lies like truth

I was lured to the East coast this week with the promise of fall color and experienced not only incredibly vibrant scenery out of doors but also colorful art happenings inside, including one of the best concerts I’ve heard in a long time.

The vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Tim Eriksen knocked me sideways at the sweetly shabby Next Stage Arts performance space in Putney, Vermont, where he gave the kind of performance that makes the hairs on one’s lower back prickle.

Eriksen’s roots lie firmly in the American folk tradition. His voice, which is nasal in quality without sounding pinched, is as supple as old leather and as strong as bathtub moonshine. And he can handle himself virtuostically on the banjo, guitar, fiddle, jew’s harp and most likely anything else that exists on this earth that can be strummed, blown, bowed or plucked.

But Eriksen isn’t your typical folk balladeer. He looks more like a pirate rocker with his black biker boots and jeans, silver jewelry and bald pate. And his musical palate is as broad as it is deep.

I’m a fan of Eriksen’s new album, Josh Billings Voyage, which comes out tomorrow and marries his background in American folk music such as New England hymns, shape note tunes and sea shanties with the musics from other parts of the globe like India, Zanzibar and Mexico.

Josh Billings Voyage is a whimsical effort: The songs speak of quotidian life in “Pumpkintown,” an imaginary village in Massachusetts. The flavor of the album is resoundingly American, but there’s always a twinge of something else playing at the edges of the music to remind us that the world is both a big and small place.

For example, one of the most playful songs on Josh Billings Voyage, “The Mice,” about the singer’s stint living in a mouse-infested eighteenth century house in New Hampshire, features some beautiful Indian microtonal voice effects.

I’ve enjoyed listening to the CD for the last few weeks. But experiencing some of the songs live is an entirely transformative experience. Together with percussionist Peter Irvine (introduced to us by Eriksen as his “friend and lawyer”) Eriksen creates a dense, multi-textured sonic landscape. The effect is much richer than appears possible coming from the hands and mouths of just two guys standing on a small Vermont stage.

If you want to make bank as a musical theatre creator, come up with a production that will have recycle value.

And if you can write something that will come into vogue, say, ooh, I dunno, every four years, then you’re really smart: Four years is just about enough time for people to want to see your show again. Any longer and the musical is likely to fall off producers’ radar; any shorter and your audience will soon suffer from fatigue.

How else, beyond election fever, to explain the popularity of works like Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins and Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman’s Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson?

Neither show is particularly good. And yet great Bay Area companies (as well as many others further afield) are mounting these works, at what looks like significant expense, in order to have something to present to audiences that’s “topical” as every fourth November rolls around.

Assassins, which looks at the history of U. S. presidential assassination attempts, has some witty lines. Sondheim is undeniably a great lyricist. But there isn’t one notable tune in the work and its shapeless, episodic structure quickly becomes monotonous.
Shotgun Players production, directed by Susannah Martin with music direction by Dave Moschler, is fairly watchable on the whole. But not even the crack cast and production team can overcome the rhythm problems inherent in the piece. Plus there are some intonation and timing issues between the instrumentalists and the singers, which could be the result of the fact that the musicians’ view of the stage is impeded by the set design.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, meanwhile, doesn’t even have smart lyrics to recommend it. The show, which conceives of the country’s seventh president as a belligerent rock star, is just bloody awful. Grinding music, unlikeable, cardboard characters and boundless clichés more or less sum things up.

San Francisco Playhouse chose this musical as the opening show for its beautiful new 200-seat theatre at 450 Post Street near Union Square in San Francisco. I am excited about the company’s move up in the world. Being in the crowd on opening night was a privilege and a thrill. I only wish the company had picked a better project to launch its new digs with.

The stagey punk aesthetic, so tired at this point (Spring Awakening, American Idiot and their black eye-makeup and skinny denim’d theatrical siblings had their moment of squinting in the sun several years ago) grates on the nerves in director Jon Tracy’s one-note production. Plus, Ashkon Davaran (pictured) lacks the necessary charisma and sex appeal to play Andrew Jackson. Turning the character into an “everyman” figure with a scruffy mohawk and bad temper just doesn’t seem to work. We have to be able to fall in love or at least lust with with the character in order to understand the “populism” which rules his campaign. But again, the rot isn’t as much to do with the cast and crew, as with the musical itself, which, as President Jackson himself likes to put it in the musical, “sucks.”

Regardless of the quality of these two shows, they’re bound to sell ballot-box-fuls of tickets and are therefore canny business moves on the part of the Shotgun Players and San Francisco Playhouse managements.
But can we not come up with any more engaging theatrical fodder for election season? Or are all election season productions necessarily bad? (David Mamet’s November is another unfortunate case in point.)

Let’s keep trying, I suppose. And in the meantime, we’ll always have Julius Caesar.

When Bellini wrote The Capulets and the Montagues in 1830, trouser roles  were on their way out. Romeo was the last major role of this kind in Italian opera.

To see Joyce DiDonato play Romeo in San Francisco Opera’s mesmerizing current production of the work though, is to yearn for more of these cross-dressed parts in twentieth and twenty-first century operas.

Despite the fact that most of the opera sounds like a jaunty triumphal march — which is somewhat disconcerting when the performers on stage are singing lines like “Death to the Montagues!” and “Prepare yourself for a massacre!” — DiDonato’s fierceness and force of will makes the music and text seem like they are perfectly in alignment.

Dressed in costume designer Christian Lacroix’s modish, Victorian-street-urchin-meets-biker-boy garb, the performer oozes virile masculinity. I wouldn’t be surprised if nearly every woman and man in the house, regardless of their sexual orientation, secretly fantasizes about playing Juliet to DiDonato’s Romeo.

The flexibility and fluidity of the performer’s voice is such that she can make even the most feminine-sounding run at the very top of her range sound testosterone-laced in this production. At times, DiDonato’s vocal power makes her come across as sounding more like a countertenor (or perhaps even a castrato, if I may hazard a guess as what this kind of singer sounded like) than a mezzo soprano. And there’s also a softness at the edges of her voice which makes the character seem entirely vulnerable.

There are many things to recommend this production, including Lacroix’s costumes, the San Francisco Opera orchestra’s emotional yet punctilious playing, Guido Levi’s mood-contorting lights and Vincent Lemaire’s expressionistic set design, not to mention a stellar cast, which besides DiDonato, features Nicole Cabell as Juliet, Saimir Pirgu as Tybalt, Eric Owens as Juliet’s father, Capulet, and Ao Li and Lorenzo, the Capulets’ physician.

DiDonato, however, is worth the price of admission alone.

Andras Schiff gave an hour-long lecture about J S Bach last night at Davies Symphony Hall. The pianist recently began a two-year residency with the San Francisco Symphony, during which time he’s devoting much attention to Bach.

There’s an effortless yet quiet sense of humor to the man which I find charming. He seems very self-effacing in spite of his grandeur at the keyboard.

Of the many fascinating things that Schiff mentioned during his talk, which the pianist deftly accompanied with short musical excerpts to illustrate the points he wanted to make, the thing that I found most interesting was his interpretation of certain pieces by Bach in terms of the color spectrum.

For Schiff, every key in which Bach wrote a Prelude and Fugue in The Well-Tempered Clavier brings to mind a different color of the rainbow. According to the pianist, C Major is white, E Major is light blue, G Major is green, and B Minor is black. He played excerpts from the pieces Bach wrote in those keys to illustrate his assertions.

I can’t say I heard the hues that Schiff hears when he played those excerpts last night. But it’s a lovely idea anyway. It probably helps the pianist to embody a certain feel for the music as he plays through the series.

I kept trying to visualize the colors Schiff mentioned as he played, as if attempting to conjure a scene from Fantasia in my mind’s eye. I think that might be why I couldn’t quite understand what Schiff was getting at with his synesthesia-esque thoughts.

Andras Schiff will play Book Two of The Well-Tempered Clavier on October 21. For more information, go here.

I spent the weekend in Lone Pine, a cowboy town on the far side of California.

I’m not kidding about the cowboys; there were horses hanging outside the saloons on the main thoroughfare while their owners were inside getting beers.

I was in Lone Pine for the hiking, specifically to climb Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental United States. And what a walk that was!

What I wasn’t banking on was that Lone Pine would be having its annual weekend-long film festival the weekend I was in town.

I want to say a few words about the gem of an outdoor movie event I stumbled upon on Friday night after arriving, courtesy of The Echo Park Film Center.

The Center, a non-profit media arts organization based in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, visits the festival every year with its veggie-oil-powered “Filmmobile.” Its representatives run filmmaking workshops for kids and adults and put on outdoor screenings. All of its activities at the festival are free to the public.

The night I was there, an old projector, which had been jerry-rigged to run on solar power, was playing the reels for a Hopalong Cassidy movie from the mid 1930s. Many classic westerns, including the Hopalong series, were shot in and around Lone Pine, so the film was the perfect choice.

The atmosphere was lovely, with audience members sitting on benches under an awning in the warm evening air and helping themselves to drinks and snacks provided by the Echo Park Film Center. The organization’s staff made us all feel very welcome.

If I hadn’t had to get up at 2 am on Sunday morning to hike up a big hill, I would definitely have returned on Saturday evening to experience the screening of Stagecoach.

This picture represents a yogic approach to voice. The different chakras in the body are aligned with the vowel sounds. While western singing practices mostly focus on the resonance of the voice in the face — and most particularly the mask — yogic singing is all about making the whole body vibrate.

It’s fascinating to say a vowel like EE and feel it buzzing in the top of your head, the chakra where the sound comes from. The same goes all the way down the body. The vowel EH does indeed seem to sit in the throat, where the corresponding chakra is; AH comes from the chest. OH from the stomach and OOH from deep down in the pelvis. (It’s not for nothing ‘ooh’ is often the sound that accompanies sexual stimulation!)

I’m learning about yogic vocal techniques as a student on an eight-week course taught by jazz singer and yoga instructor Ann Dyer. It’s turning out to be a fascinating exploration, because I’m discovering a whole new way of thinking about how we use (and fail to use) our voices.

Of particular interest from the first class is the stuff about “deep listening.” In order to sing well, you have to listen intently. This goes for all singing, regardless of genre or tradition. At one point during the workshop, we practiced listening.

The sensations I felt by doing this just for a few minutes were palpable. My breath automatically slowed down and deepened, without the need to consciously make an effort to do these things; Individual sounds in the room and outside on the street became amplified in volume and more distinct. Sounds that I would have filtered out, such a classmate clearing her throat, the buzz of a light fixture in the lobby or a dog barking a few blocks away, were suddenly right at the forefront of my conscience. It was an almost effortless exercise. But for a few minutes it helped me focus my mind in a new way and at least temporarily took me away from my extremely visual-oriented world into an aural dimension.

I think i’m going to incorporate deep listening into my life in a more regular way. I tried it while climbing Mount Whitney (the highest peak in the continental United States) at the weekend and it helped me get through some tough parts of the hike by forcing me to shift my focus.

One more key learning from Ann’s class was to do with the rationale for why she’s teaching a yogic singing class in the first place. Ann believes that people, particularly in the United States, have become separated from their singing voices. Here’s what she said:

Singing is no longer part of everyday life in this country. People are self-conscious abut their voices. Being asked to sing a song is like being naked. Singing has become an elitist activity, one just for professionals, and lots of people are told they shouldn’t sing. But your singing voice is such a fundamental part of who you are. My mission is to reunite people with their singing voices.

I think Ann’s dead right. Her mission is not unlike that of VoiceBox, the weekly public radio and podcast series I host and produce.

I’d like to end this post by quoting from Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927), a Sufi teacher who had some wise words on the subject of the relationship between an individual and his / her voice, which Ann shared with us the other day. Khan’s thoughts really spoke to me.

 

 

OK. Playing catchup on a few experiences of the past few days. Had to get some thoughts out about public book readings this morning and now will devote some time to sharing brief thoughts about a couple of arts events I was lucky enough to attend over the past few days (even if the events themselves didn’t put me on the edge of my seat)…

1. Rhinoceros at Cal Performances: Theatre de la Ville from Paris is visiting all the usual stops a company of its size and renown would visit on a U.S. Tour, from UCLA Live in Los Angeles to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. This past weekend, the company, led by director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota came to Cal Performances in Berkeley. Zellerbach Hall is in some way a great setting for Ionesco’s piece of absurdist-existentialist drama. The brutish concrete architecture, the voluminous stage that seems to swallow up the performers that stand on it, unless they happen to be part of a Wagnerian symphony orchestra and the general lack of warmth of the place all serve to make an audience feel like the world is a strange and basically hostile place. Yet I couldn’t quite feel connected to Mota’s production. The actors’ declamatory speaking style, which often veered into shouting, reminded me of the sort of thing you’d expect to hear in a staging of Racine at the Comedie Francaise. And there were lots of cliches, such making the play’s hero, Berenger (Serge Maggiani) a disheveled, everyman look, in contrast to the rest of the characters, who were more put together in physical appearance. Berenger resists becoming one of the herd in the play. But the production ultimately feels like it’s part of the pack rather than something that breaks from tradition. Clearly, Mota is no Berenger.

2. Samuel Carl Adams and Gustav Mahler at San Francisco Symphony: The San Francisco Symphony premiered Drift and Providence, a new work by the twenty-something composer Carl Samuel Adams over the weekend, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. Adams ambient soundscape of a piece sounds like it might work better during a afternoon lounge session by the W Hotel pool in Los Angeles than in a concert hall. The blurred string lines merge with the percussion (led by cowbells being rubbed against each other throughout the work) to create a deep, complex wave of sound whose components are hard to pull apart from one another. Listening to the piece underwater would probably sound the same as listening to it above ground. During the second half of the concert, Michael Tilson Thomas pulled a Mahler 5 out of the orchestra which had the opposite effect. Despite what came across as a throwaway opening from the trumpet (the famous solo didn’t sound as ominous as I like it to sound) every note came out with clarity, precision and flow. Adams’ work put me to sleep; Mahler’s woke me up.

Some novelists and poets are extraordinary readers. By all accounts, Charles Dickens was an incredible orator. And I’ve gotten goosebumps while listening to Dylan Thomas read Under Milk Wood in a recording.

But in general, I have to question the point of the majority of public author readings these days. They’re mostly quite dull and perhaps even a waste of time, no matter what the marketers think.

I often leave not wanting to read the book, and only buying a copy out of deference to the poor author, who more often than not looks like he or she is having a miserable time up there wedged between the shelves of self-help titles and adoring fans.

I was at a friend’s novel reading just last night and this feeling was palpable. His book seems fine. And he’s a sweet, thoughtful guy. But he’s far from being a lively performer.

My friend’s novel, like the majority of novels out there, was written to be read in private, not shared aloud with other people. And just because you’re a good writer, that doesn’t necessarily make you a good public speaker. Reading out one’s own work can also be particularly trying for an author. One just doesn’t have the necessary distance from the material to make it come alive in speech.

I understand that live author appearances help to sell books. However, as our reading habits become increasingly digitized and fans find ways to interact with their favorite authors through avenues like Twitter, Facebook and video feeds at festivals and conferences, I wonder whether publishers will eventually let go of public readings altogether? Book tours are certainly not as much of a priority for the publishing companies as they used to be, so it’s not like these words should come as much of a surprise.

And then there’s another aspect of technology to consider: One of the main reasons why a fan might attend a book reading is to get a signed copy of the book. But with Kindle editions of texts making the physical act of an author leaving his or her mark impossible (digital signature, anyone?) one of the main reasons for going to a live reading is fast becoming obsolete.

In order for live readings to have a place in tomorrow’s world (or even today’s) I think authors need to write increasingly with a live listener in mind. And they need to develop their delivery and interaction skills, maybe by taking acting or at least public speaking classes. Finally, the techies at Kindle and the other e-reader companies need to find a way to enable authors to sign digital copies of books. Maybe the technology already exists to do this. If so, it needs more uptake.

 

We’ve all known it for a while now: It’s become close to impossible to make a living as a full-time arts journalist these days.

And it’s not just arts journalists who know it; a friend of mine — a high profile French technology and environmental correspondent who’s based in The Bay Area — told me over the weekend that she is currently being paid 65 Euros (about $85) to write 1000 words for a major National French newspaper.

Here in the arts world, things have equally become a total joke. For example, the Senior Interactive Producer for probably the most highly-respected and trafficked media organization in the Bay Area (no, it’s not the San Francisco Chronicle) contacted me yesterday to find out if I’d be interested in covering the local performance scene for his organization.

The pay? $50 for a 500 word review.

For a split second, I thought the guy was kidding, or that perhaps that there was a zero missing from his email. I was then intrigued by a cryptic sentence following the statement about the fee, that read:

“However there is some flexibility that allows us to reward creativity in the range of things covered and the forms that coverage might take.”

I asked the Senior Interactive Producer to explain his qualifier. His response read:

A basic review would be $50 for a five paragraph, 500 word piece.
Same would go for something like a profile or an interview.
We also offer an additional $50 if you can provide us with a slideshow of 10 images. These would be images you take yourself.
Similarly, we offer an additional $50 if you do a “guide” type piece — IE: The 10 plays to see this fall. We offer an additional $50 for breaking news pieces — IE: 100 year old theater burns down — it burned last night and we have filed a piece by 11am the following morning. (that’s a grim scenario, but it should serve to illustrate.)
Coverage of a theater festival might also provide the opportunity for additional payment. However, that would most likely take the form of an interview or something like that. We want to write about things before they happen so that folks have the opportunity to go and see.
Of course, there is also flexibility in rewarding the creation of something new — that I haven’t outlined here because you would make it up.

Now, there will always be arts journalism. It’s not going away. I am not paid anything to write this blog and I’ll continue doing it because I love to articulate my thoughts about culture and I don’t have to answer to any editors or, god forbid, Senior Interactive Producers to do it in this forum.

But in light of yesterday’s email exchange, I am now ready to call it official:
Professional arts journalism is, at least for the moment, just about dead. I’ll continue to take on interesting journalistic projects of national significance that will grant me more exposure and at least pay marginally acceptable fees in exchange for my expertise and time. Otherwise, I’m starting to make my living in other ways.

Finding a way to talk about California Shakespeare Theatre‘s production of Hamlet, SF Playhouse‘s take on My Fair Lady and the Man Ray and Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism exhibition at the Legion of Honor all in a single blog post might seem like a stretch. I kind of agree.

But I’d like to cover these very different experiences together anyway because it strikes me that they all have one thing in common: An attitude towards memory, particularly as it pertains to nostalgia.

My Fair Lady is nothing if not a source of nostalgia for theatre goers. There are so many memorable songs in the piece and Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison’s performances from the famous film are so deeply ingrained in our collective conscience here in the western world that the mere mention of “Gaaarrrrr! I’m a good girl, I am!” evokes instant feelings of warmth for a (fictional), rose-tinged past.

Bill English’s production starts out by making a bold statement against nostalgic views of Lerner and Loewe’s beloved musical: The director’s vision of Eliza’s world is pretty dark. The actors playing working-class characters show up on stage in the opening scenes with their faces besmirched with dirt. The titular flower girl wears pants. “All I want is a room somewhere” is performed like a fight song, with Monique Hafen’s Eliza singing while brandishing a shiv. But before too long, the production, which is entertaining if slightly rhythmically uneven, resorts to more well-worn staging concepts. Sometimes, as is the case with the scene at the Ascot Races, the mise-en-scene appears to explicitly recall the movie.

Liesl Tommy’s production of Hamlet at Cal Shakes seems to set out to make a statement about memory. The production takes place in and around a neglected swimming pool, perhaps several months or even a few years after a big blow-out party has taken place. Various “remembrances” are scattered about, from the dried flowers of Ophelia’s funeral to Yorick’s skull. The most interesting conceit of the production, which otherwise feels insubstantial, noisy and gimmicky, is the idea of having Horatio (Nick Gabriel) as a sort of omnipresent witness to all of the events on stage. Horatio has the opening line of this production, beckoning us to listen to the story, and then floats about in almost all the scenes, quietly observing the denouement.

The problem with treating Hamlet as a nostalgia piece is that it tends to distance us from the immediacy of the events and the dramatic strength of the characters. Everything is parsed through Horatio’s memory in Tommy’s conception of the play. But because memories are by their nature faulty things, the vision feels incoherent and the stakes don’t feel high. We are left with a weird combination of the flotsam and jetsam of ideas and objects that we popularly associate with Hamlet, mixed up with things that appear to intrude on that vision, like machine gun-toting courtiers and a recording of the Fleetwoods’ bittersweet a cappella rendition of “Unchained Melody”. The place of this song in the production is as much of a source of confusion as Leroy McClain’s Hamlet putting a question mark on his final proclamation — “the rest is silence”.

The Legion of Honor’s exhibition about Lee Miller and Man Ray focuses on the relationship between these two seminal figures in twentieth century photographic history. Ray and Miller shared a long and intimate history, one rife with memories and nostalgia. One of the most interesting rooms in the show is devoted to Man’s attempts to work through his loss of Miller after they split up as a couple. The former model-turned-war-photographer’s lips, suspended above a bucolic landscape in a famous Man Ray painting (see above) are a focal point of the exhibition. You can even buy gold Miller lip brooches and magnets in the museum gift shop.

On the other hand, Miller’s use of the camera to create memories reigns a lot of the nostalgia in. Her portraits of dead German soldiers and functionaries at the end of the Second World War are eerie and unflinching. Even Miller’s depictions of quotidian life treat memory in an unsentimental way. One of my favorite images of Miller’s depicts the glass door of a high-end jewelry emporium all scratched up by the well-heeled clientele who accidentally scrape the door with their diamond rings when pushing the handle to get inside. This image for me sums up the photographer’s view of the past: While the present moment depicted in the photograph is quite literally inscribed with the memory of countless people who’ve passed through the jewelry store’s door, the memory is anonymous, unconscious and completely lacking in nostalgia.

What made last week’s Public Radio Program Directors Conference in Las Vegas barely tolerable was getting off The Strip for an evening.

I have visited Vegas before several times (for conferences and to review opening night of Cirque du Soleil’s Love for The Financial Times) but had no clue until I got away from the hotel-casinos with their stale cigarette smoke, nerve-jangling slot machines and five-dollar lattes for the first time on this visit that the place actually possesses a little bit of a pulsing neon heart tucked away in its otherwise back-lit plastic casing.

The first delight of my Escape-from-the-Strip trip was The Mob Museum. Located in downtown Vegas in an old courthouse where famous Mafia cases were heard, this lightly-attended but stylishly put-together homage to gangster life and death presents a fascinating exploration of the lurid underworld of organized crime.

Some components of the exhibition halls, such as the mug shot gallery illustrated above, are pretty inane. But there’s plenty to sink one’s teeth into.

The film presentations are particularly enticing. One of my favorite parts of the museum is the courtroom in which museum goers sit in pews and watch an engrossing short documentary the role played by those very surroundings in mob history. There’s also a great sequence in another part of the museum on gangster films. I could have sat on the plush red velvet couch all evening with a bucket of popcorn and watched Goodfellas from start to finish.

The museum maintains a lively balance between the business of crime itself and the law’s attempts to curtail it, and it also shines a thoughtful light on the relationship between organized crime and the not-exactly-squeaky-clean worlds of politics and entertainment.

After a couple of hours in the museum, I headed with my friend towards a random part of town north of the Strip without too much of a clue of where we were heading beyond a vague promise on Open Table of a place that might serve us tapas and cocktails.

To reach our potential destination, we strolled through a part of town with real, everyday businesses like vacuum cleaner repair stores and car washes. Wow. Imagine that in Vegas. And we saw a nice example of how daily life rubs up against surreality when we came across the unprepossessing, low-slung storefront which serves as the locus of the TV series Pawn Stars. Besides the line of people waiting outside before the shoot, the only evidence of the building’s “celebrity” is a small plastic sign out the front which reads “As Seen On TV.”

Eventually we found ourselves at The Arts Factory, which turns out to be at the center of a small but lively underground arts scene. The area around a section of East Charleston Street contains bars, cafes, galleries and even a black-box theatre.

We had drinks and tapas on the patio at Bar + Bistro, where we were entertained for free for an hour by an eager young woman in a long, black dress, who sang dramatic renditions of mostly contemporary show and pop tunes accompanied by a pianist and several of her friends as backing singers. There was a little too much sturm and drang in the vocal performance for my taste. Or, rather, the singer’s repertoire didn’t quite make sense in the context; lighter cabaret fare would have worked better. But she had a decent, musical theatre-esque voice and her brief forays into more fun-loving arrangements of chart-topping club tunes made me very happy.

The evening rounded up with more live music (this time a thrumming indie rock band) in a stylish drinking hole around the corner with big couches, hipster art work on the walls, and very friendly bar staff.

So while I am always relieved to be leaving Las Vegas, departing Sin City this time around made me kind of itch to get back there again and explore the city’s hidden culture more extensively. I’m sure there must be more of it if I look closely enough.

San Francisco Opera’s Opera in the Ballpark event is one of the best things about living in San Francisco. I’ve been to every single simulcast, which the company presents once a year at the Giants’ home stadium on the waterfront to tens of thousands of people for free. And it’s always a memorable evening.

This year’s offering — Rigoletto — will stand out for me for a few reasons.

Ok, so I don’t much care for the grandiose nineteenth century Italian operatic warhorses. But this year, I decided for the first time to see the production twice: I experienced Verdi’s chef d’oeuvre from the comfort of an orchestra seat on opening night a couple of weeks ago in a Michael Kors cocktail dress and Prada heels, and then this past weekend on the baseball diamond in jeans and sneakers surrounded by friends and a copious picnic. I far preferred the ballpark version to that of the opera house, even though it was freezing on the field and the experience was mediated by a large screen and a blaring PA system.

In the opera house, I was of course able to hear the spectacular voices of the performers more cleanly and closely as well as the lushness of the orchestra’s playing. Zeljko Lucic (Rigoletto), Aleksandra Kurzak (Gilda) and Francesco Demuro (The Duke of Mantua) are all breathtaking in their roles.

Yet the warmth and beauty of the cast’s vocal performances came across amply in the ballpark. And the great advantage for the outdoor audience is being able to see the singer-actors’ faces and bodies up close. This simply isn’t possible indoors. Even from the orchestra seats, you can’t get a clear view of what’s going on on the acting front on stage.

Plus, there’s something effortlessly warm and deeply communal about sitting on the grass with some 20,000 other people sharing food, wine and a great opera. The crowds on the diamond and in the stands clap and holler and gasp and laugh. There’s freedom to move around. There’s also a much greater diversity of audience members at the ballpark and it’s particularly wonderful to see so many kids gazing up at the screen.

Another thing I love about Opera in the Ballpark is the competition that KDFC runs every year to find a singer for the National Anthem at the start of the show. This year, the local classical radio station received some 70 entries. The winner was a Barbershop Quartet. They sang a tuneful yet harmonically quirky arrangement of the song and the crowd loved it.

I think more cities should follow the San Francisco Opera’s lead. Opera in the Ballpark is one of the most truly transformative arts experiences around.