Get Your Green

The Good Word

Friends, the good word this week is "green". No, my liberal friends, I don't mean buying organic non-GMO tofu in a biodegradable container that you bring home in your plug-in hybrid on the way back from your anti-fracking rally. I mean the other kind of green. The one that lets you buy that organic non-GMO tofu.

Usually when I talk about money in News and Notes, it's not something good. It's almost always has to do with some company or another drowning in debt, or some big fancy building project that will eventually leave its company drowning in debt. Most of us in the arts don't like dwelling on money too much, which is good, because most of us don't have it. We like to think that what we do shouldn't be sullied with thoughts of money, that the great art should be its own reward, that we are proud to be poor and brilliant, and blah, blah, blah.

But, as some great philosophers once said, "cash rules everything around me". We live in a world that's structured and ordered by the flow of money, and it's not all filthy lucre. Sometimes, money is your friend. Last week on News and Notes, we talked about a pair of new NEA reports, and I was a big gloomy gus about the whole deal, since they didn't exactly paint a rosy future for the arts (or at least the ones that require you to put on pants and leave the house). Well, I guess I missed out on a third report the NEA, released in conjunction with the Department of Commerce, that says in 2012 arts and cultural projects contributed $698 billion to the US economy. That's more than generated by construction, transportation, or even bacon and bacon-related products. Granted, that $698 billion includes movies, music and television, so a sizable chunk of that is currently lining Disney's pockets; but, hey, at least Americans still like buying artsy-type stuff.

If you are one of those artsy-types in America, then you can't do much better than living in the Twin Cities. According to the latest Creative Vitality Index report, the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro is the fifth most creatively vital metro area in the nation, which I guess means that you can do a little better, but only by 4. Believe it or not, performing arts alone generated around $200 million in revenues in 2013, and while sports industry revenues dropped by 14% over a two year period, creative sector revenues rose by a whopping 20% in the same time, leaving total revenues for the two sectors close to equal for the first time that I can recall. (Sports still has a slight edge, but I think we can take them down)

See? Money isn't all bad. Now, if I could just get some of it…

The Future

Hey, are you excited about the future of theater? I am! Seriously, guys, stop laughing. I really am. Even though I have the sneaking suspicion that the current regional theater system is going to come crashing down around us in a pile of dusty hubris, what comes after it will be pretty amazing. I think of it like the Great Chicago Fire: it was a pretty crappy time for everyone involved; but, in the end, everyone liked the rebuilt version of the city way better than the old one. (It turns out, the old one was actually a huge firetrap built on top of a swamp)

So, I'm happy to see that the Kennedy Center's Region 5 American College Theater Festival is here in the Twin Cities this week. Hundreds of theater students from colleges and universities across Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska and the Dakotas have descended on Normandale Community College to talk shop, swap notes and learn a thing or two. Also, I'm pretty sure that Jen is finally going to hook up with Dante. Come on you guys, this has being going on all semester!

If you want to see the future architects of our coming post-apocalyptic theater landscape, you'll probably find them here. For some reason, they've asked me to sit on one of the panels during the festival, so I will have a little bit of time to try to influence them before my ravings cause me to be dragged away screaming epithets over my shoulder. Plus, there's a workshop called "Are You Bored With Your Wood?" It should be good times.

For those of you who aren't college students anymore, you'll have to contend with finding the future here in the real world, which now means the internet. In the past, you budding scribes and scrappy theater companies had to wade through publishers, cheap chap books, poorly-designed submission procedures and ill-conceived contests to find each other. Well, The National New Play Network is here to put a stop to that nonsense. They recently rolled out an online new play exchange to help better facilitate playwrights and theater companies hooking up, much like Jen and Dante (seriously, Jen, just tell him you like him, already!). The new exchange promises big new exciting things, (but that's in an article on HowlRound, which promises big new exciting things about every 30 seconds) and as a zealot for new work, I heartily support the direction it's aiming for.

The Trouble With Musicals

So that was the future. Let's look at the present, which looks remarkably like the past these days. I ran across three different controversies centered around three different musicals, any one of which I could fill an entire column with; but I'm just tired of having opinions about things like this, so I'll let you have at it: First of all, you may have heard that Disney produced a movie adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's classic Into the Woods. After all the money Disney has made from other musicals, it shouldn't be a surprise that they would go after one of the most-produced shows in America, but when you think about it, Sondheim is a really odd-pairing with Disney. We've already been through the pre-release controversies over the movie version cutting and changing the show to conform to its own standards, and now we're seeing that the darker elements of the last half of the show have been watered down somewhat. I'm not here to tell you that Into the Woods is a cultural watershed moment that is now being whitewashed and dismantled (that was already accomplished with the "junior version" of the show), but it's important to remember the context in which the original was produced: that is, during the height of the AIDS crisis in America.

Secondly, I'm still puzzling over how to feel about the controversial casting of James Barbour as the Phantom in the Broadway run of Phantom of the Opera. In 2008, Barbour plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges over an inappropriate relationship with a 15-year-old girl that occurred in 2001. He served a short sentence and a few years of probation and went right back to being a regular performer on Broadway. Creepy? Skeezy? Sleazy? Sure, it's all of those things; but he served his time, and it seems to have not been an issue for anyone over the years until he was cast in a show whose central plot revolves around a predatory older man with an unhealthy obsession for a young woman. The producers of the show finally responded to complaints by releasing a statement that said "we believe James has completely honored the second chance he was given".

Thirdly, something that finally doesn't have anything to do with sex. You may remember a little while back when a local production of Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson was protested for its portrayal of Native Americans. Then, after that, Stanford University pulled the plug on its own production. Now, a theater in Raleigh has canceled their planned production of the show after a new artistic director decided to rethink the production.

The Gentry

Settle in folks, because we're heading through the rocky shoals of Creative Placemaking again. In spite of what I've said about it, cities across the country are still doubling down on claiming that arts investments are what will revitalize cities. But then, our old friend Gentrification showed up to the party, already a little tipsy, and started drinking way too much and hitting on the hostess. Apparently, New York's art scene is doomed because gentrification has driven all the real artists out. Of course, artists themselves are often blamed for the gentrification that has driven them out, while they themselves look back to some grand pre-gentrification golden age.

Now that those artists are fleeing New York like cockroaches from fumigation, they're winding up in the current decaying urban landscapes, like Detroit. You might think that any major city would love to see its old seedy industrial neighborhoods bloom into something like the expensive and showy SoHo or Chelsea in New York; but not everyone in Detroit is so happy about it.

Never mind the fact that gentrification may not actually be a problem. It's one of the few proxies we have for talking about economic and class divides without being accused of "class warfare", so we're probably going to stick with it for a while. I'm sorry all you artists out there, but you're probably going to continue to get blamed for it.

In the meantime, as you struggling artists prepare to mount your brand new experimental immersive theater piece in an abandoned piece of property, please make sure you let the audience know what the rules are.