Archives for August 2009

Yesterday afternoon, I was amused to receive a press release in my inbox regarding a local actor, Michael Rice (pictured, left). Rice, who is best known to many people in the Bay Area theatre community for his now-defunct “Cool As Hell Theatre Podcast” which the San Francisco NPR station KQED ran for a while, is passionate about self-promotion. This time, however, he might have gone a little too far.

Rice is promising a “Money Back Guarantee” refund out of his own pocket to anyone who feels that his performance was sub par. The refund will be from Rice himself and not involve the producing theatre, the press release explains.

The actor has just closed a run as Trigorin in the Shakespeare’s Associates production of Chekhov’s The Seagull in Livermore, CA. He was previously seen in William A. Parker’s Waitin’ 2 End Hell at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in San Francisco. What’s not clear is whether the money back guarantee stands for a particular show he’s currently or soon to perform in, or whether it’s a general standard he plans to maintain for a while or his entire career.

“I create, sculpt, and deliver signature character pieces for the stage that are entertaining, bold, and believable,” states Rice. “If a patron comes to a show and does not believe I was entertaining, bold, and believable, I will refund their money,” he says.

Rice might be miffed to hear that he isn’t the first theatre person to have come up with the refund idea. Over in Chicago, The Chicago Tribune’s theatre critic, Chis Jones, published a story yesterday about the Collaboraction production of Migdalia Cruz’s El Grito del Bronx at the Goodman Theatre. At the end of the opening night performance, Jones reports that cast member Eddie Torres went on stage and told the audience that “anyone who didn’t feel like they had enjoyed the evening’s show should now make their way to a table in the lobby, where they could pick up a refund for what they’d spent on their tickets.”

Jones goes on to argue: “I hope the money-back guarantee dies a quick death, never to return. It’s not that I’m opposed to money-back guarantees in general–I recently took Home Depot up on a similar offer. But a piece of art is not a light fixture. And I think that such a speech is beneath the dignity of a fine artist like Torres. It’s a bit like watching an actor leap down from the stage and start clearing tables. Those in the audience know about economic realities, but it still makes us uncomfortable. We don’t like to see those who bare their souls for an audience’s edification and enjoyment have to stoop to such things.”

I share Jones’ indignation at the refund policy (to which nine audience members at The Goodman actually responded during the course of the run.) The money-back-guarantee schtick is cheap and gimmicky. No two ways about it. Theatre-makers who think that it will do something positive for audiences or their careers need to think again. Telling audiences they can have a refund shows either incredible hubris or a complete lack of confidence in one’s abilities as an artist.

Art is a commodity to a degree. But it doesn’t function in the same way as a light fixture in the marketplace. If a lightbulb doesn’t turn on or off, or if it’s cracked or broken, there’s clearly something wrong with it. It’s a black and white situation. But art can, generally-speaking, only be judged subjectively. Many great artists throughout history have seen their work boo’d by the public. If people like J S Bach or Oscar Wilde had operated under a money-back-guarantee, their lives would have been even more miserable.

Exciting news for the Bay Area theatre community: Z Space, one of the area’s most innovative developers and presenters of new plays, is moving to the 286-seat Theatre Artaud, a venerable old performance building in the Mission/Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. The signing of the 10-year lease on the building represents the first time that Z Space has had its own space.

Theatre Artaud hasn’t been a permanent home for a company in quite a few years. Built as an American Can Company tooling factory in 1925, the shop provided jobs for San Francisco Mission District families through the 1960s. In 1971, a group of artists moved into the abandoned industrial building, naming it Project Artaud, for French avant-garde theater artist, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), who believed art should happen in non-traditional spaces. Today, there are more than 70 individual artists’ live/work studios at Project Artaud, in addition to arts related nonprofits, small artist businesses, studio theaters and galleries.

With this move to a new base, Z Space plans to expand its offerings to San Francisco performing artists and audiences, and curate a multidisciplinary presenting program featuring theatre, dance, visual, and multimedia arts.

Z Space Executive Artistic Director Lisa Steindler will continue to oversee all of the organization’s operations, and will also continue to develop and produce new work. Z Space Managing Director David Szlasa will take on a more active programming role, and will work closely with the artistic community to solicit proposals and curate the space.

On a personal note, I’m thrilled about the news. Theatre Artaud is one of my favorite places to see work. It has a spacious, airy feel to it, and is the sort of space that can easily be transformed to fit the needs of a wide variety of artworks including dance, concerts, straight plays, art exhibitions and multimedia work. Artaus is also very easily accessible public transport-wise and is within striking distance of a bunch of great restaurants, bars and cafes. I can’t think of a better home for Z Space and I wish the company well as it embarks upon this new chapter of its life.

Sometimes an artist’s relationship with his or her company or group can last a lifetime or decades. Sometimes it barely lasts a season. I’ve been curious lately about what it is about a long-term, largely positive collaborative situation that makes an artist decide to move on when there’s no obvious reason at stake — such as a lack of funds or a falling out with a collaborator — driving the decision.

I’ve been in many situations in my life as a musician where a longstanding collaboration with an orchestra, wind ensemble or choral group has gone from fueling me to feeling like a millstone around my neck. What’s interesting is that the change happens so insidiously that it’s often hard to tell what’s happened to alter my feelings about being involved with the group and make me want to quit.

I can look back once a collaboration has turned sour and still remember the excitement I felt over several years about going to rehearsals, the satisfaction of playing, singing, dancing or acting well, the challenges of getting a tricky passage perfect, the fun of meeting other artists involved with the group and becoming friends with them, and the high of performing in their company.

And yet, like a relationship that’s run its course, I’ve sometimes arrived at a point where I absolutely have to move on. I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as to call this a product of “artistic differences” at least in the traditional sense of the term. Then again, I suppose what happens is that I get bored with the way that things are being done and start to feel antsy for a different approach, which in a sense is another way of saying that I have developed artistic differences with the group.

This has happened to me twice since I moved to the Bay Area nearly 10 years ago. The first was with an orchestra, which I loved playing with for years until I started to get fed up with the music director’s slipshod approach to conducting and the fact that we played Beethoven’s 9th Symphony year after year after year and still never seemed to improve!

The second instance happened more recently, this time with a vocal ensemble. Singing with this group has been such an important part of my life for the last few years, but lately I’ve become very unsatisfied with our work. The director misses rehearsals to go on vacation and pays very little attention to detail — including major issues like how to pronounce words. He’s gotten very lazy. The repertoire is wonderful but we are constantly under-rehearsed. And projects sometimes don’t reach fruition — a recording we put together over several very late nights a couple of years ago still hasn’t been edited or turned into a CD. I managed to drag myself through the last set with little enthusiasm despite loving the music we performed. And now I know it’s time to call it quits and find some other musical outlet(s) that will hopefully better suit my temperament.

What’s all this about? Are my standards getting higher? Am I developing more rigor and proficiency as an artist? Or am I just turning into a cantankerous, old fart? Maybe it’s just a question of boredom. Falling in love and falling out of love is something we all experience. But we generally think of it in terms of romantic relationships rather than relationships we develop artistically over the course of our lives.

For some reason over the past two days, people have been randomly shoving CDs in my hands. Two of the recordings I received by San Francisco artists are wonderful which is why I need to tell you all about them.

The first is a self-titled album by Or, The Whale, a local folk rock band. A mixture of bittersweet ballads and careening torch-songs are melodic and catchy. The band uses a lot of banjo and mellow harmonies. Great stuff for a sunny afternoon drive through the countryside. Or, The Whale is about to embark on a west coast tour with stops in Oregon and Washington

The second is Obey Your Signal, the latest CD by Loop!Station, an electronic music-inspired voice and cello duo comprising of San Francisco musicians Robin Coomer (voice) and Sam Bass (cello). Many musicians are using loop pedals in ingenious ways these days to create polyphonic, multi-layered effects with barebones resources. Coomer and Bass approach their work in an eclectic way. Sometimes the sound is hard and punky with a Siouxie Sioux edge. Other times, it sounds like it’s been inspired by Bach. The duo is playing at Cafe Du Nord in San Francisco this Sunday. Absolutely not to be missed.

I ended up having to retract my long-held-to aversion to Jack Nicholson last night following a screening of Easy Rider at San Francisco’s Red Vic movie theatre. I have seen the film several times before. But it had been years since my last viewing. One of the best things about the film is Jack Nicholson’s performance as a drunk and muddled momma’s boy of a small-town lawyer. He brings such vitality and sweetness to the role. His death in the middle is the cruelest moment of the entire film.

I think, perhaps, that there was something inspired about Nicholson in his early years. Then he became typecast as a weirdo and his performances became increasingly one-dimensional. I couldn’t get more than 20 minutes through About Schmidt. Jackson’s approach to acting has become a caricature of itself of late. It was wonderful, through reacquainting myself with Easy Rider, to remind myself that he was once a great actor.

When it comes to developing close ties with audiences, few bands in the history of rock music have garnered a fan base as strident as the Grateful Dead.

“The standard musician-audience relationship doesn’t exist in a Grateful Dead show,” says longtime Grateful Dead publicist Dennis McNally, who will be speaking at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music this weekend after a performance of Dead Symphony no. 6, Lee Johnson’s composition based on 10 of the Dead’s songs.

Members of the band were very open to all sorts of musical styles and educated their fans to listen to long, spiraling improvisations that merged genres as diverse as rock, folk, blues, reggae, gospel, bluegrass, psychedelic rock, jazz and country. But serious fans — the Deadheads — have not always been so flexible. In fact, when it comes to other musicians interpreting the Dead’s music or even appearing in concert alongside the band, the Deadheads can sometimes be puritanical.

David Gans, host of the nationally syndicated Grateful Dead Hour radio show who attended a performance of Dead Symphony no. 6 by the California Symphony earlier this year, said: “The audience was very nicely divided between Deadheads and regular California Symphony subscribers. The music director’s intention was to bring these two audiences together. The Dead themselves and their audience members were known for being open-minded and trying new things. however, there is a certain kind of dogma in the Dead world – the fans are fiercely protective of the music as they understand it. They are hostile to irrelevant interpretations. Hence, the people who didn’t want to hear about Johnson’s symphony didn’t show up to the concert.”

Read my LA Times story about the symphony here. This blog post can also be found on the LA Times’ website, here.

August usually presents a bit of a lull in the local performing arts scene as companies ramp up for their Fall seasons. But the ramp up this year is far from quiet. Here are a few upcoming theatre happenings that I’m excited about:

1. Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days at California Shakespeare Theater (Aug 15-Sep 6). Marsha Mason was scheduled to play Winnie in Jonathan Moscone’s production. She suddenly dropped out halfway through rehearsals a couple of weeks ago citing “personal reasons.” No matter. Patty Gallagher will doubtless do the role proud, and so will Joan Mankin, who’ll be stepping in at select performances.

2. San Francisco Fringe Festival (Sep 9 – 20). Always a treat. You never know what you’re going to get.

3. Green Day’s American Idiot at Berkeley Repertory Theater (Sep 4 – Oct 11). A highly anticipated rock musical based on the band’s best-selling 2004 album. The box office over on Addison Street probably resembles a mosh pit at this point.

4. Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter at the American Conservatory Theater (Sep 16 – Oct 4). The vivacious Kneehigh Theatre Company from England brings its unusual retelling of Coward’s classic to San Francisco. Can’t wait.

5. Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s Boom at Marin Theatre Company (Nov 17 – Dec 6). OK, so I’m cheating. This production of an apocalyptic play about human reproduction at the end of time by a brilliant local playwright isn’t happening until just before Christmas. But it’s worth sticking in the date book anyway.

Sometimes you just have to say “it is what it is.”

This is what I told myself as I exited Club Fugazi in North Beach on Saturday night after having sat through Beach Blanket Babylon for the first time. The San Francisco theatrical institution — a sort of kitsch-topical cabaret involving covers of famous rock tunes, cartoonish impersonations of famous people and huge, splendiferously-adorned hats, has been going for 35 years. There have been runs in London and Las Vegas. The San Francisco iteration of the show plays to packed houses twice a night most nights a week.

I have to admit that I’m baffled by the longevity and popularity of the show. I have nothing but admiration for the performers, who put so much energy and commitment into telling hackneyed jokes on such well-worn topics as the Clinton-Lewinsky affair and spoofing Elvis. They’re a talented and highly professional lot. And the costumes and hats are certainly eye-catching. This is especially the case in the grand finale, when the show’s diva, Val Diamond, comes on wearing a hat festooned with San Francisco landmarks (including a working cable car which actually chuffs its way past a model of the famous Painted Lady Victorian houses) that takes up almost half the length of the stage.

But, my God, the show is full of mind-numbing, lowest-common-denominator stuff. I had some fun and it’s not as if the show’s founder, Steve Silver, set out to create high art. He simply wanted to entertain people. But not all entertainments are that entertaining. I was so ready to leave after about 45 minutes.

By the rivers of Beach Blanket Babylon, there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered how short life is to be wasting one’s Saturday evening watching people dressed like lampshades imitating Barbra Streisand, John McCain and Oprah.