January 31st, 2010, 2 Comments »
A reader wrote with an interesting question. They’re planning on going to see a play this month–Robert Lepage’s “The Blue Dragon”, and wondered “do I go to opening night? I’m sure they had months to rehearse, but maybe there’s jitters?”
And here’s what I said. If you’re looking for the best artistic experience, I wouldn’t go on opening night. There are always jitters among the performers, and that can result in an uneven or less nuanced performance. Also–this is particularly the case with Lepage’s highly-complex work–the risk of a technical issue declines with each performance. Last year, I know somebody who attended an opening night at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria and the lighting basically failed. The very-professional actress had to do her entire one-woman show under house lights.
I’d also avoid the closing night show, for some of the same reasons. The ideal show might be a Friday night in the second-half of the run. There are often matinees on Saturday, and I figure the actors may be pacing themselves to handle the demands of doing the show twice in the same day.
I’m going to see that Lepage play this month as well, and I’m pretty psyched. What night do you like to go to a play?
2 Comments »
August 24th, 2009, 7 Comments »
As I get older, I find I have to work harder to discover new music that I like. When you combine this with the balkanization of the music industry and the rise in popularity of music genres I don’t particularly like (rap, hip hop and so forth), it can be downright tricky to come across new bands.
New tools like iTunes and Pandora help, certainly, but I still find that I have to work at the process.
D.J. Palladino is working harder than I am at it. He’s written a long article (found via Waxy) about his indie rock education. In particular, I like how he correlates today’s music to the rock and roll he grew up with:
Much of my pleasure came from the surprising connection this new music had to the stuff I loved when I was a kid. Most of my friends are stuck in the 1960s, their formative years, but who can blame them? The long feedback howling in songs like “Omaha” by Moby Grape were screams against our parents’ bland lives; they gave us hope that music could reorder the world. When that music died, many of my generation failed to find the same spirit even in the simplistic delights of punk rebellion. All I can say is my musical tastes are much like my working habits, which might charitably be considered ADHD.
I was pleased to recognize the names of about half the bands he references in the article. My favourites among those he lists aren’t particularly obscure: Rilo Kiley, New Pornographers, M. Ward and The Shins.
If this is entirely new territory to you, there’s a handy infographic primer at the end of the piece that’s worth a look.
7 Comments »
August 6th, 2009, 8 Comments »
I was talking last night about how much of our home media consumption is time-shifted. We pretty much only watch shows that I’ve downloaded or recorded on the PVR. I only listen to radio via a few podcasts. I discover music on my own schedule, as opposed to MTV or the radio.
I started thinking, then, about how we could time-shift media we enjoy outside the home. I wondered if the digital distribution of movies to movie theatres meant that they could display the movies when I wanted, instead of according to their schedule?
Couldn’t they open up their schedule to voting? For example, what if I had twenty people from my office who wanted to attend a summer blockbuster at 4:00pm, but the movie is scheduled to run at 3:00pm and 5:30pm. Couldn’t we, hypothetically, visit the cinema’s website and vote to change the movie schedule for that day?
Once digital distribution is commonplace, a cinema should run entirely like any other shop at the mall. It has no requirement for a skilled and scheduled projectionist, so the movie schedule could change daily based on the whims of its patrons.
And seeing as we’re changing movie start times, why can’t we vote on which movies the cinema runs? The real answer is that the producers, distributors and cinemas have this farcically baroque system for scheduling movies and dividing up box office revenue. That could change, though. Just as MP3s, Napster and iTunes has tranformed the music distribution channel, technology shifts could change the way movie sales work.
A vote-for-upcoming-movies model would reduce the amount of guesswork that cinemas have to undertake when scheduling movies. Combined with the crowd’s ability to adjust the schedule, these changes might, in theory, increase the average attendance per showing.
Surely some independent cinemas have tried this model. Have you heard of any?
8 Comments »
