SHAKING AND SIZZLING

posted by James Reel

    After some time off, I’m back in my usual Tucson Weekly spot(s) with two items. First, a review of the latest fare from Borderlands Theater:

    Los Angeles is one big seismic hazard, and nowhere more so than in the vicinity of Esmeralda Portillo and Sam Reyes. They work for a big law firm--she's a physically extroverted secretary, and he's an introverted intellectual accountant. They're about as different as can be, and they grind against each other like two tectonic plates, each heading in the wrong direction. Esmeralda has a tendency to shake things up, anyway; her father used to call her "Earthquake Chica."
    That's also the title of the Anne Garcia-Romero play being produced by Borderlands Theater, a company that often explores the fault lines between cultures. This time, though, the unstable plate boundaries are between two individuals shifting within their shared Mexican-American culture.

    That’s the intro; find out what I think about it all here. Then, a look at Invisible Theatre’s migrating cabaret series;

    Lucky for Invisible Theatre that "cabaret" is a state of mind.
    Basically, cabaret is a kind of entertainment usually involving song or comedy, presented in a small room. Traditionally, that small room is a cafe or nightclub where patrons sit at tables, but this year, IT is moving its cabaret series into its own traditional 80-seat theater.
    What's now called "Sizzling Summer Sounds" started about a decade and a half ago as a comedy-improv series featuring Molly McKasson and IT director Susan Claassen, but it morphed into a mostly musical offering. After several years at the Doubletree, the events shifted to the Arizona Inn; last year, remodeling and changing priorities there sent the series to Soleil restaurant in the foothills. But since then, the restaurant has been sold twice and is itself being remodeled, leaving the summer sounds without a place to sizzle.
    "We thought before we go into another venue, it would be good to get at least a 50-year commitment before we build another stage," jokes Claassen.
    So she has relocated the performances to her own theater...

    Find out more here.

ROMAN HOLIDAY

posted by James Reel

    No time or money for a trip to Rome this summer? Here’s a consolation: a virtual tour of ancient Rome, as it looked around A.D. 300. The site is called “Rome Reborn,” and it’s part of a big project undertaken by the Insitute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. The four 3-D videos are accompanied by music, including pieces by Vivaldi and Mendelssohn (his “Italian” Symphony). You’ll have to provide your own soundtrack while perusing the stills; what better time to hear Respighi’s Pines of Rome? Actually, you won’t see any trees or people in the renderings, because the focus is on architecture (so why is the interior of the Basilica Maxentius so murky—verisimilitude?). Somehow the images, so barren of life, remind me of certain paintings by Giorgio de Chirco.

SEEING STARS

posted by James Reel

    Salon.com’s tech blogger, Farhad Manjoo, has an interesting article on ratings bias, and why all those user-driven Web sites featuring one- to five-star reviews aren’t reliable. The story contains a nugget that applies to professional criticism as well as amateur contributions; referring to the head of one popular review site, Manjoo says, "Stoppelman and others at Yelp also have another bit of advice about star ratings—that it's wise to look past them and to judge a product or a place according to the people reviewing it, not how many stars it gets. It's the people, not the stars, who shine on Yelp.” Ditto for the professional critics in newspapers and magazines; you should always consider the credibility and peculiar personal tastes of any critic when you read a review. And never, ever look only at how many stars are awarded; the written reviews are far more informative and important than some silly graphic device.

SPOLETO OPERA

posted by James Reel

    A week and a half ago, I dropped in on the Spoleto Festival USA, in conjunction with a meeting of the Music Critics Association of North America. I saw two of the festival’s opera productions, which on musical grounds were mostly solid, and occasionally impressive (aside from Karen Huffstodt’s faux-Brünnhilde hooting in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny). But these works are more interesting to consider, I think, in terms of their success—or lack of it—as theater.
    Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 1758 utopian comedy L’Ile de Merlin emerges from the dusty vaults with a mild inherent problem: There’s very little direct conflict to challenge the main characters. But that’s not the sort of story this is; it’s more of a Gulliver-style satire of 1750s France, in which our two heroes find themselves washed up on a strange island where philosophers are jovial, lawyers are honest and lovers are faithful—quite the opposite of the situation back home in Paris. The heroes encounter one unusual character after another, each explaining a different aspect of the island’s society. Most of the music is original, but in some cases Gluck borrowed popular songs of his day—think John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera—and gave them new lyrics that parodied the original texts. Who knew that Gluck was the Weird Al Yankovic of his time?
    Today’s American audience is not likely to recognize any of those old pop songs, and the structure employed by Gluck’s librettist, while common to its genre, can seem creaky and less than involving to people who prefer plot-driven, sex-and-violence Romantic Italian opera. So Spoleto stage directors Christopher Alden and Roy Rallo decided to run the opera through with 21st-century irony. Our two heroes are modern-day slackers draped over a couch, the philosopher arrives in a happy-face costume, and so on. This is well and good, but Alden and Rallo make the fatal error of mocking not just the opera’s conventions, but its very convictions. The directors don’t trust utopias—after all, Nazi Germany was supposed to be one, at least for the “Aryans”—so there’s something sinister about the smiles permanently affixed to the faces of our heroes’ love interests, Stepford Wives in the making. Most damaging is the directors’ treatment of one scene in which an island inhabitant tries to impress his point upon the visitors by repeating it—but in a more florid, crowd-pleasing manner. That is, after all, how the da capo aria was supposed to function back in the day. But instead of indulging in the expected pyrotechnics and ornamental flights of fancy, singer Richard Troxell is directed to bellow and huff in the most disagreeable manner imaginable. And our heroes like it, for some reason. Now, if the passage had been turned into an all-out punk rock performance, we could understand why the slackers are won over. But what the directors give us is just pointlessly ugly. This is the very definition of a Eurotrash production: not necessarily one that transfers the work to an alien setting, but one that contradicts and subverts the musical and dramatic texts themslves. In the end, Alden and Rallo couldn’t even bring themselves to do that anymore; they simply ran out of ideas and let the opera sputter out on autopilot.
    In contrast, Spoleto’s problem with The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny had nothing to do with the stage direction of Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser, although I do wish they’d had a freer sense of fun. No, the trouble lies with composer Kurt Weill and librettist Bertolt Brecht, who suffered from a Teutonic insensitivity to dramatic scale and pacing.
    Mahagonny is a pleasure city founded by a trio of crooks; alas, they’ve set up so many rules that the fools they’re trying to bilk don’t have enough fun to stick around and put up with the high cost of sin. But then arrives our doomed hero, Jimmy Mahoney, who diagnoses the town’s trouble and inspires the crooks to institute a “do what you want” policy. Do what you want, as long as you pay for it. If you don’t pay, the penalty is severe, unless you bribe the judge. This is Jimmy’s downfall, but even as he is being executed, the city descends into chaos, apparently the only logical end of unchecked capitalism.
    Now, Weill was not a composer to unleash a torrent of music to guide the course of a drama no matter how little textual support he had, so he had that advantage over Wagner and Strauss. Weill had the opposite problem: He tended to lock himself into a particular song form and follow its structure to the end, even if the textual variety couldn’t really justify it. (And for Mahagonny he provided mainly a procession of dirges, which makes for a very long three hours in the theater.) Weill, at least, could inject harmonic and timbral variety into just about anything, so the real fault here lies with Brecht, operating at his most didactic. For example, in the “new” Mahagonny, the men sing of the four essential pleasures of life: eating, lovemaking, fighting and drinking. Brecht then constructs an elaborate scene devoted to each of those pursuits, when a succession of little blackout routines would have gotten the point across much more effectively (and more in keeping with the quasi-vaudevillian nature of life in Mahagonny itself). In a dark social satire like this, I’d much rather be skewered than bludgeoned. (Oh, there was one nice little knife twist: Spoleto charged as much as $125 for a seat at this anti-capitalist opera.)
    I can’t help thinking of something Hilton Als wrote about the American painter Winslow Homer:

Surely what we value in Homer is that he reminds us how deep and rich the effects of straightforward narrataive can be in pictures if it is made simple enough. Narrative in writing can take any amount of digression, because we read in sequence and over time, but a single stray incident in painting spoils the whole, which arrives all at once, in a moment of vision. Homer is at his best as a storyteller, and his real genius lies not in sublimation but in abbreviation: he has the gift, perhaps not so weird in the land that invented Morse code, for telling a big story in a minimum number of pulses.

DR. PANGLOSS, EDITOR

posted by James Reel

    Hank Klibanoff, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's managing editor for enterprise, tells Alex Ross that he’s shocked—shocked!—by the uproar over his paper’s plans to revamp its arts coverage, requiring respected critics to re-apply for jobs that may or may not involve substantial criticism: “I really thought the arts community would be pleased to hear that we'd be writing more about artists, their lives, arts institutions, behind the scenes, etc.” Well, the arts community will most certainly not be pleased if serious criticism is going to be supplanted by puff pieces about over-exposed soloists, feel-good stories about cute kiddies at the symphony, and “reviews” by newbies who aren’t equipped to pass informed judgment on professional artists. Alex Ross seems mollified that the Atlanta paper is sorting things out properly, but it’s still up to Klibanoff and his colleagues to prove they’re not making the same blunder that’s already been made by many other papers, including those right here in Tucson. You can find the full Ross-Klibanoff interview here.

THRIVING

posted by James Reel

    From the Washington Post:

    A bunch of European composers who haven't had a hit in decades have been very, very good to radio station WETA.
    Since dropping news and talk programming for classical music in January, the Arlington public station has seen its fortunes soar. Ratings have more than doubled since the switchover from BBC and NPR reports to Bach and Brahms concertos. And perhaps just as important to WETA (90.9 FM), pledge contributions from listeners have been gushing.

    This is very nice (read the rest here), but let’s not forget that the purpose of public radio is not to earn big ratings and make lots of money in pledge drives. It’s to serve the otherwise unserved, and, frankly, that’s not an inherently lucrative or popular mission.