If You Have a Spare $200 Million or So …

… you could buy the rights to what is probably Broadway’s greatest back catalog. The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, the private company which controls the rights to such shows as Carousel, The King and I, South Pacific and The Sound of Music, is up for auction.

More Free Night of Theater Tickets

If you missed out on last week’s Free Night of Theater ticket-grab, today is your lucky day. At 3 p.m., 150 additional tickets will be made available for Dallas Children’s Theater’s Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, plus 100 more tickets for One Thirty Productions’ Wedding Belles. To reserve your seats, log on to www.freenightoftheater.net.

To read a little more about what DCT and One Thirty have to say about their productions, check out our roundup.

The Big Center Hires the Big Voice for a Walk-On

And the answer to Stephen’s question (see below) about who the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts would get to make their opening-day announcement is really quite simple.

Just get the Greatest Voice for Announcing Anything in the World.

James Earl Jones

– who promptly gave the dignitaries and million-dollar arts patrons assembled at the Belo Mansion a little sampler (Jacques’ Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It, some reminiscences of playing Of Mice and Men at SMU, Fences on Broadway and The Great White Hope on stage and film — funny, there was nothing about this guy, though). And then Jones didn’t even announce the one (the only) new fact. The official opening date of the DCPA. That was left for John Eagle, head of the opening ceremony committee.

October 12, 2009.

Memo to Mine Owner: Most of the Canaries Are Gasping

A quick roundup of news items about the economic meltdown and the arts:

• The Telegraph (London): Bad for British theater

• Hollywood Reporter: Bad for media companies

• Bloomberg: Bad for art auction houses

• Bloomberg: Bad for art galleries

• Bloomberg: Bad for the whole entire art market

• Washington Post: Bad for high fashion

• The New York Times: Bad for New York theaters

• Boston Globe: Bad for Masschusetts art groups

• Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Bad (maybe) for Seattle Art Museum

• Orlando Sentinel: Bad for Central Florida art groups

• The Independent (UK): Great for an online satiric series

• Bloomberg: Great for a French comic book

• Bloomberg: Great for movies — if you like Depression-Era Hollywood

Arts on Campus: There, but Not There

Marjorie Garber, author of the superb Vested Interests:Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety as well as Patronizing the Arts,  writes in the Boston Globe:

This is an era of what could be called the “visual intellectual.” Students on college campuses and members of the general public flock to hear - and see - addresses by filmmakers, artists, and performers. Cultural attention, and cultural primacy, have shifted to encompass art installations, the moving image, technology, and performance. Phrases like “visual literacy,” “aural literacy,” “digital literacy,” and “media literacy” are increasingly common.

But although artists and performers are highly prized as visitors to colleges and universities, the kind of work they do has not reached a comparable importance in the curriculum.

Art and higher education might seem a natural fit in many ways, but they have a long and uneasy relationship. The arts are often still consigned to a secondary role within universities, sometimes viewed as not intrinsically intellectual, or not intrinsically academic. Even when a university invests significantly in the creative arts, and offers an array of courses in painting, sculpture, creative writing, and performance, many scholars and academic administrators remain unconvinced: Arts do not seem to lend themselves easily to the “tenurable” standards of other university subjects.

A Million Here, A Million There, And It Starts to Add Up

Yesterday, it was a $3 million gift to the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts — an additional $3 million gift from Diane and Hal Brierley — but today, it’s a still-mysterious $6 million gift. The DCPA folks aren’t saying who, yet. But that makes 129 gifts of $1 million or more into the center’s $333 million kitty.

With their latest gift, the Brierleys have boosted their total donation to the DCPA to $8 million. The money is going to the  Diane and Hal Brierley Esplanade, which will run from the Wyly Theater through the Elaine D. and Charles A. Sammons Park. And then there’s the Brierley Encore Suite in the Winspear Opera House, kind of a fancy green room for receptions and the like.

Free Night of Theater — Success!

At the stroke of noon, I hit up www.freenightoftheater.net, hoping to score tickets. Many of the offerings sounded enticing, but the one I had set my sights on was The Light in the Piazza, presented by Theater Three. It’s not often that you get to see a Tony winner gratis. No doubt, you will all be happy to know that I succeeded.

When I checked the site just 20 minutes later, there were only a handful of shows that weren’t sold out. (And now that you are reading this, even THAT’s probably out of date.)

So now that the big ticket grab is mostly over, how do we feel about the concept? Which show did YOU target, and were you able to get it? Or was your Web browser running frustratingly slow today?

UPDATE: All the tickets are gone, folks. And in under an hour!

UPDATE II: If you missed out on tickets, a link has been added to the Free Night of Theater page that allows you to sign up for updates. There’s a chance that more tickets could be made available.

George Steel, Agent of Change

Anthony Tommasini, the classical music critic of the New York Times, has written a bittersweet profile of George Steel, the new general director of the Dallas Opera. Sweet, because Tommasini clearly values Steel highly as an innovative New York musical theater presenter and producer (he has turned Columbia University’s Miller Theater into “a hotbed of adventurous programming”). Bitter, of course, because next month, Steel starts with the Dallas Opera. It’s an outfit that Tommasini, with a fair degree of accuracy, considers downright stodgy:

The Dallas Opera? Talk about conventional programming. This season the company is offering mostly comfy favorites: La Bohème, Die Fledermaus, The Marriage of Figaro, The Italian Girl in Algiers. In this context the inclusion of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux seems downright risky.

But then, Steel argues, that’s precisely why the Dallas Opera hired him. In contrast to his earlier, more cautious statements about learning the ropes, Steel now sounds as though he’s been given something of a mandate to shake things up. Here’s hoping.

This, by the way, is one of the ancillary benefits (and increased pressures) of ambitious new buildings like the Winspear Opera House and the Wyly Theater. Citizens, in effect, are saying to these arts groups: We’ve given you the facility you ‘ve always wanted.

Now give us that world-changing art we’ve heard about.

Image from classicaldomain.org.

Turn Down All That Blasted Music!

In case anyone didn’t notice: Dallasites now have the rare opportunity to see not one but two rock operas in town at the same time, works by major rock artists re-interpreted by local theater companies (we can argue about whether either show fits the “opera” bill, but still … ): The Undermain Theatre re-opened its production of Neil Young’s Greendale last night, after its brief, sold-out run in New York (see my original review here), and, of course, the Dallas Theater Center’s production of the Who’s Tommy runs through Sept. 28 (and you can see my review of it here).

In a nutshell: Neither production solves the fundamental narrative and dramatic problems in either script. But both present some terrific live rock ‘n’ roll, performed by local artists (Oso Closo’s the Who, Kenny Withrow’s Neil Young)

Getting Lit Up with “Tommy”

One aspect of The Who’s Tommy at the Dallas Theater Center that I didn’t mention in my review is its extensive, dramatic use of water  — right next to large amounts of electrical equipment. The set’s flooring is like a wooden deck or pier that sits on top of a shallow pool, a pool that fills up with water part-way through the show.

So we have a full, five-member rock band, Oso Closo, complete with head mikes, hand-held mikes on stands, electric guitars, amps and a synth, plus all the singing performers in the cast who also use mikes. If they have head mikes, they have the battery/transmitter pack strapped to them, generally hidden under their costumes in the middle of their back.

If anything was daring in the show, it was this: The entire set is humming with lights, mikes and guitars — and the performers repeatedly wade, even jump, into the water. They usually do this gingerly, mind you, but they’re still standing in a foot of water or so, while often singing, holding a mike in their hands or wearing one on their backs.  Rock musicians have gotten electrocuted while performing on wet stages (Les Harvey of Stone the Crows) and so have local theater technicians. At one point, in the dark, a crew member toweled off the deck after some splashing, but this seemed more out of fear of slipping than of getting an unwelcome jolt of voltage. At another point, a mike on a stand was knocked over, hit the stage but everyone kept playing and running around — and I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if it had fallen into the pool.

I have to assume that, of course, all of this has been carefully checked and re-checked beforehand. But watching it still made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, particularly when the water was getting splashed around (it wasn’t just me — at one point, my wife grabbed my arm. She’s worked in theaters). A confirmation of my concern came when Cedric Neal, who plays the adult Tommy,  takes off his body mike equipment and carefully hands it all to an Oso Closo member. Because the musicians often interact more or less symbolically with Tommy, I took this to be some gesture of surrender, resignation — Tommy would no longer be heard, he’s mute once more.

But then Neal promptly got drenched with water.

So, obviously, the cast can’t just toss a live electric guitar or a mike into the water. But their general freedom around it was startling. So I confess I’m also curious: How’d they make all of this safe?

Image from photoshop lightning tutorial.