In the fall of 1995, after five years in Seattle, I moved to NYC to be a writer and performance artist, and I basically had to start all over again.

I had passed through NYC over the summer and done some poetry shows at the Nuyorican Poetry Café, the Knitting Factory and CBGB Gallery, I knew a handful of people, but practically speaking I was at square one.

As soon as I managed to get a job and a roof over my head, I started going out to every open mic and performance I could. I frequented all the downtown spots like Dixon Place, P.S.122, Surf Reality, Collective Unconscious, HERE Arts Center, the Knitting Factory, CBGB’s, DUMBA, Mother, FEZ, Luna Lounge – I’m sure I’m forgetting a bunch of them and it would be impossible to name them all anyway, because there was so much happening. It was a fantastic time – so much energy, so many creative people doing all kinds of fantastic, crazy stuff. Performance, poetry, comedy, music, dance, film, literature all of it interconnecting and overlapping. And, of course, all of these creative people tapping into, and extending, the preceding decades – more than a century! – of bohemian artists and art-making.

I started curating and producing reading series and events while writing and performing my own work. Gradually, from 1998-2003, my focus shifted from writing and performing my own work to becoming a creative producer and cultural critic. Joining the staff of Performance Space 122 in 2002 greatly expanded my network of people and as I shifted to a curator/producer/critic role, it changed the nature of the conversations I was having. I began to get a more holistic view of NYC’s downtown arts ecology.

Over the next decade, I observed the same recurring pattern of the artist’s journey from small, intimate spaces within a specific, local, creative milieu to large venues and a general audience. I developed a sense for who was going to make that journey and started paying close attention to how it affected their work, and what that means for audiences. Moving to Los Angeles in 2016 yielded yet another perspective on this arc as I saw more and more people pursuing opportunities in television and film. But that’s a different essay.

For reasons that are too complex and numerous to recount here, many of Los Angeles’s pre-eminent venues for live dance and theater feature a preponderance of touring work, much of it originating in NYC.  Not infrequently, “downtown” artists I had known in NYC were now making this touring work. Less frequently, shows I had seen in NYC in smaller contexts would transfer to Broadway with the touring version arriving in Los Angeles years later, so it was possible to see the transformation over time and distance. One of the most notable recent examples was Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma!.

In October 2018 I was visiting New York and managed to get tickets to Fish’s staging of Oklahoma! at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. I had known Daniel since college and was a longtime fan of his work. I had been hearing about Oklahoma! while it was being developed at Bard Summerscape, but had never been in the right place at the right time to see it.  After four years in California, coming back to Brooklyn and St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2018 felt like a homecoming. It was delightful to run into friends I hadn’t seen since we left – the social energy was great and that energy carried over into the performance itself.

The performance space at St. Ann’s Warehouse was intimate, maybe around 200 people or so, the show was presented with seating on three sides. The audience was up close to the action and could see each other, we could hear the actors breathe and move, we all could make eye contact with each other. Despite the amplification – or maybe because of it – the show felt a bit like it was happening in a small rock club; you could see, hear and feel the audience members around you reacting to the show, you could sense that the actors were aware of, and playing off, the audience’s energy.

Photo from NY Times

Fish’s re-framing of this iconic American musical was brilliant and bracing. He made it possible to really see the show again; he stripped away all the barnacles and cultural accretion from so many high school productions and overfamiliarity. The production was spare and just a little strange, strange enough to make us want to pay attention and figure out what was really going on in this story that we’d heard so many times before, these songs that had become rote.

I was blown away and couldn’t stop raving about it for weeks afterwards. So when I heard it was coming to Los Angeles in 2022, I made sure to get tickets and encourage everyone I knew to see it too. I was surprised to hear that it was being presented in the Ahmanson, Center Theater Group’s largest space, and I was curious to see how they would stage it.

At St. Ann’s Warehouse the space was configured in what is called a “thrust stage” – audience on three sides – and I figured maybe CTG would put the whole show on the stage at the Ahmanson to replicate the intimacy and immediacy of the show at St. Ann’s. Then I remembered that the St. Ann’s run had been four years previous, that the show had since transferred to Broadway and the production we were seeing was a touring version of the Broadway show.

The show I saw at the Ahmanson had been completely reimagined for a proscenium stage – the standard configuration that most audiences are familiar with – and looked like a Broadway show. Many of the design elements were the same, as was the basic plywood aesthetic of the set. There was a lot more open space onstage than in a conventional Big Broadway Musical, but the size of the house (10x larger than St. Ann’s Warehouse) and the configuration of the stage, required that the show become less intimate and more presentational.

Sis as Ado Annie in Oklahoma!

This meant that the actors had to “play big” to fill the house. My experience of the show was that Fish was almost gesturing towards avant-garde contemporary opera, especially in the over-the-top, outsized, scenery-chewing performance of trans actress Sis as Ado Annie, the girl who “cain’t say no.” This staging of the show was alternately rollicking fun and dark, and it worked in its own way, on its own terms, but I didn’t feel the same sense of risk and implication, that same emotional involvement as I did at St. Ann’s.

Of the friends I know who saw the touring production of Oklahoma! here in Los Angeles, responses seemed to fall into three categories. Many theater people who knew Oklahoma! and were of an experimental bent, but hadn’t seen Fish’s staging at St. Ann’s, loved it. Many theater people who knew Oklahoma! well but weren’t of an experimental bent didn’t like it.  People who had no prior knowledge of the musical Oklahoma! were, by and large, befuddled.  They had no reference points by which to understand what Fish was doing or how it reframed the original.

From my perspective, I think that the version at St. Ann’s cohered more clearly as a show unto itself. An audience member who had no previous familiarity with the musical Oklahoma! would still come away from the evening feeling like they’d experienced something special. The story, the music, the staging, the intimacy of the performances – the whole thing just held together with a rigorous internal dramaturgy – if that makes sense. And because it was a small venue, because we were up close, as I have written previously, there is more intersubjective exchange between audience and performers, it feels like co-creation, not mere spectatorship. I don’t think the same is true of the large-scale touring Broadway version.

Part of it is about the way we experience and receive live performance – who is in the audience with you? Are you among friends and familiar faces? Or are you one of many in a mostly-anonymous crowd? And part of it is how a live performance operates at different scales.

I go back to that thing about Nirvana and Oasis. Nirvana’s music – in my opinion – was made to be played in small-to-midsize venues to smaller audiences, originally in a specific community (Seattle) or milieu (“alternative/indie”). My friend Daniel was music editor of Seattle’s The Stranger back then and interviewed Kurt who, as I recall, said that they were just hoping to get as big as Sonic Youth. That would have been huge! No one anticipated that this would break out the way it did. The music wasn’t built for a general audience, but it hit a nerve. Oasis’ music on the other hand was always intended to be massive, filling stadiums. Nirvana was about connection and Oasis was about pageantry. I don’t know if, or how, Nirvana might have changed their music when they started to play stadiums. I only surmise that when they got to the stadiums, the musical experience changed significantly for artist and audience alike.

There’s this theory called Dunbar’s Number, which is “a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.”  Dunbar proposes the outer limit is 150 people. And I’d theorize that when it comes to the optimal size for maximum impact of live, in-person experiences, we’re talking roughly the same number.

I often wonder about audience expectation. So frequently an artist’s reputation – or the word of mouth about a specific show – starts to build at the time of the small group experience. I can think of any of number of artists and shows that I saw in small clubs and venues where you could just feel it – that thing – and it’s electric, you know that it is magic, lightning in a bottle. Then the buzz radiates outward, there’s a small group of aficionados who come and get turned on, then the next circle out, then the next. The wider and farther it goes the more diffuse it gets. By the time it gets to Broadway – or a stadium – it is an entirely different thing. At that point there’s usually a widely accepted consensus about the quality of artist or the show, but audiences are having very different experiences.

It is very, very difficult to create that sense of intimacy, engagement and risk of the small group experience when an artist starts to play bigger venues; it is even harder to do that and maintain the essence of what that artist does. But sometimes, very rarely, they do.

Recently we all had the opportunity to revisit one such extraordinary moment – Tracy Chapman playing “Fast Car” at the Nelson Mandela 70^th birthday tribute concert in 1988. Shortly after Chapman’s duet with Luke Combs at the Grammys, the Internet rediscovered this incredible moment. Watching the video now, in 2024, it is still heart-stopping to hear the massive crowd at Wembley Stadium quiet down and pay attention. For most of the audience Chapman is probably not much more than a small dot on a stage, they are probably, mostly, watching her on the monitor. But still there is something in her directness, simplicity and focus; something to the clarity of her artistic vision that draws us into the world of the song and brings the world of the song into our hearts. There is something there but removing the clutter of spectacle, even in a stadium, that can allow a connection to happen. Of course, this was before smartphones and social media, I don’t know that in this day and age any artist could command the kind of undivided attention that Chapman seems to inspire in the video. But you never know.

In 2018 I went to see all four six-hour shows of Taylor Mac’s “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” at L.A.’s Theatre at Ace Hotel.

Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times

As I have recounted on numerous occasions, I first saw Taylor perform back in the early aughts at some ungodly hour of the night in a dark, dank, queer bar called The Slide on NYC’s Lower East Side. It was one of those moments where you see someone perform and you just know that they’ve got that electric thing, they’re captivating, unique, creative and they’re going to do amazing things. I had the great good fortune, while working at P.S.122, to support Taylor’s early work through an award and a commission, and have watched him realize his ever-expanding vision year after year. It has been remarkable and inspiring to witness.

Taylor’s work is inclusive and community-focused, he possesses a creative generosity with collaborators that plays out on stage and with the audience. And Taylor’s aesthetic is deeply rooted in queer counterculture going back to the 1960’s and 70’s. One expression of that counterculture, typified in books such as The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, is generosity, kindness, acceptance, love and joy as acts of resistance against patriarchy, against homophobia, against war, against capitalism. It can sound quaint, even corny. But if the audience is willing to go along – and not all audiences are – Taylor’s shows can transform even the largest spaces into temporary autonomous zones and transient communities.

That was my experience at the Ace Hotel in 2018. I was about to turn 50, I was grumpy, I was tired. I had just been through two messy job break-ups in as many years and was feeling so totally and completely over Los Angeles, over everything, especially anything art related.  I was pretty much dreading going to this epic 24-hour show spread out over four nights.

But that soon changed. Taylor’s expansive spirit and conviviality, his determination to create a social space capacious enough to embrace everyone, suffused the room and I, for one, couldn’t help but be won over. Taylor’s informal, familiar aesthetic belies the highest artistic rigor. One simply could not achieve that sense of intimacy and immediacy in a hall of that size without both vocal chops and creative discipline. “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” is nothing if not strategically designed with peaks and valleys and feints and sleights of hand, emotional closeness and Wagnerian peacock-y pageantry, albeit with glitter and plumage and fabulousness. By the end of the night strangers felt like friends. By the end of all four shows, friends felt like comrades, survivors of some extraordinary ritual returning to the too-familiar world but taking home a tiny imaginary bag of magic pixie dust, hidden in our pocket in case of spiritual emergency.

If Taylor Mac’s “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” in Los Angeles was about creating a temporary community, then the night that avant-garde drag cabaret duo Kiki and Herb played Carnegie Hall in 2004 was a homecoming.

Kiki and Herb started out in San Francisco in the early 90’s before moving to NYC.  After years of playing underground and alternative venues with weekly shows at restaurants like Cowgirl Hall of Fame and clubs like Fez (back when everything downtown was sponsored by Alize) and Flamingo East on 2^nd Avenue, they had garnered a massive following but had never played a venue the size of Carnegie Hall.

A publicist once told me that an artist has a certain size audience at any given time. So if you have 1,000 loyal fans who will dependably show up, you can do 100 shows for 10 people, 10 shows for 100 people, or one show for 1,000 people. Wait long enough and you can sell out Carnegie Hall!

Upon reflection that night at Carnegie Hall felt similar in many ways – and totally different, in others – to that Nirvana show at the Paramount on Halloween 1991. That sense of occasion, of history, of the misfits taking over – in this case, occupying the hallowed halls of the mainstream. Over the years Kiki and Herb had played many shows in many small venues, mostly to various micro-communities within the queer community, some of whom overlapped but some of whom didn’t.

I think, for many people who were there, it was a watershed moment. Kiki and Herb were undoubtedly avant-garde. They started in alternative, downtown spaces. One of the most striking live experiences I have ever had was seeing them play Gay Shame at the all-ages queer anarchist collective DUMBA in 1998. Kiki and Herb’s repertoire included Wu-Tang Clan, Nirvana and Kate Bush, among others – not standard drag fare at the time – their terrifying but hilarious backstory, Kiki’s unhinged, rambling monologues – this was the stuff of late-night downtown clubs and radical political spaces. They were punk rock. And they didn’t change a thing when they got to Carnegie Hall. They didn’t have to. Because everyone that was there was already on board, already a fan, already passionately attached. People knew each other, the halls were abuzz with old friends reconnecting and new friends being made. And when the show started … well, it would take an entire essay to describe. You can listen to the recording to get a sense of it.

The point being that the magic happens when things are little, intimate and close-up. Where the audience knows the performers and the performers know the audience, where there’s a scene or a milieu, when you have some people coming together around … something. Could really be anything. Some people refer to that thing as a “social object”.

Once it gets beyond a certain size – a moving target, really, but let’s say, most of the time, Dunbar’s Number of 150 – either the artist changes their work to fit the new size and larger audience, or the audience’s experience and expectations change – sometimes both.

“But what about the Internet?” I hear you ask. We’ll talk a little about that next time.