That photo is from the Seattle Center, no?

The biggest theater shows in Seattle are performances like Wicked or War Horse where a touring cast attempts to recreate an experience exactly. Of course there is a difference seeing a live performance versus a filmed performance, but I think the goal is uniformity.

Listening to DVD commentary I heard Tom Baker complain about being in Rocky Horror on the West End because he was told to play the role exactly like it was always played rather than reinterpret it from scratch. It would be a lot more interesting to see a clean re-staging of the play, but people (we are told) want to see it like it is in the movie.

I'm only an occasional theater goer, so I'm not really sure what to expect, but I think wanting to see Wicked as close to the original is kind of a natural impulse. However, that doesn't really give me any reason to see the play here rather than to wait for the DVD of the play or the movie version.

Over the last year I've seen Mike Daisey, The Wild Party, American Buffalo, The Half Brothers, Wicked, War Horse, Boeing Boeing, the Vaudevillians, Waiting for Godot, the Seagull, and sundry burlesque performances. I think the more local, more interpretive performances were most fun, but I've been trying to make it a point to seek them out. In other years I likely would only have seen the bigger touring performances.

It seems to me that Theater has been dead for a number of years. Just peruse the recent years of Theater at the 5th Avenue…and you get the same old tried fare of musicals that were popular in my great grandparents era. It's just boring. No risk. No risqué.

I went to NYC last week. I was with a group of friend from Brasil who spoke very little english. So, it was decided that we'd go to one of the enduring and popular Broadway musicals. I didn't expect much, but I figured "this has been on Broadway for a number of years, so it must be spectacular." It was shitty. I hated it. The songs were mostly boring. The acting was mediocre. The staging was predictable and uninteresting. I couldn't believe that this was the best of NYC Broadway, but it is.

LIve theater experiences for me have been most rewarding with things like Cirque Du Soleil in the past few years. In many ways, I think Vegas has vaulted live experience into a new form that NYC has lost along the way a long time ago.

But, as for story telling? NOTHING can compete, right now, for the long form television series. Movies are being unseated; you can't develop plot and characters in 2 hours the way you can in 20 or more hour-long episodes, and that's the focus anymore. We are in a golden age of story telling, and it's happening on the small screen.

And, if Theater can't surprise me or take me to those places, I'm not interested anymore.

This is not rocket surgery. Ticket cost (assume the associated outing expenses--parking, child care, etc.--are equivalent to a movie). No, I don't have a solution; live theatre produced by professionals is expensive, but how anyone can scratch their heads at declining attendance when ticket prices are now out of the reach of, say, anyone with 30K in student loans outstanding betrays a stunning lack of awareness.

@7 this is not to disagree with your point per se, but where could you possibly be seeing theater in Seattle where the "average ticket" is easily $100 for a good seat? Are you seeing exclusively touring Broadway shows at the Paramount? (If so, you might consider broadening your horizons.) As far as I know, the best seats at ACT and the Rep max out at well under $100. You could have an excellent seat to "Middletown" tonight at ACT for $52.50 + fees. At the 5th Avenue you could go see "Secondhand Lions" tonight and sit on the main floor three rows from the stage for $39. And that's just day of show. If you are on the email lists for the companies you like and plan ahead of time you can routinely get discounts. Even the opera, the ballet, and the symphony you can find reasonable tickets with a marginal amount of planning and flexibility. And that's to say nothing of all the great small companies in Seattle (WET, Balagan, Strawberry Theatre Workshop, et al) where you can usually see innovative shows for even less, or On the Boards, which brings in internationally and regionally touring shows and typically charges not more than $25 for a general admission ticket.

Could tickets be more accessible? Sure. But a $100 average price for a theater seat just doesn't ring true to my experience of the arts in this city.

@8 - Good point as to prices in this town, but as the article in question was in the NYT, I think this is more about national trends, and the average ticket price in New York when I was there back in the '90s was already in the $100+ neighborhood.

Given the expenses of putting on a professional production, ACT's $50 + change price is a real bargain, and that doesn't even account for the ways one can get into a show there for even less. But that doesn't change the fact that $50 is, for a lot of the audience that keeps any given art form not only solvent but evolving, a fair amount of money. I'm not just talking about young people, as it's always framed, but people who have often eschewed "success" as traditionally defined in a capitalist society in order to be involved, as a producer or consumer, with art that remains under the surface of the so-called mainstream while subtly guiding the direction in which that mainstream travels. This audience could do pho, a movie (whether we're talking about a doc at NWFF, a blockbuster at Pac Place, or anything in-between; to the moviegoer, the cost difference between "fringe" and "mainstream" is usually nil) and drinks for two for the price of a single theater ticket (if they take transit; they may have to trade drinks for parking).

The only good solution I can see to the ticket issue is either that artists give up on the notion of quitting their day jobs or that theater receive better subsidies. The merits of subsidy end up being more a political matter than I wanna broach here, and as a theater artist, I don't like the idea of being forced to be a hobbyist for my entire life (though I'm navigating my way through it now, getting enough paying work annually to keep me from feeling like an absolute dilettante).

So really, I think the issue @5 & @7 bring up isn't so much one that no one has thought of a one to which no one can think of solutions that don't suck.

Given that, I think we need to look at the art itself to figure out why the bolder elements among the upper classes, or those bolder elements in the middle class who may divert funds currently going to other art forms, cable subscriptions, or good wine/scotch/weed--the ones who can afford to go--aren't going to the theater necessarily, or are going primarily to fringe productions. I think that we can't escape that while theater boards and subscribers (as distinct, perhaps [I'm only guessing], from single-ticket buyers) are, or see themselves as, "liberal," they tend to be largely conservative, even reactionary, when it comes to aesthetics. Equity houses do plays, generally within a few degrees of being realistic, featuring lots of talking, and generally so very "adult"--even belligerently, militantly adult, with administrators and artists alike imagining themselves a bulwark against the adolescent skew of culture (funny when you consider how much of what is still dismissed as to "avant-garde" for the mainstream theater audience is anywhere from 40-100 years old).

I'm not sure which or cause and which is effect (or if I'm inferring causation from mere correlation), but it seems to me you can't separate this from the influence of the "academy" in theater. Music and cinema's greatest revolutions have embraced autodidacticism and even incompetence--both affected and genuine--as a source of new ideas; music that eschews musicality or musicianship formed the basis of postpunk records that shifted the evolution of music for the last 40 years (and that doesn't even speak to the rogue theorists of the 19th & 20th Centuries that many recent artists would name-check as influences); the French New Wave long ere now exalted the idea that great filmmakers could arise from just about anywhere but film school. In theater, however, you are generally not considered "serious" if you don't have a degree, preferably a masters, in performers. The days in which theater was a the people's art--an art of vagabonds, whores, madmen and shamans (that doesn't look right, but the internet assures me that's the plural of shaman :))--is ancient history, and anyone wistful for such an egalitarian condition, desirous of a more visceral art, or even supportive of self-teaching, individual study, or on-the-job learning is told to grow up and get back to school or asked (politely, of course) to get out of the way of the professionals.

It's certainly to broad a generalization to say that ALL interesting art is made at the fringe level, or that ALL theater at the LORT houses is square/bourgeois/whatever-word-the-kids-today-use-to-mean-staid/flaccid/irrelevant, and I would go so far as to say that a proper balance, or a well-punctuated imbalance, between revolutionary and reactionary principles in art, and that the staid is as necessary as the brash if the art form is to continue to produce canon fodder. But the staid has held the professional stage (for the most part) for . . . well, for MY whole life, at least, and I'm in my early 40s.

Come on. The joy of the live experience is that when the audience gets into something — laughs a little longer, startles a little harder, holds their breath a little tighter — the performers can feel that and adapt to it. If something isn't working, the performers can speed up and get past it, or do something different that might work better. The performance does not go at the predetermined pace of the Editor who pieced it all together; when it works, it goes with a flow that is shared between the performers and the audience. Watching a movie is only live for the viewer; the performers can literally be dead and long gone. That is the experience that cannot be replaced by a movie, TV, or video made of performances that were originally live. Nobody questions the difference between downloading an audio track and seeing a band perform live. Why would anyone conversant with theater try to pretend a live show and a recorded performance are not different in the same way?

The pricing problem is very real, though. For the Seattle Rep to meet expenses for a year, just as an example, it would need to sell every seat in both of its theaters for $20 apiece, 365 nights a year. This is clearly impossible. Sometimes, they're going to put up a show that isn't a complete, sell-out, smash hit. And their current budget doesn't include paying the whole cast and crew every night, either; it would be more expensive to produce that much, so the prices would have to be higher. In the current environment, at their current ticket prices (about which you are complaining), they're earning less than 45% of their expenses and making the rest of it up through contributions and other sources. The ticket prices aren't high because they're catering to an elite audience, they're high because that's what it costs to pay the artists a living wage. There's no way for a live theater to compete with film prices, except by asking the artists to subsidize it. Small theaters with ticket prices comparable to movie tickets are only able to do so by asking the artists to donate their time, shifting the cost onto the performers instead of the audience.