Sweating It Out in Miami

By Gerald Clarke

The city's ambitious arts festival lacks only one thing: audiences

June is not a good month for tourists in Miami. It is hot, 90DEG or thereabouts; it is usually the rainiest month of the year; it is the beginning of the hurricane watch; and it is graduation time for a whole new generation of mosquitoes. As a result, hotels have vacant rooms, restaurants have empty tables, and taxi drivers roam the streets looking for a beckoning hand. What is needed, obviously, is something to make people flock to the area despite the weather. Out of such logic was born the New World Festival of the Arts, Miami's attempt to attract tourists and at the same time turn itself into one of the country's major cultural centers. But alas, as the 23-day festival was coming into its final stretch last week, it had still drawn more mosquitoes than people.

Festival President James W. McLamore, founder of Burger King, cast his ambitions even beyond the U.S., predicting that the three weeks of music, dance, drama and film would constitute a "worldclass event of world-class quality, with elements so rich and varied that it would have international appeal." State and local governments chipped in half of the $4.8 million budget, and new works were commissioned from a dozen or so major playwrights, composers and choreographers, including Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Lanford Wilson, Gian Carlo Menotti, Lukas Foss, Ned Rorem and Geoffrey Holder. To give the festival a festive look--and to remind everyone that this was, after all, flaky, flamboyant Miami--Christo, the site artist, was hired to wrap pink plastic ribbons around ten small, uninhabited islands in Biscayne Bay.

The first thing to unravel was Christo's ribbons. He said he could not tie the bows properly until next March, and sent instead drawings of what he had planned. Williams' play, And Now the Cats with Jeweled Claws, came in too short--no more than 45 or 50 minutes--and Executive Director Robert Herman, the operating head of the festival, had to switch to another new Williams work, A House Not Meant to Stand, which had already been seen in Chicago. Peter Evans, a Miami playwright, withdrew altogether. Menotti, who had been paid $10,000 to write his Second Piano Concerto, said he could not finish it in time and would regretfully return the money. The Pops-by-the-Bay concerts also had to be canceled when the Florida Philharmonic went on strike.

The Hispanic community, which now constitutes 40% of Miami's population, complained that there were no productions in Spanish. Feelings were not at all mollified when Herman announced that the official dress for men would be not white tie, black tie or even coat and tie, but the guayabera, a fancy open-necked Cuban shirt, worn loose outside the trousers.

The war in the Falklands took its toll too: the Maracaibo Symphony from Venezuela, a country that was angry at U.S. support of Britain, abruptly withdrew.

Most damaging of all was a nonevent: the expected rush of tourists failed to materialize. Hotels could identify hardly anybody, except a few critics, who had come to Miami just for the festival. Many of the houses had to be "papered," meaning that free tickets were given to some of the audience, mostly local residents. At the opening night performance of the New World Ballet, 1,800 people--60% of the audience--walked in free. Other groups played almost for themselves: only 125 showed up to hear Camerata Bariloche, an Argentine chamber orchestra.

If the festival did not flourish at the box office, it was not the artistic flop that some local critics claimed it was either. Robert Ward's opera Minutes Till Midnight, which took as its theme the moral dilemma of an atomic physicist, is less than exciting, but it has a serviceable tonal score and a singable libretto. Albee's The Man Who Had Three Arms, though wordy, is an intriguing, often hilarious parable about the hazards of fame in the TV age, with excellent performances by Robert Drivas, Patricia Kilgarriff and Wyman Pendleton. Williams' A House Not Meant to Stand lacks focus, particularly in the second act, but it is probably the best thing the playwright has written since Small Craft Warnings, a decade ago. It is inhabited by a rich collection of Williams' scarred characters; reworked, it might join the list of his earlier, more memorable plays.

Lack of focus is also the main criticism that can be made of the festival built by Herman, who also doubles as the energetic, ebullient head of the Miami Opera. He had several critical successes, but he tried to do too much and concentrated his efforts too little. Miamians were puzzled and overwhelmed, and out-of-state tourists, who might have found in the festival an excuse for a vacation in February or March, simply yawned from afar. After 21 premieres, more than 200 performances and the possible loss of $700,000, the festival had to acknowledge the force of an old Hollywood truism: "If the people don't want to come, you can't stop them.'' --By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Marilyn AIva/Miami

With reporting by Marilyn AIva

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