Guess who else hates Diane Paulus?

The arts blog at the Times has printed a letter Stephen Sondheim (left) has sent to the editor regarding its fawning coverage of Diane Paulus's "updating" of Porgy and Bess. And boy, does our leading musical-theatre genius ever nail Harvard's leading theatrical poseur to the wall.  The text of the letter is below (go to the blog to read the 95 comments, almost all of which echo Sondheim's concerns). Of course I've been railing about Paulus's upcoming molestation of Porgy and Bess since I first heard about it, months ago (indeed, my comments regarding it played a part in my resignation from the IRNEs). But it's nice to have such high profile back-up! I'm not sure which organization Harvard can force Stephen Sondheim to resign from, but I'm sure some such effort is now afoot . . .

But without further ado, on to the letter itself:

The article by Mr. Healy about the coming revival of “Porgy and Bess” is dismaying on many levels. To begin with, the title of the show is now “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.” I assume that’s in case anyone was worried it was the Rodgers and Hart “Porgy and Bess” that was coming to town. But what happened to DuBose Heyward? Most of the lyrics (and all of the good ones) are his alone (“Summertime,” “My Man’s Gone Now”) or co-written with Ira Gershwin (“Bess, You Is My Woman Now”). If this billing is at the insistence of the Gershwin estate, they should be ashamed of themselves. If it’s the producers’ idea, it’s just dumb. More dismaying is the disdain that Diane Paulus, Audra McDonald and Suzan-Lori Parks feel toward the opera itself.

Ms. Paulus says that in the opera you don’t get to know the characters as people. Putting it kindly, that’s willful ignorance. These characters are as vivid as any ever created for the musical theater, as has been proved over and over in productions that may have cut some dialogue and musical passages but didn’t rewrite and distort them.

What Ms. Paulus wants, and has ordered, are back stories for the characters. For example she (or, rather, Ms. Parks) is supplying Porgy with dialogue that will explain how he became crippled. She fails to recognize that Porgy, Bess, Crown, Sportin’ Life and the rest are archetypes and intended to be larger than life and that filling in “realistic” details is likely to reduce them to line drawings. It makes you speculate about what would happen if she ever got her hands on “Tosca” and ‘Don Giovanni.” How would we get to know them? Ms. Paulus would probably want to add an aria or two to explain how Tosca got to be a star, and she would certainly want some additional material about Don Giovanni’s unhappy childhood to explain what made him such an unconscionable lecher.

Then there is Ms. Paulus’s condescension toward the audience. She says, “I’m sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.” I don’t know what she’s sorry about, but I’m glad she can speak for all of us restless theatergoers. If she doesn’t understand Bess and feels she has to “excavate” the show, she clearly thinks it’s a ruin, so why is she doing it? I’m sorry, but could the problem be her lack of understanding, not Heyward’s?

She is joined heartily in this sentiment by Ms. McDonald, who says that Bess is “often more of a plot device than a full-blooded character.” Often? Meaning sometimes she’s full-blooded and other times not? She’s always full-blooded when she’s acted full-bloodedly, as she was by, among others, Clamma Dale and Leontyne Price. Ms. McDonald goes on to say, “The opera has the makings of a great love story … that I think we’re bringing to life.” Wow, who’d have thought there was a love story hiding in “Porgy and Bess” that just needed a group of visionaries to bring it out?

Among the ways in which Ms. Parks defends the excavation work is this: “I wanted to flesh out the two main characters so that they are not cardboard cutout characters” and goes on to say, “I think that’s what George Gershwin wanted, and if he had lived longer he would have gone back to the story of ‘Porgy and Bess’ and made changes, including the ending.”

It’s reassuring that Ms. Parks has a direct pipeline to Gershwin and is just carrying out his work for him, and that she thinks he would have taken one of the most moving moments in musical theater history — Porgy’s demand, “Bring my goat!” — and thrown it out. Ms. Parks (or Ms. Paulus) has taken away Porgy’s goat cart in favor of a cane. So now he can demand, “Bring my cane!” Perhaps someone will bring him a straw hat too, so he can buck-and-wing his way to New York.

Or perhaps in order to have her happy ending, she’ll have Bess turn around when she gets as far as Philadelphia and return to Catfish Row in time for the finale, thus saving Porgy the trouble of his heroic journey to New York. It will kill “I’m on My Way,” but who cares?

Ms. McDonald immediately dismisses any possible criticism by labeling anyone who might have objections to what Ms. Paulus and her colleagues are doing as “Gershwin purists” — clearly a group, all of whom think alike, and we all know what a “purist” is, don’t we? An inflexible, academic reactionary fuddy-duddy who lacks the imagination to see beyond the author’s intentions, who doesn’t recognize all “the holes and issues” that Ms. Paulus and Ms. McDonald and Suzan-Lori Parks do. Never fear, though. They confidently claim that they know how to fix this dreadfully flawed work.

I can hear the outraged cries now about stifling creativity and discouraging directors who want to reinterpret plays and musicals in order to bring “fresh perspectives,” as they are wont to say, but there is a difference between reinterpretation and wholesale rewriting. Nor am I judging this production in advance, only the attitude of its creators toward the piece and the audience. Perhaps it will be wonderful. Certainly I can think of no better Porgy than Norm Lewis nor a better Bess than Audra McDonald, whose voice is one of the glories of the American theater. Perhaps Ms. Paulus and company will have earned their arrogance.

Which brings me back to my opening point. In the interest of truth in advertising, let it not be called “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” nor even “The Gershwin-Heyward Porgy and Bess.” Advertise it honestly as “Diane Paulus’s Porgy and Bess.” And the hell with the real one.

Good news from ArtsEmerson - and is Harvard's "populist" really all that popular?

The news is good from ArtsEmerson, even if the Globe doesn't want you to think so.

The Boston Globe includes an interesting statistic today - you have to look for it, though; it's buried in a hatchet job on ArtsEmerson by Laura Collins-Hughes. The article is clearly a response to the meme I first posited last fall - that ArtsEmerson's director, Robert Orchard, had pulled the intellectual rug right out from under the now-"populist" ART (his former employer).  By now I'd say that's the conventional wisdom - if you want to go to a baseball game, a strip club, or a Journey concert, you go to Harvard.  But if you want challenging theatre - that is, if you like Shakespeare with the words - you go to Emerson, which in one incredible year presented the dazzling millennial circus Psy, the hilarious Fräulein Maria, the stunning Aftermath, a brilliant social documentary by The Civilians, and a superb production of The Cripple of Inishmaan by the Druid Theatre. For a time, in fact, it seemed that everything Emerson touched was turning to gold - but of course, a few bombs eventually fell (like the Abbey Theatre's ridiculous Terminus), and the "big name" events, such as the visit by Peter Brook's troupe, or the tour of F. Murray Abraham's Merchant of Venice, turned out to be worthy, but slightly mixed, bags.

But you can't have everything, and even with those disappointments I still stand by my prediction of a few months back: the ArtsEmerson inaugural season did indeed prove to be the greatest theatrical season this town has seen in thirty years.

But anyway, back to why I'm jumping up and down this morning.  The Globe clearly has it in mind to question the staying power of ArtsEmerson - word on the street has it that several of their projects lost money, and judging from the announcement of their next season, they've slightly trimmed their sails.  Under pointed questioning, Orchard dodges the specifics of the program's finances, although he admits he'll be concentrating this year on fund-raising.  Still, he hasn't trimmed his seasonal sails by much, and even though ArtsEmerson is clearly relying on big-name draws from the BAM circuit (like John Malkovich) to boost their profile, they're also bringing back Kirk Lynn of the Rude Mechs and the great Civilians.  They're also betting on the super-sexy Circa from Australia, who blur the line between circus and dance (and whom I caught in Edinburgh a year or two ago; don't miss them) - and are finally bringing in (they promise) current Met bad-boy Robert Lepage.  And there is sure to be at least one more great surprise lurking among the acts I don't know.

But how popular will such a line-up be?  In other words, can Boston really support this much theatre for smart people?  Or do we need a little dumbed-down Harvard sugar - or scotch - to swallow what's good for us?

Well, as it turns out - the numbers are kind of encouraging.  We're not as dumb as Harvard and the Globe wants us to believe we are.  ArtsEmerson sold around 50,000 tickets last year, it turns out - trailing, it's true, the Huntington (at 106,000) and the ART (at 82,000).  And part of ArtsEmerson's box office was no doubt due to the drawing power of F. Murray Abraham (whose performance as Shylock was actually disappointing, but if he pays the bills, invite him back!).  Still, 50,000 tickets actually strikes me as a respectable number for a maiden season largely populated with unknowns.  And the news gets better when you look at the "membership" numbers - in one year ArtsEmerson has signed up 4,000 people.

Now an ArtsEmerson "membership" isn't nearly as large a financial commitment as a subscription would be.  Still - having 4,000 people sign up for anything cultural is a very good sign in this town.  (Compare to Celebrity Series's 2700 subscribers.)  Plus, ArtsEmerson members in many cases look like new converts to the arts - two-thirds of them don't overlap with any other arts series.  (Yes, you read that right, startling as that number is.) And the news gets better - the ART can boast far less sustained interest from its patrons: it only has 2600 subscribers for those 82,000 tickets sold.  Indeed, the real news in the article is the following statistic - the Huntington has nearly four times as many subscribers as the ART does (a whopping 10,000 subscribers!).

When I read that, I suddenly felt another rug being pulled right out from under Diane Paulus & Co.  I suppose the evil Paulus is up where she needs to be in terms of single ticket sales - but let's be honest, take out the horny kids who hit The Donkey Show over and over, as well as all of Amanda Palmer's Facebook friends, and I'd bet you good money the ART isn't selling many more tickets than ArtsEmerson did in its inaugural year (and maybe only two thirds of the Huntington's haul).  And that's even with the advantages of Harvard's incredible brand and social reach, along with really constant promotion in the press, and open threats to local critics who don't toe the line (as well as a slew of awards from frightened scribes who know better than to cross the ART's dragon lady!).

And yet with all that, it's clear Paulus isn't really getting any kind of traction; she's not building anything.  The young audiences the aging diva so covets aren't really committing to her vision.  I mean, I knew the Huntington was more popular than the ART - although you never read that in the paper - but still, Peter DuBois has gotten four times the commitment from the community that Paulus has?  That's kind of incredible; I've been raving about them recently, but even I'm kind of surprised.  I'd say that's Boston theatre's best-kept secret.

The excuse for Diane Paulus's meagre artistic achievement, of course, has always been that she's a "populist," that, as Paulus apologist Christopher Wallenberg put it in a recent article, her "whole mission" is to follow the audience.  (That's right: avant-garde theatre that follows the audience.  Can you spell o-x-y-m-o-r-o-n, Chris?)

But what do you have when your "populism" isn't really all that popular - when you're a series of flashes in the pan, when people check you out because they've heard you're dirty and loud, but then don't come back?  Well, I know what people like Christopher Wallenberg and Ed Siegel will prescribe - Harvard needs more Red Sox, more tits and ass!  Because after all, the millennials just don't commit, do they; they're so cheap they won't even pay for their favorite albums; so how could you expect more than an anemic subscription base for an organization targeting them?  You have to string the kids along from thrill to thrill, the way a video game or a porn site does.

There's some truth to this - but it's not the kind of truth that really helps Diane Paulus.  Because in the end memberships and subscriptions do point to the long-term health of an organization.  And somehow it seems the Huntington and ArtsEmerson, which are facing the same environment as the ART, are doing better at getting folks to commit; indeed, ArtsEmerson seems to be much better at pulling new converts into the high-culture fold - supposedly Paulus's specialty - and with real, not fake, art!  Which maps to a disconnect I've already perceived between what I hear informed Bostonians say and what I read in the print press; I never run into anyone, frankly - outside the Harvard/media echo chamber, that is - who takes Diane Paulus or the ART seriously.  When people say they like a Paulus show, it's always prefaced with an embarrassed little laugh that tells you "I know it was kind of stupid, but I'd drunk a little too much, okay?  So I kind of liked it." I'm beginning to realize that somewhere deep inside, believe it or not, people still know that Amanda Palmer can't sing, and that Aeschylus didn't write a rock opera, and that The Donkey Show isn't Shakespeare. And I believe Paulus's numbers reflect that.  And so I think - or at least for the first time I hope - that in those numbers I can finally see the light at the end of a long tunnel at the ART.

Pimping the Professor, Part II

I always knew there was something fishy about Diane Paulus.

I just never thought the facts would smell this fishy.

Suspicious types like me sensed from the get-go that there was something a little too neat about the importation of The Donkey Show, created by Paulus and her husband, Randy Weiner , into ART's Zero Arrow space last fall. The piece had been initially developed for night clubs (in New York and elsewhere) where it had run profitably for years. It was obviously a piece of commercial theatre (that paid undisclosed royalties to Diane and her hubby) sliding into what was widely understood to be a non-profit piece of cultural real estate. Unsurprisingly, due to its nearly-bare boobs and disco tunes, The Donkey Show was a hit - but people like me began to wonder, as it was extended over and over again, whether we'd ever see "real" theatre, or any performance risky enough to turn off the bachelorettes, at Zero Arrow Street again. After all, in its original locales, The Donkey Show had run for years.

(Note: we moved the NSFW graphic to after the jump.)



Will Harvard wake up to the ethics of Diane Paulus and her husband?

Meanwhile, of course, the press blithely applauded this obvious land-grab. As in the equally-dismaying case of Shepard Fairey at the ICA, the smarter print critics pretty much sat on their hands as the professors went pop (one local scribe whispered to me that Paulus was "middlebrow" - duh - but was too cowardly to say that on the record), while the dimmer bulbs did cartwheels; at last, high art had been obliterated (again)!!! And what do you mean, this all might be unethical? Diane Paulus is a woman, and she voted for Obama! She's one of us!!!!

Right. Or maybe she's a fembot with her eyes on the prize, as it were (which is how she comes off in interviews). At any rate, as in the case of Fairey, the Diane Paulus mystique may be about to look a little tarnished. Because now, in a Globe piece by Geoff Edgers, the picture over at Zero Arrow gets a good deal less murky, and a good deal less savory. It turns out that Paulus' husband has, indeed, been taking home a tidy royalty on The Donkey Show - a royalty which seems to include part of the bar tab. He even owns the "Club Oberon" trademark. To Edgers, this is "an unorthodox relationship [between a promoter and Harvard]." Others might use harsher words, particular when they read Weiner's babble about "What a show is, it's a promotion, like a wet T-shirt contest, it's karaoke, it's girls get in free. The genius of doing a show is that people will actually pay for that promotion. I'm winning on the promotion and I'm winning on the drink."

No, I didn't make that up - Weiner actually said that on the record. What's funny is the way Edgers buries this and other details in what could pass for a puff piece (is Edgers as clueless as he has often seemed, or is he clueless like a fox this time around? You decide!). To Edgers, there's really no issue in having a non-profit theatre space at our leading university host "a quiz show, a burlesque, and a conjoined-twin singer-songwriter duo," presented by (who else?) Amanda Palmer. But even he can perceive that the A.R.T. seems to be sliding toward Mafia-restaurant territory, where the husband of the artistic director is hawking drinks and pocketing the change, and the theatre's new producer, Diane Borger, has a son-in-law who in a very strange coincidence is one of said hubby's partners in his latest New York venture, "Caligula Maximus." Again, I'm not making this up - could the whole mess look more corrupt and money-driven if it tried? No surprise, then, that almost no one at the A.R.T. wants to comment on the situation.

Okay, I admit I'm laughing right now, and I'm wondering just when, exactly, Harvard will make its move to remove this big-ass omelette from its face. Of course Harvard hardly has an ethical reputation to rival Mother Theresa's; still, the situation at the A.R.T. pushes the limits of the plausible deniability that is the university's norm. The claim that The Donkey Show is, in effect, funding "riskier" work at the A.R.T., as A Chorus Line once did for Joe Papp, is debatable, I'd say - but if Harvard wants to go that route, it still pretty much has to move the dancing girls to a commercial venue (as Papp did with his hits) to make the argument hold water. If The Donkey Show were playing on Lansdowne Street (where it belongs), and held its own in the commercial sector, there'd be few arguments against it, even if Weiner and Paulus were throwing a few bucks Harvard's way. Of course it may well prove unfeasible to run Paulus and Weiner out of town on a rail (which, frankly, is what should happen), but Harvard owes it to its own reputation to at least move The Donkey Show downtown, and bring theatre back to Zero Arrow.