Archives for 2011

I’ve seen a couple of documentaries lately set in the artistic echelons of New York that have completely refreshed the way in which that world operates.

The first was Herb & Dorothy, a heart-warming and insightful film about Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, an New York couple of very modest means (she was a librarian and he worked nights sorting mail at the post office), who became unlikely but very prolific and respected collectors of contemporary art. I blogged about that movie here.

A few nights ago, I saw Bill Cunningham New York, a film about a longtime New York Times fashion photographer, Bill Cunningham. The movie treads similar thematic terrain to Herb & Dorothy in that it shows how you don’t have to be glamorous or rich or young to be part of the cultural haute-monde.

The film tells the story of Bill Cunningham who on the surface cuts an unlikely figure in the New York fashion world. A confirmed bachelor with only one love in his life — taking pictures of beautiful clothes and accessories — Cunningham lives exceedingly modestly. Until recently, he resided in a tiny Carnegie Hall apartment packed with filing cabinets full of his photo archives and notes. The movie follows him around on his bike each day as he snaps pictures of interesting clothes on people he sees around New York for his column.

Beyond being a delightful document of one man’s passion for fashion, the film is also interesting for its despiction of the elderly residents of Carnegie Hall, the last of whom were moved out at around the same time that the film was made to make room for offices. In my favorite scene, Cunningham hangs out with a couple of his amazing neighbors, including a barmy but fantastic octogenarian portrait photographer (I forget her name) who likes to dress up as a ballerina and dance the Dying Swan solo from Swan Lake. Tantalizing stuff.

Both Herb & Dorothy and Bill Cunningham New York are great, life confirming films for a rainy day or dark night.

P.S. Extended absence greeting: I’ve just returned from Canada and am now off to Arizona for a week. I will be back with you upon return from my desert adventure.

Hotel rooms don’t make much sense as settings for plays, at least from a business and audience comfort sense. At best, you can only fit between 10 – 20 people in the average hotel room, meaning you can only sell a very limited number of tickets. And the sorts of hotel rooms that accommodate fringe theatre companies tend to be the kind that don’t have very good temperature control. It’s always either way too hot or way too cold.

So it’s surprising in a way that theatre companies should gravitate so often to hotel rooms as venues for site-specific performances.

And yet, at another level, it’s easy to see why they do. They’re intimate for one thing. Plus, doing a play that’s set in a hotel room in an actual hotel room has the potential to compound the metaphorical power of hotel rooms as spaces of transition, where people are given license to behave in outlandish ways and think about deep existential questions.

It’s a good thing that art wins out over questions of commerce and audience comfort in the case of the Alley Theatre production of Stephen Belber’s Tape. The play, which reunites three high school friends over the disturbing half-forgotten memory of a date rape committed some ten years previously, is currently playing in a room at the recently renovated Waldorf Hotel in Vancouver. The room was boiling hot. The seats were cramped and two of the three cast members smoked cigarettes a foot away from where I was sitting. But I felt completely engaged in the action nonetheless.

Hotel rooms, being so small, tend to exacerbate flaws in the writing, direction and acting. But cast members Daniel Arnold, Matthew Kowalchuk and Marisa Smith flowed through the space, commanding it entirely. They allowed the tensions to arise from the script, rather than from the awkwardness of performing a play in front of a room of strangers seated almost in their laps.

And yet for all that, I think it’s time that playwrights and theatre companies started doing more interesting things with hotel rooms, if they continue to perform in them at all. I’ve been to so many of these productions at this point, that I’m growing a little tired of being a fly-on-the-wall in the cramped and airless spaces.

Having been slightly put off by the amount of time spent looking at a screen on stage during the production of No Exit at ACT last week, it was interesting to go to head out to the Rialto Cinemas’ Elmwood Theatre on College Avenue in the East Bay last night and watch a full stage production — Danny Boyle’s staging of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein adapted by Nick Dear for the UK’s National Theatre — at the movie theatre.

Over the last decade or so that performing arts events have been captured on film for cinema audiences, cameramen and editors have become very skilled at the task of making a play, opera or concert come alive for remote audiences. It took me a while to get used to the twitchy editing in Frankenstein — the camera wouldn’t keep still for more than a few seconds at a time — but after I while, I found myself more or less immersed in the action.

I can understand the reason for the constant movement at the start of this production: The opening 15 minutes is a wordless pantomime in which we see Frankenstein’s monster emerge from an ersatz “egg” like a befuddled baby bird and begin to make sense of his new body. This long sequence would probably have come across as rather static on screen without the help of the camera which panned every which a way to give us views of the emergence of this being that theatre audiences would not have been privy to (e.g. aerial shots.)

I’m not sure if the camera settled down much thereafter or if I just got used to the movement. Either way, I ended up not minding too much.

Frankenstein represented the first time I’ve seen a straight drama on screen. I’ve experienced many operatic productions in HD. Music adds an extra dimension though, and I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough going on in a standard play to keep me engaged from afar. But Boyle’s production of Mary Shelley’s work clips along, the acting is engrossing and many of the stage effects, such as the glittering panoply of lightbulbs representing the electricity and inspiration that ignite both monster and maker that shimmer at various points during the course of the drama, come across strongly even on screen.

Seeing the film of the play makes me want to see the play again — not just once, but twice. The actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller switched off the two lead roles for different performances throughout the run. Last night’s performance featured Cumberbatch as the monster and Miller as Dr. Frankenstein. I’d love to see the show done in reverse casting. And I think I’d be happy experiencing it again on screen.

Yet more coverage — this time on the BBC website — about Rebecca Black bids me in incredulous tones to ask: Why is anyone surprised about the pop singer’s success?

Black’s meteoric rise on social media and the talk-show circuit is completely understandable. The fact that she can’t sing and that the song that rocketed her to her two minutes of stardom (“Friday”) is terrible is neither here nor there.

We live in a culture that adores mediocrity. When people go online and deride her terrible lyrics and auto-tuned bray, they actually help to further Black’s notoriety, not hamper it in any way.

If something is panned as being universally bad, it piques our curiosity. We wonder ‘how bad can this possibly be?’ and we go and take a look and a listen. The turgidity is relative of course — there are many pop songs as stupid as “Friday” out there. (The 1990s Whigfield number “Saturday Night” springs immediately to mind; Sunday, coming wistfully at the end of the weekend, is perhaps impervious to truly inane musical treatment.)

There are some cases of musical badness which deserve attention because they provide light relief. Examples include The Really Terrible Orchestra (a classical music ensemble based in Scotland made up entirely of proudly mediocre instrumentalists) and the hilariously off-color opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins, who makes me giggle every time I hear her castrated-tomcat version of the Queen of the Night’s famous aria from The Magic Flute.

But Black’s song doesn’t fall into the category of good badness. The song and the singer are merely mediocre. And the best way to deal with mediocrity is not to fan the blaze of instant celebrity by covering it extensively in the media and helping it go viral by facebooking and tweeting about it, but to ignore it.

P.S. Yes, I’m aware of the fact that writing about Black in this blog post contradicts what I just said.

The Virtual Stage and Electric Company Theatre‘s “live film” production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit currently playing at ACT‘s Geary Theatre, is packed with interesting staging concepts — some of them illuminating of Sartre’s bleak existentialist drama and others less so.

My favorite of the production’s many intriguing conceits is the idea of flipping the setting for the play inside out: Instead of showing us the hermetically-sealed hotel room in which the three condemned newly-deads Cradeau, Inez and Estelle chafe at the prospect of eternal imprisonment, the action happens in the yawning space beyond the hotel room, with the valet (who’s little seen in Sartre’s text) almost constantly on stage.

With the “exit passage” so palpably on view and the play’s action mostly taking place behind a locked door stage left and projected on screens at the back of the stage, the notion that there might theoretically in fact be “a way out” of this eternal damnation known as life is dangled before our eyes as a tantalizing possibility. It’s like the tinkle of the Valet’s many obsolete bells which gather in a useless pile at the front of the stage.

But the escape route area beyond the prison turns out to be a less hospitable place than the gaol of the infernally-hot hotel room in Kim Collier’s production. Ultimately, we’re left wondering who really has the bum deal in this drama — it is the squabbling hotel room inmates? Or is it the poor valet, forever stuck wandering the drafty netherworld beyond the bolted door?

I’ve been looking around on the excellent Rumpus alternative comics site today.

A critique of centipedes by an author/artist called Ted Wilson made me laugh out loud.

For any professional arts reviewer who occasionally suffers a moment or two of surreal angst about what it is they’re doing for a living (admit it, we all do) then “Ted Wilson Reviews the World” provides the perfect tonic / reality check.

Centipedes as a species only get two out of five stars in Mr. Wilson’s astute review, which begins:

“Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing centipedes.”

He really doesn’t have anything good to say about this insect:

“There have never been any famous centipedes, in history or in fiction. I attribute this to the fact that centipedes are gross…I think some people in really poor countries eat centipedes, but because they’re poor, not because they like them.”

I will certainly be checking in with the critic next week when he applies his laser-like power of insight to a review of OshKosh B-Gosh.

Explored three very different aspects of the local cultural scene this weekend — all of them a refreshing contrast to Lemi Ponifasio’s dark and dirge-like “Tempest: Without a Body” which nearly caused me to slit my wrists last Thursday.

1. Pinball in Contemporary Art exhibition at the Pacific Pinball Museum: I’d been meaning to get to the Pacific Pinball Museum for ages. The fact that it’s located on the non-public-transport-friendly island of Alameda meant that it took me a while to organize an outing. I’m very glad I made it over there. The museum features an eye-popping, ear-jangling collection of pinball machines dating back to precursors of the contraptions from the late 19th century all the way to the 1990s. Many of the machines are extremely beautiful, especially those designed in the 50s, which are made of lovely old wood. Of the newer machines (which are generally louder and more garish in appearance) I liked the “Fun House” machine best for its innovative use of ramps and a scary-looking clown’s head with a mouth that gapes open and shut as you play. On Friday, the museum was having an opening night party for its new exhibition about the influence of pinball on famous artists. The museum had printed copies of works on display by Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud, and William Wiley among others. The candy-colored, pop art-infused works imbued pinball, a form of entertainment which I know very little about, with a new significance. It would have been lovely if the Pinball Museum could have collaborated with a larger art institution like SFMOMA on this show in order to have original works represented rather than copies. But in any case the exhibition still succeeded, albeit in a modest way, in drawing a link between pinball and fine art.

2. Teatro Zinzanni‘s Too Caliente To Handle: The first and only experience I’d had of Teatro Zinzanni, San Francisco’s high-end dinner-theatre experience was not altogether positive. Many of the circus acts seemed hackneyed and the food wasn’t much to write home about. I went along on Saturday night for two main reasons: 1) to see what was going on in the wake of the announcement that the company’s beautiful mirrored Spiegeltent performance space might have to move from its prime location on the waterfront to some other probably less desirable spot, and 2) to check out what Ricardo Salinas, a member of the satirical, high-energy Culture Clash theatre company, and the director of Zinzanni’s latest show, would do with the concept of dinner theatre. I came away on a high. The latino theme infused many aspects of the evening, from chanteuse Rebekah Del Rio’s heartfelt spanish-language rendering of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”, to the zapatista slant of the topical political comedy (in which the kitchen workers, in a nod to the company’s fears of displacement, stand up to their corporate bosses and insight a grassroots theatrical revolution), to Beaver Bauer’s amazing costume designs which playfully combined the Victorian fairground chic that is integral to the whole Zinzanni esthetic with the bullet belts and sombreros of Mexican revolutionaries. The food, which also had a latino flavor, was also more delicious than I had remembered it to be from my last visit.

3. SFO Terminal 2 Open Day: I spent a chunk of Saturday singing with my vocal ensemble, the International Orange Chorale, at San Francisco Airport’s newly-opened Terminal 2 as part of its public open day. The airport staff did an amazing job of inviting a very diverse group of artists. There were musical and dance ensembles of all kinds and as the day went on, the place became increasingly packed. As far as the experience of singing away from conventional venues goes, it wasn’t the most satisfying of musical experiences. The acoustics were lousy and audiences mostly walked past rather than stopped to listen. But a few people stopped by and seemed to appreciate the music. And it’s always fun to get away from singing in churches for a change. Plus, the experience allowed us to be more experimental than usual. We sight-read through a bunch of stuff and even attempted a little bit of performance art at one point by singing a song as we traversed a long corridor on a conveyor belt. The men in the group traveled one way down the belt and the women traveled the other way so that we met in the middle. It wasn’t entirely successful musically, but the experiment was a lot of fun.

Theatre director Peter Sellars was in town last night with the Samoan choreographer Lemi Ponifasio to introduce a two-night run of Ponifasio’s Tempest: Without A Body at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

In a pre-performance talk, Sellars called Ponifasio’s Tempest “the one great piece I’ve seen about 9/11.”

I dearly wish that I could agree, as this clearly seems to be the sort of Important Political Work that it’s not polite to dislike.

The production, which involves a cast of Pacific Islanders, is a deeply dark meditation on the theme of human rights created in response to the escalation of state powers and unlawful detention in the post 9/11- world. The piece has been widely acclaimed around the globe since premiering in Vienna in June 2007. It has been performed at such places as the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre London 2008, Theatre de la Ville Paris 2010 and Volksbühne Berlin 2010.

I can see how it’s interesting for a group of artists from a part of the world that most people think of as a sun-drenched tourist’s paradise to create a work as dark and oppressive as this. There are some incredible, fast-action choreographic sequences in which a group of male dancers perform ritualized steps with fast footwork and sharp, frenetic hand gestures. The seamlessness of their movements makes them look both graceful and eerily machine-like.

But beyond this, I didn’t really get much out of Tempest except a terrible headache.

The relentless, 90-minute performance takes place on a pitch black stage punctured with shafts of eerie white light. Between this and the oscillating, industrial-strength white noise that serves as the production’s sonic accompaniment, you feel you’re being tossed around the inside of a washing machine. Every now and again, various figures emerge from the shadows, and skulk back. A bent-over angel figure in a ragged dress belts out blood-curdling screams and holds up a blood red hand. A Maori chief dressed in a suit with no shoes on makes an ardent speech in his native tongue.

The experience is completely unsettling and the meaning, beyond a depiction of the resolute bleakness of imprisonment underscored by vague references to Shakespeare, Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee and Maori activism, remains largely intractable.

Ponifasio obviously wants the production to stir up visceral, unsettled feelings. But is the dramatic sense of relief that I experienced as soon as I exited the theatre really the sort of end-goal that an artist should aim for? With Tempest, there’s very little chance that Ponifasio will leave ’em coming back for more.

One very common way in which theatre artists make universal themes carry weight beyond a distant historical or mythical moment is by tearing characters in the stories out of the history books and legendary annals and giving them a contemporary spin. The thinking, I guess, is that if you make figures of yore seem more like people that we can relate to, the themes they articulate on stage will resonate more strongly today.

Writer/actor Jason Craig and composer Dave Malloy have been very good at doing this in the past. In shows like Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage, the duo connected the legendary figure of Beowulf with the preoccupations of our own time. They turned the Anglo Saxon hero into a nerdy rockstar and surrounded him with equally nerdy academics all trying to decipher his tale. In doing so, we understood something about the way in which legends are born, perpetuated and ruined over centuries of academic research that wouldn’t necessarily have come across in a telling which focused more on re-creating the Anglo Saxon world.

The duo’s latest musical theatre piece for Shotgun Players in Berkeley, Beardo has some of the same appeal. Centering on Rasputin, the infamous aide to the Russian royal family, it combines Malloy’s quirky anti-musical song-writing sensibility (which encompasses influences as broad as opera, kletzmer, doo-wop jazz and indie rock) and Craig’s downbeat, terse-humored language, to draw a parallel between Tsarist Russia and a hillbilly American backwater that seems ancient and yet very real today.

The production begins and ends with Ashkon Davaran’s Rasputin lying senseless on the ground in the middle of a wood. The opening song (and returning refrain) insists on his downtrodden roots “in a shack in a field in a shack in a field…” and Davaran’s homespun accent also gives his character a hick tang.

The parallel successfully makes Davaran’s Rasputin seem like a modern day mystic, a sort of Kurt Cobain meets Jim Jones. But the emphasis on turning Rasputin into a 21st century Messiah — which creates a lot of edgy humor and spawns brilliant songs — comes at the expense of digging more deeply into the play’s otherwise scantly- treated ideas. At one point, a 30-strong chorus of Russian peasants comes on stage and sings an ardent, harmonically-rich torch song on the theme of what it means to live under a useless, despotic monarchy. But the amazing theatrical moment is wasted in the grand scheme of things because Craig and his colleagues don’t attempt to link the ideas expressed in the song or even the visual concept of suddenly introducing so many people on stage with much else in the production.

The result of this is that Beardo, though very entertaining, ultimately, doesn’t add up to much beyond a fun night out. It’s not enough to indicate that the problems facing another time and place are very like the ones we face today by giving characters a contemporary spin. A dramatist still has to do the hard work of going deeper to make a theme meaningful on stage.

In general, I think that artists’ head shots should reflect what the artist looks like now. But performers make money at least in part by their looks and getting head shots done is an expensive business. So it’s no surprise that there’s often a great discrepancy between the photograph that a performer chooses to include with his or her publicity materials and what they actually look like on stage.

The photo in the press packet that accompanies Geezer, Geoff Hoyle’s new solo show at The Marsh in San Francisco, doesn’t shy away from this discrepancy: It shows the artist, who’s 64 years old, as he was at least 20 years ago. In the photograph, there are a few wrinkles on Hoyle’s face and his hair is beginning to thin. But it’s definitely a much more youthful looking artist than the one that stands before us today on stage. The wrinkles are much deeper and the receding hairline reaches way back on his skull.

“This is what I USED to look like!!” the artist scrawled on a post-it note appended to the image.

It’s the perfect visual metaphor for the show, which is all about the aging process. Shakespeare summed up Hoyle’s feelings about this brief spell in time we call life when he wrote: “Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more.” The consummate performer takes this sentiment and runs as far with it as his creaking limbs, swelling prostate and popping varicose veins will allow him.

Hoyle has packed a lot of living into his 64 years and this mostly autobiographical production is full of vivid stories of a life richly lived.

The performer studied under the mime master Etienne Decroux and participated in the student riots in Paris in 1968. He spent time on a commune in the Ozarks and performed on Broadway in The Lion King.

The bittersweet thing about all of this is that it all goes by in a flash. By the end of the show, hunched up and wheezing with his lips puckered and his eyelids pressed together, Hoyle fast forwards about 20 years to paint a portrait of a comically wizened octogenarian.

At least this makes the present-day 64-year-old actor who stands before us — a living head shot — look lithe and young.

Matthew Benjamin and Logan Brown’s play Wirehead is about the frontiers of technological advancement.

The play tells of a time in our not-too-distant-future when the entire world is run by a gargantuan Chinese corporation, human strength and intelligence is measured by the amount of silicon a person has in their body, and phones can be turned on and off by sticking a finger in your ear.

Yet for all the banter about human advancement, Wirehead feels like a terrible play written at around the time of the industrial revolution and its ensuing years.

The pot-boiling melodramas of Israel Zangwill (not a name very well known today) came to mind as I watched SF Playhouse‘s cast earnestly intone Benjamin/Brown’s lines. The fears of yesteryear — of a dangerous man-machine meld that will lead to the destruction of humankind — are played out in Wirehead in much the same way as they were played out by dramatists concerned with similar issues a hundred years ago. Only this time, with more expletives.

What a waste. SF Playhouse always goes all-out with casting, set design and direction. And this production, snappily helmed by Susi Damilano, slickly designed by Bill English and performed by a top-notch cast including Gabriel Marin, Madeline H D brown, Scott Coopwood, Lauren Grace, Craig Marker and Cole Alexander Smith, is no exception. But it’s all for nought when the script is this embarrassingly bad.