Reinventing the Theatre for a New Audience
with Agostino Leone
I recently thought that I could have been a ‘theatre nerd’ if I was more exposed to it when I was younger. The closest I came was obsessing over High School Musical and the other Disney Channel Original Movies that involved singing and dancing. However, when the film The Last Five Years (2014) got released, I added ‘attend a live musical’ to my bucket list (I still haven’t done that but we’re getting there).
The Last Five Years was originally an Off-Broadway musical but only when it was adapted to film and released on Amazon Prime did I engage with the story. I would never have even heard of it otherwise- and yet, I must have seen it about 5 times within the first few months of its Amazon Prime release.
Agostino Leone, a Masters in Media Production student at Ryerson University, is currently developing a musical production he hopes will reach more young people- whom, I had heard him say, are not as engaged with musical theatre as generations before them. I reached out to him to hear his thoughts on the issue and how he hopes to change that.
Leone feels that technologies like Netflix are deterring people from physically going out. After all, why leave when you can get content from the comfort of your living room? Engagement with older forms of media, such as the theatre, is discouraged by the use of newer forms. Therefore, in order to attract younger people, the theatre, he says, has to reinvent itself.
And that’s exactly what he hopes to do with his production, Between Time, currently in development.The story follows four individuals who are in a space between life and death and find that they must make a decision about their next step –only they don’t know what that is. Leone says this plot lends itself well for a musical, because the genre is based on suspension of disbelief which is what excites audiences about it. His hopes are for the production to be in the form of a film, building on the success of La La Land with younger audiences, and that it will have an accompanying digital visual album so that audiences can access it easily and continue the experience outside the film. Leone rightly says that most of the conflict in musicals is in the songs (i.e they contain most of the major things that happen in the story) so having them with you constantly just makes it so that you can engage with the story even when you’re not able to view the film (like me with the soundtrack for The Last Five Years in the shower or when I’m writing).
These hopes are not without worries. Leone states that making what has been created for the stage accessible via digital platforms is “possibly killing the theatre” and opens him up to backlash, especially from purists. Though, he understands why, he believes that because musical theatre has changed lives and influenced different art forms, it is “important to let that live, even at the cost of maybe not having it on the stage”. Distributing content in new ways ensures that the genre does not die out and that its artists are still appreciated for what they do.
Yet, Leone recognises that moving something over to a digital platform is not all that engages audiences. He states, pondering about user experience, “does the film experience really involve the user? I don’t know. I might have to look at that again.” He does, however, note that the characters have ‘universal struggles’ which audience members will hopefully be able to relate to stating, “so they can listen to the song and be like ‘oh I get her, I get it’.” At the end of the day, all he can really hope for his film is that it inspires audiences in their everyday lives and content creators to innovate.
More information about the film can be found at agostinoleonefilms.com
