The sad decline of Boston's First Night

[ron_newman]

New Year's Eve is coming up, which means it will be time for Boston's annual First Night celebration. Here's this year's schedule ... but wait, what happened to the Hynes Family Festival, opera, classical music, dance, indoor rock bands, jazz, improv, comedy, film festivals, experimental visual art, etc. etc

Comments

[hikerpoet]

I feel like there was a stretch of *really* bad weather for a few years in a row that affected the momentum.
It was a pretty good thing going, and one shouldn't be surprised by that unpredictability this time of year, but I feel like there was a decent stretch of extra bad nights (five degrees, or bad ice storm, or blizzard) that hit it at just the wrong time for several New Year's Eve's in a row around the several years before it was handed off.
I consider myself super outdoorsy and community, even, but there was a lot of bad timing that way for a stretch in there that made me not blame people for getting gunshy for planning on it.

[ron_newman]

True -- but except for the fireworks, parade, and ice sculptures, most of this event has generally been indoors. The two last years of FIGMENT First Night on the Common were fun, but also a recent innovation (which sadly won't return this year).

[hikerpoet]

Yeah, but that was hard even when it comes to commuting (even by public transport--there are a lot of people who came from out of town and logistics were a bit tougher even if they were taking it) to making it from event to event and so on. There was definitely some bad luck there! I feel like 4th of July could take a similar hit if there was a run of incredibly bad thunderstormy afternoons/nights a handful of years in a row, but thankfully it hasn't hit just right (wrong?) in quite the same way, though!

I do love Figment! I always go to the summer festival, and sometimes New York as well.

[xo_kizzy_xo]

I'd only gone to a couple of First Nights (heh, I always seem to work on New Year's, but I digress). A lot of my friends stopped going because it was either too cold, too crowded, or too much of a pain to hop on the T.

[siderea]

Interesting. Which years, do you recall?

I definitely have had a sense that programming had been slowly changing and for the worse for more than a decade. I had suspected, from what I learned chatting with a friend who was with a group that performed for a while then stopped, that it was simply too hard a gig, logistically, for many groups, and they withdrew.

I remember when the Boston Ballet held FN open studios; the lines to get in were around the block. I remember all sorts of trad, early, and world music ensembles (first time I ever heard taiko live was at FN); quirky fun things I would never have encountered otherwise (h/t St Mary's Heavenly Fire Steel Drum Band). I remember attending nine different events, never repeating a genre. I remember it being hard to choose what to attend, so spoiled for choice

[ron_newman]

I've also noticed the lack of long lines in recent years, but attributed it to there being a larger number of simultaneous events competing for the same number of attendees. I don't know if that's really true, though.

One show I remember well was the very last performance ever by Opera Boston. The company went out of business at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 2011.