PACIFICA OVERTURES

posted by James Reel

    At the beginning of last night’s Arizona Friends of Chamber Music concert, I did an onstage interview with Dmitri Tymoczko, whose brand new Eggman Variations for piano and strings would be premiered a few minutes later. Then I jogged back to the green room to alert the Pacifica Quartet that it was showtime. Before they’d go out, though, first violinist Simin Ganatra asked if I could follow them on and close the piano lid; she didn’t want it reflecting the group’s sound in strange ways while they played the concert’s opening work, a Mendelssohn quartet.
    That’s the first time in years a woman has had to ask me to put the lid down.
    Because I help run the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, anything positive I say about the concert will be suspect. Despite my vested interest in the organization, though, I must tell you that the Pacifica’s performance of Mendelssohn’s Op. 12 quartet was superb, the best-balanced, most emotive yet not overdone performance I’ve ever heard. It even surpassed their excellent recording, released last year and reviewed by me in an issue of Fanfare that for some reason doesn’t have its feature articles online. (Yeah, I know, I’m also Fanfare’s webmaster, but I have no control over the archive part of the site.)
    The group’s performance with pianist Ursula Oppens of Tymoczko’s Eggman Variations (it’s a reference to the Beatles song “I Am the Walrus”) was also good and focused, although I think there were a couple of brief moments of imprecision in what sounds to be a very tricky score. The work went over surprisingly well; surprising, because the writing is quite pointillistic, and in new music our audience tends to prefer pieces with interesting, strong rhythm rather than complex texture. But the folks always respond enthusiastically to any performance with the requisite commitment and intensity, and those qualities certainly came across last night. I regret missing the Pacifica’s performance of Beethoven’s Op. 132 after intermission, but … early to bed and early to rise.

IN PRINT, OUT OF MIND

posted by James Reel

    At last night’s concert, people buttonholed me and wanted to chat about an article I have in the current issue of Fanfare about a microtonal composer, and a review I wrote for the Tucson Weekly last November of the UA’s production of Henry IV. It’s hard enough for me to remember what I wrote last week, let alone last quarter, so all I could do was smile and nod and pretend I knew what they were talking about.
    On the subject of what I wrote last week, today’s Tucson Weekly carries my review of a well-performed, disturbing play at Invisible Theatre:

    At the beginning of The Exonerated, which opened last week at Invisible Theatre, 10 actors file in and take their seats, most behind a long desk on either side of the stage, one in the middle, two on stools behind. It's so tidy, so symmetrical, so orderly. But without ever moving from their seats, these actors produce 90 minutes of absolute wreckage.
    The destruction is personal, emotional, psychological. The Exonerated is a documentary play by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, who interviewed men and women who were wrongly convicted of murder and spent years on death row until they were cleared by the extraordinary efforts of, primarily, public-interest groups.

MORE ON TOP HAT

posted by James Reel

    James Mitchell Gooden, who runs Top Hat Theatre Club, believes that bad reviews can harm his company more than good reviews can help it, so, as I wrote last week, he is not inviting critics to his latest production (I understand the Star’s Kathleen Allen is also not invited to review the show). But I have spies everywhere, and a friend who attended Top Hat’s production of Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor—an adaptation of Chekhov stories—has reported back. I trust her theater judgment, and she liked what she saw. Here are some of her comments; I won’t reveal her name because I’m quoting without permission:

    If you get a chance I encourage you to see this play at Top Hat. Top Hat has finally hit its stride, after the debacle of Murder at the Vicarage.
    As for discouraging reviewers—James Gooden should have trusted 1) the material; 2) his own talents as a director; 3) his actors. For one thing, this is NOT Neil Simon—this is Chekhov (my favorite playwright, after Mr. W.S.), who can be trusted always to tell us something important about the human condition—and tell it gracefully. Chekhov's irony fits James Gooden's style perfectly—and their sense of timing fits. And on the third point, the actors clearly are enjoying working with material of this quality. …
    Simon has stagecraft, whatever the emptiness of some of his plays and characters, and these playlets are not empty. My favorite of the six is "The Seduction," in which the biter is bitten, the tables are turned by the woman the aspiring seducer underestimates. That is the most Chekhovian of the lot. Still, I am haunted most by "The Audition," with the final lines from the last scene of Three Sisters.
    Maria Fletcher has great fun and does a good job in the last episode—a new tone for her, it shows her range. (Truth to tell, I can imagine Kristi Loera in that role! The rapid changes from victim to termagant—and back—reminded me of Kristi's performance in The Housekeeper. Scary ladies!)

BAIT

posted by James Reel

    Back in 1976, when I started working at KUAT-FM the first time around, exactly twice a day the announcers would be given two full minutes, just before the news, to talk about everything that would be happening on the station for the rest of the day. A couple of problems there: Two minutes is an awfully long time in the radio world to blather on, and how many people would really be glued to their radios all day?
    Eventually this was reduced to what was logged as a “next hour highlight.” We’d take anything from 15 seconds to a minute or more to tell you all about what was planned for the coming 60 minutes plus. Often this meant merely listing everthing on the next page of the music schedule, the assumption being that just telling you that the music was happening would be enough to keep you tuned in.
    This week, management has issued a new directive, and I think it’s the most sensible of all. Every once in a while we’re supposed to spend maybe 15 seconds alerting you to one interesting piece we’ll be playing within the next 60 minutes, and not beyond that. This takes care of the laundry-list syndrome, and it gets around the fact that we sometimes fall into patterns of playing perfectly nice compositions about which there’s nothing interesting to say. Most importantly, it recognizes that just because you’re listening now you won’t necessarily be tuned in two hours from now, unless you’re hearing the station in a doctor’s office. I know there are a few folks out there who leave the radio on all day, but they don’t need to be sweet-talked into staying tuned, because they’ll be listening, or half-listening, no matter what. Most other people have better things to do than build their days around the knowledge that we’ll be playing a Rheinberger string quartet at 11:22 and a Scharwenka piano concerto at 12:18. If we can persuade you to keep listening for just a few minutes more, that’s accomplishment enough.

CAN'T TAKE THE PRESSURE

posted by James Reel

    Last weekend, while waiting for The Fever to begin (see the review link below), I exchanged a few words with Kathy Allen, the Arizona Daily Star theater critic. I don’t chat much with Kathy; our tenures at the Star didn’t overlap and so she’s not one of my old newsroom pals, and while we do catch sight of each other at plays we don’t often speak, because, being shy, I clamp myself into my seat and try not to socialize with anybody. But Kathy has always been friendly toward me, and as she passed by last Saturday night she told me that she’d been relieved to see that my review of the last show at Top Hat Theatre Club was about as negative as hers. The production had its positive elements, but overall it smacked of amateurism. ("In an Agatha Christie mystery," I wrote indelicately, "the corpse on stage shouldn't be the production itself.") “I’ll keep going,” Kathy said, “but I don’t think I’ll review them anymore.”
    I’m not ready to give up on Top Hat yet, but it turns out the matter is beyond my control.
    The company has a new show opening this weekend, and yesterday I called to snag a pair of tickets to review it. I left a message noting that nobody had sent me the customary press release about the show. Later, company director James Mitchell Gooden called back.
    “I didn’t send you a press release because I’d rather that you not come,” he said with his usual pleasant demeanor.
    “What’s up?” I asked.
    “Well,” he said, not at all spitefully, “I don’t need your help.”
    In other words, he wants some time to develop his company before potentially subjecting it to further negative reviews. P.T. Barnum said there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but Barnum was a hugely successful showman who could afford to welcome even bad press. Gooden’s company, only about six months old, isn’t that tough. So until further notice, you won’t have me telling you what to think about Top Hat. You probably won't have Kathy Allen, either.
    Actually, I’m rather pleased by this turn of events. Not only does it free up at least four hours of my weekend (including seeing the show, writing the review, travel time), but being “disinvited” by a theater must mean I’ve finally arrived as a critic. If I keep this up, I won’t have to bother going anywhere.

FEVER

posted by James Reel

    If you peruse the latest Tucson Weekly, you’ll see that I’m quite impressed by the Rogue Theatre’s production of Wallace Shawn’s The Fever, featuring J. Andrew McGrath:

    He veers from one subject to another; at the time, the transition makes sense, but a moment later, you can't remember how he got from the subject of ice cream to an anecdote about a woman who joined the guerrillas in the hills. He is sick. He is feverish. Something in him needs to be purged. …
    Cynthia Meier directs actor J. Andrew McGrath in a production stripped down to its absolute essentials. The Fever has been presented elsewhere with elaborate sound and light cues, even dancers. That's a mistake, I think; Meier wisely focuses our concentration on McGrath, because all the color and distraction we need exist in the feverish mind of his character.