I can understand how people enjoy acting, and so there are plays needed to give them a stage.
But honestly: movies have sterling actors and acting, varied camera work, locations, special effects, million dollar budgets…why, when you could see a movie, would you go to a crappy theater instead and watch a live play, with amateur actors and a cut-out card-board decor, if it isn’t because someone you know plays a part in it and they have urged you to come watch?
This comes under the categories of taste or preferences. Why watch live musicians if you can have a CD? Why go to a game if you can see it on TV? The experiences are different. Without taste and preference, there’s no reason to see ANY of this - I mean, it isn’t like it accomplishes anything, other than the experience. And movies and plays give different experiences.
They’re different kinds of art with different good points. A performance of a play is a one-time thing and there can be a real connection between the actors and the audience. A movie is the same every time out. Also, your comparison of “sterling” movie actors (many of whom suck) to “amateurs” in theater (many of whom are excellent) is silly. There’s no inherent superiority to one or the other.
Media don’t have to replace each other. There’s still a place for radio even though we have TV. The Internet didn’t replace books. The list goes on.
With all due respect, maybe you’re attending the wrong plays? I’ve certainly seen my share of “amateur” actors, but there are plenty of theaters with world-class acting.
Perhaps, but then the entrance fees in the top class theaters are usually five to six times what renting a movie or seeing a movie in a theater would cost.
There are some plays that simply don’t work on a screen- The Skin Of Our Teeth or Noises Off come to mind. Besides, you’re specifically comparing amateur theatre and high-budget movies. If you can go see a high-quality theatre performance, you could compare that to a high-budget movie.
Anyway, a lot of high-budget movies are crap, pitched to the lowest common denominator. Granted, not all theatre performances are good, and there are times I’ve felt like I wasted my money, I think I more often feel like I’ve wasted my money in the movie theatre.
I’d like to ask the OP what examples of live theatre he or she has seen.
Did you see Transformers?
Moved from IMHO to CS.
Well, I live in a provincial town, (100.000 inhabitants) that is the cultural capital of my province. It has two big professional theaters where national plays are shown, one smaller professional theater that is linked to its own semi-professional, and a bunch of amateur podia.
The last show I saw were an adaptation of Hamlet, in one of the two professional theaters. It was sold out, and the leading parts was played by an theater actor who has also been awarded several prizes for his roles in nationally released Dutch movies. His performance was so-so; the rest of the play was so bloody awful we walked out of the theater after 45 minutes.
Six months before that, I had watched Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet on dvd. The two versions, as for their quality, didn’t even live in the same zip-code.
The play I saw before that was an amateur rendering of some translated Ibsen play. It was boringly bad. The woman I went to see it with was very enthusiastic, but only because she knew about half the actors personally and chatted with them afterwards.
If I had been a little boy, surely I would have preferred that movie to a play with actors in foam Transformers suits, yes. Each movie has it’s own target audience.
Have you ever been to a Disney park? Theater is a lot like what they do there. You know that the effects in The Haunted House and Pirates Of The Caribbean are fake; in the latter, you can even see the streams of clear plastic with fiery-orange light shining on them to simulate “flames”. But you accept them as flames in that context. It’s sort of like an agreement between the audience and the actors that “we’re all going to pretend this is absolutely real”. And in good theater, this really works.
It’s a little odd now that I think about it. Disney made its reputation with film, long before the first park opened, and yet the parks probably share more with theater, in concept.
I’ve seen lots of Broadway and off-Broadway plays and musicals, and lots of road company tours also, plus a bunch of local theater. One of our goals is to see more.
There is something special about seeing actors do the lines or sing the songs right there, no cuts, no editing, no thousand takes. It’s more spontaneous. It is also cool to see well known people up close, like Derek Jacoby doing Turing or Penn & Teller doing Penn and Teller. My kids have seen plenty of movies and TV, but it didn’t compare to one of the cats in Cats crawling on the balcony right in front of them.
Plus, while there are lots of movies and lots of plays, there can be plays too specialized to ever become movies.
As for acting, acting in plays is different from acting on screen. Some people can do both, and some can’t. It’s great to see both types.
So maybe you’ve never seen a little kid’s face light up when he meets his favorite movie character “in person.” It happens all the time at Disneyland and Universal Studios. Even when they’re old enough to understand the difference between a cartoon and a costumed performer, there’s a special thrill to seeing a hero in the flesh.
In film, there is no two-way connection between the audience and the actors, no chance that a performance will be raised or taken in a different direction because of the energy in the house, no chance that you will see anything that can only be seen at that special, unique moment. These possibilities may mean nothing to you and that’s OK, but they do to me and a lot of other people.
and yet
These statements do not compute.
I like both plays and movies. To me, there is a world of difference between seeing someone on a screen and seeing them standing there right in front of me. And good stage acting is different from good movie acting, so I don’t agree that the latter makes the former obsolete.
But it is getting harder for the average person to see good plays, because there aren’t enough plays being produced.
I’ve seen a lot more movies than plays, but I would say that about the same fraction of each were good. I’ve never seen a play with cut-out cardboard décor, unless you count the one I performed in in second grade.
And my high school’s production of Macbeth was better as a Shakespeare play than Van Helsing was as an action movie.
They’re different. It’s like saying “why would anyone watch a game of baseball when they could watch football?” or “why would anyone go jogging when they could be riding a bicycle?” There are superficial similarities, but fundamental differences. You may like football while I prefer baseball, and you may like biking while I prefer jogging, but because they are superficially similar doesn’t mean one must be superior.
Part of the appeal, especially with community theatre, IS the personal connection – I don’t live among Tom Hanks or George Clooney or Meryl Streep or Jodi Foster. I live among the people who participate in community theatre, I may run into them in the grocery store or at a restaurant, and some I may even be friends with. To see people I live and work with, people who are a part of my community or people I’m even friends with transform into a different character on the stage gives a different perspective from watching a relative stranger assume the role.
Aside from that, seeing something on the stage is simply a different experience than seeing it on the screen, with different benefits and different downsides.
There’s the saying that more people are more afraid of public speaking than of death. Go and see Leatherheads at the movie theater and George Clooney doesn’t know (and doesn’t care) that you – or anyone else, for that matter – is there watching it. Go to a play, and the actor can see you, and, in fact, the entire audience. Clooney isn’t going to feed off the audience’s response to his performance.
Also (having done it in community theatre a couple times), I have a huge respect for the actors’ contribution to the show. For that hour and a half or two hours, you must be focused on the show, your lines, your blocking, the other actors and completely in “show mode”. There’s no second chance for that performance – even in a professional show with eight or more shows a week, every night’s show is “out there”, and if you’re not on, you don’t get to take it back and it’s not going to wind up on the editing room floor.
And that applies to everyone involved. All the actors and all the crew have to come together and execute a perfectly orchestrated performance, and get it right the first time. And it’s not even so much that it’s great when it’s perfect – I’m appreciative of watching the attempt. With movies, when it doesn’t work, it’s “CUT! Take 2!”
Why do you suppose an audience claps at the end of most any stage show, while rarely doing it at the theater?
This is exactly what came to my mind upon seeing the thread title. I think it’s a good parallel.
I’ve seen a fair amount of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals; only two of the movies (South Pacific, Sound of Music) improved on the stage productions.
Look at the biggest successes on Broadway of the past 30 years–including anything by Andrew Lloyd Weber–and you’ll see a lot of failed movie adaptations, and a surprising number of no adaptations (Cats, Les Miserables). This is by no means absolute, but the stage and the cinema are fundamentally different experiences.
Do you know anyone who prefers the movie versions of A Chorus Line, Godspell or Cabaret to any professional stage version?
Another good parallel is between going to an aquarium and watching a TV program about ocean life. Each offers something the other doesn’t; I enjoy both.
I read a study awhile ago on infant acquisition of foreign-language phonemes when exposed to a woman reading a book in a foreign language versus exposure to a nearly identical video of a woman reading a book in a foreign language (television placed at exactly the same height, same volume, same woman, same book, etc.). Children acquired the new phonemes much better from the live person than from the video. I’m not really clear on why this is so, but it is.
I suspect that whatever mechanism accounts for this effect also account for the visceral thrill I get from seeing a well-executed play. Yes, there are amateur companies in town; I rarely go see them. Most I go see an excellent local company perform, and it is always an absolute delight. I love movies, too, but I’d never give up live theater for the sake of more movies.
I was talking with an actor friend about the difference between professional and amateur theater, to make a semi-hijack. We decided that, broadly speaking, in professional theater the actors are there for the benefit of the audience, whereas in community theater the audience is there for the benefit of the actors.
Daniel