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.

UNTITLED

posted by James Reel

    Over at the NewMusicbox, the American Music Center’s Web zine (to which I have contributed on a couple of occasions), editor Frank Oteri wonders “why do so many composers still insist on numbering their works rather than naming them? … Sure, we're no longer living in the era of Haydn, Beethoven, and the gang where everything was either Piano Sonata No. 28 or Symphony No. 6, but this strangest of naming games has yet to completely disappear from our collective reflexes. … Why must [compositions] be named as if they were volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica?”
    Well, classical compositions can be about something beyond music, but often they aren’t. What purpose is served by assigning some fanciful title to an abstract work? A certain popular Beethoven piano sonata sounds nothing like “moonlight” to me despite its title (awarded by someone other than the composer); the nickname, at best, is just a faster way to refer to the work than Piano Sonata No. 14 in c-sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 2. The title doesn’t change the character or the content of the work, which exists independently of any description.
    Many compositions have been deeply inspired by some poem or story or character, and truly deserve to carry fanciful titles. Liszt first popularized this practice, although he was hardly the first to employ it; today, such composers as Michael Torke and Michael Daugherty almost always write music that refers to something beyond the score—color and texture, if nothing else, in Torke’s case. Some composers have devised titles and narratives for their compositions, but ultimately decided it was best to let the music stand on its own; Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 are examples of this.
    But what point is served by assigning some imaginative title to a piece of music merely as an afterthought? What, exactly, do titles like Structures and Synchronisms, so popular in the 1950s and ’60s, mean? Nothing more, I suppose, than that the works don’t follow some traditional structure like sonata or symphony, and aren’t written for a conventional combination of instruments, like piano trio or string quartet. Well, OK, except that such titles were so abstract as to be ultimately meaningless.
    In traditional forms, calling something merely “symphony” or “sonata” is fine by me; if words could adequately describe what music expresses, we wouldn’t need the music.

POP THE CLUTCH

posted by James Reel

    My right thumb is still a little numb this morning from yesterday’s cello practice. Obviously, I’m not following the advice I reported in a recent issue of Strings magazine, where the subject was playing with a tension-free bow hand. Here’s the beginning:

    THE FIRST TIME A TEACHER HANDS US a stringed instrument, we figure the tricky part will be putting our left-hand fingers in the correct spots to get the right notes. How hard can moving the bow with the right hand be?
    Well, as we discover the moment we first draw the bow across an open string, it’s not that simple. Then, as we try to get a decent sound, a lot of us tighten up that right hand, use the wrong pressure in the wrong direction, and start making noises that remind us that strings used to be made of catgut.