Mama Mia! Here we go again (with the arts journalism sturm und drang)
It was a tough week for arts journalism here in Washington. On Tuesday, news broke that The Washington Post was cancelling the long-running "In the Galleries" column featuring DMV art exhibits. On Wednesday, a local choreographer whose work I negatively reviewed 11 years ago confronted me at a DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities happy hour. I did my best to listen patiently, but also pointed out that these 11-year-old complaints are relatively moot since The Washington Post no longer reviews local dance. And on Friday, Peter Marks, esteemed former theater critic at the Post, shared a stage with his replacement Naveen Kumar at a Kennedy Center forum ostensibly convened to discuss the future of theater criticism in front of a lot of people are disappointed that Kumar will be based in New York.
"I kinda feel like Joe Biden," the always witty Marks quipped when he took the microphone. Kumar countered that he felt more like Barack Obama following Michelle.
Good criticism always relies more on metaphors than adjectives.
What I'm Reading
Cara Ober, the editor of Bmore Art, co-penned an important essay that starts with objecting to the Post cutting its "In the Galleries" column, and branches off into an elegant argument for the value of arts journalism as content that attracts the most engaged readers rather than the most readers. As Ober notes, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made clear after buying the paper that he felt, "the brand should be truly national, even international."
The flawed thinking here is that a newspaper should alienate an engaged local audience and the coverage that is essential to them in order to garner national headlines and web traffic.
Where this logic fails is in confusing the difference between QUANTITY and QUALITY of readership, as well as in dismissing the longer term archival value of regional arts writing, which often forms the basis of art historical arguments, an ongoing academic and museological cannon.
Important context: 1) I'm from Baltimore, so of course I'm proud to see Baltimore's leading culture journalist weigh in so eloquently, and 2) From Jan. 2014 to Oct. 2016, I wrote The Washington Post's "Backstage" column, a companion piece to "In the Galleries" that rounded up local theater news. When I moved to Minnesota for a year in Nov. 2016, the paper opted to cut "Backstage," a Style-section fixture that had been around since the 1980s.
If our positions had been reversed, and "Galleries" columnist Mark Jenkins had moved away in 2016, I wonder if his column would have been cut instead of mine? Could DC's paper of record have retained its theater and dance column for (at least) another 8 years if I hadn't left town? Who knows. The bottom line is that the Post still has two staff visual arts writers, but only one staff theater critic and no dance writer, since my mentor Sarah Kaufman was laid-off in 2023.
What I'm Seeing
The 25th anniversary tour of Mama Mia! opened at the Kennedy Center Opera House Aug. 15 with press night performance would have given my 10th-grade show choir director a stoke.
Mr. Watkins was a stickler for coming in together on the downbeat, all singers articulating clearly and in unison. Although I doubt he was an ABBA fan, Mr. Watkins would have held this touring cast long after the fourth period bell rang and made them practice "Lay All Your Love" halfway through lunch.
This Mama Mia! tour is! not! great! And yet! We had a pretty good time. The singalong reprise at curtain call was possibly more fun than two hours of performance that came before it. "How could anyone possibly have left before that?" said my plus-one, questioning the lame Washingtonians who slipped out during the first rounds of applause.
Mama Mia! continues at the Kennedy Center through Sept. 1. Barring a serious babysitter crisis or national emergency, please stay till the end.
If I Could See Anything...
Midsommar night's are overrated; late-Sommar nights are the time to be in Sweden. My dear friend Linda Zachrison, a former North American cultural counselor based at the Swedish Embassy, is beginning her second season as artistic director of Gothenburg's State Theatre. Her duties include helping to curate events for the annual Göteborg Dans och Teater Festival, which runs through Aug. 23 to 29 in Sweden's second-largest city. I'm tantalized by this world premiere collaboration between Dutch choreographers Imre and Marne van Opstal and the Swedish new age organist Anna Von Hauswolff for GöteborgsOperan Danskompani. Could a three-minute version of Atlas Song be Sweden's Eurovision entry for 2025? A girl can late-summer dream.
While in Göteborg to get my contemporary-dance-and-organ fix, I would also have also seen Linda's interview with avant garde theatre director Robert Wilson. A link is coming, so if you are reading What/If via email and really want to theater nerd out, check the website for what was likely a smart, funny and incisive conversation.
Hej då for now.
