I’m a pretty sophisticated fella. It’s in my DNA. I mean, my family was among the first in its county to install indoor plumbing, and I was taught that coloring between the lines and painting landscapes was just as important as milking the cows or castrating any hogs that got feisty.
My appreciation for the fine arts is firmly in place, but I think you snobby Northeasterners are missing the boat on how to market high-brow culture.
There’s an economic and social crisis out there in the world, and this is no time to be sophisticated and reverential about Alexander Calder and his funny sculpture. Let the kids play on the damn stuff. If it fosters an appreciation of art, let them pretend it’s a piece of playground equipment.
Theater? During the 85,641st performance of “12 Angry Men,” pull some guy out of the audience and let him sit on the jury, looking pensive. Modern dance? Stop all the agonizing analysis of form and style and line. Put on a sexy show like those Danish dance troupes tend to do. Let the audience dance in the aisles.
Old And Rich
Perhaps no segment of the snobby arts has been more stressed and yet more innovative than opera. You know opera. It’s all very high-falutin’ and the average age of the opera audience is about 86, with a median family income of $4.2 million. The audience was getting too small, and in an economic downturn, even the wealthy patrons were pinching pennies.
To their credit, the opera buffs fought back. Simultaneous English translation showed up on screens above the stage. And, in a successful new experiment, live opera performances are now telecast on the big screen in some towns. You can drip popcorn butter on your tie, while gasping at Florestan being starved to death in “Fidelio.”
A good start. But the Connecticut Opera has canceled the rest of its season; the Opera Orchestra of New York has dumped the remainder of its season. This is no time for opera marketeers to sleepwalk like Amina in “La Sonnambula.” They’ve got to get down, get funky, bring them kids kicking and screaming into opera that is as interactive as other aspects of their sorry lives.
When Faust is about to poison himself, he doesn’t need Mephistopheles to interrupt him; the kids in the audience can shout, “no, no,” and they can take the credit for setting the stage, so to speak, for the selling of a soul.
This opera thing is life-and-death. No option should be dismissed out of hand in an effort to make opera part of the middle-brow cultural landscape. Is it Black History Month? Make the rounds to the black schools and churches with “The Emperor Jones.” It would be shocking, controversial, and it would get people talking about opera.
Sex, Drama And Conspiracy
I notice the Metropolitan Opera offered up “Rigoletto” early in February, which is a production that I would take on the high school auditorium tour. Those hormonal high school girls could relate to Gilda, couldn’t they? There’s enough sex and drama and conspiracy to commit murder and angst in that show to keep the kids off their cell phones for at least a few hours — while they gain an appreciation for opera.
Marketing isn’t always pretty. But the high-culture arts need some mass-market nonsense to prosper. Should Tosca leap to her death from the prison wall? Poll the audience. During the show. Really.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
