Communism is the cure.
That's no load of Bolshevik.
A thunderous blast of good ol' un-American, Commie-pinko, gimme-red-or-gimme-dead!, anti-capitalistic Marxist propaganda of such epic proportions that it would—McCarthyistically speaking, in a Nixonian state of red-baiting, blacklisting, Alger Hiss-teria—corrupt our children, blacken our future and obliterate our cherished way of life.
(Relax, flag-wavers and Bush-whackers: This is, at heart, an apolitical theater harangue, which is nothing without a little hammy, over-the-moon theatrics. Right, comrades? ... We now return you to your regularly scheduled rant.)
Just a little communism. Just in Las Vegas. Just on local theater stages.
Just so we don't have to choose—and by extension, lose—among a remarkably rich smorgasbord of 10 community-mounted productions (double digits: an infrequent, impressive one-weekend output for this often arts-averse outpost), each one an intriguing theatrical entrée.
How 'bout a little cooperation and coordination, people? How 'bout a little what's-mine-is-yours-and-yours-is-mine thinking, ideologically blasphemous though it may be? How about a loose confederation of local drama pooh-bahs working in concert instead of conflict to boost the collective profile of community theater?
How about creating a Theater League of Las Vegas (with the cool-sounding acronym, TLLV, so you can dazzle your friends and neighbors and the office hottie, inviting her to join you on your very own, 100 percent immoral casting couch)?
How about we explain?
This weekend is nothing short of a spectacularly messy free-for-all worthy of Bluto Blutarsky.
Carrying over from runs that began last week are Macbeth (UNLV), Mort (Clark County Library), A Soldier's Play (Clark County Library), The Inspector General (CCSN), Something's Afoot (Las Vegas Little Theatre) and Pete 'n' Keely (Summerlin Library Performing Arts Center), compounded this week by the openings of Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical (Las Vegas Academy), Sylvia (Theatre in the Valley) and the wee-hours "Insomniac Project," Durang's Shorts (LVLT). Additionally, there's a staged reading of Terrible Infant (Winchester Center).
With the exception of the latter and the late-nighter—LVLT is early-birding its "Insomniac Project" to jack up attendance, shifting its Friday-Saturday shows from midnight to 11 p.m. and the Sunday performance from 7 p.m. to 6 p.m.—every single production goes curtain-up in the same Thursday-Saturday/7-8 p.m. window, or 2 p.m. Sunday matinee slot, thwarting a wider sampling by locals and wasting a rare theatrical bumper crop.
But, you rebut, doesn't this artistic avalanche signal a market becoming competitive? Robust? Vigorous? A city on the verge of a cultural breakthrough, even lurching toward (dare we speak it?) a fine-arts renaissance?
Possibly.
And damn their independent little hearts.
Blabber on endlessly about constructing spiffy, costly new mega-theaters to lend the arts scene a new sheen and erase that downscale Downtown vibe. Absent an attitude shift, it's akin to wrapping a Gucci coat around a goat.
Are any of these stage rats familiar with a concept called stag-ger-ing-the-sched-u-le? The idea that there's more than one way to skin a math equation? That two productions per weekend for five weekends, or several alternative permutations, would expand exposure, increasing the number of theatergoers able to catch—and conceivably learn to love—local theater, slowly growing the audience base? Or that simply extending how long the enticing scent of community theater lingers in the local air—rather than blowin' your load in one weekend flat—raises its overall visibility from its current near-invisibility?
Exacerbating the scheduling farce: Several theaters double up on plays—worse yet, on the weathered old warhorses that eat up opportunities to venture into more adventurous terrain. Last season brought us twin Hello Dollys, and this year brings a matching set of Kiss Me Kates (triple, if you count Las Vegas Academy's recent rendition of Kate's source material, The Taming of the Shrew).
Sure, you grouse. Leave it to some fancy-pants pansy of a critic with an air of entitlement and elitism stuck up his rump to whine about potentially catching only six of 10 plays over 72 hours, including four plays over 48 hours. Or enduring two renditions of "Before the Parade Passes By," when none is enough.
Who else would bother? Why try to out-loon a lunatic?
Good point. And not the point.
This is the wrong time to mimic the postwar Broadway boom—even Broadway can't afford that, given that live theater accounts for such a slim slice, hell, sliver of the national entertainment dollar—as if Vegas acting troupes are turning away hordes of groupies.
They're not.
Rather, this is the right time to recognize the value of ... you know ... that C word.
Think of it as community communism for the common good. An equitable, fair-share distribution of an unexpected theatrical windfall. If that's too unpalatable to you patriots, consider this: You've got to create a substantial local audience before you can compete for it, rather than splintering a sparse one—like a dozen voracious vultures battling over the carcass of a sparrow—as is starkly evident this weekend. To paraphrase Bennie Franklin, the Vegas theater community must hang together, or we most assuredly will hang separately.
Though it's not like we haven't tested the noose.
"I tried to start monthly meetings of all the artistic directors in town," says Deanna Duplechain, founding artistic director of the Nevada Theatre Company, which operates out of a tight, storefront space at the Lakes. "I hoped we could work together on scheduling, not repeating shows in the same season, putting stuffers in all our programs so audiences that came to see my show could find out what other shows were playing, putting together lists of what each theater had in stock so we would be able to borrow from each other—equipment, set pieces, costumes, props."
Sounds simply divine, Deanna! What, pray tell, happened?
"Some people wanted to move it to what I thought was an unrealistic level, like 'Let's all pool our resources and get a theater space together.' The very practical small steps, just basic communication, weren't enough to keep people interested every week. Some people came just to make sure someone else didn't get something they didn't. We had it for about three or four months, then it petered out."
(We now arrive at that portion of our story where we acknowledge the difficulties of transforming our proposal of touchy-huggy-feely camaraderie into a living, breathing entity, but still hold out hope like the visionary prophets we are.)
Yes, it's difficult to transform our proposal of touchy-huggy-feely camaraderie into a living, breathing entity.
(Didn't we tell ya?)
Nonprofits, as most community theater companies are, have grown so adept at playing begging-for-dollars that in some minds they've come to resemble the homeless with hands out, a perception less than conducive to cultural development. And with so many troupes of both long standing (Las Vegas Little Theatre) and fly-by-nighters (New City Theatre, which opened, shuttered and reopened over one year) thumb-wrestling for subscribers, relations can get rubbed raw.
Certainly, balancing schedules among a gaggle of groups so that productions don't crash into each other like the Marx Brothers and Margaret Dumont—all juggling actors, set designers, decorators, directors, musicians and backstage crew, themselves juggling full-time jobs and families and school obligations—could drive even the most patient planner to skip town and become a backup singer for the South African Hottentot tribe.
"I'm always interested in getting us all together, and we tried it, but once everybody started getting into their own rehearsals, it just fizzled out," says Joy Demain, president of Jade Productions, who's starring in the current Pete 'n' Keely at the Summerlin Theatre—a venue that exposes another scheduling trip wire.
"People who have their own permanent spaces, like Las Vegas Little Theatre and the Nevada Theatre Company, they can do their shows whenever they want to. But for me to get to use the Summerlin Theatre, I have to do it when I can get the theater. I have no choice. But if we could all organize, it would certainly be helpful."
Selecting which companies stage what material when—given that musicals and comedies (and especially, musical-comedies) attract bigger audiences and better bucks but are often less theatrically satisfying than straight drama—could create a traffic nightmare of Kafka-esque dimensions, depending on which companies are desperate for cash infusions.
And with multiple troupes, egos running rampant—as they tend to do in any "creative environment"—could approach suicidal levels in an aggregation of prickly, hyper-sensitive, arrogant artists.
(Disclaimer: The author of this story disavows any charges of inexcusable stereotyping, excepting prickly, hyper-sensitive, arrogant artists.)
"There's also no support system for any arts in this city—when overworked and underfunded and understaffed arts organizations try to buy their own support, that doesn't work," Duplechain says. "And we all want to think that we're sharing the same audience, but that's not necessarily true. I went to a meeting in Los Angeles about them sharing each other's mailing lists and developing their audiences. They did a survey and were surprised to find that while certain people go to theaters across the board, overwhelmingly, people had one theater they liked, and that's where they mostly went.
"I don't know if we share the same audience in Las Vegas, but a lot has to do with driving. Somebody who lives in Henderson might not want to drive to Sahara and Durango (near where NTC is headquartered) after their commute to work. And theaters differ in their characteristics and can serve niche audiences. People who went to Oklahoma! at Spring Mountain Ranch might never set foot in the Nevada Theatre Company."
OK, yes, right, granted, it's absolutely true, we cry UNCLE! already—the obstacles are formidable. Yet somehow, cities still prove the viability of synchronicity among the stage set. Reno has a coalition of local drama companies, and—though a fraction of a fraction of Vegas' size at a population of approximately 8,000 citizens—cozy little Ojai, California, managed to assemble the Ojai Theater Guild, now in its seventh season.
"The Ojai Theater Guild was formed as an effort to make community-based theater more viable by applying common sense and creativity to innovate solutions for the increasing cost of theater and the shortfall in available funding," says the introduction to the guild's website, in predictably corporatized, tight-ass verbiage.
(Still, they're doin' some good shit here, man.)
"There are no less than eight independent theater companies operating in the Ojai Valley. This presented a challenge to the guild founders. Finding common ground for so many artistic groups can be somewhat daunting. Nonetheless, the first meeting was held and what emerged was a consensus that there were several areas that the groups could work on cooperatively that would greatly enhance the viability of doing theater in Ojai."
Since 1996, the O'Jays (as we like to call them) have worked to "jointly market and publicize the various guild member productions ... host an annual awards and fund-raising banquet ... raise funds, through grant-writing and other activities, to provide resources to individual theater groups and shared resources that multiple groups can benefit from ... and compile a database of actors, technicians, choreographers and technical theater specialists, becoming an automatic casting tool for guild productions."
(Sounds like they've got their aforementioned shit together. Can't our shit be as sweet-smelling as their shit?)
"Having given it a shot, I'm not interested in doing it again," Duplechain says, "It took a lot of time and energy, then just faded away."
You're excused, Double-D, with plaudits for your efforts. But what of the rest of you local Nathan Lanes and weekend Lloyd-Webbers and part-time Sondheims?
It's difficult? So we hear. But consult the nearest dictionary.
"Difficult" does not mean "impossible."
Pass the borscht, comrade.