theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
More Stoppard—why the heck not? Via ArtsJournal, Mark Lawson looks at updating the text of plays set in previous decades when they’re revived.
One major Stoppard play has never been revived: Night and Day (1978). Its plot depends on the need for British journalists in Africa to find a house with a telex machine. Now that reporters have satellite phones, the play is more or less incomprehensible.
Septime Webre and the Washington Ballet mix it up Latin style with live music—in the lobby, on stage, and in the pit—and Latin works by three choreograpers, including a restaging of Webre’s own Juanita y Alicia. Even though some of the company’s stars are missing, it makes for a fun evening.
After an opening serenade by Mariachi Los Amigos, the dancing opens with Paul Taylor’s Piazzolla Caldera, a suite of tangos set to music by Astor Piazzolla and Jerzy Peterburshsky, Sona Kharatian brings a leggy soulfulness to the “Celos” section, nicely balanced by the pair of comic borrachos danced by Jonathan Jordan and Jason Hartley. It’s an easy dance to enjoy, but perhaps not to love, with its unbalanced casting of seven men and five women. Its featured role (created, I believe, by Francie Huber) doesn’t have a clean break after the solo to give us the opportunity to applaud.
Mystic Warriors, performingly traditional Andean music, provides the intermission music. Following the break is Nacho Duato’s Na Floresta. Maki Onuki continues to develop her artistry, dancing two good solos, one slow, one fast. The time following this dance, ordinarily filled by another trip to the lobby, is taken—nay, stolen—by harp virtuoso Celso Duarte and his band, Jarocho Fusion.
Webre’s dance closes the evening, accompanied live by Cuban salsa band Sin Miedo. An extended family and friends assemble for a garden party, dressed in crisp off-whites, the women in pointe shoes, the men in jackets and Bermuda shorts. But an earthier element is also present in the form of Luis Torres, wearning colorful native trousers and not much else. The two factions come together in his duet with the robust Elizabeth Gaither, who doffs the linen and imported European decorum. She snaps off a crackling good run of very fast partnered turns.
Charles Isherwood articulates why I was underwhelmed when I read Tom Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia:
In my view much of The Coast of Utopia consists of great chunks of erudition and history untransformed by the playwright’s imagination and craft into a compelling play.
I would still like to see the piece, it’s just that I won’t be scurrying up to New York to see it.
Well, we’ve been in rehearsals for Seussical for three weeks. The big concern so far has been turnover in the cast: we’ve lost one cast member who was facing a much heavier load at work, and three of the team have had to drop out for medical reasons. So we will miss Laura, Don, Sarah, and Liz, who will still be with us in spirit come opening night in March.
It’s typical for a cast this size (25) to have some churn, but four is a lot. We have filled in with new members Karl and Katie (husband and wife), Amanda, and—well, me. In addition to my responsibilties on the left corner assisting Joan, I will be singing the small character roles of the Grinch and Yertle the Turtle. The music isn’t horribly difficult, but there will be passages when the only sound onstage will be coming from either the orchestra or me, and that’s a little scary. I’ll be wearing a green bodysuit instead of my usual blacks when I’m on headset. I haven’t asked director Haley whether I can keep the headset when I’m onstage.
On a more positive note, one of the fun things about this cast is the number of family connections. Sour Kangaroo (Lisa-Marie) will have a live Baby Kangaroo, her daughter Emily. The Bird Girls will be the ever-harmonizing Marylee and her daughters Amy and Jenny. Two of the Wickersham Brothers will be sisters Lucy and Susanna (yes, women are singing men’s roles: this is community theater, there are no men, can we move on?). And Haley’s assistant directors Jess and Jim are variously related to other staff.
Time to vote for the Bloggies.
Via Arts & Letters Daily, Joseph Epstein watches himself begin to run down.
Sleep has become erratic. Someone not long ago asked me if I watched Charlie Rose, to which I replied that I am usually getting up for the first time when Charlie Rose goes on the air. I fall off to sleep readily enough, but two or three hours later I usually wake, often to invent impressively labyrinthine anxieties for myself to dwell upon for an hour or two before falling back into aesthetically unsatisfying dreams until six or so in the morning. Very little distinction in this, I have discovered by talking to contemporaries, especially men, who all seem to sleep poorly. But this little Iliad of woes is pretty much par for the course, if such a cliché metaphor may be permitted from a nongolfer. That I have arrived at 70 without ever having golfed is one of the facts of my biography to date of which I am most proud.
Via things magazine, a visit to the ruins of the Sutro Baths at the San Francisco oceanfront.
Via The Morning News, Dr. Scott reviews each episode of House.
I did think it was clever that he noticed the distended jugular veins. As soon as I saw them, I started yelling “She has a cardiac tamponade” at the TV. I think that was about the time my wife decided to move down to the other end of the couch.
Gloryoski, WETA 90.9 FM has given up on being an imitation WAMU and has gone back to programming Western art music (“classical” music, if you must).
Everything is back the way I wanted it, but what for the love of Michael J. Fox is that white hairline in the subtitle?
I’m in the process of restoring this blog’s theme after an unexpected WP upgrade clobbered my customizations. More the fool me for not saving the customizations in a separate folder. Well, I’ve learned that lesson.
Saturday at the festival was dominated by plays with a sports metaphor: our own The Gold Lunch, a 60-minute reduction of Richard Dresser’s Rounding Third from Thurmont Thespians, and a very strong production of Never Swim Alone by Daniel MacIvor from Port Tobacco Playhouse Players (thanks, Leta!).
Many of the comments and questions from the adjudicators were spot on, while others (as usual) could only be answered with, “well, yes, but that wouldn’t be the play we brought you,” or even, “well, yes, but that would be wrong.” More than one judge encouraged us to slow down and savor some of the moments, and they’re quite right, my rhythms tended to be lockstep. And another good question that I didn’t have a ready answer for was, “why was it that you and Dana separated?” I don’t know what I think about the note to pump up the just-off-the-playing-field energy. I think it can work for the first paragraph, but I’m not sure how to fit it between the opening moment on the podium and the more analytical section that begins “My ex-wife, Dana, is as formidable an opponent…”
They praised many of the technical elements, some of them lovingly timed out (staring the the anthem mid-verse) and others impromptu (cobalt blue wine glasses from my cabinet). More than one judge appreciated Ron Carlson’s phrase “her twin peninsulas floating before you.”
I am more or less satisfied with my own work. I think I made a good adjustment to the three playing sides. My focus was generally there, but I did jump forward within a line more than once.
Deborah Solomon interviews John Ashbery.
…you have never been asked to serve as poet laureate of the U.S. Is that a snub?
I really don’t think I’m poet-laureate material.
It’s not something you would like to do?
I don’t think so. To be poet laureate you have to have a program for spreading the word of poetry. I’m just willing to let it spread by itself.
Saturday I rode up with Ted and his team to tech in our shows at the Cultural Arts Center of Frederick County. (The Maryland one act festival performances will be there this weekend.) The Center is lightly converted from a McCrory’s five and dime store; the building wraps around other buildings on the northwest corner of Patrick and Market Streets. As a performance space, the black box theater is long on character. It seats 110 on three sides of a playing area (no stage) about the size of Silver Spring Stage’s, but with the advantage that I can make myself heard in the Frederick space. On the downside, the space is punctuated by load-bearing columns, and lighting designers have to find ways to throw light around them. (This means that if I’m not paying attention, I’ll be standing in the dark on Saturday.)
The dressing area is where the luncheonette used to be, with even less soundproofing between it and the auditorium: nothing but a black curtain. But Cindy, Zeke, and Spence ran a tight ship technically, and we got everything done that we needed to get accomplished in our 80-minute time slot, and then some. We’re bringing The Gold Lunch as a showcase, which means that it is not eligible to advance to the regional competition. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t be adjudicated in open session, five minutes a piece from three judges. Leta and I did the math and figured that they will have to talk longer than I will. They’re theater people: they’ll find a way to fill the time.
I had a couple of hours to kill until Leta arrived and it was our turn to tech, so I walked around old town Frederick, Maryland. Frederick is undergoing several sorts of transition. I’ve flickr-tagged these images as suburbanMd, and in many ways the town is now a suburb of D.C.: it has its own branch of the MARC commuter service, for instance. But in many ways it’s still an ordinary American small city, a little grubby behind the ears.
While the Francis Scott Key Hotel is now an office building (you can just make out an old painted sign for it in this image), Carroll Creek Park consists of new and newish brick and stonework lining the channelized Carroll Creek through downtown, just south of Market Street.
Just the sort of place for open-air arts and crafts festivals, like the one I visited here a few years ago. Very pleasant, with whimsical footbridges.
But many of the shop spaces are still under construction and/or are looking for tenants, and new demolition can reveal the tattier backsides of buildings a block or two outside the gentrification zone.
After our tech rehearsal, Leta and I got dinner at Griff’s, a local institution, and a pretty good dinner it was. Local merchants were observing a First Saturday late closing, the pavements marked with dubious luminaires, so we played with the wooden toys in the toy store and dropped some cash at the funky clothing store that did a side business in Grateful Dead stickers.
Via Arts & Letters Daily, new book by Jack Sullivan catalogs all the music in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
The 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much uses Arthur Benjamin’s Storm Clouds cantata, which was commissioned for the 1934 version of the film. In the remake an assassination is to take place at a climactic cymbal crash. The bad guys, here as elsewhere in Hitchcock’s works, are surprisingly musically literate. They play recordings for the assassin.