Superstar

Via The Morning News, an upload of Todd Haynes’s notorious Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. The video is a little artifacty and it’s of the expected dubious provenance. But the 43-minute film, which tells the story of 1970s soft rock chanteuse Karen Carpenter’s demise due to anorexia-related issues, and which uses Barbie dolls for actors, is not bad—and at times, rather good. And dang, the woman could sing.

Getting work

Via kottke.org, Jenna Fischer explains her way of success in TV comedy (and plugs NBC’s The Office, gently):

So, how did I get The Office? … I developed a relationship with [Allison Jones, casting director] — not because I met her at a party and we “schmoozed,” but because I had proven to her over the course of many years that I was a reliable and serious actor capable of providing a consistent body of work.

Works that way in the amateur ranks, too.

On difficulty

A post at Via Negativa on John Ashbery and other things points to one by Reginald Shepherd on the degrees of difficulty in poetry, and a lot of the post works for other art forms as well.

Semantic difficulty can in turn be broken down into difficulty of explication and difficulty of interpretation. Some poems present both kinds of difficulty, some only one or the other. In the case of explicative difficulty, the reader cannot decipher the literal sense of the poem: “What is this poem saying?” One encounters this in Hart Crane’s “At Melville’s Tomb,” and he wrote an extensive explication of the poem for Harriet Monroe, then editor of Poetry. In the case of interpretive difficulty, one grasps what is being said on the literal level, but doesn’t know what it means, what it is meant to do. John Ashbery’s poems, usually syntactically and explicationally clear, often present this interpretive difficulty. To say that one doesn’t know what a poem means, if one understands its literal sense, is to say that one doesn’t know why it’s saying what it’s saying. The reader asks, “Why am I being told/shown this?”

It is semantic difficulty which readers are usually experiencing when they say, “I don’t understand this poem.”

In theater, this translates to the comment one hears in the lobby at intermission, “I wish they would put something in the program to tell us what this play is about.” It’s perfectly clear what, say, Waiting for Godot is “about,” what the story is: two hoboes hanging out by a withered tree expecting to meet someone who doesn’t show up. But the bemused audience member wants to know why he’s being told this particular story. (Of course, my perennial frustration is with audience members who, when presented with the fence of a difficult play, balk and refuse to jump it, even with the carrot of a program note suggesting an interpretation.)

And as well:

Formal difficulty is a particular case of what George Steiner, cited by Shetley, calls modal difficulty…. In the case of modal difficulty, a reader asks, “What makes this a poem?”

Some of the experimental work of the 1960s might fall into this category.

Word list

A theater rehearsal, in terms of the words exchanged, is a collision of specialized vocabulary and jargon from several different disciplines; as collaborators, we may stumble towards some level of mutual comprehensibility, but some dark spots of incomprehension remain. Kevin, the full-time assistant technical director of theater where RCP perform, wasn’t familiar with one of the items on the list below, collected from several weeks of Seussical rehearsals.

dance belt
I once heard this expression as the punch line to a joke in The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940, and I didn’t get it. It describes a brief undergarment worn by men to avoid, um, VPLs and other mishaps under tights. A close synonym, as two or three of us muttered to Earle when the costumer explained that we would be required to supply our own, is “jockstrap.”
color note
As used by music director Matt when rehearsing “Biggest Blame Fool,” the note of a chord that provides the particular bluesy quality, and hence the one that he wanted to make sure was sung with a little more oomph.
smart casters
Wheels bolted into the base of a set piece that can either swivel or be locked into place. Dawn has designed and Steve built a couple of huge pieces for the back of the set that aren’t going anywhere without smart casters.
sitzprobe
One of the few terms of art in music not taken from Italian. Refers to the first rehearsal that brings together singers and the orchestra, generally with no other technical or acting elements involved.
Anatevka
Strictly speaking, an allusion rather than jargon, Anatevka is the Russian village that provides the setting for Fiddler on the Roof, home to oppressed Jews who struggle on gamely. And hence, per director Haley, the idea of the plaintive mood that we’re looking for in the second half of “Here on Who,” when the Whos (and the Grinch, for some reason) sing to Horton that war is coming and the truffula trees are all gone, and he is the only one who can help them.
l’istesso
Per my copy of Randel’s New Harvard Dictionary of Music, “The same tempo; hence, an indication that the tempo is to remain the same despite a change in meter and thus in the unit of metrical pulse.” Which doesn’t give me very much information that I can work with: I just latch on to whatever Matt and the band are playing and hang on.

Choreographer Heide has kept her vocabulary, both spoken and physical, simple, for which we non-dancers in the cast are grateful. But there will still be something interesting to watch.

Orson’s Shadow

This imagined reconstruction of the unlikely collaboration of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier on a 1960 production of Rhinoceros amuses, but fails to excite. To be sure, two egos as large as those of Olivier and Welles have not collided on a Bethesda stage since Shakespeare, Moses, and Joe Papp several seasons ago, and two more colorfully neurotic artists in eclipse (Welles’s truimphant Citizen Kane already nearly two decades in the past, Olivier on the verge of dropping his second wife, the forlorn Vivien Leigh) would be hard to find. But how much spark can a play generate when its first act climax is a hiring decision?

Wilbur Edwin Henry is particularly effective at capturing the bear at bay that was Orson Welles at mid-career.

  • Orson’s Shadow, by Austin Pendleton, conceived by Judith Auberjonois, directed by Jerry Whiddon, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland

Vigils

“Plants grow and die at the same time each year, and that makes them easier to love.” So says one character in Woolly’s current offering by Noah Haidle, a bittersweet fantasy about love, death, and letting go; the play’s theatrical construction has hints of Tony Kushner and Craig Wright.

Widow (all character names are anonymized to role names) has spent the last two years of her life mourning the death of her firefighter husband. Her clinging to the past takes on physical form, as she keeps his Soul (the surprising Michael Russotto) locked in a box at the foot of her bed. Widow (the always-strong Naomi Jacobson) and Soul replay and replay scenes from their less-than-happy life together—their marriage was forced by an unplanned pregnancy, which subsequently ended in a miscarriage— in sort of a Truly, Madly, Deeply meets Groundhog Day mashup. Unable to control their memories, Soul and WIdow replay scenes of pain more often than those of happiness, and although each would like to utter the words that would undo the pain, each scene repeats as in the past. Soul’s replays are carried out in part by Body (hunky Matthew Montelongo) because Soul is now blind, as he waits out the time on earth before Widow can release him to the afterlife. (The significance and theatrical effectiveness of Soul’s blindness is, unfortunately, lost on me.)

The three are almost overmatched by the perfect J. Fred Shiffman as the adenoidal Wooer, a fireman friend of the family. Shiffman’s Wooer is an amiable dork, awkward at small talk, who simply loves Widow and wants her to move on with her life.

Lest it be thought a heavy show, the play is still a comedy, and fantasy elements keep the mood light. A show-stopping set piece at a high school reunion calls for the four principals to line-dance to an old Britney Spears song, just because. Alas, the Foy flying apparatus for Soul and Widow, however effective, is still a bit obtrusive.

It’s an interesting twist that Wooer can interact, to a limited degree, with Soul. Haidle, young but already skilled in the art of putting a play together, says in a playbill interview,

To write the things I am trying to write, you have to establish the rules very quickly and the audience will give you their time. They’ll go with you for about eight minutes. And in those eight minutes you can do anything, but you have to show them that they’re in a world that has rules. You establish those rules, and most importantly I think, and I don’t know how you do this, but I think you have to tell them when they get to go home.

  • Vigils, by Noah Haidle, directed by Colette Searls, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

One-Tooth Ree

Thanks to Language Log (?!), Mandana T. Manzari reports on the Large Number Championship. Two philosophers compete at MIT to produce the largest finite number ever written on an ordinary whiteboard. The winning number:

The smallest number bigger than any number that can be named by an expression in the language of first order set-theory with less than a googol (10100) symbols.

Pedants might clean up that definition to read, “an expression… with fewer than a googol symbols.”

Wireless, not wireless

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.

¡Noche Latina!

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.

  • ¡Noche Latina!, Washington Ballet, Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, Washington