Arts An Open Letter to Washington Ensemble Theatre
posted by on November 29 at 12:56 PM
Dear Washington Ensemble Theatre,
Let me just say, I love that you do shows on Mondays. No other theater does shows on Mondays. What’s wrong with other theaters? Don’t they know how much other stuff happens on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays? Don’t they know that if they, like you, did Thursday-through-Monday runs, they’d reach a lot more people? And they’d stand a lot better chance of getting into Stranger Suggests?
That’s all. Oh, I also love that you do awesome shows. (Spoiler alert! Brendan Kiley raves about Never Swim Alone in the paper coming out this week.)
signed,
your faithful Stranger Suggests wrangler
For the past few years a lot of fringe theatres have been including at least one Monday "Industry Night" slot to their runs (in professional theatre, Monday is traditionally the one day off per week for performers), so this is not a completely new idea, although adding Mondays throughout the run definitely is.
Annex Theatre will also be bucking the trend with their next three shows, all of which will be performing on Tuesday & Wednesday evenings, rather than the more traditional (Thursday)Friday/Saturday theatre scheduling.
A lot of theatres that run holiday shows run the whole month of December, including Mondays. Speaking as a performer, I hated that. For a working person who does theatre as a hobby or an avocation, it's a colossal pain to have a show after work, for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that an emergency at work all of a sudden becomes the end of the fricking world - because you can't stay late to fix it and miss a show. Most community theatres don't have understudies, and almost none of them pay the performers anything except a couple of comp tickets.
Capitol Hill Arts Center frequently has theatre events on Monday nights. Every first Monday of the month, CHAC presents'On the Table',a live play reading. Balagan Theatre also had an Industry Night this past Monday 11/27 for 'A Dangerous Age'
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