Archives for April 2010

I’ve been giving the TheaterMania iPhone app a try. It’s not bad. Intuitive to use, the app allows you to select from three menus – “Broadway shows”, “shows near me” (which it finds via the GPS system and Google maps), and “browse by location.”

I used the “browse by location” section a couple of days ago to help get information about a play I was seeing at The Magic Theatre. The app only has the major US theatre towns (as well as London) listed, so if you’re looking for a show at, say, Dad’s Garage in Atlanta, you’re out of luck (although I guess you could use the “shows near me” feature to find it maybe.)

The information provided about each show is clear and easy to navigate. You can also browse to see which shows are opening and closing. The “type” and “title” categories seem a but pointless. It seems that the feature is meant to separate shows by genre, eg “musical”, “drama” etc, but all you see is a list of shows with no discernible classification system in place.

The system only failed me when I wanted to find out how best to get from downtown San Francisco on public transport to the Fort Mason Center. The app lets you see a may of where the show is and where you are, but it doesn’t link up with Google Maps as deeply as it should. I would have liked to have been able to plot my route using Google Maps’ handy public transportation feature.

Still, all in all, the app (which is free) is handy for a meandering theatre buff.

Actors are sometimes criticized for not using their bodies to their fullest — for “acting from the neck up.” But Arwen Anderson makes a virtue of confined physicality in Lydia Stryck’s luminous and affecting new play about, among other themes, the healing process, at the Magic Theatre.

In Stryck’s An Accident, a two-hander directed by Rob Melrose and also starring Tim Kniffin, Anderson plays a woman hospitalized with memory loss and a broken body after being run over by a car (driven by Kniffin’s character, named Anton.) It’s a challenging role. For 80 minutes, the actress has to lie mostly on her back with her body hidden under bedsheets. Movement-wise, she only really has access to her face, head and neck.

Anderson’s performance, which makes vivid use of her expressive eyes, eyebrows and mouth and wide-ranging vocal modulations, never resorts to mugging. It’s a subtle and beautiful piece of acting, reminiscent of the actress Billie Whitelaw being physically confined in various plays by Samuel Beckett.

I’ve seen Anderson act in many shows in the past and have generally found her to be a solid, dependable and rounded performer. But this is the first time I have been swept away by her virtuostic talent.

Given that part of the mandate of lies like truth is to highlight important cultural trends, it would be remiss of me not to blog about the latest craze sweeping the Bay Area cultural scene: unusual manifestations of bacon.

It’s almost impossible to go anywhere these days without encountering the delicious pork product’s presence in unlikely contexts. My local candy store sells bacon-flavored chocolate. At a dinner party the other day, someone brought homemade bacon-infused caramels. Even the arts are bringing home the bacon: At a choral rehearsal last Sunday, a fellow singer passed around a Tupperware container full of chocolate chip-nut-bacon cookies. They were extremely tasty.

I can’t help but think that the bacon fanaticism is just a passing fad which I suspect people in this most health-conscious of places will tire of when they realize how many extra calories they’re consuming thanks to that extra bit of more-ish smoky crunch in their breakfast cereal and beer. But the trend is very much part of Bay Area culture. We embrace this kind of thing here. Creating unlikely mashups in everything we consume from foodstuffs to theatre is in our DNA. This month bacon-riddled truffles are all the rage. Next month it’ll be naked virtuoso violin-playing trapeze.

PS This just in from my friend John in Michigan. His son Michael sent him the following story, which pretty much sums up the case for bacon. I guess it’s not a Bay Area thing after all – the passion is global.

Bacon Tree

Pancho and Cisco are stuck in the desert wandering aimlessly and starving. They are about to
just lie down and wait for death, when all of a sudden Pancho
says………

“Hey Cisco, do you smell what I smell. Ees bacon, I theenk.”

“Si, Pancho, eet sure smells like bacon. “

With renewed hope they struggle up the next sand dune, & there, in
the distance, is a tree loaded with bacon.

There’s raw bacon, there’s fried bacon, back bacon, double smoked
bacon … every imaginable kind of cured pork.

“Cisco, Cisco, we ees saved. Ees a bacon tree.”

“Pancho, maybe ees a meerage? We ees in the desert don’t forget.”

“Cisco, since when deed you ever hear of a meerage that smell like
bacon … ees no meerage, ees a bacon tree.”

And with that, Pancho staggers towards the tree. He gets to within
5 yards, Cisco crawling close behind, when suddenly a machine gun
opens up, and Pancho drops like a wet sock.

Mortally wounded, he warns Cisco with his dying breath,

“Cisco … go back, you was right, ees not a bacon tree!”

“Panch, Pancho mi amigo… what ees it? “

“Cisco … ees not a bacon tree. Ees

Ees

Ees

Ees

Ees a ham bush….”

In Fado music, the singer’s voice and command of the stage should cut the audience to the core. I don’t speak Portuguese, but when these elements are in place, I feel like I understand the meaning of the words being sung at the deepest level. The most powerful performers, such as Amalia Rodrigues and Cristina Branco, have a way of connecting with people that is entirely visceral. Even the peroxide-topped Mariza, for all her populist appeal, can carry a song by dint of her searing voice and queenly aura.

Such is not the case, as far as it’s possible to tell from a single performance, with the Fado star Ana Moura. Moura was in town last weekend for a show at the Palace of Fine Arts as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival’s Spring Season.

The singer is gorgeous of course, with long dark hair, high cheek bones, limpid eyes and a nimble figure. She looked beautiful in the two identically-shaped tight-fitting, floor length gowns she wore during the performance. But her voice is way to sweet for a Fado singer. She sounds like she’s singing about happy things rather than the bitter-sweetness inherent in the Fado-centric word “saudade”, which stands for longing for or missing someone or something in Portuguese.

Moura also lacks stage presence. She has an annoying habit of wiggling her little hips and shoulders up and down and from side to side. She also – inexplicably – spent half of Saturday night’s performance standing sideways to the audience and pitching her gaze slightly downwards as if concentrating hard on pocketing the black in a particularly crucial game of snooker. The singer has an undoubtedly lovely profile, but all of her energy got lost in the wings.

At the weekend, I had my first exposure to shape note singing (also known as “sacred harp singing”) — an American a cappella singing tradition which took off in the mid-19th century in the church tradition.

The all-day Bay Area shape note singing convention drew about 100 people to a small church hall in downtown Berkeley.

The thing about this music is that it’s so ardent and powerful that regardless of whether you pay attention to the churchy lyrics or not, you cannot help but get sucked in by the fervor and sheer volume of the singing.

For the entire six hours of music-making (combined with a bit of eating and socializing) we all sang at the very tops of our lungs. As is typical of this style of music, every song was sung at a bracing fortissimo. You have to have good support for your voice or you will seriously blow out your pipes.

This happened to my friend Greg, a shape note singing aficionado, who has an amazing voice (one of the finest in the room) but hasn’t quite learned to practice his art from his diaphragm. Greg cheerfully admits to losing his voice after every shape note singing event he attends. He’s got a bit of a cough and I’ve basically lost my voice entirely. I sound huskier than Carla Bruni. My excuse? I went into the convention with a bad cold. The experience of singing this music made me so euphoric that I belted my way through the day despite a sore throat and low energy. And now I’m paying the price! It was worth it though.

What other public radio station would allow one of it’s music programmers to create a show on the theme of yoga and singing whose playlist, over the course of an hour, veers between Handel’s “How Beautiful are the Feet” and “Head Crusher” by Megadeath?

No one expects opera singers to be able to dance. So when, as a director, you have performers who are capable of using their bodies in expressive ways, you should make the most of them.

A world premiere collaboration between Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet and the San Francisco Opera Center‘s Adler Fellows showed off the dancing skills of opera singers Ryan Belongie, Sara Gartland, Maya Lahyani and Austin Kness. The singers moved with agility and grace and displayed a remarkable technical understanding of intricate movement figures. I found myself wishing that Alonzo King, who choreographed the piece entitled Wheel in the Middle of the Field, had made more use of the singers’ dance chops.

The work consists of 14 short movements, each one danced by soloists or small groups of dancers to music sung by one or more of the Adler fellows accompanied by Allen Perriello. What I especially love about Wheel is the relationship between the melodious and well known arias and art songs (which range from Schubert’s “Die Mainacht” to an arrangement of the “Pie Jesu” from Faure’s Requiem for four voices by Mark Morash) and the angular and discordant movement vocabulary. The dissonance between the lush tonality of the music and atonality of the dance seems to speak fundamentally about the way of the world – yin and yang, beauty and ugliness go hand in hand.

I don’t think I’ve ever described a work for the musical theatre as “adorable” before. But that’s the word I would most readily apply to Berkeley Repertory Theatre‘s new musical Girlfriend.

Based on Matthew Sweet’s early 1990s album of the same title and directed by the mercurial Les Waters, Girlfriend tells the story of two teenage boys falling in love against the backdrop of Sweet’s lollipop rock soundtrack played with verve by a dykey all-female four-piece band.

The piece is full of expectation, warmth and youthful vigor; it’s the stuff of spring. Whether you’re in love or remember falling in love (particularly for the first time) the work perfectly captures that initial feeling of excitement.

A two-hander starring Ryder Bach and Jason Hite, Girlfriend is on a much smaller scale than some of Berkeley Rep’s other recent forays into musical theatre such as American Idiot and Passing Strange. But it’s got more soul than these other works to my mind and it’s so much more intimate than pretty much any other musical I’ve seen to date.

Theatreworks’ recent two-hander, Daddy Long Legs, a love story of a similar size and scope, didn’t achieve the same level of closeness and freshness. I really hope Girlfriend goes on to be performed elsewhere. It’s a chamber piece though — I don’t suppose it’ll ever make a Broadway show. But it would be perfect off-Broadway fodder.

The Lark theatre in Larkspur is a gorgeous art deco movie house. But it’s no place to hear live music, especially of the unadorned vocal variety. The Artists Vocal Ensemble (AVE), a professional choral ensemble from San Francisco, attempted to sing Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to Saint Cecelia there last night as part of a Britten celebration which included a screening of a documentary about the composer’s life.

I have never heard this normally slick-sonorous ensemble struggle so much. The acoustic was as dry as hermetically-sealed film stock and completely unforgiving. The singers had trouble hearing each other on stage, I gather. Some of the intonation was off. And the voices of the twelve brave singers did not blend as well as they would ordinarily have blended.

I gather that The Lark occasionally runs live entertainment programs. Marrying movies and live music is a wonderful idea in principle. But the theatre is going to have to find a way to enhance its acoustic or present only amplified music if it wants to make this programming truly satisfactory.

And as for AVE, the difficult setting exposed one of the shortcomings of the group’s performance model, which throws a group of singers who don’t necessarily consort on a regular basis together for just a few rehearsals before performing. When the room is this unforgiving, singers need to be absolutely on the same wavelength with one another to make things work. This synchronicity is really only possible when vocalists get to know each other in a rehearsal room over extended periods of time.

Last week, I spent four days working at a conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. I didn’t realize until I arrived what a hub the otherwise fairly nondescript town is for museums. The downtown area is tiny, but it plays home to many institutions including The Light Factory, The Levine Museum of the New South, The Charlotte Nature Museum, the Harvey B Gantt Museum for African-American Arts + Culture and the Mint Museum of Art, to name the main establishments.

I spent a wonderful hour pottering around the Levine Museum, which is free on Sundays and boasts some terrific, interactive installations about life in the southern states over the last 150 years or so. I particularly appreciated listening to old-time local music recordings and checking out what a 19th century sharecropper’s homestead and local hat emporium might have looked like back in the day.

The frustrating thing about the way in which Charlotte has its museum life organized is its lack of accessibility. The museums generally seem to be open during work hours while locals are in the office and the many convention attendees are stuck in the convention center. Weekend hours are limited. And I noticed that the Mint Museum, which I would have liked to take a look around had I had more time, seemed to be constantly rented out to private receptions.

I’d be curious to know how many locals visit the Charlotte museums. The Levine seemed pretty empty when I was there.

The Cutting Ball Theater Company‘s production of a new play by Marcus Gardley, “…and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi” has been extended for a week and is selling out fast. It’s easy to see why. Gardley’s language is tactile and poetic, the Demeter/Persephone Greek myth-based story about a mother’s search for her daughter moves along with the fluidity and depth of the MIssissippi river thanks to Amy Mueller’s rhythmic direction and the cast members act with an arresting sense of ensemble.

Best of all is the a cappella gospel and spiritual singing, which flows throughout the play. I rarely hear such visceral vocal music. The theatre is so small, the actors are so close to us and they singing is so ardent, that it’s impossible not to feel completely drowned in the harmonies from the get-go. I was completely swept away.

On the other hand, the singing and staging make up for the shortcomings in Gardley’s dramaturgy. At times, the play feels like second-rate Suzan-Lori Parks, with its twisted-archetypal characters with names like “Free Girl” and “Yankee Pot Roast” and gender- / genre-bending plotlines and poetics.

Gardley is a talented playwright with an original voice. His works “Love is a Dream House in Lorin” and “This World in a Woman’s Hands” demonstrate his ability to moonwalk on water. He doesn’t need to imitate other playwrights.

The vocal ensemble which I recently joined, the International Orange Chorale, will be performing a terrific, free concert tomorrow, Sunday April 11, in San Francisco. Sadly I will be traveling on business to the East Coast so won’t be able to sing. But I’d like to spread the word, so please forgive the shameless plug.

Also, as a result of my trip, I will be taking a few days off from blogging. You will find me here again starting on Monday April 19.

REQUIEM

by Maurice Durufle

Zane Fiala, Artistic Director
Stephen Lind, Organ
Megan Stetson, Mezzo soprano
Pawel Walerowski, Cello

SUNDAY, APRIL 11, 8:00 PM
ST. IGNATIUS CHURCH

650 Parker Avenue, San Francisco
FREE Admission (donations welcome)

Please join the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco (IOCSF) as we present Maurice Durufle’s stunning and luxurious Requiem. Completely unique in its application of medieval melody, modern orchestration, and comforting treatment of the subject matter, Durufle’s grand masterwork is a welcome departure from this troubled world and a hopeful arrival in a place of peace and eternal rest. IOCSF will be joined by Stephen Lind, Megan Stetson, and Pawel Walerowski for what is guaranteed to be one of its most exciting and not-to-be-missed concerts to date.