"What Is a Song?"

by Ben Sisario 

[Last year, a federal jury found that Ed Sheeran did not copy Marvin Gaye’s 1973 classic “Let’s Get It On” for his 2014 hit “Thinking Out Loud,” in the music industry’s highest-profile copyright case in years.  But the courtroom didn’t hear Gaye’s sensuously sung original recording.  Instead, the jury was played a bare, electronically recreated track with a robotic voice.  It brought up a curious question: “What is a song?”   

[This is the topic of Ben Sisario’s article in the New York Times “Arts” section of 6 May 2024, republished below.  I’m posting it on Rick On Theater because it harks back to my post of 5 May 2015, “What Constitutes Theft in the Arts?” (Rick On Theater: What Constitutes Theft in the Arts?), about some court cases and accusations concerning charges of plagiarism in the performing arts.]

One response is simply the music flowing out of your earphones. But legally, the answer is quite a bit more complicated.

For most music fans, a song is a simple thing to define: It’s the melodies, the lyrics, the grooves that come out of your speakers.

It’s a much thornier question when it comes to copyright law, one that has been tested in a series of high-profile lawsuits over the last decade, involving stars like Ed Sheeran, Led Zeppelin, Pharrell and Robin Thicke [the Williams-Thicke case, Pharrell Williams, et al. v. Bridgeport Music, et al. (decided on 22 March 2018), is mentioned in the above-referenced post]. Is songwriting defined by what you hear on a recording, or the notes inked long ago on a piece of sheet music? Where does a composer’s work end, and a performing artist’s begin?

In other words, what, exactly, is a song, in the eyes of the law?

In many music copyright disputes, one of the main issues is originality, or how the law sets a boundary between creative expression that is the property of a single artist versus material in the public domain. Last year, a federal jury in New York heard hours of expert testimony about whether a syncopated four-chord sequence in Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” was distinctive enough that Sheeran’s song “Thinking Out Loud” infringed on it — or whether, as Sheeran’s lawyers contended, those parts are generic “building blocks” that no musician can own [Kathryn Townsend Griffin, et al. v. Edward Christopher Sheeran, et al. (decided 4 May 2023)]. The jury ruled in Sheeran’s favor, finding that he and a co-writer had created their song independently and not copied from Gaye’s 1973 classic.

But a key question running through that trial was about something even more fundamental: whether the core of “Let’s Get It On” — and what is protected by its copyright — is determined by the sounds we hear on its original recording, or the notes written on yellowing sheet music stored at the Library of Congress.

That issue was at the  center of an appeals court’s decision four years ago regarding Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” [Michael Skidmore v. Led Zeppelin, et al. (appeal decided on 9 March 2020)] and it is being considered in another appeal related to Sheeran and “Let’s Get It On.” Many experts believe it’s an underexplored question that gets to the heart of how copyright law intersects with music.

“This is the deep, existential, metaphysical question at the center of music copyright: We don’t even know what it is,” said Jennifer Jenkins, a law professor at Duke.

It is also an important question for an industry that in recent years has poured billions of dollars into deals for song catalogs, partly on the faith that their underlying copyrights offer robust protection against infringement. That may be challenging for older songs, because of a quirk in the law that can restrict how a song is defined and, therefore, just what its author owns.

Getting copyright protection

There is a key date related to this issue: Jan. 1, 1978, when the last major revision of United States copyright law [Duration of Copyright] took effect.

Since then, songwriters have been able to register a composition with the Copyright Office by submitting a recording; all the melodies, chords and lyrics on it are considered evidence of their work. But earlier songs were subject to the Copyright Act of 1909, which required that songwriters submit transcribed sheet music, known as deposit copies.

For a century, these deposit copies were little more than receipts in a copyright paper trail. But since the “Blurred Lines” case a decade ago, when Pharrell and Thicke were found to have copied Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” and ordered to pay more than $5 million in damages [equivalent to $6.2 million today], these once-obscure documents have taken on a greater significance.

The judge in that case ruled that, under the 1909 law, the deposit copy for “Got to Give It Up” (1977) determined the “scope” of that song’s copyright. In other words, only the notes on its paper submission counted as representing Gaye’s songwriting creation, and any other elements that were on the song’s recording but not the deposit copy — like percussion and studio atmospherics — were not part of the underlying composition. (A separate copyright applies to the recording.) The jury, instructed to consider only what was on Gaye’s deposit copy, found that “Blurred Lines” had copied from it.

These deposit copies can be minimal, sometimes featuring just a vocal melody and indications of chords. The one for “Taurus,” a 1967 piece by the psychedelic rock band Spirit, which Led Zeppelin was accused of copying on “Stairway to Heaven,” is a single-page sketch of barely 100 notes, and a lawyer representing Michael Skidmore, a trustee of the trust that owns rights to “Taurus,” argued that it was not even an accurate transcription.

The deposit copy for “Let’s Get It On” is five pages but omits elements like piano, drums and guitar — including the wah-wah opening guitar lick that has been a Pavlovian call to the dance floor at many a wedding — that are part of the signature sound of Gaye’s original track.

The judge overseeing Sheeran’s trial, citing an appeals court’s detailed decision in the Led Zeppelin case, ruled that the absence of those elements from the “Let’s Get It On” deposit copy meant that lawyers for the plaintiffs — family members of Ed Townsend, Gaye’s co-writer and producer [Townsend had died in 2008; Gaye died in 1984] — had to restrict their arguments to the vocal melody and the chord pattern. That restriction likewise applied to Alexander Stewart, a music professor at the University of Vermont, who testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs.

“Every time I opened my mouth and said the word ‘bass line,’ I was cut off,” Stewart said in an interview. “It was hard to make any cogent argument.”

Following a ruling by the judge, Gaye’s recording was never played for jurors. Instead, they heard an electronic realization of the deposit copy, submitted by the defense. It included bare piano chords and a robotic-sounding vocal — an oddly cold interpretation of one of pop music’s supreme erotic anthems. As the track played, quizzical expressions came over a few jurors’ faces.

Some scholars say the legal distinction between a composition in a deposit copy and what appears in a finished recording is a sign that the law has not kept up with how pop music has been made for decades. Very often, songs are created in the recording studio, and the line between composing, producing and performing can be fuzzy.

“It is completely divorced from actual music-making practice,” said Joseph P. Fishman, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School.

Jenkins, of Duke, said these cases point to one of the basic complexities of applying copyright — a concept originally made for books and other written material — to music.

“Music is first and foremost an auditory art form, but for most of copyright’s history it’s been defined as something you see,” Jenkins said. “There’s this disconnect, where the signifier — that written thing — is what a composer owns, but the signified is what the song actually is. It’s what we’re listening to.”

‘A Lousy Rule’

Exactly why deposit copies have gone from obscure legal formalities to hot topics in some of the biggest music lawsuits of the last decade is unclear. One theory is that historically, most accusations of infringement have involved the most prominent elements of a song, like the hook, vocal melody or lyrics — things that even the plainest sheet music would highlight.

But as pop music has evolved, and techniques like sampling have become standard, it has also become more common for background elements and secondary parts to be in dispute. many recent cases, like those over “Blurred Lines” and Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” [Marcus Gray, et al. v. Katy Perry, et al. (decided 16 March 2020)], have focused on these aspects. (To some observers, the “Blurred Lines” verdict seemed to give the Gaye estate control over a loose rhythmic groove, though lawyers argued that it involved specific notes on a deposit copy.)

David Pullman, an investor whose company Structured Asset Sales is bringing the Sheeran appeal — he is best known for creating “Bowie bonds,” backed by David Bowie’s music royalties, in the 1990s — said he believes that many current artists borrow too much from popular old songs. “It’s easier to take a shortcut and infringe,” Pullman said in an interview, “than write a song that’s original.”

The history of the Sheeran case, now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, is complex. Structured Asset Sales, which owns an 11.11 percent interest in “Let’s Get It On,” filed its own suit over “Thinking Out Loud” after a judge blocked the company from joining the Townsend family’s original action.

Structured Asset Sales’ suit was dismissed by a district court judge shortly after Sheeran won at trial last year. In its appeal, the company argues that a deposit copy does not necessarily define the scope of a song’s copyright under the 1909 law, and that the material on the sheet music only needs to be sufficient to identify it, despite the law’s reference to a “complete” copy. In court papers, Hillel I. Parness, a lawyer for the company, argued that expert witnesses should be able to interpret deposit copies for the jury, as happened at a trial involving the singer Michael Bolton in 1994.

[In Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton, the jury found on 25 April 1994 that Bolton’s “Love Is a Wonderful Thing” (1991) had infringed the Isley Brothers’ copyright for “Time, Love and Tenderness” (1991). On 9 May 1994, the court entered judgment for $5.4 million ($11.4 million in 2024) in favor of the Isley Brothers. The verdict withstood several appeals and survived as decided in 1994.]

Sheeran’s lawyers argue that the deposit copy rule is clear from the law, and is supported by longstanding guidance from the Copyright Office. At oral arguments last month, Donald S. Zakarin, a lawyer for Sheeran, also warned that straying from a deposit copy’s notation could lead to problems of “subjectivity” when defining a musical work that is in dispute.

“Future authors,” Zakarin said, “are going to be subjected to, ‘No, no, no, I intended to have that bass line. I know it’s not there, but I intended it.’”

In an informal survey of about a dozen intellectual-property experts, most said Sheeran’s side had the stronger argument about deposit copies under the 1909 law. “It’s a lousy rule,” said Fishman. “But that does seem to have been the rule at the time.”

But this rule, as set down in the Skidmore v. Led Zeppelin appeal, has at least one prominent skeptic in Paul Goldstein, a professor at Stanford Law School who is the author of a widely cited copyright treatise.

“Where I disagree with Skidmore,” Goldstein wrote in an email, “is in its assertion that the fact the copyright was secured by deposit of a copy of the musical work implies that the deposit copy defines the scope of copyright in the work to the exclusion of any other relevant evidence.” That evidence, he said, could include things like drafts and correspondence around a song’s creation.

Goldstein pointed to another possible source of evidence: sound recordings submitted to the Copyright Office as a supplemental registration. Under that theory, a songwriter with a deficient deposit copy of an old song could, since 1978, submit a recording of it to cover any additional elements — bass lines or guitar solos, for example — absent from the original registration.

This workaround was suggested by the Copyright Office and the Justice Department in an amicus brief filed in the Led Zeppelin appeal. It was apparently little known at the time, though Structured Asset Sales’ court papers note that in 1988, the music publisher for the Rolling Stones’ song “Sympathy for the Devil” submitted that track’s 1968 studio recording to cover a new “arrangement.”

Pullman, of Structured Asset Sales, said that discussion of this workaround during the Led Zeppelin appeal led him to submit the recording of “Let’s Get It On” as a new registration in 2020, to cover any compositional elements not on the deposit copy — which could be more ammunition in a dispute against Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud.”

Could it work? So far that issue has not been tested by the courts.

[Ben Sisario has been covering music and copyright for more than a decade, including trials involving Ed Sheeran, Led Zeppelin and the song “Blurred Lines.”  He’s reported on the music industry for the Times since 1998.]

"If You Rebuild It, Will They Return?": Regional Theaters Struggle to Revive

by Rob Weinert-Kendt 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[Rob Weinert-Kendt’s report on the difficulties faced by America’s regional theaters to come back from the COVID shutdown was published on the American Theatre website on 20 March 2023 (AMERICAN THEATRE | If You Rebuild It, Will They Return?; nb: the online edition has hyperlinks to many of the topics and references in the article).  It’s the latest installment in Rick On Theater’s occasional series on the state of the non-profit theater sector in the United States.

[I’ve published several articles concerning the state and background of the regional theater in the United States, starting with “A Crisis In America’s Theaters” on ROT on 13 September 2023.  That post was followed by “The Regional Theater: Change or Die” on 3 October 2023 and “Regional Theater: History” on 8 October.  These articles reported on the declining prospects of the regional theater in the United States.

[I then posted a serialized history of the National Endowment for the Arts (in 11 parts, 5 November-10 December 2023) because the NEA was instrumental in the development of the modern non-profit theater in the U.S.  The plight of this segment of our theater is serious enough that I’ve continued to post on it from various perspectives to demonstrate the history and importance of the American regional theater system and to explain the situation that put U.S. theater, as it’s now constituted, in peril.  Below is my fifth post in this irregular series.]

3 years after shutdown, despite some encouraging signs, most U.S. theatres are struggling to get audiences to commit.

It is perhaps a dubious sign of progress that the third anniversary of the COVID shutdown—which in the theatre field is marked as beginning March 12, 2020, the night Broadway went dark, along with most live performance venues across the U.S.—passed fairly quietly a week ago. [ROT’s coverage of the COVID shutdown is catalogued in the afterword to “‘Audiences Are Back, More or Less’” (Rick On Theater: "Audiences Are Back, More or Less"), 18 March 2024.] While we can’t say we are in a post-pandemic world as long as the virus’s daily death count remains in the hundreds and COVID safety advisors remain on theatres’ payrolls, we are, for better or worse, in a post-pandemic posture as a society. Federal relief money, including the Payroll Protection Program (PPP [3 April 2020-31 May 2021]) and the Shuttered Venues Operating Grant (SVOG [1 March 2020-30 June 2021]), which helped theatres keep many employees on payroll and maintain their operations over more than two years, has evaporated, and nearly all theatres, commercial and nonprofit alike, have lifted mask mandates, let alone vaccine requirements.

Indeed, things seem almost . . . normal again at many theatres. But are they? For the vast majority of theatres, the 2022-23 season we’re currently in the midst of is as close to a full return to live, in-person programming as they’ve managed since the COVID shutdown. And that’s a step forward, after many theatres’ plans for the 2021-22 season were scotched by the deadly Omicron [a variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19] wave of fall 2021 and winter 2022 (though Broadway got through a season of plays and musicals, and a fairly interesting one at that). But you don’t have to look far for signs of attrition: When, last fall [September 2022], American Theatre published its first full season preview of TCG member theatres’ programming since fall 2019, the overall quantity of shows submitted for our listings was down more than 40 percent from pre-pandemic levels. It might at least be considered a triumph that most of the shows announced in that issue did make it to the stage, with only a smattering of cancellations and reshufflings, but it’s also clearly an era of diminished expectations.

The more pressing question, now that theatres are back in some kind of business, is: How is business? Are audiences coming back at anything like pre-pandemic levels? And are theatres able to make ends meet? The evidence is mixed, and seems to vary by region, with reports from some theatres in Great Lakes states, including Milwaukee Rep and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, that subscription levels have held firm and may even be on the rise. Others have reported heartening bumps in single-ticket sales, particularly for last year’s holiday offerings, even as subscriptions have slumped. Broadway League president Charlotte St. Martin [St. Martin retired in February 2024] recently reported that Main Stem houses are filling 88 percent of their seats.

Some see these bright spots as leading indicators, but it might [be] more accurate to view them as outliers. The theatre administrators and researchers I spoke to, many of whom shared both hard figures and anecdata with me, told me that audiences and income are down from pre-pandemic levels by anywhere from 20 to 50 percent. That’s a wide chasm, over which the fortunes of America’s theatre industry may hang in the balance.

It’s not that trendlines are all heading in the wrong direction. According to Jill Robinson, CEO & owner of TRG Arts, which collects data on performing arts organizations in the U.S. and U.K., the gap is closing. Using 2019 as a pre-pandemic benchmark, TRG data shows June 2022 theatres reporting admissions down by 51 percent from 2019 levels, and income down by 50 percent. By December 2022, those numbers had shrunk to 33 and 35, respectively.

The issue is the pace of improvement.

“It has been coming back since about May 2021 . . . slowly,” said Zannie Voss, director of SMU DataArts, which gathered data from 200-plus performing arts organizations through 2022. “The question mark now is when is it going to plateau, or is it going to continue to slowly rebuild to earlier levels? That remains to be seen.”

Another rising trend line that is more concerning, but which speaks to theatres’ preparation for the worst: Data collected by Theatre Communications Group, the publisher of American Theatre, shows a sharp increase in the number of theatres projecting deficits into their budgets: While for fiscal year 2021, just 10 percent of theatres projected deficits, for fiscal year 2023 that number is 60 percent.

“Overall, I think 99 percent of us are back now only because of the federal funds that we received, the extraordinary fundraising we did, the generosity of our communities, and decisions that are a bit of a slippery slope, like additional draws from an endowment,” said Jennifer Bielstein, executive director of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, whose current budget is around $22 million. “The key thing to me is that we need more runway. It was assumed by all of us that federal funds would be what we needed to get back fully, but we’re seeing that it is a much slower return and rebuild with a lot of our theatres across the country.” That’s why, she said, ACT is planning with a longer recovery in mind. After a long practice of making mostly three-year contingency plans, she said, “Starting with next fiscal year ’24, we’re looking five years out, thinking that it could take that length of time to get back to where we were.”

Chandra Stephens-Albright, managing director at Atlanta’s True Colors Theatre, is also taking the long view.

“Everyone thought we were crazy when we did our strategic plan in 2020, but it has really helped us stay focused,” said Stephens-Albright, who like many theatre leaders reported a big drop in subscriptions, only partly offset by single-ticket spikes. A focus on the theatre’s mission—to support new work and education, as part of the larger aim of remaining a leading Black theatre in the U.S.—has provided a guiding light through a financially precarious time in which cash flow must be managed “very, very carefully” and seven-show performance weeks have been scaled back to five.

That strategic focus has also created some opportunities. “There’s been some spotlight on how small organizations, Black organizations, have been under-resourced,” she said. “That has got some attention, and it’s opened some doors for us to tell our story—doors that weren’t open before. That’s a positive; it isn’t enough to get us back to where we were pre-pandemic, but it certainly does make more people aware of our work and help advance our strategic objective.”

Greg Reiner, who heads the theatre and musical theatre programs for the National Endowment for the Arts [see the above-referenced 11-part ROT post], pointed to similarly encouraging signs of new participation. Though general relief funds for the field have dried up, the NEA, which just approved its highest level of appropriations ever, did pump $135 million of American Rescue Plan funding through state, regional, and local arts agencies, in addition to its direct grants to arts organizations, and that seed work is bearing fruit. As a result of what he called “a really broad engagement plan,” the endowment is “reaching folks that weren’t even applying to us before. We’ve brought in new, smaller organizations that are now applying through our regular granting programs.”

The NEA’s purview includes a lot of programming outside the realm of traditional, proscenium-based theatre, including work in correctional facilities and educational theatre. Another non-traditional area that has seen growth, according to Alan Brown of the WolfBrown arts consultancy firm, is immersive, virtual, and augmented theatre. But even when he shows theatres research showing that audiences are increasingly less willing to shell out for live, in-person theatre—a pre-pandemic trend that has only accelerated—he said he meets resistance.

“The public has embraced immersive experiences, and commercial producers are running away with millions of dollars in demand for them. That’s not only going to grow—it’s going to explode over the coming years,” Brown said, citing not only the aesthetic possibilities of this technology but also its utility in closed-captioning and enhanced accessibility. “What are nonprofit theatres going to do? Are they going to say, ‘We don’t do that; we’re about a live, authentic experience,’ or are they going to say, ‘Maybe we should figure out if we have a role to play in augmented, immersive, and virtual reality experience’? The theatre field is is pretty progressive compared to the other fields; there’s a good deal of innovative work going on. But you have artistic directors who still want to do important theatrical work on their mainstages for an audience of critics. When I start breathing fire about immersive experiences, I just get blank stares.”

For some theatres, doubling down on the live theatre experience still makes business sense, even after the stress of the pandemic. Milwaukee Rep, for instance, went into its cancelled 2020-21 season with a subscriber base of 16,000; that dropped off to [14,500] in the following year, according to managing director Chad Bauman, but has turned back around. When subscription numbers are tallied next fall, Bauman said he expects the count for the 2023-24 season to surpass pre-pandemic levels.

Milwaukee Rep has done all this without reducing the number of performances, opening last fall with a large-cast musical, Titanic [book by Peter Stone, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston; 20 September-23 October 2023], and running 11 productions since. Like many of its peers, the Rep had projected a deficit for this year, but, said Bauman, “It looks like we’re going to have a break-even budget, because our ticket sales have far outpaced our projections. Next year, we have a $15 million budget, and we don’t anticipate any extraordinary fundraising needs.”

His colleague at ACT, Jennifer Bielstein, told me she wondered if the success story in Milwaukee has something to do with how early in the pandemic that theatre was able to reopen—that is, comparatively earlier than theatres in the Bay Area or New York City. Bauman said that the Rep followed the advice of the Medical College of Wisconsin, and that a member of their board, who is the team doctor of the Milwaukee Bucks and Brewers, “had access to all the protocols that professional sports were going through, and if you remember, sports came back way ahead of everybody else. We were watching what they were doing and how it was working. They were basically testing a lot, creating bubbles, creating all these different protocols.”

Ultimately, though, Equity protocols won out, leading Milwaukee Rep, like many large U.S. theatres, including ACT, to cancel some or all of its 2021-22 season. Perhaps more importantly, Bauman noted that Milwaukee Rep was fully ready to reopen when they had the greenlight. They’d kept 80 percent of their staff on payroll, Bauman said, figuring that if they’d laid off staff, they “would leave Wisconsin, and we would never be able to attract that talent back.”

Bauman gives some credence to the early-reopening theory, noting that many performing arts organizations in the South never really shut down at all, and many in the Midwest were similarly unfazed. “Those that reopened faster, and were allowed to do so by their communities, which historically were in the Midwest and the South, are in a much healthier spot today,” he concluded. “I believe that’s because the longer we were closed down, the more out of sight, out of mind we were, people forgot about us and got addicted to Netflix, and it’s harder to get them off their couch.”

Danny Williams, managing director at Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, seconded the sense that the pandemic shattered some folks’ longtime consumption habits.

“Since we’ve come back, we have seen a decline in subscriptions of around 60 percent,” said Williams, who added that single-ticket sales have been strong for such recent production as Dominique Morisseau’s Confederates [11 February-5 March 2023] and A Christmas Carol [adapted by stage and artistic director (Hartford Stage, 1998-2011) Michael Wilson; 20 November-30 December 2022]. He attributed the drop-off to a number of factors: “One is the pandemic breaking the cycle of people just renewing; it just was something that you did—you got your letter in the mail and you sent in your money and you picked your dates. I think the other is that the demographics have changed; there are folks who are aging out of going to the theatre, and the new folks who are joining us aren’t necessarily the ones looking for a subscription. Folks younger than 50 or so definitely are not looking to drop a couple of $100 at once to commit to a season worth of plays. They want to see what they want when they want to see it.”

This change has been a major focus of WolfBrown’s research. Said Alan Brown, “I think COVID accelerated macro trends that existed well before the pandemic—shifts in public tastes and in consumer behavior, like late planning behavior. People can’t make up their minds that they’re gonna go out, often until the last minute now, and that’s wreaking havoc on marketing. People’s lives are more complicated. I don’t think that’s changing. I think that’s more or less a permanent condition. So do we fight that and keep trying to get people to buy in advance, or do we offer a late buyers’ club?”

Jamie Alexander, director of the consulting team at the firm JCA Arts Marketing, has tracked a similar crash in subscriptions, noting that among all performing arts organizations, theatres have been both hardest hit by the dropoff and the most adventurous in trying new substitutes. She pointed to membership options like Steppenwolf’s [Chicago] Black Card, Woolly Mammoth’s [Washington, D.C.] Golden Ticket, and ZACH Theatre’s [Austin, Texas] Zach XP, as well as tech-enabled opportunities for “cross-media loyalty programs.”

“Our study shows that there’s definitely growth in the people and number of organizations that are doing those sorts of programs, and there’s growth in those programs,” said Alexander. “I mean, it’s tepid—it’s not the runaway hit that subscriptions once were. But it’s something that’s growing as opposed to shrinking.”

SMU DataArts’s Zannie Voss, whose studies have shown, among other things, a troubling drop-off in corporate support for the arts, also sounded a cautionary note about plans to simply refill theatre seats. The urgency around getting people to return defines the problem the wrong way; in that framing, she said, “The organization is meeting its own need, its own desire to produce work they need people to come see, rather than thinking about, is the work that you’re doing super relevant to the community you’re serving? If it’s a community of artists you’re serving, if that’s your reason for being—great. But a profound sense of relevance is critical at a time like this.”

JCA’s Alexander concurred. “The thing I always say is, just talk to the community. What do they want, not just artistically—what do they want? What is going to speak to them? What will they pay for? Doing the research is really important. I feel like often people will just be like, ‘Oh, let’s just do a new flex package,’ and they haven’t figured out if there’s good evidence or data to promote that, and then they just waste money on promoting it.”

The challenge of marketing individual shows while also creating loyalty and awareness among theatregoers takes constant, even granular attention. Said Stephens-Albright, “We had stopped doing direct mail, but we started doing direct mail again—but very targeted. Now we do direct mail within a two-mile radius of the theatre, because heat maps tell us that people come from a certain set of zip codes.” She said she also focuses on “identifying people that are specific ambassadors, like, ‘I need you to go after these: These are your folks, go get them.’”

Zooming out, the theatres that have fared best, according to TRG’s Jill Robinson, are the ones that were not only aggressive about fundraising but about programming, despite the pandemic—the ones who said, as she put it, “‘We’re going to get back to business as soon as we can—we’re going to be outdoors, we’re going to do it digitally. We’re going to do everything we can to get back going.’ The companies that did that are in the strongest position, because they have databases that are more active, they have staff teams that have not lost momentum and skill. They have the best likelihood of heading into 2024 and ’25 feeling like they’ve got the furnace and the fuel.” Those organizations also were more likely to do what she calls “both-and programming—both programming in ways they know audiences will come back to in volume, as well as things they know that people who really love theatre will show up for, and that they know missionally they want to do for their community.”

Alan Brown is less sanguine.

“It’s curious—what made us so resilient is also what’s making us slow to change,” he said. Looking back on past three years, he marveled, “People doubled down and worked unbelievably long hours, boards of directors came together and worked together like never before, and people homed in on their core work. They didn’t have to think about innovation and new products. They could just focus in—and nearly everyone survived.” But with relief money dried up, the reality of producing again in a changed world is bringing some theatres up short. Brown offered this analogy, “What do you call it when you’re driving on the highway, on mountainous terrain, and they have those escape routes for trucks that can’t go up? We’re on one of those.” Now that the rubber is hitting the road, so to speak, Brown warned, “I think the other shoe has not yet dropped, and it’s about to. There’s going to be a lot of painful downsizing and potentially more paradigmatic change.”

The pain may be unwelcome, but change is not. The NEA’s Reiner, citing the endowment’s current chair, Maria Rosario Jackson, said, “Dr. Jackson has been talking about resisting the instinct to just snap back to the way it was before. There’s an opportunity here for a new reality. The arts ecosystem is demanding new ways of working, new ways of gauging success and progress. So there’s an opportunity here to take stock and figure out what we’ve learned, and to reimagine how we work, to move on from past practices, because a lot of those practices weren’t working before the pandemic. What are the opportunities to make arts participation more relevant and accessible and equitable?”

I asked most of my interviewees about their level of optimism for the field; most were upbeat, relatively speaking, and seemed as eager to face current challenges as they were clear-eyed about the scale of them. True Colors’ Stephens-Albright put it best.

“I’m not nervous and panicked,” she said. “You can’t be nervous and panicked and work in theatre, especially if you got through 2020.” But, succinctly summing up the field’s next mandate, she concluded, “We’re gonna have to change our tactics.”

[Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.

[In the American Theatre issue for Spring 2024, there are two articles pertinent to this examination: “Wish You Were Here: A Radical Access Roundtable,” moderated by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho, in which access consultants and artists discuss how they create sensory-conscious shows for disabled folks and their families, as well as how radical inclusivity enhances theater for everyone, and “Subscriptions Are Dead. Long Live Subscriptions!” by Rosie Brownlow-Calkin, where theater leaders talk about what’s working and what’s not in their efforts to change theatergoers’ ticket-buying habits. 

[The contents of these AT articles are very pertinent to the thrust of my Regional Theater Series.  I may, therefore, republish them on Rick On Theater in the coming weeks or months.  (The issue isn’t currently available online.)]

Understudies

[The two articles below, both from “Datebook” in the San Francisco Chronicle, are about understudies in the theater.  I’ve posted on understudies before, in “'The Unique Experience of a Professional Broadway Understudy’” by Steve Adubato (published on Rick On Theater on 22 August 2018) and “Swings” (9 March 2016), a collection of pieces from Equity News. 

[As Backstage, the theater industry trade newspaper, puts it, “an understudy is a performer cast in the ensemble of a musical (or a minor role in a play) who is responsible for covering a supporting or lead role” (“Swing, Standby, Understudy: What You Need to Know” [Swing, Standby, Understudy: What's the Difference? | Backstage], 22 March 2022).  ‘Covering’ in this usage means, of course, ‘replacing temporarily.’

[A “swing,” as which some of the performers featured below served, is a kind of understudy, common in musicals, who “is an off-stage performer responsible for covering any number of ensemble tracks, sometimes as many as 12 or more.”  A third type of understudy is the “standby,” “an off-stage performer whose sole responsibility is to cover the lead (usually a star) in a production.”

[Backstage expanded its definitions: “An understudy is in fact in the cast of a show for every performance, generally in an ensemble track or less sizable principal role.  However, they also understudy a larger role and their track will be filled by a swing if and when they are called upon to play that larger part.”

[“A swing is responsible for learning a number of tracks—ensemble and principal—so they’re able to step in at a moment’s notice if anyone in the cast calls out.  In most cases, a swing will step into a member of the ensemble’s role when that person has stepped into the more principal role they understudied.  Most nights, a swing is not actually on stage—and yet, the role is largely considered to be one of the most challenging gigs in theater.”

[“A standby is similar to a swing in that they rarely actually perform.  Standbys are granted only the heftiest roles in theater and are there to do exactly that: standby in the event that the actor is unable to perform. . . .  They cover just one role and must be ready to tackle it at any time.”

[In addition to swings and understudies, I’ve posted articles on ROT that define, describe, or explain the efforts of theater workers about whom most non-theater people (whom one of my teachers dubbed “civilians”) know little—or even nothing at all.  On 7 September 2010, for instance, my friend Kirk Woodward posted an article on being a Broadway investor in “Broadway Angel.”

[Then, on 14 January 2014, I posted “Stage Hands,” a description of the work of stage managers and dance captains; in “Two (Back) Stage Pros” (30 June 2014).  I ran articles that profiled set designer Eugene Lee and wig-designer Paul Huntley and on 28 November 2015, I posted “Broadway’s Anonymous Stars,” an article about actors who replace original stars on stage.

[I followed those posts with articles on theatrical intimacy coordinators (26 May 2019, plus follow-ups) and a theater photographer and another dance captain (6 May 2020), reviewers (6 July 2020), and theater boards (11 November 2022).

[I have also run several series of articles from American Theatre magazine on theater artists such as lighting designers (24 October-11 November 2018] and sound designers (25 March-9 April 2021), among others, and even pros on the business side of theater like arts administrators (2-17 December 2020).] 

“BAY AREA ACTORS ON UNDERSTUDYING DURING OMICRON,
WHEN THEY’RE NEEDED AS NEVER BEFORE”
by Lily Janiak 

[This report appeared in “Datebook” online on 18 January 2022 (updated: 19 January 2022).  “Datebook” is the art and entertainment guide for in the San Francisco Bay Area—books, theater, music, pop culture, and more—in the SFChronicle.]

Theater always depends on understudies, but never more so than in the omicron [a variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19] winter.

In late December on Broadway, “The Music Man” lead actor Hugh Jackman gave a moving curtain-call tribute to the industry’s unsung heroes after understudy Kathy Voytko filled in for Sutton Foster.

[Jackman made his remarks after the fourth preview performance on 23 December 2021, the night Voytko stepped in for Foster, who had tested positive for COVID.]

“I’m emotional because it humbles me — the courage, the brilliance, the dedication, the talent,” Jackman said in the widely circulated speech. “The swings, the understudies — they are the bedrock of Broadway.”

At around the same time, though, Broadway League President Charlotte St. Martin made comments (for which she later apologized) in a Hollywood Reporter interview theorizing that one reason some shows were closing was that some understudies “aren’t as efficient in delivering the role as the lead is” or weren’t as experienced.

[St. Martin’s comments appeared in “Broadway Boss Reveals Industry Plan Amid Omicron: ‘We’re Not Closing’” by Abby White, 20 December 2021.  St. Martin retired as Broadway League president in February 2024.]

These two incidents span extremes of the understudy experience. Understudies are hailed as saviors; they’re overlooked or disparaged as makeshifts.

For understudies in the Bay Area right now, as the variant makes them more in demand than ever, the reality is even more complicated.

For musicals at large companies and on Broadway, there’s an elaborate taxonomy for understudying. An umbrella term is “covering.” An “understudy” will usually already be performing an unnamed part in the ensemble but be prepared to cover for a named character. A “standby” waits offstage but is also prepared to cover a lead character. A “swing” can cover any track in the ensemble. At smaller companies, “understudy” might cover all these roles.

“Your job as the understudy is to keep the show open so that the work that all these other performers did can still happen,” said San Francisco actor Nic A. Sommerfeld, who’s understudied locally five times, including stepping up four times in Marin Theatre Company’s “Georgiana and Kitty: Christmas at Pemberley” this winter.

“There can be the stress of whether you match up, whether you’re quote-unquote ‘as good,’” Sommerfeld added, “and I don’t think that attitude is as helpful as just remembering that what you’re doing is making the show have another performance.” 

That doesn’t mean that understudying isn’t artistic, noted Vishal Vaidya, who’s currently understudying for John Gallagher Jr. in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s “Swept Away” while also serving as an ensemble member.

“Someone like John Gallagher is a magical actor,” he said. “I can’t re-create that magic; I have to find my own magic.”

“Understudying is a blend,” he went on. “You don’t want the audience or the other actors to really feel like so much is different, because you have to honor the show that was built, but in order to honor the truth of the acting, you have to give it your flavor.”

Sommerfeld, who uses plural pronouns, found themself delving deeper into craft as they kept covering for principal actor Zahan F. Mehta, who had a back injury.

“The first show was just about making it happen. It was honestly a blur to me,” they said.

Their character happened to be a nervous person, so they were able to draw on their own in-the-moment feelings. “But by the fourth time I did the show, I found myself almost wishing I was getting notes,” they recalled. “I was starting to lean into certain moments and, other than audience reaction, didn’t really know what worked.”

San Francisco freelance casting director and Casting Collective founding member Laura Espino, who this season is casting San Francisco Playhouse’s shows, said that understudying demands a special kind of artist.

“You have to be satisfied with just playing the part in front of your closet mirror in your bedroom — and do it just as well,” she said.

Understudies have to deal with at least as much stress for a fraction of the glory and usually less pay. Self-motivation is key.

“You are the rehearsal process,” Espino said. “You are your director.”

Still, there can be great joy in it. San Francisco actor Michael Phillis recalled going on as understudy in his favorite role in his favorite play — Prior Walter in “Angels in America” — at Berkeley Rep in 2018.

“Your whole career flashes before your eyes,” he said. “You’re about to prove what all that money and study and struggle to be an actor was for.”

But there can also be deep concern for a lead actor who’s hurt or sick. Actor Kenny Toll, who’s now based in New York, remembered filling in for Joe Estlack, who had a back injury, during two technical rehearsals for “Bonnie & Clyde” at Shotgun Players, with the possibility that he might have to perform as well. He was ready to help — it was his job — but Toll and everyone else’s concern for Estlack, who soon recovered, cast a pall.

“Understudying is not as glorious or wonderful as it’s often portrayed,” Toll said. “It was a really awful thing. (The show) was Joe’s piece. That piece of theater was built for his body.”

Understudying demands extraordinary memory. San Francisco actor Rodney Earl Jackson Jr. has worked in various understudy capacities in several Broadway shows and tours — “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations,” “Motown: The Musical,” “The Book of Mormon” and, most recently, “A Christmas Carol” at BroadwaySF’s Golden Gate Theatre. In “Ain’t Too Proud,” he had to know all five harmonies of the five Temptations; he also had to memorize separate choreographies — who entered on beats one, three, five and so on.

“I’ve got to have the mental capacity and gymnastics to switch between them,” he said.

Jacob Keith Watson, another “Swept Away” ensemble member and understudy, says that his many years of understudying and swinging have given him an odd skill.

“I call it ‘swing brain,’ where you accidentally know other people’s stuff,” he said. It comes from having to learn where and how to enter and exit, to grab and deposit every prop, all by watching from afar instead of doing it himself.

“Randomly, someone will be like, ‘I don’t remember where I come in,’ and out of nowhere, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, you come in stage left. Couldn’t tell you why I know that. I just saw it once, and it stuck in my brain.’ ”

That skill comes somewhat in handy right now in rehearsal, when his ensemble role in “Swept Away” requires him to be asleep and keep his eyes closed for a long stretch — time when in an ideal world he’d be simultaneously observing Wayne Duvall, the actor he’s understudying. “I can kind of hear that he’s stage right,” Watson said.

Right now, Espino said, the bulk of her work at the Casting Collective — a small, new local outfit — is finding understudies, as a result of concerns about the omicron variant. The increased likelihood that an understudy will go on, she added, is tantamount to having to cast a role twice.

At Berkeley Rep, Vaidya, Watson and other understudies don’t go anywhere besides their hotel or the theater. They know that if they took risks, they’d risk everyone else’s health too. They’re also aware that these gigs, with a greater chance that at some point they’ll have to perform, could mean exposing themselves to contagion. Yet union actors don’t qualify for health insurance unless they work a certain number of weeks per year, which complicates the calculus for any job opportunity.

Still, Vaidya spoke with calm pragmatism about the possibility of filling in: “I’m ready, but I’m still going to feel like I’m shot out of a cannon.”

[Lily Janiak is the San Francisco Chronicle’s theater reviewer.] 

*  *  *  *
“‘ASTONISHMENT, HORROR AND GLEE’:
BAY AREA UNDERSTUDIES RECOUNT ON- AND OFFSTAGE DRAMA”
by Lily Janiak 

[The second article from “Datebook” was also posted to the SFChronicle’s website on 18 January 2022.  It continues the conversation about understudying with actors in the Bay Area.  Below this article is a list of the theaters and shows mentioned in the two Chronicle articles.]

Everyone loves an understudy story — when the drama behind the scenes rivals and perhaps heightens what’s onstage, when the art form reveals how the sausage is made, when routine evaporates and every gesture, glance and line crackles with danger and life.

This winter, as the omicron variant makes the industry rely on understudies as never before, The Chronicle solicited Bay Area performers (or those with local ties) for their all-time favorite understudy memories. Here are a few, including one where actor Vinh G. Nguyen understudied in two different shows in one day:

Name: Valerie Weak

Understudy role: Viola in TheatreWorks’ “Twelfth Night,” 2007

“I had a dream where I had to go on last minute. It was terrifying, and in the dream there was a problem with me fitting into the costume. I woke up before I had to deliver any lines. I realized it had only been a dream. Then I realized it was June. The show had run the previous December and had been closed for six months. Understudying is an exercise in anxiety!”

Name: Alex Moggridge

Understudy role: Shakespeare in ACT’s “The Beard of Avon,” 2002

“At the end of the first act, Shakespeare has a gorgeous speech where he suddenly shows his amazing poetic side for the first time, impressing the hell out of the Earl of Oxford, played by Marco Barricelli. On my first performance, I completely biffed that speech. Like, it was gone. I have no idea what I said, but it was not what (playwright) Amy Freed wrote, and it was definitely not poetic.

I’ll always remember the look Marco — who I kind of worshiped and badly wanted to impress — gave me when he delivered his line in response. The line was ‘That’s not bad.’ And it was so bad. It was so, so bad. Marco’s look was a beautiful combination of astonishment, horror and glee. He almost winked at me.”

Name: Laura Domingo

Understudy role: Maria in Fairfield Civic Theatre’s “Lend me a Tenor,” 2013

“I played Maria in ‘Lend Me a Tenor’ originally with Ross Valley Players in the fall of 2012. Then in late January, now-defunct Fairfield Civic Theatre was about to open their own production when their Maria got a really bad case of the flu during tech week. It hadn’t been that long since I’d played the role, so the lines definitely came back quickly.

I think every actor has that period after a show has closed and you’ve had some space from it where you sit and think of all the things you would have done differently with the character, if you could do it all over again. And this was my opportunity to make some of those adjustments!”

Name: Benjamin Ismail

Understudy role: Damis in Berkeley Rep’s “Tartuffe,” 2015

“As soon as the cast arrived for Berkeley rehearsals, I was tapped that I’d potentially be going on for almost an entire week of performances.

[Berkeley Rep’s Tartuffe was a co-production with Costa Mesa, California’s South Coast Repertory and Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company following the Berkeley mounting. The cast of the production was drawn from all three regions and assembled in each city for each presentation.]

I immediately drove down from Sacramento, learned the lines and blocking in (stage manager) Michael Suenkel’s office and was thrown onstage after watching one run. It was the fastest I think my brain has ever worked: trying to synthesize everything I was seeing and convert the actor’s choices into my versions of the same moments, do intricate blocking and — oh, yeah — say things. I was terrified and electrified.

Apparently they liked what I did because that led to a lovely relationship with Berkeley Rep and several more roles, including Louis Ironson in ‘Angels in America,’ an experience which will probably live in the most special corner of my heart for the rest of my life. And it all really ‘started’ with my shot as an understudy.”

Name: Mark Jackson

Understudy role: Characters in Shotgun Players’ “The Death of Meyerhold,” 2004

“I wrote and directed but did not perform — until one night an actor got sick, and the next night with 30 minutes notice I went on. Harrowing.

With 80 characters for the cast of 12 to play, and scenic changes also being actor-driven, the offstage show was as tightly choreographed as the onstage show. Moments of ‘break’ were rare. I have memories of seeing actors standing in the wings, beautifully lit by ambient light from onstage, closing their eyes for a precious few-seconds-long meditation before then leaping out into action. I already admired that cast for the depth of commitment and enthusiasm they brought to that piece (but) seeing their backstage ‘show’ up close, and especially the various ways in which they helped fold me into it on the fly, to keep me and the piece on track, only heightened my appreciation for what they had accomplished.

The next night when the actor returned, I was never so happy to see another human being in my life!”

Name: Vinh G. Nguyen

Understudy roles: Hilarion in Bay Area Children’s Theatre’s “Gold: The Midas Musical” and a male ensemble track in Palo Alto Players’ “Flower Drum Song,” 2019

“On one particular Saturday, I went on for two performances for ‘Gold’ in the morning and afternoon. One of the actors knew he was going to be out. I did my homework, came in, and they did a put-in rehearsal, which was nice.

I drove to ‘Flower Drum,’ and we knew that one of my castmates had injured himself the performance before, but we didn’t know how bad it was until the next day. I got a call. I ended up covering for him, along with my track. Luckily, my other track didn’t have to be onstage for the book scenes, so I just learned it really quick and hopped on. It was crazy, crazy, crazy.

As human beings we are so adaptable. I think we give ourselves less credit than we deserve. As a director, one of the things I’m very proud of is I’m very decisive. I can make a decision on the spot and back up my artistic decision and articulate that very clearly. I think some of that had to do with my experience as an actor and the times when I was swinging and had to direct myself and see what is the best course of action that will benefit the show and the bigger picture.”

Name: Lauri Smith

Understudy role: Becky in Berkeley Rep’s “Becky Nurse of Salem,” 2019

“My now-fiance and I  were hosting a football-watching party. The 49ers were playing the Seattle Seahawks. We had a bunch of people arriving at our house at 5 p.m. At around 5:15, somebody noticed that I wasn’t having anything to drink. I looked at my watch, and I said, ‘I have to wait until 6:35 for a 7 o’clock show, just on the off-chance that something happens.’ I swear to you, my phone rang when I finished that sentence. I saw the name on the phone, and it said Michael Suenkel. Michael said, ‘I really wish I was making this call in a couple of weeks.’

We had had one understudy rehearsal but hadn’t even finished it. They didn’t have clothes for me, so he started naming, ‘Can you bring a pair of shoes? Can you bring a pair of jeans? Can you bring a shirt of your own?’ I had to drive to the theater in the pouring rain, and, rapid-fire, the lines were going through my head. 

I wear a necklace around my neck most days that has a charm that says ‘Believe,’ a penguin charm, and then the third charm is an infinity symbol with my mother’s ashes in it. I took it off and laid it in my spot in front of the mirror. ‘Becky Nurse’ was so much about magic. It was sort of like I was tapping into my mother and my ancestors and their power to help give me a little extra something. I even remember thinking of Pamela (Reed, the lead actor) several blocks away. She had said something about being the channel for the role to speak through her. It was almost like I was like, ‘OK, Pamela, if you could direct some energy a couple of blocks this way so that I could be the channel tonight?’

During the first monologue, there was a moment in the middle where I finished a sentence, and I had no idea what came next. I inhaled. A thought came to me. I knew it wasn’t the next line, but it popped into my head and I just kept going.

Afterward, I had so much adrenaline going through me. I felt like I was going to be up until 4 in the morning. I wanted to do it again.”

Name: Mary Lins

Understudy role: The Baker’s Wife in Berkeley Playhouse’s “Into the Woods,” 2021

“On Thursday, at around 5 o’clock, we made the final call. That started my clock. I left all of my managing director duties and had about 26, 27 hours before curtain.

I have a background in performing — I went to school for it — but it had been 20 years. It’s a big role, and it’s Sondheim. With the timing of his death, for me there was an element of truly wanting to honor that work. As a staff member at the theater, there’s also a piece of, ‘I still have to show up for work on Monday.’

I was already off book. It was basically like auditing a class. I had sat through a lot of rehearsals, but I had not been on my feet. It was like reading and memorizing an entire textbook on how to ride a bike but never actually having hopped on a bike.

I had to make this choice to trust, and it paid off in this really human way, especially after having a couple of years where we’re separated from others.

Every time I walked backstage with the other cast members, it was like the wildest pep rally of my life. I felt like I had gotten to crowd surf through the show.

The challenge and the joy of theater really is a practice of people coming corporately together and making it happen. As a managing director, I’m looking at rights and royalties, contact lists and budgets. But to actually have the honor of embodying the thing that I’m usually managing was such a gift.”

[Below are lists of the Bay Area theaters and productions named in the two SFChronicle articles above.  I’ve listed them in the order of the reports; if I could find a web address for the theater, I’ve included it in the information noted.]

BROADWAY PRODUCTIONS

The Music Man: Winter Garden Theatre, 10 February 2022-15 January 2023

Ain’t Too Proud: Imperial Theatre, 21 March 2019-16 January 2022

Motown: Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 14 April 2013-18 January 2015

Book of Momon: Eugene O’Neill Theatre, 24 March 2011-Present

BAY AREA THEATERS

Marin Theatre Company (https://www.marintheatre.org/) – 397 Miller Avenue, Mill Valley, CA 94941-2885; (415) 388-5200; e-mail: info@marintheatre.org

Berkeley Repertory Theatre (aka: Berkeley Rep; https://www.berkeleyrep.org/) – Admin Offices: 999 Harrison Street, Berkeley CA 94710; (510) 647-2900; e-mail: customerservice@berkeleyrep.org

San Francisco Playhouse (https://www.sfplayhouse.org) – 450 Post Street, San Francisco, CA 94102; (415) 677-9596; e-mail: info@sfplayhouse.org

Shotgun Players (https://shotgunplayers.org/) – 1901 Ashby Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94703; (510) 841-6500, ext. 303; e-mail: boxoffice@shotgunplayers.org

BroadwaySF Golden Gate Theatre (aka: Golden Gate Theatre; https://www:broadwaysf.com) – 1 Taylor Street, San Francisco, CA 94102; booking house, no resident company; (888) 746-1799; e-mail: feedback@broadwaysf.com

TheatreWorks (aka: TheatreWorks Silicon Valley; https://theatreworks.org/) – Admin Offices: 350 Twin Dolphin Drive, Suite 127, Redwood City, San Mateo County, CA 94065; (877) 662- 8978; e-mail: boxoffice@theatreworks.org

American Conservatory Theatre (aka: ACT; https://www.act-sf.org/) –  415 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94102; Box Office: (415) 749-2228; e-mail: tickets@act-sf.org

Fairfield Civic Theatre – community theater in Fairfield, Solano County, California; now defunct (before 2021)

Ross Valley Players (http://www.rossvalleyplayers.com/) – 30 Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, Ross, Marin County, CA 94957; Admin Office (415) 456-9555 ext. 3

Bay Area Children’s Theatre – closed in 2023; formerly located in Oakland, California

Palo Alto Players (https://paplayers.org/) – Lucie Stern Theater, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto, CA 94301; (650) 329-0891; e-mail: info@paplayers.org

Berkeley Playhouse (https://berkeleyplayhouse.org/) – 2640 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704; Main Office  (510) 845-8542; boxoffice@berkeleyplayhouse.org

BAY AREA PRODUCTIONS

Georgiana and Kitty: by Lauren M. Gunderson and Margot Melcon; Marin Theatre Company; 18 November-19 December 2021 (world première)

Swept Away: book by John Logan, music and lyrics by The Avett Brothers; Berkeley Rep; 9 January-13 March 2022

Angels in America: by Tony Kushner; Berkeley Rep; 17 April-22 July 2018

Bonnie & Clyde: by Adam Peck; Shotgun Players; 17 August-19 September 2013

Christmas Carol: by Jack Thorne; Golden Gate Theatre; 26 November-26 December 2021

Twelfth Night: by William Shakespeare (et al.); TheatreWorks Silicon Valley (@ Lucie Stern Theatre, Palo Alto); 28 November-23 December 2007

The Beard of Avon: by Amy Freed; ACT; 10 January-10 February 2002

Lend Me a Tenor: by Ken Ludwig; Fairfield Civic Theatre; January 2013 (I could find no detailed record of this show by the now-defunct theater troupe; it was named in an article on the production and coverage of local theater awards, the Arty Awards of Solano and Napa Counties, but its performance dates weren’t reported)

                   Ross Valley Players; 11 September-12 October 2012

Tartuffe: by Molière; Berkeley Rep (co-production with South Coast Repertory [9 May-8 June 2015] of Costa Mesa, California, and Shakespeare Theatre Company [2 June-5 July 2015] of Washington, D.C.; I can’t reconcile the overlap of the dates of the closing at SCR and the opening at STC); 13 March-12 April 2015

The Death of Meyerhold: by Mark Jackson; Shotgun Players; 11-28 December 2003/7-25 January 2004 (world première)

Gold: The Midas Musical: book, music, and lyrics by Min Kahng; Bay Area Children’s Theatre; 23 February-12 May 2019 (world première)

Flower Drum Song: book by Oscar Hammerstein II, music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers; Palo Alto Players; 26 April-12 May 2019

Becky Nurse of Salem: by Sarah Ruhl; Berkeley Rep; 19 December 2019-26 January 2020 (world première)

Into the Woods: book by James Lapine, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; Berkeley Playhouse; 19 November-23 December 2021

An Odd Coupling

by Kirk Woodward

[In his first contribution to Rick on Theater since the start of the year (“Keeping Up with Mr. Dylan,” 1 January), my friend Kirk Woodward is taking a perhaps surprising look at two popular plays by two esteemed playwrights—and finding profound commonalities between them.  

[Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George, a musical about a renowned 19th-century painter and his 20th-century descendant, and Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, a comedy about two aging comics, are not only two different plays, they’re two different kinds of plays.

[Kirk’s been contributing to ROT since the earliest days of the blog—I started it largely at his suggestion—so I’ve gotten used to his proclivity of looking at things from unexpected perspectives.  “An Odd Coupling” is no exception.  You will find here an interesting and provocative look at art, artists, and personal relationships.]

Over a period of a few weeks I saw productions of the musical Sunday in the Park with George and the play The Sunshine Boys and noticed a connection between the two, which I will describe here, partly to clarify the matter for my friends who, I believe, think I have lost my mind. 

Sunday in the Park with George, of course, is the 1983 musical with a book by James Lapine (b. 1949) and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (1930-1921). The first act of the musical dramatizes the efforts of the painter Georges Seurat (1859-1891) to create his large (6.6 feet by 9.8 feet) pointillist masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

The second act of Sunday presents a contemporary art scene and the efforts of one of Seurat’s mistress’s descendants to make his own mark in the world of art.

The Sunshine Boys is a 1972 play by Neil Simon (1927-2018) about the efforts of a pair of mostly retired vaudevillians to work together after an acrimonious breakup eleven years earlier.

From these brief descriptions, connections between the two works may not be obvious. Since Neil Simon wrote plays based “odd couples,” mismatched relationships, we might think of these two pieces as an “odd couple,” or perhaps an “odd coupling.” 

However, there is a theme common to both shows (or, more accurately, to one show and one act of the other), a theme presented in the poem “The Choice” by Wiliam Butler Yeats (1865-1939), the first four lines of which read:

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

In both plays discussed here, an artist finds his (all concerned are men) life so impacted by his art that relationships with other people, particularly with those closest to him, are almost impossible to maintain.

In Sunday, the relationship in question is between Georges, the painter, and Dot, his mistress. She would give anything for an affectionate relationship with him, but he is obsessed with his painting, for which she is modeling. Ultimately she leaves him; he doesn’t seem to understand exactly why, but he is so wedded to his craft that he is unwilling to do anything about it.

In Sunshine the two former vaudevillians, Al Lewis and Louie Clark, once the team of “Lewis and Clark,” are so wedded to comedy patter that it’s no longer possible for them to have a conversation without resorting to gags and punchlines.

In the process they have gotten so tired of each other that when offered an opportunity to perform together again for money and prestige, they can’t manage to work together at all. Insults are pretty much the sum total of their communication with each other, and with everyone else.

Both plays raise the question of whether it’s worthwhile to sacrifice life for art. We can ask, is this a genuine choice? There are a number of ways to look at this question. A starting point might be a comment that the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) made on Yeats’ poem. Auden questioned whether “perfection” was possible in either art or life. He doubted that it was.

His question seems relevant to say the least. Is Yeats saying that perfection is possible, either in art or in life? What does “perfection” mean – perfection in terms of what? What would perfection look like? Since we are – I would say – imperfect people, how would we even recognize perfection if we saw it?

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has a character say that

                                 as imagination bodies forth
            The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
            Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
            A local habitation and a name.

Art makes “local” – it brings to a particular time and place – the material that it draws on. Under those conditions what could “perfection” mean? The artist who aims for some kind of abstract success is almost certainly headed for disappointment. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), for example, intended his giant five-play series Back to Methuselah (see “Re-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1918 to 1933” by Kirk Woodward, 23 August 2016) to be a “world classic.” Some of his plays are; those particular five are not.

If “perfect” art isn’t possible, surely on the other hand “good work” is not only possible but is frequently created, possibly even without the artist’s “raging in the dark.”

The playwright Noël Coward (1899-1973) surely spoke for many artists when he said, in his introduction to the first collection of his works, Play Parade (1933), that his aim in writing was to do work of which he could be proud, and, by so doing, to earn his living. The relative modesty of those ambitions lacks the drama of Yeats’ formulation, but is achievable.

Mentioning Coward leads to another way of considering the question of the roles of art and life, and that is to consider the question from the point of view of the artist’s relationships, not to art, but to people. Coward, to continue with his example, was a sociable, companiable person, with too many friends to count.

Not everyone is Noël Coward, of course – probably a good thing for all of us, as I’m sure he’d admit – but his career does demonstrate that the split between life and art in the characters in Sunday and Sunshine is somewhat hyperbolical.

In both Sunday and Sunshine the choice between art and life is absolute and drastic. Are there no artists who are able to maintain good relationships with others, including those closest to them? Or – as I suppose some would argue – is no one (other than Coward) able to maintain such relationships?

I don’t know the answer to those questions, and any answer surely would be a matter of opinion. Clearly choosing to do any one thing means choosing not to do something else at that moment – if, say, I want to play the piano for half an hour, in that time frame I won’t be able to play with the dog.

However, there’s some degree of difficulty in any relationship, and people handle many of those difficulties successfully – otherwise there would probably be few of us around. Both Sunday and Sunshine present either/or cases – they seem to suggest that one utterly succeeds with a relationship, or utterly fails.

And there’s something else in the situations presented in the two plays that gives one pause. Are we talking about art in this discussion, or are we simply looking at psychological states? To be specific, isn’t Seurat obsessive, as described in the dictionary: “Having an idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on one’s mind.”

His obsession is his pointillist style of art: “A technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image.”

Such a style of painting would be attractive to someone with obsessive tendencies, and they could easily take over that person’s life – one estimate is that the Sunday Afternoon painting contains some 220,000 dots! How much of Seurat’s accomplishment is simply due to an obsessive temperament?

The question, of course, is unfair; all art works are created by somebody, just as all artist works are something (even if that “something” is nothing more than a thought, as in Conceptual Art), and everyone has human traits. The point is, though, that Sunday presents Georges entirely as an artist dedicated to his art, where another observer might advise more time off, or less coffee.

And aren’t Al and Louie, in Sunshine, compulsive in their need to turn every action, every sentence, every thought into comedy? The dictionary says that compulsion is “an irresistible urge.” Louie (and Al, but to a much lesser extent as we see him) simply has to verbally slap anybody he talks with, at the expense of anything else, including career, money, and personal relationships.

Neil Simon might agree with this diagnosis, although I doubt that he would emphasize it; as mentioned earlier, his principal concern is to present people who simply can’t get along with each other, and yet have to somehow. But, again, one can ask if we’re not dealing, not just with art (in this case comedy), but with severe neurosis.

Or are they the same? Laura Thipphawong, in her article “Art Theory: Freudian Psychoanalysis” (artshelp.com), writes that

To view art not as material, but as evidence of the most inaccessible features of the mind, transcended art into the realm of endless philosophical possibilities, as complex, frustrating, and challenging as the mind itself.

It would be pointless to name painters and comedians who, as far as we can tell, have maintained at least outwardly successful and apparently happy relationships and marriages. No one can really know what’s the actual state of a marriage – sometimes not even of the state of one’s own.

Still, I am reluctant to generalize from Sunday and Sunshine to a general admiration of people who end up sacrificing everything for their art (or for anything else – one can find such behavior in business, in social relationships, in hobbies – in practically anything, actually). In fact, neither of those shows actually end up doing that, although they come close.

Many plays present a protagonist who makes a choice that flies in the face of convention, law, family, or many other things. Sunday and Sunshine are not alone in that. Both those shows focus on artists; art is not the only arena in which people act in ways that may be considered heroic or, alternately, obsessive or compulsive or both.

As a matter of fact, when discussing Sunday, we’re only talking about its first act. In the second act, as I interpret it, the theme of art versus life is barely touched on. We hear that George, Dot’s great-grandson, is divorced, and we see his wife, but that relationship is not presented in any detail.

Instead, George, in Act II, is primarily focused on something to create art about. There is a suggestion that he will find his inspiration in life if he looks for it. However, this suggestion is at most peripheral to the large conflict between art and life presented in the first act.

And in Sunshine, Louis and Al at the very end of the play manage to achieve at least a working arrangement – they will continue to joke and jab, but they will talk. This, and the faint suggestion of a new path at the end of Sunday, are the only signs in the two shows that perhaps art and personal life don’t need to be such complete opposites after all.

In Sunday Georges never gets to evaluate his choice (and in fact he died abruptly when he was only 31), but a later George at least begins to. In Sunshine it’s almost too late for adjustments, but maybe Louis and Al have a chance.

Artists have to take their own paths; none of us has any business telling them what they ought to do, and in return we are free to make our own decisions about the results. The relative values we put on work and on personal relationships in our own lives, of course, are choices we have to make for ourselves.