THE THEATER MIRROR, New England's LIVE Theater Guide
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MARQUEE | USHER | SEATS |
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Okay, here's my chance to try to make some Sense out of the thirty or forty years I've spent seeing, reviewing, or working in theater here in Boston. There are three things I'd like to concentrate on:
And let me start each with an illustrative story:
"Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of theatres... "
Near the end of the last century, Kevin Lindsay started providing programs, Free, to small theatres all over Boston, then all over Massachusetts, and probably all over New England. The center-section was the production's program, and it was paid for by the ads in the "magazine" wrapped around every issue --- those ads reaching more and more eyeballs every time a new theatre contracted to use the "PROSCENiUM" programs.
Eventually, almost the only theatres NOT using the PROSCENiUM programs were the big Broadway barns that still used PLAYBILL. Those theatres were about to join the majority when they learned that PLAYBILL intended to buy PROSCENiUM, and they rejected the contract.
Why?
Because PLAYBILL also ran the Broadway subscription-system called SHOW OF THE MONTH which competed with BROADWAY IN BOSTON's subscription-system, and the merger of the two program-companies would have kept SHOW OF THE MONTH in business.
The week after PROSCENiUM folded hundreds of theatres were suddenly forced once again to spend their own money to print their own programs. And one of the most promising tools for health and unity in theater everywhere was murdered by corporate greed.
But of course Broadway in Boston's self-serving bottom-line bean-counters are only the latest generation of absentee landlords who systematically pissed away the most intelligent, most enthusiastic audience for theater anywhere in America.
How did they do it?
Look, when I got here to Boston in 1957 there were THREE Broadway houses that had new shows every two weeks --- shows trying-out on their way to New York or touring-companies of long-run Broadway successes. But every show was not "Oklahoma" --- and I remember getting calls inviting me to see shows for free when audiences thinned. For a time, shows that were too good or too bad to draw big houses went into Ye Wilbur, where I saw "The Hollow Crown" and "The Subject Was Roses". But even the worst of shows were here for only those two weeks, and "The Theatre District" of Boston was always the liveliest part of the city.
The first thing the bean-counters did was to lose the courage to fail. When guaranteed blockbusters became scarce, the bean-counters forgot that what made theater exciting in Boston was the always-newness of it, and they let their big barns go dark and often stay dark for up to almost a year at a time.
For the blockbusters, runs got longer and went into re-runs and RE-re-runs. How many times can yet another "Phantom" or "Les Miz" or "Chicago" break box-office records --- not because more people want to see it, but because the admission-prices rose from unreasonable to out-of-sight? And, while the "product" available to fill four Broadway houses (including The Wang, Wilbur, Shubert & Colonial) here in Boston dried to a trickle, guess what solution was proposed: add to the mix yet another unfillable theatre: The Opera House!
The bottom-liners still figure the potential of a show as every seat sold at every performance --- and so any show making less than that unrealistic profit is a failure. That may be because they expect theater-goers to behave the way World Wrestling devotees do, where "the product" is no less fictional, but the audience a little more predictable.
But the bean-counters never learn. They never learn Anything.
In about 1976, I went to the Boston GLOBE to try to get on a list of approved "stringers" hoping to do journalistic odd-jobs. Whoever I talked to was very diplomatically, discouragingly non-committal. But then someone else told me the editor of the newspaper (whose name I have forgotten) wanted to see me. When I stepped into his office he shook my hand and said (and I quasi-quote here) "What would you do as Arts Editor of the paper?"
Well I must have looked shocked, because I was. I had no idea I might be considered for the job, but I was certain I couldn't Do the job. So I was probably mumbling whatever I remembered of Joe Hanlon's dicta about precise and concise description of what went on onstage when the editor interrupted. "And get that opinion in, fast and first!" he enthused. But I disagreed, saying it was the Reader's opinion and not the writer's that interested me.
And, of course, I didn't get the job.
I wonder sometimes, whether Anyone did.
The GLOBE is, sadly, the most influential newspaper in Boston, and opinion-mongering is the name of the game, there and at every other major paper. But ever since I quit B.A.D. there has not been a "newspaper of record" here --- in the sense of a periodical viewing all the theatrical events in the city, not just two or three. And there is an effective rule of thumb here: the shorter the review, the bigger the opinion; the fewer the reviews, the more important their opinions seem. And, when an ego obsessed opinion-monger gets published by the biggest megaphone in town, those opinions tend to rule. Writing reviews for the GLOBE is like getting a license to kill.
Recently I asked whether a critic was staying after press-opening for the cast-party and I was shocked at the reply: "I don't fraternize with the enemy." In contrast, Elliot Norton gladly conversed with the people bringing their work to Boston; they learned things from his private talks, and I suspect he learned things from them as well. But when Norton retired, Kevin Kelly and Arthur Friedman and their successors set the tone, monging opinions right and left and rarely taking the time to explain what the audience might see on stage that justifies such dicta.
I am proud that many theater people are friends of mine. If I have done anything by writing about plays I hope it's convincing audiences as well as creators that it's possible to LIKE theater here in Boston, rather than taking the attitude that "There are good things and bad things about this show, so let's talk about all the bad things first." Actors, directors and playwrights all know that ANY show can be improved, but having their shortcomings --- especially when they exist only in the eye of critic --- slapped in their faces only makes it that much harder to improve; especially if an over-zealous critique cuts down on potential audience. The aim of critical thinking is to Examine the work, not to turn the critic into God.
Ah, but I did speak of hope, didn't I? Okay, how many of these names are familiar to you:
Another Country Productions; As Yet To Be; Molasses Tank; Alarm-Clock; Company One; Rough & Tumble; Out of The Blue; SouthCity; Image Theatre; Mill 6 Collaborative; Theatre Cooperative; Metro Stage Company; Mercutio; Hijinx Unlimited; I Sebastiani; The Animus Ensemble; QE2; Encore Theater Company; Faskarsnopera; Reagle Players; Queer Soup; Up You Mighty Race; Our Place; Centre Stage; North Shore Music Theatre; Pilgrim Theatre; Stoneham Theatre; The Publick Theatre; Wellesley Summer Theatre; Charlestown Working Theatre; Actors' Workshop; Devanaughn Theatre; Boston Playwrights' Theatre; Durrell Hall; Zero Arrow Theatre; Turtle Lane Playhouse; The Boston Center for The Arts; 11:11 Productions; Actors' Shakespeare Project?
How about these:
SpeakEasy; Zeitgeist; Nora; Boston Theater Works; Sugan; Theater Offensive; The Charles Playhouse; The New Repertory Theatre; The Lyric Stage of Boston; The Huntington; The American Repertory Theatre?
Or these:
The Footlight Club; Vokes Players; Hovey Players; Quannapowitt Players; Acme; Concord Players; Arlington Friends of The Drama; Newton Country Players; Belmont Dramatic Club; Bay Players; Wakefield Repertory Theatre?
Some of these companies (11:11; A.S.P.)have been in Boston for only a year or less; some (SpeakEasy; Company One) have long, healthy track-records; The Theatre Coperative, still operating on a shoestring, is in its ninth year; The Footlight Club has been in business 128 years so far. Each one is unique --- and the great news is that their number is Growing --- and their staying-power is getting stronger. The Devanaughn Theatre's schedule this year is already full. The Boston Center for The Arts is alive and well, and the Huntington, The A.R.T. and the New Rep have all created new theatre-spaces, and more are expected. And even as they come into being, new young companies are springing up like new grass eager to fill them with plays.
Truly, the critics may carp and complain, and big theater may finally be dying here in Boston and in New York --- or maybe just moving away to Las Vegas? --- but there are more new companies this year than ever before, and this new season has exploded into being. New companies, new plays, new players everywhere!
"O brave new world that has such people in it!"
August.....
First, I'd like to wish all my friends, and readers who've never heard of me, a very happy Birthday this year.
Not Your birthday: Mine!
On the 4th of August I will turn 73 --- which is close to three-quarters of a century! (Pretty good for someone who never believed he'd last till 25, right?)
A dozen years ago when facing a left knee replacement, I retired from my security-guard job to live on Social Security and MassHealth --- little knowing that within the year the Internet would have me working harder than I ever had before at the job I truly love: reviewing plays. Now a washer in that left metal knee needs replacing and, pointing to ugly bone-spurs in the right one, the orthopods have offered me a Two-For-One deal, and I can hear their surgical Black&Decker Skillsaws warming up in the wings. I no longer scamper, and names and simple nouns I Know I know tend to hide themselves in the mental mush of my mind when I need them most. I have heard the dreaded C-word uttered (In error, let me hasten to assure everyone!) by a doctor, and over the next couple months I will try to edge out from my last eleven years of up-loading and up-holding The Theater Mirror, in ways that will let it continue without me --- though I hope to find other ways to exercise my undying love for the stage. (Wasn't it Cyrano that said "To die is but a little thing, but --- not to see plays?")
In truth, these medical reminders of my actual age have made me aware of all the changes in theatrical activity I have lived through, and so I asked JulieAnn to let me write for N.E.E.D. a sort of Retrospective of the ones I remember. This is the first of what I expect to be a four-part memoir of "Jesu, Jesu, the times that we have seen!" --- my "Life in The Theater".
I didn't start out expecting to end up as a theater reviewer; probably nobody does. I was born and lived my first 24 years in East Brunswick, New Jersey. (Don't giggle. Many very intelligent people are FROM New Jersey, after all.) I learned to read early at a time when STORIES could be heard half a dozen times every night on radio, and comic-books were only a dime each, and during The War the restrictions of an A-Ration-Card (i.e. only three gallons of gasoline per week) marooned my mother and I in town each Saturday, seeing two and occasionally three double-features in the local cinemas. In other words, I was awash in Stories of all kinds and varied media --- though not that of the stage.
Well, in kindergarten a trio of girls with feathers stuck into their sweaters enacted a fable of birds ignoring the news that the farmer's hired man, then his son, had been ordered to mow their meadow, and only took flight when the news was he'd do it himself. (The acting and production-values were execrable.) And at one point I marvelled when, in a marionette performance of "Aladdin's Lamp" the clap and puff of smoke revealed a huge Genii turbanned and swarthy. It was only remembering, double-decades later, that I realized it was just a fat actor, and I had been so taken in by the story that I'd taken the little puppets for people.
I have, luckily, been blest with the ability to see theater as Truth ever since.
In South River High School God gave me two gifted, appreciative teachers who made me what I am. Mrs. Appleby's English classes gave me a chance to write essays, "critiques" and finally to write (imitatively at first) actual Stories of my own. Mary N. Small, teaching first French (where I first met Cyrano, shortly before Jose Ferrer brought him alive for me) and then a Speech class, and competitive orations and debating that sent us, on week-ends, to other schools. Searching for an oration, I chose The Declaration of Independence and, when one morning I declamed it before the entire school assembly I got for the first time what I later recognized as the ultimate accolade for a performer: a second or so of stunned silence before a wave of enthusiastic applause. The text was Jefferson's, all the pauses were Mrs. Small's, but the performance and the applause were mine, all mine. None of my work with the Dramatic Club (Stage-Manager in Wilder's "The Happy Journey from Trenton to Camden"; the German doctor in "Little Women") got such a response, nor did they deserve it.
But in the public library I discovered that the stories I head on radio had been Written by People --- in particular that a towering talent named Norman Corwin had written twenty-six breathtakingly beautiful shows I had heard, with no commercials, over station WCBS from New York. For a time I stopped writing stories and wrote scripts. And I suddenly knew what I was going to do with my life. Instead of becoming a pilot (my earliest dream) I knew, when I graduated high school in 1950, that I would spend the rest of my life writing serious drama for radio.
Two years later, the very last radio drama series ("Escape!") left the airwaves to wall-to-wall top-40 pop.
But that summer an old enthusiasm returned when Bill Gaines began publishing a series of rather well-written (for the times) comic-books that brought that medium back into my life. E.C. (Entertaining Comics) is still highly respected in a field where masterpieces and mediocrities are spewed out by the hundreds and thousands every month, and the best of them bound later into what are called "graphic novels" and, sometimes, turned into movies. For the next five years, I sent a letter of comment/criticism to E.C. about every issue they published, I trekked to New York to visit their offices once or twice, and a few years back, shortly before he died Bill Gaines had me down to New York for the best steak I've ever tasted and some serious talk. I had drifted away when in 1955 a self-censoring Comics Code Authority censored E.C. out of existence, and Bill closed all his comics and began publishing an irrelevent little humor magazine called MAD. (Yes, now you know who Bill Gaines was. But, as everybody got to know who he was, I was secretly proud that I knew who he Had Been --- and I loved him.
All of that --- the stories and scripts and comic-critiques --- were preparing me for a career reviewing plays, though I didn't know it at the time. I was rejected by the day-school, but took night-school classes at Rutgers in New Brunswick (NJ) for six neurotic years of living at home with two people I realize now were Clinically Depressed: my father a binge-ing week-end alcoholic my mother could not whine into sobriety. I escaped into stories, read and written; into "Science Fiction Fandom" --- which consisted of mimeograph-printed personal "fanzines" distributed by mail --- and, eventually, into theater and ballet.
In 1951 I was drafted --- and spent eighteen Days "in uniform" while the Army confirmed that I was debilitatingly asthmatic, spewing me out too late to start a second year at Rutgers. So I went to Glens Falls New York where Skidmore College had an extension night-school, staying with an aunt & uncle. The diversion left me a semester free, during which I coiled telephone-wire at a local plant --- and spent the wages every week-end taking the Pennsylvania Railroad one hour into New York City to see plays ("Mrs. Patterson" with Eartha Kitt; "Bullfight" at the Theatre de Lys with Hurd Hatfield) and Balanchine's City Center ballet. Then, at a Science Fiction convention a pair of people offered me a bed in their Cambridge apartment, and I tore myself out of the family home determined to major in extra-curricular activities up here in the frozen north and, of I could manage it, to grow up.
There were a lot of momentous upheavals in the wider world at large that made my entrance on the Cambridge scene fortuitious. Like, Brooks Atkinson writing a review in the New York TIMES of a play at The Circle in The Square --- in other words, he went "Off Broadway," coined a new phrase and opened a whole new genre to exploration. Like, the year after I arrived the Loeb Drama Center opened for business as a plaything for The Harvard Dramatic Club. Like, Cyrus Durgin died, and a feisty kid named Kevin Kelly became Theatre Critic for the Boston GLOBE. Like a bunch of kids from B.U. started a theater company in a second-floor space in Charles Street and a year later moved to an old synagog building behind the Shubert Theatre, taking with them the original name: The Charles Playhouse. Like a guy named David Wheeler starting a peripatetic Theatre Company of Boston which, with The Charles, grew into Boston's first two Regional Theatres. Like a huge, ambitious cultural-center planning a hotel, the Institute of Contemporary Arts museum, all on the banks of the Charles River. The enterprise began with a tent-theatre at which I saw Jason Robards Jr. and Siobhan McKenna do "Macbeth" and John Geilgud heading an English company doing "Much Ado" and a series of modern dance companies. (That scheme collapsed when an architect absconded to Cuba with most of the money, but the asphalt dish under that "temporary" tent-theatre is still used these days by The Publick Theatre.)
When I arrived here in 1957 it was a Golden Age of Theatre generally, but particularly in Boston --- which was a "try-out town." (After a disasterous two weeks in New Haven, a musical called "Green Grow The Lilacs" was re-written, on a glass-topped table in the ladies' room of The Colonial Theatre, into something called "Oklahoma!") There were three big houses here --- the Shubert, the Colonial, and Ye Wilbur Theatre --- and at that time, of you had a play you wanted to try-out, you had to reserve a two-weeks slot two years in advance; theatrical activity was that busy. And Kevin Kelly, unlike his blandly over-positive predecessor, realized that his review in the GLOBE could make, or could break a show's reputation on its way to its New York opening. He got drunk on that power and, when try-outs dwindled and stopped, Kelly's resume hit the editors' desks every time a New York critic was fired, quit, or died. Early on, he thought himself too important, as the Broadway Critic, to waste his time with local companies like the Charles and TCB --- though that changed.
When I got here (fresh from one semester in Rutger's School of Library Service) I was, as an English Major, fitted for only two jobs: washing dishes or selling books. Throughout my life, I've done a lot of both. But my first real job was at The Harvard Bookstore and a fellow book-pusher there (Earl Edgerton) that summer after his graduation wanted to play Sheridan Whiteside "The Man Who Came to Dinner", and I was cast as The Doctor. (I missed my final entrance twice because backstage business distracted me.) Next semester the Harvard Dramatic Club did Anouilh's "Tiger at The Gates" and I played two bit-parts --- badly. And when they did "The Plough & The Stars" --- the last HDC show before Loeb opened --- I saw my calling and graduated from bad actor to mediocre stagehand.
But many of the residence houses of Harvard had theater-clubs in those days, and the Loeb Ex was always busy, Poets' Theatre did a couple of major plays on the Loeb Stage, and no one ever asked if I was a student when I showed up on crew --- they just shoved a hammer in my hand and told me what to do. I worked the second show on the Loeb main stage ("Peer Gynt") and worked the summer-stock seasons there of four plays each, and went from Harvard Book Store to a now defunct Barnes & Noble outlet and finally to a Paperback Booksmith that was opposite The Brattle Theatre. I was still awash in stories, read and written, film and stage, and worked every show I could for about five years.
Then as one summer ended, a red-headed kid came prowling around Loeb saying he was the new Arts Editor of the student paper THE TECH, but he couldn't find any theater reviewers at MIT, so he was looking for them at the other end of Mass Avenue. The vice-president of HDC and I both volunteered, but then the HDC president took a year of absence, so I did a review a week for The Tech that year, working with this guy named Joe Hanlon. I'll talk about him a lot next month, because when he graduated he went off to Tulane to get a Masters in Math and then came back to get a doctorate in particle physics at Tufts. But he also came back with an idea about an arts-centered weekly newspaper aimed at colleges. It started as a four-page centerfold insert in THE HARBUS NEWS and it was called BOSTON AFTER DARK.
But you know it now as The Boston PHOENIX. I'll talk about that next month.
At both ends of my six-year "career" reviewing plays for BOSTON AFTER DARK I worked with gifted editors. The first was Joe Hanlon, the founder of the paper.
Joe had been a paper-boy in Plainfield, New Jersey, and while an undergraduate at MIT he played all the editorial positions on their student newspaper THE TECH. After graduating and picking up a Masters Degree at Tulane, he came back to get a Doctorate at Tufts, with a great idea that was to change how newspapers were sold in Boston. Aside from THE TECH and THE HARVARD CRIMSON, all the college newspapers in Boston were printed by the same company. Hanlon's idea was simple: the very same four-page centerfold-section, covering the Arts, could be printed into every one of those different college papers --- and the ads in that insert would pay its expenses. He started with the newspaper at the Harvard Business School --- THE HARBUS NEWS --- with a student there named James T. Lewis as ad manager.
It was a great idea ... but it never worked. None of the college papers wanted to give up revenue from arts advertising. But after Hanlon and Lewis tried for about a month, they heard a new, slick-paper monthly magazine planned to do exactly the same thing, and so they boldly decided to give the thing away free every week. (Under its new name [THE PHOENIX] it's being given away free here today.)
I had a review in the second issue ("Hot September" a musical version of the play "Picnic" that had an on-stage swimming-pool but closed in Boston)and then one of Morris Carnovsky directing himself as "King Lear" out at Brandeis, and I was off and running. [Relevant Aside: When the Spingold Theatre Complex was planned, a famous British director was scouting America for a major regional theatre. He was offered Spingold --- but Tyrone Guthrie said this was too close to New York, and so he built his theatre in Minneapolis.]
Joe Hanlon, maybe ten years my junior, taught me how to review plays. I had been writing for years --- but writing Stories, so I was eager to be edited and willing to learn. He thought of a review as a News Piece, and whatever opinions might be voiced had to be justified by concrete examples from the stage. We could argue for half an hour over a sentence, until both of us agreed it had been improved. And his bugaboo was "weasel-words" --- like "almost" or "nearly" and he never tolerated "one of the best" insisting it was either THE Best or it wasn't --- is still with me. I learned reviewing as a Craft, and only much later learned to see it's possibilities as an art. [Once he sent me to review a movie version of a British play ("The Kitchen") but the movie closed before the review could be printed. "It's a good review," he told me, "tells me everything I need to know. Erm, did you like it, by the way?" I said I had. "I thought so," he replied. That, from Joe Hanlon, was a Gold Star.]
But Hanlon only edited BOSTON AFTER DARK for one year. He and his ad manager Jim Lewis argued for a month over how much Joe would have to pay to buy him out, until Lewis fatefully ask how much Hanlon would take for HIS half --- and shortly thereafter James T. Lewis owned the paper ... basically supporting it for the next three years out of his salary working at Raytheon. Hanlon went first to editing THE VIETNAM SUMMER NEWS, then helped found yet another newspaper called COMPUTER WORLD, and finally he and his wife --- fed up with surreptitious spying because of their "radical" ideas --- became citizens of England, where he started work for THE NEW SCIENTIST and is, to this day, a working journalist.
Just about the time Hanlon left, B.A.D. picked up a second theater reviewer, who re-wrote his reviews for the student-run radio station WBUR. We would alternate reviewing the big local regional theatres --- The Charles Playhouse and The Theatre Company of Boston --- then he did the Broadway reviews, and I covered college shows, community theatre, and a growing number of tiny "off-broadway" companies. Oh, my co-anchor's name was Stephen M. Mindich. For the next three years I reviewed one or two plays a week --- for love; nobody was ever paid then --- and was a book-pusher at several Paperback Booksmiths.
That was the late '60s, and The Charles and TCB qualified for matching federal grants as Regional Theatres. I saw great plays at both: "Galileo" by Brecht and "Poor Bitos" & "The Rehearsal" by Anouilh & "Dutchman" & "The Iceman Cometh" all at The Charles; Arden's "Armstrong's Last Goodnight", "Marat/Sade", Gertrude Stein's "Yes Is for A Very Young Man", Albee's "Tiny Alice" and some Sam Beckett plays at TCB. Those very titles suggest that there was a theater-hungry audience here eager for experiments and challenge. It was the age when "Hair!" brought total nudity to Boston after weeks of legal wrangling, and ended censorship in Boston.
At one point, I found ten small hole-in-the-wall theatres doing notable work, and arranged a two-week Showcase Festival for them in The Loeb Ex. I urged them to co-operate with each other for mutual needs --- for instance in buying advertising --- and to show them how I arranged a back-page ad in B.A.D. featuring all ten. In a discussion of such co-op ads one militant artistic director rose to complain that if the paper could give them one ad they could give it to them every week. "It wasn't a gift from the paper," I had to respond, "I PAID for that ad, and it cost me a full week's salary." Ultimately, of course, each company found themselves too busy to co-operate on anything. That's still true today.
I can't remember all of them, but The Caravan Theatre did wonderfully innovative shows in a church in Cambridge; Sam Shamshak's Atma Theatre moved from one abandoned building to another and did my first "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" in a church coffee-house on Charles Street. Rosann M. Weeks' Hub Theatre Center worked several years in the basement of The Old West Church. The Rose Coffehouse hosted several tiny companies. In Cambridge The People's Theatre specialized in color-blind casting (Their "Death of A Salesman" featured a bi-racial family.), and they actually built a new theatre-space in Inman Square that may now be the home of Improv Boston. And for years Boston's longest-running show, the improv-group called THE PROPOSITION, worked in an old bakery also in Inman Square.
B.A.D. remained a four-page folded single-sheet give-away for three years, with Jane Steidemann as editor, Jim Lewis as publisher, and Movie reviews by Deac Rossell --- until the shot-in-Boston movie "The Thomas Crown Affair" had its world premier here. I took a week's vacation from the Booksmith to work on what was to be a 12-page Summer Preview issue handed out free at the opening, with several interviews with the movie's makers. It turned out a 24-page monster, with Steve Mindich so successful as an ad-salesman he borrowed money from his father and bought a half-interest in the paper. A few months later I drew my first paycheck (initially for copy-editing) from the paper, hippies were selling it on streetcorners for a quarter, and now co-Publisher James T. Lewis talked confidently of "delivering the youth market to advertisers." I quit pushing books to work full-time as Theater Editor. The '60s were coming to an end, and Boston had a fourth major newspaper reviewing plays.
Back then the Boston HERALD-TRAVELLER was a big bedsheet-sized newspaper with Samuel Hirsch as theater critic while at the tabloid-sized RECORD-AMERICAN sat Eliot Norton, and Kevin Kelly spoke for The GLOBE. Each one found enough activity for at least two reviews a week. At B.A.D., I was perhaps a little drunk with space and tried to cover Everything. If eight shows opened in a week, I tried to find one or two other reviewers to see what I couldn't. And when I discovered there were plays that ran only one week-end and couldn't be reviewed in a weekly newspaper, I started "A Critick's Notebook" to give exposure to such things as Mort Kaplan's Studio productions at Northeastern, or Harry M. Ritchie's in the old Tufts Arena Theatre. I worked up to seeing 150 plays one year, and 200 the next ...
But I'm getting ahead of myself. After working together on the ever-expanding Entertainment Weekly, eventually James T. Lewis and Stephen M. Mindich differed over how to grow. Lewis saw it as sort of national, similar to Rolling Stone, and franchised a CLEVELAND AFTER DARK, a PHILADELPHIA AFTER DARK --- with record-reviews and film-reviews flown out from BOSTON AFTER DARK bulking up local arts coverage. Mindich saw it as a Village Voice like-a-look needing essays and news and sports columns. Once again two titanic owners argued over who'd buy out whom and for how much. Mindich finally showed his resolve by starting a whole new newspaper (PUBLICK OCCURRENCES, ran three weeks) --- and instead of a honeymoon my wife and I rushed back from our Pennsylvania wedding to work on it. When Mindich won the paper there was a week of agonizing search for a new name and the final choice was --- BOSTON AFTER DARK of course.
That's right, honeymoon. I had run into Judith Ann Quigg --- a new theater reviewer --- at a TCB opening, asked her on a trip with a friend for dinner in Rockport, and a year later --- 9 May 1970 --- we were married. She became Assistant Editor under Arnie Reisman (Yes the same one you can hear every week over WGBH) and later Regional Editor of the Providence JOURNAL, Managing Editor of a Buffalo paper, and quit Mike Royko's Chicago daily when Rupert Murdoch bought it. She was that other gifted editor I talked about back in the first paragraph.
Those proved to be stormy years both for us and for newspapers here in Boston. Judy was so over-worked she quit B.A.D. Then so did I: When Reisman quit, I was told by the new editor that he wanted One Major Review a week with any others so small as to be irrelevant. After trying to cover everything that opened (150 shows one year, 200 the next, remember?), I sent a letter to every theatre in town explaining why, sent a resignation to B.A.D. saying I couldn't work that way, and Judy and I went off to Rockport the day before deadlines.
For a summer, we tried to publish a THEATRE JOURNAL, but when there were no ads we had to fold. I taught a class in Reviewing Theater at Tufts for one semester. Then the rival weekly in town --- called The Cambridge PHOENIX --- asked Judy to edit a wholly separate paper to go free to colleges that we called TIME OUT (after the London magazine). The PHOENIX reviewer Arthur Friedman (who later succeeded Eliot Norton at The HERALD) and I sparred a little in print; Judy and I once ran our two reviews of "Godspell" --- hers negative, mine positive --- on the same page, allowing readers to decide for themselves.
But the writers of the PHOENIX went out on strike against the publisher, Judy decided to work on the strike-paper, we were vilified and hounded and at one confrontation I got a skinned nose and busted glasses when I rashly threw the first punch. We went back to Rockport, then to London for ten glorious weeks (60 plays!), and re-located to Providence where the JOURNAL at first thought they wanted me to cover smaller theatres, but Judy kept getting promotions. I was in therapy --- I finally figured out because I was "in mourning" for that Reviewer I no longer was. We separated and I came back to Boston first working for the "Boston 200" celebration, then at a Brentano's bookstore in the old Chestnut Hill Mall. There was, after nine years, a friendly divorce. There was a hiring-freeze on at all the Boston newspapers, and when Brentano's fired me because they needed someone who could sell games and jewelry as well as books, I again took the offer of a bed from one of the people who originally got me out of New Jersey. "If you can find a job, we can buy a house," she offered, and I spent the next five years washing dishes at The Cafe DeLuxe in Decorah, Iowa.
But this is already much too long, and doesn't explain how I started THE THEATER MIRROR on the Internet, does it?
That's what I'll have to explain next month, I guess.
Where does a group-effort like THE THEATER MIRROR really begin? The Mirror wouldn't exist without him, so in a sense it started back in Oak Ridge Tennessee when Lee VanderLaan started work doing computer-composition for a newspaper and progressed rapidly to computer guru to working with another company fabricating "clones". Then he moved to Boston.
I met Lee about 1971 when he and an old friend of mine visited our coast before trekking West to visit the other one. When they got there, their VW blew up, and I sent them $200.00 to buy a new engine. Lee has "repaid" that loan hundreds of times over ever since, in computer equipment, parts, programs, and continual trouble-shooting and advice, starting when he re-located to Boston early in the '90s.
He gave me a "DOS Machine" that I used as "a smart typewriter" and a dot-matrix printer to go with it. Then he said I had to learn Windows --- and I learned then that, if I swung the mouse by the tail like a mace I could break three teeth off the keypad, but it wouldn't fix the problem. [Joe Campbell's joke: "There is a god in my computer, an Old Testament God: Lotsa rules, No forgiveness!"]
My connection with computers stretches back only fifteen years, but changes came so swiftly it's hard to explain what things were like as things evolved. My first "connection" to the Internet was through what were called "Bulletinboards" --- in particular a section of one that featured commentary on comic-books. Another section on the same board (I've forgotten its name!) dealt with theater, and I thought I could post reviews there of try-outs on their way to The Apple; that's where the phrase "What Happened in Boston, Willy?" first looked pertinent. It still shows up in The Mirror.
Let me back up a minute. One of the reasons I spent the first five years of the '80s in Decorah, Iowa, was that I had worked on "A Guidebook to The Theatres in Boston" that no one would publish. When I got back, I kept collecting the name-address-phone of all the theatres I could find in the Thursday CALENDAR Section of the Boston GLOBE, hoping someday to sell that idea. And so, when Lee insisted that we had to make an Internet Website ("a space on The InfoBahn"), my first thought was to do something about theater. I wanted to list all the plays people could see in Boston (stealing from the CALENDAR of course), plus either a review or a "Notebook Essay" of some sort every week. That and a "GREENROOM Discussion" section that I hoped people would use to tell everyone about the plays they had just seen, was the content --- and I was The Content Provider.
We got in gear at the beginning of the school year in October 1994.
The Mirror had an early p/r opportunity handed to us when a friend working at Ye Wilbur Theatre arranged to give a free ticket to one performance during the after-Xmas week to anyone e-mailing The Theater Mirror. The offer languished for some nail-biting weeks, but on the night about fifty people slogged through a wet snow to see "The Mousetrap" --- a group I called "We few, we happy few". We kept their addresses on file as a mailing-list hoping to make them similar offers, but found theatres quite niggardly with their comps and couldn't ever duplicate the coup. In general, I have spun lots of great ideas on how to improve theater in the past ten years, and always failed of implementation. There is only so much a "little red hen" can accomplish, actually.
Ten years ago, most internet geeks were still under the spell of an "ARPAnet-Syndrome" that insisted the World Wide Web was for a free exchange of information, and any catchpenny-schemes and even advertising were looked upon with scorn. Lee of course, always swimming upstream, put a " .com" at the end of The Mirror's URL and fully intended to make us both rich with it. Implementation is still in the Beta stage on that score...
Our first big push was to mail a letter to some two hundred theatres in New England mentioning that their shows were already listed free in The Mirror and offering advertising at a modest rate. We're still waiting for our first sale!
Our first review from someone other than me was Jamie McGonnigal's of the musical "Rent" trying-out at The Shubert. (When he graduated Bridgewater, Jamie split for a theater career in New York City, where he's producing and directing still today.) And when Lee moved to Ipswich a neighbor sent in some of what I first termed "guest reviews" that are still archived.
Then I was told that a freelance critic name of Beverly Creasey had a newspaper collapse under her, and she agreed to send reviews to The Mirror so she could continue to see the shows she loved. I got her reviews by snail-mail and typed them into The Mirror. Beverly is a stubborn luddite without benefit of Internet, but she has since figured a way to write the reviews with a word-processor and then to send them in by e-mail.
Beverly and G.L.Horton were early founders of Playwrights' Platform, and between them hatched the notion that Boston needed an "Outer Critic's Circle" of smaller-paper reviewers who would seek out and recognize the good work in small companies being neglected by the big Boston papers. They and I tried for one fruitless year to "get all the bumblebees headed in the same direction" but finally what is now called The Independent Reviewers of New England's IRNE Awards had its first Awards Ceremony (1997)and what I still think of as "The IRNE Party" quickly grew into a major event of the theatrical year. (Still on the IRNE steering-committe is Jules Becker, whose reviews appear in N.E.E.D.) Because nominees and those ultimate award-winners are announced in The Mirror, some people think I "created" the IRNEs, but it wasn't my original idea, and it has always been a group effort which, I think, all of us can be proud of.
Over the years, The Theater Mirror has grown and changed by accretion. The GREENROOM began getting so many "Production Announcements" and "Audition Calls" that those became separate pages in themselves --- and typing them up from e-mails became a backbreaking chore for me. (Remember, when I started The Mirror in 1994 I was already 62 years old!) A list of links to "USEFUL theater websites" kept growing and growing. A "Resources" list tried to alphabetize the name-address-phone-URL for all the theatres or theater-companies in the six New England states. Those, as well as eleven years worth of reviews, are available for free access to anyone with internet conections.
Over time, other people began sending me reviews on a regular basis, including Beverly Creasey, Will Stackman, Tony Annicone (who covers Rhode Island), Caroline Burlingham Ellis, Carl A. Rossi, and Bob("The Old Grump") Guenthner. Each has a different style. They decide for themselves what to see and what to write. I promise to accept any reviews sent me via e-mail and to get them up uncut and un-edited --- but I've still had a hard time finding reviewers outside the Boston/Providence area. Nonetheless, the archive of reviews is evidence of the scope, intensity, and health of the theater community.
When I started The Mirror, I decided to take seriously my own belief that negative reviews help no one. And since there's no "white space" to fill, as there might be in newspapers, I don't write about shows I don't like --- except to counteract what I see as undeserved general praise, or gross over-pricing of inadequate shows --- and that has drawn the criticism that "Larry likes Everything!" which is not true. What is true is that I like Theater, I like to Like plays, and in my own reviews I have always tried to be descriptive rather than judgemental, and to allow the reader to do the judging on evidence from the stage. I freely admit I do not know enough about theater to call myself a critic. I just review plays --- though I do not censor whatever reviews are sent to The Mirror by others.
Just as the flood of both theater websites and advertising in e-mails has changed the Internet drastically in the last 11 years, The Mirror has reflected great changes in theater itself. In general, though "Broadway in Boston" makes money, it is no longer the test of excellence. The North Shore Music Theatre (in Beverly) and The Reagle Players (in Waltham) do better musicals, and the Huntington and the BCA, the Lyric and The New Rep do more exciting plays. Smaller companies in Boston give a bigger bang for your buck, and last I counted there are around ninety of them in Boston alone. Suburban theatres are demanding attention in Newton, Wellesley, Stoneham, and soon in Watertown, Sturbridge, and Lowell. And a group of seasoned Equity professionals have banded together as the Actors' Shakespeare Project and, like a bunch of eager kids, have said "Hey gang, let's find us a place and Put On A Show!"
For a final look at my forty years of involvement with theater here in Boston, next month I'll talk less about myself and more about the history I've lived through.
Okay, here's my chance to try to make some Sense out of the thirty or forty years I've spent seeing, reviewing, or working in theater here in Boston. There are three things I'd like to concentrate on:
And let me start each with an illustrative story:
"Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of theatres... "
Near the end of the last century, Kevin Lindsay started providing programs, Free, to small theatres all over Boston, then all over Massachusetts, and probably all over New England. The center-section was the production's program, and it was paid for by the ads in the "magazine" wrapped around every issue --- those ads reaching more and more eyeballs every time a new theatre contracted to use the "PROSCENiUM" programs.
Eventually, almost the only theatres NOT using the PROSCENiUM programs were the big Broadway barns that still used PLAYBILL. Those theatres were about to join the majority when they learned that PLAYBILL intended to buy PROSCENiUM, and they rejected the contract.
Why?
Because PLAYBILL also ran the Broadway subscription-system called SHOW OF THE MONTH which competed with BROADWAY IN BOSTON's subscription-system, and the merger of the two program-companies would have kept SHOW OF THE MONTH in business.
The week after PROSCENiUM folded hundreds of theatres were suddenly forced once again to spend their own money to print their own programs. And one of the most promising tools for health and unity in theater everywhere was murdered by corporate greed.
But of course Broadway in Boston's self-serving bottom-line bean-counters are only the latest generation of absentee landlords who systematically pissed away the most intelligent, most enthusiastic audience for theater anywhere in America.
How did they do it?
Look, when I got here to Boston in 1957 there were THREE Broadway houses that had new shows every two weeks --- shows trying-out on their way to New York or touring-companies of long-run Broadway successes. But every show was not "Oklahoma" --- and I remember getting calls inviting me to see shows for free when audiences thinned. For a time, shows that were too good or too bad to draw big houses went into Ye Wilbur, where I saw "The Hollow Crown" and "The Subject Was Roses". But even the worst of shows were here for only those two weeks, and "The Theatre District" of Boston was always the liveliest part of the city.
The first thing the bean-counters did was to lose the courage to fail. When guaranteed blockbusters became scarce, the bean-counters forgot that what made theater exciting in Boston was the always-newness of it, and they let their big barns go dark and often stay dark for up to almost a year at a time.
For the blockbusters, runs got longer and went into re-runs and RE-re-runs. How many times can yet another "Phantom" or "Les Miz" or "Chicago" break box-office records --- not because more people want to see it, but because the admission-prices rose from unreasonable to out-of-sight? And, while the "product" available to fill four Broadway houses (including The Wang, Wilbur, Shubert & Colonial) here in Boston dried to a trickle, guess what solution was proposed: add to the mix yet another unfillable theatre: The Opera House!
The bottom-liners still figure the potential of a show as every seat sold at every performance --- and so any show making less than that unrealistic profit is a failure. That may be because they expect theater-goers to behave the way World Wrestling devotees do, where "the product" is no less fictional, but the audience a little more predictable.
But the bean-counters never learn. They never learn Anything.
In about 1976, I went to the Boston GLOBE to try to get on a list of approved "stringers" hoping to do journalistic odd-jobs. Whoever I talked to was very diplomatically, discouragingly non-committal. But then someone else told me the editor of the newspaper (whose name I have forgotten) wanted to see me. When I stepped into his office he shook my hand and said (and I quasi-quote here) "What would you do as Arts Editor of the paper?"
Well I must have looked shocked, because I was. I had no idea I might be considered for the job, but I was certain I couldn't Do the job. So I was probably mumbling whatever I remembered of Joe Hanlon's dicta about precise and concise description of what went on onstage when the editor interrupted. "And get that opinion in, fast and first!" he enthused. But I disagreed, saying it was the Reader's opinion and not the writer's that interested me.
And, of course, I didn't get the job.
I wonder sometimes, whether Anyone did.
The GLOBE is, sadly, the most influential newspaper in Boston, and opinion-mongering is the name of the game, there and at every other major paper. But ever since I quit B.A.D. there has not been a "newspaper of record" here --- in the sense of a periodical viewing all the theatrical events in the city, not just two or three. And there is an effective rule of thumb here: the shorter the review, the bigger the opinion; the fewer the reviews, the more important their opinions seem. And, when an ego obsessed opinion-monger gets published by the biggest megaphone in town, those opinions tend to rule. Writing reviews for the GLOBE is like getting a license to kill.
Recently I asked whether a critic was staying after press-opening for the cast-party and I was shocked at the reply: "I don't fraternize with the enemy." In contrast, Elliot Norton gladly conversed with the people bringing their work to Boston; they learned things from his private talks, and I suspect he learned things from them as well. But when Norton retired, Kevin Kelly and Arthur Friedman and their successors set the tone, monging opinions right and left and rarely taking the time to explain what the audience might see on stage that justifies such dicta.
I am proud that many theater people are friends of mine. If I have done anything by writing about plays I hope it's convincing audiences as well as creators that it's possible to LIKE theater here in Boston, rather than taking the attitude that "There are good things and bad things about this show, so let's talk about all the bad things first." Actors, directors and playwrights all know that ANY show can be improved, but having their shortcomings --- especially when they exist only in the eye of critic --- slapped in their faces only makes it that much harder to improve; especially if an over-zealous critique cuts down on potential audience. The aim of critical thinking is to Examine the work, not to turn the critic into God.
Ah, but I did speak of hope, didn't I? Okay, how many of these names are familiar to you:
Another Country Productions; As Yet To Be; Molasses Tank; Alarm-Clock; Company One; Rough & Tumble; Out of The Blue; SouthCity; Image Theatre; Mill 6 Collaborative; Theatre Cooperative; Metro Stage Company; Mercutio; Hijinx Unlimited; I Sebastiani; The Animus Ensemble; QE2; Encore Theater Company; Faskarsnopera; Reagle Players; Queer Soup; Up You Mighty Race; Our Place; Centre Stage; North Shore Music Theatre; Pilgrim Theatre; Stoneham Theatre; The Publick Theatre; Wellesley Summer Theatre; Charlestown Working Theatre; Actors' Workshop; Devanaughn Theatre; Boston Playwrights' Theatre; Durrell Hall; Zero Arrow Theatre; Turtle Lane Playhouse; The Boston Center for The Arts; 11:11 Productions; Actors' Shakespeare Project?
How about these:
SpeakEasy; Zeitgeist; Nora; Boston Theater Works; Sugan; Theater Offensive; The Charles Playhouse; The New Repertory Theatre; The Lyric Stage of Boston; The Huntington; The American Repertory Theatre?
Or these:
The Footlight Club; Vokes Players; Hovey Players; Quannapowitt Players; Acme; Concord Players; Arlington Friends of The Drama; Newton Country Players; Belmont Dramatic Club; Bay Players; Wakefield Repertory Theatre?
Some of these companies (11:11; A.S.P.)have been in Boston for only a year or less; some (SpeakEasy; Company One) have long, healthy track-records; The Theatre Cooperative, still operating on a shoestring, is in its ninth year; The Footlight Club has been in business 128 years so far. Each one is unique --- and the great news is that their number is Growing --- and their staying-power is getting stronger. The Devanaughn Theatre's schedule this year is already full. The Boston Center for The Arts is alive and well, and the Huntington, The A.R.T. and the New Rep have all created new theatre-spaces, and more are expected. And even as they come into being, new young companies are springing up like new grass eager to fill them with plays.
Truly, the critics may carp and complain, and big theater may finally be dying here in Boston and in New York --- or maybe just moving away to Las Vegas? --- but there are more new companies this year than ever before, and this new season has exploded into being. New companies, new plays, new players everywhere!
"O brave new world that has such people in it!"
Love,
===Anon.