BLUE LEAVES

posted by James Reel

    Maybe I’m an absent blogger these days, but I do still drag myself out to review plays. Here’s the beginning of the latest effort in the Tucson Weekly:

    The older John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves gets, the less funny it seems.
    Around 1970, it started out as a black comedy, emphasis on the comedy, about a dysfunctional Queens household on the day the pope came to New York in 1965. When the Arizona Theatre Company mounted it in the 1980s, as part of its challenging (and, the fearful claimed, alienating) 21st-anniversary season, the emphasis fell a bit more upon the black than the comedy, although it still provided its share of laughs.
    Right now, in the Catalina Players' production, The House of Blue Leaves is seeming less like a comedy than like a bitter fantasy bordering on the surreal, populated by characters who are every bit as troubling as they are amusing.

WORDS OF WISDOM

posted by James Reel

    Oboist Patricia Mitchell has this to say about performing with an ensemble that’s hovering below her own ability:

The important thing for a serious musician to remember is that lowering one’s standards when playing in a less-than-stellar group is only a reflection on that musician, not on the group. It’s also a bad habit that can seep into one’s playing when in a better group. So I try to play my best. Every time I play. That’s all.

CULTURAL PROVOCATEUR

posted by James Reel

    Oops! I forgot to post a link yesterday to my contribution to the latest Tucson Weekly:

    Performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña has been billed as a cultural provocateur and as a radical.
    Gómez-Peña is in Tucson right now, stirring up artistic trouble courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art. He and members of his troupe, La Pocha Nostra, are conducting workshops for 15 like-minded artists, the results of which will be displayed and performed on Saturday, Aug. 11, at MOCA.
    Gómez-Peña is a smart guy (in the early 1990s, he received a MacArthur "genius" grant) and a quick thinker, so he didn't seem taken aback when I called last week with a rude question: What good is a radical artist in contemporary America, where even the supposedly liberal media are pretty conservative, and ideas that are even remotely progressive aren't taken seriously or given any real coverage in the mainstream culture?

WHAT'S COOKING?

posted by James Reel

    Courtesy of Sound and Fury’s AC Douglas, here’s a recipe I’m sure many of my musician friends would love to try, although they might choke on the result: How to Cook a Conductor.

HEAL THE PLANET

posted by James Reel

    Classical music may be better for the environment than rock’n’roll. So posits Greg Sandow. I’m willing to believe it, whether it’s true or not.

GONE FISHIN'

posted by James Reel

    Well, not exactly fishing. I’m scrambling to finish up several writing assignments before departing Friday morning for a weekend of snorkeling, sea kayaking and cycling in La Jolla. Fine dining, too … mustn’t forget that. No doubt I’ll be writing some stray article in the car on the way to California (yes, during the shift my wife will be driving) and e-mailing it to the editor from the hotel. Free wi-fi is a wonderful thing. Back on duty Monday.