Parabasis

Riedel on Memoirs

Michael Riedel backs up my earlier assertion that Brighton Beach Memoirs premature closing might have more to do with poor producing choices than anything else:

The Times offered the producers of "Brighton Beach" several weeks worth of splashy ads in the paper and on its Web site at steep discounts, production sources say.

In exchange for what one source calls the "fire sale" price, the Times demanded exclusivity.

"Brighton Beach" couldn't advertise anywhere else until after opening night. No radio spots, no e-mail blasts, no direct-mail campaign -- none of the things most shows do to generate advance sales.

But the Times ads didn't work, and the show opened with an advance of less than $500,000, sources say. Some nights, the cast played to 500 people.

I often wonder if Riedel's stories are true, and having talked to people who claim he's made up things they've said or done in his columns, I try to take him with a grain of salt. That being said, I'm on pretty much every theater mailing list there is and I didn't receive a single piece of direct mail in the lead up to the show.  And this would gel with the producer's quote that they were counting on a rave review, because a rave review could then lead an after-opening-night advertising strategy as they expanded beyond the Times.

The issue here for me has less to do with the show, which I don't really care about either way or another.  What upsets me more is the groupthink on Brighton's closing, from Patrick Healy to Howard Kissel to Ken Davenport to Playgoer that somehow the show was failed by its audience because we're all starfuckers or we aren't Jewish enough or we watch too much television.  It's bullshit.  

The producers tried to do a big Broadway show on the cheap. They decided to do two parts of a trilogy and not open them at the same time, thus robbing the show of any sense of it being special. Then they tried to skimp on advertising. Then they only had three weeks of previews, which cut out a lot of chance to build advance word. Then they didn't have enough cash reserves to keep it open after the reviews to build an audience. And they clearly had no advance press strategy whatsoever. 

That's called bad producing, folks.  Neil Simon was failed by Manny Isenberg, not the "Broadway audience" or lack thereof.  Last year a three hour long solidly (and excellently, and gloriously) middle brow play starring nobodies opened on Broadway, ran for two years, made money and won the Pulitzer Prize. I'm sick of this condescending bullshit. It's lazy thinking. I can understand why Ken Davenport and Patrick Healy might not want to second guess one of Broadway's most respected (and best connected) producers, but come on. 

If you want to view it as a great tragedy that you can no longer do a mediocre job of producing a Neil Simon play and have it be a hit simply because it's a Neil Simon play, I suppose that's your right, but it just seems like crying over spilled milk.

What's Up With Eric Schaeffer?

That's the question I'd be asking if I was on the Board at Washington D.C.'s Signature Theatre. The acclaimed artistic director has built one of the best theaters for musicals in America and garnered a regional Tony. 

He's also gradually been making inroads in New York, in ways reminiscent of Bart Sher prior to leaving Intiman. The only difference is, Bart Sher directed some of the best received shows in New York, while Schaeffer has helmed projects like the Kathie Lee Gifford musical "Under the Bridge".  Signature's one Broadway transfer is Glory Days (which he directed as well), the now notorious bomb that closed on opening night (and which I saw). His latest is co-directing Million Dollar Quartet, which is currently headed to Broadway.

I think Schaeffer's a perfectly fine Director. And if he wants to transition to doing Broadway, good on him. Few directors understand musicals as well as he does, and I've seen him do some really great revelatory work (particularly with Cabaret). But if I were a board member at his theater, I'd be wondering if it's really in the institution's best interests to have Schaeffer use the theatre as a spring board while representing it outside of DC with such sub par dreck.  Signature is better than Glory Days, and Schaeffer is better than an overblown jukebox musical or a Kathy Lee Gifford children's book adaptation. . And it doesn't help any theatre company in DC to have a home grown show with such a high profile  transfer bomb as badly as Glory Days did. 

Ben Brantley's Star-Worship Blinds Him. Again.

Quoth B-Squared:

But in the self-contained universes of Mr. Foreman, which are both boundless and hermetically sealed, all performers are created equal, right? They are stylish robots, carrying out the commands of a dictatorial auteur. People don’t so much act in Mr. Foreman’s productions (which he has been creating for five decades now) as take orders, the better to embody their director’s convoluted currents of thought. The happy surprise of “Idiot Savant” is that there is, for once, an actor in the house. Mr. Dafoe, who spent many years working as a team player of the avant-garde Wooster Group, knows how to pose in a living painting where individual figures count for less than the landscape. But he also brings a star’s bright idiosyncrasy to Mr. Foreman’s wonderland and the aching throb of an energetic man in a straitjacket. There’s warm blood coursing through “Idiot Savant,” and it raises the humor and humanity to heights rarely felt in a Foreman work.

Cause lord knows, T. Ryder Smith, Jay Smith and Juliana Francis aren't actors, right?  And neither was David Greenspan when he appeared in BENITA CANOVA.  

Seriously tho, it's always been true that in the best of Foreman's work, talented actors have managed to inject his plays with real humanity, a humanity he deliberately sought to strip out of his work* in recent years by deleting the core trio of actors in his plays and replacing them with video installations.  Whether that deliberate dehumanizing of his world works for the individual viewer is up to them (I'm not a fan, George Hunka, for example, is).  But still, Willem Dafoe is not the first "actor" to appear in Foreman's work, nor is he the first actor to bring idiosyncrasy to one of Foreman's plays (honestly, are you going to try to tell me that T. Ryder Smith or David Greenspan are less idiosyncratic performers?).

What he is is the first "star" to appear in Foreman's work. And thus Brantley, who seems to be on a more openly star-obsessed kick than usual is actually able to see it. Because apparently, all Brantley sees now is stars. And yet, despite being fairly open of his love of stars and how much he's "rooting for" them, he turns around and wonders why casting directors are such starfuckers who cast out of the pages of US Weekly, showing a remarkable lack of understanding of his own place in the theatrical landscape and his impact as the lead reviewer for the Times.

W(h)ither The "Broadway Audience"?

I have to agree with my main man 99Seats against my ole friend Playgoer: This Howard Kissel column on the closing of Brighton Beach Memoirs really is garbage.  But it's garbage because it completely ignores the "business" part of show business over and over again. Let's go to the tape:

I was saddened to learn that Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs," which opened last Sunday, will close this Sunday. "Broadway Bound," with which it was supposed to run in repertory, will not even open.

This news has been attributed in some quarters to the death of The Neil Simon Audience.There is some truth to that, but I fear the problem is much larger. It has to do with the death of The Broadway Audience, which disappeared some time ago.

So far so obvious, right?  I mean, if a show closes, pretty clearly the audience for that show either didn't exist or didn't come to the theater. A lot of people are taking the "didn't exist" perspective.  Kissel wants to broaden "didn't exist" to mean not only "the Neil Simon crowd" but "The Broadway Crowd".  What Kissel doesn't talk about (and, to be fair, no one seems to be talking about) is whether or not the show was well produced or well marketed.  One of the producers said in the Times that it would take absolute raves to keep the show open.  

That's a pretty clear sign right there that the show was inadequately financed and had low cash reserves, as they couldn't afford to keep it open long enough to build an audience.  Yes, advance sales were reportedly quite slow, but I just want to pause for a moment before we all start writing epitaphs for this audience or that audience and say that the show wasn't widely (or interestingly) marketed, they clearly didn't have enough money to keep it open, and the biggest "draw" was David Cromer, who only theatre insiders know, have heard of or are interested in. I'm not saying that these are the definitive reasons why BBM closed (Broadway closings are like ink blot tests) but these are all real problems with the production that have nothing to do with whether or not the "audience" for Brighton Beach Memoirs exist or who that audience is.

Moving on... How does Kissel define the audience? Well...

The Broadway audience, which highbrows condescended to, especially when it was at its height, in the decades after World War II, was certainly centered in New York. It was middle class (with significant exceptions both higher and lower on the social ladder.) It had a higher percentage of Jews than the population at large.

It also went way beyond the Hudson. In the decades after the war Broadway was a significant factor in middle class life all across the country. It was not only New Yorkers who knew Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams (not to mention all the major figures of our musical theater.) Those names counted for something in every major city across the country, in part because their plays toured immediately after they finished their Broadway run, often with the original stars. That was how a little boy in Milwaukee (moi) became entranced with the theater.

In other words, Howard Kissel is upset that more people like him don't go to Broadway these days, and that Broadway isn't designed to appeal to him anymore. There's a couple of tipoffs, the "moi" and the little bit of resentment-filled bristling with "which highbrows condescend to".  I understand these frustrations... hell, I think i wrote something similar from the perspective of younger audiences a week and a half ago. But here's the issue... if this is what Howard Kissel wants, theater that appeals to himself as a demographic, there's lots and lots and lots to see of it in this town. It might not be on commercial Broadway, but Lincoln Center, MTC and Roundabout all essentially cater to him as an audience. Those are the three largest theaters in town, and three of the largest performing arts companies in the nation. There's plenty of others who appeal to him a a demographic as well. This will become important in a few paragraphs when Kissel tries to explain what happened to the "Broadway Audience":

Broadway lost its national audience as well as a lot of its local audience starting in the '60s, when it became increasingly politicized and intellectualized. The audience that had grown accustomed to turning to the theater for emotional catharsis no longer found it. When I think of the friends with whom I used to go often to the theater, they now tend to go more frequently to the opera and the ballet, where they find the emotional rewards the theater, Broadway or otherwise, seldom gives them.

This is the point where this starts to read like a bad blog post.  You're not supposed to be able to say shit like "X was caused by Y" without some evidence to back it up.  Even one title of one show that was a hit with tourists but too intellectual for the MiddleBrowClassJew audience would help.  Instead, we get a poll of Howard Kissel's friends to match Thomas Friedman's poll of Magical Taxicab Drivers Who Talk Like Thomas Friedman. 

There's a lot that's really, deeply wrong with this paragraph, including the simple questions of what about all the other decades between then and now? Did the 80s continue to drive these audiences away because Phantom and Miss Saigon were too "intellectual"? Is Broadway intellectualism really the issue? That Broadway isn't middlebrow enough?

But what's really really wrong with this paragraph is that it ignores that the entire landscape of the theatre industry has changed radically since 1960.  Simply put: People don't have to go to a Broadway show (or local tour) to see professional theater anymore, because there was this thing called the regional theater movement. Moreover, NYC's MiddleBrowClassJew audience is extremely well served and catered to by this other thing called Off-Broadway.  Which is where David Cromer's other show, Our Town (which Kissel loved) continues to play very successfully.  Furthermore, a lot of people have seen BBM at their local community theater or high school and might think twice about seeing it for $100.  Which is the other thing that Howard Kissel doesn't mention-- the show was really fucking expensive to go see. 

I'm not saying that audiences haven't changed for Broadway. Obviously they have. And of course it's a lot more tourist driven than it was.  I'm just not sure I see this as such a huge tragedy so much as a demographic realignment driven by business realities.  

There's more wrong with this column, but 99 handles it well and this blogpost is getting longer and angrier than I intended it to be, so head on over there and read what he has to say about it. To me, what this ultimately reads like is blog posts on The Corner by old white guys lamenting the death of monoculture at Universities.  Kissel's demographic group used to be the catered to group at the height of a monoculture in his particular area (theatre). That monoculture has broken up a little bit with some positive and some negative consequences, but his demographic group is no longer as in charge as it used to be and now he's throwing a tantrum about it.

My Bad Instincts

So... In the past few years, I've helmed a few shows I didn't produce and a few I did both here in New York and regionally and I thought I'd try to spell out my one really big takeaway from this experience: I need to do work whose reception I am unsure and nervous about. 

 Why? Because every time over the past few years I've done a show whose (positive) reception I was confident of, the show bombed.  Two of those bombs I produced. 

When Clay and I did volume of smoke down in Richmond, VA for the first time at the Firehouse Theatre Project, we were very nervous about how people would take it.  Clay is somewhat of a hometown hero in that city, but Richmond has a strange relationship with its past, particularly with slavery (people my age were taught in the RIchmond public schools that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery and was largely about Northern Aggression and "states rights") ñ, and this was a play that not only put slavery front and center but ended with the line "This city deserves to burn down".  This city being Richmond. It's not the play's perspective, it's one character's perspective. But still, endings matter, and that one is pretty f*ing harsh. We were really really worried that people would take it as a "fuck you" to their city.

The play was a big hit. We even had someone laugh at that line at one performance I attended-- probably because there is a little wink embedded within the line (Richmond burnt to the ground fifty years after the events of the play). 

So naturally the next year when a venue in New York became available at the last minute at a deep discount, Anne and I thought "Why not try producing for the first time with volume of smoke?" It was somewhat of a proven commodity, the workshop in NY and the production in Richmond were both well received.  It could be put together quickly. Several of the actors from the workshop were available etc.

I was pretty proud of the show, but that didn't stop it from bombing. Both critically and commercially. Very few people came to see it, not a whole lot of those people liked it.

A year later, we produced The Honest-to-God True Story of the Atheist at Under St. Mark's. I was totally terrified of doing this show, I really didn't know what peopel would think of it.  It's a pretty insane kamakaze attack on the very idea of "story" and "belief" and it ends with an object lesson in how the former can be used to manipulate the latter that's fairly... in your face.  Anyway, not everyone who came to see it loved it (some good friends of mine hated it and/or were made angry by it) but it was full every night with responsive, enthusiastic houses.

Naturally, then, when we decided to do a show down in DC for the DC Fringe fest, Atheist made a lot of sense, right? Small cast, fun, very very very fringey show, irreverent, controverisal, what could be better? 

I am extremely proud of that production. I think Abe, Jen and Daryl were terrific, the script from Dan was really great and I think my own work was quite, if I say so myself, deft and skilled at keeping this strange undulating chaotic machine on the tracks for its full 75 minutes. But it's quality didn't stop the houses from being sparse most nights. And most of the time I would say roughly 50% of the audiences even enjoyed themselves, let alone liked it.

Along the way, I've also directed several plays I was really really unsure about. Two of them,  In Public and MilkMilkLemonade, were two of my biggest hits and got me the best press I've ever gotten. 

What this tells me moving forward is the work I need to focus on is the work whose reception I'm not confident about. The work where I wonder "what the hell are people going to make of this?", the work where I'm scared of the reviews and worried about audience response.  For some reason-- at least with me-- that's where the work that other people really respond to comes from.

Question(s) Of The Day

Have you ever seen a production of any of Ben Jonson's plays that worked?  If so, how did they make them work? A friend just e-mailed me after seeing a disappointing production of The Alchemist and I was just thinking... I wonder if it is possible to do Ben Jonson in a satsifying way these days or if his plays' sensibility and sense of humor just too foreign to us now. 

Diversity in the Arts

Playgoer and Mission Paradox both have highlighted this piece by Michael Kaiser raising some interesting questions about diversity in arts orgs. I'm not part of the cult of Kaiser quite yet, I found his much-lauded piece on arts management, for example, to be a bit overrated. (I don't think the lack of good managers is the single biggest problem facing the arts, nor do I think that getting more and better managers and paying them better is necessarily the best way to take care of all the other problems facing the arts. The Roundabout and The New Group, for example, both "know how to find resources, attract audiences and other constituents and provide support to our artists" but they also do consistently awful work and surely although the main goal of any institution is to perpetuate itself and grow, doing good work has to be up there in the goal list too, right?)

My thoughts on it are going in too many different directions for me to quite cohere them yet, so I'm going to hold off for now and simply ask you, dear reader, what you think about it. Here's some sample graphs:

Having spent a great deal of my career working with arts organizations of color, I am as committed as anyone to the diversity of our arts ecology. I do not believe that we can have a truly great artistic community if all segments of our society are not represented well.

But I do not think I believe anymore in forcing Eurocentric arts organizations to do diverse works or to put one minority on a board.

When large, white organizations produce minority works they typically select the "low hanging fruit," the most popular works by diverse artists featuring the most famous minority performers and directors. This almost invariably hurts the minority arts organizations in the neighborhood, most of which are small and underfunded, and cannot afford to match the marketing clout or the casting glamor of their larger white counterparts. How else to explain the reduced strength of American black theater companies over the past twenty years?

Meg's New Friend First Rehearsal

I am sound designing Meg's New Friend, written by Blair Singer and directed by Mark "Mr. Excitement" Armstrong for his company, aptly titled, The Production Company.  It was a great first rehearsal (what I was able to attend of it, anyway). It's always interesting as a director to get a sense of another director's process, and the way they do things etc.

I was really struck by a few things:

(1) Mark founded a company called The Production Company because he wants to keep the group's focus on Production. A similar thing to 13P's "We don't develop plays, we do them" approach. The idea being that he saw all this great writing around him and wanted to create a space where it would actually be produced instead of read.

(2) Blair Singer quote: "People are hungry to see good acting in small spaces". I think this is one of the comparative advantages of Off-Off Broadway theater that's relatively seldomly remarked upon-- the intimacy of the venue is important. When you have some really good actors (or as Blair put it, "truth tellers") on stage, the smallness of the space really heightens the experience.

(3) Meg's New Friend is a play about a woman in a long term relationship who begins to fall for her boyfriend's sister's new boyfriend.  The new boyfriend is black. The other three characters are white. Part of what I really like about the play is that it is  a play about relationships, not about race but it doesn't ignore race either. Race is in the mix, but it's not the whole conversation. It's one of the reasons why I really wanted to do the play. This has actually really informed the sound design. There's a way in scene transition music where you could make this play about race, or try to comment on the race politics of the play. And it doesn't need it.

(4) Blair's real talent is for creating plays that feature universally decent characters. They have flaws, yes, but they're decent people trying to do the right thing. And yet there's still stakes, conflict and drama.  This is really hard to do.  It's much easier to do plays about fundamentally not-decent people (Labute) or insert spoiler characters who do fucked up things (Rebeck) to create conflict and stakes. 

(5) Similarly, Mark is very talented as a director at focusing on the human dynamics in a play. he really gets back to fundamentals like relationships, stakes, given circumstances etc. and is able to articulate those and bring those dynamics out in a show really well.

I'm really looking forward to this project! And looking forward to just being a sound designer. And to blogging about it, because as a designer i feel capable of writing about it in ways I don't when I'm directing plays.

Pumpkin Pie Show: Commencement

So it should be said before I write my recommendation that you all see The Pumpkin Pie Show: Commencement at Under St. Mark's that I couldn't be more compromised here. Clay McLeod Chapman, the writer/director (although he wouldn't use that second word) is one of my best friends and most frequent collaborators.  I acted in a previous incarnation of The Pumpkin Pie Show. Hanna Cheek, who stars in the show, has been in two projects I've directed and is a good friend (and was in the version of the PPS that I was in). 

I'll keep it short and sweet then: In the performance I saw Saturday night Hanna Cheek gave one of the best performance I have ever seen in an indie theatre show.   It was truly remarkable, and as someone who has followed her for years, it was pretty stunning to watch her hop to another level and make it look easy. 

Casting directors and agents take notice! Ignore Hanna Cheek at your peril!

More on Critics from Rob Kendt

I was going to include John Lahr's review of Bye Bye Birdie as another example of bad contextualization in my earlier post today, but for some reason forgot to. Whoops.  Rob Kendt does a great job of explaining what is so wrong with Lahr's BBB review, and what is so right about Lahr's writing at its best here.