According to this site, mine was the third most popular male name in the year I was born, and according to this site, it was the top-ranked name in the 1950s (at least in the United States). And yours?
As a theater critic, I don’t write raves very often, so it’s somehow a little embarrassing that I enthuse this week over a silly little farce:
Gaslight Theatre's treatment of The Adventures of Robin Hood is by no means a straight-arrow affair. Writer-director Peter Van Slyke has pulled from his quiver one groan-inducing gag after another, yet by the end of his assault, his show has hit every mark precisely on target. Robin Hood is Gaslight's most consistently funny and entertainingly silly production in a long time.The full review is here, in the Tucson Weekly.
Van Slyke's first advantage here is that he doesn't have to come up with a plot of his own, and risk losing the narrative thread or letting it go slack. You know exactly what's going to happen; how it happens is where the inspired Gaslight lunacy comes in.
I keep forgetting to link to my articles in Strings magazine, at least those that are posted at the Web site. Here’s one from the latest issue, but I’m afraid it will be of interest only to beginning and intermediate string players; it starts like this:
Have you ever put bow to string and found, to your horror, that the instrument croaks like it’s had too much whiskey and a few packs a day too many? Where is that singing tone that made you fall in love with your stringed instrument? If you’re producing a sick sound, it’s time to visit a doctor—someone like Dr. Laura Talbott, who’s not an MD but assistant professor of violin and viola at Oklahoma State University. She knows how to cure your sound-production ailments.By the way, the editors moved that final period into the wrong position. In American usage, periods and commas ALWAYS go INSIDE quotation marks. NO EXCEPTIONS. EVER. Colons and semicolons, on the other hand, always go outside the quotation marks. The placement of question marks and exclamation points depends on the context.
There are about as many different varieties of sick sound as there are childhood diseases; let’s consult the doctor about just two of the most common maladies. She’s diagnosed them as “stressed-out sound” and “anti-sostenuto-itis”.
It occurred to me this morning that there’s one very consistent exception to my rule about applying the definite article to names of performances spaces, and I unconsciously alluded to it in my last post. Seems that if a space is called “hall”—just “hall,” not “music hall” or “residence hall”—and is prefaced by an individualizing name, it doesn’t take the definite article. Thus: Verizon Hall, Centennial Hall, Toad Hall. Although I can imagine somebody talking about an encounter with “the Monty Hall.”
Meanwhile, friend of the blog Michael Dauphinais sends this note about my admonition to use “theater” rather than “theatre”:
Your blog posting mentioning this spelling variant got me thinking. I was taught once upon a time that "theatre" was the general term for the art form and that "theater" was the building. Upon re-examining a few on-line dictionaries, I can find nothing to corroborate this explanation. Most sources seem to view the two spellings as interchangeable.I’ll let Michael’s message serve as this blog’s effort toward Canadian Spelling Day, at least for now. Anyway, the Associated Press style book (which is ignored by the stylistically peculiar and anachronistic New York Times) tells us to prefer the “theater” spelling in all instances, except when a theater or a company’s title uses the other spelling. “Theatre” is a Britishism (borrowed, like so many English words, from the French) that is nearly but not quite as pretentious in American usage as “centre” (employed here only by certain pretentious shopping and arts centers) and “amongst.” Please, fellow Americans, use these spellings only if you really want to look like an utter twit.
Perhaps you should have a British/Canadian spelling day on your blog? Think if the colourful language opportunities. Readers would have something new to analyse. It would be the cat's pyjamas.
On my way to the studio this morning, I heard C24’s John Zech introduce a piece being played “by Combattimento Consort of Amsterdam.” Apparently, C24 has banished from its satellite feed the use of the definite article (as well as the names of conductors; Zech pointedly omitted them from two other announcements during the 20 minutes I was listening). The disappearance of “the” is a worsening problem. I think it began with the movie Titanic, in which James Cameron was so busy writing stilted dialog that he forgot that people referred to ships with the definite article (think of Mutiny on the Bounty, or how on Star Trek—the original series—they talked about the Enterprise). These days, I’m running across copy all the time that drops the “the,” as in “a performance at Tucson Music Hall” or “Emerson Quartet will perform next week.” It’s as if everybody just got off the boat from some homeland where the articles are so bound up with gender, number and case that they’re too traumatized to bother with the very simple articles in English.
Here’s a simple rule for how idiomatic users of English ought to employ “the,” specifically in arts writing:
If the name of a composition, ensemble or place includes a generic term (such as “orchestra,” “consort,” “theater”—and note the proper American –er ending of that last word), preface it with “the.”
Critics never review plays before the official opening night, except when they attend that oddity called the “press preview” (which does not exist in Tucson). Nevertheless, I accepted an invitation from some people putting on a play who hoped for some coverage before the end of the show’s two-weekend run. They were confident that they’d have something good to present to me in their rehearsal hall, and they were right:
New House, New Dog is a new play by Tucsonan Toni Press-Coffman, billed as "a comedy about pets, painting and aging parents."Read the entire article here.
Well, the pets and painting are there mainly for alliteration; they're actually almost incidental to this play, which does, indeed, focus on how adults cope with their difficult, elderly progenitors.
And comedy? Yes, it's funny, but the humor is based on character and social interaction and reaction, not snappy jokes. And like the theater works of French Romantic playwright Alfred de Musset, Press-Coffman's comedy is just sufficiently uneasy that, by the end, it slides imperceptibly into drama.
The play opens this weekend; last week, I attended a run-through in a bare rehearsal room minus lights, music and any other stage trappings but the essential furniture and props. Because the production was a work in progress, it can't be subjected to a regular review. But, unfinished as the show was, the script, actors and director had already come together so securely that I'm already as enthusiastic about this work as I was about Press-Coffman's That Slut! (see "Sexual Healing," Sept. 4, 2003).
James Reel's cranky consideration of the fine arts and public radio in Tucson and beyond.
