You may already be a winner!
Nice party, man
Yes it was, wasn't it? Thanks to everyone who came out to Minnesota Playlist's 2nd Annual Winter Bash this past weekend. You hearty souls spat in the face of winter even as it finally unveiled this year's first murderous chill. Thank god you had booze.
If you were there, you know that Playlist founders Alan Berks and Leah Cooper announced the winners of the "Unsung Hero" awards, based on nominations from those who attended. If you weren't there, now you also know that. Three winners were chosen that night through a careful and thoughtful selection process of drawing them randomly out of a basket.
The powers that be here at Minnesota Playlist have assured me that they will have photos from the event, as well as the full list of Unsung Hero nominees, up on the site for you on Wednesday or Thursday this week, so that you can see all the fun that you missed.
You might be a winner, but probably not, but you might, right?
If you were lucky enough to be drawn as an Unsung Hero, maybe you could be just starting a hot streak. Have you bought your ticket to the Powerball? (or, as my girlfriend calls it The Idiot Tax) At $1.4 billion, it's now officially a world record jackpot, at odds of 1 in 292 million, which is probably also some kind of record, considering that the odds used to be a much more reasonable 1 in 175 million.
Even though that math sucks big time, you're probably playing the game in your head of "what would I do with that money?" For some people, it's hookers and cocaine; for other people, it's theater.
No, really, it literally is. Remember Roy Cockrum, the former monk who won the jackpot in 2014? You know, the one who immediately turned around and made big donations to the Goodman and Steppenwolf in Chicago? Well, he's still at it.
A big, weird experimental 17-person play about the life of Catholic mystic Thomas Merton written by Charles Mee that Cockrum originally funded at Actor's Theater of Louisville will be making the big transfer to New York. Cockrum's lotto money is fueling the whole thing, as he continues to make good on his pledge to spend his filthy lucre on actually producing theater, instead of endeavoring to get a big, ugly building named after himself. As he said after he won: "I do not intend to fund buildings or endowments or to buy tables at galas."
Instead, he has chosen to put his money behind a production that offers "a collective sense of confused delight" (which is cool now, since someone at Howlround told us that theater no longer has to make a lick of sense).
Good job, Roy! I hope the rest of you will be so generous with your own lottery winnings.
The tax man has a change of heart
If you do win it big, and you do decide to make it rain on your favorite non-profit theater company (What are those odds, like 1 in 547 million?), you should know that the IRS has decided to not make that more difficult than it already is. Last year, the federal bean counters wanted to roll out a new regulation requiring nonprofits to collect social security and/or tax ID numbers from donors in order to file additional paperwork documenting each donation. Currently, nonprofits are only required to issue acknowledgement letters to donors of $250 or more, testifying to their donation.
A number of advocacy groups like The Performing Arts Alliance rallied people to complain, and the people won out over the bureaucrats. The IRS quietly killed the proposed change.
Of course, they only sought to implement the new rule after a study came out showing that the nonprofit world loses about 13% of its income to fraud; but I'm sure that problem has cleared up on its own. You guys are all honest, right?
2015 keeps rolling on
At the end of 2015 (remember that, all the way back to two weeks ago?) I wrote a retrospective looking at the stories from the year that we'd still be looking at in this current year, which is now 2016, no matter what I keep writing on my checks. So, lets check in with some of the stories that we haven't actually left yet.
And, let's get the Children's Theatre sex abuse lawsuits out of the way right away. A third suit against former CTC teacher and current restaurant owner Jason McLean was filed Wednesday. The new complainant, Melissa Beneke, claims that she was abused for four years and that she was coerced by McLean into denying it during the 1984 investigation that resulted in the conviction of CTC's founder John Clark Donahue. If you're keeping score at home, that's now four pending lawsuits against CTC, three of which name McLean.
So, let's move on to something that makes you feel less icky, like you're wearing a mohair sweater soaked in motor oil. How about we check in with how the change in theater leadership is going?
It's the last days of Pamela Mitchell's tenure at the Ordway. News articles have been framing her tenure at the arts multiplex as one of peacemaking, but we in the theater world probably know her best from the 2013 fight over Miss Saigon, which her administration was clearly not prepared for. Mitchell eventually saw the light and apologized to protestors (you know, a year later), solemnly swearing that the Ordway would never again produce the show under her watch (you know, right before she announced her retirement). In a recent interview in which she was goaded into speaking about the incident again, Mitchell said: "We’re further along in our journey around diversity, equity and inclusion partly because of the searing experience of Miss Saigon."
Hopefully, that journey will continue with her successor, who was just announced today, and who the Pioneer Press gushingly declares is absolutely perfect for the job, not because he has successfully run two different large complexes similar to the Ordway with financial solvency and without major incident, but because he's a Canadian hockey coach.
Hey, as Pamela Mitchell said: "Don’t forget to have fun." (Hopefully, she also left a post-it note at her old desk saying "FYI: No more Miss Saigon")
Over at the Big Blue Box in Minneapolis, the Guthrie has now announced their new Managing Director, Jennifer Bielstein. In the previous Joe's tenure, the positions of Artistic Director and Managing Director were smooshed together, and Dowling ruled the roost for so long that you probably forgot that the Guthrie, like most large theaters, used to keep those jobs separate. Well, now the job is back, and she's a lady and everything.
Bielstein comes to us from Actors Theatre of Louisville, where she helped run the Humana Festival of new works. Maybe I'm just reading tea leaves, but this—combined with Haj's background of producing new work in his previous job, and the fact that Paul de Cordova asked him in an interview for Playlist if the Guthrie would be an incubator for devised work and Haj said "I think it will be"—sends signals that the new Guthrie will actually put some muscle behind producing and commissioning new things, instead of endlessly juggling chestnuts and importing other people's work.
(By the way, if you remember Sophie Kerman's review of a recent roundtable talk featuring Haj and other new ADs to the Twin Cities scene, MPR is now streaming a good chunk of it for your listening pleasure.)
The finest
I know that last week I said that I was done wrapping up last year, but, what's one more year-end review between friends, right? You may have thought City Pages was done naming the best of 2015 theater, since they literally already published that article, but it looks like they couldn't resist the siren song of the Top Ten list. So, here's their list of ten finest productions of 2015.
Congratulations to you winners for making such fine productions! You're so fine. You're so fine, you blow my mind.
