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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > April > 20
Monday, April 20, 2009
Review: Ellington’s ‘Queenie Pie’ gets a respectful refashioning
Duke Ellington received due homage this weekend when the University of Texas’ Butler School of Music debuted their smartly crafted production of ‘Queenie Pie,’ the jazz genius’ only opera.
Before his death in 1974, Ellington and his collaborating librettist, Bettie McGettigan, never completed ‘Queenie Pie,’ which was originally intended to be a one-hour PBS special.
From the remaining manuscripts — which sometimes indicated merely a melody for what should have been a fully-fledged orchestrated song — UT music scholars Jeff Hellmer, John Mills and Robert DeSimone crafted together an finished version of ‘Queenie Pie’ as close as possible to what Ellington may have envisioned.
(Concert versions of the work have been done and last year Oakland Opera presented their extended, operatic version.)
Read more about their process.
The result? A snappy operatta cum nightclub revue that wonderfully showcased Ellington’s big band-era genius. No extraneous excesses of added material here. Instead, we arguably got pretty close to what Ellington and McGettigan intended ‘Queenie Pie’ to be.
This production also showcased an important collaboration between UT and Huston-Tillotson University, an historically black college across town from UT. DeSimone, director of UT’s opera studies and director of ‘Queenie Pie,’ tapped HTU choral studies professor Gloria Quinlan who in turn rallied her students to join the production. Quinlan is also a UT alum, another element of synergy to the collaboration.
For all the musical burnish in this re-imagined ‘Queenie Pie,’ the plot remains slim. Queenie Pie is a Harlem beautician — a character modeled after Madam C.J. Walker, an early 20th-century cosmetician whose hair straightening product helped make her one of the first African American millionaires — and the reigning champion of a local beauty contest. When her primacy is challenged by the young Cafe Olay, Queenie frets and fusses. In a vivid dream, Queenie Pie finds love in the arms of the king of a magical island — a way out of her previous life.
But the UT creative team smartly didn’t try to overwrite or add to what Ellington and McGettigan left behind, patchy as the plot may be. Instead, this iteration ‘Queenie Pie’ played like a two-act, 75-minute revue, songs strong together with a little bit of narrated plot or dialogue in between and singers and big band presented as if the stage of UT’s McCullough Theatre were that of a Harlem jazz club.
And really, who needed a fleshed out plot when Ellington’s music did it all?
In their arrangements, Hellmer and Mills seamlessly filled out Ellington’s sound. And Hellmer led a crackerjack student big band (culled from UT’s jazz program) who sat behind glittering marquee stands on stage and delivered the punching, swinging rhythms with plenty of brio.
Although special guest, noted jazz singer Carmen Bradford, as Queenie Pie, ddin’t get her chance to impress until the second act, she wowed immediately with impeccable phrasing and pure panache. No wonder Count Bassie plucked her to sing with his orchestra when she was just a teen.
Soprano Morgan Gale Beckford, a UT student, stunned as the sassy Cafe Olay, with a voice clear, polished and full of confident character.
An energetic chorus of UT and HTU students flashed through their song and dance. And Michaele Hite’s 1920s period costumes dazzled, especially the women’s extravagant hats.
Somewhere, the Duke, has reason to be honored that his ‘Queenie Pie’ has gotten her proper moment on the stage.
‘Queenie Pie’ continues at 8 p.m. Friday and 7 p.m. Sunday at McCullough Theatre, UT campus. See www.music.utexas.edu for ticket information.
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Long Center, and other projects, nets architecture prize
The Long Center for the Performing Arts netted a 2009 AIA Austin Honor Award Saturday night from the Austin chapter of the American Institute for Architects.
Design architects Nelsen Partners Architects and lead designer Stan Haas were honored.
I sent my design love to the Long Center last year in a review shorty after it opened. A year later, I still think the Long Center is one of the smartest additions to our built landscape.
AA-S photo.
Also among the 14 winners of an AIA design award this year was “Ultimate Pulse,” the temporary public art project by Legge Lewis Legge architects that lit up First Night Austin 2008 with 1000 LED flashlight discs.
“Ultimate Pulse.” Image courtesy Legge Lewis Legge.
And Miro Rivera Architects won for their very sculptural public restroom on the north side of the Town Lake Hike and Bike Trail.
AA-S photo.
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Review: ‘Let Me Down Easy’
In most reporting, a quotation is a punctuation point. A fantastic quote is the example of a character or the pudding where we find proof, but most of the writing in a story, the underlying argument, is still the reporter’s. Sometimes there are quotes that just need room to breathe, though. “Let Me Down Easy” is all breath.
Playwright and performer Anna Deavere Smith draws from hundreds of interviews, presenting a handful of them in verbatim excerpts.
Smith brings “Let Me Down Easy” to Austin’s Zach Theatre on her last stop before the play opens Off-Broadway at New York’s Second Stage Theater this fall.
The characters range from Lance Armstrong to a cancer patient and her mother from Midland to the dean of Stanford University School of Medicine. Not all have a personal or professional relationship with cancer, but each has something to say on the subject of mortality.
That includes Smith herself. In the opening speech, and the only one where she’s present as more than an unseen and unheard interviewer, Smith talks with New Yorker theatre critic John Lahr about the motivations behind “Let Me Down.”
Unsurprisingly, as Smith and Lahr point out that she hides within and between her characters, they’re the least dramatically compelling minutes of the production. Lahr reappears several times to offer some sort of advice or academic perspective. The meta-approach and critical dialog feels fussy, but also crucial to the overall project. While Smith is interviewing the subjects, the audience is asked to interrogate the work.
There’s heart, though, as well. Smith’s interpretation of some characters, like evangelist Hazel Meritt talking about her deceased daughter, have all the force of emotional body checks. Others, like a rodeo bull rider from Idaho, abound with confident humor.
Still others, like our former Texas governor Ann Richards, sparkle on the round stage, interacting with the real native Texans. All highlight Smith’s ability to shift, mercurially but precisely, from one human being to the next. And that’s impressive — sometimes stunningly so — but alone it wouldn’t matter.
The thought is as essential as the feeling. It’s the combination of Smith as mimic, reporter and curator of all these personalities that makes “Let Me Down Easy” work. Each sentimental moment is balanced by one weighing public policy ideals against reality, celebrities are compared to just folks, and bitter resignation is matched with an embrace.
Smith says the play is always changing based on past productions and future interviews, so the end result won’t stay the same. This group of characters is worth a visit, but I don’t think there’s an answer hidden in “Let Me Down Easy” — just people and lines of thought that are more or less appealing. And that’s ideal. Smith has laid out the evidence in an engaging collection. The audience can now ask the questions.
(“Let Me Down Easy” continues Tuesdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 and 7 p.m. through May 10 at Zach Theatre, 1510 Toomey Rd. $15-$65. 476-0541, www.zachtheatre.org.)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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Monday morning report: No perfect storm
Last year, the convergence of the Austin Lyric Opera at the Long Center and the Reggae Festival on Auditorium Shores caused what Long Center leaders dubbed “a perfect storm” of traffic congestion.
In April 2008, the 1,200-space city-owned Palmer Events Center garage - which serves the Palmer and Long centers - filled up with reggae festival attendees by mid-afternoon. By the time evening rolled around, those with tickets to the Austin Lyric Opera, the garage was full and the area around South First Street, Riverside Drive and Barton Springs Road was gridlocked.
Not so this past Saturday night. Parking in the Long Center garage (which is operated by the Austin Convention Center, not the Long Center) was reserved for opera patrons. Reggae Festival goers were directed to the nearby city-owned One American Center.
Yes, the area was crowded. And with a hot rod car show in town and construction along Riverside Drive, there was plenty of traffic. But that traffic flowed and tempers didn’t flare like last year.
In fact, on the Long Center’s City Terrace some opera patrons were even seen grooving to the reggae beats that floated over from Auditorium Shores. Maybe we can all get along…
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