Happy 50th Anniversary: "The Fantasticks"

Try to remember the first time you saw The Fantasticks...I'll bet you were callow and life was mellow!

Today is the 50th anniversary of its original off-Broadway opening, and after zillions of performances and thousands of productions, this little show retains the heavyweight title of longest running musical anywhere and is still running in NYC.

It's a testament to Harvey Schmidt & Tom Jones, its creators, that they chose not to work against the simplicity of the source material on which they based their show. These talented men went on to create a number of other memorable musicals, like the hits I Do, I Do, 110 in the Shade, and lesser-known but still revered works like Celebration.

Back in 2000, I had the pleasure of hosting these two gentlemen (and, believe me, they are gentlemen!) for a summer at the Laguna Playhouse in their retrospective revue The Show Goes On. What a delight getting to know them.

So, here's a toast to Harvey & Tom, and if you remember, "then follow!"

Karma & creativity

Our presentation last night of author and educator Peter Clothier at Fullerton's Muckenthaler Center drew a small but enthusiastic group of creative people eager to hear Peter's thoughts on "persistence." (His new book is Persist: In Praise of the Creative Spirit in a World Gone Mad with Commerce)

They were treated to a lot more than that.

After reading a short written piece, he spoke extemporaneously about his life as a writer and how he seemed to lose his way for a number of years, distracted by all the things that usually induce artists to lose focus.

How he regained mastery over his artistic self was a story well worth hearing--and instructive to those of us who wish we could be true to our aesthetic aspirations.

If you missed it, don't fret: we're presenting him again next week (Thursday, May 6, 7 pm) at Casa Romantica in San Clemente, and admission is free.

You can read a bit about Peter's own thoughts about last night's gig on his blog.

California's nonprofit arts revenues = California's convenience store revenues

"Last week, I was in California, and I learned that nonprofit arts organizations there have annual revenues of $2.4 billion, which is roughly equivalent to the revenues of California's convenience stores. That is significant," said a smiling Landesman. "But arts workers make more than Slurpees, they make places." The arts, Landesman said, help "change the ethos of a town or community. They enliven it, they activate the public life."

--Rocco Landesman, Chair, National Endowment for the Arts

(March 27, 2010, The Washington Post)

One artist's wry twist: FUNDING THE ARTS

I've known dancer and choreographer Felice Lesser since high school in Connecticut, and by the early 1970s she had already founded her own contemporary dance company in New York. The Felice Lesser Dance Theater has managed to survive all these years, continuing to present brief seasons in Manhattan and to tour occasionally, and the work I've seen has always been interesting.

Felice is presenting her latest work, entitled Funding the Arts, at the Baryshnikov Art Center in New York in mid-May. According to the official description, it's about:

"a few rogue ex-C.I.A. agents (and their K.G.B. counterparts, now bound in a common venture), who overthrow governments around the world, rob their treasuries, and use the booty to fund their first love -- their ballet company.
But when they return to the United States in the post 9/11 world, they find they
are totally unprepared for the realities of running a non-profit arts organization. Out of money, they look for a way to keep the company afloat, while trying to bring down their arch-enemy, and save the world (not to mention dance as an art form), while an apathetic public stays home and surfs the internet."

Gotta love that!

"Will opera ever come back to OC?"

This is a terrific overview of the situation by OC Register music critic Tim Mangan.

Are you the "odd man out"?

Insightful, clever and fun article in the NY Times about finding yourself in the audience at an event you hate--while everyone else loves it.

It certainly happens to everyone at some point. My favorites:

- Attending CATS on Broadway with a friend and theatre colleague, both of us feeling there was no "there, there," and drowning amidst the ecstasy of hundreds of CATS-lovers.

- Presenting August Wilson's MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM in its original production, a brilliant piece of theatre, compelling, visceral and impossible not to be moved by--only to find my audiences totally lukewarm to the experience.

Feel free to comment with you own "odd man out" experience here.

Front page news: "Addams Family" musical

These days, it's rare enough to find much to read in the dwindling arts sections of America's daily newspapers--even in the estimable New York Times--but today that paper ran a story on the front page of the main news section (albeit "below the fold") about the great success of The Addams Family musical on Broadway despite uniformly bad reviews.

It was almost like the Times could not believe their own critic had failed to kill the show with his venomous review, so that made it "front page news."

The Times story says that the show has already sold more than $6 million in tickets, and that only the combination of an already well-known name-brand like The Addams Family and a brand-name Broadway musical theatre star like Nathan Lane (they give scant mention to co-star Bebe Neuwirth) meant that this show could puncture the conventional wisdom of The Great White Way.

Then the arts section front page carried a story by the Times theatre critic Ben Brantley about yesterday's announcement that the Pulitzer Prize for Drama went to the acclaimed musical Next to Normal--a decision made by the Pulitzer board that overrode the recommendations of its selection panel. Brantley pooh-poohs the Pulitzers in drama as having a record of being awarded rarely to anything but mainstream and mediocre works (he should know, he says, because he was on the panel one year). And he cites a history of the Pulitzer board overriding selection panels that have chosen more daring works, so--he says--why should anyone have expected otherwise this year?

The LA Times critic Charles McNulty, apparently--(who was on this year's panel and had a hissy fit over this), and so this story winds up being a bit of an East Coast-Left Coast dig by Brantley against his counterpart.

Oh, and the Times couldn't leave it alone: they also ran a sidebar story quoting unnamed sources from the Pulitzer Prize board that board members went to see Next to Normal in the few days prior to the award announcement--as if there was some "plot" afoot to snatch the prize out of the hands of a more deserving candidate.

Although my own heart rate rose a fraction when reading these stories of "great importance to the arts community," I can only surmise that the vast majority of the world would only have yawned--if they had even noticed the stories to begin with.

And, of course, since most of the world now accesses the paper online, the concept of "front page story" is lost in translation anyway.