Attendees at BroadwayCon (Photo by Howard Sherman)
If the sight of perhaps 750 theatre fans spontaneously breaking into a song from their favourite musical warms your heart, then the conference rooms of the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue were the place to be on January 22. If the cast of that same musical, having heard about the impromptu singalong, asking some 3,000 theatre fans to sing to them is similarly inspiring, well you should have been in the Hilton ballroom that same afternoon.
From January 22 to 24, the Hilton was home to the first BroadwayCon, a fan convention for theatre buffs. Filled with events, performances and panels not just about Broadway, but about the theatre overall – though admittedly with a tilt towards musicals – BroadwayCon reportedly sold some 6,000 tickets, which had gone on sale 10 months earlier and cost $125 per day or $250 for the weekend.
I went to BroadwayCon with a mixed agenda: first, sheer curiosity, second, the intention to document it for this column, and third, because I had been invited to moderate a panel about production assistants who subsequently ‘made it big’ in the theatre business. I didn’t know quite what to expect, and one press representative I saw at the event confessed that when it was first announced, there was a feeling of uncertainty in their office.
On the eve of the event, The New York Times cited the demographics of the attendees, provided by the organisers: “Nearly 80% of the registrants are female; 75% are from outside the state of New York; and 50% are 30 or younger.” That’s a far cry from the general assumptions about theatre appealing to an increasingly older crowd, and while 6,000 fans certainly can’t sustain the field alone, the sight of multiple Elphabas, Phantoms, and Tracy Turnblads was evidence that theatre still holds a very strong appeal.
What was on offer? Among many options, there were cast conversations with leads from Fun Home, Spring Awakening, Hamilton and Fiddler on the Roof, and a reunion of cast members of Rent (just days before the 20th anniversary of Jonathan Larson’s passing and the show’s first Off-Broadway preview). There were fan meet-ups organised by affinity (a room that was packed by Sondheim fans at 10am was rather sparse by 11am, when the call was for Lloyd Webber buffs), conversations about diversity, design and marketing, as well as audience participation games and variety shows. Both singalongs I mentioned earlier were from Hamilton events.
I experienced a mild sense of deja vu throughout the weekend (I spent time at BroadwayCon on each of its three days) because it was 40 years ago, to the precise weekend, that I had attended my very first fan convention of any kind, the 1976 International Star Trek Convention, at the very same hotel. It is frankly remarkable that with the flourishing of fan conventions since that time, it was only this year that anyone managed to capitalise on the convention model for theatre and Broadway.
While there were occasional snafus with wrangling crowds into the largest and most popular events on Friday, a gigantic blizzard unfortunately prevented many fans – as well as guest speakers and performers – from reaching the hotel on Saturday, and even Sunday. But the organisers scrambled valiantly and effectively to insure a good experience for those who made it. So while the attendance never seemed as high as on that first day, and while the largest rooms may not have always been as filled, I sensed no lessening of enthusiasm among the die-hards who had either stayed over at the hotel or braved the elements to be there.
Like Broadway itself, access to BroadwayCon wasn’t cheap, and presumably there were countless fans who couldn’t attend because of the added expense of a flight and hotel tickets. But this first year should prove that there’s an enormous appetite among theatre fans to gather both with those they admire, and others who share their passions, getting out of social media and chat rooms and into real life interactions. As someone who began the weekend by adopting a slight distance and harbouring even a bit of cynicism, I was drawn back through heavy snow and puddles of icy slush because BroadwayCon successfully tapped into my inner fanboy, and because I was having a good time watching others have a good time. It gave them access to the world I’ve long been in. The theatre must do more of that.
It’s a tad too early to announce the emergence of a new trend, but two recent announcements suggest that there’s something brewing in the theatrical zeitgeist.
The announcements to which I refer are Quentin Tarantino’s repeated references to adapting his newest film The Hateful Eight for the stage, and Warner Bros Theatre Ventures’ announcement that Stephen Adly Guirgis will adapt the 1974 film Dog Day Afternoon for Broadway. I’m more sanguine about the latter than the former, because Guirgis is a proven theatrical talent who is likely to assert his own unique take on the true-life story that fuelled the Sidney Lumet film. While some have noted that The Hateful Eight is, if you strip away the profanity and slurs, the widescreen, and the protracted running time, really a western equivalent of an Agatha Christie locked room mystery.
The potential wave of which I speak is the movie-into-play adaptation, which seems poised to supplant the movie-into-musical and jukebox musical trends of recent years. This isn’t a brand new idea, and has actually been more common on British stages than American ones, with Chariots of Fire, The Shawshank Redemption, Cool Hand Luke and The Ladykillers among the examples. But when British exemplars have crossed the Atlantic, they haven’t set Broadway afire, with Festen and Elling being blink-and-you-missed-them failures. The Graduate ran for a year, but it closed more than 12 years ago.
Misery, now on Broadway in a different version than the UK one in the early 1990s, has held its own in the face of negative notices, buoyed no doubt by the Broadway debut of Bruce Willis, but its fortunes have been declining. Breakfast at Tiffany’s and A Time To Kill both closed particularly fast.
Experts will be quick to note that in many cases, the movie-to-play adaptations are often based on an original book from which the film and play have been adapted separately. But it’s usually the movie’s success and familiarity that prompts the theatrical version. The same impulse that has driven the trend for musical adaptations of movies seems to be behind these play efforts, with movie companies eager to exploit even properties that perhaps don’t lend themselves to musicalisation.
The problem is that drama into drama efforts often aren’t transformative enough to make the new stage versions compelling. When assembling songs into a story (like Mamma Mia!) or adding songs to one (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), there is inevitably a change in the source material. But the play into play paradigm doesn’t necessarily undergo the same kind of revision and rethinking – even though it’s essential to making great theatre. And of course without fundamental change, the inevitable comparisons are easier to make.
The best film into stage adaptations (The Lion King, Once) create something that is an altogether new way of looking at the preceding work. If film companies’ only goal is to generate more income from existing material, and to trade on our affection for it, then this incipient genre may well prove an unsatisfying one, as so many jukebox musicals and movie-to-musical adaptations have been before.
Having also produced Misery, Warner Bros’ choice of Guirgis is a heartening one, particularly if they give him room to let his own imagination and language truly create a new work for the stage, rather than a photocopy. While I never want to see them lured away for long from original work, I can only imagine what artists like Annie Baker, Anne Washburn, Stephen Karam, Suzan-Lori Parks, Mike Lew, and Tarrell Alvin McCraney could do with some classic and – better still – not-so-classic films. But only if it interests them creatively – not just for the money.
This essay originally appeared in The Stage, under a slightly different title.
Ian McKellen as King Lear (Photo by Simon Farrell)
Oh, British theatre, you’ve bested your American counterparts again, and you likely don’t even know about it. I should explain.
In late October, a new streaming service called BroadwayHD came online, to a flurry of press attention, likening the offering to Netflix or Hulu for the stage. As the holiday season often affords the opportunity to seek out online entertainment, I finally had the opportunity to peruse the offerings on the nascent BroadwayHD. To my surprise, I found remarkably little US theatre, let alone material from the Great White Way.
As of now, the relatively limited repertory of the service is comprised overwhelmingly of BBC offerings, tilted towards Shakespeare. Now, there’s no question that the selection is choice, featuring esteemed actors such as Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, Juliet Stevenson, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins and others, but the fact is, few of the shows on offer ever played Broadway.
Rifling through the categories of comedy, classics, drama and musicals yields a decidedly anglicised view of theatre. The category of musicals, which one would expect to be a strong suit, is the most American of sections, but also particularly thin, with only nine offerings, the most recent being Memphis and the oldest being Tintypes from 1980. One of the titles is the Bette Midler made-for-television Gypsy, which was never performed on stage.
That’s not to say there’s no value in the service, because I’m eager to explore some of these pieces – Daniel Craig in Copenhagen, anyone? But for now, it remains largely a US subscription-based version of BBC’s iPlayer with a cache of older titles. It also points out, once again, how behind US theatre is in adapting to the newly pervasive video reality, whether broadcast into movie theatres like NT Live is, or available on a mobile device.
I will always say that filmed theatre is not true theatre because it alters according to what the video camera finds. The live experience is unparalleled. But until all of the parties concerned – producers, writers, directors, actors, designers, craftspeople and crew – get together to hammer out an agreement that makes it possible for more US theatre to be recorded and distributed electronically, us Americans will be runners-up to our British colleagues (and soon our Canadian ones as well). Without that commitment, access to theatre will remain out of the reach of swathes of our population, for geographic and financial reasons.
Meanwhile, less attentive users of BroadwayHD will be left wondering why all of these ‘Broadway’ shows were performed with British accents.
Amber Riley, Shanice Williams and company in The Wiz. (Photo by Virginia Sherwood/NBC)
Last week, more than 11 million people in the US watched a live broadcast of the musical The Wiz, an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz that came almost 30 years before Wicked. Created for a black cast, it won best musical at the Tony Awards in 1975. The Wiz (2015 edition) was the third annual live musical from producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, following The Sound of Music in 2013 and Peter Pan last year. The Wiz was, by consensus, vastly superior to the previous two, and I happen to agree; in fact, I tweeted that opinion only 75 minutes into the three-hour broadcast. As has always been the plan, The Wiz production is now expected to run on Broadway in the 2016-17 season, although it’s unlikely the stage version will manage to field a cast like the broadcast did. Among the performers were Mary J Blige, Queen Latifah, Ne-Yo and, in a cameo role, Common.
Mind you, the early days of US television, when most broadcasts were live, were filled with adaptations of plays, and some distinguished works first written for TV, like Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful or Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight were later adapted for both the stage and as films. Remarkably, what seems to be driving the new popularity of live staged TV are social media, which value the immediacy of sports, awards broadcasts and, yes, theatre, because as they unfold in real time – with all of the spontaneity and potential for gaffes intact – they create the opportunity for shared experiences online. Indeed, audience members can chat away with one another throughout these shows without disrupting anyone else; they can even let their cellphone rings without causing an interruption in the performance.
This blurring of the stage and screen is happening at an accelerating pace in a variety of ways. While NT Live has forged new paths for the streaming of theatre to cinemas around the world (though they’re only really live in the UK and nearby time zones), the US has been much slower to adopt the model, due in part to more restrictive, and therefore expensive, union agreements. That said, just last night, the Off-Broadway production of the intimate musical Daddy Long Legs was streamed live online for viewing anywhere, which is an important development that will surely be closely watched as a test case. Can the embrace of video technology add value to a property or production even when it’s offered up gratis?
This week has also seen the daily release of new videos from the second series of My America short films from Centerstage in Maryland, where artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah has been exploring the intersection of film and theatre by commissioning original short plays from an array of writers. The new series has been shot guerrilla-style on sites where racial violence has taken place, essential spots in the new civil rights movement. But it blurs the traditional lines between the mediums by shooting plays in real-life settings specifically for video viewing; it’s theatre that won’t play in a theatre.
Just as the word television is becoming more a term for a specific viewing appliance, as opposed to the content itself, what we consider theatre may have to evolve as well. Purists will say that The Wiz was a Broadway text and score produced for video, not theatre – in no small part because there was no audience present – and that despite the credentials of the participating authors, My America is essentially a film series.
But perhaps we should be worrying less about the labels and looking more at impact: The Wiz may have inspired an interest in theatre among young people who may never be able to attend the show’s promised Broadway run; the Daddy Long Legs stream may help promote a chamber piece into the musical theatre repertory; live audiences could not have attended a play performed outside the burned out chemist shop that went up in flames during the Baltimore riots.
And in the US, it’s worth noting that the largest national audience for musical sequences from Broadway shows isn’t on the annual Tony Awards broadcast – it’s found in the first hour of the broadcast of the venerable Thanksgiving Day Parade from New York, which is seen by more than 20 million people. Just because it’s not performed in a theatre, does it stop being theatre?
Early last week, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Committee gave its blessing to a plan to elevate Broadway’s famed Palace Theatre by 29ft in order to make way for street-level and below-ground retail in the heart of Times Square and to redevelop the hotel that already rises above the venue.
There are still several hurdles for the plan to clear before it’s a completely done deal, but a timetable setting out the project’s completion by the end of 2019 was also announced, in a report that first appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
The Palace is a fabled location, less as a legitimate theatre venue than for its origins as a premier vaudeville house. To ‘play the Palace’ means to have truly arrived in showbusiness terms.
Judy Garland famously performed there multiple times in the 1950s and 1960s, as did other name performers such as Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis. Since it was bought by the Nederlander Organization in 1965, the Palace has been home to such theatrical hits as the original productions of Sweet Charity, Applause, La Cage aux Folles, The Will Rogers Follies and the current production of An American in Paris.
Like any theatre, it has also had its share of flops, including the musical Cyrano, a version of Frankenstein that I loved as a teen, and (amusingly) both Henry, Sweet Henry and Home Sweet Homer.
It’s important to note that while the interior of the Palace is landmarked, and therefore must be preserved, the exterior is not. Giant signage adorns the outside. Because the theatre is accessed via a lengthy entryway, its street-level frontage on Seventh Avenue is quite limited, sandwiched between the hotel entry on one side and a change bureau and a McDonalds on the other.
Opposition to the plan, citing the Palace’s historic and iconic status, remains, and it will likely grow louder as the final regulatory steps are taken. While I certainly want to see the theatre preserved, and by regulation it must be, I’m not joining the chorus of those who oppose the venue’s potentially elevated status.
This is because the project – driven first and foremost by commerce, I know – has the potential to rethink aspects of the theatregoing experience for the next century.
As Broadway theatres have begun to pass the 100-year mark, it’s impossible not to wonder how these tourist draws will fare over the long term. As ticket prices continue to rise and make Broadway into an increasingly luxury brand, the beloved but antique interiors may seem increasingly problematic to patrons: steep staircases, small lobbies and tight bathrooms come quickly to mind. This holds true for backstage as well, since the theatres weren’t conceived with modern technology in mind.
The Palace project has the potential to alleviate some of the front-of-house frustrations and make the Broadway theatregoing experience more consistent with that one might find at venues less than half its age. With new venues such as the Culture Shed, the performance spaces at Pier 55 and, maybe one day, the Ground Zero Arts centre on the horizon in New York, the patron experience on Broadway may stand in even sharper relief. Those of us who love the connection to days of theatre past may be willing to overlook some of the inconveniences that come with historic venues, but one cannot help but wonder about subsequent generations, and theatres shouldn’t become deterrents to seeing productions.
The Palace plans outline significant new space for audience and pre-show events, more akin to one what might find at newly built regional houses, as well as more support space backstage. I trust there will be new bathrooms. While great care must be taken with the jacking-up of the theatre, there is also a significant photographic record to guide replication should any pieces be inadvertently damaged in the process.
While exterior landmarking and past air-rights sales will likely prevent the same process from occurring at many other Broadway houses, the Palace may yet prove itself to be a new model of retaining the very best of our historic theatres while adapting to a newer era of entertainment and audience expectation.
There is risk, to be sure, but there’s also potential. If the view of the stage from my seat remains unchanged whether I’m at street level (in the stalls) or 29ft above it, if the beauty of the hall is preserved, then the lifting of the Palace isn’t going to get much of a rise out of me.
They are, to many, the scourge of Times Square and the theatre district. I refer not to the prostitutes and three-card monte hustlers of 25 years ago. They’ve long since been exiled to the outer reaches of our tourism mecca.
Now, thanks to the pedestrian plazas created along Broadway between 47th and 42nd Streets under our former mayor Michael Bloomberg, visitors and theatregoers often must run a gauntlet of unauthorized Marvel superheroes, Sesame Street characters, and cartoons come to life in order to reach their destination. Oh, and I can’t forget the desnudas, the topless women whose bodies are painted in patriotic red, white and blue.
“Elmo Eats His Hand” (Photo by Howard Sherman)
It wasn’t so long ago that the only regular character in Times Square was the blonde-tressed, muscularly defined Naked Cowboy, posing on traffic medians with tourists for tips while clad in nothing but a cowboy hat, a guitar, boots and a double layer (per news reports) of tighty-whitie undershorts. But the greater pedestrian spaces in the new plazas allowed the situation to mushroom, into roving hordes of often ratty knock-off characters aggressively soliciting passers-by to pose for photos and then compensate them with tips.
Over the summer, the situation reached a fever pitch of outrage, particularly towards the desnudas, with a series of affronted front pages in the New York Daily News. This led politicians to posture about how they proposed to limit this activity, ranging from impinging on free speech rights to tearing up the still-unfinished plazas themselves. As someone who works in the heart of Times Square, I tend to look at the characters – both those in costume and those in public office – with a sense of bemusement. The only people I truly feel for are parents trying to keep their children away from these low-rent facsimiles, who tend to remove their character heads (or don robes) whenever someone doesn’t seem ready to shell out for a photo, destroying many a toddler’s dreams.
“Iron Man and Bunnies” (Photo by Howard Sherman)
It is a little hard to call the situation a quality of life issue in an area largely devoid of residential property, but it can be annoyance when you’re late to a meeting and have to dodge Hello Kitty beckoning with open arms in order to make it to the next crosswalk. I confess that it has always surprised me that Disney (which controls not only their classic characters, but also those of Marvel and Pixar) hasn’t chosen to exert its copyright in order to drive away these scofflaws. I’m sure it has its reasons, and there are certainly non-Disney characters in the mix.
But I’d like to suggest, on a major tourism weekend in New York (our Thanksgiving holiday) that the theatre community has it in its power to seriously disrupt this cycle, peaceably, while reclaiming Times Square as a theatrical centre at the same time. My proposal is based on something already taking place, albeit at a simpler level.
It’s not uncommon for shows to field street teams of people to pass out flyers to promote their nearby productions in the plazas as well. Some may only sport T-shirts emblazoned with logos, but some go the extra mile creatively – Chicago, for example, sends out black-clad women wearing red stockings who strike Fosse-eque poses while proffering a leaflet.
I would suggest that even shows that don’t engage in this type of marketing could contribute to upgrading the character situation in Times Square by hiring people to walk the zone fully and professionally costumed as Jean Valjean, Elphaba and the Phantom, to name but three. Sans flyers and paid not by the tourists but by the shows – and perhaps also out of pooled funds from the Broadway League, the Times Square Alliance and the NYC visitors bureau – they could be compensated at an hourly rate and wear prominent badges saying “no tips accepted”.
“Elvis and Chewie” (Photo by Howard Sherman)
Posing for photos, never breaking character, directly competing with the more mercenary band currently at large, they would undermine the freelance players by offering a cleaner, safer, more professional alternative. This would allow Broadway to reclaim Broadway, while overwhelming Instagram and Facebook with theatrically-based tourist photos. They wouldn’t even have to show up every day; just enough and irregularly enough to make the current situation unprofitable for the pushy opportunists.
Of course, this won’t drive away the desnudas, unless a revival of Hair or Oh, Calcutta! decides to get in on the action. But for all of those who miss the tawdry Times Square of old, maybe a few desnudas provide a nostalgic link to the bad old days. And if people leave New York with a selfie that includes someone nearly naked along with, say, one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s cats, maybe that will only help sell the city, and the theatre as well.
There’s been a song running through my head for the past week, prompted by a series of press releases I’ve received. Anyone on a press list will tell you, notices from publicists flooding your inbox don’t normally move one to song.
The tune in question is “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” from Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. If you don’t know the song, it’s a cabaret number devised by the lead characters, spoofing the cultural array offered up by the Kennedy White House in the early 1960s. I’ve always been taken with the line, “We’ll have Bernstein play next on the Bechstein piano/And Auden read poems and stuff.” There’s lots of material like that.
The Sondheim wordplay is on my mind because there has been a steady drumbeat of cultural interest by the Obama White House in recent weeks, though not remotely for the first time. Without being political or trumpeting national pride, I have to say this makes me rather happy.
A number of Broadway shows were in Washington DC on Monday to tape Broadway at the White House for broadcast next week by TLC, one of our countless cable channels, on our Thanksgiving holiday. It features Michelle Obama as a special guest, with performances from several Broadway shows including On Your Feet, An American in Paris (in poignant timing), School of Rock and Fun Home. On Wednesday, the White House hosted a livestream salute to the Americans With Disabilities Act in its 25th year, which included a performance by the cast of Spring Awakening, which reached Broadway after being developed by the company Deaf West in a tiny theatre in Los Angeles.
This is all on top of New York City’s traffic-stopping special performance of the musical Hamilton two weeks ago, with the Obamas in attendance, in a high-price-ticket fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee. The event was widely known about and seen thanks to news reports about the president’s onstage remarks. And it’s worth noting that this was the second time the Obamas, who have visited Broadway regularly throughout his terms, have seen Lin-Manuel Miranda’s look at early US history (although Miranda’s alternate was on the first time they went).
Sondheim’s ribbing of the Kennedys notwithstanding, it’s incredibly affirming for every theatre geek in the country to know that the form of culture we participate in and love finds favour in the highest corridors of power. To be sure, some might make the charge that theatre is an elitist art if they’re trying to tear down the politicians who attend, but TLC wisely made the taping of their show part of a daylong event for students from arts programs in public schools around the country. Who can argue with that? As for Spring Awakening, the stream was free for all to see.
Diehards like me cling to moments when theatre is recognised by the wider culture. I’m happy to tell you that in the 1950s, the sitcom I Love Lucy sent Lucy and Ricky to Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, while more recently South Park featured Stephen Schwartz and Andrew Lloyd Webber in a brilliantly absurdist episode. There is symbolic power in politicians sitting in the dark watching the performing arts live, because it’s going to reach some portions of the population who might just decide to check this stuff out for themselves.
As Broadway is showcased before our political leaders and donors, it’s worth noting that even though some of the aforementioned shows originated with subsidised companies, there’s a vast array of theatre that isn’t defined by commercial success. Maybe before leaving office the Obamas might stop in at one or more of those companies. Or invite them to their home for the holidays.
This column originally appeared in The Stage newspaper in London.
Standing with A.R. Gurney in the garden area outside Connecticut’s Westport Country Playhouse on a summer night evokes a profound feeling of déjà vu. Thirty-one years ago, I met Gurney just after graduating college and beginning a summer job at the Playhouse, when Westport produced 11 shows in 11 weeks. Gurney was a frequent guest during that time, when the theatre also produced his play The Middle Ages.
I’ve seen Gurney, born Albert Ramsdell Gurney Jr. but known to all as Pete, in countless theatre lobbies since then, often near his Connecticut home—at Hartford Stage, where I was public relations director for eight years, during which time the theatre mounted Children and the premiere of The Snow Ball; at Long Wharf Theatre, where his Love Letters had its first sustained production and where I saw it performed by, most notably, Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn; and in New York City at the Flea Theater, at Primary Stages, at Lincoln Center.
Gurney, of course, is the enormously prolific author of more than 40 plays, including The Dining Room, The Cocktail Hour, The Perfect Party, and Sylvia, which is being revived this month on Broadway. Our meeting in the Westport garden was on the occasion of an “invited performance” of his newest play, Love and Money, which would officially premiere several weeks later at New York’s Signature Theatre.
Pete has let it be known that Love and Money might be his last play, as he turns 85 next month, but he’s been dropping not-so-subtle hints about retiring for at least four years.
We spoke again in his Manhattan apartment a few days later. He’d moved there just a week before, downsizing from his longtime prior home a block away. As in Michael Yeargan’s set for Love and Money, there were packing boxes here and there, a sign of transition in any life—in the play, a home being closed up, but here a new home just beginning to be filled.
HOWARD SHERMAN: So, Pete, is Love and Money really going to be your last play?
A.R. GURNEY: Well, you know, you can’t predict your own psyche to that degree. Playwriting is such a habit with me now. I’ve written an awful lot of plays. You can’t tell what ideas will suddenly strike you.
Jim Houghton [Signature’s artistic director] said, “We want to revive two of your older plays,” and he named the two that I thought would work, and added, ‘We want you to provide a new play at the end.” And I said “A new play? Jim, I’m 84 years old, I don’t think I can whomp up one,” but I did, and it turned out to be a particularly rewarding experience.
What was so rewarding?
I found myself reverting to habits that I really hadn’t done in quite a while. I wrote plays, I’d occasionally change a line or two, but I knew just what I was doing. This one I didn’t know quite what I was doing, and as the play developed, I changed the nature of it. We added characters—I felt like a kid starting out again, and thank God for [Westport artistic director] Mark Lamos’s tolerance of me, and thank God we still have time at Westport where we can fool with it a little bit.
I noticed a lot of references in Love and Money, both explicit and subtle, to other plays of yours. Does it help if an audience knows your other work?
I found I was footnoting myself as I went along. If the audience wants to make those connections, I’m delighted, but I hope the play isn’t dependent on it. I’m trying to think of other examples in drama and elsewhere where writers have done that, alluded to themselves. Faulkner does it, but I’m no Faulkner.
In 1982, when The Dining Room became your most widely produced play to date, you were already over 50, but you’d been writing since the 1960s. In that sense, you’d been an emerging playwright for an awfully long time. The Dining Room was an experience full of luck. There just happened to be a slot open in the 60-seat upstairs theatre at Playwrights Horizons, and I had just happened to meet David Trainer, who was looking for something to direct. The play was successful artistically and we managed, with luck, to get some excellent actors in it.
But then there was much more luck involved. The downstairs theatre at Playwrights Horizons opened up. I said to André [Bishop, then-artistic director of the company], “I just don’t think we can move downstairs, 120 seats—I don’t think we can do it.” But one thing led to another. Roger Stevens happened to see it and wanted to put it on at the Kennedy Center, so there was luck in availability of space, and coincidence in availability of actors.
It wasn’t a play that just knocked everyone off their feet—some people didn’t like it at all. If you look at the original review of The Dining Room, it was way in the back of the Times. If that was a breakthrough, it was on rather unusual terms. On the other hand, I enjoyed the experience so much, of writing it, of doing it, and because it was beginning to make a little money, I decided I could leave teaching alone.
You taught literature at MIT, not a liberal arts college and certainly not an arts school. Besides an income, what did teaching give you?
In the end, I learned a lot. I was an English major at Williams College, and it was a very narrow major—I didn’t read around a lot. At MIT I was forced to read classical literature, philosophical argument, Pascal and Descartes, and I had to talk about it with extremely bright students.
So what was the appeal? Just the sense that I was learning a lot in the course of teaching, and performing a lot. As a teacher at MIT, your classes don’t pretend, and they’re eager to learn, or at least I felt they were. But you have to keep them interested. They’ve all been up to the wee hours of the morning doing their problem sets and experiments. You have to become a good theatrical teacher in order to survive.
In your work, you often take off from other literature—the Bible, the classics, Shakespeare. What’s the affinity?
In the first place, most of the stories, whether from the classics or from the Bible, were pretty good stories. What I didn’t realize was that these were at the heart of the traditional WASP culture, these things we had to learn in Sunday school, these plays we had to read at school. As I continued to write, I came to realize that I’m not just trying to swipe a plot that seemed important in the past, but that I’m really writing about Western culture as it was embraced by the WASP culture.
Maybe I was trying to hit common denominators. I felt in order to speak to another human, you have to put your arm around them and say, “We all agree on this story, we’ll agree on this plot, so let’s all work together.” The Golden Fleece really dealt with suburban culture, and what was going on was that men and women were waking up to their responsibilities as parents and their dreams of being more than just parents.
While you were tagged as the great chronicler of WASP culture, you weren’t necessarily celebrating it. You were writing about its downfall and perhaps not regretting that.
Even at the end of Love and Money, I celebrate aspects of WASP culture that I hate to see go—but yes, that’s why my parents really didn’t like what I was doing. They felt I was just poking fun at things they took very seriously. I’d always been the wise guy in the family. I’d always been the outsider making wisecracks at the dinner table, and I found I could do that better on the stage. I didn’t realize to what degree the WASP culture was bankrupt, and I think it is—culturally bankrupt, not financially bankrupt—until really the past three, four, five years. I was just trying to write about what it was and how silly it was in some ways, and one thing led to another.
There are characters in your plays who seem like they might be you—a young man or grown man from Buffalo, N.Y. Were you ever writing veiled autobiography?
I was not absolutely hamstrung by trying to repeat history, but I was aware of some of the characters, such as in Indian Blood or the son in The Cocktail Hour, being like me.
There was a wonderful production of The Cocktail Hour at the Huntington—the character of the young man in that was played by James Waterston, a wonderful actor—and for some reason the play became his story, more than the mother’s or the father’s, maybe because the actors were generous enough to give it to him. His story was extremely moving to me. My son saw the opening and said, “Don’t go near it, Dad, they don’t know what they’re doing.” I went down and saw it anyway and thought they knew exactly what they were doing.
So many of your plays are set in Buffalo. Is it the real Buffalo, or the Buffalo of your mind?
It was my home, although it’s like Dante’s Florence. Dante wrote the Divine Comedy not while living in Florence—he was banished from Florence—but he grew up there, and it was at the heart of his thinking, and he used it as a way of saying very general things about the world. Well, Buffalo, for many reasons, was very influential in my life. My parents, my grandparents, in some cases my great- grandparents, were born there. My great- great-grandfather was one of the first mayors of Buffalo. My wife comes from Buffalo and her family comes from there. So there’s a tribal pressure there, and the story of Buffalo as it changed from an aggressive, vibrant town to a town which is trying to decide what it’s going to be and do next is a general story.
You have worked often with a relatively small core of directors: Daniel Sullivan, Jack O’Brien, Joey Tillinger, Mark Lamos, Jim Simpson, David Saint, and David Trainer. Is there a benefit to that?
We knew each other so well that we could talk easily with one another. But I’ve had very good experiences with other directors. Lila Neugebauer, who directed [Signature’s] Wayside Motor Inn, which had been a real loser of a play—she just brought it to life. I worked with Kim Rubenstein on The Cocktail Hour at Long Wharf, and she was terrific, but she had a very different slant. So I don’t think it’s always important that you work with someone who’s in the same world that you are or who knows what your work should be like. I think Arthur Miller would say the same thing.
What did you think of Jim Simpson’s deconstruction of What I Did Last Summer this past spring at Signature?
When Jim decided to have a drummer onstage and when Michael Yeargan said, “We just want rear-screen projection on paper, the paper of the script,” I said, “Oh, God, that’s not what I had in mind at all.” But I didn’t say, “Knock it off.” I went to a rehearsal and looked at it and thought, “It’s sort of interesting. I’m sort of taken up by this.”
I hope I’m not so old that I can’t respond to change if somebody else wants to do it. But I can’t suddenly change the way a play should be done. That’s the director’s job. And if there’s any kind of argument in its favor, the director has to make it and I’ll try to go along with it.
Take Mark Lamos’s recent production of The Dining Room [at Westport]. When I first saw a rehearsal I said, “It’s a terrific cast, Mark, but it’s not the way I envision it. The dining room table and the scenery is all powder blue. What’s going on? I assume it’s just a rehearsal table.” And he said, “No. What you see is what you get.” Under lights, the way people entered and exited without giving a hint of what the world outside is like, it all worked beautifully. I never would have thought of it myself. But I hope I’m smart enough to know that there are many ways to skin a cat.
Sylvia is only your fourth play to reach Broadway, but your plays have had such success in smaller venues. Was Broadway ever something you wanted?
I’ve never had much luck on Broadway. Lord knows I’d be a fool if I didn’t want to have a play on Broadway. But with Sweet Sue, for example, without Mary Tyler Moore and Lynn Redgrave selling the tickets, it would have closed after a week.
I do think my subjects are not necessarily what Broadway has traditionally been interested in. The pressures of adjusting the script, as we had to with Sweet Sue and again with The Golden Age, which lasted I think two weeks, it just hasn’t appealed to me.
I have to feel compatible and congenial with the audience. I have to feel that these people are people like me, who have some of the same concerns and interests and that’s why they’re at the theatre. As I look around at a Broadway audience, and I hope this changes in Sylvia, I don’t see that many people of whom I can say, “Oh, I’m glad that person is here, I hope I can speak to him or her.”
Though we’ve talked about Jim Simpson, we haven’t talked about your work at the Flea, which has done eight of your plays, making you, as I’ve said before, the hottest 75-year-old Off-Off-Broadway playwright around. What’s the draw?
You know, a lot of people tease me because I’m always sure I’ve written my last play.
I got a call from Swoosie Kurtz, who was performing in The Guys, and she said, “You’ve got to get down here, it’s a terrific play and the whole Flea Theater situation is very interesting.”
And I liked the play very much, I liked Swoosie very much, and I liked Jim Simpson very much.
So I found myself surrounded by younger people, theatres that were available all around me. A lot was happening politically in our country, mostly bad, and I found myself wanting to write with and for these young actors. It was a very refreshing experience for me.
And before too long, I’ll have another play there.
This interview originally appeared in American Theatre magazine.
For the week ending July 19, almost at summer’s halfway point, there were 29 shows on Broadway, meaning 11 theatres were dark. To be sure, some of those only became vacant a few weeks ago. Owners of empty theatres may be taking this downtime for some necessary repair and deep cleaning, impossible while a show is running. There are marquees in and around Times Square already advertising their next tenants.
That said, it always seems a bit counterintuitive that more than a quarter of the 40 Broadway theatres are usually dark during the summer, when New York is flooded with tourists. It seems an unfortunate time for a cyclical contraction (often matched in January and early February).
Illusionists Penn and Teller have a short-term run at the Marquis Theatre, their first New York gig in 15 years. While they’ve been in residence in Las Vegas and making television shows, they’ve clearly built up great interest, because this two-man (and one female assistant) show is doing very solid business, grossing more than $1.2 million in the week examined, even at 80% houses at the Marquis Theatre.
The Marquis was also home to another short-term booking in late 2014, when The Illusionists did comparably well, including a week over the New Year holiday when the gross leapt up to $2.2 million. Magic? I think not. They’ll be back in November.
While I don’t want to see Broadway houses turned into Vegas showcases and concert halls as a rule, these shows’ success suggests that during gaps in Broadway theatre schedules it could be very lucrative to bring in shows and acts that are touring, or small enough to be mounted for genuinely limited runs, akin to An Act of God, which has just ended at Studio 54.
You might remember Judy Garland’s last stands at the Palace in the 1960s, or Lena Horne’s triumph at the Nederlander in the 1980s – Broadway costs have made this type of event much rarer now. Yet, just as American television has revived the idea of summer replacement series, instead of leaving new programming to cable, perhaps it’s time to revisit summer entertainments on Broadway and Off-Broadway. I see some regional theatres using this tactic, since the real estate (an ugly way to describe our beloved theatres, I know) is otherwise just sitting there, not making money for anyone.
Many Broadway musical performers have acts they perform around the country with symphonies. But maybe during the summer, a few of those concerts could take up residence here in New York, both to capitalize on the tourist trade and give us locals a chance to savor more from our greatest talents, in the venues where they made their names.
Or maybe, just maybe, people will buck the conventional wisdom, as the musical Hamilton is, and open full shows in the summer, instead of during the October to April season. After all, it worked out pretty well for A Chorus Line, Avenue Q and Hairspray.
An artist’s impression of how the new St Ann’s Warehouse venue will look after its October opening
When the latest incarnation of St Ann’s Warehouse opens in the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge in New York, a theatre that already has a reputation of staging cutting edge UK plays will be in prime position to attract new audiences. Howard Sherman meets its leading lights
There has long been a reciprocity between Broadway and the West End, dating back perhaps a century, with shows and artists travelling back and forth with regularity and acclaim.
For a steady diet of many of the UK’s most acclaimed companies and artists, New Yorkers can turn not only to Times Square but also to an area of Brooklyn called Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). This is where St Ann’s Warehouse has been a leader not only in presenting provocative, inventive and often thrilling work from the UK, as well as from across Europe, South Africa and Asia, but also at the forefront of the reclamation of an industrial neighbourhood as a community asset.
A wide variety of UK work has played at St Ann’s in recent years, including Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter, The Red Shoes, The Wild Bride and Tristan and Yseult, the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch, several pieces by Daniel Kitson and now Let the Right One In.
Founded by Susan Feldman as Arts at St Ann’s in 1980, the company began with a dual purpose: establishing a creative centre for its Brooklyn Heights neighbourhood while also working to rehabilitate and preserve the historic church building that served as its home. In those days, the company was focused on shortrun concerts and musical events, but its move into the rough and tumble Dumbo neighbourhood in 2001 brought very different opportunities and challenges. From October, it begins work in its fourth venue when it moves into the former Tobacco Warehouse, a short distance from its current interim space, which has been in use since 2012.
Susan Feldman and Andrew Hamingson (Photo by Howard Sherman)
Recalling the early years at the church, Feldman explains how it “lent itself to music and fantastic spectacle”. But, in a move to a Water Street warehouse that was supposed to provide a home for only nine months but lasted for 12 years, theatre moved to the forefront of the programming, somewhat unexpectedly.
“We didn’t build a theatre,” Feldman says. “We used what was there, which was a very interesting grid, plus it had heat, electricity and an alarm system. We just built these temporary structures, so we could be flexible and move the space around. We kept that as we moved from place to place, so that temporary vibe and state of being became permanent.”
With the new building, the company’s executive director, Andrew Hamingson, speaks about only two “revolutionary” changes in store: “For the first time in St Ann’s history, there will be air conditioning, which means we can programme year-round if we want to. The second is a permanent dressing room.”
Hamingson also cites the opportunity for the offices and the theatre to be all under one roof and the increased potential of reaching out to even broader audiences, because the new venue is in Brooklyn Bridge Park, which he says draws 120,000 people each weekend.
While Feldman says St Ann’s audiences have been pretty much split between Manhattan and Brooklyn residents, she and Hamingson say the balance is shifting towards the continually gentrifying Brooklyn. Hamingson notes that they do not have the kind of tourist audience that one finds in Manhattan, but there is a serious international audience that makes its way to Brooklyn. Feldman attributes that to greater awareness of the neighbourhood itself – and to the success of Black Watch in its first of three visits, in 2007, which she calls a “crucial turning point”.
National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch
“Black Watch was a very special case,” she says. “There was a big New York Times story about how audiences didn’t want to talk about the war in Afghanistan. Then we did Black Watch and we found people absolutely did want to know about the war. The emotional responses of the audience and the press were so huge that it was more than just a cultural phenomenon. There was a need to wrap your arms around people and that’s what this play was doing and inviting.”
NTS’s executive producer Neil Murray says the show’s run at St Ann’s was significant for NTS as well. “The original run of Black Watch at St Ann’s and Ben Brantley’s New York Times review have been a huge driver not just for that show, but the company’s success in the US. While we have subsequently brought something like another seven shows to the US, including the 2015 runs of Let the Right One In and Dunsinane, that initial Black Watch run was a big springboard.”
The process of bringing a foreign show to the US puts St Ann’s in the position of being a presenter, but also a producing partner. “You can take a show from Europe and it really has to adapt to come over, it has to adapt to come into our space,” says Feldman.
Citing shows like Brief Encounter and Misterman, she speaks of having to shrink the productions. “Recapitalisation has to happen, so that becomes very much like producing. We have to raise money together to close the gap between the presentation costs and the box office. There’s always a period of risk assessment that we go through because we don’t have a single budget every year. We have to develop funding that’s going to go for each project and we put that together the way a producer would for every single presentation.”
St Ann’s does not typically participate financially in the future lives of productions it brings to the US, only doing so in cases where it has commissioned and plans to premiere the work.
Tristan Sturrock in Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter
Kneehigh’s executive producer Paul Crewe says he enjoys Feldman’s risk taking approach, and describes the connection between the companies as one that is “based on the work and a mutual respect”. He adds: “For Kneehigh, St Ann’s was a shop window into the US, because other programmers would often see the work. St Ann’s is one of the reasons we have had opportunities to play other cities and venues in America.”
As for how she finds work, Feldman says she visits three or four festivals each summer and makes trips to London regularly. She says that she also gets recommendations from others in the field.
Hamingson and Feldman say that bringing international work to the US has got harder. There used to be a lot more government funding for cultural exchanges, says Hamingson, adding: “Those pools, because of the downturn, have closed up a bit, so we’ve had to find other partners to take smaller pieces and do more of the fundraising on our own.”
“In fact, we are concerned,” says Feldman, “because there’s a lot of talk in Europe about how they’re going to follow the US model. When they say things like that they mean they’re going to start with philanthropy, but what they’re missing, the one reason that so many people go to Europe to see work is because of the core support that European companies get in their towns and in their cities.
“That support sustains the development of work on a regular basis. If it goes away, because they want to go on the US model, there is going to be an even worse drying up of original work. To me, it’s not a great sign. On the other hand, for European companies to be able to make use of philanthropy, and the desire of patrons to support, is a good thing for sure.”
As for the distinction between Brooklyn and Manhattan, neither Crewe nor Murray place much emphasis on it back home. “People in the UK are certainly aware of St Ann’s particular kind of programming,” says Murray. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that companies we really admire, like Kneehigh and Druid, are also frequent visitors there. I’m not sure a Scottish audience makes that distinction between Manhattan and Brooklyn, but in deference to Susan Feldman, we are always very careful to differentiate.”
“We have had, and continue to have, an interest in Manhattan,” says Crewe. “But the fact that St Ann’s is slightly outside the Broadway and Off-Broadway aesthetic gives us a sense of being part of a maverick world – an outsider that is a little rebellious. This fits well with us.” St Ann’s move into the new Tobacco Warehouse facility this year will be followed by the openings of several new performing arts venues, including the Ground Zero Arts Center, the Culture Shed, and Pier55. So is Feldman concerned about market saturation? Not really: “You know, the more culture there is, the more culture there is.
“What’s really going to determine what goes into those buildings as well as what goes into our building is going to be the financial relationships of whatever’s going in there. They’re not going to be the Metropolitan Opera suddenly that’s got an unlimited budget to make art. Five spaces the size of St Ann’s, which is what the Shed is supposed to be? I don’t know. But they’re talking about Fashion Week, they’re not talking about Mark Rylance and Measure for Measure. Some people say we’re all competing for the same money and it’s going to be a very competitive. I don’t think we’ve ever competed on that level, so I’m not sure. We’ve always been a niche.”
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5 things you need to know about St Ann’s
* Founded 1980 in a historic landmark church by the New York Landmarks Conservancy to provide a complementary public use for the building and to preserve the first stained glass windows made in America.
* It has never had a permanent home. This will only come with the opening at the Tobacco Warehouse in October 2015.
* St Ann’s Warehouse has been the New York base and often national launching point for multiple theatre pieces by the National Theatre
of Scotland (Black Watch and Let the Right One In); Enda Walsh (four productions including Misterman); Kneehigh (four productions including Brief Encounter and The Wild Bride; and Daniel Kitson (including the world premiere of Analog.ue), among others.
* St Ann’s activated the first warehouse at 38 Water Street in DUMBO in November 2001, one month after 9/11, with a sold-out concert hosted by Martin Scorsese.
* American rockers who have also found an artistic home at St Ann’s include Lou Reed and Jeff Buckley.
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This article reflects British spelling and the copyediting style of The Stage, where it first appeared.
