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

[Skip Corris]

On 2/12/08, Robert Hawkes <rhhawkes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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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