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.)

ORCHESTRA IN A BOX

posted by James Reel

    Via Artsjournal.com, here’s a link to a notice of a Knight Foundation study showing that all the trendoid things orchestras have been doing to lure new audiences are basically worthless. Note this:

    The report, which is based on both the experiences of participating orchestras and audience research in their communities, isn't all negative. It asserts, for example, that nearly 60% of adults said they had some interest in classical music, and nearly a third said it was part of their lives on some regular basis. Of that 60%, however, fewer than 5% actually patronized their local symphonies. (Even fewer, the research shows, buy the tickets, make the decision to attend, or subscribe--but let's not get bleaker than necessary.)
    So how are those interested adults—the broadest target audience—getting their classical music? More than half of them said they listened to it "at least several times a month" on the radio. They also own classical CDs—16, on average. The single most popular venue for listening is the car, then the home. It's not the concert hall.

    That’s good news for those of us in the radio biz. And, I hate to say it, but we could even get along fine if all the orchestras in the world shut down tomorrow. There are literally thousands of superb performances available on compact disc of the standard repertory and far, far beyond. Now, if orchestras did shut down, we’d have no way of playing new orchestal music on the air, but very few stations do that to any significant degree, so I doubt that anyone would notice. Not that I’m saying that’s a good thing; it’s just the way it is.

SUITE SUCCESS

posted by James Reel

    My cover story for the current issue of Strings magazine is all about Bach’s suites for solo cello. I myself don’t have much to say on the subject; I left that to the cellists I interviewed: Yo-Yo Ma, Jian Wang, Maria Kliegel and Suren Bagratuni, with some comments cribbed from Janos Starker’s liner notes for one of his recordings. (He didn’t want to be interviewed about Bach yet again, and told me to lift something he’d already written during the 60-some years he’s been involved with Bach.) The editor said he was quite pleased with the way this piece turned out (even though I delivered it six months late), and no wonder. It’s exactly what he asked me to do in the first place. I put the same set of questions, most of them suggested by the editor, to each of the cellists, extracted the most colorful answers, added a few transitions and a little background information, and there you have it. More like typing than music journalism, really; the interviewees did all the work. You can find out what they have to say about Bach if you follow this link.

WORD FACTORY

posted by James Reel

    Late yesterday afternoon I received an e-mail from the head of the Catalina Players advising me not to drive across town to see her play last night, because there’d be no performance. It seems that an inspector from Atria Bell Court Gardens, whose lovely little Academy Hall is home to the theater company, had just told them they had to move their stage back a foot and a half. This just before opening night. I don’t know both sides of the story, so I won’t comment on this odd situation, but I confess I was relieved not to have to go out last night. I’ve got plenty else to do. Between now and late Sunday afternoon, I must review two other plays and write two previews for the Tucson Weekly, edit an art review by Margaret Regan for the Weekly, finish preparing the index for a book about Arizona sheriffs, write a profile of violinist Jennifer Koh, and proofread two chapters of somebody’s dissertation. First thing Monday I need to start proofreading a book about arthritis, and start reviewing some CDs for Fanfare. Plus the usual fun and frivolity here at KUAT-FM. I’ll wave to you when I come up for air.

DRIVERS WANTED

posted by James Reel

    My theater review in the latest Tucson Weekly is, unusually for me, nothing less than a rave:

    There are times when an avid theatergoer gets so discouraged that staying home to watch TV actually seems like a viable option. Why venture out and pay good money to see yet another opportunistic jukebox musical, soullessly jokey comedy, half-hearted revival, or rough and underfunded new play that really needs to be worked over by a good dramaturg before it's ready for public consumption?
    But then some company presents a play that's heartfelt and true, perceptively directed, acted with profound understanding of the characters, and designed with such intelligence that the story and characters are supported and amplified by every detail of costume, set, sound and light. And then we remember why we should turn off the TV and take a chance on the theater.
    Arizona Theatre Company has mounted just such a production, a moving, funny, finely wrought version of August Wilson's Jitney.

    Read the rest here. And while you’re poking around the TW Web site, take a look at this week’s feature. It’s an excerpt from The Reaper's Line: Life and Death on the Mexican Border by Lee Morgan II. It's a book I edited, the memoirs of a recently retired Customs agent based in Douglas. The most hilarious bits didn’t get into the Weekly, but a couple of the more harrowing, gut-wrenching episodes did.