Good News, Bad News

Offsetting the news that Gypsy will move up its closing date from next Mar. 1 to Jan. 11, just one week after Black Sunday (Jan. 4, when it seems that half of Broadway will shutter), is an encouraging tidbit I, for one, had overlooked: Forbidden Broadway Goes To Rehab, initially announced to close out the franchise on Jan. 15, is now selling through Mar. 1.

But what will be left to parody?

Deathbed Star

James Surowiecki, in the current New Yorker, puts the plight of newspapers into perspective better than I have in any of my musings on the subject, explaining how the end is starting to look a lot more like a spectacular flameout than whimpering fadeout:

The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular. The blogosphere, much of which piggybacks on traditional journalism’s content, has magnified the reach of newspapers, and although papers now face far more scrutiny, this is a kind of backhanded compliment to their continued relevance. Usually, when an industry runs into the kind of trouble that Levitt was talking about, it’s because people are abandoning its products. But people don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product.

What does it say, after all, that I read Surowiecki's piece on the subway this morning—The New Yorker being the only dead-tree publication to which I still subscribe—and then found it immediately for free online, all the better to link to it here? His sobering conclusion:

For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

Maybe guilt is one answer: After reading the various Atlantic blogs for years now without paying a dime, I've put an Atlantic subscription on my Christmas list.

UPDATE: A former Atlantic blogger dissents on Surowiecki's economic emphasis, pointing out that the "problem newspapers are having with online isn’t that the readers won’t pay, it’s that the advertisers won’t pay."

"Ages" to Rock Broadway?

According to a post on All That Chat, the hair-metal extravaganza Rock of Ages is moving to the Atkinson. Start stocking up on lighter fluid.

Animal Animus

Way off-topic, but as it comes via Trey Graham, it passes my stringent arts-related test: "Fuck You, Penguin," a hilariously profane blog that, in lashing out at toxic levels of cuteness in animal photos, somehow only fortifies it (to my softie's eyes, at least).

Road's End

Lowered expectations can be a boon, clearly. Partly thanks to this new site, and also because I'm a fan, I've read every review that's been written of Road Show, Sondheim's new chamber musical at the Public, and I was prepared for the worst. What I saw instead was an arty, rueful, resourceful little musical of hearteningly sturdy craftmanship and, I almost hesitate to add, an unmistakeably valedictory tone that was moving in itself.

I can't argue with my fellow critics on substance; Road Show is inarguably a bit hollow and lachrymose, but it's never less than smart and involving, and I was surprised how often I smiled or laughed more or less exactly as I think Weidman and Sondheim intended—with a world-weary, slightly self-aware catch in the throat. Over the years I've gone from Sondheim skeptic to smitten fan, and today I hover uneasily somewhere between the two; I'm no longer convinced, as I once was, that time alone will be enough to turn his thornier shows into Rodgers & Hammerstein-style standards, though I cherish nearly every one of his scores the way I cherish the theater scores of Janacek, Ravel, Weill (I exclude Passion, the only show of his that put me to sleep). I was left cold, for instance, by the recent Sunday revival, and not because of the production; I think that show has proven to be what its critics said it was all along: a brilliant but lopsided conceit with a constrained, self-involved view of art and human connection.

On the other hand, one thing that moved me most about Road Show was seeing Orville Mendoza among the ensemble; years ago, he was among one of L.A.'s most essential Sondheim interpreters, etching an indelible Sweeney Todd in East West Players' 99-seat production, and later a definitive Kayama in EWP's Pacific Overtures. East West was among a cadre of scrappy L.A. theaters who kept my Sondheim faith alive in the 1990s and beyond by presenting his shows in intimate settings where every crammmed-in word counted (a revelation later echoed here).

And this may be the thing I think I like most about Road Show: its gritty modesty, its clear embrace of the smaller canvas and whites-of-their-eyes intimacy. I wish I could say there's a commensurate increase in intensity and impact to compensate for Road Show's smaller scope, but that's not quite the case; I'm not sure there's that much there there. Still, director John Doyle's dry-eyed, free-ranging presentational boldness seems exactly right in this pointedly Off-Broadway context, and it manages to show this brittle material in its best possible light. Perhaps paradoxically, something about Doyle's production—the travelling trunks, the echoes of vaudeville, the hard-sell, win-or-lose themes—put me in mind of possibly the greatest musical ever, which not coincidentally has lyrics by Sondheim and recently announced a new Broadway closing date, the towering Gypsy. As rough bookends to a career, an artist could do a lot worse. I will only add, as someone who has seen a lot more than his share of bad theater, that if all the so-called failures I sat through were as good as Road Show, I'd be a much happier man. Faint praise, perhaps, but not meant to damn.

UPDATE: Below, Orville sits at Sondheim's piano (isn't Facebook great?).

Today on (and About) Critic-O-Meter

Two plays with war and family on the brain: Craig Lucas' Prayer for My Enemy and Keith Reddin & Meg Gibson's Antigone remix Too Much Memory. Read all about 'em.

In other Critic-O-Meter news, LA Weekly's Steven Leigh Morris offers a longer and more thorough version of his blog entry deploring Isaac's and my new review-reviewing site. I'm honored that Steven takes our site seriously enough to take it apart so vigorously (and I'm kind of tickled by the piece's illustration, by Justin Renteria), but of course I'm disappointed that he relates our venture to the culture of standardized testing and a reductive "one-click-fits-all" model.

While I admit feeling a sting of truth when Steven writes, "To assess a play with a grade is mildly insulting to the critic but deeply insulting to the creators," I also have a response, having been on both sides of that coin--I've been reviewed as well as reviewed others, and both I and my targets, last I checked, are still standing. And the response is this: that at least part of what Critic-O-Meter is intended to do is to serve as a corrective to the undue power of a few daily critics, both in the area of consumer advice and in the realm of setting the terms and boundaries of the critical conversation. I have felt firsthand, and heard secondhand over the years, the deep frustration with the way one or two critic's tastes and distastes too often become the final verdict/conventional wisdom on a play for all time--in the markets I've worked in, it's been whoever has "Times" on his side--when I and others who care about this kind of thing know that the critical conversation about a given play is/was much, much wider and more diverse than any one critic's writing could possibly reflect. So what could I do with this knowledge? Ramble on about a particular undersung show when asked, or even when unasked; advocate favorites with theatre awards or year-end lists.

Critic-O-Meter, in that spirit, is our way of broadening the conversation to include everyone writing about every show we can find (and have time to include); if we want to drop our thoughtful two cents about our favorite shows and issues into the giant wishing well of the blogosphere, well, that's what a blog like this or this is for. The grading process at Critic-O-Meter, as Steven rightly notes, is entirely subjective, but that's the essence of our gamble: that the grades, and the paragraphs of summary we add about each show, are the value that Isaac and I add beyond a simple review aggregator.

As a critic, sporadic practitioner and occasional paying theatergoer myself, I know I can handle the insult of being reduced to a grade, particularly if the so-called "reduction" in fact holds out the chance of a more abundant, noisy, and spirited conversation.

Another Great Invalid

I once wondered, in a weak, self-doubting moment, how I had ended up invested in, or on the side of, what felt like so many lost or disrespected causes: mainline Christianity, mainstream liberalism, arts journalism, musical theater, theater in general. To those seemingly-always-losing-ground concerns, I might add music (as a business, at least) and journalism/criticism in the age of the Internets. As much as I feel invigorated by the trends I've highlighted here and here, I can't deny that to make ends meet, I've mostly had to think outside the box of the actual journalism industry (and the cratered music business, for that matter). Though he's mostly stating the obvious, coming from blog optimist Andrew Sullivan, this pre-mortem has an especial sting. His diagnosis:

The problem here, however, is that online advertising, while growing, is not growing fast enough to replace print advertising. It almost certainly will one day, but the distance between the print sinking ship and the online life raft was always perilously long. And now the recession has whipped the waters between into hurricane turbulence. I have a feeling that if and when the storm ends, there will be few ships left and only a few survivors clinging onto small but buoyant dinghies.

And he concedes the most damning retort to media optimists:

The terrifying problem is that a one-man blog cannot begin to do the necessary labour-intensive, skilled reporting that a good newspaper sponsors and pioneers. A world in which reporting becomes even more minimal and opinion gets even more vacuous and unending is not a healthy one for a democracy. Perhaps private philanthropists will step in and finance not-for-profit journalistic centres, where investigative and foreign reporting can be invested in and disseminated by blogs and online sites. Maybe reporter-bloggers will start rivalling opinion-mongers such as me and give the whole enterprise some substance. Maybe papers can slim down sufficiently to produce a luxury print issue and a viable online product. There’s always a hunger for news, after all.

My question, then, is what to do about this state of affairs, except wring our hands? Shrinking space, particularly for arts coverage, has been a recurring theme since I started in print journalism nearly 20 years ago. But as my own reading and consuming habits, and those of the generation coming up behind me, have migrated inexorably to the Web, I have found access to more, not less, arts coverage and criticism, and my writing has arguably reached as many if not more readers through the Web than it ever did in print (the line blurs a bit here, since though I've essentially left the journalism-industrial complex for my living, I still freelance for a number of print publications with a much bigger Web presence and legitimacy than I've got on my own; that Sullivan's blog beats major news organizations in Web traffic is a glaring neon sign of the times).

In one of the few ink publications I still tote around for subway reading, The New Yorker, I came across this speculative analogy, in Adam Gopnik's recent piece:

Samuel Johnson arrived in London in March of 1737, at the age of twenty-seven. He...had no luck in his dream, of becoming a London writer and wit, for a very long time. He had the misfortune to have arrived in London in a time not unlike this one, with the old-media dispensation in crisis and the new media barely paying. The practice of aristocratic patronage, in which big shots paid to be flattered by their favorite writers, was ebbing, and the new, middle-class arrangement, where plays and novels could command real money from publishers, was not yet in place. The only way to make a living was to publish, for starvation wages, in the few magazines that had come into existence. Johnson worked as a miscellaneous journalist, carrying his clips around and begging for assignments.

Sounds like fun. And here's a tart little cautionary aside that may also seem relevant to our time, particularly in the blogosphere:

The new order had also produced a permanently bitter and underemployed class of writers, who had meant to be Popes but were left to be merely beggars in the square outside, and they made their living working for penny-a-line pamphlets and cheap gossip tabloids, creating a constant mouse scream of malice that runs in counterpoint to Johnson’s grave sonorities.

A final meat for the stew: the Web's lack of space restrictions blessedly allows Playgoer to write 5,480 words about a recent disgrace at the Times (the public editor's kowtowing to the Catholic League over Jason Zinoman's review of Corpus Christi). Garrett has some ads on his site, but I doubt he's making serious bank for writing that long, and that passionately, about something he cares about—nor does he have an editor pressuring to him to temper or trim his views.

In short, our current cultural moment, in which unpaid or barely paid self-publishers and freelancers can have their say and reach an audience with a minimum of investment and no limits on expression but their own imagination and stamina, may soon enough be a moment we'll look back at with a wistfulness rivalling our current eulogies for the newspaper business—either that, or this new-media moment of simultaneous scarcity and opportunity is a small eddy that will swell into the wave of the future. We can't know, but as for me, I'll keep looking forward as much as I look back.