STAGE : Glowing Reviews Increase Demand for Festival Plays

“The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of trades,” wrote Mark Twain.

In other words, nobody loves a critic until glowing reviews come in.

Well, the glowing reviews have come in for the Soviet Arts Festival theater presentations of the Maly Theatre’s “Brothers and Sisters” at the Old Globe Theatre and Nicolai Kolyada’s “Slingshot” at the San Diego Repertory Theatre. And the phones haven’t stopped ringing at the theaters since.

“Slingshot” actually wasn’t doing poorly before the reviews. Its 53% advance sales were the highest of any play produced at the Rep in a subscription series in three years. This occurred despite being so different in intensity and style from most American theater productions that producing director Sam Woodhouse sent a letter to subscribers warning them of the content, which audiences might find “at times frightening and unsettling but, in its conclusion . . . uplifting and inspirational.”

“We have these expectations that the theater is a cupcake, a place where you go to have fun,” said Woodhouse, explaining why he sent the letter. “The Russians use the theater as a way of discovering the great truth of existence--the anguish and the ecstasy. When you break ground, it helps to tell people a little bit about the shovel.”

But the Old Globe expected better than the 45% advance sales it received for its mammoth undertaking. The Old Globe usually counts on an 70-75% subscriber rate in its regular season (of which “Brothers and Sisters” was not a part). The show cost the theater $750,000 to produce above the $250,000 paid for by the festival, a figure the theater hoped to make up with tickets priced at $75. The cost of the initially scheduled three-week run was $750,000, with $250,000 added for the fourth week, running through Nov. 19, making it a million-dollar baby.

“That’s why my fingernails were so short,” said Thomas Hall, managing director.

But, after the reviews, sales jumped 10%, bringing the theater to over $400,000 in sales. If this rate continues, it would bode well for the Globe to break even, Hall said.

Hall would prefer to do better than break even--for more than the obvious reasons. Undertaking a project that took no less than 14 months of negotiations to bring here, was “very much an experiment,” according to Hall. If the project becomes a commercial as well as a critical success, that will help the Globe negotiate other such exchanges.

It has not escaped Hall or Woodhouse that both plays, like the San Diego Opera presentation of “Boris Godunov,” are about the suffering of the Russian people. In “Boris Godunov,” the people suffer under the czars, in “Brothers and Sisters” under the Stalinist government that starved the farmers feeding the rest of the country, and, in “Slingshot,” Russians suffer in a contemporary world of hardship and repression.

Woodhouse and Hall agree that Russians have used the theme of suffering to achieve greater intensity in their art.

“I’m really beginning to believe that the Russians as a people--if theater is any reflection of life--believe that without suffering there is no light,” Woodhouse said. “When one is starving and one can’t improve one’s physical lot, where does one look for happiness and a sense of wholeness if not to the spirit and the heart?”

Said Hall: “Suffering is obviously a very prominent theme and all it takes is one trip to the Soviet Union to understand that. But what is important to me is not just the suffering of the Soviet people, but the will to survive. I think that, finally, is what makes this work so moving.”

PROGRAM NOTES: The Soviet arts festival may end in November, but the Soviet invasion continues with the North American premiere of the 27-member Soviet Acrobatic Revue at the Old Globe Dec. 5-17. The group replaces the Peking Acrobats, who couldn’t get exit visas because of political unrest in China. The Soviet Acrobatic Revue will kick off its 90-city United States tour in San Diego. . . . Peter Coyote, Stockard Channing and Joyce Van Patten were signed Tuesday to star in Neil Simon’s new play, “Jake’s Women,” at the Old Globe Theatre March 8-April 15. The show will mark Old Globe debuts for Coyote and Channing; Van Patten was last at the Old Globe in Simon’s premiere of “Rumors” last year. . . .

There’s a new ending on “Breaking Legs,” Tom Dulack’s play which continues in its world premiere at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage through next week. Artistic director Jack O’Brien, who directed the work, reports a standing ovation on the tryout of the new conclusion in which the playwright gets to keep the girl and his integrity. . . . The La Jolla Playhouse is planning for a 1990 season, even if it is still raising money to ensure it will happen; it has already distributed a brochure offering patrons the opportunity to see the 1990 season at the 1989 price. The response is three times greater than at a comparable time last year, said a Playhouse spokeswoman. . . . James Morrison, who played the psychotic killer in this season’s Playhouse production of “Down the Road,” is working on a television series to be aired in January called “Capitol News” with another Playhouse alum, William Russ (“Ghost on Fire” and “Hedda Gabler”). This time Morrison plays a mild-mannered political aide. . . .

Reuel Olin stepped in as the new artistic director of Diversionary Theatre, San Diego’s gay and lesbian theater group. Olin, a former member of the company’s board of trustees, replaces Thomas Vegh. . . . Currently performing actors Linda Libby (“Angel City”) and David Whitney Johnson (“Solid Oak”) will be doing double acting duties at Patrick Henry High School on Friday in the California Young Playwrights Project touring show, “The Inner Circle.” The story about teen-agers and AIDS plays at 8:30 a.m. in Rooms 111 and 113. . . . The San Diego Critics Circle Awards will be held Sunday at 7 p.m. at the Abbey Restaurant. . . . Still making Halloween plans? Featured at the upcoming post-performance discussion for the Playhouse’s “Macbeth” on Halloween eve will be the Three Wayward Women--Rebecca Schull, Tracey Ellis and Jessica Black--talking about sorcery beginning at 10:45 p.m. . . .

Also on Halloween night, Ethan Feerst, executive director of Sledgehammer Theatre promises “something with giant pumpkins and blood” in the set his company is designing for the final appearance of Soviet rock star Vladimir Kuzmin and his band, Dinamik, at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.