TCG 2012: Two Views, One Source

August 6th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

As some of you may know, I’ve been writing a monthly column for The Stage in London since the beginning of the year; regretfully, it is only available in the print edition so not easily shared stateside or online. For my July column, I had planned to write about the TCG conference held in Boston in late June. Unfortunately, my focus didn’t suit The Stage‘s requirements, despite two efforts that differed in style but were perhaps too alike in content. So, a bit belatedly, I share with you all two versions of my reflections on TCG 2012, which also serves as an insight into an amateur journalist struggling to meet an editor’s requests, and not succeeding. However, there’s no hard feelings, and I’ll be back in the pages of The Stage later this month.

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Version #1: MODELING MOVEMENTS AND CHANGE IN THE AMERICAN THEATRE

Attending the 2012 Theatre Communications Group multi-day conference in Boston felt somewhat like being thrust into an epic mashup of Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges and Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, going from hotel ballroom, to meeting room, to lunch session and then doing it all again, perhaps five cycles altogether. But while the roughly 1,000 attendees, made up of leadership and staff from large and small companies across the U.S., did gather for full conference plenary sessions, the rest of their time was divided among self-chosen breakout sessions and segments where one is segmented by affinity group (be it job title, budget size or particular creative focus). Consequently, every attendee had their own unique experience.

Not being a seasoned conference-goer, and having not attended TCG’s conferences for more than a decade, I was struck by the sheer scale; I remember the days of 400 attendees on a bucolic college campus. There was a barrage of information, opinion and inspiration coming non-stop, all focused on the making of theatre, and far too much from which to choose. For example, there were 53 breakout sessions, of which one could attend only 3.

The conference theme was “Model the Movement,” referring to the resident theatre movement which is roughly 50 years old (TCG itself is exactly 50 years old). Various models arose in discussions, but the breadth of the event rendered it difficult to pursue one theme singlemindedly. The takeaway from such a varied buffet is not sharply defined, although the persistent theme of change permeated the event. As an attendee, what I recall most were key thoughts, each of which might form a worthy topic for its own conference.

  • Opening speaker Howard Shalwitz of Washington DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company questioned the new trend in talking about theatre as storytelling. “I’m not saying that stories aren’t a critical part of what we do in the theatre, but to say they’re the whole thing is a bit like a symphony orchestra saying they play melodies or an art museum saying they show pictures.”  Shalwitz also worried that in an effort to develop an efficient system of producing theatre seasons “that places the entire burden of innovation at the feet of our playwrights.”
  • Marketing guru Seth Godin, observed that “100 years ago, everyone went to the theatre because there was nothing else to do”; spoke to the attendees’ hearts with “You are in the arts because we want you to fail and do it often until you do something that blows our heads off”; and most vividly suggested, “Don’t strive to be heard when you’re there. Work to be missed when you’re not.”
  • Diane Paulus, artistic director Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre and director of Broadway’s Hair and Porgy and Bess, expressed her belief that, “It is a generous act of the audience to come to the theatre and give several hours of their life to you,” while desirous of moving past established patterns because, once, “Theatre was ritual, theatre was pageant, theatre was all different kinds of things. Let’s not limit what we think theatre is.”
  • Kwame Kwei-Armah of Centerstage in Baltimore, speaking of play selection, surprised many by saying, “I don’t have to love it. I have to love that my community will really love it and get something out of it. I’m not here to serve myself.”
  • Clayton Lord, marketing director of Theatre Bay Area and editor of the intrinsic impact study Counting New Beans called for unity with, “We have to instill loyalty to art, not ‘my art’.”
  • Ralph Peña, Artistic Director of New York’s Ma-Yi Theatre, counseled, “Within every organization we have to get leaders to acknowledge their own biases, because if you don’t see anything wrong, you’re not going to change.” He also asked pertinently, regarding diversity, “What art is not ethnic-specific?”
  • Adam Thurman, marketing director of the Court Theatre in Chicago, spoke to the ever-present conference theme of change with, “Discomfort causes everyone to focus and everyone to hear each other…the ability to live in that discomfort creates the progress that this industry is looking for.”
  • On the same panel as Thurman, Suzanne Wilkins of The Partnership Inc. of Boston, spoke of organizations’ need to “tolerate complexity and paradox – the capacity to connect across difference” in efforts to diversify both internally and within their audiences.

Two final observations, distinct from the inspirations that abounded:

  • While most resident theatres produce musicals, that theatrical form was barely mentioned in any session I attended and seemed to not be on anyone’s minds. As evidence, a breakout on a student arts education program, which included on its panel Broadway stalwarts Rebecca Luker and Marc Kudisch (who both sang), drew only 25 attendees. In other circumstances, this would have been packed, but obviously this crowd had other interests.
  • The conference gave ample time to controversial monologist Mike Daisey, whose piece about Apple became a major news story when it was revealed he’d fabricated elements. Daisey presented a two-hour work-in-progress performance of his newest piece (about his life and travels post-scandal) and included him on a plenary panel about “Theatre’s Role in Activism,” where he was confronted from the audience by one marketing director who remains deeply angry at being made complicit in Daisey’s lies. “You didn’t do it,” he said to her in a packed hall, “I did it. You may be stuck with having to react to it. But it’s my fault. It’s my fault. It’s not a communal failing.” In the wake of director Julie Taymor’s appearance at the 2011 TCG conference after she’d been removed from Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, Daisey’s appearance suggests that the TCG conference may not just provide inspiration. It may be the place to go for artistic absolution as well.

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Version #2: DAVID BOWIE AND THE AMERICAN THEATRE

While “Model the Movement” was the stated name for the Theatre Communication Group’s 2012 national conference, it may as well have been “Changes: Turn and Face the Strain” from David Bowie’s early hit song. “Change” was certainly the word on everyone’s lips throughout the course of this gathering of the leadership and staff of many of America’s not-for-profit theatres. Perhaps it is the theme of every professional conference these days, but as I’ve only attended theatre conferences, and few recent ones, the theme of alteration was startlingly prominent.

Held in late June in Boston, the conference itself was an enormous change from what I’d experienced in the past. I hadn’t attended a TCG conference in more than ten years, and my most vivid memories go back more than two decades, when the event was held on a small-town New England college campus and perhaps 400 attendees explored the issues of the day. The 2012 conference brought together some 1,000 participants from theatres large and small in a hotel conference facility and one vast ballroom. While I encountered a number of leaders in the field who I had met over the course of my career, I was struck by how many people I didn’t know at all, a result of some combination of my most recent jobs, the significant expansion of the conference, and the inevitable influx of new talent, both artistic and administrative.

The vastness of the attendance, while to my eyes strikingly inclusive, was apparently not perceived that way by all. During the conference, and in the weeks that followed, various topics of contention arose. In tweets and on blogs, there were charges of elitism, as the cost of the conference had proved prohibitive for some smaller companies; of censorship, as volunteers chafed against being told that they were observers, not participants, and should not ask questions in public forums; and of an artistic-institutional divide, as some took issue with the declaration by Michael Maso of Boston’s Huntington Theatre, upon receiving an award, of his belief in institutional theatre. “Does that make us overstuffed bureaucracies?” asked Maso. “Bullshit!”

But those assorted debates seemed to take on larger life post-conference. In the moment, the event was an almost head-spinning array of non-confrontational challenges to orthodoxy, made essential by shifts in the field as well as the larger society. The opening keynote by Howard Shalwitz, artistic director of Washington DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre, was a saga of self-exploration, of a producer who worried that his theatre had become so skilled in its producing model that it had become an assembly line, leaving too little room for innovation. “It’s not just the stories we tell,” Shalwitz decided, “but why and how we tell them that determines our success.”

The pervasiveness of change was perhaps best demonstrated when, during a period of elective breakout sessions, I split my time between panels on “Hacking the Not-For-Profit Model with For-Profit Methodologies” and “Artistic Decision Making: Weighing the Balance in a Complicated World.” Despite the former panel consisting of for-profit veterans who had just made the shift into not-for-profit at New York’s Public Theater, and the latter comprised of not-for-profit artists including Kwame Kwei-Armah, just completing his first season at Baltimore’s Centerstage, my move from one panel to the other seemed merely a change of location and personnel. I had left a room where new leaders at The Public spoke of the change they hoped to instill, only to enter a room where the necessity of change for survival was under discussion. Was this happening in every break out, I wondered. Were seemingly specific themes being subsumed by an overarching theme of change? I would have had to jog about quickly to attempt to find out: during three time slots with breakout sessions, there were 53 panels from which to choose.

Since transformation is change, the presence of monologist Mike Daisey reiterated the unofficial conference theme. Having experienced a highly public fall from grace after it was revealed that he had invented portions of his piece, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, the conference offered the semi-fallen Daisey both an artistic platform (he previewed a work-in-progress) and an intellectual one (as a panelist discussing “Theatre’s Role in Activism”). In the wake of director Julie Taymor’s appearance at the 2011 TCG conference after she’d been removed from Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, Daisey’s quasi-rehabilitative appearance suggested that the TCG conference may now be the place to go for artistic absolution.

Although I found the conference exhausting, there was something reassuring simply in being part of a vast gathering of professionals who all, ostensibly, are genuinely dedicated to the well-being of theatre outside of the Broadway realm. Given the variety of theatre companies around the country, with different artistic goals and economic means, perhaps it is inevitable that it could not be all things to all people, and if it did not yield a singular model for the regional theatre movement, it certainly reinforced the necessity and inevitability of evolution.

Can One Make Theatrical Penance?

July 31st, 2012 § 2 comments § permalink

“Convicted rapist Mike Tyson starts previews tonight on Broadway,” went the tweet, and there’s no arguing a single one of those words, as they are absolute fact. Since Tyson’s one-man event was announced, his conviction and jail sentence for rape has been prominent in accounts of the 12-performance gig, and surely they’re not being copied from any press release.

When actor James Barbour withdrew from a production of The Rocky Horror Show at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre last summer, the ostensible reason was to, as the Los Angeles Times reported, “deal with issues of his wife’s pregnancy.” But that was viewed by many as suspect, since a public uproar had begun in the days just prior, when the local community learned of Barbour’s charge of sexual misconduct with a child, which was plea bargained to two counts of endangering the welfare of a minor.

Charles S. Dutton served time in prison for various charges, most notably for manslaughter. Yes, the esteemed Dutton killed someone.

Now I am not capable of discussing the moral relativism of these crimes, or the particulars of the cases and their outcomes; I decry them all. I make no excuses for any of them, nor am I personally seeking to rehabilitate or further vilify anyone or their reputations. What strikes me though is how two of these men are, apparently, forever labeled with their crimes, while another would appear to have transcended them. One is embraced in the theatre community, one’s career is surely severely impaired, while the third has now, as a novice, turned to Broadway for the kind of career renaissance that fading movie stars have sometimes sought.

Perhaps a key differentiation is that Dutton’s crimes occurred before he came to theatre, that he found theatre in prison, before he was known. His story only mattered to people once he had wowed audiences in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, committing manslaughter on stage no less; Dutton also had an august mentor in Lloyd Richards. Barbour and Tyson were already known (Tyson was truly famous for sports, not theatre) and their crimes were sexual, which may well be more unforgiveable than murder in the court of public opinion; every week Law and Order: Special Victims Unit reminds us that sexually based offenses are “especially heinous.” Dutton has always expressed remorse over the man who died at his hands; Barbour has tried to move on (although he is required to notify employers); Tyson hasn’t necessarily made the public penance some might desire.

Whatever his show may be, Tyson is in a likely a no-win situation. If he ignores his crime, he will be accused of glossing over that part of his biography; if he rationalizes it or attempts to defend himself, he will refuel the outrage that has never fully settled down; if he makes light of it, he will be condemned.

These different histories are far from identical, which is why I can draw no conclusion in which they are united. Indeed, I can only raise their apparent differences within the uniting realm of stage entertainment. Yet I read countless stories of prison programs in which theatre is a rehabilitative aid, and I marvel at the stories that emerge from such programs, about men finding themselves not necessarily as career artists, but through the therapeutic and emotionally revealing process of theatre. So I wonder about the role that theatre plays, as therapy, as career, as vehicle, as another convicted criminal comes to Broadway tonight. Can people transcend their past through theatre, can they come to terms with it, and will audiences accept them if they do? Or are we always in the jury box, dozens upon dozens of angry men and women all, rendering our own particular verdict on a case by case basis?

Does Criticizing Critics Cross a ‘Times’ Line?

July 16th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

It cannot be easy being a “public critic,” or ombudsman, so I have a certain sympathy for Arthur Brisbane, The Public Editor of The New York Times. Although he is in their employ, he is charged, as I understand it, with acting as the voice of the people at the paper, exploring issues and practices at the paper  independent of the  regular news and editorial staff. The practical, personal, professional and ethical issues are complex, no doubt, and it’s worth noting that the paper’s first Public Editor, Daniel Okrent, has turned to the comparably relaxing world of the professional theatre as an alternative.

But despite this sympathy, I have to say that The Public Editor’s newest work, “The View From The Critic’s Seat,” is a disappointment. While written with Brisbane’s usual clarity, it sets up a premise and then utterly fails to address it, leaving this audience member to wonder whether late cuts muted his commentary or whether he simply wasn’t able or willing to confront head on an issue which he himself had highlighted.

In his first act, running a brief 5.5 column inches, Brisbane relates stories of readers who have expressed their displeasure with the tone of several articles in the arts pages of the Times. Since none of those he cites are a Mr. Richard Feder from Fort Lee, NJ, I have to trust that these are direct quotes from actual readers, not composites or inventions.  The readers expressed reservations about pieces on the singer Jackie Evancho, principal dancers in a performance of “The Nutcracker,” and the late artist LeRoy Neiman. I know little of the work of the first artists’ named; my closest connection to Mr. Neiman was a free Burger King book cover I received sometime in the early 1970s, adorned with Mr. Neiman’s Olympic art. Therefore, my response to the column is not compromised by any personal feelings about those discussed by The Public Editor.

But after setting up the premise that he will address what some readers see as unduly harsh assessments of artists, Mr. Brisbane pivots suddenly, referring to complaints about criticism as “a certain backwash of discomfort,” employing a negative, unappetizing metaphor unilaterally to this particular subgenre of reader correspondence.  He then ceases to utilize his own ostensibly opinionated voice for his disproportionately long Act II, preferring instead to dedicate some 17 column inches to the culture editor Jonathan Landman discussing the scale and challenge of covering all that the Times culture desk endeavors to encompass. And while the scale is almost certainly as wide ranging and logistically complex as Mr. Landman asserts, it has absolutely nothing to do with the issue of opinions which may step beyond an undefined line of propriety and into character assassination.

It’s a shame that The Public Editor didn’t go beyond a single source, since within his own paper he can find evidence of ethical quandaries when it comes to authors personal opinions, what appears in the paper and what is appropriate. Perhaps Mr. Brisbane might have explored Charles Isherwood’s declaration that he no longer wished to review Adam Rapp’s plays, an internal issue given a public airing that allowed Mr. Isherwood the opportunity to once again cast aspersions on the work of an author even as he was saying that he no longer wished to be forced into the position of casting comparable aspersions.

That aside, it is the inexplicable avoidance of the very topic he sets up that proves such a letdown and, as if to exacerbate matters, he tosses in a coda at the end of his encomium to the Times cultural reportage saying that it “should never come at the expense of the subject’s dignity.”  Well, has it, Mr. Brisbane? Has it? Had he spoken to the various subjects of Times criticism, or conversed directly with the letter writers, I suspect they could have given him numerous examples where they feel that line was crossed, so that Mr. Brisbane could have made his own assessment.

The Public Editor’s column can, at his or her discretion, be a monologue; in this instance it was a two character piece adopting the form of an interview. Had Mr. Brisbane chosen to bring in the active voices of others who are affected by this issue, and not simply spoken with Mr. Landman and quoted from letters, he could have provided a compelling picture of the ongoing struggle between arts and critics, newspapers and their public, and perhaps even between a Public Editor and his employer.

Despite his hagiography of the Times culture section, which I also admire, I shall continue to follow The Public Editor’s work with interest, in the hope that he will challenge authority, play devil’s advocate and on occasion ruffle a few feathers. For those of us who care about (and pay for) quality journalism, The Public Editor has the potential to be one of the most valuable voices in journalism, as a check and balance against the reporting of the news itself.

Update, July 16 at 1 pm: Timing, as they say, is everything. Barely two hours after I posted this piece, The New York Times announced that Arthur Brisbane would be succeeded as public editor by Margaret M. Sullivan. While my criticism of yesterday’s column by Brisbane stands, so do my hopes for the role of the Public Editor and, therefore, Ms. Sullivan. I look forward to her tenure, which beings in September. 

Do Revivals Inhibit New Broadway Musicals?

July 10th, 2012 § 3 comments § permalink

Data doesn’t lie, they say, which is why I decided to take a data-based look at Broadway musicals. In the first part of my inquiry, I was trying to see whether musicals based on movies and “jukebox” musicals using scores created for other media were crowding out new, wholly original musicals. My conclusions were essentially that: movie material and even, within reason, existing music, are not scourges of Broadway, but the limited number of new musicals produced in any year pose the greater threat to sustaining the form with original books, music and lyrics. Logically, the next step was to look at revivals and their role in the ecosystem.

The conventional wisdom is that we’re overrun with revivals. Many feel that the musical theatre past is constantly being dredged up on Broadway: three Gypsy revivals in less than 20 years; two Sweeney Todd revivals in the barely 30 years since the show’s debut, with a current London production eyeing New York; three Guys and Dolls in just over a 30 year span. This is the sort of evidence that’s given of Broadway going back to the same musical well over and over. But those are the exceptions, not the rule.

Once again looking at the period from 1975-76 through the 2011-2012 Broadway season, a span of 37 years, I found 138 revivals. This includes return visits by Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly  and Yul Brynner in The King and I (twice each in 20 seasons, with Pearl Bailey and Lou Diamond Phillips toplining third incarnations), though recurring Broadway stands like those of Channing and Brynner  are now rare. My count of 143 also includes the new trend for returning holiday entertainments (for this study, the second runs of How The Grinch Stole Christmas and White Christmas are revivals). But still, that yields only 138 revivals, for an average of only four per season (3.73 to be precise).  And in fact, of those 37 years, only five of them ever saw seasons with more than five revivals, balanced against two seasons with no revival musicals and four with but a single one.

Has there been a huge jump in musical revivals of late? While 2011-12 and 2009-10 each saw seven revivals, the year in between saw only two. The years with seven  are the anomalies, not a trend, at least not yet.  And while there was a marked lull in the mid-80s, revivals were always part of the landscape; in the three earliest years that I examined, the revival count was four, eight, and five. So everything is hunky-dory, right?

In recent years, there’s been a remarkable consistency to the number of new musical productions, be it new work or revival: since 2002-03, there have never been less than 12 new musical productions on Broadway, nor more than 15; the 37-year average is 12.5. What has happened is a seemingly natural homeostasis: in years with lots of new musicals, there have been fewer revivals, and vice versa. While it’s impossible to know which book houses first, new shows or revivals, and surely it varies show to show, year to year, it does demonstrate that the limited number of Broadway venues, narrowed by long-running hits and further reduced by the number of musical-optimal theatres, has created a limit on overall musical production. Chicken (new musicals) or egg (revivals)? I can’t say whether one controls the other. But together, they seem to have found their level. And it doesn’t add up to an enormous amount of new musical productions of either kind.

Since new Broadway musical theatres are unlikely to be built, advocates seeking to raise the level of new musicals above the nine-per-season average might hope that theatre owners would exercise artistic control and favor new works, but that’s a naive position.  Theatre owners will book the shows with the best prospect of running, whatever their vintage. There might also be a desire to lobby producers to focus on new work, but given the ever increasing costs of Broadway, reviving proven work can seem even safer than new shows with familiar titles drawn from films or scores assembled from the work of road tested composers. In either case, the deciding factor will often be money: those who actually assemble a production and manage to assemble the financing as well will book the few available theatres. And as for success? Once again, a key element is whether they are actually done at all well.

Personally, I would not like to see revivals vanish from Broadway and, finding that they rarely exceed four a season (perhaps 10% of an entire Broadway season), think they’re at a level which doesn’t do any damage. Broadway does have the ability to play a single production for a very large audience  and, as a draw for New Yorkers and tourists alike, it seems proper that our musical theatre heritage maintain a place where it first made its mark. My concern is that with an average of only nine new musicals a year, and of course fewer that which succeed, the pool of musicals worthy of being revived is growing awfully slowly – especially since the biggest hits now seem to run for a generation in their first appearance. Since the producing and critical community tend to express the sentiment that we should only see a work revived once in a generation, especially if the prior incarnation was a hit, the options narrow.

I think revivals actually create a greater problem outside of New York for the overall health of the form. Let me explain. In the mid-70s, when my survey starts, musicals were primarily the purview of Broadway, a range of civic light opera companies, summer stock, and the rare regional theatre like Goodspeed (where I once worked). Since that time, the regional theatres that emerged beginning in the 60s as dramatic companies have discovered the lure of the musical, and it is now rare to find the large regional theatre that doesn’t program one musical a year (at least). But I will hazard a guess (I’m not backed by data now) that the tendency is for more of the regional companies to do known commodities than to undertake wholly new shows. In their seasons, the musical slot is the budget balancer, the show that pays for new plays and large classic; new musicals primarily appear when a commercial producer wants a low-cost try-out and dangles enhancement funds as a lure, or when the new tuner is so small in scale that it remains affordable. When it comes to new musicals, are our largest not-for-profit theatres risk averse?

As before, that is not to suggest that there are not worthy organizations dedicated to the development and growth of the new musical repertoire. The question is how much of that material finds ongoing life, and begins to be recognized as a work considered part of the popular musical repertoire?

So to come back to the concern I expressed at the end of my last post: how will new musicals find audiences and how will their creators make lives in this business? If Broadway has but nine slots a year, if not-for-profit companies primarily seek the tried and true, how will new musicals develop creatively and develop a public profile? There needs to be a new model for musical production, one which doesn’t rely solely on Broadway for artistic or commercial success and affirmation. America needs more places to do new musicals, in a variety of styles, in which Broadway is simply one alternative, not the pinnacle from which all success derives. To achieve this would require a major reinvention of the ecosystem I referred to at the top of this post.

But musical revivals are in no way hogging the Broadway spotlight, and as with Shakespeare, each generation’s great performers should get the chance to play great roles. And perhaps those classics should be celebrated, because they can often show the current generation what craft and talent in the form has looked like in the past, in order to inform the future.

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Notes on process: as noted at the end of my first blog on the subject of new Broadway musicals, I am working with information drawn from multiple sources. To reduce inconsistencies, I completely re-charted the seasons, relying solely on the Playbill Vault. As a result, my number of new musicals crept up; what I originally counted as 309 became 322, as I worked through such fine distinctions as “musical vs. play with music” and discovered that a forgotten work such as Censored Scenes from King Kong should have been called a musical.  Consequently, the annual average number of new musicals shifted from a bit over eight to closer to nine, which is why there’s not a precise match with the prior post. I have no doubt that were someone else to undertake this review, or even were I to go over it another time, the counts might shift slightly yet again. But as I said in the notes to the first piece, the ratios and trends remain consistent. And those are what tell the tale.

 

 

 

 

HowlRound: “What’s Wrong With Canadian Plays?”

July 1st, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

I wrote this essay for HowlRound, the online journal of the Theatre Commons, now based at Emerson College. It was posted there on June 30, 2012, unwittingly for all concerned only a day before the national celebration of Canada Day by our northern neighbors. The piece provoked a great deal of comment, and while you can read my original thoughts here, you would benefit from many views other than my own, which can be found in the comments section of the original post.

Canada, land of plays largely unknown to Americans

Quick, name five modern Canadian playwrights (Canadian natives, put your hands down). Can’t do it? OK, name five Canadian plays that aren’t The Drawer Boy or The Drowsy Chaperone. Having trouble? I bet you are.

I’ve probably seen somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 to 2,500 productions in thirty-four years of active theatergoing in the U.S., with occasional trips to England and, yes, Canada. But while I can minimally exceed my own low threshold by citing George F. Walker, Joanna Glass, Michel Tremblay, Morris Panych, Tom Cone and Michael Healy, that’s the sum total of my knowledge of Canadian authors. That puzzles me.

The United States and England may be two countries separated by a common language, but the fact remains that theatrical literature flows fairly freely across the Atlantic, with Irish and the occasional Scottish work thrown in for good measure. If you use theatrical awards as any kind of a yardstick, it’s often hard to tell, based upon nominees and winners in any given year, whether you’re looking at results for The Tonys or The Oliviers. While provincialism may rear its head in certain quarters, there’s no arguing that Miller and Williams are staples of the London stage just as Stoppard and Churchill are revered here—and of course that Shakespeare guy is everywhere, and not just because his works are royalty-free.

But what of Canada? Surely U.S. Customs is not stopping Canadian plays at the border, which seems sufficiently porous to allow U.S. works to make the northbound trek unencumbered. It’s not as if there isn’t a theatrical tradition in Canada (remember that Sir Tyrone Guthrie started the Stratford Festival ten years before founding his eponymously named Minneapolis venture) and thriving theater communities in the major cities of each province. And even if our northern neighbor has mixed English and French heritage, let’s remember that authors as diverse as Samuel Beckett, Marc Camelotti and Yasmina Reza have written their plays in French, all of which have gone on to international success—so language can’t be the barrier.

The love affair between the British and U.S. theater may be rooted in our common heritage, although it’s not as if shows shuttled between the countries constantly since we settled our differences in 1776. But the American stage, which began coming into its own in the early days of the twentieth century, could look to London for a rich, centuries old heritage of authors and actors; a healthy Anglophilia fueled camaraderie. As the glitter of our Broadway evolved the form known as musical comedy, British theatergoers came to love the form as well, beginning a reciprocity that would ultimately expand beyond that particular form. Canada seems to stand outside that mutual admiration society.

It’s not as if Canadian culture has not been embraced by Americans. There are countless Canadian actors who have become big Hollywood box office (some quite venerated, as evidenced by the many awards heaped on Christopher Plummer over the years); Canada’s SCTV and The Kids in the Hall proved as seminal to U.S. comedy and satire as did Saturday Night Live and The Second City; Toronto emerged as a key Broadway tryout town (boosted, no doubt, by a once favorable exchange rate). So where are the plays?

I am taking it on faith that there are a lot of terrific new plays being done in Canada because Canadian theaters’ seasons, based on a cursory survey, aren’t made up solely of imported works. New work is being done and (presumably) people are going to see it. So I first have to ask what’s happening in Canadian literary agencies? Are they aggressively courting the literary offices and artistic directors of American companies—and if they are, is the response welcoming? As for the theater companies themselves, I am used to seeing a barrage of advertising from the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, often in glossy inserts to newspapers and magazines backed by tourism councils. But where are the companies that specialize in new works? Are they the victim, like so many companies that focus on what’s new, of taking a backseat to that which is bigger, higher-volume and already better known? In point of fact, Canada’s greatest cultural export is a commercial enterprise, Cirque du Soleil, the circus behemoth that encircles the globe with its particular style of circus arts. Maybe the clowns are blocking everyone’s view.

The aforementioned festivals, terrific as they are, probably aren’t helping matters much either. They are major tourism attractions with huge audience capacity, and because they are at their height during the summer, they offer the vacation and junket-ready U.S. media the perfect opportunity to take a northerly jaunt to see many plays in a concentrated period of time, fulfilling some unspoken quota of Canadian theater coverage while visiting bucolic towns. But what’s on display there are fine classics by Shakespeare and Shaw and, with increasing frequency, U.S. musicals. The work is Canadian theater, but rarely Canadian literature.

I’m compelled to point out that I’m not lobbying for Canadian plays because I find something wanting in new American plays, and I hastily acknowledge that there are already too few opportunities for new work to be produced here as it is. But there is a cultural lacuna when it comes to Canadian theater that seems perpetual. We owe it to Canadian artists to see beyond our own borders and the theaters of the West End, especially when we can get to major cities in Canada in perhaps one-fifth the time it takes to get to London, and if we’re of a mind to, we can even drive (not an option for London, as you know). To those who say that Canadians have a different sensibility than Americans, I say so do the English, the Irish, the Scots and the French, yet we don’t have any problems there (although some do start quivering the moment any play mentions cricket). And if anything, the Internet should have helped to erode this invisible barrier, since we can now read Canadian theater reviews online at will, rather than trying to hunt down copies of the Globe and Mail at our local, dying newsstand.

For all of our interest in international exchange, in world theater, it is work from other continents that excites the programmers of our own cultural festivals and the centurions of our literary offices. Perhaps proximity breeds indifference, since Canadian work is not familiar enough to us to breed contempt. But I for one would like to know more about what’s going on up there and can’t help but think that at least some of it belongs down here. After all, Canada theater veterans produced the greatest television show about theater ever made, Slings and Arrows, which transcends national boundaries. There must be more.

P.S. Yes, yes, what about Australia, I hear you cry. They speak English too. But that’s half a world away. Let’s look in our own backyard first.

If My Show Closes, It’s Your Fault

June 29th, 2012 § 2 comments § permalink

A famous cover from the early days of The National Lampon — which did in fact sell magazines.

“Unless business improves,” potential audiences were told, “we will have to close.”  Let’s parse that for a moment, this phrase that has popped up in ads and press releases a couple of times lately.

“Unless business improves” means that business is lousy. A honest admission to be sure, but when used in connection with entertainment, it also can say, “No one is coming to our show.” And if no one is going to a show, isn’t that a self-perpetuating situation? After all, who wants to go to a show that no one is going to? There must be something wrong with it, or else people would be going.

“We will have to close” is a statement of simple fact, since in theatre, if no one is going, you can’t generate enough income to sustain the run by at least meeting your weekly operating expenses. This seems rather self evident, given the first half-of the phrase. It’s amazing that news stories actually carry this phrasing straight from the press release, since it’s not news.

Taken together, there’s a somewhat larger meaning, namely that if you (yes, I mean you) don’t do your part, some unnamed ‘we’ will suffer. The unnamed we, if you think about it with a sensitivity to the people who make theatre, can mean that actors, crew and house staff will be unemployed. No one likes putting people out of work. But the we can also refer to the people who make the decision to close, namely the show’s producer(s). Without meaning to imply anything, I suggest that there is probably more sympathy among the public for actors than producers.

But that’s what is being played on – our sympathy, or looked at another way, our guilt. This message says it’s up to us to keep the show in question going, and if the show closes, then its our fault. Now perhaps we already saw the show. Therefore, we’ve done our bit and can’t be reasonably expected to go again just to keep the show alive. Maybe we’ve always been curious to see the show, in which case we either have to get a move on, or come to the realization that we’re just not going to get there. Or maybe we were never interested in the first place, and this sort of please means we can start gloating early.

Guilt, in general, is not a good sales tool in the arts. Being forced to eat broccoli doesn’t make it taste any better, and guilt isn’t going to make us want to see a show we’ve chosen not to see.

There’s a new variant of this. “Final weeks? Book and keep the conversation going.” Again with the guilt. There’s hope, this ploy says, but only if you act now, to co-opt the words of a thousand infomercials. Coupled with an ongoing campaign in which this same show constantly tells us about the celebrities who’ve seen the show, we’re made to feel like we’re losing out and we’re the ones dropping the ball. We’re not cool.

I haven’t named specific shows because they’re hardly the first, although you may well know of the ones that have deployed this maneuver of late. It’s a tactic of longstanding, yet I’ve never even heard an apocryphal story about a show that pulled this particular arrow out of their quiver and provoked a change in fortune. Might they have managed an extra week or two? Perhaps. But I’m unfamiliar with a turnaround. (Yes, Dreamgirls ran for months while advertising “final weeks,” but at some point, that devolved into a claim that no one actually believed. As many know from raising children, threats are only effective if you’re prepared to follow through on them.) This is a tactic of last resort, used when you can’t think of anything new to say or show about your show in order to sustain flagging interest. It’s a creatively bankrupt marketing campaign and death knell all in one.

At this time of year, when Broadway and Off-Broadway shows are closing in the seasonal culling of the herd, most merely announce their final date and hope that those who have yet to attend, or those who wish to attend once again, will be motivated by finality, and do what they’re able to do. The productions march stolidly to their final day, sometimes building sales as the end draws nigh, sometimes finding they’re really already gone. But telling us it’s our fault, that we should, that we’ll miss out? To me, that’s like ordering me to eat my broccoli. And you know what? I never have.

The Stage: “When The Circus Came To Broadway”

June 28th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

Hearing that the circus is coming to town usually evokes idyllic reveries of a parade of animals trouping down Main Street, the Big Top going up, the smell of sawdust and cotton candy. But when the circus in question is the multinational behemoth Cirque du Soleil, and they ditch the Big Top to stand in the reflected glare of Broadway’s lights, the effect on the Great White Way is somewhat chilling.

Cirque’s Zarkana made its debut last summer at Radio City Music Hall, just one avenue away from Mamma Mia! and Wicked. While Cirque had played New York many times over the years, they’d previously pitched their tent, literally, at the outlying Battery Park City or Randall’s Island, or occupied the unloved Theatre at Madison Square Garden with an oddity called Wintuk. But Zarkana changed the playing field, putting up to 54,000 available tickets a week on the market barely outside the Broadway district, accompanied by a marketing campaign commensurate with that capacity and a nearly four month residency.

While it’s impossible to cite any single cause for what anecdotally seemed a down summer in 2011 for shows that were less than smash hits, there was a lot of murmuring about the Cirque effect. That murmur approached a grumble when tickets were made available at TKTS, the Times Square half-price booth, vying for customers using the exact same tool as Broadway shows with available seats.

On the one hand, the presence of tickets at TKTS suggested that Zarkana was less than a smash. But it also meant that when tourists were seeking entertainment options, the widely marketed brand of Cirque was competing with shows that may have only had a couple of months to begin establishing themselves in the public consciousness. If a family was choosing between a new musical unannointed by the Tonys or the pinnacle of modern circus arts, the choice wasn’t necessarily hard. And the scale was daunting: with more than 5400 seats per performance and as many as ten shows a week, the ticket inventory in midtown Manhattan was expanded considerably; all of Broadway – if every theatre has a show on concurrently, which is rare – has just under 400,000 seats to sell each week.

The plan, it was generally known, was for Zarkana to return annually for five summers. As it turns out, Zarkana must have truly underperformed, because this year is already being advertised as the last chance to catch the show in NYC, the run was dropped from 152 to 121 performances, in June the balcony isn’t even being put on sale, the show has been trimmed from two acts to a 90 minute one-act, and more. While hardly the debacle that Cirque’s previous original Manhattan show, Banana Shpeel, had been (it was radically altered with little success during a protracted preview period at The Beacon Theatre), Zarkana is certainly one of the Montreal company’s rare misfires (although they’re hoping its fortunes will change in Las Vegas, its next home). No doubt this is a relief to Broadway producers, who are more than ready to wave goodbye to the clowns and acrobats that, for their money, can’t depart fast enough.  But Cirque may not give up: thwarted in their effort at a permanent home on 42nd Street a few years back, they may not be ready to admit defeat in establishing, if not a year-round beachhead, at least a perennial success in such a prominent international destination.

It does raise the question of what happens to the cavernous yet elegant Radio City Music Hall now. Its management has been after a sit-down summer attraction for some time (35 years ago, they produced their own summer spectaculars, running some 150 performances as well). So do they have a back-up plan of their own– or might Cirque rotate in another show from its menu of productions? Is it possible that Radio City will return to a summer of one and two night concert stands, including the return of The Tony Awards, which were displaced in favor of a months-long booking? We know that while nature abhors a vacuum, the owner of an entertainment venue hates empty seats or an empty hall even more. Broadway may have dodged long-term Zarkana damage, but perhaps something equally threatening, or even more so, is waiting in the wings.

Narrow Chances for New Broadway Musicals

June 28th, 2012 § 9 comments § permalink

To begin, an exercise. Below you’ll see four groups of shows, labeled A through D. Groups A and B have a common factor, as do groups C and D. Take a moment to see whether you spot the common ground. Now imagine the Jeopardy theme playing.

Group A: Grey Gardens, Hairspray, Once, Passion, The Producers, Nine, The Light in the Piazza

Group B: Sweet Smell of Success, Big, Nick and Nora, Carrie, The Red Shoes, Footloose

Group C: Once, Jersey Boys, Movin’ Out, Contact, Fosse, Crazy for You, Ain’t Misbehavin’

Group D: Good Vibrations, Never Gonna Dance, Saturday Night Fever, Swinging on a Star, Buddy, The Look of Love

Did you get it? A and B are both lists of musicals based on movies, groups C and D are lists of musicals which came to Broadway with scores that had originally been written for other media.

If you are a fan of Broadway musicals, odds are you’d be quick to declare your affinity, or at least respect, for the shows in Groups A and C, while I imagine you’re unlikely to come out with passionate statements about the artistry of the shows in Groups B and D. Although not shown above, I also suspect that my Group E would meet with general favor – Next to Normal, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Urinetown, Book of Mormon, In The Heights – namely, the supposedly extinct, wholly original musical.

Why am I playing this parlor game? It’s because I hear certain assumptions about musicals, and particularly Broadway musicals, all the time and they tend to be generalizations, based on recent and often selective memory. So I set out to look at whether Broadway is being overrun by musicals based on movies, or jukebox musicals, thinking I’d look at the past 10 or 15 years, but that turned into 20, then 25, and finally I ended up studying all of the new musicals to play Broadway since the 1975-76 season.

Why 75-76? Because just as Oklahoma! was seen as a watershed in the development of musical theatre, I feel I can argue that the next (and to date, perhaps only other) watershed musical was A Chorus Line. While a look all the way back to the season of Oklahoma! might be edifying, both Broadway and society in general have changed radically in that time; without undertaking a master’s thesis (or without an intern to wrangle data for me), this more modern era seemed manageable.

To get right to the first headline: yes, there are more musicals based on movies than there used to be; there were four this year and five last year. The year A Chorus Line debuted, there wasn’t a single movie-based musical, so that might send you running to proclaim how great things used to be. In fact, you’d be further buoyed when I told you that season saw musicals based on classic Greek literature, Shakespeare and U.S. and world history. But I’d deflate you when I told you those shows were the major flops Home Sweet Homer, Rockabye Hamlet, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Rex. A pedigreed source isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.

What we did see more of back in the 70s were musicals based on books or plays which had also been made into movies, although the source cited for the musical was usually the original material; some examples of this are Chicago (a play, later the film Roxie Hart),  The Grand Tour (the play Jacobowsky and the Colonel, later the Danny Kaye film Me and the Colonel), and Sarava (the book and film Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands).  But what’s worth noting as well is that these weren’t books or films which were hugely well known and, in those pre-VCR days, they weren’t easily found either.  For audiences and critics alike, they may have felt fairly new overall, successful source or not.

Though most think it of as a recent phenomenon, the jukebox musical was also already prevalent. Existing musical materials were frequently drafted into Broadway duty, although the early tendency was to do so in the form of a revue (Ain’t Misbehavin’, Eubie); in 79-80, a Cole Porter score was grafted (albeit unsuccessfully) onto Philip Barry’s Holiday as Happy New Year. In this era, perhaps the first major book-based jukebox musical was My One and Only, a troubled production that came out on top with a Gershwin score, following efforts by young avant-gardist Peter Sellars to crossbreed the songs with a Gorky play.

Sources in the 80s ranged from novels to comic books to plays to original stories to U.S. history, and movie-based musicals typically had literary antecedents, such as La Cage aux Folles and Carrie. The first shows I spotted in my sample that were based on original screenplays were from the 78-79 season: King of Hearts and Ballroom, the latter from a TV movie (although musical from movies certainly predated that; Promises Promises, from Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, is merely one prior example).  Because films may also have their own source material, it’s sometimes hard to tease out when the movie in musical pattern really took hold (or if it was in fact something new), but the mid 90s seem to be a point at which they became more persistently present.

Yet now I’ll venture my first strong opinion on this, which is that, as Group A up at the top reveals, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with musicals based on movies. When it is done with enough craft, with care and talent, no one begrudges a show its origins, although there is a tendency to now judge the source even before the show is produced. It would also appear that, in many cases, the more successful examples of this genre are shows drawn from lesser-known films; the rush to translate recent hit films hasn’t necessarily meant greater box office success. Barreling ahead, I’ll say that while I think we need original scores lest the craft of musical theatre songwriting be lost, there have been terrifically entertaining and creative shows based on music cobbled together from other sources, whether it be earlier musicals, pop radio or a songwriter’s catalogue. Again, the only question is whether it’s done artfully.

My rather wide spreadsheet built for this overview ended up showing me some things I did not expect, which play into our perception of Broadway being “overrun” with jukebox musicals and musicals based on movies. By looking at Broadway seasons, shorn of all plays (new and classic), concert bookings (which used to be quite frequent) and revivals, an interesting picture of new musicals in the post-Chorus Line age emerges. A rather small picture.

Based on my research, there were 322 new musicals on Broadway in the past 37 years – which works out to an average of nearly nine a year. That is a startlingly small number when you consider that musical theatre is considered to be one of the major art forms that is innately American, and Broadway, whether we like it or not, remains the prime showcase for that work and the engine for its economic success.  Yes, my time period covered the dark days of the eighties and early 90s, when Times Square was supposedly at its lowest. That didn’t keep critical and popular successes from arriving: A Chorus Line, Sweeney Todd, Dreamgirls, Big River, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, The Secret Garden, Tommy and more. What was happening was that fewer new shows were opening – coming off an already small number.

We’re not talking about a vast gap; in the late 70s, an average of 12 new shows opened each season, as already mentioned, the 37-year average is 9 (8.7 exactly). There were some truly dark years, but they’re not so long ago: 94-95 (2 new musicals), 2000-01 (five) and 01-02 (six).  As the number of new shows dropped, the scales tipped even more disproportionately to movie-based and jukebox musicals. But there’s no clear pattern which demonstrates these type of shows having usurped or corrupted Broadway; without them, the number of musicals might be even lower. There simply aren’t other musicals being produced to fill out the roster.

It is true that without celebrities, and there are few bankable musical stars these days, producers are looking for titles or music with built in marketing pull, because when you’re raising $10 or $12 million for one show, you’re looking to mitigate risk. That said, look at my B and D lists and you know that there’s no sure thing. Yet that doesn’t stop people from trying to maximize potential, and that same rationale speaks to the affinity for revivals as well (although I’ve not studied whether there’s been a commensurate increase in musical revivals to balance out the loss of new shows). I will note that Broadway did once seem even more musical, as the 70s and 80s saw a plethora of short-run concerts, with a roster of performers that resembled those of Vegas showrooms, including Engelbert Humperdinck, Bing Crosby, Shirley Bassey, Peter Allen, and Patti LaBelle, as well as the occasional dance company, ice show (!) and three editions of Oba Oba.

The success of the major long-running shows, ushered in by A Chorus Line, has also served to hold down the potential for new musicals on Broadway, marketing and financing aside. With shows settling in for 10, 15, 20 year runs, there simply aren’t enough of the big musical houses available, and so fewer shows get on. There are only 40 Broadway theatres, and many are too small to sensibly house a musical. The Broadway musical is a victim of its present day success and a finite amount of space.

Although I can now speak only anecdotally, I daresay there are more people than ever studying and writing new musicals. In contrast to the golden age of the 40s and 50s, when the skill of writing musicals was learned on the job or through mentorships, we now have undergraduate and graduate programs in musical theatre; the regional theatre network, founded primarily to mount plays, has discovered the artistic and economic appeal of musicals; and there are countless developmental opportunities under a variety of auspices. Yet with rare exceptions, truly successful musicals are made on Broadway, the opportunities there have diminished, and every hit new musical suppresses the potential for other shows for years at a time. The musical development complex runs counterintuitively to the chances for major production.

Musicals made from movies will not kill the American musical, as they only succeed when they’re done well. Jukebox musicals will not eliminate new musical scores, because only the shrewdest interpolations yield a successful show. What will keep the American musical at low ebb is: a) a risk-averse mindset among some producers that opts for the familiar over the unknown, despite the great success in the recent past of wholly original work, b) the almost single-minded focus on Broadway as the locus of all musical success when it is only the most lucrative market for musicals; c) the inability of Broadway to provide sufficient berths for a higher number of new musicals annually; and d) the perpetual generation of more and more musical writers into a field that can encourage many of them, but sustain few.  We need new avenues for the success of musicals that don’t require passing through Times Square and we need to eradicate the notion of Broadway and New York as the sole arbiter of a musical’s success. There are organizations attempting to do this, but the iconic nature of Broadway and its potentially considerable rewards still dominate.

The problem, however, is not Broadway; Broadway is an expensive and risky though potent option. The problem is that we have made Broadway the only hope. But we can’t. The numbers don’t lie: 8.5 new musicals a year, and fewer of those that run, is not enough to be the flagship for and to sustain an entire field of creative endeavor.

*    *    *    *

Notes on process: Counts were based on information from Theatre World and Playbill Vault, both invaluable, but not completely consistent on records and which theatres were indeed Broadway houses, especially in the early years covered. Whenever possible, I erred on the side of inclusion, but someone else might count slightly differently depending upon their methodology and judgment.  I considered new musicals to be newly constructed shows, using both new and existing scores, which could reasonably considered to be musical theatre; song revues like Ain’t Misbehavin’ or Swing I considered new musicals, while something like Tango Argentino or solo concerts, even when by impeccable artists such as Barbara Cook, were ruled out. I did not follow the Tony designations for “special theatrical events” during the decade that award existed, but judged each show on its own merits consistent with what I said previously. I would be the first to say don’t take my 309 count as written-in-stone gospel, but I’m confident that the trends and averages will hold up to scrutiny.

Update July 10: In preparing a follow-up to this piece, I re-reviewed the seasons in question using only the Playbill Vault for consistency’s sake. The post as it now appears reflects adjustments in numbers based upon that re-review, which reflect marginal changes which but do, as expected, maintain the ratios as originally determined.

Another Fornicating Play

June 14th, 2012 § 5 comments § permalink

Anton Chekhov

George Carlin

You needn’t be an English major to recognize that one of the words in my title is out of place. The second word is a verb, therefore unless theatrical texts have become anthropomorphized and begun getting it on with each other, the word is inappropriately used. You likely recognize that the word “fornicating” is a substitution for a common vulgarity, for which it is technically a synonym. Said vulgarity is fairly all-purpose, and is often used as a negative adjective. You will therefore accuse me of bowdlerizing my speech, perhaps to avoid offending some perceived notion of community or even professional standards. You would not be wrong. However, for the remainder of this post, I will abandon all euphemisms and employ, as appropriate, language from which I have heretofore abstained from in my internet and social media discourse. You are thusly warned. Those of delicate sensibilities may excuse themselves.

So…

This morning, Playbill wrote about Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company’s 2012-13 season of five plays, one of which is a world premiere adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, by Aaron Posner, evocatively titled Stupid Fucking Bird. I know nothing about this particular version, but the title gives me the sense that it will perhaps be updated, and use a more colloquial patois than that usually associated with the master dramatist. Certainly anyone making a decision about whether to see the show will be unable to claim, should the language of the script echo that of the title, that they were caught unawares.

Of course, that decision-making may be impaired by media coverage announcing, featuring or reviewing that play because, in all likelihood, a number of media outlets will refrain from ever using the actual title. Some may drop the second word entirely, others may opt to print only “F——,” as if they’re fooling anyone. The theatre will face challenges in advertising the play, resorting to their own euphemisms if they desire to promote the work in compliance with the standards and practices of print and electronic media. On the other hand, they’ll likely get other coverage precisely because of this conundrum, though it will likely speak more of Carlin (George) and less of Chekhov (Anton).

This is hardly the first title to break the profanity barrier. English playwright Mark Ravenhill confronted us with Shopping and Fucking a number of years ago; Stephen Adly Guirgis confounded copy editors everywhere with The Motherfucker with the Hat just a couple of seasons back on Broadway. Dashes and asterisks got a workout with each of them, as did an entire range of smirks and jokes from on-air personalities. In some cases, advertising campaigns were altered midstream in a capitulation to public mores.

So-called profanity isn’t the only category of language that creates challenges for theatres and for those that cover it. The website address “cockfightplay.com” takes you to the current Off-Broadway hit Cock, since the title alone would apparently evoke undesirable connotations for some, the presence of a rooster silhouette notwithstanding. A number of years ago, a play by the late African-American writer John Henry Redwood, No Niggers, No Jews, No Dogs, caused an uproar for the Philadelphia Theatre Company, which premiered it. We may be a country founded on free speech, but our ongoing inability to define pornography and obscenity creates a grey area; inflammatory words employed knowingly for artistic and cultural reasons are verboten.

Now I’m not advocating that every play (or musical) should begin using (and advertising) titles that may run afoul of prevailing sensibilities. But I’m also not one to deny any artist the right to express themselves as they see fit, although they should be aware of the possible consequences that may befall them and their work, no matter how much a producer or theatre company may seek to support them.  We’ve seen the phenomenon of ever more outrageous titles and topics being deployed in fringe festivals, but in that case it’s to help stand out from a mass of work and attract attention for brief runs in small venues. I don’t think Ravenhill, Posner, Redwood, or Cock’s Mike Bartlett were naïve in their title choices, they may have wished to shock, but I sort of doubt that marketing was their primary motivation.

Last night, on basic cable, the reboot of Dallas deployed “asshole” as an epithet, and I feel certain that I’ve heard it on various cop shows over the years. While Cock cannot be a title, “vagina” has become a ready punchline on network comedies, as has “penis”; perhaps it is the slang which makes it dirty? South Park, famously, had its characters say “shit” some 175 times in a single episode. I’m not talking about premium channels here; I’m talking about basic cable and broadcast. Frankly, often tuning in for The Daily Show a few minutes early every night, I can’t even believe some of what’s said on Comedy Central’s scripted series.

If we are not quite at a double standard, we are on a collision course when broadly accessible entertainment can be, to use a quaint old term, potty-mouthed, while the relatively narrow field of the arts are precluded from using the names they deem appropriate. Apparently, many fear unsuspecting 6-year-olds will stumble upon a newly profane New York Times Arts section, provoking uncomfortable conversations.  Once upon a time, theatre was allowed greater latitude than movies and TV in what could be said or portrayed; the tables are now almost completely turned. Surely if children can be warned nightly about the dangers of a four-hour erection, “shocking” titles for plays aren’t going to do much harm.

 

There’s No Place Like Home

June 11th, 2012 § 3 comments § permalink

The lesson of our journey, the moral of our story.

Just as Clybourne Park (premiered at Playwrights Horizons) and Once (workshopped at American Reportory Theatre, premiered by New York Theatre Workshop), with victories at The Tony Awards, prominently reaffirmed how central this country’s not-for-profit theatres are to new theatrical work, we learned that The Goodman Theatre’s production of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh  (not a new work) will not be brought to New York by producer Scott Rudin (though others may yet step in). Just as I confess to being pleased about the first two works being anointed last night, I also confess that I am not disappointed by the prospect of Iceman remaining a Chicago phenomenon (even though those involved in the production may be).

Now perhaps it’s easy for me to say that about Iceman because I went to Chicago to see it, and therefore its potential inability to transfer doesn’t leave me out in the cold. But I wouldn’t mind it being seen only in Chicago because it further reinforces the notion that superb theatre exists around this country and that a transfer to New York should in no way be the sole arbiter of artistic success.

Despite protestations to the contrary, America does have a national theatre. We simply don’t restrict it to the work of a single company. America’s national theatre exists across the country and a centralized company or facility would, by necessity, be insufficient. Unlike Europe, where the dimensions of the major countries are simply smaller than the U.S., and therefore it is possible to have a National Theatre that is theoretically available to all, any such venue here would be inaccessible to most of the population. Iceman is a production of America’s national theatre, as was the other show I saw on my jaunt, Timon of Athens at Chicago Shakespeare.

The Iceman phenomenon put me in mind of Hartford Stage’s Peer Gynt in the late 80s, for which I was the publicist. This was a rare full-length Gynt, in a new translation that retained Ibsen’s rhyming verse; it ran six hours in two parts and while the audience was wary at first, it became a smash, running eight weeks (the longest run at that theatre before that time and, I believe, ever since). There was talk of a New York transfer, with particular interest from then-prolific producer Roger Stevens, but it was not to be. Yet despite lasting only eight weeks in Hartford, without New York imprimatur, it is a show still spoken of in artistic and audience circles. I continue to meet people who tell me of their travels to see it, and its enormous impact on them. It too was a beacon of America’s national theatre.

What if Jordan Roth had not rescued Clybourne Park when the Broadway production faltered? Would New Yorkers have been deprived, since only a relative few had been able to see it at Playwrights Horizons? Yes. But would America have been deprived? No, because the play had already been seen at numerous regional theatres and had begun international production. Our national theatre had embraced it.

I could cite example after example. But the juxtaposition of the Tonys and the recent news about Iceman (which, again, is hardly the last word on the topic) prompts me to proclaim my own credo about theatre in America and about my theatre going: there is great theatre everywhere in this country and countless opportunities to see it. We may not always gather in vast numbers in stadiums or arenas for our entertainment, but we gather constantly for our theatre.  We gather on Broadway, in storefronts, in resident theatres and in school auditoriums. No one can see all of it; we will always be disappointed in that which we can’t see, but only in the very smallest of communities, only from economic limitations or distress, might we have to go entirely without.

Yes, despite living in one of the world’s theatre capitals, I am driven to seek work in other cities (a topic I hope to explore in greater length one day soon); I am the exception. As we heard as children, at the end of a beloved film, sometimes what we’re looking for is right in our own backyard. We only need to appreciate it for what it is and know that while there may be magic and grandeur elsewhere, there’s plenty to satisfy us in America’s national theatre, which is located wherever you live.

 

 

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