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Chloe Veltman: how culture will save the world

Confessions of a Voiceover Rookie

UnknownPeople often tell me I have “a nice voice.” So in pursuit of new career avenues after my lovely two-year fellowship run at Stanford comes to an end in June, I decided to look into a possible future as a voiceover professional for commercials, e-books, video games etc. I don’t see this as a full-time possibility. But it could be fun and potentially lucrative to get the occasional voiceover job.

A colleague at KALW put me in touch with Elaine Clark, an expert in the field, who has been running a voiceover studio, Voice One, in San Francisco for nearly 30 years. Until this past week, I had no idea that San Francisco was such a hotbed for Voiceover.

I read Elaine’s book, There’s Money Where Your Mouth Is, on the plane back from Atlanta at the weekend. It bore a lot of similarities to various manuals on acting I’ve read in the past, but with an added sales dimension, where the (usually corporate) hirer is somewhat creepily termed a “hero.”

Spending an hour with Elaine lefty me feel icky but fascinated. I thought that my work in radio over the past three and a half years would stand me in good stead as a voiceover person. But within 30 seconds of standing behind a mike in Elaine’s studio, it became patently clear to me that voicing commercials has precious little in common with being a radio host.

Elaine made me read a bunch of short scripts from different corporate clients including Pier 1 Imports, Sam’s Club and PayPal. Each script demanded a slightly different feel. I was given a couple of minutes to read and think before each one and then I had to give it a try.

Needless to say, my attempts left much to be desired.

As a radio host, I’m used to looking up from my written outline and making as much eye contact as possible with my in-studio guests. But looking up in voiceover work is all wrong. You have to keep your eyes glued to the script so as to not shift the focus. “Think of the script as the client. You have to stay fixed on what you’re selling,” Elaine instructed.

My biggest rookie mistake was that my voice kept going up instead of staying anchored. “When your voice goes into the upper register, no one believes what you’re selling,” said Elaine. I also sounded unpleasantly squeaky up there. I think that this is one of the biggest hurdles that I have to jump at this point: I have to be a good enough actor to believe that buying that couch from Pier 1 changed my life utterly and for the better. Got some work to do there.

If I’m going to get anywhere in this business, I also have to visualize not only the specific character that I am emulating with my voice, but also a specific person that I’m speaking to during the spot. That’s tricky.

I felt pretty silly and awkward throughout the session, but Elaine is a patient teacher and gave me lots of interesting feedback. She made all the script lines sound so effortless, where my voice sounded mostly forced and “salesy” to me.

One thing that greatly and quite surprisingly helped was gesturing as I spoke my lines. When I read about the way in which voiceover actors use their bodies in Elaine’s book, I  sort of thought of it as an affectation. After all, what’s the point of waving your arms about, nodding your head and raising your eyebrows if no one can see you? But in actual fact, gesturing really helped me find rhythm and musicality in what were otherwise flat and boring-sounding lines. Plus, moving about helped me to feel looser and more relaxed, which in turn helped me to get over my sense of awkwardness a little.

Elaine ended the session by evaluating me. She said I had “a nice voice” and that I “take direction well.” So that’s good. I clearly have a long way to go before I get to the stage where I can  find an agent, get auditions and potentially snag gigs.

I don’t feel too discouraged by my meager efforts yesterday. I think I’m going to take more classes. We’ll see what happens.

Catching My Breath

photoI’m at Atlanta airport awaiting my delayed flibght back to San Francisco after a whirlwind week of performances, meetings, parties, long drives and random encounters that have left me precious little time to blog.

Here are a few scattered impressions of things I did on my travels from Atlanta (which I already covered here and here) to Louisville, KY and Nashville, TN.

Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame: En route to Louisville, I fed my basketball fetish with a visit to the world’s only temple to women’s basketball. It was a Tuesday afternoon, icy rain was careening down on Knoxville and there was hardly a soul about. I more or less had the museum to myself. The museum official told me that the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame welcomes around 22,000 guests a year. Judging by the hoards that I saw attending a women’s basketball game in Louisville later that day, the news came as no surprise.  I didn’t care much for the endless glass cases filled with university team uniforms and photographs of the various esteemed coaches of the sport. The museum is most interesting for what it tells about the early history of women’s basketball, mostly through waxwork models and plaques with text. The sport came into being in 1892 by a Russian émigré to the US, Senda Berenson, who adapted the rules of the men’s game, which had been invented a year previously. Berenson taught phys ed at Smith College and thought that women would greatly benefit from playing basketball, even if the game was deemed to be “too rough for ladies.” In the early days, men were prevented from watching the women’s games due to the racy nature of the uniforms, which consisted of baggy wool bloomers and long-sleeved blouses. Oh, and the WBHOF is also home to the world’s biggest basketball. It’s on the roof of the building. It helped me identify the museum as I rolled into town in my rented KIA in the impenetrable weather.

The Humana Festival of New American Plays: I was in Louisville for a few days for various meetings and shows. I caught two dramas at the Humana Festival, probably the country’s most prestigious outlet for contemporary US theatre, which recently came under the direction of two Bay Area transplants – Les Waters and Meredith McDonagh. I saw Waters’ production of Will Eno’s Gnit and McDonagh’s take on The Delling Shore by Sam Marks. Gnit, which looks at Ibsen’s Peer Gynt through a 21st century lens, is a quirky-thoughtful, if slightly long-winded, work. What I most appreciated about it, apart from the great ensemble cast and Waters’ pace-y direction, is what the play has to say about listening. The dramatist takes Ibsen’s play, with its focus on how a human being realizes his highest self through speaking, and considers what happens when you take this to an extreme. In Eno’s dramatic universe, there is so much noise in people’s heads from their constant speaking and navel-gazing, that they have lost their ability to listen. This is not only borne out by the main character, Peter, and his constant self-deluding talk, but also by the chatter of the townspeople, all embodied by just one actor — the comically schizophrenic Danny Wolohan.  The fact that the sound for the production is mostly emitted from the horns of two old Victrola machines, which pass ominously across the stage between scenes, harks back to the early years of recorded sound, when people’s habits around listening arguably started to change. The Delling Shore was less compelling as a drama. The shrill four-hander about the contentious relationships between baby boomer fathers and their 20-something daughters draws much inspiration from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. But unlike Albee’s work, The Delling Shore hits one note. McDonagh’s direction is fluid and rhythmic. The talented, four-strong cast does its best to find substance in the shallow story revolving around the competitive nature of the relationship between two ageing writers, but I left at the end feeling prickly and impatient.

Copland and Mexico: Daniel Gilliam, the head of the local classical music radio station, WUOL, took me to Whitney Hall, the home of the Louisville Orchestra, to experience the home team give a morning concert accompanied by coffee and Krispy Kreme donuts (for which I clearly have a weakness.) I had a great time at “Copland and Mexico,” a program involving live music, video and commentary devised by the orchestra manager and scholar Joseph Horowitz. Horowitz’s tightly written script uses Aaron Copland’s fascination with Mexico as a way into a discussion about a musical figurehead who is less familiar to American audiences — the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas. Gustavo Dudamel has done a lot to bring the great Mexican maestro to the attention of the American public in recent years. But Horowitz’s program goes further in this regard by providing valuable musical, political and social context for the music we hear during the two-hour program, which Horowitz presents in partnership with the aid of various regional orchestras around the country.  It’s also an entertaining way for audiences to engage with live music in a concert hall setting. In the first half of the show, the orchestra played short pieces by both composers – Copland’s El Salon Mexico and “Buckaroo Holiday” from Rodeo, and Sensemaya and Homenaje a Federico Garcia Lorca by Revueltas– with aplomb. The hall’s acoustics aren’t fantastic, however, and the sound only came into its own when a small chamber group centered around a piano performed Revueltas’ Lorca homage. The highlight of the program came in the second half, when the orchestra played Revueltas’ live score to the beautiful, politically-charged hour-long film about Mexican fishermen’s rights, Redes. I was transfixed.

Visual Art around the city: Louisville surprised me for its lively approach to public art. I loved the clatsch of colorful metal chickens on the waterfront and a ostentatious, golden statue by Serkan Ozkaya of a naked Biblical David (inspired by Michelangelo) in front of the city’s new boutique 21C hotel/museum. Speaking of 21C, the hotel is home to eclectic contemporary art exhibitions. I spent a merry afternoon sampling local bourbons there and checking out some of the art, which is free to view for guests and non-guests alike. On display currently are portraits by Catherine Opie and Kiki Smith to name two of the more well-known names represented in the current exhibition.

The Willett Distillery: My friend, the restaurant critic and cocktail writer Virginia Miller, suggested that I visit the Willett Distillery, a new distillery located in Bardstown, KT, about an hour from Louisville. I stopped in for a press tour on my way to Nashville on Friday morning. The distillery was originally started in 1937 by Thompson Willett, but fell into disrepair. It was given a facelift last year by the original owner’s descendents. Willett is a friendly, understated place. The brands include Noah’s Mill, Rowan’s Creek and Johnny Drum. The best part of the tour is getting to see the fermenting grain bubbling and seething away in massive cauldrons. The staff don’t mind you putting your hands into the mix to feel and taste it. The alcohol kills all germs, they say. It’s easy to imagine leaning over too far and falling in to one of the kettles. According to my tour guide, the only thing that’s disappeared into the boil so far is the iPhone belonging to Willett’s master distiller, Drew Kulsveen. The tank had to be drained and an employee had to fish it out.

Tribute to Ron Davies: With only one night to sample what I could of the music scene on this first visit to Nashville, a friend of a friend suggested that I make my way to 3rd and Lindsley, a music club located in an unprepossessing industrial corner of the city, to hear a bunch of top-tier Nashville musicians perform numbers from the Ron Davies songbook. The musical tribute, which featured guest spots by a slew of country music artists, was organized by Davies’ sister, the prolific country record producer, Gail Davies. Her now-deceased sibling is not well-known outside of country music circles. But he was a great songwriter, responsible for writing songs for the likes of David Bowie, Helen Reddy and Maria Muldaur.  I sat at the bar with a sweet but stressed out middle-aged lady by the name of Kim who described herself as a friend / handler of one of the performers – the singer Janelle Mosser. Kim was worried because she had to get Mosser to another gig across town (a 30 minute drive away) but the singer had been placed very near the end of the Ron Davies program, making a late arrival to the next concert inevitable. She sped off as soon as Mosser was done. I had a great time. The music made me want to sway. Crystal Gayle, Mandy Barnett and Bonnie Bramlett were on the lineup among other Nashville royalty. The stage was crammed with top of the line musicians including a superb fiddler and electric bassist. I was susprised to see the addition of violin, viola and cello in a corner of the stage, playing along as if the presence of a classical string trio were perfectly normal in a saloon setting. The room was packed and I felt very fortunate to be there.

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum: Before I rolled back to Atlanta in my KIA, I took a tour of The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. I did this because I had been told by practically everyone that this was the place to go on one’s first visit to Nashville and because I was able to obtain a press ticket. Although I enjoyed checking out the exhibition about Patsy Cline, which includes such whimsy as the singer’s collection of salt and pepper shakers, and seeing the many amazing musical instruments and clothing items on display, I left feeling quite disappointed. My main issue with the CMHOFAM is that it takes a very simplistic, breezy view of country music. The institution is home to the Frist Library and Archives, one of the world’s great research centers for country music. But it refuses to engage in any way with the genre’s complex and dark relationship to the race politics that shaped the scene over the years and the over-commercialization that has developed in more recent decades.

Passover in Atlanta

photoMy Ebenezer Church experience in Atlanta last weekend which I blogged about a few days ago was nicely balanced by a wonderful Passover celebration with the family of my friend Seth Samuel, an Atlanta native who now lives in the Bay Area and produces VoiceBox, the following day.

Seth is one of nine siblings. With his parents (Melissa and Don), eight of the nine Samuel children, half of Seth’s sister Lily’s ultimate frisbee team, and me, it was a large and lively table.

Seth’s mother, the formidable Melissa Fay Greene (a well-respected non-fiction author and National Book Award finalist) led the seder.  There was a “plague” of rubber frogs all over the ceiling, the food was delicious, we each got a prize for hunting down the matzoh, and it was all very jolly. Above is a picture of various members of Lily’s frisbee team playing with the puppet cicadas that they’d won in the matzoh hunt. The cicadas are a reference to the team’s name, but I can’t quite remember the details there.

Best of all was the music. Everyone sang. It didn’t matter that half of us were hazy on the tunes and lyrics and couldn’t understand Hebrew. It was raucous and delightful. Seth improvised accompaniments on the piano and one of his brother’s provided beatbox percussion to a few of the songs.

When the seder disbanded, we continued singing show tunes and then some of us gathered in the living room to hear a witty piece of audio that Seth had created by manipulating Ira Glass’s voice. I urged Seth to send his piece to the host of This American Life. I think the guy would get a kick out of it.

I didn’t want to go home.

Palm Sunday at Ebenezer Baptist Church

UnknownI attempted to undertake a bit of ethnographic research for my book about singing culture in the United States by visiting Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church on Palm Sunday. The church where both Martin Luther King and his father preached is a warm, friendly and obviously deeply historical place that ultimately revealed more about spoken word than song culture to me.

There wasn’t a spare inch of pew left in the house by 11.30 am when the service was in full swing. I think there were about 2,000 people present, but I’m not sure about the actual capacity.

Ebenezer boasts a choir of around 50 singers, all African-American. The mostly middle-aged male and female choristers generally sing together, yet are identified in the service program by two separate names — The Singing Sisters and The J. L. Roberts Men’s Chorus.

The acoustic in the room isn’t all that great for singing, though the rock-jazz instrumental ensemble that accompanies the singers comes through pretty cleanly. The sound, particularly from the women, is heavily vibrato-laden. On Sunday, the repertoire consisted of archetypal spirituals such as “Ride On, King Jesus,” arranged by the great spiritual composer, Moses Hogan, hymns like “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name” and the gospel tune “Make his Praise Glorious” arranged by Ed Lojeski.

Overall, the music was quite disappointing really. I was, surprisingly for an atheist of Jewish extraction, much more impressed and moved by the talk.

The only baptist service I have attended previously was at Al Green’s church in Memphis where singing is an extremely important part of the goings on. Green pretty much sings his way through his sermon with that incredible voice of his and the congregation joins in often, embellishing the melodies with melismatic abandon.

Attending Green’s church is an intense musical experience. I mistakenly imagined that this would be the case at all Baptist churches.

But despite the fact that the choir sang quite strongly at Ebenezer, very few members of the congregation sang during the service. They mostly listened politely to the choir and only joined in on “The Palms,” a song arranged by one “C. H. G.” for which lyric sheets were provided as inserts to the service program.

Ebenezer’s pastor, the extremely charismatic and smart Reverend Raphael G Warnock, PhD, doesn’t sing his sermon like Green does. But owing to Warnock’s melodious speaking voice, sense of humor and sensible view of the world, I was found that I was far more compelled by the spoken content of the Palm Sunday service than the sung one. The pastor spoke brilliantly about gun control and the misplaced enlightenment of pious people who consider themselves to be religious but aren’t good social citizens.

If I lived in Atlanta, I’d probably come back to hear Warnock preach. I learned a lot yesterday, even though I didn’t glean much that could help me with my book about singing.

Righto. It’s 6pm. I’m off to Passover supper at the home of the brilliant civil rights author, Melissa Fay Greene.

Viva Charlotte!

photoI just I interviewed Charlotte Church for VoiceBox and she impressed me greatly.

Church shot to fame in the mid-1990s as a pre-teen for her classically-trained soprano voice which sounded impressively mature for her years. She sold millions of records. In more recent times, the vocalist has reinvented herself as a television talk show host and now as a writer and performer of brooding indie pop songs.

At the age of 27, Church has lived richly. She’s tasted commercial success, turned her back on it, given birth to two children, survived drubbings about her physical appearance, love-life and outspoken nature from the British tabloid press, and keeps moving forwards, reinventing herself as an artist while maintaining a strong basis in her classical music training.

It’s not just that I respect Church for her career. She’s also a level-headed, warm-hearted and intelligent person, with a deep understanding of her voice and curiosity about the world around her. When we spoke in her hotel room for an hour or so on Thursday for a VoiceBox show that will launch in a few weeks’ time, Church was suffering from a bad cold and exhaustion from being on the road. Nevertheless, old pro that she is, the singer gave me a great interview.

And then, at around 11pm at one of San Francisco’s underground nightspots, The Rickshaw Stop, Church made her San Francisco debut. The artist performed a fantastic set with her band of songs from her new album, One and Two. Her clear articulation, chest-thumping tone and ability to stride massive, heart-stopping intervals with perfect intonation despite feeling under the weather, all belie her years of classical training. Every now and again, she stop to chug down water or spoonfuls of manuka honey (her favorite cold remedy) from a glass jar.

When she was small, Church was appreciated by millions of people basically for being a freak — a child with a fancy-sounding woman’s voice.  These days, she’s less easily marketable. She has to find a way to make the sound she wants to make in the deep and wide pool of intelligent, 20-something, female indy rock artists. It’s a quieter journey this time, with less media attention and fewer adoring fans. She was the opening act on Thursday night for a couple of trendy British acts – Rudimental and Kidnap Kid. From the balcony where I was watching the stage, I heard one audience member yell “We love you, Charlotte!” Slightly later, someone else shrieked, “Charlotte’s got big tits!”

It was a committed, powerful performance. I’d much rather hear the Charlotte Church of today, doing the thing she loves with tons of heart to back it up, than the performing monkey of the 1990s singing two lines of the “Pie Jesu” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem surrounded by a TV audience and tons of artificial reverb.

 

Hoopless

imagesI’m trying to take up basketball. It’s un uphill struggle, but not for the reasons that you might think (lack of fitness, delusions of NBA grandeur etc) but rather because there’s apparently very little in the way of opportunities for anyone over the age of 18 who’s never aimed a ball at a basket before to start to do so.

I’ve been working on trying to find a class or coach for around two years now, and have been entranced by the sport for a great deal longer. There are no beginner classes at Stanford, where I have been based for the last 18 months. The YMCA and other gyms I contacted either said they didn’t offer anything for adult beginners or just didn’t return my calls and emails. Three private coaches have turned me down, saying they’re too busy and don’t teach team sports. Organizations like “Hook on Hoops” only work with kids. And the aptly-titled “It’s Never Too Late” company that is meant to cater to grownup rookies only operates on the East Coast at the moment, though the owner told me that he used to hold workshops in San Francisco. (That It’s Never Too Late exists at all is a miracle to me and I am on the organization’s mailing list in the hopes that a return to the west might eventually happen.)

In the meantime, I’m shooting hoops and practicing my dribbling skills solo on my neighborhood court two or three times a week, reading up on the sport, watching live games at Stanford and in Oakland, the home of  The Golden State Warriors, gorging on YouTube videos of Larry Bird and Shaquille O’Neal and hoping that I find my way on to a court with real, live teammates and opponents eventually. I don’t quite feel ready to join a pick-up game, as some people have suggested I do. I haven’t ever set foot on a court that had another human being on it, so I don’t think I’m quite ready to play on a team yet, unless it’s a team of equally inept starters.

I mention my hoop woes here at ArtsJournal because it occurs to me that the arts are much more receptive to adult beginners than the major sports are in this country.

If you’re past your teenage years and want to learn to ballet dance, play in a taiko ensemble, join an improv theater troupe, throw pots or make a documentary film, it’s quite easy to do so.

Here in San Francisco organizations like The Community Music Center and ODC Dance Commons are just two of the places where anyone of any age can turn up as a total newbie and pick up enough skills to quite quickly be at ease undertaking their art both on their own and as a group. Even ultra-pro organizations like The San Francisco Symphony — arguably the arts equivalent of the San Francisco Giants — offers playing and singing opportunities for people with no musical experience through its Community of Music-Makers scheme. While participants at the adult beginner level are unlikely to become the next Itzhak Perlman, Matthew Barney or Suzan Lori-Parks, opportunities for mature neophyte art-makers can certainly help people develop competence, exercise creativity and have fun.

So what’s up with the world of basketball then? And is the trouble I’m experiencing unique to this sport, or do adults who want to pick up baseball, football, hockey and other mainstream American sports have similar trouble starting out? Adults deserve to have learning opportunities across a wide array of activities. Learning is a life-long thing after all. This is something that the arts, thankfully, are beginning to understand. Now it’s time for sports to catch up. Here’s to more little leagues for big people.

PS Thanks to Michael Robinson for sending me his interesting article linking basketball to music.

Singing Things

UnknownI just experienced an amazing weekend of song.

It all kicked off last Thursday when I attended The Little Opera Company‘s dress rehearsal at The Alcove Theatre in downtown San Francisco. The Little Opera Company, which was the focus of a VoiceBox episode last week, creates newly composed opera productions from scratch with kids aged 6 – 10. I watched 14 children run through Candyland, an opera they wrote, designed and performed in with the help of a few adult mentors. The kids are incredibly creative. The storyline and songs in the short stage works they came up with are full of vigor. However, the biggest challenge they face is singing loudly enough so that the audience can hear what they’re singing about. The coaches tried to get the children to sing together for the sake of volume and when they managed to do it, every word was clear and the tone was strong and rather lovely. But more often than not, the group forgot to sing as one, leaving two or three little cast members fending for themselves with their tiny voices that just didn’t carry beyond the front row.

The weekend continued with contrasting performances given by the recently formed 14-member choral ensemble in which I sing — Convivium — and the polished Clerestory men’s vocal ensemble. It was surreal going from singing devout, somber Lenten works by Lauridsen, Poulence, MacMillan and other composers as part of an Episcopalian church service where no one clapped, to hearing Clerestory’s Bacchanalia program in the 44 Page Street concert hall in which the amazing vocal ensemble perform rotund, mostly jocular works about wine, women and song to whoops of delight and thunderous applause. Audience members ate and drank throughout the concert, which featured Purcell’s “Down with Bacchus” and “Hoy Comamos y Bebamos” by Encinas among other booze-related musical fare. I loved the way in which my day transitioned from the sacred to the profane. I can’t speak for Convivium’s performance as I was in it. I’ve no idea if we were any good. We got through some tough repertoire and we’re not doing too badly for a new ensemble, I guess. I wouldn’t mind getting away from the churchy stuff for a bit though. Clerestory, one of the Bay Area’s best professional ensembles, was sublime, as usual, however. I enjoyed every moment of the group’s performance.

On Sunday, I roped my friend, the amazing multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and actress, Beth Wilmurt, into visiting the Aloha Warehouse in San Francisco’s Japan Town into helping me buy a ukelele. We meandered back to my place, where she taught me four chords and persuaded me to join her for a Studio NPG Music Party, a monthly ad hoc singalong gathering which Beth sometimes attends. I should have stayed home to do some work, but  I couldn’t resist exploring this corner of San Francisco cultural life which I had never heard about before. So, it being St Patrick’s Day, we prepared a version of “Molly Malone” to perform at the gathering, which takes place in Potrero Hill in an apartment above the Thick House Theatre. Studio NPG, short for “New Performance Group,” hosts singing parties and other cultural exchange-oriented events. The focus of the organization’s monthly singalongs is show tunes, but this weekend quite a lot of Irish fare was sung. Anyone can turn up and join in on a grouyp number or perform something for others to listen to, with the aid of pianist Barry Lloyd. The $5 entry fee is a bargain: A fun, community music-making experience accompanied by a great pianist, a glass of wine and snacks are all included in the price. The repertoire yesterday included “I Got Rhythm,” “Consider Yourself” (from Oliver!) and the Beth-Chloe rendition of “Molly Malone,” which went down quite well.

The weekend ended with a visit to the SF Jazz Center in my neighborhood to hear one of my very favorite vocalists perform the last of her four-night residency with SFJAZZ, Mariza. The Portuguese fadista was on top form yesterday evening. She looked like an expensive bottle of perfume or absinthe with her figure-swooping, floor-length black and green dress and perfectly smooth bottle-blonde-capped head. And that voice! I spent quite a bit of time during the concert trying to figure out how to put its quality into words. The obvious thing to say about Mariza’s way of singing is that it sounds like a fine bottle of Porto — rich and deep. A sip of it makes you drunk. But that’s a cliche and there’s more danger to her vocal abilities than that. Mariza’s voice is a bit like stepping inside the dripping pelt of a freshly-killed fox. But that’s not quite right either. Dead animals capture the danger, but not the velvety appeal of the way she sings. In any case, I was, like everyone else in the room, licking the palm of the fado queen’s hand. She even had us singing the refrain of her beautiful song, “Rosa Branca,” in Portuguese. I’m still agog.

Easy Targets

UnknownDead Metaphor, George F Walker’s dark comedy about a young American man on the make who returns from the war in the Middle East looking for work only to find himself enmeshed in the conniving strategies of a Tea Party politician is asinine.

It makes for a night of solid, albeit not particularly thought-provocative middle-brow theatre for the well-heeled liberal masses.

The American Conservatory Theater‘s current production, helmed by Irene Lewis, does a wonderful job of giving Walker’s cleanly structured but vacuous play something approaching substance. This result is largely due to the efforts of the smart ensemble cast led by George Hampe as the war hero protagonist Dean, and Rene Augesen, in splendidly catty form as the campaigning arch-conservative candidate, Helen Denny. The rhythm of the play moves swiftly and the actors keep time perfectly, elicit laughs in all the right places and never over-act.

The main issue I have with Dead Metapahor besides the fact that it feeds Bay Area audiences a world view which they already know and love and thereby completely fails to challenge them in any way, is the playwright’s habit of going for easy targets to get laughs.

Tea-partyer Denny is thoroughly dislikable and hilariously lacking in any kind of moral compass. There’s no depth or nuance to this character at all. Meanwhile, the failing mental health of  Dean’s father (played with nuance by Tom Bloom) provides too much cause for lame jokes revolving around old geezers with loud mouths and confused minds.

If only Walker could take seek inspiration from the play’s sharp shooting protagonist  and take aim at more difficult and complex marks.

Strike!

6I feel quite torn about the current standoff between the musicians and management at the San Francisco Symphony.

On the one hand, the musicians deserve to be paid well for being so very world-class. The wages should rank more or less alongside the other top-tier orchestras in the land and it’s right for the musicians’ union to push for that.

On the other hand, today’s canceled afternoon concert and the threat of the upcoming tour being canceled as a result of the musicians’ strike, gives me pause for thought.

And it’s not as if the players in the ensemble are struggling financially like the workers who sometimes protest outside grocery chain stores and corporate hotels for the pittance that they earn for cleaning rooms and stacking cans of beans. According to The San Francisco Examiner, currently, San Francisco musicians make a base pay of $141,700 while those at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra bring in $144,040. Players with the Los Angeles Philharmonic net $143,260.

Sounds pretty great to me, even if The Bay Area is one of the most expensive places to live on Earth.

Hmm.

Food Fight

Unknown-1If the work of a theatre director isn’t hard enough these days with ever-shrinking rehearsal periods (a tiny three and a half weeks seems to be the current standard in many theatres in the Bay Area!) and increasing competition from events involving food trucks, live painting and DJs, it now seems that staging scenes involving food has become an unpalatable chore.

I was having a drink a couple of days ago with a theatre director friend of mine who’s working on a production at a quite high profile regional theatre company right now. Like many dramas, the play he’s producing has a scene in it in which the characters eat a meal on stage.

In the past, staging such a scene generally wouldn’t have been a big deal. But apparently the list of dietary restrictions that the director received from the actors in this production is so ridiculously long — we’re not simply talking about one cast member declining to eat meat here; the list includes all kinds of no-no’s like no soy, no gluten, no dairy etc — that finding a way to stage the meal scene is proving to be a massive problem.

The theatre company unsurprisingly balks at the budget involved in coming up with a realistic-looking culinary option that accommodates all the various dietary peccadilloes  of the cast members. Management suggested that the director cut the scene entirely. This, naturally, he isn’t willing to do.

I can’t imagine this sort of problem happening ten years ago. Is it the quality of food that’s to blame for creating a more allergic population? Are theatres’ decreasing resources at the root of the problem for no longer being able to afford to serve up stage meals that meet the dietary restrictions of actors while still looking credible to audiences? Or is it that Bay Area thespians simply being too fussy?

Making Street Musicians Visible

photoIt’s amazing what a difference a dedicated environment makes to the street performance experience.

When a performer stands on a street corner juggling or singing songs, most people simply walk by, unless the performance is happening in a place that’s specially sanctioned for street performance e.g. specific areas of Covent Garden Market in London or Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.

But if there’s a space that’s specially dedicated to street performance, it suddenly takes on a different dimension in the eyes of the public. Some people still walk past. But many more recognize that something out of the ordinary is taking place and they’re more inclined to gather around to watch.

Such was palpably the case yesterday, when VoiceBox partnered with Street Stage to create a pop-up music experience in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District. VoiceBox is the weekly public radio and podcast series about the human voice that I host and produce under the auspices of KALW in San Francisco. Street Stage, the brainchild of urban planners / landscape architects Ross Hansen and John Matthew Francis is a wooden, mobile stage which comes out of the back of a flatbed truck and can be assembled in about 30 minutes.

With the blessings of a few local businesses on a particularly highly-trafficked section of Valencia Street, we set up the stage yesterday morning and presented a curated program of vocal artists between noon and four in the afternoon. The eclectic musical lineup included Tall Heights, Jimmy Kansau, The New Thoreaus, The Conspiracy of Beards and Caitlin Lacey and the Twin-Not-Twins.

What was interesting to watch as the time went on was how people lingered and gathered around the stage. Instead of walking by (though some people did), large numbers stuck around, put tips in guitar cases, signed mailing lists, picked up fliers, and bought CDs. The level of engagement was truly exciting to see. The performers, some of whom had a background in street music, and some of whom didn’t, all seemed super happy to be out on a sunny day performing on the Street Stage.

The platform itself seems to have this galvanizing effect on the performance environment. The wooden structure is kind of like the perfect member of an ensemble cast: It draws attention to itself (even before there was anyone playing and singing on it, people stopped to look at it and ask questions) while at the same time supporting rather than upstaging the artists who tread its boards.

We documented the event on video and audio for VoiceBox. The program will launch on March 29. Visit our website for more information.

Kid Friendly

imagesFollowing up my last post about how many art museums make it hard for parents with small children to visit, with some thoughts about an arts experience that I participated in over the weekend that provides access to families in a very broad-minded way.

While art museums aren’t necessarily the place to bring toddlers, it seems community orchestra concerts are!

I performed as an oboist with the Mill Valley Philharmonic this weekend in a series of concerts featuring music by Beethoven, Barber and J S Bach. It was great to see families in the audience at the performances — and it was especially gratifying that there were so many children from babes in arms to kindergartners to elementary, middle and high school students.

Here are the factors that make the attendance of children at such concerts a no-brainer for their parents:

  • The concerts my orchestra gives are free.
  • The performances happen at assorted times of the day across the span of a weekend, e.g. 2pm, 4pm and 8pm, making it possible to accommodate meals and bedtimes.
  • Audience members are free to move about the space. People come in and out as needed with their squirming infants without causing a scandal.
  • Many musicians hang about during the intermission and after the program so children and their parents can go and talk to them about their instruments.

These are small details. But they’re important ones. The kid-friendliness of the concerts that The Mill Valley Philharmonic puts on is one of the reasons why it’s so great that high-level community orchestras exist. The musical programs aren’t specifically oriented towards families. But they work on that level beautifully anyway.

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