I know that ads these days are targeted to my search history and the like, but in looking up the embed code for Super Size Me for this post, this contrast is all too apt. Check out that Metropolitan Opera ad next to Morgan Spurlock chomping down on Big Macs.
I went to New York City Ballet this afternoon for a late 20th- early 21st-century quadruple bill of works by Benjamin Millepied/David Lang, Christopher Wheeldon/Arvo Pärt, and Peter Martins with both Esa Pekka Salonen and John Adams. I’d actually seen all but the Millepied/Lang, which was my main impetus for going and, sadly yet thankfully it was the first piece. I’ve seen chamber works done by NYCB before, and in the State/Koch Theater—look no further than Jerome Robbins’s Goldberg Variations (which, admittedly, has a full cast dancing to solo piano). However, I don’t think the sheer size of the State/Koch has truly hit me until today as I struggled to surrender to the masterful music and movement that formed Millepied and Lang’s Plainspoken.
Photo: Paul Kolnik
True, part of it is Fourth Ring. It’s always a zoo and it’s always a mixed bag on a matinee—especially when you’re perched at the top in row M. On some days such as today, sitting up there is akin to spending a couple of hours in Target. People have conversations at normal volume, kids fidget and get up for walks, cell phones go off…one enterprising parent decided Target was too good and went full Wal Mart with some McDonald’s that she fed to her little one during Wheeldon’s After the Rain. There was just no enjoying nothing up there. I left after the first intermission.
But it’s not just the people’s fault. When your theater seats 2,586 like the Koch or 3,995 like the Met, there is going to be a reasonably high proportion of talkers, munchers and cell phonies. And chances are high that they’re going to be cashing in on the $20 cheap seats. And yes, in those rare sell-out performances (like NYCB’s well-timed run of Swan Lake this month), there is a good financial incentive to have a house as large as the Koch, but does it really balance out? How many house employees does it take for each performance? In the interest of full disclosure and a point of fact, I used to work for the Koch when it was still the New York State Theater, as an usher in fact. In the early 2000s, we averaged about $35 a performance and there were probably 30 or so ushers working each night (though fewer after the seating rush). For just the ushers that’s about $1050 a performance, or 52.5 seats in fourth ring. Now that’s sort of a pittance next to 2,586, but that’s also just the ushers—some of the lowest men and women on the theatre’s totem pole. I would be really interested to learn how a sold out performance correlates into a company’s finances. Looking on the other end of the spectrum, the average ticket at (Le) Poisson Rouge is about $15 to $20 and, while the club holds a comparatively paltry 800 people (and not, I imagine, all in the main room at once) I would imagine that they have proportionally far fewer operating costs than the Koch. And the fewer people, the more mellow a setting. Even at a place like LPR, where there’s a buzzing bar and table service for crunchy comestibles like nachos, the atmosphere is still relatively more quiet and focused on the art at hand.
You have something bigger than life, like The Nutcracker or the Ring Cycle, and you’re kind of in business with the stadium-style seatings. Kind of. Even with a perfect audience (like those I sat with in the Met’s Family Circle for Nixon in China), the sheer size, the too-big-to-fail aura, left me cold. I think even had the Koch been dead silent this afternoon, it would have taken some yogi-level concentration to feel like a part of the performance. Even at $20, what I’m looking for is a small fashion boutique as opposed to a big-box sweatpants store; otherwise I might as well go see Just Go With It. At least the concessions stand there takes credit cards and gives me something substantial for $8.
The problem is the real complication and conflict between message and reality on the part of companies like NYCB. This season, the company used photos by Henry Leutwyler for an American-Apparel–esque ad campaign aimed directly toward the casual and sexy downtown hipsters that every arts organization wants in its fold. Executive director Katherine E. Brown told the Wall Street Journal back in September that the ad campaign was an attempt to “project the personal and the human side of these really exceptional artists,” swapping tutus for rehearsal clothes. Brown added, “It was clear that making a stronger connection between the audience and the artist is something that would deeply enhance the audience experience and break down the veil between the artist and the audience.”
Personally, I love the ad campaign, but I don’t love the subsequent experience I have in the theater. I feel no connection to the artists when I have to stare down 13 rows of disengaged audience members who are treating the theater like their personal Starbucks. I feel no connection to the artists when they’re engulfed by the sheer vastness of the performance hall. I feel no connection to the artists when I feel like I’m in third class on the Titanic just because I didn’t have more than a Jackson to drop on a ticket. Critics of NYCB’s new ad campaign worried about how showing dancers without fake eyelashes and tiaras would destroy some of the magic? How about sitting near an upper-level restroom where you can hear the toilet backing up mid-performance, or having to shield your eyes from the glare of the light grid?
Photo: New York Times
I wouldn’t be getting long-winded about this had it just been an isolated incident, and I hate feeling so cranky over the idea that the arts are thriving to the point where a Saturday matinee for the City Ballet is so well sold (at least in the upper sections). But I felt the same thing at Nixon next door, and I feel the same way every time I have to qualify my argument that cheap seats to the opera and ballet exist—”but they’re up in K2.” How many friends I have brought or sent to a show only to have them leave disappointed because they felt excluded sitting up in Fourth Ring or Family Circle. How many of those same friends have been well satisfied with performances at Zankel Hall or Galapagos Art Space. Call me cranky. Call me elitist. Call me Eurotrash for saying that the houses of Germany and Austria have the upper hand for seating an average of 1500—over half of the Met’s seating capacity. But I think we’re Morgan Spurlocking ourselves at the expense of the art and the enjoyment of the average concert- opera- or ballet-goer. A 2,500-seat theater isn’t the place to showcase a pas-de-deux set to chamber music by Arvo Pärt, and a 4,000-seat theater doesn’t really suit a radically intimate opera by John Adams. It pleases the big-ticket (no pun intended) buyers on orchestra and first ring/parterre level and ignores those sitting in the rafters.
And maybe I just have a very big case of the Fuck-Its, but I say tear it down like the Berlin Wall. I realize the Koch just underwent significant renovations (I guess the Tea Party is good for something?). I realize that did a huge improvement to the theater, particularly for New York City Opera’s residency. But fuck it. Cut the theater in half and put in a restaurant that doesn’t taste like hospital cafeteria fare. Move the administrative offices up from the basement—natural light will do a hell of a lot for employee morale. Or move all of the operations to a place that isn’t such a wasteland for everything besides theater. Because the alternative, as I saw it this afternoon, is our cultural center of the city lying in a hospital bed drinking two gallons of soda per day and going in for gastric bypass surgery. In this country, that kind of an alternative is an epidemic.
