Archives for 2008

There are many reasons why I’m excited to be sticking around the Bay Area this Summer, culture-wise. Here are just a few of them…

1. American Bach Soloists’ SummerFest — what lovelier way to spend a summer evening than munching a gourmet picnic supper serenaded by some of the country’s finest early music specialists?

2. Thrillpeddlers’ Theatre of the Ridiculous Festival — San Francisco’s own Grand Guignol stage company presents a weird and wonderful program of theatrical campery featuring Charles Busch’s Theodora, She-Bitch of Byzantium and Charles Ludlam’s Jack and the Beanstalk.

3. Asian Art Museum’s Ming Dynasty Exhibition — Not the place to go charging about like a bull in a china shop.

4. San Francisco Theater Festival — this event seems to get bigger and bigger and more and more inventive with each passing year.

5. Lucia di Lammermoor at the Ball Park — can’t wait to experience SF Opera’s production on a massive screen while eating hotdogs and drinking beer.

6. San Francisco Renaissance Voices staging of Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum — I’m currently wrapping my head around Hildegard’s germanized Latin plainchant text in order to play “The Soul” in this astounding 12th century work.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of what a specialist in one field can bring in terms of his or her perspective to another, completely unrelated sphere of expertise. A couple of years ago, I suggested to my then-editor at SF Weekly that the different arts critics at the paper might switch disciplines for one issue, to see how each of us would bring our specialty to bear upon a different subject. My editor didn’t go for the idea at all. Shame really; I would have loved to write a theatrical restaurant review and read what my restaurant crtiic colleague would have said about rock music and what the rock writer would have said about fine art.

Having not given up on the idea completely, I was therefore gratified to see that the UK’s Guardian newspaper has asked its sports and arts writers to trade places for a day. Over two issues, the Guardian is publishing what its arts writers have to say about everything from cricket to soccer, and what its sports writers think about the likes of San Francisco Symphony’s take on Brahms and an exhibition of works by sculptor Louise Bourgeois.

I read the sports pieces by arts critics with great interest, though I have mixed opinions about the success of the experiement.

In the most successful of these reviews, the arts writer leveraged his special understanding of art to give the reader a fresh insight onto a sports topic.

Theatre critic Michael Billington’s terrific summary of a darts tournament in Cardiff is the best of the bunch. The critic not only offers the same sharp portraits of the personalities he meets at the sports event that he would of a character or actor in a play, but he also sets the stage by drawing parallels between darts as a sport and theater. (“Darts,” I am told by Sky Sports commentator Sid Waddell, “is working-class theatre.”)

Less successful, however, are the reviews in which the arts writer comes off as a complete novice, utterly lost in the new environment and full of naive wonderment or boredom at the task. Rock critic Caroline Sullivan’s uninformative, unamusing write-up of an England v New Zealand cricket match is a case in point. I’m not saying that an art critic should pretend to be an expert on sport, but he or she should at least bring something of worth to the table. Are there are pop songs or groups that remind the writer of any of the cricket players on the field? How does sound travel on a cricket pitch in comparison to the acoustics in a concert venue? Instead all we get from Sullivan is the feeling that she’d rather be somewhere else: “It’s New Zealand v England – I establish that much, along with the fact that NZ are batting and England bowling. Beyond that, I’m completely lost.”

I’m looking forward to reading what the sports writers have to say for themselves. What’s crucial is that we get the sports addicts’ unique perspectives on the culture. If all they give us are signs of confusion and boredom, then the exercise of trading places for a day is really no more than a gimmick.

I’ve long been campaigning for the appearance of more bars and cafes in performing arts spaces in the US. Seems to me that venues should be doing everything they can to get audiences and performers mingling and interacting and discussing the work and its connection to the world at large. One of the best ways of doing this is by giving people a congenial place to meet, eat and drink. Booze, of course, is the best lubricant for chat.

I also think it’s important for venue managers to let patrons bring drinks into the performance space. People shouldn’t have to gulp their drinks down before they take their seats. They should be able to enjoy a quiet sip in the dark as they experience a show if they want to. As long as the drinking isn’t noisy or otherwise distracting to the actors, then I think it can greatly enhance audience members’ enjoyment of the theatrical experience. If it works for outdoor theatres, then why not let indoor theatres follow suit?

Small venues, flying under the radar as they do and armed with a less stringent rules about getting wine stains out of plush carpets, have spearheaded the theatre bar and drinks-during-the-performance movement. Larger spaces have been more reluctant to jump on board.

Yesterday evening, however, I was surprised and extremely pleased to arrive at American Conservatory Theater’s main venue, The Geary Theatre, for a performance of ‘Tis Pity she’s a Whore, to find a billboard announcing that the company now permits drinks to be brought inside the auditorium.

According to Janette Gallegos, ACT’s spokesperson, the company has been toying with the idea of in-theatre drinking for a while as a way to facilitate dialogue and improve the show-going experience. The experiment began with the ACT’s last production – Curse of the Starving Class (which I didn’t get to see) – and feedback, Gallegos says, has mostly been positive. “A couple of people complained about being distracted by the noise of swirling ice-cubes, so we may end up nixing drinks with ice in them in future. But otherwise people seem happy. It’s an evening out after all and trying to go to the restroom and gulp down a cocktail during a 15-minute intermission can be challenging.”

I was always under the impression that theatre companies had resisted allowing patrons to bring drinks inside the theatre for licensing reasons. Someone once told me that a theatre company needs to get a nightclub license in order to allow alcohol to penetrate the inner sanctum of the performance space. But at least as far as ACT is concerned, no extra permits and licenses were required. The only additional burdens on the company are the extra cleaning and maintenance costs associated with allowing people to bring plastic cups full of drinks into the arena. So far, according to Gallegos, people have been very careful to bring out their trash and throw it away.

I hope The Geary Stage keeps up this experiment and that more performing arts spaces follow suit. Meanwhile, ACT is becoming more imaginative with its concession agenda: Next season, patrons might get to lick ice-cream cones through plays by Tom Stoppard and John Guare.

Prejudice is an insidious thing. Without even realizing that I’d been turned off the music of Wagner at a young age as a result of my father’s vendetta against anyone popular opinion considered anti-semitic, I had decided I hated Wagner. I had made this decision, even though my only exposure to the composer during my formative years had been through playing Die Meistersinger Von Nurnberg in my school orchestra at the age of 15.

It was only when I was in New York a couple of years ago participating in the NEA/Columbia Journalism School’s mind-opening Classical Music and Opera Institute that I was forced to examine my foundationless views on Wagner. Music scholar and orchestral impresario Joe Horowitz persuaded me to analyze the roots of my opinion of the composer for the first time. Joe sent me his DVD of Patrice Chereau’s famous Bayreuth production of Das Rheingold recorded in 1980. I had never heard or seen anything like it before. I wasn’t expecting the moody-evocative entr’acts, the over-the-top, epic storyline, and those depravedly-human gods. I was enthralled.

At the ripe old age of 33, I finally got the chance to experience my first Wagner opera live on stage for the first time. San Francisco Opera (in collaboration with Washington National Opera) is staging a new Ring cycle between now and 2011 directed by Francesca Zambello. I caught the first instalment starring Richard Paul Fink as Alberich, Stefan Margita as Loge, Mark Delavan as Wotan and and Jennifer Larmore as Fricka on Saturday night.

Zambello’s use of the story as a fable about America’s use and abuse of natural resources is definitely prescient. This theme comes across beautifully in the contrast between the F. Scott Fitzgerald-like breeziness of life in Valhalla and the dark, sweaty flames of the mines of Nibelheim. Less successful are the endless video projections employed throughout the performance depicting clouds, mountains, water and other natural landscapes. These become distracting and tedious after a while. They don’t add much to our overall understanding of the universe depicted in the opera.

Even though I experienced it on DVD, Chereau’s production remains superior. In particular, I fell in love with Heinz Zednik’s shifty Loge in Chereau’s production. SF Opera’s Margita is no match for Zednik as an actor, though he has a fine, hard tenor voice. He’s just not wily and mysterious enough.

In general, though, I found myself engaged by SF Opera’s production over the two and a half intermissionless hours that I was pinioned to my seat. The music is so lush and full of surprises. And the story is simply mad. I can still hear the clanging anvils from Alberich’s underworld ringing in my head.

I’m looking forward to the next installment of the cycle and will be forever indebted to Joe for challenging my ill-founded bias. I wonder if I could get my dad hooked on this stuff too?

As a singer-in-training, I’m just beginning to squawk out my first aria from the operatic cannon. I’m tackling “Che Faro Senza Euridice?” from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. The famous song is, of course, one of the most divinely beautiful and tragic arias I’ve ever heard, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from my mangled attempts to penetrate Gluck’s underworld.

Thankfully, my singing coach came up with the bright idea of pointing me to YouTube so I could hear some of the world’s great mezzos and countertenors tackle the aria. I spent a very interesting hour listening to the many different renditions that can be found in YouTube’s ever-revelatory cache. Here are my reactions to the interpretations that struck me in the most visceral way, both good and bad:

1. JANET BAKER Probably the most moving version I heard. It’s no wonder that this aria was one of Baker’s signature pieces. She absolutely floored me with her depth of feeling. I was right down there in Hades with her, clutching the dead body of Euridice. There’s something a bit Miss Piggy-like about Baker’s visage. But she made me cry anyway.

2. SHIRLEY VERRETT A heavier sound than Baker’s, but still balanced. The singer looks majestic in her Roman senator-like getup. Sometimes, however, she gets a bit carried away with the emotion of it all.

3. TERESA BERGANZA A lush, powerful voice. I wasn’t too keen on the singer’s habit of swooping up and down to catch some notes, rather than hitting them head on. A bit too romantic a sound for my taste.

4. KATHLEEN FERRIER Singing in English from an old phonograph recording. Even the translated text and the crackling, hissing interference from the record can’t destroy the singer’s strength of feeling.

5. ANDREAS SCHOLL Scholl is my favorite male classical singer, but there’s something too clean and choirboy-like about his delivery on this occasion. He sounds absolutely sterile — more like he’s singing about losing a sock in the laundry than the love of his life.

6. JENNIFER LARMORE I saw Larmore last night do Fricka in SF Opera’s production of Das Rheingold. She was great. The mezzo has clearly lost about 30 pounds since the YouTube clip I saw of her singing Orfeo. Her delivery of the aria doesn’t apeal to me really — it’s plodding, heavy and there’s just too much vibrato. In fact, Larmore sounds like she’s singing Wagner.

Feeling very inspired — and not a little bit intimidated — as a result of hearing all these great voices. Now to try and make the song my own.

Yussef El Guindi’s new play about a Middle-Eastern actor trying to make his way in Hollywood without being constantly cast as an Allah-praising, virgin-deflowering plane hijacker or suicide bomber has one of the catchiest titles I’ve heard on stage in recent years. Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes presciently ties in with the blockbuster new Indiana Jones movie currently playing in cinemas across the country — Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — while at the same time refuting the link to Hollywood by deliberately eschewing any connection to the Harrison Ford franchise in terms of plot, characters and dialogue.

The irony is tidy, but it also unfortunately backfires: I found myself getting impatient with the play’s repetitive central argument (Middle Eastern actor faces off against Hollywood Machine) and longing to find out more about this Jihad Jones character and the adventures he has with the Kalashnikov Babes.

The racial-stereotyping issue the play seeks to expose is a serious one. From Disney’s animated feature Aladdin to the Fox television series 24, unseemly portraits of Arab characters have become increasingly common in U.S. popular culture over the past two decades. In the current political climate, Arab evildoers frequently replace Cold War Russian spies and Nazi soldiers in World War II as the villains in many a TV and film epic. This trend has doubtless affected public perceptions of the Arab World in a negative way.

But back to Guindi’s play, which is currently receiving its premiere under the auspices of San Francisco’s Golden Thread Productions. Sadly — and somewhat ironically — for Guindi, the latest Indiana Jones flick doesn’t even focus on Arabs as evil-doers. The bad guys this time around are Cold War Russians, led by a severe-bobbed Cate Blanchett executing one of the worst performances of her career.

Still, I’ll continue to dream about the play that Guindi didn’t write — the one about Jihad Jones. I wonder what kind of character Guindi’s Jones would be? A thug? A savior? A raffish anti-hero who keeps us guessing? I wonder if I’ll ever find out. In the meantime, my essay about the play that Guindi did write appears in next week’s SF Weekly starting Wednesday.

The American Actors Equity Association (AEA) is pulling out of San Francisco.

On June 5, members of the Equity Bay Area Advisory Committee received a letter from Equity’s headquarters advising them of the organization’s decision to close San Francisco’s AEA office. “Over the next several months we will transition the administration of San Francisco/Bay Area Equity companies to our Los Angeles office,” the letter, signed by AEA President Mark Zimmerman and Executive Director John P Connolly, read.

The decision comes as a result of an AEA study into the organization’s business practices. The departure of San Francisco AEA business rep, Joel Reamer, to sister organization AFTRA in May, further prompted the decision.

Bay Area actors are reacting strongly to the news.

“There has been no consultation with the local membership regarding problems maintaining the office, no discussion about why there has been a problem maintaining a local rep, and no conversation at all with local membership,” says Bay Area Equity member, Steven Pawley. “The decision was announced to us by staff members only and it was presented as a decision already made.”

AEA’s head office maintains that Bay Area Equity members were kept in the loop about the decision.

“In consolidating and upgrading our business practices it was decided this year to eliminate the San Francisco office,” says AEA spokesperson Maria Somma. “The study was presented to the Western Regional Board. Then it went to the National Planning Committee and then on to the President’s Planning Committee. We had a meeting with the Bay Area Advisory Committee in the last week of May to inform them of our decision. We then sent a letter out to every single one of our members last week.”

AEA has had a presence in the Bay Area since the mid- to late 1970s. Following the closure of the San Francisco office, AEA will continue to maintain three other main offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

According to Somma, the relocation of Bay Area Equity business to Los Angeles is a positive move.

“The consolidation of our offices on the west coast will give us a stronger infrastructure. The change will be greatly facilitated by today’s high-speed, advanced telecommunications,” she says. “Furthermore, we intend to have not just one but a team of business agents working with Bay Area members in the future.”

Bay Area industry officials have mixed feelings about the decision.

“I think closing the SF office will have a negative effect for both actors and theatres in our region,” says Brad Erickson, Executive Director of Theatre Bay Area, the region’s performing arts umbrella organization. “But I also recognize that this is an internal decision on Equity’s part. They have the right and the responsibility to make whatever staffing decisions they deem fit. I just want to make sure the regional and national leadership understand the many benefits provided by this local office.”

“This is a serious issue for local AEA artists and smaller theatres,” says Kelly Ground, Chair of Equity’s Bay Area Advisory Committee. “The big houses have totally outsourced productions, actors and directors from New York. The only avenues for local artists are the smaller companies. These companies need nurturing to use AEA actors. They benefit in the long run, in terms of quality and the ability to apply for grant funding. They need a local presence. A phone call isn’t going to do it.”

Dance and puppetry are kindred artforms. Dance captures the essence of human behavior and feeling. So does puppetry. Both art forms depend upon physical human dexterity. Given the close ties between the two, you’d imagine that there would be tons of renowned puppet danceworks out there. I guess there’s Petrushka – a ballet with a puppet in the plot. Maybe the doll at the center of Coppelia counts too. But I can’t think of any really well-known works created for puppets off the top of my head.

The innovative Bay Area-based choreographer Joe Goode‘s latest collaboration with puppet master Basil Twist could kick off a new trend for puppet ballets. The duo’s new piece, Wonderboy, which received its world premiere at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts over the weekend, mines deep inside a puppet’s super-human soul.

The piece features just one puppet – a waif-like boy with skinny limbs, large eyes and a white, angular face. The story, if you can call it a story, for the piece doesn’t feature a narrative in the traditional sense of the word, follows the obsessions of an introverted young boy facing the weirdness of the world for the first time.

The puppet sits more or less still for a lot of the time during the 45-minute work, propped up inside a window frame with gauzy, white silk curtains by a couple of dancers as he watches the world. The spectator sport gets a little tiring after a while, especially since the boy is rather dyspeptic and whiny (a fact exacerbated by the high-pitched electronically manipulated timbre of his speaking voice.)

The piece picks up radically when the puppet takes part in the scenes he has for so long observed – the most captivating moments occur when the puppet is completely integrated into the dancers’ choreography. At one point, for instance, a female dancer slides along the floor on her back with her legs raised in the air making slow bicycle movements, while the puppet stands with his feet planted firmly on hers’ moving forwards in time with the dancer’s movements. In another magical moment, the puppet leaps precariously over the dancers’ curled, stepping stone-like bodies, as if trying to negotiate the challenges of life.

Wonderboy had a strange effect on me. I’m not sure I understood it fully, though there is something wondrous about the way Goode, Twist and their collaborators have reunited the two brotherly artforms of dance and puppetry. I loved the interplay between the wood and string-made instruments of the musical score, the wood and string-made puppet, and the wood and string-made puppet soul at the heart of the piece.

On Saturday night, the Berkeley Early Music Festival hosted the U.S. premiere of the largest work of vocal polyphony in the history of western music at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church. The 16th century Italian composer Alessandro Striggio wrote his mammoth 60-part Missa Sopra “Ecco Si Beato Giorno” for five choirs between 1565 and 1566.

Berkeley music scholar Davitt Moroney unearthed the manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris in 2005 and it received its world premiere, under Moroney’s direction, at the BBC Proms in London last year.

Hearing it performed by the members of five Bay Area choirs on Saturday together with an ensemble of period instruments (cornetts, sagbutts, organs, harpsichords and a violone) was quite an experience, not least because the work completely defied my expectations. For one thing, it sounds nothing like the other big cannonical choral work of the period — Thomas Tallis’ magnificent Spem in Alium — even though Moroney contends that Tallis was inspired the work following a visit from Striggio. The Striggio is comprised of much simpler and cleaner blocks of sound. For another, it’s a much more modest work than I supposed a 60-part mass would be.

The sound throughout comes at the listener in gently undulating waves, more than a crashing tsumani. Quite often, choirs sing alone or have “conversations” with just one or two other choirs in the group. These conversations often take the form of plain call and response passages.

Only in the second setting of the work’s two Agnus Deis does the whole 60-voice party kick in. At this moment, the choirs come in one after another until every singer has joined the fray. But even then the effect is like a warm caress rather than a barrage of sound. If I didn’t know I was listening to 60-part polyphony, I would guess that there were maybe only 15 – 20 parts.

This warm timbre is one of the most wonderful things about the music. Striggio’s mass may not be as impressive a piece as similar works by Monteverdi or Tallis. But it’s beauty lies in its understated magnitude.

Finally, here is a June 1 article with some interesting background on the work by The San Francisco’s Chronicle‘s Joshua Kosman.

Visiting Oakland Museum of California isn’t like visiting other major museums in the Bay Area like the de Young and SFMOMA. Oakland doesn’t attract much of a tourist contingent, so on any given day, the museum’s visitors are locals. This creates a very different dynamic as many of the people who visit the museum not only seem to hold a powerful affection for the place like it’s home, but also run into each other in the corridors, galleries and sculpture gardens and say hi or stop to chat.

This sensation was powerful when I last visited the museum on Friday evening. I went both to check out the Birth of the Cool exhibition which recently opened in the institution’s art galleries (and runs until August 17) and the latest of the “First Friday” soirees, which the museum runs on the first Friday of each month from 5 – 9pm.

I thoroughly enjoyed wandering around the venue. The Birth of the Cool exhibition, which riffed on 1950s Californian art, design and culture and its incluence on American and global style, was quite a relief after having sat through the new Indiana Jones flick the night before. The canned mid-20th century kitsch of the film with its cheesy references to James Dean and soda fountains pale in comparison to Oakland Museum’s mellow-fresh insights into life 60 years ago.

Some of the items in the exhibition seem obvious. What would a retrospective of the period’s cultural influences be without a major section devoted to the design and films of Charles and Ray Eames, or the jazz of the exhibition’s namesake, Miles Davis. Needless to say, the galleries were packed with Eames chairs and William Claxton’s iconic images of jazz musicians.

But my own favorite part of the exhibition revolved around the starkly beautiful images of architectural photographer Julius Shulman. Shulman’s photographs of modernist houses set against stagering southern Californian desert and mountain backdrops are engrossing because they look like still-life paintings and yet feel larger than life. Shulman believed in putting people in his pictures of buildings to make the structures look lived in. He succeeds in this aim, yet the well-dressed couples that occupy his frames are so mannequin-like that they almost seem alien. The effect is powerful.

Another delight of Birth of the Cool is the film footage of Hugh Hefner’s television series from the period, Playboy’s Penthouse. Watching Hef chatting with Lenny Bruce about on-screen drinking while smoking a pipe reminds me that even mainstream American culture wasn’t as straight-laced as I generally thought.

Like Hef, the people of Oakland know how to let their hair down. The First Friday event swirled around me as I walked through the museum. A jazz band played upbeat swing tunes in the packed museum cafe. People of all ages, sexes and ethnic backgrounds hit the dance floor with abandon. Others lounged about, chatting, eating and drinking. The sculpture gardens were busy with people sipping wine and gazing out at the gorgeous sunset across Lake Merritt below.

Oakland is experiencing something of a “rebirth of the cool” these days, a feeling underscored by my evening at the museum.

The morning I left for the East Coast on a business trip last week, I happened to read an extraordinary article in the March issue of Gourmet Magazine. Francis Lam’s piece on the art of omelette-making is one of the most wonderful bits of food writing I’ve read in my life.

The article is brilliant because it’s deceptively simple, like the subject that it covers. We tend to think of throwing some eggs in pan as just about the easiest thing one can do in a kitchen besides making toast, and Lam’s salty-humorous story explains that there’s much more to making an omelette than meets the eye.

Similarly, there’s much more to this philosopher-chef’s article than I first supposed. I was reminded of a few crucial life lessons in the author’s egg-splattered prose. “It was astounding how something so commonplace, so elemental, could have so many variables,” writes Lam, “You just have to learn to see all those variables, to recognize what effect every moment of heat, every motion of the hands has. To get back to that thing I tasted, I would have to know exactly what to look for and nail it every step of the way.”

In just a few short lines, Lam pretty much sums up the eternal tension inherent in gaining experience in any field or activity as we go through life. This tension can also be summed up by the old adage “the more I know, the less I know.”

But Lam’s quest to create the perfect omelette goes beyond merely imparting this truthism in a roundabout way. The journalist manages to find a means of surmouting the problem. It’s not really a happy one, though it’s sweetly Sysiphean. Here is a link to the full article on Gourmet‘s website. Read it and I guarantee you’ll never look at a plate of eggs in the same way again.

Epilogue: A couple of hours after I read the article, I arrived at San Francisco airport for my flight out east. Once I cleared security, I went in search of breakfast. I ended up at an airport diner where I foolishly ordered an omelette. The greasy concoction that arrived on a paper plate after five minutes brought Lam’s description of eggy perfection into sharp relief. Having just read about master chef Daniel Boulod’s intricate omelette-making techniques (which Lam describes in detail in the piece) and imagined the giddy heights to which cooking eggs can rise, I was now confronted with the opposite end of the spectrum. The omelette infront of me was cold, rubbery and radioactive yellow in sheen. Could an omelette get much worse?

I was hungry so I tipped the contents of a little paper sachet of salt over my breakfast, grasped my plastic fork and knife, and tucked in anyway. I feel guilty admitting this, but I polished the thing off and quite enjoyed myself too. Recalling Lam’s article made me smile.

The sight of people walking down the street yakking into cellphones via wireless headsets used to unnerve me. If it wasn’t bad enough that they were talking loudly and not paying attention to their immediate environment, the fact that they appeared to be talking to themselves owing to the absence of a phone clamped to their ears made their behavior seem all the more freakish.

So many people use wireless headsets these days that the “she’s not deranged, she’s just talking on her cellphone” phenomenon has become commonplace. And I’m happy to report that ever since I started taking singing lessons, I’ve found a way to turn the public’s gradual acceptance of the wireless racket to my advantage.

Whenever I walk down a street, I take the opportunity to practice my scales, arpeggios and songs. If I sing quietly enough, I just look like someone talking via a Bluetooth headset. A great way to squeeze in a bit of vocal practice without worrying that whether I look like a weirdo, it’s an ingenious ruse.

On another note, I’m skipping town for a conference in North Carolina on Sunday and may not have time to blog until I return to the office at the end of next week. Needless to say, I’ll be leaving my wireless headset at home.