And that is the closest Dowling will ever come to suggesting that the shows on the Guthrie mainstage aren't as interesting as they could be.
Daniel Corrigan
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When people like Hoeschler and Kearns talk about "accessibility," "market share," and "retail," what they're really talking about is people: people who have a finite amount of time and money to spend on entertainment; people who might just as well go to a Twins game as to the theater; people who, most likely, are going to go to a movie or to Riverdance. If, as Hoeschler indicates, the Guthrie wants not only to maintain its core audience but to actually cut in on other entertainment outlets' piece of the pie--or boost its market share, if you will--the theater must reach these people.
Says Hoeschler, "In the theater world, you've got a major conglomeration of Jujamcyn-Pace [the Broadway theater owners and producers with a local foothold at the State and Orpheum Theatres], and Disney; that's very big, much greater than changes in government funding that affect 1 percent of your total budget. But it's a competition that's been healthy. These guys have shown that the theater of old needs to be competing more aggressively with entertainment--needs to be more entertaining. The Guthrie is perfectly capable of competing in that market."
Words like "entertaining" are vague, coded terms these days that don't exactly mean what they should. After all, wouldn't any Guthrie booster claim that every Guthrie show is entertaining? What the term really means is any combination of the following qualities:
1. Loud
2. Expensively produced, with fancy sets and costumes
3. Musical
4. Comic
5. Broadway-born or -bound
Think The Lion King, think Sunset Blvd., think Rent. That's entertainment in 1998. Indeed, like some long-lost stepfather, the very system Tyrone Guthrie sought to combat has come back to haunt his theater 35 years later; and this time, it's wearing Mickey Mouse ears, and carrying our own City Hall in its back pocket. As Hawkanson notes, the Guthrie has lost many subscribers to Broadway, and while the theater shares "significant [audience] overlap" with the touring spectacles, many of those defectors have yet to return to the Guthrie fold. And the new Guthrie seems to have determined to imitate such economies of scale without adopting them whole cloth.
None of this is to imply that the Guthrie is going to be mounting Cats any time soon; Dowling may be a populist but he's no whore, and he admits there are limits to what he'll do. (Neil Simon, for instance, is off-limits.) The future of the Guthrie might be found in a hybrid production like Dowling's A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was just a sequin shy of becoming a full-blown musical, and not a few people missed out on Shakespeare's language amid the rumble of synthesizers and special effects.
Neither Dowling nor Hawkanson professes an antipathy toward the new competition, and, in fact, the relationship between the Guthrie and Jujamcyn may soon feature as much cooperation as competition--though whether either is truly healthy remains to be seen. "We've done a lot of co-promotions," Hawkanson says of his neighbors on Hennepin Avenue. "We share mailing lists and marketing information." Actually, they share more than that: Mike Brand, head of Jujamcyn Productions, which presented the world premiere of The Lion King, recently joined the Guthrie's board. Jim Binger, Jujamcyn's founder and the CEO of Jujamcyn Theaters (which owns and operates five Broadway theaters, among others), is a lifetime Guthrie board member.
Today, the civic culture that once took so much pride in supporting its nonprofit institutions can now realize a far greater return, at least in terms of dollars, on openly entrepreneurial entertainment. Many of the same subcelebrities and jolly burghers who have bankrolled the Guthrie for years can now be found on opening nights at the curiously titled "Twin Cities Broadway Theatre Season."
"What do you say?" Hoeschler asks with an ambivalence that suggests an acceptance of the inevitable. "The NEA is just another one of your funders that died. The question is, is the Guthrie able to compete with these big, corporate productions that the city is subsidizing very aggressively? The answer is, with someone like Joe, he's gonna do it. Should he do more Chekhov? Maybe yes, maybe no.
"You or I might feel it's too bad the market is being driven by musicals and big production numbers and that stuff. But the fact of life is that the American theatergoing public is not as highbrow as it used to be." One former Guthrie insider encapsulates Dowling's compromises with fewer rationalizations. "Joe's artwork isn't interesting to me. There's no question that when Garland failed, he failed big. I've also had some of my most incredible artistic experiences [with Garland] with the most obscure plays nobody had ever seen. With Joe, there aren't as high highs, but not as low lows either." And though his energy seems indefatigable and his enthusiasm boundless, Dowling can slip into a quiet kind of introspection.
"Sometimes I feel we're a kind of dinosaur, really--big theaters in particular," he says. "None of my children are interested in theater, and if they were going out for an evening, neither of them would choose the theater as their first choice. That depresses me sometimes because this is something that I've given my life to, and I haven't passed that on. Their generation does not think of theater first at all. Now if they come, they're bused in by schools. The number of people who've come through these doors in the last 35 years is enormous. How many of them come back?"
And then, as subtly as it appeared, Dowling's reflective mood passes. He's got no time to be tired today; he's got to go. A glance at the clock, a gracious goodbye and many thanks. He throws on a coat. He's gone.
