Issue 42: Theatre
Adam Feldman || President, New York Drama Critics’ Circle
The first show of the Obama years, it seems to me, came before the new president was even elected. In Central Park this past summer, the Public Theater staged a free revival of 1967’s “American tribal love-rock musical” Hair; at the end of the night, the audience was invited onstage to do a hippie hippie shake with the exuberant young cast, and the feeling was euphorically hopeful. The sun, finally, was going to shine in; this was the dawning of the Age of Obama. Things feel more somber now. The economic downtown has hit the theater world hard, and it will be interesting to see if the same mood prevails when Hair comes to Broadway in March, when Obama is no longer an arriving promise but an ever-present compromise. The same cultural trends that helped lift Obama to office, however, have also begun to play out onstage. The confectionary musicals and glibly cynical dramas that dominated the theater just a few years ago have started ceding ground; the biggest hits of recent months—Billy Elliot, All My Sons, South Pacific—are essentially sincere, tacitly leftist explorations of morality, responsibility and community. (The Wall Street Journal’s furious review of Billy Elliot dubbed the titular boy dancer “Karl Marx in a Tutu.”) The incipient depression may leech money from the theater, but box office receipts are just one sign of strength, and I am optimistic for the cultural health of the medium. Because in a very real sense, the inclusive values of the Age of Obama dovetail with theater’s greatest strength: the opportunity it offers for disparate strangers to unite in a common feeling.
Adam Feldman is president of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, and reviews theater and cabaret for Time Out New York.
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