Archives for July 2008

Yesterday, I had interesting phone conversations with the dramatist David Henry Hwang and the movie director David Cronenberg. We were talking about the new opera version of The Fly, for which Hwang has created t he libretto based on David Cronenberg’s cult 1986 movie (as well as the 1958 Kurt Neumann film and the original 1957 novella by George Langelaan.) The score has been written by Howard Shore, who wrote the music for the 1986 film.

From talking to Hwang and Cronenberg, it sounds like they’ve been aiming for a compelling fusion of film and theatrical sensibilities.

According to Hwang and Cronenberg (and some reports about the project in the media) the opera makes use of more makeup and special effects than you would normally see on the opera stage. The production involves a puppet baboon and baritone Daniel Okulitch has to scale the walls and ceiling of the set in a harness. Shore’s score involves many truncated back and forth exchanges between characters, like film dialogue. The libretto also references a couple of Cronenberg’s other films, including Scanners and Videodrome.

Yet the creative team, according to my sources, isn’t in the least bit interested in re-creating Cronenberg’s movie on stage. The production uses no video; the story takes place in flashback and is set in the 1950s; Cronenberg says he hasn’t even watched his movie since it came out in 1986.

But the point in the opera where film and theatre intersect most intriguingly by the sounds of it, is where Cronenberg employs an acrobatic double to perform a daring physical act beyond the capabilities of Okulitch (who, granted, is in better physical shape than most opera singers and reportedly does most of his own stunts.) Yet, as Hwang tells me, even though Cronenberg uses this highly filmic technique on stage, Okulitch’s momentary stand-in follows theatrical conventions in the sense that the opera’s creators haven’t tried particularly hard to find a perfect physical match for the singer. The acrobat employed to do the scene in Paris, Hwang says, didn’t look anything like Okulitch. “We’re not trying to fool anyone in the audience,” Hwang says.

Theatre relies on audience members suspending their disbelief to a much greater degree than film. But I wonder if this film-theatre fusion will work for me when I see the production in September when it arrives in Los Angeles? Or will Cronenberg and his collaborators have created a hideous monster — a theatrical Brundlefly.

Following the world premiere in Paris, which closed three days ago, the opera will have its U.S. opening at Los Angeles Opera on September 7.

As I read over Tom Lubbock’s interesting piece in today’s UK Independent newspaper about society’s obsession with explaining works of art, I couldn’t help but be reminded of my own recent attempts to impose meaning on an approach to a theatre production which I don’t fully understand.

I’m currently involved in what’s being billed as a “fusion” production of Hildegard von Bingen’s 12th century musical drama Ordo Virtutum. My vocal ensemble, San Francisco Renaissance Voices, is performing the work in the original Germanized Latin chant. But the director has imposed an Asian flavor on the 12th century piece by dressing us up in Indian dance outfits (long colorful skirts, matching embroidered or sequinned tops and flowing scarves) and introducing Kathak dance steps. We’ll also be accompanied by a bansuri (Indian flute player) and a harpist.

;Perhaps it’s the overly-analytical theatre critic in me, but as soon as I found out that we’d be mixing traditions, I felt a pressing need to know why.

;When the director wasn’t able to give me a truly satisfactory explanation, my mind started spinning like car wheels stuck in a ditch. Without even doing it consciously, I started to look for all kinds of rationales for why we might be doing Hildegard this way. Suddenly, clues for the meaning haphazardly started to emerge for me. I gleaned insights from the text (eg Hildegard refers to “garments” a lot in the piece so having the performers all dress in really bright and atypical clothes is a way of drawing attention to this idea.) I found myself thinking about the basis for Hildegard’s story – about the battle between the devil and the virtues for the soul – as having echoes in Indian mythology. I even went as far as to consider the link from a musical/physical perspective: chant opens up the body in the same way as saying “om” or some other mantra in yoga, which has its roots in Indian culture.

;You’ll probably think that this is all a bit over the top. Maybe so. But the point I’m trying to make is this: Art need not justify itself by having to mean something. But we cannot help but search for it anyway. If my director chooses to create a fusion production of Ordo for the simple reasons that he happens to know a bansuri player, has a few sarees from a friend who recently moved to Asia lying about his office, and thinks it might be cool to explore some of the vaguely universal ideas in the work, then at some level that’s OK. I, however, personally have to find more tangible to connect with the work I am about to perform. Some of these ways are intellectual and some are more visceral, physical and emotional, as the above examples suggest.

Many of us cannot avoid mining for meanings in art because we are sentient human beings and we naturally look for ways to understand the world we live in. Art provides one way of getting to grips with the essential incomprehensibility of the universe, but great art makes no claim to provide the answers.

;One of the great joys of experiencing art, in my opinion, is the playfulness it inspires in the audience. I can spend hours just mulling over alternate and contradictory meanings in a work of art, or equally, just turn my attention to how it cause vibrations to course through my body or makes me want to rush out of the room in horror.

Outside of academia, I can’t see a drive to find a work of art’s meaning trumping the basic experience of interacting with the work itself. And for anyone who’s tired of having art explained to them, the solution is simple: Just ignore the program notes and the artist’s statement on the gallery wall and walk around before and afterwards with earphones in one’s ears to avoid listening to other peoples’ reactions. Live in a cocoon. It’s as easy as that.

Following last week’s post about two great music radio shows that I’ve been listening to lately — London Calling and Thistle and Shamrock — I received a variety of mail not just from fans of these shows, but also from radio buffs about other interesting musical offerings on the radio.

I am particularly grateful to Mark Urycki, Program Director at WKSU in Kent,OH for pointing me in the direction of Folk Alley. This online folk music radio station boasts some ear-grabbing content. Just now, as I’ve been typing, I’ve heard a gorgeous ballad by Sonia Marie entitled “Ashes Fall Down,” Nick Drake’s maudlin “Road” (one of my favorite songs by the late brilliant songwriter) and Jeff Black’s “One Last Day to LIve”, a song which wouldn’t sound out of place played on mainstream American rock radio.

Mark tells me that most listeners access Folk Alley online, but some public stations in the US are broadcasting it on their HD channels.

Some other things to know about Folk Alley:

*Folk Alley features feature concerts and studio recordings by professional bands.

*The Open Mic section broadcasts music by anyone who feels like sharing their material. I’ve been shuffling songs on the Open Mike playlist and have been delighted to hear a wide variety of content from a skin-tingling version of “The Star of the County Down” by a German Celtic music group called Craic, to a rockin’ bluegrass track by James Reams & The Barnstormers with guest fiddler Bill Christoph.

*According to Mark, all the Open Mike music on the site is original. “The really good songs get added to the regular mix,” says Mike. “Some people from different states have met on Folk Alley and later collaborated on music.”

*The channel is about to celebrate its 5th anniversary. Folk Alley is producing concerts in Cleveland, OH and Boulder, CO in August in celebration of this auspicious event.

*Folk Alley is working on developing un-hosted side streams so that people who only want to hear Celtic or Bluegrass or 1950’s music or whatever, can hear those genres nonstop. Though my own musical tastes are all over the map, this development particularly excites me; it’ll mean I can listen to sea shanties all day if I want to.

The French soprano Natalie Dessay has the opera world in thrall. People are crazy about her for more than her singing. For one thing, she’s a tremendous actress. Around 23,000 people were putty in her hands the other day during a live simulcast of Lucia di Lammermoor at San Francisco ballpark. And some people are talking about her turn in La Fille du Regiment at The Met recently as trumping Juan Diego Florez’s famed nine high C’s.

On top of that, she seems like a very down to earth person. At a recent CD signing event at SF Opera, staff were trying to move the long line of fans waiting to meet the star through at top speed. But Dessay wasn’t in the mood to be rushed. She asked the people who came to meet her questions and appeared to want to take the time to talk to each person individually.

Some friends of mine were puzzled by the way in which Dessay signed their CDs — a flamboyant “Natalie” squiggle followed by “DC”. Then one of them, who speaks French, realized that the letters DC, when said with a French accent — “Deh-Seh” — sound like “Dessay”.

Seems like the performer has been playing around with her name for years. According to a sweet profile by Norman Lebrecht in La Scena Musicale, Dessay started out life with a different spelling of her name. Lebrecht writes: “She was born Nathalie Dessaix and changed it because the ‘h’ in her forename looked phoney and she was taunted in school as ‘deux-Sexe’, or two sexes.”

And here’s another thing that I love about Dessay: Her desire to try new things. I don’t think many opera stars take on non-singing roles in stage plays very often. Besides the fact that few have the acting chops, theatre productions probably don’t pay nearly as well as lead roles in major opera houses. But Dessay, according to Lebrecht, has just turned down Lucia the Royal Opera House to act in a Paris stage play, her first spoken role.

I would love to see her do that.

It seemed as if I had my finger on the radio dial in my car forever last night until, thankfully, I happened upon the late, great Joe Strummer’s wonderful BBC radio show, London Calling, on KALW 91.7 FM. The ex-Clash frontman’s radio show, which showcased music from all over the world, aired for several series before the musician died very prematurely of heart failure in 2002 at the tender age of 50. Last night, Strummer’s show offered sweet relief from the barrage of Dave Matthews-like schlock and watered-down jazzmatazz that was coming at me across the radio waves.

I’m glad to have something new to tune in to regularly as I drive back across the Bay Bridge on a Tuesday evening after singing. The only other radio show I listen to with any regularity is The Thistle and Shamrock, a beautiful showcase of Celtic music hosted by the inimitable Fiona Ritchie.

Here’s a great piece about Strummer from the BBC website, written in 2000 upon the launch of the third series of London Calling.

It’s an election year, and theatre companies are tripping over themselves to put on plays with political content.

One such play, Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, is currently receiving a revival at the California Shakespeare Theater. Wilde’s potent 1895 social comedy is, at least on the surface, an ideal kind of election year play. Telling the story of a politically-ambitious woman’s attempt to bring down an up-and-coming statesman by exposing a dirty secret from his past, the work satirizes the sordid deals that underpin many political careers, showing us that life in Victorian England isn’t so very different from American culture today.

Yet for all of Wilde’s incisive comments about the less-than-pristine realities that go hand in hand with politicians’ outwardly high moral stance, the play doesn’t fit into the political play mold easily. From a political perspective, it’s an unsettling work at best and at worst, brilliantly confusing.

One of the tricky things about An Ideal Husband are its sexual politics. As in most of Wilde’s plays, the most charismatic characters in this comedy are its women. Yet despite their power and the fact that the play was written at the height of Britain’s burgeoning Suffragette Movement, Wilde takes what seems to be a reactionary view towards the political advancement of his female characters. Mrs. Cheveley’s political career revolves around blackmail; and Lady Chiltern’s efforts to mobilize women politically are affectionately brushed under the carpet. Then, at the end of the play, Wilde delivers what must have come across as a bit of a bombshell to enlightened female audiences of his day: He has the one character with any sense — the gorgeously dandyish and completely politically-uninterested Lord Goring — spoil his forward-looking sensibilities by uttering the following lines, apparently with none of the character’s usual irony: “A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions.”

What does Wilde mean by ending his comedy like this? And how to pull off these lines in front of a 21st century audience without undermining the strength of the core political messages of the play?

The problem brings Kate’s last speech in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew to mind. Should Kate speak those lines about being utterly subservient to her husband as if she means them? Or should she sound like she is under duress? I’ve seen it done both ways many times to greater or lesser effect.

Cal Shakes artistic director Jonathan Moscone goes for the latter solution by having Julie Eccles, in the role of Lady Chiltern, utter the lines back to her husband between clenched teeth. The ambivalent ending is further underscored by Moscone’s use of thunderous canned applause, when Michael Butler’s Lord Chiltern, having had his political career saved by his wife, exits with his hands held aloft in the pose of the great statesman. It’s discombobulating stuff.

Another problem with seeing the play as a vehicle for making a political statement is to do with the author’s preoccupation with art. Most of the characters are compared to works of art in the stage directions. In Cal Shakes’ production, they all look like works of art in Meg Neville’s flamboyant period costumes too. Goring, who is in many ways the play’s hero, is an archetypal aesthete. He puts art above politics and is, though affected in his way of dressing, is one of the most unpretentious of all the characters on stage.

So where does all this leave us then, experiencing the play in an election year? It leaves us thoroughly entertained and not a little bemused. There are no great and worthy truths about the democratic process to take home from the production. Only a sense of cleverly-crafted confusion about the way the world works, of which both Wilde and Lord Goring would have approved. At the end of the day, the play covertly undermines its political theme completely. An Ideal Husband may be the least ideal election year play. Why? Because, as Wilde famously put it in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray: “All art is quite useless.”

MSNBC ran an intriguing article a few days ago about a new study which suggests a link between pre-historic cave paintings and singing.

“Analyzing the famous, ochre-splashed cave walls of France, scientists found that the most densely painted areas were also those with the best acoustics,” wrote MSNBC LiveScience reporter Heather Whipps in her story. “Humming into some bends in the wall even produced sounds mimicking the animals painted there.”

Researcher Iegor Reznikoff, a specialist in ancient music at the University of Paris X in Nanterre, suggests that cave dwellers used sound to communicate with each other as the cave systems were so dark, with light from torches only extending a few feet. “Because Paleolithic humans had a deep connection with the melodic properties that helped them navigate in a cave, they likely celebrated the unique acoustics by singing in conjunction with their painting sessions,” Whipps reports. “Why would the Paleolithic tribes choose preferably resonant locations for painting,” Reznikoff is reported as saying in the article, “if it were not for making sounds and singing in some kind of ritual celebrations related with the pictures?”

It’s an interesting idea. It’s also sort of appealing, in a Hollywood screenplay-minded way, to think of groups of ancient people gathering in a brightly-adorned nook to celebrate and perform rites accompanied by music. But I wonder if the connection between the resonance of particular parts of a wall in a cave and the presence of paintings has a simpler explanation? Perhaps it’s just a case of “whistle while you work” — of ancient artists simply enjoying the sounds of their own voices while undertaking an art project?

Another July 4th. Another sunburn. Another fireworks display. Do I sound like I’ve been in this country for too long?

It’s actually been ten years, almost to the day, since I first arrived on these shores — a mere slip of a girl with little idea that cheese could be squeezed out of a tube, let alone that skyscrapers were capable of collapsing if hit by a couple of exploding planes.

The world has changed a great deal over the past decade, so it seems to me. And yet some things, like Independence Day fireworks, never seem to change. And yet, in a sense, they do.

I experienced my first ever July 4th display of pyromaniacal derring-do on the shores of the Charles River in Cambridge, MA. That was in 1998. I was overwhelmed by the crowds and the power of the Boston Pops Orchestra coming at me from the opposite bank.

This year, as I sat with equally humungous crowds watching the fireworks display at the Marin County Fair in San Raphael California, I couldn’t help but feel a bittersweet twinge for my salad days on the east coast.

Back then, I sat on the banks of a great river, watching an amazing display of lights to the sound of a live orchestra. I was embarking upon a new adventure and there was a credible president in office. This year, I sat by a glorified pond watching the ducks run for cover in a patch of nearby reeds as the red, white and blue lights went off against a backdrop of canned rock music blasting above my head from a set of mammoth speakers.

What’s the cliche about “viewing the world through rose-tinted spectacles”? Perhaps I’m a little guilty of that. Yet I love this country. In wouldn’t have stayed so long if I didn’t. But while I’m still on an adventure, the man in office never lit my fuse.

Once upon a time, people — at least the rich ones who lived in England — journeyed into the Great Hereafter to the divine music of Henry Purcell and William Byrd. These days, it seems that Celine Dion and Queen are the favored choice for bidding the world adieu.

According to an interesting item in the Melbourne, Australia-based Herald Sun “The funeral industry has reported a growing movement away from traditional hymns and sombre songs towards more joyful – even humorous – music, such as ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, ‘Highway to Hell’ and even ‘Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead.'”

I’m all for injecting a sense of humour into the somber business of death. But I’d personally come back to haunt, mercilessly, anyone who saw fit to play the simpering Andrea Bocelli/Sarah Brightman ‘Time to Say Goodbye’ or Dion’s equally asinine theme song from Titanic,  ‘My Heart Will Go On,’ at my funeral.

Having recently made a recording of 16th – 18th century dirges by some of England’s great funeral music composers of the period — Purcell, Byrd, Tallis, Parsons etc. — with my vocal ensemble San Francisco Renaissance Voices, I think that I’d personally enjoy some of that gorgeous, heavy old stuff when I go. Those Jacobeans and Carolines: They did death with a flourish. They understood it in a way that we don’t anymore.

What I like best about this largely homophonic music, besides its moss-covered tranquility and chilly stateliness, are the words. All those wonderfully creepy lines about worms devouring human flesh. I’m not a religious person, but I’m still moved by the idea of “seeing God” even after the body disintegrates.

My favorite piece from the dirge pack, however, has little to do with religion, really. It’s Byrd’s lament at the death of his great mentor Tallis. It’s a beautiful, bitter-sweet homage with a rapturous refrain: “Tallis is Dead! Tallis is Dead! And Music Dies.” I’d be very happy to have that piece sung as they fling my ashes to the four winds, because it’s so damn ardent.

What songs would you want played at your funeral?

A new operatic adaptation of David Cronenberg’s 1986 sci-fi horror movie, The Fly, is receiving its world premiere tonight at Paris’ Theatre du Chatelet before arriving at Los Angeles Opera on Sept. 7.

I’m interviewing Cronenberg about the work for a magazine profile next week, in preparation for which, among other things, I’ve been re-acquainting myself with the movie.

On the face of it, The Fly doesn’t look like it would necessarily lend itself to operatic treatment. Telling the story of a scientist (played by Jeff Goldblum in the film) who accidentally manages to fuse himself with a housefly, Cronenberg’s film is packed with gory moments, cheesy lines and steampunk-like technical contraptions.

But upon closer scrutiny, I think the subject matter might make for a very good opera. For one thing, there’s the film’s exploration of the universal and increasingly-pressing theme of man versus nature. This idea has been explored on the opera stage many times, from Wagner’s Das Rheingold to John Adams’ Dr. Atomic. For another, the film is so intense in terms of its characters and emotions, that the story plays itself out like a quintessential tragic opera plot. It starts out with a casual meeting between a handsome and mysterious scientist and a pretty, go-getterly journalist and ends up in disaster, death and tears. Finally, the movie’s straightforward linear narrative, handful of characters and clear three-act structure would work easily on stage.

Add to this the opera world’s obsession with attracting people in their 30s and 40s (as opposed to today’s standard 50+ opera goer) and The Fly, with its cult-like status, starts to look like a very sensible proposition. And if Philip Glass, Christopher Hampton and Robert Woodruff can get away with making an opera out of the signing of the treaty of Appomattox, then I think Cronenberg and his collaborators have every reason to create arias and recitatives out of bugs.

According to an Associated Press story, the audience at a dress rehearsal in Paris on Monday apparently broke out in giggles when a mezzo-soprano belted out the film’s catchphrase: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” I wonder if it will be possible to take this operatic insect seriously? Or will it end up being a buzz-generating curio — a theatrical freak of nature like the BrundleFly?

I’m generally not a great fan of audience participation sequences in theatrical productions. I’m all for theatre-makers finding inventive ways to engage audiences and get them invested and involved in productions. But most of the time, when it comes to making some poor unsuspecting schmuck get up on stage, the laughs are cheap and the audience members’ parts are poorly integrated into the action.

Over the weekend, though, I caught one of the wittiest and interesting uses of audience members on stage that I’ve ever seen. The production was Point Break Live!, a theatrical spoof of the 1991 Kathryn Bigelow action movie starring Keanu Reeves as an under cover FBI agent who infiltrates a gang of bank-robbing surfers, led by Patrick Swayze.

The play’s central conceit revolves around the fact that theatre budgets are tight, and as a result, Reeves isn’t available to participate. So every night, the show casts a member of the audience in the role of FBI agent Johnny Utah.

People “audition” for the part and the cast selects the evening’s Utah by asking the rest of the audience to clap for the person they most want to see play the role.

The conceit works because it plays off Reeves’ unfortunate reputation as a terrible actor. The actor may have gone on to do great work as the lead character in the Matrix series and even reputedly pulled off a decent Hamlet in Winnipeg in 1995. But, with the possible exception of his po-faced rendition of John the Bastard in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado, his performance in Point Break is probably the most cardboard-like of his career to date.

As such, it makes perfect sense for an audience member with very likely no acting experience to read Utah’s lines of cue-cards and play the action hero for an evening. The result is surprisingly clever and engaging. The audience member goes on a wild ride with the rest of the cast throughout the show. This includes being swung around above the audience’s head in a harness in the scene where Utah and the surfers jump out of a plane (one of the most creative bits of staging in the show) and chasing a bank robber down the street outside the theatre — we can see what’s going on from inside the auditorium thanks to a live video feed.

Never before have I been so fully engaged in a show that makes such plentiful use of audience participation. It’s no wonder that this scrappy spoof has garnered a devoted following since first being staged in Seattle in 2003. Since then, it’s played in New York and Los Angeles and arrived in San Francisco in April.

Needless to say, Point Break Live is a lot of fun. And it breathes new life into the tired audience participation idea.