Storefront Rebellion

Backtracking in the face of "an abundance of caution"*

It's possible that I wasn't giving young audiences enough credit in my last post. Why the change of heart? Two recent stories I saw this weekend suggest that the larger problem might be with the "let's avoid anything that's uncomfortable" stance of the adults in charge.

In Toronto, school groups have been pulling out of bookings to see Joseph Jomo Pierre's play Born Ready, which in Richard Ouzounian's words "deals realistically with ghetto life in Toronto and the gun culture that young people are drawn into," after two school boards expressed their dismay. In other words, administrations are determining that a play that deals realistically with the world many of its teen audience members are living in might be too mature for them. As Ouzounian says, "A special performance for educators and a four-star review in this paper doesn’t seem to have helped."

Meanwhile, college administrators at a school in my home state banned a student production of Sondheim's Assassins on the eve of its opening, claiming sensitivity to the Northern Illinois University shootings. Unnamed faculty members in this story point out that the administration is banning pretend gun shots even while real gun shots are going off at parties organized by football players. Never mind that Assassins is in large part an attempt to understand why certain people, from Lee Harvey Oswald to NIU's Steven Kazmierczak, resort to this kind of senseless violence. [Extraordinarily Full Disclosure: I'd have to dig through some boxes to be sure, but I believe Ardith Morris, Arkansas Tech's theater director and the director of this production of Assassins, was an instructor at a summer theater program I attended there in high school. Wow.]

To me, this sounds a lot like abstinence-only sex education—attempts by adults to shield young people from a world they're already living in. They don't work. Theater's purpose, in my mind, is to give us ways to understand the world we live in. The fewer barriers we create between that purpose and its audience, the more likely the audience will be to fully absorb it.

*This quote comes from the linked story about Arkansas Tech, from its president. An overabundance of caution, in my opinion.

Can our teens handle mature teen material?

Reading The Playgoer's post about the National's program of mature theater for young audiences, I couldn't help but wonder how well the teen audiences are able to deal with subject matter about "child murder, pregnant 13-year-olds and soldiers returning from Iraq."

As Christopher Piatt pointed out in his review of Daniel Talbott's Slipping last week, the Side Project here is pretty masterful at handling adolescent angst, even though their shows aren't necessarily (or at least aren't overtly) targeted to teen audiences. I happened to catch both Slipping and the concurrently running Perfect, by Philip Dawkins, at the Side Project's tiny Rogers Park space on Sunday; both shows deal with teen characters in adult situations. (In the interest of full disclosure, Dawkins is a friend of mine.)

The night after I saw the shows, I heard a horror story about last Friday's performance of Perfect. Apparently a group of teens had been brought to the show that night (a church group? a school group? I don't know). Now, believe me when I say the Side Project is an intimate space—in the configuration for Perfect, it probably seats about 20 people. And from what I hear, three of these kids sat in the front row Friday night and heckled and catcalled the actors who were working inches away from them.

Yes, as Garrett points out, there's a big market in young adult novels and even TV shows that traffic in teen characters and risqué themes, and there long has been—Adam Rapp's got nothing on Judy Blume. But teen audiences are able to take in those stories alone in their rooms, on a private, one-on-one basis. Seeing a play in a theater full of their peers is a different matter. Heck, as a guy who served a tour of duty doing Shakespeare for Chicago Public Schools students back when I was still performing, I know firsthand how hard it is to break through the Wall of Cool kids of this age are constantly trying to project in front of their peers.

Are kids in the UK better equipped to handle this sort of stuff? Am I not giving US teens enough credit? I don't know, and I certainly wish there were less of the "We must protect the children" mentality in the States—maybe if there were, our kids would be able to deal more maturely with this kind of material. But I'd definitely be interested in knowing how UK school audiences are responding to the latest work from the author of Shopping and Fucking.

Say what you mean

This afternoon, I got an email from my friend Jeremy saying, "I'm happy to see that you guys finally updated your blog."

Believe me when I say we've been trying to. We spent a big chunk of last week trying to find something worth blogging about so that August: Osage County's Broadway opening could move down the list. Two weeks after the fact, it was starting to seem like old news (though what might be the final print word, Hilton Als's less than glowing New Yorker review, just showed up online today). But it's a slow time for new openings, and just the same as I practice here, we only post on the TOC blog when we have something to say. This morning we finally found inspiration.

This weekend, I (obviously) saw Actors Workshop's Three Hotels (review here) and the closing performance of Egan Reich's The Most Liquid Currency in the World, in a very well-acted world premiere by Pine Box Theatre, the company I wrote about here.

I took tonight off to watch the incredibly disappointing Bears game with the guys (and honorary guy Julie); I'm taking tomorrow night off as well before spending three nights in a row at the theater; I'll then head off for several restful days in the theater-free hinterlands (a.k.a. Northwest Arkansas), where I'll relax with the family and hopefully catch up on some of the Oscar season's movies I haven't yet seen—I'm thinking if my Dylan-fan dad hasn't seen I'm Not There yet, and assuming it's actually playing in the land of multiplexes, I'll take him to see it. It'll be a nice rest before the plays start opening again in January.

If I don't post again before then, happy holidays, y'all.

Wicked bad, Betty

Just watched Ugly Betty's Wicked episode. I love me some Ugly Betty. I love Justin and his showtune club, and I love tonight's episode for presenting going to theater as something that normal people do. (See, I don't hate Wicked! Really! And I also love Ugly Betty for casting Marlo Thomas as a cougar. And Henry, who I've loved since he was Harrison on Popular.)

But I'm also peeved with Betty for setting a bad example of awful audience behavior. Betty and Henry spent most of Wicked in the audience texting to each other, not to mention the whispered, non-show-related conversation among Betty, Gio and Daniel.

It just so happens that I spent some time today on, um, the Broadway-fan message board All That Chat—I swear to GOD it was work-related, I was curious about what the commenters were saying about the first few previews of August: Osage County (and so far the feedback is incredibly positive), and the experience of going on the boards did prompt me to turn to Christopher and say "Internet message boards may be the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity"—point being, I found this thread today, which is entitled "I consider texting/emailing during plays to be the new scourge..."

This is nothing new to us. Mr. Piatt addressed this scourge in a TOC blog post last spring, and that was of course preceded by Tracy Letts's April post on the Steppenwolf blog.

Last night I attended a performance of Eduardo Machado's Chicago premiere of The Cook at the Goodman (review to come next week) with my friend Neal. At the open of the show, we heard the now-requisite chuckles at the preshow announcement to turn off cell phones and unwrap candies and cough drops. At intermission, we lamented the fact that, despite the chuckling, we heard an hour's worth of unwrapping cellophane and two ringing phones in the first act.

So thanks, Betty, for encouraging this kind of obliviousness to continue. I'll keep watching (after all, tonight's ending was frickin' heartbreaking), but consider yourself On Notice.

(Also, I left the TV on while writing this post, which means I saw my first-ever episode of Grey's Anatomy. Man, Grey's, you are a dumb show. But I still love you, Sara Ramirez.)

Skyrocket(ing price)s in flight

More musings on the highs and lows of ticket prices: In a what-about-the-little-guys column in Wednesday's NY Post, Riedel reports on the irony* of the Broadway transfer of Billy Elliot, a show about lower-class struggles, establishing a record-high base price for orchestra seats of $135.

Broadway has turned its back on the working and middle classes. If you're not rich, if you don't have a loft in SoHo or a three-bedroom on the Upper West Side or a house in Westport, get lost, we don't need you, you can't afford us. If you really want to take the family to a show, check out the Ice Capades.

The Playgoer imagines the producers' mindset:

And so, maybe you stop caring that more and more "regular folk" are not going to be able to afford theatregoing as a regular habit. And you start caring a lot more about a) those who can afford it, or at least can "expense" it. And, b) those who will still splurge once a year--i.e. those for whom theatregoing is rare and expensive event (like a Vegas show or a 4-star restaurant), not part of their regular artistically nurturing diet. This naturally includes tourists, even very middle-class, middle-income tourists who can't really afford it either, but will pay it once in a blue moon to treat their spouse and/or family.

As Broadway goes, the "regular folk" ship may have sailed, as we learned from Frank Rich when TOC talked to him for our Theater cover story last month.

“When I arrived as drama critic [in New York] in the ’80s, the audience was one third tourists and two thirds from the tristate area,” Rich says, quoting statistics from the League of American Theaters. “It’s now flipped. A lot of these big shows, which are corporate brands, they are primarily for tourists.”

The big Broadway shows these days, with "premium" ticket prices reaching $300–$400, have apparently given up the pretense that they're in business for the average New Yorker; instead they're catering to expense accounts and tourists.

Chicago ticket prices aren't at nearly the same level of crazy as Broadway, and that's largely because the majority of Chicago theater is nonprofit. (There's a reason that Broadway is referred to as a "theater industry" and in Chicago it's a "theater community.")

The newly-opened Jersey Boys tour, though, does seem to have established a new record with a top ticket price of $95. (I did a quick search of the TOC archives yesterday, and $95 is the highest top price for the Broadway in Chicago houses in the last 2 1/2 years, narrowly beating Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays at $92.50 and Wicked's current top of $90. I presume there was nothing higher before TOC's existence, but I could be wrong.) The top prices at the nonprofit theaters are downtown as well: floor seats at Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play at the Goodman, or Chicago Shakespeare's Cymbeline and Passion, run $70.

Not exactly the price-gouging of Broadway, but man—if I didn't get press comps, I wouldn't be able to afford good seats to these shows. Which probably means I wouldn't see them at all.

*Dear god, is this actually ironic? Ever since Alanis I'm terrified to employ the term for fear I'm using it wrong.

Jerseybeat

Last night I caught Across the Universe, the Julie Taymor movie musical scored entirely with Beatles songs.

The night before, I attended the Chicago premiere of Jersey Boys.

Suffice it to say that if I've got to see another piece of Baby Boomer nostalgia porn fetishizing the imagined past, better it be Taymor than Des McAnuff.

Fine, don't suffice it. Consider this the dissenting opinion to my buddy Mr. Piatt, who quite enjoyed Jersey Boys. I didn't hate it. I agree with him that these four Seasons are particularly well cast, and the music is terrifically polished. But that polish that makes the soundtrack sparkle is exactly what's wrong with the rest of the show—it's polished to a high-gloss–over.

Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice's book contains some of the laziest, most clichéd storytelling I've seen; this is a show in which the music business is referred to as both a "rollercoaster" and a "merry-go-round" no more than twenty minutes apart. Transitions and elisions in the ever-present narration were as artificial as, "Look, there's a woman. And speaking of women, Frankie got married." Furthermore, for a story that relies heavily on the implication of mob ties, the boys seem suspiciously removed from any actual danger. And age-old Italian stereotypes are leaned on with only slightly more pressure than age-old gay ones (in the form of famed Four Seasons producer Bob Crewe, reduced here to the classic mincing homo joke).

But the story is mostly beside the point for Jersey Boys' target audience, which is there more for the faithful recreation of the iconic pop moments of its youth. The money moments for Sunday night's audience were those in which the four leads, close approximations of the Four Seasons as they appeared forty years ago, reconstructed the American Bandstand and Ed Sullivan performances of yore.

The generation gap yawned wide as a reasonable facsimile of "Walk Like a Man" prompted, in the middle of the first act, the first of the evening's three standing ovations. There was some discussion later among those of us who remained seated and mystified about what might, ten or twenty years from now, provoke the same response from our age group. The Madonna musical? Bon Jovi? Recreations of the Nirvana concerts that few of us made it to in time?

In the end, Jersey Boys isn't much more or less dramatic than the backstories of any of those artists or any other episode of Behind the Music. Seeing legends Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio join their young doppelgangers onstage for the opening-night curtain call was neat, but they won't be there for the average performance. Jersey Boys isn't the worst thing that's ever happened, but I'd point out that some VH1 and a Four Seasons greatest hits disc won't run you $30–$95.

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Read Christopher's full Jersey Boys review, as well as reviews of 13 other shows this week (including my 4-star reviews of Northlight's Miser, BoHo's Songs for a New World and BackStage's Waiting for Lefty) at the TOC website.

Experiments in Marketing?

The news of the day from elsewhere seems to be all about alternative marketing. In London, the National Theatre has started a YouTube channel, with trailers for plays and artist interviews. (The Guardian blogger notes that she found the YouTube link on the National's Facebook page. Hmmm.)

In New York, Signature Theatre announced its next four seasons, but more importantly announced the continuation of its "Signature Ticket Initiative;" with corporate underwriting from Time Warner and others, Signature has sold every ticket for the last two seasons at $15, and will continue at $20 a ticket for the next four years. From the Backstage story:

According to statistics provided by the theatre, Signature sold 50,000 tickets: 50 percent of them to new buyers, 30 percent to new households, and 20 percent to people under 35. Ticket prices at a major Off-Broadway house such as Signature typically cost $55-$85.

And from the Times:

James Houghton, the Signature’s artistic director, said the ticket initiative was an unambiguous success, with all productions selling out, some within 48 hours. According to surveys conducted at the theater, half of the ticket buyers were new to the Signature, a quarter earned less than $50,000 a year, and a fifth were under 35.

“We worked very hard to reach audiences and communities that just don’t think about going to the theater because they’ve been priced out,” Mr. Houghton said at a news conference.

What can Chicago take from this, I wonder? Our city is already full of affordable theater. Of the five shows TOC lists under "Don't Miss" this week, three are priced at $20 or under; all five are $30 or less. (It helps that, aside from Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God tour returning to the Lakeshore, the other four are all non-Equity.) Of all the Chicago shows recommended in the comments of the latest "What Would You Recommend?" thread at Parabasis, the only two that cost more than twenty bucks are the ones at the Goodman and Steppenwolf.

So why aren't we selling out every performance of every good show? Because Steep Theatre and the Strange Tree Group don't have press conferences to announce their low ticket prices? If $15 tickets created such a bump for Signature in younger, lower-income audience members, do we simply need to get the word out to Chicago audiences that they already have cheap theater available to them? Is this applicable at all?

Paranoia, the Destroyer

Saturday afternoon, I finally got around to catching a performance of Forbidden Broadway: SVU. The revue has been playing at the Royal George cabaret for six or eight weeks now on its break from New York, and it's been selling well enough that it just announced another extension here, through September 2.

I had seen another iteration of Forbidden Broadway in New York in 2000, and just prior to its current Chicago run I interviewed its creator, Gerard Alessandrini. Though it didn't make it into the final print interview, I had asked Alessandrini if he thought Chicago audiences, who didn't necessarily know the ins and outs of what was going on on Broadway, would get all the jokes. He seemed pretty confident that we would, and noted that most of the shows they parodied had been through Chicago either on their way to Broadway or on tour afterward; I was particularly curious, having been given a preliminary copy of the show's running order, how things might have changed in the past two months.

The answer is: not much, really. The show got high marks from most of the Chicago reviewers, and obviously has been selling well if it's extending. But the performance I attended was a real litmus test: a Saturday early matinee (FB does three shows on Saturdays, at 2pm, 5pm and 8pm). This was going to be the ultimate "bluehair" performance, and late in the run. How would it go over?

Ultimately, it was a hit. The order of the numbers has been rearranged extensively from the advance plan I saw, but it's overall the same content. The 2pm audience was slow to warm up, but we did. My friend Adam and I, both under-30 theater majors, were easily the youngest in the room and often the quickest to laugh, but there were several other audience members who were clearly regular Broadway visitors and who got a lot of the visual jokes that no one else did. One lady in particular seemed to be an NYC regular; where the majority of the audience would breathe a palpable sigh of relief when they recognized music from Fiddler but then didn't get the gags about the recent revival and Harvey Fierstein, this lady got all the jokes about Light in the Piazza.

As the show ended, though, I heard the most telling commentary. When we were getting up to head for the exit, a man in the row behind us was talking to his wife about not just Adam and I, but the older audience members who were often solo laughers during the show.

"They obviously had plants in the audience," he was saying. "She was laughing before the jokes."

I wanted to tell him that no, she was just laughing at the jokes he didn't get. But what would have been the point?