Category: theatre

Seattle’s ACT Theatre gives itself a reprieve from oblivion. The theatre had said it needed to raise $1.5 million by this Friday to avoid closing. But “at a meeting yesterday afternoon, the 25-member board elected to pay ACT’s skeleton staff of nine employees and the company’s other essential expenses out of their own pockets for a month, while trying to raise the $1.5 million they say is needed to keep the theater from closing permanently.”

How do you sell 120,000 tickets and still run up a $500,000 deficit? Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre did it last year, and last week said if it wasn’t able to raise $1.5 million toward an accumulated deficit of $1.7 million, it would have to close its doors by this Friday. So far, no white knight has come forward…

Broadway producers are trying an unusual tactic in their battle with musicians over the set minimum number of musicians required to be included in every show. Ordinarily, in these disputes, the front office talks about fiscal responsibility, and the musicians counter with talk of artistic integrity. But in this case, the producers claim that the musicians’ position is artistically indefensible, and that minimums, as they are known, are unfair to the composer of a show’s score, and to the entire creative team. It’s an innovative approach, but unfortunately, some rather high-profile Broadway composers are already refuting the claims.

Broadway producers say that the number of musicians emplyed for a show “should be left to the composer, lyricist, and musical director of a Broadway musical.” The head of the musicians union agrees: “We agree completely, absolutely 100%. The problem is they’re not the people who make the decision. How do we know? Those people are members of our union. And they say, unless we protect the minimums, they can’t work in the same parameters as they do now on Broadway, because the numbers are dictated to the musical creative team by producers.” Musicians and producers are locked in contract talks.

“It is tempting to see Ibsen and Strindberg as inherently antithetical. On the one hand, Ibsen: sane, progressive, rational, formal. On the other, Strindberg: neurotic, reactionary, religious, fragmented. Ibsen’s characters think and speak logically and consecutively: Strindberg’s dart backwards and forwards. They do not think, or speak, ABCDE but AQBZC. ‘I see the two men as violent, necessary opposites, who between them laid the foundations of modern drama’.”

Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre is $1.7 million in debt, has $3,000 in the bank, and has reduced its staff from 65 to nine. If the theatre doesn’t raise $1.5 million by next week, one of Seattle’s oldest and most respected theatres will close its doors.

Some trace Seattle’s ACT problems to its move from a comfortable (but run-down) home to an ambitious multi-theatre complex that’s expensive to run. Still… where was the theatre’s board?

“The [Los Angeles-based] Mark Taper Forum’s producing director, Robert Egan, known for fostering new plays and emerging writers, said Friday that he has changed his mind about running ACT Theatre, a major regional company in Seattle, because a worsening fiscal crisis there has nullified the adventurous artistic plans that made him want the job in the first place.” ACT ran a $500,000 deficit in 2002, and is making plans to trim as much as $2 million from its 2003-04 budget. ACT’s board has released Egan from his obligations to the company.

Colorado’s arts funding is down, but the state is in the middle of a theatre boom, with new projects sprouting everywhere. “The 20 projects range in cost from the city of Denver’s taxpayer-authorized, $75 million renovation of the Auditorium Theatre to the $75,000 it is costing John Ashton to turn a fur-storage shop into a new, 99-seat home for his 16-year-old Avenue Theater.”

Say you belong to a church that just isn’t packing ’em in the pews these days. And say you feel the need to do something about this, and that you’re not averse to a little modernization of services. What do you do? Well, if you’re a New Yorker, you apparently import some Broadway people to sing a few show tunes, and watch the attendance soar! No, seriously, a church actually did this. And a Methodist church, to boot! Not everyone is a fan (particularly those who note that the practice seems to draw a large number of gay men to the services,) but the pastor in charge calls it a miracle.