Tynan's Anger

It's not surprising that, when The 39 Steps premiered on Broadway, some critics were outraged that a play lacking any focus on plot would be any sort of success. The outrage was less palpable when the play made it to Broadway, where it has become a smash success, outlasting every play from its season, including the more beloved farce of Boeing Boeing and the endless (and deservedly) awarded play August: Osage County. Two years later; it is easy to see why; what The 39 Steps lacked in drama or plot, it made up for in a remarkable display of stagecraft that is rarely seen today. It's perhaps the only non-musical that fully provides a bang for its buck to Broadway visitors more interested in spectacle and escapism, and in a unique twist of contemporary culture, it provides such entertainment in a way movies cannot.

Up until the last 10 years or so, there was simply nothing the theater could do to compete with movies for spectacle. No matter how much explosions, gunfire, loose women, or blood you had on stage, it was nothing compared to the Schwarzenegger movie playing a few blocks down from Broadway, let alone any town in America. Despite all the advances in special effects however, there is still a sizable portion of America that prefers organic effects to digital; no matter what CGI can accomplish in Avatar or Lord of the Rings, it will never replace the more natural sets of Star Wars or 2001. That portion of American audiences has been abandoned by Hollywood, and they're the types who have bankrolled The 39 Steps, guffaw by guffaw.

Between the endless supply of visual, verbal, and auditory gags, the occasional breaks for puppetry, the intentionally horrible use of accents, and references to just about every Hitchcock movie you can thing of, criticizing the script of The 39 Steps would be like criticizing the virtuosity of Bob Dylan's singing voice. The poetry is not in the words of this plays, but in the effects, the actors, the mannerisms, and the jokes (in other words all the things that made farce the go-to form of entertainment before pictures could move.)

The choice of The 39 Steps, a great Hitchcock movie (both in its U.K. and U.S. versions), but by no means among his best work, is rather appropriate. The 39 Steps was one of the earliest displays of the MacGuffin method of cinematic narrative Hitchcock pioneered: it doesn’t matter what the 39 Steps are, so long as it allows Hitchcock to advance his cinematic vision (The Maltese Falcon featured the most famous use of the MacGuffin). The same holds for Maria Aitken's staging, which features a constant barrage of theatrical devices old and new, including a brilliant display of stage tech that deservedly won Tonys for lighting and sound. At no point does The 39 Steps feel dated or self-righteous; it would seemed more like that had the play been a straight adaptation. The winks to the audience are occasional and only when necessary—most hilariously at the play's climax.

The 39 Steps is the only play I've seen, Broadway or not, where the director has gotten billing over the writer/adapter/conceiver. That's pretty much at the heart of the play's appeal. Its genius cannot be displayed in a script, but in a theater, using devices that have mostly been abandoned by non-musical theater. But The 39 Steps didn't just outlast August; it outlasted Grease and Xanadu. There's a fine line between old-school theatrical escapism and new wave, self-satisfied theatrical spectacle. The 39 Steps toes that line better than most anything that's been on Broadway in recent memory.

Labels: 39 Steps, adaptation, Broadway theatre, new york, Theatre

Watch this episode of Theater Talk very carefully. Michael Riedel, the instigator of most of the conversation, is not treating the death of theater criticism as a "what if" question. He's treating it as a given. If the aforementioned death hasn't happened already, it will, in Riedel's viewpoint. Very subtly, he manipulates the conversation to talk about the death of intelligent theater criticism and suggests that the rise of celebrity gossip, outrageous blogging (never mind the outrageousness of his column), and an A.D.D. culture will make the likes of Kenneth Tynan and Clive Barnes obsolete. There's a reason he's doing this: nothing would benefit Riedel personally more than exactly that kind of death.

The panel he assembled includes two critics who are in his pocket; Mike Kuchwara of the Associated Press, the only theater critic who benefits from critics losing their jobs, and Jacques le Sourd, who even Riedel himself has admitted is a close confidant and potential leaker. John Heilpern, for one, is not having any of it, and saves this panel from turning into an outright eulogy for a medium that isn't quite in the coffin. But Riedel wants you to believe it is. Because that would benefit Riedel.

Let's make one thing clear on Riedel: he is not a theater critic. Riedel is a gossip columnist for a trashy tabloid. He will trash shows in his columns, but those are reviews in the same way New York Post covers are editorials. He mainly succeeds by being the only voice for the inner workings of Broadway—for theater geeks, that is exceedingly rare, interesting information. But that he writes about a more obscure field doesn't reduce the fact that he embraces the worst traits of tabloid journalism. He will be nasty instead of being insightful, trade on rumor and shallow personal aspects of the theater scene rather than critical judgment, and he's probably more corrupt in doing so than we like to think. Riedel writes for the New York Post, a publication most good New York theater liberals don't trust with anything else; in fact, they usually despise the paper like nothing else in the New York media. So why should they make an exception for Riedel?

When you think carefully about the source of the eulogies, most of the immediate talk of the death of theater criticism that has gotten the theater press and blogosphere in a tizzy stems from Riedel himself. Figuring himself as a theater critic, Riedel wrote a column in October that bemoaned the dimished role of the theater critic in the internet age. He said nothing new, and I took pains to point out that theater criticism is far from dead. The reason the idea took off, however, was because the theater press figured that if even Riedel is worried, we're in trouble.

Listen, here's what everyone's already known about Riedel even before the death of print began. He's an egotist, unafraid of controversy and utterly devoid of empathy; a careerist, and a manipulator. He is not only willing to trample over anything and anyone to get on top—he takes active glee in the process. These are all the classic traits of a tabloid journalist, and they're the traits that make the rest of the the traditonal journalistic world avoid tabloid journalism like the plague. Riedel just happens to have an Ivy League education and concern himself with a "high art" rarely privy to tabloid journalism anymore in the U.S.. All the conniving parts of his trade and personality are still there.

So I would venture to say that Michael Riedel is actively, intentionally manipulating the talk of theater press to bemoan the death of theater criticism more than actually cover theater. Why would he do this? So he can turn the overall discussion to the TMZ side of theater, maybe even integrate a bit of Hollywood scandal into the stictchings of Broadway "coverage." This would give him the authority in the theater world Ben Brantley and Charles Isherwood currently have.

Watch that video, and you see that Riedel is doing exactly what I have just described in this discussion. Take this panel discussion as a microcosm of the theater discussion at large, and it's scary to think of how powerful Riedel would become if no one had the guts like Heilpern to stand up to him. Normally I don't call on spurned theater artists to fight back against their detractors in the press. But no journalist should instill a culture of fear over a community like Riedel has. It's time the theater community, of New York and the nation, learned to grow a spine and fight him. He's not the sharpest mind we have. He can easily be outwitted.

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Labels: Broadway theatre, celebrity gossip, john heilpern, michael riedel, new york, new york post, tabloid journalism, theater criticism

Image via WikipediaHOW TO SAVE THEATER CRITICISM

Lately there’s been a lot of rambling about the death of theater criticism. Michael Riedel has felt demeaned as an old stodgy covering theater, a far cry from the classic depiction of the theater critic. The Playgoer has wondered whether mainstream theater is now immune to critics in the same way that movies have gotten. On a guest post on The Critical Condition, Variety’s Sam Thielman saw the role of theater criticism deteriorating and scattering across the medium’s spectrum.

Over the next few days, I will give my take on the role of theater criticism and the critic in contemporary and future American theater. In Part One, I explored the differences in the theatergoing experience between the critic and uncommitted audience member. In Part Two, I explored the relevance of theater in a digital age. In Part Three, I conclude my discussion by outlining the role of a theater critic in the current economic and cultural climate.

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PART THREE—What is to be done

If we are to save theater criticism—and I believe it is truly worth saving—we’re going to need to equip it with some tools for its own survival. Here’s my modest proposal for ways to ensure that theater criticism stays current and vital through the digital era.

Embrace the digital era
Forget the Algonquin; print media is no longer sustainable under any respectable business model. Print is not going to be dead in 2 to 3 years; it’s dying as we speak. There are some elderly theater patrons who still want print. Let them have their print for as long as humanly possible, but in the choice between going digital only and shutting down an entire publication, the former is better from both a business and human standpoint. Don’t think theater criticism can survive in print just because of the old theater attendees. If you want to obtain that under-30 crowd that every person in theater so desperately craves, digital is the only choice.

Ditch thumbs up/thumbs down, A-F grade, 1-4 stars, and all that
Some would say with the rise of sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, providing a numerical score is more essential. But theater doesn’t have an infrastructure like that yet on the web, and there’s no need to create one. Even the binary system of see it/don’t see has become obsolete in an era where the financial disparity between the critic and patron’s decision to attend theater has never been higher. Instead, provide a summary of what segment of your audience you think would like this production, and which one wouldn’t. No sacrificing of editorial standards is involved in saying that.

Cover any and every professional production
What is the benefit of online media if not creating an infinite platform for expressing one’s belief? Why should a theater section cater to the limits of print column space in their online coverage? I don’t care if it’s a 50-word summary of a show that no one would or should be seeing—every work of theater needs to be addressed by some publication or another. If a theater section is serious about being the voice of the theatrical critical community, it will leave no stone unturned. In the age of volunteer writing, this shouldn’t be such a financial risk, either.

Go national
I was shocked to open my New York Times Arts section a few months ago to find a front page review by Charles Isherwood of—gasp!—a Chicago production. It shouldn’t have to take winning a Pulitzer and Tony to have your work reviewed by the leading theater authorities if you dare to open outside of New York City. Now that no one has to struggle to find reviews from any publications from any location, the long-standing need to create a national theater discussion can be easily addressed. Call it the Terry Teachout model of criticism—if a regional theater is willing to have a major critic or publication review its work, why hold back due to geography?

Interact more with the artists
This is a dangerous proposition for any neutral critic—as Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Lester Bangs said about the artist/critic dynamic in Almost Famous, “These people are not your friends.” A detached, professional relationship is necessary, but in order to build a bridge between practitioner and critic, everyone must at least be courteous to each other. The responsibility is on the critic’s end as much as the artist himself. If you’re building a discussion about theater, it’s hard to maintain the current system where critic and artist are at each other’s throats.

Pander to the theater geek
In catering to a mainstream audience, most theater editors will beat the Brecht out of all their budding critics. But a market that hasn’t been tapped in the online press is the theater geek; one who can quote Carol Churchill plays and Rodgers and Hammerstein on a moment’s notice, and know every last detail of what’s been on Broadway for the last 15 years or so. I’m not saying every publication has to do this—this is just a huge side of the theatrical community that is currently lacking a real online voice, even as the film and music geek have found online outlets multiple times over.

Talk about theater in larger terms
It’s not enough just to focus on the theatrical community any more. It’s gotten too small, even on Broadway, for someone just to think in terms of what’s beneficial to theater. More talk has to involve how a particular play benefits society. The problem is that through theater critic lenses, it’s often impossible to think outside that prism. Well, get with it, boys and girls, because even today’s theater crowd cares about a lot more than just theater, as strange as that may sound.

Labels: Broadway theatre, critic/artist relations, how to save theater criticism, new media, regional theater, terry teachout

This review was originally published on Blogcritics.
American Buffalo, David Mamet's breakthrough play currently in an excellent revival at the Belasco Theater, may be a better source of explanation for the current economic crisis than you can get from any economist. Every exchange in the play has business on the mind; in the world of Donny, Teach, and Bobby, even friendship breaks down into business. The overwhelming sense of mistrust among these closest buds ultimately results in disaster on both the business and personal level.
American Buffalo is a tragicomedy, but all the play's comedy comes from the humanizing effect of the word "fuck." All the play's tragedy results from the perils of the phrase “I don't know.” On the television show You Can't Do That On Television, uttering the phrase "I don't know" got you slimed. In the world of the petty Chicago crooks of American Buffalo, which could also be called You Can't Do That in Business, uttering the phrase will get a gun pulled on you, or worse. Forget your economics textbook; try messing with Teach with a porous economy of information.
I'll admit that when the cast of American Buffalo was announced, I was a bit frustrated. Not so much about the stunt casting of Hollywood stars who fit the roles but had no theatrical experience. I was more upset by the missed opportunity to see the poetic beauty of grizzly old white men on Broadway, a thrill that few but Mamet can provide anymore (where have you gone, Lawrence Tierney?).
But was the highly anticipated Broadway revival of arguably Mamet's greatest play ill equipped for the task? Fuck you, this is David Fucking Mamet we're talking about. Everyone involved in this production knows that this is too good of an opportunity to mess up, and though things are played relatively safe, everyone holds his own. Things are kept tight thanks to the direction of Robert Falls, a sensible director who, as the current Artistic Director of Mamet's own Goodman Theatre in Chicago, was the only sensible pick for the job.
Keeping things in line is no small task with any Mamet play, but especially with American Buffalo, which may be the tightest, most definitive Mamet play, even now, over 30 years and 20 plays later. Every beat is concentrated into three actors, any of whom can throw the play off the rails at any time with a single stumble. The demand for that kind of precision is why, despite the star power of John Leguizamo, Cedric the Entertainer, and Haley Joel Osment, the real star of this production of American Buffalo is Mamet himself. That emphasis is portended by a pre-show reminder on behalf of Mamet to "turn off your fucking cell phones," the most effective strategy I've seen yet. In terms of the star power, I predict that even those complete theater novices who come merely for the celebrity factor of the actors will leave the theater thinking “this Mamet guy is pretty good.”
Leguizamo, the biggest stage star of the production, is given the most free reign by Falls, in a role that Leguizamo not surprisingly nails. Teach's mix of cockiness, explosiveness, and thinly-veiled vulnerability are all motifs that Leguizamo has explored extensively on stage in the past. The dialogue in his one-man shows may as well have been Mamet's. My only complaint was the drug-dealer costume Leguizamo was given. Cedric the Entertainer, whose best roles have been as paternalistic, straight-talking sidekicks, translates his onscreen persona naturally to the stage. Save for a couple of hammy moments, Cedric makes for a nearly flawless Donny.
The real X-factor is Haley Joel Osment as the hard-edged but incompetent Bobby. Osment, whose starry-eyed image and acting chops staked his name in films like The Sixth Sense and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, had become tainted in recent years with tales of teenage drunken escapades. Here, Osment reinvents himself from the preppy, puppy-eyed kid to the slummy, hard-talking young ingrate, and the transition is surprisingly successful. Some of Bobby's naïvete mirrors past Osment roles, which helps ease the actor into the role. While it's not a perfect transition, Osment does more good work here than most would have expected (including wisely deciding to keep facial hair for the role).
Any discussion of Mamet's legacy can no longer avoid the laissez-faire conservatism and resentment of the left that Mamet recently espoused in his controversial Village Voice piece "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'" back in March. At that time, especially following the lack of sophistication in his latest Broadway smash November, it was becoming popular to dismiss Mamet's importance. Sure enough, Mamet followed that piece with Redbelt, arguably his best movie of the last fifteen years, and he is now seeing two of his classic plays get Broadway revivals.
After seeing American Buffalo for the first time after the “brain-dead liberal" piece, I've found it's simply impossible to dismiss Mamet's vitality. It's also hard to see how anyone could have assumed Mamet to be a true-blue liberal in the first place. What liberals saw as a reflection of the breakdown of American idealism in American Buffalo, Mamet saw as “just business.” Business can be awful, cold, and frequently destructive, but it's the core of all human interactions. The story of the breakdown in American Buffalo mirrors the breakdown of the American economy: when crooked businessmen lack the information they need to do business properly, the lack of trust can only lead to disaster. Rather than see this as a product of a broken system, Mamet sees the outcome of American Buffalo as an inevitable consequence of the economic system America is based on: in Teach's words, "The freedom…of the individual…to embark on any fucking course that he sees fit."

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American Buffalo by David Mamet. Directed by Robert Falls; Set and Costumes by Santo Loquasto; lighting by Brian MacDevitt. Photos by Carol Rosegg.
Starring John Leguizamo (Teach), Cedric The Entertainer (Donny), and Haley Joel Osment (Bobby).
American Buffalo is being performed at the Belasco Theater, 111 W. 44th Street. Tickets can be purchased at telecharge.com.

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Labels: 2008-2009, american buffalo, Broadway theatre, Cedric The Entertainer, david mamet, haley joel osment, John Leguizamo, new york, theater review

How America Failed Theater: A capitalist marketing perspective on theater's socioeconomic role in American life.

In case you're not convinced that it's essentially impossible to make money as a theater blogger, try this experiment. First, watch this video by online media guru Gary Vaynerchuk:




Now, take Gary V's suggestion and apply it to theater blogging. First, google "theater" and see what Google Adwords come up with. You'll likely get a lot of results on movie theaters or home theaters; perhaps the term is too general. So search for New York theater. When you do this, you'll get a lot of websites of individual theaters themselves, and maybe a few other publications. Search for "regional theater," and you'll get the same, as you probably will for any city you happen to live in. The only other results I got were for vacation and ticket services. This is probably the best option for advertising, but keep in mind the majority of the desired audience of these sites are out-of-towners whose interest in theater doesn't go all that far out of The Little Mermaid or Wicked. They're not going to be all that interested in your Brechtian analysis of some way off-off-Broadway show.

In Gary V's video, the way to make money off your blog is to call up these people and get them to advertise on your blog. Of course, most theater people are introverts, and get clamped up at the prospect of cold calling. But besides that, if you're focus is being critical and editorial, there's simply no way you can court advertisements from individual theaters and claim to have independent critical judgment. If you were going to get advertising from these sources, you'd need someone else who works on your website for strictly advertising purposes. For smaller theater publications, and especially theater blogs, that's a virtual impossibility. Even if you could get someone to do it, the amount of time you'd need to invest wouldn't be worth the minimal results you'd probably get.

From a marketing perspective, it shows the limits of niche marketing, even though theater isn't by any means the smallest niche to try to make a profit. Within the theatrical community, however, there are two main factors keeping these kind of marketing strategies from succeeding. For one, theater is based more around a sense of community. Any show produced or artist supported by a theater is seen as more of a means of adding something to the theatrical discussion. Unless you're making something like The Little Mermaid, it is not seen primarily as a revenue stream (even if profit is still in the back of your mind).

Secondly, in the case of individual theaters as possible advertisers, it is impossible to extract the product of the theater (be it talent, show, or community) from the theater that's producing it. If you're selling beer, you're almost always selling someone else's beer. From a business perspective, you have no emotional attachment to the brand of beer you're selling, even if you have a weird beer specialty market. In theater, the product your selling is inherently produced by your own personal labor and belongs to the individual laborers who produce it. Do you know anyone who buys Budweiser from Anheuser-Busch directly? Or for an off-off Broadway parallel, you can't even buy Summit Ale from the Summit Brewing Company online store.

In How Theater Failed America, Mike Daisey spoke of contemporary American theater submitting to the American capitalistic system of constant competition, fear of failure, and an artistically counterproductive need to make theater marketable to a stable audience. Tom Stoppard spoke of this just last night. Tony Adams recently talked about how theater don't focus on content anymore. Scott Walters has fought for artistic emphasis constantly. The consensus seems to be that this is a recent, troublesome development. Daisey suggested that a better title for his show would have been "How Theater Became America."

Yet, from the capitalistic perspective that these sources lament, the Gary Vaynerchuks of the world, theater is still a hopelessly unmarketable faux-commodity, one that flies in the face of long-term financial stability, and maintains a system of ethics entirely outside of that of American capitalism. From this perspective, theater still seems like something you do in spite of your desire to make a living. Whether it be theater's Marxist heritage or the nature of the artistic endeavor in general, success in theater is an entirely different mindset from success in business. The standards for good theater (artistic excellence) are wildly different from that of normal business marketing (ROI, profit).

If you're in theater, even using the term "commodity" in referring to theater will make you cringe. Yet, the fact that this cringe is nearly universal is a unique thing to theater, in terms of business and even in terms of the arts. Technologically reproducible art, be it film, music, fine art or literature, have all become dominated by a top-down big business structure to various degrees (the high art/low art distinction be damned). Theater can be top-down too, especially in New York (less so in Chicago or London). But despite the stereotypes of the Broadway producer, theater still exists on an immensely smaller business scale than just about any other form of art in the country. For all the complaining of theater's increasing commercialization and commodification, theater simply does not exist in the same financial stratosphere as any other form of art, even at its highest level. Some people who do theater are rich, but virtually no one gets rich—and I mean really rich, megamillionaire style—purely from theater itself.

As a result, theater has more of a focus on artistic excellence over profit than almost anything else in our culture. No matter what you think of the current strength of American theater, that's an enviable position for any artist to be in from an aesthetic standpoint. The downside is thatit's much harder to make a good living in theater. Of course, that's a tradeoff virtually every theater artist is willing to make.

But at the same time, most people in theater have problems with the notion of the majority theater artists having to live in poverty. As much was we like to romanticize the notion of a community of financially stable theater practicioners, without a wide-ranging income spectrum that includes the (relative) ultra-rich and ultra-poor, you simply cannot reconcile theater with the free market capitalist system that we currently live in. The Cold War proved that this liberal capitalist system is ultimately the most sustainable from a global economic perspective. By no means does that mean theater has no value in America—it may even give it more value simply precisely because it is so different. But again, what that means is that theater, at its core, has and will always run in spite of the larger socioeconomic spectrum of a capitalist society. If you go into theater, you better only want to make a sustainable living, or else you're screwed. No one should have to live in poverty. But poverty for some is virtually inevitable, and that rate will inevitably be higher a large-scale community that does not conform to the liberal democratic capitalist system. Communities like that national theater community we all strive for.

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Labels: art versus business, Broadway theatre, economics, gary vaynerchuk, how theater failed america, mike daisey, Summit Brewing Company, tom stoppard