OFF BROADWAY

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    This terse e-mail just arrived from the PR guy at Broadway in Tucson:   

    As of August 20, 2007, Mark Rasdorf is no longer with Broadway in Tucson.
   We are excited to announce that our new General Manager is Lendre Kearns, formerly of the La Jolla Playhouse in Southern California.

CUBBY-HOLES

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Via On an Overgrown Path, here’s an interesting remark by former BBC Proms director and BBC Radio 3 controller John Drummond: “There's no such thing as ‘the music audience.’ They like the organ, or they like chamber music, or they like symphony concerts, or they like opera, or the nineteenth century, or new music. But they don't like each other. There is a mass of different audiences. So any (radio) schedule you put together is going to displease more people than it pleases.”
    There’s a certain amount of truth here, although Drummond is of course grossly oversimplifying. I see some of the same people in the audience for the Tucson Symphony as I do for the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, Arizona Opera, the Arizona Early Music Society, and so on. These are musical omnivores. But I’ve also observed a significant compartmentalization of audiences, which can be most easily judged by how many people drop away—it’s much less crowded at early-music or new music organ concerts than at the symphony.
    Opera, I think, has the highest percentage of attendees who shun other kinds of music performance. I’m not just referring to the “opera queens” who, between swoons, can dissect every performance Maria Callas gave from her debut to her career’s wretched end. I also mean those people who don’t really know much about music, but who attend opera for the spectacle—the singing, the acting (such as it is), the scenery, the costumes, the live orchestra in the pit, the whole impressive package. Some of them, I think, have absolutely no curiosity about music; otherwise, they’d show up at non-operatic concerts from time to time. Perhaps it’s rather like people who watch a lot of television, but would never think of going to see Shakespeare or Ibsen or even Tony Kushner in an actual theater.

ROTTEN TOMATOES

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    A friend alerts me that Connie Tuttle has besmirched my culinary reputation in her latest contribution to the Tucson Weekly:

    James Reel inspired this column. I recently ran into the Weekly arts editor at Trader Joe's. We exchanged the usual social chatter and then went on our separate shopping ways until I spotted him reach for a can (gasp!) of marinara sauce and place it in his cart.
    People ... I know it's summer, and the heat is not conducive to cooking, but making a sauce from scratch takes approximately three minutes more than opening a can (not counting cooking time).

BLUE LEAVES

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Maybe I’m an absent blogger these days, but I do still drag myself out to review plays. Here’s the beginning of the latest effort in the Tucson Weekly:

    The older John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves gets, the less funny it seems.
    Around 1970, it started out as a black comedy, emphasis on the comedy, about a dysfunctional Queens household on the day the pope came to New York in 1965. When the Arizona Theatre Company mounted it in the 1980s, as part of its challenging (and, the fearful claimed, alienating) 21st-anniversary season, the emphasis fell a bit more upon the black than the comedy, although it still provided its share of laughs.
    Right now, in the Catalina Players' production, The House of Blue Leaves is seeming less like a comedy than like a bitter fantasy bordering on the surreal, populated by characters who are every bit as troubling as they are amusing.

WORDS OF WISDOM

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Oboist Patricia Mitchell has this to say about performing with an ensemble that’s hovering below her own ability:

The important thing for a serious musician to remember is that lowering one’s standards when playing in a less-than-stellar group is only a reflection on that musician, not on the group. It’s also a bad habit that can seep into one’s playing when in a better group. So I try to play my best. Every time I play. That’s all.

CULTURAL PROVOCATEUR

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Oops! I forgot to post a link yesterday to my contribution to the latest Tucson Weekly:

    Performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña has been billed as a cultural provocateur and as a radical.
    Gómez-Peña is in Tucson right now, stirring up artistic trouble courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art. He and members of his troupe, La Pocha Nostra, are conducting workshops for 15 like-minded artists, the results of which will be displayed and performed on Saturday, Aug. 11, at MOCA.
    Gómez-Peña is a smart guy (in the early 1990s, he received a MacArthur "genius" grant) and a quick thinker, so he didn't seem taken aback when I called last week with a rude question: What good is a radical artist in contemporary America, where even the supposedly liberal media are pretty conservative, and ideas that are even remotely progressive aren't taken seriously or given any real coverage in the mainstream culture?