The LA Times review hit the paper this morning for our revival production of Saturday Night at the Palace.
Unfortunately, the review in this paper, which has the most potential to help a small company (or large theatre for that matter) sell tickets, is not as positive as all the other reviews to come out thus far. That’s life. It happens. You don’t try to “understand” these things… they are what they are and you do “go forward.”

While I don’t want to discuss the content and what aspects are mentioned and what aspects are left out… what I do think is worth a little ink is the headline. I think it is a little baffling what I am trying to understand is why the dismissive tone of our company in the headline? Our company has done nothing BUT go forward since our beginning in 2002. I fear the headline (whatever respect or “helpful” intention was behind it) actually undermines and dismisses every bit of progress (undeniably impressive) that we’ve made over the past six years.

1. We have grown our budget from $30k to $250k in less than six years.

2. We have built an impressive board of directors, comprised of 18 industry leading professionals, philanthropists, and theatre professionals.

3. We have kept to our mission of helping artists earn a better wage - and have become one of the highest paying small theatres in Southern California.

4. We attracted the attention of the State Theatre of California and are now artists in residence there.

5. In six years we have established relationships with major literary agencies, established writers and emerging writers, presenting 13 “premieres” out of our fifteen productions.

6. We have grown our average attending audience by more than 400% in six years.

7. There’s plenty more…

So, I can only assume that the reviewer was disappointed that we “re-hashed” a play we did six years ago. Well, we’re not disappointed. We have many reasons for doing it again and it has been something we have wanted to remount since day one - and we felt like six years later was a respectable amount of time to wait and that surely by now we had proven we were a “moving forward” company. This is a choice, not a fall back.

In any case. Thank you for the tip. We’ll try to be more of a forward thinker… although to be a forward thinker you need a little help with resources and support… and headlines like this one don’t really “help” us “go forward” in that way.

Original post by brad