Vent
Editor’s Letter
The Show must go on
This issue is dedicated to the theater.
New York is a theater city, maybe even more than London, because NYC is crammed full of drama. Every corner, bus, and sidewalk stoop sports lovers’ spats and trysts, with endless stories emerging from the very core of our Apple.
New York has so much theater we even have categories. We have Broadway and Off-Broadway, we have Off-Off Broadway and musical theater, we have drama, we have circus, we have cabaret, and opera and open-air concerts and venues that blur the lines and offer genres like New Wave, Next Wave, or Under the Radar. We have given birth to many artists and given homes to artistic refugees from across this wide land and all the seas. New York knows how to roll out a red carpet for theater of any kind.
We are a tough town, and shows can spend millions only to be cut to ribbons by reviews and close the next day, leaving sets, casts, and producers weeping in the wings. But we can also offer up shows done on a shoestring, ideas being financed on Master Card, and these sometimes morph into iconoclastic gems everyone wants to replicate.
The fall, is the seasonal flip of the year that excites me, not January. And a big part of the frisson is the theater season. Who will dazzle, who will fizzle? How will our brains be accosted and enchanted? I can’t wait to see.
I worked in the theater for most of my early years. Soon out of college, I followed my then boyfriend to Europe as he stage-managed a world-wind tour of experimental plays that rotated on swivelling stages and changed my view of the universe and my place in it. After one summer I was hooked while he was on the fence about theater as a career. We parted, he became an architect, and I went on to be a stage manager, costume designer, and, finally, a producer. I taught theater at Sarah Lawrence and NYU, and always at the root I told my students to remember that they were charged with making magic.
The lights go down, and artists who in off hours resemble you and me, are endowed with an ability to capture and transform as they take the stage or roll right out in front of you on the floor. Even when theater doesn’t quite work or falls flat on its face, the attempts still inspire me, reminding me of the expansive power that humans possess. After all, the show was written, danced, sung, or spun by folks who dream like us.
Join us this fall and experience shows on Broadway, or in Brooklyn at BAM, or the Public Theatrer, La MaMa, Lincoln Center, Theater Row, City Center, PS 122, on a street, in a park. Find a show in a vast rococo Broadway theater or wiggle into in a hole in the wall and open yourself up to the possibility of magical transformation.
Wickham Boyle
