The Denver Art Museum, on balance, is a very respectable
repository of art. It's rather tall and narrow, organized
into seven floors, and is designed to be interactive and
family-oriented, with breakout reference collections and
"discovery libraries" on most floors and sketchbooks placed
within reach.
On the top floor, collections centered on the American
West avoid an overdose of Remington-Rockwell sentimentalism.
The European/American collection is very spotty, with some
nice 14th-15th century pieces; however, the thematic
organization leads to some silly juxtapositions. Next is a
fine, broadly-scoped Asian floor, which includes a vitrine
of Indonesian wayang golek puppets. The
Pre-Columbian/Spanish Colonial floor left me overwhelmed and
hoping to come back for a focused visit. Moving on down is a
spread-out level devoted to Native North American work,
featuring a Navajo sand painting that complements the
Tibetan sand painting two floors up.
The second floor is a cramped jumble of architecture and
design, sharing space with overflow from the Native American
floor. It's only between the second and third floors that
the building encourages you to use the staircase; between
other floors it's noisy and exposed to the outside elements.
Finally, at the bottom is a contemporary collection,
introduced by a tasty painting by Richard Patterson -- a
realistic rendering of a minotaur figure, overpainted by
trompe-l'oeil brushstrokes that allude to Roy Liechtenstein
and Gerhard Richter. The current hang wants to give us a lot
to read, and is keynoted by a Jenny Holzer message board. A
good, if small, room of mostly Robert Motherwell completes
our visit.
Nick Park sets new standards of excellence for lighting,
camera movement, and focus control in the domain of
stop-motion animation with his latest, Chicken Run.
Ditzy Babs gets all the punch lines, and they're winners.
The plot of this one is even more streamlined than previous
Park outings, but it does feature two simultaneous
construction projects. The Stalag 17 parody elements get off
to a cracking start with the line, "Nobody escapes from
Tweedy's Farm!"
All this, after four commercials before the trailers at
the Carrmike cinemas in Fort Collins, Colorado. Five if you
count the trailer for the new Pokemon flick.
Germinal Stage Denver turns out to be a
comfortable 100-seat thrust-stage theater in a residential
district of northwestern Denver. (Fly space and wings appear
to be inconsequential.) It also turns out to be the
closely-controlled company of Ed Baierlein, who directs and
plays the leads in this production. But with a
quarter-century of history and a nearly-full Sunday evening
house (many of the audience members past middle age), the
organization must be achieving some commercial success.
Artistically, they seem to be doing all right as well.
Baierlein has woven together three distinct portraits of
teachers, from Chekhov's On the Harmfulness of
Tobacco, Fornes's Dr. Kheal, and Ionesco's The
Lesson, into something of a whole. Baierlein finds a
variety of comic schtick for each of his three academics to
indulge in. He succeeds best with the shabby, slightly
pathetic, ultimately touching John J. Krueger from Chekhov.
One wonders what Baierlein could accomplish, were he to
engage with other creators in some artistic friction.
M. Emmet Walsh (Joe Keller) anchors an
ensemble of beefy performances in Miller's play of the
conflict between commerce and family. Rhea Seehorn (Ann
Deever) plays in a lower, richer register, and David Fendig
(Chris) just keeps getting better and better. Paul Morella
delivers a wiry reading of war-wounded George.
A piece of stage machinery doesn't work because it's not
used consistently: The carpet of grass of Keller's back yard
peels away in Act III to reveal a transparent deck,
suggesting a pit of truth which the characters must sail
above -- or fall into. For the most part, the action plays
around this deck, at the edges of the stage, and then
undeceived Chris and Ann meet center stage near the end of
the play. But sometimes the players must use the transparent
deck to meet the needs of the blocking.
The Fantasticks, book and lyrics by Tom Jones,
music by Harvey Schmidt, directed by Kathy Feininger, Round
House Theatre, Silver Spring, Maryland
This play is my idea of what theater --
straight or musical -- is all about. If you can't make me
see a high wall with just a guy on a ladder and a stick --
if you need a computerized revolve, a chorus of dozens, and
half the broken furniture of Paris to do that -- then you
can't do theater.
That said, Round House's production uses a deceptively
complicated lighting plot to heighten its otherwise-no
frills production -- and it works. At its core are two
strands of four-colored carnival lamps that are slung across
the conventional square-platform set, and are flown (into
RHT's low-slung grid) by a semi-visible crew member in
blacks. The actors enter the space in Act I directly from
the familiar upstage back doors.
Jimi Kinstle's Mortimer brings home a fancy three-part
death scene. Michael L. Forrest revealed very touching
aspects of El Gallo that I haven't seen before, for instance
in the monologue that sets up the glade scene ("the sound of
a shadow.")
20 june '00
There is one good thing that can be said about Gone in
60 Seconds: it makes Battlefield Earth look
good. I've heard better dialogue in old episodes of The
A-Team.
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If on a winter's night a traveler, a novel by
Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver
I so much wanted to like this book, but I
found it to be academic and arbitrary. Calvino seems to be
trying to write the universal novel, but his efforts
dissolve into insubstance. The book tells (in second person
singular present) the story of a universal reader who begins
to read a book, only to find that only the opening chapter
is available. He goes in search of the rest of the story,
only to come upon another book. He can read only the first
chapter of that one before he is thwarted in a different
way. This cycle repeats ten times. We have no
emotional involvement with the reader, the pasteboard
characters he meets in his search for the missing chapters,
nor in the characters in the ten different opening chapters.
Along the way, the few observations that Calvino makes about
the act of reading could have been better delivered in a
conventional essay.
Thieves Like Us, a novel by Edward Anderson
This noir novel from 1937, collected by the
Library of America, delivers a story: a bank-robbing spree
by three escaped convicts in small-town Texas and Oklahoma.
It was filmed by Robert Altman in 1974. What surprises are
the long passages of straight dialogue between Bowie and
Keechie. What astounds is Anderson's command of narrative
ellipsis. What tickles is his way of turning the attributes
of minor characters into proper names, like Frog Chin. What
irritates is the repetition of the book's title, that the
privileged classes are just as dishonest as the book's
lowlifes (though we're never sure whether Anderson intends
satire or direct statement). What ultimately satisfies is a
passage like this one from a hold-up:
"Don't bother yourself..." T-Dub said.
"You're liable to wake up with somebody patting you in the
face with a spade if you do."
Paul Taylor Dance Company, Eisenhower Theater, Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts, Washington
"Cascade" is the new piece for us (1999), and
it has a bronze, formal Grecian flavor to it. It is set to
movements from Bach piano concertos. The brawny "Presto"
section (for five men) confirms my suspicion that Taylor
saves his best writing for the men. The dance features an
interesting turn that involves dropping to the floor,
pivoting on the buttocks, and rising again, all the while
turning.
"Syzygy," from 1987, bounces the dancers around the stage
like so many asteroids, and remains upbeat except for a
strange passage of contentiousness. Donald York provides a
cheery, cheesy synthesizer score. The dancers master a
tricky-looking 360-pivot in arabesque. A new cast member
(Amy Young?) brings a lot of joy into her dancing.
And now for something completely different: props!
comedy! characters! story! "Le Sacre du Printemps (The
Rehearsal)" is revived from 1981. Sections of this dance are
a hilarious parody of Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes. There
is a Harpo Marx-ish scene before a mirror, with a second
dancer playing the reflection; there is a section where the
action is split between two places, with the choreography in
one echoing that in the other. Lisa Viola has a lovely grief
scene.
Wonder of the World, by David Lindsay-Abaire,
directed by Tom Prewitt, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company,
Washington
Woolly's new comedy concerns Cass, a woman
who leaves her husband, gets on the first bus leaving from
the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and finds herself in
Niagara Falls with a new traveling companion, an alcoholic
who wants to go over the Falls in a barrel. At times I
sensed the actors straining to sell jokes that weren't quite
there. But Emily Townley crackles in multiple roles,
including three different waitresses in ridiculous theme
restaurants, and as a helicopter pilot in a scene where
Cass's husband's very comical dirty little secret (it
involves Barbie dolls) is revealed.
1 june '00
Romeo and Juliet, The Bolshoi Ballet, Opera House,
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington
The libretto (by Leonid Lavovsky, Sergei
Prokofiev, and Sergei Radlov) and choreography (by
Lavrovsky) is slavishly faithful to the narrative of
Shakespeare's play, to the extent that story-telling crowds
out the dancing in the last two acts: the title roles have
very little to do by then. However, Prokofiev's quirky score
is enjoyable, and Nina Ananiashvili's Act I Juliet is
long-legged, light, and girlish. Nikolai Tsiskaridze is
winningly flamboyant as Mercutio, but he's stuck with a
death scene that goes on embarrassingly long. Denis
Medvedev's acrobatics as the Jester are a bit astounding.
The decor features a traveler and legs in a wine-and-gold
oriental print, as well as a curtain in the same pattern
that is hung both ends from the same pipe, so that it hangs
in an inverted half-circle. Scene changes can go on behind
it but dancers can get downstage of it on either side. Alas,
scene changes behind this curtain were not always noiseless.
Someone once characterized American football as intense
violence interrupted by committee meetings. That just about
sums up Gladiator: when Maximus isn't hacking someone
to pieces, the picture bogs down.
The new Hamlet doesn't work, either, although
there are some good bits, like Ophelia's mad scene. The only
unqualified success is Robert MacNeill's epilogue. With the
exception of gormless Ethan Hawke, everyone in the cast at
least did enough work with the text to understand what they
were saying. Much of Hamlet's soliloquies are done in
voiceover, and with Hawke it's hard to tell when he's not
in voiceover.
Being Dead, a novel by Jim Crace
I was surprised to find myself little
affected by Crace's story of a married couple, both
biologists in late middle age, murdered by an opportunisitic
robber and left to rot (literally) on the beach. The book is
not much more than an elaboration of its epigraph, a piece
of light verse by Sherwin Stephens. Daughter Syl, in a
subplot, seems stereotyped.
Cruddy, an illustrated novel by Lynda Barry
I was much more impressed by this blackly
comic story of a 1960's bloody crime spree by an
eleven-year-old androgynous Roberta and her brutish father.
It is told in flashback by Roberta, now sixteen and
alienated, on the verge of discovering sex and drugs. The
book is a kind of gross-out noir, Jim Thompson as told to
Trey Parker and Matt Stone. There's not a cheery note
sounded at all. Everything is inventively, luridly, grim.
Here is one of the murder victims:
a big pinch-faced woman with hair that was
crispy-fried blond, like old doll hair that had been rubbed
all day on the sidewalk. Her eyes were squinting mean and
she was blowing snorts of cig smoke at me.
Barry finds decay in the most unlikely places, like a
disused tube of lipstick:
Orange Pucker was the name of it. I opened it
and swirled it up and saw pale tufts of mold growing near
the bottom.
the chorister's c ||| pedantic nuthatch
©2000
David L. Gorsline.
All rights reserved.
