TRIALS

posted by James Reel

    I had a couple of good nights at the theater last weekend, and you can read about them in the latest Tucson Weekly. First, something special for Easter:

    I am happy to report that my expectations had been dashed by the time I staggered out of Stark Naked Productions' three-hour mounting of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. This is only Stark Naked's second show, I hadn't seen the first, and although I knew producer-director Eugenia Woods to be experienced and sincere, I figured this would be a worthy but not entirely successful effort with a large and therefore necessarily uneven cast. And the play? A trial in Purgatory to decide if Judas really deserves to rot in hell for betraying Jesus and then hanging himself, with witnesses including Satan, Freud and Mother Teresa, plus a cameo by Saint Monica, a jive-talkin' momma whose favorite word is "motherfucker"? Obviously, we were in for an irreligious farce.
    I was wrong, wrong, all wrong. Not about Eugenia Woods being experienced and sincere; that's what enabled her to assemble a strong, well-directed cast and put on a show of very good production values. This is not some well-meaning, amateurish Easter pageant; it's a skilled presentation of a serious play.
    Oh, yes, the script ... I was wrong about that, too. Sure, it has plenty of jokes and funny anachronisms and exaggerated characters--Pontius Pilate is like a gangsta rapper, and Satan, expertly played by Paul Clinco, comes off like an oily Mob nightclub owner. But in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis asks serious questions about free will and God's forgiveness, and he doesn't foist any easy answers upon us.

    Those rogues at the Rogue Theatre have taken a mildly cynical play by Bertold Brecht and, by stripping away Brecht's contrived happy ending, have solidly affirmed the work's dark view of human nature. And that's all to the good, theatrically speaking, in a play that asks how one can be good in a society that abuses those who try.

RAPID PROGRESS

posted by James Reel

    Well, here’s a fine howdy-do. After arguing for a very long time about whether or not Tucson really needs a big new arena, and then becoming sympathetic to the Tucson Convention Center’s complaint that it can’t accommodate big conferences—sympathy that intensified about a month ago, when the biggest annual conference here bolted for Phoenix—the city council has all of a sudden approved a big new arena and TCC expansion. The trigger was pulled when, less than a week ago, downtown property owner Allan Norville (a longtime thorn in the city government’s side) unveiled his own arena proposal. That got the bureaucrats moving fast, rushing their own proposal before the public perhaps months ahead of schedule. A couple of weeks ago, when I was researching an article on TCC expansion for the Downtown Tucsonan, I asked my various sources if it were true that they were going to put a proposal before the council around the middle of this month (which is the rumor I’d heard). All they’d say is that they’d be going public “by the end of the summer.” Well, they even managed to get it done before the end of spring! Very interesting, what will motivate a bureaucracy.
    Now, of course, that Downtown Tucsonan article of mine is good for background, but it has no worth as a news story.
    Next question: Does earmarking all that money for the arena constitute a slap in the face of those at the University of Arizona who proposed gobbling up almost all the available Tax Increment Financing for a science center on the west side? (For more on that, go here and persevere.)

TASTY

posted by James Reel

    Apropos of nothing, I have just read television writer Jane Espenson's description of what she ate for lunch on July 26, 2006: "tongue sandwich from Art's Deli. It's exciting because it tastes you back!"

PS

posted by James Reel

    Regarding the silliness of the “death of the classical CD” stories, Alex Ross offers a reality check: He finds that the number of new classical releases listed in Gramophone magazine has nearly doubled since 1988.
    And regarding my complaint about the journalistic laziness of parroting the numbers from campaign finance reports, there is one good story to tease out of those filings: Who is giving money to whom? That’s the real story. But it takes work, and the reporter has to be able to figure out which names are tied to which special interests. In Tucson, the late Chris Limberis was an expert at this. How many other reporters are so determined today?

KILL THESE STORIES

posted by James Reel

    The Guardian has published yet another hand-wringing article on the death of the classical CD industry. Please, let’s stop this foolishness. Yes, the major labels—Sony, BMG, EMI, DG, Decca and a couple of others—went lemming on us and followed each other over the cliff of corporate stupidity. But that’s only a small part of the story. Hundreds of small labels, with good American distribution, are still issuing dozens of classical CDs every month, most of which are much more interesting and necessary than the slop the majors have been dumping onto the market for the past 10 to 15 years. Evidence? For starters, go here, here, here, here and here.
    And while I’m on the subject of non-stories, could the news outlets please stop devoting so much coverage to how much money various political candidates are raising? NPR tried to justify the obsession on a newscast this morning by explaining that fundraising is a barometer of a candidate’s relative political health. Well, in the first place, it isn’t. It’s a barometer of how much money a candidate can raise from fat-cat contributors, which is rather different from political health. Or it would be, if the news media didn’t take the lazy way out and parrot the numbers from the latest campaign finance statements instead of reporting on candidates' positions on actual issues of interest to the electorate. If news organizations insist on reporting on political fundraising, at least move that effort into the financial section, and stop pretending it’s real political coverage.

ELSEWHERE

posted by James Reel

    I’m scrambling to meet some writing deadlines, so in lieu of doing something original here today I’ll just point you to things I’m involved with elsewhere. If you’re a beginning to intermediate string player, you may have some interest in an article I put together on crossing techniques for Strings magazine. If you’re not a string player, the piece will be just too geeky and specialized for you. But you may find something more to your liking among the new reviews up at the Fanfare site, of which I’m the administrator. The first review on the page is even by yours truly. We’re working on a complete redesign of the site, because nearly everything you’ll see on that page is wrong in terms of contemporary Web design and ad display, but I didn’t design the site in the first place, so don’t blame me!
    Now, please pardon me while I try to write two play reviews and finish an article about Friederich August Kummer's cello duets while jockeying CDs here at the radio station, before heading off to take over the Tucson Weekly while the real editor is trying his best to create an international incident in China. Just don't tell my boss I'm doing all this writing on KUAT time.