Aaron Garrett Aaron Garrett

Failure to Cultivate an Audience is a Failure of the Artist, not the Audience

(photo from American Theatre article. Manuel Herrera, Yeman Brown, and Jōvan Dansberry in "Dancin'" on Broadway. (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Yesterday a revival of Bob Fosse’s Dancin’ closed on Broadway, and last week Fosse’s daughter and producer on the revival Nicole Fosse took to American Theatre to write an opinion lamenting the closure and placing its necessity at the feet of its failure to garner any Tony nominations.

More than that though she took the Tony’s to task for its structural inability to recognize an unconventional show like Dancin’, with no plot structure and little singing it isn’t an obvious choice for Best Musical, and it certainly doesn’t fit into Best Play.

Fosse and the producers chose to use a commercial route for Dancin’ and the public decided it didn’t want to see it.

I can appreciate the disappointment that Nicole, the crew and cast feel. I can sympathize as a person who also makes unconventional theater and has a tremendously difficult time getting any kind of institutional attention for it. I can even agree that the Tony’s should potentially have a category for non-traditional performance, as she suggests. What I can’t do is empathize with the idea that the Tony’s are the barometer for theatrical legitimacy and join with Nicole to say that they have a responsibility to recognize new work.

“The Tony Awards are signaling to the world that it’s not a worthy theatrical experience—that it isn’t worth your time or your money.” That’s what Nicole writes. If the Tony’s don’t nominate something like Dancin’ maybe producers won’t bring another dance-focused show to Broadway anytime soon, and wouldn’t that be a loss? Maybe, but if Dancin’ were selling tickets it wouldn’t need a nomination to stay alive.

Fosse and the producers chose to use a commercial route for Dancin’ and the public decided it didn’t want to see it. And we can be disappointed, even judgmental, of audiences not wanting that kind of performance, but it isn’t fair to suggest that an award ceremony ought to hand out a nomination to prop up a show the market rejected. That’s cronyism at its worst.

Sleep No More is an unconventional theater piece playing in New York successfully for over a decade, without any awards recognition. It succeeds because people want to see it. Phantom of the Opera finally closed this year after decades of performance, because ticket sales finally started to flag. Would it have served the public interest to keep it open because it is valuable to the culture even if the public didn’t want it anymore?

Broadway is an advertising campaign, an extraordinarily successful one which has unfortunately made the public less interested and less respectful of the theater that goes on in their own communities and of the theater that doesn’t play as well on those specific streets. The Tony’s are a beefy arm of that campaign which shut out enormous amounts of interesting competition to focus only on work that doesn’t represent that vast majority of theatre in this country.

Last week Pronoia did a show at Eureka (like we do ever 2nd Friday, come July 14th!) It was an ok show, sparsely attended (though I’m grateful to everyone who came out!) We didn’t sell any tickets. None of the people who saw it, including friends, thought it was worth paying for. That’s disappointing to me. But I believe it’s my job to convince them that this theater we do is worth their time and their money.

I’m disappointed that I won’t get to see Dancin’, that it probably won’t go on tour. I wish other people had found the work as compelling as I did, but they didn’t. I’m disappointed that Pronoia isn’t doing as well as I think we should be, and that people don’t find our work as compelling as I think that ought to, but it’s not anyone else’s fault other than my own, and I get another chance to try to convince them in July.

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Presidential Death-Match Aaron Garrett Presidential Death-Match Aaron Garrett

Indies: Populists v the West

We know that no third party or independent has ever successfully become president- but not for lack of trying! Aaron and Dennis begin to take a look at the 1950s and beyond during a time of fringe candidates fighting for the restoration of segregation (and other melancholy times)!

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Aaron Garrett Aaron Garrett

Painting You (William Finn) and Waiting for Philip Glass (Wendy Wasserstein)

With these final two pieces we’ve reached the end of Love’s Fire a night of theater based off Shakespearean Sonnets which, from my vantage point, is not as exciting as it could have been.

Then again, I’m looking for humor, and not everyone wants to supply that.

Arguably these two authors, William Finn and Wendy Wasserstein, are the ones I’m most aware of (with the exception of Tony Kushner,) and their styles are much more similar to mine.

William Finn decides to produce his work as a song, which does make it difficult to parse (at least for me.) It’s a short piece, barely two pages of lyrics, describing the… woe? acceptance? nonchalance? of a painter presented with painting his subject/lover. He finds that he is much less able to do so than he was when they began their relationship.

I’ve said before that Tuesdays are hard for understanding because I get so little sleep, and today I was challenged (though pleasantly so) to understand the why of what’s happening. The painter has lost objectivity, and although he likes the relationship that has caused this he is worried about the loss of identity and nuance that comes from being able to ply his trade.

It is the best that it can be, I think: evocative, simple, elegant, and I think it would gain much from the staging.

Wasserstein’s Waiting for Philip Glass is something else altogether. A wealthy person throws a party for other wealthy people so they can appreciate, support, and hobknob with Philip Glass. Over the course of the short play people enter and exit, often being snarky about whomever has just left the room, and being frankly disgusting with the level of wealth “pop over to Spain to see the opening in Bilbao” is a sentiment expressed multiple times.

It eventually settles into a tense conversation between two ex-lovers (the host and a guest) and their shared disappointment over what happened, and their shared disapproval of their ex-partners’ new partner.

I loved every moment of the piece, but it felt like it didn’t resolve into anything, as though it were always right on the cusp of making its point, but in the end perhaps all it wanted to do was show something true and not comment on it (which historically makes me crazy, but I’m growing peaceful with that lately.)

At the end of the day Love’s Fire is a night of theater which doesn’t ignite anything in me, and I think it shows the limitations of an anthology by several writers: in the absence of a cohesive vision each writer looks to their bag of tricks which makes everything stand out, but rarely gel.

If my barometer for what makes a good sketch show is akin to a cubist painting: we have one subject (in this case romantic love) looked at from many different perspectives. In this collection we see jealousy, ecstasy, change, and neurosis, but I couldn’t say I’ve walked away from the collection with any new thoughts on the subject and so I think it is something of a let down.

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