The live performing arts could replace the movies if they knew how
In a running gag on Seinfeld, some semi-arty-sounding movie title would go viral and the characters would have to evade their chronic First World mini-micro-problems so they could finally see the film together. Anything from finding a newspaper listing to hogging a cherished parking space to getting in line too late at the multiplex could foil their plans to see Prognosis Negative or Chunnel or Rochelle, Rochelle.
Fast-forward two-plus decades to right before the pandemic, and British comedian Ricky Gervais was savaging Hollywood at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards for having no such gotta-go-and-see movies with original stories at all. “No one cares about movies anymore. No one goes to cinema. No one really watches network TV,” Gervais complained. “Everyone’s watching Netflix!”
Slamming the industry’s addiction to film franchises and “fantasy adventure nonsense,” Gervais whined that most films shown at the movie theater are “lazy” and “awful.” Notifying the assembled actors and directors that he’d use his hosting gig to have a laugh at their expense, he told them not to bother being offended: “Remember, they’re just jokes. We’re all going to die soon, and” — twisting the knife — “there’s no sequel.”
Yet right up until the pandemic there were always original, fresh, standalone stories that you had to leave your home to see with no sequel and no prequel. Those stories are called plays, musicals, operas, and ballets. Even symphonies are often basically stories, particularly as you track later in classical music history.
Transplanted to a post-pandemic 2021, would Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer — eyes glazed over from a year-plus of streaming while lounging on their couches — pass on Fast & Furious 9, A Quiet Place Part II, and the upcoming The Matrix 4 at the cineplex and actually take in an Off-Broadway play, head to the New York City Ballet, or check the concert listings at Carnegie Hall?
How about the crew from Friends? What if they and other 1990s yuppies had moved out to the suburbs or another city by now? Would the local opera company or orchestra get the middle-age patronage of Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey if none of the follow-ons to Iron Man 3 or Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s upcoming Phase Four movies really appealed? How about the local live theater company presenting Margaret Edson’s play Wit or the musical psychodrama Next to Normal if the stench of attending Joey’s lousy musical farce Freud! in Season 1 had finally worn off all these years later?
You’d think that everyone in the performing arts world would rush to fill the void of presenting original stories to mass audiences with live actors, singers, dancers, and musicians and no superhero capes and computer-generated enemies of the people in sight. To be sure, many of these organizations are now announcing such live, post-pandemic productions for the fall and beyond. But they only manage to squeeze in these season announcements between what long ago became their main form of messaging — a wretched mix of table-pounding demands and groveling begs for donations in both snail-mail and email.
And that’s a lot of the problem right there. Siloed in their genres and insular in their logic, the classical arts in particular often treat their entire mailing list like decades-long patrons. No matter how many “outreach” or “young professionals” programs they sponsor, they seem fundamentally convinced that they can’t expand their overwhelmingly white and primarily older demographics, and they fail to perceive broader shifts in the culture that can make their venues a new destination for entertainment and enjoyment.
To prove it, watch for the Captive Audience Syndrome that’s likely to replace Covid as the main disease risk in concert halls and opera houses around the country. Traditionally a key moment in any evening arrives when the audience expects the lights to go down or the conductor to give the first downbeat. Instead the board president walks out on stage and informs the ingrates in the audience that their ticket price didn’t cover the cost of production, so they’d better fill out the donation slip in the program or pay up in the lobby for a subscription to the rest of the season.
At least at the movies, the Coming Attractions are free of charge!
Board leaders at all of these performing arts organizations could take a cue from iconic film director Martin Scorsese’s November 2019 complaint in The New York Times about the state of the movie business as exemplified by the Marvel franchise. Scorsese said that cinema was meant to be an “art form,” and before the arrival of sequels, spin-offs and remakes, “we stood up for cinema as an equal to literature or music or dance.” And he noted that the elements of character development and “revelation” in movie-making are getting lost.
In fact, almost all successful musicals, from the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows to rock operas, contain the amazing constant of the “I Want” character song near the top. Think of Eliza Doolittle singing “All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air” in My Fair Lady. Or most of the cast singing “God I hope I get it” at the start of A Chorus Line. Or Alexander Hamilton swearing that “I’m not throwin’ away my shot” at the top of Hamilton.
Compare that to the rather more abstract goal in so many genre franchise films of simply making sure the world doesn’t blow up. Meanwhile, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater actually has an acclaimed work from 1960 titled Revelations. And while revelations in opera often seem just as likely to result in the suicide of a title character like Tosca as eternal knowledge and understanding, the emotional punch is usually indisputable.
Scorsese also said that truly effective cinema can provide “unexpected and maybe even un-nameable areas of experience,” which perfectly describes the possible intellectual and emotional effect of purely instrumental music. That includes everything from a string quartet performing in a salon to a jazz combo in a nightclub to a solo violinist or pianist combining with up to 100 assembled orchestra musicians in a virtuoso concerto performance.
Can disaffected moviegoers be enticed to the live arts for these comparable experiences? Perceptive observers of the performing arts scene long ago noticed that it’s not all that hard to get new people to come and try something once. The much bigger challenge is getting them to come back, and often for surprising reasons unrelated to the performance itself.
Several years ago, classical music consultant Aubrey Bergauer brought a group of “culturally aware” Gen X-ers and millennials to the Bay Area orchestra she was then running and discovered that they were wowed by the experience of hearing a symphony orchestra playing live. The problem is not the musical style, it’s the cues they pick up from what Bergauer labels the “User Experience” of navigating a symphony concert from the moment they walk in the door until the moment they walk out. And the baffling technical language about “classical music” that they have to navigate on orchestra and opera websites before buying tickets often stops the progress toward repeat attendance right then and there.
All of this represents a huge missed opportunity because going out to the movies has retreated toward the same “event” logic of attending a supposedly high-culture type of performance. Sony Pictures Chairman Tom Rothman strikingly noted in a June 2019 New York Times roundtable discussion that as opposed to past generations, “Young people don’t go to ‘the’ movies, they go to ‘a’ movie.”
What a contrast from a 1990s ritual once shown on Seinfeld, when Elaine and her date, “Blaine,” simply showed up at “the movies” without a plan. Once there, Elaine lobbied for a goofball comedy called Sack Lunch, but Blaine suggested the high-flown (and this time all-too-real) film The English Patient because “it’s up for all those Oscars.” Disaster struck for Elaine when Sack Lunch sold out right before she and Blaine reached the ticket window. Her resulting loathing for The English Patient in the face of universal — if sometimes pretended — acclaim cost Elaine her boyfriend, practically her job, and her sanity.
No self-respecting adult Gen Z-er would fall into such a trap because absorbing bits and pieces of a film or limited series on a phone has replaced the rarity of a full schlep to the movie theater. That frees up many post-pandemic nights when they could go out to a live play or a sublime jazz or classical concert if these genres would concentrate on getting into the conversation rather than crying about their place in the culture.
They could even take a cue from the one non-franchise, non-remake, non-horror, non-superhero film now flourishing at the movie theaters — a musical! If In the Heights can grab a cinema slot at a time when rom-coms and standalone movie dramas have dropped off the scene, then many other cultural forms originating in live stage performances can plan for resurgence. Talking positively to all the audiences abandoned by the movies can ensure many sequels of live-arts attendance all across America.
