Dramatics: Lin-Manuel Miranda is in the show

May 15th, 2016 § Comments Off on Dramatics: Lin-Manuel Miranda is in the show § permalink

Lin Manuel Miranda (photo by Howard Sherman)

Lin Manuel Miranda (photo by Howard Sherman)

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Lin-Manuel Miranda—bookwriter, lyricist, composer, and star of the Broadway hit musical Hamilton—has already given a matinee performance and served as master of ceremonies for a streetside #Ham4Ham show. He is optimistic there will still be time for a nap after talking with this writer and before a second performance of Hamilton in less than two hours.

“The sense of community I get from doing it is really why I’m here,” he says, sipping a cup of tea. “That’s joyous to me. That’s the thing that I loved most about doing high school theatre. I always try to stay connected to that same impulse. It’s the running joke that Jonathan Groff and I have: ‘We’re in the play.’ There’s nothing better than being in the play, of being chosen from everyone in your school and showing the world what you have.”

At thirty-five, with Hamilton, Miranda is at the top of the theatre world after only three Broadway musical credits, following his Tony Award-winning In the Heights and his contributions of music and lyrics to Bring It On. He’s already broken into film, writing cantina music for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and writing the score for an upcoming Disney animated feature, Moana, to be released next fall. He has performed at the White House, and the president has come to see him in New York. He’s welcomed at events from the Kennedy Center Honors to gatherings of historians who seem to love Hamilton just as much as die-hard musical theatre buffs. In the midst of all this attention and activity he’s still very connected to his roots. Anyone who follows him on Twitter can find him relating stories about his parents, his wife, his young son, his relatives, and his countless friends, as well as chatting with as many fans as he can.

The experience of high school theatre never seems to be very far from Miranda’s mind. He speaks of it often, and his school theatre experiences are the explicit topic of our interview. He tells me his earliest artistic goal was to be in his sixth grade play.

“We had an extraordinary music teacher at my elementary school who started the tradition of the sixth grade play,” Miranda recalls. This was at Hunter College School, a public elementary and high school for gifted students. “I’m very lucky that she started it just when I got there. I think the first sixth grade musical they did was West Side Story when I was in kindergarten.

“The entire school would watch the sixth grade play. I remember as young as second or third grade already fantasizing, ‘What’s going to be the sixth grade play when we get to sixth grade?’ It’s funny in retrospect to think how much of my life was spent thinking, ‘What show are we going to get to do?’ which is not the usual elementary school concern.

“Then, the crazy thing that happened was we got to sixth grade and they said, ‘We’re going to do the previous six years’ shows. We’re going to do short versions of all of them.’ So we get this lethal dosage of musical theatre at age twelve. I was a cowhand and a son in this unwatchable four-hour show that our parents had to sit through. But for me, it was the greatest experience of my life.”

Miranda didn’t go out for theatre at all in seventh grade but returned as an eighth grader with the encouragement of his English teacher, Rembert Herbert, whom he thanked in his Tony acceptance speech.“He really got me engaged as a student first. He told me, ‘You’re writing all this stuff in the back of my class, but none of it is for class. So can you join us?” Pressed on what he was writing at the back of class, Miranda confesses, “Bad love songs to girls.”

“What caught Dr. Herbert’s attention,” he explains in more detail, “was that we had an assignment where we were put into groups and we had to teach three chapters of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, which was a book I really love. I decided we’re going to make a musical version. I wrote a song for each chapter, and I was such a control freak that I recorded them all a capella and the other kids lip-synced to my voice.”

Herbert encouraged Miranda to contribute to the annual student-written, student-directed Brick Prison show, and beginning in ninth grade, Miranda also began auditioning for shows.

“I was in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes and in You Can’t Take It with You. Those were my plays. In ninth grade, I got cast as the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance, which was huge, because I beat out the seniors. Then, Godspell in tenth grade. I started dating the assistant director and she became my high school girlfriend. Then she directed A Chorus Line junior year and I was her assistant director, so I kind of apprenticed into the directing track. Then I directed West Side Story my senior year.

“So I got too busy to [act in] the plays. But I was a president of Hunter Theatre, even though I didn’t participate. I would do their budgets. We all hung lights. We all did all the stuff.”

Directing West Side Story as a senior was an important time for Miranda.

West Side Story is such a controversial show, because everyone’s unflattering in that show. The Puerto Ricans say, ‘That’s our only thing and we’re all gang members.’ I’m sensitive to that. At the same time, for me, it was an incredible teaching experience. I got to bring Puerto Rico to school. My dad came in and gave dialect lessons to my white and Asian Sharks. There was no brownface, nothing stupid like that.

“But I wanted to make sure that while they’re in America, they’re yelling Puerto Rican things like ‘Wepa!’ It was a way for me to actually engage the part of me that only existed at home and bring that into school. That was really lovely.”

Were there any parts Miranda wished he could play again or roles he missed out on?

“If I could do the Pirate King again,” he says, laughing, “having more than a reliable half-octave of range, I’d love another crack at it. That being said, I have no regrets. I had a wonderful time doing everything. Those are the shows that are just in your bloodstream forever—because you did that. It’s a totally different thing than loving a cast album or seeing a show and loving it.

“That’s why, for me, a show I write becomes real when a high school gets to do it. Because I know there are kids who had their first kisses as Benny and Nina [in In the Heights]. I know there are salon ladies who are going to be friends for life because they were Daniela and Carla together. I had that experience with my friends on the shows we worked on. That’s what I love most about being on this side of the process now, being the one who makes the musicals.”

Theatre wasn’t Miranda’s only interest in high school. In addition to writing some short musicals, he was making films as well, pulling his friends together from all of their other activities to work on them. But he relates that experience back to theatre.

“I think that one of the best things getting to be in a position of authority in theatre in high school gets you is that you have no power to hire or fire or replace anyone. So the only voice you have is your self-created authority. I learned to harness that: ‘All right, guys, this is the plan,’ knowing at any point that anyone could say, ‘I don’t want to do this. I want to go home.’”

Given the wide variety of skills Miranda displays as writer, composer, and lyricist, I ask him about his musical training.

“I took orchestration and composition, which was a class available in high school, but really just piano lessons and basic music theory. I actually have a couple of friends I would call up in the middle of the night and ask, ‘Hey, I’m playing an F#, an A and a C. I don’t know what this chord is called. What is it?’ And they’d say, ‘You’re playing an F# diminished.’ I kept thinking I was going to invent a new chord. And they’d say, ‘No, they all exist.’”

Miranda discovered the friendships he made while working on shows gave him shortcuts across the usual boundaries of the school’s social order.

“The saving grace of being a theatre kid,” he explains, “is that you get to make friends in every grade. So if your grade is kicking your butt, which was true for me some of the time, I had friends in other grades. The heartbreak that comes with that is sometimes your best friend will graduate because they’re two or three years older than you.

“And that’s something. I knew even then that was something my peers weren’t sharing. They were relentlessly involved with who is friends with who, and what clique is big, and who is in and who’s out in my grade. Being a theatre kid allows you to have this birds-eye view of it. I would spend my lunch period with at least four different groups. So I was always a little friends with everyone.”

Miranda went off to college planning on a dual major in film and theatre, and those interests narrowed the schools he applied to very quickly, since few offered both. He chose Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he eventually dropped his plans to also study film.

“I got to college thinking I knew everything. I got the rude awakening of, ‘Oh, I don’t know anything. I know how theatre at my high school worked. There’s still so much I have to learn.’ I was both humbled and empowered by this. We thought we were hanging lights right—we didn’t know what the heck we were doing. And that’s the fun of it. You learn the skill set you need to prepare you to work with lots of different kinds of people.”

Although we agreed the interview would focus on Miranda’s school experiences, it’s impossible to talk with him right now and not ask about Hamilton. Hip-hop, rap, and historical biography are not the usual ingredients of musical theatre. Had he always envisioned it on Broadway?

“I honestly thought of it like Jesus Christ Superstar,” he says. “I thought, ‘This will be a show, but I’m going to write it by writing the music first,’ which is exactly how Andrew Lloyd Webber did Superstar. It was a concept album. I had the good fortune to ask him about that. I peppered him with questions like ‘How did you get these for-real rock singers on that concept album?’ He said, ‘Because they were just around. We recorded the Jesus Christ Superstar concept album next door to where Led Zeppelin was recording album number III. You would just say, ‘Hey, do you want to come in and sing this part?’

“My vision for having rappers play the founding fathers started as ‘I’m going to get the artists first.’ Then we just started writing the show and I stopped worrying about landing the rapper and said, ‘Let me make the thing.’ Now we’re reverse-engineering it. We’ve got this mix tape coming out and hip-hop artists are going to be covering songs from the show.

“It worked out the way it was meant to work out. I was going to make a concept album that someone else was going to stage. It turns out I made a staged piece that someone’s going to turn into a concept album.”

Given the enormous demands on his time right now, one has to wonder, is Miranda having fun?

“What I’m enjoying so much about the success of Hamilton is it’s an opportunity to get together everyone who loves musicals. I know a lot of people who don’t love musicals like our show, but you can get them in because of history. You can get in because of politics. You can get in via hip hop.

“For me the fun is getting on Twitter and talking about Les Mis or Wicked for a little while, talking about the shows we all love, and reminding the pop culture world at large. Because you know what? We all do love shows. I know everyone likes to think of musical theatre as this niche genre. But a lot of us did the school play. A lot of us watched Glee. A lot of us, even if we never saw a Broadway show, could sing a few show tunes because of school and because of our parents. So it is this secret thing that we all know that we don’t all talk about together. That’s what I’m enjoying about this part of the process.”

What part of the creative process gives him the greatest pleasure?

“For me, it’s all about what I can bring, because musicals are such a hybrid art. They’re fourteen art forms mashed into one. So it becomes a simple calculus for me of ‘What can I bring into the room?’

“One of the things I love best about writing is being able to bring a song to my creative team—walking into a room with people you trust, showing them a new song, which is like being naked in front of them, to be honest. That’s why it’s important to get the right people in the room, and knowing you’re going to leave with a better song because of the people you’ve allowed. That’s an exhilarating process.

“Expand that to the whole show entirely. That’s a pretty great moment,” Miranda continues, enthusiastically. “Seeing a cast read your work for the very first time, that’s a really exciting part of the process.

“You know, it’s not lost on me that as someone who kind of felt like an outsider in my own community growing up, I’m just writing communities for myself. That’s what I get from being in the show, too.”

 

This interview originally appeared in Dramatics magazine, published by the Educational Theatre Association.

The Stage: Will theatregoers buy two years of tickets just to see “Hamilton”?

May 13th, 2016 § Comments Off on The Stage: Will theatregoers buy two years of tickets just to see “Hamilton”? § permalink

Christopher Jackson and company in Hamilton (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Of all the differences in arts marketing between America and the UK (and Europe), perhaps the most significant is our dearly held concept of the subscription. Under this plan, tickets for an entire season are sold essentially as one unit, yielding a discount over individual ticket prices and a year’s worth of cultural programming for the purchasing patron, and significant advance sales for the producing or presenting organisation. A fundamental tenet for arts sales here for many decades, albeit one that has softened some in recent years as buying habits have changed, the concept perseveres in theatre, ballet, opera and symphonies, with various alternative versions now found as well.

I once had occasion in the early 1990s to explain subscriptions, through a translator, to the artistic director of a Russian theatre company that performed in true, continuous repertory. The language barrier took a back seat to the cognitive befuddlement.

At the core of the classic subscription is the idea that one need not worry about the chore of buying tickets to events individually. While patrons may end up with seats to something that doesn’t particularly interest them, they are assured tickets to shows that may become highly successful and hard to get. The discount mitigates the acquisition of seats for events that aren’t desired. Subscription also usually carries the right to buy subsequent seasons before the general public, and often the right to retain the same seat locations each year.

As the musical Hamilton begins its march towards world domination through touring and major sit-down productions, it automatically becomes a huge draw for the venues where it will play, the enticing centrepiece of any subscription package. In Washington DC, where it will be seen as part of the Kennedy Center’s 2017-18 theatre season, some two years from now, there has been some blowback to the Center making clear in its marketing that subscribers to their 2016-17 season will have the first opportunity to the following year of programming, the season with Hamilton.

While consistent with their longtime sales practices and those of  many organisations like it, the degree to which Hamilton tickets are coveted is being translated by some into the charge that the Kennedy Center is requiring people to buy subscriptions for two years of theatre if they want to be sure to see Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash. I have no doubt that this scenario will be repeated at presenting venues wherever Hamilton plays, and will be at issue for a number of years given the show’s still growing popularity.

Is this price gouging, or the arts equivalent of blackmail? The problem is a by-product of the escalation of ticket prices for theatre everywhere. The result is that it now costs many hundreds of dollars for a single subscription to a Broadway touring series, let alone a pair for those who don’t like to see theatre alone. Of course the demand for Hamilton is fuelling a booming resale market (aka scalpers or touts), driving up its perceived value even further, with tickets being offered at $1,000 each. In a stroke of timing and luck, just last night, I was able to snag a pair of newly released seats for the Broadway run at the original price of $199 each; I jokingly referred to them on Twitter as investment-grade.

The expansion of Hamilton into multiple markets is not creating a new sales paradigm of excess and expense. What it is doing is revealing the degree to which ticket markets have grown increasingly, often punishingly expensive, as producers and venues have discovered, rather later than many businesses, that supply and demand can yield greater profits on the most popular productions. Combine that with the ever increasing costs of producing and running theatre productions and the result is higher prices, higher grosses, and higher returns when a show hits it big. That also leads to a widening divide between those who can afford tickets to Broadway shows and national tours, and even Off-Broadway and regional productions as well, and those who can’t.

There have been massive hits before Hamilton and there will be massive hits in its wake, hard as that is to conceive right now. Just as our politicians debate economic inequality in every aspect of American life, Hamilton, while loved by countless people, many of whom who have yet to actually see it, has become the unwitting poster child for this societal issue when it comes to entertainment. It’s a cruel irony for a musical about the man who created the American financial system. If only he were here to solve it, and make theatregoing more democratic once again.

 

Daveed Diggs Of ‘Hamilton’ Is Your Favorite Toy Tiger

April 26th, 2016 § Comments Off on Daveed Diggs Of ‘Hamilton’ Is Your Favorite Toy Tiger § permalink

Hobbes and Me

Hobbes and Me

Years from now, newer converts to Hamilton fandom will marvel at how Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail assembled such a notable cast. It will be viewed like Rent, like American Graffiti, a remarkable gathering of young talent that’s a tribute to those who managed to bring them together, including the casting team at Telsey + Company. It’s not that the Hamilton cast was entirely unknown, to be sure, but the acclaim for the project raised the public’s awareness of each and every one of them, regardless of what they had – or hadn’t – done before.

In the case of Daveed Diggs, who is surely one of the true breakout stars of Hamilton due to his Act 1 performance as Lafayette and Act 2 role of Thomas Jefferson, his primary prior recognition was as a rapper. But that’s not to say that Diggs hadn’t acted before. In one of the wonderful discoveries hiding in plain sight on YouTube, Diggs can be found in the eight-episode video series Hobbes and Me, playing Bill Watterson’s beloved philosophically named tiger from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.

The decidedly low-budget series was created by Bay Area actor, rapper, writer and producer Rafael Casal in 2014; Casal also plays Watterson’s Calvin – though that name never appears on the videos. Neither does Diggs’s or, for that matter, Watterson’s. The “scripts” are eight selected original strips; the settings suggest they were filmed at Casal’s home. Diggs’s tiger costume is a tiger-patterned coat and striped pants seemingly out of a 1930s prison film.

Of course, as more people learn of Hobbes and Me, it’s possible that recognition may also prove the undoing of these charming novelties. It’s widely known that Watterson has never permitted any adaptation of his strips, live-action or animated. No doubt Hobbes and Me, which doesn’t even carry credits, is an unauthorized riff that, by both showing Calvin and Hobbes strips and utilizing their dialogue verbatim, is very likely on the wrong side of the copyright line.

But with Diggs’s star on the rapid rise, the eight episodes are a four and a half minute (in total) opportunity to see him before the glossy magazines and TV interviews came calling. Take a look while you can.

Incidentally, Hobbes and Me isn’t the only Casal-Diggs collaboration. There’s also a Star Trek riff called The Away Team, with Diggs playing a key role in Episode 2, “Boletus Frequencia.”

P.S. Casal’s website says he’s developing a musical called The Limp for Diggs. Stay tuned.

 

The Stage: Why “Nerds” failure to boot up will be erased from Broadway’s memory

March 11th, 2016 § Comments Off on The Stage: Why “Nerds” failure to boot up will be erased from Broadway’s memory § permalink

Empty display cases at the Longacre Theatre (Photo by Howard Sherman)

The fact that Nerds, a musical about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs which has been in development for a decade, cancelled its Broadway run less than a month before its first preview, shouldn’t be entirely shocking. After all, the marquee of the Longacre Theatre, where it was to begin performances, still carried the logo for Allegiance, the musical that closed there in February. At 5 pm on March 8, the day of the announced cancellation, the lighted display cases on the front of the building were empty and dark.

By the same token, the box office lobby was crammed full of equipment boxes for the show’s load-in. The cast was already in rehearsal. Presumably there was a nearly finished set somewhere, costumes on racks, and so on.

What happened to Nerds seems to happen every so often, but it’s one of the lesser discussed examples of a show going awry on Broadway. It doesn’t have the ignominy of closing immediately after its opening night (like the musical Glory Days) or the gossip page-worthiness of shutting down in previews (like the Farrah Fawcett vehicle Bobbi Boland). It’s not a case of a show that announced plans to happen, but never really came together, like Pump Boys and Dinettes did two years ago.

It’s not a saga like the cursed, headline-making musical Rebecca, twice underway and twice cancelled, with a con artist posing as the representative of a fictional investor behind its undoing. Because Nerds never began performances, it will never enter any of the history books or databases that would preserve its brush with Broadway.

Nerds was simply a lower profile show that, like a number before it, couldn’t survive the withdrawal of a key investor late in the game – or at least it stated that was the reason. The same thing happened to a revival of Godspell in 2008, although that one managed to get on three years later, with much of the same creative team and even a few of the same cast, albeit under the aegis of a different producer. But that’s more the exception.

The fate of Nerds is a reminder that for all of the bullish words about Broadway’s health – highest attendance! highest revenue! – many of the shows that get there may be doing so while playing a game of brinksmanship, racing the clock to get in the entire capitalisation by the legally mandated deadline. After all, if shows feature 10, 15, even 20 producers above the title, how many individual investors stand behind them, to make up budgets that can now be $4 million for a play, and in some cases four times that for a musical?

With Nerds, there are people who have suddenly been put out of work with no warning, there are people on the hook for expenses for a show that had its last full performance for a small invited audience on Wednesday in its rehearsal hall, there are creators whose dreams have been dashed. Nerds may quickly fade from the memories of the relatively few who were familiar with it, and it joins a list of other shows to meet the same fate. But it’s also an important reminder – in the era of juggernauts from The Phantom of The Opera and The Lion King to The Book of Mormon and Hamilton – of how many pieces have to come together to make a show a success, and just how fragile a new production can be.

30 Years Before “Hamilton,” US Politics Were Rapped on NYC Stage

March 11th, 2016 § Comments Off on 30 Years Before “Hamilton,” US Politics Were Rapped on NYC Stage § permalink

The achievements of Lin-Manuel’s Hamilton are significant and expansive, so much so that I need not add to the proliferation of reviews, essays, parodies, think pieces and so on engendered by his landmark work. However, I feel that, in light of my increasingly senior status and the years of theatre history stashed in my head, I must point out that Lin was not the first to merge rap and American politics on the New York stage.

Travel back with me over 30 years, to an Off-Broadway venue in Greenwich Village known as The Village Gate. A cabaret theatre, it was home a number of acclaimed revues in its day including Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris in the 1960s, National Lampoon’s Lemmings (with Chevy Chase and John Belushi) in the 1970s and Tomfoolery in the 1980s. Closed in 1994, today the building that housed The Village Gate is, last I noticed, a CVS pharmacy.*

Rap Master Ronnie on vinyl

“Rap Master Ronnie” on vinyl

But for a very short time in 1984, thanks to composer Elizabeth Swados and lyricist Garry Trudeau (yes, of Doonesbury fame) then-President Ronald Reagan could be found on stage rapping away, while he was simultaneously in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The opus that provided this platform? An hour-long revue called Rap Master Ronnie, with actor Reathel Bean in the title role.

An off-shoot of the Broadway Doonesbury musical that Trudeau and Swados had created just the year before, in truth Rap Master Ronnie had only a single rap number, the title tune (which then-Times critic Frank Rich cited as a high point). But while its musical styling wasn’t really beatbox-based overall, the show did interrogate Reagan’s presidency pointedly and musically in the weeks leading up to the 1984 election (which would ultimately see Reagan win a second term).

Speaking to Stephen Holden in The New York Times, when the revue began performances, Trudeau talked about the impetus for his theatrical advocacy, four years before his HBO series Tanner 88 and decades before his Amazon series Alpha House:

”I don’t know if there’s anything artistic being done about this election – it is either being ignored or given up on,” Mr. Trudeau observed. ”It didn’t seem right to me to let it go without trying to say something. The piece is enormously challenging because, as everybody knows, Reagan has proven unusually resistant to frontal assault. That’s a very difficult target to take aim at.”

It’s an interesting statement to read in an election year 32 years later, no?

I digress. I also admit to making the Hamilton link in perhaps my BuzzFeed-iest ploy for attention, just to lure you in to learn of largely forgotten bit of theatrical agitprop, that has nevertheless left one wonderful artifact: the music video version of the title track of Rap Master Ronnie. So I apologize for making you wade through everything up until now, and invite you to see a rapping political figure from days gone by – when everyone’s friend and role model Lin-Manuel was but two years old.

More trivia: Rap Master Ronnie’s limited run at The Village Gate was succeeded by another musical about a politican, Mayor, which portrayed then-NYC mayor Ed Koch in a decidedly more lighthearted lampoon. It was created by composer and lyricist Charles Strouse and marked the first significant credit for a young writer named Warren Leight, who would go on to win a Tony for Side Man and has been steering the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit franchise for several years. But again, I digress.

 

* Update: I am informed by reader Rafael Gallegos that the one-time Village Gate is now the nightclub Le Poisson Rouge. I swear it was a pharmacy for a time, but this shows you the last time I sought either medication or entertainment on Bleecker Street.

The Stage: Theatre needs fans in its offices, not just in its seats

February 19th, 2016 § Comments Off on The Stage: Theatre needs fans in its offices, not just in its seats § permalink

The cast of Hamilton accepting the Grammy for best cast recording (Photo by Howard Sherman)

The cast of Hamilton accepting the Grammy for best cast recording (Photo by Howard Sherman)

I guess my dash from row O to row A the other night pretty much erased any pretence of professional distance. Especially once Entertainment Weekly magazine saw fit to write about it.

My so-called sprint was occasioned by my attendance at Monday night’s live broadcast of the opening number from the musical Hamilton, which was being performed at its home at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York as part of the recording industry’s annual Grammy Awards. My seating shift was in response to a request for someone to fill an empty front row seat. I was happy to help out, and I received a round of applause for my selflessness.

Online, my efforts prompted a number of Twitter followers and Facebook friends to call me a “fanboy”, and while it’s not a term I’d apply to myself in middle age, there are worse things that could be said of me. Since I have always maintained that I am not a critic, seeing myself as someone of the theatre who sometimes writes about the theatre, I’m actually a bit reassured to find that my fandom is showing. Thirty-six years after I first went to work in a box office, there’s something rejuvenating about finding that I am indeed still an enthusiastic fan of theatre, although a long way from starstruck.

Hamilton has certainly been the most public expression of my fandom, as evidenced by the 48 Ham4Ham videos that I’ve shot on the street outside the Rodgers, having begun them simply as material for a blog post I wrote in August, and never stopped. Just this week, my cover story on the musical’s protean creator and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, comes out in Dramatics magazine, the only national US publication for high school theatre students. But I am not without self-control: I’ve seen Hamilton only twice, and I’ve never entered the ticket lottery for day-of-show seats.

By the standards of die-hards, I am an amateur. I have not committed the Hamilton cast recording to memory, like many fans who have yet to even see the show. While I would like to see it again at some point, I am not given to seeing shows numerous times; barring professional commitments, I rarely see any show more than twice, unlike fans I know and read of who happily see the same show dozens of times. My theatre fandom drives me to predominantly see that which I have not seen before. So little time, and so many shows.

As it happens, my front row experience, which also included witnessing Hamilton win the Grammy for best cast recording and a rapped acceptance by Lin-Manuel, came only four days after my latest opportunity to see perhaps my favourite stage performer work his magic once again. Bill Irwin, a gifted actor, clown, mime and so many other things, has returned to New York’s Signature Theatre with his sometime partner David Shiner for a second run of Old Hats, perhaps the 10th or 11th time I’ve seen Bill in a show of his own singular creation. I have been an unabashed fan of Bill’s since I first saw him in the mid-1980s; his particular gifts have the effect of making me grin the moment he walks on a stage (save for his career-changing turns in Albee’s The Goat and Virginia Woolf). Privileged to have first met him 15 years ago, when I greeted him excitedly by ticking off the litany of his work that I’d seen, like Kathy Bates in Misery, I take unbridled joy in seeing him at work – and now going backstage to see him along with an always intriguing mix of acting and circus royalty. I have long been a proselytiser to the cult of Bill, and I’m not in the least ashamed of it or subtle about it.

I think there’s something to be said for maintaining the enthusiasm of a fan even as the realities of raising money, balancing budgets, serving and collaborating with artists and staff, and so on, can abstract and distract from the very reason that drew us to work in the theatre in the first place. Given my career, I’m no longer the teen who stood in awe as James Earl Jones signed a programme for me, but I am also far from a jaded aesthete who deploys 35 years of theatregoing to decry the theatre of today. If you spot me by a stage door awaiting an audience with Laura Benanti or Audra McDonald, or at an event with camera phone at the ready (the better to feed my social media activity), don’t think less of me. After all, I’m still in touch with the kid who fell hard for theatre and never wanted to do anything else, and can still be thrilled by it and the people who make it.

Theatre needs fans not just in the seats, but in its offices, its rehearsal rooms and on its stages as well. After all, it’s not as if we’re in it for the money.

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.

The Stage: Ticket bots are wreaking havoc on Broadway prices

February 5th, 2016 § Comments Off on The Stage: Ticket bots are wreaking havoc on Broadway prices § permalink

Code“I have a guy.”

I used to hear this phrase a lot, from various people not in the theatre industry, who always seemed to be able to acquire tickets to sold-out Broadway shows with ease. I don’t hear it so much anymore, because now everybody has a guy, whether ‘he’ goes by the name of StubHub or Ticketmaster Fan-to-Fan resale or something along those lines.

In 2007, when New York State lifted caps on the amount that ticket resellers could charge over face value, long-standing opposition from the commercial theatre community had gone silent. Only six years after The Producers had introduced ‘VIP’ or ‘premium’ pricing, using the argument that these higher priced tickets would make it possible for productions and artists to realise more income via direct sales, most shows followed suit, with their sales success directly correlated to audience demand. Resellers jumped into the fray, more openly than ever before. But now, with the rise of automated bots that gobble up tickets for sale online, it seems to be getting even harder for the average ticket buyer to acquire seats at something close to a reasonable price, even from the official ticket outlet, in the already expensive Broadway arena, if they can get them at all.

In “Why Can’t New Yorkers Get Tickets?,” a report issued last week by the state attorney general, the results of which surprised no one familiar with what’s been generally evident for some time, it was affirmed that a combination of preferred sales that limited the number of seats actually made available to the public, along with mass acquisition of tickets by bots, were biting into ticket inventory in a big way. While there are laws in New York against the use of bots by resellers, and a few fines have been levied, it’s going to take a lot more scrutiny to police such sales. As it seems in so many aspects of modern life, the people determined to get a leg up on everyone else, even when their actions are criminal, seem to be further ahead of the technology curve than those chasing them.

Theatre is not alone in this struggle; the same holds true for rock concerts and sporting events. But any given theatre is so much smaller than those venues that the problem seems more pronounced, as does the heightened demand that drives prices up, a situation most apparent today with Hamilton, which is enjoying demand that’s comparable to those experienced, in my theatregoing life, by, among others, Cats, Phantom, Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, the 1992 Guys and Dolls revival, Rent, Jersey Boys and The Book of Mormon.

So this isn’t a new story, even if it has been turbocharged by technology and made more apparent by the rise of online sales. It’s based in the fundamentals of supply and demand. Some theatre buffs might feel some small sense of pride that theatre is able to generate this kind of interest and desire. But in the process, it only emphasises how expensive theatregoing can be, even when only a few shows command eye-popping prices on the open market.

Broadway is a predominantly commercial enterprise, so it’s unlikely that capitalistic efforts will ever return ticket sales to something close to accessible for the majority; the real battle is over who gets their hands on the most significant part of the revenues being generated. However, just as dynamic pricing spread from the commercial realm to subsidised companies, one can’t help but wonder what’s happening when celebrities appear in regional houses, or when 200-seat theatres such as New York Theatre Workshop start selling tickets to Othello with David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig in the leads this fall. While NYTW made an effort to limit resales during its run of Lazarus by requiring photo ID to pick up seats, that will only go so far.

As someone who was extremely surprised when the commercial theatre industry ended its opposition to resale caps almost a decade ago, I certainly applaud efforts to put all ticket buyers on a level playing field and stem the tide of unbridled price hikes, both official and illicit. At a time when income inequality continues to divide America in so many things, it’s a worthy effort, though I fear a losing battle which has probably already had an insidious and deleterious effect on the perception of theatregoing as an entertainment option for all, even beyond the confines of Manhattan.

Somehow, some way, people with the means to do so will manage to get the tickets they want, when they want. They will always have a guy, even if their guy is now a silicon chip.

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.

The Stage: Does the West End need its own BroadwayCon spin-off?

January 29th, 2016 § Comments Off on The Stage: Does the West End need its own BroadwayCon spin-off? § permalink

Attendees at BroadwayCon (Photo by Howard Sherman)

Attendees at BroadwayCon (Photo by Howard Sherman)

If the sight of perhaps 750 theatre fans spontaneously breaking into a song from their favourite musical warms your heart, then the conference rooms of the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue were the place to be on January 22. If the cast of that same musical, having heard about the impromptu singalong, asking some 3,000 theatre fans to sing to them is similarly inspiring, well you should have been in the Hilton ballroom that same afternoon.

From January 22 to 24, the Hilton was home to the first BroadwayCon, a fan convention for theatre buffs. Filled with events, performances and panels not just about Broadway, but about the theatre overall – though admittedly with a tilt towards musicals – BroadwayCon reportedly sold some 6,000 tickets, which had gone on sale 10 months earlier and cost $125 per day or $250 for the weekend.

I went to BroadwayCon with a mixed agenda: first, sheer curiosity, second, the intention to document it for this column, and third, because I had been invited to moderate a panel about production assistants who subsequently ‘made it big’ in the theatre business. I didn’t know quite what to expect, and one press representative I saw at the event confessed that when it was first announced, there was a feeling of uncertainty in their office.

On the eve of the event, The New York Times cited the demographics of the attendees, provided by the organisers: “Nearly 80% of the registrants are female; 75% are from outside the state of New York; and 50% are 30 or younger.” That’s a far cry from the general assumptions about theatre appealing to an increasingly older crowd, and while 6,000 fans certainly can’t sustain the field alone, the sight of multiple Elphabas, Phantoms, and Tracy Turnblads was evidence that theatre still holds a very strong appeal.

What was on offer? Among many options, there were cast conversations with leads from Fun Home, Spring Awakening, Hamilton and Fiddler on the Roof, and a reunion of cast members of Rent (just days before the 20th anniversary of Jonathan Larson’s passing and the show’s first Off-Broadway preview). There were fan meet-ups organised by affinity (a room that was packed by Sondheim fans at 10am was rather sparse by 11am, when the call was for Lloyd Webber buffs), conversations about diversity, design and marketing, as well as audience participation games and variety shows. Both singalongs I mentioned earlier were from Hamilton events.

I experienced a mild sense of deja vu throughout the weekend (I spent time at BroadwayCon on each of its three days) because it was 40 years ago, to the precise weekend, that I had attended my very first fan convention of any kind, the 1976 International Star Trek Convention, at the very same hotel. It is frankly remarkable that with the flourishing of fan conventions since that time, it was only this year that anyone managed to capitalise on the convention model for theatre and Broadway.

While there were occasional snafus with wrangling crowds into the largest and most popular events on Friday, a gigantic blizzard unfortunately prevented many fans – as well as guest speakers and performers – from reaching the hotel on Saturday, and even Sunday. But the organisers scrambled valiantly and effectively to insure a good experience for those who made it. So while the attendance never seemed as high as on that first day, and while the largest rooms may not have always been as filled, I sensed no lessening of enthusiasm among the die-hards who had either stayed over at the hotel or braved the elements to be there.

Like Broadway itself, access to BroadwayCon wasn’t cheap, and presumably there were countless fans who couldn’t attend because of the added expense of a flight and hotel tickets. But this first year should prove that there’s an enormous appetite among theatre fans to gather both with those they admire, and others who share their passions, getting out of social media and chat rooms and into real life interactions. As someone who began the weekend by adopting a slight distance and harbouring even a bit of cynicism, I was drawn back through heavy snow and puddles of icy slush because BroadwayCon successfully tapped into my inner fanboy, and because I was having a good time watching others have a good time. It gave them access to the world I’ve long been in. The theatre must do more of that.

WestEndCon, anyone?

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.

Resolutions, Via Theatre, For 2016

January 2nd, 2016 § Comments Off on Resolutions, Via Theatre, For 2016 § permalink

Bernadette Peters in Into The Woods

Bernadette Peters in Into The Woods

 

At first, they were a few lunchtime tweets, which proved of little interest, it seemed. But when I collected a couple, and added a few more, for a Facebook post at 9:30 pm on New Year’s Eve, they seemed to resonate. And so, with little ado, my New Year’s resolutions by way of lyrics and dialogue from works of theatre, but no less heartfelt for being so.

  1. Talk less, smile more.
  2. Wake each morning to realize I have a good thing going.
  3. Never walk alone.
  4. Decide what’s right, decide what’s good.
  5. Half the fun is to plan the plan. All good things come to those who can wait.
  6. Many people have to depend on the kindness of strangers. Be that stranger.
  7. When I speak, and I will, be kind.

 

Sources

I don’t want to patronize those who recognize where these are all from, or presume that everyone will know each one. So if you want to seek any of these out in their original contexts, here are some details.

  1. Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton, direct quote
  2. Stephen Sondheim, Merrily We Roll Along, “And then one morning I woke to realize, we had a good thing going.”
  3. Oscar Hammerstein II, Carousel, “Walk on with hope in your heart and you’ll never walk alone.”
  4. Stephen Sondheim, Into The Woods, “You decide what’s right, you decide what’s good.”
  5. Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd, direct quote
  6. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
  7. Robert Anderson, Tea and Sympathy, “When you talk about this…and you will…be kind.”

 

 

Of Race, Ethics, Education and Rights: My Top Posts of 2015

December 22nd, 2015 § 1 comment § permalink

Rent at PACT in Tullahoma TN

Jonathan Larson’s Rent at PACT in Tullahoma TN (photo by Howard Sherman)

I honestly wish I could figure out what makes one blog post a roaring success, and another a blip on the radar. Certainly the topic under discussion has some impact, but readership seems just as likely to be affected by the title, a photo, the Facebook algorithm, the timing of a tweet, what else is happening in the world, and so on. In short, I have no idea.

In looking over my most-read posts of 2015, I do know which ones took a great deal of research and time, and which were dashed off in under an hour. I know which ones were written after a great deal of consideration, and which were wholly reactive to something I read or heard. They don’t necessarily correlate to readership at all.

I am surprised by the way in which my most-read posts were grouped in the latter half of the year, with seven coming since October 29. Is there any correlation with the fact that I began regularly working out of The New School Drama offices starting in early October, in my new role as director of the Arts Integrity Initiative? I think it’s just coincidence, but it’s possible that the new environment meshed with some significant incidents to yield my most successful writing.

While it may seem paradoxical to offer up my most-read work once again, I have no doubt that there are plenty of people who didn’t read one or more of these when they were first posted, and perhaps there are a few people who would like to catch up with them now. You’ll note I’m not providing them in order of popularity, because it’s not a contest, but I can say that even within these ten, there’s a differential of some 10,000 views.

*   *   *

July 3: Preparing For Anti-“Rent” Messages From Tennessee Pulpits

I had spoken with the leadership of the PACT community theatre in Tullahoma, Tennessee when they first began experiencing resistance to their production of Rent, but they decided that they’d prefer to try to address the opposition on a local basis. But ten days before performances were to begin, they learned of a letter in opposition to the show that was being circulated to the local clergy, and felt it was time for me to take up their cause and make it a national issue. I traveled to Tullahoma for the opening night, where I was welcomed by numerous members of the community, including the mayor, but the opposition had failed and the show played to an enthusiastic crowd. A prayer circle outside the theatre, in quiet protest of the production, drew only four people, including the two pastors who had been most opposed to the show.

August 1: Disrespecting Playwrights And Their Words with Young Players in

Minnesota

Words Players Theatre found itself in the midst of a firestorm when several bog posts, mine among them, questioned their practice of soliciting plays for production with their teen actors, but saying that the director had the final word over the show, contrary to the tenets of The Dramatists Guild. I stand by what I wrote at the time, but I was troubled by the degree of vehemence that some directed at the company, which didn’t necessarily seems the best way to educate students, their parents and the company’s leadership about respect for scripts in production. I ultimately wrote a second post, trying to walk back some of the rhetoric that surrounded this situation, not just mine, by the way.

September 15: Putting On Yellowface For The Holidays With Gilbert & Sullivan & NYU

I was far from the only person to speak out against the archaic, stereotypical use of yellowface in a production of the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players production of The Mikado, but I was among the first, with my blog post going online alongside two others on Tuesday, September 15. The groundswell of reaction grew very quickly in subsequent days, and advocates against the practice of yellowface awoke three days later to find, with great surprise, that the production had been canceled. NYGASP says they will return with a reconceived Mikado that’s appropriate to 21st century America. Perhaps I’ll be writing about that in 2016.

October 29: When A White Actor Goes To “The Mountaintop”

It took three weeks after the production closed for word of Katori Hall’s Olivier Award-winning play being produced with a white actor as Martin Luther King to find its way to general awareness, but once it did, it brought great scrutiny to this production, at a community theatre based out of Kent State University’s Department of Pan-African Studies. What was even more remarkable, and remains still less known, is that the concept of having white and black actors each do four performances as Dr. King never happened – the white actor played the role for the entire run.

November 1: She Has A Name: Casually Diminishing Women In Theatre

I wasn’t exactly mystified as to why an interview with Pam MacKinnon carried a headline that mention her collaborators Al Pacino and David Mamet, both more famous, but it didn’t seem right that the person the paper actually spoke with was subordinated in this way. Intriguingly, not long after I posted my piece, the headline was altered, removing Mamet and Pacino – but it still didn’t mention MacKinnon by name. I was intrigued to discover that in coming up with a headline, I had birthed a Twitter hashtag: #SheHasAName.

November 2: A Seattle Theatre Critic Flies Past An Ethical Boundary

Critic offers his extra complimentary press ticket for sale, via the personals section. This one pretty much wrote itself. But I have to say that I quickly came to regret the tone of this piece, because I let myself succumb to snark precisely because it was so easy in this case. I should have stuck to the facts and let the story speak for itself. My feelings about what this critic did (or tried to do) haven’t changed, but I should have done better.

November 13: Erasing Race On Stage At Clarion University

Coming on the heels of the Mountaintop situation at Kent State, this dispute over racial representation in a college production of Jesus In India at Clarion University led to playwright Lloyd Suh pulling the rights to the show. There was a backlash against Suh from those who didn’t understand, or didn’t wish to understand, what it means to have white actors, even students, playing characters of color. Statements from university figures to the press only fed the uproar. But it has led to multiple offline conversations between Suh and the professor who was directing the show, and between the professor and me as well. Suh and I will be visiting the KCACTF Region 2 festival in a few weeks where we’ll meet for the first time and discuss the issue with the college students and their professors in attendance.

December 2: What Is Being Taught About The Director-Playwright Relationship?

After the heated dialogues that both The Mountaintop and Jesus in India engendered, on social media, in comments sections and in direct correspondence, I was moved to wonder aloud about how the playwright-director dynamic was being addressed in college training programs, both undergraduate and graduate. It prompted yet more comments and e-mails, and frankly helped me to learn a great deal more and provide the basis for further exploration. The post became the basis for a panel added to the KCACTF Region 3 festival, and I’ll be headed to Milwaukee to participate in the conversation right after the first of the year.

December 3: What Does “Hamilton” Tell Us About Race In Casting?

With Hamilton being cited as a reason why white actors should be permitted to play characters of color, I took the opportunity of a previously scheduled and wholly unrelated interview to ask the show’s writer-composer-star Lin-Manuel Miranda for his take on race on stage, both in his own work and the work of others. He was, as always, thoughtful and eloquent, during his dinner break on a two-show day.

December 9: Black Magic Crosses Directing & Design Line in Connecticut

When a community/semi-professional theatre in Connecticut staged a production that looked startlingly like a professional production that had been stage nearby three years earlier, it was an opportunity to address the issue of appropriation from other productions and what constitutes originality in directing and design. While the company in question suspended performances within 24 hours, and have subsequently restaged the show on a new set, the outpouring of anecdotes (and expressions of frustration) about productions that have slavishly copied others came pouring out. I expect to write more on this subject.

*   *   *

October 16: When A Facebook Comment Says More Than a Long Blog Post About Diversity

While it didn’t make the list of my ten most read posts, top on my list of posts that I wish had been more widely read is this one. Written on a day when a combination of medications for an infection laid me low and found me laying on my sofa most of the day, an array of tweets and comments roused me to string together a few sentences which were probably my only coherent thoughts until the drugs wore off. Even if you don’t read the whole post, take a look at the italicized midsection, which is what I actually wrote that day; the rest is subsequent framing.

June 9: If The Arts Were Reported Like Sports

Truth be told, this was one of my ten most read posts of 2015, but that has little to do with what I actually wrote and everything to do with the video I’d discovered and embedded, once again with framing material that isn’t essential to enjoying the video. My greatest contribution was a snappy title. But if you haven’t seen it and need a laugh at year end, this vid’s for you.

*   *   *

My thanks to everyone who read, commented, shared, tweeted or wrote to me in connection with my writing this year, and special thanks to those who brought situations to my attention so that I could explore them and share them even more broadly. You all have my very best wishes for a safe, happy, arts-filled 2016.

Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts and interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

 

 

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