Blogging the 2011 TCG Conference: Closing Thoughts

Blogging the 2011 TCG Conference: Closing Thoughts

Although I didn’t really catch any of the conference on Saturday, there are a few thoughts and loose ends for me to wrap up. I did some more research on the Theatre Artist Survey I talked about on Friday. I also wanted to describe a great conversation I had with Michael Seel, executive director at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center in Pasadena, which produces not only plays and musicals but also a new concert series featuring local composers and cutting-edge music artists.

Written By

David O

Apologies for the delay—here’s what I did on Saturday, the last day of the 2011 Theatre Communications Group conference in Los Angeles. I attended tech rehearsal for the piece I’m currently composing, Stranger Things.

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While there, I stuffed the piano with just the right amount of waxed paper, scotch tape, and bobby pins to give it that perfect “buzz”.

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(While I was at rehearsal, I understand the highlight of the TCG day was a session with Julie Taymor, during which the moderator continually tried to steer the discussion towards Spiderman, while Ms. Taymor was much more interested in moving on to other topics.) After rehearsal, my wife and I hit the post-conference party at REDCAT, but I think we got there earlier than anything was happening. We ended up ditching out for our favorite late-night sausage and beer hang, Wurstküche.

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So, although I didn’t really catch any of the conference on Saturday, there are a few thoughts and loose ends for me to wrap up… First of all, I did some more research on the Theatre Artist Survey I talked about on Friday. One important piece of information I discovered was that this survey was originally sent out to artists via TCG member theatres around the country, and via “the unions” (my strong assumption is that they are referring to Actor’s Equity and the Directors’ and Designers’ unions, and not AFM). Given my understanding of TCG membership, these are primarily not-for-profit theatres around the country as opposed to the big Broadway houses. (Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.) I say this because it seems to me that this very likely affected in a pretty significant way the artists who were surveyed, particularly in the music department. Composers, musical directors, and musicians on Broadway are operating under a whole different business model than those in nearly any other theater in the world. I’d love it if someone would investigate this more closely, especially in light of the current “Save Live Music on Broadway” movement. Anyway, some more figures. A reader was asking about the figures of the ethnicities of survey respondents: 86% (!) identified as White; 4% as African American; 3% as Hispanic/Latino; 2% each for Asian and Mixed Race; and 1% each for Native American, Pacific Islander, and Other. In the discussion on Friday, Cricket Myers said based on her experience she had a hard time accepting that as the ethnic makeup of theatre professionals as a whole, however Sonja Parks said that yes, she feels most of the time like one of the 14% non-white people in the room. (I guess it all depends on perspective.) Personally, the numbers that I find a little more suspect (which weren’t discussed on Friday), say that 33% of respondents identified New York as their home city, while only 7% called Los Angeles home. I’ll buy that a third of the nation’s theatre artists live in New York, but I’d lay good odds that LA hosts almost as many as that. Again, this speaks to the issue of who the survey was sent out to, and who defines themselves as “theatre artists.” Also flashing back to Friday, I had a great conversation with Michael Seel, executive director at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center in Pasadena, which produces not only plays and musicals but also a new concert series featuring local composers and cutting-edge music artists. Michael says, “We’ve found that, even in the short four months we’ve been doing this new music programming, we’ve seen a great deal of crossover between the new music audience and our theatre audience.” Kudos to the Boston Court for helping to strengthen this connection! (Full disclosure: I kicked off this concert series with an evening of my own work, so yes, I’m totally biased.) Finally, I’d like to close with some words from my conversation with Ben Krywosz on Thursday. As we hiked up Bunker Hill, we discussed how a composer in theatre is almost always pigeonholed into one of two camps: a conventional “big-time Broadway composer” (or one who aspires to be) or a more “artsy” type, usually relegated to a subordinate role on the design team, creating moments to support the direction of the play, working in partnership with the sound designer (or perhaps actually being the sound designer). I expressed some dismay that there’s not much of a role for the composer to be an actual creator of music-theatre pieces other than ones with primarily commercial motivation, and therefore more traditional form. (Not that we don’t all wanna make a buck, but you know what I mean.) In response, Ben shared an interesting opinion about the non-traditional music-theatre as a “growth industry.” According to him:

Cinema is doing for theatre what photography did for painting…. [After] the Renaissance… painting became very naturalistic, and very real, and you measured the quality of a painting by how much it looked like it was real. Then, in the 1800s, photography comes along… and says to painting, “Hey, I can do what you’re doing much better and cheaper by pushing a button, so let me take care of duplicating reality; you go back to doing what you do well, which has to do with form/shape/color on the two-dimensional plane.”…. [Similarly…] with Stanislavsky… plays became about realism and naturalism… and that was fine until film comes along, and says [to theatre], “You know, I can duplicate reality much better than you can.”… As a result, theatre in the last thirty/forty years has become more stylized, much more abstract, much more non-naturalistic, and as soon as you move in that direction, music becomes a logical tool…. And that’s why I think music-theatre is a growth industry.

I’ll raise a glass to that. David O, signing off from Los Angeles. It’s been a pleasure.

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