Storefront Rebellion

Case Studies in Criticism in the Interactive Age

As you know if you follow my thoughts here, at Time Out Chicago or in my various extracurricular ventures with any regularity, one of my favorite hobby horses is the opportunities that the online world provides for interaction among critics, artists and audiences, and how the internet does and doesn't change the game. A few recent incidents on the East Coast offer good examples and bad examples of critical conversation.

Web presence matters.

Nick has a terrific post today about You And Your Website. It gets a little wonky (in a good way!), but I love what he says about New Leaf's website:

For a company that was tiny and had no money, this pro-bono design was the get of a lifetime. We still get comments, in a market five years older, about how great our site looks. That site has caught the attention of artists just landing in Chicago, and we get the privelage of working with them first… because we had a web presence that was simple and sleek and showed us off.

This reminds me of one of Terry Teachout's guidelines for theaters inviting his attendance: "Web sites matter--a lot. More often than not, your site will be my introduction to your company. You don't have to cram it full of cutesy-pie bells and whistles, but the smarter the design, the greater the chance that I'll give it a second glance." Absolutely true.

A few weeks back, commenter Chaz asked if I could elaborate on why I considered Steppenwolf, the House and New Leaf three of the best examples in town as far as leveraging social media and engaging audiences online.

Let's start with the big dog, Steppenwolf. Of the three, they have the smallest cross-platform presence—if they have a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page, for instance, I'm not aware of it. What they do have is a handsomely designed, cohesive web brand all contained within steppenwolf.org. Steppenwolf's website is easy to navigate and provides viewers with a rich selection of content; from the page for the current production of Art, you can reach bios for all of the cast members and most of the directing/design staff, view photos from rehearsal and production, get video and podcast discussions of various aspects of the play, and read blurbs from selected reviews.

Furthermore, Steppenwolf makes better use of its blog than almost any other company out there. The company publishes postings from ensemble members in rehearsal, visiting artists, youth council reps and productions running in the Garage, in a way that invites audiences into the process. And when those posts generate comments, everyone up to artistic director Martha Lavey responds. The company's email list is also well-used, with smartly-timed blasts, whether they're for a mainstage show or a one-night Traffic engagement.

The House gets points for being early adopters. Back in February 2005, I called them out at Gapers Block for starting a blog. A few months later, they had a Flickr account and a podcast. Even earlier than that, they enticed viewers to their website with Chris Burnham's comic-book rendering of the Valentine trilogy (I still miss the iteration of the website that had all the company members in a revolving circle of Flash caricatures). These days, one of the company's staff positions is titled "Community Manager;" Katherine Raz mans the House's Twitter stream and its Facebook hub. (BTW, Raz is one of the panelists at this discussion March 12.)

New Leaf is the smallest of the three, yet it manages to do most of the same work the larger companies do online. It has a handsome, well-designed website, which links prominently to an engaging blog, a Twitter account that's active when the company is, a vibrant Facebook thing, and a podcast (careful, that's an iTunes link).

Is there anybody else I've missed who's using the net well?

Social media arts marketing forum March 12

You want to hear something constructive about theater marketing, you say? That's cool.

Y'all know how I feel about online marketing and social media, right? When used well, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr et al can be effective community-building tools that are inexpensive and labor-light enough to be implemented by organizations of any size. (For my money, Steppenwolf, the House and New Leaf, each at different budget levels, are three of the best examples in town.)

So I perked up when this announcement from DCA came across my desk today:

On Thursday, March 12, from 6 - 7:30 pm, the Chicago Department of
Cultural Affairs presents the Creatives at Work Forum “Social Media
and Marketing Strategies.” This panel examines how social networking
platforms enrich, complement, and expand the reach and quality of
artists’ relationships with their audiences. Moderated by Demetrio P.
Maguigad (New Media Manager of Community Media Workshop) this panel
includes Leah Jones (Natiiv Arts & Media); Katherine Raz, (The House
Theatre of Chicago); Rachel Thorne Germond (Founder, RTG Dance); and
C.C. Carter (Young Chicago Authors).

That's Thursday, March 12, 6–7:30pm in the first floor Garland Room at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington St. It's free and open to the public.

Weekend links

• More comments have cropped up on Nambi E. Kelley's Steppenwolf blog post about Tennessee Williams that I wrote about a few weeks ago, now that the Reader's Bill Williams and Tony Adler both picked up on it this week. Steppenwolf staffers Martha Lavey, Ed Sobel and Joy Meads have all weighed in on Kelley's original post; see also the comments on the Reader blog posts, including one from Kelley's Glass Menagerie director (and Steppenwolf ensemble member) Yasen Peyankov.
• The L.A. Times notes that La Jolla is offering "pay what you can" performances in the wake of the economic crisis. SoCal's Broadway incubator offering Oobleck-style pricing? Maybe there's something to these alternative business models after all.
• Which reminds me, I'm still looking for input on how Chicago's box offices are doing in the crunch.
• FunnyOrDie.com on Broadway, basically. To quote Tim Gunn, "Make it work."
• Dan Granata has Toledo-related advice for the Trib's Chris Jones, in response to Chris's review of Katie Holmes's Broadway debut.

Free Night of Theater: is there a downside?

I wrote a blog post at TOC today about TCG's Free Night of Theater promotion, in which Chicago is taking part for the first time this fall. More than 45 Chicago-area companies are making blocks of free tickets available to their October shows, ostensibly to patrons who are new to the theaters they'll be visiting at no charge.

Here's what I like about this as an audience-building endeavor, at least on paper: Theater companies, in my understanding, choose to opt in and choose how many tickets at which performances they want to give away. Audiences get a free sample, giving up nothing more than their email addresses and anonymous demographic information. And, if TCG's numbers from other cities can be trusted, that exchange results in a significant return: one-third of Free Night patrons return to the same theater to buy tickets or subscriptions within the year.

Even better is this: TCG, and particularly its executive director Teresa Eyring and its house magazine, American Theatre, have been criticized in many corners of the theatrosphere in recent months for only representing the interests and outlooks of its members, our country's big-box regional institutions—the Goodmans, Guthries, Intimans and South Coast Reps of the world—and not reflecting the realities of the smaller theaters that make up the vast majorities, in offerings if not in budgets, of most of our cities' theater scenes.

I don't disagree with that assessment. But here's a TCG initiative that's equally open to all sizes of companies. Everyone from Steppenwolf and Northlight to Raven and Caffeine to the student productions at DePaul and Loyola can participate in a program that presumably gives all of them the same audience-building results, through a single centralized website.

Theaters of all sizes give away huge numbers of comps all the damn time. Isn't it a win-win to move them to new patrons instead of friends-and-family? Tell me in the comments if I'm wrong.

Pieces of flair

Added some new links to the sidebar, some of which should have been there months ago. Among them: Patrick's Backstageat.Backstagejobs and the Onion/A.V. Club's new Decider, which I've linked to before; new theater company blogs from Griffin and The Plagiarists; and from NYC, the group blog Extra Criticum, semi-Chicagoan Ethan at Tynan's Anger (though now reënsonced, as the New Yorker would put it, in New York, he's a recent U of C grad and knows what's what here) and the always hilarious Rocco of What's Good/What Blows.

As always, please let me know if there's anything else I should be reading—particularly official blogs by Chicago companies that I'm missing.

Everyone's a critic

Not to spend all my time here promoting TOC, but this should be of particular interest to readers of the blog. The cover package in our new issue is all about the intersection of criticism and blogging (as well as other user-generated content sites like Yelp and LTHForum).

I moderated a roundtable discussion (in an online chat room, no less) with print critics and bloggers. Excerpts are in the magazine, but you can read the full transcript here. Check out the whole package here.

The Strike Strikes Back

I never expected to be expending so much Chicago pixel-ink on New York's stagehands' strike, but more than one Chicagoan—and I'm not talking about theater people—asked me over this Thanksgiving break for news on the Broadway work stoppage and whether or not it could affect theater here (obviously they're not reading the TOC blog or they'd know that it could conceivably have an impact in Chicago if it continues much longer).

The two sides sat down again for talks today, for the first time since last weekend. As of this writing (11pm central time), there are no updates at either of the most reliable sources, the Times theater section and NY1. But do read the excellent breakdown of the issues in Sunday's Times, a team-up between theater reporter Campbell Robertson and business/labor guy Steven Greenhouse.

While you're at the Times website, check out Sunday's nifty profile of Steppenwolf ensemble member Martha Plimpton, currently in previews for Lincoln Center's Cymbeline, which focuses on her journey from Goonie to classical actor and improbably includes a link to her MySpace page.

In theater-web news closer to home, Signal Ensemble Theatre has started a blog of its own; I've added it to the list of Blogs by Chicago Theaters at right. If there are more that I'm missing, let me know.

For your información

Tanya Saracho of Teatro Luna is blogging about her new project.