When I saw it for the first time last week, I was really struck by the poster for the West End debut of the musical Urinetown. Why? Because it didn’t look like a theatre poster. It looked like a movie poster.

In point of fact, it looked to a certain degree like the poster for Star Trek: Into Darkness, which owed a debt to the poster for The Dark Knight Rises. Many movie posters are endlessly iterative and imitative, as they want to subtly remind you of other successful films in the same genre. I give points to Urinetown UK for evoking dark futures with humanity under threat – completely consistent with the world conjured in the show. Equally apt, it counters the darkness by placing a young attractive couple, reaching for a drop of water, at the center of a spaghetti-tangle of (empty) pipes, and they added a tagline: “A drop of hope can change the world.”

It has taken almost a decade since Urinetown’s Broadway closing for it to reach England, so the opportunity to capitalize on Broadway buzz has long since faded, That certainly suggests one reason why the graphic bears no relationship to the Broadway marketing material, unlike The Producers, The Book of Mormon, Jersey Boys and so many other US to UK transfers. That works in two directions as well, since Mamma Mia! and Matilda ads look the same in both countries, having started in London.

As I pondered the Urinetown UK art, it struck me that one reason the vast majority of theatre ad design looks so different from movie ad design is that while a movie is trying to simply drive sales and pique interest, theatre designs, more often than not, are trying to build a brand. If theatre images emphasize a star, they could be undermining a long run, since eventually stars leave; movies have no such problem. Think of the image of Les Mis’ Cosette: as the show ran and ran, the image became so ubiquitous that they could run ads without the show’s title and you would know what the ad was for. Producer Cameron Mackintosh’s team even could play with the image, running variations on Cosette that honored holidays or welcomed other shows to Broadway. And it was hardly the only show to do that: think of the Phantom’s mask, the eyes of Cats, the Chagall-esque Fiddler on the Roof, Larry Kert running after Carol Lawrence for West Side Story (though that would eventually be supplanted by Saul Bass’ fire escape logo for the film). Colleges, high schools and community theatres use knock-offs of these designs for years and years.

As I’ve said, it’s the lapse in time that has afforded Urinetown UK the chance to go in another direction, since given the relative age of the show, it doesn’t undermine a worldwide branding effort.  The other reason they have that opportunity: in my opinion, the original Urinetown graphic never became iconic. Do you remember it? Perhaps only vaguely, and I suggest that’s because it was only a type treatment, as opposed to an image, a true logo, a brand.

To digress for a moment: when I worked at Hartford Stage, one of my responsibilities was to work with a range of local designers to secure pro bono graphic designs for each of our shows. In addition to keeping expenses down, it insured that each show would have its own feel and look, with the ads held together by a very solid, strong and consistently utilized company logo. In this process, the artistic director had only one edict – there must be some representation of the human in every graphic. He believed that people are at the center of theatre, that audiences come to watch people on stage, and so the human element – sometimes nothing more than an eye or a hand – was a reminder of the unique nature of live theatre. In hindsight, thinking back over 50 shows, I believe he was right and I’ve advocated for this approach ever since. To be fair, not every design was perfect, and some worked better as art than as marketing, but the best remain those that followed the artistic director’s dictum. If you think of great theatre graphics, I’d be willing to bet that you’ll find the majority do so as well. That’s why, at least in my estimation, there’s not a graphic image from the Broadway Urinetown that lingers in memory.

But turning back to Urinetown UK, as I have often this week, I continue to applaud the complexity and sophistication of its imagery, which come to think of it also recalls that used for Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil.  I was so intrigued, that I took the time to watch a three-minute promo video for the show and, to be honest, it ended up showing me what I think is missing from the Urinetown campaign. A barrage of words flew at me from a variety of speakers, all describing the experience of the show: epic, wackadoo, eco-friendly, apocalyptic, daring, exciting, entertainment, political, adventurous and satirical wit. Director Jamie Lloyd said he hoped it would advance “conversations about climate change, environmental disaster, the moral responsibility of big business.”

But looking at the poster and watching this video, I realized that something has been, if not forgotten, downplayed for this Urinetown, at least as I know the show.

It’s very, very funny. I laughed a lot.

Not only that, it is especially funny to those who know and love musicals, since it’s “satirical wit” is focused, in part, on previous, iconic musicals.

Now if it is Lloyd’s intention to lean heavily on the show’s Brechtian overtones and downplay the humor, then you can probably ignore everything from here on in.  But if Urinetown UK– with all of its topical, political and social overtones – is to retain its irreverent take on both a world without water and its stance as a love letter to musical comedy, then I’d urge the powers that be to tweak the tone of their rhetoric and their imagery, lest they mislead their potential audience – and those who buy. Remember, you’re fighting a title that, for some, carries a whiff of something distasteful, even while it becomes a memorable point of distinction from most other musical theatre.

I’ve heard it said many times that if a show is a hit, its logo – whatever it is – looks brilliant. And perhaps in the long run, if there is in the long run, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But when you’re trying to set expectations and lure audiences, every communication is freighted with meaning (it can even effect the advance perception of critics who were previously unfamiliar with the material), and what I remember most of Urinetown was having a darned good time.

It’s not unusual for book releases to be coordinated with a related event taking place elsewhere in the media circus: the autobiography that appears just as a star’s major film is coming out, the personal memoir that primes the public for a political campaign. However, no one can accuse Julie Taymor of engaging in such wanton promotion – she certainly can’t be pleased that Glen Berger’s Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (Simon & Schuster, $25) debuts just as she returns to the stage with A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. One imagines she’d have been happier if there were no book at all.

Countless people are reading and writing about the book as another chapter in the seemingly never-ending saga of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, the headline generating musical that has been the target of brickbats from arts journalists virtually since the show was first announced. Spider-Man: TOTD seemed to throw raw meat to the media at every turn, ranging from fundraising challenges and production delays to several highly publicized cast injuries which seemed to turn the show into a latter-day Roman arena. It kept Patrick Healy of the Times and Michael Riedel of the Post in competition for breaking tidbits in a manner rarely seen before.

I didn’t find Berger’s book particularly revealing, largely because it covers ground that had been extensively reported elsewhere, and I confess to having consumed the events as they happened. In fact, I made a point of seeing the very final performance of the Taymor version and the opening night of the version reworked without her – and, for the most part, Berger’s – consent, after they had been supplanted by Philip William McKinley and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa respectively. Yes, I watched the show’s travails, as most did, as a theatrical car wreck in slow motion, a modern-day tragedy of creative hubris played played out in benday dots and rock chords.

For all that Berger recounts, the book constantly reminds the reader that it is the story of Spider-Man: TOTD as viewed through one person’s biased eyes – rather than the whole story. Berger goes out of his way to paint himself as a innocent caught up in the maelstrom of vastly more famous, and vastly wealthier, artists than himself. His emphasis on being separated from his family, of his personal financial troubles, of how different his world is from that of his acclaimed and wealthy collaborators Bono and Taymor – they grow tiresome, as if Berger deserves some sympathy or absolution for his role in the debacle by virtue of his less lofty perch. But he’s not exactly Nick Carraway observing the actions of Gatsby and the Buchanans – he’s a willing participant until his own calculations backfire on him, severing his ties forever with Taymor, who he has built up as his own artistic Daisy. To compare him to Faust conveys a grandeur I decline to confer.

The fact is, reading Berger’s book is like watching only one viewpoint from Rashomon, and one is all too aware that others undoubtedly have very different versions of the same events. I can’t help but suspect that the musical might at best be a page or two should Bono write his life story; producer Michael Cohl would no doubt recount the saga as a story of how he rescued a damaged show that most believed was dead on arrival; should Taymor tell her version, it will be of an artist (herself) persecuted by greedy philistines. Whether anyone will care to follow the tale repeatedly refracted through varying prisms is anyone’s guess, though that might be the only way to get the real story.

All of this should not suggest that Berger’s book has no value. It is, at the very least, a superb answer to the perennial question about troubled or failed shows: “Didn’t anyone realize how bad it was going to be?” The book is an encyclopedia of ignorance, ego and self-delusion, a look at how a theatrical property, especially one with such a high profile, almost becomes unstoppable, and the many ways in which it can go wrong, of how perspective is lost when you are so close to the work for so long.  Aspiring producers should read it as a cautionary tale – not about a one-off disaster, but rather about when it pays to just say no, shut a show down, and move on, since Spider-Man may be the most expensive show to date, but there are plenty of complete flops that followed much the same misguided path.

Inevitably, Berger’s book will find its way onto many a theatrical bookshelf, even if it doesn’t have the elegance or educational value of many other books with which it shares conceptual and theatrical DNA. As I read it, I was reminded of a book about a vastly less well known disaster: playwright Arnold Wesker’s The Birth of Shylock, The Death of Zero Mostel, a chronicle of a quick Broadway flop notable mostly for the death of Mostel, its leading actor, who died while the show was trying out in Philadelphia. Like Berger, Wesker seems almost entirely unaware of his own complicity in the show’s failure, even as he repeatedly tells about his taking aside actors to countermand the edicts of the show’s director, John Dexter.  Shylock the show is in the dustbin of Broadway history, whereas the legend of Spider-Man will surely go on; however, the author’s account of the production of Shylock makes for better literature than Song of Spider-Man.

While there are certainly great Broadway books  of autobiography (Moss Hart’s Act One is an exemplar of the kind), more often than not the best chroniclers are those on the fringes or outside of a production entirely. Ted Chapin’s Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical ‘Follies’ is an impeccable recent example of the former, derived from Chapin’s own notes as a production assistant on the original Follies; William Goldman’s The Season: A Candid Look At Broadway has long stood as a grand achievement of the latter. Of course, in both cases, the authors were given rare access, which seems almost impossible in the more media savvy world of today; the film industry was reminded about the danger of giving journalism too much access when critic Julie Solomon roamed free on the set of a Brian DePalma film, resulting in The Devil’s Candy: Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco, a detailed chronicle of the famous flop The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Though it covers work which is vastly less infamous and some 50 years in the past, I daresay that Jack O’Brien’s recent Jack Be Nimble: The Accidental Education of an Unintentional Director (Farrar Straus and Giroux, $35) is the more worthy, entertaining and educational insider theatre book of the year. While O’Brien could have easily produced a standard memoir, given his own considerable achievements as a director, he followed Chapin’s lead and instead opted to write about the access he had as a young man to a remarkable confluence of talents: the members of the APA and later the APA-Phoenix theatre companies, which included Richard Easton, Rosemary Harris and above all the now little-remembered Ellis Rabb. I know firsthand what a wealth of stories Jack can tell about his own exploits, but by deciding to honor the artists who formed his own aesthetic, he has written a work of history and memoir that is ultimately more important and informative than Berger’s attempt to make a few more dollars off the Spider-Man debacle.

Perhaps, one day, a young PA on Spider-Man: TOTD will emerge with his or her own book, to draw the truest picture of what went on as the web collapsed.  Until then, we’re left with a lopsided recap of a story that we mostly know, told by what is called, in literary circles, an unreliable narrator.

Position 1: a stage production that is recorded, filmed or actually broadcast live ceases to be theatre. It may be considered television or film, but it is a record of theatre, not the thing itself. True theatre is experienced in the flesh, so to speak.

Position 2: for people who have no means to see any theatre, or a specific production, a recording or live transmission of the event, whether it occurs in a movie theatre or on a computer, is better than not seeing it at all, provided it is at least competently produced.

Position 3: even though it means I don’t get to see some things that really interest me, I don’t enjoy recorded theatre, no matter how artfully done, and I’m lucky enough to have access to lots of great theatre live, so after a few tries, I now don’t go. But that shouldn’t stop anyone else.

Why have I laid out these positions so baldly, rather than making a case for them? Because I want to talk about an aspect of the growing appetite for cinecasts, NT Live, the home delivery Digital Theatre and the like that isn’t about the viewing experience at all. That’s a matter of opportunity and preference and I leave it to everyone else to hash out those issues. My interest in this trend is about how it is branding certain cultural events and producers ­– and how U.S. theatre is quickly losing ground.

In general, people attend commercial theatre based upon the appeal of a production – cast, creative team, author, reviews, word of mouth, etc. Who produced a show is pretty much irrelevant, and only theatre insiders can usually tell you who produced any given work.  In institutional theatre, the producer has more impact, as people may attend because they have enjoyed a company’s work previously, because it conveys a certain level of quality. This is true in major cities and regionally, and while the name of the theatre alone isn’t sufficient for sales, it is a factor in a way it isn’t in the West End or on Broadway.

As a result, what is happening with theatrecasts is that the reach of the companies utilizing this opportunity is vastly extended, and the brands of the companies travel far beyond those who sit in their seats or regularly read or hear about their work. There’s long been prestige attached to The Royal Shakespeare Company, the Metropolitan Opera and the National Theatre; now their presence in movie theatres has served to increase access and awareness.  These longstanding brands are being burnished anew now that more people can actually see their work. The relatively young Shakespeare’s Globe, even as it makes its Broadway debut, is also gaining recognition thanks to recordings of their shows.

It should be noted that for UK companies, “live” is a misnomer when it comes to North American showings. We’re always seeing the work after the fact, given the time difference, so in many ways it’s no different than a pre-recorded stage work on PBS. But the connotation of live is a valuable imprimatur, and few seem to mind it, even when there are “encore” presentations of shows from prior years. The scale of a movie screen, the quality of a cinema sound system appear to be the true lure, along with the fact that these are not extended engagements, but carefully limited opportunities that don’t compete with actual movie releases.

MEMPHIS, one of the rare U.S. originated cinecasts

Regretfully, by and large, American theatre (and theatres) are missing the boat on this great opportunity for exposure, for revenue, for branding. There have been the occasional cinecasts (Memphis The Musical; Roundabout’s Importance of Being Earnest, imported from Canada’s Stratford Festival) but they’re few and far between.  We’re about to get a live national television broadcast of the stage version of The Sound of Music, but it’s an original production for television, not a stage work being shared beyond its geographic limitations.  Long gone are the days when Joseph Papp productions of Much Ado About Nothing and Sticks And Bones were seen in primetime on CBS; when Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man was produced for ABC with much of the original Broadway cast; when Nicholas Nickleby ran in its entirety on broadcast TV; when PBS produced Theatre in America, showcasing regional productions, when Richard Burton’s Hamlet was filmed on Broadway for movie theatre showings 50 years ago.

London MERRILY rolled across the Atlantic

Most often, when this topic comes up in conversations I’ve been party to, there’s grumbling about prohibitive union costs as a roadblock. Perhaps the costs have changed since the days of many of the examples I just cited, yet somehow Memphis and Earnest surmounted them. Even as someone who doesn’t particularly care to see these recorded stage works, I worry that American theatre is lagging our British counterparts in showcasing work nationally and internationally, in taking advantage of technology to advance the awareness of our many achievements.  Seeing an NT Live screening has become an event unto itself – this week the National’s Frankenstein is back just in time for Halloween; the enthusiasm last week for the cinecast of Merrily We Roll Along (from the West End by way of the Menier Chocolate Factory) was significant, at least according to my Twitter and Facebook feeds.  The appetite is also attested to by an online poll from The Telegraph in London, with 90% of respondents favoring theatre at the movies (concurrent with an article about the successful British efforts in this area).  I’d like to see this same enthusiasm used not just to bring U.S. theatre overseas, but to bring Los Angeles theatre to Chicago, Philadelphia theatre to San Francisco, Seattle theatre to New York, and so on – and not just when a show is deemed commercially viable for a Broadway transfer or national tour.

I’m not trying to position this as a competition, because I think there’s room for theatre to travel in all directions, both at home and abroad. But without viable and consistent American participation in the burgeoning world of theatre on screen, we run the risk of failing to build both individual brands and our national theatre brand, of having our work diminished as other theatre proliferates in our backyards, while ours remains contained within the same four walls that have always been its boundaries and its limitations.  Somebody needs to start removing the obstacles, or we’re going to be left behind.

Sesame Street music director Bill Sherman with Elmo and Zoe on the set. Sherman won a Tony Award for In the Heights in 2008 and has recruited Broadway peers to compose for the children’s show. (Photo: Howard Sherman)

You know how to get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. But do you know how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?

Turns out there’s a shortcut from New York’s theater district — and it’s landed a number of Broadway’s top songwriting talents on the venerable children’s program.

The man to see is Bill Sherman, a 2008 Tony Award winner for his work on orchestrations for In the Heights. Sherman is in his fifth season as music director for Sesame Street. Back when he started the job, Broadway’s songwriters were an obvious go-to.

“I knew them,” he shrugs. “It was easy access. I was trusting songwriters I knew and loved.”

He’s since discovered that no matter whom he calls, Sesame Street meets with universal enthusiasm. “Everybody will stop some really important thing they should be doing and really focus on this.”

From A College Buddy To Strangers In The Biz

Sherman’s first call, five seasons back, was to Lin-Manuel Miranda, composer and lyricist of In the Heights. “Lin has been my best friend for 10 years,” Sherman says. “We went to college together, so asking him to write a song was very easy.”

Miranda was followed by other Heights alumni, Alex Lacamoire and Chris Jackson, and by composers Jason Robert Brown (Parade, The Last Five Years), Justin Paul (A Christmas Story) and Tom Kitt (Next To Normal). And while some of these artists typically write both music and lyrics, Sesame Street primarily taps into their composing skills.

“So much of what we do is curriculum-based that it has to go through many levels of approval,” Sherman explains. “So most of the lyrics come from the [Sesame Street] scriptwriters.”

Miranda, an adept lyricist, says being forced to focus solely on the music was “enormous fun.”

“The writer will say, ‘It’s very Harry Belafonte; it’s Ravel’s Bolero; it will build and build.’ You get a sense of what they were thinking, of the rhythm that’s in their heads.”

With “Elmo the Musical,” More Shots At The Spotlight

Sesame Street‘s musical universe expanded further when the show introduced its “Elmo the Musical” segments — stand-alone bits, eight to 10 minutes long, that take place entirely in the imagination of the childlike red fuzzball.

The Elmo the Musical segments are through-composed — musicalized from start to finish — “so each composer had their chance to really sink their teeth into the music,” Sherman says. “It became their episode, their thing. We tried to figure out a way to use the composers’ strengths for whatever particular episode it was.”

An installment called “Detective,” for instance, “asked for this complex, jazzy [sound], and Jason Robert Brown is known for that.”

Like all the composers, Brown — who’s never met Sherman — jumped at the opportunity.

“I had a 2-year-old who stared at Elmo all day long,” Brown says. “So there was nothing better than that.”

Then came the kicker: That episode’s script was to be written by John Weidman, a Sesame Street veteran and co-creator, with Stephen Sondheim, of iconic musicals like Assassins and Pacific Overtures.

“I called him and said, ‘So we’re finally writing a show together, only it’s for a furry red puppet,’ ” Brown says. “When I got the recording of Elmo, I could not have been more excited if it had been Frank Sinatra, if it had been Joni Mitchell.”

This fall, as puppeteer David Rudman laid down Cookie Monster’s vocal track on Tom Kitt’s “If Me Had a Magic Wand,” Kitt described the song using an old-school musical-theater term. It’s “a soaring, emotional ‘I want’ moment,” he said, a readily identifiable, recognizably Broadway kind of sound.

But as Sherman is quick to point out, the “Broadway sound” is very much in flux.

“I’ve been part of musical-theater situations that pushed boundaries, that brought new sounds to Broadway. Taking this job, like [working on] In the Heights, was an opportunity to put new sounds in kids’ ears. People assume musical theater is vaudevillian, epic ballads and tap-dance numbers. So to turn that on its head and bring in audiences that don’t go to Broadway shows is important to me.”

Is it a challenge for these sophisticated writers to gear their work for toddlers? “Sometimes,” says Sherman, “composers think that because it’s Sesame Street, they have to dumb it down. … [But] these days children have unbelievably sophisticated ears. I think dumbing it down is disrespectful to kids.”

“That’s Not What Cookie Monster Sounds Like”

When composers have kids of their own, they’ve got an in-house test panel. Brown did demos, complete with character voices, for his daughter.

“Her response was, ‘That’s not what Cookie Monster sounds like,’ ” he reports.

Sherman has met with greater success at home.

“If my 3-year-old hears something, and 15 to 20 minutes later she’s still singing it, then I know I did the right thing,” he says. “If the 1-year-old dances to it, then I know that it sounds right.”

There might well be more musical theater in Sesame Street‘s future; Sherman admits he’d like to work with Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Pippin) and Marc Shaiman (Hairspray).

And there’s one more big fish he’d like to land — the whale of the business, really.

“We toyed a bit with going after Sondheim,” he said. “We haven’t gone that route yet, but to call up Stephen and see if he was down [for it], that’d be funny. Why not?”

*   *   *

View this post in its original form on NPR.org

Arizona’s Cactus Shadows High School

Having learned of high schools terminating productions and firing teachers over everything from Legally Blonde to The Laramie Project, it hardly comes as a surprise that Edward Albee’s Tony Award-winning play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? came under fire last week at Cactus Shadows High School in Scottsdale, Arizona. Where surprise comes into play is that the sentinels of censorship sprang to action not over a production of the work, but over it being read in an advanced drama course for which students could receive college credit.

I’d have to admit that The Goat probably isn’t typical high school fare, and shouldn’t necessarily be in the general reading for all students. But for students prepared to work at a college level, Albee’s writing is important if not essential. I happen to be a particular fan of the play, finding it so compelling in its original Broadway production that I took the unprecedented step (for me) of paying box office rates to see it twice. In my personal hierarchy of Albee plays, it is second only to Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, with which it shares many characteristics. Is there “vulgar” language? Yes. Does it invoke (but not portray) bestiality and touch upon incest and pedophilia? Yes. But it does not advocate those taboos; it deploys them in service of a deeper meaning. Serious acting students working at a college level should be prepared to grapple with such material.

Upon reading and watching press accounts of the Scottsdale challenge to The Goat, they at first appear similar to other protests against certain works in high school theatre, but the situation at Cactus Shadows escalates to a whole new level.  Even though students admit to being offered alternative material, a preemptive acknowledgement that some might wish to opt out of The Goat, complaints arose from some who didn’t exercise that option. When school board members advised concerned parents to express their dismay to the principal and the teacher, they instead brought in the police. In turn, the police allowed the irate parents making the complaint to directly confront students about the teacher and the play, which I can’t help but think is a violation of any sensible school policy, let alone due process. Yet the Scottsdale Police Department says there is no complaint on file. What gives?

The school superintendent, quickly distancing herself from the teacher, says that she’s investigating how the play was brought into the classroom, as if it was smuggled in under cover of night. To the contrary: the play was on a list of works submitted in advance to parents, for their signature. Could the parents have all been expected to know the material and judge their comfort accordingly? Of course not, even if you accept the concept that parents have the right to individually approve curricula. But the teacher, who has been placed on paid administrative leave, could hardly be accused of subterfuge. While certainly the superintendent doesn’t check every lesson plan, is it possible that the teacher of the course submitted the reading list to parents for sign off without passing it by any other member of the faculty? I’d be surprised.

I’m really stunned that the school’s policy is apparently to take a teacher out of the classroom over any complaint until it’s investigated. This is an intellectual issue, not a student safety one. How is such a matter investigated and how long should it take? How does it rise to being a police matter?

The language of press reports from KPHO TV and The Arizona Republic have no doubt inflamed the situation, since they elide the gap between discussing hot button topics and portraying, let alone endorsing, them; certainly any metaphorical meaning is cast aside in the rush to grab eyeballs. Clearly neither reporter knows much about Albee (and to be fair, can’t be expected to) but they take far too much at face value from the conversations they have had about the controversy. Regretfully, the teacher sold Albee short by saying The Goat is an absurdist play; it may be harsh and posit extreme situations, but it is rooted in reality. The Goat is not Ubu Roi or The Bald Soprano.

Read the comments on the news stories linked here, because they suggest that the complaints are far outweighed by supporters of the teacher and the class. But that’s not evident from the stories themselves, especially the video segments, which emphasize the dissenters, not those who think the situation has been precipitated by a vocal minority. Editorial balance is one thing, but misrepresenting the balance of public opinion is another.

As I read The Goat again, I was struck by how much of the dialogue in the play resembles an interview – or even a conversation – with Edward Albee, a daunting experience I’ve had the challenge and pleasure of undertaking. For Albee, there are no easy answers; he actually seems to delight in not providing any, despite writing some of the most probing theatrical work of the past half-century. Ask Edward what The Goat is about and I’d lay odds that his answer would be, “About two hours.” This only deepens the mysteries of the play.

The study and practice of theatre is not about easy answers. What a shame that a teacher in Scottsdale challenged his advanced students with some difficult questions and was taken out of the classroom as a result, and both he and Edward Albee are presumed guilty unless proven innocent.

P.S. When I attended high school in the late 70s, Albee’s The Zoo Story was on the reading list for English class, not for a drama or advanced placement course. When I saw the play again, for the first time in many years, at Second Stage in 2007, I was struck by the darkness and complexity of the material and marveled that it had been studied in a suburban high school classroom – without opposition – almost 30 years earlier. I am also indebted to everyone who had a hand in making that happen.

Update, October 15, 3 p.m. eastern time: I am pleased to report that the teacher suspended for teaching The Goat, Andrew Cupo, has been returned to the classroom, as reported in the Arizona Republic. But this is far from a victory, as from now on, Cupo will be required to clear every text he uses with the principal, bypassing (it would seem) a departmental chair, who I imagine normally has that responsibility. I believe in proper approvals, but has a special status been carved out for Cupo? In addition, superintendent Debbi Burdick has said that, “no plays that include suggestive sexual information, excessive profanity, suggestive sexual undertones, or that would be considered controversial in a high-school setting will be used for any reason.” I wonder: is this content policy in place solely for Cupo and drama, or for all literature taught at Cactus Shadows? Regardless, the long shadow of censorship has been strengthened at the school, forcing Cupo to seek approval for and second guess his every decision and depriving students of some of the greatest works of drama.

My thanks to Linda Essig for bringing this situation to my attention and for sharing the local news accounts. An Arizona resident, she has also written “An Open Letter To The Cave Creek School District,” which includes Cactus Shadows High School.

This year’s cinematic Romeo and Juliet

Oh, please. The headline is not a spoiler. More than 400 years after the play was written, “young doomed love” is the Romeo and Juliet brand, and I suspect that most anyone coming to see something with that title on it would actually be disappointed with a happy ending. True, they did such things in the 1800s, but it proved a passing phase.

Odds are that those kooky kids from Verona are dying somewhere in the world every night. However, movies about them, while not infrequent, only come along every so often. The newest appeared this past weekend and made a spectacular belly flop at the box office, averaging just over $1,100 per theatre, meaning that based on the average U.S. movie ticket price from 2012, about 136 people saw it per theatre between Friday and Sunday. A dud by any other name would smell as bad.

Some will say the film died due to lack of stars: Hallie Steinfeld was impeccable in True Grit but she didn’t become a teen queen as a result; Douglas Booth was entirely unknown to me, as were his prior film and TV credits. Ed Westwick brought some Gossip Girl capital as Tybalt, but apparently not enough; fine actors such as Damian Lewis, Stellan Skarsgard, Natascha McElhone and Paul Giamatti have been in some great movies, but no one buys tickets for R & J to see the adults, do they?

The fact is, while staying true to the R & J brand in storyline, period design and almost all things, the film’s producer and creator failed to attend to one of the world’s most powerful brands: William Shakespeare.  That’s why their film seemed a folly as soon as we started hearing snippets of airy language that sounded old-timey but not Shakespearean in the trailers, and accelerated when screenwriter Julian Fellowes, ostensibly promoting the film, pompously informed us mere mortals that most people can’t understand Shakespeare and that thanks to his own highly expensive education, he was well suited to dumb down old Will for the rest of us. Yes, this new R & J offered up the sure-fire marketing lure of simplified language for all the dolts who like their Shakespeare de-caf.

A Klingon Shakespeare buff

To be fair, only a handful of countries of the world actually hear Shakespeare in its original language; he is a foreign playwright on most continents and so we don’t know what is actually being spoken in countless productions. His stories take priority, not the precise words. This gives weight to a brilliant joke in Star Trek VI when an alien character urges that Shakespeare is best heard “in the original Klingon.”  But it is an act of perversity to translate Shakespeare from English to English, one even odder than English language operas in North America that still feel compelled to provide supertitles.

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the Shakespeare brand carries a mixed message. On the one hand: greatest playwright in history, profound insights, timeless plots, stunning language. On the other: the language does in fact stun some people into incomprehension, and years of bad English teachers and ill-advised productions have made Shakespeare seem a daunting experience for so many who might enjoy his work if they weren’t so afraid of it.

I am not Shakespeare, nor was meant to be.

Even though this new R & J film wasn’t a studio production, it summons visions of pitch meetings out of What Makes Sammy Run: “I’m giving you the straight dope. Shakespeare – great story man, little wordy though, language a little dusty. Here’s what we do: we keep absolutely everything that makes his stuff sell year after century, but we put it in language everyone can understand. But let’s keep it British. Maybe we can get that Downton Abbey guy to do a rewrite.”

The result was a product which tried to exploit the Shakespeare brand at the same time as it was draining it of its appeal. For people who find the word Shakespeare daunting, just the mention of his name can be a a turn-off; for those whose hearts flutter when they hear it, bowdlerizing the language eliminates any interest in seeing it. That’s not to suggest that reinventions of Shakespeare aren’t fair game: it’s been done in everything from Joe Macbeth to West Side Story to 10 Things I Hate About You. Even Sons of Anarchy is rooted in Hamlet. Heck, in Washington DC, there’s the Synetic Theatre, which is acclaimed for wordless Shakespeare. But Synetic isn’t foolish enough to sell their work as the same old Will and just get by with a program insert saying,” At this evening’s performance, the actors will be mute.”

I’m no Shakespeare scholar any more than I am a movie box office prognosticator, but having seen two stage Romeo and Juliets in the past two weeks, I admit to schadenfreude at the film’s failure, since it was such a foolish business move from the moment Fellowes’ agent got the call (surely after Tom Stoppard fell over laughing) and because I could have called it the moment that first trailer came to light. Our lovers will live to die another day on stage and screen; the IBDB alerts me to a Romeo and Juliet in Harlem due out next year. Using the original language. As for this version, its failure is no tragedy – and certainly not a Shakespearean one.

Pulp fiction or stealth arts management texts?

The stories of troubled arts institutions abound these days: the closing of the New York City Opera, the end of Shakespeare Santa Cruz and Theater of the Stars, the year-long standoff at the Minnesota Orchestra. That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure you can think of others.

While the steady decline of City Opera and the intractable situation in Minnesota have been fairly well reported in the arts press, they’re the exception. Typically, organizations in extremis keep their woes close to the vest as long as possible, until they’re forced to go public with what one of my former bosses called a “fire sale”: unless we raise this much by this date, we’ll have to close. Often as not, that’s just the sign that the canary in the coal mine has fallen off its perch.

Because the business of the arts is rarely covered as if it’s actual business (which it is) and because understaffed arts desks don’t have the resources to analyze and report on the fiscal health of companies on a regular basis, the ends of organizations seem precipitous and alarming. To those in the know, they’re anything but, and even when there’s an effort to assign blame, it’s rarely representative of the whole situation.

For perspective on this, I turn to Michael Crichton.

The late author specialized in a certain brand of fiction that would usually take some kernel of present day fact and extrapolate stories in which he imagined how that fact would impact us at some future date. Some of what he wrote was sci-fi (The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park) while some was social or cultural dynamics (Rising Sun, Disclosure); what he lacked in literary cachet he made up for in plotting and invention, even if some disliked his penchant for long asides about scientific or technological facts deployed to underpin his sometimes overheated stories.

In one of his less popular works, the mostly forgotten corporate espionage thriller Airframe, Crichton described in detail how airplanes crash. While I no longer have the book and wasn’t about to buy it again, I remember the central concept very clearly. Crichton explained that, save for an explosive device either onboard or launched at a plane, a crash doesn’t occur because of any single event. Typically, they emanate from some failure which then triggers others; Crichton notes that a swift and proper response to the inciting incident by the plane’s crew can usually avert disaster. It is when one or more of these smaller failings go unchecked that they multiply, eventually resulting in a crash. Crichton described the sequence of proliferating crises as an “event cascade.” That term has stayed with me, long after the rest of Airframe has been forgotten.

The fact is, arts organizations crash because of event cascades as well. It is rarely a single unforeseen occurrence which brings down companies; it is a series of actions, or lack thereof, that result in closure. They are of course best seen in hindsight, since boards, artistic directors and executive directors don’t have anything on their desk that will begin insistently flashing red the moment the first failing occurs. Absent such an indicator, it’s easy to overlook the first events in a cascade: the belief that consecutive operating deficits will somehow be solved at a future date; the utter conviction that a couple of seasons underperforming at the box office will be righted by some future succession of hit productions; the surety that going over-budget on a show will yield that long-sought hit; the expectation that funders will always step in insure the company’s stability for the long-term.

What if arts orgs had controls like this?

The lack of any alarm that goes off when bad decisions are made, decisions that often arise from from a place of  passion and the very best intentions, means that arts organizations are subject to event cascades that are out of hand before anyone realizes they’re taking place. Shrewd, successful boards and staff leadership are constantly on the alert for warning signs, not out of pessimism, but from a position of cautious responsibility. Even as they do well to embrace risk in order to possibly yield the greatest achievement, they also know when steer the safest course.

Just last week, Carnegie Hall settled a stagehands strike in a matter of days (with undisclosed terms), even though it was over a matter with long-term ramifications for the company. Did they solve a problem or trigger a cascade? Time will tell. And that’s the other challenge for arts organizations: our event cascades happen in slow motion, sometimes played out over months or years, making the inciting event even harder to spot. They are only evident in retrospect, as seen by the many post-mortems that have flourished in the wake of City Opera’s closure (this one from Bloomberg News is particularly blunt). Then, of course, it’s too late.

No one dies when an arts organization goes down in flames (an oft-used metaphor), but many lives are disrupted and vital cultural resources are lost. That’s why vigilance is called for at all times on the part of everyone with operational and organizational responsibility. To use an image from a better-known Crichton creation: you can have the best containment system money can buy, but when the electricity goes out, it’s useless. And then the raptors are loose.

With three Romeo and Juliet productions currently underway in New York – on Broadway, Off-Broadway at Classic Stage Company and a return engagement of the company 3 Day Hangover‘s decidedly non-traditional depiction – and a new film version due out this coming Friday, it seems time to inaugurate “Pop Goes Shakespeare,” which might just as easily be called “Shakespeare Goes Pop.” Whatever your preference, my plan, in this Shakespeare-heavy NYC theatre season, is just to periodically ramble through an array of Shakespearean adaptations and appropriations in film, TV and music. You can expect my entries on Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens to be exceptionally brief.

Considering there’s already rumblings among the purists about the admittedly peculiar decision by the new Romeo and Juliet film to have Downton Abbey‘s Julian Fellowes rewrite true Shakespeare into faux Shakespeare, it seems worthwhile to note how many different ways the Bard has already been retooled, rebooted and revised. Yet the couple always seems to survive to die another day.

Marketing for a 1930s film version, directed by George Cukor, with Leslie Howard, Norma Shearer and John Barrymore, went in for the hard sell – but was a bit cautious about any of that off-putting dialogue slipping out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D6BxQwYQ4I

An authoritative voice-over and giant fonts ruled again in 1954 when Laurence Harvey (pre-Manchurian Candidate) played Romeo opposite British actress Susan Shentall as Juliet. She was apparently so successful in the role that she never appeared on screen again (and hadn’t appeared before this either):

In the tumult of 1968, as Vietnam raged and hippies sprang into full flower, Franco Zeffirelli’s classical take on the story, with 15 year old Olivia Hussey as the 14 year old Juliet, found favor with audiences. It didn’t hurt that, as both Tom Lehrer and Stephen Sondheim advised, it had “a tune you can hum” that made the pop charts. But here’s a sonnet:

Another youth oriented take came in 1996, when Baz Luhrman lent his hyperkinetic style to a modern day version of the story, with youthful Claire Danes (pre-CIA duty) and Leonardo DiCaprio (pre-iceberg) as our hero and heroine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjxHdNxvySU

Want to get the kiddoes started on the Bard early? You might like some of the anthropomorphized animal versions of R & J. Perhaps you’d enjoy the story as puppy love, with seal pups, in the unfortunately titled Romeo and Juliet: Sealed With a Kiss:

Or if you can’t watch animated seals without worrying about the fate of real ones, perhaps you’d prefer the story set among garden gnomes (which are in no way endangered, so relax), accompanied by songs from Sir Elton John, and voiced by James MacAvoy and Emily Blunt:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPQyg8XtGsw

Turning to more adult versions, there’s the inevitable ultra low-budget zombified version of the story, Romeo and Juliet vs. The Living Dead:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj27pNtnB2Q

The lunatics at Troma Films, the auteurs behind The Toxic Avenger films, manipulated the story to their own warped ends for Tromeo and Juliet:

Oh, and if you’ve ever been hungry for a martial arts/gangster interpretation, perhaps you aren’t familiar with the oeuvre of Jet Li and the late singer Aaliyah, who bonded in a film with the spoilery title Romeo Must Die in 2000:

On stage, while Tom Stoppard offered up truncated texts of Hamlet and Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet had to settle for my friends at the Reduced Shakespeare Company, who travestied the romance in a version that, by their standards, is rather long. It took two videos to include it all. Get on the ball, guys!

Musicians have been inspired by the romance of R & J, even into the rock era, although it was really just the names that were invoked rather than the story itself. Dire Straits’ version of a modern pair of lovers has become a standard, yielding numerous covers. Here are two takes: the original from Mark Knopfler and the boys, as well as Amy Ray performing the more muscular Indigo Girls version.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkfotbNqQgw

If Dire Straits’ street song serenade is too soft for you, then turn to Lou Reed’s tribute to the lovers in near apocalyptic 1980s NYC:

Too harsh? Then let’s shift back to the 1950s, for something infectious from The Reflections, about a couple who are “Just Like Romeo and Juliet.”

And gosh darn it: looks like that cutie Taylor Swift had to read Romeo and Juliet in school, leading her to write “Love Story.” It appears, however, that she never finished the play, since her retelling is a wholly happy one. The video director may not have read the play either – the art direction makes the story more like a cross between Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights. But changing the period is done all the time in full versions, so I shouldn’t kvetch.

Many accounts of the current Broadway Romeo, Orlando Bloom, take note his modern, hip costuming, so one can’t help but imagine that director David Leveaux shares my affection for the minor hit “No Myth” by Michael Penn and its refrain, “What if I was Romeo in black jeans? What if I was Heathcliff, it’s no myth.”

I’d like to cap off our tribute to the doomed duo on a classy note, with a selection from Elvis Costello’s collaboration with the classical Brodsky Quartet, “The Juliet Letters,” suggested by the many young women who to this day leave letters for Juliet in present day Verona. This is one of my favorites from the album, “Taking My Life In Your Hands.”

P.S. What about West Side Story, I hear you cry. Yes, we all know it was suggested by Romeo and Juliet. I didn’t think you needed a reminder.

If you’ve not yet heard the story, the basic facts are these. Earlier this week, members of the football team at the University of Mississippi (aka “Ole Miss”) were required to attend a performance of The Laramie Project, the play by Tectonic Theater Project and Moisés Kaufman about the murder of Matthew Shepard 15 years ago and the impact of his killing on the town of Laramie. Some 20 players were among the students who taunted the cast with gay slurs; they may have instigated the incident. In the many news reports about it, it has been noted that the players were required to write a note of apology; one may have done so in person.  You can read accounts from the Associated Press and ESPN for more details.

This profoundly upsets me, and I suspect anyone who reads what I write, so my personal condemnation of the incident is insignificant. Given that just last week I explained how I can barely watch fictional stories about sports, and that I previously spoken up on the value of seeing Laramie Project produced in high schools, my deep dismay over this incident is unsurprising.

It remains a sad fact of American life that this kind of bigotry flourishes. For all the advances that have been made since Shepard’s murder, there are clearly swaths of people in this country whose reactionary behavior proves just how far we have to go in accepting that all people are created equal. It is a bit of sick irony that the football players at Ole Miss were required to attend a performance that explores the pain and horror of hate crimes and used it as an opportunity to display their basest beliefs.

I am encouraged, however, to see that the sportswriting community, which I do not know well (as you might surmise), has not shrugged off this incident. I recommend to you three columns in particular. “Apology isn’t enough for what Ole Miss thinks its football players did” is the headline of a piece by Gregg Doyel of CBS, who expresses my shared skepticism that the players will face any meaningful punishment for their actions. Greg Couch of Fox Sports goes further, and calls for the suspension of the players (“Time for Ole Miss to send a message”) as does his colleague Clay Travis (“Ole Miss Must Ban Players — Now”) – and I agree with them completely.  I am pleased to see members of the sports media standing against these actions, since they have access to the general public in a way the theatre community itself could never muster, even if every website and blog were to unite over this issue.

But the culture of college sports, especially at schools with teams that compete at the top level in games that land on television, have this pathetic inability to truly address meaningful change in an often corrupt universe. At The New York Times, business writer Joe Nocera has written column after column about the repeated failures of the NCAA to curb abuses within their system, specifically the kind of money made on the backs of so-called student-athletes, with a particular eye to the long-term effects of traumatic brain injuries. We read about crimes, in particular sexual assault, that is systematically hushed up at colleges, by athletes and other students, in the name of protecting the reputation of the school. Disrupting a play doesn’t rise to a comparable level of criminality, but this week’s events are symptomatic of a larger disease, one that is not unique to sports programs, but that is in abundant evidence right now at Ole Miss and should be quashed in no uncertain terms.

We only have to read the accounts of Tuesday’s Laramie performance to see that Ole Miss cares more about their football team than about the student body at large, let alone the drama program in particular. When members of the team began their heckling (too soft a word, just as bullying is insufficient these days as well), it was the football coach who was called – but what about security, the police? They will be held accountable as athletes within a special system, not simply as students, let alone as individual citizens ganging together to espouse hate.

Ole Miss has a football game tomorrow. The school has not yet said whether these offenders will play in it, or whether anything more will be asked of them than the wan apology already proffered. At the same time, I suspect if activists were to interrupt the game by running onto the field and calling the players names, they would be arrested, suspended, and expelled or some combination thereof.

Even if you agree with every word I’ve written even before you read it, I hope you’ll add your voice to the chorus speaking against this incident at Ole Miss and all of those like it, in person, online, using whatever resources you have. Even if, like me, you’re no sports fan, surely you have friends and family who are, and who should hear about what has happened this week in Mississippi, since it’s hardly an isolated case. Worse has been done and sadly will be done, but we can’t allow the empty theatre of college athletic penalties (if they even occur) to trump the sad human drama that led to Matthew Shepard’s killing and which is played out on our national stage day in and day out.

To write directly to members of the University of Mississippi athletic program, here’s a complete list of contacts. Write directly to the Chancellor of the university, Dr. Daniel W. Jones at chancllr@olemiss.edu and to the director of Athletics Ross Bjork at rbjork@olemiss.edu.

Direct tweets to @OleMissRebels, Ole Miss Athletics (@OleMissNow) and football @CoachHughFreeze. Post Facebook messages to www.facebook.com/olemisssports and www.facebook.com/OleMissFootball

Update – Saturday, October 5, 8 am: The Ole Miss’s “Bias Incident Response Team” released the following statement on Friday evening:

“The task of identifying specific individuals who were purported to have disrupted the performance is difficult because of the dark theatre, and initial reports vary in regard to the frequency, volume and source of the comments or disruption,” the statement read. “Although initial reports indicate that student-athletes led the action, it is important to note that this has not been verified and they were not the only students present. Reports indicate that comments were made by student athletes and students but no report has singled out a specific student or mentioned any names.”

According to a report in the Jackson Clarion Ledger, headlined “Ole Miss delivers punishment in homophobic slur incident,” members of the team at the performance will, however, be required to attend “educational dialogue session led by university faculty and allies.” In other words: we know they were part of this, but not enough to actually punish them, despite what the headline says. Apparently at Ole Miss, the dedication to football outweighs the word of a faculty member. The headline from ESPN, “No evidence against Ole Miss players,” seems to completely absolve them.  The ugly game goes on.

“It’s one of my lost plays that I feel we can bring back,” says British playwright Alan Ayckbourn of 2003’s Sugar Daddies, which will make its U.S. debut this month at Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre, directed by the author.

ACT has previously staged 10 Ayckbourn plays with other directors. So what prompted this in-person visit by the playwright himself to stage a work little seen beyond his home base of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England?

“They asked me, is the simple answer,” explained Ayckbourn. “I met Kurt Beattie the artistic director when he came to Scarborough two years ago. He slipped me the ground plan of their Allen Theatre, which is conveniently in the round, and he asked if I’d fancy working there.”

Ayckbourn says the plays – about a young woman who helps an elderly crime boss who she helped after he’s hit by car, and ends up as his protégeé –  is based in part on the Faust legend. “It is, in the end, the story of a girl corrupted by worldly goods, “ Ayckbourn says. “Do you sell your soul or do you hold on to it? There’s nothing particularly English about it.”

Still, Ayckbourn notes that he’s not planning to Americanize the play for the Seattle production. “I’d been down the road of Americanization early in my career. It turned out to be a very unfortunate choice. If you’re not an American writer, your vocabulary when you’re translating is much narrower. It’s the same as trying to squeeze Tennessee Williams into Cheltenham.”

The author of 77 plays (not including one-acts, children’s shows and holiday entertainments), Ayckbourn has directed American acting companies in two plays previously, Henceforward at The Alley Theater in 1987 and multiple engagements of By Jeeves after its stateside debut at Goodspeed Musicals in 1996. Does he find a difference when working with U.S. actors?

“Here [in Scarborough] I have the advantage,” Ayckbourn notes, “of having a rolling company and they are, to an extent, imbued with the ethos of the way I work and the style in which I write. It used to be difficult for American actors, because they went after the jokes in my stuff and fell flat on their faces – because there are none. Most of my jokes come from monosyllables like ‘yes’ or ‘no.’

“I have to ask people not to treat it like a broad English comedy. The more seriously you play my stuff, the funnier it gets. But these days, because of my age and reputation, if you like, they treat me a bit too reverently. I have to knock the reverence out of them.”