If you really want me to respond to your questions or comments, don't send them to me under a phony name and dummy e-mail address. Why should I take you seriously if you don't think enough of your own ideas to put your name behind them?
Colleague Mike Serres has forwarded this “Jargon Watch” item from Wired:
CLASSICAL CLUBBING n. A new trend in orchestral music, classical clubbing mixes woodwinds and brass with vodka and tonic. As concert hall audiences dwindle, young instrumentalists are moving the classical repertoire into bars and interlacing J. S. Bach with DJ beats in a mashup as cultural as it is musical.
Last night, after a long afternoon of radio fund-raising, I met my wife and two of our friends for dinner at a restaurant we’ve patronized for many years. The place has changed hands several times, although the food remains fairly consistent, and a new regime seems to be in charge. My guess is that it’s a family fairly fresh from the Old Country, given the tentative command of English a couple of them have. And, boy, are they eager to please. Too eager. Beginning about halfway through the meal, one or another of them would badger us literally every two minutes, checking on our satisfaction and offering us water. Lots of water. This was amusing at first, but before long I grew annoyed. We couldn’t carry on a conversation because the staff was intrusively attentive.
It’s strangely off-putting when someone is too eager to please, which is why, as an audience member, I don’t mind public-radio fund-raising drives but I find public-television pledge drives intolerable. In radio, we just do what we usually do, but less of it so we can fit in pledge breaks. Same mix of music, except that many of the selections are necessarily shorter (nothing more than 18 minutes long, because that’s the maximum time between breaks). Public television, in contrast, hauls out all kinds of special programming during its campaigns, in part to hold its regular audience with nifty, shiny things, and in part to lure non-viewers with specials that are totally unrelated to the PBS core mission but may dupe newcomers into phoning in a pledge. To me, that smacks of hypocrisy; isn’t the regular programming good enough to deserve support? That, rather than the pledge breaks, is what keeps me tuned out during TV campaigns. Radio fund-raising is much more agreeable; we aren’t trying too hard.
Two completely different approaches to “theater lite” this week. First, there’s pure froth at Invisible Theatre:
Jerry and Molly Schiff feel like the unluckiest people in the world. They're people who hate people who are overrunning their Malibu neighborhood on this fine July day en route to the wedding of Barbra Streisand and James Brolin.You can read my whole Tucson Weekly review here. Then there’s heavier fare, with all the fat and just a bit of the meat trimmed off:
Actually, it's Jerry who's angry and resentful. Molly is merely annoyed by the noise. (News helicopters! Limos disgorging celebrities! Maury Povich in ugly shorts on the front lawn!) Jerry, on the other hand, sees this as a personal affront. He and Molly live right next door to Babs, and they haven't been invited to the wedding. True, their little house can't compare to the Streisand estate, to say nothing of the bungalow on the other side to which Drew Barrymore is adding turrets. No, their house is so modest that they've been reduced to living on the set of last year's Invisible Theatre production of Cookin' With Gus.
Oh, did I mention that this is a play by Daniel Stern, called Barbra's Wedding? That it's the latest offering from Invisible Theatre? That it's a moderately funny account of a marriage that looks to be skidding into a loud divorce on the very day that Barbra is celebrating her nuptials?
In its mainstage series, Live Theatre Workshop is presenting the comedy I Hate Hamlet. And when you initially learn what the company is doing with the real Hamlet in its late-night Etcetera series, you might worry that the hatred has been held over for the 10:30 show. More than half of Shakespeare's text has been wrenched away; many of the male characters have been turned into women; and there's a definite gay thing going on with Hamlet's buddy Horatio.The rest of the review lies here.
Yet what's obvious once you're spun out of the theater after this intense, two-hour distillation of Hamlet is that just about everyone involved loves this play. The young actors are fully committed to every single line; the emotions are true; and director Adam-Adolfo's adaptation strips the script down to its essentials. This comes at the expense of some character development, but it does wonders for the trajectory of the plot. The paring is so smooth that nonspecialists in the audience aren't likely to miss any of the cut passages, except for the business with poor Yorick's skull.
Last night, my wife and some friends attended the Loft Cinema’s screening of the Met’s high-definition “theatercast” of The Magic Flute. Here in Tucson, we’re on the frontier, which means it takes a few days longer for these newfangled innovations to reach us. Telegraph wires have limited bandwidth. Anyway, I stayed home to continue working my way through Crime and Punishment, but reportedly the affair was a rousing success, with something like 500 people filling the theater. (Not enough hors-d’oeuvres to go around, though, I hear.)
So this morning people around town may well be thinking, first, “Classical music isn’t dead after all,” and second, “Arizona Opera must be getting pretty nervous with the Virtual Met in town.” But I think it’s too early to make either conclusion.
First, last night’s screening was a novelty, and it involved a very popular opera. (Glynn Ross once told me that the biggest news to him after a few years of running Arizona Opera was that he could actually fill the house with a Mozart opera, not just the usual Verdi and Puccini.) If we had a steady diet of the Met on the silver screen, I wonder if 500 people would be showing up week after week for things like I Puritani and The First Emperor. Maybe they would, but it remains to be demonstrated.
Second, should Arizona Opera worry that Met screenings would siphon off its audience? Well, that might be an issue if the Met were onscreen here every month, but that isn’t going to happen—at least, there’s no indication of that at the Loft’s Web site, although Phoenix is another story. (You’ll find the Met’s own HD theater schedule here.) Even if it were, I don’t think 30 years of Met telecasts on PBS have cut into Arizona Opera’s audience; if anything, they’ve stirred interest in seeing live productions—visceral, not virtual, opera. And after seeing a few screenings at a big movie theater, a lot of people would probably conclude that 1) the Met’s vocal roster isn’t as stellar as in days of yore, 2) its production styles are not to everyone’s taste, and 3) video tends to emphasize opera’s hokey nature, which is disguised somewhat by all the stage spectacle seen live at some distance in a real opera house.
So it’s way too soon to make pronouncements about What This Means. Let’s just wait and see—and hope there’s more to see.
Today in the Tucson Weekly, I review a show in which an actor modestly outperforms a playwright:
On opening night of Arizona Onstage Productions' Talk of the Town, Brandon Kosters held the stage for 85 minutes as Johnny, a small-town Texas teen coming to terms with his homosexuality, his adoration of the Judds and his community's distaste for his sexual orientation.Read the entire review here.
After the performance, playwright Paul Bonin-Rodriguez took a seat on stage and read from a sequel play, following Johnny through the end of high school. Same character, two quite different readings, and for the purposes of Talk of the Town, I think the playwright (a talented actor himself) must defer to Kosters' concept of the character.
