Hey buddy! Wanna buy another theater?

Have I got a deal for you

A little over a year ago we pined together over theater dreams lost as the Hollywood Theater in Northeast Minneapolis was sold off to a developer for $1. If you've been waiting for another chance to buy a big old theater, you have another shot; but it will cost a little bit more.

Without much fanfare, the Music Box Theatre, long-time home of Triple Espresso, suddenly popped up on a realtor's website, for the low, low price of $1,950,000.

Basil Considine at Twin Cities Arts Reader gives us a good rundown of the building's history, so you can know what kind of legacy you'll be keeping up if you can scrape together the cash to buy it. The question is: who would want to scrape up all that cash? That's a lot of cash scraping. I could scrape all day long, and not have enough cash for that. And besides, it's already too late to lure Lakeshore Players over here. They're already halfway to paying for a brand new space.

I was talking to someone last night who has a plan, though. Since Minneapolis drag club the Gay 90s lost most of its performers over the weekend, maybe people could get together the cash to turn the Music Box into something a bit more fabulous. As this dreamer I was talking to calculated, "If we had 1,500 people donate, each of them would only have to give" (pause for calculator tapping) "$1,300".

Is that really too much to give drag a good home? (Also, there is this theater for sale in Park Rapids, MN.)

Even more heart-stopping followup!

Last week on News and Notes, we led off with followups on stories that we've already gone over before. It was so much fun, that I decided to do it again! Come on, everyone! Get on board and help me ride these things completely into the ground!

People are still nattering on about Oregon Shakespeare Festival's project to translate Shakespeare into more modern language. Last week, we looked at Michaeal Feingold's informed take on it, and this week he's out with part 2.

Feingold's conclusion:

"The desire to translate Shakespeare comes from fear: Audiences go into the plays believing that they will not understand, that this exalted genius's work is too far above them. Actors and directors, far too often, likewise fall into the Shakespeare religion, 'playing Shakespeare' — as if it were a special, remote style, like Kabuki — instead of simply playing a role in a play."

TimeOut New York took their criticism of the project a step further by bringing the translations all the way into modern conversational language, which resulted in choice gems like this:

Should I f***** kill myself, or should I not f***** kill myself?
That’s what I’m asking, I guess.
Whether I should put up with all this unbearable s***,
Or just,
You know,
F*****—blam!
Y’know?
I dunno.

Last week, we also talked a bit about the 99-seat fight with AEA in Los Angeles, and the unserved lawsuit that LA actors cooked up. Equity released an extremely brief statement in response, and you should know that they are very disappointed, and don't you know that you're really just hurting all the other actors? While Equity is trying to perfect the same guilt tactics used by your mother when you don't call often enough, they also ominously state "Equity is fully prepared to defend both the process and the substance of Council’s actions." I guess they're calling bluff on the lawsuit. Your move, actors who don't want to get paid.

I've also been waiting around for knee-jerk negative reaction to the Jubilee to hit the interwebs, and the interwebs were really letting me down. I found that someone started a NOtoJubilee Facebook group (which has a grand total of 1 like). Sure, there are commenters who think the project is misguided, but this is exactly the kind of thing that should prompt a big White Guy Freakout (since, you know, only 73% of plays produced in the US last year were by white male playwrights).

So, I traveled to the other side, my liberal friends. I went to The Federalist and found this article by a Brooklyn-based theater Artistic Director that helpfully explains how it's really white people's culture that's being unfairly appropriated and that theater is really a white cultural heritage and, besides, the Jubilee is actually helping to keep white culture dominant. If you aren't familiar with The Federalist, you should know it's a favorite right-wing libertarian online magazine (in case you couldn't tell), and the comments below this article are just priceless.

In the meantime, HowlRound's writers continue to defend the project, and now 39 companies have now signed up.

Technobabble

Woe, these modern times! Do ye goodly gentlemen and gentlewomen not long for simpler days gone by? Did our forebears wrench their inspirations from the heavens by way of mechanical interventions? Nay! Twas by the gentle scritch-scratch of the goose's quill, the black of earthly ink on parchment, the gently quickening whiff of sewage flowing free in the streets. Forsooth, what soul among us earthbound stock can rightly say that Man, in his finite faculties, could be much improved in this earthly firmament by the implementation of such mechanical witchcraft as video, Twitter or modern plumbing? Zounds! Say not these damnedable machinations that tinkerers hath wrought have advanced the plight of the scribbling writer in his quarters, the uncouth playactors who scurry cross the boards, much less the hooting masses of the audience questing for some piteous distraction from from the mundanities of work and cholera!

Yet, my compatriots, yet… time insists on its unceasing procession into that unknowable country which is the future. And here stand we, betwixt tradition at our backsides and at our fronts the open maw of that god some call Technology.

Or, in other words, theater can be an awfully conservative art form that freaks the hell out when new technology tries to intrude on its sacred turf. And here comes the internet. Let's see how that's going:

Social media is on the rise and professional theater criticism is on the wane. There may not be a direct causal relationship between those two facts, but I did put them together in one sentence, so now you think there is. In a world where anyone can publish a blog with their own theater critiques, we suddenly see a publication charging for its reviews, a critic trying to sell his press comps on craigslist and a whole lot of soul-searching from professional critics. Over at the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones has an article examining the growing influence that celebrities' social media accounts have on ticket sales and how this shift may cover up clear conflicts of interest, as major producers scramble to get celebrities tweeting about their shows.

However, there's a new website hoping to help the reviewers out by packing and canning their work into a new aggregator based on the Rotten Tomatoes model.

But don't worry too much about how much reviews and social media can affect ticket sales. Pretty soon you'll be able to stream all the Broadway shows you want online. In HD, even! So now there's never a reason to ever need to see anything live. Hooray!

Stand against

I was talking with someone recently about after-show curtain speeches. I don't mind them, as long as they humanize the theater company and welcome the audience in as part of the art. My friend is pretty against them, because they feel that it breaks the theatrical spell. We disagree on this point, but I think we see the reasonableness in each other's arguments.

But no matter what opinion you have, there's always someone who holds a more unreasonable version of it. Friends, I leave you with this opinion piece from a guy who thinks that dancers shouldn't even bow after a performance.