lies like truth

The one downside to being an arts critic / reporter is that you’re not supposed to leave performances before the curtain comes down.

I completely understand this rationale: A review or feature story based on incomplete knowledge is hardly fair to the performers or readers. Not to mention the people in the audience that might be put out by you hopping out of your seat in the middle of a show.

When critics are given aisle seats, it’s supposed to be to help them get to their laptops so they can file their reviews more quickly. The system wasn’t set to accommodate those who need to get out prematurely.

At this point, though, I can’t decide whether years of sitting in theatres has provided me with a really high tolerance for terrible shows — or a really low one.

Most of the time, my tolerance is really high. I love going to see live performance. There’s always something to be learned, and even when a show really stinks, I’ve figured out how to focus on various thoughts, sights, sounds and even smells particularly intently (wow, look at that amazing stucco ceiling; the seat feels a little threadbare etc) to help me get through it. Let’s call it a form of meditation.

However, there are occasions — thankfully I can still count them on the fingers of one hand — where not even a yogic trance can save me from wanting to stab out my eyeballs and run screaming into the street.

Such, sadly, was the case on Tuesday night, when I went to see the Voca People show at the Marine’s Memorial Theatre in San Francisco. Within about five minutes I knew I had made a horrible mistake in going to the show. I expected it to be cheesy fun. But I didn’t expect to have my intelligence insulted by a bunch of babbling, white-clad, Blue Man Group-knockoffs.

Voca People, an eight-member, mixed a cappella singing group, has gained an enormous following in this country and abroad. It’s clear that the five male and three female performers have quite good voices. It’s also evident that there are people on the Voca People team who have great musical arranging skills. But the show consists of nothing but boring, corn-syrup-infused medleys of greatest hits from the western musical cannon (from The Queen of the Night’s aria from The Magic Flute to the theme tune from Rocky.) And with no more than ten seconds devoted to any single song to allow the singers and arrangements to settle in, it’s very hard to appreciate any of the skill on display.

The premise — a group of singing aliens coming to Earth and wishing to find out about the human race by absorbing and regurgitating their songs — is inane. As if global vocal music culture can be encompassed by western pop and classical music. And the comedic schtick, such as it is, does nothing except appeal to lowest common denominator life forms.

I felt valuable minutes of my life sliding by, irrecuperably. I tried deep breathing but it didn’t work. By half an hour in, I was digging my nails into the arms of my seat and clenching my toes in my sandals. After an hour, I thought I was going to throw up. There was no choice but to leave.

If the chunk of the show I missed turned out to be fantastic, then I guess I’ll have to beg the forgiveness of my readers, and vow to bring an emergency sick bag to all future productions I attend to avoid having to leave prematurely ever again.

But somehow, I doubt that Voca People evolved much beyond what I’d already witnessed that night.

Either way, I guess I’ll never know.

What I do know, however, is that life’s too short for performance that causes this much pain. So, much though in principle I believe it’s a terrible, unprofessional thing for an arts journalist to scurry out of a theatre early, sometimes you have to make exceptions to the rule. I don’t regret a thing. It made the emergency double whiskey I chugged down at the pub next door especially tasty.

Yesterday, Stanford University held a media reception and briefing to unveil its 2012-2013 season plans. The news was worthy of attention. But the Bay Area’s dwindling klatch of arts editors were clearly out to lunch. (Or, more likely, so deeply buried under a pile of press releases and deadlines that they didn’t even know to come.)

The upcoming season’s programing is already headline-grabbing in its own right.

It includes the first ever collaboration between the Kronos Quartet and Laurie Anderson, the U.S. premiere of a piece by Steve Reich performed by Alarm Will Sound and a percussion work by John Luther Adams performed by Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche.

But the season announcement was the least of what Stanford wanted to talk about.

The rest of the news was perhaps even more significant, at least in terms of the Bay Area’s arts ecosystem: the opening in January of next year of the high-tech, 844-seat Bing Concert Hall (pictured: artistic director Jenny Bilfield talks through the plans) and a complete re-branding of the university’s performing arts program from the genteel-sounding “Stanford Lively Arts,” to the pithier “Stanford Live.”

Given the triple-header of news possibilities on the table, I was to a degree saddened by how few journalists attended the briefing. Besides a couple of internal media people from the various Stanford University publications, only around a handful of external arts media representatives showed up.

Compare this to the media stampede that was Berkeley’s Cal Performances announcement around a year ago of the revival of Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach. OK — so having Glass and his famous collaborators present to talk about the large-scale re-staging of the landmark contemporary opera probably helped to attract a particularly high numbers of attendees. But, still, I was expecting to see a few more people at Stanford yesterday.

I wonder if having Laurie Anderson and Kronos’ David Harrington in the room would have made any difference? Hmm.

The words theatre and magic are often seen in the same sentence, even though the two genres place very different demands upon audiences’ understanding of reality that are often difficult to reconcile.

In most forms of theatre, audiences understand that they are witnessing a make-believe world, but choose to suspend their disbelief in order to enter fully into that world and potentially be transformed by it.

Magic, by contrast, requires audiences to completely buy what they’re seeing on stage as hard reality: They have to be convinced that it is truly possible to saw people in half and put their bodies instantly back together again, or for an illusionist to read the secrets of their minds.

That being said, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is one of the few plays I can think of that comes tantalizingly close to uniting magic and theatre together into one seamless whole.

This feat is very much in evidence in Jonathan Moscone’s incandescent new production of Shakespeare’s late Romance at the California Shakespeare Theater, which makes (mostly) carefully calculated demands on both our suspension of disbelief and complete buy-in to an alternate reality.

The most magical quality of the production is its Ariel, Erika Chong Shuch. Shuch is a Bay Area-based dancer and choreographer (she also created the movement sequences for this show.) This is Shuch’s first Shakespearean acting job. But the fine-featured performer executes the role like she was born to play it.

Shuch’s is a very human Ariel — she clearly loves Prospero like a father and we often see her struggle to weigh up the benefits of obeying the old man’s orders and getting impatient with him for stringing her along.

Balanced against this is the physical joy of Schuch’s movement. Aided by fellow sprites, she takes off and twirls around in the air and leaps elegantly from one stack of tattered books to a bit of crumbling boat on Emily Greene’s salvaged wreck of a set. This is what gives the production its uncanny sparkle.

One aspect of the production that adds to the magic is Moscone’s decision to double many of the parts. Doing so obviously comes with economic benefits as there are only nine actors in the production (and three of these are non-speaking sprite roles). But the decision also makes sense in terms of the world of the play.

By having Catherine Castellanos play both Caliban and Sebastian, Nicholas Pelczar take on Ferdinand and Trinculo  and Michael Winters perform Prospero and Stephano, the concept of power — who holds it and why — is turned on its head. Power becomes something fleeting and coincidental: He that plays a king in one scene plays a pauper in the next. Magic seems to be the only rational explanation for anyone’s status in life.

But every now and again, the qualities that anchor the theatrical and the
magical in the production come un-moored in a sea-sick inducing way.

The doubling of parts poses particular challenges on the audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief and immersion in the magical “reality” of the story towards the end of the drama.

In the “big reveal” at the play’s conclusion, some inelegant transitions made me fearful about how Emily Kitchens, as Sebastian, would be able to suddenly turn herself into Miranda. I felt the same discomfort regarding Nicholas Pelczar who takes on Trinculo and Ferdinand “all at once.”

The characters didn’t end up having to talk to themselves, thank sprite, but they came uncomfortably close to having to do so. Thus isn’t the kind of stage illusion-making that Shakespeare was shooting for.

Michael Winters’ disappointingly dull Prospero also hampers with our ability to “stay in the play.” Besides bringing little in the way of electricity to this most electrifying of Shakespearean leading roles, the actor struggled with his lines on opening night, creating a knot in my stomach. At one point, Kitchens had to feed Winters a line. And he came close to causing a shipwreck with his character’s famous “Ye Elves…” speech. I would have much rather seen James Carpenter do the role.

Still, getting pulled away from the play is mostly a fleeting issue in this production. In this Tempest, magic and theatre still fly together strong.

There are times when it’s good to go into a cultural happening with a strong sense of what one’s letting oneself in for and there are times when a lack of knowledge provides the best possible ammo.

I had no idea what to expect when I showed up on Friday evening at Z Space Theatre in San Francisco’s Mission district for an event that the French consulate, which hosted the soiree, was calling “Un Bal Litteraire.” I didn’t bother to read much about it. The short description that Ivan Bertoux, the Deputy Cultural Attaché for the French consulate here in San Francisco, gave me a few weeks ago was enough to pique my interest: “It’s a new play nightclub,” Ivan simply said.

I had a ball at The Bal. It was one of the most unusual and gratifying arts experience I’ve had in a while, in fact. Why? Because the entire auditorium — audience and performers alike — danced. A lot.

Never has a night at the theatre been so communal…and so incredibly sweaty.

Here’s how The Bal bounced:

Three French playwrights — Marion Aubert, Nathalie Fillion and Samuel Gallet — arrived in San Francisco earlier this week to take part in a Franco-American drama festival entitled Des Voix: Found in Translation. Productions of their plays are being produced in town this weekend.

The Bal was the kickoff event for the festival. To prepare for the happening, which has been produced several times in Europe in recent years but has never before now been experienced by US audiences, the playwrights participated in what might best be described as a “theatrical hackathon.”

Six dramatists — the three French visitors plus American playwrights Marcus Gardley, Octavio Solis and Liz Duffy Adams — gathered on Wednesday afternoon with a bunch of their favorite songs at their disposal. They came up with a storyline involving San Francisco and a set-list of ten songs that they felt best described the story, and would encourage people to get up off their seats and boogie.

Then, over the next 24 hours, each playwright developed a section of the narrative. They reconvened to read the pieces out loud together. After that meeting, the French writers’ pieces were sent off to a team of (caffeinated!) translators to be turned into English overnight. The translators included Dan Harder, Aubrey Gabel and Ivan Bertoux.

On Friday evening, a crowd of at least a hundred people showed up at Z Space for the Bal. A line of microphones had been set up on an otherwise empty stage. Some audience members sat in the regular seats out front. Others of us sat in chairs to the side of the stage, flanking the mics.

After introductions, the playwrights assembled on stage (as pictured above) and started doing a reading of the new play they’d just created. As soon as the first scene ended, the music started. A few people rushed the stage. With about 30 seconds, most of the audience was up on its feet, shaking around to the pop song that was booming through the theatre’s the sound system.

When we sat down again and the dramatists returned to the microphones to continue with their reading, most of us didn’t bother returning to our seats. We sat on stage.

The dance party occurred throughout the evening because each of the ten scenes in the play was interspersed with a song. The styles ranged from rock to pop to hip-hop and were all equally compelling to move to.* After the closing scene (which saw the protagonist, a young French woman, and her lesbian lover from San Francisco, going happily off together into the sunset) there was yet more dancing. And then we all repaired, breathless and happy, to a very sweaty reception in the Z Space lobby.

Not only was the incorporation of the dancing a wonderfully absurd addition to an evening of play-going and fitted well with the quirky, feelgood comedy being narrated on stage, but it also helped to break up the action and melt traditional barriers that usually separate the performers and audience members. Plus it was simply great to let off some steam.

One doesn’t usually go to the theatre to lose weight. But burning calories is clearly a natural consequence of attending A Bal Litteraire.

*For some reason I’m having trouble recalling the song titles from the evening today. The Cyndi Lauper hit, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was one of the tracks. The rest will hopefully come back to me soon. Or I’ll ask Ivan for the set-list and post that at some point…

Carey Perloff’s surprisingly astute production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (or Fin De Partie in the original French) at the American Conservatory Theater ended with a game-like coda last night at San Francisco’s Geary Theatre.

Killing My Lobster, a local sketch comedy troupe, came on stage at about 10.30pm and performed a bunch of skits inspired by the great Irish playwright and his dramas. The image above captures the crowd gathering drinks and taking their seats before the Lobsters took to the stage. It was quite a party.

This postlude was canny for a bunch of reasons:

1) It brought a bunch of younger people into the Geary Theater (though I don’t know how many of them had also come to see Endgame and Play, which acted as a prequel for the main drama.) Most of the white-haired ACT patrons vacated the premises after the curtain fell on the main show.

2) There’s a compelling link between Perloff’s grimly humorous, clown-centric production which stars one of this country’s best physical comedians, Bill Irwin, and Killing My Lobster’s absurdist approach to sketch comedy. In other words, bringing KML in to the Geary made artistic sense. It was also a refreshing thing to see a big, traditionally-inclined company collaborating with a smaller, more irreverent one.

3) The “three-act” structure of the evening made for a wonderful night out. First we warmed up (if that’s the right expression) with a suitably terse take on Beckett’s sepulchral Play performed by Rene Augesen, Anthony Fusco and Annie Purcell. Then we watched Bill Irwin as a vivacious, wheelchair-bound Hamm go at Nick Gabriel’s youthful-forceful Clov with busy-bodied, facially mobile energy in Endgame. Finally, the Lobsters gave us something to brighten and reinforce the loony darkness of Beckett’s worldview with about 40 minutes of comedic skits.

4) The Killing My Lobster part of the evening was bumpy in some places but mostly came off brilliantly. My favorite section was a wonderfully bonkers skit entitled “Cooking with Clov” in which the Endgame character attempts to make recipes from Beckett’s play — sugarplums and pap — with the help of an aged Katharine Hepburn. There are of course no ingredients to cook with, so the whole project takes on a hilariously – and appropriately – nihilistic bent. Other notable sketches included the inspired “Waiting for Godot to Leave,” in which a randy couple wishes Beckett’s most famous non-appearing character would get out of their house so they can have sex, and “Clov Letters,” in which Hamm and Clov exchange missives about their relationship, a feat made all the most bizarre by the fact that Hamm is blind and can’ actually read the letters Clov sends him.

5) The final skit of the evening featured Bill Irwin, an unexpected coup. Irwin spent his time on stage sitting in Hamm’s dark glasses and reading a braille magazine while a young woman and aspiring theatrical clown sat next to him completely star-struck and wondering how she might possibly pluck up the courage to talk to her hero. Irwin ended up with his hands all over the woman’s breasts. The whole thing was ridiculously crude, but somehow it seemed like a fitting ending to an evening of Beckett, a playwright who managed to marry vulgarity and poetry into a seamless whole.

PS Here‘s Terry Teachout’s review of Endgame in The Wall Street Journal. We more or less share the same opinion of the show.

A visit to the Brick and Mortar Music Hall in San Francisco a couple of nights ago provided some hints at the sorts of things that concertgoers will and will not tolerate.

I  asked a bunch of friends to join me for an appearance by the Seattle-based band Hey Marseilles (pictured.)

I had heard the group at the SXSW festival in Austin, TX in March and was rather taken by its loose, fluid melodic style and gypsy-jazz tinged instrumentation as well as the lead singer’s husky-wholesome, folksy voice.

I personally had a great time. Hey Marseilles did not disappoint: The musicians looked entirely happy to be with us in the room (especially the cute cellist who kept smiling a secret smile,) the music chugged along with energy and I could have kept bobbing around to the Hey Marseilles sound all night.

My friends, however, bailed before the band had even played its first note.

The two main reasons for the exodus had nothing to do with the band’s talent. The main issues were to do with timing and one of the supporting acts.

There were two bands that preempted the headliners. The first was pretty great — two young women with silky yet powerful voices playing keyboards and backed up by an astute group of musicians. Their mainly indie rock sound had melodic and rhythmic drive to it.

The second, however, was a complete disaster. Again, two women were involved.  But this time with no band behind them. The music the women played was utterly drab. Its dirginess lacked any kind of melodic or harmonic direction. All the rhythmic joy of the first group dissipated when the second act came on stage and we were stuck with them for what seemed like an eternity.

By the time this terrible twosome left the stage, it was about 11pm. My friends had had enough. The music sucked and it was a Tuesday night with an early start for them the following morning. They left without even bothering to listen to a single track by Hey Marseilles.

My friends weren’t the only people driven away by the awful music of the second supporting band. When I looked around, it seemed that the room had emptied considerably. The first group of musicians had brought in the crowds. Those that followed them managed to empty the space, leaving the headline act to perform in front of an unnecessarily modest crowd.

A third and perhaps less important factor that seemed to put my friends off was the website of Hey Marseilles. The home page is basically a merchandise page. The band shoves things to buy down visitors’ throats when it should foreground its music. (Merchandise may make the band more money than music at this point, but that’s not a reason to focus on commercialism on the website.) This fact alone nearly put my friends off buying tickets and coming out at all. But they liked what they heard of the band on YouTube and changed their minds.

I spend a lot of time in theatres and music venues and I have some understanding of what it’s like to be a performer. So my tolerance for the things mentioned above is perhaps higher than most. But there are lessons to be learned here both for presenting venues and for bands:

1) Venues should more carefully monitor supporting acts. They need to be strong.

2) On weeknights, particularly early in the week, it might be a good thing to only have one supporting act. Or if there must be two, make sure both acts and particularly the second one is very compelling.

3) Don’t make the homepage of your band’s website a storefront. It puts people off.

A weekend of musical adventures in the Bay Area. Some quick thoughts about a few things I came across…

1) Berkeley Symphony Gala: The best one I’ve attended yet. The reason? The Symphony featured short chamber pieces by a bunch of great composers such as Gabriela Lena Frank and Paul Dresher. In between courses of the dinner, Berkeley Symphony players as well as guest soloists like pianist Sarah Cahill performed the pieces in alcoves around the room. Sometimes the musicians were just a couple of feet away from the audience members. These intimate musical vignettes were so much more seamlessly integrated into the fabric of the orchestral fundraiser than the usual thing you find at such events — a random performer playing in a corner whom most people pay scant attention to — because they were a true celebration of the talents of musicians and composer.

2) John Chen and Ely Karr in recital: I’ve been living across the street from a church which calls itself “San Francisco’s Church of the Arts!” for the past three years but only managed to catch a concert there for the first time on Sunday. I wandered in for 30 minutes between returning from a weekend trip to Sonoma for a friend’s 40th birthday party and heading off to another event in the Twin Peaks neighborhood, and caught violinist Ely Karr giving a very determined and rather workmanlike rendition of J S Bach’s Capriccio in B flat Major followed by John Chen playing an extremely dense work by Joseph Nicolas Pancrace Royer on the harpsichord entitled Le Vertigo. I found the piece to be more schizophrenic than vertiginous with its thumping, repeated block chord passages that would suddenly collapse into a scrambled melee of notes and then revert back again without any warning. Weird and wonderful stuff from a not-very-well-known composer who was born 20 years after Bach.

3) Two Road Trip CD Recommendations: I often listen to the CDs I get sent in the mail from promoters on long car journeys. In the batch I took with me to Sonoma this past weekend, two recordings came up trumps. The first was 13 Ways of Looking at The Goldberg: Bach Reimagined featuring the luminous young pianist Lara Downes (pictured above.) Downes follows a sensitive performance of Aria, from Goldberg Variations with a chocolate-box of short pieces inspired by Bach’s masterwork. There is so much variety of mood and texture on the CD. I love in particular the whispy pointillism of Fred Lerdahl’s Chasing Goldberg and the off-kilter humor of C. Curtis-Smith’s Rube Goldberg Variation. The other CD which blew me away was jazz singer Barbara Dane’s On My Way. The recording was made in 1961. I had never heard of Danes until an acquaintance thrust the CD in my hand at the radio station the other day. Her voice has flexibility and a casual ease. There is a lot of depth to it too. Danes sings standards without too much adornment. But she makes me focus intensely. Never has Pete Seeger’s crusty old Hammer Song sounded so new.

Wednesday night saw the inauguration of VoiceBox‘s live event series.

I am choosing to call it the inauguration of a series because it came off stupendously well and I am gagging to this again. And again.

The basic premise for the series was to find a way to create truly immersive, interactive live experiences for VoiceBox listeners as a way to create a more engaged sense of community around the weekly, syndicated public radio and podcast series that I host and produce, as well as potentially forge a revenue stream.

I believe Drinking/Songs: A Night Of Beer and The Music That Goes With It succeeded on both counts.

The venue, 50 Mason Social House in downtown San Francisco, was packed and there was a line out the door and around the block at 7.45pm. We had to turn folks away. (As Katy Newton’s photo above illustrates.)

The audience got to taste seven beers inspired by seven different global brewing traditions from Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Delaware (e.g. a Chinese beer, a Finnish beer, a Scottish beer, a Belgian beer etc…) and join in with the six-member professional vocal ensemble (we dubbed the group The Fill A Steins) on a few of the drinking songs that the singers paired with the beers throughout the evening.

We had a discussion led by a beer cicerone (Sayre Piotrkowski) and the singers about the ancient, global link between ale and song. And we recorded the whole thing for radio and podcast. An edited version of the show will be available starting next Friday night on KALW (and a few other radio stations) and iTunes.

It was an incredible thing to see 200 people crammed into a Tenderloin bar all swinging beer glasses and singing along with the refrain of a raucous Finnish drinking song. And when the singers performed the melancholy Chinese drinking song, the room was entirely hushed. You could have heard a maltworm creep.

Also, the event also generated a decent profit and a lot of goodwill. Plus it was a lot of fun, albeit a lot of work, to put together.

Cheers and on to the next.

One of the things that the a cappella world prides itself on is how stylistically all-encompassing its remit is. In a cappella concerts and competitions, anything (supposedly) goes, from barbershop and jazz to instrumental rock music imitations and quasi-choral art pieces. At least, that was how the articulate a cappella performer, arranger and producer Deke Sharon put it in an interview I did with him and a few other a cappella mavens for VoiceBox the other day.

So it was interesting on Saturday night when I served as a judge for the 2012 National Finals of the Harmony Sweepstakes A Cappella Competition at the Marin Center in San Rafael,  to witness how challenging this compellingly broad theory actually is in reality.

The competition featured an array of different styles of performance. There were barbershop groups — Rooftop Rhythm (Chicago), Foreign Exchange (Boston); jazz ensembles — Sing Theory (San Francisco), GQ (Mid-Atlantic); rock outfits — Six Appeal (Pacific Northwest — pictured above), Audiofeels (New York City) and one group, Down 4 The Count (Los Angeles) that put out an amalgam of several of these styles.

But the different musical genres didn’t really sit well together in competition.

The basic problem is that it’s very hard to compare a group of nine youths in tight jeans, sneakers and skinny ties all jumping about and doing beat-box versions of pop favorites with a group of middle-aged men and women singing  jazz-inflected arrangements of quaint old songs. It’s like trying to judge a pianist and symphony orchestra playing a Beethoven concerto against a jazz trio doing a take on a Keith Jarrett piece.

The other palpable thing is that the singers themselves seemed seemed a little disgruntled at having to pit their skills against other groups that come from such radically different vocal music genres. Many times, the hosts of the event — last year’s winning team, the Da Capo barbershop group — made fun of other genres and enthused wildly over the barbershop ensembles on the program. This was all done in a lighthearted fashion, of course, but I sensed an undercurrent of seriousness beneath the fun.

And I even heard a couple of the judges complain about having to compare rock style groups with the barbershop ones. “I just don’t think of barbershop as true a cappella,” one judge said during the intermission.

Still, even though the genres chafe against each other and evaluating them side by side is, as the old saying goes, like comparing apples with oranges, the competition was a lot of fun. The 3,000 seat auditorium was packed. People loved the music and the energy of the performers. And for me personally, as someone who finds genres in music to be an impediment to enjoyment, I quite liked all the different style bunged into a program together.

PS On a completely different note: I attended The New York Philharmonic’s concert at Davies Symphony Hall last night. Besides smoldering billows of piano brilliance from Yefim Bronfman in the performance of Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 2, some lovely woodwind solos in the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and the slouchy insouciance of Bernstein’s Lonely Town: Pas de deux from On the Town (which was played as the encore), I found the whole thing to be rather underwhelming.

The Kronos Quartet rounded out its year-long residency at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this weekend with a concert featuring the music of a bunch of incredible women composers and vocalists.

From the hushed, sepulchral creepings of Laurie Anderson’s “Flow,” sensitively arranged by Jacob Garchik, to the strident, mystical incantations of Van-Anh Vanessa Vo’s “All Clear,” the music was consistently inventive and emotionally panoramic.

It was also visually stunning.

One thing you rarely want to do during a Kronos concert is close your eyes. I often several minutes at concerts with my eyelids down, just to get a pure taste of sound through deprivation of the more primary sense of sight.

But if you so much as blink at a Kronos gig, you risk missing a magical, humorous or bizarre visual moment.

This concert was no exception.

Watching the players ceremonially walk across the stage to beat hanging gongs, stick pacifier-like objects in their mouths and then emit kazoo-esque parps, or pass sand through their fingers into a concave “drum” the size of a small satellite dish, was an immersive experience.

In fact, the visuals were so well incorporated into the rich and diverse sonic landscape that I felt like I was experiencing temporary synesthesia. My senses of sight and hearing merged into one.

No matter how well they play, few string quartets are capable of transforming people in this way.

It was few months ago that I first heard about The Frost Amphitheatre. If I hadn’t been told about this outdoor concert venue smack bang in the middle of the Stanford campus, I would have never suspected that the site, with its grassy seating tiers shrouded in redwood and oak trees, existed. That’s crazy when you think about the fact that the venue can accommodate some 6,000 people.

Many members of the Stanford community are unaware of the venue’s presence even though they cycle, walk and drive by it every day. But for many years, the Frost Amphitheatre hosted legendary concerts by groups like The Grateful Dead. But it’s pretty much fallen into disuse owing to inadequate bathroom facilities, a lack of electricity and nothing in the way of ADA compliance.

According to Stanford’s Institute for Creativity in the Arts, the last time Stanford looked at upgrading the facility, the price tag was estimated to be somewhere in the region of $12 million. These days, if the university wants to put on an event there (which it currently only does sporadically, though the band Modest Mouse is performing there on May 19 in a program billed as “Frost Revival”) it costs around $400,000 in portaloos, electrics, shuttle buses and other peripherals to make the venue serviceable for an evening’s entertainment.

Earlier today, I was delighted to take a tour of the Frost Amphitheatre. I went with a small group and was gobsmacked by the expansive simplicity and beauty of the space. Our group (a Stanford Design School project team exploring ideas to reinvent the theatre experience for new audiences) is looking at a variety of different spaces on and off campus as potential sites for staging unusual theatrical experiences. One idea we floated today, inspired by the gentle grassy slopes of the Frost, is an event which we might call “Potential Energy.” It will involve people inventing interesting vehicles in which to propel themselves down the hill towards the stage. Sort of grass toboganning meets Cirque du Soleil.

On a final note, I was surprised by how unadorned the Frost is. There is no shell structure above or around the bare stage. And virtually the only walls on the premises are natural barriers created by trees. This makes the space extremely open.

I wondered what the acoustics might be like given the sparsity of the architecture. When I stood on stage (see a photo of one of my colleagues which I took from this vantage point, above) I felt like my voice couldn’t project very far. Classical amphitheatres, on the other hand, are built so that sound of the unamplified human voice carries to the very corners. There are very few if any vertical surfaces at the Frost for sound to bounce off. And yet the reviews I’ve read about the venue on Yelp say that the acoustics are great. I guess amplified music works well in this natural environment. But I can’t imagine actors trying to project their voices there without amplification.

Douglas von Blumenthal, a radiologist who listens to VoiceBox, my weekly public radio and podcast series about the human voice, was inspired to share his interesting ideas about simultaneous opera translation having recently listened to a show I aired on the subject of translating operas into English. 

I asked Dr. von Blumenthal if I could publish his thoughts on my blog as a guest blog post and he sweetly agreed. Here they are…

In an ideal world, a translation system for the audience would be optional for each person, unobtrusive, low cost, simple to use, would not distract the audience or performer, and would not require the user to shift focus from the performer to written text.

These requirements reminded me of a system used at my favorite art museum, The Norton Simon, located in Pasadena, California.  For a small fee, visitors can rent a recorded audio “tour” discussing works of art as they move through the collections at their own pace, listening by means of a lightweight head set.

Newscasters on TV wear an earpiece on one side which is quite small and hardly visible, through which they can be given verbal information, cues, etc.

Wireless Bluetooth “earpieces” for handsfree use of cell phones have been around for a while.  These and commonly seen devices such as iPod earphones allow the wearers to carry on a conversation and hear ambient sounds with little distortion or interference while they listen privately, and are not loud enough to disturb or distract people quite near to them.

Although I am a radiologist and not an audio engineer or electronic communication expert, it seems to me that the technology may already exist in one form or another to give a member of an opera audience the benefit of “on-the-fly” translation.  This would be analogous to the UN official listening in real time to an expert near-verbatim translation of a speech being given in another language.

Transmitted information may not be limited to lyrics and dialogue.  For example, a couple weeks ago you broadcast a show featuring a very skilled and experienced “professional translator” of opera scores as your guest.  He pointed out that the best translations preserve the cadence and flow of the original language, combined with the very difficult communication of idiomatic speech.

He demonstrated this by a soft voice-over in English while we listened to singing in the language native to the opera.  The effect was stunningly beautiful and poetic, immediately opening up a whole world of information allowing neophyte listeners like me a much richer opera experience.  This would only be enhanced by very brief plot summaries or commentaries which could theoretically be interwoven with the translation.

I believe that through the earpiece the listener would be able to maintain almost total focus and concentration on what prompted the ticket purchase in the first place.  As word spread, in an ideal world opera attendance would increase, attracting new people who were interested but heretofore intimidated.

In short, development of a technological audio real-time translation system would yield a great deal on more than one level.

NB To listen to a podcast version of VoiceBox show mentioned in Dr. von Blumenthal’s text, please click here.