This feels odd. Like a pro-NRA campaign, as waged by a deer.
I must have zoned out at Theater Critic School when they taught us to advocate the slashing of theater companies, particularly in a city trying to get its all-the-world's-a-stage groove on for years, going on decades.
But we're inching closer to the NY/LA model of theatrical legitimacy than we ever imagined here in Cirque du City, and it's time to shake off the hobbyists, the pretenders and the dilettantes who come and go and come again on the fringes of our theater community, sapping its strength.
Loving local theater is downright sexy. But this scene's got to shed those love handles.
Such sentiment stems from last week's approval by the Clark County Commission of rental-car tax hikes likely to garner nearly $85 million for the long-fantasized performing arts center Downtown, with local and visiting professional theater one of its artistic tent poles. The project's still approximately $100 million away from firing up the footlights (paging private patrons), but five-alarm blazes begin with modest sparks, and that $85 mil is more than modest.
Imagine this three-pronged powerhouse: a pulsing, legit-theater Strip, with upcoming Avenue Q (Wynn Las Vegas), Phantom of the Opera (Venetian) and Hairspray (Luxor) buttressing Mamma Mia (Mandalay Bay) and We Will Rock You (Paris Las Vegas). (Saturday Night Fever danced off a cliff at the Sahara.) Tourists will flock—we pray—adding up to that market's proverbial pig in the python.
Downtown, pro road shows, once warehoused at Aladdin and now idling at Cashman Theatre, will likely draw lifeblood from visitors and townies alike, a spiffy arts palace an attractive lure for both, assuming it upgrades Downtown's low-rent image rather than Downtown diminishing its upscale aspirations.
Then there are the locals ... the locals.
Community theatergoers in Vegas comprise a cozy, committed little band spread out over too wide an expanse—a core of reliable companies bogged down by wannabes, never-be's and also-rans that still manage to siphon off potential customers from better venues. Benign bloodsuckers, essentially, with names over recent years like Empress Theatre, Summerlin's Starbright Theatre, Giocomo's Classic Dinner Playhouse, New City Theatre and the Got Theatre? Project.
Now, ironically, to earn inclusion in The Metamorphosis of Vegas into a theatrical entity, to even justify performing in an arts center's cavernous confines without playing to what looks like empty houses and embarrassing apathy, local theater needs to expand its base by cutting that fat. Give novice theatergoers a reason to sample something too easily ignored—in fact, ignored en masse in the maze of mass entertainment—by subtracting the lowest levels and tightening that menu of choices.
Theater virgins at least willing, albeit cautiously, to try out plays around town drift toward the cheapest tickets for a first look. That's often the fly-by-nighters that too frequently crop up, after-work volunteers confidently promising to deliver "real" theater to Las Vegans. Before long, their grand plans shrivel to a whenever-they-can manage-it schedule or collapse completely because they're unwilling to stare down the financial/administrative realities of a limited market, unlike, say, the Las Vegas Little Theatre or Nevada Theatre Company die-hards. Or they simply lack the stones to stick around.
But at a bargain $7.50 ticket, a first-timer's first time—and often last—is at one of these poorly conceived, acted and directed disasters, usually of dated, faded musicals or old, inconsequential straight plays. They've missed a far superior effort at LVLT, pulling off Tennessee Williams for $15, or UNLV's Nevada Conservatory Theatre tackling Arthur Miller for a $25 ducat, and sprinkling polished Equity actors among stellar student performers. Or even the avant-garde adventurers of the wandering Cockroach Theatre and Downtown's Test Market, who at least challenge the conventions that comfort theatergoers but stagnate theater.
Potential converts lost. To crap. To more Christmas Carols and Hello Dollys and Neil Simon retreads rendered nearly numb by carelessness or indifference or simple neglect by uncommitted dabblers. It's cheap and familiar—many of these musty vehicles already adapted as movies and/or TV series long forgotten and better experienced on a Blockbuster rental—and too damn easy to stumble across in this city.
It dulls the senses rather than incite the curiosity of theater samplers.
Broadway has its sub-levels, too. But off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway is often bolder and braver than the famed thoroughfare itself, fueled by the bohemian ethos of theater as raw life force. Intense and experimental, performed in lofts and lots, it's the province of passionate urban artists, not suburban software designers and soccer mommies satisfying an ego itch by croaking off-key and out-hamming Boarshead.
They need to go. The law of natural selection still applies—the strong survive, leading the weak to their demise. But not always fast enough.
Too harsh? A few hard-core theater enthusiasts around town insist that Vegas will never rival Gotham or LA for a vibrant stage rep until even the better local efforts—Signature Productions, Super Summer Theatre, Jade Productions, even LVLT—clear the road for the Big Bad Broadway Machine.
That's unreasonable. A booming Vegas is an amalgam of thriving communities that deserves a solid theater circuit for themselves that will complement the pros, not diminish them. But if you've got the stuff—talent, experience, God-given gifts that transcend your ego—and need a place to strut it, please, please, please look toward the long-established troupes in town.
Don't even consider the possibility of entertaining the notion to merely mull over the idea of starting your very own theater company.