[NEohioPAL] State of the theatre - State Theatre - Kulchur Notes

[Robert Hawkes]

It's a big, wide, all-culture issue, as I see it. The live theatre may be in
all the trouble so eloquently analyzed here, but so are serious music,
serious filmmaking, poetry and other imaginative literature, painting, and
any serious art at all.

A. It's partly about a huge shift in central cultural priority that starts
with the Romantics and reaches its full flower with (most) rock music and
(most) television: the Art of the Common Man comes home to roost, and our
most lively and lucrative arts now represent the Best We Can Be, but the
Most We Can Make. And the less imagination we have to use to consume it, the
better, until we reach the utter absurdity of "reality TV" - which is about
as "realistic" as a Road Runner cartoon, but which demands actual negative
imaginative input from its audience.

The audience at Severance Hall and at other "classical" venues is likewise
aging and dwindling - and also grousing if anything new or different is
presented, not realizing, apparently, that the more an institution such as
the Cleveland Orchestra is allowed to be a mere museum for the established
repertoire, the more its possibly inevitable death is hastened.

My generation - the rock'n'roll generation - never returned to serious music
after a period of rebellion, never took its children regularly to serious
concerts, never had that music in the house. (I did, but I'm in a tiny
minority by now.) I used to be able to joke, in my classes, that copper,
like Leonard Bernstein, was a great conductor. I can't make that joke any
more, not even if I use the name of the current Music Director of the
Cleveland Orchestra. 35 years ago, it used to be a real faux pas to schedule
Parents' Night on Orchestra Opening Night. Now it couldn't matter a damn.

The same thing has happened to the theatre. "Younger" people don't go to the
live theatre, not so much because it's become something of a rich man's toy,
I don't think, as because they were just never taught the habit. I know,
from inviting friends to come to plays I have been in, that it's incredibly
hard to get even otherwise reasonable adults to do something they're not
used to doing. It's not the money; it's not the actual inconvenience. It's
the doing something they were never taught to do. And what they're used to
doing is going down to the State to see *Wicked* and imagining that that's
what theatre is all about.

The serious arts are just not central to our culture any more, so why should
we pass them on to our children? What's central is reality TV and *American
Idol*; canned pop music EVERYWHERE (including my dentist's chair); cineplex
cinema films that ALL look the same, celebrating mindless violence, slick
effects, and general dehumanization - in short, whatever will numb my
intellectual, aesthetic, musical, visual, and spiritual sensibilities and
reduce me and everybody around me to the lowest common consumer denominator.

B. Suburban sprawl. Some "younger" - and older - folk who might come to the
theatre, or to serious music, don't do it much because it's just "too far"
from where they live, and they are content to cocoon at home unless it's
something REALLY special - like *Wicked*.

Don't get me started.

RHH
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