The Playgoer: Stuck in the Past

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Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Stuck in the Past

The difficulty much "high art" has in connecting with contemporary audiences isn't helped by so much anachronistic and pointless Victorian trappings, leftover customs that end up freezing everything in some idealized past moment.

In classical music, this is crystallized in the penguin suits modern orchestras still have costume themselves in to be taken seriously by their subscribers. Finally someone has written about this, albeit across the pond, over on the Guardian's Culture Vulture blog.

There are many equivalent touches in theatre--the proscenium being the most conspicuous. But the whole look of a Broadway house is basically a Victorian museum, isn't it? Which is fine for some revivals, of course. But don't new plays sometimes look weird in such spaces?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The same is true of British West End theatres, but that's what they're selling to tourists: Theatre with a capital "T," right?