This was the year of Oprah and the opera, of The Boss and The Baker Awards, of Twitter and "The Raven."
Inside today's section is a smattering of some of the top trends on Baltimore's arts scene in 2009. Think of them as billboards along a highway: Each one points to a different exit, and yet taken together, they provide a pretty good road map of where we're heading.
Though there were some heartbreaking losses in the past year, such as the demise of the Baltimore Opera, there also were some exciting developments.
The city threw a humongous bicentennial birthday bash for favorite son Edgar Allan Poe. The economy has started to perk up. And there are indications that Jon + Kate might finally be off the air for good.
See? Don't you feel better already?
The recession and the arts
The faltering economy hit Baltimore's arts community hard this year. The cruelest blow came in May, when the Baltimore Opera Company was liquidated, right down to sets and costumes in storage and posters on office walls. Various factions of board, staff and patrons should have come together to find a way to save the historic company, but the odds were formidable.
Drops in attendance, contributions and endowment fund values (for those fortunate enough to have endowments) caused many organizations to face staff reductions, pay cuts and furloughs, postponed or canceled events. At the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, musicians gave back 12.5 percent in salaries and benefits. The Baltimore Chamber Orchestra suspended operations in January to regroup for the fall. Theater companies felt the pinch in various ways, and a budget shortfall at the Maryland Historical Society led to layoffs and curtailed hours of operation.
The Walters Art Museum's cost-cutting included scrapping a collaborative exhibition with the Mus?e d'Orsay in Paris and the Getty in Los Angeles. Still, the free admission policy at the Walters held firm, as it did at the Baltimore Museum of Art, positive signs in the midst of gloom. And even though the finality of Baltimore Opera's demise in 2009 still casts a pall as 2010 nears, the new year is starting to look a lot better for the health of local culture than the last.
- Tim Smith
Saving the Senator
The battle to keep Baltimore's single-screen movie showplace, the Senator Theatre, up and running, was rarely out of the news - and that's to be expected when the fate of any city landmark hangs in the balance. But in this age of impersonal megaplexes, the impassioned debate over the Senator's future, which came to a head when the city took ownership in July, reveals how much loyalty an individual cinema can earn when it's run with affection for movies and respect for audiences.
Under Tom Kiefaber's stewardship, the Senator was a place where moviegoers could expect expert presentation.
The city is now considering a handful of proposals for the theater's future. Movie exhibition is at least a part of all of them. Kiefaber prefers the Towson University-sponsored WTMD-FM bid to transform the site into a base for the radio station and an eclectic education and performance platform. The other credible plans include one from the owner of the Charles, James "Buzz" Cusack, to continue booking the Senator as a first-run theater, enhanced by a crepes shop and restaurant like those that flank the Charles.
The hope is that the Senator can retain its touch of class and its anchor value to the neighborhood as it heads into a vital eighth decade.
- Michael Sragow
Local bands make good
If 2008 was the year Baltimore's music scene broke out, 2009 was the year it paid off for Baltimore bands.
Many prominent local groups signed deals with national record labels this year. In September, ambient pop duo Beach House signed with Sub Pop Records, home to acts like the Postal Service, the Shins and Flight of the Conchords. The long-haired, hard-rocking foursome J-Roddy Walston and the Business signed with Fairfax/Vagrant Records this month. And former WZT Hearts member Jason Urick joined several other Baltimore groups, including Double Dagger, Thank You and Human Bell, on Thrill Jockey Records, a Chicago-based label.
Meanwhile, composer Dan Deacon (also known as Baltimore's Wizard of Weird) released "Bromst," his darkest, most cerebral album to date. And Merge Records put out indie rock duo (above) Wye Oak's sophomore album, "The Knot." Both records were warmly received.
"It's been a fertile year for Baltimore bands," said Greg Szeto, who runs the Baltimore-based music blog Aural States. "There's even more stuff cropping up."
- Sam Sessa
The Boss is king
A host of A-list bands hit the road this year, and nearly every one played a show in the area. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band made a triumphant return to Baltimore, playing the 1st Mariner Arena for the first time since 1973, when they opened for Chicago.
Springsteen led the band through an electric set that lasted nearly 3 1/2 hours. Frank Remesch, 1st Mariner's general manager, had tried for years to get The Boss to come back to Baltimore. When Springsteen finally returned to the old arena, in front of an audience of 14,839, Remesch said it was a religious experience.
"Can we repeat that? Probably not," Remesch said. "You only get one chance at a first kiss, and that was a first kiss. Here, he was king for a night."
Springsteen wasn't the only big name in town. R&B; star Beyonce and hip-hop heavyweight Jay-Z both put on stellar shows at 1st Mariner.
FedEx Field in Landover also played host to a pair of top-notch performers. In early August, Paul McCartney toured through his unparalleled body of work, supported by a lean four-piece band. At 67, McCartney still had the boyish charm that helped woo so many fans, so many years ago. And in late September, U2 proved once again why they're one of the biggest names in rock.
- Sam Sessa
A new Discovery
From the end of "Jon & Kate Plus 8" to the start of what it is hoping will be a beautiful relationship with Oprah Winfrey, it has been a year of headlines and tabloid madness for Maryland-based Discovery Communications, a company once known for nature documentaries made in other countries.
"Jon & Kate," a reality TV series about a family of 10, became tabloid manna last spring when it was revealed that Jon Gosselin, the 34-year-old dad, was having relationships with women in their 20s. By the time the series, which airs on Discovery's TLC channel, returned for its fifth season in June with the announcement that Jon and Kate were divorcing, the tabloid-driven audience had soared to 10.8 million viewers - and Discovery earnings were up $109 million over last year.
But it was the beginning of the end for the Gosselin show, and the series shut down production in October after Jon took legal action to keep his children off the air. The divorce became official Friday.
While Discovery has long been a major TV brand, it vaulted into a new category of importance and recognizability with the announcement in November that it would launch the Oprah Winfrey Network in 2011. With Winfrey saying she will end her landmark syndicated talk show after 25 years in 2011 to devote herself to her new channel in Silver Spring, the possibility that she will do a new talker on OWN has set the media world abuzz.
- David Zurawik
Leno switch hurts WBAL
Most analysts predicted that the arrival of Nielsen's Local People Meters in July would shake up the world of Baltimore TV in 2009. The advanced, instant ability to electronically count viewers was expected to show that leading stations like WBAL and WJZ were over-counted by the old diary method, while stations with smaller audiences, like WBFF, WMAR and WNUV, were under-counted.
While there was a tiny bit of realignment in that regard, it was a programming decision made by NBC executives in New York and Los Angeles that truly changed the local TV news landscape here. NBC's decision to move late-night talk show host Jay Leno to prime time and air his show at 10 p.m. Monday through Friday knocked affiliate WBAL out of contention as a front-runner in late news and handed that most lucrative of all local newscasts to WJZ.
By October, WBAL's 11 p.m. newscast had lost 58 percent of its audience of 25-to-54-year-old viewers compared with last year. And that is the demographic on which most advertising buys for local newscasts are made. WBAL's loss as a result of the Leno lead-in is one of the worst hits taken by any major market station in the country.
And the competition is not limited to arch rival WJZ. At 10 p.m., not only did Leno get beat by prime-time entertainment programming on the other network-owned and affiliated stations in Baltimore, but WBFF Fox-45 also beat Leno with its 10 p.m. newscast.
- David Zurawik
Poe makes his return
The biggest name on Baltimore's arts scene this year may have been a guy who's been dead for 160 years.
Certainly, Edgar Allan Poe hadn't gotten this much press since dying a bedraggled, possibly beaten man wandering the streets of Baltimore, in 1849. (In fact, he probably got far more, given that his death warranted only a four-sentence obituary in The Sun). But Baltimore, which has been waging a war of words for decades with Boston, Richmond, Va., New York and Philadelphia over which city can best justify calling the first great master of the macabre its favorite son, pulled out every possible stop to celebrate this bicentennial year of his birth (in 1809, in Boston).
There have been continuing Poe exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Enoch Pratt Free Library. There was a big-time 200th birthday celebration that stretched over four days back in January and February, a wine tasting in March (with plenty of amontillado on hand, naturally), a theatrical performance of "The Fall of the House of Usher" alongside Poe's grave outside Westminster Hall in June, and a five-day commemoration of his death, complete with the elaborate funeral he never had, in November.
And it's not over. Actor Jeffrey Combs is scheduled to perform his one-man Poe tribute, "Nevermore," inside Westminster Hall on Jan. 23 and Jan. 24.
"I think we more than rose to the occasion," says the Poe Society of Baltimore's Jeff Savoye. "Poe would have loved the attention."
- Chris Kaltenbach
Stage fright
In 2009, Baltimore's theatrical larder was, if not exactly bare, then less full and tempting than it usually is. Local troupes economized by staging fewer shows with safer and less challenging fare.
Subscription series at both the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center and Rep Stage in Howard County were cut by one, and for the first time in several years, the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival didn't mount a major fall production.
In addition, duplication abounded. The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival and Rep Stage mounted identically cast productions of "Wittenberg" in June and August, and there were other examples.
Not only are there fewer shows to see; there were fewer offerings with the potential to shake up established points of view. The Hippodrome Theatre, with the largest audience of any venue in Baltimore, intentionally is shifting toward the cozy and familiar. Future audiences probably will see more established crowd-pleasers like "Fiddler on the Roof" from 1964, and fewer controversial offerings like the Tony Award-winning "Spring Awakening" with its themes of teen suicide and incest.
It's all the more laudable then, that a few bold choices are being made despite budgetary constraints. Everyman Theatre staged its first world premiere, and Center Stage has never backed away from its commitment to new and unproven work.
- Mary Carole McCauley
Arts and social networking
While some folks were fixating on the term "socialism" during 2009, local cultural organizations were focusing on "social networking" with extra vigor.
The most impressive manifestation has been the Baker Artist Awards, created as an entirely online contest that invites area artists of any genre, from painting to poetry, to upload their work - and Web visitors from anywhere on the globe to check them out and vote for favorites. The inaugural awards were distributed in March (above, the winners); the second contest, which started in October, offers several new interactive options on the site aimed at helping artists and arts fans to network even more.
Baltimore's long-established cultural enterprises got more deeply into the social media groove. The BSO, already on Facebook and My Space, added Twitter in May, and did so with a splash: A contest for in-demand tickets to Trey Anastasio's concert with the orchestra garnered more than 900 followers within a week. And a social networking blast paid off quickly, selling 1,100 seats to a "Final Fantasy" program in the summer before the BSO placed a single old-fogey-media ad.
Center Stage also jumped into the Twittersphere this year and plans to create a presence on trendy blip.tv soon. Everyman Theatre's embrace of Twitter had a twist - entrusting tweets to a cast member, so followers can gain an insider's perspective and a deeper social connection.
- Tim Smith