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.
