Saturday, January 3, 2009
Theater Exit, Pursued by a Bear (Market)
Posted by Brendan Kiley on Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 3:10 PM
Always be closing:
Akron, Ohio — The final curtain falls on Carousel Dinner Theatre Saturday night when the Rubber City institution closes after 35 years of serving musicals and prime rib to hundreds of thousands of Northeast Ohioans hungry for live entertainment.The Carousel, the Cleveland-area's only dinner theater —a combination restaurant, bar and Broadway musical palace that seats 800 — announced on Friday that it will go out of business after tonight.
Which means hundreds, if not thousands, of patrons who already signed up for the 2009 season of six shows — which had been scheduled to begin Wednesday — will be owed refunds. Season tickets for prime seats cost $309.
Carousel owner Joseph E. Palmer and marketing director Sarah Lance did not return telephone calls and email inquiries Friday, the day the Beacon Journal reported the closure had been announced to the Carousel's 150 staff members on New Year's Eve.
For those susceptible to the romantic allure of attending the last performance of a Broadway show, January will be one for the history books. The annual post-holiday doldrums in the theater district are proving particularly doleful in 2009, as more than a dozen plays and musicals — almost half of the current lineup, incredible though it may seem — get ready to close by the end of the month.
What's still kicking: Vancouver's PuSh Festival (Jan 20 to Feb 8), Portland's Fertile Ground Festival (all new works; Jan 23 to Feb 1), and NYC's Under the Radar Festival (Jan 7 to Jan 18), with shows by Mabou Mines, Holcombe Waller, Tim Etchells, Tim Crouch (with England, which he performed at the Henry a few months ago), and sometime locals Tommy Smith and Reggie Watts.
Because, in the New Economy, fringe theater is not as fucked as big theater.
We hope.
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Giving it away for free = for the moment, barely holding on.
Hooray!
Whether a recession develops into a severe and prolonged depression depends on a number of circumstances. Among them are the extent and quality of credit extended during the previous period of prosperity, the amount of speculation permitted, the ability of monetary policy and fiscal policy to reverse the downward trend, and the amount of excess productive capacity in existence.
For what it's worth, Britannica sez a depression is:
in economics, major downswing in the business cycle that is characterized by sharply reduced industrial production, widespread unemployment, serious declines or cessations of growth in construction activity, and great reductions in international trade and capital movements. Unlike minor business contractions that may occur in one country independently of business cycles in other countries, severe depressions have usually been nearly worldwide in scope.
The worldwide scope of what's going on is pretty clear, so the odds are interesting right now.
2. The Carousel is not the only dinner theater, as far as I know The Tangier is still open even though you're more likely to go there for Blue Oyster Cult than broadway.
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