Why is it so difficult to discuss how we price tickets? I want to note right away that I’m not asking why we struggle to SET ticket prices; for very good thinking about pricing, I suggest you read through Trisha Mead’s posts on the subject. I’m asking why we struggle...
September 2010
At least twice a rehearsal, a potential audience member wanders in and asks what we’re doing. They ask what play this is, if they can watch us rehearse, when we’re performing, whether we need more performers, and if we ever hold open mic nights. These are people from the neighborhood...
(This photo was taken with a fancy rented underwater camera rig by Portland Center Stage photographer Owen Carey. Pictured is Kevin Reed as Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard.) Got your own great photo from your show? Don’t you want to see it EVERYWHERE? Read on. Recently, The Royal Opera House...
In the world of arts advocacy and audience development, one of the common, repeatable concepts is that if you bring kids to the theatre young, you’ll have them for life. I’ve been contemplating how our small theatre centric, internet savvy community could help make children aware of the process. We...
Quick: how many theatre pieces have you seen with the word Project in the title? Quite a few, right? Maybe you’ve been involved in one. I have. And almost everyone knows about The Laramie Project. The word Project is often an indicator of devised work–pieces created by an ensemble rather...
Every Friday—really, consistently, every Friday—at noon, you’ll find a line around the corner at Hot Doug’s. Folks in line take photos. Here are a few. Every Friday night—really, consistently, every Friday—at 11 p.m. you’ll find a line around the corner at the Neo Futurists, for their 30-plays-in-an-hour show Too Much...
Mashable proclaims that QR codes are poised to hit the mainstream. So what’s a theater to do? First, what are QR codes? QR = Quick Response. They are square bar codes packed with more dense information than the traditional bar code you recognize, and are most often linked to a...
I want to start by asking a simple question: what plays would get produced if artistic directors were only allowed to select from anonymously-submitted blind scripts? What if, in other words, artistic directors had to choose plays without knowing the names of the people who’d written them – or their...
Want to see us live and direct from the first annual Chicago Fringe Festival? Streaming via the #newplay channel from Arena Stage, we go live at 10:30 am CT, 11:30 am ET, Saturday, September 4th, 2010. Kris Vire, theatre editor at Time Out Chicago, is the moderator. The panel includes...
In the fairly recent past, an active subject of conversation that kept resurfacing was the content of current shows in the commercial sector. Namely, the fact that a majority of new productions on Broadway are based on pre-extant Intellectual Property. Of course many artists aren’t too thrilled about this when...
