(I'm just full of theatre stuff tonight, more on Mozilla next week; I've got some stuff cooking...)
The producers of the "Tony-winning smash-hit musical" Avenue Q have anounced that instead of taking the show on tour, they have signed an exclusive arrangement to mount the show in Las Vegas. While this arrangement makes sense financially, why go to the expense of touring when you can make tons of money in Vegas without hiring a single truck, I personally say "it sucks to be you" to this plan (to use a signature line from the show). The ability to take a show on the road is something that people should cherish; very very few shows come anywhere close to the ability to bring the unique experience of seeing a Broadway show outside of New York. If money was the only motivator, the producers should have realized that theatre was the wrong industry for them in the first place.
Tony Kushner, speaking to the League of American Theatres and Producers, spoke on the spell cast by Broadway theatre: it's a feeling of "ecstasy, pure and simple, and we’ve all felt it, in the presence of great musical theater – at [age] six or at six hundred, it is instantly recognizable, Bacchic joy, and as close to irresistible and universal as anything other than Shakespeare or Mozart."
Remember your first Broadway show? Seeing real-live actors on the stage before you? Dancing their magic and pouring their hearts into each and every show. Remember the feeling of peering into the orchestra pit, seeing the real-live musicians (note the hidden scorn for virtual orchestras contained in this statement) as they brought the music of Broadway forward? Theatre is to be shared with everyone, not holed up in a room between the slot machines and the craps tables.
Take the show on the road, bring it to the world.
Posted by zach at June 10, 2004 10:51 PM