CRITICAL CONDITION

posted by James Reel

    Here are two related items one can find while trawling ArtsJournal.com, both relating to the wholesale sacking of arts critics at American newspapers these days, after years of more gradual and subtle dumbing down of arts coverage. First, Michael Kennedy, a Twin Cities high school teacher and sometime theater director, pleads for the place of critics in newspapers and society in general, noting along the way that what passes for criticism in Minneapolis now revolves around media ephemera and big events from big presenters:

    Yes, we have the smaller venues, but do you hear about them very much? Not really. We hear more about television shows, movies, traveling Broadway shows and what to wear to a nightclub than we do about the fine arts in the Twin Cities.
    This city is in a quiet artistic crisis. With all of our small theaters, small galleries, music groups, dance companies and literary venues, we should be getting clear, serious criticism. We should have people working full time covering all of the theaters they can seven nights a week. There are tons of art galleries that most people have never heard of. Musical groups are everywhere.
    We need the critics. Their opinions are one thing, but the fact that they can go into these small places, consider these artists and watch these performances says that the arts are a serious part of this community.
    But the critics are fading away because of corporate decisions in the newsrooms, and along with those critics go the arts.

    Now turn to the Wall Street Journal, where Greg Sandow looks at the problem from inside the newsroom, and blames those on the outside:

    Who reads classical-music reviews? There's been a decline of interest in classical music, especially among younger people. One sign of that is the aging of the classical-music audience, which (as measured by the National Endowment for the Arts and by private studies) has been going on ever since the 1950s. Do newspapers survey their readers? What if they found—just as we did at Entertainment Weekly—that not many people read their classical reviews? What if the editors themselves don't listen to classical music?
    This, I think, is where we are now, though I don't have reader studies to back me up. How should people in the classical-music business react?
    The last thing they should do, in my view, is blame the press. "Newspapers don't care about art or culture!" people cry. But I'd turn that around and ask if people in the classical-music business really understand the current state of our world. Because here's something else I learned back in the '90s when I talked to those opera-company publicists. One thing any publicist wants is advance coverage, preview articles about whatever's being publicized. Once, the opera publicists said, they'd get these automatically. But that had stopped. "You're doing 'La Traviata'?" an editor might say. "You did it three years ago. What's the story now?"
    For orchestras, this could hit even harder. "You're playing Brahms? You played Brahms last week!" Classical music can look predictable to the outside world, and (to be honest) not very interesting. Same old, same old. Great classical masterworks, played by acclaimed classical musicians.
    So the classical-music world needs to look at two things: what it offers and how it talks about what it offers. Why are we playing Brahms? What does Brahms give us that Mozart, Feist, or Bruce Springsteen can't? And how, exactly, is this week's Brahms performance different from last week's?
    Some classical-music institutions are learning to answer these questions. But as for the many that haven't—in an age when new arts groups compete for coverage and popular culture keeps getting smarter—why should they expect any press coverage at all?

    Well, Greg is largely right. Back in my daily newspaper years, I gave up on writing opera previews because they turned out to be the same articles about young American singers with the same bland stories performing the same operas that have been performed for decades. Same problem for orchestral concerts. Cookie-cutter soloists aside, there are always interesting things to learn about Beethoven and Brahms and their music, but how can arts journalists convey any of this if the performers aren’t putting the old warhorses into some sort of interesting context, rather than sleepwalking through the usual one-from-Column-A and one-from-Column-B programming format? Arts writers can’t find an interesting angle if the presentation is flat.
    But Greg overlooks something important: It doesn’t matter if a small percentage of subscribers read arts coverage, because the few who do tend to be a paper’s core readers, those who will stick with the paper, renew their subscriptions, pay attention to what they’re reading, always be reliable while the flighty single-copy buyers come and go.
    The business and, yes, sports sections—entire sections!—also appeal to minority interests, and they’re full of mysterious jargon. Yet they’re hardly being eviscerated like the arts units. Why? Because, contrary to Greg’s support of newsroom managers, today’s newspapers are run by uncultured idiots.

ATC GOES BEDDIE-BYE

posted by James Reel

    This just in from Arizona Theatre Company:

Arizona Theatre Company gets bright and brassy, sexy and sassy with the addition of a brand new revival of the classic Broadway musical The Pajama Game to its 2007-2008 season. … ATC’s all-new production of The Pajama Game replaces the scheduled run of Mask. Due to unexpected scheduling issues with other projects for the creative team of Mask, that project cannot happen at this time.

    “Unexpected scheduling issues”? Is that the theater equivalent of bureaucrats and corporate officers leaving their jobs in order to “spend more time with their families”? Sounds ominous in its innocence.
    Honestly, I wasn’t sure I was looking forward to a musical version of the good, unpretentious movie Mask; what would it turn out to be, some kind of Phantom of the Trailer Park? And Cher is in retirement again, so what’s the point? That aside, how, exactly, can the 1954 Pajama Game be considered a viable substitute? The two musicals occupy utterly different universes. (Oh, and “brand-new revival” is supposed to make this old show seem fresh?)
    A much better replacement would have been something like Urinetown, except that’s on next season’s schedule at the University of Arizona. Or if ATC was in the market for a classic musical, how about the greatest of all American operettas: Candide? Oh, wait, they’re doing that at the UA, too. Hmm …

WITH FANFARE

posted by James Reel

    Among my several income sources—it takes several to make a living as a freelancer—is Fanfare magazine, for which I write CD reviews and features, and also serve as a sort of Webmaster. I don’t think of myself as a real Webmaster, building and repairing the site's structure; I’m more like a gardener, transplanting bits and pieces of the magazine to the Web site. I took over the job from a fellow who had just died, and who had designed the site back when it wasn’t expected to be much more than a billboard advertising the availability of subscriptions to the print edition. These days, a site has to be much more than that, and now Fanfare’s is, thanks mainly to the work of my more tech-savvy colleagues Celeste and Pete Stokely. A few days ago we went live with a completely new design, and lots more reviews available on a rotating basis to non-subscribers. I’ve been plotting several new features to roll out one by one in the coming months, but already the Stokeleys have made a very successful overhaul. Please pay it a visit, and let us know what you think.

SHAKING AND SIZZLING

posted by James Reel

    After some time off, I’m back in my usual Tucson Weekly spot(s) with two items. First, a review of the latest fare from Borderlands Theater:

    Los Angeles is one big seismic hazard, and nowhere more so than in the vicinity of Esmeralda Portillo and Sam Reyes. They work for a big law firm--she's a physically extroverted secretary, and he's an introverted intellectual accountant. They're about as different as can be, and they grind against each other like two tectonic plates, each heading in the wrong direction. Esmeralda has a tendency to shake things up, anyway; her father used to call her "Earthquake Chica."
    That's also the title of the Anne Garcia-Romero play being produced by Borderlands Theater, a company that often explores the fault lines between cultures. This time, though, the unstable plate boundaries are between two individuals shifting within their shared Mexican-American culture.

    That’s the intro; find out what I think about it all here. Then, a look at Invisible Theatre’s migrating cabaret series;

    Lucky for Invisible Theatre that "cabaret" is a state of mind.
    Basically, cabaret is a kind of entertainment usually involving song or comedy, presented in a small room. Traditionally, that small room is a cafe or nightclub where patrons sit at tables, but this year, IT is moving its cabaret series into its own traditional 80-seat theater.
    What's now called "Sizzling Summer Sounds" started about a decade and a half ago as a comedy-improv series featuring Molly McKasson and IT director Susan Claassen, but it morphed into a mostly musical offering. After several years at the Doubletree, the events shifted to the Arizona Inn; last year, remodeling and changing priorities there sent the series to Soleil restaurant in the foothills. But since then, the restaurant has been sold twice and is itself being remodeled, leaving the summer sounds without a place to sizzle.
    "We thought before we go into another venue, it would be good to get at least a 50-year commitment before we build another stage," jokes Claassen.
    So she has relocated the performances to her own theater...

    Find out more here.

ROMAN HOLIDAY

posted by James Reel

    No time or money for a trip to Rome this summer? Here’s a consolation: a virtual tour of ancient Rome, as it looked around A.D. 300. The site is called “Rome Reborn,” and it’s part of a big project undertaken by the Insitute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. The four 3-D videos are accompanied by music, including pieces by Vivaldi and Mendelssohn (his “Italian” Symphony). You’ll have to provide your own soundtrack while perusing the stills; what better time to hear Respighi’s Pines of Rome? Actually, you won’t see any trees or people in the renderings, because the focus is on architecture (so why is the interior of the Basilica Maxentius so murky—verisimilitude?). Somehow the images, so barren of life, remind me of certain paintings by Giorgio de Chirco.

SEEING STARS

posted by James Reel

    Salon.com’s tech blogger, Farhad Manjoo, has an interesting article on ratings bias, and why all those user-driven Web sites featuring one- to five-star reviews aren’t reliable. The story contains a nugget that applies to professional criticism as well as amateur contributions; referring to the head of one popular review site, Manjoo says, "Stoppelman and others at Yelp also have another bit of advice about star ratings—that it's wise to look past them and to judge a product or a place according to the people reviewing it, not how many stars it gets. It's the people, not the stars, who shine on Yelp.” Ditto for the professional critics in newspapers and magazines; you should always consider the credibility and peculiar personal tastes of any critic when you read a review. And never, ever look only at how many stars are awarded; the written reviews are far more informative and important than some silly graphic device.