BLOG: Little Medallion/Statue Thingies

Alright, Already: I'll Talk About the Tonys Last week on News and Notes, I made the promise that I would eventually have to talk about the Tony nominations. Now I'm making good on my threats. Since they were announced a month ago, I guess it's about time that I pay attention to them. You, the dedicated reader and theater devotee that you are, almost definitely know who was nominated and who was snubbed. I did not. So, I get to approach this with the normal level of naivete and incredulity that I normally reserve for big-budget Broadway. First of all, A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder got pretty much all the nominations, which means that you can expect it to be coming to a touring house, a regional theater and a community theater near you in the near future. Being musical theater illiterate, I had never heard of A Gentleman's Guide before, so I assumed that it was a new original musical. As it turns out, it was new (well, new-ish; it was a transplant to Broadway from the west coast); but it was actually adapted from a book, which itself has already been adapted into a movie (which, in turn was adapted into a radio play). In fitting with the musical's source and 1909 setting, the music of the show has been described as a "pastiche of Gilbert and Sullivan". We're in a conservative swing on Broadway right now. Out of all the musicals nominated for Best and Best New, there is only one, If/Then, that is completely original, and not an adaptation or revival. Even the the music in many of the "new" musicals on Broadway right now are in the same vein of Gentleman's Guide: deliberate references to past trends and styles. Call it pastiche, homage, parody or thievery, but Broadway is busy looking back at its old high school yearbook and remembering how cool it used to be. It might even be looking at buying an old Trans Am to fix up. Unfortunately, this is a strategy that is actually working. The crazy combination of classics, revivals and adaptations that is Broadway right now is apparently appealing to enough the audience's nostalgia to boost ticket sales to record levels. Not that ticket sales are what sway Tony nominations. Truth be told, A Gentleman's Guide hasn't actually been selling like gangbusters. (It probably will now that it's virtually guaranteed to walk away from the award ceremony with a boatload of those medallion/statue thingies). What sways the Tony nominations are the whims of a surprisingly small number of people. The 2014 nominations were decided by a group of only 33 people. And none of them liked the Rocky musical. (It's OK, Rock. You didn't win in the movie, either). You Can't Win 'Em All If you're an actor, you know that you will get rejected many, many times in your quest to attain the perfect role. Or any role at all. According to my old theater program director, "Auditions are your work. Acting is just a bonus." Even realizing this, though, doesn't mean that auditions aren't a bitter slog through the swamps of anticipation and rejection. Over in Britain, their version of Actor's Equity (which I'm sure has an extra "u" in it somewhere), has put forth a measure to create a code of ethics for the casting process. I don't know what's going on over there on the British Isles, but I doubt that their "degrading casting process" is any worse than ours. As an actor, you'll get plenty of trite advice on how to nail that audition and just win, like, every role ever! But the sad fact is that 95% of what decides who gets cast has nothing whatsoever to do with you. The next time you're feeling down about not getting that callback, then I want you to read this recent blog post from Bitter Gertrude on why you didn't get cast. Remember, it's hardly ever about you. Calling it Quits But it's OK if you didn't get that role, or that award, or that "oh, hey I saw you in that one play" recognition. It's all part of the romance of being the starving artist. You're young and brave and suffering now, but someday they will recognize your greatness. Sure, it will probably be after you're dead, but still, someday… Except that, as I was reminded in reading a recent piece in the New York Times, art is work. Being a professional actor is more like being a professional pipefitter than you might believe: someone is paying you to do a job. And just like in the larger economy, the middle class is rapidly disappearing from the arts world, where there are huge Disney-class warships cruising on Broadway waters and precious little room in the ocean for much else aside from our little fishing boats. The Twin Cities own Arts Junkie posted his own musings on this NY Times piece, in which he ponders his own struggle with art and commerce. His conclusion (in a manufacturing metaphor):"The artist is in many cases the factory, the labor, and the widget all at once." So, it's really hard, it's a ton of work, you get almost no chance at recognition, and almost none of us make any money (while Cameron Mackintosh takes home all of the money). How do you know when enough is enough? Though I hesitate to bring you yet another story of woe from Philadelphia, I was notified of a blog post from Philly's LiveArts website that has been making the rounds, in which a critically-acclaimed and ostensibly "successful" actor in Philadelphia decided to lay down the mantle and walk away. So, What Should We Do About All This? I don't know. Maybe try to sue the Guthrie? (Just kidding: their lawyers will slaughter you in court). An old article from Diane Ragsdale has been making the rounds again on the interwebs, in which she argues that the current declining state of the regional theater system is an inevitable problem of institutionalization that those very institutions may be incapable of recognizing. Plenty of people think that they have the brilliant solution that, if only the big theaters would listen to them, all the problems of withering creativity and poverty-level artists would go away. Over at HowlRound, there's someone right now advocating that we should all become repertory theaters. I don't personally don't believe that grand system-wide fixes will work. We won't be able to batter down the doors of the Guthrie or the Kennedy Center or La Jolla Playhouse and demand change by force. However, I do think that upswells from the bottom can change things, so I like to celebrate those moments when small things accumulate and start to turn the system through conscious direction. We may have a new supergroup of theaters in town dedicated to eradicating racial stereotypes, but it's been their own work at creating alternatives to Miss Saigon and The Scottsboro Boys that has been changing culture and attitudes. We have organizations like the Playwrights Center that have been seeding the country with new work by financially backing playwrights and giving them a home. And we have my most favorite populist free-for-all of all: the Fringe Festival, where anything and everything can be turned on its head every year. So, before I go this week, I want to take a quick look back at the city I lived in before coming to Minnesota. Cincinnati is a fairly conservative town with it's own dominant LORT house cranking out A Christmas Carol, Pride and Prejudice and Clybourne Park in a multi-million dollar facility by the river (sound familiar, Minneapolis?); but when Over-the-Rhine (the "Oh, god, don't ever go there or you'll be murdered and raped at the same time!" neighborhood of Cincinnati when I lived there) started to recover and experienced a renaissance, it wasn't a tired retread of Jane Austen that did it. It was the Cincinnati Fringe Festival that helped. So, if you're looking for the ray of sunshine between the shadows of the indifferent institutions, there it is. Now go forth and enjoy this beautiful day.