Playgoer Lives!

Well that was some "hiatus," wasn't it?  Where were we...

For the few of you that might still be tuning in, welcome back! Sorry for the prolonged, um, "intermission." My excuse is simply lack of time, mainly. I finally completed my PhD in the fall--at the CUNY Graduate Center Theatre Program--and went right into a busy semester of adjunct teaching. (For the academically uninitiated, for "adjunct" think "freelance.") So the good news is, I'm finally--as my mother always wished-- "a doctor"!  The, as of yet, less manifestly good news is that I'm now "on the market" seeking full time academic employment as a professor. So please excuse the blatant plea, but if you're in academia and your department is hiring, and you're a fan of this blog, tell them to hire Dr. Playgoer!

While I'm groveling, I also want to put out there that Playgoer is looking for any other kinds of new "revenue streams." That includes being more available for hire, personally, for writing/reviewing. And if anyone has offers or suggestions of what to do with the blog to "monetize" it more, please share! That includes advertising; for a long time I have sold a small amount of ad space (simple text links), so if you or your company is interested. (You can also still purchase ads via "Blogads" in the upper right margin.)

As before, I can be reached at playgoer_at_gmail, with any tips, offers, or inquiries.

Indeed, the increasing economic challenges of both freelancing and running a blog (not to mention during a Depression!) have taken their toll on me as well. Chloe Veltman testified to this eloquently a few months back. (Her argument, basically: freelance theatre writing has ceased to be a sustainable self-supporting profession, even of the most minimal kind.) And when I look around the Blogosphere as a whole, I see a similar cresting, perhaps, after a wave of volunteer bloggers in the 2000's subsidized the whole discourse. More and more onetime independent blogs are either folding or, with luck, being acquired. (Hey, anyone wanna buy a theatre blog?)

I admit thinking long and hard about whether to resume The Playgoer at all. It's definitely become much harder for me than it used to be to stay online all day and keep up with everything going on in theatre. And I've completely lost touch with whatever remains of what we used to call "the theatresphere"--the coterie of other theatre bloggers upon whom I once relied to generate the kind of conversations that fueled this whole endeavor. But is there even a theatre blogosphere any more? I'm heartened to see many of the old-timers are still posting. But I haven't even begun to be able to catch up with what they're doing lately.

My sense is that, with the new mobile technologies, a lot of theatre-blogging-type activity has migrated to Twitter and other bite-size platforms. Debates that used to go on for days between different blog sites in long posts now transpire over a few hours between several theatre folk at once in 140 characters or less. Does anyone have time any more to actually sit down and read a blog? Can a classic 1200-word blog-rant survive the attention span we give to our handhelds?

Well I've decided to stop worrying about such questions and go ahead and do what I can right here on this little piece of web real estate I have. So, for now, this will become a kind of Playgoer "Weekend Edition"--which will be devoted mostly to reviews.My primary objective right now is just to get back into writing about theatre, and that's the easiest way to start. So if you want to keep following, expect a single post each weekend (possibly Friday, possibly Sunday) discussing one or more current or recent New York productions. (Or out of town shows, if I've been traveling.)  I also aim to step up my Twittering, to supplement the more long-form writing here with quicker links and comments on theatre news and gossip.

Playgoer Weekend Edition begins this weekend with my shortly forthcoming writeup of the current Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. [Now posted, see below.] Which, as anyone who's seen it can attest, is just irresistible to write about for so many reasons!

Meanwhile, for now, I'll just say welcome back and I hope you'll find some virtual space for Playgoer in your busier-than-ever online reading habits. (Links to new posts will go out on Twitter and Facebook, in addition to the usual RSS feeds.) The landscape of The Theatresphere has changed and I look forward to you and I discovering--or REdiscovering--it together.

REVIEW: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

If only the current Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof featured something as jarring and surprising as a "Ghost Skipper" floating in and out of the background. Despite the understandable ridicule of that eventually discarded idea (which was cut by the time I saw a press performance), I might not have minded such a choice were it part of a bold, expressionistic dream-like reinvention of the play. But director Rob Ashford ends up serving up something much duller--a rudderless stumble-through of a long and flawed play where souped-up visuals try to substitute for drama.

Sara Krulwich, for The New York Times

I suppose I should start with the element that has made this production happen at all--the misguided star casting of Scarlett Johansson as "Maggie The Cat." I say misguided not because Johansson lacks talent or even stage chops. As she proved in her debut in A View from the Bridge, unlike other movie star Broadway novices, Johansson has a natural presence and energy on stage. (Only her voice--no doubt exhausted from delivering her long opening monologue eight times a week--gives away a lack of training. When little Scarlett starts sounding like Kathleen Turner with laryngitis, you know something ain't right.) Scarlett Johansson is not what's wrong with this Cat. If anything, it works against the show that this "star" character is basically only prominent on stage at the very beginning and very end! (That's certainly going to backfire with fans buying tix only to see her...)


No, what's wrong is that you have talented, able actors who are at sea in a script that certainly does not "direct itself." Ashford has put a lot of care into the setting and ambiance. (More on the many dubious "atmospherics" later.) But one doesn't get the sense of much insightful scene coaching in rehearsal.

That opening monologue of Maggie's, for instance, is quite a challenging aria and puts a lot of pressure on the actress to ground everyone in the play. But poor Scarlett seems to have gotten little advice other than "louder, faster, funnier." Even the more seasoned actors suffer from a clear unease and lack of direction. While everyone else in the audience that night seemed there either for our young starlet or seeing "Bloody, Bloody" Benjamin Walker in a towel, I was most looking forward to veteran Irish thesp Ciarán Hinds as Big Daddy. Anyone familiar with Hinds' stage and screen roles as gangsters and even the Devil himself (in MacPherson's The Seafarer) would expect the ultimate menacing patriarch. Instead, with that wan, weather-beaten face buried under bushy grandaddy whiskers and a Yosemite Sam accent, he's completely de-fanged. And just as Johansson seems completely on her own through her long Act One, Hinds and Walker spend their big Act Two confrontation dully sitting around and talking with occasional random bouts of wrestling.

As for Walker, the very fact I find little to say about him is revealing enough. True, Brick is an awfully hard part--more reactive than active, forced to listen more than talk. But whatever punk rock presence he brought to Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson is sorely missing. Like his lean, tall, but frankly unimposing and somewhat delicate bare physique on constant display, Walker conveys little energy, strength or purpose on stage. But again--he doesn't seem to have received much direction other than "keep your shirt off." (And, perhaps conversely: "keep your towel from dropping.")

Ashford--formerly known for direction and choreography of hit musicals--began making a more dramatic name for himself in London, where his "Streetcar" (with Rachel Weisz) was a recent hit at the Donmar. But while the British rightly celebrate Williams, I've noticed they seem to like their Tennessee with a heavy dollop of "Southern Gothic" exoticism. So based on this Cat, I can see why they may have liked about Ashford's style. Here, Brick's little upstairs bedroom becomes a veritable grand ballroom--with a chandelier and several balcony windows encircling his regal bed. The airiness of it all (gossamer walls and high ceilings) is certainly pretty. But it makes it awfully hard to feel sorry for the guy. Or to believe this is a real house, for that matter.

And far more questionable, to my mind, than any visions of Brick's dead admirer is the added presence Ashford gives to the scripted characters of the African American household servants. I'm referring to their singing of black spirituals (!) during the Act Three climax. Now, even though the play is set nearly a hundred years after the Civil War, if one wants to paint Big Daddy as a plantation owner and his estate as some throwback to Dixie and Tara, I'm game if it's meant to add to the feeling of corruption and moral decay in the family. But these slaves servants sure are one happy bunch of Singing Negroes! The elder female maid is seen genuinely caring as she eavesdrops on one of Big Mama's concerned phone calls. And the men smile when they are ordered about by Big Daddy. Perhaps this is Ashford's way of trying to justify these characters and flesh them out.  But wouldn't it be more humanizing to show the truth of their situation--that they are there merely because it is their job?

Now that the (mostly negative) reviews are in (StageGrade average: C-!), it will be interesting to see how the show fares at the box office.  (The production is, after all, a purely commercial enterprise.) Playbill shows the house last week was at 83.5% capacity--not bad for a nonmusical play (oh wait, this is a musical!), but not the 99% I'm sure the producers expected Scarlett Johannson to draw. If what they wanted was a vehicle for her, maybe they should have avoided a three-act, two-intermission(!), talky script, where she's not even on stage half the time.

And I left really thinking the play is not even among Williams' top works. Nothing much happens, Brick is a cypher, and who outside of the family would care about Big Daddy's inheritance anyway? The play lives or dies, therefore, on the dynamism of the acting. And the acting in a meandering, plotless script like this depends more than usual on the directing.

Here's a directorial suggestion, by the way: Cat is basically one long continuous one-act, isn't it, unfolding more or less in real time in that one bedroom. So how about a site-specific, intermissionless staging in an actual upstairs room of a mansion, where the audience is stuck in that room with bedridden Brick, with the cast of eccentric characters popping in and out.

Such speculation, at least, diverted me for much of the performance at the Richard Rodgers Theatre...

Playgoer on Hiatus

As has been apparent since the Tony Awards, The Playgoer has been taking the summer off. But I do indeed intend to resume blogging during the fall in some form. What does that mean? Shifting to weekly? Migrating to Twitter? Tune in next month and see...

Tony Blogcast 2012

For Twitter followers: additional Tony observations were tweeted at: @theplaygoer

11:10 Once for Best Musical. What can I say. I didn't see it coming. And I'm glad they didn't follow my advice to fold. But the reason I was skeptical about their B'way prospects was that I've seen way too many "small" and good shows die on Broadway in pursuit of some antiquated retro dream of a Broadway that is no more. But, hey, they made it work! How did they do that? A subject worthy of further reporting... Meanwhile, Parker & Stone presenting Best Musical? Craven plea for audience? Yes. But brilliant nonetheless. And why? Because the big question hovering over Broadway this year--from Book of Mormon to Smash--is: can Broadway take back its place in truly "Popular Culture"--the realm from which it came.  More to come....Good night!

10:55 The anointing of Nina Arianda! Look, she's great. But Venus in Fur? As a play? Crap, no? (Also, love how CBS announcer pronounced her character's name as "VAnda" ('a' as in "Mandy")... Audra is indeed fantastic in Porgy. Pretty much the reason to see it.....Ad-Buy Watch: the new Woody film (there's your demographic indicator)

10:48 Re: James Corden's Best Actor Tony: 1) Yes, PS Hoffman was clearly pissed. I liked him very much in Salesman. But now I realize... did he do this for the Tony? 2) Corden is fabulous. And he embodies how, at its best, 1Man/2Guvs wonderfully displays the inherent porousness of stage comedy. (i.e. actors/audience interaction). But, look, this award (and 2Guvs' B'way success) was Anglophilia all the way

10:40 Upset for Steve Kazee, another harbinger of Once's big night. Big upset. The anointing of Jeremy Jordan will have to wait....Add to CBS-unworthy list: Michael Kahn's Regional Theatre Tony for his Shakespeare DC Theatre...And yet Hugh Jackman's Special "Humanitarian" Tony gets primetime, replete with clips from Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway! And presented to him by... Mrs. Hugh Jackman. Why? To prove to Middle America that there is a Mrs. Hugh Jackman...

10:30 Tony Low Point: A musical number Live from a Cruise Ship! Ok, admittedly, those cruise ships do employ, at any given moment, probably 50% of AEA musical performers* (And Ish tweets that Royal Caribbean has bought mucho ad time on the broadcast) .....Awkward as it must have been for CBS Primetime viewers, Mandy & Patti's singing back & forth of classic lyrics was the first true theatrical-talent moment of the night.... Big upset for Porgy over Follies (hmm, a little FU to the latter's composer, Sondheim's trashing of the former?)

10:20 Ricky Martin makes such a happy "Che" doesn't he? And poor Elena Rogers (playing, ahem, Evita!) doesn't get to do a thing.... Note Bene: One important thing to keep in mind about all these production numbers on the broadcast: the shows pay for them themselves. Yes. Really. Infomercials within an informercial, if you will...."Blah-Blah-Blah Unimportant Drama Fag" awards update: Lighting Design/Play: Peter/Starcatcher... Ad-Buy watch: Les Miz The Movie!


10: 10 Jim Parson's intro to Best Play? Just plain weird. ... Same goes for slow-mo blocking of Clybourne Park actors. Oh wait, are those even the real actors? And...cue B-Roll. (CBS just doesn't know what to do with plays, do they?)... Kudos to Clybourne Park and kudos for Tony voters for not finding a way out of it.  But for anyone watching the broadcast... it might as well be in a different universe, right?  It's like Best Foreign Film at the Oscars...


10:00 "Other Awards" update: Lighting/Play for Once ....Ad-Buy Watch: Rebecca: The Musical...

9:55 Haven't seen Once yet. (Maybe because I'm still humiliated from predicting its demise!) But that number they did tonight, I bet, goes over much better than the rest with most of America.  Why? Because at least they won't find it cheezy.... Meanwhile stay tuned for Ricky Martin and a cruise ship....(kid you not)

9:45 "Those Other Awards" update: Bob Crowely, Set Design/Play for Once.... BigTime bow to genuine Pop Culture: Tyler Perry presents Best Play/Revival

9:40 I'm afraid any progress the current Porgy & Bess was striving for in the depiction of "simple negro folk" was not helped by their on-air speed-freak medley..... Meanwhile in Broadcast Ad-Buy watch: Rock of Ages--the MOVIE!

9:35 A while ago, Ellen Barkin delivered the official B'way statistics that  it's been "another record breaking box office season." Eerily reminded me of Politburo announcements about crops in the latest 5-Year Plan...

9:30 More "killing time during commercials" awards: Best Set Design (Play): Peter/Starcatcher... As I just tweeted: "Is it too much for ATW and http://TonyAwards.com  THEMSELVES to tweet out the winners of offscreen awards? Really?"  It really hasn't been easy to find that info online tonight. There's only so many twitter feeds I can troll....

 
9:23 Who says the Tony broadcast doesn't honor plays. "Here's one line of B-roll from each play!"  EXCEPT, any "Play with Music" gets a break. Hence: Peter/Starcatcher and End of the Rainbow. Dangerous precedent? As for One Man Two Guvs,viewers out there must be wondering what the hell the otherwise brilliant James Corden is doing slapping himself with a weird British accent...

9:13 In "Other Awards" news.... Best Costumes to Peter/Starcatcher and Follies... CBS Advertising Watch: Roundabout's Harvey w/ Jim Parsons

9:08 During the Nice Work segment I realized: I miss the excerpts that were just about one great number sung by one great star.  But now, since Matthew Broderick is still (still!) a bigger media star than Kelli O'Hara, we get three seconds of her "Someone to Watch Over Me" and three minutes of his "college try" at "Sweet and Low Down."  It's Production Number by Committee.

9:01 No, I have not seen Peter/Starcatcher and Christian Borle is undeniably a fab actor.  But is his award a Smash shout-out?  How could it not be...

8:55 Not-ready-for-prime-time awards are indeed still being handed out...during commercials.  Latest: Sound Design for Once (musical) and Peter/Starcatcher (play)

8:49 Lowpoint so far: Orchestra cutting off Mike Nichols.  Mike Frickin' Nichols!

8:40 Buddy's number from Follies must seem pretty weirdly out of context to viewers. (It's kind of a crazy dream sequence--hence the trippy vaudeville suit.) But while such uninformed rabble are thinking this typifies everything they hate about Broadway, I just want to pay tribute to Danny Burstein, one of those hundreds of NYC actors who in any other era would be considered major stars. (And as McNulty points out, he just got in on the redeye from LA, where Follies just ended its tour.)

8:31  Michael McGrath is indeed excellent in Nice Work--a show I enjoyed more than most. The rare "revisal" that honors and retains the spirit of the original.

8:30 Shows so far buying advertising time during the broadcast: The Best Man. Developing....


8:25 That Newsies music sure wouldn't inspire me  to dance like that. Although I do appreciate the cheesy attempt to musicalize Waiting for Lefty--"Strike!Strike! Strike!"--although Odets probably didn't imagine a funky beat

8:20 Tony Mysteries--Why was Patti LuPone pushing a lawnmower? What was Amanda Seyfreid doing there? (And why didn't her mike work?)

If Neil's special opening number was another Shaiman & Wittman special commission.... not up to their usual. No big laughs. Which makes it just...a...waste...of...airtime.

8:15 While I love Book of Mormon, odd choice to start with "Hello." This really assumes a "target demographic" for the broadcast, doesn't it. If you don't know the musical, would you think those decadent Broadway heathens are just making fun of Mormons? No use in questioning motive, though, since that's easy: extend advance sales for Book of Mormon! (and Scott Rudin, inc)... James Earl Jones with the Darth Vader autograph equipment, though, was pretty priceless

All in all, pales in comparison's to last year's far more original, elaborate, and even confrontational number,  "Broadway: It's Not Just for Gays Any More."
 
8:00 Let's start the festivities the way I always like to start: unearthing from off-screen obscurity the not-so-trivial awards already handed out. And, quite frustratingly, I must say TonyAwards.com does not make this info very easily accessible, something they--of all websites--should be able to do immediately, you'd think.... First there's the little matter of Best Book--that is, script or play in the musical category--going to Irish playwright Enda Walsh for Once. Kinda important, don't you think. Anyway, that plus Martin Lowe's intimate orchestrations signal a good night for Once.

Also in major non-network news is the Choreography award to Christopher Gattelli for Newsies--which apparently is the chief reason that show is in such contention.  Go figure.  I guess all that matters to them is we'll see some of the dancing on the broadcast.

No sign at all of the design awards yet, which usually join these other "obscure" categories in preshow exile.  What's up with them?

*UPDATE: Martha Plimpton tweets me straight on the cruise issue: "Now non-union cruise ships are the same as Broadway, FYI. Good performers should have union protection."

The Annual Playgoer Tony Live Blogcast

...is on!

Yes, sorry we've been absent here a long time. But help nurse Playgoer back to life by visiting and taking part in the traditional Tony Live Blogcast here tomorrow night starting at 8:00 EST.

Past blogcast archive--going all the way back to 2005!--here.

Tony Noms 2012

They're out there.

Random thoughts:

First I recklessly tweet that Once would not even make it to opening night on Broadway, now it leads the pack with 11 Tony nominations. Go figure. (And have I seen it? Of course not.)  And given the competition, I now (equally recklessly) say it's the odd on favorite to win Best Musical.

Of the four Best Musical nominees, three are based on movies and one is a "revisal" of an old Gershwin musical (old songs, new script). I actually am not among those lamenting movies-into-musicals-- before that it was plays-into-musicals, no? (And even books.) But, as movies, Newsies and Once already were musicals, although I gather much new music has been added to both for Broadway? So Leap of Faith has the only fully original score of the bunch.

Note that for the actual "Best Original Score" category they couldn't even find four satisfactory musicals. 1) Newsies, which is only partially original for the stage; 2) Bonnie and Clyde, which... speaks for itself; 3) Peter and the Starcatcher, a play with music; and 4) One Man Two Guvnors, another play, featuring a mock-Beatles band playing 60's rockabilly pastiche between scenes.  So, anyone want to comment on the state of the new musical?

Speaking of 2Guvs (as the kids call it), a shame it apparently was deemed neither fish nor foul by the committee: Although it's actually a loose adaptation of Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters, it was ruled ineligible for the "play revival" category. Yet it appears to have seemed too (deliberately) old fashioned for Best "New" Play--a category which instead includes an adaptation of an old Viennese novel, a Peter Pan "prequel," and a Raisin in the Sun "sequel."

Best Play Revival includes Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Gore Vidal's The Best Man.  I don't believe that's what they were called when they opened originally. So let's call them new plays! (Ditto for The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, of course.)

Remember Spider-Man? The Tonys didn't.  Sets and costumes is all they get.  But as Erik Piepenburg @nyt just tweeted, the show's producers are probably just relieved, for legal purposes, that Julie Taymor did not get any further validation as "director."

As for performers...

Best Actor/Play looks like a tossup between three formidable fatmen: Philip Seymour Hoffman, James "2Guvs" Corden, and James Earl Jones. Jones would probably win in the "Featured" category--what's he doing here?

When you consider that Venus in Fur is playing to only 57% capacity (up 9 points from last week!), you wonder how Manhattan Theatre Club feels throwing a lot of money away for the sake of Nina Arianda's Best Actress nomination. Girl owes them!  (Oh yeah, got Best Play nod, too. So David Ives owes them!)

Speaking of MTC, blessed year for them.  From what I heard, no one particularly liked their (pointless) Wit and Master Class remounts. Yet both are nominated for Best Play Revival. (And likewise the only faintly praised Cynthia Nixon for Best Actress in Wit.)

Special Award for Hugh Jackman??? Well he did make some folks a ton of money this season.

And finally, shoutout to Shakespeare Theatre DC for the regional award. About time!

Review: The Morini Strad

My latest for Time Out: Willy Holtzman's The Morini Strad at Primary Stages.

The takeaway: "Tuesdays with Morrie for the WQXR crowd."

By the way, forgot to mention in the review that this is "based on a true story."  But I must say I found myself wondering: where's the "story" here???

Rush Tickets for All!

Kudos to producer Jordan Roth for simplifying the rush ticket policy for at least one Broadway show:

A limited number of lower-price general rush tickets will be available for every performance of the Broadway run of Bruce Norris' Pulitzer Prize-winning Clybourne Park, the comedy-drama about the personalities behind racial shifts in a neighborhood, producer Jordan Roth announced on March 26, the day of the play's first preview. "We hope to give as many people as possible the opportunity to share this astonishing theatrical experience," Roth said in a statement.

Rush tickets (at $30 each) will be available on the day of the performance at the Walter Kerr Theatre box office beginning at 10 AM. Limit two per customer. Opening night for the limited 16-week engagement is April 19.

Yes. Finally. Increasing the opportunities to see a show instead of constricting them. What a concept.

Let's hope this scores big, since it's about time Broadway in general simplified the whole rush policy mess. Every show has its own policy--which is usually not publicized. Many are for only for the under-30 set (or even younger, requiring student ID). Do they have to make it so obviously begrudging?

When, in fact, I bet when a show is actually good, tons of folks will, er, rush to any opportunity to go for less than $40, or even $50.

And seriously, producers, how do you feel about your churlish rush policies when you're staring at all those empty seats during previews, huh?

Correction of the Day

Time we had a little humor in the Mike Daisey affair...

A writer named Jason Mick, at the Daily Tech site, criticizes, as I have, the things that Daisey got wrong or made up. Then he adds:

Mr. Daisey is married to Deborah Fallows, a Chinese native who wrote the book Dreaming in Chinese.

It is true that Deborah Fallows . . . wrote the book Dreaming in Chinese. It is true that friends have told her that she might as well have been born a native Chinese person, since her spirit matches that of Chinese women in so many ways. But she is a native of Chicago, not any place in China, and of Czech rather than Chinese ethnic background. And she is most definitely not married to Mike Daisey. At least that is what she told me when she stormed back into the bedroom this morning irate about what she had just seen about herself online.

-Mr. James Fallows

("Jason Mick might want to ratchet back his outrage over Mike Daisey's sloppiness with facts," he adds.)

And for the record, Daisey is married to his director/collaborator Jean-Michele Gregory.

Orson at 24

Orson Welles in 1939, when he was still a stage and radio star, pre-Citizen Kane. From a new exhibit of Golden Age Hollywood color photos at the National Portrait Gallery in DC.

Kinda looks like "the tall guy" in any twenty-something theatre company today, doesn't he?

About Mike D

"We do not and cannot fact check our artists; we're a theater, not a news organization. The vast majority of what occurs on our stages is fiction. If we didn't believe fiction could reveal truth, we would have to give up our profession. With that said, it obviously matters a great deal to me that our audience understands what they are seeing."

-Oskar Eustis, AD of the Public Theatre, presenter and producer of Mike Daisey's The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs--which, if you didn't know already--came under a bit of heat this weekend.

I am just way too busy this weekend to weigh in on this coherently. But I think Eustis basically gets it right, from a theatrical standpoint.

On the other hand, someone who gets it wrong (at least in this quote) is the man who called him out, This American Life's Ira Glass, who complained: "The normal worldview is: somebody stands on stage and says this happens to me, I think it happened to them." Yes, I think Daisey did himself in when taking his stage show to NPR without accounting for the semiotic differences in mediums. But, man, the ambiguity of "truth" on stage...that's what theatre's all about!

A Site with a View

From NYPL, an online Noel Coward archive with bio and lots of photos. Take a tour and add a little style to your weekend!

The Lincoln Center Performing Arts branch will also have an on-site exhibit of many of the same materials starting next week.

At right: Poster for original Broadway production of Coward's Design for Living , with from l to r: Alfred Lunt, the playwright, Lynn Fontanne

Review: Beyond the Horizon

For Time Out this week I review Eugene O'Neill's 1920 Broadway debut play, Beyond the Horizon. A title long familiar to me from theatre history books, nice to finally see it in this Irish Rep revival.

By the way, I wrote this last week, so that "slut" line was pre-Limbaugh, I promise.

Kickstarter: Better than NEA?

Are you sitting down? The crowd-funding site, Kickstarter, will soon be able to boast a bigger arts-funding treasure-chest than the National Endowment for the Arts.

Or, at least, so boasts its boss:

Kickstarter is having an amazing year, even by the standards of other white hot Web startup companies, and more is yet to come. One of the company’s three co-founders, Yancey Strickler, said that Kickstarter is on track to distribute over $150 million dollars to its users’ projects in 2012, or more than entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), which was $146 million. “It is probable Kickstarter will distribute more money this year than the NEA,” said Stricker in an exclusive phone interview with TPM. 

Of course Kickstarter works very differently from a federal granting agency, and basically relies on how well you can bully (I mean, encourage) thousands of friends into coughing up a few bucks each. Sullivan rounds up the debate over the claim's merits here.

And to be fair, Strickler himself is far from suggesting his company supplant the Endowment:

“We view that number and our relationship to it in both a good and bad way.”
As Strickler explained, the milestone is “good” in the sense that it means that Kickstarter may now reach a point where it will funnel as much money to the arts as the federal agency primarily responsible for supporting them, effectively doubling the amount of art that can get funded in the country. “But maybe it shouldn’t be that way,” Strickler said, “Maybe there’s a reason for the state to strongly support the arts.”

Free-marketers would probably be happy to suggest a Kickstarter-like solution for "privatizing" public sector arts funding. Which is why I think the right lesson to draw from this is not that the NEA is unnecessary but that--in its current atrophied and deliberately starved state--it's so small!  At a time when anyone from political campaigns to Kickstarter projects can raise millions online in small contributions, $150 mil ain't much.

Just a reminder that-- No, Republicans, cutting the NEA won't do bupkis for the deficit.

So I'm all for Kickstarter shaming the congress by showing up how pathetically small their arts funding is. Unfortunately it won't be taken that way by many.

Meanwhile...how long till you think some major nonprofit starts taking to Kickstarter when subscriptions decline?

MTC's Big Buy

So I'm up early today and I decide to tune into "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, and what do I see a commercial for? Manhattan Theatre Club!  No, not one of those 15-second blips at the end of the commercial-reel that stations reserve for cheap local ads.  A proper 30-second glossy spot that I assume is going out nationally--or at least on the East Coast (6-6:30am time slot), or just the greater metro area if that's possible.

I can't find any video online yet to post, but basically it's Cynthia Nixon telling us all how wonderful MTC is. Yes, also a plug for her star turn in Wit, but that's just mentioned along the way. (And, no, she's not bald in this one.)

Why do I find this at all interesting? Well, it seems pretty unprecedented--a nonprofit theatre company spending BIG bucks on a nationally broadcast cable news show to basically advertise its brand. (Using Nixon and Wit as a hook, their latest "product.") I don't believe the word "subscribe" is ever used, but, hey, it is almost spring, which means subscription time. While there is no 2012-2013 season yet, titles of past greatest hits (Proof! Rabbit Hole!) flash across the screen. And the "copy" is all about how you can always count on a fabulous night out at the theatre there, with lots of shots of the "Samuel Friedman Theatre" lit up on the Great White Way. (No mentioned of the subterranean Stages 1 & 2.)

But if this is a national spot it may not even be about subscriptions. It's aimed at tourists, closing with a line something like: "MTC: as exciting as New York itself!" (No comment.) Competing for Broadway consumers, basically.

So I guess I have to admire their balls, at least. 'Cause that sure must cost a lot of their precious funds.

(Anyone know how much, by the way?)

Garofalo's Stage Debut

"Stage-acting, she feels, is a true test of discipline for someone who is used to flying by the seat of their pants 'in that you've got to say this here and you must put that prop there. You must turn the light on right now. That gets me because of my immature response to authority. I perceive it as an authority figure telling me, even though it's not. That's just how immature I am.'"

-Janeane Garofalo, on what it's like to make your stage debut (in New Group's Russian Transfer) in your 40s after years of standup and movies.

Pretty apt tribute to stage actors, actually.

Not Student/Not Senior

Looks like 9-5 employed adults are finding it just as hard there as here to get a decent theatre ticket discount:

While young people have access to youth ticket discounts (and so they should) and retirees have the time to take advantage of mid-week matinee offers, it's the average Joes – average age, average salary, average working hours – who are missing out on the chance to develop what could be a long-term passion. The sad fact is that if you didn't have the means to acquire one earlier in life, you often have little opportunity to do so in adulthood, either.

And don't get me started on all-day camp-outs!

Is Kickstarter Working?

Yesterday, the fundraising website Kickstarter reached a milestone when not one, but two of its clients passed the million-dollar threshold.

I mused last year upon the opportunities here for small theatre productions (and companies) and have noticed many doing so this season. In fact, "theater" has its own category on the site so you can check out current projects there.

So my question to those doing so...How's that working out for you?  Is there a future in this? Success stories? Fails? Please share!

The "Phantom" Menace

Patrick Healy's lede for today's front-page NYT story on the 10,000th(!) performance of Phantom says a lot:

“The Phantom of the Opera” will make show business history on Saturday with the 10,000th Broadway performance of an $8 million production that became an $845 million hit. But it is also something much more. It is the musical that has come to define modern Broadway by proving the purchasing power of women and tourists, the durability of repeat business and the lure of spectacle: ingredients for success embraced by producers of “The Lion King,” “Wicked,” “Mamma Mia!” and other smashes.

While “Phantom” has prospered from unparalleled word of mouth, a show as much for sightseers as for theatergoers, its unprecedented Broadway run has hardly been a foregone conclusion. When it opened on Jan. 26,  1988, big hits were few, and roughly half of Broadway’s theaters were empty. Yet thanks to persistent marketing, strict quality control and flexibility in ticket pricing (the worst seats can now be had for only $26.50), “Phantom” survived  — in fact thrived  —  when shows with bigger stars and better reviews brought down their curtains. 

When he tells how much some of those initial investors have made, you can see why some monied folk still chase the Broadway dream.

The Privatization of Censorship

Nick Cohen in the Literary Review (UK) offers some useful ways to think about censorship in the 21st century:

We cannot puncture our own myth that we are fearless seekers after truth, even though, if we honestly owned up to our limitations, we might force society to confront the fact that modern censorship does not conform to old models. It is a mistake to think of repression as repression by the state alone. In much of the world it still is, but in Britain, America and most of continental Europe the age of globalisation has done its work, and it is privatised rather than state forces that threaten freedom of speech.


Editors are no longer frightened of politicians but of Islamist violence, oligarchs and CEOs. They worry about libel and the ability of the wealthy to bend the ear of their proprietors or withdraw advertising. But they are not frightened about leaking the secrets or criticising the actions of elected governments.

We need new ways of thinking about censorship.