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| re: This could well be the death of Encores. | |
| Posted by: mikem 06:11 pm EDT 03/17/22 | |
| In reply to: This could well be the death of Encores. - ShowGoer 08:26 am EDT 03/17/22 | |
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| "This could well be the death of Encores." I think the Encores many of us love is already dead. It was killed off but they didn't tell anyone. The new artistic director has made it clear that her mission is markedly different from the long-standing Encores mission. I think the new mission will drive away a lot of subscribers, and I don't think it will pick up enough new ones to make Encores financially viable. The fact that the new Encores is also artistically unsuccessful is a problem as well. They have two major duds out of the gate. Even if Into the Woods is as great as we hope, I think the subscription renewal rate will have a noticeable drop. So the question is whether the Encores board wants to return to the old mission (presumably with a different artistic director) or keep going down a path that isn't artistically rewarding or financially sustainable. |
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| re: This could well be the death of Encores. | |
| Last Edit: PlayWiz 06:22 pm EDT 03/17/22 | |
| Posted by: PlayWiz 06:18 pm EDT 03/17/22 | |
| In reply to: re: This could well be the death of Encores. - mikem 06:11 pm EDT 03/17/22 | |
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| How long is the contract for the new artistic director? Can she be fired and/or paid off for malpractice or "different artistic vision", etc. if it is more for one season? People seem to be staying away in droves, with lots of empty seats and canceled subscriptions. Bring back the vision and the production for what was going to be "Love Life" and others preceding it, and not this reinventing the wheels of someone's misguided dream. | |
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| re: This could well be the death of Encores. | |
| Last Edit: ShowGoer 06:54 pm EDT 03/17/22 | |
| Posted by: ShowGoer 06:53 pm EDT 03/17/22 | |
| In reply to: re: This could well be the death of Encores. - PlayWiz 06:18 pm EDT 03/17/22 | |
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| I don’t have those answers but I do know that feels like what the endgame would have to be (at the very least, were she to survive this it would be one of the more stunning turnarounds in theatre administration history; I can think of several well-known names who’ve held artistic directorships at major regionals only to be let go after a season or two for merely choosing shows that didn’t get the butts in the seats, but with none of the rocking of the boat than has happened here. Picking a few things the audiences didn’t like is unfortunate, but it doesn’t show as much, for lack of a better word, contempt as does changing the entire raison d’etre of the company in the first place). Somehow she went from planning to direct Thoroughly Modern Millie - where I believe the extent of the textual changes as announced was going to be bringing on a Chinese-American playwright primarily to address the highly problematic main villainess and make that character more less racially insensitive - to mounting a season that thus far has consisted of one show whose book was fully rewritten and set in a different time period, but which at least presented most of the score as originally heard and intended…. and now another show that’s basically a top-to-bottom rewrite not just of the tone, the intent, and the dialogue, but also of the score itself, by doing away with all the original orchestrations and arrangements and trying to make the classic Cy Coleman sound come across as more authentically ‘street’ or something. (The aspect that’s been touched the least, ironically, is the lyrics, never the high point of this particular show in the first place, and a moot point now because the loud instrumentation and poor sound design here don’t give those lyrics a fair hearing anyway). Talk about ‘give an inch, take a mile’… and in so doing, not only increasingly throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but in less than a month, squandering all the benefit of the doubt and nearly all of the good will that an incoming artistic director needs to have. |
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