A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

posted by James Reel

    As part of its triage effort to stop our orchestras from hemorrhaging audiences and donors, the American Symphony Orchestra League has taken the bold step of—changing its name! Beginning this fall, the professional association and advocacy group will be called the League of American Orchestras. According to a press release issued yesterday:

For the past three years the American Symphony Orchestra League has been engaged in an intensive planning process, more comprehensive than any such effort in the League’s 65-year history, involving extensive consultation throughout the orchestra field and beyond. From that process a strategic direction and implementation plan have emerged that will enable the League to transform itself to better assist orchestras with the innovation, training, research and development, leadership, and advocacy they need. The League of American Orchestras name fits in with this broad new vision of a revitalized and re-energized League.

    Certainly, the League’s image will improve with the abandonment of an acronym—ASOL—that looks and sounds like “asshole.” In contrast, “League of American Orchestras” makes one think of a band of comic-book superheroes. Now, that’s how to appeal to a younger audience.

TOM MACHAMER

posted by James Reel

    Back in the early 1980s, the local news didn’t have to wedge into little slots in Morning Edition and All Things Considered, as it does now. (KUAT-FM doesn’t carry those programs, but our local news is simulcast with KUAZ, which does.) Newscasts back then lasted a full 15 minutes, give or take a few seconds (there’s no leeway now, when they have to mesh precisely with NPR). Our news director at that time, Tom Machamer, had a very relaxed attitude toward timing. He would always amble his way 20, 30, 45 seconds beyond the formal endpoint of the newscast, intruding into my four-hour block of music. This annoyed me a little, anal-retentive person that I am, but I never made an issue of it. For one thing, it just didn’t matter. For another, I saw no reason to make trouble for Tom, who was an able newsman and a very nice guy. That wasn’t just my opinion. Steve Jess was a KUAT news producer back then; years later, when he became Statehouse News Bureau Chief for Boise State Radio, someone asked him who his mentor had been, and Steve answered, “The news director Tom Machamer in Tucson, Ariz. was an incredible people person who had a gentle way of dealing with people. I try to follow his example personally and professionally.” (Go here and scroll down to Page 6.)
    Tom left KUAT many years ago to do missionary work with his church. His work had taken him to Fiji; I just learned  that recently, he had finished building a house for someone, went snorkeling, then began to feel tired and came out of the water. He died of a heart attack on the beach.
    The process of dying is often ugly, but passing quickly on a Fiji beach, relaxing after doing public-service work? I can’t think of a better way to go for a nice guy like Tom Machamer.

SIMON SAYS

posted by James Reel

    Here’s my latest screed from the Tucson Weekly. This time, two Neil Simon plays, each of them actually pretty decent (this from a critic who dislikes most Neil Simon), and benefiting from excellent production. Here’s the lowdown on what’s at Live Theatre Workshop:

    Neil Simon is a hugely popular playwright, but not a consistently good one. Although he's celebrated for his comedies, the plays that draw from the more serious episodes in his own life feature better-drawn characters and elicit a more sincere interest in what happens to them. Broadway Bound, now playing at the UA, is a good example of this, and so is Chapter Two, at Live Theatre Workshop.
    Chapter Two documents Simon's devastation upon the early death of his first wife, his unexpectedly fast courtship of actress Marsha Mason and the expectedly difficult first weeks of their marriage. This being a Neil Simon play, we expect the characters to overcome their problems and live happily ever after; little did Simon know when he wrote this in 1977 that he and Mason would be divorced within five years. If Simon had written Chapter Two after that failure—when he was well into Chapter Three of his life—this play would surely have been darker, or at least more wistful. What he gave us is pretty good, although it shifts awkwardly from Simon's usual clusters of throwaway laugh lines to quiet domestic drama, and doesn't really prepare the secondary characters for the transition.

    The rest lies here. Now, on to the aforementioned university production, which is even better:

    The UA's Arizona Repertory Theatre and its earlier incarnation have mounted some impressive large-scale projects in the past decade or two: Nicholas Nickleby, The Kentucky Cycle, Henry IV 1 and 2, The Cider House Rules and maybe one or two others I am by now too stunned to remember.
    I wouldn't put it past them to put on Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy as soon as they can get the rights. Probably the only thing stopping them from launching August Wilson's 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle is that, as Richard Pryor once observed, there are no black people in Arizona, and that presents a severe casting problem.
    You might not be inclined to include in this august company Neil Simon's three plays documenting the maturation of his alter ego, budding comic playwright Eugene Jerome; the Simon plays hold to a more intimate physical, emotional and, yes, intellectual scale. Yet with Broadway Bound, the concluding installment in Simon's cycle, Arizona Rep's town-and-gown team has again displayed the talent and sustained commitment to match its ambitions.

    You’ll find the full review here.

CRITICAL CONDITION

posted by James Reel

    Here are two related items one can find while trawling ArtsJournal.com, both relating to the wholesale sacking of arts critics at American newspapers these days, after years of more gradual and subtle dumbing down of arts coverage. First, Michael Kennedy, a Twin Cities high school teacher and sometime theater director, pleads for the place of critics in newspapers and society in general, noting along the way that what passes for criticism in Minneapolis now revolves around media ephemera and big events from big presenters:

    Yes, we have the smaller venues, but do you hear about them very much? Not really. We hear more about television shows, movies, traveling Broadway shows and what to wear to a nightclub than we do about the fine arts in the Twin Cities.
    This city is in a quiet artistic crisis. With all of our small theaters, small galleries, music groups, dance companies and literary venues, we should be getting clear, serious criticism. We should have people working full time covering all of the theaters they can seven nights a week. There are tons of art galleries that most people have never heard of. Musical groups are everywhere.
    We need the critics. Their opinions are one thing, but the fact that they can go into these small places, consider these artists and watch these performances says that the arts are a serious part of this community.
    But the critics are fading away because of corporate decisions in the newsrooms, and along with those critics go the arts.

    Now turn to the Wall Street Journal, where Greg Sandow looks at the problem from inside the newsroom, and blames those on the outside:

    Who reads classical-music reviews? There's been a decline of interest in classical music, especially among younger people. One sign of that is the aging of the classical-music audience, which (as measured by the National Endowment for the Arts and by private studies) has been going on ever since the 1950s. Do newspapers survey their readers? What if they found—just as we did at Entertainment Weekly—that not many people read their classical reviews? What if the editors themselves don't listen to classical music?
    This, I think, is where we are now, though I don't have reader studies to back me up. How should people in the classical-music business react?
    The last thing they should do, in my view, is blame the press. "Newspapers don't care about art or culture!" people cry. But I'd turn that around and ask if people in the classical-music business really understand the current state of our world. Because here's something else I learned back in the '90s when I talked to those opera-company publicists. One thing any publicist wants is advance coverage, preview articles about whatever's being publicized. Once, the opera publicists said, they'd get these automatically. But that had stopped. "You're doing 'La Traviata'?" an editor might say. "You did it three years ago. What's the story now?"
    For orchestras, this could hit even harder. "You're playing Brahms? You played Brahms last week!" Classical music can look predictable to the outside world, and (to be honest) not very interesting. Same old, same old. Great classical masterworks, played by acclaimed classical musicians.
    So the classical-music world needs to look at two things: what it offers and how it talks about what it offers. Why are we playing Brahms? What does Brahms give us that Mozart, Feist, or Bruce Springsteen can't? And how, exactly, is this week's Brahms performance different from last week's?
    Some classical-music institutions are learning to answer these questions. But as for the many that haven't—in an age when new arts groups compete for coverage and popular culture keeps getting smarter—why should they expect any press coverage at all?

    Well, Greg is largely right. Back in my daily newspaper years, I gave up on writing opera previews because they turned out to be the same articles about young American singers with the same bland stories performing the same operas that have been performed for decades. Same problem for orchestral concerts. Cookie-cutter soloists aside, there are always interesting things to learn about Beethoven and Brahms and their music, but how can arts journalists convey any of this if the performers aren’t putting the old warhorses into some sort of interesting context, rather than sleepwalking through the usual one-from-Column-A and one-from-Column-B programming format? Arts writers can’t find an interesting angle if the presentation is flat.
    But Greg overlooks something important: It doesn’t matter if a small percentage of subscribers read arts coverage, because the few who do tend to be a paper’s core readers, those who will stick with the paper, renew their subscriptions, pay attention to what they’re reading, always be reliable while the flighty single-copy buyers come and go.
    The business and, yes, sports sections—entire sections!—also appeal to minority interests, and they’re full of mysterious jargon. Yet they’re hardly being eviscerated like the arts units. Why? Because, contrary to Greg’s support of newsroom managers, today’s newspapers are run by uncultured idiots.

ATC GOES BEDDIE-BYE

posted by James Reel

    This just in from Arizona Theatre Company:

Arizona Theatre Company gets bright and brassy, sexy and sassy with the addition of a brand new revival of the classic Broadway musical The Pajama Game to its 2007-2008 season. … ATC’s all-new production of The Pajama Game replaces the scheduled run of Mask. Due to unexpected scheduling issues with other projects for the creative team of Mask, that project cannot happen at this time.

    “Unexpected scheduling issues”? Is that the theater equivalent of bureaucrats and corporate officers leaving their jobs in order to “spend more time with their families”? Sounds ominous in its innocence.
    Honestly, I wasn’t sure I was looking forward to a musical version of the good, unpretentious movie Mask; what would it turn out to be, some kind of Phantom of the Trailer Park? And Cher is in retirement again, so what’s the point? That aside, how, exactly, can the 1954 Pajama Game be considered a viable substitute? The two musicals occupy utterly different universes. (Oh, and “brand-new revival” is supposed to make this old show seem fresh?)
    A much better replacement would have been something like Urinetown, except that’s on next season’s schedule at the University of Arizona. Or if ATC was in the market for a classic musical, how about the greatest of all American operettas: Candide? Oh, wait, they’re doing that at the UA, too. Hmm …

WITH FANFARE

posted by James Reel

    Among my several income sources—it takes several to make a living as a freelancer—is Fanfare magazine, for which I write CD reviews and features, and also serve as a sort of Webmaster. I don’t think of myself as a real Webmaster, building and repairing the site's structure; I’m more like a gardener, transplanting bits and pieces of the magazine to the Web site. I took over the job from a fellow who had just died, and who had designed the site back when it wasn’t expected to be much more than a billboard advertising the availability of subscriptions to the print edition. These days, a site has to be much more than that, and now Fanfare’s is, thanks mainly to the work of my more tech-savvy colleagues Celeste and Pete Stokely. A few days ago we went live with a completely new design, and lots more reviews available on a rotating basis to non-subscribers. I’ve been plotting several new features to roll out one by one in the coming months, but already the Stokeleys have made a very successful overhaul. Please pay it a visit, and let us know what you think.