posted by James Reel
Arizona Theatre Company is presenting Tuesdays with Morrie. It’s got a good director and two-man cast, but otherwise I’m not impressed:
The house lights dim, and the curtain rises on Morrie Schwartz, a popular but aged sociology professor at Brandeis University. Morrie does a loose-limbed little dance for us, and we sense that we should enjoy it while we can, for this is a play, and we are aware that by the end of the play, Morrie will dance no more. In about 90 minutes, this vibrant character will succumb to Beautiful Death Syndrome.
This is an extremely rare affliction limited almost exclusively to characters in plays and movies. Symptoms include suddenly heightened levels of forgiveness and sagacity, concurrent with a gradual physical decline that does not preclude projecting the voice to the balcony. Blessedly, cases of Beautiful Death Syndrome almost never involve disagreeable discharges from various orifices, soiled sheets, foul odors, sunken facial features, long bouts of unconsciousness, anger, bitterness, fear or crying, except among other characters and the audience. The victim of Beautiful Death Syndrome merely gets weaker and weaker, and expires with quiet dignity after uttering a few final profundities.
Often, we last see the victim of Beautiful Death Syndrome posthumously, in an uplifting image that may involve dancing in a golden light far upstage. For now that he has passed away, he is going to a Better Place: the cast party.
The review continues on to production specifics
here.
More to my liking is
Conjunto at Borderlands Theater:
We know about Mexican and Mexican-American farm workers, and we know about the scandalous internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. But we rarely see those stories intertwine, as they surely did 60 years ago.
Intertwine they do in an Oliver Mayer play aptly titled Conjunto. The word means "united" or "conjoined," and that's precisely what happens to his characters, though none too easily, in a fine new production at Borderlands Theater.
"Conjunto" is also a style of music popular among the working class of Texas and Northern Mexico; in our area, the accordion-driven music is better known as "norteño." This particular music has no place in Mayer's play--instead, we hear 1940s pop hits, singing cowboy Gene Autry and charro cantor Jorge Negrete--but it's relevant in that it's music of and for people who toil, especially those bent close to the earth.
Such are the characters in Mayer's play.
The rest awaits you
here.
tucson-arts,
April 27th 2006 at 6:53 —
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posted by James Reel
Here’s what I’ve done since Friday afternoon:
1. For myself: I started working in a new key (F major) and third position on the cello. If I keep at it, in a few months I’ll be able to play ineptly in all 24 keys, all over the fingerboard.
2. For my bank account, and by extension my household: I edited two articles by Margaret Regan for the coming issue of the Tucson Weekly, finished a little proofreading job for a guy who’s writing a book on local train history, updated the Fanfare Web site in my capacity as the magazine’s webmaster, and reviewed two plays for the Weekly.
3. For my friends: I gave the pre-performance talk Sunday afternoon for the season’s final Chamber Music Plus Southwest presentation, so my pal and cello teacher Harry Clark would have a few more minutes to change from his Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops into more appropriate concert attire, and his wife, pianist Sanda Schuldmann, could chat a few more minutes with actor John Rubinstein, who’s full of good stories about his father, Artur Rubinstein.
4. For my community: I spent Saturday morning working with a group in my neighborhood that’s cleaning up and restoring a little section of Anklam Wash, where many of us walk our dogs and frolic in various ways. With a grant from PRO Neighborhoods, we’re building a series of trincheras, or little rock dams, along two major erosion channels. The trincheras will slow the flow of rain runoff entering the wash and allow silt to build up behind the rocks. This will repair the erosion damage, give the water a little more soil to soak into along the way, and provide growing space for native plants, which will themselves help control erosion. It’s a technique that’s been used in this region for centuries, though not by contemporary civil engineers.
I don’t often accomplish something in every category in a single weekend, so I’m pretty satisfied with the way the past few days have turned out. Except that I didn’t have a chance to read for pleasure, do the ironing or go grocery shopping. Ah, well … a new week begins.
quodlibet,
April 24th 2006 at 7:51 —
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posted by James Reel
About three months ago, Sony unveiled its newest supposedly revolutionary gadget, which it calls the Sony Reader. This is the latest variation on the e-book, a portable electronic device that can download, store and display thousands and thousands of text pages, until the battery dies. (Let’s hope Sony Reader batteries are easier to replace or recharge than the iPod’s.)
Various iterations of the e-book have been around for years, but the technology has never caught on. Perhaps the Sony Reader has overcome the gadget’s many inadequacies, but I doubt that I’ll be investing one anytime soon. An essay I wrote in the late 1990s, at the height of extravagant claims for the inevitable primacy of electronic storage and display over the traditional book, is now a bit dated, but I still hold to these near-Luddite opinions:
HOWEVER MUCH NOISE anti-intellectuals and bookburners make, they never have the last word.
In the year 415, a powerful Roman redneck named Cyrillus ordered a Christian rabble to lynch the pagan philosopher Hypatia. After nearly three more decades of failing to win anybody's Mr. Congeniality contest, Cyrillus himself succumbed in 444. A bishop of Alexandria eulogized the old bastard in remarkable terms: "At last this odious man is dead. His departure causes his survivors to rejoice, but is bound to distress the dead. They will not be long in becoming fed up with him and sending him back to us. Therefore, place a very heavy stone on his tomb so that we will not run the risk of seeing him again, even as a ghost."
That's my favorite anecdote from Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading (Viking, 1996). Manguel has little to say about the future of reading, but the very act of retrieving that anecdote tells us much about the resilience of the book against an onslaught of electronic innovations.
When I went searching for that lovely eulogy, I couldn't remember the names of the principals involved, so the volume's index was no use. I did, however, recall reading the passage at the top of a left-hand page a bit more than halfway through the book. With a few pageflips, I found the spot.
It would have been much more difficult to locate the story onscreen. Because I couldn't recall any useful keywords, the software's "find" mechanism would have been as useless as the book's index. And because each online chapter would be one long page of scrolling text, I'd have no visual memory of the anecdote's location.
For those of us who return to texts with only vague notions of what we seek, the book remains the most accomodating random-access storage device. Its strength lies in its physical limitation--the text's segmentation into pages , which fence off blocks of words into manageable little realms defined by "top" and "bottom," "left" and "right," "before" and "after," "crisp" and "stained" and "dogeared." It's like getting your bearings in the American Southwest: You may not know your precise coordinates, but you define your place in relation to the mountains ahead, the mesa to the left, and the sage-choked plain behind.
By comparison, an onscreen search is no more scenic than a Kansas country road. When your keyword pops up in obviously the wrong passage, there's no need to linger; clicking with annoyance on "find next" resumes the quest instantly and whips you to the next monotonous field of words without context.
With a book, even failure can be rewarding. You expect your visual search to be inefficient, so you conduct it with greater patience and an open mind. The eye, as it skims down a page, continually snags on the unexpected and the half-remembered. You may not find the passage you seek, but at least you are enriched by the distractions along the way.
Now, the computer is undeniably the vehicle of choice for rapid, no-frills delivery of a narrow range of information. Newspapers, magazines and reference volumes don't stand a chance against the Internet and CD-ROMs. The computer user, like the harem eunuch, knows that certain advantages fall to the swift and sterile.
When we're lucky, we can obtain just the right nugget of knowlege in less time than it would take to phone a reference librarian. But too often we are crushed beneath the wheels of the latest Web search engine. Our amateurish queries return a deluge of close-but-not-quite-right citations--an infoblitz so intimidating that we give up after the first 10 dead-end links.
Yet how much easier it seems to go blundering through some weighty tome off the shelf--the 3,400 pages of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, perhaps. Gibbon is finite, fringed by endpapers and enclosed by covers. The Internet has no comparable boundaries; we are more readily frightened by its mass of information, and more readily outraged by its omissions.
And we are more quickly defeated by its anti-linearity. If you try to go browsing through a document's hypertext links, you are led away from the information you want, and mired in irrelevancies and ephemera. A book, too, may lead you astray, but only within a narrow field--that bounded by its covers.
Curious, that accident is the delight of book-reading but the scourge of online life. It is again a matter of boundaries, of visible and tactile definition. We hold a book in our hands, and we feel that we control a small, riotous component of the universe. We squint at the computer screen, and feel that we teeter over a black vortex of equal parts knowledge and sludge.
Hardware developers are well aware of all this. Within a very few years, our portal to cyberspace won't be a box on the desk. It will be a battery- powered palmtop computer, with a relatively big glare-resistant screen and a CD-ROM drive and a port for cartridges providing high-speed wireless connection to the Internet. The thing may slip into a backpack, rest in an open hand, or, when necessary, prop up a short table leg. In other words, it will impersonate the book.
This evolution is mainly cosmetic. It won't eliminate the terrors and vexations of cyberspace. But it will enclose them in one of terraspace's most practical and therefore most enduring forms.
You can strike out at the book by destroying its creators, as Cyrillus did Hypatia, or by creating an alternative information storage and delivery system. But we will not readily forsake bound printed pages. During the past 500 years, they have become integral to our concepts of both research and relaxation. We may find diversion at the computer screen, but nothing is as rewarding as curling up on soft cushions with a comforting drink, a warm mammal, and a good book.
quodlibet,
April 21st 2006 at 7:31 —
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posted by James Reel
I heartily approve of both productions I review in the latest Tucson Weekly. And yes, I very much like the performances in She Loves Me at the UA, even though the score is, regrettably, forgettable:
She Loves Me was the last middling success (only 303 performances--not a spectacular run) of composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick before they endeared themselves to audiences forever with Fiddler on the Roof. Now, Fiddler was an anomaly for Bock; that show was full of generously lyrical, instantly memorable songs, most of which drew explicitly from Jewish folk music. Nothing Bock wrote before or after that was nearly so compelling.
And that includes She Loves Me, a beguiling show full of charming characters and abounding in pleasant music that does what it needs to do quite ably until the houselights come up, whereupon the melodies evaporate from your mind before you've gotten through the lobby. It's as if Bock had reached into a trunk labeled "showtunes," sprinkled them with a little paprika (the story is set in Budapest) and left it at that without putting his soul into the work.
I even more heartily recommend the new offering at Live Theatre Workshop, even though it may start past your bedtime (curtain is at 10:30 p.m.). It’s a crisp, intense, short three-character play called
Tape, and first among many good things about this production is one of the two male leads:
Now it's official: Christopher Johnson is one of this city's finest young actors.
Over the past few seasons, he's grown a little with each role he's taken on, and in the past year-and-a-half, he's done some remarkable, harrowing things on stage: taking on two conflicting characters in one, simultaneously, in Titus Andronicus, and playing a gay (but not camp) Jesus in Corpus Christi. Now he has his best role yet, not as flamboyant as those others, but far more real, and demanding a greater emotional range.
Read the rest
here.
tucson-arts,
April 20th 2006 at 7:03 —
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posted by James Reel
An article in the Chicago Tribune describes outrage among Chicago’s jazz-establishment personalities over news that the city’s three bundled public radio stations will switch from music programming to talk in early 2007. People seem especially upset over the loss of the jazz and world music format of WBEZ-FM. Details so far are nonexistent, but the article has this from WBEZ/WBEW president and general manager Torey Malatia (who worked in Phoenix in the 1980s, when that city had a commercial classical station): “WBEW will be focused ‘heavily [on] culture and music and arts’ … while WBEZ will offer ‘mostly public affairs [with] arts and culture certainly mixed in as relief.’” All talk, but it won’t all be about the events of the day.
So first, the good news is that the two stations won’t be duplicating the same network news/talk programming, as is happening in Washington, DC. There are legitimate questions about whether the stations can serve culture better by playing it less and talking about it more, but the more serious question is how will this serve Chicago listeners? According to the article, WBEZ “draws 600,000 listeners,” although it’s not clear exactly what that means in terms of individual sets of ears over a particular period. Still, the number sounds pretty impressive: Imagine everyone who lives within the Tucson city limits tuning to the same station. But it doesn’t seem like all that much for a city as big as Chicago, particularly with its long jazz heritage. Is jazz simply too much of a niche genre? Has the station been playing the wrong kind of jazz? Does the presence of world music turn off hard-core jazz fans, or attract more listeners who aren’t that committed to jazz?
These are issues that Malatia has presumably been thinking hard about. Let’s just hope that whatever changes come to pass are being made to serve Chicago’s underserved listeners better, and not merely to trade the current audience for new listeners who will give more money during pledge drives.
radio-life,
April 19th 2006 at 7:21 —
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posted by James Reel
Rich Russell objects to radio announcers promoting classical music as “relaxing,” and so do I. What Rich probably doesn’t realize is that there’s a widespread, consultant-generated effort among radio stations to assure potential listeners that classical music is “relaxing”—hence, not threatening—because a survey taken a few years ago revealed that many people used that very word to describe the music. (Whether they came up with that term on their own or it was one of several loaded expressions offered by the canvassers is unclear to me.)
Our music director, Steve Hahn, mentioned in a staff meeting a few weeks ago that more recent interpretation of that research indicates that people don’t really believe that classical music is relaxing, it’s just a convenient word they use to set the music apart from the high-decibel assault of even the most innocuous pop music today. So all they mean is that it’s “different,” perhaps less invasive, than certain other kinds of music. Well, maybe that’s a little closer to the truth, but Beethoven symphonies and Carmina Burana—some of the most popular classical works among people who don’t count themselves as hard-core classical fans—are in their way just as invasive as any stadium rock band. Sure, there’s plenty of aimless classical piffle out there (the Elgar Violin Concerto, anyone?), but anybody who thinks that classical music on the whole is “relaxing” just isn’t paying attention.
But then, how many people really sit and pay attention to the radio anymore?
radio-life,
April 17th 2006 at 6:47 —
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