This is my version of that. I think I feel a lot of confusion and anger around arts criticism. So I said about the lyricist panel, I don't care if anyone comes because I just want to hear the conversation. I'm so excited you're all here. I'm so excited to hear this conversation. And I have to say, it was the fastest panel to organize, Liz Engelman and I had a phone conversation which chose the two people we wanted. I wrote them and I emailed her five minutes later and said they have already both said yes and they like each other. Come on, I am thrilled to give you Ann Catania from Lincoln Center Theater. Hi everybody. Now I have to hold this microphone up, which is very heavy. I feel like, as Linda said, we're at the Golden Globe Awards here, sitting at these little tables. You know, I actually have three questions that I want to pose that, well one of them sort of has something to do with drama criticism, but I actually don't really think of you guys as drama critics. I just think of you as fellow thinkers who are solving problems in the theater. So one will have something to do with it, but the other two won't. And I hope it might be a kind of free ranging discussion about a bunch of things. And now I have to introduce this with the sun directly in my eyes. Okay. So here are the three things I thought would be interesting to have a conversation with you guys about. The first is that when I went to graduate school in the Middle Ages, I was in a DFA program for dramatic literature and criticism in the 70s. And I think, I was saying this on an email to my Linda and to Peter, that I think at that moment, there probably were 200 drama critics writing at various papers around the country. And there was one person who might have been known as a dramaturg and that was Arthur Ballet in Minnesota. And switching that ratio out, sitting around today, here are two drama critics at 200 dramaturgs, which would have just been unimaginable then. I mean, it was just absolutely unimaginable. So that led me to what I think is what, that led me to my focus for this afternoon, which really has to do with change. I'm up here looking a little ragged because I'm in the second to last day of the director's lab, which has been going from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. with a million elevator and bathroom problems for three solid weeks. And I have 58 directors, 24 actors, eight designers and a stage management team from every country from Burundi to Brazil, all over the United States. So it's just been this ongoing questioning and talking about everything. And the second topic, and then I'm gonna go back and ask some questions about this. We devoted the lab this year, as it always is devoted, to something that comes out of a conversation in the lists, or we have like 1500 directors talking to each other all over the world once they've finished the lab.  So I decided to do a lab about extremely challenging plays that we love, and the love is more stressed than the challenge, but equally so. And that's what we've been doing for three weeks and it's really been an eye-opener how rarely these directors, who are professional directors, five or six years into their careers from all around the country, et cetera, how rarely they've had a chance to work on plays like this, and how just observing and then taught, we have a fantastic group of actors, very great New York actors. It's been interesting to see how wary of any kind of conflict the directors are. And it's been interesting to see how they move quickly to game-playing as opposed to diving in and, you know, and diving in and really figuring out some way to explore whatever these very different texts are, the text range from When We Dead Awakened to Tambor Lane to The Owl Answers by Adrienne Kennedy to the new Stoppard play to a fantastic Syrian play called The Drunken Days by Wanoosa Salad. I play, I had just gotten to know, and a very good play from Costa Rica called La Segway and the original version from the 19th century of Uncle Tom's Cabin, so obviously pretty radically different challenges in each of those plays. And that much of the dialogue with the company and among themselves in the rehearsal rooms was very constrained to things that were positions that people knew they could go to that would not, that would, I don't want to say politically correct, but that would avoid conflict. And it created a kind of storm where the actors were abandoned. They couldn't work in the way that they had hoped to work. And, you know, much has been worked through, but I think this question of the kind of plays that we are producing, the kind of plays that are coming out of the play development world in America and the directors who are capable of doing them is one that I want to touch on. That's my second point. And then the other thing, I don't know whether it's just what's going on in the world today, you know, if you read the, if you go on the New York Times site, you'll see lots of stuff has been happening today, lots of stuff has been happening in the last week, lots of stuff has been happening that there's so much change going on right now, which is always a good thing. And I have been, you know, thinking and talking, and especially with these young directors at great length about the whole, really the status of our resident theaters, the buildings, the buildings that have to be maintained, who the audience is for these buildings, who is being programmed for. And with the withdrawal of support from obviously government corporations, the increasing reliance on boards who are rich. So we have that elitist thing that surrounds us, which comes out of certain reasons. And then I've had some very interesting conversations recently with, I'm very in the lead director's lab to having people come in who are founding theaters in small cities around the United States where there are no theaters, because that's a really tough job to make a theater where there hasn't been one and how you reach out to the theater. But it's interesting how few of these directors think at all, I wanna say politically in terms of their communities.  Do you even know who they are?  And the theater seemed to be very removed from the, it's not just political life, but from the life of the city that they're in, which is news for many of us old timers who were in Washington for the lobbying for the NEA and who tried very hard to continue to involve people who represent us in the theater. So I'm sort of seeing the institutions drifting away. And I don't know if the small theaters that are created are mainstreaming in in some way that ties them to a community. And there's much discussion about, I'm doing a play and all my friends with MFA's are in the audience and then I go to all their plays, but where's my aunt? Where are the real people, uncle? And so that's on my mind. So to go back to the first and then you're gonna throw out some things and then we'll open to questions at the end. I'm curious about, I mean, why has this dramatured critics ratio swapped? You mean in this room? No, it's swapped in this room, in this country. This is a representative, two of us and the rest of them. You do think? I do think that's a representative, yeah. Or do you have something else to add to that? Yes, go ahead, Linda. Darling, you do it first. Well, I don't know, you know, I write a lot about theater in Washington, obviously, and I don't know that every theater in Washington has a dramaturg. I think there are probably four or five companies that have, I mean, I can think of Willie Mammoth and Studio Theater and Shakespeare Theater and Arena Stage, you know, a couple of years ago, actually, I made the decision in the, you know, in the little agate at the bottom of the reviews that we write, which includes the lighting designer and the set designer. I decided in certain circumstances to start adding the name of the dramaturg. Thank you very much. You're doubling it in your hand on that one. Especially in situations where I felt, my God, this person had a challenge. I guess you don't write 400-word reviews. No, I don't write. No, I have a little more leeway than that. And I became more and more aware of the value of dramaturgy just from having done this over a period of years and started to understand a little bit about what literary managers do and what people who are assigned to this particular role in various facets have to do. But what's happening in terms of this ratio, what's happening is daily criticism as an ongoing thing is dying. It's just dying. And I don't know really what's replacing it at this point. Papers like mine and Linda's are still engaged actively in reviewing as many things as we possibly can. But I have to say that the appetite for it is not growing. And that's reflected in the realities of my business, which is how many people are reading your stuff. Now in the old days, you went out with the million other copies. Nobody knew who the hell was looking at your particular story. And now they can measure it by the minute. I had the other day, I wrote a story about Steve Martin bringing a musical to Washington. And it was just a news story in that case. More and more of my writing is actually non-reviews. And I noticed that he had tweeted on his account to his six million followers, my story. Well that was how people read it. I mean that's the bulk of the people who read my story read it on Steve Martin's Twitter account. So if I could get nothing but people with six million followers to tweet my stories and participate in shows, we'd have more of a future here. But the truth of the matter is we're not leading any charge in terms of readership. And I think that in a way, you and I have the same problem. We're more and more driven by what our audience wants as opposed to what our tastes might be even. It affects what I decide to cover, both in Washington and in New York. So some of it is just the marketplace. And I don't have a solution. Linda, any thoughts? For us, I think it's not really the marketplace so much as the internet has done wonderful things for everybody, but not for newspapers. And the number of critics, our colleagues, the herd has been culled over and over and over again. You know, I just, I look down, I look up and I see how many more of the herd is gone and I go back down to grazing hoping that nobody will notice me. But it's just the, space for critical writing, for professional arts coverage has diminished just about everywhere. You know, possibly not at the Washington Post, not at the Times, not at the Wall Street Journal, not at the LA Times. But for most of you who are working in other cities, you know what's going on with newspapers all around the country. So the arts, the art space has shrunk a lot and the desire for commentary has shrunk even more so that feature stories and news stories and trend stories are much more in demand than series criticism. So I believe that, except for a small number of newspapers that we are the last generation of on-staff critics that from now on, there will be a couple of papers that we'll always have on-staff critics but otherwise there's really, you know, I don't want my editors to know this but there's really no reason to keep me on when we know I'm better than a lot of people but am I better enough so that they, if they give $100 and a pair of tickets to somebody who writes for free on the internet, will enough people know that, will enough people miss Linda? So I, you know, they're gonna have to prime my cold fingers from the ledge. I'm gonna do this but looking ahead, I do not see the critical writing, especially in newspapers or especially then in places where people get paid which is a kind of crappy way to look at what is a profession but I think that professionals get paid for what they do and can do it as a lifetime occupation so that isn't something that they do on the side and their real job is somewhere else. And that, you know, when I was a baby critic, there were hundreds of us, there was a, you know, we were wanted and so things is depressing but that's all. I think all of us who have done any kind of beginning research on plays, when you go into archives and you find coverage of plays from the 40s or 30s, you know, you find it often on the front page of a newspaper, you know, so and so stars in or an announcement of things and then you see over the years, the decades, the coverage moving back and back into the paper and getting smaller and smaller and then gradually evaporating and the question is, you know, what's gonna replace it? And it's not even so much the who, you know, in terms of people writing on the internet or whatever but I think it's the discussion of theater in the culture of this country. Where's that gonna happen and is it gonna happen? Well, I think that the business or I think is very conflicted about that question itself and sends very contradictory signals to us, their business, the business of theater, sends us very contradictory information. On the one hand, there's an attempt sometimes to, there's a sense, I think, a growing desperation in a sense among regional theaters, especially the feeling that they are trying to chase their audience and not sure even how to respond to reviews whether thoughtful or not. I have found over the period that I've been reviewing and it's spanned about 20 years on and off. I started at the New York Times as the off-Broadway critic and went to the Washington Post in 2002. I have, to become the chief critic, I have noticed over that time that regional theaters have become much more ticket driven, much more single ticket sale driven and they think much more like commercial producers. What can you do for me? What can your review do for me? Even among very serious people in the business and I mean artistic directors and I don't talk as much to literary managers and dramaturgs, but it permeates the organizations to the point where you feel as if there's mission drift on that end. I still do the same thing I did as I did 20 years ago and I hope I do it better than I did it then. But I feel as if there's less good understanding between the people who review and the people who receive the reviews about what our relationship is supposed to be.  This is the newest thing in the business, I keep calling it that, among arts institutions large and medium size, they're starting to think, well we're just gonna talk to our audience ourselves. We're gonna hire quasi journalists or journalists to do the job of a critic. We don't really need that intermediary. So that again, to some degree a practical decision, but mostly it's a marketing and commercially driven decision by companies that are essentially not for profit. So I think that one of the changes that has come is that there's, I don't wanna say less respect for what we do, but it seems less clear to theaters that we're a useful part of the process. Yeah, and I think it's true, I've seen in my own years that with the decline in the number of critics, there's been a decline in the power of critics as well to open and close shows and those kinds of things, which I think people in the theater are always grateful for. Yeah, I think that's a good thing, by the way. Word of mouth is what should happen, I think on some cases. But I'm curious, will it be better if we're at a place after you retire, which won't be too soon, I hope, without any critics?  I think... I can't even believe I'm saying that sometimes, but I... I actually think there's always gonna be critics. I think that people want to have that next step in the conversation and sitting in a restaurant after the theater and talking about it is in some ways what we do. But I think that people will always want to know what other people think and seek out people they trust to get that judgment. The problem, I think, is that both in terms of the internet where people have these discussions in niche groups, so that theater, that there's a lot of interesting commentary going on on theater websites. But for me, that gives up the possibility of actually talking to a large number of people. I'm a 60s perfect ability of mankind person, and I always thought that if you expose people to things that you love, that are great about the arts, then maybe they'll think... That probably they'll think so too. And coming in at a time in the late 60s and 70s, that really there was that attitude that we wanted to reach a larger number of people. Now I think that people have to know what they need to know in order to find the commentary, as opposed to that mosaic where you pick up a paper, and you don't really know that you'd be interested in this review, but because something about the writing compelled you to want to read it, that you ended up being interested in something that you didn't know. And people who just, we're ending up to be, even though there's so much more information in the world, we don't know what we don't know. You have to know where to go to find it. And that I think is the same problem with what you were saying about the nonprofit theaters, creating conversations with their own people. The other problem, and there's, the other big issue is just the cost. And I do think that readers, our audience, which should be our primary audience, just the reader out there who wants to know more about theater is really trying to figure out how much they want to spend to see something. And it's a different calculus for theater than almost any other performing of the performing arts, maybe opera or ballet, but certainly not movies and television. They can do that very cheaply, but they still need to know, if you're gonna charge them, there were theaters in Washington for, and God love them, they do really good work, but they're charging for a four-character play. And I'm only saying this because it just happens to stick in my mind that it was a four-character play. I don't count the number of actors in each show, but they were charging like 120 bucks, a ticket. And it doesn't even occur to me, and we're encouraged not to really think about how much was being charged per ticket to a show and trying to make some judgment about whether it's worth it. That's not what we do, but the fact of the matter is that the more you charge, probably the more we're gonna, that probably does guarantee us some longevity in this business just because people, and I get letters when people feel like they've been booked. They come to me.  And it's like I'm the front line suddenly, and I'm gonna say, hey, I just, I didn't pay to see it, but the fact of the matter, and maybe it would be better if we did. But all I'm saying is that this is, that as much as we talk here about the art and what goes into the crafting of a play, the incredible work that goes into it, it becomes very much a transaction for people out there who want us to tell them whether this is going to be economically worth it for them. Well, the consumer guide purpose of criticism has always been there. It's always been the least interesting part of the job for me. I think somewhere in there for people who need to know whether or not to spend 120 bucks, they might be able to get that information in what I write, but just this sort of kill for a ticket, yes, no, thumbs up, thumbs down, winners, losers, mentality of that concept of criticism is the most boring part of it for me. I mean, the other thing, and then we'll move on to my other insolvable questions, is, I mean, somebody once said, you don't expect a civilian to go into an operating room and say to a brain surgeon, hey, put that suture there, but people seem to be absolutely free to say, oh, the second act's too long, or to take something, I mean, people who have no idea what goes into making a play, and what worries me sometimes is if I'll see, I mean, you see on a chat room or something, somebody say, gosh, I went to a show and the leading actor was out, and the understudy happened to be in the theater that time and went on. And you think, okay, this is somebody who's never spent a day in the theater in their life, so you like to think that somebody is at least looking at your work who understands something about what you're doing. Well, it's the downside of the democratization of the news, that it's great that everybody has an opinion, but if everybody can vote, has a, can vote someone off the island, then why do you need an expert? And there's such a suspicion of expertise. There's actually a hostility against people who may be perceived as being experts now, because it's somehow anti-populist, and that's depressing. Well, I think about, I sometimes look, open other parts of the paper, and if you read, for example, a story about a football game, if you didn't know anything about football, it would be a foreign language.  There's not enough time or space to educate people, and the same thing sort of is true of theater. I think we use shorthands. I remember using the word restoration comedy in a piece in the Washington Post, and my editor, who's no longer my editor, said, that's really too technical a term. And I thought, and he said, can we call it an old comedy? And I said, no, I said, rest, listen. I said, restoration comedy is accepted as understood by enough people, and the ones who don't know it, damn it, they can go to their computer and Google restoration comedy. I mean, there is something to be said for a standard of what people can know, and not know. On the other hand, I taught for 10 years, or almost 10 years at GW, a class on reviewing, and I would take the students every week to a show, and many of them were honor students who had never been to the theater before. They were biology majors, and they just wanted, they had heard that the theater was interesting. And the first class was always a class in what you could wear, what you can't, there was an approach, not that you can't, like I said, you can go in almost anything, t-shirts, jeans, it's not, but I mean they didn't know. They had no, these were 18, 19 year olds, and I realized that by the end of the course, they were totally immersed in theater. They'd seen 10 plays and written about them, and it was a magical world opened up to them, but I realized also that there is this mentoring, and a very close connection that has to be forged these days between people who know the theater and people who don't know the theater to broaden the audience, to make it something for more people. And I wish we had that skill. I wish we had that luxury somehow to make the communication that I'm trying to do in reviews reach out to the people who don't quite feel comfortable going or even understanding some of the, some of the, you know, I realize, you know, how many times a year I have to write, explain what the book of a musical is. You know, I can't, that term, you know, even on the copy desk at the Washington Post sometimes throws copy editors. It's not a pretty word, though. It's not specific enough. It needs a better word. Well, I'm saying, you know, but these were things we took for granted 25 years ago. I think we take them, we have to take them less for granted now as the experience becomes, not so much, I'm sure there are a lot of people going. I mean, the numbers on Broadway seem to indicate, you know, millions of people are going, but I think the people who are interested in it are more than just as something to put in a scrapbook. About the time we went to the theater. You know, that's where we're losing the connection. Okay, so I'm gonna switch over to the subject of plays and the kinds of plays that we're seeing. So mostly these are questions for you about what you're seeing and what you're happy seeing and what you're not seeing. I went to see the revival of Heidi Chronicles. Wendy was a very close friend of mine. I worked my first day as a professional dramaturg was the second day of rehearsals of uncommon women and others. I commissioned Isn't it Romantic? She was a very close friend of mine. And there's a line, which I'm not gonna be able to quote exactly about where Scoop says, I wanna, you know, I wanna marry a girl, but I don't wanna marry a 10. I wanna marry a seven, because a 10 would be too challenging.  Are those plays punished? Do we see them any more as much as we should? We saw them, you know, with Angels of America, you know, in my own life, the plays that I have worked on that have been the hardest and the most ambitious have been the most successful, oddly enough. Costa Eutopia, right? I mean, Costa Eutopia. Everybody would say, what is Lincoln Center thinking or drinking to do that? And it was a smash, right? A smash. Yeah. I mean, and I think there was an article in the New York Review of Books, Daniel Mandelson saying, when you see someone walking across the plaza, at Lincoln Center at 11 at night, after 12 hours in the theater, turning their cell phone and saying, and you can't believe what happened to Alexander Herzen. It's like, whoa, you know, hard to believe. But any thoughts about that? Yeah, I'm sure you have thoughts. I get more pleasure out of trying to force people to see tough stuff than almost anything else. Maybe finding new voices, somebody new, writing about somebody that has got no attention who deserves it, that probably slightly more, but I'm a bit of a sadist, I guess.  Mr. Burns started at Willi Mammoth Theater a few years ago, and I was, I think it may have been one of the two or three best things I've seen in Washington in my 12 years in this job. And I got as many, what were you thinking responses as I did, people said, this is for me. It was a play, I don't know how many of you've seen it, but it dazzled me with its ambition, its refusal to explain itself, its attempt to describe where we are as a culture, all those things that you want plays to do, and did it in a kind, in somewhat of an esoteric way for some people, but it made people furious. I mean, they got angry at the idea that they couldn't grasp every minute of it. And that's sort of where we're at. I think also of The Flick, which thankfully won the Pulitzer Prize, but the Artistic Director of Playwrights Horizons, a very smart man who I think spoke, gave the keynote here yesterday, wrote an apology of a sorts to his audience, because so many people- I think he regrets that now. And he definitely regrets it, and yes, I know, it's a sore point with Tim, but there was anger, the audience. It wasn't just, well, I didn't really get it, but it wasn't my cup of tea. I mean, fury. And I think there's a kind of, a level of, even among people who love the theater, there's a growing, maybe intolerance of some of the idiosyncrasies that Playwrights choose to make the subject of their work. Although The Flick just moved to a pretty good sized theater. I don't know how it's doing. Yeah, so it's a commercial run, but it's at the Barrow group. I mean, it's at the, yeah, the Barrow.   But I think it's doing well. Something that I noticed this year, and it's probably been true before, but it really bothered me this year, is that all of the, almost all the plays that got to Broadway that are at all challenging to the structure, and in any way, not a traditional subject predicate you know, family in the living room play, or British.  Oh, they're good. But would the incident of the dog in the nighttime, if it had opened at a nonprofit theater in America, would that have gotten to Broadway? Or would the audience have gotten to Broadway? Even not a great play, but still a historical drama that has, that people have to know a little bit about the theater, about history. Or why didn't an American write Enron? Or why didn't an American write Enron? But it killed me this whole year to see that if you're going to, that virtually all of the American plays that got to Broadway were either throw back middle-brow comedies or dysfunctional family plays. Or, you know, dysfunctional family plays. And when I, I could, you know, that, I mean, the river, the river would never, I mean, yes, the river got to Broadway because it had Hugh Jackman in it. But it was a play that nobody understood, right? It was on Broadway. People went, Hugh Jackman was in it. But it wasn't an American playwright.  No, and so the American playwrights who are doing, you know, it's not that American playwrights are not doing challenging work, but it's not being seen. It's being kept in non-profit ghettos. And I don't understand why it is that- You know, it's interesting. That people welcome a challenging, structurally challenging adventure's plays, the beekeeper play with Jake, Joe, and Paul. Oh, a lot of constellations. Constellations. Who would have ever done that? Why isn't that an American play? You know, it was, but the experimental, not even experimental, but anything that pushes the form. In American plays, somehow don't get the larger ones. Except for, I have to say, I was having breakfast this morning with Louie Dothan. Is she here somewhere in the Golden Globes? Okay, and I was, I can't say I was rehearsing this whole panel, but I was, I mentioned this to her, and she said, you're forgetting something really important, so thank you, Louie. And that is, that's totally right, but she said to me, I'm forgetting, and I was forgetting, that's not the case with musicals. If you look at Hamilton and you look at Fun Home, if you, I mean, there are many, there's something being pushed forward in that form that is experimental, that is new, that is on Broadway, that we're not seeing perhaps in the play world. Yeah, but why aren't we seeing it in the play world? Are they not being written? Are the nonprofit theaters around the country not producing them because what you were talking about before about them being afraid of their boards and afraid to alienate their audiences? All of those, virtually all of those plays that I mentioned that came from England, I think with the exception of the audience, came from nonprofit, our equivalent of nonprofit theaters, came from software. Yeah, and maybe we should stop talking about Broadway. But they're also, I mean, hand to God made it to Broadway, which is, you know. Silly. It's silly, but it's not, I mean, it's a serious play, it's also a serious play, I think, and remember last season, the Willino play? The Realistic Joneses? I mean, they are, there are attempts by some producers, thank you. Cliborne Park, yeah, go to Winter Broadway.  I'm not so sure it breaks down quite that. Well, it did this year. It did this year, except for disgraced, and when you were talking about what about if it tries to be a 10 and it's a seven, should we give that more credit than if it just tries to be a five and it's a five? I found that with disgraced, which I think is a superior play to anything that opened, you know, just looking at Broadway this year, but it was not a particularly good production, and then you have something like Curious Incident, which is a lesser play, but a spectacular production, and then how do you decide, you know, okay? And do you tell people, oh, please go to see disgraced, it's a really good play, even though it was better when it was at Lincoln Center. Is your question, Anne, should we be giving them the benefit of the doubt? Is that what you're asking? Well, I mean, I'm just... Like plays that are difficult plays? I mean, I was thinking about, you know, after Angels in America, Tony Christian was writing this plan commissioned for the National Theater called Henry Box Brown, which he never finished, and you know, probably like the intelligent homosexuals guide to the universe, it wasn't as, you know, what's the word, perfect or good a play as Angels in America, but it was, might've been really interesting, and somehow those kinds of plays, you know, I mean, Bruce wrote The Low Road in London, which was, you know, somebody helped me describe it, a sort of epic English history play about Adam Smith, you know, and it's hopefully being done here, but it's not 100% certain, and it's big, it's messy, I don't think it's a perfect play, but I hope he's not ever gonna listen to this, but I think it's really, you know, incredibly interesting, and somehow that kind of raw ruggedness of ambition, and again, it's not really Broadway, it's more not Broadway theater. What are you proposing here that, I mean, that we're not championing those plays? I'm just trying to understand where do we bring this to the intersection of the critics? I'm thinking more of why aren't we, the dramaturges championing those plays, because we're the ones who are getting them out there. I mean, sometimes it seems to me that plays that are, how do I put this, you know, weird for weird's sake, have what I call the waiting for Godot retrospective effect, you know, you don't wanna be the person who saw Waiting for Godot, and wrote that bad review about it, so you're willing to take a lot more, give a lot more leeway to things that you just simply don't understand at all, but somehow that there's that middle ground of writers who you respect and like who are trying something different that get cut down. I don't think theaters, from my point of view, I don't think theaters care much what I say should be, you know, what writers I like and what writers should be done more. I've over the years written many times, not, I don't say here's what you should do, but you know, but people I have admired and there are many American writers that fall into that, American playwrights that fall into that category, I never feel like I get any, that the artistic directors of theaters that I cover have any interest in, not particular interest in what I've said, except if it's a production I've seen of the work that they're thinking of doing in Washington because, oh, it'll get a good review when it's here, that'll help. That's why I'm saying, I don't think there's a real conversation that goes on. Even among people who are, you know, I don't think you could, whatever you can accuse us of in terms of our defaults, you can't accuse us of not loving this work, the profession, the thing we cover. You can't do that and maybe the grievances become bigger than the appreciation, whatever level that you feel we are doing some good, but I never feel like that evolves beyond my sort of having a conversation that I start with the theaters coming back and continuing the conversation either because they're afraid of, there are all these myths like you're gonna offend the critic. Listen, don't talk to him.  I mean, I'm just saying, it's become that and if in fact we're in a world where there's less of us but still have some credibility and authority to some degree, there is no reason that we shouldn't be talking more about the things, not necessarily because you're currying favor or you want a good review next time, but because we're in a world of uncertain sounding boards, we are a constant for the time we're in these jobs and I don't think that gets through and it's probably partially our fault because we're so distracted by whatever's coming next but on the other hand, because when you threw that out to the dramaturgs, I'm thinking, well, why are you not asking us about the seven, I mean, I think there's a, and if anyone has a shared sense of the world in terms of the word, maybe you guys understand things about play is that we will never understand but we share that, that love of the language and the love of what happens when a playwright attempts to make this happen. I think a lot of it too has to do with what Linda we were saying about, you have 400 words or whatever. I mean, if you look at the criticism of O'Neill or something like that, I mean, you can see people writing about O'Neill tracking play after play and this is what he seems to be trying to do in this play and this is, and it's part of a larger discussion than just an up or down. Yeah, there was a sense of it being part of the literature. For 23 years, I've been teaching critical writing to dramaturgs right next door at Dodge in the School of the Arts here at Columbia. So I feel like I have a foot in the dramaturgs and the critics, I got two little students here. And part of what they do for their final papers, they, each one writes, reads an anthology, a collection by some historical critic and just looking at what kind of writing was going on there compared to what we're allowed to do, what we're encouraged to do, what there's an appetite to do now. It's a different world. I have these collections called the theatrical theater reviews, New York theater reviews, that used to come out monthly and I was at the Chicago Tribune for 11 years and the woman before me was Claudia Cassidy and she used to collect them. So when no one wanted them, I took them home and I have collections of all the reviews from different years in New York. So I could pick up and we do this in class, I'll bring in the 1956 volume and we'll look at the 12 critics who reviewed that play and look at the amount of space they had and imagine that they all wrote on deadline. They all came back from the theater and wrote those beautiful things before they went to sleep that night and it had a place in people's lives and in the theater's life that I think for reasons that are larger than newspapers and larger than the theater and larger than critics has changed just the kind of country we live in now. And it's not there. Okay, so I'm going to my last question because I want to leave some time for people to ask questions. I mean, Linda, you're a New Yorker, you're from Washington, which is a little further away although it's still sort of on the East Coast but opening our vision to what's happening in other cities around the country and other theaters who are communicating whether it's the Alliance Theater or whether it's Seattle Rap or whether it's the Taper or the Goodman or, you know, I'm just curious about your thoughts about where these institutions will be in 20 years and is a kind of theater that young people are making which I'm hoping you'll jump in on this later with questions going to end up into that environment and into that space, which is really a creation of the 1960s. That's when those theaters were built. There was a vision for them of a particular sort, which, and they've grown. I mean, I have some piece of napkin that I wrote that's some amazing, I should have brought it, some statistic that I read probably from Pew that there's something like 1,800 theaters in America now that have operating budgets of over $225,000 a year, which is absolutely incredible considering there is that statistic when they founded the NEA that only 5% of the American population had ever been in a theater. We're not a nation of aristocrats, we're a nation of peasants, so nobody had that tradition. I mean, there had been theater, but so it's pretty remarkable what's happened. But at the same time, you wonder just the idea, and then at the other hand, obviously you have the whole thing about where do people want to live? They want to live where there's some kind of culture, whether you can't get young people who are smart to move to a city where there isn't university, where there isn't some hip-tech thing, where there isn't some kind of art scene, people are leaving towns where there aren't. So there's some role for those institutions, but I don't know, what do you think about where they'll be? Whether we're talking about Cleveland Playhouse, TCG was just out there, and San Francisco. It's hard for me because I'm so New York based now, but I was the theater critic at the Chicago Tribune in the 70s and watched the birth of the off-loop theater movement, the Chicago theater movement, and that happened at a time when really theater in Chicago was touring companies and dinner theaters and Second City, and suddenly people who moved there or just got out of college and started wanting to do theater, and these little theaters that are now major institutions began because smart, interesting young people wanted to put on a show. And it was years and years of that accumulation before there was this recognition that Chicago's a major theater center, but I wanna believe that the people who, the Stuart Gordon's and the people who began those little theaters in the 70s in Chicago because they needed to have that kind of fun are still doing it somewhere, but I'm incapable of knowing where the institutional theaters are gonna be going at. In Washington, you have a better idea. I think the bigger the theater, the bigger the problem they've got at this point, the Shakespeare Theater Company, every major theater in Washington over the last 12 years has built a new theater, everyone. It's a completely new infrastructure from everyone, and there's a lot of theater companies in Washington, a lot of them, it's a big constellation of big companies or even mid-sized companies. The Shakespeare Theater Company last year did a production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which to my mind forms no part of the classical canon. This year they did Man of La Mancha. This is not what they did five and 10 years ago, and when I asked, they said, well, it's based on plaudis, a funny thing.  I mean, hello, Dolly, is based on the matchmaker, so I guess everything is fair game. It's a game of filling seats, and you can't, the missions are changing desperately trying to find people who are going to fill these seats. It's not unlike what's happened on Broadway, where you can't fill 1,200 seats every night. It's a load of larger scale if you don't know who the main actor is. It's just, you know, this was never the issue. You know, once upon a time, the playwrights and the songwriters were the stars on Broadway. That's no longer the case. You cannot, almost in any case, in very few. The Book of Mormon is an unusual example, even outside of Washington, I mean outside of New York, but all I'm saying, I think there is a huge problem with what is going to be filling these theaters in the coming 20 years. It's the most successful theaters in Washington, to my mind, are the ones that didn't build to the highest level of seats. Willie Mammoth has a 250 seat theater. The Studio Theater has four 200 seat theaters. That's about it, I think, in terms of, if you wanna sell out a play, that's the scale you have to think of these days, at least from what I'm talking about, plays. Musicals, it's a little different, the Shakespeare Theater Company can't fill their 800 seat theater every night with as you like it, unless you get Halle Berry and a Cardassian to do it. I mean, basically, you can't do it. It's not going to, it's not happening. So the prognosis, I think, for many of these places that built up. And the other thing is that a lot of theaters found that their donors would give them lots of money if you could put their name on something. They won't give as much money if it's for commissioning plays or sponsoring a playwright's season by a playwright. That doesn't have permanence for them, for many people. There are a few. Arena Stage did a residential program for playwrights a few years ago, a playwright in residence program that was heralded with a big grant from the Mellon Foundation and it has sort of withered over the years. It didn't have any, it didn't fulfill its promise. They even gave health coverage to the playwrights. It was extraordinary. It was a great advance. I don't even know if that program is being renewed. And yet they've got these giant new spaces that have incredible heating bills that they're gonna have to pay for. And what are they gonna put in those theaters? They just did Fiddler on the Roof. I mean, that's what we're talking about. And on that note, I think we'll open to questions. Peter, you said a startling thing. You mentioned the occurrence of institutional in-house creation of descriptive or critical material about the theater's product. And that makes me think of Lessing, who was hired to do the same thing for his theater in the 18th century. Now, might there be a possibility there of something that isn't simply PR promotion, but actually a place of perhaps dramaturgical innovation in terms of communicating with a much more clarified, local, and specific audience? I think that's a useful and an evolving notion that is going to take hold in places where there is a literary bent and a staff with the sophistication to carry out what you're saying. And I think there are places where that would be a perfectly great thing.  But Lincoln Center Theater puts out a magazine that dramaturgically and philosophically and sociologically about their major productions that offers insight and enjoyment that you don't get anywhere else. And I believe that when a theater has the resources, but also the smart enough people to wanna do it. And this magazine's been going on for a pretty long time now. 67 issues. 67 issues. And each one of them honestly have been more valuable than some plays I've seen. Not necessarily your place, but I mean, I got more about the theater from reading these lovely magazines, these important magazines. So something else about hiring your own critic. I just did a little column for next week about there's a website in LA called Bitter Lemons. I think their logo is bringing Los Angeles Theater together whether you want to or not. And they've started this program of allowing theaters or actors or directors or anything to buy a review. For $150, a theater can buy or pay for a critic to come to their theater and write a 300 word or more review. And the only guarantee is that it's not going to be a positive review necessarily. They're supposedly going to, the objective is that they be not compromised. And the reviews will run on the website to the first week or something. And after that, it can be disseminated by the writers or by the theaters or whatever. I have no idea if that can work. $125 of it goes to the author, goes to the critic. And 25 goes back to the website to administer the program. You know, there's a lot of critics out of work in LA. And a lot of theaters not getting reviewed is this a solution? I don't know. The people who were buying the review and you're not, the other part of it is you don't get to pick your critic. They assign somebody just like a news organization would. And most of the reviews were being purchased by a fringe festival, which makes sense in a way. I mean, it was almost, you know, any attention was gonna be worth it for a play that's trying to stand out from a panoply of plays. But I don't think it's gonna, I don't think that that's gonna be a very hard model to replicate. Hey, mister, you wanna buy a theater review? I just think, you know, we live in a transparent world where it's instantly known that this was paid for. It devalues it immediately, even if it's smart. I think that's gonna be a tainted model. I just don't think that's gonna solve anything. I think it's possible to have it not be tainted if it's administered correctly.  Boy. Hi, I'm Kat Rodriguez. I'm in Baltimore right now. I have, I guess, a comment and then a question. As an early career dramaturg, I don't know, maybe I'm not jaded yet, but I see my peers, whether they're, you know, early career professionals in the theater or not caring about representation and the dialogue around it. So I think there is hope. I'm actually hopeful. And then the second thing is this is a question that is coming out kind of some of the conversations we've had at other panels regarding theater for young audiences or theater made by affinity groups. And it's a conversation that has also been had a lot in the Latino theater commons. And I know Tlalacrivis is a kind of champion of this question. But what do you do? What is your advice for a theater company or an artist who creates work and it just doesn't get reviewed? For example, I did some freelance work in Tucson at Borderlands and the local critic just decided, you know, your work's not good, so I'm gonna stop reviewing it. And it's the theater company that is doing work for and by and telling the stories of the indigenous and the Latino-Latina community. It's so important. So what do you do for that? And then especially for artists who are working in academia or who need that criticism for their portfolios or for their tenure-track positions? You know, what's starting up in some cities, I don't know, I can't talk for every city, but there are websites, you know, theater-intensive websites that just review locally. There are three in Washington. They don't pay their critics, for the most part. I think it's a voluntary kind of thing. But it's grassroots. I can't vouch for the quality of every review, but they cover the waterfront. And it's a matter of organization. You know, there's a new organization in Washington called the DC Coalition for Theater and Social Justice. They're trying to do it from the other end. They're trying to get communities organized to do theater that's pertinent to them. And this is just another manifestation of that. It, you know, there needs to be like-minded people who are gonna create some vehicle for it. It's not that, it doesn't seem, I mean, it probably takes a lot of work, a lot of sweat. But, you know, you're not, you're gonna have the hardest time with the large media organization and getting them to come just off the cuff, unless it's some incredibly newsworthy or intensely interesting subject. I, you know, but also, but again, you know, a lot of organizations are looking for things that are gonna bring in new audiences. And certainly, you know, any large, you know, anything that interests the Latino community is gonna be, it's gonna eventually start to get attention. It might take some time. But the way, but the internet, you know, the websites, take a look at something called DC Theater Scene. It'll give you an idea. And you're in Baltimore, so you're close enough, or yeah. You're right around the corner. Hello, my name is Coriana Moffitt. My question will begin with a short explanation in that in the past two weeks in Boston, four reviews have come out on three shows and each of the four reviews has had some racist comments, specifically talking about why characters in these shows were played by people of color and what the purpose or point of that was in that they did not themselves, their characters were not there solely for to represent their race. And these are reviews from bloggers, from the Metro version in Boston and from just side newspapers. So I ask my question, I have a couple. I mean, you're welcome to answer however many you want. Just, is there any kind of mentoring in the credit community of how to talk about race? Also, how do you talk about race? And how do you advise for theater companies to address these issues when they come up? It's a landmine, just as it is in America. And since the theater, the best theater deals with a lot of the things that we have to be as people, we bring the people that we are.  And then be surprised. Just, I don't know how you deal with a critic who you perceive as racist. There used to be one major critic in New York who would regularly make, you know, slam Jews and black people and was extremely negative about non-traditional casting. And for those people, you just have to wait until somebody smarter comes, you know, more open comes around. But the thing is that it's so difficult because I remember there was an all black production of some fluffy 30s musical. And I remember thinking, well, this is a, you know, it was a fluffball in the 30s and now it's an all black fluffball. And I reviewed it, you know, as this black production of this fluffball, but I didn't take it any more seriously than that. And then I got up the next morning and found out that the New York Times said it was a minstrel show. And I went, holy shit, was that a minstrel show? Did I not recognize that it was a minstrel show?  And that's where I'm answering your question at all. I don't understand why people go to plays if they're not going to have their minds opened up to things they haven't heard or seen before. It always astonishes me when I read and reviews the kind of, even in 2015, the kind of like suppositions people make about what they bring from their own backgrounds or their limited backgrounds, what they bring to the review. I think you're talking about the case. Is this the one where it was involving a Filipino American? Yeah, I read about that. You know, the reviewers are only as good as what they bring of themselves and their own curiosity about the world.  There was a review in London just a couple of weeks ago of the motherfucker with the hat, which was mouth-dropping, by a major publication, mouth-droppingly dumb and scary. And scary to think that you could say these things. You know, it's not about political correctness, it's about human decency. And it's also about your capacity to understand things you didn't understand when you walked in the door. That's the whole point of this. And if you're about parading your ignorance, if that's what you think this job is so that you can find like-minded ignorant people to agree with you, then you're really not gonna, you're not gonna gain much respect in the long run.  So yeah, oh yeah, it was a total pan. It was a total, I mean it was, he used words that were, you know, offensive. We have a question from the Twitterverse, which is asking both of you to speak to how you think about the communication you're having with each of your constituencies. So, you're writing presumably for ticket buyers, you're writing presumably in a dialogue with the artists in your city. Peter, I know that's true of you, particularly in Washington, D.C., because I know a lot of those artists and I know they know you and talk to you. And, you know, perhaps theater management, can you talk a little bit about that to address Twitter folk? I started tweeting about four years ago, I think, three or four years ago, and it changed my whole perspective on this job. It 180 degree changed for me in terms of what I was learning, who I realized was listening, and who was trying to listen, what things I could gather personally and experientially about myself and the job that would help me understand where theater was going, all those things happened for me. But the other side of it was, I was conscious, though, of people I was writing about who were now in direct communication with me and sometimes that made for painful exchanges or at least more difficult ones because the model is we're supposed to be behind, you know, I mean, for all time was, you know, don't have any contact with the people you're writing about because it's gonna color your sense of, you're gonna save your bullets, so to speak, to put it in really gross terms. But I see myself foremost, when I write, I try to write for an informed reader. I don't try to write for people who work in the industry. I don't try to write for the creators of the work. I try to write for people with whom I'm imagining I'm talking behind their back, in a sense, in the review. And if they choose to, you know, eavesdrop, that's their decision. I'm talking about the writers and the actors and the directors. If they want to participate, that's their decision. But I try to look at it as people out there who I can either somehow persuade of the value of some aspect of this work. And I would say that it's become harder with Twitter. That part of the job has become harder because I am conscious of, and the only other difference I would say is that when it's a embryonic work, when it's a first production of something either musical or play, that I know is gonna go on from Washington to somewhere else, eventually probably New York, that's the only exception. I do have consciously in mind what would be helpful from one audience member's perspective in terms of what might help in the next time they think about this piece, or what some of the objections might be either completely ludicrous or very, very helpful. I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's just because it's just my reaction. Hi. I've been struggling with the whole question of elitism and classism and found myself perhaps guilty of it. And Peter, you were mentioning this first class of protocol in theater for college students. I was at a production about a year ago. There was a student group there. I was very happy to see students there. They were young. They were, I think, in high school. And one woman was sitting next to me and she was texting the whole time. And I said something to her. I thought she would stop. I thought, you know what, lighten up. Don't say anything. I couldn't help myself in the second act. I said something. And she said, what, you know, why? You know, my phone's not on. And I said, well, but you're sitting next to me. It's bothering me. And more importantly, it's probably bothering the actors, you know, who noticed it. And I could tell, this never occurred to her. Okay. I got into a conversation with her teacher afterwards. The teacher sort of took the responsibility. But I got into almost an altercation, which was not right. But I guess the question is, you know, with so much being affected by the fact that we don't, like in England, have a culture of going to the theater, that prices even in non-profit are really unaffordable. You know, it's $60, $70, $90 to go to Off-Broadway now. Except for student groups. And I've worked on productions where the artist has said, we have got to have 10 or $20 tickets for this. Insisted on it. I mean, what is the solution so that it becomes a more democratic cultural phenomenon? Yes. Yes, there needs to be cheaper tickets, for sure. I think we shouldn't idealize the audiences in London because a couple of years ago, I read all these stories about complaints about people who were having sex in the balconies of plays and eating in the first row, passing chicken down the line. And so I think that manners are, bad manners are not just our problem because we have a not very good education system alas anymore. But I think that people who have... I do talk to... I don't talk to the artist back to the other question. I feel very, very strongly that I am not advising the artist how to dance or how to play the piccolo or how better to enunciate. That's for their teachers to do and for the people in their professional lives to do. If they read something that I write and it's helpful to them, that's great, but that's not my job. But my job, I believe, is to talk to sort of the person who's not a specialist. I always, because I've always worked for mass market organizations and I've always wanted to talk to people like my mother who was not a particularly well-educated woman but a sensitive woman and that I would like to tell my mother why she should like this play. And so I think that my rule is don't overestimate the reader's information or underestimate their intelligence. That if you can find that balance. And in that way, I think that maybe you do get to bring in more people who wouldn't ordinarily go to the theater. And I don't know if there's a way to tell people that you don't tweet, you don't text in the theater except the Gestapo tactics that they use in yelling at people when anything happens. But there's just a lot of bad manners around it and possibly by example, we can help. But I probably didn't answer that either. I would just say briefly that I found that when I had students who really, I mean they were motivated enough to take a course and find out more but really didn't know what to expect from what they were going to see or whether this would even be for them and even probably didn't like all the things we saw. But I did know that after 10 shows that the close mentoring that I did over a period of 16 weeks turned many of them into theater kids. They understood the language. They were proud to tell other people what they'd seen and to kind of get them. They wanted to like proselytize as a result. I wouldn't say everybody but over the years I've stayed in touch with enough of them and they've become regular theater goers. It takes, I think in this day and age it takes that kind of close contact and it's not once. It's not taking your fourth grade class and letting them see a great musical. They'll be, 2% will be enchanted and maybe tell their moms and dads they wanna go. I think it's persistent, repeated, engaged discussion and at whatever stage of life they're at. And college students are a perfect one because they're looking for the next, what comes next in their lives. And it may not, that's how I think it's gonna have to happen. It's like we're gonna have to be like little gorilla groups of mentors. Hi, I'm Shelly. I teach at a university in San Diego, San Diego State University. And so I'm thinking a lot about these questions, both the questions about the advent of the internet and I appreciate very much the devastating changes that that has wrought on your field. But I'm wondering if we can think about the flip side, the positive side of it and also think about young people and thinking about, I'm always thinking as a person who works with undergraduates and graduates think about training critics and what that pathway is because oftentimes it feels like they either go through the journalism school and have no knowledge of theater or they go through the theater area and have very little understanding of the whole journalism side. So it's interesting to think if we can honor those who have been let go and that kind of thing but think about that next group that might be coming up and it taking advantage of this new form. Maybe we don't have to be limited to 400 words if we're not going to print. Maybe we don't have to follow the same structure we've always followed so somebody can cut off the last couple paragraphs. We don't have to worry so much about that when we can be online. So maybe there's some positives. Also I see in my students, especially on things like ratemyprofessor.com that they are reviewers from a very early age. They put their thoughts out about everything, right? I mean, whether it's a video game or food or, you know. So there's a lot of criticism happening out there. So I'm just wondering how we can maybe see or imagine the next generation of critics. You know, whatever the format is that their criticism will funnel into. I don't know what that's gonna look like necessarily and I'm not sure I like the idea or what I think of the idea of theaters paying for their review. It's like theater subsidizing the journalism. I don't know, I'm not sure what I think about that but I'm thinking. But yeah, how do we train that next generation of criticism that's coming up the next group of people? So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Thank you. I don't know why it has, you know. I mean, theater criticism hasn't been around for centuries. I mean, it's been around a couple of centuries probably. There's no reason it can't be reinvented in another way. We're probably not the right people to ask that, you know. Because we've been doing it for so long in the way we've done it and we know a way to do it. You would need someone to look at what we've done and say, we can improvise on this. There's no reason to ignore the past and what's been done and if there is a new way to do it, it's gonna be somebody in their 20s or 30s or maybe even teens now who's gonna do that. I don't think, you know, we're not the people who are gonna decide that. But it's not as if people didn't do that with us. There isn't, there's no one way that anybody, any of us became critics. But I was, I always depress my students and say, I know it's really boring to hear that the 60s were better. But I was part of a Rockefeller Foundation program for the training of classical music critics. Imagine the Rockefeller Foundation training classical music critics for two years in 68, 69. And then also was at a dance critic training program. And then, and now Peter and I both teach at the O'Neill Center in the summers where we work with young critics and mid-career critics. But that's not the same thing as what you're saying, which is somebody, you know, the Rockefeller Foundation program for the training of internet critics. And that, as Peter said, is for someone else. Okay, hi, my name is Jeanine Sabeck, formerly of Arena Stage in D.C., currently at Brigham Young University. We've talked a lot at the conference about this idea of community. And I'm, as I've been listening to the conversation, I'm wondering about the question of, is it possible for theater artists and critics to work together in a way that doesn't compromise the integrity of your review, but that allows theaters to work with their local critics in a way that allows them to fill any 800-seat house regularly without a show that is form in any way related to Broadway or have a huge star attached. How do theater artists and critics work together and is it possible? I have no friends in the field intentionally because I found early on in Chicago when I was reviewing people who lived in my neighborhood that when I could see their little faces above the keyboard, I was in trouble. That whenever, that I would either think, well, am I being especially mean to this guy because I have to prove to myself that I'm not favoring him because I like him and that there's just layers and layers and layers. Many critics can be involved in the theater, the workings of the theater and not have a problem with it. I can't do it. I have what I refer to as emotional conflicts of interest and which I think are much more toxic than whether or not somebody buys you a theater ticket. And it may have something to do with being a woman. There aren't many women theater critics still, but there are some, but it may be just being raised to please, the way I was, that possibly I make an emotional connection with the people that I need to review. And if there are enough complications between me and the event and the review without complicating it further with having emotional feelings about the people I'm writing about. So I have basically a drawbridge over the moat. Many critics can function otherwise, but I can't do it. Well, and by the way, there's other ways to reach audiences than reviews, as you know, there's a gallery of possibilities and the ways in which theater writers can activate those are really, it's based on the work itself and for something you're describing as something very marginal or of interest to a narrow group of people. There is some degree to which people have to be able to find things on their own. There's gotta be a natural curiosity that people have for that thing and there's only so many ways to make that happen from our institution's point of view. So I think you have to think beyond us if you're talking about community, I think that's where you've gotta go to those communities and figure out what the connection is. We're almost your last resort in those situations, unfortunately, I think. I have a funny feeling just based on the hands raised and the Twitter responses that I know what's gonna be talked about at dinner and we could talk for another hour, but it is six o'clock and especially for the dance dramaturgy people we need to get on the road. So thank you to Anne Catanio, Peter Marks and Linda Weiner, lot to chew on. Very quick housekeeping things before we send you to dinner in the conference bar if you lost sunglasses, see me. If you are going to the dance dramaturgy workshop, the one train to 18th Street, I will meet anyone who wants a guide at the registration table in 15 minutes and I'm happy to guide you all down there together. Let's keep the conversation going. If you could be here at 9.30 tomorrow morning, so we can start at 9.45, that would be awesome. See you at the bar.


I'm super excited to welcome all of you here for our first, is this the first one? This is our first one, right? First in person concert in about three years forever. It's been forever, yeah. This is a high school band. We're gonna play some tunes. First one is Libertango by Astro Piazzolla. We do have some solos on this, double check. Ari, let's get a solo. Ari in Olivia and Sawyer. She had never, I'm pretty sure, never touched a drum set before we started. This next piece is called Fantasia on the Dargasson. This piece to me is a good example of how effective recycling can be. So Gustav Holtz took two folk tunes, one called the Dargasson, and the Green Sleeves comes in about halfway through, so two English folk tunes, and wrote them into this lovely piece which he wrote for String Orchestra. And then a few years later, he was asked to write a piece of music for concert band. So what did he do? He took us and pulled out that old folk piece for String Orchestra and re-orchestrated it for concert band. And then this version that we're playing is almost exactly the same thing that Gustav Holtz wrote, except regular instrumentation ensembles. So we're gonna play Fantasia on the Dargasson. Edith is gonna open us up with a little bit. So I'm actually gonna play for concert at this point. This is well popular on TikTok at one point, that from them, it's a cool song, so we're playing it. Music, he has made it in.  Thank you for all that you've done for us. String Band, we're a band this year. I'm going to let me play with them, so we truly are conductors and coach teaching and all the things, coach choosing the music. Thank you to our wonderful view list here for choosing our next piece. The next piece on your program might be Dust in the Wind. And I'm really sorry, but our guitar player isn't able to come tonight. So we're not gonna play it. It really makes the arrangement. So we are going to next play Selections from Hamilton. Features My Shot, Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story, and You'll Be Back. And so we've worked really hard to put this piece together and let's have some fun playing for you. Thank you for waiting while we do our last little shift here. Week and a half, well, a couple of years, but we last week took a tour with the Band and Strings and chorus to all of the elementary schools. We went to three of them on Monday and two more on Friday and got to perform and interact with the kids there at all the elementary schools. It was really a terrific experience, but it sort of put us off and we had several people today. Do we have a concert tonight? And they say, yeah, we do. Normally we would do our in-school performance the day of the concert. We're actually doing it tomorrow. And this morning during our normal class time, we had the middle school in-school concert. So we haven't really seen these folks since Friday. And so it's understandable that we're a little confused about whether we were having a concert, but I think pretty much we all made it. We had a cancellation of one of the play-downs for Varsity Girls' Softball and we're sad about the cancellation. They get to play tomorrow, but that does allow a couple of our students in chorus and band and such to be here tonight. We're glad about that. And so let's do some singing, eh? If we can stand up straight. Our first piece tonight is the Sting Song from the mid-80s called Russians. And as we were talking about things that are going on in the world these days, this song seemed appropriate. It's all about, we hope that all of the countries and all of the nations love their children. And that's really what this song is about. So this is Russian. Children respond to our group. Chef said we don't subscribe to this point of view.  If the Russians love their children, we share the same. Regardless of ideology, it's love their children. Don't subscribe to this point of view. The Russians love, Russians love, Russians love their children. We can check our wonderful diction and pronunciation. This is Ave Verum, which is written in Latin by two of our students that we'd like to recognize tonight with us for four years of pandemic and barely any chorus and Zoom chorus and just it's been incredibly challenged for young musicians, incredibly challenging for young musicians these last couple of years. And Anne and I would really just like to give our appreciation to Alah and Jillian and Tia, our seniors. But we are going to feature them on this piece. So you'll hear the three of them. This is Take On Me.


All right. Hey guys, this here is RetroJot and you are watching ComigodinTV and this is a massive kind of place set here I originally had the camera on a tripod and I attempted to actually do a test run going live with it like that and it just it the To be able to show everything off It's just it was insane things kept falling over because I had to walk around the tripod so we're gonna go ahead and handheld this and Try not to move around so much unless necessary, so let's get into it Real quick if you haven't already go ahead and please like the page subscribe Feel free to comment below and comment as we're going along on this live video review. So here we go So this was created. This is the second GI Joe headquarters The first one came out. I believe in 1983. It was essentially just what you see here this flat part right here It didn't fold up to my knowledge rating was this pretty pretty much flat You're able to fit a couple of vehicles here in here There was a computer outpost on the inside. It was a jail sale and then there was a removable Hella pad that you can put wherever you want. It was pretty cool for the time It didn't compare to play sets like Castle Grayskull for instance Nor does it compare to the GI Joe USS flag place set which Would love to have that But this this was one of three play sets I wanted the most as a kid the first being Castle Grayskull the second being the Ninja Turtles sewer play set and the next being this beauty And I did manage to finally get all those previous ones, but later on in life as I grew up and got a job So and this I just got a few weeks ago So let's go ahead and go over this beautiful beautiful beautiful place. I absolutely love this with all his 90s neon color glory So I'm gonna move in Now this play set boasted in the commercials that could hold up to Up to 50 GI Joe figures. I don't have I have I don't know as far as GI Joe not including Cobra. I don't have that many GI Joe's I have more Cobra figures than I do GI Joe just cuz come on Cobra was cooler But this does hold a lot of figures. I don't have to just use the pegs You could put them pretty much anywhere all of these figures with the exception of I believe that's heavy-duty is on a peg so All right, so let's go ahead and go over this play set We'll start with the very front and kind of work our way around the play set this way So first off, you'll notice we have this Gatling gun here. Yeah, the GI Joe figure that fits in here Now this Gatling gun Which really cool about this is it is removable You could just take it off Of here like so That and you could put it wherever you want You want to hear you put it up here? You can move it. You don't put it over here. That's its second functionality Besides being a front Weapon here, I'll show you the third one next This does fold up it can be moved and it does fire Missiles when you turn the knob And this is really hard one-handed So we'll just leave that folded up for right now But these do these do these fire out and I don't really want to lose them anyway, so I'm not gonna just fire them out Here we have What is basically kind of like where the Joe's can lay and shoot their guns while Cobra's attacking them this way This has various different pegs It has two four six eight pegs. I have seven Joe's here on the pegs To display and again, this is really cool. You'll see the door here, which does just fold up like so Yeah, once that is folded up you can take and We move the figures and then just just slides in the base like so And that's gonna serve for multiple functionality because you then can put Joe's in here like so and you can just Store them in there if you wanted to so that's kind of neat Moving over here. You will notice that we have a gun. This is one of three rocket launchers And it does fire like just like that and I did there goes a missile There goes a rocket Another cool thing was should Cobra be attacking and fire a missile here then this here will go And as you can see for it being Well over 20 years old this place that everything on here work. It's 100 percent complete. It works So I'm really uber uber excited about this Then we'll go over here to the next rocket launcher And this is the second of three rocket launchers and what's cool is this can go anywhere You don't have to put them here. You can remove these guns here and you can put the rocket launchers in there We have the third rocket launcher here, which has a tripod this comes off the tripod So you can put these little laser guns on this tripod you put one of these Rocket launchers on the tripod. It's really cool and you can move it wherever you want So and of course these also fire Alright You'll notice this little door here That I'm getting into right now. Let me go ahead and spin this sucker around So we're gonna get ready to go inside This awesome massive GI Joe headquarters We're going inside And looks like I have a GI Joe who fell There we go. So over here. We have the jail You could fit. It's made. It's got one peg for a figure. You could probably fit to GI Joe's in here as you can see I have Destro in here So what happens here is you go back to the front and you notice this little can right here so you take this can and Say Cobra wants to free whoever's in it. They found the schematics of the headquarters They know behind this wall is the jail sale So and they want to free Destro. They need more weapons and only Destro can make it for them So they're gonna free him. How do they free him? Well, they're gonna explode this area by hitting this explosive can See if I can There we go. And then we're going to just Boo. Oh, well And now you see Destro in here and Destro can escape the jail sale like so He doesn't want to come out. Ha ha. I am free Free to create my massive mass effect weapon.  Mass effect here I come So that's got destroyed. I'm gonna have to rebuild that. All right So And we have Joe's falling all over the place up here Live video. Yay. All right. And here we have some more GI Joes on pegs. Again, you could fit probably The commercial back in the 90s said that you can have up to 50 GI Joes on here If you use the pegs, you can fit more GI Joes if you don't use the pegs so Here you see a An area to fill up all your joe vehicles Now here's the thing. This is Inaccurate complete but inaccurate This hose is supposed to be attached here. Well, they're the peg broke The peg is actually at the other end of this hose here um here So I ended up bringing it to where it actually went in here and the peg stops the wire from coming out And it makes more sense because why would you Put the gun in here When the hose is here To fill up your vehicles, wouldn't you want to get right straight from the source? So this works out better. I like this better. So There you go um We had it has a working elevator here. You'll see scarlet's behind And it goes up now. I like this. It's cool all play sets for the most part having elevator even castle grace go ahead and elevator The ninja should ninja turtles to replace that helen elevator But they all went somewhere castle grace go went to another level Um, the sewer place that went to the street level. This goes nowhere There's no she has to jump from the elevator to here and she'll have to jump and I'll go up It goes up it goes up and that's where it stops. It doesn't go up any further So she has to jump to get up here or climb up there and if they're firing that gun It's good. She's gonna get in the way So it doesn't function doesn't have much functionality, but it's still cool Um, and it has a high drive lifting running out there So anyway, it's still pretty cool Um, we'll continue from the bottom here. So here we have a service area for the gi gel vehicles Uh, it's not very detailed, but you could see Uh, well painted detail, but you definitely see a lot of like wires and buttons and things like that Then this serves for some other something else This can fit And these grooves right here And it just it goes in just like slides in right in and it can go up down You could I don't know why you want to shoot Inside the headquarters, but you have that option to do so I think it's mostly for storage purposes. You could take it and this and I'll show you everything when this whole thing folds up It does and it goes up and so and you can see snake eyes here as he's on one of the pegs And uh, you'll also notice that this isn't one of the original gi joes Either is he he's from the gi joe versus or uh, yeah gi joe versus cobra line It came out in the early 2000s and you'll notice so these are compatible with this play set So which is really cool Um continuing around here, uh, we do have this other platform here. It doesn't really serve much of a purpose other than to put more gi joes Um, this this this set also has electronics now when I purchased this Um, that was one of the things I wanted to know if it worked Um, I did put batteries in it. I have the batteries over time that were in here were corroded I had to scrape it out the batteries are under the battery pack is underneath here. I don't think we can actually Kind of make it out It is a pain to change the batteries I took them out because you have to take this off.  You have to lift this out It's just a real pain in the rear to do so But I can confirm that all the electronics do work on this. It is really cool. And it's your 90s annoying sound effects like that like the annoying machine gun or the Do-do-do-do-do-do-do Just horrible 90s military sounds that we got as a kid with the little guns Um, it also has a search light which I didn't have I still don't have a A bulb for to see if it worked, but it is here Uh, continuing on the lower level though, uh more pegs more pegs Uh, you will notice that I do have extra rockets Um when I went to complete this Extra rockets came with some of the rockets that I plot to complete this So which is cool because I was an area to store extra rockets for your rocket launchers and for your Uh rapid fire missile launcher here Uh, moving around here, we have uh lady j here and dial tone. I believe it's dial tone um And a computer console here the computer console does nothing. It's just neon orange Uh, but you do have some stickers down here. I don't know why they're down here Um, it's weird spot for them, but hey, you know, whatever And so that covers the bottom And here is where you would put the rocket launcher There you go So one more thing in the back here. I want to note I go moving up is it has this cool little hook Uh now this hook can come down And you could hook it To various vehicles or whatever, but one cool thing is you'll notice here on the back of their gizos Has that in from his hole Where the screw is but I also served as the place for the backpack um And it has a little hole here For the peg here for the hole So you can take this And just plug it into the back of the gijo Theoretically Uh has them stand here He's not 20 to stand there we go there we go And then just turn this and Turn turn turn and he can repel up Or down whichever And there down it goes So It's just a fun little feature. I mean you could also use it to hook up the back of vehicles and Let them hang the vehicles there so they can work on them easier. It is near the service station um, I also use it to kind of wrap around here and Hook to this when I fold it up and I'll show you that it just keeps this part from folding down at random times when I move it Um I love this place. I I really really do So moving up to the top here I have more joes. I fell down. We'll just remove him Uh more pegs more pegs more joes And I'll show you something now from the front here with these guys out of the way Uh, we just come over here Turn this back around There's one more feature in front now that we're on top that I wish to show you um And that is this feature here Um, you notice that this is kind of out of place. It's not black with the rest of it. It's not even green It's the wonderful 90s neon So this is what happens. Uh, we have this which if you push I'll back up here a bit so you can see I'm going to push this in and when I do That's going to collapse that So there you go Um, we got a piece on the warp Uh and shipwreck is still attached To do this he did not fall he's holding out pretty good there It looks like he's kind of yelling down how's how's things going down there Uh so All right, um, so now I'm going to go ahead and show you the um Folding up features here. I'm gonna let me grab this piece down real quick Reconnect this There we go. All right He's still looking down Okay, so This whole thing I have to take figures out here He was I actually have another shipwreck figure. It was newer From a few years ago. It came with the cobra commander But the peg the peg legs don't work if they're too small for these older pegs So so what you do here is you got to take your gijos Off the pegs here And this thing has a defense mode And I'm going to go ahead and put This back on Maybe hold on Let's dream close up There we go. All right. So this all folds up. I already showed you that this goes in Uh, this also comes up like so This also comes up. We've got figures attached. Uh, they may fall out Um This spins around He's probably gonna fall out So Him We'll go ahead and put this up Now this does have a habit of just kind of falling Falling around when I um When I move this around so what I'll do is I'll take this I'll wrap it around here and just kind of Attach to this and then it won't I can't even tighten it a bit too. So there we go. This is wherever And we turn it back around And now Now we have A fully fortified GI Joe headquarters Uh and easy to store So you can because you can't stack it on boxes or whatever you want. So Oh, the rather than just leaving it out now All right. Well, there you go. My friends. This is definitely one of my favorite play sets of all time I like that castle grace goal. Good to turtle sewer play set 92 GI Joe headquarters I absolutely love this thing now These go on eBay Complete like this for anywhere between I believe 150 to $250 roughly Here's the kicker. I got mine in the thrift store here in town. I bought this for three dollars I bought this whole thing for three dollars and it came with two bags with all the accessories and stuff like that And it and in the bag It also came half complete The mask boulder hill play set I kid you not I got all of that for three dollars And I'm in the process of completing the mask boulder hill play set I will go ahead as soon as it's complete and do a review of that as well Steve, I'm not kidding.  It was six dollars It was six dollars. I got this half off for three dollars with the mask boulder hill play set The figure is not included. These are all my figures. Yeah, I kid you not Best find ever So Um, all right. Well, I would like to thank everybody. Uh, all you comic idioms for tuning in and watching and supporting this channel, of course Um If you have any questions if you'd like to comment Feel free to do so Steve. I want to thank you for very much for tuning in and watching Um, I hope you enjoyed the video. I hope the camera wasn't all Move it too moving around there for you.  There was no way I was going to be able to do this With a standard tripod. I'd had this was something I'd have to get in So you could see all the details and everything and now it was good All right to everyone else who's watching us later on again. Thank you Please make sure you like the uh, like the page comment below and subscribe and why I had to feel free to share You know, what the heck? It's some retro goodness. Everybody needs a little bit of nostalgia in their life. Go ahead and share the video Um, and until next time my friends. Thank you very much. This has been retro john and I am out