Piece of cake
It’s easy to produce theater. That’s the conclusion one could draw from a spate of country-spanning articles about audiences and budgets going up, up, up. Yesterday, the Times told us how Broadway sales are very strong this summer and Playbill announced that a big-budget Mamet revival there had recouped its costs. Today, we read that the theater scene in Seattle is regaining the spotlight.
So, why do we at Handcart have to work so hard? What these articles are saying is that for some it’s recently become easier or at least more feasible once again to produce theater with budgets close to $1,000,000 or more. I’m still looking for articles that say it’s better now to be a small theater group trying to grow!
Q of the D
I have begun rehearsals on a play that deals with the power of theater, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good. From time to time I’m going to post snippets of it here.
Today I post from Captain Tench, RM, who doesn’t approve in general, and might not even approve even if the foundations of society had been laid. They are in what is to become Sydney, and rations are short and society barely exists.
My dear Ralph, a bunch of convicts making fools of themselves, mouthing words written no doubt by some London Ass, will hardly change our society. … I would simply say that if you want to build a civilisation there are more important things than a play. If you want to teach the convicts something, teach them to farm, to build houses, teach them a sense of respect for property, teach them thrift so they don’t eat a week’s rations in one night, but above all, teach them how to work, not how to sit around laughing at a comedy. … Are you saying Rome would not have fallen if the theatre had been better?
Lady Gregory’s legacy
Having recently put on a production that was all about Lady Augusta Gregory, we take note when an article in the Guardian discusses major troubles at one of her enduring legacies, the Abbey Theatre. Many of us saw the recent touring version of The Playboy of the Western World. It seems somebody at the Abbey forgot to account for the costs of taking that show on the road (!), and their management structure “has not changed since Yeats’s day.”
This article says, “Just when it looked as though things could not get worse,” and goes on to mention another big problem, its current, expensive West-End failure. But things can always get worse, as we are reminded in today’s coverage in the BBC of the bad artistry at this year’s Avignon arts festival: “‘You think you’ve reached the last point in mediocrity, pretentiousness and confusion. But no. There is always something worse,’ said Le Figaro’s drama critic.”
Memories of ATA
We’ve rented space more than once from James Jennings at the American Theatre of Actors, recently profiled at Backstage.com: “Jennings also rents out space to 10 to 12 theatre companies yearly; Urinetown was launched at ATA.” We know! During rehearsals for The Wild Ass’s Skin, why did we ignore that production on the other stage? Why oh why didn’t we pop over to see what Urinetown was all about?
I’ll huff and I’ll puff
I just discovered that David Mamet is blogging along with Arianna Huffington. Here. I found out because today he posted something — for only the 3rd time since starting the venture more than two months ago. Not much huffing, really, certainly not a ton of it, and not much to say about the theater.
Harry Shearer, on the other hand, has logged in about 65 posts during the same time.
Today’s musical note
Not that we want to talk about musicals much here and I posted something about them just a couple of days ago, but Julie Andrews is directing. It’s The Boy Friend at Goodspeed. That’s all.
People flock to large mile-high theater
To Denver’s LIDA Project Theatre: “We feel your pain.”
It can be difficult to draw crowds to good and important shows. This is all the more frustrating when you consider how easy it can be to draw crowds to certain holiday fluff. A case in point in yesterday’s Denver Post article summarizing the year in theater there:
LIDA Project Theatre developed its own original examination of the Columbine massacre. It was an emotional production of intense local interest and import, and it drew media attention from around the world. It just couldn’t draw flies to the theater. In 17 performances, it attracted 27 people per night. Nine months later, the mediocre “Radio City Christmas Spectacular” drew … nearly 3,000 [per performance].
Those numbers (17 × 27 = 459) are not all that different from some of Handcart’s shows. Trust me, we feel your pain. What is one to do, short of getting Clear Channel to market for you?
One budget to rule them all
Striving to make theater more irrelevant, the World’s Most Expensive Musical Ever is chugging along in Toronto. Even as I say that, I also say that of course The Lord of the Rings might be good and enjoyable, so I am torn between dichotomous hopes.
First, one hopes that it will be good in a way that the movies were not, giving us more character, fewer battles and special effects, a sense of an extremely difficult journey but not one that’s impossible unless you suspend belief. This would come from employing the strength of the stage. But … one wonders if all the money is being put into overcoming this “weakness” of the stage. So then one realizes that this is probably just another effort to cash in on the something du jour by fooling the masses into thinking it’s important because it’s at the theatre, my good man. And at 27 million (Canadian?) dollars, one would experience a certain schadenfreude in its failure, which is my other hope.
Minty fresh ‘Skin’
The Mint Theater is one we like and admire. They have the good sense to spell “theater” like Americans. They have a mission statement that pleases us (“bringing new vitality to worthy but neglected plays”). And they have a strong production of The Skin Game that got good reviews in the New York Times a few days back and now in today’s Wall Street Journal (scroll down). Go Mint!
The good, the bard and the ugly
In the Guardian, a two-sided follow-up to yesterday’s announcment of the RSC’s staging all of Shakespeare’s works. Check out this summary of the good (the “simple pleasure of watching his plays,” “people are discovering a new relevance in his work”) and the ugly (box-office motivations, “Bardmart” “will not produce any radically new ideas about Shakespeare’s achievement”) vis-à-vis the bard. The good is rather in line with Handcart’s mission, the ugly rather in line with why we haven’t put on Shakespeare yet and rather in line also with why we will.
Taking down those that take down
The reviewers, reviewed and skewered by one fabulous blogger. Had beefs with the New York Times lately? Cuddle up with the Playgoer, who got up early to lay into them, and good.
That’s a lot of shaking
The Royal Shakespeare Company announced today that they intend to stage pretty much every word Bill ever wrote. They’ll start April 2006 and end a year later. Check out their plan for this Year O’ Shaking on the RSC’s site. It “will be the first time all 37 plays, the sonnets and the long poems have been presented at the same event.” Makes the annual Sonnet-thon in Boston seem downright wee.
Shirley Jones in ‘Carousel’ all over again
The movie Carousel stars a wonderful and young Shirley Jones. She was even better in Oklahoma (or was it the movie that was better?). Now she is playing in Carousel again. A different role, of course, and in suburban Boston of all places.
I want to see it — to see if she’s still delightful, to see (or hopefully not see) if it’s really weird and sad for her, and to check out what kind of institution in Waltham can pull such big names.
As for her being delightful, she prefers to think of non-delightful roles as her best.
Comparing regional auditions
In Boston, it’s the StageSource audition, (June 20-21, 27-28 this year). In D.C., it’s the open audition for the League of Washington Theatres (June 15-17, 20-21). In both places, the timing and the concept is the same: have a regional audition with auditors from many local theaters listening to performers of all levels. It’s a productive few days, I am sure, and any aspiring actor in the region should plan on such auditions.
This year, there were articles about each audition in the papers. In Boston, though grueling, the auditions are run without long lines. In Washington, however, some people have to show up at 4:50 a.m.! Now, there is some reason to infer that the young woman who showed up before dawn was flaky and a bit too dedicated to doing things the hard way (once “nearly arrested as a drug-addled vagrant because I refused to break character”), but still, I’ll take Boston.
Wham, BAM, thank you, Melillo
The best shows I’ve seen in New York have been at BAM (and the worst shows, too). Because I’ve not been going there too long, all these shows have been produced under the current BAM administration who are profiled in the Sunday Times.
Read about the decisions and trade-offs going on there. Peter Brook and Robert Wilson will be elsewhere this year. There will be less opera because of money. (I saw a compelling production of Janacek’s Makropoulos Case at BAM, so this point makes me sad.) And they’re planning to build a smaller stage — and then their new identity will be all set.
Keep advance sales to a healthy level, please
Handcart Ensemble’s most recent production had very strong advance ticket sales, possibly record-breaking for our theater company. But, unlike the money-grubbers that are putting on The Odd Couple, we can promise that tickets to our next production will be available on relatively short notice without going through scalpers. We care for “theater-loving souls.” We care for you.
You’re welcome.
As somebody likes (or dislikes) it
Heading to Central Park this holiday weekend for a little Shakespeare? Feeling important, self-congratulatory, cultured and, like, all smart and stuff? Take yourself down a notch with Slate: “Shakespeare in the Park is a benediction for intellectual daytrippers.”