How Theatres Can Combat the Stay-at-Home Mindset by Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal, December 25, 2013

Thoughts, numbers, analysis and a suggestion from the country's most peripatetic theatre critic:

How Theaters Can Combat the Stay-at-Home Mindset

by Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal

Dec. 25, 2013 1:43 p.m. ET

The house lights fade to black. The room falls still as an actor steps from the wings and speaks the simple words that set a plot in motion: "O for a Muse of fire." "Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve." "This play is called 'Our Town.'" Suddenly the outside world vanishes and you're swept into a parallel universe of excitement and adventure, poetry and magic, fear and hope.

That's what it feels like to go to the theater and see a great play. But when did you last do so? A week ago? A year? Or do you now prefer to stay home and watch cable television or use Netflix  to stream a movie?

If so, you're one of the reasons why live theater is in trouble.

Take a look at the National Endowment for the Arts' latest Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the most statistically reliable study of its kind. Not only did "non-musical play attendance" drop to 8.3% from 12.3% of U.S. adults between 2002 and 2012, but attendance at musicals also fell, to 15.2% from 17.1%, the first time the latter figure has declined since 1985. That's really bad news. Musical comedy has always been live theater's bread and butter, the ever-popular fare that never fails to fill the seats. If fewer people want to see "Fiddler on the Roof" or "The Lion King," then the pillars that hold up American theater are crumbling.

A big part of the problem for New Yorkers is the horrifically high price of tickets to Broadway shows. But 63% of all Broadway tickets are bought by spendthrift tourists. Fortunately, off-Broadway and regional-theater seats don't cost nearly so much. I just saw a play in Boston, the Huntington Theatre Company's superb revival of A.R. Gurney's "The Cocktail Hour," for which tickets ranged from $25 to $95. (By contrast, the top ticket price for Broadway's "The Book of Mormon" is a whopping $299.) And the vast majority of professional stage productions, both in New York and in the rest of America, are presented by not-for-profit theaters like the Huntington. These companies, of which there are about 1,800, mounted 14,600 shows in the 2010-11 season, as opposed to 118 commercial productions on Broadway and elsewhere. Yet they, too, view the NEA's bad-news numbers with alarm, as they readily acknowledge. Even at the top-tier resident regional companies, subscription income, still considered the most reliable yardstick of a resident company's economic health, is much weaker: Adjusting for inflation, it's plummeted 13.7% since 2008.

What's gone wrong with theater? It isn't a matter of quality control. I've been reviewing performances from coast to coast since 2004, and I continue to be impressed by what I see. Instead, what I'm hearing from regional artistic directors is that they're being slammed by the on-demand mentality.

In 2004 the iPod was a novelty and tablet computers were a dream. Now we take for granted that we can see whatever we want whenever and wherever we want to see it, be it "Grand Illusion" or "Duck Dynasty." Is there a demonstrable link between our fast-growing taste for on-demand entertainment and the plight of live theater? As yet there's no definitive proof. But there's no question about the rise of the on-demand mentality, nor any doubt that theater's audience share is declining relative to that of other art forms that are accessible via the new media.

Let's look again at the NEA survey:

• A generational shift is occurring… Young people are more likely to use the new media to consume art of all kinds. The NEA reports, for instance, that 6.6% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 use handheld or mobile devices "to read, listen to, or download novels, short stories, or plays," versus 2.5% between the ages of 55 and 64.

• …and theater gets left in the lurch. At the same time, few Americans use the new media to watch plays. While 61% of all adults use "TV, radio or the internet to access art or arts programming," only 7% view stage plays or musicals on the electronic media. Disaggregate those numbers and the tendency is even clearer: 16% of all U.S. adults are using the new media to read fiction, as opposed to 3.4% who do so to view theater or dance performances.

Click to read more at the Wall Street Journal on-line

Opinion: The Collapse of the Theatre Season Subscription Model, Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2013

Author, drama review and WSJ columnist Terry Teachout sees that because of financial pressures, regional theatre programming is collapsing toward the safe center:

Theatre's Expiring Subscription Mode

by Terry Teachout, April 26, 2013

Terry Teachout (image: Amazon.com)

[. . . .] [N]ot only are solo and small-cast plays increasingly taking the place of large-scale shows, but I've noticed in the past couple of years that many regional theaters are also opting for significantly less adventurous fare. More familiar comedies and recent Broadway hits, fewer challenging new shows and revivals of great plays of the past: That seems to be the direction in which American theater is moving.

But is it all about the recession? Not long ago I spoke to the artistic director of a well-regarded theater company somewhere in America that's feeling the pinch. No names: I'll call her Ms. X for the sake of convenience, though "she" may or may not be a woman. In addition to running the company, Ms. X is a stage director of high seriousness, one whose work I've praised in the past. Yet her company is inching away from the kind of programming that led me to start reviewing its shows in the first place. I didn't ask why—we were talking about something else—but Ms. X volunteered an explanation, and though I wasn't taking notes, this is more or less what she said to me:

"I'm in the ticket-selling business. If I don't sell tickets, we shut down. We used to do it by selling subscriptions. That gave us money up front, and it also made it easier for me to do serious work, because people were buying a five-show package, and they trusted me to give them a well-chosen, wide-ranging package each year. We'd do a comedy, a new play or two, a classical revival, maybe a couple of modern classics. August Wilson, Tennessee Williams, that kind of thing. Sometimes they didn't like all five. Maybe they never did. But they still went home feeling like they'd gotten a balanced diet, they'd done their duty to theater. And that used to matter to people. It really did. They thought that seeing good shows made you a better person.

"Then the subscription model fell apart, for a lot of reasons. Some subscribers got too busy, or too old, to commit in advance to five shows on specific dates. Some of them couldn't afford to buy all five in one pop anymore. And young people never have gotten in the habit of subscribing to anything. On demand, that's their motto. Anyway, it all added up to the same thing: We had to start selling individual shows instead of a package. When that happened, everything changed. Instead of trusting us to give them something good, people started playing it safe, and we had to play safe with them. We didn't have any choice. The last time I tried putting on a classical revival, our single-ticket sales dropped by nearly half. And we've had to start using name actors as often as we can. Doesn't matter what the show is: It's the star that sells, not the play.

"Look, I'm as serious as I ever was. And I don't waste money, either. I didn't pile up debt by building a big, fancy theater complex, which is what's gotten a whole lot of other regional companies in hot water. And I think we're still putting on good shows here—but more and more of them are middlebrow shows. Safe shows. And more than anything else, it's the collapse of the subscription model that's done it to us. It's as simple as that."

Is it? Or was the old-fashioned subscription model always a snare and a delusion, an easy-money honeypot that seduced growth-happy companies into losing sight of their artistic missions? While I'm sure that the answer varies from company to company, there seems little doubt that the model itself is going bust. According to the Theatre Communications Group, nationwide revenue from subscribers plunged 18% between 2007 and 2011.

What now? Modernize the subscription model? Or scrap it altogether and try something completely different? If I knew, I'd start a theater company. But I do know that if regional theater wants to save its soul, it'll have to find new ways to sell tickets. Otherwise, it's going to be "The Odd Couple" and "Clybourne Park" over and over again, forever.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Friday. He is the author of "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong." Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

Click to link to the article at the WSJ on-line

Arts Reporting: Germany's Leading Playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig, J.S. Marcus in the Wall Street Journal, December 17

Via ArtsJournal.com, a look at Germany's leading contemporary playwright, published at the Wall Street Journal:

The Future of German Theater
Celebrated playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig mixes the abstract with the naturalistic in his work

By J. S. MARCUS for the Wall Street Journal

The names of the most popular playwrights on German-language stages haven't changed much in decades, even centuries. Recently, however, marquees from Hamburg to Vienna have to add a new name alongside Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller and Ibsen—Roland Schimmelpfennig, a 43-year-old Berlin-based author and director, who in the course of a few seasons has become German-speaking Europe's most celebrated younger playwright.

This has been Mr. Schimmelpfennig's year. In the summer, he was awarded the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis, regarded as the highest honor for a playwright in the German language. (Previous winners include Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek and East German playwright Heiner Müller.) Last month, his latest play, "Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God," premiered nearly simultaneously at Germany's two most prestigious theater companies, Hamburg's Thalia Theater and Berlin's Deutsches Theater. And this Sunday, Mr. Schimmelpfennig will cap the year at the Akademietheater, the second stage of Vienna's legendary Burgtheater, with a version of the play that he has directed himself.

Read more at Wall Street Journal.com . . . .

Arts Reporting: Re-release of Audio of Waiting for Godot with Bert Lahr

Drama critic Terry Teachout writes the following for ArtsJournal:

TT: The Cowardly Lion's bravest night

I rejoice to report that the 1956 recording of the first Broadway production of Waiting for Godot, starting Bert Lahr, is finally back in print. Since no one else in the world seems to be aware of this wonderful fact, I decided to announce it to the world in my "Sightings" column for today's Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt:

Every critic who covered the show heaped praise on Lahr, and the most perceptive ones saw that his performance was profoundly true to the spirit of the play. Though Lahr was no kind of intellectual, he had instinctively understood what Beckett was up to. "I know it's supposed to be tragic, but there are lots of gags," he told his agent after reading the script. So there are, for "Godot" is a Laurel-and-Hardyesque farce about the meaninglessness of life. Even those critics who, like Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, found it hard to stomach the play's dark vision were staggered by the crazed beauty of Lahr's acting: "His long experience as a bawling mountebank has equipped Mr. Lahr to represent eloquently the tragic comedy of one of the lost souls of the earth."

Alas, "Godot" closed after just 10 weeks, and Lahr never appeared in it again. But Goddard Lieberson, who produced original-cast albums for Columbia Records, had the brilliant idea to record a complete performance of the play. The existence of the resulting album, which has been out of print for the past quarter-century, is no secret, but its long-standing unavailability has caused it to be overlooked by most people who write about "Godot." Even John Lahr, the comedian's younger son, fails to mention it in "Notes on a Cowardly Lion," the uniquely perceptive biography of his father that he wrote in 1969.

It is, therefore, stop-press news for anybody who loves great theater that the 1956 recording of "Godot" is available once again, not as a CD but as an mp3-only sound file that you can download from Amazon for $3.56 or from iTunes for $5.99. (You can find it on either site by searching for "Bert Lahr.") Culturally speaking, I'd call that the deal of the decade....

The 1956 production of "Godot" was Lahr's show all the way, and to hear it now is to boggle at his seemingly infinite comic resourcefulness. He whines, he whimpers, he chortles, he grunts, giving each line precisely the right flavor. Yet never for a moment does his clowning conceal the play's underlying pathos, and whenever he opens his mouth, it's always Beckett, not Bert Lahr, that you hear....

Read the whole thing here.

Opinion: Obama Plays It Safe with the Arts, Wall Street Journal

available at the on-line edition

June 11, 2009

Obama Plays It Safe With The Arts

By DAVID A. SMITH

Last week President Barack Obama announced Jim Leach as his choice to lead the National Endowment for the Humanities. Mr. Leach, an Iowa Republican who served 30 years in the House before losing his bid for re-election in 2006, notably went against his party last year by endorsing Mr. Obama, not John McCain, in the presidential race. Now that President Obama has picked Mr. Leach for NEH and Rocco Landesman, a successful Broadway producer, to head the National Endowment for the Arts, the Obama cultural team is complete.

Of the two, Mr. Leach is more surprising -- if only because his cultural qualifications aren't as immediately obvious. But he was a solid supporter of the endowments while in Congress, and both the National Humanities Alliance and Americans for the Arts recognized his contributions. He's also familiar with academia, having recently taught at Harvard and Princeton.

Still, Messrs. Leach and Landesman are probably not the choices initially expected from a president who was being lobbied just a couple of months ago to do something as bold as create a cabinet-level department of arts and culture. These are the choices, rather, of a president who doesn't want this to be a political fight. With these nominations it's also clear that Mr. Obama is not making a statement that great change is needed at either agency. This is not to disparage these choices -- both of which, in addition to being rather surprising, are quite good, at least in the eyes of those who think both endowments are already following a wise course. In fact, given the constituencies that rallied most vociferously behind Mr. Obama in the campaign, his choice of these two men ought to elicit a sigh of relief from conservatives.

Taken together, what might these two nominations mean for the relationship between the government and the arts under the Obama administration? Do they signal any new directions for these agencies?

Not necessarily. Both endowments currently enjoy considerable support in Congress and, given the history of the NEA in particular, this is no small achievement. While some supporters of the arts are quite upset with the direction the NEA has taken in the past few years (more about this later), there's no denying that it's in better shape than it ever has been. It enjoys broad support in Congress in part because it has steered clear of controversy and extended its good effects.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

WSJ Drama Critic Wants Regional Theatre to Review

Wall Street Journal theatre critic Terry Teachout advises today in his "About Last Night" blog that he is looking to travel to review regional theatre presentations -- and Texas is a location of interest.

Excerpts:

April 27, 2009
TT: So you want to get reviewed

If you read the Friday Wall Street Journal or this blog with any regularity, you probably know that I'm the only drama critic in America who routinely covers theatrical productions from coast to coast. As I wrote in my "Sightings" column a couple of years ago:

The time has come for American playgoers--and, no less important, arts editors--to start treating regional theater not as a minor-league branch of Broadway but as an artistically significant entity in and of itself. Take it from a critic who now spends much of his time living out of a suitcase: If you don't know what's hot in "the stix," you don't know the first thing about theater in 21st-century America.

But suppose you run a company I haven't visited? How might you get me to come see you? Now's the time to start asking that question, because I'm starting to work on my reviewing calendar for the fall of 2009. So here's an updated version of the guidelines I use for deciding which out-of-town shows to see--along with some suggestions for improving the ways in which you reach out to the press:

• Basic requirements. I only review professional companies. I don't review dinner theater, and it's unusual for me to visit children's theaters. I'm somewhat more likely to review Equity productions, but that's not a hard-and-fast rule, and I'm strongly interested in small companies.

• You must produce a minimum of three shows each season... That doesn't apply to summer festivals, but it's rare for me to cover a festival that doesn't put on at least two shows a season.

• ...and most of them have to be serious. I won't put you on my drop-dead list for milking the occasional cash cow, but if The Foreigner is your idea of a daring revival, I won't go out of my way to come calling on you, either.

• I have no geographical prejudices. On the contrary, I love to range far afield, particularly to states that I haven't yet gotten around to visiting in my capacity as America's drama critic. Right now Colorado and Texas loom largest, but if you're doing something exciting in (say) Mississippi or Montana, I'd be more than happy to add you to the list as well.

Click to read the full posting of "So You Want to Get Reviewed" by Terry Teachout

Teachout's e-mail at the blog: tteachout@artsjournal.com

Teachout's video blurb review of Guys and Dolls

Kennedy Center Offers Arts Management Mentoring

On February 3, Kennedy Center president Michael Kaiser announced the new initiative "Arts in Crisis," aimed at providing guidance and mentoring to non-profit arts organizations in trouble.

Through its new website www.artsincrisis.org the Center invites e-mail inquiries and requests and undertakes to provide written replies or to match non-profits with qualified mentors.

Kaiser's career has been built on arts turnarounds, and he published a 183-page guide, The Art of the Turnaround: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Arts Organizations (2008: Brandeis University Press). In an interview published February 19 in the Wall Street Journal, Kaiser commented on the scope of the initiative:

"It'll differ by organization," he says. "Some just have questions -- 'How do I talk to my board about planning?' 'How do I recoup ticket sales for this particular performance?' That's really just a simple conversation between them and my development staff."

Others have more complicated troubles -- "the kind you can't answer in a simple phone call," he says. On-site visits may be necessary.

The initiative is a natural outgrowth of arts management education that the Kennedy Center has been offering in the eight years since Mr. Kaiser's arrival. It's also fundamentally driven by a passion to end a self-defeating phenomenon he has witnessed throughout his career.

"When there are economic challenges, the first things that staffs and boards cut are programming and marketing, and that's the worst thing you can do," he says. "You're guaranteeing yourself you'll have less revenue next year, and that's how sick organizations get really sick. That's why I'm so nervous right now and why I'm doing this."

Within 24 hours of the February 3 announcement of the program, the Kennedy Center had received 110 e-mailed pleas from 31 states, and even one from Iceland.

Arts philanthropists provided $500,000 to support the program. Replies and counseling will come from Kennedy Center staff and from volunteer mentors across the country.

Kennedy Center Arts in Crisis website, access point for program, with video of Kaiser and additional information

Washington Post article of February 3: "he center's president said he is not as concerned about smaller organizations -- which are used to dealing with difficult situations -- as he is about groups that are misdirecting efforts at downsizing. "I'm worried that people are cutting the wrong things first, and that makes it much harder to compete for funding," he said. "Those who cut the programming first wouldn't look as attractive to the funders."

Miami Herald article: Co-funded by Miami philanthropist Adrienne Arsht and Kennedy Center trustee Helen Lee Henderson, the $500,000 program -- Arts in Crisis: A Kennedy Center Initiative -- will offer advice in fundraising, budgeting, marketing, building effective boards of trustees and other facets of running an arts organization during the current economic crisis.

Wall Street Journal interview published February 19 (access may be limited to subscribers only)