We in Tucson have long held that Phoenix is Arizona’s own Hellmouth, and here’s further evidence: A soprano engaged by the Phoenix Symphony for a concert opera is savaged by an army of bedbugs at the Hilton, no less. This is no place for entomologists; time to call in a slayer. The soprano's lawyer says, “She looks like a piece of wood that has been attacked by termites.” Which means she now resembles the average tenor trying to act.
One review and a two-in-one preview from me in the current Tucson Weekly:
Here's the secret to an effective portrayal of Hamlet: Put a potato in your codpiece.Find the rest here. Then, gazing ahead:
Or so claims John Barrymore. Of course, he's been dead for decades, and his notions are rather old-fashioned. Then again, Barrymore has recently materialized to coach the sort of contemporary actor who is probably beyond remediation: a television star. A well-placed potato may be the only possible improvement to this thespian's equipment.
Such is the acting class that is Paul Rudnick's I Hate Hamlet, which is enjoying a lovable production at Live Theatre Workshop.
Had your fill of wholesome entertainment over the holidays? Well, a new year has arrived, and theater producer Kevin Johnson hopes you've got enough of an appetite left to sample his own special kind of fruitcake.Here’s where you’ll get the whole story.
Here's what Johnson is serving up this week, from the test kitchens of his Arizona Onstage Productions:
First, there's Talk of the Town, a Paul Bonin-Rodriguez comedy about a self-described "sissy boy" coming to terms with his sexuality in a small Texas town.
Then, there's a special two-performance fundraiser featuring live music and a screening of a heady 2005 musical film called Reefer Madness, inspired by the famously campy 1936 anti-marijuana movie of the same name. This event is designed to pay off bills from earlier Arizona Onstage shows and help fund the rest of this season.
Violist Charles Noble has posted his New Year’s resolutions. Now, this fellow is a member of a very busy orchestra and a string quartet, but he’s issuing directives to himself that include “‘perform’ more” and “better integrate music into my life.” What he’s vowing, essentially, is that music will be more for him than a blue-collar-style job. His resolutions would well be adopted by musicians everywhere, and retooled for other people to apply to their own professions.
Because we don’t have enough relief announcers to provide full relief during the holidays, I wound up working on New Year’s Day. At least I didn’t have to come in for my usual morning shift, after an evening of quiet but rather late celebration; instead, I got the 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. slot. And because of that little time shift, I sometimes felt a bit lost.
I’ve been doing this job off and on since 1976, and this time around I’ve had the weekday morning shift for the past two years. I can pretty much do it in my sleep (and yes, sometimes it probably sounds like I am). I have a neat routine down; I show up around 4:49 a.m., reset the clock (it loses one second per day), cue up my first three CDs, look online for the weather report, check to see if there are any important composer/performer birthdays to mention, start lining up the various announcements I’ll have to read during the coming six hours, and away we go. I do a little simple math when each selection begins so I’ll know, down to the second, when it will end and not be caught by surprise. I know that NPR news will run from one minute past the hour to six past, at which point I switch to the local newsroom for a newscast that will continue until 09:30. I don’t have to pay attention to the clock during the news, because I know the NPR segment will end with 15 seconds of funding credits, and Robert Rappaport always begins his last story with the word “and”; I can always hear the end coming. The music is all programmed by somebody else, so the announcer’s job requires very little effort, once you fall into the pattern.
But the pattern of the afternoon shift is a little different, and that kept me off-balance yesterday. In the afternoon, we cut away from NPR news earlier, at the “This is NPR news” cue at four past the hour. No 15-second warning full of underwriting credits, just a rushed, unprepared outcue. At the end of the shift, we switch to a satellite music feed, which begins at exactly 6 p.m., not 6:01, the pattern I expect from the morning newscasts, and that really fouled up my calculations. Also, that feed, unlike the news, does not emerge from silence, so if I punch the button a second or two early (as I did yesterday), you hear a fragment of jabbering between my last word and the first word of the network host. Sloppy. Embarrassing.
Add to this the fact that yesterday was the first day we used a new log format (the log tells me what announcements and non-music program elements to run, and when). This new format is cluttered and disorienting—to describe it with words of more than four letters—and I felt that I didn’t know exactly what was supposed to happen next, even though it was laid out right in front of me.
The final problem: In radio, we use military time, which is not something I usually have to deal with because I’m gone long before the complications of the 24-hour clock kick in. But yesterday I was the afternoon guy, and I had to figure out what 15:41 meant in terms I’m accustomed to. It reminded me of a joke that floated around Yuma, where I spent my childhood. Yuma was home to both an Army and a Marine base, and the joke—although I never heard this on the air—was that disc jockeys would have to say, “For you civilians, it’s one o’clock. For Army personnel, it’s 1300 hours. And for you Marines, the big hand is on the 12 and the little hand is on the 1.”
Yesterday, I felt like a Marine.
James Reel's cranky consideration of the fine arts and public radio in Tucson and beyond.
