DRIVERS WANTED

posted by James Reel

    My theater review in the latest Tucson Weekly is, unusually for me, nothing less than a rave:

    There are times when an avid theatergoer gets so discouraged that staying home to watch TV actually seems like a viable option. Why venture out and pay good money to see yet another opportunistic jukebox musical, soullessly jokey comedy, half-hearted revival, or rough and underfunded new play that really needs to be worked over by a good dramaturg before it's ready for public consumption?
    But then some company presents a play that's heartfelt and true, perceptively directed, acted with profound understanding of the characters, and designed with such intelligence that the story and characters are supported and amplified by every detail of costume, set, sound and light. And then we remember why we should turn off the TV and take a chance on the theater.
    Arizona Theatre Company has mounted just such a production, a moving, funny, finely wrought version of August Wilson's Jitney.

    Read the rest here. And while you’re poking around the TW Web site, take a look at this week’s feature. It’s an excerpt from The Reaper's Line: Life and Death on the Mexican Border by Lee Morgan II. It's a book I edited, the memoirs of a recently retired Customs agent based in Douglas. The most hilarious bits didn’t get into the Weekly, but a couple of the more harrowing, gut-wrenching episodes did.

NICE GUYS

posted by James Reel

    Some people perceive classical musicians as distant and even arrogant, and that's certainly true in some cases. But yesterday I was reminded how warm and genuinely nice many classical artists can be.
    I called violinist Jaime Laredo at his home in Vermont to get some comments for an article I’m writing on one of his former students, Jennifer Koh. I’d interviewed Laredo a couple of times in the past and met him socially when he appeared in Tucson with his Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, and I’ve always found him to be genial and open. But I was especially impressed by the warmth and generosity of his praise of Jennifer Koh, and I could almost sense that he blushed when I told him that Koh thinks of him as her mentor. Laredo, besides being a superb chamber musician, obviously cares deeply about people other than himself.
    I also placed a call to England to chat with John Rutter about his new recording with the Cambridge Singers of (mostly) Renaissance music for the bedtime Compline service. Rutter has enjoyed a long career as a choral conductor, but he’s even better known as a composer of highly accessible choral music. A couple of decades ago, some people dismissed Rutter’s music simply because it was pretty, but now I think most of us understand that there’s a big difference between music like Rutter’s that contains both prettiness and integrity, and music by others that is merely opportunistic shlock. I hadn’t had reason to speak with Rutter for several years, but as soon as yesterday’s conversation began I remembered why I’d enjoyed our previous interview so much: He comes across as articulate, precise in his expression, yet gentle and kind. This man is the very personification of Fauré’s Requiem, the work that makes even death seem like a loving comfort.
    Now, being nice does not mean that you are necessarily a good musician, and a great many vile, reprehensible people clog the pantheon of Great Artists. But we sometimes forget that it’s perfectly normal for good people like Jaime Laredo and John Rutter to make good music. You don’t have to suffer, or be insufferable, to be an artist.

SOUSA MEMORY

posted by James Reel

    Listener Robert E. Harris, a retired chemist, offers this thought after the past weekend's Tucson Symphony Sousa concerts:

    My late father-in-law, Jerry A. Harn, was as teetotal as could be. He was city attorney for Galesburg, Illinois in the 1930's.   When Sousa and his band came to town, naturally, Mr. Harn got the job of buying some whiskey so Sousa could have a drink (or maybe two.)
    Mr. Harn was a reserve officer in the US Army, and ended up as a Col. in the US Air Force reserve.  He and his family stayed in Claremont, CA after WW II, which is where I met my future wife.
    I like Sousa, as I played a lot of clarinet parts in Sousa marches when I was in high school band in the late 1940's.
    The pops programming I hate is overamplified (so much so that my ears hurt) and consists of reprises of pop tunes that I mostly did not like at all 50 or 60 years ago. Give me Sousa, or well done Beetles, or Leroy Anderson, or Spike Jones or Elvis (but not Hound Dog) or show tunes from musicals, but not so loud!

WHOSE SIDE?

posted by James Reel

    One thing that has long bugged me about the Arizona Daily Star, one of my ex-employers, is the Sunday “Reader Advocate” column. The Star just doesn’t understand what the person in that position is supposed to do.
    Consider this key sentence from Debbie Kornmiller’s most recent column, concerning the dozen guiding principles recently set forth by the paper’s publisher: “I will write each month, starting in November, about a different principle and how we are serving our community.” If Debbie were truly the reader advocate, she’d be writing about how the paper is not serving its community. She’s supposed to be the newsroom watchdog, catching errors in judgment and fact and writing on behalf of the paper’s subscribers. Debbie does sometimes write about newsroom errors, but the column almost always winds up being a defense of what was done, or maybe a summary of the noble steps the staff took to correct the situation. I can understand why she prints reader comments only occasionally—the public comments appended to online stories are shamefully unintelligent, so she obviously doesn’t have much to work with—but that doesn’t excuse her from generating her own objections to what the Star does, and offering more than an account of how the chain of command occasionally breaks down. She merely explains; she doesn’t act. And, really, how often do we need her to explain how the weather page is being revamped, or how the crossword puzzle got put in the wrong place, or why the TV listings are inaccurate? These are about the least important elements of the newspaper, yet they dominate her column.
    Debbie, whom I like personally, isn’t functioning as a reader advocate. She’s a newsroom apologist. I miss crusty old Leo Della Betta, who had the job back in the pre-gender-neutral days when it was called “ombudsman.”

SOUSA ON PARADE

posted by James Reel

    The serious-minded among us assail orchestral pops concerts, when we condescend to think about them at all, as showcases of superannuated pop stars cynically programmed to pander to a crowd that will in the end have no reason to support the orchestra’s performances of its core classical repertory. Perhaps I have made such a comment once or twice in the past. But this weekend I am actually participating in a pops concert that showcases a superannuated pop star: John Philip Sousa.
    Every couple of years the Tucson Symphony Orchestra hires Keith Brion to lead a cycle of pops shows. Brion has conducted a great variety of wind ensemble music over his long career, and has strong opinions about serious matters in his field (feed him enough ice cream, and he might tell you what he really thinks about Frederick Fennell). But his greatest love is the music and career of Sousa. Brion doesn’t just conduct Sousa’s music; he re-creates Sousa’s concerts, mixes of marches and theater suites of the day, complete with “encores” after every two or three programmed items. Furthermore, Brion dresses in a 1920s Sousa-style bandmaster’s uniform, imitates Sousa’s stage manner (including his quick shuffle across the stage onto the podium), and does his best to follow Sousa’s own performance style (something of a challenge, since many of the old Sousa 78 r.p.m. records weren’t actually conducted by Sousa himself). It’s a lot of fun—good light music that’s well prepared and played with integrity. If only all pops concerts could rise to this level.
    And what role do I play? Brion likes to have a local come out and narrate the first half of the concert, and I’ve been asked to do the honors Saturday night. At the very least, it gives me a chance to wear my tux, and such opportunities are few and far between in our casual desert pueblo. Tonight’s narrator will be my KUAT colleague Sooeyon Lee, arts reporter for Arizona Illustrated on channel 6. She tells me she’s probably going to wear a “not too revealing” formal dress she got from her sister, an opera singer in Korea. On Sunday the narrator will be my token right-wing gun-nut talk-radio-host friend Emil Franzi, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure classical music of the 19th and 20th centuries, and is actually a much more cultured person than his cultivated redneck persona would lead you to believe. I’d expect Emil to take Brion up on a loan of a bandmaster’s jacket, given his militaristic tendencies.
    Ticket info is available at 882-8585.

DEATH BY TOILET SEAT

posted by James Reel

    I’ve got two theater stories in the current Tucson Weekly, and the editorial staff manged to put the word “edgy” into both subheds.
    First, an approving review of the latest at Live Theatre Workshop:

    OK, so you sit down at Paula Vogel's The Baltimore Waltz knowing only that it's a play about a brother and sister rampaging through Europe while one of them dies from a mysterious disease.
    In the second scene, you find out that the brother is gay (he's a San Francisco children's librarian just given the pink slip, so he's maliciously having his little innocents cut out and wear pink triangles, just like he does). "Oh, no," you think, "not another AIDS play." But then it turns out that it's his straight sister who's been diagnosed with the disease. "Thank god," you think, "not another AIDS play." And then you find out that she's succumbing to Acquired Toilet Disease, which afflicts a very small segment of the population—unmarried elementary-school teachers—and is transmitted via toilet seats. "All right," you think, "at least it's not another damned earnest AIDS play."

    Read the rest here. Then move on to a preview of the doings of a new company—or, I should say, an old company that’s been elsewhere for a decade:

    Ken Tesoriere calls his theater company Coyote Ramblers, which makes perfect sense. Tesoriere has been a rambler all his life—a teenage racecar driver, a freelance journalist roaming the United States and Europe, a painter, a novelist, a playwright and director. The Manhattan native launched Coyote Ramblers in Tucson in 1993, ran it for three years, got fed up with the local scene, moved his operation to Los Angeles, won some nominations and awards, got fed up with the L.A. scene and came back to Tucson last year.
    "For good," he says. And maybe that's true.
    But reviving Coyote Ramblers in Tucson hasn't been easy. Health trouble slowed Tesoriere down, but more critical was his difficulty finding a space where he could operate Coyote Ramblers as a part of Lyric Arts, an organization that at full force will present visual art as well as theater, offer acting and art classes, and put on staged productions and readings.
    The company's first staged offerings in Tucson in nearly a decade are coming up Nov. 3-19 in a cozy space at ArtFare. Tesoriere is presenting three short works of his own under the group title American Album, Volume One (Women on the Verge).

    You can get the full scoop here.