lies like truth

SF Playhouse‘s brilliant current production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Den of Thieves is my guilty pleasure of the week. I say this with some reservations as the play is hardly trash, though compared to the artsy-fartsiness of the play I saw the previous night at Berkeley Repertory Theatre by Naomi Iizuka, I feel almost guilty for enjoying myself so much at the Guirgis play.

What SF Playhouse’s production demonstrates so beautifully is the extent to which a piece of theatre can be pure fun and also thoughtful at the same time. This is not a common outcome in my experience. The play is pretty silly – even Neil Simon would hesitate to tell such a story on stage. But it’s also got a thoughtful edge.

Concerning a failed nightclub heist by a bunch of small-time kleptomaniacs, the play is full of over-the-top characters. Some of them, like Sal, Big Tuna and Little Tuna, are textbook Italian mobsters with a twist – the sorts of wise-guys that people the middle period films of Woody Allen. The other characters are also caricatures, but they’re so interesting that their huge presence on stage is welcome. There’s Flaco, a stereotypical young hoodlum, who postures and swaggers his way through life. He’s a scrawny white kid, but he thinks of himself as Latino. Then there’s Boochie, a white girl who looks like a hooker and thinks she’s Latina. Paul is a nebbische 12-step program officer and ex-crook. His background is interesting: he’s the adopted black child from a family of Jewish bandits, known back in the day as “The Den of Thieves.” Finally we come to Maggie, a young Latina who actually is of Latin extraction. Of all the characters, she’s the least caricatured and the quietest – though as a recovering kleptomaniac, she’s also got a wild streak. She’s a welcome balancing force in the mayhem.

The theatre is small. But as large as all these characters are, they’re never overbearing. I was so involved in the story – there was hardly a moment when I didn’t completely believe in the characters thanks to the engrossing performances by every single person on stage and Susi Damilano’s pacey direction – that they could have bellowed right in my face or sat on my lap and I wouldn’t have wanted more distance from them.

The play is a lot of fun. But it also engages the brain, which is why I shouldn’t call it a guilty pleasure. Den of Thieves is not Strictly Come Dancing or Project Runway. The playwright’s subtle commentary on the nature of dishonesty, the reasons why people fall into and out of a life of crime and our deep desire as human beings to “follow the herd” have kept me thinking ever since.

Every so often I go to the theatre and get tricked into thinking the play I’m seeing is good. Beautiful performances, slick staging and strong visual imagery can sometimes make me believe that a drama is really profound when it isn’t. It’s only after the fact — sometimes several days or even weeks after the curtain has come down — that I realize that I had been duped.

This happened last night during a performance of Naomi Iizuka’s new play at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West. But luckily I came to my senses about 30 minutes in when I realized, after a fit of yawning, that Iizuka’s play, despite appearances, is not as interesting as it looks.

For a while I was caught up in the story about a Victorian era American couple’s relationship with Japan, each other and the art of photography. Director Les Waters and the competent cast do such a magical job of giving the illusion of form to a formless drama — whose incoherent themes veer between sexual tourism, the art of Japanese tattoo and the complex relationship between photography and memory — that it’s easy to feel momentarily engaged. But the incoherence soon set in and the 95 minute drama feels more like three hours.

Iizuka never makes us understand why this story needs to be set in Japan. I found myself caring very little about the characters and their trajectories. And the playwright hits us over the head with conclusions about her scantily-explored themes through a seemingly never-ending series of monologues at the end of the play.

The play is ultimately very much like its stylish lighting design — which includes the intermittent flashing of a square of lightbulbs like a giant camera flash going off. We’re momentarily blinded by these lights. But eyesight, at least as I’m concerned, is quickly restored.

As I do not currently work for SF Weekly or the San Francisco Bay Guardian, two weekly, advertiser-supported newspapers here in the Bay Area, I feel it’s time to weigh in with my feelings about the increasingly nasty relationship between the two news organizations. The competing papers have been at war for years, deriding each other in print on and weekly basis and dragging each other through court. I guess there’s nothing unusual about this in the world of newspapers. But I’ve never had much patience with tit-for-tat in the media — especially while the industry is struggling so much as a whole to stay afloat . 

Until near the end of last year, I served as the chief theater critic for SF Weekly, a position which I held for five years. Prior to that, I wrote theater reviews and features for the Bay Guardian for about three years. I enjoyed my work for both papers and like many of the people who work at both organizations. I consider them to play an equally important role in the cultural fabric of this part of the world.

So it makes me very sad to see them so angry at each other. In this difficult economic climate, these news organizations should be supporting each other, not attempting to tear each other down. If this continues, it won’t be long before The Bay Area has no alternative papers at all. This predicament may come to pass eventually anyway. But does it need to happen as a result of the Weekly and Guardian committing combined suicide?

One of the problems with Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland film is its title. Critics have been deriding the film for all kinds of reasons such as its shock tactics and the lack of charisma of its leading lady. And yes, much of the criticism is deserved, for the film isn’t up to Burton’s usual snuff.

But I think one of the most basic issues is the movie’s title. By calling his film, “Alice in Wonderland,” Burton sets up obvious expectations, namely that the film will be an adaptation for the screen of Lewis Carroll’s famous work of literature.

Taking place 15 years after the original story and featuring such non-Carrollian plot points as an engagement party and a business trip to China, Burton’s film veers even further away from the original than Derek Jarman did with his version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, whose memorable ending included a performance of the song “Stormy Weather” complete with chorus line.

By using the same title for the film as Carroll does for his book, Burton sets up viewers’ expectations: many of us expect a degree of fidelity to the source material which isn’t there. Burton’s Alice is, in many ways, a gorgeous fantasia on the theme of Alice. But it’s ultimately got little to do with the story that Carroll wrote. Unlike Jarman’s The Tempest, Burton’s Alice isn’t an art house movie, where a certain amount of creative leeway in this regard is generally acceptable. The movie is mainstream entertainment for mass audiences. As such, the title should reflect this to avoid confusion.

I am not a fan of those lists of “Top 50 Women Artists” or “Top 10 Young Conductors” or “The 20 Most Powerful Cultural Movers and Shakers” that pop up with alarming frequency in the media.

Having worked for magazines where I’ve been responsible for compiling these things, I’ve seen first hand what a subjective and nepotistic game the list-making can be. And, generally speaking, I don’t think the people who are responsible for compiling the lists really know the entire pool of potential candidates well enough to make decisions. Plus, very often, the people doing the best work are doing it quietly. Their efforts go unnoticed because they don’t necessarily draw attention to themselves. These people are amazing at what they do but don’t generally make these sorts of lists because they’re not big schmoozers and self-publicists.

That being said, I can’t seem to resist reading those lists. Just this morning, ArtsJournal published an article from the BBC about the “inaugural list of 50 women to watch in the arts” in the UK. I think this sort of thing is dumb. And yet for some reason I felt compelled to read the article and check out the list. The question is, why do I bother?

I suppose the main reason is that I’m interested to see if there’s anyone on the list whom I know personally or at least whose work I know. I’m also curious to see whether I’d agree with the compilers’ decisions and whether there are any glaring omissions.

But I wish I’d boycott the lists. They’re bad news.

While cycling down the coast in Kauai last week, I chanced upon an extraordinary sight. I heard the trombones before I saw them, actually. Brass scales and arpeggios caught my ears as I whooshed along, providing an unusual sonic backdrop for the palm trees, sandy beaches and ocean setting.

Eventually, the perpetrators of the sound came into view: two young men wearing blue floral Hawaiian shirts, black slacks and black shoes were standing next to each other on the path by the beach, playing in the open air.

I couldn’t resist stopping. “Is this some kind of art installation or a rehearsal?” I asked. The guys laughed. We got chatting. I found out that they were two members of the Honolulu Symphony‘s brass section. According to the trombonists, the orchestra is pretty much on its knees financially. In a last gasp to keep its players employed, it has been sending out players to do educational programs and give community concerts in different parts of the islands. The players I met had traveled to Kauai to teach workshops in schools and give a benefit concert for United Way with their colleagues from the Honolulu Brass ensemble.

That evening, I attended the concert, which attracted about 200 people. The ensemble played a lot of light music such as a medley of tunes from John Williams’ score for Star Wars. People seemed to enjoy themselves. What I liked best about the performance was its interactivity. The musicians all talked about their instruments and the audiences were given ample opportunity to ask questions throughout. Many questions were asked about everything from technique to repertoire to instrument cleaning methodologies. After the concert, audience members lingered on to talk to the players.

I left feeling quite emotional about the experience of hearing this fine, hardworking group of musicians play. I wonder what awaits them in the coming months? Will they all be out of work by the summer? It can’t be easy making a living as a classical musician in Hawaii. One of the trombonists I met is thinking about moving to San Francisco. He says the Bay Area is one of the few parts of the country where a musician can pick up a decent amount of freelance work owing to all the part-time orchestras in the region. The other player is planning on staying in Hawaii. Picking up and moving isn’t as easy when your wife has professional responsibilities and you have a small child. Whatever happens to them, I wish my seaside brass players courage and fortune for the future.

The weather not being all that cooperative in Hawaii last week, I ended up spending quite a bit of time trying to find fun things to do indoors. At the advice of a sweet and avuncular Michigan lawyer names John who was on Kauai vacationing with his wife, I followed a dirt track just outside the center of the town of Hanalei to hear a slack key guitar concert in a local community center given by a couple of Hawaiian old timers, Doug and Sandy McMaster.

Doug is one of the few people remaining on the islands who practices this old school form of guitar playing. Slack guitar is a soloistic style of playing which came into being in the late 1700s. It’s purely instrumental and doesn’t involve any singing, though originally it was used to accompany hula dancing and chant. It involves alternate tunings to the regular guitar tuning system (around 75 known slack guitar tunings are known of today) and extensive use of the thumb as a self-accomaniment device. The mode of playing was born when Mexican workers, who had come to Hawaii to teach the locals farming techniques (the cow had recently been introduced on the islands) left some of their instruments behind when they went home to Mexico. The locals picked up the Mexicans’ guitars but didn’t know how to recreate the original tunings, so developed their own systems based on what sounded good to their ears. The resulting effect is extremely melodious, sweet and mellow.

What a double-act the McMasters turned out to be! Sandy, a portly lady with a broad grin and the kind of speaking voice that could soothe the temper of the most harried politician, clearly (or at least in performance mode) wears the trousers in the relationship. She casually and almost inaudibly strums a ukelele in most of the pieces and does pretty much all of the talking, telling mystical-tinged yarns about the development of slack guitar and her and Doug’s experiences over the years on the islands. She decides the playlist and tells her partner what to do at every stage. Only at one point during the two and a half hour concert did Doug get a chance to pick a tune and even then he seemed shy to do so and looked for Sandy’s approval of his decision.

Doug, a gaunt gentleman with long straggly hair and a low voice, spent the first half of the concert peeping out from behind dark glasses. He has a sheepish aspect about him and a dry, understated sense of humor. He is also a very amazing musician. I was very glad to be sitting in a place where I could see Doug’s fingers work the fretboard clearly. He gave the impression that he was hardly moving his thumb at all, but the musical structure was often so dense that it sounded like there should be three pairs of hands playing at once, not just one.

As the music flowed evenly like waves lapping a shore on a beautiful day, I shut my eyes and almost fell into a slumber. It’s a good thing that Doug and Sandy serve Oreo cookies and water at intermission — I needed the sustenance to kick me out of my lovely listening lethargy.

If you’re on Kauai, I thoroughly recommend a trip to hear the McMasters play. They perform twice a week, on a Friday at 4pm and Sunday at 3pm in the Hanalei Community Center on Kauai’s north shore.

You know how sometimes you look at a once-familiar word, phrase or sentence and it suddenly seems incomprehensible, like it’s written in Swahili or Urdu?

That happened to me a couple of nights ago as I was on the plane back from New York staring dumbly at the screen of a passenger seated a couple of rows ahead of me. My neighbor was watching an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm on the in-flight TV service and Larry David was gesticulating in his usual over-the-top fashion at some other guy in front of a theater box office.

All of a sudden, the words “Will Call” came floating into view. Being a frequenter of box offices on an almost daily basis myself, I never pay much attention to these two small words. But seeing them on screen the other day gave me pause for thought. What on earth does “will call” actually mean? And where does the phrase come from? It makes very little sense to me in the context of a box office. A sentence like “I will call you tomorrow” uses the words in a normal way. If anyone out there can shed light on the etymology behind this phrase, I’d love to hear from you.

PS More travels ahead: Lies Like Truth is going on hiatus for ten days or so. I will be blogging again from March 9.

KALW 91.7 FM, the small, scrappy and innovative public radio station which broadcasts my weekly radio show about the art of singing, VoiceBox, is doing really well in terms of listener numbers. I was gladdened to find out that the station, which is tiny and run on a shoestring, came in fourth on the Public Radio Player‘s list of live radio streams which are accessed most by listeners.

At the top was WBUR (Boston), second was WBEZ (Chicago), KCRW Music (Los Angeles) came in fourth, followed by KALW (San Francisco). KQED, the much bigger and shinier local NPR affiliate here in the Bay Area, came in a distant 17th.

Read more here.

Here’s a very quick roundup of some stuff I experienced on my trip to New York over the past few days:

1. Pinball machine exhibition at San Francisco International Airport: I should pay more attention to the exhibitions in the international concourse at the airport. The show on pinball machines at the moment is not only gorgeous to look at thanks to all that chrome and all of those flashing lights, but is also very informative. I might have to visit a pinball convention one of these days. San Francisco appears to be one of the last remaining bastions of interest in these lovely old machines.

2. Fela: I caught the much-talked-about Broadway musical about the Nigerian Afro-jazz musician and activist Fela Kuti as soon as I got into town on Friday night. Although I didn’t learn a great deal about the artist’s life beyond what I already knew (the musical really only goes into the Wikipedia version of Fela’s history and legacy) I appreciated my $27.00 standing place for two reasons: 1) after five hours on a plane it was great to be on my feet, and 2) you can dance so much better from the back of the orchestra than you can from an actual seat. My fellow standers and myself rocked out for two and half hours to the great on-stage band.

3. Iannis Xenakis exhibition at the Drawing Center: Most people know the Greek composer/architect Xenakis for his music, but people often forget that he was an accomplished architect who worked for Le Corbusier for many years. The exhibition made the connection between draftsmanship and music in Xenakis’ work and I left all the more informed and entranced for it. I appreciated the iPod I was given at the front desk which enabled me to listen to music by the composer as I looked at his visual work which ranged from oblique scratches on graph paper, to carefully executed plans for sound installations to music manuscript.

4. Radiohole’s Whatever Heaven Allows at P.S. 122: I was completely flummoxed by this show by the downtown New York experimental performance bastion. There were just too many in-jokes and the whole thing smacked of self-indulgence. Though there were a few memorable moments, such as when the cast members threw shotglassfuls of what appeared to be Kahlua in their own faces.

5. Mr. and Mrs. Fitch: Douglas Carter Beane’s new play about a couple of yuppie middle aged newspaper gossip columnists starring John Lithgow and Jennifer Ehle is utterly insufferable. Both Ben Brantley agrees with me so there’s no point wasting any more time and space explaining why it’s probably among the worst ten plays I’ve ever sat through in my life. The only mystery is why I bothered seeing it through to the end.

8. Regret of the trip: Not staying an extra day for the opening of the Whitney Biennial.

It’s a common assumption that if you’re a truly great singer, you can sing most anything. But this assumption of course is false. There are amazing lyrical tenors who can’t do Wagner. And incredible jazz singers who can’t sing folk music. For many experts, fach is everything and knowing your parameters as a vocalist is the best way to become excellent.

In the world of choral singing, however, some groups have earned a reputation for being able to sing in practically any style. The King’s Singers is one such group.

But at last night’s concert at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, the six-song, all male, a cappella showed that some musical styles may not fit them as well as others. The group breezed beautifully through a bunch of Italian and English madrigals by Schutz, Monteverdi, Weelkes and Bennet, and brought lushness and warmth to a performance of Saint-Saens’ Saltarelle.

But the King’s Singers’ performance of Berkeley composer Gabriela Lena Frank’s Tres Mitros de Mi Tierra (a commissioned world premiere) reminded me of hearing the Trinity College Choir from Cambridge, England, attempting gospel music at a concert at Grace Cathedral last summer. They just sounded stiff and “trained” — they couldn’t get under the skin of the music at all.

The same thing happened to the King’s Singers at last night’s concert: No matter how much accuracy and dexterity the vocalists brought to Frank’s rhythmically complex, mystical three-movement piece about three mythical Peruvian characters, they just couldn’t quite get into the swing of it. I guess these particular Brits (or maybe Anglo-Saxons in general?) are just too buttoned up to really communicate this ethnic kind of music. The piece, which offsets beautiful, delicate moments with a strident Latino pulse felt mostly quite stiff and formal.

I wonder if it would have sounded more supple if sung by a group more comfortable with Latino and/or folk idioms?

PS lies like truth is going on hiatus for a few days owing to travel plans. Look out for a new post next Wednesday.