Boston Is Still Very Much A Pre-Broadway Tryout Town – That’s The Problem Responding to the Boston Globe article about the city’s attempt to reclaim its place as the preeminent place to test Broadway-bound shows, Bill Marx argues that the tryout business never left Boston at all: it just moved to the area’s nonprofit companies, especially American Repertory Theater under Diane Paulus. “Major regional theaters … were initially established to produce a non-commercial response to the safe fare of Broadway. … Isn’t this a betrayal of the theaters’ mission?”