Sunday, January 27, 2008
Shows Survive by Sharing a Stage
New York Times: "IF you are thinking of taking in a show at New World Stages, the Off Broadway theater complex on West 50th Street, you had better take a close look at your ticket before you go inside. Going to see “Altar Boyz”? O.K. That has a typical evening curtain time of 8 p.m. But if you’re attending “My First Time,” the hour is 7 p.m. The family-oriented musical “Pinkalicious” runs sometimes at noon, sometimes at 2 p.m. As for “Naked Boys Singing” — well, that could be either 6 p.m. or 10:30 p.m."
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8 comments:
I love this idea mainly because I have had some experience with two shows running the same stage/set before. Mind you, we did not do the switch over between "The Fantasticks" and "A Midsummer Nights Dream" in 30 minutes, but we managed to put a day in between each show so that we could make the necessary changes. It was a fascinating organizational process with both shows opening the same weekend and organizing the rehearsal space for tech week, but we pulled it off.
The only difficulty is that it creates a big limit on your design process for any particular show. Not that the designs come out horrendous, but they may seem generic in order to accommodate two different settings. Even if a completely new set is loaded in between the shows, it still limits the physical storage space available for any one design.
Regarding the limited design problem:
It's not so big of a problem for Off-Broadway shows that are already significantly scaled back due to budget. It certainly might push the show in some kind of direction, but in truth, it really, really helps a very low budget production. It just requires the design team and director to use the space in a different, more interesting way. Might breed some kind of interesting rivalry between shows.
It's interesting how they are employing rep theatre methods for a commercial show. I would, personally, hate to have to deal with the chaos of a turnaround. I think it's one of the greatest advantages to commercial theatre. But it's a way to save on space and cost. Very interesting.
I wonder how many lighting designers there are for all of these shoes in such a small place. Since no one really wants to have to change too much before a show especially with so little time in between it must be pretty hard to create a plot for all of these shows. This theatre must also have a lot of storage to hold the set and other stage items for all of these shows. It also must get very hard managing and controlling the things backstage when you have so many people for so many shows. Hopefully not all Theatre will have to adapt to these conditions.
This reminds me of over the summer doing the Fringe Festival In Scotland with my school. We literally had 15 minutes to get into a theatre and set up everything. We rehearsed this 15 minute setup numerous times in our own school, it was not an enjoyable situation.
I like this model just because it is a much more economical way to do Theatre. As a theatergoer, it means that there are potentially more shows available at once, which is nice when far too often a show will close before interested audiences can go see it. I think that It places a major strain on the commercial designers who now need to approach off Broadway with a repertory mindset.
I think the comment about demand was interesting. The fact that its hard to justify doing 8 performances a week of an Off Broadway show to less than half full housing during the week just doesn't make sense.
And with this new model, there may be less performances per week, but there is definitely more publicity for a wider range of shows. Its almost like two for the price of one publicity wise. In general, the more outlets for lower budget productions out there, the more likely more lower budget productions will thrive. And any theater thriving in any way it can is usually a good thing.
I think it's interesting for the producers o figure out a way to survive in New York. It almost seems like we're going back in time, the time when people went to theatre for the popularity of the theatre, and not the production. It'll be interesting for them to figure out the pair they want to share the theatres with. Since the audience that is attracted to Altar Boys would be most inclined to be attracted to the Naked Boys Singing. I hope this works well for all and not create any more strikes.
I worked at New World back when it was called Dodger Stages. The show was called "For Christs Sake" where a bunch of people from a church put up money to put on a musical about Jesus. Our theater was down the hall from where Alter Boyz was playing, and we had lots of people calling to complain because they thought both shows were related to each other, and that they took great offense to the latter one. Oh well. The building is really neat, big for a off Broadway. The common places look like something you would expect to see in the "pre-show" part of a Disney ride, almost industrial. I think it would be interesting to talk to the PM and hear about all of the challenges that go into th set up
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