Author Topic: News: Canadian Theatre Festivals At A Loss  (Read 3170 times)

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On_Headset

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News: Canadian Theatre Festivals At A Loss
« on: Oct 24, 2012, 07:28 pm »
The Canadian press are reporting that  the Stratford Shakespeare Festival will finish its 2012 season with a significant deficit. Numbers aren't yet available for the other big festival (the Niagara-on-the-Lake Shaw Festival), but they were in a similar position at the end of 2011.

Neither festival is in immediate financial jeopardy (Stratford in particular is sitting on a $56m endowment), but it worries me that nobody seems to know what they're doing.

This summer, Stratford programmed 14 plays, of which only 4 were Shakespeares. Many of the productions are complimentary (MacHomer, Christopher Plummer's A Word Or Two, etc.), but then you get to You're A Good Man Charlie Brown, and it all comes to a screeching halt.

How exactly do you market a Shakespeare festival that incorporates Charlie Brown? "Come for Cymbeline and Elektra, stay for the kiddy musical?" (The answer: you don't. The rumour mill suggests Charlie Brown sold so poorly that the balcony was closed less than a month into the six-month run. Ouch.)

These festivals increasingly feel like two seasons wrapped into one, with very little crossover. On the one hand, the Shakespeare and the English-language canon; on the other, contemporary musicals, seemingly out of the blue. (Next Season: Othello, Blithe Spirit, Merchant of Venice, and... The Who's Tommy? What, like, seriously?)
« Last Edit: Oct 24, 2012, 07:36 pm by On_Headset »

PSMKay

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Re: News: Canadian Theatre Festivals At A Loss
« Reply #1 on: Nov 03, 2012, 01:04 am »
And oddly enough, hot on the heels of this post, the Stratford festival announced that they were dropping "Shakespeare" from their name. Huffpo has the article.

MatthewShiner

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Re: News: Canadian Theatre Festivals At A Loss
« Reply #2 on: Nov 03, 2012, 01:48 am »
But . . . to do an entire season of Shakespeare they would be flipping through the cannon so quickly.

I think variety is good, especially given the geographical area that they serve, as well as the artists they serve.

Utah Shakespearean Festival does 3 and 3.

My time at Shakespeare Theatre Company in DC we never did more then 65% Shakespeare (Although we did mostly classical work, sometimes getting into Shaw . . . or more modern writers, but usually with a classic bent)
« Last Edit: Nov 03, 2012, 01:53 am by MatthewShiner »
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On_Headset

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Re: News: Canadian Theatre Festivals At A Loss
« Reply #3 on: Nov 04, 2012, 02:46 am »
I'm not advocating that the festival should switch over to an all-Shakespeare model. That would be silly.

But their existing model (mixing the English-language classics with modern musicals, absent any sort of higher-order thinking or curatorial design) is not only obviously not working, it seems silly on the face.

It creates enormous internal inefficiencies (How many classically-trained Shakespearean actors would be baseline willing to appear in You're A Good Man Charlie Brown, let alone prove equally talented in both types of production? You end up with two different companies sharing a name and box office, but very little else.), I have no idea how you market such a disjointed season, and it's clearly not attracting the audiences they need to keep themselves afloat.

Kelasaurus

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Re: News: Canadian Theatre Festivals At A Loss
« Reply #4 on: Nov 14, 2012, 02:26 am »
Stratford has the biggest budget of any theatre in Canada, they have tons of money.  I don't think it will take them long to bounce back, especially with the season they've programmed for next year.  This year, they programmed some lesser-known and less popular works, so I can't say I'm completely surprised that they didn't make as much money as they did, say the season there was West Side Story and Midsummer.  They will make a lot of it back with R + J, Fiddler and Othello.  They've got a new AD who plans to take it in a new direction, so we'll see how this pans out.

I can't lie, I think Charlie Brown was one of the strangest programming choices I've ever seen.  It just didn't work.

However, I can't exactly say I feel bad for them, when other companies across Canada are struggling.

And so they're dropping "Shakespeare" from their name, no biggie, it wasn't there for years and years, they added it and now they're taking it away.  It would appear that they're growing to be more famous for musicals now anyway.
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