Please don't plug your phone charger into the set

Get your diversity on

Ignoring the occasional setback courtesy of people with no real understanding of history, America has generally been getting better at this whole "diversity" thing, especially in the arts world.

Which is why I'm still genuinely surprised when another diversity milestone is passed. It usually feels like we should have gone by it a long time ago. It feels like driving from Minneapolis to Chicago for what seems like hours, only to look up and realize, "Wait, I'm only in Tomah?!" I guess we're making progress, but I figured we'd at least be in Madison by now.

What I mean to say is that Misty Copeland has recently become the first black female principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, and even though my mental picture of ballet is whiter than an albino Englishman riding a polar bear in a blizzard, I figured that this was something that had to have happened before. But, as it turns out, the dance world, especially the ballet portion of that world, has been a difficult one for minorities to get a major foothold in.

According to Scott "Bad Boy of Musical Theatre" Miller, musical theater is one of America's only true indigenous art forms, along with jazz, comic books and murder mysteries. (He forgot to add the most widely practiced American art form: taking offense at something) This year, of course, was finally the year the major awards show for this "indigenous American art" recognized women as major writers in the craft.

Now, the Ziegfeld Club wants to make sure that this kind of award goes out every year. They've just recently announced the new Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award to recognize emerging female composer-lyricists. Unlike the Tonys, all you have to do to be considered is send a submission.

In defense of the average

Last week on News and Notes, I gave you a choice between two different articles to be angry about. Option B in that choice was Elizabeth Day's declaration of theater as a "stilted, overrated art form".

Well, thank the gods for The Guardian's Lyn Gardner, who provided the perfect rebuttal to Day, pointing out that seeing underwhelming theater is not a bug in the system, but a feature:

"The truth is that with any art form you have to wade through a lot of less good stuff to find the gems, and there is a purpose in the less good stuff because that’s how artists, novelists, film-makers and theatre-makers learn. And for the reader or the audience there is a real pleasure in going on a journey with an author or a theatre-maker and seeing them develop over a period of time. If everything was astonishing it would be very dull, and often even in the average there is something gleaming to be spotted if you look for it. And of course sometimes you find something in a show that seems to be speaking just to you."

Fringe, ho!

With that in mind, friends, I am pleased to announce that you now have plenty of stuff in this art form we call theater to wade through, for the 2015 Minnesota Fringe Festival site is now live! This is not a drill. Please proceed to your nearest scheduled Fringe preview night and try to remain calm. You will need to bring your own hip waders as you slog your way through the uniuried madness that is the Fringe. You will most likely hate something, maybe without even seeing it, but I guarantee you that you will eventually see something that is speaking just to you. Plus, there's a chance that "speaking just to you" may not even be metaphorical.

For the past two weeks, I have been previewing this year's Fringe offerings using the lazy, arbitrary and totally unfair method of looking only at show titles and company names. If you feel that I have maligned your show in any way, please feel free to tell me during the festival at the new Fringe Central location, Red Stag Supper Club. Since Fringe Central is finally happening on my side of town (GO NORTHEAST! WOO!), I will probably be a bit more tipsy than normal (read: "aggravatingly drunk"), and I will most likely be willing to entertain any and all complaints (with the caveat that you must be at least as drunk as I am).

Get outta town

But, if Fringe just really weirds you out, and you need to get as far from it as possible, you have one option: leave town. Why not head up to Alexandria, MN to spend some time with L’Homme Dieu. The 55-year-old theater has a long history, starting off as a partnership between St. Cloud State and the community of Alexandria. Now it acts a sort of colonial outpost of Twin Cities theater (4 of the 5 shows on its stage this summer were exported from Twin Cities companies), only with better fishing.

Why stop there, though? You can take a whirlwind statewide tour of theaters across Minnesota.

What not to do

At this point, I would have assumed that audience members no longer need to be told before a show starts what to do with their cell phones. Nothing makes me feel more condescended to than to have an announcement command me to silence my "electronic devices," lest I be distracted from the major cultural event happening in front of my eyes.

Alas, mankind apparently really, really needs to be talked down to.

This past week, an audience member at the Broadway run of Hand to God actually climbed onto stage at intermission to plug his phone charger into an outlet on the set. It was there that he was quickly greeted with two disappointing realities: (1) an outlet in a realistic-looking set is probably not real; and (2) ushers who will kick you and your phone off the set are decidedly real.

Given that the man reportedly said "Well, where can I plug it in?" after he was shooed off the stage, it is now apparent that we need to amend our standard cell phone reminders to include "Please, for the love of god, just keep the damn thing in your pocket and just freaking wait. What's that it? Oh, it's dying, is it? That sounds just awful. You know what else is dying? Theater. And you're killing it. Right now. Please enjoy the show."