Not on the List
Festival of New American Musicals is noteworthy for what’s absent
By Don Shirley
Make way, Coachella and Stagecoach. Look out, L.A. Times Festival of Books. Those just-completed events drew several hundred thousand people. Now it’s time for the Festival of New American Musicals, which is claiming just as much significance.
It’s “one of the most important cultural events ever to hit the Southland,” says Jason Alexander in a video on the festival web site. It will “blanket our theater community with fully staged productions, workshops, readings, concerts, lectures and master classes” involving “major theaters, smaller theaters, colleges and high school campuses.”
Gee, that sounds great, and it’s happening primarily in the next two months. So let’s see what’s available. Click on the list of participants on the web site – and start looking for L.A.’s major theater companies.
Hmm, no Center Theatre Group? Where’s Pasadena or Geffen Playhouse? How about the main specialists in musicals – Broadway/LA, Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities, Musical Theatre West, Theater League, even Alexander’s own Reprise (which was created and formerly run by Marcia Seligson, now the festival’s executive producer)? Not one of them is on the list.
True, the biggest theatrical companies in Ventura and Orange counties – the Rubicon Theatre and South Coast Repertory, respectively – are represented. Scott Schwartz’s My Antonia, opening Saturday at the Rubicon, is part of the festival, even though Schwartz is quoted in the show’s press release saying that it’s “a play with music, and not a musical.” Still, the music for the show was written by his father Stephen Schwartz, who is the festival’s “creative advisor” and also one of the most successful composers in musical theater – witness his Wicked (not part of the festival, even though it’s playing in Hollywood).
The Rubicon will open another fully staged festival show in June, and South Coast will present a new kids’ musical next month with a festival tag attached. Thirty-three scheduled events are listed at lafestival.org (one additional entry, still on the list, was canceled). But most are concerts, readings, student productions, or collections of very short shows. Depending on how you define your terms, there are only 8 to 10 fully staged and professional musicals, mostly in small venues.
That many musicals, over two or three months, is nothing more than standard operating procedure in L.A. Most of the bigger companies stage new musicals on their own timetables, including the recent Mask at the Pasadena Playhouse and Center Theatre Group’s upcoming 9 to 5. The festival offers no central ticketing. It’s hard to discern how this is an actual “festival,” which normally suggests something that reaches far beyond business as usual.
I don’t want to pick only on this festival. The late Edge of the World Festival, which focused on small, edgy productions – most of them non-musicals – had the same problem of being unable to distinguish itself from any given weekend in the L.A. theater scene. The urban festivals that do seem sufficiently different, such as the Olympic Arts Festival of 1984 and its several descendants or the annual UCLA Live Theatre Festival, rely on international imports for that sense of being something special.
Of course any fully staged theater festival faces certain logistical issues that aren’t problems for the organizers of Coachella or the book fair. Design elements are usually more elaborate in theater than they are in concerts and fairs. Plays – whether musical or not – require more rehearsal time in the festival venue. It’s hard to find a group of venues that can host the components of a theater festival within walking distance of each other.
Yet downtown L.A. might be such a site. If more of the former movie palaces on Broadway could be restored to theatrical purposes and then combined with performances at the Music Center, LATC and Union Center of the Arts – and lots of philanthropic and moral support – L.A. might have a theater festival that’s truly festive.
For Don Shirley’s theater reviews, see Stage listings.
Published: 05/07/2008
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
