Since we saw it in the Philadelphia Fringe last September, I've been hoping that this piece would make its way to New York. I wish I could go to the concert at Bard College—I broke my ankle on February 10th so my ability to travel is severely limited for the next couple of months; as much as I enjoyed the experience in the Rotunda, I'm sure the acoustics in a concert hall will showcase Melissa Dunphy's music and libretto even better. I keep checking periodically to see if I'll haven an opportunity to hear it again (or perhaps even something new); I can think of one or two great venues here in the City for the piece. Regardless, if you're a fan of classical music or if you just appreciate good political commentary with a wicked sense of humor, don't miss this opportunity.
Melissa Dunphy's The Gonzales Cantata is an amazing and amusing mash-up of classical music and C-SPAN delivered with an absolutely perfect deadpan: if someone didn't understand the joke coming in, there's a good chance they'd be mystified by these musicians' impeccable performances. The joke, of course, is that all of the libretto here has been taken from former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' testimony before Congress about the firings of U.S. Attorneys in 2007. In the reality of the hearings, all of the participants were male except Diane Feinstein (D, CA); Dunphy has reversed the genders and given all the plumb male roles to sopranos—the standouts being Jessica Lennick as Patrick Leahy (D, VT) and a brilliant performance, vocally and as an actor, by Mary Thorne as the beleaguered and befuddled Gonzales. Musically, Dunphy has taken the work quite seriously which is what really makes it hilarious: it's beautiful, soaring music in which Gonzales sings, "I don't recall" 72 times in one two-minute aria (as he actually did in a single session before the Senate committee). It's only natural to compare this piece to Handel—without question the master of the oratorio—but Dunphy's music is not parody: it references the baroque but seems to me to be as strongly connected to contemporary classical music. The work is scored for string octet, harpsichord and a chorus, all of whom perform spectacularly, and it sounds amazing in The Rotunda (although I was grateful for the projected libretto so that I could follow along with the bouncing ball, as it were). There are only two more performances and there are still seats available: if you're a music lover with a wicked sense of humor (or if you just have a wicked sense of humor) and you're in Philadelphia this weekend, you must go see this piece.
Pig Iron Theater's Welcome to Yuba City, by contrast, makes no pretext of being high art: the dozens of bizarre characters who inhabit a roadside cafe in this quintessential western town appear in a series of vignettes that are closer to the classic Merrie Melodies cartoons than even to What's Opera, Doc? That's not to say that it isn't absolutely artful: the grace, skill and precision of this wildly physical production is truly remarkable. But what this group of very talented artists have created is a Whitman's Sampler of performances: perfect, bite-sized little confections to briefly savor before moving on to another. The cavernous space in which they've installed this piece is as perfect a matching of production to environment as I can imagine: you can't really capture the mythos of the contemporary west without distance, openness, space; the Festival Hub space is incredibly vast and director Quinn Bauriedel and choreographer Christina Zani have both used it to its full advantage. In fact, it's the enormity of the space that makes the athletic performances of the cast even more astonishing: the workout they're all getting just from running around backstage, rushing from one side of the building to another, making one of their many costume changes on top of what we're actually seeing them do onstage is staggering. And they're all hilariously funny. There's a little more time to see this one—it runs through the end of the festival—but I promise you it's going to sell out; buy your tickets now because you've really got to see it to believe it.
Josh Koenigsberg's Al's Business Cards begins with a fairly benign event: Al Gurvis, a decent, hard-working gaffer living in NJ is mistakenly given someone else's business cards by his printer. It's the kind of thing that could happen in real life to anyone, at any time, anywhere: no big deal, really. Somehow, this innocuous mistake begets another simple mistake, which begets a misunderstanding, which begets a misinterpretation, all of which eventually leaves Al totally... begotten. It's a very funny play and Koenigsberg does an excellent job of allowing each of these errors to build in such a way that you think it could all be resolved once a key piece of information reaches the right character... but that never quite seems to happen. The dialogue and situation are very natural without being predictable and the production is simply and smoothly directed by Lauren Keating. The actors all give fine performances, especially Azhar Khan as Al and Bobby Moreno as Al's goofy (if somewhat racist) co-worker.
Inferno: the New Rock Musical, on the other hand, is just a mess. If Rick Merino had just been satisfied with writing all of the songs and playing the narrator, Dante, it might have worked; his music is slightly derivative—mostly metal, sometimes grunge-ish, with the occasional alt-rock number tossed in from time to time—but it's engaging and well-performed by the six band members and three actors. Unfortunately, Merino also tried to direct the production: this is almost never a good choice. The ensemble—Leslie Segan, Adam Poslunszny and Buzz Cartier—have been given the task of playing everyone except Dante and the underworld guide, Virgil (Sean Jeans), by donning dozens of different masks, wigs and costume pieces that make the piece feel like an ad for Halloween Adventure;* as their masks are all generic monsters and not at all specific to the cantos in which they appear, it's impossible to know how their characters differ from one circle of Hell to the next (I haven't read The Inferno but I have to think that's an important progression in the book). The hard-working trio also spend as much time rushing to and from the dressing room stage right to change clothes as they do onstage performing; I was exhausted just watching them. There's a good piece in here somewhere, I think: if it had been performed as a concert, without the half-hearted attempts at staging, it would be much more enjoyable. Instead, it comes off as under-rehearsed, ill-considered and amateurish.
When I started college in 1981 at what was then North Texas State University in Denton, the telephone poles and bulletin boards were always covered with hundreds of xeroxed, hand-drawn flyers for bands playing the local bars. I don't know if this one band was playing a lot more often than any of the others in town but the flyers that stood out the most to me were the ones for Brave Combo: I remember thinking, "what a great name!" I had absolutely no idea what kind of music they played—as a poor theater major who was always going to a rehearsal somewhere, I didn't get out to bars all that much—but their announcements always registered somewhere in the recesses of my brain and I was intrigued by the band.
June 11th took us out to The Brooklyn Lyceum for The Nerve Tank's A Gathering by Chance D. Muehleck, directed by Melanie Armer. The text mixes naturalistic dialogue and poetic imagery in an intriguing fashion; the mash-up of the recognizable and the surreal in the work is a little unnerving—almost like lightning flashes that briefly illuminate within the dark, meandering soundscape of voices and industrial-ish white noise that occasionally flare up into a almost deafening roar. Melanie has done a great job making the piece fill the entire raw environment of the Lyceum so that the three actors use almost every inch of the enormous playing area: the balcony along the back wall, the stairs on both sides that lead up to it, the huge space behind the audience (the seating takes up only a fraction of the enormous room) and even a surprising niche in one wall. The lighting is entirely done with fluorescent strips (some placed beneath the four pew-like benches scattered around center stage) and the overhead fluorescent lighting in the space (which all began slowly flickering to life over the last few minutes of the piece). The actors the night we attended (there is a rotating cast as the episodes have been presented in installments since February) were Craig Dolezel, Stacia French, Irene Hsi and they all did a good job: they moved very well and had a nice handle on the dense language (volume was sometimes a problem but it's a big ol' cavern of a space so I cut them some slack on that one). If I have any complaint about the piece, it's that there's almost too much happening to be able to take it all in: just when I felt I had a handle on a character or a situation, something would change and I'd have to reassess (I know this was done intentionally by the artists but it was frustrating, nonetheless). The Nerve Tank is in residence at the Lyceum throughout 2009 and they'll be presenting a new work there in a much smaller space this fall; I look forward to seeing how it compares to the vast canvas they've used for A Gathering.
On Saturday, June 13th we journeyed north to the Triad on the Upper West Side for Huxley Vertical's Brave New Kabarett. We'd never been to the Triad and found it to be a pretty good place to hear music: a well-designed, intimate little proscenium theater with a pretty good sound system. Price-wise, it's a lot like The Duplex in the West Village (a $10 cover plus a two-drink minimum—$8+ for beer/wine/cocktails, $7 for non-alcoholic drinks) but there's a little more breathing room between the tables so it doesn't feel as crowded. The show was a lot of fun: basically a variety show emceed by Huxley Vertical's bandleader, Seth Bedford. The evening kicked off with a couple of ragtime selections from guest artist Brent Weldon Reno and musical theater selections sung by Patty Bruce, then a couple of very funny numbers each from Bobby Blue and songwriter Ben Lerman, and a few songs from Dutch singer Sabina Petra; interspersed throughout the set were the Weimar-inspired selections by Huxley Vertical. Our friends, Caroline and Jeff, joined us for dinner and the show which made the entire experience even more enjoyable: they are as excellent as dinner companions as they are travelers.
I was a little surprised when I heard earlier this year that Eugene Ionesco's Exit the King, with Geoffrey Rush in the lead role, was coming to Broadway. It's a classic of the genre that Martin Esslin dubbed the Theater of the Absurd and I just couldn't see how it could possibly have enough commercial appeal for even a limited engagement—with or without a Hollywood star. Nonetheless, Catherine and I'd been hearing for weeks that the production—and especially Rush's performance—was amazing and that we'd be fools to miss it; we finally got tickets for the closing performance on June 14th and I'm happy to say that the reports did not exaggerate. The story is a rather obvious allegory on aging and mortality: King Berenger I learns in the first few minutes that he'll be dead by the end of the play and that he must prepare himself for this inevitability. While this might sound like a better recipe for tragedy than comedy, Ionesco's script is insanely funny and was beautifully executed by director Neil Armfield and his exceptional cast, which also included Susan Sarandon, Lauren Ambrose, Andrea Martin, William Sadler and Brian Hutchinson. But Geoffrey Rush's performance was the primary reason to see this show: his Berenger was full of life and energy, a man who absolutely refused to give into death until the last possible moment. Even from the back row of the balcony (which, fortunately, is not really very high up or at all far back from the stage of the Ethel Barrymore theater), the final instant of the piece—a sudden gasp of air from the incapacitated Berenger—was the most chilling experience I've had in a theater in recent memory. I don't know how Exit the King fared financially but I'd love to think that, between the critical success of this and the Roundabout's Waiting for Godot, commercial producers may begin to realize the enormous potential in some of these 20th century classics.
This building is now luxury condominiums (of course—it's hard to find a building in Manhattan that hasn't been converted to condos these days) but it was originally the home of Carl Fisher Music Publishing, well known to every kid who ever sang in a choir or played an instrument in an orchestra or band. In fact, I'm pretty sure I still have a couple of books of arias from my high school days going to U.I.L. vocal competitions (I wasn't very successful). The reflected light you see is from this building.
I'm not very good with song lyrics. I never believed that Jimi Hendrix was saying, "'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy," but there have been plenty of other songs that I've mangled in my head almost as badly. Some singers, of course, enunciate better than others—I've never really had a problem with most of Bruce Springsteen's songs,* while the vast majority of Nirvana's album, Nevermind, is sung, I believe, in Ancient Greek. But, by and large, I just don't pay close enough attention to the content of a song: I'm just more interested in the sound and feel of a song—the harmonies, the chord progressions, the tension in the music.
The play we saw was Target Margin's production of Tennessee Williams' Ten Blocks on the Camino Real: it's an early one-act that Williams later expanded into the more famous full-length, Camino Real. I don't know the finished play at all—I've never read it or seen a production—but after seeing this earlier incarnation, I'm curious to get a copy and compare the two. It's an extremely expressionistic piece, which at first surprised me until I began to think about The Glass Menagerie and, to a lesser degree, Streetcar: they're both basically naturalistic plays that employ abstract devices in the storytelling; Ten Blocks, by contrast, is entirely surreal abstractions. The play begins when a young American boxer stumbles into an unnamed town—in Mexico, Spain, South America?—in which the inhabitants all appear to be in a sort of limbo: they don't seem entirely alive and yet they're not quite dead, either. This, of course, is the point of the piece—an allegory about life and death and the illusive, intangible connection between them; if it feels a bit heavy-handed by 2009 standards, I'm sure it was revelatory in 1948. I've been intrigued by the productions I've seen from director David Herskovits: he brings an eclectic visual sense to theater and doesn't shy away from making a point with broad strokes; it's not to everyone's taste but I think his augmentations of the theatrical devices serve the surrealistic world of Ten Blocks well. For instance, when Kilroy appears, he wears enormous golden boxing gloves that impede his ability to perform actions in the script; sound effects are amplified to deafening levels; the characters are exaggerated to the point of characture. The actors all give nice performances, especially Curt Hostetter; I had trouble hearing a couple of them several times but I was on the back row and, as he usually does, David used just about every inch of the cavernous playing area at the Ohio (I am so going to miss seeing plays in this space!). My favorite Target Margin piece is still the two-part Faust from 2006, but Ten Blocks is a strong work and a fascinating interpretation of a rarely-seen play.*
We ended our evening by heading out to Spike Hill to hear p o c k e tt k n i ff e, the resident Friday night band there. It's ridiculously easy for us to get there: we get the L train at First Avenue and take it one stop to Williamsburg; the bar is even right across the street from the subway entrance. Robby Sinclair, the band's drummer, also played in Ralph's production of A Quick Nut Bread and has worked with This Ambitious Orchestra. Naturally, we arrived to find Benjamin Ickies and his friend, Pablo Cubarle, already there with some other people—it may be a city of 9 million people but we invariably run into people we know at these events. Catherine and I liked the set they played: it was fairly eclectic—a couple of songs reminded me a little of Radiohead but there was also a sort of '80s techno number and one or two electronic numbers that had a more free form jazz feel. We arrived "late:" the band was supposed to start at 11 but we figured that wouldn't happen and, sure enough, we had time to get a beer before the first number around 11:30. The set had a nice flow, the guys are all good musicians and I was almost surprised when they announced their last song: the time flew by without my really noticing. I'm looking forward to seeing them play again—earlier in the evening, I hope.
Since the show went on the air in the late '70s, I have been a huge fan of WKRP in Cincinnati. It's one of my favorite workplace comedies of all time: the writing was smart, ridiculously funny and the ensemble was extremely well-cast—in the cases of Howard Hesseman and Richard Sanders I would even say brilliantly. But for me, one of the stars of the show was the radio station itself: if it had been on the air in Fort Worth, TX, I would have listened to the kind of eclectic, personality-driven playlist that Hugh Wilson created.Carlson enters the DJ booth where Johnny Fever appears to be asleep while a record plays. Carlson looks around the booth a bit, then moves toward the turntable, looking as though he might try to stop the album to see what's playing.This, to me, is a perfect example of what is lost when the actual music is taken out of the show. Watching the episode, Catherine and I both brightened up a bit when Carlson entered the booth: we've quoted the "Do I hear dogs barking" and "I do" exchange to one another for years and had no trouble recognizing the set up. Since we knew immediately that the song was not Pink Floyd, we were more than a little disappointed... and then the scene ended abruptly when Johnny startles Carlson with "Don't touch that." It's still funny but it's not hilarious: the original scene is absolutely hi-larious.
Johnny: Don't touch that.
Carlson: What's the name of this orchestra?
Johnny: Pink Floyd.
Carlson: Oh. Is that Pink Floyd?
Sound of dogs barking on the album.
Carlson: Do I hear dogs barking?
Johnny: I do.
Carlson picks up the album jacket and reads the track list on the back.
Carlson: Pigs on the Wing? What's that like?
Johnny: I don't do requests.
Thanks to progarchives for refreshing my memory on this scene; I'd forgotten the last two lines
When I sat down to read my Playbill at New World Stages last night and realized that someone, Chris D'Arienzo, had actually written a book for Rock of Ages, my first feeling was dread: I feared that we were about to see the hair band version of Mama Mia. I needn't have worried, though: apart from a few pairs of Spandex pants and the prodigious use of hairspray, the two shows are as theatrically distant as the music they celebrate. No one here has taken anything that happens onstage seriously—except the performance of '80s musical mash-ups, which are all lovingly and flawlessly performed. Anything less than that and I could see this being a really long evening...
Actually, I'm pretty sure that he was never really cool, but he was an incredibly talented accordionist and band leader. My friend Benjamin Ickies, who was featured in a recent Times article about the reemergence of the accordion in contemporary music, is also an incredibly talented musician and orchestra leader (he's the musical director and creating all of the arrangements for our Beggar's Opera project) and is, I think, pretty cool.
My favorite radio station for a few years now has been woxy.com. The playlist leans heavily toward contemporary alternative rock, but the djs also program according to their personal tastes, so there's an eclecticism that I really like—there aren't many stations left where can you hear The National, Wilco and Johnny Cash all in the course of a few hours. They also have Lounge Acts, where up-and-coming bands come into the studio, play a few songs and chat with the djs; Local Lixx that features groups from the Cincinnati area (where woxy is located); a Vintage channel for all the alternative rock you already know and love; and a whole lot more.
After the disappointing end to Saturday, Sunday was actually another perfect day. The weather was again warm. We had a disgustingly fatty (but very tasty) breakfast at a little café across the street from our hostal—we split their Desayuno Americain, which was of course the largest option on the menu: eggs, bacon (much thicker, bigger and sweeter than what we get in the U.S.), thick-sliced white toast, coffee and fresh orange juice. I’m sure the name was intended as an insult, although the owner was very nice to us.
According to elpais.com, a forensic anthropologist has reconstructed the face of composer Johann Sebastian Bach. I looked for some more information on this story in English, since we all know my Spanish is not good, but no one else seems to have picked it up yet. So, I'm not sure why Dr. Caroline Wilkinson, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Anthropology at the University of Dundee, thought we needed to know what Bach really looked like, but there ya' go: now we do.
ModFab is directing this new cabaret performed by his husband, Dennis Blackwell, and pianist Jason Hart. Catherine and I already have tickets for the Saturday, March 15th performance (Catherine's in rehearsal for The Importance of Being Earnest with Aisling Arts, otherwise we'd be there for the opening night). I've heard Dennis sing before and he is a talented musician with a beautiful voice: I'm really looking forward this production. They've been working on this show for months and it will definitely not be your garden variety cabaret, knowing these guys.
