Theatergoers are likely to be people who appreciate public spaces. After all, a theater is a public space.
Yet the geography of Los Angeles is inhospitable to theatergoing in public spaces that are on the scale of, say, Times Square. So many miles, so many freeways separate us from each other. Too often, L.A. theatergoers go only to the biggest theaters or to the theater closest to where they live. And too many Angelenos remain unaffected by the theater, or even unaware of it.
A few concentrations of theaters try to contradict L.A.’s vast distances. NoHo and Santa Monica Boulevard’s Theater Row offer clusters of mostly small theaters — but the only theater with more than 99 seats in either area is El Portal. While enough theatergoers are sometimes spotted on the streets of these areas to create a healthy sense of a humming theatrical scene — as opposed to a line outside an isolated theater — these companies lack the marketing budgets and the seating capacities to draw the attention of most Angelenos and are completely unknown to most tourists.
LATC, with four theaters feeding into one lobby, can sometimes feel like a theater district all by itself, but that seldom happens under current economic conditions. A few years ago, hope thrived that the Pantages, the Montalban and the Ivar could create a little Times Square-like excitement, but only the Pantages now remains active. Other theaters, such as Cornerstone, try to connect the multiple strands of L.A. through their programming and through traveling to different neighborhoods.
Then there are the occasional attempts to create a sense of theatrical density through festivals. The Edge of the World Theater Festival made a brave effort for several years. Now we’re on the eve of the Hollywood Fringe Festival.
If all goes well, hundreds — if not thousands — of eager theatergoers will line the streets of Hollywood, going from one theatrical experience to another and coming back for more on successive days over the 10-day festival.
I wish them well. I hope that the buzz will attract some theater newbies, although I worry that the festival’s uncurated aspect will attract a few too many shows that might be just as likely to drive away potential theatergoers as to lure them back. Yes, people go to other fringe festivals, most famously in Edinburgh, for the sheer sense of adventure. Let’s hope that the same spirit reigns in Hollywood for the next few days — that theatergoers will be brave enough to overlook a few wrong turns on the road to theatrical transcendence.
Some L.A. theater practitioners accept the scattered nature of our theater scene and try to live with it. They raise the question: Why try to ape New York or London? Let L.A. serve as a different model for a theatrical geography. At least we manage to keep the ticket prices lower.
I can agree, most of the time. But I’ve got to admit that whenever I pass through Times Square (as I did recently), I get a charge out of the sense that so many people are excited to be theatergoers, at least temporarily. This doesn’t mean that the shows they’re about to see are necessarily worth the big tariffs or that these theatergoers will experience something that’s transformational, as opposed to recreational. But for some of these people, it’s a way to get excited about the idea of seeing a live theatrical event — as opposed to something pre-recorded.
My most recent visit to Times Square occurred a couple weeks after the attempted bomber tried to wreak havoc on the neighborhood. That incident illustrated one of the advantages of the L.A. style of theatergoing — I doubt that anyone would attempt to set off a bomb in NoHo or along Theater Row. The crowds just aren’t thick enough.
If the bomb had gone off, it might have severely depressed Broadway theatergoing — for who knows how long? Even this unsuccessful attempt might have caused some theatergoers to think twice about their plans. But when I was there, crowds were still filling the streets, as usual. They weren’t all going to a show — actually, I wasn’t doing that either, in the brief time I was there. But it was still difficult to walk through Times Square without feeling that theatergoing is a big deal. May Hollywood create that same sense of excitement in the coming 10 days.
