Month: December 2003

The Year That Was (And Not Any Better)

Why do annual reports always make things look as rosy a possible, asks Theatre Communications Group director Ben Cameron. So his assessment of the current year in theatre business: “Conceived in affluent times, the 2002 fiscal year was one redefined by the events of 9/11, by unanticipated new patterns of audience behavior and fears of terrorism, by a crumbling national economy and rapidly escalating unemployment. As our recently released TheatreFacts 2002 demonstrates, it was a year in which local and city funding fell by 44 percent, in which the number of corporate donors fell, in which foundation funding slipped and in which field expenses grew more quickly than earned revenues. It was a year in which 54 percent of theatres finished the year with a deficit—a shocking slide from the 71 percent that had achieved a surplus just two years earlier—and had not individual contributors rallied in unprecedented numbers, covering more than 20 percent of expenses, as opposed to the 9.6 percent covered five years ago—the results would have been far worse.”

TV Nation (On Stage)

Plays are starting to look too much like TV, complains playwright Joanna Laurens. “Where are the subtle plays, plays that address current social issues by sidling up to them, not by hitting you over the head with them? That is what I want to see. I don’t want the same experience from both television and theatre. The mediums don’t function in the same way – and yet, they are increasingly being used interchangeably. Let’s put this play on the screen; let’s put this film on the stage. Let’s clog up our theatres with naturalism.”

UK Theatre: Wanker Nation?

What can you tell about a country by the plays it produces? An American critic drops in to the London stage, and reports that British playwrights seem to have a dismal perception of today’s UK. “The organised, shimmering intelligence of contemporary British theatre contrasts, shockingly, with its vision of a hopelessly incompetent wanker nation. Is the Great Brittle of these 12 plays, a country where no one has any faith in anything, true to the life people are living outside the theatre? Or is the truer portrait of Britain in late 2003 that piece of street theatre enacted by thousands of well-behaved, jolly protesters in Trafalgar Square last month, toppling the papier-mché statue of George Bush?

Game On

Video games have fast become the recreation of choice. “Figures for the overall size of the industry in 2003 will not emerge until March but, in 2002, the UK leisure software market value topped £1bn for the first time, compared with cinema box-office income of £755m and video/DVD rental worth £500m.”

Hollywood’s Got Game(s)

Hollywood’s top movie producers are teaming up with computer gamer producers to collaborate on projects. Why? “Nothing grabs Hollywood’s attention more than money. And with video-game sales topping Hollywood box office receipts for the second year in a row (games raked in $30 billion in global sales versus the movie industry’s $20.4 billion in 2002), Hollywood agencies have gone virtual.”

“Angels” – Missing Out

“Angels in America” is such a creature of the theatre, that no matter how skilled the screen translation, it loses something on the TV. “For all its gorgeous writing, “Angels” doesn’t prove suited to film the way “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” did. Mr. Kushner’s plays are strict creatures of the theater in ways that many of his predecessors’ and most of his contemporaries’ are not. He is our foremost playwright of the imagination. I mean this partly in the sense that he can send characters darting off to Heaven or Antarctica without seeming foolish, but mostly in the sense that, on the stage, his plays demand that we engage our own imaginations.”

Outsider Art Comes Inside

“During the 1990s, the field of outsider art—a term for work by self-taught, often visionary artists, made in idiosyncratic styles or folk-art traditions—gained increasing respectability and value. In 2001, at the same time as a new headquarters for the American Folk Art Museum opened in midtown Manhattan, a wave of contemporary artists, many with M.F.A.s and major gallery representation, began to exhibit works that unapologetically resembled the style and intensity of the best of their self-taught predecessors.”

The Literary Lion Of Tulsa

For nearly half a century, Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko has been “a piercing voice of conscience, sometimes bitterly angry, other times overflowing with enthusiasm and hope. Many Americans see him as part Walt Whitman and part Bob Dylan; Russians know him as a wildly popular poet who embodies their country’s spirit and has often screamed truths that others feared to whisper. His fame has spread far beyond his homeland, and today he is among the world’s most widely admired living writers.” And now he’s in Tulsa…

Pittsburgh Opera Cutting Back

The Pittsburgh Opera, which has been looking for ways to trim its budget, is announcing that it will cut back the number of productions it mounts next season from five to four, and will replace the fifth opera with something called a “special production.” The company says that the cutback will give it much-needed financial breathing room, and stresses that it isn’t in anything approaching dire fiscal straits.