| 'WTF is Next' for Williamstown Festival? | |
| Posted by: portenopete 10:22 am EDT 09/06/24 | |
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| Just received an email from WTF promoting an article from The Berkshire Eagle that featured this excerpt. (Paywall prevented me from reading the whole piece.) "What’s next for Williamstown Theatre Festival? Raphael Picciarelli — the organization’s new leader and, officially, its managing director of strategy and transformation — has an answer. 'We want to create something similar to a music festival,' Picciarelli said in an interview with The Eagle. As Picciarelli envisions it, future WTF seasons will consist of a series of weekends, spread out over the course of the summer, each offering a highly concentrated variety of programming — from productions of classic plays to, who knows, immersive dance classes. He referenced festivals like California’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and Chicago’s Lollapalooza, where audiences can attend as many or as few events as they'd like, from many different artists, across a campus. 'Maybe you go for the headliners, but you get to stay all day and experience other sets,' Picciarelli said. Outside those weekends, select WTF programming will take place throughout the summer...'the core focus of the Festival will be these condensed weekends that are holistic experiences. Condensing everything gives audiences more opportunity to be curious, because they’re already there, and these things are already happening...my biggest ambition is that folks don’t come for a show. They come for the festival.'" I'm feeling sad that a storied and legendary theatre that thrived for so many decades has abandoned its identity and mission. Coachella and Bonaroo and the Whitney Biennial and the Festival d'Avignon are all great and exciting events, but I don't need WTF to copy them. I find it hard to believe that in the monied hills of the Berkshires there is not enough of an audience to sustain a four-month-long summer theatre festival that features major Broadway and Hollywood talent doing both classics and untested scripts. Who is Raphael Picciarelli? Most of you are probably better informed than me so I looked him up: "Raphael Picciarelli is a creator, producer, culture curator, and community gatherer energized by the possibility of personal transformation through art and community. Raphael’s career began in film and theatre production, where he was a collaborator alongside producers and creative teams from development to production. He then brought his storytelling skills to consulting, where he guided leaders and companies in the space between business rigor and courageous creativity. He’s worked with the likes of Deepak Chopra, Howard Schultz, and Sherrilyn Ifill to transform their respective organizations, and with companies such as Expedia, New York Botanical Garden, and Consensys to shape the experience, identity, and culture of their brands. He also served as the artistic director of The Misfits, a nonprofit theatre company in New York City, where he developed original work, while creating multiple projects for film and television with his creative partners. Raphael holds a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts." The description "a community gatherer energized by the possibility of personal transformation through art and community" should have been preceded by a trigger warning. That kind of gobbledygook gives me major hives. And can we hope for Deepak Chopra, Howard Schultz and Sherrilyn Ifill to headline a production of DESIGN FOR LIVING sometime soon? I feel like George's Mother: "Oh, Georgie. How I long for the old view...." |
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