DOWN IN THE DUMPS

posted by James Reel

    Drew McManus has released the results of his annual review of orchestral web sites, one area in which orchestras of almost any budget can compete on a level field. The Tucson Symphony’s site has dropped 22 places since last year’s evaluation; it’s ranked 62 out of 80 sites reviewed, and Drew awards it an F overall. The TSO comes out better than the Milwaukee Symphony, but worse than the orchestras of such metropolises as Dayton and Elgin. The top-ranked site, by the way, touts the Nashville Symphony.
    Drew’s criteria:

    Between 8/26/06 and 8/31/06, I examined 80 professional orchestra websites and ranked them by how well they presented their concert schedule, sold tickets, provided organizational information, facilitated making donations, and on overall content and functionality. …
    [Whether] or not an orchestra has a budget that accommodates professional graphic design and photography to create an aesthetic web signature isn't as important as simply allowing a graphical interface that allows users to easily absorb crucial information.

RETURN OF THE NATIVE

posted by James Reel

    I’m back, and pleased to be here. I’ve never had a vacation I didn’t enjoy, but in the end I’m always happiest at home. (The finale of this vacation wasn’t especially pleasant, though. After getting up around 5 a.m. Florence time, trudging all of five minutes in a light rain to a bus station to catch a ride to the airport, making an effortless two-hour hop to London, working our way through Gatwick with far less security-measure chaos than we’d experinced two weeks earlier, watching three pretty decent movies during the 10-hour British Airways transatlantaic flight, and landing in Dallas-Ft. Worth with the satisfaction that the journey was nearing its unremarkable end and without at any time involving a body-cavity search by over-eager security personnel, then, after all that, bad weather delayed our flight to Tucson more than three hours, and once we finally got back in the air and approached our fair city, we circled for a good 45 minutes waiting for somebody at Tucson International Airport to figure out how to turn the runway lights back on. We wound up being dumped in Phoenix, and caught a ride with another passenger who was renting a car and driving to Tucson immediately. We got home at exactly midnight—more like 9 a.m. the next morning, as far as our bodies knew—although our checked bags didn’t show up until dinnertime the following day.)
    Anyway, I’m still catching up and settling in, so no worthwhile blogging today, insofar as I ever do any worthwhile blogging. While I gather my wits, why don’t you amuse yourself with this classical-music quiz, which is tougher than it initially seems. (Warning: A few of the images display so small that you can only guess at what they are.) I am disappointed to report that I scored only 60 out of a possible 74, although the automated tallyer praised me for my astuteness nonetheless.

OFFLINE, OFF CONTINENT

posted by James Reel

    I’m absconding to Italy for my first vacation in two years, and I anticipate spending much of the next two weeks exploring towns in Tuscany so quaint and backward that they have no Internet connection. Or at least I’ll pretend they’re that quaint and backward, so I won’t have the slightest excuse to look for an Internet café and check my e-mail. I’ll be off the air and offline for the next two weeks, so you’ll have a chance to get a little better acquainted with former Phoenician Michael Dauphinais (who’ll be taking most, but not all, of my air shifts) and explore other fine Web sites, including the blogs in the panel on the right side of your screen.
    Oh, and don’t even think about breaking into my house while I’m gone. It’s guarded by an imposing dog and a tough house sitter, and we have many observant neighbors who are home most of the time.

GASLIGHT PHANTOM

posted by James Reel

    Thursday has arrived, and with it my last contribution to the Tucson Weekly before I abscond to Italy for two weeks. (The Weekly will have a three-issue break from me, because even though it’s a two-week vacation, I’ll be gone for three theater weekends.) So if I become the victim of some airline mishap and don’t return to theater criticism, what will my final TW utterance be? A Gaslight Theatre review. Well, there are worse ways to go; Peter Sellers’ last movie was not the superb Being There, but the following year’s execrable The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. Anyway, here’s how I ease into the Gaslight review:

    Gaslight Theatre started out nearly 30 years ago doing gentle musical spoofs of 19th-century Western melodramas. Over time, the company has branched out to parodies of 1930s adventure serials and more recent science-fiction epics, but its current show drops a load of fruit and nuts down closer to the theater's roots. The Phantom of the Opera may not be a Western, but it's the right period, and the source material doesn't need to be tricked up much to suit the Gaslight's peculiar needs.
    Writer-director Peter Van Slyke's adaptation has a bit more to do with the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical than with the original Gaston Leroux novel; in the beginning, the Phantom is clearly dangerous, but by the end, he's a sympathetic character, and everybody manages to live happily ever after, one way or another. (Come on, I'm not spoiling any surprises; surprise isn't what anybody goes to Gaslight for, anyway.)
    As you surely know, Phantom of the Opera is set in the Paris Opera House, and the extensive lake-soaked caverns beneath it. A mysterious, masked figure haunts the theater, intimidating singers and staff and meanwhile preparing an innocent young woman, Christine, for a brilliant operatic debut--not to mention for life as the Phantom's mate. Christine, though, has her eye on a dashing young count named Raoul. The Phantom is displeased. Various bad things happen, involving a crashing chandelier, a shocking unmasking and some questionable organ playing.

THE CRITIC BITES

posted by James Reel

    Via ArtsJournal, here’s a link to a Philadelphia Magazine article about perhaps the nastiest theater critic since John Simon, the locally (but not universally) reviled Toby Zinman of the Philadelphia Inquirer. I’d never heard of Zinman, but from what I’ve read of her own work and of her detractors this morning, she seems to be 1) a highly knowledgable, experienced theater critic 2) who tends to write either raves or, more often, pans, with little nuance in between, 3) and who regularly indulges a catty sort of cruelty. Her reviews can be great fun to read, if you’re not an actor or director or writer.
    A critic has to make honest evaluations of what’s on stage, but there’s usually no reason to get nasty. A review is not just a plot summary; indeed, I usually write as little about the plot as possible. It’s an analysis of all the various components that go into a production. And if a critic is going to serve a purpose distinct from that of publicist, the analysis has to be frank and even-handed. No special lenience for one’s friends, no vendettas against artists with whom the critic does not get along. Observe carefully, do whatever homework may be necessary, and evaluate in a way that will be meaningful to readers.
    Thumbs-up/thumbs-down reviews usually aren’t meaningful, because they don’t reflect the complexity of what’s on stage. In 18 years of reviewing concerts and plays and CDs (and, on occasion, films and dance performances and books), only a couple of times have I encountered something so bad that it had no redeeming qualities at all. Neither have I been compelled to write absolute raves very often, because perfection is a rare thing. Readers sometimes complain that there are too many shades of gray in my reviews, and they can’t tell whether I liked the show or not. Well, in the first place, aesthetics don’t usually come down to like/dislike, except for people who haven’t outgrown childish gut reactions. In the second place, why should you care, really, whether I like or dislike something? Isn’t it more relevant to you if I describe my perception of the positive and negative (and interesting and dull) elements of a production in a way that helps you decide if you might like it?
    Not long ago, an actor who was about to leave town got up the courage to say hello to me outside a theater. (How do these people recognize me? I try to keep a low profile.) He thanked me not for writing nice things about him, but for being fair, even when I’d been critical of productions he’d been involved in. That’s the most meaningful compliment a critic could hope for.

PLUCKED FROM THE JAWS OF DEATH

posted by James Reel

    I saw a summary of a New York Times article about a study at New Jersey's Morristown Memorial Hospital, where a harpist is stationed in the recovery room; the study is looking into the effectiveness of harp music as a healing aid for heart-surgery patients. First thing I thought was, “Those patients are going to regain consciousness and get the wrong idea.” Sure enough, here’s the story’s lede: “When George Moran woke up on Tuesday, he thought he had died and gone to heaven.”
    The first time I met harpist Yolanda Kondonassis, I sat down with her for a long interview for a magazine article. At the end, she thanked me for never bringing up the usual questions about the harp’s “angelic” nature. Surely harpists get sick of that association, just as they probably get tired of playing those endless arpeggios by composers who don’t know what else to do with the instrument. Too bad, because the harp is capable of a great many other things … and not every harpist is an angel.
    What instrument does not carry some unfortunate association? Until a couple hundred years ago, the trombone was regarded as the instrument of the devil; in the 20th century, thanks to its ability to play lewd glissandi, the trombone took up with strippers in the public mind (the saxophone also developed lascivious associations), while the violin became the devil’s instrument, thanks in part to Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat. People tend to hold “oboe” and “duck” in the same thought (thank you, Prokofiev), and Danny Kaye, in the song “Anatole of Paris,” popularized the notion that the oboe is an ill wind that no one blows good. As the butts of jokes, violists are the new Poles and blondes, and bassists and drummers don’t fare much better. Until the time of Bach, cellists were regarded as continuo hacks; real musicians played the viola da gamba. Despite the best efforts of people like Jean-Pierre Rampal, the flute is still regarded as an instrument for cute little blonde girls, not professionals. The bassoon struggles to overcome its image as the clown of the orchestra.. The trumpet has no setting below “11” on its volume control, and a horn concert is inevitably a clam bake. So what does that leave? The clarinet, I suppose, is the one orchestral instrument completely lacking negative connotations. It might be nice to wake up in a cardiac unit and hear a crooning clarinet, as long as it wasn’t playing some long, sustained note that made you think you were flatlining.