It’s hard to do a thing when you might fail

Last week, I spent money on two things I really did not like.

The first was the movie The Brothers Bloom, and the second was the new musical Coraline at MCC. The movie was $12.50 (but I bought a ticket for my non-date date as well, so $25) and the musical was $49, (and God knows that ain’t cheap.) I know you think I’m in-sane, I know it’s not appealing, but my original idea for a blog post was to suggest money back guarantees; why should I have to pay for what I did not enjoy? Why aren’t performing arts presenters 100% behind their product? Why can’t they promise that the new – movie, musical, piece – I’m about to see is going to be worth my hard-earned cash? Of course, after actually thinking about it for two minutes, I realized presenters can’t offer money back guarantees, because that would create cultures within a culture of making art to please everyone, and certainly no good can come of that (or…can it? Shouldn’t people like what they pay to see and/or hear? Another blog post for another time, perhaps.).

In the case of The Brothers Bloom and Coraline, I didn’t have a leg to stand on, though, muttering to myself all over the West Village about spending too much money and wasting my time, because I basically knew what I was getting myself into in both situations. The Brothers Bloom preview before Sunshine Cleaning was great – I even wrote that I was going to see the film a month or so back. I love Adrien Brody (I mean, love…), Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel Weisz, and I like a good con-(wo)man film as much as/if not more than the next guy. I chose not to read the reviews, but they were there for me if I had wanted to.

Coraline I saw before any reviews came out (and the reviews were generally positive, so I would have been led far, far astray anyway), but I could have waited for them, if I was worried about spending money on something I might not like. I had seen the movie (boring, even in 3D) and read the book (slightly less boring), but I like where Neil Gaiman’s head’s at, and the musical version of this tale had one big thing going for it: Stephin Merritt, most famously of The Magnetic Fields, wrote the music. If all else fails, I thought, the music will be fantastic, and I neglected to listen to samples on the show’s website. Spoiler Alert: the music was misplaced and uninteresting, all the while trying way too hard to be perfectly placed and very interesting.

My friend James also strongly disliked Coraline, and afterwards said that – having bought every Stephin Merritt disc up to this point – he would not buy the next one, because frankly, this broke his trust with that artist. And you know what?  That’s fine; when a musician/composer/producer/director/actor you like does something you don’t like, You the Consumer and Fan have to make the choice the next time around. Conversely, I probably will see another Adrien Brody movie in my day, but next time might wait and Netflix it.

My question in all this is, how much can and should producers and presenters prepare audiences for new works? Unlike a movie or an Off Broadway musical, a new classical music performance is usually only one night; audiences will not have the opportunity to read a review or hear the piece on the radio and decide if they should buy tickets for the next day or the next month. So on what basis are you taking your chance? Let’s say my client David Lang has a new piece at Carnegie Hall. A potential consumer can Google David and find out that the last piece Carnegie commissioned from him won the Pulitzer Prize – OK, that bodes well. Some Googling will also tell them that there’s [going to be on June 9th, ahem] a recording of the work, and that Carnegie Hall website has the piece streaming on their website. Great: if you like what the little match girl passion sounds like and you trust the Pulitzer committee, odds are you’ll enjoy what David does in the same venue next. But how much information should Carnegie have on the page of their site announcing the next work by him (this is all purely an example, by the way – there isn’t a new work that I know of!)? Should they/can they (with union rules) record a rehearsal and stream it? Post a pdf of the music? Have interviews with David on the site? Link to past press? In reality – again, if union rules weren’t a factor – they could post a video or a recording of the whole piece. But does all or any of that spoil it? Take away from the excitement of hearing a new piece for the first time, whether an audience member feels like he or she got his/her money’s worth in the end of not? Will people buy tickets if they’ve already heard an entire piece? Will they buy tickets if they haven’t heard any of the piece?

We’re told near the end of Coraline, “It’s hard to do a
thing when you might fail.” Yes ma’am, it is, and art isn’t easy, as another wise man once scored. But failure
is subjective, and perhaps potential audiences should be given the
tools to judge for themselves before clicking or saying ‘Purchase’.