lies like truth

The Theatre Development Fund has launched a whimsical online resource called Theatre Dictionary.

The tool is being billed as “a video guide to ‘theatre lingo’ by TDF and theatre companies from across North America.”

Clearly a lot work has gone into developing the resource.

It comprises mostly lighthearted one-minute-long-ish videos explaining terms like “fight director,” “hybrid theatre” and “fourth wall”, along with written essays providing more background on each term.

There’s also an interactive element where users can submit their own definitions and videos, making the whole thing kinda like a Wiki for the stage.

I’ve been spending some time with the Theatre Dictionary this morning. In principle, it provides a fun, low-barrier-to-entry way of demistifying the art form for a general audience. But the quality of the videos is patchy.

I love the one about “The Scottish Play,” which features a pair of actors at Soho Rep in New York talking about how much they like playing witches, and just as they’re about to utter the title of the cursed Shakspearean tragedy, another actor pops up and stops them. This leads to a funny explanation of what will befall the thespians if they utter the word. Similarly entertaining is the video about “Peas and Carrots,” the term for the gibberish uttered by actors chatting in the background of a scene, while the main action / dialogue is being played out in front.

What’s far less compelling, however, is the video describing “black box theatre.” It features a slide show of photographic stills taken in black box spaces and narration by a guy with a droning voice. The drone may be intentional, perhaps to conjure up the concept of an “empty space” devoid of life. But its monotony exceedingly grates on the nerves.

I am looking forward to seeing the Theatre Dictionary grow and thus increase its usefulness. There’s still much work to do in terms of adding more content. The site is a bit thin right now. I guess that’s where the user-generated aspect of the resource will come particularly in handy.

However, even in its current form, the tool is still provides a much more tactile way of explaining theatre terms than the standard theatre lexicons that exist in print and online.

The current production of Tosca at the San Francisco Opera is wonderful to hear. The orchestra plays lavishly and the excellent double cast (which featured Patricia Racette in the title role, Brian Jagde as Cavaradossi and Mark Delavan as Scarpia the night I saw the show) perform with utter conviction.

If only this Tosca could be as easy on the eyes as it is on the ears. I don’t think I’ve ever been forced to stare at a set as ugly as this in a long time.

It’s no surprise to discover that the design, by Thierry Bosquet – a study in kitschy gilt and teetering colonnades –  is based on that of the company’s original 1932 production.

But what on earth’s the point of taking this approach, especially when the company clearly knows good design when it sees it, as recent productions of Bellini’s The Capulets and the Montagues featuring Vincent Lemaire’s dazzlingly simple yet visually captivating designs and Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick, which brilliantly merged 2D with 3D effects, clearly demonstrate?

Perhaps back in the 1930s, the sets had to be this opulent to give people something to look at. The singers in that era generally stood stiller than they do today.

But the “park and bark” stye of opera performance went out of style long ago. Performers move around the stage and actually engage in quite a bit of acting as well as singing these days.

But their efforts, no matter how vivid, end up being wasted in the case of this production, as the set is so busy and gaudy that any attempt at blocking is severely upstaged by the surroundings.

Opera is already considered to be a moribund art form by most people. Turning it into a museum piece, at least visually speaking, can’t possibly help matters.

Why does time so often play tricks on us when we go to the theatre? Why do plays rarely feel the length that they actually are — even ones that claim a unity of time, place and action?

I asked myself these questions as I left the Magic Theatre last night after opening night of Anna Ziegler’s perfunctory-schmaltzy new play set in a kids’ camp in Maine, Another Way Home.

The drama, in which an American, upper middle-class family’s testy relationships with each another come to a head when the teenage son, Joey, runs away from his job as a volunteer counselor at a kids’ camp in the woods of Maine following a sparring match with his visiting parents,  is heavily preoccupied with the concertina effect of time.

Ziegler explores how we seemingly have no control over the way in which time has this habit, on occasions, of stretching out endlessly long, and on other occasions, appearing to squish so tightly that 30 years seem to go by in a flash.

Disappointingly, the play doesn’t really tell us anything new about this truism of human existence.

What was palpable to me, however, was that despite Meredith McDonagh’s tight direction and some muscular, sensitive performances from the small ensemble cast (Mark Pinter’s explosion of temper during a pivotal scene in his role as the family patriarch, Philip, was scarily engrossing) Ziegler’s short, 80-minute play felt much longer than 80-minutes to to me.

 

From the moment a friend in Washington DC introduced me to Martin Sexton this summer (when I was over there doing a fellowship at the Library of Congress) I have been hooked on the singer-songwriter’s voice and music.

Last night, I made the four-hour roundtrip from Silicon Valley to Sacramento and back to experience the artist live at the Jean Runyon Little Theatre, and it was totally worth the schlep.

One of the things that impressed me most about Sexton’s gig was the variety of sounds he got out both of his voice and his guitar.

All too often, I go to concerts where the artist is surrounded by a battalion of instruments. Sexton, contrastingly, produced roughly just about as many different timbres as another artist might switching between various stringed instruments, looping pedals and synthesizers, by using only one guitar and his body.

I didn’t realize from the recordings I’ve heard just how accomplished a beatboxer and body percussionist Sexton is.

And his one guitar sounded at different points of the program like many different guitars such as acoustic, bass, and steel-stringed. He even managed to channel Hendrix at one point, with some dirty reverb effects generated by putting his instrument close to a speaker.

Sexton is extremely playful on stage. Every song sounds like he’s making it up on the spot, feeling the room for the right sensation and mood to build around him.

I wish I could go to Petaluma’s Mystic Theatre tonight to hear the artist do his only other Bay Area gig. Why oh why doesn’t he have a date in Oakland, Berkeley or San Francisco???

Alas, I am otherwise occupied.

(If you’re anywhere near Marin county tonight, come check out the Mill Valley Philharmonic‘s Sibelius-cetric program in which yours truly will be essaying the second oboe line!)

However, a much better use of your time might be to head to Petaluma to watch Sexton do his incomparable thing.

Today’s blogpost is brought to you by 11-year-old San Francisco school student Jasmin Tejeda (pictured left). Jasmin joined me for The Lion King during its latest run in San Francisco. Here’s what Jasmin made of the production…

If you’re thinking of seeing The Lion King, here are a few things you might want to know about the show. 

The costumes are amazing and the scenery is spectacular. The designs are incredibly detailed. The elephant looks so huge because there were five people acting out as the elephant. All the animals look very realistic. 

The show is fantastic. When the actors sing they also act. When they were sad, I felt sad with them.  

I snapped the poster pictured on the left this morning when I was in a stall in the ladies bathrooms at the Stanford gymnasium. It was hanging on the inside of the stall door and I suspect every cubicle had one of these posters in it.

As a cultural commentator, I felt compelled to take a picture and Tweet and write about it here because the project described on the poster pretty much epitomizes what Stanford culture is these days — a mass of wolfish tech startups masquerading as sheepish humanities projects.

There couldn’t any more Stanford-trendy buzz words and phrases in this advertisement, from”hack day,” “coders,” and “women developers,” to “mobile, digital and social products,” “prototypes” and “evangelists.” The fact that the endeavor has a high-profile corporate sponsor — ESPN — and is taking place at the D-School (Stanford’s uber-hip, corporate-fawning design institute) makes this the kind of project that many students, faculty and administrators will no doubt be drooling over.

But the sports journalism angle, and the Graduate School of Journalism affiliation with the project, seems a little by-the-by to me, as if someone wanted a way to validate an unfashionable and commercially-questionable humanistic / artistic pursuit through embedding it in code.

Not that I don’t applaud attempts going on all around campus — and beyond — to find ways to turn journalistic ideas into viable business propositions. The media industry would certainly benefit from the development of sustainable commercial models. But the power of the coder over all other fields around here seems both awe-inspiring, intimidating and, frankly, just a bit boring and predictable at this point to me.

Its hard to walk around this campus without running into some new app that’s being prototyped or venture capital-backed incubator for hungry, student-run startups. But where the humanities fit into all of this is currently a matter of puzzlement.

 

I am hard-pressed to find a more wonderful anecdote to these discombobulating times of mudslinging politics, economic crises and really awful weather, than Pitch Perfect. I saw the film yesterday afternoon in a mall multiplex with my friend Kate and its life-affirming effect will stay with me for, hopefully, weeks to come.

Based on the non-fiction book Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory by Mickey Rapkin, the fictionalized film paints a vivid, humorous and touching portrait of the American collegiate a cappella scene.

Here’s what I appreciated about the movie: It’s very tightly written. We care about all the characters. The actors dance and sing with passion and dexterity. The music, which veers between oldies like Toni Basil’s “Hey Mickey” and newer hits like Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA,”  manages to retain personality despite the high gloss of the production process. The story is engaging. It’s pacey. There are some hilarious lines.

I also got a lot out of the wonderful yet subtly-communicated message at the heart of the film about oddball-ism. Collegiate a cappella is widely thought of as incredibly geeky and embarrassing, even in the light of hit TV shows like Glee and The Sing-Off. But as in Glee, Pitch Perfect aims to show how cool geekery can be.

The film’s many references to the 80s teen movie The Breakfast Club are interesting in this regard. Not only does the appearance of that chestnut (which was an important part of my life when it first appeared in 1985) make the new film appeal to an older generation. But it also points to one of the central conceits of Pitch Perfect. The characters in Pitch Perfect share oddball status with the misfit yet lovable characters in John Hughes’ movie, demonstrating that the walls between people who all seem to come from very different worlds are in fact very thin.

The wonderful advantage that Pitch Perfect has over The Breakfast Club, however, is that the thing that brings the walls down is music. That’s an altogether more positive ice-breaker than the weekend detention scenario that brings the kids in Hughes’ film together.

I bought the soundtrack this morning and listened to it on my way down to Stanford. I’ll be bopping to it on my way home too.

My head was full of thoughts about Costas Vaxevanis, the journalist who was arrested and put on trial by the Greek authorities a few days ago for publishing a list of wealthy Swiss bank account holders / tax evaders in his country, when I went to see the American Conservatory Theater‘s production of Sophocles’ Elektra.

The play, in an intelligent, new English language version by Timberlake Wertenbaker, focuses strongly on notions of justice and what radically different things it means to different people.

Elektra isn’t extremely compelling theatre. I couldn’t understand David Lang’s noodling musical score (performed live on stage by Theresa Wong on solo cello). And Rene Augesen in the title role behaves and looks like a deranged sheep throughout. Not even the much more compelling performances by Olympia Dukakis as the Chorus and Caroline Lagerfelt as Clytemnestra could mitigate the bleating, wild-eyed monotony of Augesen’s Elektra.

As a result of the shortcomings of ACT’s production, I found myself thinking quite a bit about Vaxevanis and the weird way in which justice is and isn’t currently playing itself out in modern day Greece several thousand years after Sophocles wrote his tragedy.

In Elektra, justice is a sort of impulsive, tit-for-tat sport rather than something metered out carefully in court. Agamemnon kills his daughter so his wife Clytemnesta kills him so their other daughter, Elektra, plots to revenge her father by killing her mother.

The courts acquitted Vaxevanis on Thursday of charges of violating personal privacy laws after he published the list of 2,059 names of prominent Greeks sequestering money in Switzerland.

The journalist’s acquittal shows some measure of legal justice, I suppose. But the injustice of the divide between rich and poor in that country will continue to loom large over Greece long after the news of Vaxevanis’ case fades.

I wonder whether the authorities’ treatment of the journalist and attempt to cover up corruption will lead to more trouble?

Let’s hope that things don’t escalate to the point where they start to resemble the House of Atreus’ idea of “justice.”

I’ve lately — and embarrassingly belatedly — become hooked on The Voice, NBC’s singing show which asks celebrity judges from the music world like Christina Aguilera and Cee Lo Green to pick pop-stars-in-the-making, coach them, and then pick a winner based on watching them compete against one another in “sing offs” in front of a live studio audience, a panel of fellow judges and of course the millions of viewers watching the program at home.

The show’s been on my radar for a while, and I was finally inspired to check it out when I heard on the radio that The Voice is one of two factors (alongside televised football games) cited as being responsible for pushing NBC’s ratings through the roof. The network had been lagging behind all the others for years before The Voice came along.

The Voice makes for compelling viewing mostly because of the mostly incredible voices of the singers involved in the show. May favorite performer from the series is Avery Wilson (pictured above), a teenager with an amazingly mellifluous R&B voice and a sweet personality. Plus the guy can move. He just got knocked out of the competition by Cody Belew, whom I don’t think has as exceptional a voice or stage presence at all. I think the reason for Wilson’s failure can largely be attributed to a poor choice of song (the naff dance hit “Yeah 3x”) which didn’t show off his abilities to their fullest. Meanwhile Belew did moderately interesting pop-inflected things with Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” That was a more inspired choice in terms of creatively showcasing the singer’s more modest talents. 

Now, to get to the meat of this post: there’s one issue to do with The Voice that I’m having trouble wrapping my head around. While other vocal music-oriented reality TV shows like The Sing-Off and American Idol judge performers singing separate songs, The Voice pits two singers against each other over the course of a single song. This means that the singers have to perform a duet together while at the same time duel against each other. To me, the tension between having to cooperate and make harmony with someone while wanting to defeat them in that very act is totally bizarre.

The San Francisco Giants won the World Series and a rogue group of fans left the city in a state of disrepair. Crazy times. Mitt Romney’s threats notwithstanding, at least we will always have art to make sense of it all. And this past weekend’s adventures in Bay Area culture do nothing if not underscore what a weird and wonderful world we live in. I’d like to share some brief thoughts about my experiences… 

Friday: Salon97, a refreshingly unstuffy organization which organizes listening parties for classical music fans, among other wonderful things, threw a Halloween Party. As soon as I arrived (very late, sadly) host Cariwyl Hebert thrust a kazoo at me and I joined a room of about 30 people, all of them armed with the small, plastic pipes. We instantly formed a kazoo orchestra and tootled our way through Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. I’d never played a kazoo before, but I apparently have some natural talent for the instrument. The picture above comes from later in the evening, when Cariwyl lent me her Mozart wig and I performed snatches from Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bald Mountain for anyone who would listen. The evening was scary in the best way. Oh, and speaking of Mozart, check out Salon97’s YouTube Channel which features fun, short videos of the great composer engaged in everyday activities like building a couch fort, taking a shower and rocking out to his iPod.

Saturday: I sobered up enough to attend Cal Performances’ co-production of Einstein on the Beach at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. The four and a half hour experience flew by and I was so emotionally moved by it that I just had to walk out, jump in my car and head home when it was done. I didn’t have it in me to find my friends and discuss the experience, as had been planned. I don’t mean to sound glib when I say that there might be about as much “meaning” to be extracted from Philip Glass, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Child’s iconic 1975 work as there is from a kazoo orchestra. It’s the rhythm and shape of Einstein that are completely overwhelming. I just surrendered to the waves of repeated sounds and movements and shapes that whirled before my eyes. It was a little like sitting in a room staring at the paintings of Mark Rothko for a while. I had never seen the work before, and I was surprised to see how well is has stood the test of time. MIDI keyboards and saxophones are not new today as they were when the piece first premiered in France in 1976. And abstract, choreography-forward operas are equally entrenched in our culture. But somehow Einstein still feels fresh. I’m still trying to figure out why. Perhaps this has something to do with the focus and concentration of the performers and production team. It’s such a  monumental undertaking. I’m still in a state of wonder at how the dancers manage to hold their arms in one position for half an hour without dying from lactic acid build-up and how the chorus members can remember such complex micro-patterns of notes for such extended periods of time. Their concentration and flow has a Zenlike effect on the audience. My body and mind were in a buzzing trance throughout. The whole abstract work ended with a simple, heartfelt love poem that went straight to the heart, which instantly dissolved any feeling of pretension and abstraction that I might otherwise have harbored if I had not been so swept away by the whole thing. I left feeling totally cleansed and quite strange.

Sunday: Clerestory is a ten-member men’s vocal ensemble whose singers have sung with some of the most prestigious groups in the country. Many of them used to be in Chanticleer (dubbed “the world’s reigning male chorus” a few years ago by The New Yorker). Having experienced the ensemble’s latest concert series featuring music inspired by the sea, I have to say that Clerestory is every bit as musical as Chanticleer, and has two crucial advantages over the more well-established group: wisdom and age. There are no leaders in Clerestory and the singers figure out a way between them to put an innovative program together and sing the pants off it. The SeaSongs concert series, performed yesterday in a cavernous, sunlit old Ford automobile plant on the water at Point Richmond in the East Bay, reflected Clerestory’s maturity and sense of togetherness. Old tunes by the likes of Dufay and Brahms sailed elegantly alongside Paul Crabtree’s rapturous “Lovely on the Water” and a newly commissioned work by Eric Banks, “These Oceans Vast.” The Banks piece was the high point of the concert. The six-movement song cycle, which traces a sea voyage (both physically and metaphysically) through easy and turbulent waters, showcased the singers’ ability to listen carefully to one another, bring out key lines in dense textures and make every word of the poems by Herman Melville upon which the cycle is based, heard.  I should also add that despite their maturity, the men of Clerestory have not lost sight of their sense of fun. These guys might be older than most of the members of Chanticleer by at least ten years at this point, but they still know how to have a laugh, as the encore piece — a hilarious version of “What Shall we do with the drunken sailor?” — proved.

I quite often find myself wishing that curatorial statements could be excised from the walls of art museums. Or that they could be less pretentious.

This feeling struck me palpably last week while I was visiting The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) for the first time during a trip to the East Coast.

One of my favorite parts of the museum was the huge, lofty room containing The Cartographer’s Conundrum, a multi-media installation by the New York-based artist Sanford Biggers.

The installation is jaw-droppingly beautiful and strange. Colorful church pews at one end of the room appear to be taking off from the ground, transported perhaps by an explosion of pipe organ pipes and other musical instruments that make up some sort of dais in front of them. The floor is covered in cracked mirrors cut into star shapes. The Autumn light floods the room, causing the transparent colors in the pews and window panes to glow and the stars to sparkle.

When I first explored the room, I felt like I was in a magical space. I found my own meaning in the colors, musical motifs and quasi-religious architecture. What spoiled the experience — and this happens all too often when I visit a modern art museum — was the description of the artwork on the wall. 

“…Sanford Biggers’ goal is to both study and expand the emerging genre of Afrofuturism, which engages science-fiction, cosmology and technology to create a new folklore of the African Diaspora while simultaneously illuminating the underrepresented career of master painter and muralist John Biggers…”

The text went on. And on. In a similar vein.

Suddenly the magic of Biggers’ installation evaporated and I was left with nothing but a crude, academic summary of the work that did nothing to enhance the experience for me. I wish I hadn’t read it at all.

When Orson Welles adapted Herman Melville’s Moby Dick for the stage in 1955, Kenneth Tynan famously wrote: “It is absurd to expect Orson Welles to attempt anything less than the impossible. It is all that is left to him. Mere possible things, like Proust or War and Peace, would confine him. He must choose Moby-Dick, a book whose setting is the open sea…and whose villain is the supremely unstageable whale.”

Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer have created an adaptation of the famously unwieldy novel for the opera stage that is is amazingly sea-worthy and water-tight. The current run at the San Francisco Opera made for one of the most engrossing evenings of opera I’ve experienced in recent years.

Heggie has a brilliant way with melody (though some of the arias and orchestrations are so lushly Romantic that they made me feel slightly sea sick.) Scheer’s libretto feels salty without being too drenched in old sea dog repartee. And the cast, headed by tenor Jay Hunter Morris as a wizened and peg-legged Captain Ahab, provide physically and sonically arresting performances. This helps to mitigate the bottom-heavy feel of the singing. There is only one female role in the work — Pip the cabin boy — flightily sung in this instance by soprano Talise Trevigne.

One of the most intoxicating parts of the experience is the production design. San Francisco Opera’s use of video is often pretty disappointing. The airplane that swooped in across a screen at the start of the recent production of Nixon in China was impressive, but the conceit didn’t go anywhere. It wasn’t integrated into the rest of the production design. Conversely, the churning water/cloud projection motif from the Ring Cycle was over-used to the point of making me want to strangle the Rhine Maidens.

In Moby-Dick, projection designer Elaine McCarthy and set designer Robert Brill collaborate to integrate their artistry in an immersive way. At the start of the opera, a video projection of a starry night sky gradually morphs into a beautiful line-drawn rendering of an enormous whaling ship, which looks extremely real, as minimalistic as it is. And then the ship appears to keel as the curtain opens at an angle and there we suddenly are, smack bang aboard the deck of the Peaquod with a massive cast of sailors busying about.

The transition between video and set is not only seamless but is used to great effect at several points during the production. It is particularly powerful in the scene where the Peaquod’s crew sets out in small fishing boats, created using a combination of the video projected line drawings and the vertiginously steep rake of the physical set (see picture above).

The relationship between the fragility of the video montage and the solidity of the stage set physically suggests the dissonance between the reality of life on the high seas and the more ephemeral demons in Captain Ahab’s head. It’s quite a brilliant piece of design thinking and execution.

I hope that opera companies will create more productions that bring together video and set in such an intelligent way.