You can't write that!
Kind of a big deal
Let's all give a big, giant congratulations to the folks at Huge Improv Theater. This past week, they reached a tremendous goal: their fifth anniversary. In the past five years, they've had a gargantuan impact on the improv scene in the Twin Cities, creating a tremendous following and fostering an immense growth of local improv talent. It's a towering achievement of cyclopean proportions covering a prodigious amount of things, and now I'm running out of synonyms for "huge" so I will end with my favorite: "elephantine".
Good job, gang!
We'll do it live!
Forgive me, die-hard musical theater people. Somehow, I completely missed out on the fact that, once again, "Grease" is the word. A few years ago, I was slathering along with all of you over the opportunity to see if Carrie Underwood can act in a live broadcast musical (verdict: no), and now I overlooked the fact that Grease: Live is a thing that happened? It's a live-broadcast version of the best-selling movie musical of all time, the one show that every high school in the country will trot out eventually (in spite of the terrible, terrible lessons it teaches), and I didn't even notice that NBC was putting it up as their latest live musical offering?
Wait… didn't NBC just do The Wiz! Live? What? This was on Fox? Holy crap, we've got networks competing to do live broadcast musicals now?! How the hell did I not know about this?
It looks like Fox brought the heavy guns to this fight, with a giant cast on a giant soundstage with a live audience, directed by Thomas Kail (who also directed Hamilton). As per usual, Fox went with the "more is more" approach, and audiences just ate it up: more people tuned in to Grease than any other live musical since The Sound of Music. So, I guess this is a trend that has some staying power (in spite of Peter Pan Live). As this arms race continues, prepare for it to get bigger and dumber. You'll want to head down to the fallout shelter before Starlight Express explodes on your screens.
Kick out the tweets
Hey, Broadway, how ya doing, buddy? Still kinda down from losing $10 million in revenue when you shut down for that blizzard, huh? Yeah, that sucks; but, hey, things are looking up, right? You're taking Twitter but storm. Last year Hamilton generated over 1 million tweets. That's, um, good, I think. Right?
Yeah, there's a smile! So, you probably shouldn't look at this article from Forbes about how tweets don't translate into ticket sales. No, don't read that! Now you're just more sad. Here, Broadway, quickly read this response article in Medium from an ad agency guy about how Twitter is just a small part of the bigger picture, and it's actually all good. Hey, what is that you're reading? Is that the response that Forbes wrote in response to that previous response? What does it say?
"Measurement is at the heart of social media – and it’s all f***ed"
Well, that's awfully negative. Why do you even read things like that when you know they're just going to bring you down? Let's talk about something happier. I have this great idea for a live broadcast of Starlight Express.
What's a Wooster gotta do?
And now for the strangest fight this week. The Wooster Group, that wacky bunch of experimental theater makers founded by Spalding Gray (and who also recently put a bunch of white people in red face), just finished up a run of Harold Pinter's The Room in New York. Then they took it on tour to LA. Then the troubles began.
The Group received a notification from publisher Samuel French (you know, the guys who publish everything) that they would not be allowed to promote the LA run of the show, since they did not obtain the proper licensing to extend beyond their original New York run. They appealed, and were allowed to do limited promotion, but were informed “There may be absolutely No reviews of this production; e.g. newspaper, website posts etc.”
In the meantime, the Group's plans to take the show back to New York and on to Paris are on hold as the Pinter estate and the Wooster Group argue about who applied for what licensing when. That will definitely hurt their bottom line, as the company usually has to tour a show extensively to make its money back.
However, the fight has settled in not around the rights to the play, but to the strange stipulation that the Wooster Group must somehow prevent outside organizations from reviewing the show. Now this has awakened the wrath of the theater critics (and you don't want to mess with them; they still have literally hundreds of readers across the country). In a recent statement, the American Theatre Critics Association came out, guns a' blazin':
"First, this is objectionable behavior that tries to restrict not only artistic freedom of expression, but also freedom of the press. Second, it is foolish in its futility in this cyber world in which anyone's opinion can go viral seconds after the curtain goes down."
Tough talk, ATCA. We'll see how futile it is when Samuel French's jackbooted thugs drag you from the theater and force you to burn your notes in front of your weeping families.
No to nom de plume?
Last week on News and Notes we were reminded of the ongoing sexual abuse lawsuits against Children's Theatre Company, when an opinion article showed up in the Star Tribune asking everyone to forget for a moment about the allegations against former CTC teacher Jason McLean and consider his artistic vision as a restauranteur instead. Given what McLean is accused of, that proved to be quite difficult to do ("forgive and forget" is not an oft-used phrase on the web), and numerous netizens were quite displeased with Olive Allen's defense.
This led to the next question: "Who exactly is Olive Allen?" Internet researchers combed the web for clues. Mostly, all they could say was that they could find no trace of a current-day living person with that name that was also "A writer in Minneapolis", as Allen described herself in the article. Some fervent researchers, like Kate-Madonna Hindes at Girl Meets Geek, suspected that Allen was actually Jason McLean's daughter, Olive McLean, hinting at a clandestine attempt to spin the McLean name back into the positive territory.
Unfortunately for the conspiracy-minded out there, this deduction was not to be proved true. The Star Tribune, which had initially accepted the name at face value in spite of their stated policy of using real names, finally did some checking up on the person whose commentary they had to have know would prove so inflammatory (conveniently, after said commentary inflamed plenty of traffic for their website). It turns out "Olive Allen" is actually Kay L. Hansen, who has no connection whatsoever to McLean, other than really digging his restaurant. The Star Tribune, upon learning the truth, quickly changed the attribution on the opinion article.
Lest this be just another sad footnote to the much sadder situation surrounding CTC's dark past, let us consider for a moment the ethics of the pseudonym. The Star Tribune has a stated policy of not allowing them, because, like most old-school producers of journalism, they still subscribe to the idea that "readers have a right to know who is speaking to them, and writers need to take responsibility for what they say.”. However, we now live in the future hellscape crafted by the internet. Online harassment is a real thing and legal systems still don't know what to do about it. In principle, we like to believe that people should be able to say their opinions, however wrong-headed they may be, but in practice internet users frequently gang up to do really crappy things to people they disagree with. That is why there are plenty of compelling arguments for the idea that the internet should be more pseudonymous.
As a person who writes things on the web and who sometimes has opinions about those things, I understand the urge for Hansen to hide behind "Olive Allen". No one wants the kind of flak that she will undoubtedly receive now. On the other hand, I'm still in the old-school camp believing that if you feel the need to mouth off about your opinion, you should put your name on it. Of course, this means that I sometimes don't share opinions that I know will be extremely unpopular (like my stance on dolphins) when I determine that the blowback I would receive vastly outweighs the good that sharing my opinion could do. Sure, I'd like to tell everyone the truth about those evil moistened squeak toys, but the rest of the world has made up its mind, and I have to decide if my stance accomplishes anything. It's all part of the complicated social math you have to do to be a human being in a complex social web with other human beings (unlike those filthy dolphins).
You know what? Screw it. I'll just say it: dolphins are despicable. I don't care what anyone thinks!
