BY BEN WINTERS
"ArtsLine" reported back in May on Professor Richard Florida, who had postulated in the Washington Monthly on the importance of creative people to a city’s economic development success. People who "share a common ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference, and merit" are the key, argued the professor in the article and his subsequent book "The Rise of the Creative Class," which got a fair amount of media attention as the summer progressed. Now, in their Sept. 2 issue, Newsweek comes along with their own piece about how and why artsy types conglomerate.
"In recent years new kinds of creative laboratories have emerged," writes Adam Piore in the Newsweek spread. "Driven out by the high rents of cities like Paris and London, and aided by technology and the growing ease of travel, more artists and thinkers are congregating in smaller, far-flung communities around the world."
Necessary ingredients for creating this sort of creative stew, says Piore, include cheap rent (natch), a certain amount of chaos ("Disorder has a way of shaking up old ideas, pushing people to take risks, making them see things in new ways"), and what Piore might have called a flagship arts organization, "a creative spark to fuel the rise of a genuine community." His examples of such an institution include SubPop Records, the indie label that spearheaded the rise of grunge, and by extension Seattle’s blossoming as a cultural destination in the 1990s.
Piore’s piece is accompanied by a sidebar, co-written by a raft of Newsweek’s finest, highlighting eight burgeoning cultural capitals. Including one city that doesn’t regularly find its way to the arts page: A "massive influx" of returning exiles to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, "has sparked a dynamic exchange of ideas–don’t laugh–not unlike that seen in the Paris of the 1920s. Every day film directors, painters and novelists meet at the Artists Association of Afghanistan to drink tea and debate with their colleagues, some of whom haven’t seen each other in years. Association president Timor Shah Hakimyar says his membership is at 3,000 and growing rapidly."
Also on the list of "new culture meccas" is Austin, Texas–duh–Newcastle, England–hmm–and Zhongguancun, China–uh…what?
Here’s the description of that Beijing neighborhood, provided by Sarah Schafer: "The way [the] sunlight reflects off the new high-rises buzzing with tech start-ups and Internet cafes, or the crowds of scruffy students and salesmen shoving past lines of touts hawking pirated software, fake diplomas and pornographic DVDs." That last part sounds like New York's Lower East Side (more specifically, it sounds like Chinatown). But in reality it’s "the most frenetic neighborhood in Beijing, perhaps in all of China, and one that the ruling Communist Party has pronounced will lead the world’s most populous nation into the Information Age and beyond."
Austin, Texas, by the way, may not be leading Texas into the information age, but it’s doing something right: "The town is home to some 1,500 musical acts," writes Piore, "part of a music scene that supports 14,000 jobs, generates $616 million for the economy and produces $11 million in tax revenue."
BIG HAIR DAY
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As the New York theatre correspondent for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I), Jeffrey Eric Jenkins is uniquely positioned to comment on the cultural phenomenon that is Hairspray, the bop-shoo-bopping musical that is sweeping Broadway off its feet. It is creating the kind of ticket demand not seen since The Producers debuted, but only after it spent a couple months sweeping the Home of Grunge off its feet in its out-of-town tryout. In the August 27 P-I, Jenkins weighs in on how a cute show based on a cult movie has become the bona fide "IT" show of the season. Spending gobs of money in the right places, Jenkins concludes, didn’t hurt.
Watching the Broadway version, he writes, "a few minutes pass before we wonder where they spent the $10.5 million…maybe the money went for a promotional campaign that resulted in 586 media placements in the past six months…The Hairspray marketing team definitely knows how to build 'word-of-mouth’: feed the media machine a steady diet of sweet tidbits and it will spin cotton candy."
Case in point: Jenkins notes "seven major features" that have appeared in the New York Times in the run-up to opening (including one by John Waters, on whose film the show is based). All before the actual review of the show , in which "Times critic Ben Brantley, arguably the most powerful theatre critic on the planet, provided Hairspray with enough kind words to allow the marketers to construct enthusiastic-looking quote ads."
Actually, Brantley is inarguably the most powerful theatre critic on the planet, and when he wrote that "if life were everything it should be, it would be more like Hairspray" the show’s promotional team could not have been disappointed.
One final note from the Jenkins article: "As the promotional machine for Hairspray rolls on, Bloomingdale's has plans for a Hairspray boutique that will appear in several locations around the country. But it’s not the first time that the retail chain has done promotional tie-ins with Broadway shows. Other Broadway productions that inspired Bloomingdale’s boutiques included Rent and Saturday Night Fever."
Man of La Mancha opens later this season, and I can’t wait to see the boutique.
"WE’LL CALL IT THEATRE ON THE CIRCLE NOW"
Following the theatre-and-cash beat down the left coast, we arrive at an Aug. 24 San Francisco Chronicle piece bemoaning–and somewhat celebrating–a new trend towards corporate influence in that city’s traditionally boho performing arts communities. The story is hung on the impending closure of Theatre on the Square, a 20-year-old institution that under producer Jonathan Reinis has brought San Fran all manner of upscale, eccentric entertainment, from The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe to Picasso at the Lapin Agile. Now Reinis is giving it up, and apparently the New York-based behemoth Nederlander Organization is interested in picking up the lease. And Nederlander, notes Chronicle Arts and Culture critic Steven Winn, is already a substantial player on the scene: "in the South Bay…the Nederlander Organization will begin booking most of the formerly independent American Musical Theatre of San Jose’s season next month."
Winn points out that having big corporate players in town isn’t always all bad (Berkeley Rep, for example, was able to do Homebody/Kabul and Metamorphoses as joint productions), but the bottom line is a little scary. "As major players like the Nederlander Organization, Disney and Clear Channel become larger and more influential, independent producers in mid-size houses may find themselves competing with much bigger players for both shows and the real estate to present them."