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Biz Talk By Jacob Coakley Once More Into the Breach I’m going to beg your forbearance as we look one more time at the issues brought up by the lawsuits between the Broadway creative team of Urinetown and two out-of-town productions. To recap: After a lawyer representing the director, choreographer and several design members of the Broadway production of Urinetown sent cease and desist letters to productions of Urinetown in Chicago, Ill. and Akron, Ohio, claiming those two companies plagiarized their work, the companies responded by filing suit for declatory judgments stating they did not violate copyright or trademark. Last month I took a look at how and why that could affect contracts between producers, writers and directors in the future. This month I asked people directly involved with these lawsuits, and people who might be affected by their outcome, if it was affecting business now. Not surprisingly, Joe Palmer, president of the Carousel Dinner Theatre in Akron, Ohio, had no comment on the lawsuit he has filed. Ask him how the suit is affecting his business, however, and he’s very clear: It isn’t. Is it affecting how Carousel is choosing plays for next season? “No.” Is it affecting Carousel’s reputation in their community? “It’s a non-factor, completely.” Surely it must be affecting their budget? “It is an expense I have no hesitancy incurring.” So not exactly business as usual, but it’s not changing his business practices. Blue Dog LLC was the producing entity of Urinetown in Chicago; it was dissolved after the show closed. The founder of the corporation was also the director of the show, Tom Mullen. Mullen doesn’t have to worry about protecting the interests of a company, merely his own reputation. Has the incident affected his ability to get work? “It’s actually been very positive,” Mullen says, “Most people that I talk to are very much in support of me.” Palmer and Mullen’s responses may be well-played bravado, but they echo the reactions of three other people I spoke with, representatives of Manhattan Theatre Club, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Las Vegas Academy, a charter school that focuses on the performing arts. Manhattan Theatre Club is in a unique position because they have historically been an Off-Broadway theatre and therefore had negotiated with the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers as an Off-Broadway house. This meant they were required to pay sub-royalties to the directors. Now that they own a Broadway house, however, MTC is gradually “aging out” of that contract and into a LORT contract. By LORT contract they are not required to pay directors sub-royalties in the future. Jeff Bledsoe, financial director of MTC, has worked for years making sure that directors get the royalties they are due, so he isn’t alarmed by the idea of MTC re-starting paying directors sub-royalties, should things change. He laid out how royalties work for his theatre, and gave me some candid numbers. “In perspective, the most we get [in royalties] in any given year is $200,000 to $250,000 total,” he says. “But for the most part it’s never that much. Now, our total budget size is $20 million, so the 200k is not a big hit at this point.” Quick math: the 200k comes out to 1 percent of their budget. If directors got 5 percent of that, it would be .05 percent of MTC’s annual operating budget. One can begin to understand how Bledsoe can be a little sanguine about how much this suit might affect his business — which is not to say that he isn’t scrupulous about making sure directors get the sub-royalties already negotiated by their Off-Broadway contract. “Our sub rights last for 10 years, so all during that time, we owe money to the directors,” he explains. “Some years, we could owe as little as 45 cents. We always chose to pay every amount regardless of size, but often the director wouldn’t bother to cash the check.” Not everyone has the luxury of a $20 million budget, but not everyone has an Off-Broadway agreement with the SSDC, either. The LORT contract doesn’t require theatres to pay directors sub-royalties. So how would regional theatres’ business be affected if they had to pay directors royalties? I spoke with Karen Racanelli, general manager of Berkeley Repertory Theatre, a LORT B theatre based in Berkeley, Calif. Her sentiments were similar to Bledsoe’s. “We would support whatever a director brought to our production, so it wouldn’t cause us to act in a different way if directors had copyright.” What if your business wasn’t producing new works, but training? Could these lawsuits potentially chill school productions, placing a burden on productions both financially and artistically, as schools tried to weave their productions through competing claims of intellectual property surrounding staging? Glenn Edwards, a trustee of the Las Vegas Academy didn’t seem to think this was a likely outcome. In a phone conversation he didn’t demonstrate any worries that increased licensing fees would prevent him from doing any shows, and he wasn’t concerned with getting hit with a lawsuit, either, because, “We in no way try to duplicate the original Broadway productions. We have our own designers, we have our own choreographers,” he says. On the other hand, “Certain aspects of any script dictate certain things.” And that lands us right back at a legal and philosophical discussion as to whether directors have intellectual property rights for their direction, which I will leave to others to argue. I did, however, ask Bledsoe why theatres didn’t move to a work for hire situation, like Hollywood, where writers and directors sign away their rights to produced work, and the studio owns all the rights. It would seem to sidestep this problem neatly. He had a very telling response: “Most of us in theatre, I think, have that artist’s mentality — at least I think we’re not all driven by the bottom line. We’re here because we want to support the art and the artist. We want them to make money off their work so they’ll continue, so they’ll produce more stuff. And we will sometimes try to extend a play, even if we’re not going to make a lot of money on it, even if we break even, because we know the artists will get paid for another week.” The sticky part is, as always, trying to determine how much the artists will get paid that extra week. 44 April 2007 • www.stage-directions.com
Off The Shelf By Stephen Peithman Act Up Books for actors, directors, teachers to soak up in between performance and class Acting is as much a process as it is an art, and that process is the focus of this month’s roundup of new books. Since actors and directors have only weeks to transform the words of a script into a living and breathing organism, the rehearsal period is key to a successful production. That’s the focus of David Hlavsa’s An Actor Rehearses: What To Do When — and Why. In simple, sequential and detailed fashion, he starts even before rehearsals begin and continues through first readthrough, blocking rehearsals (“Relationships in Motion”), technical rehearsals (“It’s Not About You”) and performance. Hlavsa’s introduction is a masterful encapsulation of the rehearsal process, almost by itself worth the price of the book. It also sets the stage for his later explanation of how to work effectively with directors, get the most out of the language of the play, create compelling stage relationships with other actors and connect with an audience. It’s all done with a common-sense approach and easy sense of humor, making this a wonderful resource for the beginning (or experienced) actor, teacher or director. [ISBN 1-58115-462-3, $18.95, Allworth Press] Through work on monologues and scenes, actors learn to develop a strong point of view on a particular text, leading them to make dynamic acting choices. To help in that process, Smith and Kraus continues to publish its yearly anthologies, including The Best Stage Scenes of 2006. All the selections are from published, readily available plays (publication and rights information are provided), from authors such as Keith Reddin, Pearl Cleage and Don Nigro, as well as new dramatists Ron Fitzgerald, Eisa Davis, Michael Golamco, John Cariani and Kenny Finkle. Most scenes involve characters under 40 years old, and editor D. L. Lepidus has included both comic and dramatic situations. [ISBN 1-57525-558-8, $14.95] Lepidus has also edited The Best Men’s Stage Monologues 2006 [ISBN 1-57525-554-5] and The Best Women’s Stage Monologues 2006 [ISBN 1-57525-555-3], both $11.95. The men’s collection includes monologues from contemporary plays by Theresa Rebeck, Don Nigro, Terrence McNally and Athol Fugard, plus up-and-comers such as Jonathan Dorf, Sheila Callaghan, Josh Fox and Michael Puzzo. Again, there’s a nice variety of comic and dramatic pieces. Most of the pieces in these two volumes are appropriate for actors or students in their 20s or early 30s. The acting process needs an audience, and The Back Stage Guide to Working in Regional Theater offers a coast-to-coast overview of regional companies, Shakespeare festivals, touring theatres, university/resident theatres, youth and children’s theatres and outdoor theatres. Based on interviews with a wide range of professionals, the book offers detailed information on each of the League of Resident Theatre (LORT) houses in the U.S., plus sections on the business of acting, career strategies and personal marketing for the actor. Also included are essential Web sites, a sample organizational chart, contact names, a guide to theatre unions, and behind-the-scenes stories of the regional movement that has been a major force in American theatre for more than two generations. [ISBN 0-8230-7880-9, $19.95, Back Stage Books] Inside The Actors Studio — Icons is a DVD anthology of four extended interviews by James Lipton (from his Bravo Channel program), featuring Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand and Clint Eastwood. These actor/directors reveal much about their own creative process, and the credit for those disclosures must go to Lipton, who manages to put the usually guarded Streisand and Eastwood at their ease. The DVD set includes Lipton’s new introductions to each interview and a section of outtakes as a bonus feature. Lipton’s manner is often an odd blend of scholarly intensity and starry-eyed fan, and yet he gets these four people to talk about acting and directing in ways they have not elsewhere. [$39.98, Shout Factory] www.stage-directions.com • April 2007 45
Page 1: SALUTES NEW YORK CITY • A TALE OF
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Page 22 and 23: Theatre Spotlight By Robert Woltman
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