country, or about 60 cents per capita. The NEA is also spread more widely and thinly so it reaches every congressional district with limited impact on large theater cities like New York. This leaves nonprofit theaters in the city to rely on private donors for funding.
For the last few years, England has been moving toward the U.S. funding structure by decentralizing ACE funds and creating tax credits for philanthropic donations to the arts. In 2022, conservative lawmakers in the U.K. pressured ACE to reallocate funds away from London in hopes of promoting a more equitable spread of funding across the country. But these reallocations caused many London-based theaters to struggle or even close due to their lost funding.
For Buchan, the reallocation was “very, very heartbreaking,” he said, “because a great deal of British culture of the 20th century springs from public funding.”
Both ACE and the NEA were founded as “arm’s length” organizations, able to distribute their funds based on art alone and free from government intervention, at least in principle. But Westminster’s recent intrusion shows that it’s not just through funding distribution that England is following in America’s footsteps. Various administrations in the U.S. have done the same with the NEA; in fact, just this last year, President Donald Trump proposed to eliminate the body entirely.
As public arts funding declines and production costs rise due to inflation, theaters are having to shift to presenting more commercial productions, like revivals, adaptations, and celebrity-led shows that are more surefire money-makers, rather than developing new works, like “Two Strangers.” Broadway, in particular, relies on shows that develop across the pond because production is much cheaper there. But with less public funding support for London theaters, the transatlantic pipeline has grown wobbly, making successes like “Two Strangers” harder and harder to achieve.
“This show probably wouldn’t have happened if it had happened 10 years later or even five years later,” Buchan said. “Even though now it’s privately funded, a great big commercial piece, I don’t think it would have happened without central funding for the arts.”
About a week before their opening night in November 2025, Buchan and Barne sat in the balcony of the Longacre Theatre. The two are self-proclaimed “eccentric British men” with matching beards, round glasses, and a combined height of 12 foot 6 inches. Even looking down at the stage where crew members adjust a New York skyline made of suitcases, they still can’t quite understand how they got here.
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Buchan and Barne, two lifelong friends and bandmates, ventured into musical theater in 2015 when they attended a writing program where participants watch a show and have 24 hours to write a short musical in response. Their assignment became a 15-minute comedy about two English actors who dislike each other but have to perform an American love song. For the next three years, they continued writing the show as a Christmas cabaret, which they submitted to BEAM, a new musical showcase in England. BEAM is funded by ACE and produces excerpts of about 40 new musicals from English writing teams bi-annually.
Meanwhile, independent producer Tim Johanson was looking for new material at BEAM and was intrigued by Buchan and Barne’s presentation. “I believe that the hardest thing to do in musical theater is to make people laugh through song,” Johanson said. “And it really made me laugh.” He talked with the writers at a bar afterward and signed on. From that moment on, things moved quite quickly.
With Johanson on their team, Buchan and Barne expanded their cabaret to a musical comedy titled “The Season.” The show was about a wedding on Christmas day and first premiered in 2019 at Royal & Derngate in Northampton and The New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich, both small theaters in England, which, at the time, were receiving ACE funding. But even with successful regional runs, Johanson still hesitated to move it to London’s commercial theater scene because, as a Christmas show, he worried the West End might not take them seriously year-round.
Buchan and Barne were hesitant to remove the Christmas aspects at first. But when the COVID-19 pandemic halted their progress, they started revising and “Two Strangers” emerged: a two-person musical comedy about Dougal, an exuberant Brit traveling to New York for the wedding of the father he’s never met, and Robin, the hardheaded Brooklynite sister of the bride-to-be.
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In 2023 the show moved to Off West End’s Kiln Theatre, which is supported by ACE, and soon coasted to the West End’s Criterion Theatre in 2024 with positive word of mouth and an avid fanbase. The show’s evolution was, in large part, due to the publicly funded spaces that gave Buchan and Barne the chance to workshop the piece in front of audiences.
“It’s those regional theaters who had the courage to take a punt on two completely unknown writers and a completely unknown story,” Buchan said. “But the budgets for those regional theatres are very small and, increasingly, they’re closing or ceasing to produce work.”
The reallocation of ACE funds has had a substantial impact on the ability of theater companies inside and outside of London to function, which has, in turn, stunted the development pipelines that “Two Strangers” benefitted from. The funding cuts came in 2022, after Nadine Dorries, the Culture Secretary for the U.K.’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) at the time and a member of the Conservative (Tory) Party, ordered a major redistribution of ACE funds away from London in order to “level up” the regional areas. This resulted in a cut of £50 million worth of ACE grants in London. During the Tory rule from 2010 to 2024, ACE funds were also cut by about 30% due to austerity, a fiscal program meant to reduce national spending.
Though Dorries sped up the process, ACE had already been slowly shifting the funds away from London as a part of “Let’s Create,” a 10-year strategy aimed at helping people experience the arts wherever they live. “Over recent years we have been rebalancing our investment to make sure that everyone, whichever corner of England they live in, has better access to great creative and cultural experiences,” ACE Chair Sir Nicholas Serota wrote in London news website The Standard.
Historically, ACE funds have been disproportionately concentrated in London and the south of England, with the North receiving lower funding per capita. In theory, the reallocation was meant to help the kinds of theaters that “Two Strangers” played at during its development, as it allowed for funding increases for regional theaters. But, in effect, this harmed many London-based cultural institutions.
Unlike in the U.S., where the economic output is distributed among multiple states, London is responsible for about 22.3% of England’s gross domestic product (GDP), despite making up only 1.2% of the country’s landmass. Arts attractions in the capital city are an important economic driver, as 51% of the £124.62 billion in economic output from England’s creative industries in 2022 was generated in London. But when theaters in London experienced funding cuts, the entire industry was thrown into disarray.
The Gate Theatre was founded in 1979 as an artistic space to bring international stories to the London stages and started receiving funds from ACE in the early 2000s. Organizations that receive ACE funds are called National Portfolio Organizations (NPOs). The application to become a NPO takes place every three years and even if an organization achieves NPO status in one cycle, they still need to re-apply in the next. In 2022, there were a few reasons why The Gate didn’t have the strongest application.
For several years, The Gate had been planning to move from their original venue, a 60-seat blackbox theater up a rickety staircase from a pub, but could never find the time amid its yearly show schedule. Then the industry shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic and they saw their chance. But when it came to applying for ACE funding, they had just moved from their home of 40 years and had not yet proved that they could exist anywhere else. They had also moved from a borough that had only a few NPOs at the time to a borough that had 17, which was a detriment since, due to the reallocation, funds were distributed based on zip code.
Their team was prepared for a partial cut, but the 100% cut came as a shock. “It was just unthinkable that you would go from £345,000 a year to nothing,” said Nicola Clements, CEO and Executive Director of The Gate.
To make up for the lost 45% of their income, they shrunk their team by half, let go of their office space, and decreased the number of shows they produced per year from five to one. They no longer have a permanent venue, instead using other theater companies’ spaces, and their new office is just one small room in a shared facility. In the move, they also lost their phone and printer contracts as well as their computers.
“Since the cut we have been six months away from closing. Consistently. For three years,” Clements said. “We’ve basically spent the last three years trying to answer the question: can we survive without the Arts Council? And after three years I can emphatically say no.”
Even though the funding reallocations were planned around decreasing funding in London, theaters outside of London have also been affected. New International Encounter (NIE) is a theater company with various offices around Europe, one of which is in Cambridge, England. They have been a NPO for about 10 years but the amount they receive hasn’t increased, apart from the occasional one percent, so it doesn’t go as far as it once did due to inflation. They’re also a touring company that doesn’t have their own venue and must travel to other theaters to present their work.
“It’s getting more difficult for us to book a tour because the venues don’t have the production budgets that they had to be able to book us,” said Lisa Elmer, Executive Director of NIE’s U.K. office. “Or if we’re new to them, it’s whether they’ve got the money to be able to take a risk on us.”
Even the venues that will take a chance on them often cannot offer as much as they used to. In the past, theaters would reach out and ask NIE to develop a show and then pay for any associated costs. Now, some theaters will require that NIE pay to develop the show before approaching them, so they can decide whether they want to book it or not. Other theaters have offered to pay for the cost to put on the show but can only offer to split the revenue from the box office with NIE, so their income depends on how well the show sells.
“Venues have got less money to commit to the unknown,” Elmer said. “It may be that if they’re a small arts center, they are better off hiring the space out for a private party than they are having a performance of Shakespeare in there on a Friday night.”
New works cost more to put on because they involve paying all of the creatives for the time they spent writing and developing the piece, compared to a pre-existing work where those expenses are already taken care of. But the inability for theaters to pay for new works has affected the makeup of productions in the British theater industry. Many theaters are shifting to producing more revivals of classics, adaptations of well-known intellectual property, and celebrity-led productions, rather than developing new projects.
Clare Bayley, a playwright who teaches a class on modern British drama at New York University in London, noticed that this last year she took students to various pieces that were riffing on classic works, like Henrik Ibsen’s 19th-century plays “Hedda Gabler” and “The Lady from the Sea.” She supposed that theaters had commissioned playwrights to write contemporary versions of them as a way to persuade audiences to see new work.
“It’s still very limiting for writers because they’re just doing versions of existing plays,” Bayley said. “I think theaters are terrified of not filling their auditorium and so they’re programming quite conservatively.”
It isn’t just adaptations. Many of the theaters that used to present new works now primarily show revivals. The Bridge Theatre, for one, was founded specifically for commissioning and producing new shows. Now, they’re presenting a production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” and last year they housed 1950s classic “Guys and Dolls” and William Shakespeare’s “Richard II,” which starred “Bridgerton” actor Jonathan Bailey.
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Because theaters are less able to present new shows, writers will often have to work for free and self-produce their own workshop just to attract a producer or venue. But for many independent artists, that’s unsustainable. If BEAM didn’t exist, for instance, and Buchan and Barne hadn’t met their producer, Johanson, they would have had very few ways to get their emerging show in front of audiences and receive the developmental help that they did.
Every year, Matt Wolf, an American London-based theater critic, makes a list of his top 10 shows of the year for The Arts Desk. This year, he was about to publish his list when he looked down and realized that, for the first time ever, he didn’t have a single new British play.
“I was kind of upset by that because new writing has to be in the life of a theater,” Wolf said. “I love the classics. I genuinely do. But if you’re not going to have new plays, how are you going to have the classics of tomorrow?”
While the British industry is dependent on ACE funding, it’s a different story across the pond. Without as much public funding, the American theater industry relies largely on philanthropy, a strategy dating back to the very beginning of the American arts industry. In the late 19th century, the wealthy population of the U.S. wanted to create high-art institutions like they had in Europe. But without royalty to finance them, they pooled their money to subsidize the institutions, starting with museums, orchestras, and opera companies in the Northeast.
“What they realized is that for certain kinds of art, the market will never really be able to support it,” said Michael Rushton, professor of economics and public policy of the arts at Indiana University. “And this was as true in 1880 as it is now.”
This became the model for the American nonprofit institution, long before the government got involved. Since philanthropy was created as a substitute for royal donations, it never took root in the British system the way it did in the U.S. One time, Nancy Lukitsh, an American private arts donor, was fundraising and ran into two of her friends from business school who live in London. She was asking for about $500 but both of them said no because, at the time, they didn’t receive any tax credit from the U.K. for philanthropy.
The Tory government in the U.K. did create tax benefits for donations to the arts as a part of their effort to emulate the American philanthropic model. Now, British residents can offset their taxes by donating to the arts. But the theaters that lost their ACE funds in 2022 still had trouble turning to private funding, either because they didn’t have as much fundraising staff on their teams or because their audiences were less accustomed to donating to arts organizations.
“We lean on the arts funding a lot here,” said Kate McKeown, the development producer for “Two Strangers.” “I do think there’s something really amazing about how America views theater investing as an actual business. We don’t have different laws about how you invest or how you get your investors, anything like that. Whereas in America, it’s so much more set up.”
Public arts funding from the government is a relatively recent invention — and, ironically, the U.S. was the first country to implement it. In the wake of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which involved pumping government money into various industries, including the arts, to generate jobs and stimulate the economy. They hired writers to create a collection of travel guides to each of the states. They put on plays and built infrastructure. The WPA was short-lived because it was less concerned with the quality of the art and more with getting people back to work, but it set the tone for the positive societal effects that government arts funding could have.
“The arts provide jobs, they provide economic vitality,” said Tooshar Swain, the director of public policy at advocacy group Americans for the Arts. “President Roosevelt understood how important the arts were to the mentality of a country that was going through some really harsh economic times.” This is still true today, as the arts are a $1.2 trillion industry in the U.S. and make up 4.2% of the nation’s GDP. For every dollar that is spent on the arts, more goes back into the economy.
A similar situation happened on the other side of the Atlantic following World War II. England was struggling, as the war had desecrated both its land and wealth, and English economist John Maynard Keynes had the idea to create ACE in order to bring the arts to the whole country.
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What was then called the Arts Council of Great Britain was founded on very specific conditions: it would receive money from the government but it would bring in experts from outside the government to recommend and review works, rather than let politicians decide what art was worthy. It would not be given free-reign and could still be called to Parliament, but it would have the freedom to make its own decisions on how it wished to spend the money. Keynes named this independence from the government “arm’s length.”
This became the model for public arts funding agencies around the world, including the NEA. The U.S. was in a very different place after the war, as the fighting didn’t take place on American soil. Instead, the American government had the privilege of deciding what they were going to do with the vast wealth that they had gained. President John F. Kennedy originally had the idea for American public arts funding and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the NEA into effect in 1965.
“They were trying to say, ‘Look, we’re a super rich country. We’re the richest country in the history of the world,’” Rushton said. “‘And when history looks back at us, what are they going to see?’”
A unique aspect of the NEA was its geographic reach and federalism: when it was created, the body told all 50 states that if they set up a state-level arts council, it would give the state money. Within a few years, every state set up their own arts council, which helped democratize the funding to give the states more power.
The NEA now reaches all 435 voting congressional districts in the U.S. and this widespread dispensation helps it survive political scrutiny. Throughout the years, many Republicans in Congress have tried to end the NEA. But every time they do, the organization can point to concrete entities that they fund in the lawmaker’s own district. The NEA isn’t in the Constitution and could be ended, but no one’s ever actually gone through with it.
“The whole crux of America, in general, is how much government intervention do you want, when you’ve come from a colonized society where you didn’t want that government intervention?” Swain said.
The extent to which the government should be involved in the arts is still a prominent topic of debate and the NEA has not been left unscathed. In the late 1980s and ’90s, a period known as the ‘Culture Wars,’ the NEA underwent major cuts, brought about by backlash from mainly conservative politicians to the art that was created by individuals during the AIDS crisis. In response, the NEA stopped giving money to individual artists and instead started supporting only nonprofit organizations.
“I think the arts is often a sword to the left,” Barne said. “The right wing philosophically disapproves of giving money to people who are just going to create what they see as propaganda.”
Similar restrictions resurfaced just last year. In May 2025, President Trump proposed to terminate the NEA as a part of an effort to shrink federal spending on “unnecessary governmental entities.” The organization preemptively rescinded some of the grants that they had awarded to arts institutions. However, these cuts were not permanent, as the Republican Congress passed a bill in early 2026 to fully fund the NEA at $207 million, largely in response to 18,000 messages from arts advocates.
Because the NEA is so decentralized, it represents a small amount of funding for most New York City nonprofit theaters. New 42, an Off-Broadway theater company, received $15,000 from the NEA in fiscal year 2025. Compared to its annual operating budget of $22 million, losing the NEA funds wouldn’t make much of a difference and they could most likely cover the loss with private funding from individual donors.
On the other hand, for many smaller theaters, NEA funding is crucial to their existence. Lauren Fitzgerald, Vice President of Marketing at New 42, was also the chair of the board for a small nonprofit in upstate New York that closed during the pandemic. If it had lost NEA funds it would have been devastating. “It could be like a quarter of the budget that was going away,” Fitzgerald said.
In the most recent funding cycle, theater companies were asked to attest that they would not include programming in their season that was aimed at increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion, also known as DEI, in order to receive funds. This was one part of President Trump’s series of executive orders to dismantle DEI programs within the government, workforce, and higher education.
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“The vast majority of arts organizations were like, I’m not signing this,” Fitzgerald said. “But the ones that are small and it represents a big part of their budget and they were gonna fold unless they did it, they took it and ran and tried to stay under the radar.”
While the arm’s length principle is meant to allow the organizations to distribute arts funding based on merit, that principle is called into question when the government, either in the U.S. or the U.K., determines what can and cannot receive public funding based on content or geography. But funding decisions based on art alone are also controversial, as some feel it suggests that a government agency knows what type of art is most worthy of funding.
Arts funding tends to prioritize what is known as “highbrow art,” such as opera and ballet, over commercial works, which are typically more popular among the masses. “It’s incredibly paternalistic, this idea that there’s good art and if left free to their own devices, the little people would underconsume it,” said Ryan Bourne, a libertarian economist who wrote about why the NEA should be ended. “I think a lot of people have this kind of snobbishness that they don’t want to put on incredibly lowbrow popular performances. But Shakespeare was successful because he put on plays that people really wanted to see.”
Allowing the government to determine what qualifies as worthy art has more effect than just prioritizing highbrow art over commercial work. Every new administration that comes into office in the U.S. has the chance to decide whether they will abolish the NEA or use the funds to their benefit, and most choose the latter.
The Trump administration canceled grants to arts organizations in order to funnel more money into the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. President Trump also appointed himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center, a federally funded theater in Washington, D.C., and banned certain productions from performing there, particularly those that featured drag performances. Even the Obama administration faced controversy in 2009 over accusations that government officials asked artists to use NEA funding to create works that supported the president’s agenda.
“It’s inevitable that when you have a government agency distributing funds,” Bourne said, “the stuff that gets funded will fulfill some sort of political criteria, even if it’s very loose criteria, and that will affect the type of artists that apply for the funds.”
It’s not just a partisan issue. There are many taxpayers on both ends of the political spectrum who would prefer that their tax dollars not be used to perpetuate messages that they don’t approve of, and that includes through artistic works.
“We shouldn’t be forced to pay for things that we might disagree with on a moral basis,” Bourne continued. “Art is supposed to be pluralistic, it’s supposed to be diverse, it’s supposed to be something that often challenges us, thrills us. And I think the government playing a big role in art corrupts that sense of what good art is about.”
Broadway is fueled in large part by imports. It relies on shows, like “Two Strangers,” that come from across the Atlantic because development is much cheaper there. Notably, shows like “Les Misérables” and “Matilda” started at the subsidized Royal Shakespeare Company before transferring to the West End and, later, Broadway. Even some of the biggest Broadway hits originated in England, including “Phantom of the Opera,” “Mamma Mia!,” and “Mary Poppins.”
“Theater’s just more popular there,” said Kara O’Rourke, a senior analyst at Broadway media agency AKA NYC. “They’re more receptive to shows. So a show can be interesting or kooky or weird or still getting its legs and it will have an audience. And that’s a really good breeding ground for creativity and theater iteration.”
But Broadway shows cost much more to operate than West End shows, and many that make this transfer aren’t prepared for the associated costs. “Cabaret” burned through its entire $24 million capitalization and faced a lawsuit from a disgruntled investor. “Tammy Faye” shuttered after less than two months. “Back to the Future” received mixed reviews and lost much of its $23.5 million capitalization. Even the Tony Award-winning revival of “Sunset Blvd.” closed $6 million in the red.
Broadway generates $14.7 billion in economic impact annually for New York City and supplies 96,900 local jobs. As it gets harder for shows to succeed on Broadway, there are widespread implications for the future of the industry and the economic welfare of the city. Since the arrival of “Two Strangers” came at a time when the transatlantic pipeline had begun to wobble and operating costs were growing rapidly, the team was wary of transferring to Broadway.
“We had benefited all the way along the process by staying small for as long as possible,” Buchan said. “That seems to be the best model because you have a longer time to build up some enthusiasm and to improve the show before too many people have seen it. So we were so terrified of coming to America.”
Eventually they had to take the plunge. “Two Strangers” opened on Broadway on Nov. 20, 2025 to largely positive reviews and recently received eight Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical. But the work and costs to get there were substantial.
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The show is inexpensive by Broadway standards, costing about $480,000 per week, with a capitalization of $8 million. By comparison, the West End production needed only £1.45 million (about $1.9 million). On Broadway, everything from casting and marketing to rent for the theater costs more, and only 20% of Broadway shows recoup their initial investment.
Many of these increased costs are due to Broadway’s 13 unions, which add staffing requirements that don’t exist in the West End. “There are not as many theater unions in the U.K. so the artists do not get paid as much,” O’Rourke said. “So thank goodness for the unions making sure artists get paid and can afford to live in the city where they work. However, that contributes to the prices.”
Because of union rules, “Two Strangers” uses battery-powered leaf blowers to clear the stage of fake snow, as plug-in ones would require employing a technician just to plug them in.
To offset these costs, a Broadway show can charge more for tickets, but audiences expect more in return, and a two-person cast, five-person band, and singular set may not meet their standards. “Not changing sets is risky,” O’Rourke said, “because a lot of people come to Broadway to see a spectacle. They love ‘The Great Gatsby,’ right?”
Even in the West End, “Two Strangers” didn’t recoup and struggled to get people to pay enough to pack a 588-seat theater. Broadway’s Longacre Theatre has almost double that with 1,077 seats. To fill the larger space, they enhanced the set, adding LED lights to the zippers of the suitcases and scenery that descends from the ceiling, such as a neon Chinese restaurant sign, a traffic light, and a JFK departures board.
But finances aren’t the only challenge for a West End-to-Broadway transfer. Cultural differences also affect the ways that American and British audiences receive a show, and for “Two Strangers,” moving to Broadway meant facing the toughest audience for any show set in New York: New Yorkers themselves.
“This whole musical is the product of two people who had no idea what they were doing,” Buchan said. “Because there are so many things that you would never advise anybody to do, the first one being: ‘Don’t write a show about New York if it’s gonna be in New York, unless you’re a New Yorker.’”
Indeed, New Yorkers immediately spotted inaccuracies throughout the development process. An early version of the set had an incorrect subway map. A traffic reporter referred to the “Brooklyn Queens Expressway,” and their sound designer had to tell them that everyone calls it the “BQE.” One consultant even made Buchan and Barne take geography lessons to understand the city’s layout.
Before Broadway, they transferred to American Repertory Theater, a nonprofit that receives NEA funding, in Cambridge, Mass. Because of the theater’s subscription model, they had full houses every night and could focus solely on audience reaction and refining jokes, which provided a cost-effective way to continue workshopping the show before Broadway.
“That gave us a route into Broadway that wasn’t saying, ‘This is a hit West End show,’” Johanson said. “It was going, ‘No, this is a show that could be better than it was in the West End.’”
The strategy of transferring to a nonprofit theater before heading to Broadway may become more popular among West End transfers because of the success of “Two Strangers.” West End hit “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” for example, which won the Olivier Award for Best Musical in 2025, recently announced that it will be transferring to The Public Theater, a nonprofit, Off-Broadway theater, in Fall 2026.
But even runs at nonprofit theaters are growing increasingly expensive. The costs to develop a show have skyrocketed in both the U.S. and England with inflation, and without aid from public funding many shows aren’t even able to get off the ground without fronting large amounts of money at the start. It used to be that commercial producers would approach regional theaters in the U.S. and ask to do an out-of-town tryout to get their show in front of audiences before heading into the commercial sector. The theater would agree to spend the amount that they usually spend on a show and if the production cost more than that, the producer would have to pay the difference.
Now nonprofit theaters are presenting commercial productions as revenue drivers and expecting the producers to foot the entire cost to devise and operate the show. This causes shows to head into production with large expenses before even reaching the commercial industry.
“Many nonprofit arts organizations are struggling to center their mission because commercially minded interests have clouded their decision-making process,” said Joe Hetterly, a New York-based producer. Even the boards of the nonprofit theater companies are composed of people who come from business and real estate.
American producers and investors are also heading across the pond to work on their projects to avoid the higher development and production costs in the U.S. However, that’s caused British theaters and managers to raise their prices because they know Americans will pay them, which boxes out local London artists.
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Despite the shakiness of the industry around it, “Two Strangers” persevered. Now on Broadway, it’s already lasted longer than any show to play in the Longacre Theatre in the last two years. And for Buchan and Barne, it’s finally reaching the audience that it was made for. They now delight in watching New Yorkers experience their city through, as they put it, “British people’s rather foolish love for American culture.”
In one scene, Dougal asks Robin where his father lives and she responds, “Tribeca.” “Oh yeah, next to Central Park,” Dougal says, a line that kills with audiences now, but hasn’t always. “Lots of the jokes about Dougal getting stuff wrong in New York,” Barne said, “English people just didn’t get it.” Even in Massachusetts the joke didn’t always land.
“Other people have told us now that it was its destiny,” Buchan said. “This is its home. And I think there’s a part of us that’s like, ‘Okay, maybe that’s true.’ On some level we always wanted this, we just didn’t allow ourselves to admit that. But there’s no question that the New York audience is responding to it more than any other audience has.”
“Two Strangers” has shown that there is still an appetite among consumers for new works. But as public arts funding decreases and new work development becomes more challenging, artists and theaters have had to be savvy. The Tank, a nonprofit theater company in New York that receives public funding, has a presenting program where they cover all of the hard costs of self-producing for artists. Participants get free use of The Tank’s theater, equipment, front of house services, marketing, insurance, and rehearsal space.
Meghan Finn, Artistic Director of The Tank, also took that model and replicated it as a pop-up program called Re/Venue, which partners with theaters with currently unused spaces and allows artists to present their shows there for free. “Why should the theater sit dark when you have so many artists that need the resources?” Finn said. “When they have a dark time where they aren’t making any money, we should fill it with artists.”
They then split the box office revenue with the theater and give part of their half to the artist. The theater and artist both walk away with money and the artist gets the experience of presenting their show for free in a new venue.
The Tank and Re/Venue have year-round open submissions and they try to say yes to as much as they can. Finn started Re/Venue in 2024 and they’ve already made a lot of money for various theaters. Finn thinks that other theaters, including those in England, could adopt a similar system to not only aid development of new works but also help theaters generate more income by taking advantage of their venues.
“Part of theater’s problem is that we don’t maximize use of our space,” Finn said. “People are paying to heat and cool their spaces for 24 hours a day, and they’ll sit dark and only be used 20% of the time. And that seems wasteful to me.”
Similar to the decline of new works in London, as production prices in the U.S. rise, development is the first thing on the chopping block. Without access to playwriting groups and developmental workshops, artists are turning to places like The Tank where they can receive free production and affordable rehearsal space.
Last season, one of The Tank’s core produced programs, “The Lobster,” was written by an artist who had been presenting at The Tank for years. It was also directed by a former Tank intern, who had worked as Finn’s assistant and traveled with her when she was directing in Europe, and produced by The Tank’s 2022–23 producing Fellow. The show ended up on the list for top 10 theater of the year in Vulture and the New Yorker.
“No one’s first show is ‘Hamilton,’” Finn said. “Great art is born of spaces where failure is an option. When failure is not an option because of financial need, you end up with mediocre stuff.”
Right now to do a show at an Off-Broadway theater costs around $300,000 to $500,000. “Someone’s first play shouldn’t be that expensive because they’re gonna mess it up,” she continued. “If the U.K. is emulating our system, good luck to them.”