On the nights that "The Donkey Show" wasn’t playing (it ran on weekends for 10 years), anything could happen. The job sustained me through my twenties-and provided a rare window in the venue’s growing pains and evolution.īack then, it all felt like a big experiment. I know this, because I worked there as a bartender during those early years. So this was taking the concession model, and making it a little more core.” “And concessions have always been a revenue source in entertainment, in general. “In the not-for-profit model, you’re always looking at other revenue streams,” Paulus says. Holly Bourdon in "The Donkey Show" in 2019. Plus, the bar sales brought in extra revenue for the theater. She hoped the bar guarantee model would encourage what she calls an “entrepreneurial” spirit among producers, and incentivize them to create work that thrived in a nightclub setting. Paulus wanted "The Donkey Show" to provide a blueprint for a different kind of theater-immersive, interactive, disruptive. Paulus decided to revive "The Donkey Show," and rebrand the A.R.T.’s black box as OBERON, after the play’s fairy king. In the early 2000s, Paulus produced a popular show in New York called "The Donkey Show," an irreverent takeoff on Shakespeare’s "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" that took place inside a disco club. “And I thought, ‘Oh, I think it's more like a nightclub.’” “I was thinking, what is the experimental black box for the 21st century?” Paulus says.
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The A.R.T.'s Arrow Street stage, at that time, was a black box-a flexible space popular in experimental theater. The crowd during a performance of "The Donkey Show" at OBERON. The beginning of Paulus’ tenure was marked by controversy-she did away with what was left of the resident acting company-and the creation of OBERON signaled her intentions to take the theater in a more populist (some said more commercial) direction. OBERON was dreamed up by artistic director Diane Paulus when she joined the A.R.T. This month, OBERON closed its doors for good, after canceling its final run of shows in light of the omicron surge.īut the closure of OBERON, which is part of Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, is different from the typical tale of a small venue brought down by the pandemic. announced that it would not renew OBERON's lease in 2022. mounted Tony-winning musicals and sent no fewer than 9 productions to Broadway, Oberon became a home for performers like Giragosian: the burlesque dancers and the aerialists, the drag kings and the character actors, the musical theater nerds and the stand-up comics. “Because we all, you know, broke artists.”įor the past 12 years, as the A.R.T. “To be able to, like, have a show and not have to put any money down to start the show was huge for us,” Giragosian says. But if an event sold enough drinks at the bar, the space was free. Instead of paying to rent the theater, performers tried to hit a bar sales minimum, and made up the difference in ticket sales. OBERON was huge, with a catwalk above the bar and high quality sound and lighting systems. Then, Giragosian started to hear whisperings about a new space opening up on Arrow Street in Harvard Square-OBERON. (Courtesy Roger Gordy, left and far right, courtesy Melissa Kooyomjian, center) Robyn Giragosian in costume on stage at OBERON. “We were performing at the YMCA in Central Square,” she says.
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The venues around town didn’t quite cut it. Giragosian was part of a group of performers who liked to do wacky, high-concept shows. (“A Pizza Me” – get it?) Another time, she did a number dressed up as a lobster, wearing a shiny red corset and tap dancing while she whipped off her fake appendages. Once, she performed a strip tease to Britney Spears’ “Piece of Me” in a pizza costume. Onstage, she was Femme Brulée, and her routines usually involved an elaborate costume of her own making, which she then stripped off, piece by piece.
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(Robin Lubbock/WBUR)īack in 2009, Robyn Giragosian was in need of a place in Boston to perform her burlesque act.
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The shrine behind the bar of OBERON, composed of mementos of performances gathered over the years.