Art Meets Commerce

Well, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how Mickey feels about online videos, but the guy who runs the biz side of Disney World is giving them a whirl …

NPR did a great piece on Michael Eisner (CEO of Disney)’s year-old broadband production company, Vuguru. Vuguru produces “low-budget, quick-and-dirty Web series” using online video.

The company is producing Foreign Body, its third Web series, which is serving as a promotional tool for Robin Cook’s novel of the same name.   Fifty 2-minute videos will be made in all, and one video is released each day for viewers to download for free.   At the end of the online series, the characters’ stories continue in the novel that fans will have to buy.

A few weeks ago, my friend Yvonne, who is in her early 30’s, invited both friends and family to a party. Her mother-in-law was particularly excited to attend because Yvonne’s college friend, Dave Gilbert, was a fellow party-er.  Gilbert, Yvonne’s mother-in-law had recently discovered, had designed her favorite computer game.  (Gilbert is owner of Wadget Eye Games .)

This cute coincidence is illustrative of a larger trend.

The game Yvonne’s mother-in-law loved is a “casual game,” which are those computer games that are not shoot ‘em ups or epic games, but simple games with simple rules — think Tetris and Bejeweled.

According to a report by the Casual Games Association, 200 million people play casual games online. Women account for 51% of this large pie (according to one report , this number is 76%.) Women also make up 74% of people who pay for games. And people over the age of 35 account for 62% of all gamers.

Casual games: designed by young men, played by their moms.

My sister and her husband made their first visit to New York last week. (They live in Los Angeles, where I’m from.) Naturally, we wanted to show them a kling-klang-king of a good time. We also had theatre-type commitments almost every night of her visit. (Yeah, I know, sucks to be us.)

Luckily they love theatre and were very good sports about devoting most of their evenings to our professional preoccupation. Also, luckily, all the things we saw were truly wonderful. (Phew! It would’ve been awful to make out-of-towners sit through a bunch of stinkeroos.)

First, we took them to Almost an Evening, for what happened to be F. Murray Abraham’s final performance. The cast and crew were also kind enough to include them in the champagne toast that followed. Let me tell you, there’s something supremely satisfying about introducing your family to an Academy Award winner, who also happens to be extremely charming and funny. That’s just cool!

On Tuesday, we were over at the Cherry Lane Theatre (which we love) to see a workshop performance of one of the company’s Mentor Project plays. Do you know about Mentor Project? It’s Artistic Director Angelina Fiordellisi’s ten-year-old program that matches emerging playwrights with masters of the craft. Over the course of a single season, three established artists are each paired with a mentee to work on one play. Each work is given a staged reading and a workshop presentation in CLT’s Studio space. Past mentors have included Tony Kushner, Alfred Uhry, Jules Feiffer, Wendy Wasserstein, Theresa Rebeck and Lynn Nottage.

We saw a performance of Jailbait by Deidre O’Connor, directed by Suzanne Agins and mentored by Michael Weller. I had seen the reading and liked it very much, and I’m thrilled to tell you we were all truly impressed by what we saw on the stage last week. O’Connor’s dialogue is pitch perfect and her characters are deftly and lovingly drawn. It’s the kind of smart, honest theatre that you know is being made in New York, in little theatres, in basements, in rehearsal studios and studio apartments, but that rarely gets noticed amidst the hullaballoo.

Our next outing rocketed us from the humble to defiantly lavaloovanal: We took in a performance of Boeing Boeing. I ponied up the bucks for 7th row seats on the aisle–hey, you only take your sister to a boffo B’way show once in a while, right? Anyway, the show is, on its merits, pretty pukey. It’s a Sizzlin’ Sixties Sexcapade that definitely shows its years, BUT the production values are so high, the cast is so polished, and–most importantly–is so obviously having the time of their lives that it just doesn’t matter. I mean it, the joy radiating from the stage is palpable. The post-curtain/pre-bow samba–which has exactly nothing to do with the plot–is clearly there just to let this group of goof balls burn off a little excess joy before punching out for the night. It’s fun, it’s cwaaazy, it’s as one review has it: a nutball comedy. Go for the laffs.

Finally, we walked over to the Atlantic Theater Company for a preview of Conor McPerson’s Port Authority, which opened last night. Expertly acted by Brian D’Arcy James, John Gallagher and the incomparable Jim Norton under the direction of Henry Wishcamper, Port Authority grabbed me in the first thirty seconds and never let go. Read Brantley’s review here. It’s a series of monologues by three Irishmen, one young, one middle aged, one old. Each tells the story of a love that never was, a victim of passivity, fear or simple bad timing. It’s haunting and wrenching, mesmerizing and strips the theatrical experience to its bones. It’s essential, and I mean that literally, for certainly the first drama resided in the stories we told around the fire, our faces gilded by its glow and the night wrapped tight around us. That’s how Port Authority feels: intimate and painful and achingly human.

Anywhoo, my sister and her husband were thoroughly charmed by all of last week’s theatrical hocus pocus. Their enthusiasm reminded us just how fortunate we are to see so much shockingly great theater every single blessed day of the week! (In case we were starting to take it for granted.)

It doesn’t take a Rocket-Science Marketer to know that a Tony nom helps with ticket sales. Read this article from Gordon Cox at Variety:

The beneficiary of 13 nods, “In the Heights” ($650,504) was one of the production that saw sales climb by six figures. Fellow tuner nominees “Cry-Baby” ($347,297) and “Passing Strange” ($256,680) stepped up by $80,000 and $50,000, respectively, while the bump for “Xanadu” ($228,658) was a more modest $10,000.

Largest uptick of the week was registered by last year’s Tony winner, “Spring Awakening” ($562,435), which woke up with $150,000 more than it did the prior frame. Other six-figure leaps were reported at revival contender “Macbeth” ($618,354), “Legally Blonde” ($588,736), and “Avenue Q” ($319,509).

“Monty Python’s Spamalot” ($614,070) and “Rent” ($525,230) both came close to rising by $100,000 each.

Total cume rose by $1.6 million to $20.3 million for 35 shows reporting, or about $21.3 million including the $967,000 estimates for “Young Frankenstein.”

Slowdowns were few and far between, with two high-profile revival nominees, “Gypsy” ($835,697) and “South Pacific” ($704,978) slipping by about $20,000 each. The recently recouped “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” ($651,472) slid by around $30,000 in the wake of a strong sesh propelled by the recent return of star Terrence Howard.