Archives for May 2009

Am rather sad to hear about the demise of the great British television arts series, The South Bank Show, which the ITV network has decided to can after 33 years on the air.

Failing media budgets seem to be a major contributing factor to the decision to shut down the program. The other main reason cited by the network is to do with the departure of the show’s long-term host, Melvyn Bragg, who’s been running the programme since it started in 1978. In an article in The Times, the network is quoted as saying: “The South Bank Show and Melvyn go hand in hand”.

I wonder what this will mean for British arts programming? Will ITV actually fulfill its promise of fostering new opportunities for arts coverage on the network? It’s hard to imagine any other show doing such a thorough and entertaining job of exploring global culture with such breadth and eclecticism.

That being said, my own personal brush with Melvyn and his entourage wasn’t exactly wonderful. I once interviewed for a coveted “researcher” position on the show. This was in 2001 or 2002, I think. I sailed through the first interview with a couple of the Great Man’s flunkies and was invited for an audience with Melvyn himself.

This wasn’t so much fun. I remember walking into a dark room with about six sloaney-looking TV types sitting around a rectangular table. Melvyn was holding court in the middle.

The basic premise of the interview was to see how I would defend myself in a contentious pitch session. I didn’t realize this at the time however. No one actually told me that I’d be openly contradicted. Being a naive, sincere little thing, I didn’t have the wits to latch onto Melvyn’s game. I thought he hated my ideas and flatly rejected them when he asked me to suggest several potential subjects for upcoming South Bank Show episodes and barked “conductors are boring!” when I suggested the idea of devoting an episode to orchestral maestros. I turned red at his assault and meekly replied “Oh?” What I should have said of course was “No, conductors are NOT boring, Sir Melvyn, and here’s why…” But I wasn’t expecting to be challenged in this way. I was completely caught off guard. Naturally my lack of spine didn’t go over well with the sloanes and their king. I didn’t get the job.

I don’t remember feeling too cut up about it, although it might have been fun to work on the programme for a couple of years. It’s all moot now though. Even the sloanes are having to pack up their MacBook Airs.

Having read all about her in newspapers and magazines and listened to friends and acquaintances enthuse about her voice, I finally got around to checking out Susan Boyle’s singing abilities for myself on YouTube. The middle-aged, small-town British singing sensation caused global excitement with her take on “I Dreamed A Dream” from Les Miserables a few weeks ago on the UK TV talent show, Britain’s Got Talent.

Having watched the video footage, all I can say is that I feel slightly queasy — nay, indignant — about the audience’s reception to Boyle.

People were clearly alarmed by the singer’s frumpy appearance and embarrassing hip-wiggle before she opened her mouth to sing. The studio cameras panned around to show the cruel, cynical looks on their faces. As soon as Boyle launched into her show-tune, however, the crowds instantly started screaming and didn’t stop till she was done.

The fact is: No one actually heard her sing. They were so busy dealing with their shock. This reaction was made clear by the judges’ comments after Boyle’s performance. “Without a doubt that was the biggest surprise I’ve ever had,” said one. “I’m reeling from shock,” said another. “It was an extraordinary shock” said a third.

And to this day, I still don’t think people have really heard Boyle sing. They’re so wrapped up in the Susan Boyle “package” — her underdog story, her frumpy appearance, her undiscovered talent — that they’re not really listening to the quality of her voice at all.

I tried to make out what I could of Boyle’s singing from underneath all the screams of surprise. She has a lovely, rich, strong voice to be sure. But take away the “package” that surrounds that voice, and it’s not as exceptional as many think. It’s a good voice. But it’s not great. I certainly don’t think it’s unique in any way. In a “blind” listening test where listeners could hear several similarly stagey women vocalists singing the same song from Les Miz, I wonder whether people would be able to pick out Boyle’s voice from the pack?

So I’m kinda steamed for Susan Boyle. I wish people would stop obsessing over her background and appearance and start listening for once. They might be disappointed to hear that Boyle’s not the Vocal Talent of the Decade. But they could still get some measure of enjoyment from her mellifluous tones anyway.

I’ve been working on a story for the Los Angeles Times about the new generation of women conductors. The article is scheduled to appear in the publication’s Calendar section this Sunday. 

As is so often the case, some of the most interesting details I learned in the process of reporting the piece — regarding conductor Marin Alsop’s ideas about how women conductors should and shouldn’t use their bodies on the podium — barely made it into the article itself because they were off on a bit of a tangent. So I thought I would bring the subject up here. That’s one of the beauties of being a blogger; juicy material need not go to waste. 

According to Alsop, who serves as music director of the Baltimore Symphony and is a mentor to lots of young maestros (many of them women), female conductors need to think more carefully about the way in which they use gesture than their male counterparts. Reno Symphony’s new music director, Laura Jackson, tells a funny story along these lines about being coached by Alsop as a recipient of the Taki Concordia women’s conducting fellowship. “Once, when she was watching my left hand, Marin shook her head and said ‘your left hand is way too girly,'” Jackson recalls. A New York Times story from 2005 about Alsop corroborates Jackson’s anecdote: “[Marin Alsop] coaches female conductors in ways a man could not, pointing out, for example, that if a man holds the baton with outstretched pinkie, it can look sensitive; if a woman does so, some may see it as frilly.”

Alsop herself has a lot to say about gesture when it comes to being a woman up on the podium: “As a woman, you need to think twice about what you’re doing on the podium,” Alsop told me in a phone interview last week. “There’s one extra step you have to go through to convey only musical ideas, rather than having your gestures reinterpreted because people think as a woman you’re conveying something else. Think about shaking hands when you meet someone. If you have a very firm handshake as a woman, it’s a bit frightening. But a firm handshake is appealing in a man. In other words, as a female conductor, you have to figure out how to be strong without coming across as threatening. People should only respond to your musical gestures, rather than some preconception they have in their minds about strong women.”

I’ve been covering the performing arts in San Francisco for the best part of a decade and am lucky enough to experience theatre and dance productions in many venues across the city. It’s a source of continuous delight to me that I still come across performing arts spaces that I have never visited before.

This weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing two theatre productions in spaces that were new to me as a theatre goer.

The first was the studio space at the top of the Brava Center for the Arts in the Mission. Brava has been around for ages. It’s faded, crumbling glory reminds me quite a bit of the gorgeous Harvey Theatre at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Until I saw Molly Rhodes’ play, For All The Babies Fathers on Friday evening, I had not yet explored the upper area of the Brava building with its small theatre — an airy wooden box complete with gorgeous old rococo ceiling.

Designer Jamie Mulligan transformed the plain space into something akin to a beautiful contemporary art installation with narrow, knee-high wooden “shelves” upon which myriad glasses of all shapes and sizes and half filled with water rested, like crystals on a necklace. The contrast between the period details of the room and the modernity of Mulligan’s set design were instantly arresting.

On Sunday evening, I experienced my first ever theatrical production in a hair salon. OK — so the Glama-Rama Salon in the Mission District of San Francisco may not be a purpose-built theatre. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the salon’s owner decided to open her salon to more theatrical productions in the future as playwright Sean Owens’ new, 1980s screen romance inspired drag comedy, Stale Magnolias, fits the location as well as as false eyelashes on a tranny.

Like Dolly Parton and Julia Roberts in the 1989 movie from which the play steals its name, a couple of Owens’ characters are beauticians. The play even grapples with women’s balding issues. And what’s more, all of the cast members spend their time strutting about the airy pink-painted salon in some of the most extraoardinary wig creations I’ve ever seen – designed by Jordan L Moore, wigmaker extraordinaire to many local drag luminaries. Enormous and meringue-like, the show’s wigs give Marge Simpson and the members of the heavy rock band Kiss a run for their hairspray.

Still, I wished that the cast had made more use of the Glama-Rama setting – perhaps by employing the salon’s wonderful old-fashioned hair-dryers for one or two of the play’s many gratuitous makeover scenes. When you get to perform in a space as interesting as a hair salon, why not make the most of it?

August Strindberg’s Miss Julie has always seemed like a dour play about class divide to me. The master-servant power games have dominated productions I’ve seen in the past. As a result, the play has generally felt old-fashioned. While the class system still exists to some degree in Europe and the US, it’s just not as big an issue as it once was.

Last night, though, I experienced a production of the play at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre which made me see the play in an entirely new light — as a love story.

Director Mark Jackson’s fluid production starring Mark Anderson Phillips as Jean and Lauren Grace and Julie feels very human and entirely modern, even though the characters are dressed in stilted Victorian-era garb and perform around Giulio Cesare Perrone’s antique kitchen set complete with huge wooden table and prominently-displayed meat cleaver.

Part of the reason for this feeling of freshness stems from Jackson’s judicious use of Helen Cooper’s translation of Strindberg, which bumps and grinds along in the fashion of a midsummer night romp of yore while never sounding heavy and overwrought in the actors’ mouths.

Another reason for the play’s modernity is the focus on the love story. Jackson levels the playing field between the two central characters by giving them similar accents which makes their attraction and eventual coupling seem all the more plausible. This is the first time I’ve seen Jean played with such an upscale British accent, rather than with a “regional” accent more commonly associated with servant roles on stage. At first, I thought it was odd — misplaced even. But then I realized that Jean could well have learned to speak like his masters. After all, he’s studied and scrutinized their ways throughout his life.

Though Phillips is given on occasion to overacting and the blocking from moment to moment feels jerky in places, the chemistry between Phillips and Grace is definitely on: It feels as fragile and dangerous as the fine line that divides Jean and Julie from transcending their place in the order of the universe.

In the first half, the characters’ flirtations play off the master-servant roles in a sexually-charged way. Grace is very much the dominatrix in this part of the drama and Jean, her gimp. Things get particularly interesting — and extremely real — in the second half of the play, when the roles reverse. The extremes that the characters feel for one another — the warmth, the dependence and the rage and guilt that stem from being connected through sex — capture what it is to be in a complex relationship with someone you love. Emotions run high and no feeling is ever one thing; it is many things at the same time.

The brilliance of Jackson’s production is that he makes Jean and Julie’s relationship appear at the same time very new and full of promise and very old and bound for death. The latter, of course, wins out. But Jackson never loses sight of the newness of the passion between Jean and Julie, which is what provides the tension in the play and makes a rollercoaster love story out of grumpy, post-coital malaise.

The Guardian‘s Michael Billington was absolutely right when he compared the work of Strindberg and Ibsen in this way: “If Ibsen caught the tensions of the night before, Strindberg revealed the acrid taste of the morning after.”