ATLarts

By Mandy

June 16, 2008 8:14 AM | Link to this

The Color Purple and Aide both started nn Atlanta.

By Curt in Atlanta

June 16, 2008 8:23 AM | Link to this

I’ve been tuning the pianos at the Alliance for the past seven or eight years. From my perspective, this theater advances in it’s performances with every season. The crew are top notch and the administration second to none. That is why they won the Tony for best regional theater last year. Will they eventually send a show to Broadway? I think so. But things take time. Their award winning status will no doubt secure them higher levels of production and opportunities. However, continued community support does wonders for a group such as this. We need to make certain that this fine theater thrives, and that is done by continued patronage and donations.

By BPJ

June 16, 2008 11:37 AM | Link to this

Several points to keep in mind:

First, the primary measure of success for a nonprofit theatre is the quality of work it puts on stage for its community. Atlanta’s leading theatre companies do very well by this standard. When work developed here travels elsewhere, that’s a bonus. There are plenty of works premiered here over the years which have gone on to produced around the country. Sometimes it is the Atlanta cast traveling with the play, as Atlanta’s Theatre du Reve is doing later this year, taking Voir Un Ami Pleurer to Paris this fall.

More often, a play developed here is then produced elsewhere, by another theatre company, with its own cast. And that brings me to the second point: New York is not quite the theatre capital it used to be. Don’t misunderstand - NY is still the leading theatre city in America, but its role has changed. Recently a theatre director with long experience told me that when they started producing here, in the early 1980s, a play produced in Atlanta (or Seattle, Houston, San Francisco, etc.) needed to have a successful NY production before other theatres around the country would perform it. There were exceptions, but this was the rule; a play needed the New York stamp of approval to be taken seriously. But the theatre landscape has changed in recent years. Now there are plays which premiere in one US city, then are produced in Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, LA…and if a NY production happens, fine, but it’s not the make-or-break affair it used to be.

A related point regards Broadway itself. The Times’s Ben Brantley put it this way a few days ago: “Even more than Hollywood, Broadway is now in the business of manufacturing — almost exclusively — comfort food, products that soothe and reassure by their familiarity. (And, yes, I include in that category Mr. Letts’s “August,” a skeleton-rattling drama set in a big old dysfunctional family homestead in contemporary Oklahoma.)” Yes, there is wonderful work on Broadway (& for me, better work off-Broadway), but it’s a small slice of American theatre nowadays. By its nature, Broadway must present the work with broad appeal, and that’s an important role. But there’s so much more to theatre, and America’s leading nonprofit theatres (the Alliance included) exist primarily to provide something beyond constant reruns of “Cats” and “Phantom”.

As for August: Osage County, it’s well-worth seeing. It’s well written, and that Chicago cast plays the hell out of it. But as for it being the next great American play…not so much.

By wb

June 17, 2008 1:08 PM | Link to this

Yes, The Color Purple and Aida both started at the Alliance. But both were backed by producers outside of Atlanta, directed by non-Atlantans, and opened on Broadway with non-Atlanta casts.

By BPJ

June 17, 2008 3:45 PM | Link to this

That’s true - I think better examples than those musicals would be plays, such as Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky or Alfred Uhry’s The Last Night of Ballyhoo, which have gone on to have significant theatrical lives around the country.