It has belatedly come to attention that there’s a very good article (by Kerri Allen, not by me) in last December’s issue of American Theatre about Tucson’s Borderlands Theater and its efforts to merge the arts and border activism. The article is rather hard to find on the Web, but I’ve done the legwork (fingerwork?) for you. The full article is here, but you’ll have to scrounge up the print edition to find an amusingly incorrect photo caption.
I see on the security monitor that one of the burly workers who has just arrived to renovate a room off the main corridor is swinging his arms in time with the Strauss waltz we're piping into the hall. Now, there's a scene to perk up a gloomy morning.
The 14th Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival begins this Sunday, and continues through the following Sunday. As usual, it keeps me busy; besides a couple of private gatherings for musicians and for board members like me, I’ll be MCing Thursday’s kiddie matinee, co-teaching an Elderhostel class on chamber music, and—of greatest interest (if any) to you—giving the pre-concert talks. I try to make these presentations more than just 20 minutes of potted musicology; I devote most of the time to interviewing festival musicians and composers, getting them to talk about things that aren’t covered in the program notes. If you’re coming to any concerts, please do arrive half an hour early for the free talks. Ushers close the hall doors while the talks are in progress to block noise from the lobby, but if you arrive late, please feel free to come in through one of the side doors and claim the nearest seat. I hope to see you there!
Yesterday, a fellow from the Music Critics Association of North America informed me that I’d been nominated to run for the organization’s board. After laughing myself into a coughing spasm, I accepted the challenge, even though I doubt I’ll be elected; probably no more than two people in MCANA know who I am. Most likely, the nominating committee compiled a list of members who paid their dues on time but hadn’t attended the annual conference in several years. It’s a scheme to get slackers like me to show up for the next conference, in late May, just in case we win and are needed at the board meeting.
I’ve been thinking about what sort of mission I might propose for myself as a board-member-at-large. I think I’d like to address two issues related to the same root problem: American newspapers are phasing out their full-time classical-music critics, and replacing them, if at all, with staff reporters who lack the assignment’s necessary expertise, or with freelancers who have no influence on the direction of coverage. So, first, I’d like to make sure that freelancers continue to see MCANA as an organization that is worth the annual dues that come out of their own pockets, not out of some newspaper’s expense account. Second, I think MCANA needs to conduct some aggressive membership and service outreach to nonspecialist newspaper staffers who get stuck with the classical beat, but don’t realize there’s an organization that can help them develop the credibility they lack.
Really, it’s up to the critics to set their own standards and police their ranks, because newspaper editors are proving incompetent at quality control. For the past few years, features editors have been chosen for their efficiency rather than their breadth of knowledge, and without that knowledge they can’t possibly judge the work of people on specialized beats. People who are color-blind can’t be trusted as interior decorators, but editors who are culture-blind are allowed to supervise cultural journalism. If anybody’s going to keep newspaper coverage of classical music from becoming a national embarrassment, it’s got to be the critics themselves.
Here’s a sensationalist item you’d expect to find in one of the British tabloids, but not in the respectable Guardian: Richard Wagner was a cross-dresser, maybe. This allegation is based on a previously unpublished letter in which Wagner orders a dress, listing its every frill and bow in great detail. Nowhere does he state that the dress is for his use, rather than for his wife, Cosima, and there’s no indication that he ordered it in his size, rather than hers. Wagner was a notorious micromanager, so I see no reason for him not to be intimately familiar with the specifics of female couture, along with so many other things. Maybe he was a cross-dresser, but this letter proves absolutely nothing. Let’s have some actual evidence. Didn’t journalists learn anything from the WMD fiasco?
And, by the way, if Wagner did enjoy slipping into a skirt now and then, so what? Defenders of his character have bigger things to contend with than supposed transvestism. This is an issue I just can’t care about, and I bring it up only as an example of press laziness. Shall we now have a little chat about cold fusion?
Maybe this lung infection is just making me intolerant. More than usual, I mean.
In the current Tucson Weekly, I review a late-night production of Neil LaBute’s rather slim Fat Pig:
Back in his student days, Neil LaBute must have heard the term "theater of cruelty" and decided to make it his own: not the violent shattering of false reality that Antonin Artaud had in mind, but something more literal, more petty and personal. LaBute has devoted his career to showing us what nasty little assholes we are.The full review is here.
LaBute is best known for his quietly vicious first two films, In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, but he's also quite an active playwright. By LaBute's standards, Fat Pig--the current late show at Live Theatre Workshop--is a tender romance, but LaBute isn't really cut out for a play revolving around two nice people. Malignant forces do go to work on our hero and heroine, but the whole thing seems just a bit soft. LaBute doesn't bite into his hero's soul; he just gives it a good, hard gumming.
James Reel's cranky consideration of the fine arts and public radio in Tucson and beyond.
