Wednesday, November 09, 2011

Margo Jones in 1951

Margo Jones
"What our country needs today, theatrically speaking, is a resident professional theatre in every city with a population of over one hundred thousand. According to the 1940 census figures, there are over one hundred such cities in the United States. For reasons which will become evident in this book [Theatre-in-the-Round], I believe it woul dbe easier to start in the larger centers, although I am certain that once all these cities acquired resident professional theatres, smaller communities would want them too; and possibly within some ten years the one hundred and seven cities would also have their own theatres." [italics mine]

Sixty years later

  •  Number of cities with LORT theatres: 63
  • Median Population: 804,000
  • Average Population: 1, 460,000
  •  Number of LORT theatres in cities under 100,000: 8
    • Population of the counties these are in:
      • Skokie, IL (pop. 69,731): 5,288,655
      • Palo Alto, CA (pop. 61,200): 1,682,585
      • Bethesda, MD (pop. 55,277): 930,813
      • Abingdon, VA (pop 8,191) : 51,102
      • Jupitor, FL (pop. 39,328): 1,351,236
      • Laguna Beach, CA (pop. 23,727): 2,846,289
      • Princeton, NJ (pop. 14,203): 350,761
      • Malvern, PA (pop. 3,059): 433501
Of those eight cities, most are suburbs of major metropolitan areas: Chicago, San Francisco, DC, Palm Beach (largest county in Florida), Anaheim...

Sorry, Margo.

Think Again: Funding and Budgets in the Arts

Every once in a while, I think I'll post a link or two to posts written earlier in the life of Theatre Ideas that seem worth revisiting ...