Theaterweek	by Anthony Chase

GOODBYE TO CHET MAIS

If you have attended music and theater events in this community regularly over the past several years, chances are good that you have seen Chet and Janet Mais in the audience. If you don’t know them personally, you would recognize them. Together they have been constant supporters of the arts. Over the years, in their quiet, yet reliably cheerful way, they have befriended countless people at arts institutions. A marvelously charismatic couple, Chet’s open friendliness has always been the perfect complement to Jan’s New England reserve and her wry and incisive wit. Everybody likes them.

It was with a shock of sadness, therefore, that we learned Chet had died on Saturday, December 15. We all knew that Chet had been fighting cancer, but his irrepressible spirit and affirmative outlook left us to believe that all would be well. Shortly after surgery a couple of years ago, he and Jan had gone to Prague, and reported on the trip with vivid joy. Chet and Jan were known for their remarkable capacity to take pleasure in the good things, and to offer clever and insightful commentary on the not good things.

So familiar are Chet and Jan as a couple, that it seemed strange, over the past few weeks, to see Jan by herself. At Ariel Dorfman’s Just Buffalo lecture, she simply explained to anyone who asked—and everyone asked—that Chet was in the hospital.

Movingly and appropriately, Chet died on their 45th wedding anniversary.

Jan indicates that there will be no service for Chet and that she craves her privacy at the moment. She assures friends that she is “fine,” but wishes to grieve alone. She expects to reemerge sometime after the holidays. Jan suggests that it might please Chet if those who are so inclined would give contributions to the African-American Cultural Center on Masten Avenue, or to the Community Music School in his memory. He had particular affection for both institutions.

Chet taught music at Daemen College from 1977 until his retirement as Professor of Music and Composer-in-Residence, in 2006. He completed the Ph.D. in composition at the Eastman School of Music in 1976.

In support of the theater community, for many years, Chet served on the Artie committee, for this publication.

WHITE CHRISTMAS

Marla Schaffel is the marvelously talented star of White Christmas, the hokey holiday musical that plays at Shea’s through the weekend. The actress, who received a Tony Award nomination for her performance as Jane Eyre a few seasons ago, has appeared at Shea’s before—as Maria in The Sound of Music and as Eliza in My Fair Lady. It is a pleasure to have her back, and she is terrific in this show. She sings brilliantly, and nails every comic moment.

White Christmas is a slim hodge-podge of crowd-pleasing Irving Berlin tunes strung through an appealingly predictable plot in order to showcase the sort of talent that only the American musical theater can produce. It is easy to take for granted the sort of chorus dancers who populate this production, but there is some major hoofing talent here. I spotted Roxanne Barlow, one of the leggy beauties from Dame Edna’s first Broadway show, playing a featured chorine. Among the principal performers, Kristen Beth Williams is luscious as the other “sister”—singing and dancing wonderfully, and frankly, just looking great in the costumes (as does Miss Schaffel, actually. Wade Laboissonniere’s costumes are really terrific). Tom Galantich and David Engel are very charming leading men.

Karen Murphy is a standout as Merman-esque Martha Watson.

Incidentally, for those who follow such things, this is the Theater of the Stars tour, not the Walter Bobbie production that featured Buffalo’s Jeff Denman, which you may have seen in Toronto (or on last year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade). This production has a movie set pretext, staged by Jeff Calhoun, which seemed extraneous, but sometimes provides a Brechty kind of fun. Frankly, I was having too much fun to quibble much. I knew we were in for a well-worn holiday ride. Happily, there is enough talent on hand to justify the journey.

To state the obvious, White Christmas is a perfect week-before-Christmas entertainment. The production is brimming over with talent. The show ain’t Angels in America—hey, it’s not even Oklahoma. But I had a good time, and Marla Schaffel, Kristen Beth Williams, Tom Galantich and David Engel would be welcome guests at any holiday party.

Tickets are going like crazy, but I am told there are still some good seats available for every performance.

STUDIO ARENA

You may have noticed that the imminent merger between Shea’s and Studio Arena Theatre reported in the Buffalo News a few weeks ago does not seem to have materialized. Such an announcement was, to understate the point, premature. The parties who would be involved had not even spoken at the time of that report.

In the meanwhile, the beleaguered but apparently indefatigable Kathleen Gaffney, artistic director and CEO at Studio Arena, continues to keep the boat afloat as best she can. This is not the deal she signed on for, to say the least.

The regional theater movement was established in response to the perception that the shows that were touring from Broadway were far too commercial. The idea was that not-for-profit regional theaters could produce high-quality and intelligent theater, and that their not-for-profit status, coupled with government support, would protect them from commercialization. This worked throughout the 1960s—and, indeed, that was the Neal Du Brock decade at Studio Arena, when that theater developed a national reputation on which it still tries to coast.

Studio Arena then made some strategic errors.

They moved into a larger, high-maintenance facility, never anticipating that government subsidy would go away and some of Buffalo’s most important philanthropists would move out of town. In addition, the population of the city declined year after year.

In response, the board of directors violated the very mission of the regional theater movement. They insisted that the theater combat its inevitable financial crisis by introducing more and more commercial product.

David Frank, artistic director at Studio Arena from 1980 until 1992, spoke disparagingly of “the season of Greater Tuna” when the board and managing director pressured him to presenting that mindless two-hander because it would a crowd-pleaser. The show did well and the board was delighted. By contrast, when Frank brought in Maria Irene Fornes, the vastly influential Cuban-American playwright, winner of a record-breaking nine Obie awards, to direct an exquisite and provocative production of her own play, Abingdon Square, he was criticized because the show didn’t do well at the box office.

Gee, audiences who lapped up Greater Tuna didn’t respond in the same way to Maria Irene Fornes. Go figure!

The problem with “crowd-pleasers” is that crowds are fickle. When a theater goes for a one-time bang, it ignores its devoted audience and fails to develop future audiences. This sort of slipshod stewardship cannot justify the potential box office of one individual show. This is theater for people who don’t actually like theater to begin with. This is why the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra does not offer an “All Pops” format. This is why many theaters present A Christmas Carol to fill the coffers, but do not include it in their regular subscription.

It is impossible, under the current circumstances, to evaluate Kathleen Gaffney’s potential as an artistic director. Her initial impulses seem good. Studio Arena needs to be a smaller operation. Its potential audience seems to justify a LORT D, rather than the pricier LORT B designation. Her choice of a thought-provoking play like The Vertical Hour by a major and controversial playwright like David Hare seems to counter the dumbing-down that has been going on at Studio Arena for years. Her current production of A.R. Gurney’s Indian Blood is really delightful. The problem, however, is that in the midst of a bona fide financial crisis, she will only be judged by her box office receipts. At this point, she could serve up Meryl Streep in Medea directed by Stephen Daldry, and win the Tony for outstanding regional theater, but if she didn’t cash in at the box office, her board would dub her a failure.

Something’s got to give.

If Studio Arena Theatre goes under, they will have deserved it. But Buffalo does not deserve it, and Kathleen Gaffney does not deserve it. The real culprits are long gone. The board was too clueless to recognize the damage that former managing director Ray Bonnard was doing by taking the theater in a commercial direction, or the damage that Gavin Cameron-Webb and Ken Neufeld were doing by compounding the error. The time to correct these mistakes is fifteen years past. The question now is whether or not it is too late to fix things.

A merger of some sort would probably be a good idea. The successful models across the country, however, have been educational mergers, not commercial mergers. A plan must be found that reduces the costs and once again protects the artistic mission of Studio Arena Theatre from commercialization. A plan of that sort would justify its future, and our continued investment in the institution.

Next week, Artvoice interviews Kathleen Gaffney.