Wexford Collegiate “Hamilton” video via CBC

On the one hand, it’s hard not to admire the efforts of Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts in Scarborough, Canada, near Toronto. A teacher and her students made as thorough a pitch as possible to be the first high school to produce the musical Hamilton, seemingly having staged several elaborate numbers from the show in their effort to be recognized. While YouTube videos showed a only simple set, the lights, costumes and sound demonstrated how much time and effort was spent trying to get the attention of the creators of Hamilton, with full out performances of multiple numbers from the show.

There’s no doubt that pretty much every high school as well as college theatre troupe in the US and Canada (and perhaps even ones outside of North America) shares Wexford’s desire to produce Hamilton. There are numerous professional venues that are still trying to book the show, be it as a tour or sit-down production, and no doubt plenty of Equity and non-Equity companies would relish the opportunity to perform the musical.

Wexford Collegiate “Hamilton” video via CBC

Of course, Hamilton has connected with young people in a way probably unrivaled since Rent, making the pleas from young people particularly potent. We are living in the time of Hamilmania, as a single musical has captured the interest and imagination of theatregoers and non-theatregoers alike. Everyone wants a piece of Hamilton, or Hamilton itself.

On a practical level, it was always highly unlikely that Wexford’s efforts would succeed. At this point, Hamilton isn’t even confirmed for a professional Canadian debut, let alone a high school one. Performance rights have not been made available beyond official companies derived from the Broadway production. If permission were to be granted uniquely to Wexford, the outcry from high schools everywhere would be deafening.

Of greater concern is that the Wexford videos didn’t appear to be simply demos to make their case. An article from the CBC says, “They’ve [Wexford] already performed an unauthorized presentation of material from the show, parts of which were captured on video.” So there’s more than what YouTubers were seeing? How much of Hamilton was staged at Wexford?

The CBC spoke with the teacher behind the project, Ann Merriam:

“After seeing it the first time, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to see it again, I’m going to tell everyone I know to see it, and I’m going to introduce it to my kids and school and have them perform it,'” she told CBC News in an interview.

Merriam said her school’s performances of the show were “an unbelievably meaningful” experience for the kids.

This suggests something much fuller was presented at Wexford Collegiate, very possibly violating the copyrights of the very artists whose permission is being sought. It’s one thing to work on numbers from Hamilton in a class, but another if what took place rises to the level of performances, even if only in front of the school’s student body. Whether or not the “performances” were advertised or charged for, Wexford may well have crossed a line, and indeed may be teaching some very bad lessons about respecting copyright, even as they were asking permission to produce the show legitimately.

YouTube takedown notice

As of the evening of June 16, the same day the Wexford videos were first featured by the CBC, they were gone from YouTube, due to a copyright infringement claim. So if the goal was to get their appeal noticed, Merriam and her students succeeded, but not in the way they wanted. Perhaps the videos were scooped up preemptively by automated copyright protection services, but the jury’s out.

If much time and money were spent to produce this elaborate pitch, one can’t help but be concerned about the wisdom of the effort at all, both in the allocation of resources and the precedent of performing too much of the material to which the school was apparently fully aware it didn’t have the rights. If either Merriam or the CBC overstated what was actually performed, that’s unfortunate, but since the videos were not parodies or amateurish tributes by a handful of fans, they possibly went too far as recorded material. Arts Integrity both called and e-mailed Merriam before 11 am on the 16th, while the videos were still available, for more clarity on the project, but neither inquiry received a response.

Lin-Manuel Miranda has already said how much he looks forward to seeing Hamilton done by high school students, and you can’t blame Wexford for trying to be the first. However, in the process, the school became an object lesson for other high schools (or any theatre group) thinking of similar gambits, with Hamilton or any show not yet available for licensing. Artists control and are compensated from the works they create through copyright, and violating it is not the way to plead your case.

Are you still grumbling about “tweet seats”? Oh, that is so 2013. Time to get with the program and start worrying about the newest development in mobile tech, which could have a vastly more significant impact on the live performing arts.

At this year’s SXSW Festival, a new app, Meerkat, saw a frenzy of adoption by attendees, so much so that Twitter moved to quickly curtail the app’s access to Twitter data. The reason for that draconian move came clearer yesterday when the app Periscope, which is owned by Twitter, was launched as a direct competitor to Meerkat.

So what do they do? Both apps allow you to stream live video from your phone. Now, instead of taking something so pedestrian as a photograph via Instagram, or so cumbersome as shooting a video and then uploading it to YouTube, anyone with an iPhone and a dream can relay what they’re seeing in real time to their connections on these services. This will of course result in streams from countless teens doing teen oriented things for the entertainment of other teens, but it will also turn everyone who wishes to be into an instant broadcaster into one. Yesterday, Periscope immediately became a source for realtime video of the tragic explosion and fire in New York’s East Village.

Of course, as I experimented with Periscope (I’ve loaded Meerkat, but not tried it yet), I realized how significantly this could have an effect on live entertainment. Now, anyone adept enough at manipulating a smartphone from an audience seat might well be streaming your show, your concert, your opera to their friends and followers. If they can do so with a darkened screen and sufficient circulation to keep the blood from leaving their upraised hand and arm, the only thing stopping them would be vigilant ushers, chastising nearby patrons and battery life. For however long they sustain their stream, your content is on the air – and unlike YouTube, where if you find it, you can seek to have it removed, this is instantaneous and so there’s no taking it back.

I should say that I’m not endorsing this practice, any more than say, a play about graffiti artists is exhorting its audience to go out and start marring buildings with graffiti. I’m just pointing out that there’s a big new step in technology which could serve to let your content leak out into the world in a way that’s much harder to control than before (while also offering many new creative opportunities for communication) – and since these apps are just the first of their kind, they and competing apps will be rolling out ever more effective tools to stream what’s happening right in front of you, just as cell phone cameras and video will continue to improve their quality and versatility.

Scared yet?

Some will quickly say, as they have from the moment cell phones started ringing during soliloquies and operas, that there should be some way to simply jam signals inside entertainment venues. But the answer to that remains the same: private entities like theatre owners cannot employ such technology (which does exist) because they would be breaking the law by interfering with the public airwaves. No matter that the photos, video and streams may be violating copyright. That kind of widespread tampering with communications wouldn’t be allowed – and if it ever were, it could very well have a negative effect on patrons’ willingness to attend.

The quality of streams via these apps would leave much to be desired (think of your stream also capturing the heads of those in front of you, and the couple on your left whispering about their dinner plans). They’d hardly capture the work on stage at its best, but if your choice is $400 a ticket for Fish in the Dark or a free, erratic stream, you just might choose the latter.

Movie companies have been fighting in-theatre bootlegging since the advent of small video cameras, and one hears stories about advance screenings with ushers continually patrolling the aisles in search of telltale red lights (sometimes wearing night vision goggles) and assorted laser and infrared technologies designed to mar the surreptitious image capturing. But does that seem desirable or even feasible at live theatres?

I’m not shrieking about this problem because I expect plenty of others will. That said, I’m also not about to just instill fear in your hearts and run away. Having just chastised others for enumerating arts problems without offering ideas on how to address them, here’s my thought on how to try to stave off the onslaught of Meerkat and Periscope and their ilk: we have to solve the issues that are preventing U.S. based organizations from cinecasting on the model of NT Live.

Yes, the Metropolitan Opera has built a strong following for their Met Opera Live series. But we’re not seeing that success translate to other performing arts in a significant way, with theatre the most backward of all. I know it may seem counterintuitive, but if people have the opportunity to access high quality, low cost video of stage performances, they’re going to be considerably less interested in cheap live bootlegs in real time. It won’t stop the progression, but it will offer a more appealing alternative.

Video is now in the hands of virtually every person who attends the theatre, the opera, the ballet and so on. Short of frisking or wanding people for phones and having them secured in lockers at every performance space (can you imagine?), the genie is out of the bottle. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not keen on the ramifications of these advances either, but there’s no point in damning reality. The question now is how do the arts respond – by seeking to police its audiences as if attending a performance resembled an ongoing TSA checkpoint, or by offering alternatives that just might make the newest developments unappealing or irrelevant?

But the field, commercial and not-for-profit alike, needs to get a move on, because even if this is the first you’ve heard of Periscope and Meerkat, it won’t be the last. Just wait until smartphones can record and stream in 3D.

P.S. Last week when I saw the Radio City Spring Spectacular, there was a caution against flash photography – not all photography, just flash. There may well have been a warning about video, but all it would have taken was a fake Twitter account and one of these apps to start sharing parts of the show with you as an untraceable scofflaw. Just imagine if I had activated Meerkat a bit sooner.