2LUCK CONCEPTS John Luckacovic and Eleanor Oldham (Executive Producer) John spent 19 years with Columbia Artists Management Inc., rising to an officer and director of the company. Eleanor was with ICM Artists in London, where she signed and managed the careers of conductors and instrumentalists. In 2001, they formed 2Luck Concepts to search the world and develop and produce unique and engaging projects. Among many projects, 2Luck managed and produced all of Akram Khan’s projects including Sacred Monsters (featuring Akram and Sylvie Guillem), In-I (featuring Akram and Juliette Binoche) and Until the Lions produced on a sound stage at the MGM studios in Los Angeles. 2Luck produced and managed the first-ever tours of London’s Shakespeare’s Globe Original Practice productions of Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure, followed by Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Comedy of Errors and Hamlet. 2Luck also produced tours of Poland’s 100 member national treasure MAZOWSZE, as well as two coast-to-coast tours of Anda Union from Inner Mongolia, The Music Man In Concert featuring Shirley Jones and Patrick Cassidy and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Saturday Night Fever. Current projects include the award-winning street dance/contemporary Company Wang Ramirez from Germany, the dance theatre hit 5 Soldiers from the UK, Aakash ODEDRA’s new full-length work “Samsara”, the last solo production from AKRAM KHAN “Xenos” as well as his new company work “Outwitting the Devil”, Doug Varone and Dancers “in the shelter of the fold/epilogue” and a new work in creation “Somewhere”, a new choreography to the music of “West Side Story” and Chinese dance star Yang-Li PING’s; “The Rite of Spring”.
Getting Personal
Rebecca Agnew talks to two experienced US artist managers who have joined forces to launch a company offering artists a fresh approach
EVEN OVER THE TELEPHONE, AN infectious enthusiasm emanates from John Luckacovic and Eleanor Oldham, directors of 2Luck Concepts. Two years ago, the duo, who are partners in life as well as business, decided that the time was right to set up their own company in New York. 'We had been working for large agencies and realised that, as time went on, we were getting more constrained creatively,' Luckacovic explains. 'We got into this business because of our passion for the projects, but found we were spending less and less time with the artists. In traditional management/booking situations, the need to promote the project supersedes the need to nurture and present the artistic and commercial potential of the work.' 2Luck Concepts aims to remedy this by offering a more personal service. So in 2001, Oldham, whose career credits include working as an artist manager in London, Paris an New York, two years as artistic director of the Maurice Ravel International Music Academy in Saint Jean de Luz and developing acts such as the Three Mo' Tenors, quit her day job to begin 2Luck Concepts. Luckacovic joined her six months ago after 19 years with Columbia Artists Management, where he was a vice president and member of the board of directors.
His career credentials also include producer of the international sensation Stomp and Twyla Tharp and Mikhail Baryshnikov's 36-city tour. They admit that getting the new agency of the ground was not too difficult. Luckacovic explains: 'We both have strong reputations in the States and overseas, have worked with major projects and were offering more personal and focused attention.' Oldham adds: 'We didn't really publicise what we were doing - people were interested and enthusiastic from the start.' 'The first few months were a little tough,' recalls Luckacovic, 'but we are on a roll now. We find things either by word of mouth or recommendation.' Interest has also come through the company's striking website. 2Luck Concepts' current portfolio includes such diverse acts as innovative dance duo Ballet Boyz, KAASH (IF) - a collaboration between choreographer Akram Khan, composer Nitin Sawhney and artist Anish Kapoor - and the London-based Shakespeare's Globe's production of Twelftb Night. Rather than being the usual list of one-night stands in traditional venues, the tour of Twelftb Night, which Luckacovic and Oldham have devised, has taken the theatre company into unorthodox performance spaces for week-long residencies, which also incorporate educational and outreach work.
For example, the performances in Ann Arbor, Michigan were given not in one of the town's two traditional theatres, but in a 500-seat spaces built into a former ballroom, which enabled the play to be seen 'in the round' in true Shakespeare style rather than behind a proscenium arch. 'That's what makes us unique,' Luckacovic says. Luckacovic and Oldham booked, managed and produced the entire Globe tour, but on other projects they have worked in conjunction with some of the larger agencies. In the pipeline, for example, is six to eight-week tour of Amazones, the women master drummers of Guinea, which 2Luck Concepts is to produce and manage on behalf of IMG. Other plans include Zurich Ballet's first tour of the USA with Heinz Spoerli's production of Goldberg Variationsand a drumming show from Korea. Both partners are still relishing the freedom setting up 2Luck Concepts has granted them and admit that their complementary skills have helped things run smoothly. 'After 35 combined years working in an office, it has been an adventure,' Luckacovic enthuses. 'When it comes to choosing projects, we both have to be passionate about it or we won't do it. It has to hit us right in the gut, otherwise it's not fair on the artist.' I AM
NEW YORK -- The company of Shakespeare's Globe leaves London to make its first full U.S. tour this fall. The troupe will be visiting American shores for two months. Under the direction of Tim Carroll, the gender-bending staging of the Bard's romantic comedy opened last year at London's Middle Temple Hall, the venue of the play's first recorded staging in 1602. The Globe's artistic director, Mark Rylance, played Olivia, a role he will reprise Stateside. Under the direction of Tim Carroll, the gender-bending staging of the Bard's romantic comedy opened last year at London's Middle Temple Hall, the venue of the play's first recorded staging in 1602. The Globe's artistic director, Mark Rylance, played Olivia, a role he will reprise Stateside. In keeping with the Globe's authentic presentation of Shakespeare, 2Luck Concepts is looking for U.S. venues that can replicate the footprint of Middle Temple Hall with its extended thrust stage. At present, the Freud Theater on the campus of UCLA is the only traditional theater booked to present the production. "But the auditorium is not being used," Luckacovic says. "The audience fits on risers on the stage of the Freud." Duplicating the design of Middle Temple Hall limits seating to between 300 and 500. Chicago's Shakespeare Theater will present the production at Navy Pier. A ballroom will be used on the campus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. And the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis is currently looking at everything from high school gymnasiums to a cave on the bank of the Mississippi River. Other cities on the tour include Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Despite a rave review from Ben Brantley in the New York Times, the Globe's production of "Twelfth Night" is not yet booked for Gotham. (The company was seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last season in "Cymbeline.") Open weeks in the tour are early October and mid-December, not the ideal time for optimum box office. "In many ways, we're not in the commercial world but rather the performing arts-center world, with venues that are more attuned to risky undertakings," Luckacovic says. "We are producing the tour, but finding the venues that will pay for it." The tour of the 33-member company is capitalized at around $140,000 a week. Shakespeare's Globe Theater, a replica of the original Globe, was the vision of American actor-producer Sam Wanamaker, who died in 1993. The company and its new venue opened four years later, and has toured Germany and Japan. As for the new 2Luck Concepts, Luckacovic was formerly a vice president of CAMI. Oldham had been an agent with ICM in Europe.
Bard's 'new' outdoor home wins over skeptics
Not too long ago, the very mention of Shakespeare's Globe prompted polite snickers in London legit circles, if not outright sneering. Wasn't the Bankside reconstruction, situated across the Thames within view of St. Paul's Cathedral and some 200 yards from the site Shakespeare and co. once played, an invitation to tourist kitsch and theme park theater? The resounding answer: not when it's in the hands of a smart and determined artistic director, who also happens to be a top-rank actor. Since being appointed the playhouse's first a.d. in January 1996, Mark Rylance has quietly defied skeptics and done the apparently impossible. As a recent matinee of Rylance in "Richard II" made clear, the theater plays not just to inquisitive (and, in gift shop terms, acquisitive) Americans but to local pensioners, students, skinheads and the inevitable pigeon. And whereas standards once prompted cause for alarm, leading to demands for greater interpretive heft and better actors, Tim Carroll's staging of "Richard" offered an amazingly open-hearted and alive reading of a play that too often can come across as rhetorical indulgence. At the curtain call jig, some 1,300 people looked ready to cheer the performers until dawn, while the cast, headed by Rylance, joined spectators in an ecstatic release. (Among the "groundlings" visible standing through the performance: Tony winner Stephen Dillane, late of "The Real Thing" and, more recently, Leonard Woolf to Nicole Kidman's Virginia in "The Hours," his hair grown long and shaggy and covered by a straw hat.) This summer's celebrations haven't been confined to sundrenched performances of "Richard II." After some faltering attendance when the season began in May (cool weather and the Iraq War were the unsurprising culprits), four of the five shows in the 2003 rep -- this theater's most ambitious yet -- are playing to 80% or 90% capacity or better, with fifth and final entry "Taming of the Shrew" and its all-female cast selling out in previews. (Production, starring Janet McTeer as Petruchio, opened Aug. 21.) Even the poorly received "Dido, Queen of Carthage," the first of this season's two Marlowe stagings, has reached 55% attendance -- well below breakeven but proof nonetheless that, as Rylance puts it, "we seem to have built some confidence with the audience. They'll come and take risks with us, even when a production like 'Dido' is very roundly panned and words like 'ghastly' are used." In fact, the "Dido" I saw in mid-July, almost a month after opening, was far from a fiasco, even if some of director Carroll's modernist touches -- didn't jungle gym sets go out with the original Broadway production of "Merrily We Roll Along"? -- seemed a bit de trop. (At the same time, it's quite nice having Mercury, the "god of communication," on hand to urge us to turn off our cell phones.) In the title role, Rakie Ayola charted an altogether riveting descent into a desperation you will already know if you have encountered the same tale relayed in different ways by Virgil, Purcell and Berlioz, among others. Claire Van Kampen's original score paid due homage to Purcell while creating its own glistening soundscape that, as is the case more often than not at the Globe these days, held a once-boisterous audience rapt. Whereas the opening Globe season of "Henry V" in 1997 saw the occasional spectator hurling vegetables at the actors -- in mock-imitation, presumably, of Elizabethan riotousness -- such feigned anarchy has, thank heavens, faded. In the intervening years, says Rylance, "(Globe audiences) have been refining and demanding that we refine our playing; in a sense, they've led us and been very patient with us." It helps, too, that Rylance has built an ad hoc repertory troupe of players who are familiar with the demands of a singular space. "Now, we've got quite an ensemble," says the a.d., who is 43. " 'Richard II' has over 10 players who have played with us before." The result is to make house favorites out of, say, Will Keen, a veteran of the 2000 season (he was Ferdinand in "The Tempest" in which Vanessa Redgrave played Prospero) who brought a tremulous fervor to his Aeneas in "Dido, Queen of Carthage." More recently, Scottish thesp Liam Brennan added to his ramrod-straight Bolingbroke in "Richard II" a commendably unfussy account of the title role in Marlowe's "Edward II" -- the play that ends famously with the poker. The only real problem with the latter evening: the self-evident falloff between Shakespeare and his chum Marlowe. The Bard, one assumes, would have done considerably better than the following from Edward upon hearing of his beloved Gaveston's death: "O, shall I speak, or shall I sigh and die." Still, not everyone can be Shakespeare, and Rylance is keen to push the Globe output where appropriate, programming contemporary verse drama as he has done in the past (cf. Peter Oswald's "Augustine's Oak" in 1999). In stylistic terms, productions will continue to range from those like "Richard II" that explore original practices -- "It's right to consider a piece of art," says Rylance, "within the context of the time it was made" -- to modern-dress, contempo stagings like "Dido" or a 2001 "Macbeth" (also helmed by Tim Carroll) that got some nasty reviews but played to packed houses. The recipient of flat-out raves, director Carroll's 2002 original practices staging of "Twelfth Night," starring Rylance as a shimmeringly beautiful Olivia, is poised to take the Globe on its first American tour. Producer John Luckacovic has planned a five-city, eight-week circuit of the production starting Oct. 20 at the Freud Playhouse in L.A. After that are Minneapolis (the week of Nov. 3), Pittsburgh (Nov. 10), Ann Arbor (Nov. 17), and final stop, Chicago, for a three-week stand from Nov. 24. New York isn't on the menu -- Rylance wasn't keen to take "Twelfth Night" to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where he has been before -- but Luckacovic will be inviting New York producers and press to check out the production in LA; in time, Gotham could well figure in some way. (The New York Times' Ben Brantley raved about the play, and Rylance's perf, during its Globe tenure.) Preliminary discussions have been held about similar American travels in fall 2004 for "Richard II." Says Luckacovic, speaking from his home in New Baltimore, N.Y., 2½ hours up the Hudson River from Manhattan: "I would love to make (a Globe tour) an annual event." The tour is costing "well over $1 million," adds its producer, none of it provided by the originating theater. "The Globe said they wouldn't risk one penny," he says. Nor should they, in a British funding climate that finds the Globe still after eight seasons receiving no public subsidy at all. It's in triumphing over those odds, among others, that Rylance deserves the cumulative kudos: "A genuine visionary and an authentic acting genius," wrote the Independent's Paul Taylor of the star. Sam Wanamaker, the Globe's late, great begetter, would be proud.