Howard Sherman

The Stage: Why the thrills and chills of Sweeney Todd still speak (and sing) to me

June 29th, 2018 § 0 comments § permalink

*Michael Cerveris and Patti LuPone in the 2005 Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd”* *(Photo by Paul Kolnik)*

When the Tooting Arts Club set up its immersive Sweeney Todd at Harrington’s Pie and Mash in 2014, I doubt it was expecting the production to become the longest-running professional production of Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece. But that’s what happened, with the New York incarnation having recently passed 558 performances on its way to a total of 636 when it closes in August. If you tack on the London runs, it has lasted even longer.

Nit-pickers can say that the so-called Tiny Todd only had to fill 130 seats per performance in Manhattan, while the original Broadway run at the Uris, now Gershwin, Theatre had 1,800 or more (seating in the venue has been altered over time). But the record is for longevity, not admissions. After all, no one quibbles with shows like Théâtre de la Huchette’s The Bald Soprano, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, or The Fantasticks at the Sullivan Street Playhouse over their house size. Instead they applaud in amazement at their longevity.

For a die-hard Sweeney fan like myself – it has been, without question, my favourite musical since I first saw the original Broadway production late in its run – it’s heartwarming to know that for the past year and half, the mad barber has been wielding his razor in Greenwich Village eight times a week. It is a nightly affirmation of my own affection.

*George Hearn and Angela Lansbury in the 1981 national tour of “Sweeney Todd”*

When Sweeney was new, my adoration of it struck some as downright odd. During my first year at university, my roommate must have been convinced that I too, like the musical’s title character, was a bit off, so obsessively did I play the original cast recording (especially side two of the first disc in that two-record vinyl set).

My father was utterly mystified until he saw the show almost two decades later and admitted that he now understood its appeal for me. Like many, he couldn’t fathom a musical with such a sanguinary plot.

To brandish my bona fides, as well as the original Broadway production, I have also seen Sweeney on its first national tour, its first New York City Opera production, its first Broadway revival (a transfer from the Off-Broadway York Theatre known by aficionados as Teeny Todd), the Goodspeed Opera House production for which I was general manager, John Doyle’s Watermill production at Trafalgar Studios, Doyle’s Broadway production with Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris, Jonathan Kent’s production with Imelda Staunton and Michael Ball, and the Tooting Arts version at the Barrow Street Theatre, which I plan to see once more before it closes. I’ve probably forgotten a couple.

*Imelda Staunton and Michael Ball in the 2012 West End production of “Sweeney Todd”*

I have also seen several secondary school productions, including one in New Hampshire where I helped faculty, parents, and students get the show back on the schedule after it had been cancelled by school administrators. One of the greatest joys of my professional life was reading aloud to the cast of that restored production, without them knowing until the very end who their correspondent was, a letter from Stephen Sondheim, praising them for their perseverance.

I have long known that my unswerving dedication to Sweeney puts me in a minority compared to those among my generation who cite A Chorus Line, Les Miserables, or The Lion King – and those of all generations who now declare Hamilton – as their favorite.

To a degree, loving Sweeney Todd deeply is a cult choice – not so obscure as say 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but hardly as mainstream as The Music Man. The things we love aren’t predicated necessarily on what others think. Rather, they are about what affects and appeals to us alone, what moves us, and somehow Sweeney spoke (and sang) to me, and hasn’t stopped in 38 years.

It is the very dissonance between my personality and the show that suggests why it might have a hold on me. There is something unknowable about Sweeney Todd, that makes some of us watch its Grand Guignol repeatedly, tapping a dark part of our heart perpetually, both horrified and thrilled, adjudicating and complicit.

If Sweeney Todd is the musical theatre’s equivalent of a violent film or video game (American Psycho notwithstanding), I should point out that it has never made me violent or even desirous of revenge. What I take from it is the beauty of its music, the propulsion of its plot and the brilliance of its construction. You may not want to get me started on how the musical contains three different songs called “Johanna,” which reveal more about the men who sing them than the woman about whom they supposedly sing.

*Siobhán McCarthy and Jeremy Seacomb in the 2017 Off-Broadway run of the Tooting Arts Club production of “Sweeney Todd” (Photo by Joan Marcus)*

Having seen many Sweeney Todds, the Teeny Todd, and the Tiny Todd – the latter two part of an ongoing de-escalation of scale for a work of soaring emotion and drama – I cannot help but expect that a one-actor version of the show may yet be on the horizon. That might sound facetious, but don’t rule it out. After all, Sondheim has allowed many variants on Sweeney, including a prog-metal version and alt-folk version among them. So long as the script and score stay intact, it appears Sweeney can wreak his havoc in many different arrangements, both physical and musical.

When I return to the Tooting Arts Club Sweeney at Barrow Street once more in the next few weeks, I will again savour a meat pie before the show, opting for the chicken rather than the vegetarian version. Indeed, tasty as the pies are, they are also my only disappointment from that production, because there wasn’t a beef option on the menu when I first saw it. After all, when having a meat pie at Sweeney Todd, one wants its juices to run bright red – and not from the presence of beets inside, if you know what I mean.

Originally published in The Stage

In A Times Square Renovation, New Version of the Past

June 11th, 2018 § 0 comments § permalink

Arnie Charnick at work on a Hotel Edison mural (Photo © Howard Sherman)

There are many who remain upset with the owners of the Hotel Edison for their ejection of the Edison Cafe several years ago, and you can count me among them, because along with the cafe went the best chicken soup I’ve ever had, a balm on days when it was cold out or I had a cold.

But now I have to tip my hat to those same owners, who, in the process of renovating the hotel, haven’t taken the corporate, pre-fabricated route, at least so far as the deco-ish lobby goes. Indeed, on this post-Tony Awards morning, when many Times Square denizens are still rousing themselves, there’s an artist in the passageway that connects 46th and 47th Streets through the Edison, painting new murals that evoke the bygone days of Times Square, at the turn of the 20th century, in the 1940s and in the “bad old days” of the 1970s (as seen thought the eyes of a motorist cruising 42 Street).

I would have liked to see more varied representation of people of color in the images, since they were far from absent in Times Square over the years. The objectification of women in several images, while perhaps true to the eras portrayed, perhaps need not have been quite so foregrounded. Al Jolson in blackface, while certainly accurate, perpetuates a discredited practice.

Yet it is a pleasure to see artwork in progress, not just a digital print-out being pasted to a wall. I made a point of telling the artist, Arnie Charnick, that his work was exciting, since we so rarely have that opportunity to express our appreciation directly to any artists, but I must confess that his mumbled reply was inaudible to me. No doubt his head was filled with thoughts of the work at hand, and a passerby snapping pictures with his iPhone was one of what is assuredly many distractions as he works so publicly.

Nonetheless, if you like seeing public art in progress, hustle to the Edison and take a look over Arnie’s shoulder. The art is handmade, and the hands are still making it.

Update, June 12, 2018: Apparently I was not the only person concerned about the representation people of color in these works. Subsequent to this post going up at 10 am on June 11, the artist removed the words “Place Trash Here” from a trash can visible in the lower left of the 1970s image, which depicts a black man in the can. The Daily News wrote about the complaints of hotel staff members which led to this alteration. My intent was not to precipitate censorship of the work, only to express my own response to it, but works in progress are not yet set in stone, or paint, as the case may be.

Hotel Edison lobby mural of the turn of the century by Arnie Charnick

Hotel Edison lobby mural, of the 1970s, by Arnie Charnick

Arnie Charnick using a digital reference at the Hotel Edison (Photo © Howard Sherman)

Quotation Marks Don’t Soften a Slur in Chicago

March 31st, 2018 § 0 comments § permalink

Now there is a redaction, an editor’s note, and an author’s apology. But for roughly 24 hours between Wednesday and Thursday this week, in a theatre review in the Chicago Reader, the racially incendiary “n-word” was part of the text online.

The review, by Justin Hayford, was of the Court Theatre’s current production of the stage adaptation of the 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. The slur is spoken, once, during the play itself, by a black father to his black son. When the word first appeared in the Reader, it wasn’t presented as a quote, but rather as Hayford’s paraphrase of that moment in the play.

Within hours of the review going online, outrage flared, with multiple advocates conferring and venting on social media with one another and sharing the communications they had begun to share with the Reader. Their efforts led to a fairly quick reaction from the publication, or rather reactions, because at first, the piece was altered to place the entire phrase containing the word in quotes, suggesting that Hayford was citing a line in the text. Subsequently, in a second edit, the quotes were shifted to only include the word itself in quotes. Finally, on Thursday afternoon, the word was wholly redacted, appearing as “[vile racial epithet]”, with the actual snippet of a quote – different than what Hayford had previously written – from the play appearing in the text, marked off with quotation marks.

Hayford’s apology began:

“I included the N-word in my review of Court Theatre’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. A lot of people let me know I shouldn’t have.

You’re right. I agree. I apologize.”

He went on to write, in part:

“Although the character in the play uses the N-word, I could have conveyed the horror of the stage moment without quoting the word at all, as many of you rightly pointed out. I might have used “vile racial epithet” instead. I clearly underestimated the hateful and hurtful nature of that word’s appearance in print, even when citing a character’s use of it.”

The editor’s note on the piece itself now reads:

“During the play, one of the characters uses a racial slur. Although the offensive language came directly from the script, we should have not printed it. We have removed the offensive word. We apologize.”

Given the relatively rapid time lapse from offense to apology, some might feel that the issue has been put to rest. But that fails to recognize the significance of the initial insult and the ham-fisted way in which the Reader tried, twice, to rationalize and qualify the primary word choice.

With any professional publication, even though the ranks of editors and copy editors have been reduced in recent years throughout the field, it’s simply not possible that Hayford’s review appeared online without at least one other person at the Reader having read it and approved it. The backtracking and ultimate contrition only began when the furious reaction set in.

When quotation marks went up around Hayford’s original clause containing the slur, it was ostensibly to make clear that the word was part of the text. But Hayford’s failure to provide an accurate quotation from the script completely undermined the effort, and in a review of some 440 words, was a phrase of less than 10 sufficient context to justify that particular quote, with that word, the only quote in the review? As it came clear that Hayford was not citing the script, the quotes were shifted to only the word in question, stripping it of any context and making impossible to acknowledge it as coming from the script. On that basis, quotes could have also surrounded Hayford’s use of the word “and.”

Having learned of the online upset during this period of multiple revisions, but prior to the final version, Edwin Eisendrath, CEO of the Chicago-Sun Times, which owns the Reader, reached out to Richard Costes, an active advocate in the Chicago theatre community, who had been posting about the review on Facebook and e-mailing the leadership at the publication. Eisendrath wrote, in part:

“The concerns, later summarized in in the e-mail you sent, are disturbing, and prompted some digging. In fact, we have confirmed that the awful racial epithet quoted in the review is in the script and was part of the performance. The reviewer felt the scene was a powerful part of the play, and included it in the write-up. . .

You are also right that the word and the subject are painful. Theatre, as all arts do, treats in painful subjects [sic]. Sometimes artists are more successful and sometimes less successful in their efforts. Reviewing these efforts can be tricky when the reviewer wants to convey the experience of the performance.”

Leaving aside the condescension of the CEO explaining the purpose and effect of theatre to someone in the theatre, it is clear that the initial plan at the Reader was to justify each successive choice – until they reached a point when they realized the position wasn’t defensible. As a matter of free speech, they had the right to print what they did, but it took a lot of voices crying out to bring the Reader to the point where the powers that be understood that in this case was a serious ethical lapse to deploy the slur.

Why “in this case”? If, in an essay-length review, a critic writing about this piece, or perhaps one of August Wilson’s plays, included a sustained quotation, or several, in which the word was fully contextualized, then it might be seen as part of a comprehensive critique and clear part of the author’s voice. It does appear – just once – in Todd Kreidler’s stage adaptation, but the brief quotation strips the word of the context of a scene or the speaker, let alone a two-hour anti-racism work.

Only weeks ago, the Reader was engulfed in controversy when this same racial slur was used in the headline of an article about gubernatorial candidate J.B. Pritzker. The Reader, appropriately, backtracked there as well; in fact, it fired the editor responsible. So it’s impossible to think that anyone working for the Reader hadn’t already been made aware of the incendiary nature of the n-word, even if they had never encountered it and its ugly history before (which is, of course, highly doubtful).

The Chicago Reader gave extraordinary service to the theatre community with its groundbreaking expose of Profiles Theatre in June 2016. In fact, their sensitivity there only throws the pain and anger prompted by the Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner review into higher relief. They have absolutely done better in the past and, if their writers, their editors and their publisher have actually learned something from making the same gaffe twice in two months, they will do better in the future. But they have to prove it.

Another Chicago voice heard clearly during the immediate outrage over the review was that of playwright Ike Holter, whose Facebook page became a rallying point against the use of the slur. Among his many posts was this thought, which might serve as a guide to all future editors and writers considering the use of the n-word and its impact:

“If a black person is mad at the word, assume it is on a level of hurt, pain and fear that you will never understand. Do not tell them to “Calm Down” or “Be Quiet”. either support them or leave them alone. When we hear that word from a non black person, it hits an invisible bone in our body. You don’t want to know what it feels like, so don’t act like you do.”

One last note: Hayford’s review, with the slur intact, sans apology, appears in print in this week’s Chicago Reader. Even if there’s an editor’s note next week, nothing can take that back.

The Stage: Ubu Bake Off gives voice to theatre’s anti-Trump insurgents

February 23rd, 2018 § 0 comments § permalink

At The Playwrights Center Ubu Bake-Off, Paula Vogel and Jeremy B. Cohen (Photo by Whitney Rowland)

Four days ago, the US theatre community fostered the birth of more than 100 new short plays, on our federal holiday of Presidents’ Day. These were not, however, created in a spontaneous outpouring of national pride, but rather a coordinated – if entirely voluntary – effort that specifically sought to conflate the current presidency with Alfred Jarry’s absurdist and profane play Ubu Roi.

Held at nearly two dozen theatres and theatre-related organisations, the Ubu Bake Off was the brainchild of award-winning playwright Paula Vogel, who, please pardon the expression, cooked up the idea while musing on Facebook just five weeks ago. The interest from her Facebook friends and acolytes was immediate.

The Ubu Bake Off followed guidelines Vogel has previously used in her teaching career. It was an exercise designed to prompt people to quick, instinctive creativity, helped along by a 48-hour writing time limit, coupled with a five-page limit. Vogel also provides a set of ingredients, so that the resultant playlets are all variations on a theme.

For Monday, the ingredients included Pa Ubu 45 (supposedly 6ft 3ins, a trim 239 lbs, in “excellent health”, and, yes, the hair is his and real), angry ambassadors from every country that Pa Ubu has insulted, a strange use of the English language that sounds like it is supposed to be English (ie, words for ‘shit’ are prolonged like ‘pshitte’), covfefe, and a double-triple-quadruple-octahedral cheeseburger with special sauce.

Among the companies that participated were the Vineyard Theatre (a creative home for Vogel) and the New Ohio Theatre in New York; the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis (which Vogel attended), Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago and Crowded Fire Theatre Company and Antaeus Theatre in California. I even got into the act, hosting a small group under the auspices of my day job at the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.

This decentralised, far-flung realisation of Vogel’s idea means that no one person saw, or even read, all of the one-act plays that emerged. Almost like carefully organised insurgent cells, each location, each playwright, was part of a larger whole, carrying out their own missions, not knowing what else might be happening for the benefit of the cause elsewhere. Yet, at the same time, we were secure in the knowledge that other partisans were fighting the good fight in the same manner at the same time.

In my little troupe, we read nine plays over two hours, with playwrights and actors joining to give voice to the texts brought into the room, none adjudicated in any way. The Playwrights’ Center deployed eight actors to read all of the plays – in this instance, an astounding 41 plays by 44 playwrights in an event that lasted more than five hours. No doubt the solutions were as varied as the locales.

Based on the circle at my office, and the plays read, the Bake Off inspired instant camaraderie (I had previously met only one of the participants). It was great fun, in the name of expressing frustrations with our present leadership, while concurrently paying homage to a literary classic. The low-pressure, everyone-is-welcome spirit also stripped away any sense of theatrical hierarchy or critical judgement. It even freed me to try my hand at playwriting for the first time in about 40 years.

But perhaps most importantly, Vogel’s inspiration and recipe yielded a great deal of work in a very short time, demonstrating that her educational tool offers a significant opportunity for involving many voices on the same subject.

Without the demands of rehearsal, staging, ticket sales and fundraising, Vogel’s Ubu Bake Off stripped theatre to its most rudimentary essentials, yielding experiences that were, if my own metaphorical kitchen was at all representative, unifying and cathartic. It certainly provides a model for rapid-response theatre applicable to almost any topic. I suspect we have more national Bake Offs in our future.

On The Front Lines, In School And In Theatre

February 17th, 2018 § 0 comments § permalink

I am tired.

I am tired of reading posts about “my rights” to a hobby that includes automatic rifles. You like guns, fine. But accept the fact that guns are dangerous and require strict regulations.

I am a teacher. I am tired because my job is hard. Don’t get me wrong, I love this gig, but it is hard work. It is emotionally draining, mentally challenging, and physically demanding. I am talking about a normal day here folks, and this past week was NOT NORMAL.

On top of all I do, I must also include drills where we hide in the theatre from a shooter. I must take time out of our day to discuss my students’ fears and concerns about their safety in our little town. I must plot with them strategies for when a shooter actually gets inside the theatre, what do we throw at them? I must remind them that if the fire alarm goes off to let me get to the door first to make sure there is no shooter out in the hall.

This last bothers me because normally I stay behind to look for stragglers and to shut doors. I must take time from my work to plan safety routes, and to devise strategies for my students for any given circumstance. What if someone is in the bathroom down the hall? What if it is lunchtime, which way should they run? What does gunfire sound like? What should I do first?

I can’t describe to you the silence that followed some comments about what to do if I, the teacher, do not return to the safe zone: “You shut the locked door and you stay quiet.” Yes, you forget about me and take care of each other, would you promise me that please?

The kids are terrified. Yesterday was even worse than Thursday, because of a threatening Snapchat, we were on alert. The phone lines were flooded with concerned parents, the halls had security and police patrolling. But you know what broke my heart? Sitting in my office working on my computer while I listened to our music teacher, a truly lovely man, kindly talking to his beginning level choir class, showing these young and frightened children how to cross the music hall to the band room as it is safer than the choir room.

As a teacher, I am privy to the emotional and mental health assessment of every student in my classroom. I am seeing more and more students suffering from debilitating anxiety and the label PTSD appears more and more often. THIS IS NOT OKAY. It angers me that the rest of our country is so quick to judge kids without really understanding their motivations. Theatre teaches us to develop empathy, if only to understand our character and put on a better performance. I wish everyone was required to study theatre in school, if only to help them gain compassion – not just for others, but for themselves as well. Our country would be so much healthier for it.

Thank you so much, adults. On top of your own issues that plague my students thus making learning a difficult task already, you now have introduced terror into their daily classroom routine. Because of your inability to grow up and be responsible, unselfish and willing to sacrifice for others we are now living in this messed up, full of rage and extremely polarized country where children died because they attended school.

Rachel Harry received the 2017 Tony Award for Excellence in Theatre Education. She has taught theatre for 30 years at Hood River Valley High School in Oregon, and she also teaches at Columbia Gorge Community College. Much of this essay began as a Facebook post on February 17, 2018, following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. It is reposted here by permission.

The Stage: Take to the barricades to defend the arts from Trump’s antagonism

February 16th, 2018 § 0 comments § permalink

Donald Trump (Photo by Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons)

If I were given to cynicism, and if I thought I could get away with it, this week I would have submitted the same column as the one published on March 24 of last year. Why? Because we return to the same topic: President Trump and his antagonism of the arts.

The president has, for the second time in his presidency, submitted a budget to the US Congress eliminating funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Never mind that the new budget will balloon the national debt above and beyond the long-term damage done to the US by the tax cut passed in December – a plan that rewards the ultra-rich while penalising the rest of the country.

No, the president and his henchmen still want to make a statement against creativity, arts and scholarship. It would be a meaningless save in the context of the budget itself. But it’s catnip to those perceived as his core supporters.

Underlying Trump’s effort to wipe out the NEA, NEH and CPB is the fact he failed to do so last year. He’s hardly the first politician to use these entities as a political punching bag; they have long been convenient targets for the right who see them as pursuits limited to those who are politically on the left.

Certainly if the right, which always proclaims the value of free markets and self-sufficiency, wanted to prove that the arts don’t need federal support, they might have produced a conservative version of Sesame Street for commercial TV. Or perhaps we would have a wildly successful theatre company dedicated to works based on the writings of Ayn Rand and her acolytes. But as we know, that’s not the case.

Oh, sorry, but maybe I am getting cynical. It’s hard to stay fully positive when, in the 35th year of my career in the arts, I realise the NEA has been under some form of attack almost annually since at least 1990 – fully three-quarters of my professional life. Trumpism may have us on ever more heightened alert, but there’s never really been a moment when we could truly relax regarding this issue. If our community did, we were losing ground.

Nowadays, I get calls to action to defend funding for these tiny slices of the federal budget via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and occasionally still from the post office. But I can recall the era when mail, phone calls and faxes – remember those? – were the organising tools of choice to face down these perennial assaults, whether they came from within the Oval Office or under the Capitol dome.

There’s no question that the efforts to minimise or eliminate these agencies have had an effect, since funding today is less than it was 25 years ago. Even with relatively steady funding of late, the net effect is to reduce the federal impact, since costs rise while the available monies remain the same. Should we hit a period of inflation, the impact would prove even greater, even if the numbers on the ledger remain the same.

All these efforts to wear down the agencies’ advocates must take its toll on the detractors too, right? But instead, each side plays its designated role, battling to, more or less, a draw.

Not to diminish the importance of the funding situation, but this exercise in political gamesmanship is almost like some vintage cartoon series, with antagonists fighting in endless variations on the same theme, only to take up their enmity again in the next instalment.

But fight we must. The identity of the wolf at the door may vary, but the goal is the same. The arts, the humanities and the public broadcasting outlets and their supporters cannot let the government wipe an entire professional discipline from its attention and funding programme.

This year, the battle even faces a new twist, since the changes in the tax code have reduced the tax benefits of charitable deductions for many citizens and the impact of that policy won’t be fully known until donations are tallied at the end of 2018.

And so we organise to hold back those who would overrun us. We make the case for our value spiritually, creatively and economically, as inventively, persuasively and as loudly as possible.

While some political pundits have already suggested the president’s budget is dead on arrival and Congress will assemble something at least marginally more saleable – to each other and to the public – we can’t take the risk that this is the year when our interests might get bargained away.

Yet again, to the barricades (to be very clear, not a wall). And to the phones, the computers and maybe even the fax machines.

Jose Jimenez is Alive and Well and Performing in Utah

February 11th, 2018 § 2 comments § permalink

If you’re under 50, you likely aren’t familiar with the work of comedian Bill Dana. His most famous creation, a character seen on an array of television shows in the 1960s – Jose Jimenez – has been largely forgotten, especially since Dana stopped playing the character (save for one exception) in 1970. But the Jimenez character was a comedy phenomenon, appearing on Dana’s comedy albums in addition to his many sitcom and variety show appearances. Fans of the movie The Right Stuff may remember one of the Mercury astronauts repeating his catchphrase – “My name Jose Jimenez” – while in the flight capsule, a detail straight out of Tom Wolfe’s non-fiction book, prompted by sketches in which Jimenez was a reluctant astronaut.

Dana stopped performing the character 47 years before he passed away in 2017, because of lobbying from Hispanic groups who found the slow-talking, slow-witted Jimenez to be a deeply offensive stereotype. Jose Jimenez would be joined in oblivion a year later by the commercial pitchman Frito Bandito, consigned to the same fate as Jimenez for the same reason: being a negative stereotype, in this case a rootin’-tootin’ shoot ‘em up villain with a taste for Frito-Lays’ corn chip snack and a theme song that included the refrain, “I love Frito Corn Chips, I love them I do/I love Frito Corn Chips I’ll get them from you”. The Frito Bandito was as genuinely threatening as the Hamburglar and as authentic as Eli Wallach’s character in The Magnificent Seven, which is to say not at all.

The now rarely seen or heard Speedy Gonzalez

It would take much longer, until 2002, but when the Cartoon Network acquired the rights to the Warner Brothers cartoon family, they withdrew the Speedy Gonzalez cartoons from TV for yet again the same reason, stereotyping. For trivia fans it’s worth noting that both Speedy and the Frito Bandito were voiced by the famed Mel Blanc. Speedy, for those unfamiliar with him, was regularly portrayed as an anomaly in his Latinx community, with the rest of the rodent characters portrayed as slow talking and slow moving.

So with the mass media relegating the afore-mentioned Latinx stereotypes to archives years ago, it’s disconcerting to learn that a small, family-operated theatre north of Salt Lake City, the Pickleville Playhouse, has been producing a series of original shows over the past decade featuring the leading character of “Juanito Bandito”, written and portrayed by the Caucasian actor TJ Davis, sporting a black wig, sketchy accent and absurd handlebar mustache. Among the shows featuring this character have been, in chronological order, The Hanging of El Bandito, Bandito Rides Again, Who Shot Juanito Bandito?, The Hanging of El Bandito Reimagined, Bandito Rides Again Reimagined, Who Shot Juanito Bandito Reimagined, Juanito Bandito in the One with the Monkey, Ready, Fire, Aim starring Juanito Bandito and Love & Death vs El Bandito. Oh, there’s also the seasonal favorite, Juanito Bandito’s Christmas Carol.

In the peculiar ways of the internet, word of Davis’s character has recently begun popping up in theatrical feeds, inevitably in conjunction with charges of stereotyping. The tweets were most likely prompted by a joint letter, originated by Diana Burbano, dated February 9, from some 40 theatre artists to The Grand Theatre in Salt Lake City, a large venue in Utah’s capital where one of the Bandito shows recently played. Davis initially responded in a sustained blog post, since withdrawn, in which he defended the character, saying it wasn’t a stereotype because the character’s accent is so poor. His shorter, revised post reads, in part:

Two days ago I wrote a post trying to explain some of my points of view regarding the Bandito character. I’ve chosen to take it down because even though I thought it might help those who had expressed concern (people who have never actually seen what we do), it seems now that a blog post is not the appropriate avenue.

I am absolutely interested in doing the right thing in every aspect of my life. I believe that racial stereotyping is a big problem in the entertainment industry today. I don’t want to be a part of that problem, and I do not believe that the Bandito productions are a part of that problem.

JB is not a stereotype of any race or culture. I do not darken my face with makeup nor have I ever done so in order to make him appear to be Latino. Bandito has been Spanish (from Spain) from the beginning.

In the post that remains, Davis seems to suggest that his character, who he claims is from Spain, isn’t making fun of Latinos. While the character’s iconography seems drawn from The Magnificent Seven and its ilk, he’s really splitting hairs. He may believe that he’s not making fun of Latinos, but even if we were to grant him that, he does appear to be making fun of Hispanics. Yes, there’s a distinction, but for the purpose of addressing stereotyping, it’s a fairly academic one. A feature story in the Herald Journal of Logan, Utah notes that the character had its origin when, “Davis, who had seen first-hand in Guatemala how non-native speakers ‘butcher’ Spanish decided to try something different. ‘I came in one day and said, ‘What if I do this with a Spanish accent?’”

TJ Davis as Juanito Bandito (screenshot via YouTube)

Davis notes that he doesn’t darken his skin, but seems unaware that one need not employ makeup to deploy brownface, blackface, yellowface and their ilk. His self-admittedly poor accent is more than enough of a tipoff as to which ethnic group he’s referencing; one of his Instagram posts includes the ad line, “We’re adding a chow. Jou’re welcome.” The open captioning on a video from one of the productions features the dialogue, “You chooted at him because he lunched at you?” Pure Jose Jimenez material.

He further protests that he is being criticized by people who have not seen what he does. While it’s probable that the rumble of unhappiness is coming predominantly from people who haven’t made it Utah to see the character in action, there’s plenty of video currently online to get a sense of what the portrayal is like. Though Davis’s earlier post indicated that he had Latino friends who told him the character was fine, that’s unlikely to be the prevailing opinion among those he doesn’t already know, as confirmation bias in his existing circle won’t be a factor.

Davis says he wants to do the right thing in every aspect of his life, writing, “Our mission in everything we do is to create fun, clean family entertainment to help our communities create lasting memories with those they love.” Let’s take him at his word, with the assumption that his communities include Latinx and Hispanic patrons, or potential patrons. Perhaps he’s unfamiliar with Gonzalez, Jimenez and the Frito spokes-cartoon, since they’ve been out of circulation for almost a half century.

Mr. Davis, the right thing is to not make a career of a character that is instantly recognizable as a stereotype, even if he is intentionally a badly drawn version of one. Utah may be a state that is largely Caucasian – as of 2016, per the US Census Bureau, the category of “White alone, not Hispanic or Latino” represented 79% of the Utah population, the next largest category is “Hispanic or Latino” at 14%. But that’s not an excuse for ignoring the minority for the amusement of the majority. In fact, it might argue for even greater sensitivity, since the families that attend the Pickleville shows surely don’t want to be teaching the lesson that it’s fine to laugh at people who are different than you, especially when they are in the minority and overmatched by the dominant ethnicity. Even when intended benignly, brownface is an offense. Your saying the character is not a stereotype doesn’t make it true.

Some might see it as unfair to impose this sensibility on a small family playhouse, but it seems that Juanito Bandito has been expanding his territory. Davis’s Instagram account promotes recent holiday shows featuring the character playing beyond his home of Garden City, with gigs at the Eccles Theatre in Logan and the Grand Theatre in Salt Lake City. There have also been student performances for elementary schools, indoctrinating children into the harmless good fun of ethnic ridicule at the earliest opportunity.

Sure, some Utahns may mourn the mothballing of an apparently beloved character, but there are those who miss Speedy and Jose as well. Letting go of the past is part of growth and progress, and it seems high time for the Pickleville Playhouse to advance past humor out of the 1960s, especially since such contemporary musical styles as rapping are already part of their performances. After all, if Davis is committed to not offending the Latinx community, in Utah and beyond, he probably doesn’t wan’t to upset the Hispanic community either.

The Stage: Broadway’s longest-runners should be celebrated, but are they limiting new work?

February 2nd, 2018 § 0 comments § permalink

The 30th anniversary of The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)

By celebrating its 30th anniversary on Broadway last week, The Phantom of the Opera marked what now seems a never-ending series of milestones, having run longer than any show in Broadway history.

The seeming permanence of Phantom may mask its achievement, though it has an eight-year lead on the revival of Chicago and nine years on The Lion King. Even if it were to close tomorrow – and that’s not about to happen – it would take the better part of a decade before either of those surpassed it, if they could.

Congratulations are due, of course, to Andrew Lloyd Webber, but also to Richard Stilgoe, Charles Hart, Harold Prince, Gillian Lynne, Cameron Mackintosh and so many others.

There is a certain irony to Phantom’s stupendous run on Broadway, in the West End and around the world – as pointed out in Harold Prince’s autobiography Contradictions, recently revised and expanded as Sense of Occasion.

In the original 1974 book, Prince predicted that no show would ever run as long as Fiddler on the Roof, which he produced. In Sense of Occasion, he allows that he was wrong, with many shows having surpassed Fiddler – A Chorus Line, Rent, Les Misérables, Wicked and the aforementioned productions to name a few.

Last summer, Prince was quick to contradict a question I asked him about whether shows were being engineered for longer runs. He cited the international market for musicals, and for tourism, as the engine behind the longest-running shows.

What was happening wasn’t a creative decision, but rather a product of changing and expanding opportunities. Shows were running longer because ever more people wanted to see them, the new modes of marketing and because there were successive generations of new audiences.

Certainly long-running shows existed before Phantom and its brethren, but they weren’t in theatres as large, they didn’t play in as many cities, and they didn’t necessarily tour as extensively.

In the West End, The Mousetrap has run for longer, but it is a play, not a musical. In Paris, a revival of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano has been running at the tiny Theatre de la Huchette for some 60 years. In the late 1980s, I saw a production of The Three Sisters at Moscow Art Theatre that had been in the repertory since the 1940s. It may yet still be there for all I know. The Fantasticks ran for 42 years Off-Broadway at the Sullivan Street Playhouse.

Coming back to Broadway, the expanding list of long runs is something to marvel at, especially if you are among the fortunate who invested in the shows.

But just as the growing markets, according to Prince, expanded the sense of what a Broadway show could achieve, they have also fundamentally changed Broadway itself. I have heard more than a few people remark that they have been in the Majestic Theatre, home to Phantom, only once – or not at all – in their lifetimes.

That is obviously due to the Majestic having had only one show playing for 30 years; the previous tenant, 42nd Street, ran for six years before that.

I should note that Phantom has been around long enough that I saw it on a discounted student ticket. (Though it opened a while after I graduated from university, the friend who bought the seats was only six months past graduation.)

It is possible to applaud Phantom, Chicago and The Lion King and all of those who have made them possible and bask in their success, but also temper that appreciation with caution.

While only a handful of shows each decade will even approach Phantom’s phenomenal run – Hamilton seems poised to be the latest to join that esteemed pantheon – and maybe some will run for only a decade, the impact has already fundamentally changed Broadway.

With a finite number of theatres, hovering at about 40 despite the openings and closings, these hits end up restricting the opportunities for new Broadway work. It’s great news for theatre owners, but limiting for works that might truly benefit from the awareness and opportunity that Broadway affords as a result of its legacy.

Unlike some countries, where we read about purpose-built theatres for each new extravaganza, Manhattan affords little space for new venues, especially in the theatre district.

The Shubert Organization announced, not so long ago, that it would not pursue a new theatre in the area because the costs were prohibitive. Meanwhile, the new venues coming to Manhattan are performing arts centres, designed to house a variety of work.

Only if works can set up in other cities with populations and tourism that approach those of New York, and only if the media affords comparable attention to that devoted to Broadway, might we see an expansion of large-scale work.

Perhaps Chicago, Boston, Washington DC and Philadelphia, to name but four, could become home to long-term work that doesn’t need to play Broadway to ultimately reach vast audiences.

We must accept that the model has changed, as Prince noted, and so change the opportunities for production accordingly. Even leaving aside significant concerns about pricing and accessibility, Broadway’s own success may be limiting new Broadway-scale work.

In a Teacher’s Declaration, Discouraging Words and A Smidgen of Insight

January 1st, 2018 § 0 comments § permalink

Of the many criteria one might apply when considering what makes a great teacher, I think it’s fair to say that the ability to see and encourage something in a student that they do not yet necessarily see in themselves would rank high on the list. While this is probably not possible for each and every student, nor every teacher, one often hears stories from successful people about a teacher who really helped them along on their journey of education and discovery.

As I contemplate my education, it turns out that the person who did this for me was not in fact a teacher, but the cantor at my synagogue, when I was probably in fifth and sixth grades. His mentorship was not of a religious nature, however, but rather a cultural one. It was he who took me to New Haven’s art museums and talked me through their collections. He also encouraged me to try my hand at writing, some rudimentary plays all adapted, sans rights, from existing sources. He went so far as to loan me his own electric typewriter to facilitate my writing, and it was mine until it was obvious to my parents that I should have one of my own.

I don’t remember any specific lessons the cantor taught me. Rather, he was the first person to see how I responded to the arts, and at an age when I was decidedly awkward and different from the majority of my classmates, he allowed me to feel that my interests were not odd. As is the case with so much in our childhoods, this mentorship may have only amounted to a few outings, but they loom large in memory.

In contrast to this experience, the single most vividly remembered moment of my formal education came once I was in college. It was decidedly not a positive one. It demonstrated how potentially damaging the words of an insensitive teacher might be, though in my case, I largely shrugged it off, transforming it into a story of it defying authority, an anecdote I told and laughed about often.

I often tell people that I have absolutely no educational training in theatre, that all I know I have learned from experience. But there is an asterisk that I always append to that statement. While my university did not have a theatre major, there was a nascent theatre studies minor. While I didn’t pursue that course of study, I opted to take, of all things, a single scenic design course. The teacher was a visiting adjunct from a nearby university with a full theatre program; it was not a deeply practical course, but primarily a conceptual one.

This is where I should admit that I cannot draw. I am unable to translate what I see in my eyes through to my hands to create even a passable visual representation of the thing itself. I neither perceive nor judge space and distance well. When I would doodle during classes that failed to keep my full attention, everything was geometric, ordered, symmetrical. When it came to arts and crafts as a child, the ruler was my favorite tool.

So when, in this college design class, we were asked to sketch out a few ideas, to translate text into a rough setting, I was, I acknowledge, pretty hopeless. I could posit sets of boxes, rectangles and triangles; there were often layers upon layers of steps. Having read about the tricks required to suggest perspective, my ever-present lines and angle might seem to recede towards the horizon.

One day in class, as the teacher reviewed and discussed each student’s work, he came to mine and, perhaps immediately, perhaps after a bit of thought, uttered the phrase I have never forgotten.

“You have no imagination,” he told me.

In the moment, I grew angry. This wasn’t meant to be a practical course but a theoretical one. If I had known I would be judged on my drawing skills, I would have never taken the class. How dare he say such a thing in front of the other students, cutting me down so publicly.

But as it happened, the small class of perhaps eight students was made up entirely of my drama club friends, many of whom I lived with off campus. So I didn’t have to speak up for myself. I remember, in particular, my friend Leslie, who has never suffered fools gladly, putting into words all that I was thinking, with my classmates, my friends murmuring in support of her. I don’t remember how the class ended that day, but neither Leslie nor I suffered from a poor grade at the end of the semester.

For years, literally for decades now, I have retold this story in order to demonstrate what a fool this teacher had been to me, and how my friends rallied to support me no matter the effect it might have on them. I have, at times, told the story with greater detail, so much so that the artistic director of a regional theatre stopped me only partway through the account to correctly guess the name of this educator, indicating that such pronouncements were not out of character.

Now jump forward some 30 years, to 2013, when I bought my first camera in many years, a digital single lens reflex camera, which has become a beloved possession. Unless I am carrying a totebag with my computer and papers for work, my “good camera,” is almost always with me. Thanks to the nonexistent cost of taking digital photos (in contrast to my days of shooting on film), I use it to record my wanderings around New York as well as my more significant travels. I have threaded through countless New York streets capturing architectural details from earlier eras, and repeatedly visited Times Square and Washington Square to capture images of the street life there. I have had the opportunity to do performance photography, a special challenge that marries my love of theatre with the exploration of what I can preserve in the moment. I have even been paid a few times for my photos.

Now, more than 40,000 frames later, I have come to a realization: that professor was not wholly wrong. The timing of his observation could not have been worse, and perhaps it would never be constructive, but he had semi-accurately noticed something about me. But his observation was incomplete.

What I lack is a visual imagination. My thinking is profoundly verbal, whether speaking, writing, or even creating. When I read fiction, I retain all of the particulars of characters and places the author has given me, but I see nothing in my mind’s eye. I form no mental pictures. The words engage me and can be vividly recalled, even recited from memory, but I do not take the imaginative leap to invent the visual.

Yet with photography, I can frame the world before me in what I hope are inventive ways. I can see in the ever changing panorama before me details that might startle, engage or amuse me, and then in turn share that viewpoint with others. I have taken photos of which I’m very proud, but even given a team of craftspeople, I could have never invented such scenes. I am not wired to do so. It is not a flaw. It is part of what makes me, as each of us are, unique.

Some 35 years on, I no longer harbor even a wisp of ill will towards that teacher, though I hope that he learned over time how much damage he could have done to me, and might have done to others. At the same time, I worry that my own ill-chosen words have at times had a similar effect on colleagues or employees, that they remember me for verbal ineptitude or emotional opacity, and that I will never know it so that I might never make amends.

But all I can do to keep trying to express myself as best I can, whether literally or through the frame of a camera and hope that however I capture or even transform the world through my perspective, it will serve to encourage others, instead of summarily shutting them down. There are countless ways to think, to transform, to share and to imagine and we should encourage each person to do so in their own way. Failing to do so reveals only our own limitations, not those of others.

The Stage: Jukebox or box-set musical? It’s time to make the distinction

November 24th, 2017 § 0 comments § permalink

Ethan Slater and company in SpongeBob SquarePants The Musical (Photo by Joan Marcus)

‘Jukebox musical.’ For musical theatre purists, it’s a term of derision. For producers, it’s the promise of marketing the music of a well-known star, with songs that audiences already love and are happy to hear again. For songwriters, it’s a chance to have their work on Broadway, in some cases creating a new earning stream and in other cases even revitalising their careers.

But let’s forego our value judgments and even our commercial appraisals. What about the term itself?

‘Jukebox musical’ has been applied to a range of shows. Mamma Mia! used the songs of Abba in the context of a new story unrelated to the band’s history. Jersey Boys deployed the songs of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons in recounting the group’s own history. Rock of Ages featured an array of 1980s rock songs in an original story set in that era. In retrospect, some now even consider revues to be jukebox musicals, including Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Movin’ Out.

The number and – don’t scoff – variety of these shows reveals that we’ve been collectively using the term too profligately.

After all, jukeboxes initially were designed to hold a wide array of music to be selectively programmed by those with spare change. Their capacity grew when the devices switched from vinyl singles to CD albums. But the underlying result was typically eclectic, with the patrons of diners and bars serving as their own DJs, in the era before that meant mixing and scratching, mingling existing recordings with new beats.

So while the horse has already fled the stable, and the expansive use of the term ‘jukebox musicals’ is likely to stick, it makes the most sense with a show such as Rock of Ages or the new SpongeBob SquarePants musical, opening in just over a week’s time on Broadway. The latter show features a score by, among others, John Legend, Panic! at the Disco, Joe Perry and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, and David Bowie and Brian Eno. Yes, you heard me correctly.

That’s certainly a diverse jukebox but, it should be noted, most of the songs are original to the show (which I haven’t seen yet, as it’s still in previews), not tunes yanked from catalogues. Instead of mining the work of a single composer, the show opted for a variety of musical voices, rather than any singular style, yoked together by orchestrator and arranger Tom Kitt.

Another musical that deserves to be put in the ‘jukebox’ category, without judgment, would include Urban Cowboy, which combined pre-existing country tunes with original songs by Jason Robert Brown and Jeff Blumenkrantz.

So what might best serve as the proper nomenclature for those shows that take deep dives into the work of a singular composer or songwriting team? After all, we are in the age of personal music devices and streaming, where we commune with music one-to-one via headphones as we go about our day, curating our own soundtrack, with no jukebox required. The era of streaming subscription music services even negates the need, and market, for physical albums.

Even if the term is slightly old-fashioned, and I confess unlikely to catch on, I would place Jersey Boys, Mamma Mia!, Lennon, Good Vibrations, Beautiful, Movin’ Out and their kin under the rubric of ‘box-set musicals’, invoking those multi-disc packages that allowed both avid fans and budget-conscious newbies to really explore the work of a single artist or band.

It’s a vastly more accurate term for most of these shows, and even boasts its own – admittedly snarky – theme song, Box Set, from the band Barenaked Ladies. Some sample lyrics from said song:

“I never thought words that like product /  Could ever leave my lips /  But something happened to me somewhere  / That made me lose my grip /  Maybe it’s a lack of inspiration  / That makes me stoop  / Or maybe it’s a lack of remuneration /  I can’t recoup  / But if you want it folks, you got it / It’s all right here in my box set.”

Does theatre have room for distinguishing between jukebox and box-set musicals? I think so. After all, they’re not going away, so we might as well give them their due. And if SpongeBob really hits, its multi-composer approach may prove very popular.

For producers, however, it will become ever harder to come up with new box sets, as all of the best-known catalogues are snapped up, for good or ill. Though, come to think of it, a Barenaked Ladies musical could be lots of fun.

Arts administrator, writer, and advocate.

Arts administrator,
writer, and advocate.