Tony Noms 2012

They're out there.

Random thoughts:

First I recklessly tweet that Once would not even make it to opening night on Broadway, now it leads the pack with 11 Tony nominations. Go figure. (And have I seen it? Of course not.)  And given the competition, I now (equally recklessly) say it's the odd on favorite to win Best Musical.

Of the four Best Musical nominees, three are based on movies and one is a "revisal" of an old Gershwin musical (old songs, new script). I actually am not among those lamenting movies-into-musicals-- before that it was plays-into-musicals, no? (And even books.) But, as movies, Newsies and Once already were musicals, although I gather much new music has been added to both for Broadway? So Leap of Faith has the only fully original score of the bunch.

Note that for the actual "Best Original Score" category they couldn't even find four satisfactory musicals. 1) Newsies, which is only partially original for the stage; 2) Bonnie and Clyde, which... speaks for itself; 3) Peter and the Starcatcher, a play with music; and 4) One Man Two Guvnors, another play, featuring a mock-Beatles band playing 60's rockabilly pastiche between scenes.  So, anyone want to comment on the state of the new musical?

Speaking of 2Guvs (as the kids call it), a shame it apparently was deemed neither fish nor foul by the committee: Although it's actually a loose adaptation of Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters, it was ruled ineligible for the "play revival" category. Yet it appears to have seemed too (deliberately) old fashioned for Best "New" Play--a category which instead includes an adaptation of an old Viennese novel, a Peter Pan "prequel," and a Raisin in the Sun "sequel."

Best Play Revival includes Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Gore Vidal's The Best Man.  I don't believe that's what they were called when they opened originally. So let's call them new plays! (Ditto for The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, of course.)

Remember Spider-Man? The Tonys didn't.  Sets and costumes is all they get.  But as Erik Piepenburg @nyt just tweeted, the show's producers are probably just relieved, for legal purposes, that Julie Taymor did not get any further validation as "director."

As for performers...

Best Actor/Play looks like a tossup between three formidable fatmen: Philip Seymour Hoffman, James "2Guvs" Corden, and James Earl Jones. Jones would probably win in the "Featured" category--what's he doing here?

When you consider that Venus in Fur is playing to only 57% capacity (up 9 points from last week!), you wonder how Manhattan Theatre Club feels throwing a lot of money away for the sake of Nina Arianda's Best Actress nomination. Girl owes them!  (Oh yeah, got Best Play nod, too. So David Ives owes them!)

Speaking of MTC, blessed year for them.  From what I heard, no one particularly liked their (pointless) Wit and Master Class remounts. Yet both are nominated for Best Play Revival. (And likewise the only faintly praised Cynthia Nixon for Best Actress in Wit.)

Special Award for Hugh Jackman??? Well he did make some folks a ton of money this season.

And finally, shoutout to Shakespeare Theatre DC for the regional award. About time!

Review: The Morini Strad

My latest for Time Out: Willy Holtzman's The Morini Strad at Primary Stages.

The takeaway: "Tuesdays with Morrie for the WQXR crowd."

By the way, forgot to mention in the review that this is "based on a true story."  But I must say I found myself wondering: where's the "story" here???

Rush Tickets for All!

Kudos to producer Jordan Roth for simplifying the rush ticket policy for at least one Broadway show:

A limited number of lower-price general rush tickets will be available for every performance of the Broadway run of Bruce Norris' Pulitzer Prize-winning Clybourne Park, the comedy-drama about the personalities behind racial shifts in a neighborhood, producer Jordan Roth announced on March 26, the day of the play's first preview. "We hope to give as many people as possible the opportunity to share this astonishing theatrical experience," Roth said in a statement.

Rush tickets (at $30 each) will be available on the day of the performance at the Walter Kerr Theatre box office beginning at 10 AM. Limit two per customer. Opening night for the limited 16-week engagement is April 19.

Yes. Finally. Increasing the opportunities to see a show instead of constricting them. What a concept.

Let's hope this scores big, since it's about time Broadway in general simplified the whole rush policy mess. Every show has its own policy--which is usually not publicized. Many are for only for the under-30 set (or even younger, requiring student ID). Do they have to make it so obviously begrudging?

When, in fact, I bet when a show is actually good, tons of folks will, er, rush to any opportunity to go for less than $40, or even $50.

And seriously, producers, how do you feel about your churlish rush policies when you're staring at all those empty seats during previews, huh?

Correction of the Day

Time we had a little humor in the Mike Daisey affair...

A writer named Jason Mick, at the Daily Tech site, criticizes, as I have, the things that Daisey got wrong or made up. Then he adds:

Mr. Daisey is married to Deborah Fallows, a Chinese native who wrote the book Dreaming in Chinese.

It is true that Deborah Fallows . . . wrote the book Dreaming in Chinese. It is true that friends have told her that she might as well have been born a native Chinese person, since her spirit matches that of Chinese women in so many ways. But she is a native of Chicago, not any place in China, and of Czech rather than Chinese ethnic background. And she is most definitely not married to Mike Daisey. At least that is what she told me when she stormed back into the bedroom this morning irate about what she had just seen about herself online.

-Mr. James Fallows

("Jason Mick might want to ratchet back his outrage over Mike Daisey's sloppiness with facts," he adds.)

And for the record, Daisey is married to his director/collaborator Jean-Michele Gregory.

Orson at 24

Orson Welles in 1939, when he was still a stage and radio star, pre-Citizen Kane. From a new exhibit of Golden Age Hollywood color photos at the National Portrait Gallery in DC.

Kinda looks like "the tall guy" in any twenty-something theatre company today, doesn't he?

About Mike D

"We do not and cannot fact check our artists; we're a theater, not a news organization. The vast majority of what occurs on our stages is fiction. If we didn't believe fiction could reveal truth, we would have to give up our profession. With that said, it obviously matters a great deal to me that our audience understands what they are seeing."

-Oskar Eustis, AD of the Public Theatre, presenter and producer of Mike Daisey's The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs--which, if you didn't know already--came under a bit of heat this weekend.

I am just way too busy this weekend to weigh in on this coherently. But I think Eustis basically gets it right, from a theatrical standpoint.

On the other hand, someone who gets it wrong (at least in this quote) is the man who called him out, This American Life's Ira Glass, who complained: "The normal worldview is: somebody stands on stage and says this happens to me, I think it happened to them." Yes, I think Daisey did himself in when taking his stage show to NPR without accounting for the semiotic differences in mediums. But, man, the ambiguity of "truth" on stage...that's what theatre's all about!

A Site with a View

From NYPL, an online Noel Coward archive with bio and lots of photos. Take a tour and add a little style to your weekend!

The Lincoln Center Performing Arts branch will also have an on-site exhibit of many of the same materials starting next week.

At right: Poster for original Broadway production of Coward's Design for Living , with from l to r: Alfred Lunt, the playwright, Lynn Fontanne

Review: Beyond the Horizon

For Time Out this week I review Eugene O'Neill's 1920 Broadway debut play, Beyond the Horizon. A title long familiar to me from theatre history books, nice to finally see it in this Irish Rep revival.

By the way, I wrote this last week, so that "slut" line was pre-Limbaugh, I promise.

Kickstarter: Better than NEA?

Are you sitting down? The crowd-funding site, Kickstarter, will soon be able to boast a bigger arts-funding treasure-chest than the National Endowment for the Arts.

Or, at least, so boasts its boss:

Kickstarter is having an amazing year, even by the standards of other white hot Web startup companies, and more is yet to come. One of the company’s three co-founders, Yancey Strickler, said that Kickstarter is on track to distribute over $150 million dollars to its users’ projects in 2012, or more than entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), which was $146 million. “It is probable Kickstarter will distribute more money this year than the NEA,” said Stricker in an exclusive phone interview with TPM. 

Of course Kickstarter works very differently from a federal granting agency, and basically relies on how well you can bully (I mean, encourage) thousands of friends into coughing up a few bucks each. Sullivan rounds up the debate over the claim's merits here.

And to be fair, Strickler himself is far from suggesting his company supplant the Endowment:

“We view that number and our relationship to it in both a good and bad way.”
As Strickler explained, the milestone is “good” in the sense that it means that Kickstarter may now reach a point where it will funnel as much money to the arts as the federal agency primarily responsible for supporting them, effectively doubling the amount of art that can get funded in the country. “But maybe it shouldn’t be that way,” Strickler said, “Maybe there’s a reason for the state to strongly support the arts.”

Free-marketers would probably be happy to suggest a Kickstarter-like solution for "privatizing" public sector arts funding. Which is why I think the right lesson to draw from this is not that the NEA is unnecessary but that--in its current atrophied and deliberately starved state--it's so small!  At a time when anyone from political campaigns to Kickstarter projects can raise millions online in small contributions, $150 mil ain't much.

Just a reminder that-- No, Republicans, cutting the NEA won't do bupkis for the deficit.

So I'm all for Kickstarter shaming the congress by showing up how pathetically small their arts funding is. Unfortunately it won't be taken that way by many.

Meanwhile...how long till you think some major nonprofit starts taking to Kickstarter when subscriptions decline?

MTC's Big Buy

So I'm up early today and I decide to tune into "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, and what do I see a commercial for? Manhattan Theatre Club!  No, not one of those 15-second blips at the end of the commercial-reel that stations reserve for cheap local ads.  A proper 30-second glossy spot that I assume is going out nationally--or at least on the East Coast (6-6:30am time slot), or just the greater metro area if that's possible.

I can't find any video online yet to post, but basically it's Cynthia Nixon telling us all how wonderful MTC is. Yes, also a plug for her star turn in Wit, but that's just mentioned along the way. (And, no, she's not bald in this one.)

Why do I find this at all interesting? Well, it seems pretty unprecedented--a nonprofit theatre company spending BIG bucks on a nationally broadcast cable news show to basically advertise its brand. (Using Nixon and Wit as a hook, their latest "product.") I don't believe the word "subscribe" is ever used, but, hey, it is almost spring, which means subscription time. While there is no 2012-2013 season yet, titles of past greatest hits (Proof! Rabbit Hole!) flash across the screen. And the "copy" is all about how you can always count on a fabulous night out at the theatre there, with lots of shots of the "Samuel Friedman Theatre" lit up on the Great White Way. (No mentioned of the subterranean Stages 1 & 2.)

But if this is a national spot it may not even be about subscriptions. It's aimed at tourists, closing with a line something like: "MTC: as exciting as New York itself!" (No comment.) Competing for Broadway consumers, basically.

So I guess I have to admire their balls, at least. 'Cause that sure must cost a lot of their precious funds.

(Anyone know how much, by the way?)

Garofalo's Stage Debut

"Stage-acting, she feels, is a true test of discipline for someone who is used to flying by the seat of their pants 'in that you've got to say this here and you must put that prop there. You must turn the light on right now. That gets me because of my immature response to authority. I perceive it as an authority figure telling me, even though it's not. That's just how immature I am.'"

-Janeane Garofalo, on what it's like to make your stage debut (in New Group's Russian Transfer) in your 40s after years of standup and movies.

Pretty apt tribute to stage actors, actually.

Not Student/Not Senior

Looks like 9-5 employed adults are finding it just as hard there as here to get a decent theatre ticket discount:

While young people have access to youth ticket discounts (and so they should) and retirees have the time to take advantage of mid-week matinee offers, it's the average Joes – average age, average salary, average working hours – who are missing out on the chance to develop what could be a long-term passion. The sad fact is that if you didn't have the means to acquire one earlier in life, you often have little opportunity to do so in adulthood, either.

And don't get me started on all-day camp-outs!

Is Kickstarter Working?

Yesterday, the fundraising website Kickstarter reached a milestone when not one, but two of its clients passed the million-dollar threshold.

I mused last year upon the opportunities here for small theatre productions (and companies) and have noticed many doing so this season. In fact, "theater" has its own category on the site so you can check out current projects there.

So my question to those doing so...How's that working out for you?  Is there a future in this? Success stories? Fails? Please share!