Archives for July 27, 2007

Over lunch I finally got to “that bonobo article” everyone’s been talking about in last week’s New Yorker. Not far into the article, Ian Parker mentions meeting “a tall man in his forties who went by the single name Wind … who had driven from his home in North Carolina to sing at the [bonobo fund-raiser]. He was a musician and a former practitioner of ‘metaphysical counselling,’ which he also referred to as clairvoyance.” (Favorite sentence: “Wind told me that he once wore a chimpanzee T-shirt to a bonobo event, and ‘got shit for it.'”)
Something about this description — call it clairvoyance, or call it a decade of standing at parties chatting to men with names like Raven and El Niño — made me think that the city from which Wind hails in North Carolina might be Asheville. And, unless the guy has a flute-playing, bonobo-supporting doppelganger, that turns out to be correct.

It’s Bele Chere weekend in Asheville. If you’re not familiar with it, Bele Chere is a giant street festival held each year in the last hazy days of July. Downtown is closed to traffic, and the citizens overtake the streets in sweaty, plodding hordes. Generally, you walk around, look at people, listen to music, eat, drink, and then stand in line at the Port-a-Potty.
If you live or work downtown it’s a fairly epic weekend. For every transcendent moment of sitting out on your fire escape, drinking margaritas & watching hundreds of strangers do the Electric Slide, there’s an offsetting low ebb, when it’s 4 am and packs of drunks are still roaming the streets howling for Lynyrd Skynyrd (it’s like they’re meta-drunk!).
This year I’m making a curtailed foray — tomorrow night we’re meeting my sister and her S.O. at the local brewers’ tent, then hopping up the street to hear the Goodies (recommended song: “Madame Devillia”). Report to follow Monday.

My latest Wall Street Journal drama column is another report from the road, this time on the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s As You Like It and Barrington Stage Company’s revival of Black Comedy. Both shows are nifty:

Summer Shakespeare festivals are thick on the ground in America these days, and more than a few of them are a pleasure to behold. If you’re searching for the best of all possible times, though, you’ll have trouble topping the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. I see a lot of Shakespeare, but I can’t think of another outdoor festival that has a higher overall batting average. Hudson Valley’s deliberately informal productions are a model of cultural populism at its most engaging and effective, and Kurt Rhoads’ uproariously loony staging of “As You Like It,” performed in the shoot-’em-up style of a bottom-of-the-bill B Western, is one of the cleverest updatings of the Bard to have come my way….
The brightest star of the show is Joey Parsons, the fascinating Ariel of Terrence O’Brien’s 2005 “Tempest,” who is no less striking this time around as Mr. Rhoads’ Rosalind. Decked out in tight jeans and a red cowboy hat à la Annie Oakley, she plays the ardent lover-in-disguise of “As You Like It” with an eager, sexy zest that put me in mind of the young Annette Bening….
Peter Shaffer is better known for such bristlingly serious plays as “Amadeus” and “Equus,” but with “Black Comedy,” first seen on Broadway in 1967, he proved himself to be no less adept at strewing the stage with banana peels. It’s a standard-issue British comedy about a poverty-stricken ultra-modern sculptor (Brian Avers) who’s juggling two unsuspecting ladies (Ginifer King and Nell Mooney), enhanced by one brilliant twist. The action takes place during a power failure–and the onstage lighting is reversed. When the lights are on, the stage is black. When the lights are off, we see the actors lurching around in the “dark.” Add a priceless porcelain sculpture of Buddha and a strategically positioned trap door, and the result is collective hysteria….

No free link. Get with the program already! Buy a copy of Friday’s Journal or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my column and all the rest of the Journal‘s extensive arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

“When the aspiration and exclusiveness of high art were countered with the vigour and craft of entertainment, then the pretensions of the one and the sentimentality of the other were both under mutual surveillance, and it was somewhere there, in the middle of this collision that you were likely to find a healthy–a Shakespearean–kind of theatre.”
Michael Blakemore, Arguments with England: A Memoir