LIGHT AND LEAN

posted by James Reel

    Two completely different approaches to “theater lite” this week. First, there’s pure froth at Invisible Theatre:

    Jerry and Molly Schiff feel like the unluckiest people in the world. They're people who hate people who are overrunning their Malibu neighborhood on this fine July day en route to the wedding of Barbra Streisand and James Brolin.
    Actually, it's Jerry who's angry and resentful. Molly is merely annoyed by the noise. (News helicopters! Limos disgorging celebrities! Maury Povich in ugly shorts on the front lawn!) Jerry, on the other hand, sees this as a personal affront. He and Molly live right next door to Babs, and they haven't been invited to the wedding. True, their little house can't compare to the Streisand estate, to say nothing of the bungalow on the other side to which Drew Barrymore is adding turrets. No, their house is so modest that they've been reduced to living on the set of last year's Invisible Theatre production of Cookin' With Gus.
    Oh, did I mention that this is a play by Daniel Stern, called Barbra's Wedding? That it's the latest offering from Invisible Theatre? That it's a moderately funny account of a marriage that looks to be skidding into a loud divorce on the very day that Barbra is celebrating her nuptials?

    You can read my whole Tucson Weekly review here. Then there’s heavier fare, with all the fat and just a bit of the meat trimmed off:

    In its mainstage series, Live Theatre Workshop is presenting the comedy I Hate Hamlet. And when you initially learn what the company is doing with the real Hamlet in its late-night Etcetera series, you might worry that the hatred has been held over for the 10:30 show. More than half of Shakespeare's text has been wrenched away; many of the male characters have been turned into women; and there's a definite gay thing going on with Hamlet's buddy Horatio.
    Yet what's obvious once you're spun out of the theater after this intense, two-hour distillation of Hamlet is that just about everyone involved loves this play. The young actors are fully committed to every single line; the emotions are true; and director Adam-Adolfo's adaptation strips the script down to its essentials. This comes at the expense of some character development, but it does wonders for the trajectory of the plot. The paring is so smooth that nonspecialists in the audience aren't likely to miss any of the cut passages, except for the business with poor Yorick's skull.

    The rest of the review lies here.

MET AT THE MOVIES

posted by James Reel

    Last night, my wife and some friends attended the Loft Cinema’s screening of the Met’s high-definition “theatercast” of The Magic Flute. Here in Tucson, we’re on the frontier, which means it takes a few days longer for these newfangled innovations to reach us. Telegraph wires have limited bandwidth. Anyway, I stayed home to continue working my way through Crime and Punishment, but reportedly the affair was a rousing success, with something like 500 people filling the theater. (Not enough hors-d’oeuvres to go around, though, I hear.)
    So this morning people around town may well be thinking, first, “Classical music isn’t dead after all,” and second, “Arizona Opera must be getting pretty nervous with the Virtual Met in town.” But I think it’s too early to make either conclusion.
    First, last night’s screening was a novelty, and it involved a very popular opera. (Glynn Ross once told me that the biggest news to him after a few years of running Arizona Opera was that he could actually fill the house with a Mozart opera, not just the usual Verdi and Puccini.) If we had a steady diet of the Met on the silver screen, I wonder if 500 people would be showing up week after week for things like I Puritani and The First Emperor. Maybe they would, but it remains to be demonstrated.
    Second, should Arizona Opera worry that Met screenings would siphon off its audience? Well, that might be an issue if the Met were onscreen here every month, but that isn’t going to happen—at least, there’s no indication of that at the Loft’s Web site, although Phoenix is another story. (You’ll find the Met’s own HD theater schedule here.) Even if it were, I don’t think 30 years of Met telecasts on PBS have cut into Arizona Opera’s audience; if anything, they’ve stirred interest in seeing live productions—visceral, not virtual, opera. And after seeing a few screenings at a big movie theater, a lot of people would probably conclude that 1) the Met’s vocal roster isn’t as stellar as in days of yore, 2) its production styles are not to everyone’s taste, and 3) video tends to emphasize opera’s hokey nature, which is disguised somewhat by all the stage spectacle seen live at some distance in a real opera house.
    So it’s way too soon to make pronouncements about What This Means. Let’s just wait and see—and hope there’s more to see.

GAY CABALLERO

posted by James Reel

    Today in the Tucson Weekly, I review a show in which an actor modestly outperforms a playwright:

    On opening night of Arizona Onstage Productions' Talk of the Town, Brandon Kosters held the stage for 85 minutes as Johnny, a small-town Texas teen coming to terms with his homosexuality, his adoration of the Judds and his community's distaste for his sexual orientation.
    After the performance, playwright Paul Bonin-Rodriguez took a seat on stage and read from a sequel play, following Johnny through the end of high school. Same character, two quite different readings, and for the purposes of Talk of the Town, I think the playwright (a talented actor himself) must defer to Kosters' concept of the character.

    Read the entire review here.

NUTS ABOUT SCHUMANN

posted by James Reel

    Every year, cellist Harry Clark and I mastermind the Arizona Cultural Forum, which will be occupying my attention this weekend. Read about it here (but note that it’s Harry’s photo next to my bio). Our topic this time is Robert Schumann, Creativity and Mental Illness. We’ll have mental health professionals talking about Schumann’s malady and treatment, and how he would be treated today, probably with greater success (he starved himself to death in an asylum). We’ll have musicians, including Tucson Symphony oboist Lindabeth Binkley, soprano Jennifer Nagy and pianist Sanda Schuldmann, performing Schumann’s music. We’ll have artist Chris Rush talking about insanity and visual artists (Chris—you’ve got to get me those images to scan!). We’ll have a reading of David Rabe’s play Good for Otto, about life at a mental health clinic, featuring yours truly and a group of real actors, including Bill Epstein, Julia Matias, Carlisle Ellis and an excellent young actress who’s new to me, Veronica Blanco. And speaking of actresses, Margot Kidder (Lois Lane from the Superman movies some 30 years ago) is coming to town to be featured in Harry’s Schumann-oriented theater-and-music piece A Rare Pattern. We’re holding forth Friday and Sunday at Academy Village and Saturday at St. Philip’s in the Hills Episcopal Church, with evening performances at Hotel Congress Friday and the Tucson Botanical Gardens on Saturday. Here’s the schedule. I hope to see you there.

UNASKED QUESTIONS 4

posted by James Reel

    Both the Arizona Daily Star and the Tucson Citizen today report on the University of Arizona’s computer security breach, as detailed in a memo e-mailed to the campus community yesterday by UA executive VP and provost George Davis. Wrote the provost, in part:

    Last week, The University of Arizona detected unauthorized access into computer systems on campus, which temporarily has affected some services in three areas. Those areas include Procurement and Contracting Services (PACS), the Student Union and University Libraries.
    So far, no additional breaches have been confirmed, although we continue to scan systems throughout campus. The University first confirmed the unauthorized access January 2, 2007; some servers and computers appear to have been illegally breached at different times in November and December. Hackers installed software to store files (such as movies or games) on the systems, and may have attempted to access other information. At this point, no evidence exists that data actually were accessed in any way and no evidence exists of theft, including data theft, money theft or other.

    Both newspaper reporters made some calls and got some quotes, not just parroting Davis’ memo, and that’s good. But neither one connected a certain pair of dots. Earlier yesterday, Davis circulated another announcement (dated Jan. 5):

After 5 years of service, Professor Sally Jackson has asked to be relieved of her duties as Vice President for Learning and Information Technologies and Chief Information Officer (CIO) of The University of Arizona. In consultation with Sally and with President Shelton, I have decided to make this change effective immediately. From now until June 30, 2007, Sally will be serving as Senior Associate to me on core projects in Academic Affairs, following which she will return to her faculty position as Professor in the Department of Communications.

    That memo continues with the usual comments about Jackson’s fine achievements and how somebody will probably hold a reception in her honor, eventually. Now, the question the newspaper reporters should have asked Davis is this: Is there any connection between the computer breach and Jackson’s request to step down? After all, Jackson’s purview has included the UA computer network. Maybe she’s being punished (or voluntarily falling on her sword); maybe there’s no connection at all. But the reporters should at least have asked, and included in their articles the official answer, even if it was “absolutely not” or “no comment.”

CHINESE LEFTOVERS

posted by James Reel

    For weeks, I've been forgetting to post this, but here we go now. Tucson Guide asked me to write an article about the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center, and the history of Chinese immigrants in Tucson. That article appears in the current issue (not available online). Now, the rule of writing for magazines is that when you don't offer a sidebar, the editor will request one, and when you volunteer a sidebar, the editors won't be able to squeeze it in. With this article I submitted two sidebars on notable Tucson residents of Chinese heritage, and of course there was no space for them. I hate to let anything go to waste, though, so here they are.

ESTHER TANG
    Community leader Esther Tang was born here in 1917. Her father, Don Wah, had arrived before the turn of the century, and worked his way up to owning a bakery by the time Esther was born. She evoked Tucson’s Chinatown in Abe and Mildred Chanin’s oral history, This Land, These Voices:
    “I can recall they had a complex of … dilapidated little apartments. They were mostly single men who came from China, living by themselves and sending their slim earnings back. And their families in China thought, gee, we have to send all our sons and husbands to the United States. Literally they called it the ‘Gold Mountain.’ They didn’t realize their poor husbands and sons were really struggling. They didn’t know of the prejudices.”
    The Don household in which Esther grew up was hardly luxurious. “The store itself was small, perhaps twelve feet by twelve feet,” she told the Chanins, “and immediately at the back of the store there was a cloth curtain and, as you went in, there was a bedroom. We didn’t have many rooms and there were about three of us, I remember, in one bed … And, of course, we used chamber pots during the night, because we didn’t have any toilet facilities in the house.”
    Esther Don grew up, earned a degree from the University of Arizona, married David Tang, bought various commercial properties with her husband, and became one of the city’s leading community service volunteers. She was named Tucson’s Woman of the Year in 1955, and her name graces a plaza at the U of A.

SOLENG TOM
    Perhaps the greatest Chinese success story in Tucson is that of Soleng Tom, who arrived in America in 1929 at age 18 with no English and no money. He joined an uncle in Tucson, worked in laundries and restaurants, then in a market his uncle set up for him. He began to learn English by sitting in the back row of a second-grade classroom.
    Before long he’d earned a pilot’s license and been trained in aviation engineering. Tom served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. In the late 1940s he began to open a series of supermarkets—no more little neighborhood store for him. Eventually he expanded his flagship South Tucson store into one of Tucson’s first shopping centers, and developed many other business interests over the years,
    Soleng Tom won the race for mayor of South Tucson in 1955 until a “lost” ballot box turned up and handed the election to his opponent. Next he headed an anti-corruption campaign that led to the removal of four South Tucson officials (including the mayor), but then woke up one night to learn that his store had been torched, probably in retaliation.
    Beginning in the 1960s, he ultimately served five terms as president of the school district where, decades before, he’d sat in on that second-grade class. Soleng Tom died in 2000, a much-honored Tucsonan.