Great News

There's no date announced yet, but J. Holtham, a.k.a. 99 Seats, is co-founding a new-black-theater festival. Count us intrigued.

Quote for the Day

"Children need to go to the theatre as much as they need to run about in the fresh air. They need to hear real music played by real musicians on real instruments as much as they need food and drink. They need to read and listen to proper stories as much as they need to be loved and cared for."
-Philip Pullman

Quote for the Day

"In the age of electronic memory, of films, and of reproducibility, theatre performance defines itself through the work that living memory, which is not museum but metamorphosis, is obliged to do."
-Eugenio Barba

McNulty's Lear-a-Thon

One night many years ago, I took in two SoCal Macbeths within six hours, give or take: First, Shakespeare Orange County's traditional version, which had the advantage of casting two of my favorite actors, Jenna Cole as Lady M and Ron Campbell as MacDuff; then a midnight performance at Beyond Baroque in Venice of an ultra-experimental version by a bunch of young upstarts with Chicago credits, if memory serves (a production notable also for the casting of L.A. Reader critic Patrick Corcoran as a white-faced Hecate). I wrote this double-Mac experience up for Back Stage West--a clip, as far as I can tell, that's lost to the ravages of time.

I was reminded of my Scottish night by Charlie McNulty's triple-Lear review--a flurry of Shakespeare from which, hearteningly and unsurprisingly, he plucks Bart DeLorenzo's double-cast Antaeus production as most worthy.

UPDATE: Patrick Corcoran has written to help me recall that that wild Venice Macbeth was directed by Dan Ward, starred his wife Leslie as Lady M, and featured in its soundscape both the running of multiple vacuum cleaners and Portishead's "Glory Box."

Memphis's Outreach

I'm no fan of David Bryan and Joe DiPietro's pleasant if forgettable lite-rock musical Memphis, but I certainly felt the audience I saw it with was totally into it, and its excellent cast at least partly explains why it's become the sleeper hit of the season. This story on the Root, about how Broadway can reach black audiences, helps explain the rest of it:

The producers of Memphis started asking theatergoers to come on down years before the musical even made it to Broadway. Three years ago, Frost and her producing partners started the trek to Broadway with a three-week run in Seattle. They reached out to influential church and civic leaders, inviting them to see Memphis, give their feedback and, if they would, spread the word. "We started it early, and we have been consistent about it," Frost says.

As the musical made its way to Broadway, some of those Seattle leaders contacted their friends and colleagues in New York to, again, spread the word. The summer before the show opened, they sent teams to street fairs to pass out fliers and talk up the upcoming production. They also pushed group ticket sales. Frost and her partners had been involved in non-commercial theater for years, so, she says, "Audience education and development is sort of in our DNA." With seed money from producers and investors, they launched a program, Inspire Change, to encourage young people to come to the show. The money covers tickets and transportation, but also sponsors cast members' visits to schools before the students come to the show; post-performance, they participate in "talk-backs" with the cast. They have produced study guides and encouraged eager theatergoers to talk about their experiences via Facebook. In March alone, she says, Memphis had more than 7,000 young people in its audiences.

The musical's history actually stretches back to its debut at the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Mass. and TheatreWorks in Mountain View, Calif. nearly seven years ago. But the point is taken: This model, of touring and revving up audiences around the country before coming to Broadway sounds like smart marketing, period, race and age diversity aside.

UDPATE: The Times is on the case, too, with even more details.

A Point Worth Revisiting

With the Arena's heartening new residency program on the brain, not to mention a lot of talk from the TCG Conference about how Chicago nurtures its playwrights by giving them artistic homes, I thought of this clarifying call to arms, from Marsha Norman's brilliant, collegial essay for the Times about August: Osage County:

If we wanted to do one single thing to improve the theatrical climate in America, we’d assign one playwright to every theater that has a resident acting company.

Well, we first might want to start by creating more resident acting companies. But putting the artists at the center of the theater--something echoed by Theresa Rebeck and others last week--seems more and more like a solution people are waking up to (again, Feingold's piece this week on the economics of Broadway and the nonprofits plays into my thinking on this as well). Change is in the air, can you feel it?

Shaggy Links

Beyond buried at the mo, but wanted to note:

• At last, The Shaggs will make it to NYC (it came to NYMF about five years ago, not long after it debuted in L.A.).
  
• Feingold is on a roll.
  
• Just caught up with this diverting and disarmingly upbeat dialogue between the LA Times theater and pop music critics about rock on Broadway.
  
• Interesting (if very Chicago-insidery) interview with Tracy Letts.
  
• Good news no matter how you slice it.