News Clips— One Reel drops WOMAD
Published 7:00 am Monday, October 9, 2006
One Reel, the local event producer that worked for 10 years to bring the first North American edition of WOMAD to Seattle, has cut its ties to the world-music festival. The fourth annual World of Music and Dance festival may still take place at King County’s Marymoor Park in July, but without One Reel’s involvement.
“It wasn’t just that the stars didn’t line up,” said One Reel co-producer Sheila Hughes. “They were coming together in some pretty weird patterns.”
Some of the factors weighing in the decision to bag WOMAD were financial. A number of important sponsors of the event have been adversely impacted by the dot-com recession; others suffered serious losses during the Ash Wednesday earthquake. And negotiations with King County over use of Redmond’s Marymoor Park, though “ongoing,” weren’t moving in the right direction, either.
Another circumstance impacting One Reel’s financial ability to risk another WOMAD is less-than-stellar demand for tickets to its dinner-cabaret Teatro Zinzanni in San Francisco. TZ has not been the cash cow One Reel hoped for when it transferred the show there a year ago, and though advance bookings extend through the first week of May, ticket prices for the dinner-drinks-and-vaudeville show were cut 25 percent last month—hardly a sign of increasing demand.
The Seattle version of WOMAD may be dead in the water, but it’s not yet dead: King County Parks spokesman Al Dams says there’s still a hold on the last two weeks of July at Marymoor and that, “as far as we’re concerned, it’s still a go. But if that’s going to change, we’d sure like to know about it soon as possible.”
On Tuesday Hughes suggested that WOMAD UK, the parent organization that has produced periodic WOMAD spin-offs all round the world as well as an annual three-day extravaganza at Rivermead near Reading in Wiltshire, might still try to go it alone this summer in Seattle, or in partnership with another producing organization. (EMP, are you listening?)
If this is the case, WOMAD co-founder and producer Thomas Brooman isn’t saying so. Contacted by phone Tuesday afternoon in England and asked about his plans, Brooman responded with characteristic British understatement: He simply hung up.
ROGER DOWNEY
