HELP WANTED

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Rumor has it that now that Ann Brown has moved permanently to the head of the Arizona Daily Star’s opinion pages, theater critic Kathleen Allen will take over Ann’s old job as editor of the paper’s weekly entertainment tab, Caliente. (I edited Caliente’s precursor section for a while in the late 1990s.) This means that the theater-critic slot will be open. A newsroom informant tells me that management will probably slide the world-music critic into that position.
    I don’t know whether this is good news or bad, because the fellow has yet to prove himself as a theater critic, and I’m happy to give him the benefit of the doubt. If the rumor is true, though, it’s symptomatic of poor management practices at the Star, where editors believe that arts critics are as interchangeable as newsside reporters. Sure, you can rotate a young reporter from the police beat to courts to schools. As long as the reporter has access to the paper’s archives and people with fair institutional memories, moving from one beat to another is no problem. (Because of that institutional memory requirement, though, taking over a government beat is not so easy.) Arts coverage, in contrast, requires specialized knowledge of an arcane field, and the ability to write about it engagingly yet intelligently. The Star has embarrassed itself in the community by dumping an unsophisticated kid from the sports department into the movie critic’s position, and handing classical music coverage to someone who knows a lot about country music but can’t tell a clarinet from an English horn. (The Star "corrected" the story in that link, but still got the instrumentation wrong.) Let’s hope something similar doesn’t happen with the theater beat.
    If I were king of the Arizona Daily Star, I’d pull copy editor M. Scot Skinner kicking and screaming back into his old theater-criticism job. Scot was despised in some quarters of the theater community, but he knew what he was talking about, and expressed his opinions knowledgably and forcefully. Then I’d lure Ken LaFave down from Phoenix to take over the classical music beat, where he started back in the 1970s, and force executive editor Bobbie Jo Buel to get down on her knees and apologize to Renée Downing and beg her to return to the Star and review movies again. Then I’d send Bobbie Jo and her minions to the sports department, where they would toil as agate clerks while listening to the collected works of rapper Vanilla Ice. Yes, it’s cruel, but torture is now OK in the USA. I'm not talking about Abu Ghraib and Gitmo; every day, newspapers torture their readers with inept arts criticism.

UNAPPETIZING

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    I just pulled for use later today a Johann Strauss CD called Wiener Bonbons. Yes, I know how it's supposed to be pronounced, but the title always makes me think of chocolate-covered Vienna sausages. Ick. Which reminds me that my theme-dinner group once collaborated on an "upscale white trash" meal. One friend, cultured enough to run a mail-order classical CD service, brought the hors d'oeuvres, which involved Ritz crackers, Velveeta, Vienna sausages and caviar. Needless to say, there were leftovers.

WELCOME TO THE BLOGOSPHERE

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    KUAT/KUAZ newsman Robert Rappaport has started his own personal blog, which I suggest you encourage him to develop.

OMNIPRESENT

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Yesterday afternoon I did a telephone interview with 18-year-old violinist Caitlin Tulley, of whom I'd frankly never heard until the editor of Strings magazine asked me to write about her a few days ago. (Her Celtic first name is prounounced "KAT-lin," by the way.) She's very smart and down-to-earth and, from what I've read, exceptionally talented and musical. Two hours later I was in the Tucson Symphony office talking to George Hanson and orchestra administrators about the coming season, and there on the schedule was Caitlin Tully. I nearly gave myself whiplash from the double-take.
    Mel Gibson once said that early in his career he was "served like coffee"--brought out freely and easily into every available film project and TV talk show, getting tremendous (perhaps excessive) exposure and thereby becoming as common and familiar as morning java. If my coincidental double exposure to Caitlin Tulley in a single afternoon is any indication, she's classical music's freshly brewed pot of coffee. Let's hope that when she's finally served up in Tucson, she's not just another cup of decaf.

THE GAME'S AFOOT

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Arizona Theatre Company continues its lightest-ever season with a Sherlock Holmes adaptation:

After a criminally bungled attempt to purloin the works of PG Wodehouse and pass them off as theater (Over the Moon), playwright Steven Dietz and director David Ira Goldstein have masterminded a far more successful act of literary thievery, Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure. The play is receiving its premiere from Arizona Theatre Company, and if it's no intellectual match for the famous English detective, it is, at least, a fine stage caper.

CRANK CALLS

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    John Massaro spent seven years as chorus master and assistant conductor at Arizona Opera, mostly working for general director David Speers, but he quit indignantly after one year under the company’s new head, Joel Revzen. To say the least, Massaro is a bitter man; when he left at the end of 2004, he circulated his resignation letter among members of the press, and ever since then he has periodically sent out e-mails mocking Revzen (once in verse, to be sung to a tune from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado) and suggesting without much evidence that Revzen overstates his achievements. Massaro has maintained, for example, that Revzen misleadingly counts himself as a Grammy winner even though the Grammy in question was really intended for singer Arleen Auger, whom Revzen “merely” accompanied. I am in no position to take sides in the Massaro-Revzen conflict, but the triviality and mockery in Massaro’s e-mails make Massaro’s attacks seem less like whistle-blowing than petty manifestations of personal enmity.
    Last week, Massaro announced the formation of a new company in Phoenix, which he’s calling AZ Opera, and he seems to have enlisted Speers in the project. Several recipients of Massaro’s bulk e-mail announcement, employing the “reply to all” function, have responded, in effect, that there’s obviously something shifty about using a name so similar to Arizona Opera’s, and they are condemning Massaro’s project. One objector mentioned that she’d enjoyed many high-quality Arizona Opera productions over the years, and Massaro asserted in reply that she’d also claimed to have seen UFOs in the past.
    While there’s certainly room in Phoenix, and perhaps in Tucson, for a second professional company doing things that Arizona Opera doesn’t, the petulant Massaro seems motivated by revenge rather than service to the community. If he expects to be taken seriously, he needs to revise his rhetoric—and find a new name for his company that is not deliberately confusing. If he doesn’t, I’d expect Revzen and Arizona Opera to take him to court very soon. In which case Massaro would surely file briefs to be sung to tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury.