I don't know I think the mix of tourists interested in trying something new and fanbois anxious to be star-uhm, lovers could ensure a healthy crowd on a regular basis. Not the 800 seats a night Tonight filled, but I understand in NYC that number is only like 250. Something like that could be reasonable in Orlando.
It's not the ability to generate a crowd - that's easy. It's the
type of guest - precisely the types you mentioned, actually. They don't make the best/most desirable, regular audiences for a show. They get bored easily. They are all in T-shirts and flip-flops, except for the crazy fanbois - which no one wants, really, LOL.
They actually could easily fill up 800 seats a day - folks will get in a line for anything - but when they want to get up and leave because the big star main guest is gone and they don't care about the second-from-the-last-actor in the credits for a low-rated sitcom who's on in the last ten minutes, and folks start to walk out ("Don't tell me to sit down! I paid thousands of dollars to be here, I wanna go on Harry Potter now! This is boring my family!") - it's just not the crowd you want to rely on every day.
I was pleasantly surprised by this. Attended two tapings, neither lasted more than 75 minutes. And the Fun show felt live to tape--new song, maybe two minutes of patter, then a mini-concert with their three hits. I've heard stories about Disney parade tapings, but but with a looser style, I think things could work better.
That's because it was highly mechanized knowing all this, and the theme park audience. To do a show like that takes a lot more work because they are doing it as much for the folks there as they are for the actual production of the television show (keeping the audience happy makes everyone look happy, so they do it).
A real production just doesn't work that way - while that quick three-minute commercial break between Kim Kardashian and Chloe on 24 as the next guest might go by in three minutes on TV, it very well could be a half-hour in between - Chloe might be running late, her makeup may have run because she cried after Kanye walked up and grabbed her drink from her in the green room, they might have trouble getting the forklift to start that they need to carry Kim's derriere off the stage, etc.
It all boils down to the same basic thing - in order to make it work in a theme park environment, in Florida, they have to make so many compromises, and add so much expense, simply to accommodate the fact that it's in a theme park that it's just not worth it for the parties involved. Why double your cost and triple your PITA factor solely for the novelty for tourists to gawk at it, when you consider if the park just needs an attraction, it's far cheaper to just get a bunch of contract players from Entertainment and put on a show you can run a few times a day and run through even more guests.
After I left, prob'ly around 1990-ish maybe just after, they were filming the Mickey Mouse Club at the Studios. My younger step-sister had a friend whose Dad worked for the company (no clue what capacity) and brought the girls to tapings as often as they liked, sometimes daily when school was out I think I recall. Soooo the whole New Hollywood thing didn't work out so well..... Shame.
