Weekend Reviews
'King Hedley II' a royal challenge for Pro Arts
Drama: "King Hedley II"
Comedy: Margaret Cho
Hip-hop: Lil Jon
Theater: "The Water Principle"
World music: The Gipsy Kings
Pop: Keren Ann
Musical: "Bat Boy: The Musical"
Jazz: David Sanborn
Web posted: June 13, 2005
Pro Arts Collective opened Friday its first production, "King Hedley II," since the death in April of its artistic director and driving force Boyd Vance. The sense of loss at the State Theater was palpable and executive producer Lisa Byrd's restrained but emotional curtain speech articulated the company's grief and its determination to continue Vance's mission to foster African American work and enhance the larger community.
Vance had selected August Wilson's drama, "King Hedley II," and had cast much of the show before his death, leaving new director Maurice Moore to forge links between Vance's vision for the play and his own. Moore was not completely successful in this unenviable task, and the production, which runs about three hours, didn't always hit its stride.
Part of Wilson's 10-part series set in Pittsburgh in each decade of the 20th century, "King Hedley II" chronicles a short period in 1985. One character, King, who has done time in prison for killing the man who cut his face, is trying to raise enough cash to lease a video business with his friend Mister. The two aren't above a little armed robbery to enhance their business portfolio. King's wife, Tonya, is pregnant and his mother, Ruby, who left King to be raised by his Aunt Louise while she worked as a singer, is expecting a visit from Elmore, a former suitor. Their eccentric neighbor Stool Pigeon collects newspapers to ensure that the neighborhood doesn't lose a sense of history and interjects religious proclamations at opportune moments.
Mark A. Banks presents King as a man caught up in his own mythology and pride. His sidekick Mister, played by LeVan Owens, adds a light, comic touch but proves just as controlled by his own sense of justice. Gina Houston gives Tonya a practical yet soulful presence, while Cara Briggs heightens Ruby's shallow nature. Don Stewart is aided by maturity (he is the only actor playing an older character who even approaches the right age) and he creates a believable con man as Elmore. Noel Kent Smith found the right flavor as the aging Stool Pigeon, but he and some of the other performers were hard to understand in the State's tricky space.
The play itself is part of the problem. Although it raises many important issues about families, responsibility, opportunities, etc., it isn't one of Wilson's most cohesive pieces in terms of structure or story. Nevertheless, "King Hedley II" is worth seeing and, now that the emotional weight of the first weekend has lifted, the cast may settle into this juicy and important drama.
"King Hedley II" continues 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays through June 19, State Theater, 719 Congress Ave., $15-$30, 474-TIXS, www.proarts.info.
Jamie Smith Cantara
Stand-up comedy
MARGARET CHO TAKES RIBALD ACT TO BASS
This may be the most difficult review my editor has ever been forced to trim. Margaret Cho likes to say the f-word. So much so that, writing about her, I'm finding it hard not to use it myself. But decency suggests I shouldn't do that, so I'll use "x" instead. That said, Margaret Cho whose "Assassin Tour" stand-up comedy act stopped at Bass Concert Hall last Friday puts on one feisty xing show. Introduced by the infinitely less seasoned Bruce Daniels (who actually analogized gay Republicans to Jewish Nazis, a tired comparison), Cho took to the stage for two hours of unfiltered, often raunchy fabulousness.
In fact, it's hard to recall when a performance at the normally sober University of Texas concert hall was so thoroughly uncensored.
Cho knows gay men. In the past decade, she's attained Cher-like levels of worship in the gay community a fact she readily acknowledges and unapologetically capitalizes upon in her act. She's become the tough big sister to a generation of budding queens, and she'll x up anyone who tries to hurt them. Instead of using force, however, Cho relies on her irreverent, and at times incoherent, brand of humor as a defense.
Attacking homophobes, she declared, "If you think gay is contagious, then you are (gay)." She went so far as to call Pope John Paul II's sexuality into question, claiming that he bullied the gay community. Having been both one of the funny boys on the playground and a Catholic, I always felt the pontiff and I had more in common than a devotion to Mary.
Not surprisingly, Cho also took on the American right in her act. To say that she dislikes the Bush administration is an epic understatement. Every member of the First Family was game for verbal lynching, and she hung them all mercilessly, mostly in ways unpublishable in this newspaper. "The Bush twins make the Hilton sisters look like Mensa members," she began, following with musings on the family's nether regions.
Crass, brazen and admittedly a little baseless in her claims, Cho scored in these everyone's-thinking-what-I'm-willing to-say moments. But when she attacked many of the president's policies, she unfortunately struck out. Under-prepared and poorly researched bits about the war in Iraq and America's response to the tsunami crisis stifled her momentum. But her rare and undying compassion for the human condition made any such glitches forgivable.
Tommy O'Malley
Hip-hop
LIL JON, DJ NOT ALWAYS ON THE SAME TRACK
Lil Jon isn't so much a rapper as he is a brander. Everything is crunk this, crunk that. ("Crunk" as a noun describes a genre of rowdy, Southern hip-hop featuring processed dance beats and rallying cries instead of skull-flattening bass and lyrical acrobatics; crunk as an adjective describes a state of mind and body halfway between crazy and drunk.) He's got five albums with titles that include the word crunk. He's engineered a tour called Crunkfest. And he sells CRUNK! Energy Drink, which may or may not be the same as crunk juice, what he and his East Side Boyz Big Sam and Lil Bo drank from a red gasoline container instead of his trademark jeweled chalice at the Travis County Expo Center.
After too many one- or two-song opening acts, a knowingly strung-along crowd dipped into their best "lean" on opener "Crunk Juice," a short, mood-setting, rap-rock intro echoing the collaborations on the "Judgment Night" soundtrack. When that segued into "Get Crunk," a party anthem including the chant "Get crunk, mother (expletive), get crunk," in between mentions of female dogs in heat and the N-word, the dudes in the crowd favoring jeans-shorts down to their ankles, T-shirts down to their knees, spiffy kicks and askew ball caps threw their cliques' signs in the air, while their ladies nodded.
Despite the in-da-club vibe Lil Jon (aka Jonathan Smith) tried to lay down, the piercingly bright, white lights swirling behind the DJ made it seem like a warehouse party on the verge of getting busted by the cops. There was also the problem of the DJ not playing the right records. But Lil Jon went over and schooled him, then apologized in a roundabout way: "Gotta teach 'em when they young." When you're about to star in your first film, you're up for seven Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop Awards, you're producing Whitney Houston's next album, and Eminem and 50 Cent are counting on you to bring it during this summer's Anger Management Tour, there's no room for error.
Michael Hoinski
Theater
'WATER PRINCIPLE' DRIPS WITH INTRIGUING WRITING
Eliza Anderson's bleak comedy "The Water Principle" at Hyde Park Theatre makes Austin's Barton Springs seem all the more precious. The play is set at a time in the future when water and food are scarce. Whether these commodities are hard to come by everywhere or just in the area where the protagonist, Addie, lives is unclear, but she has taken it on herself to protect the land because she believes that it sits on top of an underground river.
To say that Addie is struggling is an understatement. She rations what little water she has, catches the occasional scrawny bird and downs worms for sustenance. Enter Weed; he has beans cans and cans of beans, and he gives some of them to Addie in hopes that she will sign over her land so he can build a theme park. He pushes, she pushes back. It isn't a fair fight because Addie has too many scruples, and Weed not a one. A drifter named Skimmer appears. He likes the ladies, but he also likes to eat, and he is tempted by both sides.
The action takes place inside Addie's dirty shack where a rough wooded table and filthy sofa don't exactly say "home, sweet home." A blue light under the shack's raked wooden floor suggests the cool, watery retreat just out of the characters' sight and reach.
Addie, played by Katherine Catmull, may be gaunt, weak, quirky and rather naοve, but she has some survival smarts and an encyclopedic knowledge about the animals that live on or in water. As Weed, Ken Webster is a smooth-talking schemer wiling to do whatever to takes to get his amusement park built. Joey Hood adds a low-key presence with Skimmer, a man concerned with immediate needs who rarely plans for the future.
Finding the right tone in a black comedy can be tough, and director Ken Webster, who also plays Weed, steers down the middle of the road with an approach that neither plays too much for laughs, nor knocks us out with dramatic punches. The production feels static at times, even a bit low-energy not that starving characters are supposed to be peppy and the staging at the end was a disappointment. On the plus side, granite-hard performances and some intriguing writing command attention.
"The Water Principle" continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, through July 2, Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St., $15-$17 (Thursdays pay-what-you-wish), 479-PLAY, www.hydeparktheatre.org.
Jamie Smith Cantara
World music
GIPSY KINGS REIGN SUPREME AT BASS CONCERT HALL
To many people, the term "French rock 'n' roll" could undoubtedly be considered an oxymoron. And while the Gipsy Kings, a 10-piece rumba flamenco band from the Camargue region of southern France, don't exactly play that specific style of music, the gist of their performance Saturday at the Bass Concert Hall was in the spiritual vein of some of the best rock 'n' roll.
The guitar or six flamenco guitars in this instance remained the centerpiece of the show. Commanding the microphone in full swagger and showcasing his raspy, fullthroated voice, the band's lead singer, Nicolas Reyes, implored the crowd to dance. The groupies concertgoers of every shape and denomination responded appreciatively in kind.
An early crowd favorite was "Un Amor," a song that, like the others, was sung in Gitane, a Spanish-meets-French dialect, and which translated as pure, unadulterated passion, proving once again that music might just be the universal language. The distinguishing hallmark of the Kings one feels witness to an aural sojourn of the European countryside by way of a gypsy caravan.
The show's highlights included "Djobi Djoba," which again roused the transported audience out of their seats and sparked a rash of rapid-fire clapping, and "Quiero Saber," which featured a perfect vocal and rollicking guitar licks that further invigorated the assembled mass.
The wall-of-sound flamenco style produced by the 10 musicians climaxed with "Baila Me," which as the song suggests had the crowd dancing with Reyes, and the band's encore song and hit single, "Bamboleo," which sparked a partial singalong and more fervent applause. After multiple standing ovations, the rockers finally retired.
Robert Winterode
Pop
NO NEED TO 'SHHH!' AT KEREN ANN'S PERFORMANCE
It seems entirely possible that when Blue Note Records released the first American album by French singer/songwriter Keren Ann, they were hoping for another Norah Jones. Both are startlingly beautiful, and both wander outside of Blue Note's traditional jazz fare.
But it's not going to happen, for a lot of reasons (for one, Jones' voice is sultry and radio-ready, where Keren Ann's seems barely there), but this isn't to say that Keren Ann isn't an intriguing figure in her own right. Not for nothing has local booker Philip Croley been trying to bring her here for what he calls "a couple of years."
A Parisian who spends part of the year in New York, she's a detailed and nuanced songwriter. Her third album, "Not Going Anywhere," was released in the U.S. in August; her fourth, "Nolita" arrived here in March, and both are strangely addictive slices of real-person songcraft.
As is her live show. As the Dicks were over at Room 710 clobbering the living tar out of every other venue on Red River Street, Keren Ann drew about 150 people to the Parish. Her headlining set was early, around 10 p.m., and everyone who came in after 10 did the same thing: looked at the stage, looked at their watch, and asked someone behind the bar or soundboard, "How long has she been on?"
Well, they whispered it, to be more precise. Austin is one chatty town when it hits the clubs, and I never thought I'd see the day where a crowd stood dead silent as a performer played. Accompanied only by an electric guitar, Keren Ann played her tunes with the sort of stately grace that make us hate the French for their poise. It helped that she was dryly funny between her soft, sharply written tales of heartbreak and woe. Before the marvelous "Not Going Anywhere," she related her sadness at the total lack of attendance at a South by Southwest autograph signing until she realized she was there on the wrong day. She introduced the tragic "Sailor and Widow" by saying, "For the next song, you have to imagine a drummer who is British, from the '80s." She didn't need him. Her voice, lithe guitar and precision-tooled stories were more than enough. Your move, Norah.
Joe Gross
Musical
NAUGHTY AUSTIN GIVES WINGS TO 'BAT BOY'
A lot of theater-types will tell you that the American musical is dead. And while that isn't exactly true, it's arguable that the musical has fallen victim to the same disease that afflicts two-thirds of the American public: obesity. Musicals have gotten fat, weighed down by bloated scores and dense books. One of the chunkiest clunkers to come along in a while is 2001's "Bat Boy The Musical," Laurence O'Keefe, Keythe Farley and Brian Fleming's ripped-from-the-tabloid-headlines tuner. A second rate "Tommy," really. Despite the show's considerable cellulite, director Blake Yelavich has turned Naughty Austin's mounting of the show into a svelte, engaging piece of theater.
"Bat Boy" is the sensational story of a boy-bat hybrid discovered in the mountains of West Virginia. He is taken to live with a doctor's family, the Parkers, on whom he has a profound, if initially inexplicable, effect. As time passes, Bat Boy morphs from a cave-dwelling beast into a proper English-sounding chap.
For his production, Yelavich assembled a team of top-tier Austin talent. Music director Dennis Whitehead can be credited with salvaging the more derivative offerings from the score. From the opening number, in which the company begs, "Hold me Bat Boy/Touch me Bat Boy/Love me Bat Boy/Save me Bat Boy" ("See me. Feel me. Touch me. Heal me," anyone?), and through the finale, Whitehead added some much-needed punch.
The performances were all worthy, with a few particular standouts. Playing the ragingly pubescent Shelley Parker, Larissa Wolcott presented a Clorox-clean depiction of adolescent agitation. As her mother, Toni Smith (who looked too young for the role) sang beautifully when the songs fell in her range. Supporting player Kirk German, who shifted nicely among several roles (both in and out of drag), demonstrated the most vocal control of the men. And in the title role, Tyler Rhodes was heartbreaking. His earnest handling of the lines and high vocal register forged a tragic portrait of lost innocence.
"Bat Boy The Musical" continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through July 2. Arts on Real, 2826 Real Street, $22, 472-2787
Tommy O'Malley
Jazz
SANBORN FINDS THE HEART OF THE MUSIC
There are a few pure, natural things in the world that never change. They're quite perfect as they are. Think of gold. Or honey. We might add the gleaming, flowing, alto saxophone voice of David Sanborn to that list. The genuine article was on hand at One World Theatre on Friday night for two capacity crowds to savor.
From day one, Sanborn has been a singular stylist with an instantly identifiable timbre and vocabulary of embellishments. His distinctive sound draws not only from jazz influences, but from a wealth of R&B vocal sources as well. While a swarm of mimics has followed his trail, the integrity of Sanborn's conception remains his alone.
Sanborn's cooking 6-piece touring unit, intact from his last Austin appearance, clearly shares his performance preferences deep dedication to the heart of the music without any distracting show-biz affectations. Master percussionist Don Alias was able to generate plenty of heat at the softest dynamic levels, while keyboard man Ricky Peterson spun solos full of subtle invention all night long. Like leader, like band.
The second show offered a range of material spanning the length of his recording career, including Michael Sembello's anthem "The Dream" and his own engaging "Lisa." Among the material from his intimate current release, "Closer," was Horace Silver's loping "Seρor Blues," which the graying Sanborn wryly identified as "Senior Blues."
On the gentler side, Sanborn brought soulful elegance and emotional depth to the Tin Pan Alley standard "Smile," written by Charlie Chaplin yes, that Charlie Chaplin. He too was an absolute original whose image became common currency. If you were to see the Little Tramp's photograph among a sea of impersonators, you might puzzle at which one was the real thing. Friday night at One World, David Sanborn humbly reminded us who is still the gold standard for contemporary R&B saxophone.
John Mills
