Archives for February 2009

I’m often amazed at the stealthiness and cutthroat efficiency of dead artists’ estates. Even the most little-known entertainers seem to have incredibly efficient spy networks working for them beyond the grave and even elementary schools and fringe theatres aren’t safe from the eagle eyes of lawyers.

In the latest news from the world of cease and desist orders, Matzoball Entertainment LLC of West Hollywood, California, has sent San Francisco’s fringey Exit Theatre a letter banning local playwright-performer Sean Owens (pictured in drag, left) from performing a staged reading of his new solo show about the late comedian Paul Lynde. Lynde, (pictured above, right) an American character actor who died in the early 1980s, was best known for his roles and appearances in such television shows as Bewitched, Bye Bye Birdie and Hollywood Squares.

Matzoball, the current licensee of The Estate of Paul Lynde, controls and owns the rights, image and likeness of the late actor. The estate, the letter states, does not give permission of the trademarked and copyrighted name Paul Lynde to anyone other than Matzoball Entertainment. “The family is adamant about the portrayal of Mr. Lynde and asks that you cease and desist from performing any and all performances and using the name Paul Lynde in any and all Advertising immediately,” the letter concludes.

Owens’ now-verboten play Stealth Diva was to have received a staged reading on April 11 and 25 at the Exit Theatre as part of the company’s annual DIVAfest festival of plays by women dramatists, performers and directors. (Owens, though male, is a flamboyant staple of the festival each year.)

The Exit’s artistic director Christina Augello says the EXIT has not yet picked a replacement for the Owens show.

The San Francisco Symphony is at the end of a ten-day celebration of the music of the Tatar-Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina. Last night’s concert, which featured the North American premiere of Gubaidulina’s Violin Concerto No. 2 (“In Tempus Praesens”), a work dedicated to and performed by soloist Anne-Sophie Mutter, displayed the composer’s skill at building tension through the manipulation of opposing forces in her work.

The extraordinary 33-minute piece is structured in a single movement. The composer pits Mutter’s ethereal solo violin against the dramatic strength of a large, bottom-heavy orchestra which includes four-strong woodwind sections bolstered by bass clarinet and contrabassoon, extra brass (including three Wagner tubas and a bass tuba) and a battalion of percussion instruments such as chimes, whip and timpani. The score also includes two harps, a celesta, a piano and an amplified harpsichord. A massive string section adds to the basso profundo sound with its lack of violins.

The piece constantly contrasts light, wispy textures with heavy and dark timbres. Shimmering passages for piccolo, harps, celesta and glockenspiel offset bars of blaring brass and angry, booming timpani and swarming strings. Humorous little twittering outbursts of sound offset serious emotional melodic lines. Strictly metrical passages battle against arhythmic and sometimes exaggeratedly rubato sections.

Old and new musical traditions chafe fitfully against each other throughout the piece. Nuances of Beethoven, Bach and Berg all emerged from Gubaidulina’s dense-delicate texture. The piece swerved between traditional major-minor tonality and spiraling over- and under-tones. All of these opposites, the soloist and orchestra under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas, pulled off with fitful aplomb.

“In Tempus Praesens” means “in the present time” and this work creates a collision between so many different opposing worlds that the experience of listening seems like it can only exist in a moment’s breath. The concept of tension, so audibly at work in this violin concerto (the premiere of which Mutter performed at the Lucerne Festival in 2007) can also be heard in some of Gubaidulina’s other works. I didn’t hear her orchestral piece, The Light of the End conducted by Kurt Masur last week, but in his review entitled “Exciting Struggle in ‘Light'”, San Francisco Chronicle classical music critic, Joshua Kosman, seems to have felt similarly about that work. “The Light of the End, written in 2003, outlines a 20-minute struggle between two musical worlds: the acoustical world produced by the natural properties of sound, and the system of equal temperament that evolved during the Baroque era to tame and regularize those properties,” Kosman writes. It’s hard to imagine not being taken in by the sheer drama of this composer’s music.

Yesterday, I posted a blog entry about the inclusion of what seems to be a corporate presentation in the San Francisco Fringe Festival‘s lineup this September. Ian Woodall, a British, Andorra-based mountaineer and motivational speaker with quite a controversial background, is coming to this year’s festival with his presentation The Tao of Everest — a talk he gives predominantly to executives at companies like Microsoft and Ernst & Young.

With its supposedly impartial lottery system for selecting shows, the openness of the fringe format is what makes the festival so much fun. But I wonder if there should somehow be some limitations imposed on the kinds of productions that are eligible to apply? I mean, unless it’s somehow an ironic, twisted or otherwise theatrical take on the corporate presentation genre, surely a straight corporate presentation should be excluded from the lottery for inclusion in a fringe theatre festival?

Obviously, attempting to narrow definitions of what is and what isn’t fringe theatre can become thorny and possibly counter-productive. The debate would necessarily extend beyond a discussion of whether to censor particular formats (e.g. is it OK to include presentations / political speeches / some random person reading aloud from their self-published volume of love poetry etc ??) to considering whether content can also be censored (e.g is it OK to include a play by a neo-Nazi theatre troupe celebrating the Holocaust? Or a gay-bashing dance piece? etc)

On the other hand, when I think of the many potentially more “theatrical” theatre productions that didn’t make it through the lottery for the San Francisco fringe, Woodall’s lucky break seems somewhat perplexing.

But enough from me. Gary Carr, the publicist for the San Francisco Fringe Festival, sent me a couple of interesting responses to yesterday’s blog entry in defense of Andorra’s appearance on the festival roster. Gary kindly agreed to let me post his thoughts:

“The Tao of Everest (whether truly Andorranean or not) will be in the 2009 San Francisco Fringe Festival because it was one of 30 shows (out of more than 150) that was drawn out of a hat (actually a large Tupperware container). True Fringe Festivals are non-juried. Lines cannot be drawn, and pre-selection is not part of the game. It’s all the luck of the draw as to who gets in.However, just because a show gets into a Fringe Festival does not guarantee that it will SUCCEED in that Festival. The audience decides which shows will pack ’em in and which will be lightly attended. As the 12-day Festival builds, so does the buzz about “must-see” shows. At the San Francisco Fringe, audience members can post their comments on the Fringe web site at www.sffringe.org. Sometimes the posts give high praise; other times, scathing commentary. Great efforts usually win; things that miss the mark are ignored. The only jury is the audience and – hats off to them for their perseverance – the professional critics. The only lines the Fringe can draw are those leading to each show’s box office.”

In a later email, responding to a point I raised in an email to Gary about the extent to which the anything-goes model works if productions drawn out of the hat (or Tupperware) are contentious from a content perspective (as in the neo-Nazi and gay-bashing examples I mentioned above, Gary said:

“My examples would have been a one-person show by a Holocaust-denier, or a Pro-Prop 8 homophobic show, or Dick Cheney explaining why Iraq was a good idea. My initial reaction is that these reprehensible ideas SHOULD be presented to a general audience, not just to one made up of knuckle-dragging true believers, Skinheads, etc. If a bright light is shone on stupidity, my feeling is it will shrivel up and lose most of its power. I wonder if, in the 50+ year history of Fringes, such a diatribe-filled performance as you postulate has turned up. I doubt it, but it would be fun to investigate. There is a legal antidote to things getting out of hand and rising to the level of crying “fire!” in a crowded theatre (bad metaphor?): there are laws against hate speech and treason. So a line has already been drawn. It’s at the level of enforcement where it gets tricky.”

I don’t remember much about my visit to Andorra, the postage stamp-sized, landlocked principality located in the eastern Pyrenees mountains and bordered by Spain and France. My family drove through the place one day when I was a teenager on our way to somewhere else. We stopped for about an hour. There were a lot of stores selling tax-free gold jewelry. And there was snow on the ground. About Andorra I can’t recall much else.

This September, though, Bay Area theatre audiences have been told that they will get to sample a taste of Andorrean fringe theatre when the 18th annual San Francisco Fringe Festival welcomes a production entitled The Tao of Everest from La Massana, Andorra.

It’s a bit of a stretch to call this production Andorrean, frankly, though mentioning the country does make good press release copy. Furthermore, it’s a bit of a stretch to call The Tao of Everest fringe theatre at all.

Ian Woodall (pictured far right with Nelson Mandela and others), the person behind the production, is a British citizen, though he currently resides in Andorra. A mountaineer and motivational speaker, Woodall was the leader of the first South African Mount Everest expedition in 1996, an expedition which resulted in a great deal of controversy. U.S. journalist Jon Krakauer has been particularly critical of Woodall’s personality and conduct on Everest, which resulted in the death of five team members near the summit and various other misfortunes.

A quick glance at Woodall’s website suggests that his Tao is more corporate keynote address than fringe theatre material. Subtitled “The Gentle Art of Personal Inspiration and Practical Leadership”, The Tao of Everest has been presented before many corporate audiences. “Excellent, entertaining, fun and meaningful. Your presentation felt like a movie,” writes an Ernst & Young employee on one of the testimonials about the Tao on Woodall’s website.

Hmm. I wonder how San Francisco Fringe Festival audiences will respond to Woodall’s presentation? More importantly, I wonder what place a straight-up motivational speaker has in a fringe festival at all? Fringe festivals are often free-for-alls. Part of the joy of attending them is that you never know what you’re going to get. But surely a line has to be drawn somewhere.

Cecilia Bartoli sang so scrumptiously on Sunday afternoon at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall that she made me cry.

It happened in the middle of a Bellini aria, “L’abbandono.” The Italian mezzo massaged so much pain and regret into each bittersweet line that I completely lost control of my emotions. I was speechless afterwards. I sat there frozen in my seat and couldn’t even clap. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me at a solo recital before.

The interesting thing about Bartoli is that as much as she’s a brilliant technician and a gripping actress and possesses great vocal warmth and lyricism, some of her vocalizing isn’t strictly lovely. Her trills are frequently more reminiscent of machine-gun fire than birdsong. She sounds like she’s hyperventilating when she gets going on some of the particularly fast-moving, high passages. There’s a brassiness to the way she gesticulates overtly with her eyes and mouth — she’s no sweet little choir girl that’s for sure. Yet the ugliness of these moments somehow renders her performance even more beautiful overall.

As I watched Bartoli sing that afternoon, she often pointed her right index finger to the ground while extending the fingers of her cupped left hand upwards to the sky. This physical “tic” seems, to my mind, to embody the spirit in which she approaches her art. Even as she soars into the stratosphere, she keeps part of herself firmly rooted to the ground.

One commonly held belief about classic productions of classic works for the stage is that after a while, they start to feel like museum pieces. Sets and costumes look mothballed and acting and choreography appear outmoded. The productions might be sacred cows of sorts, but eventually, most artistic directors recognize that if they don’t do something to revamp the work, it will start to resemble a carcass.

With this in mind, Helgi Tomasson’s decision to create a new production of that most hoary of classical ballets, Swan Lake, for San Francisco’s Ballet‘s 2009 season, makes perfect sense.

If any U.S. dance company has a right to lay claim to the Tchaikovsky/Petipa/Ivanov masterpiece, it’s SF Ballet. The organization has a long and distinguished history with the work, having been the first American company to present the a full-length version of the ballet in 1940. Tomasson created a new production in 1988, retaining much of Petipa’s choreography.

Unveiled on Saturday night with Yuan Yuan Tan as Odette/Odile and Tiit Helimets as Prince Siegfried, SF Ballet’s latest production again aims to retain the spirit and much of the choreography of the landmark 19th century Russian version. The most radical change from a choreographic point of view comes in the form of a short introductory scene in which we see the evil Von Rothbart transform the innocent, young Odette into a swan for the first time. SF Ballet didn’t come up with this idea — the 2000 American Ballet Theatre production used Tchaikovsky’s prologue music in a similar fashion. But the inclusion of the scene does help to provide something of a back story before we launch into the main action, so it’s a welcome addition.

The other main way in which Tomasson has refreshed Swan Lake is in his collaboration with scenery and costume designer Jonathan Fensom. Fensom’s designs are imposing yet leave the stage feeling uncluttered. The lakeside scenes (Acts II and IV) are staged in front of and on a foreboding, black craggy promontory with a huge, white full moon hanging low in the sky. The moon makes a reappearance in the ballroom scene (Act III), framed by the two sweeping wings of a grand curving staircase down which the ball guests enter. The moon motif helps to link all these scenes and provides a constant reminder of the snow-white Odette’s presence when she’s offstage.

Less successful from a design perspective is the opening act, which takes place outside the palace. Even though, once again, Fensom’s design features only one main stage element — a huge early 19th century-style gate — the stage feels as stuffy, anachronistic and as cluttered as a knock-off Gainsborough painting. If only the moon could be present in this scene to create a stylish visual link between it and what is to follow. If only the costumes could be less pastoral. If only there could be fewer extras loafing around in peasant garb trying to create an olde worlde atmosphere. The first act looks so anachronistic, in fact, that it makes me wonder why Tomasson has bothered revamping Swan Lake at all.

On the other hand, all the dancers execute their steps with such emotional warmth and technical perfection and the orchestra performs Tchaikovsky’s mesmerizing score with such eloquence, that one feels for the most part like one has stepped out of time.

That being said, I have a sneaking suspicion that I might have felt the same way about an SF Ballet version of Swan Lake without the benefit of Fensom’s new designs and some slight tweaks to the choreography. I doubt that the introduction of a few cosmetic changes have much of an effect on the overall brilliance of the dancing and music. Which begs the question: Despite the sagacity of Tomasson’s impulse to plume the ballet with new feathers, is it really worth the effort after all?

The Irish band The Chieftans performed a rollicking concert in in San Francisco last night. As befits a group that’s been around since 1962 and has over the decades performed all over the world, collaborated with all kinds of artists from many different musical traditions, put out close to 40 albums and earned six Grammy Awards, The Chieftans have pretty much become cultural diplomats.

At Davies Symphony Hall, three of the main band members — Paddy Moloney (uilleann pipes, tin whistle, button accordion, bodhrán), Matt Molloy (flute, tin whistle), Kevin Conneff (bodhrán, vocals) — surrounded themselves with a deluge of guest artists. (The fourth main Chieftan, fiddler Sean Keane was unable join with the group on its current tour dates.) The guest artists on stage last night included everything from a Gaelic singer from an island off the coast of Scotland, to two different Irish dance troupes to the entire Bushmills pipe and drum band that came on stage and played a number dressed in kilts.

Similarly diverse was the program. Some of the music was traditional Irish, but a great deal borrowed from and merged with other traditions. There were bluegrass songs (helmed by a couple of Nashville musicians who played with The Chieftans throughout their set) and numbers from Mexico and everything in between.

The Chieftans have done a great deal of worthy work by bringing people together from different traditions to play together. The wide variety of timbres and moods made for an eclectic and constantly engaging evening.

But I wonder how often these days the original band members get together just between themselves to jam? The enormous, spectacular Chieftans roadshow is a lot of fun. And if you’re going to play symphony halls and the like, you might as well make use of the space and wheel on a battalion of pipers, dancers and, what the heck, mariachi bands if you please. But I think I’d like to hear the band doing their thing in the back of a Dublin pub someday, just quietly playing some old Irish songs like they did back in the 1960s.

In the world of classical music, showmanship is often frowned upon. People tend to think that artists who spend a lot of time working on their presentation are ones who need to make up for less talent on the musical side of things.

While it’s true that many classical artists and groups these days have gotten good at matching brilliant musicianship with presentation flair, I still attend some concerts where the presentation is so mediocre that it affects my appreciation of the music.

Such, sadly, was the case a couple of evenings ago when I went to the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco to catch a program of sad love songs performed by the great English a cappella consort, The Hilliard Ensemble.

I have never before seen this vocal group live, though I have long appreciated its fine, balanced sound and peerless facility for singing very old and very new material. Officium, Hilliard’s 1994 collaboration with saxophonist Jan Gabarek is one of the best and most listened to recordings in my music collection.

From a musical perspective, I still got a lot out of the program. The group has such a good blend and they captured just the right balance between sadness and rapture in such pieces as Jean Courtois’ “Si Par Souffrir” and Clement Janequin’s “O Mal D’Aimer”. I would have rather heard the four movements of the modern Swiss composer Rudolf Kelterborn’s rich yet desolate Four Sonnets for Four Voices sung in immediate succession rather than spliced between various airs by the 15th century French composer Philipppe Caron. The effect of bouncing backwards and forwards through time rather disrupted the flow and mood of the Kelterborn. But in general, the music was beautiful.

The group’s members were a lot less successful, however, in presenting themselves. Part of the problem was the look of the stage. For acoustic reasons (I imagine) the singers were forced to sing in front of a set of ugly plasterboard panels which blocked the audience’s view of the Herbst Theatre’s handsome proscenium stage. The fact that the singers stood behind music stands also presented difficulties. They appeared partly masked and removed from us as a result. I would have thought that a group of this caliber would know its music from memory, quite frankly.

The singers’ dress sense was all wrong too — dour grey suits with an assortment of uninspiring charcoal colored shirts (as pictured above). They looked like a bunch of undertakers. The final straw was that the performers hardly ever cracked a smile and rarely seemed to glance at the people who’d come out in the rain and paid quite a bit of money to see them. Unsurprisingly, the applause between numbers was at best lukewarm. Sometimes, no one clapped at all.

When you write a preview piece for a newspaper or magazine about a performance event, you play a kind of guessing game about what the event is going to be like. No two performances are alike, so even if you’re familiar with the work being presented, you really have no idea how it will play out and how audiences will respond.

With this is mind, it was interesting to attend the west coast premiere on Monday of Philip Glass’ Music in Twelve Parts at Davies Symphony Hall. Here’s what I wrote up about the concert for this week’s issue of SF Weekly:

From his operas like Einstein on the Beach and Appomattox to his film scores for Koyaanisqatsi and Notes on a Scandal, the American composer Philip Glass is known for spinning minimal musical notes and rhythms into maximal structures. Written between 1971 and 1974, Glass’ chamber music masterpiece is nothing short of epic. An extended cycle of music involving keyboards, woodwinds, a vocalist and an onstage audio engineer and normally requiring three live concerts to perform in its entirety, the piece tests the limits of the ensemble players’ physical and psychological endurance – not to mention the audience’s ability to sit still for several hours. On President’s Day, the nine-member Philip Glass Ensemble featuring the composer on keyboards will perform the entire work in one marathon sitting (box dinners will be provided during the half-time break) at Davies Symphony Hall. Today, the sheer length of Glass’ era-defining three hour and twenty-six minute work makes experiencing it seem more like a religious ritual than a concert. Back in the early 1970s, though, listeners had a more forgiving relationship to time. As Glass fondly recalls: “It was easy to find people to listen to this music every Thursday night because nobody had anything else to do anyway.”

The piece feels like much more of an assault on the senses performed live than it does on a recording. At the start of each of the 12 movements, you feel like you’re being air-lifted into the middle of an unfamiliar and extremely wild landscape and simply dropped right in. Then, at the end of each movement, the imaginary helicopter swings by, just as quickly, to pull you out.

Over the course of the evening, I swung between many different emotional states. At times, the music carried me along as if on clouds. The feeling was blissful. It almost rocked me to sleep with its spiraling undulations of sound. At other times, the music swarmed like an angry beehive. I was screaming inside for it to stop. At one point during Part 5, I came very close to running out of the concert hall.

On various occasions, the texture alternately called to mind Bach fugues, cathedral organs and fairground music. On other occasions, I heard scratched records, casino slot machines and traffic jams. Wild stuff. The experience was sort of religious in the sense that listening requires surrendering oneself completely to the sound. It also takes quite a devotee to sit still for that long.

On that note, it was fascinating to see how the people sitting around me reacted to the event. Some people fell asleep or at least shut their eyes. Others jiggled their feet and looked at their watches impatiently. A bald, plump-bellied man sitting across the aisle twitched spasmodically to the music, moving his hands up and down an invisible wind instrument. He looked at one with the world playing his air saxophone. Somewhere up in the balcony behind the stage early on in the program, an elderly person appeared to go into some kind of seizure. An army of paramedics arrived to cart them off.

Glass isn’t my favorite minimalist composer. I generally feel more engaged by the music of, say, Steve Reich. Still, I had a great time and managed, mostly, to stay awake. I only wish that I’d taken a lead from some of my fellow concert goers and smoked a little pot before I went.

Every now and again someone in the media writes an article about how advances in digital technologies like motion capture will make real, live actors a thing of the past on screen.

This morning, as I read the latest of these, an NPR piece about the latest Brad Pitt vehicle, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, I started to wonder what impact a world free of actors on film would have on the theatre scene.

Would it suddenly increase the attention paid to live performance? If people know they won’t get “the real Brad Pitt” (pictured in digital form, above) when they go to a movie, a premium might be placed on getting to see him live on stage.

Of course, there is currently something of a premium on celebrity actors when they occasionally pop up in shows on Broadway and in the West End, though judging by the dismal ticket sales at the moment, it seems like even the biggest movie icons (eg Jane Fonda) aren’t making people flock to the theatre.

But putting celebrities aside for a moment, I wonder if the disappearance of actors from films will actually change the face of theatre and audiences as we know it? Actors of all stripes may suddenly truly aspire to working on stage (as opposed as seeing it, as many do, as a mere stepping stone for television and film careers). Bored of sitting in front of zombies made of bits and bytes, audiences might start flocking to see plays, musicals, comedy shows and operas. Wow. Imagine that. The mind boggles.

Honestly, though, I can’t see this future coming to pass, at least not anytime soon. Which is probably a good thing, even though I do like to fantasize about how it might revolutionize theatre. The disappearance of live actors from movie screens would be a terrible thing for film art. On balance, I don’t think I’d like to see technology take over, even if it does go some way towards increasing the kudos of the stage.

Arts organizations and individual artists employ a variety of different techniques for soliciting audience feedback about their work. The most commonly and innocuous method involves giving out audience surveys during a show or at an exhibition or asking people to complete questionnaires online, sometimes in return for entry into a draw for free tickets or a backstage tour or somesuch.

On occasion, particularly in a live performance or movie test-screening scenario, groups and artists will ask audiences if they’d like to participate in a post-show discussion about the work. I don’t generally find these sorts of conversations to be very effective, particularly in the U.S., as audiences tend to be very polite here and only seem to say flattering things — at least to the artists’ faces.

Over the weekend, an artist whose solo show I experienced went a stage further: He put the entire audience on the spot immediately after his performance. Providing feedback was apparently required of everyone who turned up to see the show.

It wasn’t a comfortable experience and I kind of felt hijacked. For one thing, I didn’t know until I arrived at the theatre that evening that I would be experiencing a preview rather than a full performance of the show. The fact certainly wasn’t stated in any of the press materials or on the theatre company’s website. For another, it wasn’t until after the applause at the end that the artist strode back on immediately and insisted on having a pow-wow with everyone in the room about his work. Leaving wasn’t an option.

While soliciting feedback in this way seems to me to alienate audiences more than draw them to you, I’m not sure this approach was useful for the artist either. No one in the room had time to collect their thoughts. And those that did weren’t about to say anything constructive. What happened was that we all sat there for about ten tense minutes with the artist sitting before us in a chair. He asked a few questions and got mumbled responses. A couple of audience members made platitudinous comments. Then, when it seemed like the conversation wasn’t going to take off in any meaningful way, the artist thankfully excused us and let us out.

I’m hard-pressed to think of a more ineffective way of getting feedback from an audience. Surveys seem much more productive in comparison. If I had been the artist, I would have a) warned people properly in advance that they would be attending a preview and that I would be soliciting their feedback, and b) simply left a pile of business cards on a table after the show with a quick announcement asking people to send an email or call with comments in the coming days. I certainly wouldn’t have tried to engage theatregoers in a critical conversation immediately after the show without giving them the option to leave.

In the first of a series of posts about public relations for the performing arts a couple of weeks ago, I laid out a set of guidelines for writers of press releases. Today, I’d like to devote my attention to discussing what makes an effective performing arts public relations manager from the perspective of an arts journalist.

PR is a subtle art, but many of the people who practice it are not subtle people. Those less adept at their job tend to rampage around repeatedly bludgeoning editors and reporters with information. They speak in loud, bland voices and lack the guts to provide the arts organizations with whom they work advice on how best to approach the media, instead often allowing the artists to dictate how they should run their campaigns.

Every now and again, though, I come across a public relations manager who’s terrific. I’d like to share some pointers regarding what I think makes these individuals such a pleasure to work with.

1. Competence: The best PR people know the work of the artists with whom they collaborate intimately and can answer most questions straight away. They can get answers to those questions for which they don’t have an immediate answer quickly. They are familiar with the layouts/set ups/business models etc of all the local media from radio, TV, newspapers and magazines to Internet publications, blogs, podcasts and vodcasts. They have a strong network of connections both in the media and the arts world and they know how best to match ideas with people. They keep their press lists up to date.

2. Responsiveness: Effective PR managers only need to be asked once for something e.g. press tickets, a playscript, the answer to a question about the artist, and they get back to journalists as fast as they can. They don’t need to be asked twice. They keep on top of their email and voicemail and always provide a means of communication e.g. cellphone when they’re out of the office.

3. Understanding of the Journalist’s Job: My favorite PR managers understand what a deadline is and don’t drag their heels. They also know that journalists are inundated with press releases and don’t keep pestering them by repeatedly sending out the same information more than two or three times or hassling reporters on the phone to find out if they received a press release and will be coming to review the show.

4. Appreciation for all media formats: Many PR people still cling to old media — newspapers, magazines, TV, radio — as being if not the sole means of communication, at least the most important. But the (arts) media landscape is changing and the best PR people are up on the latest new media formats and actively court those journalists working in the arts field whose blogs/podcasts/vlogs etc are serious and well-created.

5. Ability to Rectify Mistakes: Sometimes things go wrong. Requests for press tickets go missing; a misprint appears in a magazine. Effective PR managers always keep tickets back at the box office so journalists with bona fide press ticket reservations don’t get turned away. They gently contact editors to ask for the copy to be amended online / an error message to be published in next day’s issue etc.

6. Good press release writing skills: I went into detail about this in my recent blog post on the subject.

7. Ability to stand up to their clients: This is a tricky one as it’s the client who’s paying the bills. But effective PR managers need to take charge when it comes to media relations matters and persuade the artists for whom they work to follow their guidance on publicity campaign issues in order to keep messaging targeted, elegant and intelligible.

8. Openness: PR managers who don’t always put their guard up around journalists and view them with suspicion and are willing to be relaxed, friendly and, wherever possible, open, are much more fun to work with. PR managers who don’t always talk in bland “PR speak” but can provide a positive yet frank view on things are more likely to get a fair shakeout for their arts organizations from the media than those who play things too close to their chests.