Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Quick Change

Extra! Extra! Read all about it.
Today in the world of Oregon theater, the big leagues have changed up their line up.
Check it out here.
What does this mean to you? Are you sad to see some of the shows go? Happy to see the new shows in? Indifferent?
I am curious how the subscribers will react. Will they welcome the change or feel somehow cheated? I personally think some of these decisions are smart ones, but also wonder if people are really THAT interested in one man shows. I'm purely curious for my future artistic planning.
What are people really interested in seeing on stage?
Also, how DO people feel about the subscriber model?

3 comments:

Patrick Wohlmut said...

I have to say that without Thurgood and Joe Turner in the upcoming lineup, PCS just dropped the only two shows I was really interested in seeing. In terms of the season, I was very disappointed in seeing so many book-to-play adaptations. Thurgood and Joe Turner also seemed like interesting stories, and I admit too that I was excited to see a couple of plays on the season of Portland's largest theater that featured african-american stories. Now we have to wait an unspecified amount of time to see them; which as far as I, as an audience member, am concerned, could be never.

Daddy's not happy.

Marissa Skudlarek said...

Well, my parents are subscribers, and they were kind of miffed about these changes. I think one-man shows are a bit of a hard sell, especially when they are autobiographical, not one-man plays written by famous playwrights (like "I Am My Own Wife") or dealing with famous people (like "Thurgood" would have been). It is all too tempting to wonder what we'll get out of seeing this one-man play onstage that we couldn't have gotten from reading the story as a personal essay or memoir. And besides, I think audiences crave dialogue and dramatization and interaction between characters. I know I do.

Anonymous said...

It's not semantic. If you sell a person something and they pay for it, that's what you should deliver. But then again, PCS has gone to hell in every imaginable way, on and offstage, so championing mediocrity seems to be the next logical step for them.