Chris Wilkinson 

Noises off: Michael Billington gets the animation treatment

Chris Wilkinson: Theatre bloggers report a new website allowing users to input dialogue and generate virtual drama – and some videos can't resist focusing on the industry itself
  
  


Has the internet invented its own form of theatre? So asks Michael Wheeler on the Praxis theatre blog this week. He is examining the phenomenon of Xtranormal, a website that allows users to generate their own animations simply using text and dialogue. The advantages of this medium, he says, are clear: "Today Xtranormal viral videos made for free on the internet seem to be everywhere. No actors, designers, or live audience to worry about. Just you as writer-director and a cast that isn't going to give Johnny Depp a run for his money anytime soon, but might run off with Hello Kitty if you don't keep an eye on 'em." These videos allow you to create work about everything from iPhone 4s to the Tea Party movement.

Some of the most amusing videos on the site target the theatre industry itself. The Playgoer recently discovered a video that brilliantly illustrates the kinds of problems an actor can run in to when asked, at a party, what it is they do for a living. The incomprehension our actor character is confronted with will be familiar to anyone who has ever had to explain that there is more to the profession than Broadway and the West End. And actors aren't the only stars. None other than the Guardian's Michael Billington has a leading role in this video, developed from a piece he wrote in 2007 about critics and bloggers. Noises off hopes he got Equity rates.

In other news, a number of bloggers this week, including David Cote, have been discussing the imminent opening of the Spider-Man musical on Broadway (which is currently in previews). Matt Freeman and the Playgoer are both discussing the ethics of this article in the New York Times, in which Patrick Healy goes in to gruesome detail about the technical errors that marred the first public preview of the show. For the Playgoer, the problem with what the Times has done is that it has violated the basic principle of criticism that says you should not review a show until it is ready. "I do think the Times should answer to the charge of 'reviewing' previews, even if they're technically not," it says. "This is especially important at a time when 'the internet' and 'bloggers' are constantly blamed for ruining the practice of criticism by doing such things."

As Matt Freeman points out in response, however, the show's producers cannot really hide behind these conventions when tickets to this so-called "work in progress" cost more than $100. "If you're going to take a superhero property, outspend every Broadway show in history, use big names to create and (let's face it) sell your show," he writes, "then you have to live with the downside of fame and glory, too. It's unreasonable to expect the public to wait reverently and quietly without any information, to spend their money, and for the press to treat this incredibly newsworthy show as if it they can't cover it until the producers give them the 'go-ahead'."

It is, of course, entirely reasonable to give a show the chance to warm up before the critics take out their notebooks, but in return for the right to this protected preview period a theatre should, at the least, charge audiences less to see it. As Mark Shenton points out, however, the tickets he bought for Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark "were not reduced in price, and cost me $140 each". So it seems we have a case here of producers trying to have their web and, erm, eat it.

Finally, just in case you've been living under a rock – or at least without radio reception – I leave you with surely the most amusing arts story of the year: Today presenter Jim Naughtie's glorious Freudian slip when talking about Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary. As Political Scrapbook blog points out: "One assumes the 50% of DCMS staff facing redundancy were perfectly happy to hear this over their breakfast or, indeed, at any other time of day."

 

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