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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > September > 21
Monday, September 21, 2009
Review: Austin Symphony Orchestra’s season opening concert
Friday night at the Long Center the Austin Symphony Orchestra opened its 99th season with a concert featuring music by Mozart and Ravel.
Yet there was little sense of occasion that evening. (For most regional arts organization, a 99th season is a milestone.)
No public greeting or acknowledgment of the orchestra’s impending centenary. No usual beginning-of-the-season curtain speech by an official or a board leader welcoming the orchestra’s loyal audience and thanking patrons.
That silent treatment Friday night was all the more noticeable given the recent dust-up at the orchestra.
Reports emerged Aug. 31 that newly hired orchestra executive director Galen Wixson had suddenly been fired. Callers to the orchestra’s office were told that Wixson no longer worked there and he was scrubbed from the symphony’s Web site. The next day, orchestra musicians sent a protest letter to the board asking for explanation of Wixson’s disappearance.
More than a week later, board officials offered their explanation. The orchestra’s long-time legal counsel assisted in “facilitating the resolution” of “creative differences between the Austin Symphony Orchestra Society and Mr. Wixson.”
Just six months after he was hired to great fanfare, Wixson was gone.
The chill of those events seems to linger. What musical verve and artistic emotion there was to the Friday’s concert came from guest artists Leon Fleisher and Katherine Jacobson Fleisher.
With its jazzy rhythms and harmonies, Ravel’s Piano Concerto in D major for the Left Hand is a dramatic rocket ride that Fleisher — who himself spent nearly 40 years limited to the use of left hand after a neurological disorder affected his right hand — played with uncommon flair and vibrancy. The most stunning aspect of the Ravel is that by just listening to it, you would never know it’s scored for just one hand. But Ravel’s genius — and Fleisher’s virtuosity — makes for one of the best piano concertos in the repertoire.
After intermission, Fleisher was joined by his wife Jacobson Fleisher in a delightful, spirited performance of a two piano version of Mozart’s Concerto in F Major.
But the concert opener — Mozart’s Symphony No. 31”Paris” — felt perfunctory and dry, not spirited, buoyant and colorful as this popular Mozart symphony should be. The concert’s final piece Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole managed some verve and spirit if only because the rollicking Rapsodie is impossible, even in a dark mood, to resist.
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Review: ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee’
In an age of spellcheck, it might seem the spelling bee would become an anachronism, a relic of an era when remembering rules about putting an “I” before an “e” mattered.
The musical “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” which opened Saturday at Zach Theatre, emphatically announces spelling bees’ pitting of competitive youngsters against one another remains relevant—at least for a source of comedy.
Under the direction of Zach artistic director Dave Steakley, the musical’s cast and some very game audience participants string together joke after joke. The endless comedy eventually becomes the production’s only downfall: with so many one-liners, inevitably some fall flat in the two-hour performance.
Rachel Sheinkin’s Tony Award-winning book and William Finn’s music and lyrics for “Putnam County” follow a stereotypical band of six young spellers (played by adults) as they vie to be champion speller. There is last year’s winner Boy Scout Chip Tolentino (Andrew Cannata) and the earnest girl-next-door Olive Ostrovsky (Lucy Jennings).
Long before any of the children win the spelling crown, constantly sniffling William Barfee almost steals the show. As Barfee, Jose Villarreal physically created a disgustingly snotty, but oddly charming boy who spells with the help of his “Magic Foot.” Villarreal brings incredible commitment to his portrayal of the zany nerd by perfecting a stuffy-nosed lip/nostril snarl that becomes one of Barfee’s iconic gestures.
While the children characters center the show, no spelling bee would be complete without a smarmy vice-principal played by Austin’s frequent comedic showman Les McGehee. McGehee’s responses to the children’s requests to use the spelling words in a sentences elicited rolls of laughter from the audience. For instance, for the word “fandango,” McGehee quotes Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody, “Scaramouche, scaramouche will you do the fandango.” McGehee’s commentator sidekick is realtor Rona Lisa Peretti (Jill Blackwood), for whom winning the County’s 3rd Annual Spelling Bee was a lifetime achievement.
Michael Raiford’s set design of, as the children call it, the “cafatorium,” the odd merge of auditorium and cafeteria particular to elementary schools, hilariously frames the show. The onstage band, directed by Adam Roberts who also served as choreographer, had the best and, probably from their perspective, the worst of Susan Branch Towne’s costumes — cafeteria uniforms complete with hairnets
‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee’ continues 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sunday through Oct. 25. www.zachtheatre.org
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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Tonight: Early Roman tale told in 1960s-set film
It’s “Mad Men” meets Roman myth in Eve Sussman’s breathtaking, extravagant 80-minute art video, “The Rape of the Sabine Women.”
Conceived as something of a dialogue-less visual opera, “The Rape of the Sabine Women” is a video musical reinterpretation of the legend of the founding of Rome, in particular the episode in which the first generation of Roman men acquires wives by force from the neighboring tribe of Sabine.
Arthouse screens the movie for free tonight at the Paramount Theatre. Sussman will be on hand for a talk afterwards
‘Eve Sussman: The Rape of the Sabine Women,’ a film screening and artist talk
When: 7 p.m. Monday
Where: Paramount Theatre, 713 Congress Ave.
Tickets: Free
Information: www.arthousetexas.org
Sussman — a Brooklyn-based video artist and art-world favorite — has updated the mythic tale by transporting it to a trendy, hyper-polished 1960s midcentury modern setting. In Sussman’s Rome, the warriors are slim suit-wearing James Bond types while the Sabines are stylishly coiffed women in large sunglasses and Jackie Onassis-style dresses.
Arthouse presents the video in a free screening Monday night at the Paramount Theatre. Sussman will be on hand for a post-screening Q-and-A.
Sussman took as her launching point the artistic interpretations of the Sabine tale as it was rendered memorably in paintings by Nicolas Poussin, Peter Paul Rubens and Jacques-Louis David - especially David’s 1799 “Intervention of the Sabine Women.” But Sussman modernized the background of her artistic riff on the ancient tale. Shot against sleek settings in Berlin and also in Athens’ gritty Agora meat market and at a classic 1960s modernist dream house overlooking the Aegean Sea, the lavish production involved hundreds of actors that dramatize the painterly scenes.
A riveting score by Jonathan Bepler adds to the visually intense story and acts as a stand-in for any dialogue. Bepler recorded sounds live on site and also included an ensemble of bouzoukis (Greek stringed instruments) and a chorus of 800 voices.
Sussman’s extravagant retelling of the Sabine tale delivers viewers to a pleasant point just before sensory overload.
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Review: ‘bobraushcenbergamerica’
Robert Rauschenberg was an optimistic goof ball genius. That his more than half-century of art-making that profoundly changed the course of art-making sometimes obscures the sense of fun Rauschenberg brought to visual art.
Rauschenberg’s fun wasn’t lost on playwright Charles L. Mee in his unapologetically entertaining — and fun —“bobrauschenbergamerica’ now getting a spirited thoroughly entertaining production at St. Edward’s University directed by David M. Long.
Himself fond of crafting scripts from found texts just as Rauschenberg crafted art from found junk, Mee presents the ultimate collaged homage from one king of collage to another.
(Rauschenberg isn’t the first artist Mee has paid tribute to. The playwright has also celebrated Joseph Cornell in “Hotel Cassiopeia” along with Jason Rhoades and Norman Rockwell in “Under Construction.”)
With some 40 brief scenes that romp by in 70 minutes, ‘bobrauschenbergamerica’ is a hodge-podge, a rapid road trip through Americana, a sloppy mess even. It is Mee’s suggestion of what Rauschenberg might have come up with if Rauschenberg had been a playwright and as Mee has noted, that’s going for “the sheer exhilaration of living in a country where people make up their lives as they go.”
A man in a chicken suit descends from a rope. Three people ride bicycles across the stage. A young woman spends the duration of the show zooming around on roller skates in flouncy red skirt. Two men fall in love. A man slides down a waterslide that’s been slicked up with a giant martini. And there are picnics and chocolate cake and country line dancing and plenty of chicken jokes. (Rauschenberg loved chicken jokes.)
Theatrically it’s a mess and a jumble, and yet somehow it all comes together as irresistibly entertaining and a spot-on riff on Rauschenberg.
The young cast had the perfect energy to manage the manic parade of misfit American characters. Guest actress Babs George as Rauschenberg’s mother — daffy, ditzy (and perhaps deranged?) — is a 1950s housewife with a bland smile stuck on her face. But she deftly captures a most poignant, nuanced moment. ‘Art was never a part of our lives,’ she says in one of the few moments when Rauschenberg’s poor, fundamentalist Christian South Texas upbringing revealed.
That Rauschenberg went so far beyond where he came from is genius. Or maybe he never left who he was and where he came from at all.
Ordinary American detritus is beautiful. Juxtaposition forms beauty. Oddballs are in.
‘bobrauschenbergamerica’ continues 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday through Sept. 27. Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St Edward’s Univ., 3001 S. Congress Ave. 512-448-8484. www.stedwards.edu/theater
Photo: Babs George and Sarah Burhalter in ‘bobrauschenbergamerica.’ Photo by Bret Brookshire.
