We're Two!

The South Florida Theatre Scene completed its second year yesterday.  And what changes we've had in the last year!

• We've changed the layout of the page.
• We've changed our graphics.
• We've changed our address.
• We've gained a Facebook presence.

2007

Original header graphic

In our first month, June 2007, we made a total of 6 posts.  We talked about summer camp at Actors' Playhouse, we mentioned the nature of the Summer Season, and we peeked in on Dave Arisco rehearsing Tomfoolery.

August brought the first mention of the defunct Coconut Grove Playhouse. We've made several updates since then, but the Grove's future remains as clouded as ever.  We also posted our first diatribe against the sparse coverage of the arts by our daily papers.

September sees Christine Dolen entering the blogosphere with Drama Queen, and the first Sightings installment: Paul Tei on Burn Notice.

October was Urinetown month.

December brought Mosaic and Groundlings to the blog roll.  Mosaic's blog didn't last out the year; it's a lot of work to keep posting.  This is the first month the Theatre Scene breaks into double digits: 14 whole posts!

2008
January brings the first installment of The Scene.  There had been a few posts rounding up what was playing, but this is the first time it gets a name, and it eventually becomes a weekly feature.

February sees an alteration of The Scene: we start linking to critic's reviews of the shows being listed.

April: enter Theatre Row.

June: we turn one.    At that time, I noted:

The Theatre Scene gets between 30 and 50 visitors a day, peaking on Thursdays, which is when I usually get The Scene posted.

That was then: we're up to 150 visitors day on average, with an all time high of 300.  More on that later. I also noted the most-read post for the first year:

I don't know why, but it's a story from December. I have no idea why it has had so many visits, and I find Google Search hits on it every single week. The story is "Mosaic Partners with Barnes & Noble Tonight!" (I've recently removed this story to prevent further dead-end hits)

This year, I'm happy to report that my all-time most read article is something that is still up, and will remain so: Waldman Gone Wild!  It followed up on the story that achieved 300 reads in a single day, 26th Street Theatre cancels The Life. It surpassed an earlier article, Let's Give Gary Waldman A Big Theatre Scene Welcome!  The articles might have been damning enough, but in comments he made on the posts (as well as the Herald articles they link) Gary manages to make himself look more monstrous than anything I could have written.

The frequency of articles is also way up: from an average of a post a week our first year, we're averaging a post a day.  This is largely due to the fact that we broke the reviews out of The Scene, and now link up all the reviews by show. This allows us to contrast the reviews, as well as simply link to them.  While you should always click through to read the entire review in its proper context, now you can get a feel for how a show's being received across a spectrum of reviewers.

Sadly, we lost Jack Zink last year, and the Sentinel really hasn't stepped up to the plate.  Bill Hirschman is still there, but the short-sighted Sentinel management hasn't shifted him up to officially fill the position of Sun-Sentinel Theatre Critic.  The Sun-Sentinel thus covers only about half the professional shows available for review.

New features for the scene include the weekly 'Mondays are Dark,' a reading list of theatre-related stories, and the monthly Tally, an accounting of how many shows each major media outlet actually reviewed.

We've grown a lot in the last two years, and our readers have grown with us.  Thank you for participating in the Theatre Scene, and here's to another great year of theatre!