This item in Thomas Cott's daily email newsletter [[email protected]] caught my eye. From an article in the The Los Angeles Times
As Southern California's inaugural Festival of New American Musicals winds to a close, some observers and participants are raising this question: How, exactly, does this festival define the word "new"?
The wide-ranging event has included 148 events in 36 theaters from Santa Barbara to San Diego, reaching, according to the festival's leadership, an estimated 122,000 theatergoers. But the fest has included not only approximately a dozen world premiere productions and first readings or staged readings of musicals, but also about the same number of musicals that have had previous productions elsewhere. Among the latter group are several shows that can claim to be West Coast premieres -- but one of those musicals, The Times by Brad Ross and Joe Keenan, had received a full production at the Long Wharf Theater in 1993, pushing the boundaries of what one might describe as ‘new.’ "We always said, from the beginning, our definition of a musical that would fit for the festival, or was appropriate, was one that hadn't been done in Los Angeles before -- and that, for the most part, almost entirely was true," said co-organizer Marcia Seligson. "There were a couple of exceptions -- and they were things that really deserved to be seen after the author had a time period to work on them. Until shows hit Broadway or the West End, they are works in progress."
That last line is a doosey. Don't ya think? At first, I bristled at the suggestion that any production outside of Broadway or the West End is somehow "less than full" but after mulling it over a bit, I see an angle playwrights might like to work to our advantage.
There has been some murmuring or muttering in the general community lately about the ubiquitous submission requirement that playwrights encounter when submitting new work to competitions and/or theatres for production consideration. Generally speaking, there will be a bold footnote somewhere among the guidelines that says roughly:
"Only plays that have not received a professional production are eligible..."
I have heard this restriction affectionately referred to by fellow playwrights as the "virgin clause" because in essence the theatres that require this are looking for "virgin" scripts, as yet unsullied by the hands of another company or director.
The problem of course is: How does one define a "full production?" Which brings me back to Ms. Seligson's quote. I would like to suggest right here and now that from this moment forth, playwrights unilaterally adopt a uniform policy of considering nothing short of Broadway or London's West End to be a "full production" for purposes of such guidelines.
This would actually help some of these theatres find great plays because anyone who's toiled in this business for more than a few months understands that there is no substitute for having a play "up on its feet" in terms of helping shape a new script. I can't begin to count the number of times I've made tiny changes in the middle of a run of one of my scripts. Seeing accomplished pros wrestle with one's language night after night in front of a paying crowd is the best "workshop" a playwright can hope for.
Penalizing them for having done their "homework" strikes me as just plain silly.
On a related note, I remember during the Summer I spent as a young Music Composition Fellow at Tanglewood, I was amazed and impressed with the fact that the full orchestra was made available to those composers working on orchestral music. This was a rare opportunity I will never forget; hearing my piano concerto realized in rehearsal by a full orchestra and an accomplished concert pianist taught me more than I could ever have learned just sitting alone studying Beethoven and Mozart.
If we want our playwrights and composers to grow into great artists, we need to find more opportunities for them to actually see and hear their work performed. Writing in a vacuum is deadly.
So thank you to the brand-new Southern California Festival of New American Musicals and to Marcia Seligson. You're wise beyond your years!
