Issue 42: Theatre

Featured Response: Adam Feldman || President, New York Drama Critics’ Circle

Adam Feldman

The first show of the Obama years, it seems to me, came before the new president was even elected. In Central Park this past summer, the Public Theater staged a free revival of 1967’s “American tribal love-rock musical” Hair; at the end of the night, the audience was invited onstage to do a hippie hippie shake with the exuberant young cast, and the feeling was euphorically hopeful. The sun, finally, was going to shine in; this was the dawning of the Age of Obama. Things feel more somber now. The economic downtown has hit the theater world hard, and it will be interesting to see if the same mood prevails when Hair comes to Broadway in March, when Obama is no longer an arriving promise but an ever-present compromise. The same cultural trends that helped lift Obama to office, however, have also begun to play out onstage. The confectionary musicals and glibly cynical dramas that dominated the theater just a few years ago have started ceding ground; the biggest hits of recent months—Billy Elliot, All My Sons, South Pacific—are essentially sincere, tacitly leftist explorations of morality, responsibility and community. (The Wall Street Journal’s furious review of Billy Elliot dubbed the titular boy dancer “Karl Marx in a Tutu.”) The incipient depression may leech money from the theater, but box office receipts are just one sign of strength, and I am optimistic for the cultural health of the medium. Because in a very real sense, the inclusive values of the Age of Obama dovetail with theater’s greatest strength: the opportunity it offers for disparate strangers to unite in a common feeling.

Adam Feldman is president of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, and reviews theater and cabaret for Time Out New York.

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# 18: Family

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# 39: Gay Rights

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# 16: Education

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# 40: Women

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# 3: World View

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Inaugural Insight

  • The inauguration for the first U.S. president, George Washington, was held on April 30, 1789 in New York City.
  • Should January 20 be a Sunday, the President is usually administered the oath of office in a private ceremony on that day, followed by a public ceremony the following day.
  • Immediately following the oath, the bands play four ruffles and flourishes and "Hail to the Chief", followed by a 21-gun salute from howitzers of the Presidential Salute Battery.
  • The inaugural celebrations usually last ten days, from five days before the inauguration to five days after.
  • Since Thomas Jefferson's second inaugural on March 4, 1805, it has become tradition for the president to parade down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House.
  • According to tradition, in the first inaugural, President Washington added the words "so help me God" when reciting the oath, although there is no contemporary evidence of this.
  • In 1977, Jimmy Carter started a new tradition by walking from the Capitol to the White House, although subsequent presidents have only walked part of the way for security reasons.
  • The War of 1812 and World War II forced two swearing-ins to be held at other locations in Washington, D.C.
  • The new President assumes power at noon on January 20th, regardless of whether or not he has actually taken the oath of office.
  • There is no requirement that any book, or in particular a book of sacred text, be used to administer the oath, and none is mentioned in the Constitution.

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