BLOG: Lessons From the Homefront

Who's Flopping Now? Here's some bad news for Philadelphia: the Rocky musical is closing. This is happening at the same time that the hip-hop musical based on Tupac Shakur's music, Holler If Ya Hear Me, is also being marked down as a flop. Both of these musicals were targeted at demographics not traditionally associated with Broadway, but underneath that guise, they were still cynically-constructed commodity musicals. The lesson that producers should take away from these closings should be "Tell a story that makes people care," but the takeaway will, sadly, most likely be "Straight white dudes hate Broadway, and hip-hop doesn't work in a musical." Bones I'm not done with bad news for Philadelphia yet. In a News and Notes post from earlier this year I shared with you the trials and tribulations of Philadelphia Theatre Company. Unfortunately, things haven't gotten much better for them. I had originally framed this as another arts organization falling prey to the Edifice Complex (the belief that building new buildings bestows special power and prestige); but I want to widen the scope a little. You might remember last month when I shared the sad tale of the death of San Jose Rep, a LORT house that imploded in a spectacular display of deficit financing. LORT theaters across the country have become the backbone of the US theater market outside of Broadway. At the beginning of this year, there were 74 of them. Now there are 73. (The Wikipedia entry of LORT now shows San Jose Rep unceremoniously crossed off the list; the official LORT website apparently hasn't caught on yet.) I bring this up, because Philadelphia Theatre Company is also a LORT house, which means that number may drop to 72 very shortly. Yes, I know what you're thinking: "Different cities!" "Different circumstances!" "We have more theater seats per capita than any other city in the history of mankind" (or whatever that factoid is supposed to be). But I implore you to take it seriously, because those LORT houses form the bones of our greater national theater body, and it looks a little bit like osteoporosis is setting in. Now I understand why someone could plausibly argue that Disney World is the future of theater. Local Matters So, what should we, the people who have more theatre seats per capita than God, take away from this? I don't know. Far be it from me to prescribe grand solutions. I'm just a guy who complains about things. Get off my lawn! However, in a recent article examining the source of San Jose Rep's demise, I was struck by a quote from the director of San Jose Stage: "You have to know who you are and what your audience wants. If you don't keep your finger on that pulse, you're lost." Maybe trying to be all things to all people (as many large regional houses do these days) is now a sucker's bet. So, looking around at what other companies in the Twin Cities are doing, I've come up with some local lessons that the big boys may want to look at: Lesson 1: Go To Your Audience Few theater companies know their audiences and their mission better than Mu Performing Arts, and I have been struck by the simple brilliance of their recent production of David Henry Hwang's FOB, which was produced not in a theater space, but in a series of Chinese restaurants across Minnesota. To the public at large, theaters are weird, off-putting buildings that can send the accidental message of "You're not cultured enough to be here!", and getting theater out of the theaters can do wonders. Lesson 2: Don't Build for the Sake of Building The Old Log Theatre in Excelsior, MN, is not the place you go if you're looking for a deeply symbolic exploration of a gay Mormon's coming out explored through atonal Icelandic metal music and goat puppets. (Actually, where do you go for that? I want to know.) It is the place where you go to see a decent production of A Charlie Brown Christmas and Free to Be You and Me. There's nothing wrong with that. They serve an audience that wants that, and it has been working for them for 75 years. So, when a company like Old Log gives itself a friendly remodel and adds a nice restaurant that's not too flashy, this is actually putting infrastructure in service of the people who use it, instead of using infrastructure to bludgeon people into submission. Lesson 3: Doing New Work Can Pay Off If You Commit To It A lot of performing arts companies are afraid of commissioning new work, because they see it as unnecessarily risky. (The closest most come to it is the "regional premiere"). In 2008, the Minnesota Opera threw itself at the task of creating new work in a field that traditionally views anything less than a century old with suspicion, and now people are throwing money at them to keep doing it. It doesn't just pay off in dollars. One of those new works won a Pulitzer Prize. Lesson 4: Try A New Financial Model Get your sensibilities all out of whack and forget about ticket numbers! Mixed Blood's free theater scheme seems to be working. Bedlam's new space is as much a restaurant and bar as it is a theater, and the rest of their programming is based on community immersion. The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra sells $5 memberships and lets you listen to recordings for free on its website. And now the Southern comes along and ups the ante with their ARTshare membership program. Will it work? Who knows? But maybe counting seats is no longer the right way to think about success or finances. And this is coming from the cities that have more theater seats per capita than atoms in the known universe.