lies like truth

Karaoke is a wonderful invention because of its power to unite complete strangers through that electric combination of booze and song. The Singing Room, a new comedy by Denver's Horse & Cart theatre company explores this notion with love and a light touch. Although playwright Sean Paul Mahoney's script could be tighter, the essential feeling that permeates this quirky comedy can't help but put a smile on one's face. The show basically evolves like an extended improv skit, with various different characters entering a karaoke bar and … [Read more...]

Radio Silence is a formidable organization. Founded by teacher-turned-writer/editor Dan Stone, the year-old, print, online and live magazine exists at the intersection between rock music and literature. It's about time that someone came up with intelligent content in this area of our culture. There hasn't been a ton of it since the early days of Rolling Stone. The contributors and discourse include gems like New Yorker editor David Remnick discussing Bob Dylan on a podcast and an essay by Tobias Wolff about his peripatetic musical passions. … [Read more...]

After a visit to the Piedmont Bird Calling Contest on Friday night, as detailed in my last blog post, my weekend took a more serious turn with performances of The National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch at the American Conservatory Theater and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and an excerpt from Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli at the San Francisco Symphony. A few words about each: First, to Davies Symphony Hall. The combined forces of the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas made a glittering, robust … [Read more...]

The annual Piedmont High School Bird Calling Contest has to be one of the hidden cultural gems of the Bay Area, like some rare species of owl. I say hidden, but in fact this eccentric and marvelous competition which has been going since 1963, get quite a bit of exposure: The winners appear every year on the David Letterman show to perform their winning calls to millions of viewers. Before Letterman started inviting the high school bird call aficionados to perform on air, they were annual guests on the Johnny Carson show. Yet despite this … [Read more...]

Experiencing the San Francisco's Ballet's new version of Cinderella created by Christopher Wheeldon to the music of Sergei Prokofiev in a co-production with the Dutch National Ballet last night made me think about how much better ballet does, in general, at communicating figurative ideas over literal ones. The weakest section of Wheeldon's darkly sublime take on the classic story happens at the start, where the dancers are forced to pantomime their way through tons of exposition explaining why poor Cinders ended up becoming a lackey to her … [Read more...]

On Friday, I was invited to take a specially organized private tour of  The Voice Center for Medicine and the Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. The tour was carefully and skillfully arranged by Nina Eidsheim, an assistant professor in the university's musicology department, and Jody Kreiman, a professor at the Voice Center (along with Jody's team). Nina is editing a forthcoming volume of essays about singing from Oxford University Press to which I am contributing. Jody is the author, along with Diana Van Lancker Sidtis, … [Read more...]

When August Strindberg’s Miss Julie first appeared on the stage in 1888, people were understandably shocked by the author's unflinching tale about an upper class woman's affair with a servant and the ensuing power struggle that leads her to take her life. Making the play feel as raw to a 21st century audience as it did to theatre-goers in the 19th isn't easy, especially an audience as awash in "upstairs-downstairs" narratives as our post-Downtown Abbey-inhaling one is. But Neil LaBute manages to make Strindberg's masterpiece feel fresh … [Read more...]

When it comes to connecting with an audience, a singer's body language is as important as the power of his or her voice and material. This is why last night's concert by Caitlin Rose at The Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles was so disconcerting: The young, Nashville-based country rock artist was saying one thing with her voice and quite another with her body. The two were in conflict. I've been wondering if this is a good or bad thing. At this point, after some hours of reflection, I see the lack of cohesion as a strike against the … [Read more...]

Why is it so often the case that the most stimulating and beautiful works of art and the most creative and smart artists go relatively unappreciated while the people who do things that are altogether less inspiring reap wild favor and applause? I'm thinking about this today in light of Mark Jackson's bracing-taut production of Max Frisch's The Arsonists (trans. Alistair Beaton) currently playing to two-thirds-full houses at The Aurora Theatre in Berkeley. Every seat should be filled every performance during the run with someone … [Read more...]

For a while now, I've been questioning the usefulness of the standard categories under which most arts coverage is organized in the media. You know -- the "music", "theatre", "movies", "dance", "visual art"...headings. Oh, and let's not forget "multimedia" -- that weird catchall descriptor that so many sites (including my own) have for putting stuff that doesn't comfortably fit in anywhere else. The fact is that arts experiences rarely fit comfortably into this framework -- and in fact probably never have. Opera is as much music as it is … [Read more...]