lies like truth

When I auditioned for a role in Hildegard von Bingen’s musical drama Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues) I thought I’d be lucky to get a small solo part. Somehow though, I was offered the key role of “The Soul” in the famous German abbess’ 12th century morality play — the oldest of its kind existent in the world today. Exciting news indeed for someone who’s never sung a solo role in a public performance (unless you count playing Peter Pan in a musical at grade school) much less done so in plainchant.

Chant, I’m discovering, has its own set of amorphous yet nonetheless precise rules for performance. No one really knows how Bingen’s music was performed, so the best we can do is make educated guesses about it. I’ve heard many different interpretations of her music. Needless to say, no two sound anything like each other. Some versions are slow and stately while others skip along playfully. Some feature full musical accompaniments, while others only provide a drone or nothing at all. Some require the singers to use vibrato while others go for a purer sound. I even heard one recording with an awful artificial “reverb” effect that distorted the singer’s voice until it sounded like she was a member of the Irish folk-rock group Clannad.

Hildegard’s music is fiendishly hard to learn and even more tricky to memorize, which I have to do prior to rehearsals which begin in June. Lacking real melodies, a regular pulse and even bar lines, getting a feel for the shape of each musical number is challenging. I’m also finding myself struggling with getting my lips around the Germanized Latin, which I’ve never dealt with before (remembering, for example, that the word “quod” is pronounced “qvod”.)

Yet somehow the music so easily slips under one’s skin. I find myself humming phrases to myself at different times during the day and falling asleep to half-remembered snatches at night. The other thing I love about Ordo is how so much of The Soul’s part sits so comfortably in the middle of my range. Hildegard is known for skipping about between far-flung notes and demanding two-octave-plus ranges from singers. But for some reason, The Soul is tailormade for a mezzo soprano. The vocal lines, once you’ve got a grip on the notes and those awkward little trill things whose official name I can’t recall, feel fairly effortless. They don’t require the singer to growl down in the depths or scrape the heights hardly at all. You just float through each phrase.

Not being particularly religious, I don’t care much about Ordo‘s liturgical narrative — a story in which a bunch of allegorical Virtues, dwelling within the City of God, help a penitent Soul (yours truly) to resist temptation and find salvation. Yet even at this early stage of getting to know the work, I find the music utterly intoxicating. And even though at some level, I feel like I could be singing about green eggs and ham, there’s something deeply moving about the sentiment behind some of Hildegard’s lyrics. The opening solo for The Soul is particularly gorgeous:

O sweet Divinity,
and O delightful life,
in which I shall wear the brightest of
garments,
receiving that
which I lost in my first appearance,
to you I sigh,
and invoke all Virtues.

San Francisco Renaissance Voices will present Ordo Virtutum in August over five performances. It’ll be an challenging and doubtless very satisfying process bringing this gorgeous work to life.

As the home of Incredibly Strange Wrestling and the Faux Drag Queen Pageant, San Francisco is a natural breeding ground for the estoric genre of Grand Guignol theatre. Thrillpeddlers, the city’s very own permanant company devoted to recreating the works of the now long-defunct Parisian Grand Guignol theatre (and its much shorter-lived sister, the London Grand Guignol theatre) as well as staging new, original plays written in the Grand Guignol style, should become a regular stop on the San Francisco trail for locals and visitors looking to sample something of the city’s more lurid side.

Located under a flyover in the concrete jungle of San Francisco’s seedy/arts South of Market district, Thrillpeddlers’ performance space, The Hypnodrome, is a wonder in and of itself. The paint-spattered backdrops look like something vomitted from the intenstines of a wolverine. A custom-built replica of a guillotine (recreated from plans found on the Internet of Swedish origins) lurks in a corner — and usually finds its way onto the stage at one point or another during an evening’s entertainment. An old automatic player piano covers up the sound of traffic driving by outside. The auditorium is snug enough to enable stage blood to hit you if you’re sitting in the front row. The back of the seating area is occupied by a row of eccentrically-decorated private nooks called “Shock Boxes” in which couples can have a little privacy should they desire it. The end of each show is marked by a complete shutting off of all the lights in the house. Audiences hold on to their drinks and shriek with fear and/or delight as florescent skeletons, ghouls and other creatures of the night dance around and mercilessly taunt innocent bystanders. If you’re sitting in a Shock Box, prepare for a shock.

Though the melodramatic plots of the Grand Guignol genre are often condemned for seeming predictable, a night at Thrillpeddlers is usually anything but run of the mill. Even when the work makes you want to dig yourself an early grave (as was the case with the company’s fabulously terrible production of Titus Andronicus a couple of years ago) the schlocktastic antics still manage to hit you with the unexpected. One emerges from a Thrillpeddlers show with the feeling that it isn’t what happens on stage that matters — but rather how the company hurtles towards each blood-splattered climax.

And I should point out that it’s not all about guts and gore. A night of Grand Guignol theatre is based around giving the audience a range of radically contrasting experiences. In a typical program, gory dramas are mixed with side-splitting comedies. The idea is to create an emotional ping-pong effect in the viewer as we move from rolling in the aisles to feeling the hairs stand up on the back of our necks. Thrillpeddlers certainly achieves this effect with its latest production: Flaming Sin: London’s Grand Guignol. A witty, louche one-act written for the London Grand Guignol in 1922 by Noel Coward, “The Better Half” (receiving its American premiere by Thrillpeddlers) is followed by “The Old Women”, an over-the-top horror play set in a lunatic asylum adapted by Christopher Holland from the French Grand Guignol drama “A Crime in the Madhouse” by Andre de Lorde and Alfred Binet. Then, the show moves into a fast-paced revue featuring a variety of underground sideshows, from a play set in a department store and revolving around the aforementioned guillotine to a burlesque song entitled “Oom Pah Pah” raucously sung in a crimson gown and lavishly-curled wig by one of the most beautiful and graceful drag queens I’ve ever seen. The evening ends with a screening of Thrillpeddlers’ 20-minute documentary about the Grand Guignol stage, which you don’t have to go to The Hypnodrome to see: It’s a “special feature” on the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp Sweeney Todd DVD.

By the time I staggered out of The Hypnodrome at around 11.30 the other night, I felt emotionally exhausted and spiritually uplifted. It was one of the stranger evenings I’ve spent at the theatre. I don’t think I’ll forget it in a hurry. As Richard Hand and Michael Wilson, the authors of a recently published book entitled London’s Grand Guignol put it, “Grand Guignol is, in any case, essentially a form that embodies a mass of contradictions. It is comic and horrific, progressive and reactionary, realist and sensationalist, erotic and even pornographic. It is all these things and more besides.”

The last time I caught a screening of a San Francisco Opera production, I wasn’t very impressed. I was present at the company’s inaugural simulcast screening of Madama Butterfly a couple of years ago. It was a festive, atmospheric affair to be sure: While audiences watched the show from inside the War Memorial Opera House, 8,000 others gathered on a big, grassy plaza across the street to watch a live broadcast of the opera for free. Pretty red lanterns and a festival spirit complete with wine and picnics made for an enjoyable evening.

But the screening itself left much to be desired. Crudely edited and packed with unflattering close-ups of the leading lady’s triple chins, the film made suspending one’s disbelief a real challenge.

I’m happy to report that the company’s forays into screening operas have come a long way since then. This morning, I went to San Francisco’s historic Castro movie theatre to catch a screening of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. A departure from delivering simulcasts in tandem with live performances, the company recently launched a series of screenings of previously-recorded performances. This method of making the experience of going to the opera available to many more people is, in my opinion, much more satisfying than watching a simulcast. Thanks to careful, creative editing, good quality sound, and high definition images, Mozart’s opera sprang to life on screen.

I was particularly impressed with the sensitivity of the performances witnessed at such close range. The Commendatore (Kristinn Sigmundsson) looked like he was in agony when he was dying; Twyla Robinson’s Donna Elvira sassed as much as she seethed; As Don G, Mariusz Kwiecien didn’t overdo the lothario act.

Another thing I loved about SF Opera’s collaboration with film production company, The Bigger Picture, is the way in which the cameras allow us to see into the orchestra pit during the overture. It was such fun to see conductor Donald Runnicles at close range in his purple waistcoat, waving his arms and mane of white hair infront of a wobbling music stand. It was equally thrilling to get such a birds-eye view of all the instrumentalists at work too. Audience members are never privy to these kinds of details while sitting in the opera house.

Finally, it was interesting to see how the cinema audience reacted to the film. Mostly made up of elderly people and a few school groups, the audience behaved somewhat differently to the on-screen audience that could be heard responding to the live show beyond the edges of the camera lens. The sounds of wild applause heard on screen after the big arias were not matched in the cinema today. Yet while clapping seemed to be off-limits, people in the movie theatre still laughed heartily at the opera’s many humorous moments.

Other operas screened so far in the series include Puccini’s La Rondine, and Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah. Next up, funnily enough, is ye olde Madama Butterfly on April 21. I might have to go along just to see if this production fares better in edited mode rather than witnessed via simulcast.

It was a cashier at Trader Joe’s by the name of Cuba who introduced me to the MTV series America’s Next Best Dance Crew while ringing up my groceries. We’d somehow gotten into a conversation about baseball and then sports in general during which I admitted that I didn’t really watch many games. When Cuba asked me what sports I followed, I sheepishly responded that I loved dance, even though many people don’t consider it a sport. Cuba said: “Sure dance is a sport.” “It’s very athletic at any rate,” I shrugged, ready to leave.

But Cuba wasn’t ready to move on to the next customer. He proceeded to tell me about America’s Next Best Dance Crew, a recently-finished series on MTV in which hip-hop dance groups from all over the country compete for glory and a $100,000 grand prize. Viewers call in and vote for their favorite crew each week until all but one of the crews are eliminated and a winner is declared.

For many minutes after he’d finished totting up my grocery bill (apparently oblivious to the line of shoppers forming behind me) Cuba talked in animated terms about the show — the dancers’ passion and cool costumes; the fact that one group danced in masks while another performed their routines in roller-skates; the real-life stories behind the crews’ rise to fame via MTV. His enthusiasm was infectious.

When I told Cuba I was bummed that I missed the series (I don’t own a TV and am usually busy in the evenings going to review live theatre productions or making music) he immediately grabbed the till receipt out of my hands and scrawled an MTV URL and the show’s title on the back of it. “You can watch the entire series online,” he said before waving to the next customer and sending me on my way.

When I got home, I did as I was told. Even on a 12″ laptop screen, America’s Next Best Dance Crew made for engrossing viewing. I’m so glad that the Internet makes seeing these programs possible long after they’ve been recorded — and the bonus of watching the shows on the Web is that all the episodes are blissfully ad-free.

I was particularly taken with the originality of the choreography and the visceral power of the performances. Many of the steps were intricate, involving complex footwork, the isolation of numerous different body parts and precise coordination between all dancers. Though the style was recognizably hip-hop and incorporated a lot of moves from breakdancing, every now and again, I would catch some moves that surprised me. Some steps, for instance, seemed like they were ripped from the unlikely traditions of Cossack and Morris dancing. At one point, dancers squatted on their haunches and sprang up to their feet repeately like Russian folk dancers; at another, they skipped and flicked their wrists like members of a Morris group from rural England. It was boundary-pushing stuff and the on-screen audience went wild every time one of the groups tried something unusual.

What was also interesting was the way that the presenter constantly used the language of war to talk about the crews. He referred to them “battling” it out and “fighting” their way to the top. Yet at the same time, the dancers themselves and the judges were constantly undermining the “street fighter” spirit of the event by talking about the “brotherhood” and “sisterhood” that existed between the groups. It was also significant that in the final episode, all the crews (including those eliminated early on in the series) returned to perform duets or trios with troupes which they had previously competed against. Upon final analysis, the series appeared to be less about competition and war and more about teamwork and synchronicity.

A staggering 38 million viewers called in to vote in the final week, in which a crew of young Asian men from San Diego who called themselves JabbaWockeeZ and danced in gloves and masks, faced-off against Status Quo, a crew of equally youthful-looking black guys from Boston who danced in loose baseball-style jackets and jeans. JabbaWockeez won and everyone danced and cheered until the final credits rolled. It was a pretty emotional finale.

If America’s Next Best Dance Crew is anything to go by, this country need not fear for the future of dance. The art form is alive and well, and thriving all over the country. I can’t wait until the second series which kicks off in the summer. Who knew that a trip to Trader Joe’s could yield such fruit?

As predicted, I had no luck trying to buy Radiohead tickets via Ticketmaster at 10am this morning. The site had nothing available at all even right at 10am on the nose.

I’m not normally given to venting conspiracy theories, but I can’t help thinking that there’s some kind of underhand business at work in the box office world for these kind of events. I mean, people were auctioning tickets on eBay for the concert at 9.45am and a few other ticket sites were hawking seats right in the back for $500 apiece.

I’m beginning to doubt whether it’s actually possible to buy a ticket at a standard price through the conventional channels at all.

Ah well, I guess I’ll have to live vicariously through the write-ups that the concert gets or think about crashing the event somehow (which will be tantamount in terms of impossiblity to breaking into the White House I suppose.) Nothing, however, will induce me to fork out $500 for a ticket to see the band. I’m a fan, but I’m not that much of a fan. And I don’t have a trust fund.

We thought we were being clever, opting to see the band in concert in the aging, conservative town of Santa Barbara rather than trying to catch them in San Francisco. We believed we would be at an advantage, living in California, in terms of getting our hands on tickets through a British website, given the time difference. Little did we know.

Radiohead’s website announced that tickets for the rock band’s appearance in Santa Barbara on August 28 would be going on sale through the British website waste on April 9. With the U.K. being eight hours ahead of The Bay Area, we all thought we stood a pretty good chance of getting tickets once the clock switched from midnight on April 8 to 00:01 on April 9 in Britain — which meant the middle of the previous afternoon for us.

Of course, hitting the “refresh” button on our Internet browsers all afternoon didn’t yield results. The site remained closed to ticket buyers until around 9am UK time on April 9. But even those of us standing by at our computers at 1am had no luck. Within about 30 seconds, all the tickets available for purchase through waste had been snapped up. Not one person I know in the Bay Area managed to succeed in buying tickets online that night. We all went to bed dissatisfied.

What does a person need to do to get tickets to this concert? Is it even possible? I wonder if rock critics in California are having similar trouble? Seems like you need to be related to one of the band members to get in. Or have the resources to bribe someone. I expect it’s easier trying to get an appointment with the Queen of England. 

More tickets go on sale via Ticketmaster tomorrow morning. The venue, Santa Barbara Bowl, has put out a stern warning prohibiting fans from lining up at the box office at midnight tonight: “No lining up before midnight on the night prior to the “on sale” date,” the website announces. “All “on sale” lines at the Santa Barbara Bowl Box Office are subject to a wristband lottery. There is a 2 ticket limit per person.” Interestingly enough, no other concert listing on the venue’s website features a message like this. I guess Avril Lavigne, The Cure and The Gypsy Kings don’t bring out the same level of obsession in their fans.

Of course, my friends and I will be hitting the refresh key on our Internet browsers all night tonight once again — even though tickets don’t even go on sale until 10am tomorrow. Rock fans do the strangest things.

I didn’t pay much attention to the broohaha surrounding the climaxing relationship between French president Nicolas Sarkozy and ex-supermodel / singer-songwriter Carla Bruni even though I was in the UK when France’s first couple swung by for an official visit in March. The controversy on the eve of the visit concerning the publication by Christies auction house of a nude photograph of Bruni taken during her career as a supermodel and the media’s special interest in Bruni’s wardrobe (Christian Dior — a diplomatic choice, being a French design house designed by John Galliano, a British designer) seemed laughable to me.

But having been introduced to Bruni’s music by — of all people — my mother, who’s a fan and played several of the singer-songwriter’s tracks for me while I was home visiting, I’ve now become completely obsessed with the Italian-born bombshell-maestro.

Bruni’s debut CD from 2002, Quelqu’un m’a dit, is one of the loveliest collections of musical musings I’ve heard in a long time. In many ways, Bruni follows directly in the footsteps of French singer-songwriters that have passed before her, including Serge Gainsbourg and Jacques Brel in the sense that what she puts out into the world is deceptively simple: almost comical little tunes accompanied by little else than a strummed guitar.

But the surface texture of Bruni’s songs belies an inner depth and complexity. It’s the combination of Bruni’s sexy-philosophical lyrics and smoky-throated voice that haunt the listener in particular. My favorite track from the album is the title song. There are about three chords in the thing and Bruni’s voice cracks winningly every time she attempts to hit a note above a middle G. But the words, shrugging with a nonchalant sweetness in the face of one’s pathetic “little life,” are utterly infectious. You don’t know if she’s being jokey or sincere. Whatever she’s being, the music drips sensuality and I just can’t get enough.

Here’s a link to Bruni’s website. Both Quelqu’un m’a dit and her 2007 follow-up album, No Promises, are available in the U.S. via iTunes.

Being a passionate devotee of Slings & Arrows, the brilliantly written and incandescently acted Canadian TV series about the inner workings of a big regional theatre company, I was excited to stumble across an article in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle about a new video podcast series. The series concerns a group of young theatremakers as they journey towards putting on a black-box stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Double in San Francisco.

A collaboration between podcaster Bill Bowles, playwright Eric Henry Sanders, and a coterie of hipsterish 20-something Bay Area thespians, Meet The Play Group is described in the paper as “a refreshing new series that will appear to fans of The Office and Waiting for Guffman.”

Episodes of Meet The Play Group can be found at www.meettheplaygroup.com.

On Sunday, I attended an awards ceremony and party in honor of Dan Hoyle. A team of five local theatre critics (Rob Hurwitt of The San Francisco Chronicle, Karen D’Souza of The San Jose Mercury News, Chad Jones formerly of the Oakland Tribune, Rob Avila of The San Francisco Bay Guardian and yours truly) selected Hoyle as this year’s recipient of The Glickman Award for Best New Play. Every year, The Glickman Award (named in memory of play- and screenwriter Will Glickman) honors any new play to have received its world premiere in the Bay Area. Hoyle won the $4000 prize this time around for his stunning one-man show about Nigerian oil politics, Tings Dey Happen. The show is enjoying a revival in San Francisco at The Marsh Theatre following five acclaimed months Off-Broadway in New York.

For the review I wrote about Hoyle’s play last year in SF Weekly, click here.

Though I love being part of The Glickman Award panel — both for the opportunity the position provides to bestow recognition upon a very deserving playwright each year, and for the delicious disagreements that my colleagues and I invariably get into over dinner when we discuss potential candidates for the award every January — attending the prize-giving ceremony is always slightly traumatizing: They make the theatre critics give speeches.

No matter how much wine I drink, I always feel a bit nervous about throwing in my two-cents worth about why I love the winning show in public. Yesterday was no different. I sweated and shifted around in my high heels willing myself to say something intelligent. Unfortunately only burbling noises came forth. To make matters worse, I was the fifth speaker out of five, which meant that pretty much everything had been said already. So I made a joke based on something that Hoyle had said in an interview about Nigeria being like a party where the dog’s eaten the cake and all the lights are out and there’s a hole in the floor or somesuch nonsense and ploughed on through with my eyes glued to the rug, ending with some juvenile comment about being “awestruck” by the dramatist’s prowess. It was an unpleasant few minutes. But I got through it without throwing up, so for that I should at least be grateful.

The ridiculous thing is that my stage-fright is completely unfounded. No one comes to the Glickman Awards ceremony to listen to a bunch of critics rambling on. They come to rub shoulders with the winning playwright and his or her collaborators and drink good wine. Yet for some reason, knowing this doesn’t help. At least Hoyle quickly took the attention away from my muttering effort by performing a scene from his play. In a touching moment just before he started the scene, the performer had to hold back tears. His mother, who was sitting watching her son, actually shed a few. The catharsis was welcome after all the excitement.

The Theatre Communications Group (the body that oversees non-profit theatre in the U.S.) has launched a three-minute theatre video competition as part of the run-up to its 2008 National Conference to be held in Denver in June.

Contestants were asked to make a three-minute video about their theatre companies, including some thoughts about “their vision for theatre in the future.”

Browsers to the TCG website can view all eight submissions and then vote for their favorite. The winner(s) will receive the equivalent of two complimentary registrations to the TCG National Conference and the top videos will be screened at the conference.

I’m not sure what the rationale behind this competition is. I’m not sure the theatre community understands it either, otherwise TCG would have received more than just eight submissions. However, It’s interesting to see the range of styles and approaches even within such a small group of offerings:

7 Stages in Atlanta’s slick, sober effort looks and sounds like an infomercial on the theme of why theatre will change the planet. With the sound down, it could be a video for some environmental or education non-profit.

The Magic Theatre in San Francisco takes a completely opposing tack. Two hip young company members make jokey riffs about theatre while basking in the sunshine with a view of the sparkling Bay and Golden Gate Bridge in the background. The video looks like an MTV short with its rock music soundtrack and pithy soundbytes.

Actors Shakespeare Project of Boston’s video comes across as an earnest “artists at work”-type profile for public television. A narrator describes the company’s process and approach. Images depict rehearsals. The emphasis is definitely on showing “how a play is made.”

A more tongue-in-cheek and intriguing entry comes from The LARK Play Development Center in New York, which manages to combine insights about what the center does from such dramatists as Arthur Kopit and David Henry Hwang and a cheeky look into how the playwrights of the future need to forge ahead with their own creativity rather than rely on churning out plays according to a formula.

Other entries include:
Brava Center for the Arts, San Francisco
Imagination Stage, Bethesda
Kitchen Theatre Company and Ithaca
Youth Ensemble of Atlanta

What’s clear from the range of approaches to the subject is that the creators don’t quite know to whom they are pitching themselves. Creating a video about one’s theatre company for the sheer delight of it is a fun and I’m sure worthwhile exercise, but in what way does it really aid a company’s cause or the theatre’s cause in general? And if the videos are only meant to be seen by a bunch of theatre insiders at the TCG conference, then is there much point in the dudes from the Magic Theatre telling this audience to “get out and see a play!”?

Video can serve a variety of useful purposes in the theatre world for such things as recording rehearsals for the production team’s benefit and creating trailers for shows to use as tools to whet audiences’ appetites and sell tickets. In this case, though, the purpose seems less clear.

The brilliant San Francisco-baed comic book creator, Jon Adams, has been publishing tales about the quotidian lives of superheroes since 2000. Having garnered two Eisner nominations for his books (the comic book industry equivalent of the Oscars), a rocketing fan-base and appearances in publications like McSweeneys, Adams has now launched his Truth Serum comic strip as a weekly series online.

Adams’ superheroes aren’t like regular defenders of the universe. They may wear capes and masks, but you’re more likely to find them hanging about on street corners discussing girls or darning holes in their hose than dashing off to do heroic deeds. The down-to-earth humor of Adams’ superhero-next-door scenarios coupled with the delicate intricacy and precision of his drawings makes Truth Serum an utterly captivating read.

Adams now seems to be reaching a mainstream audience. Check out this article about Truth Serum in the Wall Street Journal.