This week, Shakespeare Santa Cruz sent out an urgent plea for help: by next Monday (Dec 22), they need to raise $300,000 -- or shelve the 2009 summer season, and likely close the company for good.
It's been the hot topic of conversation at Berkeley Rep for the past week. How much have they raised? How close are they? Will they make it?
Heartbreak House. Costumes by Anna R. Oliver; set by Annie Smart,
both Bay Area designers. (photo by kevinberne.com)
I don't know about you, but I like living in a region where the theatre community is healthy and strong. I love that on any given night, if I'm in the mood for live theatre, I can find something worth seeing -- whether it's here at Berkeley Rep, a short walk up the street to Impact Theatre or Shotgun Players, a BART ride away at A.C.T. or other San Francisco companies... Or, on warm summer nights, a drive over to my childhood stomping grounds in Santa Cruz with a picnic basket and plans to reunite with the rest of my high school's one-time Shakespeare Club. (What can I say? Once a drama nerd, always a drama nerd.)
Schematics for prop currently under construction for
In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), designed by Annie Smart
I say this not as someone whose livelihood is also in theatre, but as someone who is a resident of the Bay Area. As a supporter of the arts, I believe that more theatres out there producing good work means that there are more chances for people to attend theatre. More chances for first-time playgoers to give this live theatre thing a try, and discover that--guess what--you can't have this experience anywhere else. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but more theatres means more theatregoers, meaning more audiences for all the arts in the area. And that is a very, very good thing.
Scenic intern Mike Fink works on an inlaid ottoman for
The Arabian Nights (photo by brtpropshop)
Of course, as someone who does work in the arts, I'm proud to live in a place where we have enough professional theatres to support a highly-skilled, hugely talented pool of craft artisans. I'm not sure if you realize that the Bay Area is the locus of an incredible pool of theatrical gifts, from actors like Dan Hiatt to craftspeople like Bruce Busby, Sarah Lowe, Janet Conery, Kitty Muntzel and Lisa Lazar, just to name a few (and our scenic art intern, Mike Fink, above). These are people who have worked at theatres throughout the country, but they've chosen to settle in the Bay Area--and a huge part of the attraction is that there are enough theatres here to ensure they will always be able to find a job doing the work they have been trained to do.
We attract some of the nation's best artisans because we have a theatrical community which can support them. One theatre going under won't definitively destroy that (although many of the people here at Berkeley Rep are watching the outcome of this week's race because their summer jobs are on the line), but this sense of community is possibly the best example of why so many of us feel so strongly that Shakespeare Santa Cruz must win this fight.
As of this morning, Shakespeare Santa Cruz has raised $255,851. They're close, but time is running out. If you can help, please do.
There is a fantastic mailing list that many of us at the Theatre subscribe to called You’ve Cott Mail. It’s a daily digest of the salient threads in the ongoing discussion around the world about the arts and their future, sent straight to your inbox. (I love that reading and thinking about this stuff is actually part of my job.)
Today, one of those threads was a discussion on the future of arts educations in public school systems, especially given President-elect Obama’s proposed changes to No Child Left Behind.
If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you support (in theory, at least) the need for arts education in the schools. I’ve always been a strong proponent, but I became an impassioned advocate last season, when we were preparing to present Nilaja Sun’s No Child…. Among the many hats I wear, I am the editor of the theatre's playbill magazine. When I saw the first draft of this article, I was horrified.
“Fully literate” teens arriving in high school having never read a book from cover to cover? Middle-school kids who have never learned how to color?
Here’s the problem: how do you set “adequate yearly progress” markers for imagination? And failing to define them, how do you make arts in the schools a priority when an ever-shrinking budgetary pie must cover increasing needs in measurable subjects like English and math?
The Berkeley Rep School of Theatre does a lot of outreach work to local schoolsto help bridge some of that gap, but they’re one organization in one very small part of a very large country.
Obviously, it’s a tough call--where you fund one thing, you can’t fund another. But it’s still a topic worthy of discussion, and I thought I’d throw it out to you…Given the chance, how would you fix our schools? For that matter, do you think art has a necessary place in our educational system? And, assuming it does, how would you bring the arts back into the curriculum?
One of my jobs as art director is to lay out the Berkeley Rep Magazine, which contains our performance program. I'm currently designing the Joe Turner's Come and Gone issue, and in going through the actors' bios -- making sure every play, movie, and television show they've been in is spelled correctly, italicized, etc. -- I ran across an unusual credit: one of our actors, Kenya Brome, listed a television commercial.
Now, lots of working stage actors do commercials to help pay the bills. (And boy, do they pay -- and keep paying.) I saw another Berkeley Rep actor in a commercial just last week. It's not, however, something an actor usually likes to highlight on his or her resume.
But I'm really glad Ms. Brome mentioned hers, because the one she mentioned happens to be one of my favorite commercials of all time:
If you've watched much television at all in the past few years, you've likely seen this commercial and/or one of the others in Citibank's identity-theft series. As a student of advertising and marketing for some 20 years, I think these commercials are really clever.
Do you know any actors you've seen on stage who've also starred in commercials? Post your links in the comments!