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One hundred eleven productions can get away from you.
This isn’t a farewell, by any means. It does, however, bear acknowledging that this second installment of the Gallery feels to this Rogue a bit like crawling sheepishly across the finish line of the 2011–2012 season. Reviews have been increasingly slower to post going back all the way to January, and a number of productions closed altogether without receiving reviews. When you’ve failed to deliver on a tacit promise, the easiest thing to do can be to lapse into silence and avoid drawing attention to yourself. So with pressures and disappointments mounting, the site went largely dormant for the summer.
What didn’t stop, or waver in the slightest, was the quality and magnitude of productions that continued through the latter half of this season, equal to the triumphs of the fall. This is why the Rogue’s Gallery is returning in full force, to give the exceptional work of Michigan professional theater its due.
For its second year, the 2012 Rogue's Gallery retains the same thirty categories, which means a fresh crop of one hundred fifty names. In spite of the Swiss-cheese coverage of the last several months, I have been keeping records of all eligible productions, and so there are nominations for about ten shows without reviews posted to date. It didn’t seem fair for my own setbacks to impede well-deserved recognition, and more importantly, it’s a Rogue’s prerogative, and that’s final. The same dictum applies to the impossible “Is it a drama, or a comedy?” decisions about those plays of heartbreaking hilarity that defy binary categorization.
This year’s nominees span seventy-three productions by twenty-six theaters and companies. The latter number is a significant spike over the twenty-one producing organizations represented in last year’s Gallery, and here’s where the two threads of this announcement ultimately tie together. Part of the Rogue Critic’s cachet has always been the sheer scope of the project — it was always fun to make people marvel at the number of plays I see and reviews I write, as though I were doing something no mortal should attempt.
But as it turns out, it is too much for one person, even a Rogue. This season included a flurry of new companies, one-off productions, and expanded geographic coverage, and I hit capacity like it was a brick wall. The silent weeks of July and August have simmered with reflection and regrouping, and I’m now looking ahead to next season with an adjusted game plan. Details will follow.
For this is in fact a celebration of the past season, encompassing, as ever, just a hair’s breath of everything stalwart and outstanding created over the last twelve months. Congratulations to the 2012 nominees, and to the entirety of Michigan professional theater for making this job so wonderfully unmanageable.