On Lincoln Center’s Performing Arts Hall of Fame, and more

Wynton Marsalis is on the inaugural list of Legends at Lincoln Center. Credit: Clay McBride
A grab-bag of news and ideas has been piling up faster than old snow. Here are a few.
A PERFORMING ARTS HALL OF FAME?
There is something extremely admirable — and perhaps just the slightest bit odd — about Lincoln Center’s new Performing Arts Hall of Fame.
After all, rock and roll has one in Cleveland. Baseball has one in Cooperstown. And, since 1971, the theater has had one for lifetime achievement with photos hanging on lobby walls at the Gershwin Theatre (where few over the age of pubescence have had much opportunity to admire them since “Wicked” opened in 2003).
But performing arts? That’s a massive sprawl of obsessions, passions and sometimes contradictory activities to clump beneath a single umbrella for the sake of individual honor. Lincoln Center has managed to keep 11 resident organizations — including opera, orchestra, ballet, theater, chamber music, film — in relative harmony on the same 16.3 acre campus for decades.
So a hall of fame may be just the thing to make so many disparate institutions present themselves as a whole. But I wouldn’t want to be in the room when those interests learn the annual division of what I’m sure no one wants to call winners.
In fact, the honorees will not be called anything so crass and unseemly. On the other hand, given what they will be called, I’m guessing that the people who put the Legends at Lincoln Center together had a struggle finding the right words to avoid the taint of a contest.
The first list — and it’s excellent — groups 30 people (26 men, four women) as something called Founding Legends. These include late artists, including George Balanchine, Leonard Bernstein, Beverly Sills, Jerome Robbins, and such living talents as James Levine, Wynton Marsalis, Peter Martins and Gregory Mosher.
There are also dead and living administrators, philanthropists and politicians (John Lindsay, John D. Rockefeller), who made the world’s first performing arts complex possible. The Founding Legends were picked by Lincoln Center and its resident organizations, and, according to Jed Bernstein, president of Lincoln Center, the decisions were “quite convivial.”
For what is being called the “first class” of recipients, decision-making will be more or less independent from the participants in a system that includes nominating and voting committees. Sometime this month, the “first class” will be announced, and Bernstein says each “annual class” will then have a minimum of four but more likely six to eight inductees. The inaugural induction ceremony will happen June 20.
And then what? Bernstein, whom theater people know as a producer and former head of the Broadway League, is less specific at this time. Ultimately, the hall of fame will be housed in the massively reconfigured David Geffen (formerly Avery Fisher) Hall, although groundbreaking for the Philharmonic’s new home will not begin until 2019.
Meanwhile, Bernstein says “names will become part of our campus in some physical way, whether a walk of fame or a wall.” He foresees an “overarching, very robust digital program. Technology will be a huge part of this, doing things never been done before.”
He envisions free interactive exhibits and installations in lobbies of theaters and public spaces. Ralph Appelbaum Associates, which designed the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., will partner with a technical design firm called Potion.
When I first heard of this, I imagined holograms of powerful late legends — Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein here, Sills and Rudolf Bing there — lurking around the theaters and haunting their predecessors. Bernstein thinks not.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND BROADWAY?
The blizzard of January 2016 was far more impressive than the fizzled blizzard of January 2015, and a lot colder than Hurricane Irene of August 2011 and Superstorm Sandy of October 2012. But all four did something that seldom ever used to happened on Broadway. They shut it down.
Each storm closed shows for a different number of days. Also, depending on the time of the year and the shuttered days of the week, the weather caused varying degrees of financial ruin.
The Jan. 23 storm just closed Broadway for one day, but it was a Saturday, generally the busiest of the week, and the day with matinees and evening performances. According to weekly grosses reported by the Broadway League, that single day, compared with statistics of the previous week, caused a loss of more than $10 million. Most deeply affected were the shows already struggling with the winter doldrums after the holidays.
Charlotte St. Martin, president of the League, told me after the storm that it is “very, very difficult for us to take a couple of performances and put them into context. We can talk about lost revenue, but what about the effect on restaurants and all the other businesses here? We’re all part of the same ecosystem.”
I was shocked to hear that cancellation insurance varies from show to show and that most policies have a penalty or deduction of at least one performance. Although St. Martin doesn’t see the contracts, she says, “In general, most are partially covered after the first performance.”
She says that 60-70 percent of the audiences are tourists and stay near Times Square, so attendance was not the problem. But when the buses and trains stopped, the casts and crews would not have been able to get home.
Are producers worrying more about weather closings as storms get fiercer and more frequent? Says St. Martin: “We do talk about it — a great deal more.”
WOMEN, THE ARTS AND THE WORLD
UN Women, which champions the rights of women and girls around the globe, will launch a new program in New York called HeForShe Arts Week. In conjunction with the City of New York and the Public Theater, the plan, which begins March 8 (International Women’s Day) and runs through March 15, is intended to spur conversation about gender equality and the empowerment of women in all the arts.
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of UN Women, believes that performance “can make a direct connection to truths about the relationships and power structures between women and men, often without needing words, reaching those who may not otherwise be aware of unconscious assumptions about roles, identities and rights.”
Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public, says the theater is “proud to stand in solidarity with HeForShe and the United Nations as we fight together for a better world.” Specific plans are forthcoming.