So I saw Candide at the Huntington this weekend and I really really enjoyed it and I think everyone should try and see it. But I’m not going to blog about the show itself (although I could go on about how much I loved the music, the set , the story, the message and especially the innovative and imaginative direction by Mary Zimmerman –inspiring stuff that I have not seen at the Hunt since I’ve been here).
What I am blogging about is the Huntington’s program. When I sat down, I decided to find the program notes since we have recently been focusing on their effectiveness and purpose in our viewing experience. I found a one page write up by Charles Haugland called “Absurd Optimism”. Haugland, after googling his name because it did not appear anywhere else in the program (???), is a dramaturg at the Huntington. He writes a wonderfully succinct note about the history of Voltaire and his connection with the idea of Optimism (the show’s subtitle). It gave great background and mentioned nothing about the adaptation or direction of the show I was about to watch. To be honest, I didn’t think this was considered the “program notes” because the show was never mentioned! So, I unknowingly continued to search the program and found on the annoyingly large and yellow playbill insert that I should “Hear from our Artists (and tell us what YOU think!). They wanted me to call in to their “Cell Phone Playbill” ….huh?! I have never heard of anything like this. I don’t know if this is a new strategy for the Hunt or not but I was immediately taken aback. They want me to get on my cell phone in a theatre to hear about the show? This feels almost forbidden in my understanding of the proper edict of being an audience member in a theatre! I was so disappointed that all these wonderful pieces of supplementary materials, from Peter DuBois, artistic director, to Mary Zimmerman, adapter and director, to Lauren Molina, an actress in the show, was not conveniently included in the reading material of the program in my hand.
I have always been of the midset that our new technological advances tend to make us more lazy but certaintly allows us to read/see/experience a plethora of things much easier and stress-free. This seemed to do the opposite for me. I didn’t want to deal with getting out my phone and struggling to listen to a recording in a loud theatre minutes before the curtain rises. I wonder how many people in attendance that night utilized this option. Is this marketing aimed to get people to listen to these materials on their way home? Or after they’ve gotten up the next morning? I wonder how many people actually read the flimsy inset to even know about these interviews. I’m not sure how I feel about this form of information. I’m a person who values their theatre playbills. I do my best to make sure I always bring a fresh copy of the playbill home with me, if ever I want to re-read the details of the show. My Candide playbill seems incomplete and distant. I feel oddly separated through my phone from these wonderful additions. I just quickly dialed the number for the Cell Phone Playbill and got to sneak a short listen to Mary Zimmerman and her adaptation process –such great material to listen to! I would never have called up if I wasn’t blogging about it right now.
It seems theatres, especially my high school’s, have been in a constant battle with the issue of cell phones, pagers and “anything else that beeps.” This new “Cell Phone Playbill,” which irks me in a weird way, seems to be reversing this struggle and is enforcing the use of electronics within the theatre.
