Archives for June 2016

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I discuss the Metropolitan Opera’s current travails at the box office, and speculate on whether they’re soluble. Here’s an excerpt.

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The Metropolitan Opera, America’s biggest opera company, sold a lot of tickets last season—660,500, to be exact. But, then, it had no alternative, for it had a lot of tickets to sell. The Metropolitan Opera House is a 3,800-seat monster of an auditorium, vastly bigger than it needs to be. Bayreuth, by contrast, seats 1,925, La Scala 2,030 and the Vienna State Opera 2,200. To keep its doors open, the Met must fill those extra seats, and it’s no longer doing so. Two decades ago, the company earned 90% of its potential box-office revenue. That figure has been declining steadily in recent years and dropped to 66% last season, an all-time low that’s been the talk of the opera world ever since it was disclosed in May. As a result, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, has been forced to hike ticket prices to an average of $158.50 per head. On Broadway, the average price is $103.86.

So what’s wrong at the Met? Mr. Gelb argued in 2014 that “the question is not whether I think I’m doing a good job or not in trying to keep the [Metropolitan Opera] alive. It’s whether I’m doing a good job or not in the face of a cultural and social rejection of opera as an art form.” He has a point: The National Endowment for the Arts reports that the percentage of U.S. adults who attend at least one operatic performance each year declined to 2.1% in 2012 from 3.2% in 2002. Yet many observers fiercely argue back that the real trouble with the Met is not the culture but Mr. Gelb himself….

You can wrangle on and on about what the Met should do to cut costs and sell more tickets, but you may be wasting your time and breath. For if you know anything at all about economics, you’ve probably already got a pretty good idea of what’s happening there. It sounds like a raging case of cost disease—one that could be fatal.

Cost disease is the term used by economists to describe the condition of a business in which wages go up without a corresponding increase in productivity, not because the workers are lazy but because the business itself is constituted in such a way as to preclude greater productivity….

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Read the whole thing here.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, closes Jan. 1, reviewed here)
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Fully Committed (comedy, PG-13, closes July 31, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, closes Sept. 10, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, closes Jan. 1, virtually all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, closes Sept. 4, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Sense & Sensibility (serious romantic comedy, G, remounting of 2014 off-Broadway production, closes Oct. 2, original production reviewed here)

IN STOCKBRIDGE, MASS.:
• Fiorello! (musical, G, closes July 23, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for bright children capable of enjoying a love story, most performances sold out last week, closes July 10, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CAMBRIDGE, MASS.:
• Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, PG-13, two different stagings of the same play performed by the same cast in rotating repertory, closes July 10, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Confusions (five one-act comedies, PG-13, not suitable for children, Sunday, reviewed here)
• Hero’s Welcome (serious comedy, PG-13, not suitable for children, closes Saturday, reviewed here)

“In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.”

John Ruskin, Modern Painters

“Together Again,” a 1976 CBC television special featuring Tony Bennett and Bill Evans:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia”

From 2006:

I got up this morning and wrote my Wall Street Journal drama column in a setting different from the office-bedroom where I normally pass my working hours….

In Smalltown I sit at a rickety, ink-stained card table that’s as old as I am, set up next to the bed in which I slept as a teenager. When I glance up from my iBook, I see a homemade bookshelf (my father built it) full of tattered paperbacks, a complete set of Reader’s Digest Best-Loved Books for Young Readers, and a short stack of dusty 45s by such artists as Ray Anthony, Rosemary Clooney, Billy Daniels, Vic Damone, Stan Kenton, the McGuire Sisters, and Jo Stafford. A chromolithograph of Abraham Lincoln hangs on the wall behind me. To my left is a telephone with a dial….

Read the whole thing here.

Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain.

(Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.)

Friedrich Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (trans. Anna Swanwick)

It’s already been a wildly busy year, and I just covered a back-to-back pair of out-of-town shows at Chicago’s Writers Theatre and the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. Not wanting to burn out, I decided to pull the plug and take Mrs. T to Bridgeton House on the Delaware, one of our beloved summertime haunts, for a week of R-&-R. Thanks to my recent orgy of work, my next two Wall Street Journal columns are written and filed and I have no more shows to see until mid-July. My plan is to dine at some nice restaurants in Bucks County, read a couple of books about which I’m not writing, watch a few movies about which I’m not writing, watch the Delaware River flow, and revel in the companionship of my beloved spouse.

Memo to the world: if you want anything from me this week, you can’t have it. Ask somebody else.