Local stars mean box-office bonanza?

As part of its Tony coverage, the New York Times included a sidebar on how much big-name stars mean to Broadway's weekly grosses.
Basically, if you have Denzel Washington/Hugh Jackson/Catherine Zeta-Jones/ScarJo in your production and the other guy doesn't, then you will rake in two to four times as much per week.

Which leads to a local application. Kathie Doyle-Lipe has her local following, and for good reason. Some people will go see anything directed by Troy Nickerson — again, for good reason. Perhaps Patrick Treadway, Reed McColm, Ellen Travolta, Jack Bannon, Patrick McHenry-Kroetch and others have similar fan bases? (I don't know, and apologies to anyone I've failed to mention here. You fill in the names.)

Now, Bobo doesn't have access to box-office records hereabouts, and he tends to go to shows on opening night (which has its own buzz, but cannot yet have acquired the shine and increased ticket sales that result from good word-of-mouth). In other words, what does he know?

But here is your chance to praise your fellow artists. Who around here has the marquee name to "open" a show? What examples can you recall of a) poor scripts that sold well because so-in-so was the star, or b) good productions that grossed even better because of a recognizable lead actor?

[ photo: Patrick McHenry-Kroetch as Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha, Spokane Civic Theatre, May-June 2008 ]

Daniels on downers

Bobo was already up at 5:30 am this morning, so he tuned into the Webcast of the Tony nominations announcement.
Jeff Daniels acted even sleepier than I was.
I mean, show some enthusiasm, man.

But there is much fun to be had watching the current show clips, which help explain why the big nom-nabbers — Fences with 10, Fela! with 11, La Cage with 11, Memphis with eight, Red and Ragtime with seven each, and so on — did as well as they did.

The O'Neill won the regional Tony, but they weren't that high on my ballot. Marian Seldes and Alan Ayckbourn will receive honorary Tonys on the June 13 show, and long overdue, says I.

That Spokane show only got one nom, for Walken.

In the New York Times, Patrick Healy is heartened somewhat by the fact that money-makers didn't grab as many nominations as the more artistically fulfilling shows. But the Tony noms are voted on by a select group of about 30 theater people; the voters tend to skew toward the money people, for whom commercial success means it must be pretty good artistically too, right?
[ photo: Fela!, a show that will never play Spokane ]

Crazy artists; Tonys snub critics; British imports

A grab-bag of three topics in the theatrical news lately:

You think artists are nuts? Now there's proof. According to an article in the Scientific American, there may be a genetic link between creativity on the one hand and psychosis and/or schizophrenia on the other.

Variety notes that critics won't get to vote on the Tonys anymore -- causing those awards to become even more producer-driven and therefore commercial and shallow. It's true that critics don't get to vote on Grammys, Emmys or Oscars, either -- but at a time when arts journalists are getting laid off right and left, this will just further embolden bloggers full of hot air. (Wait, I'm a blogger full of hot air.)
ADDED July 19:
Jeremy Girard weighs in at Bloomberg.

The WSJ reports that more British plays will be arriving on Broadway. Included: the Jude Law Hamlet; Trevor Nunn's A Little Night Music; The Pitmen Painters, by Lee Hall (Billy Elliott), about coal miners who discover their own artistic ability, coming in April; War Horse (World War I with puppets); The Mountaintop (about MLK Jr.); and David Hare's The Power of Yes, which demonstrates that theater is quicker to respond than movies when it comes to fictional treatments of current news like the worldwide financial crisis.



But note the 500 percent difference in mounting a production in the U.S., because of British theatrical subsidies. Loving jocks (who make you feel) over thespians (who insist that you think) is not simply a Spokane phenomenon; it's nationwide. We don't love the arts much. The up-by-your-own-bootstraps ideal pretty much precludes intellectualism. Who needs book-larnin'?

Tony-watching

An L.A. Times post suggests that while about 3.6 percent of all Americans watched at least part of Game 2 of the NBA Finals (Lakers vs. Magic), about 2.4 percent watched part of the Tony Awards.
Put that way, theater doesn't seem quite so marginal. Ratings were up; the quality and size of the Broadway season were up.
Bobo's take: The Shrek number was embarrassing and awful. I was intrigued by *Next to Normal.* Geoffrey Rush was eloquent and funny.
And I read *God of Carnage* last night -- single set, 2 M & 2 W; this script will get performed a lot, much like *Art.* Amazing how Reza evokes the beast-like, savage selfishness that crouches inside the id, ready to spring, while at the same time writing laugh-out-loud passages.

If you can't see 'em, read 'em

Dwight Garner's article in the New York Times describes the pleasures of reading the Tony Best Play-nominated scripts if you live in, say, a backwater like Spokane and can't travel to what Variety still refers to as the Rialto to see the plays in performance.

Bobo is pleased to say that he's done a lot better than Garner in reading and/or seeing the Tony-winning scripts of the past five years. Bobo's also midway through reading reasons to be pretty and has God of Carnage about to arrive in his mailbox. (The LaBute just seems like more of the same; a local playwright once took classes with LaBute and reports him to be, well, not nice; given his obsession with others' physical appearance and his own ... well, I can believe the "not nice" report and reasons strikes me, so far, as just more of the same from LaBute.

Broadway grows up

Maybe it's a sign for theater everywhere -- even for theater that's in a city on the edge of a state that's stuck in a corner of the Union.
In the New York Times, Ben Brantley cites the ongoing Broadway season as surprisingly profitable and serious.
Read through his season review. Consider all the play titles. Is there an old-fashioned, inoffensive, nice light comedy among them?
And half of Broadway's business involves tourists.
Theater, at its best, can be thoughtful and visceral, immediate. In an era of airhead celebrity gossip and mindless Twitter crap, there are some folks willing to pay to see plays that aren't derived from comic books, the tried and true, or theater museums.

[ photo: Konstantin Stanislavsky as Trigorin and Maria Roksanova as Nina in Moscow Art Theatre's 1898 production of Chekhov's *The Seagull* (because Kristin Scott Thomas was so good in *Seagull* last year as Mme. Arkadina) ]

Doogie Tonys

Neil Patrick Harris will host the Tonys on June 7.
Check out the very funny video of Harris hosting the TV Land Awards.

[photo: prettyboring.com]

*Billy* is dancin'

Variety reports that *Billy Elliott* has earned 15 Tony nominations.
It looks like *Billy* for new musical (vs. "Next to Normal"); "God of Carnage" for New Play (vs. "Dividing the Estate"); "Hair" for Revival Musical (vs. "West Side Story"); and *The Norman Conquests* for Revival Play (vs. *Mary Stuart*).
But another big story is how many good actors were left unnominated for plays: Kristin Scott Thomas for *The Seagull*; three of the four cast members in *Godot*; all of the *All My Sons* cast; and more.
The show's on Sunday, June 7, on CBS.

ADDED May 6:
Charles McNulty in the L.A. Times discusses the strong competition in New Play and Revival Play while taking a swipe at the slim pickin's in New Musical (and not lamenting, too much, the absence of the Dolly Parton vehicle, *9 to 5*).

ADDED May 8:
Jeremy Gerard at Bloomberg agrees that some actors (like Frank Langella) got snubbed, and that lots of Tony voters demonstrably aren't following the rules and aren't going to all the shows they're supposedly sitting in judgement upon. Naughty, naughty Tony voters.
And Tom O'Neil at The Envelope reminds us that the three boys sharing the nomination for *Billy Elliott* isn't the only time that multiple actors have been nominated for the same Tony acting award. What's more, you know -- or SHOULD know -- when that happened for the first (and still most bizarre) time. Trivia hour!

ADDED June 1:
Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-0531-tony-awards-previewmay31,0,7036839.story
praises Billy Elliott and God of Carnage.

Cheyenne in short-shorts

Bobo has never met Cheyenne Jackson or even seen him onstage. (Maybe we're doppelgangers, or in parallel universes or something.) That's Bobo's loss, because Jackson clearly had talent to spare during Sunday's Tony broadcast.
Those eyes! That voice! Those thighs! That %^&$!#?! turkey of a show that he was stuck in!
*Xanadu* looks only marginally better than the disaster-movie it evolved from. Your heart just sank -- what could this muscular (and muscular-voiced) chap do with, you know, REAL material?
Other observations:
Mark Rylance's non-sequitur poem didn't really work. But points for effort: He did better than all those boring people who READ long lists of thank-yous.
I enjoyed Whoopi's self-spoofs, inserting herself into classic musicals. But why did we open with five minutes of Lion King -- and that ridiculous *Little Mermaid* snippet with the woman in the ridiculous costume? Clearly Disney has commercialized it, and musicals chip in to get at least some coverage in what amounts to one long advertorial for Broadway.
And why do we get 20 people cavorting in *Cry-Baby* but we can't get the five men in *The Seafarer*? In an age of free-download music, theater is harming its precarious self by refusing to give away some free content as teasers. (Is five minutes of a single straight, non-musical play too much to ask?)
At least Tracy Letts let 'em have it in his acceptance speech.

some very speculative Tony speculation

The NYT has an interactive Tony ballot, and apparently the producers of *Xanadu* have ordered up some ballot-stuffing.
It's a straw poll, of course, but it does offer some insights. Campbell Robertson's poll of two dozen actual Tony voters is probably much more accurate - and he comes up with some surprises or near-surprises: Paulo Szot for South Pacific; Passing Strange in an upset; Mark Rylance over Stewart and Fishburne; Bart Sher likely to win for director; Pinter's The Homecoming.
Of course, nobody knows anything.
Nobody knows anything.

http://theater2.nytimes.com/gst/theater/
tonys2008.html
AND
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/
theater/theaterspecial/13tony.html?ref=arts