backstage.com: “Non-Equity: The Musical!,” while more than a bit rough around the edges, is a fairly enjoyable 100 minutes, thanks to its breezy humor and gamely enthusiastic cast. Certainly it will resonate with any actor just starting out and working hard to gain that elusive union card.
2 comments:
Fringe is a great place for this show, though I do not see much of a future for it outside of festival settings. The topic hits very near an dear to a lot of artists, but can the average theatre patron really relate? In a setting like Fringe, people are performing the arts mostly for other artists. This group can connect with the ideas and struggles of a performer trying to become union. Your average Broadway theatre-goer is in their forties and not involved in the arts (not to mention, in New York, likely a tourist). Outside of New York the average age is even older, with nearly half earning more than $100,000. That is just not the type of audince member who will really relate to the struggles of Equity and unions in the arts. Unfortunately, even with re-working, I do not see this piece going "all the way to the top".
Theatre-goer statistics courtesy of the Broadway Leauge.
This reminds me of The Battery's Down, which was a web series chronicling an actor's struggle to find work in New York. The show played on stereotypes about show business and featured an impressive list of guest appearances of obscure actors that only the most Broadway obsessed of people could possibly care about.
The Battery's Down was funny but I always felt that watching it was a chore since I had to constantly Google things to figure out what it was referencing and why it was funny. I don't think Non-Equity: The Musical! is as pretentious but I think it treads a dangerous line. The only people who are really going to enjoy it are theatre people.
Many plays and musicals are based around show business, but they manage to just use theatre as a lens through which to study the human condition (and all that good stuff theatre is supposed to examine).
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