THE "GUYS & DOLLS" GUY

posted by James Reel

    In the newest Tucson Weekly I contribute a little preview of a new local production of an old standard:

    Putting on a musical is always some sort of a gamble, literally so when the show is Guys and Dolls, about professional gamblers and the women they love.
    Redondo Music Theatre's Hal Hundley is hedging his bets, though, by casting the show mainly with actors he's worked with many times in the past, in some cases going back to his days in charge of the Southern Arizona Light Opera Company (SALOC) in the '70s and '80s, and even before that to his association with Playbox Community Theatre.

    You can find the full article here.

TENSE CASE

posted by James Reel

    Does the Arizona Daily Star employ copy editors anymore? Here’s the lede from a wire story in today’s edition:

An elderly man is struck by a hit-and-run driver and as he lie there dying, thieves were making off with his groceries.

    “Man is struck” … “thieves were making off”? So the action starts in the present tense but before the sentence ends it was sliding into past imperfect? (Note to the humorless: I did that intentionally.) And then there’s “as he lie there dying.” Looks like somebody has been scolded too often about not knowing the difference between “lie” and “lay,” and has now eliminated the latter even from its proper usage.
    These are pretty basic errors, and they must have passed under the eyes of at least two copy editors and one page proofer, if things work the way they used to. Obviously, something isn’t working at the Star.

"PYGMALION" AT TOP HAT

posted by James Reel

    Top Hat Theatre Club doesn't invite critics to its performances, because when it was starting out its artistic director decided that the company's growing pains needn't be documented online for all to see, forever. So I haven't been keeping up with what Top Hat does, but a friend of mine, a savvy theatergoer, has returned from its new production of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion with this report:

This play is much more than the play which inspired My Fair Lady. IMHO Bernard Shaw set the standard for theater and music criticism. He liked what he called "a well made play," and when he wrote plays he followed his own admonitions. Pygmalion is decidedly well made, and fun, too, and the actors do it justice. James Gooden, artistic director of Top Hat Theatre, respects and admires Shaw, and it shows in this production and in his performance as Henry Higgins. Tony Eckstat turns in one of his best performances, as Pickering;  and Bruce Bieszki was born to be Alfred Doolittle. Nell Summers does Eliza proud. (Even knowing what was coming I jumped when Alfred startles Eliza by appearing where and when she least expects him.) Elizabeth Gooden is a convincingly proper housekeeper for Higgins; and Sarah MacMillan as his mother, convinces us that she love and respects him, but views with some justified alarm the prospect of his presence at her "at home."  Mike Saxon is a good surprise as Freddy. Allison Allison Bauer and Char Purrington, as Freddy's sister and mother, fulfill their roles. Edgar Burton and Bruce Purrington as Covent Garden stall keepers help establish English class society well. The actors do well by  English accents, too. Americans tend to work too hard at this and talk too fast; in this production they suggest the accents without being unintelligible. The Top Hat production of Pygmalion is a treat.

ALMS FOR THE CHORUS

posted by James Reel

    A reader sent this addendum/correction to my review of last week's Tucson Symphony concert:

The Tucson Symphony Orchestra Chorus is NOT a paid group. There are approximately 4 people per voice part who receive $500 per season to serve as section leaders with almost a hundred contacts of at least 2.5 hours per contact. That would be 16 out of 80 people, the rest are volunteers who are doing this solely for the love and joy of the music and of performing. All the singers are given a bottle of water for every performance. The soloists were paid NOTHING. You do the math. The administration and publicity department of the TSO does very little for the chorus as you could tell by what was and wasn't in the program.

    Well, from the very beginning the TSO folks have been touting this as a paid, professional chorus, and because money changes hands, there's a degree of truth in my statement that it's a paid group. Still, the information from my correspondent suggests that the TSO itself has been stretching the truth about the "professional" (that is, paid, not volunteer/amateur) nature of the chorus.

LEFTOVERS: HAL HUNDLEY

posted by James Reel

    I usually have to leave at least a couple of tidbits out of the articles I write. Here are interesting quotes without a home from Hal Hundley, who runs Redondo Music Theatre, and who directed a lot of shows in Tucson in the 1970s and ’80s; now, having returned to Tucson after several years away, he thinks some things have changed:
    “What I’m seeing, which I never saw in my earlier days, is that a lot of these little theater companies are very cliquish, very possessive of their actors, and don’t want them to go perform with other companies, which I think is ridiculous. I tell my actors, ‘Go out and do as many shows as you can.’ ...
    "This is our third show, so now I’ve had a pretty good turnout [for auditions]. The important thing to me as a director is I’d rather see just 25 good people than have to wade through 100 to get that same 25.”

REVIEW: BARRY DOUGLAS/TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

posted by James Reel

    There’s nothing less imaginative than a “Three Bs” concert—Bach, Beethoven, Brahms—unless one goes fishing around for some attractive oddities among those thrice-familiar composers’ works. That’s what George Hanson did last night to launch his 12th season as music director of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra. The first half held no surprises: the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in an incisive, controlled performance featuring Barry Douglas. The second half contained the unexpected items: Ottorino Respighi’s orchestration of Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor, and Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, again showcasing Douglas and including a cameo appearance by the Tucson Symphony Chorus.
    First it was necessary to suffer through 10 minutes of non-musical junk: an audience sing-along version of the Star-Spangled Banner—bad music imposed upon bad lyrics, badly sung—and a pep talk by the orchestra board’s president. Save it for the people who haven’t already bought tickets and need some persuading. Perhaps this was a subtle measure of damage control, as was the presence outside the hall of perky cotillion girls in their little black dresses, chirping “Welcome to the symphony!” to arriving (if scant) audience members. Management and its allies probably figured they had to do something to counteract the low-key, dignified presence of musicians outside the hall quietly publicizing their troubled contract negotiations, not to mention a recent article in the Tucson Weekly detailing the TSO’s ongoing financial trouble and its needless feud with the Tucson Symphony Women’s Association.
    What matters most to the public is what happens on the Music Hall stage, and last night’s music-making was exceptionally solid, though it held no real interpretive surprises. Hanson and the orchestra opened the Brahms concerto with well-judged contrast between the dramatic first subject and tragic-lyrical second. The violin playing was crisply articulated if not as juicy-toned as one might wish in Brahms, the woodwinds and brass blended into and emerged from the ensemble admirably and new timpanist Kimberly Toscano played with both forcefulness and control. In the first-movement climaxes, though, the lower string sound was poorly defined, and the orchestra didn’t achieve its proper fullness until the quieter second movement.
    As for Douglas, he got off to an arresting start with some powerful trills, but his approach to most of the first movement was patrician; until the outburst in the development section that brings back the first theme, Douglas’ manner would not have been inappropriate in the slow movement of a Mozart concerto. In the slow movement he produced greater variety of tone, pearly in the outer sections and stentorian in the middle. Only in the concluding Rondo did Douglas display the grand-manner extroversion you’d expect of a Tchaikovsky Competition gold medalist, and ultimately it seemed right that he withheld it until the finale.
    Respighi’s orchestration of the Bach Passacaglia, originally for organ, deserves to be played much more often. The original score lends itself well to the Respighi treatment, richer and more colorful than the Ancient Airs and Dances but less raucous than the Roman trilogy. It’s an expert orchestration that often evokes the organ without being hobbled to organ sonorities, and the TSO played it beautifully—here, at least, was the lush sound missing from most of the Brahms. It was a fine showcase of what an adept orchestra and sympathetic conductor can do.
    Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy has quite different requirements, and the performers met them well. It’s mostly the pianist’s show, and Douglas knew exactly what to do with this strange piece; his playing was effervescent and witty, not settling into the pomposity that can make the score seem like such a parody. Hanson kept the orchestral lines clear and balanced, and the choral work was excellent—dynamic and crisp. Given the orchestra’s financial trouble, it seems unwise to bring out the full, paid chorus for merely five minutes of work, but the performance was good enough to make one forget, just for a while, those unpleasant realities.