Archives for December 2008

Just like midnight screenings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Sing Along Sound of Music has become an international cultural institution over the past few years. From the bags of silly props that can’t be seen in the dark like a card with a question mark which you’re meant to hold up during the lyric “how do you solve a problem like Maria?” and fake flowers to wave during “Eidelweiss”, to the fancy dress contest before the film starts, the Sing Along experience basically follows the same formula all over the world.

It’s interesting to read reports of Sing Along screenings in different cities and compare them to the one I experienced a couple of evenings ago in San Francisco. Despite the fact that the audiences are different each night, the evening seems to unfold in a startlingly similar way wherever you are. People letting off the party poppers meant for the kiss scene between the Baron and Maria at inappropriate times, hecklers, entire families dressing up girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes/brown paper packages tied up with string etc are all part of the SASM experience no matter whether you’re catching the show in London, Sydney or New York.

But there are some aspects of SASM that I think must be particular to different geographical settings. A friend of mine who came with me to see the show at The Castro Theatre in San Francisco talked about its appeal to hen (aka bachelorette) parties. This strikes me as a particularly British phenomenon. If there were any groups of drunken, tiara-wearing lasses in the audience at The Castro, they didn’t make their presence felt. In England, it seems that SASM caters specially to such groups — even offering them free champagne.

Of course in The Castro, one of the world’s most prominently gay neighborhoods, SASM has an entirely different feel. The line “I do throw some rather gay parties” got a huge cheer, as did “follow every rainbow.” “What’s the matter with all you gloomy pussies?” elicited an auditorium-wide laugh. Until now, I didn’t understand what it is about Julie Andrews that makes her a gay icon. Now I do.

A week ago or so, I posted a blog entry about Shakespeare Santa Cruz. The coastal Shakespeare Festival was faced with raising $300,000 within a few days or face ceasing operations immediately.

Today, I’m sending out another SOS, this time for another venerable Northern California theatre company — the Magic Theatre. Here is the ultimatum as expressed in the distressed company’s cry-for-help email: “Now in the midst of a staff shutdown, Magic may be forced to cancel the remainder of its season and close for good. To keep our doors open we must raise $350,000 by January 9, 2009. This will allow us to bring back our staff, go on with our season, and remain responsible to our creditors.”

It’s interesting that both of these organizations recently acquired new artistic directors among much media hooplah and the announcement of Bold New Artistic Horizons. I wonder how much information Marco Barriccelli, who joined Shakespeare Santa Cruz a year ago, and Loretta Greco, who arrived at The Magic in the summer, knew about the financial situations of their respective organizations when they signed their artistic director contracts? Were they kept in the dark, at least to some degree, about the bareness of the theatres’ coffers when they signed on? Or did they somehow imagine that the red marks on the accounting ledgers would miraculously disappear in the wake of high quality productions, euphoric reviews and packed houses?

I ask, because no one in their right mind would uproot their lives from the East Coast as both of these highly-regarded directors did and travel across the country to watch their professional lives take this kind of wretched turn.

Thankfully, Shakespeare Santa Cruz has earned a reprieve, thanks to the donations of more than 2,000 individuals who answered the company’s call-to-arms. I’m certain that the Magic will also be able to stave off the Grim Reaper. No one wants to see this seminal 42-year-old company disappear.

My heart goes out to Greco and her staff. Here’s hoping the Magic’s new and highly talented artistic director isn’t forced to pack up and head back East anytime soon.

If you want to donate to the Magic’s emergency campaign, click here.

I think I lost quite a few listeners when I played three movements from Olivier Messiaen’s 1935 organ work La Nativite du Seigneur on my KALW radio show the other day. At least, several of my friends who tuned in to hear the show weren’t impressed by the French composer’s ponderous, mystical meditation on the nativity. “That was catchy,” said one of them, sarcastically. “Was there something wrong with your CD player?” another one asked.

In a sense, I kind of empathize with their feelings. The piece isn’t exactly easy listening. And the recording I aired on the radio featuring the composer himself playing the organ of the Holy Trinity church in Paris where he served as “organist titulaire” for more than 40 years, wasn’t very high quality. The recording was made around 50 years ago and the instrument is almost a quarter-tone flat. Still, the guest I invited on to my show for a live interview was just about to perform La Nativite in recital and I was enough entranced by Messiaen’s take on it to broadcast it near the top of my two-hour show that night.

But now that I’ve heard the piece performed live, I can full appreciate the wonders within it. Jeffrey Smith, head of music at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco (and the guest on my radio broadcast the other day) performed Messiaen’s piece in recital at the Cathedral yesterday afternoon.

I don’t think I’ve listened to an organ piece more carefully and with such rapture in my life. The music hit me on a really visceral level. The sparkling flurries of treble notes in movement VI, “Les Anges” made my head ring. I felt like I was watching snowflakes skitter down a window pane. My skin prickled with every overtone that pinged like a sharp point of light in the night sky throughout the spiraling third movement, “Desseins Eternels”. And when the reeds of the pedal descended with an epic growl in the final movement, “Dieu Parmi Nous”, before ending with a crashing, glorious major chord, I felt like I were being physically stretched in all directions, my feet pulled deep into the grown and my head way up towards the rafters of the cathedral.

Part of the pleasure of listening was also intellectual. Thanks to the judicious publication of some of the composer’s notes about his composition in the program, I was easily able to pick out particular themes, hear where raga-inspired melodies rubbed shoulders with Bach-like cadences, and feel the tension between major-minor scales and Messiaen’s innovative, freewheeling “modes of limited transposition.” Not a bad way to spend an hour on a Sunday afternoon.

My friend Sarah, a London-based professional saxophonist and trumpet player and advanced yoga enthusiast who joined me for the concert, made an interesting point afterwards. She said that like bell-ringing and singing, organ music opens up the heart chakra in the body. The news came as no surprise. Not only did I feel more awake and open during and after the performance, but I could also hear “eastern” ideas in this most “western” of music idioms, the church organ recital. This was obviously intended by the composer — ragas are mentioned in his program notes. Once again, I saw how music is one way of sampling the fundamental kinship between western and eastern spiritual traditions. As different as world theological traditions purport to be, Messiaen’s work demonstrates how they are grounded in the same roots.

This morning I’m thinking of Harold Pinter, the news of whose death on Wednesday December 24 I just learned having spent Christmas Day away from anything resembling a computer screen, iPhone or newspaper. The first image that comes to mind is that of the tree outside my office window. This tree is much larger than anything else in view. It’s many branches are crooked, but there are brilliant grass-green leaves on the end of each one, even though it’s the middle of winter. It’s also an out-of-place tree — one of the few on this very urban block in Oakland, California. It seems to blend in with the concrete and cars and street lamps, and yet it clearly stands out. If the tree disappeared tomorrow, I would lose the one aspect of the view from my window that rectifies the balance between nurture and nature, that beautifies the flawed.

Pinter always mocked the concreteness of life. His plays are like green shoots appearing through the cracks in a sidewalk. The tree is gone, but the branches are still there in the form of the playwright’s far-reaching influence — for instance, thousands of miles away from his London home, a group of playwrights in San Francisco created Pinteresque a few years ago. This medley of plays based on Pinter’s The Lover had its highs and lows. What stood out for me was the great passion that all these American dramatists shared for their muse. It was a true celebration not just of one play, but also of the writer’s famed taut style and seething sensibility.

I would have loved to have been in London to see Pinter perform his last stage role in Krapp’s Last Tape a couple of years ago. It was the perfect role for an old tree of an artist such as Pinter — Krapp is a man reduced to a gnarled husk above but whose roots spread deep and wide beneath.

Here’s the playlist from the holiday-themed classical music radio show I hosted on KALW 91.7 FM on Sunday. It’s heavily weighted in favor of choral and other vocal works, but, hey, I’m a sucka for singing and much of the holiday repertoire is written for voices:

Benjamin Britten – A Ceremony of Carols – Toronto Children’s Chorus

Olivier Messiaen – La Nativite Du Seigneur – Olivier Messiaen, organ

Traditional – “El Desembre Congelat” from Angels’ Glory – Kathleen Battle, soprano; Christopher Parkening, guitar

Marc-Antoine Charpentier – Messe de Minuit pour Noël – Aradia Ensemble

Heinrich Isaac – “Kyrie” from Missa Virgo Prudentissima – Artists’ Vocal Ensemble

Traditional – “Hubava Milka” from Wintersongs – Kitka

Truman Bullard – “Chanukah Suite” from Home for the Holidays – Eaken Piano Trio

Danny Elfman – “The Grand Finale” from Edward Scissorhands – Original Soundtrack recording featuring the California Paulist Choristers

Phil Kline – “Hallelujah!” from Messiah Remix – Phil Kline

Traditional – “Riu Riu Chiu” from Our Heart’s Joy – Chanticleer

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

It’s interesting to read James Surowiecki’s latest financial column in The New Yorker about the state of the newspaper business in the light of the current situation at SF Weekly, the publication for which I write a regular weekly column about theatre.

Two years ago at this time in December, the average SF Weekly was 104 pages long. This month, we’ve alternated between 72 and 80 pages (after having a couple of 64-page papers in November). Historically, January is a slow month for ad sales and the paper shrinks. The recession will likely magnify this seasonal trend. As a result, the powers that be have been forced to make some cuts to content, and, unsurprisingly, the Stage section is taking a big hit in the months ahead. The paper’s coverage of theatre will drop from three plays — my 1,000-word column plus two 200-word capsule reviews — to just my column. The publication will not be running capsules in January. The situation is likely to remain the same in February and March at least.

This is unhappy news for my great team of capsule reviewers at SF Weekly. I’m sad about it too, as making decisions about which shows to review among the hundreds to pick from each month has been hard enough in the past. Now the task is going to be even more difficult. Even more terrible though, is the impact of the falling coverage on the local theatre scene. Small companies in particular rely heavily on reviews not just for selling tickets but also for getting grants. In these tough economic times, the fall-off in media interest is particularly crippling.

Surowiecki doesn’t really provide any solutions to the problem in his column. But one part of the article in particular, about the ill effects of the impoverishment of content owing to reduced media ad sales, struck me as particularly poignant:

“Papers’ attempts to deal with the new environment by cutting costs haven’t helped: trimming staff and reducing coverage make newspapers less appealing to readers and advertisers. It may be no coincidence that papers that have avoided the steepest cutbacks, like the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, have done a better job of holding onto readers.”

For publications like SF Weekly which depend almost entirely on ad sales, the future is bleak. I’m lucky to have an independent outlet for my writing about theatre — this blog. And it’s great that arts organizations across the Bay Area are becoming increasingly open to coverage on the blogosphere especially from trusted sources with a strong track record and brand recognition such as former Oakland Tribune critic Chad Jones’ blog Theatre Dogs, Karen D’Souza’s blog at the San Jose Mercury News website and (hem, hem) my own effort here at lies like truth.

But because I don’t (yet) derive any income from blogging and don’t have a trust fund, my ability to cover lots of theatrical productions as a blogger is somewhat limited by the need to make a living.

As Surowiecki points out, the business model for the future of the media industry is still in the balance. I’m optimistic that coverage will bounce back — doubtless helmed by efforts on the Web. It’s just going to take a little while.

At the weekend, I attended a concert of Jewish music entitle Pomegranates and Figs at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. I went primarily to hear Kitka, the spunky all-female vocal ensemble which specializes in performing music from Eastern traditions. But I was equally curious about the other groups on the program — Teslim (pictured left — a gypsy- and folk-oriented string duo featuring Kaila Flexer on violin and viola and Gari Hegedus on a variety of plucked and strummed instruments including the oud and mandocello) and The Gonifs (a klezmer band led by Jeanette Lewicki on vocals and accordion.)

Flexer organized and emceed the concert. She managed to pull together a brilliant band of musicians, including guest string players (Shira Kammen, Julian Smedley, Leah Wollenberg and Liza Wallace), a virtuostic clarinettist (Peter Jacques) and a percussionist (Faisal Ghazi Zedan) to round out some of the numbers in her own set. What was less successful, however, was the format of the evening.

The entire first hour was devoted to some rather introspective music by Teslim & co which failed to go over in the draughty, barren and entirely unintimate setting of Zellerbach Hall. Starting off with just two musicians and building to include the extra players throughout the first half of the program didn’t seem to add much excitement. Only the final number before the intermission, which featured the sprightly Jaques on clarinet ignited a fire inside me.

Thankfully, the concert changed gear in the second half. Kitka performed a gut churning set of songs from all over the Jewish diaspora. I generally identify this group by their wild, penetrating and nasal sound. But during this set, the singers demonstrated a completely different aesthetic at times, singing lightly and gracefully. The two styles offset each other perfectly.

When Kitka quit the stage, The Gonifs performed some racy and touching Yiddish songs. I could have listened to this band play all night long. The musicians were not only virtuostic but had a great sense of humor. It was hard to sit still. If only Zellerbach Hall were more conducive to dancing.

The concert ended with a grand finale in the old fashioned sense of the word. Led by Flexer, all the musicians came on stage to perform the Yiddish standard “By Mir Bist Du Schein.” The Gonifs’ Lewicki sang the verses. She was joined by the members of Kitka, having exchanged their ethnic-y robes for plain black dresses and flamboyant 1930s style hair ornaments, on backing vocals. If I didn’t know it before, I know it now: These women can sing anything.

A newly published NEA survey of the U.S. theatre landscape between 1990 and 2005 entitled “All America’s A Stage” shows theatre companies to be remarkably resilient in troubled economic times. The ability of many performing arts organizations to keep going during periods of recession partially stems from the fact that they’re often run on shoestring budgets anyway so are at one level slightly more impervious to the yo-yoing economy. It also stems from the support that they get from their communities.

I’m always heartened by the way in which local communities come to the aid of their arts organizations in times of trouble, even when money might be scarce all around. Ten days ago, Shakespeare Santa Cruz (SSC), one the country’s most high profile Shakespeare festivals, announced that unless it could raise $300,000 by lunchtime today, December 22, it would have to cease operations.

The community rallied around the company and I’m happy to report that SSC has managed to exceed its target. At 1.25 p.m. PST, the company’s marketing officer confirmed an official figure of $416,417 received from more than 2,000 individual donors. As a result, the non-profit company, with its core staff of seven, can now move ahead with planning its 2009 summer season.

Over the week, the company’s website was bolstered by messages of support and sadness from members of the theater community. Playwrights Tom Stoppard and Donald Margulies, comedian Gene Gillette and actor Olympia Dukakis all sent empathetic words.

SSC has proposed a reduced 2009 budget of $1.45 million (down from $2 million in 2008). The new season, which runs from mid-July through August, includes Bardic stalwarts A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Julius Caesar and Margulies’ Shipwrecked!

As I ramp up for my classical radio hosting debut this Sunday on KALW 91.7 FM, I’ve been exchanging emails with Chris Van Hof (pictured left) the afternoon host on WXXI Classical 91.5 FM in Rochester New York about programing ideas. Chris (who also happens to be a professional trombonist, educator and music arranger) also sent me a list of very useful pointers about hosting a classical music radio show — his advice is invaluable to a novice such as myself. Chris tells me that he has only been in the radio business for a year. But his advice is so simply and eloquently put and makes such perfect sense that I asked if I could share his thoughts on my blog. He kindly agreed.

So without further ado, here is the Chris Van Hof Guide to Classical Music Radio Hosting:

When it comes to announcing, my biggest rule is to picture someone you know very well, and speak as though you’re speaking to just that one person. Don’t talk to “all those out in radio land” but instead talk personally to just one person.

As for programming, here are some simple concepts that are easy to apply to your music selection and planning:
– Seek variety of instrumentation (chamber, solo, orchestral, concerto, etc.)
– Seek variety of style (Baroque, modern, Romantic, traditional, etc.)
– Try to follow minor with major and vice versa in terms of tonalities, although major after major is fine.
– Look for clean transitions piece to piece. Unless you’re going for a surprise effect, for example, seek to follow a quiet ending with a pastoral beginning. Even with a talk break between pieces, this helps the listeners’ ears along. At the very least, temper your tone and delivery to either gear us up for the fast start, or calm us down for the quiet opening. In other words, match your speech to the music closest to it.
– Play music you like.
– Play artists you know (either know their work well, or know personally.)
– Once again, variety. As prevelant as it is nationwide, the Mozart Lunch Hour sucks.

Thanks to Chris. This advice couldn’t come at a better time as far as I’m concerned. It also strikes me that a lot of his points apply to other forms of radio broadcasting, not just classical music. Hope to put as much of the ideas into practice as I can this weekend.

For Chris’ blog, click here. To hear a live stream of his afternoon classical music show at WXXI, click here.

The City of San Francisco has thankfully decided to postpone its decision regarding Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s proposed radical cuts to the arts budget until midway through next year. If Peskin’s proposal had gone through earlier this week, key organizations like San Francisco Opera, SF Ballet and SF Symphony would have seen their civic contributions fall by as much as 50%.

In the meantime, as I talk to many local theatre companies about how the economic downturn is affecting their operations, it’s been interesting to hear how small outfits — those who don’t get much if any city funding so don’t have to worry so much about the aforementioned cuts — are weathering the storm.

I don’t want to go into too much detail here as my article on this subject will appear in SF Weekly on December 31. But one thing which small theatre makers are doing to keep going in tough times is banding together to share resources, audiences and staging concepts. The difficult economy is encouraging companies to look for co-productions and co-marketing opportunities with their peers. Examples include the SOMA Cultural Coalition (a group of arts organizations based in the South of Market area of town about which I devoted a blog post in October) and the Bay Area Professional Small Theatres group (BAPST), an organization run under the auspices of Theatre Bay Area which aims to create “an environment of professionalism for small theatre companies to thrive in.” Meanwhile, some companies are entering into individual relationships with fellow arts makers. For example, The Climate Theatre is a member of the SOMA Cultural Coalition, but is simultaneously making separate coproduction plans with other companies such as Encore and The Clown Conservatory.

These small companies are being pretty smart by taking the old axiom of “safety in numbers” to heart. Won’t it be ironic if the behemoths of the theatre world end up coming off worse as a result of the downturn than the minnows?

Last Thursday, I spent an hour in the company of Sarah Cahill, (pictured left) avant garde pianist extraordinaire and doyenne of the Bay Area classical music radio scene.

I have long admired Sarah’s musicianship and her wonderful weekly Sunday night classical music broadcast, Then and Now, on local NPR affiliate KALW 91.7 FM. I have also been curious about her established practice of commissioning living composers to write music for her to perform.

So I emailed Sarah to ask if I could meet her to find out more about what she does and how she does it.

We sat in a cafe in Berkeley near where Sarah lives, and talked about everything from Christmas music to the output of San Francisco’s commercial radio station, KDFC to the relationship between music and memory.

Much to my surprise, about half an hour into our conversation, Sarah asked me if I’d fill in for her on Then and Now next Sunday evening, December 21, from 8 to 10pm. I happily accepted the challenge.

Between now and then, I have the fun and slightly daunting task of coming up with two hours of classical music programming, including a playlist (obviously), a script, interviews and other features. This is something entirely new for me. Even though I’ve served as KALW’s regular theatre commentator for the past couple of years, I’ve never had to come up with more than a few minutes of material, and it’s all pre-recorded and edited by a staff producer. I don’t even have to go into the station — the producer comes to my house to record my commentaries.

I’m thinking of devoting my broadcast this Sunday to holiday season music. Nothing too original about that, I’ll admit. But in keeping with the non-mainstream concept of Sarah’s show, I’m interested in playing stuff that’s a little bit off the beaten track, both new, old and ancient. I don’t think the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah will be on my playlist, for instance. If you, dear readers, have any good ideas for me, please send them my way. And if you’re interested in catching the broadcast on Sunday evening and in the Bay Area, tune in to 91.7 FM. The show will also be streamed live on KALW’s website at http://www.kalw.org.

Last time I wrote about Santa Cruz, I described the unparalleled experience of eating a deep fried Twinkie (DFT) on the beach. I’ve had many good times in that laid back coastal town. Just last weekend, for instance, my couple of days in the city featured an array of cultural delights including a treat for the taste buds in the form of probably the most delicious cocktail I’ve ever imbibed in my life, not to mention a couple of good films and a wonderful evening spent in the company of a local Irish music outfit.

One aspect of Santa Cruz life that has made visits very worthy in the past has been the work of the city’s preeminent theatre company, Shakespeare Santa Cruz. As such, I was alarmed to receive an email forwarded from a friend while I was in town but which I ironically didn’t receive until I returned to my office, about the emergency state of the company’s finances. If the Board doesn’t raise $300,000 by Monday 22 December, the 27-year-old organization may have to close down. The San Jose Mercury News followed-up with a story about the crisis in yesterday’s paper. A few months ago I had the pleasure of profiling SSC’s then new artistic director, Marco Barricelli, for a profile in American Theatre Magazine. If anyone can pull the company out of this traumatic state of affairs, Mr. Barricelli can. He’s a great artist, a strong manager and, as someone who’s been through cancer, a survivor in the deepest sense of the word. Santa Cruz will not be the same without SSC and neither will the country’s non-profit theatre scene for that matter. I wish I had known about SSC’s financial woes when I was there over the weekend. Not that I could have written a check for $300,000 or anything like it. But I would definitely have made a beeline for the theatre. I would have bought a ticket to see the current holiday production of Wind in the Willows, tried to find out more about how things are going over there and talked about the company’s situation to all the locals I chatted with over the weekend.

On a slightly brighter note, here are some brief impressions of four highlights from my latest weekend in Santa Cruz:

1. The Wild Rovers at the Poet & Patriot Pub: This local, eight-member Celtic folk-rock band got a friendly if squat-looking downtown bar hopping until at least one in the morning when we left, with its lusty rendition of Pogues and Dubliners covers and fiery/sweet arrangements of traditional folk songs.

2. Milk: I wouldn’t normally dream of going to the movies in such a sunny coastal place as Santa Cruz. But it rained torentially all day Sunday, so there wasn’t much to do except hit the flicks. The gamut of emotions I felt while watching this biopic was extreme, ranging from sadness about the senseless deaths of Harvey Milk and George Moscone to amazement that equal rights issues have come so far in 30 years to anger that they haven’t come far enough (viz Prop 8.)

3. Zack and Miri Make a Porno: The perfect antidote to Milk. Lots of dick jokes and a touching story of young love. Enough said.

4. The Josephine at 515 Kitchen and Cocktails: Whenever I visit 515, my favorite spot for drinks, food and conversation in Santa Cruz, I order a champagne cocktail at the bar. Emily, the bartender, made me a drink I’ll never forget when she flavored my glass of bubbly with ginger-infused Bulleit bourbon and a hefty twist of lemon. The Josephine, as it’s called though no one at 515 seems to know why, is the best cocktail I’ve ever had in my life, hands down.