I have really been looking high and low for more people who blog about their experiences in theatre. I haven’t been terribly successful, but I will admit, the signs look promising. People seem to be realizing the potential for the blogs.

For example, a Google search found this nascent blog for The Playmill Theatre in Montana. You can’t actually get to the blogs from the theatre’s homepage. In fact, the home page itself is rather undeveloped at the moment. It just goes to show though that someone was thinking and wanted to get the cast and director (and perhaps the community) writing about their experiences.

I also found a very short, sparse attempt at a production blog for Aristophanes’ Acharnians.

The British seem to be doing the best job of blogging about their lives in the theatre. In addition to My London Life which I cited in an earlier entry, I have found yet another British director faithfully chronicling his experiences running his own company. (Yeah, I know, I could be doing more of the same myself. I suppose you all want to hear about my shopping trips to buy cases of water and soda for performers, eh?)

I also found a culture blog by a Brit who is something of a Terry Teachout of England (though not as prolific an author/journalist/everything)

I was very happy to see that a theatre in San Francisco was taking the idea of bloggers as the new critics to heart and offering free tickets to bloggers with a fairly significant daily readership who agreed to write a review within 24 hours. May have to follow up with them to see how well it worked.

I also found a blog in Portland, OR that does nothing but list upcoming shows and provide links to many of the local theatres. One might think that this might be useless since the local paper prints essentially the same information. And that may be so. However, the format for the listings are so simple that it is very easy to log on one Friday night and scroll back through a page or so to find out what is going on–or follow the link to a favorite performance group to find out what in particular they are currently doing.

More to come…let me know if you have a favorite arts blog out there that has gone unmentioned by me.

Those of you who have been reading since October may be aware that I belong to a block booking consortium (some previous entries here and here)

Last Monday we had the longest meeting to date trying to hammer out schedules for performers. Near the end, one of the newer members asked if it was always this difficult to resolve the scheduling. Some of the other members said this was the worst because there were now more members than ever before and their organizations were becoming more ambitious and doing more performances.

For me, however, I somehow emerged worse off than I entered. I had come in expecting to make final arrangements for 7 groups and then having to contract another 3-4 on my own. Somehow I walked out with only 5 groups and the prospect of scheduling 5-6 more on my own.

What happened was this-my consortium and another consortium, the Hawaii Arts and Music Soceity, hold joint meetings because of the 90% overlap of membership. Since they tend to do a lot of classical, early music and opera, I am not a member. Most of the other big presenters hold dual membership and with more people wanting to do more, they easily filled their schedule and as a result decided to postpone presenting two of the people I wanted.

This actually might turn out for the best because I am thinking that instead of trying to make up the difference with acts whose airfare from the mainland I might have to do pay, I might look into putting together some sort of interesting programs with local performers. The Knight Foundation article I quoted last week mentioning the San Diego Symphony’s “Can Classical Music Be Fun” program got me to thinking that perhaps I could talk to the symphony or ballet about putting together an interactive/fun program to be presented on this side of the island. Who knows, perhaps it will grow into an annual event or lead to further partnerships.