WHAT CHARACTERS

posted by James Reel

    In the latest Tucson Weekly, I review two plays that are worth seeing despite certain flaws—and in terms of strengths and weaknesses, the productions are mirror images of each other.
    Arizona Theatre Company has a beautiful hole-in-the-center show:

    Jon Jory's new adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, being launched at Arizona Theatre Company before moving on to other theaters, does almost everything right.
    It creates a fast-moving, involving stage work out of a beloved prose piece (not so difficult in this case, because Austen wrote a lot of dialogue). Jory gets the entire story told without either cramming the script with detail or omitting anything crucial. His clean, clockwork direction keeps everything clear and logical, even when a dozen people are swirling through the ballroom scenes. The cast conveys Austen's intelligent witticisms neatly, without resorting to physical or verbal pratfalls. The costumes are lovely; the simple set proves sufficiently versatile, and the sound and light design support it all effectively, without becoming distractions.
    This would be a fabulous production if it weren't for one thing: The depiction of the central character is absolutely wrong.

    In 1982, a woman, bundled in several layers of odd clothing, is caught Dumpster diving in Kansas City. When the cops get her to say anything at all, it's some incomprehensible babble. Maybe she's Mexican; maybe she's Korean. But all that really matters at the moment is that she's obviously just one more homeless lunatic wandering the streets. After all, this is about the same time that Ronald Reagan has thrown open all the asylum doors and relocated America's mentally ill to the gutters. This woman ought to be put back where she came from.
    Except--as officials learn only after this woman has been institutionalized for a dozen years--she didn't come from some asylum. She's a Tarahumara woman from the mountains of northern Chihuahua. She doesn't babble; she simply speaks her native tongue, the Rarámuri language, and no other.
    This woman, who was not released until 1994, is the real-life subject of Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda's trilingual play The Woman Who Fell From the Sky/La Mujer Que Cáyo del Cielo. Tucson's Borderlands Theater first presented the play five years ago, and has now revived it with its original star, the phenomenal Mexican actress Luisa Huertas. As before, Barclay Goldsmith directs.
    Running for 90 minutes without a break, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky still suffers from a few dry stretches, and offers only the sketchiest characterizations of the three people with the greatest impact on this woman's life, two doctors who drug the humanity out of her and the man who accidentally comes to save her.

EMERSONIAN REFLECTIONS

posted by James Reel

    The Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, which I help run, is opening its season tonight with a performance by the Emerson Quartet. This group’s concerts in Tucson almost always sell out—at least the concerts AFCM presents do—and with good reason. I suspect sometime in the near future we’d be well advised to book the quartet for a double engagement. The Emersons could easily offer an entirely different program the second night; indeed, unlike many other ensembles that offer the equivalent of a concert and a half for presenters to choose from, the Emersons generally travel the world with three or four different programs in their fingers.
    And they aren’t out there merely giving concerts in order to sell their latest CDs. Sure, they’re offering a fair amount of Mendelssohn this season, the complete Mendelssohn quartets and octet constituting their most recent CD release, but the Emersons are ready and willing to play much more than that. They’re pairing Beethoven and Shostakovich whenever they can these days—they’ve recorded those composers’ complete quartet cycles, but that was some years ago—and coming up with the occaisonal unexpected treasure, too. Tonight’s program consists of Beethoven’s Op. 18 No. 6, Shostakovich’s tenth quartet and Sibelius’ “Voces Intimae.” If you can’t get into the concert, we’ll probably be broadcasting it on KUAT-FM about a year from now.
    We didn’t ask the Emersons to play Mendelssohn here because we’ll have the Pacifica Quartet doing that later this season (the Pacifica’s fine Mendelssohn CD set was released just a few weeks after the Emersons’). If you’re curious about the Emersons’ work with Mendelssohn—especially their decision to record all eight parts of Mendelssohn’s Octet—you might like to read the cover story I wrote for last May’s issue of Strings magazine. The article gets a little technical near the end—the magazine is intended for string players—but violinist Eugene Drucker’s love of Mendelssohn comes through from the very beginning.

SAFETY IN NUMBERS

posted by James Reel

    Phil Rosenthal has a nice column in the Chicago Tribune about the success of National Public Radio in a difficult time for broadcast media. Rosenthal points out that NPR is bulking up its news divisions, and it has doubled its weekly audience, from 13 million to 26 million, in a little more than six years.
    This is all well and good, but two things disturb me about today’s NPR.
    First, the $15 million, three-year expansion of the news department (made possible more by inheriting a huge chunk of the Ray Kroc fortune than by garnering listener support or government funding) comes at the expense of NPR’s cultural programming. Music shows have been withering away over the past few years, ever since NPR execs put their trust in an evil Rasputin audience-research expert who, admitting that he dislikes music, phrases his findings in a way that belittles music lovers and portrays them as the death of public radio. Well, who needs cultural programming from NPR anyway? KUAT-FM has gotten along just fine without it for a good 20 years, drawing on other sources like Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media and Chicago commercial station WFMT.
    Second, Rosenthal and NPR are measuring success by body count. The assumption: The audience has doubled in six years, so NPR must be doing something right. Well, public broadcasting’s historic mission has not been to attract the largest possible audience; that’s what commercial broadcasters are for. NPR and PBS are here to serve unserved audiences with valuable information, entertainment and educational programming on which commercial broadcasters could not make a profit.
    If NPR’s success is to be measured by audience size rather than quality of content, we might as well give up on it now and throw our allegiance to all those exciting new reality shows on TV.

AS IF MUSIC WEREN'T ENOUGH

posted by James Reel

    Burt Schneider, who used to announce from time to time on KUAT-FM but now serves as the local All Things Considered host on KUAZ, has pointed me toward an interesting reader’s list at Amazon.com. Someone has recommended 19 novels revolving around classical music. Most seem to be murder mysteries; my taste runs more to literary fiction, so I’ve read only two items on the list: John Hersey’s Antonietta and Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto; Patchett’s is by far the better novel of the two. Burt would add a 20th title: A Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers, a novelist I admire although I haven’t read this book, either.
    I haven’t perused any music-related novels (other than Bel Canto) in several years, and I’ve come to avoid them because novelists apparently can’t avoid making some huge musical blunder that spoils it all for me. In Sándor Márai’s excellent Embers, for example, which is about the decline of the Austrian empire rather than music, characters play a Chopin two-piano piece that doesn’t exist. There was no reason for Márai to invent one. He just got sloppy.
    On a more positive note, off the top of my head I would recommend (tepidly) Frank Conroy’s Body and Soul, following the development of a young pianist, and (far more strongly) Mark Salzman’s The Soloist. The latter, about a concert cellist facing performer’s block, jury duty and a young prodigy for a student, is that rare work of fiction that gets the music right. It probably helped that Mark himself plays the cello and is the son of the late Martha Salzman, who was an excellent harpsichordist you may remember from her performances around Tucson.

LOOK UNDER THE SKIRT

posted by James Reel

    I may not feel up to coming in for my air shift today, but at least I can sit here in the comfort of my home office, a dog literally at my feet, with an advance copy of Hilary Hahn's Mozart sonata CD playing on the computer, and pass along a bit of theater gossip.
    Beowulf Alley, the promising newish theater company operating out of the former Johnny Gibson building downtown, will open Criminal Hearts on Sept. 23. This is one of several scripts credited to "Jane Martin," supposedly a Kentucky-based writer who never gives interviews and has never been seen in public. The Beowulf Alley people are repeating the rumor that Jane Martin is actually the pseudonym of writer-director Jon Jory, the man who adapted and directed Pride and Prejudice, now on the boards at Arizona Theatre Company. You can find a summary of the identity issue here.
    Here's what I find annoying amid all the speculation about Jory: People on the one hand posit that Jory uses the Jane Martin pseudonym to give himself credibility when writing about women and women's issues, yet on the other hand they suggest that Jory writes these plays in collaboration with some woman, perhaps his wife, who is a costume designer rather than a playwright.
    It's ridiculous to think that a man can't write with intelligence and sensitivity about women. But there are people who maintain, stridently, that only women can write about women, African Americans about African Americans, and so forth. All I can say is that someone who lacks the imagination and empathy to write about someone other than himself or herself has no business being a playwright. And someone lacking the imagination and empathy to believe that playwrights can write about "the other" has no business criticizing those who can.

HOWDY

posted by James Reel

    During the past couple of days, two bloggers have kindly linked to Cue Sheet: Rich Russell, who blogs mainly but not exclusively about the world of opera and choral music, and Greg Sandow, who (among many other activites) covers classical music for the Wall Street Journal and has a lot of great ideas about how to keep music connected to the audience. So if you’re new around here, welcome!
    You can find an introduction to the blog here. Perhaps, now that I’ve been doing this a full month, it’s time to elaborate on a few points. First, I’ve noticed that nothing in the design of this site tells you who I am, and something needs to be done about that because I believe people should put their names behind their opinions. So … Name: James Reel. Occupations: morning announcer for KUAT-FM (weekdays between 5 and 11 a.m. Mountain Standard Time, you can hear me by going here), and freelance arts journalist. This site is hosted by KUAT, but needless to say the opinons expressed herein are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of KUAT staff or management, the University of Arizona, the Arizona Board of Regents, my various other employers, the political party I vote against, the people I give positive or negative reviews, my two dogs, or any of my friends or detractors.
    You can read the blog entries from a particular day by clicking on a calendar date at the right. Or you can browse entries in reverse chronological order, or by category:
    Classical Music is self-explanatory, and is in part the holding tank for concert reviews I’ll post from time to time once the season gets underway.
    Radio Life consists of revelations about goings-on at KUAT, and ruminations about the broadcasting biz.
    Tucson Arts is commentary about non-music arts action around here, including links to my theater reviews in the Tucson Weekly.
    Seven o’clock Cellist is where I post the occasional remark about being an over-age beginning cello student (I started lessons in May, just after I turned 47). The title comes from a story my teacher, Harry Clark, told me about the prominent cellist Janos Starker, although I haven’t yet confirmed this anecdote. It seems that Starker was getting tired of hearing his fellow musicians moan about how their concerts didn’t go as well as they’d thought, since they’d played everything perfectly while practicing just before the eight o’clock recital. Sneered Starker, “The world is full of seven o’clock cellists.” Since I generally sound better alone than when I play for Harry, I count myself among that sorry lot.
    Quodlibet is where I dump material that doesn’t fit into any other category. The word was used mainly in the 18th century to denote a musical hodge-podge of short, unrelated, often humorous pieces. I could have called it something French, like “Mélange” or “Potpourri,” but I enjoy pretending to know something about Latin.
    Have fun, and feel free to contact me by clicking on the e-mail link in the right-hand panel. I don’t allow the blog software to post unfiltered comments, because I’ve seen too many sites hijacked by spammers and monomaniacal wackos. So send me e-mail, and unless you tell me otherwise, I’ll consider your comments (positive and otherwise) for later posting.