Since the theatre is only being filled to one-third capacity, the cutouts will fill the remaining seats, and the cost will go toward supporting the theatre. – Broadway World
Building Audiences
Just Because Film Festivals Move Online It Doesn’t Mean Unlimited Tickets
“A lot of filmmakers feel like, ‘I don’t want to put it online, I don’t want to risk somebody being able to copy it or download it.’ So I think there’s also caps for those reasons, to protect the filmmakers and their work.” – Toronto Star
How The Big Museum Audiences Have Changed Since Reopening
For the Met, long-haul travel is typically responsible for most of their visitors, who come from abroad. But with international plane travel halted, there’s a new focus on New Yorkers, which now make up over 90 percent of entrants. – Washington Post
How To Remake American Theater In The Wake Of COVID? Five New York Times Critics Offer Their Ideas
“Things clearly had to change — and with the enforced pause of the pandemic, the opportunity has now arrived in the nick of time. If ever there was a need, and a moment, to fix the theater, this is it. So for the six-month anniversary of the shutdown, The New York Times asked its theater critics … what those fixes might look like.” – The New York Times
20 Stage Professionals Weigh In On How To ‘Revolutionize’ American Theater
“Here, six months after most stages went dark, 20 theater figures — many far from the heart of the commercial sector — offer their own suggestions.” – The New York Times
How Does This Classical Music TV Series Attract Millions Of Viewers? It’s Made Like A Cooking Show
Each episode of Now Hear This “manages to turn its exploration of a single subject into a hybrid of travelogue, mystery, history, cultural study, documentary and performance — all with … intricate webs of narrative that connect composers across episodes and eras.” Showrunner Harry Lynch and host Scott Yoo freely acknowledge that they were inspired by the approach of food-TV stars such as Anthony Bourdain. – The Washington Post
Film Festivals Lose Something Essential When They Go Virtual
From the outside, many of these events look incredibly glamorous, even excessive — none more than Cannes, with its black-tie premieres in the Palais and its exclusive yacht parties off the shore. As such, it’s not hard to imagine civilians questioning why the world might need such gatherings during a time of austerity and caution. But the truth is, film festivals serve an essential function to the ecosystem of cinema that can’t be reproduced by virtual events. – Variety
Is Online Streaming Of Performances Here To Stay?
“While widespread live performance without social distancing remains unlikely until 2021, streaming platforms have found their moment in the spotlight, offering audiences access to a library of theatre. Key figures in the digital theatre movement tell Tom Wicker about what the future holds for streaming services.” – The Stage
Boris Johnson Announces Plan To Restart Performances By Testing Audience Members On Site
“Addressing a press conference at Downing Street on Tuesday, [the British prime minister] said, ‘Theaters and sports venues could test an audience, all audience members, one day and let in all those with a negative result, all those who are not infectious. Work places could be opened up to all those who test negative in the morning to behave in a way that was exactly as in the world before COVID.'” The scheme will be put to the test in October in Salford, near Manchester. – Variety
K-Pop Supergroup Tops Global Billboard Charts, Suggests Different Direction For Pop Music
The song topped Spotify’s Global Top 50 chart and rose to number one on the iTunes charts in over 100 countries. It also set a YouTube record for the most views in 24 hours. BTS’s success, particularly on the Billboard Hot 100 recently, highlights the need to re-examine how we define pop music within the global music industry. – The Conversation
Comic-Con Went Virtual This Year. Critics Said It Flopped. Fans Weren’t So Condemning
Comic-Con@Home inevitably drew comparisons to the in-real-life event, but some critics promptly branded it a failure — perhaps most prominently in Variety, the entertainment industry trade magazine. But calling Comic-Con@Home a flop for not having enough exclusive movie reveals or failing to produce enough social media buzz assumes too much. – The Conversation
How Much Difference Does Rotten Tomatoes Really Make In A Movie’s Success?
“As recently as a few years ago, the movie-review aggregator was seen as something of an industry bogeyman. But is there a correlation between box office receipts and a high (or low) score on the Tomatometer? We dug deep into the numbers to determine that.” – The Ringer
There’s One Place In Times Square That’s Already Presenting Indoor Broadway Concerts
Thank goodness for liquor-law loopholes, because one of them is the reason that Open Jar Studios, a complex normally used for rehearsals, has become the only indoor venue in New York City presenting live performances. The thorough COVID-safety measures that Open Jar has in place could be a good example of what we’ll see elsewhere before long. – Gothamist
UK Culture Secretary Says He Wants To See Performance Venues Open As Normal For Christmas
Using articles in this past weekend’s Mail on Sunday and Sunday Times, secretary Oliver Dowden announced what he’s calling “Operation Sleeping Beauty,” a plan “to bring back some of the magic of theatre for families this Christmas … We need to start filling seats in much larger numbers – not just for the audiences, not just for the venues and livelihoods who depend on them, but for the entire urban economy, too.” (The performing arts community is responding with — well, not cautious optimism, more like optimistic caution.) – WhatsOnStage (London)
Report: Global Movie Box Office Down 66 Percent For 2020
For the U.S., the firm’s annual study projects a 65.7 percent decline from $11.4 billion in 2019 to $3.9 billion this year. The firm warned that “the whole cinema ecosystem will be dramatically affected,” with cinema revenue, comprised of box office and cinema advertising (but excluding concession sales in cinemas and movie merchandising), set to contract globally at a 2.4 percent compound annual rate from 2019 to end 2024 with $39.9 billion. – The Hollywood Reporter
COVID Has Made Arts Audiences Smaller, Yes, But Also Younger
Or, to put it more pessimistically/realistically, ticket sales have plummeted across the board in the US and UK, but the biggest drop has been in older audience members, according to the new report “Who is Booking Now? Changes in Ticket Buyer Demographics Post COVID-19.” – TRG Arts
A German Experiment In How To Have Large Audiences And Be Safe From COVID
All the fans were volunteers, part of Restart-19, a study to see if and how big cultural and sporting events can be held safely in the era of COVID-19. The daylong experiment was set up by scientists to try and understand why mass events are so effective at spreading the novel coronavirus and how organizers can act to minimize the risk. – The Hollywood Reporter
Atlanta Opera, Pushed By COVID, Moves To New Business Model For Fall 2020
“‘This pandemic has devastated so many lives and businesses,’ [general director Tomer] Zvulun said. ‘But it has also been a major catalyst in accelerating our shift to a business model that we have been discussing for years: creating a company of players, performing in nontraditional spaces,” — for this fall, that means alternating performances of Pagliacci and The Kaiser of Atlantis in an open-sided circus tent — “and developing our video and streaming capabilities.'” – ArtsATL
Edinburgh Int’l Festival Online Racks Up More Than A Million Views
“The festival said its 26 digital productions, which featured specially staged performances involving about 500 artists, musicians and technical staff, were watched 1.013m times in nearly 50 countries worldwide. Last year, its live shows in Edinburgh had an audience of 420,000.” – The Guardian
New Game Has Players And AI Creating Genre Fiction Together
“Powered by an artificial intelligence text generator, the video game [AI Dungeon] can be played on smartphones or computers, offering players a choice of five genres: fantasy, mystery, apocalyptic, zombies, or cyberpunk. At the beginning of each game, the AI generates the first lines of a unique and genre-specific adventure — prompting players to type in their next actions. Players can type whatever they want, and the AI storyteller responds and adapts the adventure.” – Publishers Weekly
The Hollywood Bowl In The Time Of The Pandemic
There’s no summer season of music for the L.A. Phil at the Hollywood Bowl. But there are food banks, a take-out restaurant from those who usually make food for the concerts, and a lot of musicians, socially distanced, trying to record music, and live through this. – Los Angeles Times
The Joys Of Music Reaction Videos
Is it time for, say, Beethoven reaction videos? Because this was the experience of someone hearing “Bohemian Rhapsody” for the first time: “Watching the full gamut of human emotions – gentle contemplation, wistful sadness, wide-gobbed amazement – shimmer across his face, as the song lunges from one operatic movement to the next, is nothing short of wonderful. ‘WHERE HAVE I BEEN?!’ he asks at the end, on the verge of tears.” – The Guardian (UK)
What’s Lost When Film Festivals Go Virtual
Festivals can serve as coronations, bestowing status or, even better, controversy. (Almost inevitably, “Joker” took home Venice’s top prize, the Golden Lion.) More valuably, they can channel the conversation toward worthier less-shiny objects. At a festival, you find yourself talking to strangers: in lobbies, shuttles, at bars, in snaking lines or seated next to you, as a way of sharing enthusiasm. – The New York Times
As Movie Theatres Reopen, Audiences Weigh The Safety Calculation
As high-profile titles like Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic “Tenet” and “The New Mutants” gear up to hit the big screen, marking the first major films to open since theaters were forced to close in March, audiences are faced with the choice of whether or not to return to the movies. Sure, they’re desperate for some entertainment and eager to do something more social after months of relative isolation, but do the risks associated with indoor activities justify a few hours of big screen escapism? – Variety
Applause Is The Crucial Thing We Lack In Performances Without An Audience
“So reflexive is applause, it can be easy to forget how powerful it is, what makes it important enough to fake” in performances and sports events without live audiences. “Applause is a marvel of atonal expressiveness. A spontaneous projection of unity. And much like the art it responds to, we are worse off without it; it’ one of those things we do to make us less afraid of each other.” – The Washington Post