All Hallow's Eve brings out the trolls

Everybody's got one

In the past few weeks, I've shared some ongoing stories with you, and, as it turns out, people on the internet have opinions about them. Looking at someone else's opinion is like looking at a nude picture of yourself: unless it looks exactly like you imagine yours to look like, it's deeply unsettling. Keeping that previous sentence in mind (along with the mental image of looking at nude pictures of yourself), prepare to be deeply unsettled.

A little while back, we chatted a bit about Oregon Shakespeare Festival's plans to translate Shakespeare to more modern English, and, for a little bit, everybody just kind of freaked the hell out. While you're busy hoarding as many editions of the Oxford Complete Shakespeare before OSF's jackbooted thugs burn them in a pyre in the middle of town, maybe you should consider taking a moment to read Michael Feingold's latest Thinking About Theater blog for a more nuanced consideration of why OSF might want to translate Shakespeare.

I've been watching the 99-seat theater fight in Los Angeles for a while, up to and including the recent non-lawsuit that actors non-served to AEA. One of my favorite theater bloggers, the deliciously blunt Bitter Gertrude, has some thoughts on why AEA should take their LA actors seriously in this matter. But if you're one of those "facts and figures" types, American Theatre Magazine (which you should remember is printed by TCG, which, by and large, represents the interests of large regional theaters) recently released an article examining the question of "What makes LA so special that it needs a different agreement than any other comparable city?". Oh, and the Wall Street Journal is totally siding with the actors fighting against a minimum wage, so I hope you liberal theater people are feeling deeply conflicted now.

Deep in the nether reaches of history last week, I talked at length about the ambitious new Jubilee project that leapt like Athena out of Zeus' forehead from the pages of HowlRound. For those of you not too keen on clicking on links, it is a call for the 2020-2021 theater season across the nation to be one that "produces only works by women, people of color, artists of varied physical and cognitive ability, and/or LGBTQA artists." On this one, internet, you have surprised me at your almost complete lack of invective. This is exactly the kind of thing that I would expect you to either latch onto with slobbering uncritical zeal or lash out against with the fury of a thousand uninformed Tea Party activists. Instead, I had to go scouring the bowels of the interwebs for any kind of commentary, and literally all I could come up with was one negative critique from Bitter Lemons. Normally, I wouldn't look to the opinions of a publication that tried to scam money from theater companies for reviews, but, hey, this is all I got. If you have access to a blog and want to write a counter to Bitter Lemons, please feel free. In the meantime, more groups have signed up for the Jubilee since we last talked about it, including Twin Cities companies Day In Day Out Productions, Frank Theatre, Loudmouth Collective, Savage Umbrella and Theatre Novi Most.

Wait… Is diversity already happening?

Now before you accuse me of being a paid stooge for the Jubilee (and trust me, they're paying top dollar), you should know that I will also happily undermine any staunchly pro opinion article that anyone writes about it. I just haven't seen one yet. It will happen, and I will be waiting. It's nothing personal. It's just a thing I have to do.

But why wait five years for equity on stage? It actually looks to me like it's starting to happen without a big dramatic gesture.

It's no big deal to us anymore to do all-female Shakespeare.

Playwright Suzan Lori-Parks (whom you might remember as the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama) was recently awarded the Gish Prize, one of the largest cash prizes in the arts world.

We're starting to recognize the value of artists with disabilities, and just in time for a deaf musical to tear it up on Broadway.

A lesbian coming-of-age musical written entirely by women just cleaned up at the Tony Awards this year. And then there's freaking Hamilton, man! What's hotter than that right now?

Broadway's stages have suddenly become diverse, which will hopefully bring in a more diverse audience in the future, which will, if all goes well, finally kick the nonprofit theater world out of its white man rut. It feels icky and wrong inside to be rooting for the for-profit world to lead the way to diversity, but it looks like that's who's picking up the torch right now. Sometimes you just have to go where the light is.

So, what I wonder about the Jubilee is whether it will feel relevant or archaic by the time 2020 rolls around. If it still feels necessary five years from now, then I will guess that the non-profit world will have been delving deep into it's normal list of excuses for not changing.

Holy crap. Did I just write an opinion piece about the Jubilee? I guess you better check out next week's article in which I totally take apart this poor chump's ideas.

All hallows

Time to hang the bodies out in the front yard, start up your pagan rituals and break into a "haunted" theater. It's Halloween!

The Pioneer Press is out with their annual mega-list of Halloween-related events around the Cities, and now I want to punch whoever coined the word "spooktacular" squarely in the junk.

There are two things that I would recommend you check out this year that are both theater and Halloween:

(1) The Twin Cities Horror Festival is back for its fourth year at the Southern Theater. According to a press release that was sent to me, they're already selling about 25% more tickets than they did at this time last year, so you better get yours soon.

(2) You only have one more weekend left to catch the BareBones Halloween Outdoor Puppet Extravaganza (this year titled "We All Fall Down"). It's usually a pretty packed event, so you might as well go claim a spot at Hidden Falls Park in St. Paul right now.

Don't be that girl

For those of you who are still all pissy about cell phones in theaters and patrons being distracted from watching your wonderful performance, here's a cautionary tale about the opposite: when an audience member is just way too into it.

See, there's this touring production of the musical adaptation of the 1992 movie The Bodyguard featuring former X Factor winner Alexandra Burke; and, while everything I just described makes me choke back just a bit of bile, it's obviously someone else's cup of tea. I know this, because an audience member at a recent performance in Nottingham, England was forcibly removed from the theater for singing along "loudly and badly" with the show and swearing at anyone who told her to shush.

So, I hope we've all learned a valuable lesson; and I also hope that you know exactly which song from The Bodyguard the audience member was singing; and I further hope that this song is now firmly stuck in your brain.

Oh, you don't remember The Bodyguard all that well? How about this:

"AND IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEIIIIIIII WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOOOOOOOOOUUUU!!!"

You're welcome.