BACK TO THE BOARDS

posted by James Reel

    It’s Thursday, and you know the drill: Here's your chance to peruse my punditry in the Tucson Weekly. First, there’s a review of a fascinating if flawed show at Beowulf Alley:

    Fiction, indeed, is the title of the Steven Dietz play now onstage at Beowulf Alley Theatre Company. Dietz's work usually winds up at Arizona Theatre Company, where it has always made a mixed impression. His adaptations (Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Over the Moon) draw out the more ludicrous and melodramatic elements of the source material, and they almost seem like spoofs, but spoofs without the courage to mock. His original plays (Rocket Man, Private Eyes) are more successful, but Dietz sometimes favors cleverness over content. Make no mistake, Dietz is very clever in terms of theatrical sleight of hand, but too often, he leaves his potentially rich characters straining to break out of his complicated outlines.
    Fiction is one of his most successful efforts yet produced in Tucson, but even in this 2002 work, he sometimes lets his characters down. Michael and Linda are baby boomer intellectuals who revel in their own intelligence, wit, character flaws and cultural prejudices. ("No bond is greater," says one, "than that of ecstatically shared hatreds.") In short, they are great fun to watch, but Dietz--abetted by the otherwise spot-on director Jennifer Bazzell and actors Leanne Whitewolf Charlton and Richard Ragsdale--can't summon the fortitude to make them thoroughly loathsome.

    Also, a preview of something I’ll review next week:

    Give Kevin Johnson a few more years, and he'll likely produce the complete works of William Finn. In the recent past, his Arizona Onstage Productions has presented Finn's musicals Falsettoland and A New Brain. There's plenty more Finn out there, including further Falsettos material and the recent hit The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. But for now, Johnson has something more modest in mind: a mere song cycle, taking as its subjects loss and life thereafter.
    Elegies--Looking Up is the almost oxymoronic title of the set, requiring five singers and a piano but, Johnson promises, no stools and nobody dressed in black, the clichés of similar plotless musical-theater revues.
    "It's a fully staged show," Johnson insists, "a combination of a song cycle and a theater piece. There's not a direct story line, but you get to know the characters in the show, and they end up interacting in the songs."

    And, finally, a review of something I previewed last week:

    Ken Tesoriere would like to introduce us to some women he knows. I'm not sure that he enjoys their company, but they haunt him. They are troubled women all, and perhaps too self-aware for their own good.
    Tesoriere wants us to meet them, but he doesn't necessarily want us to help them. He just craves some company as a psychological voyeur.
    Playwright and director Tesoriere has revived Coyote Ramblers Performing Artists, last seen here in the 1990s, and his first mainstage production upon his return to Tucson is called American Album, Volume One (Women on the Verge). It's an album in the sense that these are living snapshots presented for our inspection with no commentary or context beyond what we can guess from the pictures themselves. They are three short plays, each about a woman with deep, deep problems.

LISTENING VS. HEARING

posted by James Reel

    Blogger Patricia Mitchell muses on the news item I linked to earlier about how people seem far more willing to listen to classical music in their cars than in the concert hall:

I would like their definition of "listening" because I suspect listening in a car isn't the same as listening at a concert, or at home when one puts in a CD, sits down, and does nothing but listen. I really don't think many people know how to listen these days. But I'm mean that way.

    She has an excellent point. At a classical concert, you’re expected to sit down, shut up, and pay attention, and I think that’s a good thing. If you’re not prepared to do that, you can get your classical kicks in many other ways. No need to turn every concert into a party. But neither can we expect real attentiveness from people who hear music in more casual, distracting settings.
    And that, responding to a little question Patty poses about my post, is why I don’t think it’s an absolutely horrible thing that there’s so little new music on classical radio. Much of it just doesn’t work on the air; a lot of it isn’t even effective on CD if you’re listening at home. Some is quite complex, and some is simply too quiet to muscle its way past the many distractions of home and car. It demands to be heard in concert. On the other hand, there’s a lot of music that’s been composed in the past, say, 20 years or so that would work splendidly on the radio, because it has some sort of immediacy that can grab your attention without the result of that attention being a desire to turn off the radio.
    Still, there are listeners (or should they be called hearers?) out there who complain bitterly when we play anything post-Brahms. Some people even complain about Samuel Barber, who’s almost as Romantic as you can get in a 20th-century idiom, even in his thornier works like his Piano Concerto and Piano Sonata. As Patty, an oboist, might point out, Barber was capable of writing some marvelously romantic melodies, and he assigned some of his greatest effusions for the oboe; consider his School for Scandal Overture, and the slow movements of his Violin Concerto and Symphony No. 1. (If Patty has any objection to Barber’s Piano Concerto, I suspect it’s that the traitor gave the big tune in the slow movement to the flute.)