July 20, 2023

Thursday, July 20, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

New Biden-Harris ad, using Marjorie Taylor Greene talking points. Brilliant. Touch to watch. Ad begins at :45 👇

Did you feel about the ad as Joyce Vance does? 👇

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Kamala is always busy.

The Vice President welcomed President Isaac Herzog of Israel in the Senate.

Touch the link below 👇 to watch the Vice President with the Israeli President at her residency.

https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1OdKrzzAVnnKX?t=4s

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Now, let’s get the Big Fish too.

Trump supporters protesting outside the Michigan State Capitol in 2021.

Trump’s Conspirators Are Facing the Music, Finally.

We’ve reached a turning point in the effort to ensure there are consequences for those who deliberately attempt to undermine our democracy: Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, charged 16 Republican leaders in her state on Tuesday for their role as fake electors working to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The charges, coming on the heels of news that the special counsel Jack Smith has informed Donald Trump that he’s a target of the Department of Justice’s investigation into the Capitol riot, mean we are witnessing a new and necessary phase in this quest for accountability, one in which the federal and state wheels of justice work to hold people accountable not only for the violence on Jan. 6, but also for what got us there: the alleged scheme to interfere with the transfer of power.

The charges in Michigan will surely meet criticism on all sides. Some will say the case is not broad or bold enough, that Mr. Trump and the other alleged national ringleaders should have been charged as well. Others will say Ms. Nessel cast too wide a net, pulling in low-level party functionaries who did not know better. We think those critiques are misconceived. Ms. Nessel got it just right, prosecuting crimes firmly within her jurisdiction, while opening the way for federal authorities to net even bigger fish.

Ms. Nessel brought the same eight counts against all 16 defendants. The offenses include conspiracy to commit forgery, since the defendants are accused of signing documents stating they were the qualified electors (they were not), and publishing forged documents by circulating these materials to federal and state authorities. On paper, the penalties for the offenses range from five to 14 years, but sentencing in this case would presumably be lower than that maximum.

Until now there have been no charges centered on the fake electors plot. For that reason alone, Michigan’s action brings a sense of needed accountability for those who fanned the rioters’ passions leading up to Jan. 6 by spinning a false narrative about a stolen election.

Michigan saw some of the most outrageous fake electoral certificates to emerge during the period leading up to the Capitol riot. Unlike the fake certificates in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, the Michigan documents did not include a disclaimer that they were to be used only in the case of litigation. What’s more, the documents contained more outright false statements than simply declaring that the signers were the lawful electors of the winning candidate.

For example, they state that the electors “convened and organized in the State Capitol,” when, according to the attorney general, they were hidden away in the basement of the state Republican headquarters. (It seems likely that the fake electors included this lie because Michigan law requires presidential electors to meet in the Capitol — a requirement and legal problem that a Trump campaign legal adviser, Kenneth Chesebro, had flagged in his confidential memorandumsetting out the scheme.)

In proving these cases, establishing intent will be key. Here, there are several indicators that the defendants may have been aware of the illicit nature of their gathering.

According to congressional testimony from the state Republican Party’s chairwoman at the time, Laura Cox, the group originally planned to meet inside the Capitol and hide overnight, so they could vote in the building the following day. Ms. Cox said she told a lawyer working with the Trump campaign and supposedly organizing the fake electors “in no uncertain terms that that was insane and inappropriate,” and “a very, very bad idea and potentially illegal.”

As she put it, Ms. Cox was “very uncomfortable” with facilitating a meeting of the fake elector group, and said so at the time in accord with her lawyers’ opinion. Ms. Cox even urged the group to draft a significantly more measured document simply “stating that if perhaps something were to happen in the courts, they were willing and able to serve as electors from Michigan for Donald Trump.” Her advice was not followed.

At the time the fake electors met to allegedly forge their documents, they should have been aware that state officials had certified the election results for Joe Biden — it was national and state news. By that point, there was no prospect of changing that outcome through either litigation or legislative action. On the day prosecutors say the fake electors met, two of the most powerful Republicans in the state acknowledged as much. Mike Shirkey, the majority leader in the State Senate, and Lee Chatfield, the House speaker, both issued statements declaring the presidential race over. Mr. Shirkey said that Michigan’s “Democratic slate of electors should be able to proceed with their duty” without the threat of harassment or violence.

The fake electors were told they were not allowed to bring their phones into the meeting at the Republican headquarters that day, according to testimony one of them gave congressional investigators. They were instructed to maintain secrecy and not to share any details about what was occurring. That secrecy suggests that they knew what they were doing was wrong.

Michigan’s former secretary of state, Terri Lynn Land, who had been designated a Trump elector, declined to participate in the proceedings, saying, according to Ms. Cox’s testimony, she was not comfortable doing so.

With these facts, it would have been unthinkable for the state attorney general to choose not to prosecute the Michigan 16. Ms. Nessel’s office has regularly broughtprosecutions, some of them against her fellow Democrats, centered on false documents in connection with elections. The case of the fake electors is far more egregious than most of those other cases: The defendants here were politically engaged individuals who should have been aware of the election results, as well as the flat rejection by the courts and Michigan Legislature of the Trump campaign’s claims of voter fraud.

To be sure, some critics of the case may still think that the Michigan attorney general should have gone after Mr. Trump and his top lieutenants, who helped organize the false electors. But prosecutors have a responsibility first to pursue those individuals within their jurisdiction. By focusing solely on the figures who undertook their acts in Michigan, Ms. Nessel is wisely insulating her case against charges that she overreached, exceeding her jurisdiction.

Of course, broader prosecutions may still be justified. Reporting indicates that the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga., Fani Willis, may be considering a different kind of wide-ranging case, involving state RICO crimes. Unlike the Michigan prosecution, her case may focus on Mr. Trump’s direct efforts to pressure state election officials — efforts that were caught on tape — and Rudy Giuliani’s attempt to provide false statements of election fraud to state officials.

If broad-based indictments ultimately emerge out of Georgia, and are supported by the facts and appropriate law, then we would welcome it. That is part of the genius of American democracy: The states, which are responsible for running our elections, are laboratories of both democracy and of accountability.

Ms. Nessel’s case also leaves a clear lane for Mr. Smith, the special counsel. She has avoided charging high-level national individuals whom Mr. Smith is apparently investigating. If anything, her case provides greater foundation for Mr. Smith to act, and he now seems to be following through. If Ms. Nessel can move against these individuals in Michigan, Mr. Smith can and should do the same against the ringleaders. Together, they can hold both the foot soldiers and their organizers accountable for their actions leading up to the Capitol riot. (New York Times. Authors. Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for the first impeachment and trial of Donald Trump. Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University, is a co-editor in chief of the Just Security website.)

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The Big Fish may be indicted.

Everything we know so far about Donald Trump’s potential third indictment.

What we know about the Trump target letter

Donald Trump says he is about to be indicted. Republicans are rallying to his defense. The entire political world is locked in an awkward waiting period.

We are now in the remarkable position of this being a somewhat familiar chain of events. After the U.S. went 234 years without any president or former president facing criminal charges, we could be on the verge of the third presidential indictment in four months (with a possible fourth indictment to follow).

The latest indictment furor was unleashed when Trump announced Tuesday on his Truth Social app that he had received a letter from Special Counsel Jack Smith indicating that he is a target of the Justice Department’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “It is a very sad and dark period for our Nation!” Trump wrote, calling the probe a “witch hunt” and the prosecutor “deranged.”

A “target letter,” as such as missive is known, generally indicates that a prosecutor is about to hand down criminal charges against a defendant. Here are the answers to some key questions about the target letter:

What could Trump be charged for?

Just as Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election were sprawling, so has been Smith’s investigation into them. Smith has reportedly examined nearly every path Trump used to try and stay in power, from the “fake elector” scheme to pressure campaigns against state officials and then-Vice President Mike Pence to his fundraising emails spreading false claims about the election.

The special counsel has also interviewed numerous people in Trump’s orbit — including Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Stephen Miller, and others — to probe Trump’s conduct on January 6, 2021, and his role in the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol that day.

According to ABC News, the target letter mentions three federal statutes that Trump could be charged under:

Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States

Deprivation of rights under color of law

Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant

[: per Rolling Stone: The statutes listed in his 1/6 target letter include conspiracy to defraud the US (18 U.S.C. § 371), Witness tampering (likely 1512(c)(2) obstructing an official proceeding), and 18 U.S.C. § 242 (deprivation of rights).]

When would the charges be made official?

It’s hard to know for sure, but indictments can often come just days or weeks after target letters. For example, per CNN, Trump received his last target letter from Smith in May, about three weeks before the special counsel charged him with hoarding classified documents.

It is unknown if others in Trump’s orbit received a target letter alongside Trump. According to CNN, the ex-president’s advisers — who were reportedly caught off guard by the letter — spent Tuesday calling other allies to ascertain if anyone else had received a similar missive. Lawyers for Giuliani and John Eastman, two Trump allies who were central to his post-election efforts, have publicly said that no target letters were sent to their clients.

What happens in the meantime?

For now, it appears Smith’s investigation is continuing (when the special counsel isn’t at Subway, that is). The Washington, D.C. grand jury that has been considering testimony in the January 6 case is reportedly set to hear Thursday from another witness: Will Russell, who served as Trump’s trip director and deputy director of advance in the White House. Russell has already testified before the grand jury at least twice before.

Trump also has the opportunity to appear before the grand jury himself: according to his Truth Social post, the target letter gave him until tomorrow to testify if he wanted to. It is customary for prosecutors to give defendants that opportunity before charging them; defendants generally do not accept the invitation, and Trump is not expected to now. He declined to testify before the grand juries that handed down his two previous indictments.

How have Republicans responded?

Republicans from across the ideological spectrum have responded pretty much identically to how they did during the first two Trump indictments. In the House, Trump’s closest allies — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), among others — quickly issued messages of support for Trump, accusing the Biden Justice Department of “weaponizing government” to target a political opponent.

Greene, for example, referred to Smith as a “weak little bitch” in a post on her congressional Twitter account. Here’s what McCarthy said:

Over in the Senate, the responses were — as before — a little more mixed. Trump allies like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) jumped to Trump’s defense. Trump critics like Sens. Mitt Romney (R-UT) sounded quite a bit more concerned. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stayed silent, refusing to answer reporters’ questions.

On the campaign trail, too, the usual suspects (Asa Hutchinson, Chris Christie) criticized Trump after the target letter. Other Republican candidates tried to tread their usual middle ground. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), for example, said Tuesday that Trump “should have come out more forcefully” to condemn the rioters on January 6 — while also criticizing the Justice Department for pursuing charges. When the Trump campaign posted only the first part of DeSantis’ remarks, his campaign scrambled to push out the second part as well, lest the Florida governor be seen criticizing too harshly the man he is running against for the presidency.

How have Democrats responded?

The Democratic response has been much more strident than during the first Trump indictments. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who issued terse statements after the initial indictments, offered a slightly different message Tuesday:

Other Democratic lawmakers similarly celebrated the forthcoming charges in ways they haven’t for the previous indictments. “It’s about time,” House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jerry Nadler (D-NY) told reporters.

As Axios noted, for many Democratic lawmakers — whose personal safety was threatened during the riot — January 6 is personal, which is why they have been more forceful in responding to this potential indictment than the others. (Wake up to Politics)

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s response to the news of Jack Smith letter to Trump in black and white.

Isn’t she a class act!

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Discrimination and mistreatment of the women playing in the World Cup continues.

2019 World Cup.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino could make no guarantee Wednesday that the member federations will distribute the $30,000 payments promised to every player at the Women’s World Cup.

He said at a news conference ahead of the tournament opener that he’s engaging with member federations on the issue. The payments are made the national federations, which are expected to pay the players.

But there is no mechanism to directly pay the players the money, which could be life-changing for some.

“We are moving of course in the right direction, we have been consulting with associations, with players, to try to go in the right path,” Infantino said. “We have issued these recommendations, but we have an association of associations. So whatever payments we do, we will go through the associations and then the associations will, of course, make the relevant payments to their own players. We are in touch with all the associations.”

FIFA had previously confirmed that the 732 players participating in the World Cup will be paid at least $30,000 each. The paycheck rises if teams do well, with each player for the winning team earning $270,000.

Infantino said there are complications including residency and taxation that are best handled by federations.

The payment is significant for many players: the average annual salary worldwide for women who play professionally is $14,000.

FIFA’s agreement means that half of the total World Cup prize money fund of $110 million will be paid to the players in the 32 teams. The prize pool is more than three times the $30 million prize fund FIFA paid out at the 2019 Women’s World Cup in France.

The global players’ union, known as FIFPRO, helped push FIFA to dedicate a percentage of the prize money to the players themselves. The union sent a letter to FIFA in October on behalf of players from 25 national teams calling for more equitable conditions and prize money.

However, the prize money fund is still far below the $440 million paid to the men who played in the World Cup last year in Qatar. Infantino said the goal is to equalize the prize money by the 2026 men’s World Cup and the 2027 women’s edition.

Infantino said the Women’s World Cup is expected to generate a half-billion dollars in revenue and the organization will break even. For the first time, the commercial rights for the Women’s World Cup were sold separately from the men’s tournament.

The tournament opens Thursday with both co-hosts involved. New Zealand will play Norway in Auckland, and Australia will take on Ireland in Sydney. (Associated Press).

One more thing - to add insult to injury. . .

Increased television coverage of the Women’s World Cup noted below 👇 is great and brings in more money. Will the women see any of it?

At least we get to watch.

Women's World Cup Gets Big TV Push as U.S. Team Seeks Three-Peat Win.

In a milestone media moment for women’s sports, Fox Sports is about to deliver the most expansive coverage of a FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament in history – an investment driven by the success of the U.S. national team and its pursuit of an unprecedented third consecutive victory.

From July 20 through Aug. 20, cabler Fox Sports 1 (FS1) and the Fox broadcast network will serve up more than 190 hours of live soccer programming from the tournament staged in Australia and New Zealand. The roster includes 64 matches, about half of which will air on Fox, the broadest platform for the games and for sponsors. All matches will stream live via the FS1 app. The quarterfinals, semifinals, third-place match and the big finish will all air live on Fox.

Fox Sports is also investing in pre- and post-game shows, halftime reports and other shoulder programming around the games in order to make the most of the pricey World Cup rights it acquired starting with the 2015 Women’s World Cup tourney. Established stars on the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT) such as Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan, Alyssa Thompson, Rose Lavelle and Ashley Sanchez will give Fox Sports producers plenty of material to work with in telling the story of the 2023 team.

Soccer great Carli Lloyd, who served as co-captain of the victorious USWNT team at the 2019 Women’s World Cup, will serve as a studio analyst for Fox Sports. Having retired from soccer just two years ago, Lloyd is eager to be on air to help viewers understand what players and coaches are feeling as they put everything on the pitch for a world championship.

“It’s just such a huge moment in time for women’s sports right now,” Lloyd tells Variety. “It’s no longer ‘Oh, we’re going to support this women’s team because it’s the fun thing to do.’ No, people are doing it because it’s actually a great investment. Brands and companies are seeing that more and more. The Women’s World Cup popularity has grown, around the world women’s soccer is doing well. It’s getting more resources and more support.”

Lloyd also points to the positive impact of new teams joining the U.S.’s National Women’s Soccer League, notably Los Angeles’ Angel City and the San Diego Wave.

“Those two franchises coming in have really elevated the NWSL and pushed other teams to be better,” says Lloyd, who played for the league’s Western New York Flash, the Houston Dash and Sky Blue during her career. “They’re setting attendance records and sellign out stadiums. They’re really putting a lot of dollars and resources into the league. That is allowing the league to grow faster.”

Lloyd began her TV work as an analyst and commentator for Fox Sports in April 2022 and made her World Cup debut covering select games for the men’s tournament held last year in Qatar.

David Neal, executive producer of Women’s World Cup and VP of production for Fox Sports, credits the dominance of the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT) for boosting the popularity of the sport overall in the U.S. in a significant way.

Part of the reason Fox Sports landed World Cup rights was because of its commitment to put the quadrennial women’s tournament on a par with the men’s World Cup, which has traditionally ranked as one of the most-watched global TV events.

“We give more emphasis to the Women’s World Cup because the [U.S.] women’s team is more popular,” Neal tells Variety. “They are going in as the two-time defending champions.”

Neal credits the top stars of the USWNT and the U.S.’s National Women’s Soccer League for being savvy in how they promote themselves and the sport. It comes in sharp contrast to the culture of athletes and clubs in the world of soccer outside the U.S., where broadcasters often struggle to get lively interviews with players on camera, Neal says.

After Fox Sports cut a deal with FIFA for World Cup rights in 2011, the division’s producers made a presentation to members of the USWNT in Salt Lake City. Neal and his team promised to produce the kind of image-burnishing coverage that NBCUniversal does about athletes during the Olympics. Neal credited Lloyd and the now-retired Abby Wambach for helping the set the tone and establish guardrails for Fox Sports’ lifestyle and biography coverage related to Women’s World Cup.

“We told them we wanted to portray them as a team of rock-star athletes. They gave us access and the ability to bring their stories to life,” Neal says.

Lloyd never expected to segue into the booth after her retirement from soccer. But Neal thought she would be a natural after getting to know her as a player. Neal called Lloyd shortly after the 2019 Women’s World Cup to make a pre-emptive offer.

“I wasn’t even entertaining the idea,” Lloyd says. “It’s a tough thing to do. I’ve played with these players and the head coach. I was part of that for so long. But when the opportunity presented itself, I took the leap. I knew it was going to be nerve-wracking and a bit uncomfortable.”

Lloyd feels she can add context to the game play for viewers that will enhance their appreciation of the sport and the skill of the athletes on the field.

“Viewers want to hear the perspective of what it’s like to be a player. I can tap into what a player is thinking, what a coach is thinking, what would be my message to a team in this particular situation,” Lloyd says. “It’s not that much different than what I did as player. I’m preparing to be professional and trying to be the best version of myself. I enjoy talking about the game of soccer.”

The tournament begins July 20 with a spotlight on the host nations. New Zealand plays Norway in a match set to air at 3 a.m. ET. Australia takes on Ireland at 6 a.m. ET. The USWNT plays its first match July 21 against Vietnam. That game is set to air live at 9 p.m. ET/6 a.m. PT. (Variety)

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A Dramatic Call for Help for Theater and even other Live Performances, from multiple sectors and countries.

Two calls below 👇 are about ART. The third is about ART and class.

Six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald was the star attraction at Long Wharf Theatre's annual benefit concert in May

Theater is in freefall, and the pandemic isn’t the only thing to blame.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — For more than 55 years, the highly regarded Long Wharf Theatre made its home in a converted warehouse in an old food terminal near New Haven Harbor. Then one day last year, with rent payments an escalating burden, the company became homeless.

Is a legacy theater company without its theater still a company? It’s a proposition that Long Wharf’s artistic director, Jacob G. Padrón, has been testing — an “itinerant” theater model — and the rest of the anxiety-ridden theater world is watching closely. Still reeling from the pandemic, many of the country’s nonprofit theaters of various sizes are in deep financial trouble, in what is rapidly turning into the most severe crisis in the 70-year history of the regional theater movement.

“It’s happening more and more and more, and it’s going to be an epidemic,” said Michael M. Kaiser, former president of the Kennedy Center and now chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland. “I’ve always believed that we were heading for a time that we were going to lose a whole lot of midsized cultural organizations. And I still believe that’s true.”

Evidence of the turmoil mounts day by day, as companies from California to New York announce major cutbacks in their offerings — or shut down altogether. The theater world was further rocked recently when one of the nation’s largest companies, the Los Angeles-based Center Theatre Group, said it would “pause” programming in one of its theaters, the Mark Taper Forum. That followed the upheaval at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, another industry mainstay, which said last month it needed an emergency infusion of $7.5 million or its 2023 season could not go on. The urgent effort came after a similar plea, in April, for which OSF raised $2.5 million.

The cutbacks and closings have been so regular of late that a document circulates among leaders of the field, listing recent “permanent closures” — such as Triad Stage in North Carolina, Southern Repertory Theatre in New Orleans, New Ohio Theatre in New York — and staff and program downsizings. In June, off-Broadway’s Public Theater eliminated its Under the Radar Festival, which set an industry standard for avant-garde and international plays. To save money, even august companies such as Arena Stage — working with what its leaders call “deficit planning” — are reducing the number of plays they produce.

And just last week, Chicago’s 35-year-old Lookingglass Theatre Company, debut theater for Tony-winning director Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses,” declared that it was ceasing operations until late next spring. As regional theaters often are the seeding ground for both new-play development and work that eventually goes to Broadway, every “pause” can have consequences down the road.

The crisis is a perfect storm of bad economic and demographic trends, exacerbated by a change in cultural habits during the pandemic. Experts in theater management say that 25 percent to 30 percent of theater audiences have not returned since the pandemic shutdown of March 2020 that lasted until late 2021. Retrenchment has continued, they say, not so much out of lingering fears of getting sick, but because theater simply receded as a priority as other pastimes filled the gap. Streaming entertainment at home, for example, has proved a durable substitute for the time and expense of theater.

No one cause completely explains the situation, but many theaters have been slow to respond to changes in the marketplace. Billions in federal aid — including the $15 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program approved in 2020 — kept theaters afloat during the shutdown. But that cushion was temporary. The money was largely spent, observers say, but problems from before the pandemic, such as a continual decline in season subscriptions, have not been adequately addressed.

The confluence has theater business professionals issuing dire warnings.

“By this time next year, I think the industry will shrink by half,” said Amy Wratchford, who has been managing director of theaters in Virginia and is now president of the Wratchford Group, an arts management consultancy.

Wratchford added that “donor fatigue” — a reluctance by some financial supporters to continue to shore up struggling institutions — has been settling in. (Unlike commercial Broadway shows, whose investors optimally expect a profit, the nation’s regional theaters operate on a nonprofit basis, deriving income from ticket sales, grants from philanthropies and donations from individuals.)

“What we’ve got,” she said, “is a disconnect between theater and the people who fund it.”

Kaiser, whose institute counsels hundreds of arts organizations across the country, believes that some theaters, motivated by honorable concerns about social and racial justice, pivoted in their programming too abruptly after the shutdown.

He called the move “a change of perspective in what stories they want to tell without necessarily bringing their audiences or their donors or their boards along with them, in a way that makes clear as to why this is important and how to participate and how to watch. And as a result, I think we’re seeing some serious loss of audience and board support and donor support.”

Although a few companies folded in the wake of the pandemic, it was Long Wharf’s announcement in February 2022 of a radical new direction that was the industry’s real wake-up call. A strong artistic force for decades, Long Wharf has championed such playwrights as David Rabe and Margaret Edson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Wit,” which got a crucial early boost at Long Wharf. But time and declining attendance caught up with the organization: By the point at which Padrón and Kit Ingui became artistic director and managing director in 2019, its 400-seat main stage theater was typically less than half filled, and the building was desperately in need of upgrades.

“When I got here, financial challenges were already in existence for Long Wharf over the course of more than a decade,” Ingui said in an interview in the downtown office suite that now serves as company headquarters. “There were severe deficits.”

With an operating budget of about $4 million, and facing increases that would put annual rent at about $500,000, something drastic had to be done. “The board recognized that the building and the expense and the operations were not sustainable,” Padrón said. “It just wasn’t good anymore.

“So we had to figure out a different way,” he added. “We know that it is such a risk. But we also know that great things don’t come without taking risks.”

The “great thing” Padrón had in mind was potentially exciting but also deeply upsetting to some longtime Long Wharf patrons: giving up the building and finding spaces for productions in and around New Haven. The Yale-trained Padrón, 43, a California native who grew up on shows at Luis Valdez’s storied El Teatro Campesino, founded for farmworkers, is part of a generation of younger theater leaders more committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. He envisioned Long Wharf expanding its reach to underserved communities.

That has meant offerings such as “Black Trans Women at the Center,” a multiyear digital festival of new work, and “I AM: Muslim/American,” a film by Aaliyah Miller and Halima Flynn that Long Wharf has taken for talkback sessions across Connecticut. The itinerant era also birthed a concert reading in September of the Broadway musical “Jelly’s Last Jam” in a space in the city’s Dixwell neighborhood.

There is no shortage of potential sites for the company’s projects — the staff has toured more than 60 in the area. This fall, actress Kathleen Chalfant will perform Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” in private homes in the New Haven area. And while the new team has been able to erase the company’s deficit, the unknown is whether Long Wharf can hold on to its position as a strong cultural influence and attract the new audiences it seeks.

The company’s board of directors is solidly behind the gamble.

“We had to make some kind of decision, were we going to stay or leave the financial model? That subscription model is absolutely failing,” said board chair Nancy Alexander, herself a consultant to nonprofit organizations. “And so the financial model, which was based largely on that, was starting to crumble. But the really positive and very important factor was our desire to make theater for everyone.”

The hope for some struggling companies is that reducing programming for a time — and thus the pressure on the budget — will allow them to re-energize. Meghan Pressman, Centre Theatre Group’s managing director and chief executive, said pausing work in the Mark Taper allows time for “a restructuring, a rebalancing,” as a new artistic director, Snehal Desai, takes over this summer. (The company is still presenting musicals in its larger Ahmanson Theatre.)

Pressman acknowledges that the industry came up short in the effort to lure audiences back after the pandemic. “We bet big on the past year and half,” she said, adding that perhaps a public airing of theater’s dire straits will let reluctant theatergoers know how desperately they are needed to return.

“That is one of the only positive outcomes out of this really distressing moment,” Pressman said. “If it throws a spotlight on the struggle over what is happening, then I am proud to be of service.” (Peter Marks is the theatre critic of The Washington Post where this opinion piece appeared).

American Theater is collapsing. The Federal Government must save it.

The American theater is on the verge of collapse.

Here’s just a sampling of recent dire developments: The Public Theater announced this year that the Under the Radar festival, the most exciting of New York’s experimental performance incubators, would be postponed indefinitely and later announced it was laying off 19 percent of its staff. The Humana Festival of New American Plays, a vital launching pad for such great playwrights as Lynn Nottage and Will Eno over the past four decades, was canceled this year.

This season the Williamstown Theater Festival, one of our most important summer festivals, will consist of only one fully produced work, alongside an anemic offering of staged readings. The Signature Theater, whose resident playwrights have included Edward Albee, August Wilson, Tony Kushner and Annie Baker, is delaying the start of its season and, even then, will produce only three new plays rather than the customary six.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, one of the country’s oldest and most storied regional theaters, recently announced a second round of emergency fund-raising to remain operational. The Lookingglass, a major anchor of Chicago’s theater scene, is halting production for the year. The Brooklyn Academy of Music laid off 13 percent of its staff. BAM’s Next Wave Festival, which helped catapult generations of forward-thinking artists to prominence, presented 31 shows in 2017. This year, it will present seven.

Theater has always been a risky endeavor. Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Dangling Conversation” asked “Is the theater really dead?” back in 1966. The current situation, however, risks building to an unprecedented crisis: the shuttering of theaters across the country and a permanent shrinking of the possibilities of the American stage. For those of us in New York, it might be easy to look at Broadway’s return to pre-Covid audience numbers and think it signals something like normal. But Broadway in its current form depends on nonprofit theaters to develop material and support artists. Nonprofit theaters are where many recent hits — including “A Strange Loop” and “Hamilton,” both of which won Pulitzer Prizes — started out.

So how do we avoid this catastrophe? Just as in other areas of recent American life where entire industries were imperiled — banks, the auto industry — this crisis requires federal intervention.

That’s right: The American nonprofit theater needs a bailout.

Regional and nonprofit theaters were in trouble well before 2020 and the force majeure of the pandemic. Most regional and nonprofit theaters were built on a subscription model, in which loyal patrons paid for a full season of tickets upfront. Foundation grants, donations and single ticket sales made up the balance of the budgets.

For much of the 20th century, this model worked. It locked in money and audiences, mitigated the risk of new or experimental shows and cultivated a dedicated base of enthusiasts. But this model has been withering for the entire 21st century. Subscriber numbers are falling, and nothing has arisen to take the place of that revenue or that audience. Not surprisingly, ticket prices have gotten higher, making new audiences more challenging to find.

This smoldering crisis was exacerbated by the pandemic, a ruinous event that has closed theaters, broken the theatergoing habit for audiences and led to a calamitous increase in costs at a moment when they can least be absorbed. A collapse in the nonprofit sector doesn’t just mean fewer theaters and fewer shows across the country; it also means less ambitious work, fewer risks taken and smaller casts. The reverberations will be felt up and down the theatrical chain, and a new generation of talent will be neglected. As with a bank collapse, in which a few foundering institutions can bring down a whole system, the entire ecosystem of American theater is imperiled. And American theater is too important to fail.

This is why federal intervention is required. It might seem like a radical suggestion, but in fact, it’s not even new. The Federal Theater Project, which ran from 1935 to 1939, was part of the New Deal effort to fund artistic endeavors. The project sparked an explosion in theatrical activity and inspired a generation of theater makers — including Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan and Orson Welles — and through its Negro Theater Project provided targeted support for Black theater artists across the country.

From the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, theater artists founded pioneering nonprofit companies in Oregon (Oregon Shakespeare Festival); Dallas (Theater ’47); Houston (Alley Theater); Washington, D.C. (Arena Stage); Los Angeles (Mark Taper Forum); Connecticut (Long Wharf); Kentucky (Actors Theater of Louisville); San Francisco (American Conservatory Theater); and New York City (New York Shakespeare Festival, which became the Public).

Once theaters were up and running, charitable foundations stepped in to help. The Ford Foundation, for one, provided grants to theaters beginning in the 1950s. In 1966 the National Council on the Arts announced that “the development of a larger and more appreciative audience for the theater” should be one of the primary goals of the newly formed National Endowment for the Arts. The combination of public and private sector funding that followed had a miraculous effect. By 2005, there were over 1,200 nonprofit theaters in the United States, staging 13,000 productions a year and contributing over $1.4 billion to the U.S. economy, according to the Theater Communications Group.

Now this system — which took decades to nurture, made our national theatrical culture possible and assured our place on a world stage — is falling apart. Only the federal government can provide the scope of support needed to stabilize it. One easy and immediate first step would be to pass the Creative Economy Revitalization Act and the Promoting Local Arts and Creative Economy Workforce Act, two bills that have been languishing in Congress since 2021 and 2022. These bills would immediately send millions of dollars to local artists and arts institutions across the country.

But an even more important — and formidable — step would be to greatly increase the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. It has accomplished astounding things over its nearly 60-year history, helping to seed and sustain orchestras, theaters, museums and community arts organizations across the country. The N.E.A. has brought art outside traditional venues like playhouses and galleries and into schools and military bases. But it has never been adequately funded and since the 1980s has ludicrously become a popular piñata for conservative politicians looking to score easy points.

In the context of the federal budget, the funds required for a theatrical bailout are pocket change: For the fiscal year of 2024, the Biden administration requested $211 million for the N.E.A., or about 63 cents for every person who lives in the United States. By contrast, Arts Council England plans to distribute roughly $10 for every person in England. The N.E.A. must also once again be celebrated as an essential national organ that keeps the country’s cultural life alive.

After a series of attacks on the endowment led by the Republican senator Jesse Helms and Christian right figures like Jerry Falwell in the 1980s and ’90s, Congress changed the N.E.A.’s rules so that it can no longer give grants to individual artists, except in the field of literature, and cannot fund the general operating expenses of arts organizations. These rules — the outdated results of an earlier generation’s culture war — must be repealed.

In September 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, which created the N.E.A. The act contained a long declaration of findings and purpose outlining Congress’s view as to why the arts were necessary and deserving of support. “An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone,” Congress declared. “Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”

These words ring even truer today. The arts nurture the human spirit, reflect the human condition for us and, at their best, allow us moments in which we can transcend the limitations of our own points of view and see the world anew. The government has long recognized that the market is not enough to sustain this project. Indeed, at times the relentless focus on shareholder value and corporate balance sheets puts the market and American art at odds.

If nonprofit theaters are to survive and fulfill their national purpose, it will take far more than cost cutting, layoffs and emergency fund-raising campaigns. Government aid is both necessary and essential, as is our nation’s renewed recognition that the arts are vital both to the survival of democracy and to the enlargement of the human spirit.(Isaac Butler, guest, New York Times).

Rising ticket prices are costing Australians more than just money. Our cultural climate is in crisis.

Cost of living has turned theatre and live music into a sometimes food – which has a profound effect on our future art.

The poet Mary Oliver once described art as being like “bread in the pockets of the hungry”. But the cost-of-living crisis – nicknamed “cozzy livs” by a younger generation who know that if you can’t change something, you can at least give it a name on your own terms – has come for both our groceries and our art. What happens when you can’t afford either?

The prices of live events, from theatre shows to musicals and gigs, have been steadily rising for years, particularly in the aftermath of Covid. Laneway festival tickets increased by $20 this year, while Vivid, one of the key events in Sydney’s calendar, started charging entry for select light shows. Events that were once free are free no longer and it’s not uncommon to pay hundreds of dollars for international acts. The battering that Taylor Swift fans recently took while waiting hours to buy tickets to her Australian tour is but one example, with fans forking out hundreds for seats up in the gods. Demand for stadium tours is at an all-time high and punters are paying through the teeth as a result.

As Mixdown reports, there has been a 19% increase in the cost of tickets bought through Live Nation globally in the last year, with the promotion company’s CEO, Michael Rapino, suggesting those prices are only going to rise in line with demand. There has been a proliferation of “flexible ticket pricing” options recently, where ticket prices increase with demand – the route that Splendour in the Grass went down for the first time this year.

Evelyn Richardson, the chief executive of Live Performance Australia, attributes the rise to three main factors: rising production costs, skill shortages and a change in consumer behaviour. “With ticket pricing, you always have to understand the context of tickets being sold,” she says. “The cost of freighting has gone up phenomenally. We move concerts around all the time … and moving costs have gone up significantly, coming out of Covid due to supply chain disruption.”

According to Richardson, production costs have generally gone up by 30% to 40%, sometimes even 50%. But while it’s more expensive to put on a show, promoters are having to recoup costs without the security of presales: people these days are buying tickets at the last minute, if they can afford to buy them at all.

“People are making decisions about how many events they go to,” Richardson says. “You would expect that in an economically challenging time … So now, when you’re putting on a tour and you’re looking at a massive rise in production costs, you can’t recoup just by putting up your ticket prices.”

Creative communities are at their strongest when the creation and consumption of art is affordable

Rent plays a part in this story too, as it does in every story of current financial strain. Venues are facing rising interest rates, as well as a new generation of attendees who drink less and therefore spend less money at shows. The shutting of Melbourne’s beloved live music venue The Tote, not to mention the increasingly complicated saga surrounding an attempt to revive it, point to the way that real estate is tangled up in all of this. The Tote was “priced for development”, one of its potential new owners said, leading to its steep $3m price tag, and making the venue one more casualty in an increasingly hostile war on renters.

To return to Oliver’s metaphor – what does it mean when our pockets are so empty of art? The result is a cultural climate in crisis, where art is less common, affordable and accessible. Live events in Australia are becoming the playground of the upper middle class and younger Australians are missing out. When the choice is food or a Phoebe Bridgers gig, the answer is obvious.

It would be wrong to suggest there is no affordable art in this country, of course – but the squeezing out of affordable culture has profound knock-on effects.

First, regularly consuming art is a key component to making good art and an explosion in creativity almost always comes hand in hand with an explosion in the consumption of creativity. Think of hallowed scenes like Andy Warhol’s Factory, where musicians attended art shows by their painter friends and film-makers caught an evening performance by the Velvet Underground. Or look closer to home, to the arts and literary journal Angry Penguins and the scene it produced – a cross-pollination of poets, painters and novelists.

Creative communities are at their strongest when the creation and consumption of art is affordable; when artists can see what other artists are making possible; when boundaries are pushed and challenged together.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the recent documentary about photographer Nan Goldin, is miraculous in no small part because of the scene that it captures, one where every house party is attended by a painter, poet or film-maker.

Second, art is meant to be part of our lives, not a deviation from it. We don’t go to the theatre the way we go on holiday – or at least, we shouldn’t. Culture is meant to be an ongoing, organic reflection, seamlessly intertwined with the ways that we rise and choose to live every single day. That’s how it holds its cathartic power – how it retains the ability to move and shape us.

When a hefty price tag turns art into a sometimes food, rather than a pantry staple, we lose an ongoing cultural document, one that changes as we do. The painter David Hockney once claimed that without pictures, we wouldn’t even be able to see the world. So it goes with all art – without it, we cannot form a picture of our lives, our goals, our passions.

We make art to open up possibilities; to instruct, inform, change, shape, entertain. When that creative muscle becomes atrophied, forced out of regular usage by prohibitive pricing, the effect is not just an entire subsection of the population forced to work and perform less. The effect is hunger. (The Guardian).