The insidious elitist leftist agenda
A winner every time
Congratulations are in order! The National Theatre Conference recently announced its annual awards, and some Minnesotans will be flying to New York to pick them up. Illusion Theater will receive the conference's Outstanding Theatre Award, which gave its co-producing directors Michael Robins and Bonnie Morris the opportunity to also select the Outstanding Emerging Professional award. Their choice was Isabel Nelson and Diogo Lopes, the co-artistic directors of Transatlantic Love Affair.
The NTC also gave its Person of the Year award to Polly Carl, director of HowlRound. Though she's not from Minnesota, her website's articles have provided me with plenty of fodder in the two years I've been writing this column, so I thought I'd make special note of that to cover for anything I may or may not have said in regards to HowlRound.
So many years
Holy crap, did I just say that I've been writing News and Notes for two years? Yes, I most definitely did, and I can't take it back now. Wow, that seems like a long time.
Two years isn't cool, though. You know what's cool? Fifty years.
Yes, friends, this year is the 50th birthday of the National Endowment of the Arts. (Good thing for them the Happy Birthday song is no longer held under insidious copyright) Fifty years ago, our government decided to start spending federal tax dollars to promote the arts, and and they've been trying like hell to correct that ever since.
There's been plenty of frothy-mouthed screaming in those five decades over whether the NEA is a good thing or a bad thing, and its easier than ever to argue that our society no longer believes in the idea of the public good that the NEA was created to serve; but, whatever you think of the organization and its funding patterns, it has made plenty of things happen for artists.
So, happy birthday, NEA! May you continue to fund the insidious elitist leftist agenda to spread filthy lies like "art is worth supporting".
Genius!
The MacArthur Foundation recently announced the winners of its annual "Seriously, Guys, Stop Calling Them 'Genius' Grants; We Literally Never Use That Word Anywhere in Our Press Releases" grants; or, as you probably know them, the "Genius" Grants. This year, several members of the performing arts community were recognized, including tap dancer Michelle Torrance, set designer Mimi Lien, puppeteer Basil Twist, and a guy who created a little musical you might have heard about recently, Lin-Manuel Miranda.
I know that much drooling has been done over Miranda's Hamilton, and we here at News and Notes have been guilty of adding to the sogginess; but there's a reason for all the Hamilton hoopla: it's a damn important show. We in the theater world would do well to learn its lessons (and, no, those lessons are not "we should all do hip hop musicals!"). Even though I've spent a lot of words in this column hyping a show I've never seen, I've been struggling to articulate the reasons why this particular show is so important. Thankfully, I happened upon a couple of articles that do the heavy lifting for me.
The first one is an explanation of how a show about two-centuries-dead white guys is the most socially relevant and accessible musical today, especially for that group of people we all say are important to bring into the theater world, but don't seem to actually try to hard to invite: everyone who's not snowy white. As the article says: "Lin-Manuel Miranda has done what many history curricula fail to do: allow young people of color to see themselves in history."
The second one is a praise of the earnestness of the show. In a world of musicals that have come uncomfortably OK with ironically winking at the audience and providing their own meta-commentary, Hamilton has become cool by being sincere:
"If the success of Hamilton signals anything, it is that irony is dead. We have exhausted its creative potential. Making things with quotation marks around them is exhausting. Standing at one remove is over. Put your air-quotes away. You won’t need them anymore."
Politicking
So, I guess that means the show is sincere in its beliefs in raising money for the Democratic party. The Democratic National Committee has hired Hamilton to do a special Monday night performance as a fundraiser, which just confirms all the suspicions our paranoid right wing friends have about artists being liberal propagandists.
Those on the political left do love to go on about the right-wing echo chamber, wherein conservatives only talk to themselves and therefore create an artificial sense of reality. But what if the same is true amongst all you liberal artists? What if theater is too ideologically exclusive to the left? Maybe we've created our own echo chamber out of musical numbers and choreography.
As liberal as artists tend to be, you might think that the theater world is a beautiful utopia of caring and equal rights, and you would be really wrong if you thought that. There's still a sad tradition of continuing on with old racist depictions in theater and justifying it because it's "art". We still somehow behave as if it's weird to have a strong female character lead a show. And producers apparently still think it's cool to pay women less for the same work.
But, really, the most important injustice that we've yet to address is this: the total lack of fat Hamlets.
On the couch
Every theater company has its own distinct personality. Only MinnPost thought of psychoanalyzing those personalities.
