BY BEN WINTERS
 |
| Studio Theatre's Joy Zinoman |
In
the nation’s capital, Washington Post theatre writer Peter Marks
logged a long Feb. 1 feature on “Act 1 in a period of monumental
physical change for Washington theatre, a building boom that is going
to affect every major company—and even some less-than-major ones—in
and around the city.” The Shakespeare Theatre, the Wooly Mammoth,
the Arena, the Signature—many of D.C.’s theatres, small and
large—are apparently building or planning to build in the years
to come. His piece opens with Joy Zinoman of the Studio Theatre (and incidentally
the mother of Jason Zinoman, theatre reporter for the New York Times),
currently overseeing a $12 million expansion of that once-scrappy institution.
What
Marks calls “the big if” of the theatre boom is whether all
the new seats can be filled by suburbanite theatregoers—all the
Alexandrians, Arlingtonians, and Rockvillians whose support often matches
or exceeds that of the actual Washingtonians. (Plus, there’s just
more of them.) Some theatres are looking even further afield. “Our
intent is to become a true destination theatre company, at least at high-tourist-season
times of the year, like cherry blossom time,” is how the Shakespeare
Theatre’s managing director explains it to Marks. “We’re
going to pay special attention to the way we market ourselves to Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh, Richmond, Charlotte. Those are communities where people find
it relatively easy to get to Washington.”
The
building boom, summarizes Marks, has “theatre people here more than
a little terrified. And at the same time, kind of ecstatic.”
The
Boston Masses
“More
Greater Bostonians attend performing arts events (78 percent) than professional
sports events (56 percent) each year, according to a report by the Performing
Arts Research Coalition.” So reports Maureen Dezell in the Boston
Globe on Feb. 5, and that is not a statistic to be taken lightly; this
is Boston we’re talking about, where sports are a serious business.
But
interestingly, the survey concludes that “frequent performing arts
attenders…are 22 percent more likely than those who don’t
see shows to attend professional sports games as well.” In other
words, folks who go to games also go to shows—they just like to
do stuff.
The
same held true in the other cities studied by the Coalition report: Austin,
Sarasota, Washington, D.C. and the Twin Cities; it’s the second
part of a two-part report on the arts-attending habits of Americans, and
you can read the whole thing at www.operaamerica.org/parc.
Graydon
Royce reported on the report’s findings for the Minneapolis Star
Tribune, highlighting the information that “85 percent of respondents
said they believe that the performing arts improve the area’s quality
of life.” That’s exactly the sort of info that arts funding
advocates are always happy to pass on to legislators, as Cookie Ruiz of
Ballet Austin suggested to reporter Jitin Hingorani of News 8, down in
Austin.
“We’re…in
a time of economic redevelopment of our city,” says Ruiz. “So,
one of the points that we really want to really begin to make to our city
is that the arts are a vital part of that economic redevelopment process.”
The
Breast of Times
 |
Yes,
it is very sad that journalists cynically assumed that the guest appearance
by Janet Jackson’s breast at the Super Bowl was designed to boost
sales of her new album. Even sadder is that it’s hard to imagine
any other likely scenario. Jackson’s new single appeared almost
before the offending body part could be put away, an act of auspicious
timing shrewdly noted by papers like the Arizona Republic. “Proving
there’s no such thing as bad publicity, Virgin Records digitally
delivered Janet Jackson’s new track, Just a Little While, to U.S.
radio outlets Monday,” wrote the paper. “Just as Sunday’s
Breast-gate pushed the singer to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness.
The single was originally due out March 30.” Credit to the comedians
in the Republic’s headline department, who titled that Feb. 4 article:
“Janet Jackson has another, um, single out.”
The
shocking halftime show of course generated a landslide of publicity; including
hundreds and hundreds of newspaper articles, ranging from the satiric
to the condemnatory. Also this little fact, according to the search engine
Lycos’s daily report: the incident “proved to be the most-searched
event in the history of the Internet…. Janet Jackson and the halftime
show received 60 times as many searches as the Paris Hilton sex tape and
80 times as many searches as Britney Spears.” And presumably a zillion
more searches than Janet Jackson’s last album.
Much
of the furious commentary written in the week after the breast’s
appearance was about whether FCC Commissioner Michael Powell (son of Secretary
of State Colin, who also had a tough week) would overhaul national decency
standards. Congress also leapt into action, as the LA Times reported.
“In Congress, urged on by the White House and parent groups, Rep.
Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) have introduced
a bill that would boost to $275,000 the fine that could be imposed on
broadcasters for violating indecency rules. The current maximum is $27,500.” The Grammy awards, another CBS production,
also acted swiftly: “Not only will Janet Jackson no longer be a
presenter at [the] Grammy Awards, she won’t even be attending,”
wrote the LA Daily News. “She had been scheduled to introduce the
tribute to singer Luther Vandross, but he will not attend because of ill
health. Access Hollywood reported that CBS made the decision to remove
Jackson.”
One interesting note from overseas: The English are sort of wondering what the big deal is about a simple breast. The Economist magazine, read globally but published in England, suggested that the whole flap “seems odd to Britons, whose smaller broadcast channels keep themselves afloat on a sea of smut.” The Economist notes that most American papers, reporting on the event, fuzzed out Jackson’s breast; in England, however, “not only tabloid newspapers, but also the Times and even the Daily Telegraph (average age of reader, 55) showed the star’s spangled nipple, waving joyfully in the wind.