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Reviews
November 8, 2009
Review: Chaddick Dance Theater's 'Freefall'
Cheryl Chaddick’s choreography spans a wide range of performance dynamics. In Friday night’s performance at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, the Chaddick Dance Theater presented an evening of mostly Chaddick’s work, including pieces that seemed made for an audience to watch and others that seemed more about dancers on introspective journeys.
Three musical works by The Lyric Quartet framed “Three for Violin,” the most presentational of the evening’s dances. The all-female cast’s smiles contributed to the sense that they relished the opportunity to spin and leap in their metallic, layered dresses, created by costumer Elizabeth Vowell. Dancer April Mackey centered the piece, performing a calm, but strong solo in the work’s second section.
Program closer “The Watchful Sleeping Heart” featured more somber choreography that suggested women on a never-ending journey. Projections shown as backdrop moved from desert sands to rocky mountains to drenched rain forests. Some of the most striking moments occurred when the dancers ran to the wall, their silhouettes etched into the photograph of expansive landscapes.
Chaddick’s quirkiest piece, “I’m Your Lullaby,” was a welcome respite from the more overtly dance pieces. Four characters, named in program notes as Teena “Teenie” Tahtas, Toni Grover, Nutmeg, and Chanteuse cavorted about the stage doing almost unison with shades of character layered on top. Tahtas and Chanteuse were more likely to flounce. Grover and Nutmeg (Chaddick as a rather convincing drug-addled hippie) were more likely to amble. The tiny variations on a theme were sometimes hilarious, sometimes fascinating.
The program also included Chaddick’s “The Gambit” and Cynthia Chaddick’s photographic montage “Faces and Images of India,”
‘Freefall’
8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through Nov. 21
Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Road
$12-$15
www.chaddickdancetheater.com
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November 6, 2009
Review: 'The Trojan Women'
Those left behind by war — women, children, civilians — are marginalized all over again by history, their experiences typically not the stuff of record.
That’s been true to for millennia. And in a smart re-imagining of Euripides’ ‘The Trojan Women’ by Meghan Kennedy and Kimber Lee. we’re reminded that the ravages of war dramatized in ancient Greece resonate with equal tragedy thousands of years later.
Produced by the University of Texas Department of Theatre & Dance and inventively staged by director Halena Kays, this edgy, visceral interpretation of the saga of the survivors of the Greeks’ 10-year war with Troy smartly updates the ancient story to read as a contemporary parable yet doesn’t forsake the classic drama.
Grimy, exhausted, bruised and their hair shorn, the Trojan women emerge from a smoky ruin and face their fate: to spend their lives as slaves and concubines to their Greek conquerors. (Scenic designer Peter Holtin and lighting designer Cheng-Wei Teng create a dark, ruined world of urban rubble. Music by Kevin O’Donnell, played by a quartet in formal wear, adds plenty of atmosphere.)
As the Trojan queen Hecuba, Kate deBuys is alternately beaten down and raw, the life scratched out of her, and then steely with the will to rebel. When she confronts Menelaus — played as swaggering corporate swell by Rodney Richardson — Hecuba unleashes her most powerful weapon: words. And in playwright Kennedy and Lee give Hecuba nuanced contemporary words that nevertheless deliver intelligent bite.
And the cause of this decade-long war and ensuing wreckage? As Helen of Troy Verity Branco is all classic Hollywood vixen with elbow-length gloves and coiffed long dark curls. Branco exudes sensuality. Bu she is also a modern queen resentful of how she’s been made a scapegoat for a war.
Here again, it’s that smart balance of modern psychology and sensibility blended nicely classic character and drama — a balance that makes this ‘Trojan Women’ a smart story for our times.
‘The Trojan Women’ continues through Nov. 8. www.texasperformingarts.org
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November 2, 2009
Review: 'Murder Ballad Murder Mystery'
It’s a not a spoiler to say that everyone dies by the end of ‘Murder Ballad Murder Mystery,’ a new musical play by Elizabeth Doss, a co-production of Vortex Repertory-Tutto Theatre Company.
Dying — well, murder — gets going from the get-go in this free-spirited if problematic production directed by Dustin Wills.
Doss, Wills and set designer Lisa Laratta place this wanna-be allegory in a stylized world that’s a kind of bayou/Southern gothic. Actors cavort in a shallow pool center stage or climb the sprawling platform structure that rings the center seating section. A motley four-piece bluegrass band strolls around, acting as clowns and chorus both. There’s a husband-killing tough ol’ gal, legendary murderer Stagger Lee, a Bonnie and Clyde-esque young couple and a pair of young backwoods sisters whose crashing boredom leads to — oh, take a guess.
The dead and the living, the past and the present, are intimately intwined in Doss and Wills’ Americana vaudeville-esque setting. And Mark Stewart and Andy Tindall’s twangy bluegrass music provides the aural atmosphere in the perpetually half-lit world. And the ensemble cast is full of energetic acting.
But with little linearity to it, ‘Murder Ballad Murder Mystery’ trades a little too much on atmosphere. Plenty is suggested and yes, quirky, delightful scenario after quirky, delightful scenario is unveiled and presented for our consideration.
But as imaginative as each of those scenarios are, they lack a kind of friction with each other. Never quite able to stick together, the individual pieces of ‘Murder Ballad Murder Myster’ just miss at being a whole.
‘Murder Ballad Murder Mystery’ continues through Nov. 7. www.tuttotheatre.org
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October 24, 2009
Review: 'Earthwork'
Where’s there a will, sometimes there is art.
Written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Chril Ordal, the delightfully quiet and quirky “Earthwork” recounts the true story of Kansas artist Stan Herd (deftly played by John Hawkes) who sets out to transform a junk-filled lot in New York into one of his lush fields of crop art.
Riffing off the abstract art installations introduced in 1960s by artists such as Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria, Herd combined the cerebral genre of conceptual earth art with his downhome upbringing on a Kansas farm to come up with his own take on the earth-shaping art genre.
Herd used plants and field crops which he carefully cultivated to create massive mostly figurative artworks that could really only be seen from the sky.
In an effort to get his work noticed outside his native Kansas - and to start monetizing his efforts — Herd journeyed to Big Apple in 1993 where he proposes to create one of his giant earthworks on property owned by Donald Trump.
After a decade of heated controversy, Trump won the rights to develop a strip of land along Manhattan’s Upper West Side and to appease his opposition, Trump offered to sponsor an art project on the property before construction started.
To win the commission, Herd offers to fund the project himself and just ask Trump for access to the site. But that means Herd must leverage the Kansas home he shares with his wife and child, risking everything for the chance to get his art seen.
Once in New York, Herd finds himself alone in his endeavor. But soon enough a passel of homeless men who live in nearby abandoned train tunnels takes an interest in Herd’s project and eventually becomes his earnest but motley crew of assistants.
A character piece more than anything else, Ordal’s compact film nicely avoids imposing any grandiose summations about Herd or his art work or even the nature of art itself.
Hawkes captures Herd’s unsophisticated yet headstrong character, delivering a convincing portrait of a man somewhat naive but nevertheless fiercly driven whose sheer force of will leads him on.
(Hawkes honed his acting chops right here in Austin’s theater community of the early and mid 1980s, most notably with “In the West” a critically-acclaimed collage of monologues inspired by the Richard Avedon’s photographic portraits of Westerners.)
Ruination may threaten Herd as he forges ahead with his most unlikely New York public art project. But like Voltaire’s Candide, he chooses to simply, and cheerfully, cultivate his own garden.
‘Earthwork’
Written and directed by Chril Ordal
USA, 98 minutes
Screenings: 6:30 p.m. Oct. 25 at Bullock Texas State History Museum, 1800 Congress Ave. 7:15 p.m. Oct. 27, Arbor Cinema, 9828 Great Hills Trail. Q-and-A with the director following each screening.
Image: John Hawkes as artist Stan Herd. Photo by Hometown Collaborations.
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October 22, 2009
Review: 'Spring Awakening'
There is a certain irony to the bright red “Mature Themes” warning on posters for the musical “Spring Awakening,” since the show illustrates how restricting knowledge about sexuality becomes dangerous for a group of adolescents in late nineteenth century Germany.
In Tuesday’s show at the Texas Performing Arts Center at the University of Texas, the national tour’s cast of “Spring Awakening” plumbed the depths of teenagers’ anger at adult-imposed conservatism. When the show turned from anger to wretched sorrow, a blanketing silence spread across Bass Concert Hall’s audience.
Following the path charted by rock musicals like “Rent,” “Spring Awakening” mixes high velocity rock and almost sappy emo music by pop star Duncan Sheik. Steven Sater’s book and lyrics, based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play of the same title, vacillates between celebrating the pleasure of screaming four-letter words in public places and critiquing the dismissal of children and adolescents as sentient, sexual beings. The show’s teenage characters often relish doing what is forbidden, but social strictures often mean they make these choices without full knowledge of the consequences.
The show asks much of relatively young actors, which could be a recipe for disaster given touring shows often uneven casts. But this ensemble stands up well against the Broadway version. As the central couple, Melchior and Wendla, Jake Epstein and Christy Altomare, give subtle performances. They approach Bill T. Jones’ choreography, a simple repetitive series of hand gestures, with smart shifts of character. When Wendla first does the tiny dance, standing on a chair at the musical’s beginning, Altomare manages to make it look as though someone else’s hands eerily caress her. At the height of his second act frustration, Epstein pulls off a similar, but differently inflected, sense of disembodiment. His hands furiously move across his body as though threatening to tear him apart.
Melchior and Wendla’s relationship, a friendship turned sexual, creates the musical’s through line, even as it explodes the show. In workshop versions of “Spring Awakening,” the creative team positioned the teens’ sex act as rape, but like the Broadway show, the touring version leaves their onstage copulation ambiguous around the question of consent. The directorial choice makes Wendla an ignorant bystander to her own sexuality. As the show progresses the one-time girl leader becomes another body to be shuffled about by adults. Yet Altamore’s piercing, sorrowful voice seems a reminder of the person within the body that becomes little more than a shameful symbol.
As the musical’s second couple, the bumbling Moritz (Taylor Trensch) and bohemian Ilse (Steffi D), depict teens pushed to society’s margins: Moritz because he fails in school and Else because she has to flee her father’s violent grip. As Moritz, Trensch is agonizingly sad, although his choice to make less of Moritz’s earlier comedic charm flattens the character’s emotional journey.
Although “Spring Awakening’s” controversy is usually tied to its frank look at adolescent sexuality, its greatest musical innovation might be its anchor in anger. Although the show closes with the unnecessary sappy “Purple Summer,” otherwise the ensemble comes together mainly to stomp their feet and scream—not sing major chords and hold hands. The show argues that singing together can do more than make us feel good. Sometimes it can unleash fury fueled by oppressive social mores. ‘Spring Awakening’ continues through Oct. 25. www.texasperformingarts.org
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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October 15, 2009
Review: 'Erin Curtis -- Perspective Threshold'
Everything about Erin Curtis’ solo show, ‘Perspective Threshold,’ now at Women & Their Work, is joyfully subversive.
Getting the boot? Two maxims of high modernism: ‘less is more’ and ‘ornament is crime.’
‘Says who?’ Curtis’ work declares.
And while modernist architectural icons figure as the subjects of her paintings — Eero Saarinen’s 1955 General Motors Technical Center, for example — Curtis eschews the restrained modernist palette and goes for crazy, intense colors, her use of acrylic paint adding to the artificiality of the hues.
Curtis’ paintings are giddy critiques. Yes, there’s a cool modernist building somewhere in each of these paintings. But those buildings are not entirely legible, drowned out by a riot of ornament. Planes of busy patterning and vivid decoration — historically dismissed as characteristics of folk art or traditional women’s art — disrupt the cool logic of three-point perspective. Nothing is fixed in place here and everything, especially the pictorial plane, is up for negotiation.
In one of the best recent uses of the sometimes awkward Women and Their Work gallery, Curtis moves her colorful critiques off the wall. Photographs of lush, green foliage are printed on immense swatches of billboard plastic fabric and draped overhead at the entrance to and in one corner of the exhibit. Nature — the plastic kind, that is — threatens to take over here.
And a playhouse-scale facade of a modernist house seems to bust out of one wall and invade several yards into the gallery. Step over the house’s threshold and inside you’ll see fake shadows painted on the interior wall, while cut-outs of Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Barcelona chairs occupy the mini room. Nothing real in here.
Outside the mini house, a pair of mini pool chairs surround a mini pool of flat blue sheet plastic. The mini chairs have an ideal view of a mini billboard that sports ‘Perspectivism,’ a cityscape writ in Curtis’ mishmash of flat planes and shapes that have been jiggered with a festive frenzy of stripes, flowers, diamonds and other patterns and thrown out of axonometric perspective.
Exuberant illusion undermines any expectations of order in Curtis’ universe.
So much for cool logic.
‘Erin Curtis: Perspective Threshold’
Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca St.
10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays through Nov. 18
www.womenandtheirwork.org
Image: ‘Backwaters’ Erin Curtis
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October 11, 2009
Review: 'Evil Dead, The Musical'
Move over “Rocky Horror.” “Evil Dead, The Musical” has come to town.
The campy musical, based on the 1981 film of the same name, opened Friday at Salvage Vanguard Theatre under the direction of Michael McKelvey. The sold-out show had opening night issues: malfunctioning microphones made some of the songs unintelligible over the live band. But even with the gaps, the show clipped along hilariously.
Like the movie, “Evil Dead The Musical,” follows five Michigan State college students as they try to make it through a night at a remote cabin surrounded by woods possessed by demon spirits.
Unlike the movie, “Evil Dead The Musical” parodies horror movie conventions, using goofy songs, one-liners, and physical gags to make fun of the characters’ misfortunes and idiotic choices. Somehow singing the ridiculous dialogue so familiar from horror movies transforms scenarios like deserted homes with only one escape routs and middle-of-the-night solo journeys into unknown woods into comedy.
Committed performances keep the constant humor fresh. David Gallagher plays the story’s hero Ash with over-the-top earnestness in even the most ridiculous predicaments. As Ash’s friends, Christopher Skillern, Kelly Bales, and Macey Mayfield played their characters’ stereotypes, frat boys and ditzy blondes, with laugh-grabbing excess. As Ash’s little sister Cheryl, Corley Pillsbury has a strong presence, even though her early zombie turn relegates her to performing most of the evening from underneath the stage. You can’t hide a good actor or a little sister gone zombie in the cellar forever.
Ginger Morris’s choreography brought the group together into odd, funny pairings, particularly in Ash and Scott’s tango “What the …?.”
The show is a whole lot of fun and looked to be even more entertaining for those brave enough to sit in the audience’s splatter section, where the show’s many gallons of fake blood first squirted, and then rained down from the stage.
‘Evil Dead, The Musical’ continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 5 p.m. Sundays through Oct. 31. Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Road, $12-$22 www.salvagevanguard.com
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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Review: Conspirare 'A Time for Life'
“Remember” the chorus breathed at the end of Robert Kyr’s ‘A Time for Life,’ a 90-minute piece for eight voices and a string trio.
Friday’s presentation at St. Louis Catholic Church was the second of four Conspirare performances of Kyr’s oratorio (it was premiered in 2007 by Portland, Oregon’s Cappella Romana).
Kyr plucked from myriad texts for his elegiac libretto. Native American prayers, Orthodox Church writings, portions of the Old Testament - it was all mixed together in an invocation for humankind to renew its commitment to the care of the planet.
Likewise, Kyr layered modalities that hinted at non-Western musical traditions as well as those from earlier eras of Western music in stunning blend. Wafts of medieval chants mixed with complex canons and contrapuntal harmonies or tender moments of sheer lyricism.
Conspirare director Craig Hella Johnson collaborated with Kyr (the composer was in town and offered pre-performance talks at each show) to stage ‘A Time for Life’ in the active manor Kyr intended. Tenor David Farwig walked slowly down the center aisle to the stage as the music began, pleading with us in quiet song to recall how the planet is dying. The other singers joined from the outer aisles before talking their places in front.
Farwig’s clear and present tenor commanded in his many prominent moments. Soprano Abigail Lennox deftly combined luscious tone with captivating drama.
The oratorio journeyed from dark and almost woeful to deeply thoughtful to an almost - though not entirely - celebratory end.
The Farwig proceed down the aisle followed be the remainder of the singers.
“Remember” they told us.
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October 5, 2009
Review: Ballet Austin
As the Austin City Limits Festival celebrated nineties bands like Pearl Jam in Zilker Park, down the road at the Long Center Ballet Austin also celebrated the nineties this weekend—the 1890s. Friday night the company proved its classical chops in “Swan Lake’s” second act, based on Russian greats Maurius Petipa and Lev Ivanov’s 1895 choreography, and artistic director Stephen Mills’ newest creation “The Firebird.”
In both ballets, the company’s women proved that to excel in classical ballet is to be able to transform into something more than human. As swan leader Odette, Ashley Lynn Gilfix remade her arms into delicate wings. Dancing the ballet’s central pas de deux, with Frank Shott as Prince Siegfried, Gilfix met the challenge, but both dancers seemed uncharacteristically anxious.
“Swan Lake’s” precise and demanding choreography leaves no place to hide less-than-stellar technique, and the corps dancing demands absolute unison movement. Ballet Austin’s sixteen swans performed with amazing synchronicity—quite a feat since the orchestra and dancers seemed like they were still testing out one another’s musicalities. The swans’ crispness made them seem worthy adversaries to evil sorcerer Von Rothbart (Christopher Swaim). As they battled him in the final moment, they seemed like a corps of swans who just might win.
“Swan Lake” and “Firebird” made an interesting program, in part because Mills’ striking use of asymmetry in “Firebird” sharply contrasted with Petipa and Ivanov’s absolute symmetry.
As the title character, Aara Krumpe was stunning. She has a perceptive ability to create angles with her body. Her chin has just the right thrust. Her eyes have just the right sharpness. As evil magician Kastchei, Edward Carr also made the most of the choreography’s clever shapes. Evil villains and beautiful birds: they are ballet’s winning combination no matter the century.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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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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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.
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September 19, 2009
Review: Cassatt String Quartet
Captivating and full of nuance, the Cassatt String Quartet delivered a mesmerizing concert that was very warmly received Thursday night at UT’s McCullough Theatre.
The New York-based ensemble was there to feature the Texas premiere of String Quartet No. 3 “Cassatt” by Austin composer, and UT professor, Dan Welcher, a piece they commissioned from Welcher.
The quartet did so with passion, extracting considerable affection from Welcher’s complex three-part composition. Welcher based the quartet on three paintings by American impressionist, and ensemble namesake, Mary Cassatt, reproductions of which shared the stage with the musician. (That the quartet, now entering its third decade, had asked Welcher to compose its first namesake piece is an honor.)
Welcher’s appropriately very impressionistic piece made delightful use of a recurring theme that wove through the three movements. Yet each movement had a distinct profile thanks to some clever musical quoting and riffing. Shades of Gounod’s “Faust” percolated up in the atmospheric second movement; Debussy in the melodic and melancholy third. Tone and mood ruled mightily - and delightfully — in Quartet No. 3.
(The Cassatt String Quartet recently released a CD on Naxos of all three of Welcher’s quartets.)
The Cassatt finished with a breathtakingly moving performance of Ravel’s String Quartet.
Perhaps what give the Cassat String Quartet its distinction is the distinctive presence each musicians brings to her instrument. Seamless as an ensemble, Nicole Johnson, Jennifer Leshnower, Michiko Oshima and Muneko Otani nevertheless offer rare individual clarity and appeal.
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September 15, 2009
Review: Rude Mechs' 'I've Never Been So Happy'
Once upon a time — long before it became fashionable for every artist interested in performance to dub his or her work ‘transmedia’ — the Rude Mechs were making this thing called theater. The Rudes used all kinds of things to make theater — video, lights, overhead projections, sounds, live music, recorded music, puppets, lots of fantastical props and costumes, audience involvement and yes, multi-talented performers who could act and sing and even do the kind of absurd physical movement the Rudes really like to do.
The Rudes are still using the same stuff they’ve been making theater with for 14 years in their latest project, ‘I’ve Never Been So Happy,’ now in a workshop production through Sept. 20. And while they may have dubbed part of the participatory extravaganza a ‘transmedia performance party,’ you can rest assured that what they deliver is just wonderful theater. (Um, the Rudes use of the ‘transmedia’ word is tongue-in-cheek, after all).
“I’ve Never Been So Happy” starts on the Off Center stage where six selections of the operetta — with words by Kirk Lynn and music by Peter Stopschinski — get their first staging. (Early portions were staged last season by the company and this summer at UT). The operetta’s fantasical episodic tale involves clashing notions of what the West means in the 21st century: Where’s the freedom to be an individual? What’s wrong with traditional gender politics? Is there really only one mountain lion left in all of Texas?
Whatever. “I’ve Never Been So Happy” is one big smart 21st-century theatrical valentine to the Lone Star State.
The quirky fairy tale at the root of the plot — a young couple from opposing families falls in love — only get quirkier as absurd subplots entwine (think feminist commune vs. real estate development, sibling dachsunds who can talk, etc.).
Reminiscent of the Grand Old Opry, or perhaps old Texas dance hall bands, musicians and performers take one-half the Off Center stage in Western garb and line up in straight-ahead style on platforms. They clutch mikes and belt out songs; they writhe with ridiculous character movements.
The other half of the stage is occupied by a giant screen onto which a mesmirizing shadow puppet show unfolds to provide the visual for the crazy tale of mountain lions and daschsunds and crazy characters. Crafted by Erin Meyer and Noel Gaulin, the visual storytelling rivets and effects in surprisingly emotional ways.
Stopschinski’s music rockets from shades of country twang to heavy metal to art song, all with elan and delight and with zero sense of irony.
After 45 minutes of this tender, funny, super-intelligent, super-odd story, the audience convenes outside where a dozen booths offer the weirdest Texas-themed attractions you’ll never see at the state fair. You can learn how to make rope, get a haircut, make a prank phone call to a Yankee, sing county ballads karoke style or have your picture taken in a cut-out of an infamous moment in Texas history (like the Kennedy Assassination).
The Rudes’ enlisted a passle of artists to collaborate with them on the realization of the carnival booths, all of which subtly continue the odd-ball Texas story you’ve just been watching on the stage.
Or maybe this: the carnival attractions are the tangential ideas that didn’t quite fit it into the final script but that were just too good to let slip away and not share with the audience. Then again, maybe they’re the ideas that will later bring this show or another show into clearer focus.
Or else the goof-ball fun the audience can have as they stroll around from crazy, whacky attraction to crazy, whacky attraction is the kind of unadulterated fun all participatory ‘transmedia’ theater should offer.
Here’s the difference between what the Rudes do and what so many of today’s transmedia performance strivers do: The Rudes make meaningful connections — with their audience, with the world around them and with the times in which they live.
Now, what’s wrong with having fun with that?
“I’ve Never Been So Happy” continues 8 p.m. Thursday-Sunday through Sept. 20 at the Off Center, 2211 Hidalgo St. $12-$21. www.rudemechs.com
Photos by Bret Brookshire.
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Review: 'Measure for Measure'
For centuries, scholars classified Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” as a comedy.
But the Bard’s tale of sexual morality, justice and hypocritical politics is too complex and ambiguous for easy laughs. Yes, it ends on a happy note. But its consideration of government control over private morality doesn’t make for a tidy tale.
In a new production now playing at the Long Center’s Rollins Studio Theater, Austin Shakespeare director Ann Ciccolella takes the play’s ambiguity and complexity out of its original Renaissance setting and reconsiders it against the backdrop of the 1920s American South — Savannah, Georgia in particular. Bawdy flappers and gentlemen in seersucker suits reign in this ‘Measure for Measure.’
After all, with Prohibition in effect and a double-standard toward drinking (and its related licentious behavior) practically official, the Roaring Twenties was an era riddled with moral contradictions.
Yet beyond the costumes, props and the sounds of ragtime and jazz that infuses between-scene moments (the music is courtesy of the Asylum Street Spankers), the 1920s Southern twist doesn’t have much of an over-arching effect on this production. Indeed, some Southern accents waver amongst the cast.
As the chaste Isabella — who must defy the hypocritical government to save her brother — Morgan Dover-Pearl never wavers in the intensity she brings to her super good-girl character. Matt Radford, as the Duke of the corrupt city, delivers with a seasoned polish. (Radford has had, after all, more than a decade’s professional experience performing Shakespeare in the U.K.)
If there’s an unevenness in this production it’s perhaps as much the problem of the play as this particular interpretation. The ribald, slapstick goofiness of the secondary brothel and street scenes remains in stark contrast to the serious — and very heavy — scenes the central story occupies. Indeed, that heaviness weighs this ‘Measure for Measure’ down just a bit too much.
‘Measure for Measure’ continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays through Sept. 27. Rollins Studio Theater, Long Center, 701 W. Riverside Dr. $23-$38. www.austinshakespeare.org
On Friday, Sept. 19, the music starts early when the Asylum Street Spankers will play live in a pre-show concert starting at 6:30 p.m.
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Review: Ballet Austin II's 'Peter and the Wolf'
Ballet Austin’s Associate Director Michelle Martin opened “Peter and the Wolf” with a brief Ballet 101 lesson, explaining to the crowd of children in the Austin Ventures Theatre Saturday that ballet is a non-verbal art.
Part of the fun of watching ballet with a room of kids is that they refuse non-verbal spectatorship. As the members of Ballet Austin II, the apprentice company for Ballet Austin, danced Stephen Mills’ choreography to music by Sergei Prokofiev spontaneous reviews popped out all over the theater.
As the duck, Gwenyth Kelley’s dedication to character — most apparent in her waddle — sent waves of chuckles through the pint-sized crowd. Peter (Calvin L. Thomas, Jr.) is the hero of the story and seemed to capture the children’s enthusiasm. Thomas is a clean, clear dancer, more than capable of the buoyancy often used to mark characters as childlike in ballet.
Preston Andrew Patterson danced the role of the Wolf well, but the role proved a bit too much for much of the audience, a rather young crowd since the ballet has been advertised for 2- to 8-year-olds. The Wolf’s appearances resulted in frightened faces and heads buried in parental laps. Several kids looked reassured after the show, when Patterson removed his Wolf head and, with the rest of the cast, greeted the departing children.
Even if the scare factor frightened the youngest fans, the show did seem to hold the kid’s attention. Including Martin’s introduction, the entire production clocks in at 50 minutes.
“Peter and the Wolf” continues 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.Austin Ventures Studio Theater, Ballet Austin, 510 W. Third St. $14. www.balletaustin.org
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance dance critic.
Photo by Tony Spielberg.
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September 14, 2009
Review: Making the trucks dance in 'The Trash Project'
Saturday night on a defunct airport runway shiny with rain, a bevy of trash trucks and a couple of dozen sanitation workers became dance stars in a spectacular and surprisingly moving performance created by Austin choreographer Allison Orr.
Though the torrential rains hampered goings-on across the Austin area this weekend, it didn’t deter Orr and her volunteers from the city of Austin’s Solid Waste Service Department from going ahead with “The Trash Project,” the massively-scaled performance more than a year in the making.
Nor did the weather deter a beyond-capacity audience from heading to the tarmac behind the film production facilities Austin Studios, the site of Austin’s former Mueller Airport.
In a career that’s included crafting choreography for fire fighters, dog walkers, Venetian gondoliers and other groups whose professions or avocations demand regular physical movement, it wasn’t surprising that Orr pulled off such a complex show went off in the rain.
What was surprising is how much like pure dance ‘Trash Project’ ultimately was. Orr delivered one of her most celebratory, thoughtful and emotionally resonant shows yet. Orr made trash trucks dance — and with feeling and drama.
Bleachers seating for 700 filled quickly and at least as many people stood to watch. Some clutched umbrellas; others sported rain ponchos and slickers. Everybody cheered, applauded and whooped, greeting each new wave of activity as trucks and workers maneuvered through 14 different movements.
Clad in neon yellow safety wear, the sanitation workers did what they do best: roll and load plastic trash carts, jump gazelle-like on and off the back of a rapidly moving trucks and drive with precision in carefully choreographed patterns.
With incredible respect, Orr translated everyday physical labor into cleverly patterned movement without a hint of unnecessary spectacle.
Like the most graceful of ballerinas on pointe shoes, a crane truck operated by Don Anderson glided through nimble moves, its mechanical claw slowly extending and retracting as it spun in near perfect unison with delicate piano music played by Austin composer Graham Reynolds.
At three separate intervals, the dead animal truck wove solo across the stage area as tender music and voiceover comments by driver Tony Dudley told anecdotes of his job such as retrieving deceased beloved childhood pets. After driving in complex patterns, a quartet of trucks with automated arms rollicked through some synchronized moves.
Reynolds, using a combination of pre-recorded music with some synthesized sound and a live piano trio, gave “The Trash Project” an inventive soundtrack that was at times joyously funky and at times touchingly melodic.
A cinematic musical flourish greeted the beginning as the 16 vehicles snaked in front of the audience. A segment of celebratory rap exalted recyling. And sweeper truck driver and professional musician Orange Jefferson treated with a blues harmonica solo.
That lighting director Stephen Pruitt managed to engagingly illuminate such a vast outside area seemed nearly miraculous. That Pruitt did so to great dramatic effect even more so.
But that a crowd of about 1500 could be riveted in the night rain as sanitation workers demonstrated their skill proves Orr’s most salient artistic message: Our daily labors often make the most meaningful art.
Read a story about the making of ‘The Trash Project’ here.
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August 17, 2009
Review: 'The Last Hippie'
The hippies hanging out at the Dairy Queen only look cool as long as you don’t talk to them. This is not the moral of Vincent Mann’s solo show, “The Last Hippie: A Western Novel,” but it could have been.
The play, at the Vortex through August 22, follows Mann’s bonding with San Antonio Dairy Queen hippies in 1974 rather than, as Mann seems to wish, a hippy fairy tale set in San Francisco in 1964. Mann never quite indicts the decade-late hippies he grew up with in San Antonio for being shallow. Instead, his mix of anecdotes of drug use and philosophizing clings to the past, but never offers much reason to rehearse the period.
Perhaps this stems from Mann’s philosophy of art. In a didactic epilogue, Mann tells his audience to avoid “looking for answers in art.” It is odd to receive such an instruction after sitting through a two-hour play focused on one man’s search for answers.
Directed by Pam Ramirez, Mann wanders around the stage, sometimes making creative use of props: an old bench transforms from teenage bed for drug-induced dreaming to a coffin for a drug-overdosed teen.
The show has a few gems of scenes. Mann’s description of his Colorado Springs country band becoming soundtrack to a bar fight paints a funny picture. Mann’s first experience getting high — he stage light actually brightens the first time he says “pot” — has rich details, too. He recalls sitting in a church pew, noticing the elder deacon next to him reeks of ham, an unfortunate coincidence for a fourteen-year-old churchgoer with raging munchies. But in many spots the play’s language is thin, overly generalized and tries far too hard to wring meaning from music lyrics.
Knowing laughter from pockets of the audience suggested the nostalgic trip might have more meaning for those who shared 1974 with Mann. But one audience member offered another telling response, pulling out his fingernail clippers during the play’s second half and clipping his nails through the remaining monologues.
‘The Last Hippie’ continues through Aug. 22 at the Vortex. See www.vortexrep.org. Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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August 14, 2009
Review: 'Wicked'
There can be so much pleasure when witches sing together. “Wicked” flew into Austin this week, riding not on broomsticks, but on the performances of two women: Heléne Yorke as Glinda the Good Witch and Marcie Dodd as Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. The Broadway hit, which runs at Bass Concert Hall until Aug. 30, has plenty of megamusicals’ bells and whistles, including a mechanical dragon and magic rain.
But wizardry does not give “Wicked” its heart, the intertwined voices of the leading female roles do.
“Wicked,” with lyrics music by Stephen Schwartz and book by Winnie Holzman, draws from Gregory Maguire’s novel of the same name. Like the book, the musical tells the backstory of the “Wizard of Oz.” How did Glinda become good and the Wicked Witch of the West became (supposedly) wicked?
Told by Glinda in a series of flashbacks, “Wicked” chronicles the two women’s adolescences, when green Elphaba and blonde Glinda fell on different sides of their school’s popularity divide.
Although the school story does recuperate Elphaba’s character, the resolution to the musical’s good versus bad question rests more in songs than story. In “For Good,” the song Elphaba and Glinda sing as their goodbye, the two trade a show full of alto/soprano harmonizing to hold the same final note together.
There’s the show’s answer to the good/evil question: good is what the women are when they are together, no matter what the world thinks of either of them. (And yes, as musical theater scholar Stacy Wolf has pointed out, “Wicked”’ flirts with queer — to use the word in a gay-positive way — romance.)
Joe Mantello and Wayne Cilento’s careful staging makes what could be a cartoonish world full of cartoonish characters full and funny. Glinda’s hilarious way of moving,her over-dramatic flop on her bed during “Popular,” for example, pointedly exaggerates her performance of pink hairbow-wearing femininity.
The bulbous curves and rich color palette of Susan Hilferty’s sculptural costumes add sumptuous layers of texture. The supporting cast of Marilyn Caskey as the girls’ teacher Madame Morrible, Tom McGowan as the Wizard and Colin Donnell as the girls’ mutual love interest Fiyero is excellent in purposely peripheral roles.
Sometimes musicals can feel too formulaic, but “Wicked” is a puzzle that feels good as it fits together.
‘Wicked’ continues through Aug. 30. See www.utpac.org/event/wicked for more information. Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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August 4, 2009
Review: 'Orestes' at the Off Center
“Orestes,” a new adaptation of Euripides’ classic Greek tragedy from writer and director Will Hollis Snider, takes the audience into a dark world where death rules and faith is questioned. If you’re looking for distraction from today’s troubles, you probably should stay home and watch an episode of “So You Think You Can Dance.” But if you’re soothed by the idea that people have long faced down tragedy, “Orestes” might prove to be a paradoxical kind of comfort.
“Orestes” takes place in a world already in ruin. The stage and floor are layered with fine dust, and chunks of concrete litter the edges of the space. The gods seem to have abandoned humankind, and the world is a chaotic placed steeped in tension and revenge.
As the action begins, a desperate Orestes (Gabriel Luna) pleads to the gods for help. Obeying a decree from Apollo, Orestes has just killed his mother Klytaimnestra (Karina Dominguez) to avenge the death of his father. Now Orestes finds himself questioning his faith in the gods as he is tormented by Furies (creepy heads on sticks) and put on trial for his actions by the Voice of the People (La Tasha Stephens). While the original version ends as Apollo returns to solve all the problems, this adaptation has an ambiguous ending that gives the play an even darker twist.
The cast works well as an ensemble and the actors strive to meet the challenge of the text. Luna plays Orestes with passion and stamina, but other performers fall into the trap of shouting as a way to show their intense emotions. The show opens at maximum intensity and stays relentless in its pace, at times leaving the audience wishing for more moments of variation.
What ultimately makes “Orestes” worth seeing is the way this contemporary adaptation focuses on the plight of a confused individual who questions the wisdom of having blind faith in anything — an eerily timely theme as Americans find their faith in higher institutions shaken to the very core.
(Claire Canavan is a freelance critic and writer for the American-Statesman.)
‘Orestes’ continues at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through Aug. 15 at The Off Center, 2211 Hidalgo St. $12-$15.
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July 31, 2009
Review: 'Sweeney Todd' by Summer Stock Austin
Early in the musical “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” Sweeney sings to the innocent sailor Anthony, “You are young. You will learn.”
Sweeney believes Anthony’s naivety will pass away with time, and he, too, will see the social depravity of their London home. The line rang a little different Thursday in the Long Center’s Rollins Theatre as Summer Stock Austin opened a week of performances.
Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney” is a difficult musical. It’s an almost sung-through opera and a dark comedy with complicated characters. Yet the local cast of high school and college students proved to be an able ensemble. They will learn more, but they have already learned a great deal.
Under the direction of Michael McKelvey, Summer Stock Austin is an annual affair, bringing together talented young actors for a month at St. Edwards University. (Zilker Theatre is a co-producer.) The group rehearses for three weeks, and then presents two shows. “Sweeney Todd” alternates with “Little Shop of Horrors” at the Rollins through Aug. 9.
Watching the show with the cast’s friends and families added warmth to Thursday night’s show. It was enjoyable to hear the clusters of audience members laugh as the cast member they came to see appeared with a fake beard or a wild wig. Many of “Sweeney’s” roles required the actors to play older characters. As Todd, Jacob Trussell captured the murderous barber’s entanglement of wrath and pain, especially in the show’s second half. Trussell also had a little Johnny Depp thrown in. Last year’s movie version of the musical definitely affected the production.
Kathleen Fletcher, performing as the hilarious Mrs. Lovett, best understood the range of the show’s emotions. She could move from cackle to sobriety within a single line of song. Fletcher also did an excellent job of blending movement and music. She drew tons of laughter from the audience with a fantastic rendering of the bemusing song “By the Sea.”
Lighting challenges often left the remainder of the cast in the dark — literally. Several other actors deserve note: as the couple in love (Anthony and Johanna), Ben Mayne and Mikayla Agrella, performed well, as did Nathan Brockett (Beadle), Reno Bostick (Toby), and Aaron Moten (Judge Turpin).
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July 25, 2009
Review: Jorge Caballero
Sometimes, some concerts just strike a note of perfection from the top.
Such was the case Friday night at the Mexican American Cultural Center ‘Strings, Rhythm and Lyrics’ featuring Peruvian guitarist Jorge Caballero along with violinist Maria Conti, cellist Douglas Harvey and mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Cass.
A combination of vivid programming and superb musicianship dovetailed to produce a sparkling concert that spotlighted Caballero smart and sensitive arrangements on an eclectic range of music.
Caballero’s version of Falla’s Danza from ‘La Vida Breve’ let the piece remain the virtuosic violin showpiece that is, but gave it lustrous color with a guitar accompaniment.
A charismatic performer, Cass brought charming emotion to Falla’s ‘Siete Canciones Populares Espanolas,’ an enchanting song cycle packed with melodic beauty and rhythmic energy that swooped through moods from tenderness to playfulness to nostalgia.
Caballero and Conti brought plenty of panache to Piazzolla’s ‘L’Historia du Tango,’ the composer’s musical telling of the tango from its earliest folk-inspired days to the modernist angles of nuevo tango.
Fronting the program was Jorge Morel’s ‘Rapsodia Latina’ a rich, striking composition for violin, cello and guitar with melodies that chased from instrument to instrument.
To finish the concert, Caballero paid tribute to his mother, noted Peruvian singer Maria Obregon, with instrumental arrangements of a trio of classic Latin American songs his mother recorded. It’s was a charming flourish to an utterly charming concert.
‘Strings, Rhythm and Lyrics’ continues at 7:30 p.m. Saturday. See www.austinclassicalguitar.org for more info.
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July 21, 2009
Review: 'Dear Fraility'
No one is normal in ‘Dear Fraility’ Arthur Simone’s oddly compelling darkly humorous one-man, multi-character show playing Fridays through August at Coldtowne Theater.
But it is nevertheless easy to sympathize with the eight not-normal characters Simone presents on Coldtowne’s miniscule stage no matter how absurd and grotesque the details of the lives may be. Perhaps that because Simone has carefully crafted each to be remotely believable. Forget the flat character parody. Instead, Simone delivers little jewel-like stories of strange but absorbing characters whose stories you want to hear.
There’s the barely recovered pyromaniac fresh from rehab, an old woman with nary a fond memory of the past, a man still suffering from the bullying he was victim to in his childhood and a single woman unlucky in love even if she doesn’t quite realize it.
With only minimal props, Simone performs each of their stories in short, neatly-paced monologues. And for good measure, Simone throws in a few absurdist presentations of his own, most humorously a rambling and ridiculous slide presentation on the future of capitalism. (The show clocks in a little less than one hour.)
The lanky Simone is something of a naturally jittery performer but that only gives his characters more of a manic edge that grabs the attention. What sets ‘Dear Fraility’ apart from most other monologue line-ups is the quality of Simone’s story-telling. There’s no ad-libbing or improv here. Rather, the writing has a tight, literary quality that unfolds thoughtfully.
Simone, one third of the trio of improvisational actors that founded Coldtowne Theater, delivers an odd odyssey that in the end remains sweet.
“Dear Fraility” continues at 9 p.m. on Fridays through Aug. 28 at Coldtowne Theater, Airport Blvd. www.coldtownetheater.com
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Review: 'Music Man,' parades into Zilker Park
It is the summer of music men from Gary, Indiana. While the world remains focused on Michael Jackson, Austin has shifted interest to another former Gary Indiana resident, Harold Hill. Hill is the central character in “The Music Man,” the annual summer musical from Zilker Park Theatre. On Sunday a dip in heat and an enthusiastic cast made ‘The Music Man’ one of Austin’s more enjoyable ways to spend time outside.
“The Music Man” follows Hill’s invasion of sleepy River City, Iowa. Zilker’s staging, from director Rod Caspers, displays Hill’s ability to enliven the complacent town. Hill may not bring them musical know-how, but he can give them heart. Casper builds kinetically charged crowd scenes, well constructed for Zilker’s large amphitheater. Even if seated far in the back, you’ll be able to follow the musical thanks to snappy gestures that create tiny snapshots amongst a sea of people. Upbeat choreography by Judy Thompson-Price helps keeps the long musical (three hours) from growing tedious.
Hill is a demanding role: a mesmerizing Pied Piper who barely leaves the stage. As Hill, Eric Ferguson dos not quite have the pizzazz the seductive character needs, but Ferguson carries the gargantuan role serviceably. Kara Bliss, as librarian love interest Marian Paroo, also lacks shine when singing. She does construct Paroo’s guarded, but caring sensibility through details that build throughout the show. Scott Shipman as Mayor Shinn, Emily Bem as the mayor’s wife, and Christina Gilmore as Mrs. Paroo have smaller, but sharper performances.
Among the cast’s many adorable children, Ben Roberts as the endearing, lisping Winthrop Paroo is a standout. Musical performances, led by music director and conductor Austin Haller, work well, particularly the men’s quartet, whose voices seemed to float up the hillside, courtesy of rare Austin summer breezes.
‘The Music Man’ continues at 8:30 Thursdays-Sundays through Aug. 15. Sheffield Hillside Theater, Zilker Park. Free ($3 parking). www.zilker.org.
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June 29, 2009
Review: Chamber Music Fest, Weekend One
Cool.
It’s how the Austin Chamber Music Festival unfolded its first weekend with a trio of eclectic concerts: Modern classical guitar, a string quartet’s Grammy Award-winning riff on jazz great John Coltrane and the indie stylings of the genre-busting Tin Hat Trio.
Friday, the Brasil Guitar Duo — a concert co-sponsored by the Austin Classical Guitar Society — made an impressive, virtuosic program seem effortless in front of a full house at Northwest Hills United Methodist Church. With extraordinary technique rising young international starts Joao Luiz and Douglas Lora moved fluently from Bach (with Luiz’s arrangements) to Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s to Lora’s own sparkling compositions. Drama came with Gismonti’s “Don Quixote,” an alluring rich composition from the contemporary Brazilian composer.
Saturday night at UT’s Bates Recital Hall, the festival shifted mood. The Turtle Island String Quartet won a Grammy for their CD “A Love Supreme: The Legacy of John Coltrane.” And no wonder. The quartet’s inspired interpretations of a wide range of jazz repertoire - Coltrane, yes, but also Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke — proved the foursome has not only the courage but the soul and the chops to channel the jazz legacy with freshness and authenticity. No schmaltzy pops stylings here — these are jazz musicians. And the improvisational finesse of David Balakrishnan, Mark Summer, Mads Tolling and Jeremy Kittel percolated with complexity and originality.
Sunday night, the Chamber Music Festival boldly went to a venue no chamber music group has been before — the Continental Club. About 200 people filled the storied South Congress Avenue rock club to hear Tin Hat Trio, the San Francisco-based group that blends blues, jazz, tango, classical and little cabaret into its own blend. Theirs is the kind of genre-defying music that signals the direction younger musicians are taking chamber music - blending it seamlessly with other genres and busting out of the formal concert hall. Tin Hat Trio made a bold but much welcome (and needed) choice for inclusion on a chamber music festival program.
You have to wonder when the last time people were handed a program when they walked into the Continental Club. And when was the last time the Austin Chamber Music Center music crowd ordered drinks during a concert? Both were refreshing sights.
However blame it on the current wilting heat wave or perhaps some awkward technical sound problems, but Tin Hat Trio didn’t quite deliver much energy Sunday. Ethereal to point of being atmospheric, they skittered around the music more than they seemed to arrive with it. The unusual combination of colors from the combo guitar, a soulful violin and an assortment of clarinets intrigued, but felt more like a tease than a show.
The Austin Chamber Music Festival continues through July 11. See www.austinchambermusic.org for more information.
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June 22, 2009
Review: Blue Lapis Light's 'Impermanence'
Dancers repelling off tall downtown buildings, bursting through showers of creatively manipulated light. Or dancers floating on zip lines far overhead the Austin streetscape.
The site-specific aerial dances created by Austin choreographer Sally Jacques have always traded on spectacle — chiefly the spectacular marvel of performers doing dramatic stunts which are then framed with a lot of visual and aural artifice — even if those spectacles haven’t always charted deep artistic trajectories.
But unfortunately, in ‘Impermanence,’ Jacques latest work and the third created for the J. J. Jake Pickle Federal Building in downtown Austin, the spectacle never quite makes an appearance.
Having dancers harnessed to repelling gear or maneuvering on suspended aerial silks ultimately leads to a self-limiting movement vocabulary. After all, there’s only so many things a body can do when it’s tied up or wrapped up. And if those handful of moves or poses — striking an arabesque of sorts after pushing back from a building, a slow fluttering of arms, or twisting and hanging from an aeriel slik — are just strung together tentatively or repeated repetitively, there’s little dramatic build-up and certainly no sense of an artistic journey.
That’s certainly the case with ‘Impermance.’ The limited moves churned in repetition with no trajectory established and little sense of transition. The dark, modernist building — usually a palette that lighting designer Jason Amato leverages to great effect — seemed to swallow up, not show off the dancers. And the episodes of movement seemed little connected to each other.
In the end, the formula Jacques’s relied before — the spectacle of dramatic movement and stunning lighting — just didn’t return this summer to the Pickle Federal Building.
‘Impermanence’ continues at 9:15 p.m. Thursday-Sunday. www.bluelapislight.org.
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June 21, 2009
Review: 'Tango on the Terrace'
Tango set a sophisticated tone for Austin Chamber Music Center’s kick-off concert Friday night for its annual summer festival.
Beautifully played by a five-piece ensemble led by ACMC artistic director Michelle Schumann and featuring Grammy-winning bandoneonist Raul Jaurena, the virtuoustic hour-long program of Astor Piazzolla’s urbane and expressive nuevo tango exemplified the smart, forward-thinking turn this chamber festival has taken since Schumann took the helm.
Regarded as one of the world’s most prominent bandoneonists — and a musician who can claim a direct link to Piazzolla before the great composer’s death in 1992 — Jaurena’s masterful playing exemplified tango’s schizophrenic tones and moods. Nervous and edgy, lusty and full-bodied, mournful and nostalgic — Jaurena wrested it out of an instrument that has one the most compellingly unique voices.
Schumann and the ensemble — Korine Fujiwara on violin, Russ Scanlon on electric guitar and Chris Maresh on bass — made spotless work of Piazzolla’s charging rhythms, twisting harmonies and jumpy use of counterpoint. In tango, every instrument can be used as percussion, with string players not just using pizzacato plucking, but making the distinctive ‘chicharra’ sound produced from scraping the strings. Those are tricky techniques that can sound inauthentic in some hands, but both Fujiwara and Maresh pulled it off with aplomb.
Jaurena and the ensemble poured a breathtaking level of energy and passion into the seamless program and that energy flowed off the stage. The audience — a packed house in the intimate auditorium of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center — began the rousing cheers about half-way into the concert that were soon joined by ovations.
Nothing like starting a sizzling three-week line-up of concerts with a sizzle.
The Austin Chamber Music Festival continues through July 11. See www.austinchambermusic.org for information.
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June 16, 2009
Review: 'Big Range Dance Festival'
The Big Range Festival ended its two-week Austin stint with a grab bag of modern dance. Saturday’s program at Ballet Austin’s Austin Ventures studio was uneven. Big Range mixes local dance pieces with groups from other cities.
One of the more exciting offerings on Saturday’s program came from Brooklyn. “Supplant,” choreographed by Jamal Jackson, blended West African and modern dance in a collage of fury and fire. Dancers Tiffani Harris, Meredith Moore, Asha Rhodes and Jackson brought intensity and speed to their performances. When they all fell to the floor with a resounding echo at work’s end the audience let out a collective breath and immediately applauded.
The program’s other out-of-town group, Dallas-based Muscle Memory Dance Theatre, had a similar drive to their dancing, although choreographer Lesley Snelson-Figueroa’s creation had a relatively simplistic structure to it. Two groups of women faced off, using portable green picket fences as movable dividing lines. The movement of the fences got rather clunky and repetitive, but the dancing held the piece together well.
Simple choices worked well elsewhere. Local choreographer Sharon Marroquin danced with ease and grace in a parable-esque story of a fisherman who loves to fish, and then learns from his fish.
Festival producer Ellen Bartel’s Spank Dance continued in the quirky vein Bartel seems to be making her signature. With video by Eliot Haynes and a punk-lite score by Adam Sultan, five dancers cavorted about wearing then discarding baroque wigs and skirts. While the tone of the piece felt defiant and suggested a possible political critique, the various elements never quite added up . The program also included Cheryl Chaddick’s earnest “The Watchful Sleeping Heart” and “Cycle I,” an excerpt from Andrea Ariel’s ongoing Gyre project, which premieres its next installment in August.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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June 14, 2009
Review: Gilbert & Sullivan Society's 'Iolanthe'
“All hail the influential fairy” might be the best line of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society’s production of “Iolanthe,” which opened Friday at Travis High School’s Performing Arts Center.
The members of the society, led by stage director and choreographer Ralph MacPhail, Jr., and music director and conductor Jeffrey Jones-Ragona, dedicate themselves with gusto and humor to one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s less often produced operettas. “Iolanthe” chronicles the follies that ensue when the English lady Phyllis (Meredith Ruduski) falls in love with Strephon (Derek Smootz) a shepherd, who, unbeknownst to Phyllis, is half fairy, half man.
The story, like many Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, relies on a several twisting plot lines, most of which reveal the group of all female fairies and the all male peers (members of the upper-class British House of Lords) to be equally befuddled beings. I won’t give away “Iolanthe’s” moment of resolution, but the stage picture it creates makes sitting through the almost three-hour production worthwhile.
Gilbert and Sullivan lovers usually cite “Iolanthe” as some of Sullivan’s best music. Several performers brought lovely voices to the Gilbert’s speedy lyrics, which have to be sung almost too fast for projected subtitles to keep pace. As the intensely rigid Private Willis Russell Gregory nearly steals the show. Queen of the fairies Lisa Alexander, Earl of Mountararat David Fontenont, and Lord Chancellor Arthur DiBianca were among the show’s standout voices. Fontenont and DiBianca, with Andrew Fleming as Earl Tolloller had one of the better-staged and funniest scenes, trotting and skipping to the song “If You Go In.” The production continues through June 21.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
‘Iolanthe’ continues 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday. For more information www.gilbertsullivan.org.
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June 13, 2009
Review: 'Big Range Dance Festival'
Big Range Austin is a dance festival, but Thursday’s two Big Range performances at Austin Ventures Studio were as much about music as they were dance.
The first program “Composer Challenge” paired musicians and choreographers with mixed results. Of the six pieces, only Jayne King’s “Threshold” and Ben Schave and Caitlin Reilly’s “Tickets, Please!” thoughtfully engaged with their musical accompaniment. The evening’s second program, a combination of improvised music and dance, was inventive and playful.
Part of the problem with “Composer Challenge” might have been its premise. Two composers, Austin Schell and Laura Phelan, each created a piece. Each work was assigned to three different choreographers, who then made three separate pieces. For the audience, this meant sitting through the same musical composition three times within an hour, a tedious task.
Also, neither musical work had a great deal of dynamic shifts. Since most of the choreographers chose to make dance that corresponded to the music, rather than challenging the music’s tempo or tone, dance and music grew monotonous together. King made the fullest embrace of the music, using the repetition in Schell’s “3 Stages of Oblivion” to make a dance about the utility—even pleasure—of repetitive tasks. A large video, projected for the entire piece, focused closely on a slowly rocking wooden chair. First, King sat in a similar chair, also rocking, and then she lay on her back and circled her legs as if bicycling. Then she stood, gripped a bike tire and started to spin, letting the wheel’s weight and inertia pull her round and round, recalling the hours of fun such mundane tasks provided during childhood summers.
Performing as klutzy clowns, Schave and Reilly treated Phelan’s “Swings and Arrows” as background music. Not really a deep choice, but a functional one. Other pieces on the program included works by Rhianon Renae Kjar, Ashley Parker Overton with assistance from her dancers, Deidre Russell Robinson and Shawn Nasralla.
Musician Adam Sultan opened the second show by quickly setting a playful tone. Improvisation performances often offer a chance to watch the subtleties that emerge as dancers and musicians play—play with how weight settles into their bodies, how an instrument sounds when touched in a bizarre way, or what sound happens when a person throws herself into an object. Even when I don’t know what’s going on, I know I’m being asked to open my mind to experience a room and a group of people.
The thirty-minute jam of six dancers and two musicians, Sultan and Thomas van der Brook, felt hypnotic and comedic by turns. In a late solo, Chell Garcia Trias’s joints seemed to melt as she moved. Mari Akita had a quirky sensibility that also separated her from the group. Several performers used improv to point to theatrical conventions often left unmarked. Sultan ran into the audience, producing rhythmic squeaks as he jumped on the theatre’s stairs. As two dancers crawled to the side of the stage, they called to someone in the wings, “Yoo hoo!” The improvisation felt full of clever joy.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
The Big Range Dance Festival continues through Sunday. See www.bigrangeaustin.org.
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June 11, 2009
Review: 'Love, Janis'
Janis Joplin’s colored sunglasses and uncombed hair are icons of 1960s rock. “Love, Janis,” playing at Zach Scott through July 12, relies heavily on audience’s familiarity with Joplin, but the musical also avoids the trap of superficiality icons offer. The musical does not tell the story of Joplin’s life as a tragedy. “Love, Janis” celebrates Joplin’s voice and performance style: big, wild, and oh, so pleasurable.
“Love, Janis” follows the now familiar formula of jukebox musicals: well-known popular songs interspersed with short scenes stringing together a sparse storyline. Randal Myler created the musical from the book of the same name by Joplin’s younger sister Laura. The book and musical draw exclusively from Joplin’s letters written to her family in Port Arthur, Texas, and press interviews. These materials merge into a musical for two versions of Janis, one who sings and speaks (Mary Bridget Davies) and one who delivers much of the letters turned monologues (Sydney Andrews).
In Wednesday’s performance, much credit for the musical’s depth goes to Davies, who seemed a bit too Texas cheerleader to channel Joplin in early scenes, but then her voice took over. Davies has a sensually gravelly voice in early numbers and elsewhere perfectly mimics Joplin’s sultry mumble in opening song lyrics. Davies also manages to create a full character transformation for Joplin through subtle vocal shifts over the course of the two-hour show. Early on, she is a howler, but by the end her singing has turned to a lullaby, comforting the sadness and anger lurking within the drug-addled Joplin.
Andrews, too, finds nuance in Joplin by these closing moments, having traveled from enthusiastic teen to unsatisfied, lonely star. Davies alternates in the role of singing Janis with Andra Mitrovich, who I saw a week earlier in a show that ended early due to technical problems. Creating Joplin, Mitrovich makes a woman who’s plenty beatnik, but has a stronger Texas outsider quality to her.
For fans of Joplin’s music, “Love, Janis” provides layers of context, particularly around Joplin’s debt to black female performers. Hearing Joplin talk about her love of Bessie Smith brings out “Down on Me’s” blues. Later, after Joplin calls Aretha Franklin the best voice of 1968, I heard “Me and Bobby McGee” anew, recognizing the R&B vocals in Kris Kristofferson’s country melodies.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
“Love, Janis” continues 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays through July 12 at Zach Theatre. $20-$52. www.zachtheatre.org.
Photo by Kirk R. Tuck.
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June 7, 2009
Review: 'KIller Joe'
Posters for Capital T Theatre’s production of “Killer Joe” at Hyde Park Theatre bill the play as a “very dark comedy.” In this case, there is truth in marketing. The company, led by director Mark Pickell, never shies from any of playwright Tracy Letts’s deeply unsettling writing. Nuanced, convincing performances from the cast and clear directing choices don’t allow the play’s comedy to overwhelm the gravity of its violence.
“Killer Joe” is a trailer park family drama, focused on the Smith family. The set, a trailer co-designed by Pickell and Tommy Grubbs, captures the family in detail: broken and lacking any order. Every time the family’s likeable, but inept father Ansel (Joe Reynolds) sits on the couch, he pulls dirty kitchen utensils from the cushions. When sassy, trampy stepmother Sharla (Katie DeBuys) serves dinner, the woven paper plate holders barely make it to the table in one piece. Pieces fall as Sharla walks.
The love between older brother Chris (Joey Hood) and mentally disabled Dottie (Melissa Recalde) seems the family’s only hope. Recalde aptly creates and manipulates Dottie’s robotic shell to reveal her as the family’s wise woman. The Smiths quickly entangle themselves in a web of bad choices. They hire contract murderer “Killer Joe” (Kenneth Wayne Bradley) and then put him on “retainer,” not with money, but with Dottie’s sexual companionship. It’s difficult to tell more of the plot without revealing the play’s secrets, but as Chris puts it late in the play “arrangements just kind of broke funny.”
The most uncomfortable of these broken arrangements is Joe’s relationship to the play’s women. He begins his romance with Dottie, coaxing her into sex by sending her back to memories of being a twelve-year old. Where softly disturbing silences characterize Joe elsewhere, with Sharla his sexual abuse is explosive and degrading.
Reynolds and DeBuys have the most opportunity to contrast the play’s violence against its comedy. Ansel’s inability to do anything right is reiterated with humor and detail. My favorite: As he exits with several beers in hand, we hear him drop several and curse offstage. DeBuys manages to convey subtext through only screams in the play’s most violent scenes, shifting from horror and fear to self-absorption.
‘Killer Joe’ continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through June 27. Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St. $15-$25. www.capitalt.org.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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June 1, 2009
Revlew: 'Faster Than the Speed of Light'
“Faster Than the Speed of Light” is billed as new sci-fi, multi-media musical about robots, love, and chaos. It comes off more as a live-action music video for a Bowie/”Blade Runner” concept album love child. It’s catchy, but nonsensical, and fun and occasionally emotional, but with the ephemera of pop.
Brilliant scientist Atom attempts to create the perfect life for himself in the form of robotic domestic bliss. What comes out are two sides of himself, Chaos and Serena. Both want him, for ominous or romantic reasons, and he must choose.
At least, that’s my reconstructed gist of the story. More like an opera than a traditional musical, “Faster” eschews dialogue for music. Unlike an opera, there aren’t notes providing back story and the songs favor capturing the sense of a moment over its plot points. It’s all exciting energy and little clear exposition.
That said, the music, created by producers and lead actors Stanley Roy and Jeremy Roye, is almost enough to push the play forward. Combined with a sci-fi shabby set design and costume aesthetic ripped from a dystopian American Apparel shoot, the music sets a tone that can range from the uncanny to the sentimental. Drawing from a palette rich enough to include stripped down drum, bass and vocal arrangements or piled on with electropop, cello, bassoon, and ukulele, the accompanying album might be a necessary purchase just to satisfy the inevitable earworm.
Ultimately it’s not quite enough to make the experience of the production itself last. The second half, which centers more on Serena’s lost love than the frenetic, mindless followers of Chaos, gets an emotional hook through the presence of a lovelorn and talented Kathleen Fletcher. But by that time it’s hard stay involved with the world of Atom, played by a sometimes off-pitch Roye, and Chaos, played by a permanently leering Roy. Throughout, though, the play is buoyed by Clock. Mute, sentimental, and comic, Clock is assistant to Atom and the latest in a line of Andrew Varenhorst’s standout (and varied) side roles in rock musicals.
A lot of the right elements are in place for “Faster.” It just doesn’t gel well into a final product. The story could be interesting, but the broad strokes push it towards inaccessibility and ridiculousness. The songs could punctuate climactic moments, but they stand alone. And there are hooks to show, but they’re in the music, not on the stage.
(“Faster Than the Speed of Light” continues Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m. through June 13 at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Rd. $12. 474-7886, fasterthanthespeedoflight.org.)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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Review: 'If There Is A Heaven'
Toni Bravo and Diana Huckaby the creators of “If there is a Heaven …, Though shalt not pollute!” chose well when they picked the Umlauf Sculpture Garden for their performance last weekend. The garden’s mix of art and nature invites dance. Swirling pathways and small and large artworks create a kinetic overlay of lines and shapes.
While the garden offered a lovely performance site, the work lacked thematic linkages, even though it circled back several times to environmental themes. In individual moments, the political message was clear: honor the earth. But how the dances—twelve in all, most choreographed by Bravo—added up to homage to the Earth was unclear.
The audience walked through the garden led a large coffin hoisted high by four men, a clanging cowbell, and somber drums. The pieces had a variety of tones. Some were comedic: “The Jesters” had a vaudevillian acrobatic flair all the way down to the dancers’ striped socks, and “The Explorers” had a jungle theme, complete with stuffed monkeys hanging from the trees. (Why add a silly prop to an already lush landscape?)
Some of the more successful individual works were more somber. “Mother Earth’s Angel,” danced by Chika Aluka, drew strength from its central sculpture, a huge, single bird’s wing. In the first half of “The Warriors,” choreographed by Anu Naimpally, dancer Annelize Machado demonstrated how bodies and sculpture make beautiful shapes, not just by hitting positions, but by sending energy out along extended lines.
But moments of depth never became more than moments. And important social messages never became more than didacticism.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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May 27, 2009
Review: Audio Inversions' 'Meditations and Homage'
Austin indie classical music group Audio Inversions paid a smart homage Friday night at the Long Center to one of their inspiring sources, the late American composer Lou Harrison — a pioneer in the use of world musical influences, new instruments. inventive textures that yet never lost track of a deeply felt lyricism and delightful tonality.
The winner of the third Audio Inversions composition competition? ‘Lou’ by Balinder Singh Sekhon, a short piece for percussion ensemble of regular and irregular instruments (including flower pots, brake drums and metal pipes) and amplified cello, written as tribute to Harrison.
And ‘Lou’ was a fitting tribute: percolating with offbeat character, filled with world music references that were honest and not hamfisted (as such reference so often can be) and a delightful challenge to the cellist Benjamin Westney who didn’t so much touch a bow as strummed and picked. ‘Lou’ rocketed along, sometimes almost threatening to collapse under its own rhythmic cacophony. But it recovered and ended with an energy-packed flourish.
Sekhon received Audio Inversions $750 prize money along with the premiere performance.
‘Lou’ made a fitting to finale to solidly conceived program of new classical music, a keen mix of brand new works and two masterful song clusters by Henryk Gorecki.
Both the captivating Gorecki vocal pieces — ‘Three Lullabies’ and ‘Szeroka Woda’ — got a luminous treatment from the unaccompanied vocal quintet (Jeb Mueller, Amanda Lundy, Jimmy Shepard, Meredith Bowden and Caitlin Anderson-Patters) and seemed to grab the audience in a thrall of hushed awe.
James Norman’s ‘Incline, O Maiden’ was a brilliant mini-opera enchantingly sung by mezzo-soprano Misha Penton. Using text from Goethe’s Faust, Norman — who is composer-in-residence with Audio Inversions — gave us a jewel-like monodrama modern in its stylings and packed with both visceral drama and ethereal sounds. Short, dramatically direct, modern — is ‘Incline, O Maiden’ the anti-Wagner opera? Perhaps.
Audio Inversions stirred up entries from more than 100 composers for this year’s composition contest. And in addition to performing the Sekhon’s winning entry, the group also premiered Delvyn Case’s ‘Gemini Variations,’ the competition’s honorable mention and a short, spirited if still immature piece for two saxophones.
Audio Inversions does it right. Taking matters into their own hands, they advocate for the progression of classical music by just doing it — supporting new compositions, framing new classical music in approachable terms and making it happen. Kudos.
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May 26, 2009
Review: 'The Long Now'
The Long Now” combines the sweet, sentimental morality of fairy tales, the “Twilight Zone’s” twists and sense of the uncanny, and one frightening puppet. And it works.
As Tish explains from the start, she has a special friend. Her friend, though, appears at first to be of the imaginary sort—a grotesque personification of Time. But Time and Tish have a real arrangement. When she needs to, Tish can travel back to moments in her life, experiencing them like a fortunate addict, ad nauseum and without diminishing returns. And in Tish’s life, filled with the quiet horror of daily mundanities and well-meaning, nosy office mates, the past looks more and more appealing.
Soon it becomes clear that Tish is an addict, Time is a pusher, and the one-sided arrangement is based on the fear of revealing too much of the past rather than reveling in it. The metaphor’s moral — live in the now instead of hoarding it for the future — could be trite if it stopped there. Fortunately, director and writer Beth Burns doesn’t let it. Unfortunately, because it’s so rare that new theatre includes this much suspense and this many deft turns, I don’t want to say more and ruin the story.
Instead, I’d like to celebrate the execution of it. Time is embodied in a grandfather clock shadow puppet with a hobgoblin moon face to give Hieronymus Bosch nightmares. Designed by Jesse Kingsley, the paper puppets emit a sinister susurrus as Time moves and startling snaps when the character about-faces into the scrim.
The rest of the humans, though, are what gives the story its context: Tish is surrounded by people living normal lives. Her boss, played by Heath Thompson, and coworker, Anne Hulsman, offer subdued, natural performances. They initially feel underwhelming on stage. In reality they’re about pitch perfect, grounding the story in reality. Likewise, boyfriend Larry, played by Mason Stewart, is often enjoyably eager, almost going too far, until you realize his place in the larger fantasy.
Tish, played with success across a spectrum of ages, senses, and moods by Shannon Grounds, is the heart. Grounds ranges from the sinking addict, nodding off into a fantasy or scrabbling at her chest just to feel one new sensation, to a child with all her natural wonder to the wounded adult trying to move forward. Each adds a new layer to Tish, and all are affecting.
That’s the real success of “Long Now.” Burns has mixed fairy tale, relationship drama, and mystery into one constantly counter-balancing, turning story. She weaves together first dates with fantastical bargains and humanity with magic. It’s not perfect, but, as the story goes, life often isn’t. This moment, however, is well worth revisiting.
“The Long Now” continues Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m. at The Blue Theater, 926 Springdale Rd., $15-$25. 927-118, brownpapertickets.com
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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May 18, 2009
Review: 'Oceana'
Vortex Theatre lives underwater for the next few weeks. The new musical “Oceana” created by Bonnie Cullum and Content Love Knowles floods the East Austin theatre space through June 6.
Through movement by Cullum, and design, Jason Amato’s lights and Ann Marie Gordon’s, the production does an excellent job of fully embracing another world. The parable-esque musical has worthwhile messages to send: the sea deserves care and protection. But the story unfolding inside the elaborate world gets murky at times.
The young girl (Betsy McCann) sent on a grand tour of the ocean by god Olokun (Gabriel Maldonado). He hopes she will be the one to save the ocean from destruction. She hopes to survive. But she eventually lets go, letting the water and its many spirits in.
Two groups guide the girl: merpeople who catapult through “Oceana’s” sea with the help of aerial equipment and an operatic doo-wop trio, who sometimes offer explanation. A magical seal (Katherine Craft) forges the deepest connection with the girl, but it is unclear why. The seal says the girl once saved her life, but that story-shifting event escaped me, making “Oceana’s” climax confusing.
The girl also meets a series of goddesses. Hindu goddess Lakshmi (Kira Parra) eventually helps the girl discover desires bigger than her individual needs. Parra has one of the show’s best voices. Karina Dominguez as Pele, Hawaiian deity of earth and volcanoes, is another performance standout.
Pele also has more opportunity to grow into a full character. Most of the spirit presences have one significant scene and otherwise perform with the ensemble. Meeting each goddess so briefly robs the figures of time to make the traditions from which they are borne specific or deep.
“Oceana” continues at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Sundays through June 6. Vortex Theater, 2307 Manor Road. $10-$30. www.vortexrep.org.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
Image: Rachel Martsolf and Jonathan Blackwell as The Mer in ‘Oceana.’ Photo by Tony Spielberg.
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Review: Austin Symphony Orchestra's make Mahler mighty
Austin Symphony Orchestra left the audience — and itself — breathless Friday night after its performance of Gustav Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony, the final concert of the orchestra’s subscription series.
Have we ever seen so many musicians on the stage of the Long Center’s Dell Hall? With Mahler’s massive work requiring additional musicians to the orchestra’s line-up and the 110-member Conspirare Symphonic Choir upstage, the musicians, in particular the string sections, spilled out past the proscenium.
This mighty mob of musicians was up to the monumental task Mahler’s emotional — and technical — rollercoaster of a symphony, as was conductor Peter Bay. (Conspirare conductor Craigh Hella Johnson prepared the choir.)
From the opening tremor of the bass lines to the massive chorale finale, Bay kept a tight reign. And the musicians respond with focus and energy.
Mostly importantly, Bay kept the musical integrity of each movement in tact, balancing the first movement’s motion between edgy tensions and soulful emotions while letting the second movement sound ethereal and nostalgic. The scherzo starts with a surprisingly sunny theme that’s then contrasted against bold fanfares before spinning seemingly out of control. But Bay kept Mahler’s musical madness in check while accentuating its complexity.
We’re almost exhausted by Mahler’s mood shifts by the time we get to the massive fifth movement. But it’s in the fifth movment that the whole package arrives and Bay and the musicians delivered it with gusto.
Having the violins well in front of the proscenium in Dell Hall, though, meant they didn’t always project as well and were sometimes overshadowed by the winds and brass. And while soprano Linda Mabbs and mezzo Susan Platts performed nicely, and both had lovely tone, they too perhaps suffered from being past the proscenium and somewhat subdued.
Next season, ASO and Conspirare will collaborate again, this time on Cary Ratcliff’s oratorio ‘Ode to Common Things’ based on the poems by Pablo Neruda. Let’s hear it for such musical partnerships.
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May 13, 2009
Review: 'Rent'
A round of cheers greeted “Rent’s” fantastic drag queen Angel (Justin Johnston) when she sashayed forward wearing her signature Ms. Santa Claus red fur and striped tights.
Although the touring version of the Broadway show has stopped in Austin before, it’s likely that most of the audience at Bass Concert Hall Tuesday for the show’s opening know “Rent” from its 2005 movie version or the popular cast album. But when singing alone to “”La Vie Boheme” at home, there’s no one to scream with and no way to simulate the thrill of watching a drag queen leap onto a table while wearing four-inch heels. Seeing the musical back onstage made a few aspects stand out.
“Rent” uses its entire space well, opening up a tiny, marginalized world—a bohemian fantasy of New York’s Alphabet City neighborhood just before 1990s gentrification. Marlies Yearby’s choreography finds the clean lines within Paul Clay’s cluttered but sculptured set. The ensemble’s placement around the stage, even just a well-timed group lean, underscores how this diverse community of many races, genders, and sexualities works together.
“Rent’s” final scene, as drug addict Mimi wakes from near death is incongruous with “Rent’s” more progressive politics. Lighting designer Blake Burba makes the moment even more evangelical by sending a huge stream of bright white light onto Mimi’s face. When she awakes, she tells everyone that she saw Angel and he told her to come back to her boyfriend Roger. Why does the straight, HIV-positive woman get to choose life — is even guided back to life by Angel — and the HIV-positive gay man is doomed to death?
Johnston’s Angel was one of several characters that re-invigorate this version of “Rent.” As awkward filmmaker Mark, Anthony Rapp (an original from “Rent’s” 1996 premiere) fretted with a combination of earnestness and fear that makes Mark endearing, particularly when Rapp closed his fists and eyes while belting “What You Own,” with Adam Pascal, another “Rent” original cast member who plays depressed musician Roger. As Joanne half of “Rent’s” lesbian couple, Haneefah Wood worked choreographic details to fashion her character as uptight, but practical. Wood and Rapp’s comfort together made their “Tango Maureen” a first act hit.
‘Rent’ continues ay 8 p.m. through Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Sunday at the. Bass Concert Hall, UT campus. $18-$60. www.utpac.org
Clare Croft is American-Statesman freelance critic.
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May 11, 2009
Review: Ballet Austin's 'Cinderella'
In Ballet Austin’s “Cinderella,” the shoe fit well enough. The company’s revival of artistic director Stephen Mills’ 1997 ballet has the expected elements: a beautiful Fairy Godmother, a happy couple, and a pumpkin-turned carriage pulled by adorable pint-sized dragonflies. But Friday at Dell Hall, the ballet did little to exceed expectations. The story was confusing, especially around the stepsisters, and the dancing seemed hesitant.
Mills’ “Cinderella” relies heavily on the guidance of the Fairy Godmother, the sparkling Aara Krumpe. With Cinderella (Allisyn Paino) and, later, the Prince (Frank Schott) Krumpe is a dancing guide. In pairs the dancers sweep back and forth as the Fairy Godmother pulls the young lovers toward each other through dance.
Other choreographic choices didn’t feed the story as well. The stepsisters (Anne Marie Melendez and Jamie Lynn Witts) contrast little with Cinderella. It’s an odd case: good dancing undercuts the ballet’s story. Then the stepsisters don’t come to the ball as stepsisters, but as princesses, indistinguishable from the other two princesses (Rebecca Johnson and Beth Terwilleger).
In princess variations, Johnson, Terwilleger, and Witts displayed precision. The incorporation of the ball guests into the main pas de deux was another choreographic high point in Act II. The Austin Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Peter Bay, buoyed all of the dancing.
Paino, best known for funnier performances like Kate in Mills’ “Taming of the Shrew” showed a softer side as Cinderella. Her acting, so compelling as midnight pulled her away from the Prince, will be missed when she retires after the weekend run.
Often Friday’s dancing looked anxious. In a dream sequence where the Fairy Godmother shows Cinderella her future, Johnson and Christopher Swaim struggled. Paino and Schott fulfilled the dream’s promise, also struggling in lifts as they reprised the duet at the ballet’s close.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance dance critic.
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May 4, 2009
Review: Peter Bay conducts Dan Welcher's Fifth Symphony with flair
Finally — on the eve of its centenary — the Austin Symphony Orchestra made a gesture this past weekend that actually gave the organization somewhat of a timely and relevant burnish as a resident of the ‘Live Capital Music of the World.’
The orchestra premiered Dan Welcher’s Fifth Symphony, arguably the first time in living memory — or ever? — that ASO has premiered a symphony by an Austin-based composer.
And what a heartfelt musical gesture on Welcher’s part from: His Fifth Symphony was written for his good friend of three decades, ASO conductor Peter Bay who conducted it with brio, sincerity and passion.
There was no doubt that at least some in the audience Friday night found such a premiere thrilling with Welcher receiving heartfelt cheers and a very considered standing ovation.
Such a reception was deserved. Welcher’s Fifth is a 21st-century symphony for Austin: urbane, expressive, filled with touches of whimsy and expansively American in its artistic references.
Welcher’s far too mature of a composer to have quoted directly from his American composer predecessors. But the past century of American music percolated intelligently and originally throughout: A bluesy riff, syncopated rhythms, bold percussive turns, vigorous melodies and confident brass chorales balanced against moody swirls of woodwinds.
Most delightful was the second movement, Scherzo. In it, Welcher produced the most sophisticated musical impression yet of Austin’s famed colony of Mexican free-tail bats which fill the city’s evening skies. The woodwind melody, altering in its harmonic modes, skittered into a great cloud that was then countered by blasts from the brass section.
A more reflective and melodic third movement crossed seamlessly into the final fourth movement in which everything — the swirling woodwinds, the brass chorales, the driving rhythms, the bluesy riffs — built into a brilliant burst that ended with a bright flourish. A perfect ending.
But after intermission, the evening seemed to diverge into a totally different mode - not necessarily a bad divergence, just a marked one.
Star violinist Sarah Chang delivered every inch of star performance of Bruch’s Violin Concerto No 1. (interestingly the same piece the now 28-year-old phenom played for her audition at Julliard when she was a mere six-year-old).
Chang made the Bruch rhapsodic, giving it lyricism even though the piece does little to hide its profile as a soloist’s showpiece. Though her assertive virtuosity was at sometimes odds with the orchestra’s less propulsive thrust, Chang brought on an expressive voice.
Then the program’s mood shifted again with Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien, a lively piece full of 19th-century colloquial character that the orchestra clearly relished.
If anything, this weekend’s program, while noteworthy, revealed ASO’s greater disconnect from the very musical culture of its place and time.
Little if anything was done by the ASO management to specifically market Welcher’s piece to Austin audiences. It shouldn’t have had to share the limelight with a celebrated soloist.
And that strategy is curious, because a premiere by an Austin composer would have been an obvious means for ASO to connect with potential new and younger Austin audiences who wouldn’t normally connect with most of the symphonic repertoire ASO typically offers.
In fact, Welcher’s commission fee was paid for not by ASO, but by an independent consortium of private donors in a fundraising drive spearheaded by non-profit classical music radio station KMFA-FM. Welcher gifted his symphony to ASO in honor of his good friend Bay.
What a wonderful gesture — one that Bay, no stranger to open and forward-thinking programming, took up with honor.
It leaves to wonder how much ASO management has invested in what noted music scholar Joseph Horowitz, author of “Classical Music in America,” identifies as the over-esteemed “culture of performance” — a value system that holds above everything else celebrated soloists playing a very Eurocentric, or at least very typical and expected, classical repertoire. Where’s the confidence in the symphonic music being created here and now?
Would that ASO’s management reconsider its connection to its place in a music capital so much of the world already esteems for its progressiveness.
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Review: 'Grub' and 'Geisha' at Fusebox
Choreographers often overlook the possibilities offered by the mouth when making a dance. In Angelle Hebert and Phillip Kraft’s “Grub,” Portland, Oregon ensemble tEEth — part the Fusebox Festival — leaves no inch of their mouths unexplored. One dancer sticks a finger in the mouth of another and leads her forward. One dancer uses his mouth to remove tape from the floor, pulling it up with his teeth, partially eating it, and then spitting it back out. Repeatedly dancers gesture grotesquely with their tongues.
“Grub,” a Fusebox commission, was the later (and better) portion of Fusebox’s Friday night line-up at Salvage Vanguard. The earlier program, the LeeSaar The Company’s “Geisha” felt disconnected and empty. LeeSaar will return to Fusebox next year with a piece they began work on during their Fusebox/ testperformancetest residency.
Part of “Grub’s” intensity grew from the sense that the dance, while set beforehand, was also an onstage exploration. The performers’ sense of curious, playful investigation spilled into the audience, who laughed as “Grub” got stranger and stranger.
Several handheld cameras enhanced “Grub’s” invitation to bodily invasion. In some sections, dancers turned the cameras on themselves and what they filmed appeared simultaneously on two onstage screens, offering the audience the option of the dancing person or the filmed images.
The projections felt most powerful in moments of paradox, when the onscreen image brought the audience closer to the performer than the actual dancing body could. After disrobing from the white, space-age costumes all the dancers wore, one woman rolled on the floor in a filmy white dress. The camera captured mere inches of her body, sometimes focusing on her eyes— wide in anguish— or her massaging of patches of skin into the black dance floor.
The almost sad solo stood out in “Grub” because most of the piece took a comedic route. In a late quartet, two women sang a repetitious “La La La,” as their male partners first barely brushed or poked them. The partnering grew more physical, but the women insistently continued their chant even as the men flipped them upside down or over their backs.
Repetition produced meaning (and hilarity) in “Grub,” but “Geisha’s” repetitious, undulating choreography never took root in an emotion or tone. The piece featured three people, a topless man and woman (company co-founder Saar Harari and Jye-Hwei Lin) and Lee Sher, the company’s other founder.
Lin often danced alone in silence or with Harari. Their endlessly circulating movement was always sensual, sometimes sexual. The appearance of a bare-breasted Asian woman (Lin was born in Taiwan and moved to the U.S. in 2001) begged for connection to the piece’s title, though any connection seemed elusive at best.
The only other discernible marker of Asian or Asian American references might be the red silk robe that Sher wore in several humorous, Celine Dion-esque musical interludes. But, again, one robe, readily available at Macy’s, doesn’t add up to much. Not much in “Geisha” did.
While “Geisha” felt like a bust, LeeSaar is one of the dance companies getting the most buzz today. Thanks to Fusebox for plugging Austin into an exciting performance scene yet again. Some risks are worth taking.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance dance critic.
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May 3, 2009
Revew: UT Symphony Orchestra
Whoever had the idea of raising the pit in Bass Concert Hall and putting the entire University of Texas Symphony Orchestra on the apron out in front of the proscenium deserves a Wall Street-style bonus. This seating plan transformed Saturday night’s special concert honoring School of Music patron Sarah and Ernest Butler from another concert in Bass (renovated or not) into the best-sounding live performance by a symphony orchestra that these ears can remember.
The stage of Bates Recital Hall (the UT Symphony’s usual hangout) and the hall as a whole are too small to hold a large instrumental ensemble happily. Saturday night in Bass, the players had the physical room and their instruments had the acoustical room to speak properly. Every note (and every mistake) could not have been clearer, but the marvelous blend that conductor Gerhardt Zimmermann has built with his orchestra was audible in a dramatically new way. I heard the kind of presence and detail combined with an expansive, nicely reverberant room sound that I thought only those fancy Dutch recording engineers get using about 80 microphones.
But a great hall or a great setup don’t make a dumb performance into a great one. What we heard in Bass Saturday evening, quite precisely, was what wonderful work Zimmermann has been doing at UT, where before we only sort of got the idea.
Neither piece on the program — the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with student soloist Soo Jin Nam and the Beethoven Symphony no. 9 with a solo quartet of young professionals and the massed UT choruses (excellently trained by John Len Wiles)—was note-perfect. And I could quibble about some of Zimmermann’s interpretive choices (Beethoven wrote only F’s for the timpani in the second movement; don’t add stuff at the end). But Zimmermann’s interpretation made sense, it honored the piece that Beethoven wrote and he made the whole performance totally persuasive.
This is not the first time that a conductor who is an artist and a seasoned professional has led a talented and enthusiastic student orchestra (with an expanse of rehearsal time thrown in that most professional orchestras would kill for) and produced thrilling results. But those results happened in Bass Concert Hall on Saturday in a big way.
One more thing. I generally don’t like talking from the stage at music concerts; but Zimmermann’s spoken introduction to the Beethoven, witty and revelatory, was as valuable as the performance that followed it.
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April 30, 2009
Review: Forced Entertainment's 'Spectacular' at Fusebox
The spectacle in “Spectacular” is all imaginary. It’s the stuff of a show that characters only talk about, never perform. Instead, on a stripped down stage, armed only with a microphone, a few spot lights, and a skeleton-painted sweat suit, Forced Entertainment operates purely in the theatre of the mind.
“Spectacular” consists of 90 minutes of an actor in a skeleton suit discussing the show he’d normally be putting on, occasionally interrupted by an actress’ prolonged death scene.
For starters, Robin Arthur would usually enter, following a lengthy warm-up act, down a long staircase to take center stage, a frightening, provocative appearance, he says. Instead, Arthur presents an affable, pot-bellied professional in sagging sweats, simply conversing with the audience about his doubts, desires, and, of course, this other spectacular show.
For her part, Claire Marshall’s death is protracted enough to make even Shakespeare’s Bottom grimace at the liberties taken and imaginary guts spilled—but only because she’s done him one better. Ranging from comedically large spasms to quiet, gasping shudders, Marshall’s death is an odd counter-point to Arthur’s quiet musings.
And, thankfully, that’s the show: a monologue exploring the technique of theatre, the emotions it provokes—the mental—all mashed up with not just the visceral, but mimed viscera. Both levels are compelling alone. Arthur is provocative in asking questions, entertaining in his role as a death’s head jester, and, when he describes what the audience’s reactions usually are, emotionally and hypnotically affecting. Marshall explodes one of theatre’s oldest gags to its fullest, for both laughs and, mirroring her often striking contortions, pain.
It’s when the two combine that they make you grateful this is the show you’re seeing, not some extravaganza with dancers and a house band. Whether that’s Arthur critiquing Marshall’s performance or simply standing over her, a seemingly leering skull next to a dead body, together the two can prompt the heartiest laughs or chilling goosebumps. The swings, though deftly accomplished, between both tones and often-competing focus points can be draining, but that only adds to the overall experience.
With the Fuse Box Festival drawing to an end, be thankful it was able to draw the company from the UK. More importantly, make sure not to miss it.
(“Spectacular” continues Thursday and Friday at 7 p.m. at the Long Center, 701 W. Riverside Dr. $15. 512-524-2041, fuseboxfestival.com.)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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April 28, 2009
Review: Graham Reynolds and Carrie Fountain give us a new kind of art song
Composer Graham Reynolds and poet Carrie Fountain delivered a totally Texas 21st-century remake on the classic art song with “Between Steel and Stardust (Songs of Texas Women)” which premiered Sunday at UT’s Butler School of Music.
UT vocal professor Darlene Wiley, wanting new repertoire for young singers — in particular new selections of high school singers to sing in UIL competitions — commissioned Reynolds for the song cycle. And Reynolds in turn tapped Fountain.
And together Reynolds and Fountain dreamed up charming, fresh, sweet and wonderfully relevant songs — all for soprano voice and piano accompaniment — that honored an utterly original fivesome of Texas women.
The Angel of Goliad, cosmetics empire builder Mary Kay Ash, Tejano pop singer Selena, colorful outlaw Bonnie Harper and U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Jordan got their musical and poetical due from Graham and Fountain. What better pantheon of Lone Star women to represent an modern, eclectic, inclusive view of history while engaging and delighting young women singers?
Wiley performed the songs Sunday accompanied by Rick Rowley.
The Angel of Goliad, who administered to wounded solidiers during the Texas ware for independence, received an appropriately honorific ode.
Mary Kay Ash likewise had a song that evoked the strong-willed self-made millionaire who built her fortune by unleashing thousands of Cadillac-driving cosmetics saleswomen. Reynolds gave it a melody that was charging, hectic, delightful. Fountain drew us charming images:
Pink
I’m thinking Pink.
Driving these streets
thankful some things are only skin deep
Selena and Harper were honored with beautiful, sensitive melodies. And for Jordan, Fountain pulled language from the Congresswoman’s own speeches to paint a portrait of a woman — the first African American female member to serve in the U.S. Congress from the South — who was steadfast in her will.
Let’s hope the UIL forces recognize what a delight — what a unique opportunity to sing about Texas women as inventively imagined by a Texas-based composer and poet — these songs could be for young singers.
Also premiered was Reynolds’ “Double Double: A Suite for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano,” a virtuosic piece pulled off with flair by Rowley, Rebecca Henderson and Kristin Wolfe Jensen and filled with Reynolds’ signature turns: charging rhythms, sweeping cinematic crescendos narrative melodic lines and rollicking arpeggios.
Both “Between Steel and Stardust” and “Double Double” were commissions by UT faculty to a non-UT local composer. And that represents a much commendable reach on UT’s part to the community and to Austin’s music scene — a reach that shouldn’t be so infrequent.
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Review: TEMP delivers delightful musical complaints
Whine, whine, whine.
We all do it. And we’ve been doing for centuries, sometimes, thankfully, with more poetry and music than not.
Taking a cue from the recent popularity of complaints choirs — modern ensembles specializing in resurrecting, and sometimes refashioning, Renaissance and Baroque songs of woe and heartbreak — the Texas Early Music Project delivered their own humor-inspired musical litany of grievances Saturday night at First English Lutheran Church.
TEMP artistic director Daniel Johnson’s musical celebration of kvetching attracted about 100 people who laughed at the funnier turns (and there were plenty) or showered with applause some of the regular TEMP soloists — mezzo-soprano Stephanie Prewitt and sopranos Gitlanjali Mathur and Jenifer Thyssen.
The musical grumbling began with secular songs from the 13th-century and wound their way through the centuries to the 18th-century. An instrumental ensemble — including Reniassiance lute, violin, harpsichord — complemented the changing line-up of vocalists.
Prewitt started things off with a soulful lament about a jealous husband, her voice clear yet rich and always full of nuance. Mathur and Thyssen impressed with their deft phrasing and full tones on a duet about a heartbroken young woman. And Mathur captivated with a poignant song adapted from Shakespeare’s ‘Othello.’
But the concert wasn’t all songs of woe and sadness. A
Giving their own nod to the centuries of complaints they sang, the ensemble ended with an hysterically funny flourish of their. Johnson molded the much-loved but over-played Pachelbel Canon in D into a 21st-century complaint song with lyrics culled from the TEMP member themselves.
“My boss doesn’t care if I do a good job, but I really have to look interested in the meetings.”
“Why can’t I ever catch up on sleep?”
“Why do they sell us ten hotdogs and eight buns?”
Valid gripes indeed and utterly charming when sung, as TEMP did, with plenty of flare and polish. Johnson and his ensemble get it right — they make gorgeous music and make it a good time.
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April 27, 2009
Review: 'Golf: The Musical'
Caveat: The only 18 holes I’ve ever played involved throwing discs (poorly) at Pease Park. As a game, I just don’t get golf. As a musical revue, though, “Golf” is an entertaining collection of Broadway-caliber talent that more often than not makes up for the fact that the show is, well, almost entirely about golf.
“Golf’s” loose collection of sketches and songs has a vaudevillian feel to it—as if Abbot and Costello had performed “Who’s At Hole One.” In the small space of the Keller Williams Studio with its cocktail seating, the sense is heightened and put to good use. “Golf’s” peppy numbers are catchy and often funny, but the best moments are shared more directly with the audience.
Actor and director Joel Blum, himself a veteran of the original Off-Broadway run, and Austinite Joe Penrod do more than re-create Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, they look and sound like Al Hirschfield caricatures come to life. Their bouncy “Road to Heaven” imagines the duo’s last hole together with plenty of quirks and laughs, but also more than a few groaners. But just like the original charismatic comedians, the duo can entertain even when a pun gets used one time—or twenty—too many.
Likewise, Daniel Herron, another Broadway vet, and Jill Blackwood, for whom Austin is lucky that she hasn’t gone off to Broadway on her own, are adept at bringing the audience in behind the set jokes. Whether as a hard boiled links detective with a penchant for wordplay or, in a separate song, as a wife who’s been abandoned for a mistress composed entirely of misheard double entendres or a vamp singing many of the same, they’re able to wink at the audience and make the performance entertaining past the gag’s own merit.
That’s good, because while “Golf” is if not a one-joke show, a one-themed script. And even for someone who looks forward to the O. Henry Pun-Off each year, two hours of golf jokes is shooting above par. Compounding the problem is that while some bits actually border on clever satire, like the jingoistic “Let’s Bring Golf to the Gulf,” other “topical” references simply fall flat.
But for what it is, an evening of high talent performing largely entertaining, if innocuous, material, I’d still take “Golf: The Musical” over “Golf: The Game” any day.
(“Golf: The Musical” continues Thursdays-Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m. through May 10 at TexArts’ Keller Williams Studios, 2300 Lohmans Spur, Lakeway. $30-$34. 512-852-9079 x101, tex-arts.org.)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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April 26, 2009
Review: Fusebox Fest starts off dancing with 'Erection' & 'Bodies in Urban Spaces'
Dancers have a knack for reminding audiences that bodies have infinite possibilities.
In the opening weekend of the ten-day Fusebox Festival, “Erection” created by French duo Pierre Rigal & Aurélien Bory and performed by Rigal and “Bodies in Urban Spaces” by Austrian choreographer Will Dorner and a squad of local dancers, posed physical questions.
Rigal: Why stand on your feet instead of your shoulders?
Dorner: Why sit on a downtown bench when you could perch on it knees down, butt up?
On Thursday at Ballet Austin’s theatre Rigal morphed from amoeba to frog to biped to hologram as he slowly, deftly rose from lying on the floor to standing. He began on his back, his chest thrusting upwards, as though his heart filled his entire rib cage. On his upwardly mobile journey, Rigal writhed and rippled (he must excel at party game Twister). Simple, colorful projections—a series of white bars on the floor or expanding and shrinking squares of green, blue and red—framed Rigal’s motion.
Finally reaching standing, the projections subsumed his body. First, a strobe light effect (a direct steal from David Parson’s gimmicky, but famous 1982 solo “Caught”) made it look like Rigal could fly. Next a bare-chested, glowing projection of a man (imagine a cross between the Incredible Hulk and Michael Phelps) joined Rigal onstage. Rigal sometimes meshed with his projected partner, and other times left body parts outside the animation. The final effect: wiggling on the floor, the detail-oriented contortions looked more human than the standing man.
No environment could conceal the gymnastics of Dorner’s cast. “Bodies in Urban Space” is basically a contemporary art chase. An ensemble of colorfully clad dancers runs ahead of a walking audience, who encounter the performers in a variety of architectural crevices. During Saturday’s early evening show, the piece quickly transformed bystanders into audiences: bikers quieted their Harleys and rolled back several yards to stare at upside-dance dancers wrapped around a light post.
The intentional audience — those who assembled at Republic Park for the walk to the Capitol — seemed incredibly drawn to photograph every group of butts sticking out of building doorways or legs wrapped around gutter pipes. Bodies apparently don’t come into urban spaces without their iPhones anymore.
The Fusebox Festival continues through May 2. See www.fuseboxfestival.org.
Clare Croft is American-Statesman freelance dance critic.
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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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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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April 19, 2009
Review: 'Dialogues of the Carmelites'
Austin Lyric Opera delivers a nuanced yet gut-wrenching production of Francis Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites” which opened Saturday night at the Long Center.
And that’s no a small feat to pull of with Poulenc’s very modern intellectual yet ultimately emotional query into the nature of belief. “Dialogues” is hardly an easy opera (to like or to present well) though it’s gaining currency as one of the masterpieces of the 20th-century repertoire.
Premiered in 1957, “Dialogues,” is based on a screenplay that was in turn was based on historical accounts of 16 Carmelite nuns sent to the guillotine by revolutionaries during France’s Reign of Terror.
(ALO’s special guest in the audience Friday night was the renowned soprano Virginia Zeani who originated the role of the young nun Blanche de la Force and who was invited by Poulenc himself to take the role.)
As the title suggests, most of the opera is conversationally sung text. That throws a challenge to those who might expect that opera can only be bodice-ripping romances filled with show-stopping arias.
And it clearly threw a challenge to the audience at the Long Center Friday night: In the orchestra section at least, empty seats appeared after intermission.
That’s too bad because this “Dialogues” not only had vocal talent in spades but rang with a smart emotional and intellectual clarity.
Her voice beautifully shaded in tone yet powerfully dramatic, Emily Pulley relayed every ounce of Blanche’s neurosis, fear and ultimate acceptance of her vows. In Pulley’s hand, Blanche’s anxiety-fueled religious conversion and subsequent psychological journey rings with a very contemporary reality.
Always a highlight of any ALO productions she joins, the luminous soprano Suzanne Ramo brought a charming no-nonsense to Constance, the nun whose good nature belies her smarts and her beatific faith.
In their solos, Jennifer Check (Madame Lidoine) and Dana Beth Miller (Mother Marie) unleashed torrents of luscious clear tones.
Conductor Richard Buckley perfectly calibrated the color and pace of Poulenc’s score which is by turns hauntingly lyrical, sweepingly cinematic and even occasionally playful.
Director Eric Einhorn brought a very modern, realistic tone to this nicely spare production (originally created by Calgary Opera). These were no one-dimensional nuns but rather each emerged as complex and distinct as they wrested their decisions to sacrifice their lives for their faith.
In this telling, this production of a about 18th-century Catholic nuns transcends time and place to speak to us now.
“Dialogues of the Carmelites” continues 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Friday, 3 p.m. April 26 at the Long Center. See www.austinlyricopera.org for ticket information.
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April 18, 2009
Review: Diavlolo
The dancers of L.A.-based Diavolo maintained their status as the American gladiators of the performing arts world Friday at the Paramount Theatre. Diavolo shows function somewhat formulaically: a large built structure sits center stage and extremely strong dancers pull themselves across, over, and through the object.
Friday dancers climbed a giant set of stairs in “Tete En L’Air,,” tumbled through a jungle gym cube in “Caged,” mounted a wall with large pegs in “D2R-A,” and rode a giant rocking shell of a boat in “Trajectoire.” Artistic director Jacques Heim and the dancers who help him choreograph these giant spectacles have a gift for manipulating a sense of danger through each piece. Even once the choreographic formula becomes familiar, a sudden fall or a slow slide across a capsizing platform is gasp-inducing.
Program opener “Tete” offers the most sense of story. A series of anonymous, trench-coat clad, fedora-topped figures walk down a gigantic staircase. As John Adams’ music gains momentum, the figures speed up, running and rolling down the steps and sometimes each other. Clothes come off and come undone, as dancers leap into and out of the stairs’ hidden compartments. The stairs’ transformation furthers the piece’s urban references. What was one a passageway now functions as an apartment-filled skyscraper.
But even as “Tete” grows to harried chaos, the dancers work together perfectly. The program hails the dancers’ varied backgrounds from gymnastics to acting, but says the company must be “always teammates.” That cooperation may be what makes the choreography’s sense of danger so appealing, almost heart-warming.
In the final moments of “Trajectoire,” one woman performs on top of the rocking boat’s platform, titled at a sharp angle. The audience can see the structure’s underbelly, where the other eight dancers rest shoulder to shoulder inside, their bodies’ weight holding the structure still. She can move, because other people can hold her.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance dance critic.
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April 17, 2009
Review: New percussion music beats in
Tom Burritt and the UT Percussion Ensemble charmed Tuesday night with premieres of new works by Austin composers Graham Reynolds and Dan Welcher.
Reynold joined the 12-piece student ensemble on piano for his ’ ‘Whale Drum.’ Rollicking minor chords pumped through decidedly groovy riffs that were alternated with more lyrical heartfelt moments. If anyone denies that a gathering of a dozen percussion instruments can’t be melodic, Reynolds proved otherwise, unleashing a funky harmonius frenzy.
“Whale Drum” is just first of three pieces UT’s music faculty have commissioned from Reynolds that will be premiered this spring. That inclusive gesture to a non-UT musician is welcomed bridge over the town-gown divide that keeps UT music efforts so often disconnected from the Austin community.
Welcher’s “You Can Fool” was a smart musical reflection on the recent presidential election. Written by the request of ensemble students Matthew Teodori and Philip Welder - the first commission Welcher said he’s ever received from students - “You Can Fool” flashed by as intense musical postcards of wildly different mood and color. The quartet of players paired off in duos, then rejoined at times in a dance of musical cooperation and opposition. Finally, a brief moment of peaceful world music soothed before the piece finished with rolling military snare drums. So much for a visionary getting through the layers of history, Welcher’s composition seemed to say.
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April 16, 2009
Review: 'Avenue Q'
I have a weakness for puppets. I suspect I’m not alone. There’s probably an explanation in evolutionary psychology and a human need to care for cute, furry things. There’s also years of “Sesame Street” and “The Muppets” drawing in young eyeballs. But as an adult — and, again, I think I’m not alone — there’s not much that’s funnier than a puppet working blue.
While the satire’s softened in the years since its opening (and Tony-award-winning season) in 2003, “Avenue Q” still knows how to find the joy in a foul-mouthed fur monster and even a few subtler jokes as well.
Avenue Q is the fictional lowest-rent section of New York City — a move to Hell’s Kitchen is a step up—and its residents are a mix of humans, puppets, monsters, and Gary Coleman. Their one common bond is that they’re all people, as the opening number explains, whom it sucks to be. But as much of a downer as the thought could be, it’s chirped more than whined and grinned more than gritted. That’s the magic of puppets; even suicide is a laugh when it’s presented by the falsetto-voiced Bad Idea Bears.
But in the central story around Princeton, a recent liberal arts graduated puppeteered by Robert McClure, and Kate Monster, a furry activist brought to life by Anika Larsen, there’s also a little real feeling. The “human” touches about a relationship help keep the material fresh and jokes poignant.
And even though the point of the production is to put the puppets in front of their operators, Kate’s stitched-on grin seems alone in the way it’s out of place with her story. No other character ever really lets their utter failure at life get the best of them, but Kate ranges from happy to sappy to bitter to spiteful. And some of those emotions are out of the range of her googly eyes. So while most of the puppeteers in their dark clothes and practice of standing just outside of the spotlight fade away, it’s easy to fall in to the habit of watching Larsen’s face as much as her hands. The juxtaposition of perma-cheer and changing feelings highlights the absurdity — and humor — of the rest of the production.
Not all elements hold up as well. “Avenue Q” is still, quite literally, a laugh a minute, but just since its opening six years ago, this brand of absurd satire has gained something between a foot- and stranglehold on pop culture. While Danielle K. Thomas’ version of Gary Coleman singing a lesson schadenfreude is still funny on a meta-level and superbly performed on its own, the larger joke has been played out countless times on the small screen.
Fortunately, while satire loses its point after a while, I’m not sure dirty puppets will ever lose their fun. And with this cast, several of whom come straight from Broadway, most of the material feels as fresh as ever. So forgive some nitpicking (my favorite Muppets were always Statler and Waldorf) and don’t miss “Avenue Q.”
(“Avenue Q” continues at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Thursday and Saturday, and at 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday at the Bass Concert Hall, 2300 Robert Dedman Dr. $19.50-$73.50. 471-1444. www.utpac.org.) Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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April 14, 2009
Review: 'The Method Gun'
The Rude Mechs can’t help themselves. They have to tweak whatever they do every time they do it.
And with ‘The Method Gun’ — the theater collective’s much-heralded play from last season — the tweaks, and the Rudes, are alright.
Better than alright actually. To this critic, ‘The Method Gun’ still ranks as one of the best productions to grace the Austin theater scene in the past few years.
I said as much last year when I reviewed the show’s premiere, one of the many productions that helped open up the Long Center for the Performing Arts.
But now the Rudes are back home at the Off-Center, their East Austin warehouse performance space. And now ‘The Method Gun’ packs more intensity and more poignancy. In the Long Center’s Rollins Studio Theater, the show featured plenty of visual — and theatrical — volume.In the much more intimate Off-Center, there’s no escaping the emotionally raw yet ultimately endearing ride. And the Rudes’ tweaks have made it all much more immediate and personal.
Of course, the sweet absurdity is still there. What’s not absurd about a group of actors still following an illusory acting guru named Stella Burden long after she has disappeared. So fixated with Burden’s acting technique — the method known as ‘The Method Gun’ — this group can’t let their guru go. Burden’s biggest challenge to her troupe? Present a production of Tennessee Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ performed without any of the principal characters.
Isn’t that an impossibility?
But, oh, does the troupe — superbly acted by Thomas Graves, Heather Hannah, Jude Hickey, Hannah Kenah and Lana Lesley — try hard to make it work. They put themselves through humiliating exercises, frustrate themselves with acting challenges and otherwise unravel their emotions. They fight each other, they kiss each other, they scream at one another. They fumble with out-dated audio-visual equipment, plunk out tunes on a piano and consult a miniature tiger figurine that Stella Burden held dear.
Played in a series of quick-fire almost hallucinatory scenes that ricochet around in time, the play (the script was written by Kirk Lynn) seemingly in brilliant manner builds and unravels at the same time.
And the final scene — Stella Burden’s principal-less ‘Streetcar’ — emerges as one of the most polished, gorgeous, breathtaking and riveting moments on an Austin stage.
The Rudes Mechs plan to take ‘The Method Gun’ to New York’s P.S. 122 next year. Let’s hope the folks realize what we already know: The Rudes craft compelling theater.
‘The Method Gun’ continues 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday through May 2 at the Off Center, 2211 Hidalgo St. See www.rudemechs.com for ticket information.
Photo by Bret Brookshire.
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April 13, 2009
Review: 'Arthuriosis' at Blue Theatre
The potential visual puns are obvious: “Heavy metal, from the time when that was just the dress code.” Fortunately, in The Getalong Gang’s new “Arthuriosis,” a rock metal opera about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, the armor may be clapboard, but the music is metal at its glammest.
In the only production that’s ever handed me earplugs (unused) at the door, one of the West’s oldest myths is told again. The story doesn’t diverge too much — barring, of course, Andrew Varenhorst as the Grailgnome, a guardian mutt of Gollum, Beezelbub, and awesome. But all the other main characters are there, just rocking a bit harder than usual.
The final battle between Arthur and Mordred is cast as less of a sword duel to the death and more the eternal battle between flashy lead vocalist Benjamin Wright and mysterious axeman — a returned showdown between Plant and Page. And Morgana, played with a punkish sex appeal by Kathleen Fletcher, is revealed with a riff and moves deriving more from Van Halen than Lerner and Loewe.
The style, as brought out by director Zenobia Taylor, carries the show, but there’s substance there as well. The script came through many hands, but co-writer Spencer Driggers, as a Galahad with wide eyes and a flair for mock seriousness in narration, makes it the most clear. Unfortunately, when the story meets the metal, the music (and a very muddy sound setup) wins out. There’s some wit and great parody in the lyrics, but they’re often garbled under shredding solos and heavy drums from house band “Council of the Beast.”
You may miss out on many words, but a ballad of seduction between Arthur and the disguised Morgana paired with Lancelot and Guenevere about making love on a table (you know which one) rings clear. And even if it didn’t, the rock star writhing of Brock England as Lancelot makes the plot pretty apparent.
It’s a different sort of humor than “The Sword in the Stone,” but one that goes better with shots of whiskey and a beer chaser. From what I heard, the writers are more than capable and hearing the lyrics would add to that humor. From my own experience, it’s just as easy to throw up the horns and root for the once and future king when you can’t.
(“Arthuriosis” continues at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday at The Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Road. $10. 927-1118, ggpg.org.)
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April 12, 2009
New Music Co-op: Immersive and in the dark
The always adventurous New Music Co-op staged what was more an intense sound installation than a concert Saturday night at Ceremony Hall, exclusively featuring the work of American experimental composer Alvin Lucier.
The private chapel turned community space, Ceremony Hall was dimly lit when the audience was admitted, folding chairs arranged in a large oval, a xylaphone and some other music equipment in the middle. Also occupying the center were several snare drums standing on their sides. A synthesized sine wave pulsated throughout the room as people filtered in in the dim light.
The snare drums seemed to grab the slow pulsations of the synthesized sine wave emanating what a low buzz.
The sound was immersive, intense, meditative and even frustrating at times. And that amalgam of experience held through the more than 90 minutes of the concert, even after the snare drums were put aside and soloists began to play from different spots in the room.
Or was Saturday night a sound installation? After all the audience was invited to leave their seats and move around the space to listen from different spots. And while the program indicated the discrete pieces performed, the experience was more a continuously fluid experimentation in sound and listening. Solo instrumentalists (flute, French horn, violin, cello, percussion) took turns creating long tones of specific pitch to affect the sine waves. Some sounds soothed. Others provoked. All demanded that you listen.
To end the event, the performers turned out the lights completely and using Sondols (small hand-held echolocation devices conceived of in the 1960s, but never mass-produced), began to sonically map out Ceremony Hall, the Sondols emitting muted tapping sounds that varied in speed and intensity. (Co-op members made the Sondols modeled after original plans).
In the dark, the experience became as much about listening as it was about sound - a chance for personal meditation as much a group experience.
Since it formed in 2001, the New Music Co-op has developed a small but loyal following. After all, most experimental music efforts or electro-acoustic music explorers anywhere typically don’t attract huge audiences.
But New Music Co-op does well by those who are curious and come out to their concerts. No aloof insider attitude here. Thoughtfully written and very thorough program notes explain much. And the ensemble is only too happy to chat with audience members afterwards, which invariably happens with many lingering for a while.
And all that makes for an easy open-ended scene.
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April 10, 2009
Lordy Rodriguez sees new states of America
It’s been a long road trip for Lordy Rodriguez.
The Phillipine-born Texas-raised artist has spent ten years systematically re-mapping the United States state-by-state according to his creative imagination.
Now Rodriguez’s 55 imaginative maps — he added the five new states of Disney, Hollywood, Internet, Monopoly and Territory — fill the walls at the Austin Museum of Art through May 17.
Rodriguez’s maps are immediately familiar. Who hasn’t seen similar vividly colored hand-drawn maps in an atlas, on the walls of a school room or held in the lap during a road trip? And Rodriguez has all the expected cartographic components there: the topographical symbols, the road numbers and river names, the border lines, the formal typeface.
But these maps are also deliberately absurd. What if Kansas collided with the Southeast? What if Texas bordered New Jersey? What if every state in America had a port? What if there were new borders, new bodies of water, new mountain ranges?
By re-imagining the entire country, Rodriguez considers the deeper meaning of place in the 21st century. He situates our nation’s capital half-way between the newly imagined states of Hollywood and Monopoly. The names of the towns and cities in Hollywood are taken from the movies; in Monopoly, cities are named after the cites that headquarter Fortune 500 companies.
We long to define ourselves by where we are from, where our families came from or where we choose to live. But in today’s mobile, shifting world, place is more fluid than ever before.
The lacklustre installation at AMOA disappointments and doesn’t do justice to the potency of Rodriguez’s richly imaginative ink drawings.
That’s too bad. Because in his charming, beguiling colorful maps, Rodriguez — who himself has perhaps the ultimate multi-cultural, multi-national background —ask trenchant questions. And perhaps the most important is. how would you map your world?
“Lordy Rodriguez: States of America”
When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, (Thursdays until 8 p.m.), noon to 5 p.m. Sundays through May 17
Where: Austin Museum of Art, 823 Congress Ave.
Tickets: $4-$5
Information: 495-9224, www.amoa.org
Image: “Monopoly” by Lordy Rodriguez. Courtesy AMOA.
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April 6, 2009
Review: 'Common Ground'
“Common Ground” is not a subtle play. Characters say what’s on their mind, act on their impulses, and put down wild dogs when they need to illustrate their own, potentially irreversible, failure as moral human beings. But in the space between unnaturally open dialogue and descriptions that don’t fly quite high enough to justify their artifice, Pro Arts Collective finds moments of full-force emotion and sentiment that are unmistakably powerful.
Writer Antoinette Winstead tells an old story of two brothers, but in this case the prodigal has stayed home with a knee injury while the paragon followed the Air Force to Vietnam. The particular moment in history doesn’t much affect the story, though. The bitter, almost-was rodeo star competing with his successful hero of a brother for the love of a made-to-order family could slot into most settings. The ‘60s schmaltz of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” just adds an extra punch.
Luke has, to the tune of the old standard, returned from his tour unannounced and ready to move his family away from the home where his brother and mother have provided for them in his absence. Brother James, through a mix of sincere emotion and a need to compete, is unwilling to give up his role as patriarch. As that becomes clearer and Luke must find a space for himself, the Christmas-card portrait dissolves.
Unfortunately, the characters aren’t much more nuanced than those of the parable. Descriptions and judgments fly thick in the play’sclimax, but there’s not much opportunity for us to see characters live up to those roles. Instead, we see more of the happy family—tickle fights and cookies that don’t advance the plot—and then abrupt switches into adultery and shouting.
The benefit of the no-pretense, low-subtext style is that each emotion is heightened. When Aaron Alexander’s Luke is angry, he is furiously so. When Robbie Ann Darby as the wife is conflicted between love and duty, she is poignantly so. When LeVan Owens as James sulks or dawdles his makeshift daughter on his leg, it’s wrenchingly bitter.
I was once told that if you simply take each of Shakespeare’s line at face value, the emotion and transitions come through as sudden and intense as a shotgun blast. But Shakespeare’s language is heightened by poetry. Winstead’s is straddling the fence between natural and plain. We’re given a collection of actors who can wring anger or tenderness from those lines, but the effect comes largely from the basic plot and their strength of emotion.
One perfect marriage is between Feliz McDonald and the part of Rosa Young. As a boozy, effervescent b-girl, she struts, shrieks, and snaps with impunity and lack of perception of the larger situation—a regular fool—and draws loud laughs with each step across the stage. As a scorned woman drawn into the dysfunctional family, she knows more than she lets on, until it’s time for a pointed reveal.
All that emotion makes for a powerful climax, though it’s muted by moralizing and a need to suddenly show a tender side to relationships with no introduction. Regardless, the blow-ups and confessions can’t compete with smaller, quieter moments. Taking a break from explaining his thoughts, Luke simply does. As the rest of the family gathers at the table, Aaron Alexander stood in the back of the stage and idly fingered a branch of the Christmas tree, looking in from the outside of a 2-year tour abroad.
Blunt honesty is powerful, but those hidden moments are the real Christmas gifts.
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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April 5, 2009
Review: Itzhak Perlman
To a virtually sold-out house Sunday night at the Bass Concert Hall, violin great Itzhak Perlman played seemingly two concerts.
The first half was ultra-formal, hermetic even, Perlman nodding but not otherwise saying a word to the audience, instead delivering the music in quick succession.
To Handel’s Sonata No. 13 in D, Perlman brought a polished modern feel to the Baroque stylings. To Franck’s Sonata For Violin & Piano in A, Perlman also wrested an ever so slightly contemporary burnish to a piece that lies just on the edge of romanticism and modernism.
But after intermission, the silent, formal virtuoso didn’t appear. Instead, it was Perlman the casual, accessible - yet utterly genius - violin player, the man who, in his breathtaking half-century career, has not only performed with every great orchestra and in every great concert hall, but also played popular movie scores (“Schindler’s List”) and easily joked with muppets on “Sesame Street.”
“The good news is that the piece is not very long,” he deadpanned about Messiaen’s modernist Theme and Variations. “Just pretend you’ve heard ten times before and you’ll like it.”
After that it was seven short pieces.
“This is a computer printout of everything I’ve played here in the last 40 years,” he joked waving a piece of paper. “Maybe I play something you’ve heard before, you can tell me if you like it better now, or then.”
“Here, this is a good one,” he said, before embarking on Kreisler’s transcription for violin of Falla’s “Spanish Dances,” a staple of the classical guitar repertoire full of dramatic flourish.
The pieces grew in virtuosity and technical demands, yet with each, Perlman left micro-seconds of air, even between the most rapid successions of notes for exquisite yet seemingly effortless clarity.
After Bazzini’s rapid-fire “Dance of the Goblins,” the maestro was done. No need for an encore. After all, Perlman had effectively started the encore from the first note he played.
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Review: "The Color of Dissonance"
Art about art is tricky territory. And while creative collaborations often result in a rich pluralist end product, sometime too many divergent artistic enthusiasms can clutter.
Clutter seemed to muddle “The Color of Dissonance,” an ambitious new opera with music by Jason Hoogerhyde which premiered Friday for a three-performance run at Southwestern University’s Alma Thomas Theatre.
With a libretto by Hoogerhyde, Sergio Costola and Kimberly Smith, “The Color of Dissonance” turned its lens on a seminal moment of cultural history: the birth of modernism. As this story used the pre-World War I friendship of painters Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Munter and Arnold Schoenberg as means to examine the radical break modernism made, from realism to abstraction, pretty tonal melodies to harsh dissonances.
Unfortunately, such a heady intellectual topic was never quite realized into compelling theater.
To be sure, Southwestern University deserves kudos for commissioning its faculty— of which Hoogerhyde, Costola and Smith belong — to create a such an ambitious production.
And what a production.
Kandinsky, Munter and Schoenberg were each played by a singer, an actor and a dancer, the cast clad in all-white fin-de-siecle period garb. Thousands of images — from Kandinsky’s paintings to Schoenberg’s scores to glorious early cinema and period newsreels — were projected onto the screen backdrop or sometimes cast onto individual canvases or other surface. A chorus sang from offstage after parading through the audience at the start.
More a singspiel, with arias interspersed by spoken monologue, “Dissonance” found the three characters hardly interacting so much as remaining isolated figures addressing the audience in monologues or arias. And that made for a very static, sometimes wooden progression.
iIn and around the singers and actors, the dancers wove. But their presence, and the overly-stylized choreography, distracted.
As Kandinsky, baritone Oliver Worthington was a standout, his tone expressive and colorful. Indeed he seemed poised to bring more dramatic depth to role, if only that had been part of the theatrical direction.
Unfortunately, it was not.
Really, one wanted ultimately much more of Hoogerhyde’s rich yet ethereal music. Hoogerghyde’s delicate, thoughtful tonal dramas was where this opera’s emotional force lay.
Only the media design, by Duncan Alexander, had as much impact and complexity as the score. Far beyond a typical kaleidoscopic montage, the churning story written by the images and footage offered the only true dramatic foil to Hoogerhyde’s music.
After all, just because some collaboration is good, doesn’t always mean more is better.
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March 31, 2009
New music anyone? Fear not
Who attends UT’s New Music Ensemble concerts? Like tonight, it’s usually about 70 or so people, many of whom seem to be music students and faculty.
New music is tough sell, even when it’s free, as UT New Music Ensemble concerts are. And if you’re not familiar with the UT campus, good luck penetrating (or even parking at) the ivory tower.
UT logistics aside, the idea of unfamiliar new classical music puts people off. Of course, there’s a lot of it that’s off-putting. Too much new music is insider stuff, seemingly written for like-minded academic specialists.
Then again, if you don’t take at least a chance at new music, you might miss something that will delight.
Graham Reynolds, arguably Austin’s busiest indie composer, was there tonight. Reynolds is putting the finishing touches on a song cycle and a trio for double reeds, both premiering April 26 at UT, a much welcome connection between town and gown given that Reynolds is in no way affiliated with UT.
But he had the time for a break tonight, as equally interested in hearing some new music as supporting Welcher and his efforts. And Reynolds was scoping out the young instrumental talent on stage. “I’m always looking for musicians,” Reynolds, who also co-directs Golden Hornet Project, a non-profit new music presenting organization.
In the UT New Music Ensemble spotlight tonight — two pieces by visiting composer Gabriela Lena Frank, who draws on her multi-cultural heritage (Peruvian/Chinese/Lithuanian/Jewish).
Frank’s ‘Las Sombras de Los Apus’ for four cellos proved compelling — each cello a jittery, antic voice that rattled and rumbled until they were spent, and then silent. “You can’t go wrong with four cellos,” Reynolds said before the piece began. And he spot on.
Franks ‘New Andean Songs’ — for soprano, mezzo-soprano, two pianos and two percussionists found — evoked the intriguing echoes reverberating sounds in the highlands. But while ‘Las Sombras’ had beautiful moments, a certain amount of unnecessary clutter crowded that beauty.
Student composers get their moment too at every UT New Music Ensemble.
Ian Dicke’s “The Lunatic Fringe” was a smart little piece of agit-prop. Dicke packed plenty into a 15-minute piece for chamber orchestra — chiefly a reflective commentary on the eight years of the Bush administration and the horrors of the Iraqi war. A crashing kaleidoscope of melodies (Bush’s favorite pop songs) imploded into ethereal melancholy. Throughout recorded snippets of Bush’s speeches laced through the music. Then the voices switched to those of grief-stricken families who lost loved ones in the war. Normally, spoken text mixed with music is irksome, even annoying. But Dicke pulled it off with polish.
Would that the live webcasts of UTNME’s and other UT concerts were archived online and readily available for further listening. They’re not, and that’s a shame.
In the meantime, go hear to listen to Welcher’s compositions.
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Bach rocks the Blanton
It was standing room only today in the atrium of the Blanton Museum of Art for Bach Cantata Project. About a couple of hundred people turned out for the monthly noontime concert series.
People stood on the stairs, leaned over from mezzanine and listened appreciatively to the 30-minute ‘Palm Sunday Cantata.’
And while I didn’t luck out and get a seat (I stood in the back, hence the long-shot picture), I did score with two of my favorite young singers — mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Petillot and bass Phillip Hill — featured as soloists. Both sang wonderfully, and the soaring Blanton atrium has a bit of a cathedral-like sound.
UT professor James Morrow started the Bach Cantata Project when the Blanton opened three years ago. About 200 of Bach’s cantatas survive today, which scholars estimate is about three-fifths of the total number the Baroque composer is thought to have composed.
Now, Morrow and a changing ensemble of singers and instrumentalists (from UT and beyond), present a different Bach cantata on the last Tuesday at the month. Since it launched, the Project has become incredibly popular, each concert drawing a healthy-sized audience.
What gives? Why is this noontime concert series so popular?
It’s glorious music for one thing, smartly performed in an historically accurate manner.
But the Bach Cantata Project also dovetails into how people want to consume culture in the 21st century.
Although it is a lunchtime series, that actually works well for many working people who have to juggle lots of evening and weekend commitments. The low ticket price (free with museum admission of $3-$7) makes it a bargain. You get a lot of bang — or Bach — for your buck: both a concert and a visit to the museum.
Finally, with just one cantata performed (and most are 25-40 minutes max), these concerts are accessible for people with over-busy schedules. Would that everyone have the two hours plus that’s required for most classical music concerts (really an entire evening is required). Bbut that’s not always the case. And there’s plenty of other culture out there — much of it more flexible in reach — to compete with those evening-long concerts.
Imagine: historically accurate Baroque Bach, re-shaped to fit into the 21t-century.
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March 30, 2009
Anton Nel: A luscious Long Center showing
The audience wouldn’t let Anton Nel leave the Long Center stage Sunday afternoon.
That seemed just fine with Nel. The celebrated Austin pianist exudes an elegant joy when he performs. And he clearly preferred to be nowhere else but performing for a hometown audience and on the stellar nine-foot Hamburg Steinway he helped the Long Center select.
The admiration was mutual. And Nel rewarded the audience’s appreciation and ovations with three encores after a particularly rich — and rigorous — program.
Indeed the concert was a bit of Austin arts history in the making. Since opening a year ago, the Long Center — Austin’s first civic performing arts center — hasn’t yet had a solo classical recital grace the stage of the acoustically exquisite Dell Hall. Fitting perhaps then Nel played the first such concert. The South African-born pianist and now proud Austinite has been eager supporter of the Long Center despite his own hectic schedule of teaching at the University of Texas and concertizing around the world. Nel made the Dell Hall and its Steinway shimmer Sunday.
Brilliantly virtuosic in his technical ability, Nel so smartly eschews showiness. He’s far too sophisticated a musician to be aggressive with the flourishes. Emotional tone and color is what he draws out with style and nuance.
Nel drew the intricacies out of Brahms’ Vier Klavierstucke and out of Schubert’s Fantasy in C Major, Nel extracted an ethereal mood. The selections from Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words Nel offered like distinct little jewels, each with its very different shine. And he played Mendellsohn’s Fantasy in F Sharp with a kind of affecting intensity which made the profound and deep moments all the more exquisite.
Nel’s a jewel himself. Would that we could have a Long Center recital by him an annual event. Please?
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Texas Biennial brims with brio: 4
Oh, Jill Pangallo is so funny. But mostly she is smart. And when she weaves funny and smart together as she did Friday night with “Let Me Entertain You,” her solo show presented as part of the Texas Biennial, she comes up with something poignant and a little painful in its truth telling.
Conceived, written and performed by Pangallo, “Let Me Entertain You” was nonetheless culled from writings, emails and notes by 11 of Pangallo’s peers who respond to her email asking for “donated” writing. The theme? Identity.
About 200 people braved a freakishly cold and windy spring night on Friday to fill the seats at the Fiesta Gardens stage and courtyard, a modest municipal facility with its own identity problem of sorts. (It’s plays host to everything from community fundraisers to quincenañeras.)
To such a motley stage, and with a certain do-it-yourself production value of over-the-top costumes and campy style, Pangallo brought a cast of equally motley characters. Some appeared via video; others we saw live.
There was a painfully shallow couple who met on one reality show and auditioned for another. A dowdy woman who found comfort and meaning via YouTube cat videos. An anxious college student who spilled her heart to an answering machine. Even the eccentricities of a Renaissance fair don’t have room for the fantasy self of Pangallo’s sad characters.
These are 21st-century lonelyhearts — people whose ability to communicate has become over-mediated by media to the point that they are trapped by their own utter inability to communicate at all.
That’s sad. It’s also comical. In Pangallo’s hands, it’s Facebook-age schadenfreude writ live and on stage. (Pangallo’s all-too-true monologue about Facebook’s time-sucking erstaz communication made for a real highlight.)
Pangallo understands that ultimately, performance art has to be theater, no matter what conceptual conceits are foisted on it. And theater is what she delivered.
After all, like she said, she was there to entertain us.
Photo: Jill Pangallo as P.J. Chavez.
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March 27, 2009
Review: Ballet Austin's 'Studio Theater Project'
Ballet Austin had no lonely souls Thursday night.
Couples—some in agony, some in heat—dominated the company’s Studio Theatre Project. The program was its own duo of company premieres with artistic director Mills’ new “Songs of Innuendo” and guest choreographer Nicolo Fonte’s “Left Unsaid.”
Fonte’s piece featured six dancers merging in and out pairs. Odd numbers create conflict or despair, the latter conjured whenever dancers drape themselves over the tense limbs of other dancers. Swinging bodies juxtapose nicely with “Left Unsaid’s” movement palette. Where classical ballet’s pleasure is often predicated upon the satisfaction of legs closing into tight positions, Fonte swears by large, open movements. Who needs fifth position when second position feels so good?
Fonte also twists perspectives on another common ballet convention: ensemble finales danced in unison. Because each of “Left Unsaid’s’” couples develop their emotional relationship in earlier duets, the unison choreography resonated differently for each pair. One set of choreography equaled three layers of emotional texture.
“Songs of Innuendo” went light on suggestion and heavy on sex—the fun, colorful, springy kind. Jamie Lynn Witts and Kirby Wallis were particularly adept at meeting the playful, loose tone of Mills’ work, inspired by soulful classics. Choreographically, the piece was at its best when embracing its title, choosing kinetic metaphor over literal depiction. A charming example: when one dancer bounced off another’s horizontal torso, using her partner’s body like a trampoline. Less charming (and not so much an innuendo): a quartet rolling on their backs and sticking their legs straight in the air, as James Brown belted “Get on up” as part of “Sex Machine.”
“The Studio Theater Project” continues 8 p.m. tday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Saturday-Sunday; 6:30 p.m. April 1-2; 9 p.m. April 2; 8 p.m. April 3-4,; 3 p.m. April 5. Austin Ventures Studio Theatre, 501 W. Third St. $25-30; www.balletaustin.org.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance dance critic.
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March 25, 2009
Ailey's 'Revelations' still brings the house down
A big slice of Austin went to church Tuesday night … in Bass Concert Hall.
When the round tones of “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham” filled Bass as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre ground out Ailey’s soulful “Revelations,” almost everyone in the audience came to their feet. Clapping and swaying along to the piece Ailey created in homage to black, rural, Southern church services seems like a fitting celebration of the Ailey legacy.
The company’s stop in Austin falls in the middle of its 50th anniversary tour. As usual for an Ailey performance, two things remain true: “Revelations” is one of the master works of American art and the Ailey dancers are among the most clear, precise dancers working today.
But for all the glory of Ailey’s achievements, other factors remain undeniable. Yet again the company has commissioned a lackluster work, “Go in Grace,” choreographed by Ailey dancer Hope Boykin with live music by Sweet Honey and the Rock.
For almost a decade, Boykin has been a broad-shouldered force among Ailey’s women. “Go in Grace,” her second work for the company is painfully superficial. The piece follows a family whose son strays until his father’s untimely death. Sweet Honey and a sign language interpreter walk around the family, providing a musical, ladies-on-the-stoop presence. The piece centers on the family’s young, deaf daughter (Yusha-Marie Sorzano).
But until a final solo where Sorzano imagines dancing with her now dead father, the daughter is nothing more than a small thing to be petted and protected. It’s ironic that a dancer as capable of texture and nuance as Boykin—qualities she displayed Tuesday as the dancer front and center in “Revelations” opening “I Been ‘Buked”—would create such a superficial female role.
Sweet Honey’s voices are so clear and open, it seems one could bathe in them, but their lyrics were clichéd and irritating in “Go in Grace.” Sweet Honey’s comments like “you’re so beautiful” filled in the ellipses that make dance such a porous, poetic art form. Leaving nothing to the imagination was a movement theme as well. Lyrics, sign language, and choreography aligned, providing moments where Sweet Honey sang of strength as the dancers flexed their biceps in unison.
Dancing together does not have to be boring could be the tagline for George Faison’s jazzy, sassy “Suite Otis” from 1971. New costumes that redefine the color pink bring out the company’s capacity for camp. For one example see the company’s men boogying to Otis Redding’s pleas to the “hip shakin’ mama” of “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” Ailey dancers can jump and kick higher and longer than anyone, but it is the moments of sass, struggle, and deep joy that keep Ailey performances alive.
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre performs again tonight at 8 p.m. See. www.utpac.org for more information.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance dance critic.
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March 23, 2009
Nonclassical SXSW showcase
The crowd knew what to do — with a live string quartet on stage at a bar, that is.
Saturday night, at the UK-based Nonclassical records showcase, part of SXSW 2009, the audience swilled beer, perched at the bar, straddled stools, clapped when they liked and hooted too.
Mainly, though, they listened. After all, they were there with specificity in mind. Clearly half the audience lacked the SXSW badges and wristbands that admit to all festival showcases. This was a cover-charge paying crowd there with a purpose: to see what classically-based music (composed, notated) could be like when its let loose from its stifling concert hall confines.
Gabriel Prokofiev, the London-based composer, producer, Nonclassical founder (and also grandson of Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev), brought the Elysian Quartet with him from across the pond to play his String Quartet No. 2. Amplified, that is. Remember, the gig was in a bar.
That amplification gave the strings a metallic edge, perfect for Prokofiev’s jittery rhythms and moody pizzicato-laced melodies. Prokofiev plums the range of contemporary electro-based sounds and laces them through shifting stark yet excitable patterns.
Before the Elysian Quartet though, it was Delicious, Austin composer Peter Stopschinski’s ever-morphing ensemble. Four violins, bass, the ever-intriguing Ames Asbell on viola and Stopschinski on the piano delivering rolling streams of melody in a kind of alt-barrelhouse style. For her part, Asbell dug deep into Stopschinksi dark melodies, extracting a wide range of moods and sounds.
Graham Reynolds took over for a set, the super-prolific Austin alt classical composer wresting out his newest music, including gorgeous, heartfelt portions of his score to Fritz Lang’s famed movie “Metropolis.” (Reynolds and Stopschinski are forging the same path as Prokofiev.)
Later, the Elysian Quartet returned for another set, delivering an ethereal, emotive, impressive group improvisation — improvisation being a rarity in the world of string quartets. Elysian played with aplomb.
In between sets, Prokofiev DJ’d, offering atmospheric re-mixes of music from his Nonclassical label and just about anything else, including snippets from his grandfather’s ouevre. The sounds were groovy, vibrant, smart re-imaginings that made the point: Classical music (nonclassical music?) is all music in the 21st century and it can look and feel like all music.
Listen to samples of Prokofiev’s music;
- Elysian Quartet, String Quartet No. 1, movement 1
- Elysian Quartet, String Quartet No. 1, movement 1 - REMIX
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March 21, 2009
Austin Symphony Orchestra plays SXSW? No, but they did play delightfully
Friday night, inside the Long Center, the Austin Symphony Orchestra sparkled with a smartly coordinated program of seminal mid-century American music by Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin and the often over-looked Oklahoma-born Roy Harris.
Outside, though, the crowds filled Auditorium Shores across the street for a free concert featuring Raul Malo and the Arc Angels, part of the South By Southwest Music Festival. Families laid blankets on the Long Center lawn to avoid the Auditorium Shores crowd. Children cart-wheeled in the evening light. And a few symphony-goers bopped to Malo’s Latin-infused rhythms.
Inside, the orchestra - and particularly its sharp and friendly 20th-century American program — was just as much an embodiment of Austin’s claim as the “Live Music Capital of the World” as the bands on Auditorium Shores.
And yet the disconnect between inside and outside the Long Center Friday night felt profound.
Why? It needn’t have been that way.
Now that ASO artistic director Peter Bay has had a full year in the Long Center’s acoustically perfect Dell Hall, he’s wrested greater nuance and color from the orchestra. That was evident in Harris’s sweeping, pastoral Third Symphony. Even more so with Gershwin’s Concerto in F that featured celebrated pianist Jon Nakamatsu.
This Gershwin Concerto had plenty of sass without being showy - a smart reading of Gershwin’s compelling yet sometimes emotionally ambiguous major work. Nakamatsu brought a bluesy and very moving sensibility to the soulful adagio.
Bay also brought a smartness to the program’s second half — Bernstein’s Facsimile and his ‘On The Town: Three Episodes.’ - in particular giving Facsimile a nice burnish of anxiety suited to the Bernstein’s ballet of disconnected love.
There wasn’t an anxiety to the disconnect between the orchestra and the SXSW concert. More just a polite distance. (Parking and traffic congestion seemed to not evolve into a crisis but remained a well-organized, if crowded, flow.)
Why not an ASO showcase as part of SXSW? Or a free community concert during SXSW? Or at least a ticket discount for SXSW wristband wearer?
Would that classical music in Austin not keep itself so exclusive of the rest of our live music scene.
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March 19, 2009
Review: Remaining truthful to 'The Grapes of Wrath'
When Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck penned “The Grapes of Wrath” in the 1930s, the world was gripped in an historic economic, political and social crisis that would end only after fundamental changes that came about thanks to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and its programs — programs that are still instrumental safety nets today such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Social Security system.
We face tough times now, though in very minor measure when compared to the profoundly wide-spread deprivation of the Great Depression.
Still, Steinbeck’s story of the Joad family’s exodus from the ruined Dust Bowl of Depression-era Oklahoma — now in its stage iteration at Zach Theatre — makes for a timely reminder of the power of community, as it would no matter when it’s staged.
Almost 20 years ago, Frank Galait, of Chicago’s famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company, took on the challenge of adapting Steinbeck’s now-iconic novel for the stage. And the resulting play netted Galati a Tony Award in 1990 for Best Play.
Zach Theatre artistic director Dave Steakley now brings his vision of Galati’s faithful adaptation to Zach’s Kleberg Stage in a solid and sure production.
Galati’s packed plenty of Steinbeck’s long and winding narrative into a two-and-one-half-hour two-act drama. And it dashes along, with the plot and exposition fairly whisking by in a blink at times. Still, it’s all crammed in there: the Joad’s journey in a decrepit truck to California in search of a better life, the realization that there is no promised land of abundant well-paying work, the harsh injustices of an exploitative agri-business system and the call for an collective action and understanding.
Perhaps true to Steinbeck credo of collection action, Galati’s theatrical treatment offers a showcase for ensemble acting. And the 22-member Zach cast pulls it off with aplomb. A passle of Zach Theatre and Austin acting veterans — Dirk Van Allen, Marc Pouhe, Lana Deitrick, Harvey Guion, Janelle Buchanan, Tom Green, Zach Thompson - front the tight ensemble, some of whom seamlessly shape-shift through multiple characters.
Music director Allen Robertson has crafted an effective musical overlay of traditional songs and hymns that lace throughout the drama, sung by cast members (led by singer/actor John Pointer on guitar), setting mood and serving as nice transitional interludes between scenes.
Set designer Cliff Simon conceived of sparse stage that through color and simple effects evoked the dusty, parched fields. An inventive wheeled wooden contraption played the part of the Joad’s jalopy.
Most importantly, though, Galati’s stage adaptation includes Steinbeck’s original ending — a symbolic act of humanity in which a starving man is breast fed — a scene omitted from the popular 1940 John Ford film version, likely because of its then-controversial nature.
That simple yet profound act gives Steinbeck’s story the resonance that’s carried through some 80 years after it was first published. As Tom Joad himself says “Maybe I can do somethin’… maybe find out it is that’s wrong and see if they ain’t something that can be done about.”
“The Grapes of Wrath” plays 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays through May 10. Kleberg Stage, Zach Theatre, W. Riverside Dr. and S. Lamar Blvd. $36-$46 ($20 on Wednesdays)/ www.zachtheatre.org.
Photo by Kirk R. Tuck, courtesy Zach Theatre.
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March 17, 2009
Texas Biennial brims with brio: 2
At the Mexican American Cultural Center is “Eye to Eye” one of the two group shows of the Texas Biennial 2009. Here we see the hand — or really, the eye — of Biennial curator Michael Duncan at work.
Super colorful (or is that supercolorful?), full of story, marked by craft, body-centered, organic and fantastic, swirly and girlie — the 30 artists in “Eye to Eye” all try for maximum impact (a few succeed). And to be sure, there’s plenty of raw energy here: After all, in the self-selecting pool of Biennial entrants swim mostly early career artists looking for a Big Break.
Adrienne Cullins gets all Dr. Seuss, with her “Black Market Kidney Factory.” Half-plant, half-animal, half-whatever, there are organs and veins and roots and bladders that churn in a fabulous tableaux. Oh that we could hear the sound of this churning thing. Or maybe not.
Adrienne Cullis, “Black Market Kideny Factory” (detail), acrylic on canvas
Jeannette Hernandez does much of the same yet her’s is pure body — or at least the body reimagined as a chaotic visual symphony of internal viscera and organs. This can’t be a healthy body, but it sure is gorgeous to look it, gorgeous and grotesque as it is.
Jeannette Hernandez, “Sideshow,” oil on canvas.
Jade Walker gets 3-D crafty with her impulses toward the girlie. She jumbles the handmade with the factory-made to create super-sized imaginative yet disconcerting forms. “Figure #6” is charming with its whimsy, but also eery; compelling yet unsettling with its scale.
Jade Walker,”Figure #6,” fabric, crutches, cotton stuffing, cast rubber.
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March 12, 2009
Texas Biennial brims with brio: 1
Sassy, bright, overflowing with verve and up-from-your-own-bootstraps independence, the Texas Biennial brims with brio. Curator Michael Duncan has rounded up a herd of exuberant, spirited Lone Star artists determined to make their presence known.
Is all of it really great art? No, of course not. Only a very few works are truly great, and only a few more are very good. But all of the sprawling Texas Biennial — the two group exhibits, the four solo shows, the seven public projects — makes for rewarding, delightful viewing.
It’s the do-it-yourself spirit that makes the Texas Biennial ebullient fun: Indie, artist-run, never-mind-the-art-world — full speed ahead! We do what we like in the Lone Star State and we don’t need to explain it to anyone.
But that doesn’t mean we have our heads in the Gulf Coast sand. Quite the opposite. As the mostly emerging or mid-career Texas Biennial artists prove, they’re acutely aware of what percolates around the now-global art scene. It’s just that these Texas artists don’t play slave to those trends. They do their own thing.
And because there are lots of things that they do, we’ll be making multiple posts to this blog as we peruse and review the Texas Biennial. And forgive the long, image-heavy posts, but it’s just no fun if you can’t see things.
Buster Greybill’s “Bait Box” is brilliant — and also a heartfelt and honorific memorial to the All-American fish that’s swum decades of folklore and tradition. The Huntsville-based artist crafted an enormous bronze catfish and enshrined it on a high voltage box near a forgotten boat launch in the park along Lady Bird Lake, just east of IH-35.
Greybill elevates the ubiquitous bottom-feeding fish to a new level, literally placing it on a pedestal. Albeit, it’s an ubiquitous pedestal (an ordinary utility box), but that makes Greybill’s homage all the more endearing.
Everybody has a fish story to tell — a tale of the ‘one that got away.’ Greybill’s is sharp and sweet and funny.
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March 11, 2009
Review: 'Spamalot'
Guest blogger and American-Statesman features writer Patrick Beach review’s “Monty Python’s Spamalot” while American-Statesman freelancer John DeFore asks the show’s star, Richard Chamberlain, a few questions
Coconut shells. The “Fisch Schlapping Dance.” “Not dead yet.” A black knight who insists on continuing the battle, never mind the pesky amputations and arterial spray. And a killer rabbit.
By this point, we all know these bits will be in “Spamalot,” the musical “lovingly ripped off from the motion picture ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail,’ ” as they put it in the playbill. The show, with book and lyrics by Python alum Eric Idle, won a Tony for best musical in ‘05 and made enough dough to fill a moat while on Broadway. We can’t expect many surprises. We’re going to get an adaptation of a 1975 movie and a few of the Pythons’ greatest hits. Thematic or tonal coherence? Who cares? The original Python cast never did.
But at Tuesday night’s opening of a six-day run at Bass Concert Hall, the show felt like a comfort food entree with a twist for the side dish. The sound was spot-on, the sets dizzyingly adaptable (moving clouds that served as supertitles for a closing sing-along) and the full house was just waiting to laugh at lines they’d heard only a thousand times before. (Wait for it, wait for it … ni!) It must be said that Richard (“Dr. Kildare,” “The Thornbirds”) Chamberlain is a very fine King Arthur, playing him as both oblivious and in on the joke, and that Merle Dandridge as the brazenly ambitious Lady in the Lake — a part she also played in the Broadway production — is a near show-stealer. I still don’t get how the Pythons’ version of wanton silliness and deadpan dadaism could ever be translated into a Broadway musical, which is all extravagance and hyperbole and light, but it does and does so even while grappling with the greatest theological brow-furrower ever to confront the human race: Why can’t God find another cup?
The best moments not cribbed from the film or the TV series arguably are when the show pays fromage to cheesy Broadway and Vegas musicals, but let’s face it, Andrew Lloyd Webber is a record-busting pike in a thimble-sized barrel. The audience’s laughs were genuine, but it’s cheap and easy sport.
But a cow falling out of the sky and squashing somebody? Now that’s comedy. And I really, really hope God has John Cleese’s voice.
— Pat Beach, AA-S features writer
‘Spamalot” continues 8 p.m. night throughSaturday, 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, and 7:30 p.m. Sunday. $21.50-$65.50. 51-477-6060, www.utpac.org.
Richard Chamberlain, who takes the stage next week as King Arthur in “Spamalot,” owes the bulk of his fan base not to Monty Python-style irreverence but to dignified melodrama and globe-spanning adventure. He emerged in the 1960s as television’s “Dr. Kildare,” made hit movies in the ’70s and then became king of the miniseries in the ’80s with “Shogun,” “The Bourne Identity,” and (be still your beating heart) “The Thorn Birds.” Speaking to us on the phone recently, he was just as genial and charming as legions of admirers would expect.
Austin American-Statesman: Were you very aware of ‘Monty Python’ when it was originally on TV?
Richard Chamberlain: Yes, I was living in London from ’68 through ’74, and we were avid fans. We thought they were just miraculously funny.
Any favorite bits?
Well, (laughs), the one that sticks in my mind — I hate to be boring — is the Bureau of Silly Walks. Oh, what an amazing thing!
When they started making the transition to features, what did you think?
Well, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the features. Matter of fact, the first time I saw the movie that this musical is based on was just a few weeks ago.
How did you like it compared with the play?
Well, I think the musical is about 10 times funnier than the movie.
What’s it like filling Tim Curry’s shoes? Did you see him do the show?
No, unfortunately. I wanted to see him so badly, but I was never in the right place at the right time. I didn’t see the musical until just before Christmas in New York last year. They’ve had many kings now, and according to what I’ve heard, they’ve all been very different.
So there’s no temptation, given that the play has been so successful, not to stray too far from the performance fans know.
Oh, no, no, no. With the king, the two kings I’ve seen, the one in New York and the one who preceded me in the road company, were totally different. And I’m completely different from both of them. The thing about Arthur is he’s the only one onstage who doesn’t get the jokes. He’s fun to play.
Just as ‘Spamalot’ has turned ‘The Holy Grail’ into a musical, one of your most famous television outings, ‘The Thorn Birds’ is being staged as a musical.
I just heard that, about a week ago! I was absolutely bowled over. I can’t imagine it. I mean, it would be more of an opera, wouldn’t it, than a musical, because it’s just one tragedy after another.
Any advice for them as they try to adapt it?
Oh no. I wouldn’t dare! I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like.
Well, that’s such a trend now, of trying to make musicals from unlikely sources.
They tried to make a musical of “Shogun”! But it didn’t work.
— John DeFore, AA-S freelancer
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March 9, 2009
Review: Tapestry Dance Company's 'Head to Toe'
Tapestry Dance Company shows always exceed categories. Ranging from tap to modern dance to jazz, the company is, as artistic director Acia Gray describes it, a “multi-form company.”
Sunday’s “Head to Toe” performance at the Long Center marks the company’s first incursion into one of Austin’s newest dance spaces, and the packed audience got a little bit of all the forms and approaches Tapestry employs.
The show featured twenty different numbers, mainly choreographed by Gray and guest collaborator and local dancer and teacher Erica Santiago.
In solos, Gray and Santiago built portraits of individual personalities, and then later duets drew individuals together. In Jason Janas’s “Feeling Found,” Katelyn Thompson and Janas flirted with each other and Al Green’s music, looking like a pair finding the sweet spot of couple-dom where hips and shoulders sway in synchronous motion. Clarity and simplicity also guided dancer Matt Shields’ choreography for Tapestry’s newest (and welcome) additions, Siobhan Cook and Tony Merriwether.
Improvisation continues to birth some of Tapestry’s most eloquent work. In an improvisation to Gnarls Barkley’s “Searching,” Janas managed to grieve with his body, sending echoes of pain flying with every foot stomp.
As Janas painted an aural landscape of trauma, a single chair became the focus of his anger, until he crashed into it, overcome. In other solos, like Santiago’s “To Feel” for Thompson, chairs were less character and more prop. From television to modern dance, the emotive, often earnest or angsty “chair dance” is a well-traveled road. But the use of chairs as a recurring prop helped give the multi-faceted show a thru-line.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance dance critic.
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March 3, 2009
Golden Hornet Project knows the future
Golden Hornet Project showed us what the future of indie classical music Sunday night at their sold-out concert at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz.
Or maybe Sunday night was what the future of classical music should like: An excited multi-generational crowd. Compelling live video accompaniment. Premieres by living composers.
And, oh yeah — there was beer and vegan cupcakes. Maybe that was why the gig sold out days in advance.
Golden Hornet co-founders Graham Reynolds and Peters Stopschinski took their decade-long efforts as indie composers and musicians to a new level last year when they transformed Golden Hornet into a full-fledge 501(c)(3) non-profit. Sunday was the celebration of that: 10 years of composing, playing and presenting new music and the first year of a whole new venture. Joining Reynolds and Stopschinski in the celebration was the inimitable Tosca String Quartet, themselves bold and adventurous musicians as equally accomplished on the symphony stage as in a live club.
Of course, staging the concert at a casual movie house known for its food and drink service at your seat, was the concert’s first important statement - not every composed music concert needs to take place in the austere rigidity of the concert hall. And the amplified quartet worked just fine for the program of eclectic new compositions. Behind the quartet, live video projections of the musicians — a real-time animation by local artists Lee Webster, Paul Baker, and Tyler Hardy — added moody vibrancy.
Like they have from the git-go, Reynolds and Stopschinski shared the bill with other composers. Most notably was Gabriel Prokofiev, the London-based composer and DJ, grandson of famed Sergei Prokofiev. Tosca delivered a deftly polished version of Prokofiev the contemporary’s haunting yet cerebral String Quartet 2. (Prokofiev plays SXSW March 20 with a showcase of his label Nonclassical.)
Austin musicians Tina Marsh, Josh Robbins, Emily Marks and Lauren Larson also had compositions on the bill. But it was the work of Reynolds and Stopschinski that shone. Both showed their talents crafting gorgeous, mesmirizing melodies (Reynold’s “The Ship ar the Bottom of the Sea”). Both knit strains classical, jazz, pop, rock, dance music and just about every other genre seamlessly together (Stopschinski’s String Quartet 2).
Most importantly for us, both know how to bust down barriers around composed new classical music so that everyone can find a way in.
Finally.
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March 2, 2009
Review: 'Bombs in Your Mouth' at Hyde Park
Ken Webster has just about perfected the art of picking plays for Hyde Park Theatre that are fresh, darkly comic and challenging but also perfectly suited to his direction and casting. The world premiere of “Bombs in Your Mouth” is, in that light, a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it’s rife with clichés. On the other, it’s so funny, emotional, and tight in execution that you’re reminded that some clichés are popular for good reason.
After a disappointing father’s death, Danny and Lily are reunited after six years and very divergent life paths. There is judgment, martyrdom, drinking and ultimately a sense that they’re less different than previously thought. On that level, “Bombs” seems only an edit or two away from any number of Hollywood feel-goods than to the less heartwarming “True West.”
But while the overall arc and many of the individual plot points have appeared elsewhere, playwright Corey Patrick adds a few twists of his own. Elsewhere the fighting and arguments would punctuate a larger plot. Here it feels like the driver as Danny and Lily start and stop in fits, bringing up sensitive subjects and immediately deciding they’re not ready to talk about them. The ratcheting up and down of tension without any real catharsis is surprisingly effective. And while there’s little release along the way, Patrick has a sense of humor that can work both broadly and subtly, creating space for childish jokes, drinking contests and a bit of satire.
That alone can’t make “Bombs” a great work, but Webster’s direction and the performances from Joey Hood and Liz Fisher make it a great production. Whether they’re chugging beers in a race to the monster belch or reminiscing about their father’s failures, the two make even the unoriginal elements engaging. But when Patrick gives the actors more to work with, they shine.
When the two siblings return from the police station after learning that their father might have burned down Lily’s mother’s house, they take a moment to look back. Danny wears his father’s torn, burned winter coat and reads his last will and almost stark mad testament written on a roll of toilet paper. At the same time that Danny finds some empathy performing the role of his father, almost becoming him, he dredges up the anger all over again that his father never loved his own mother as much. Lily takes over reading, slowly intoning about her own mother, “No one but (her), no one but (her)” until their father’s memoirs trail off. In that original and poignant moment, Patrick’s script hits its highest moment. As a result, Fisher and Hood are positively captivating. “Bombs in Your Mouth” isn’t a particularly new story, but it’s a good version of an old favorite. And Hyde Park Theatre’s telling of it is even better.
(“Bombs in Your Mouth” continues at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through March 28 at the Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St. $16-$18. 479-PLAY.)
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March 1, 2009
Review: A heaven-sent Rachmaninov Vesper's
Grammy-nominated Austin choir Conspirare stunned and awed Saturday night with a heaven-sent (and sold-out) performance of Rachmaninov’s stirring Vespers at St. Martin’s Lutheran Church.
Hushed and full of reverence, Rachmaninov’s religious mass for unaccompanied chorus is exquisitely beautiful and a departure from the lush piano music or emotive symphonies for which the Russian composer is most commonly known. Considered the crowning achievement of Russian Orthodox choral music, the Vespers follow the rules governing the church’s music with no instruments accompanying the voices.
And yet, while Rachmaninov echoes the melodic style of traditional Orthodox Church chants, he nevertheless brings an undeniable — though carefully considered — sensuousness with harmonies refined to almost a pure essence. The fervid intent of the music’s spirituality is undeniable.
Conspirare director Craig Hella Johnson intimately understood the balance between the simplicity and sensuousness of Rachmaninov’s other-worldly score. The choir’s intonation and vocal blend was seemless and perfect, the soloists appropriately soft, the basses gently hit the low B flats. St. Martin’s high-valuted sanctuary provided lovely — and appropriate — acoustical depth and resonance for the spiritually exalting music.
Conspirare’s exacting perfection never translates to stiff, pretentious or distant. Quite the opposite. There’s a sincerity and prescence that underlies every Conspirare concert. No wonder the audience on Saturday hushed on its own before anyone took the stage: The sublime beauty of Conspirare exudes always.
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February 23, 2009
Ellington's 'Sacred Concert' a glorious collaboration
Not a seat was empty Sunday afternoon when Austin Chamber Music Center teamed up with Huston-Tillotson University’s Concert Choir for a joyous version Duke Ellington’s ‘Sacred Concert,’ presented free as the Chamber Music Center’s annual Black History Month concert.
People spilled into the hall of Huston-Tillotson’s King-Seabrook Chapel. And the stage brimmed full too with the Concert Choir, led by soprano Gloria Quinlan, along with a 15-piece big band led by Keith Winking.
Part choral song cycle, part big band concert, part collection of gospel song, Ellington’s ‘Sacred Concert’ is a brilliant musical mashup. The jazz maestro considered it the most important music he had ever written and spent the last decade of his life devoted to it. Actually, there were three versions of the ‘Sacred Concert’ the first presented in 1965, the last in 1973 one year before Ellington’s death.
But because of the sheer scale of the works, versions of the ‘Sacred Concert’ aren’t often performed. Austin Chamber Music Center artistic director Michelle Schumann has been dreaming of presenting Ellington’s sprawling masterpiece for years. She deserves many kudos for pulling together the considerable forces to make it happen — and offer the concert free to the Austin community.
Certainly, Austin loved it on Sunday. The applause started rippling about two songs into the hour-long program that featured nine selections. At times the chorus alternated the spotlight with the big band. Quinlan showed her clear sweet soprano on “Heaven” even if some micing problems left the volume drift. Winking’s whip-smart ensemble piqued during several impressive solos. Trumpeter Curtis Calderon gave sublime swaggering minor-chord swing that nevertheless still rang as a clarion call. (‘Sacred Concert’ was Ellington’s most direct expression of his faith.) Tenor saxophonist Russell Haight offered a nicely nuanced spin on the bluesy, soulful “TGTT (Too Good To Be Titled).”
But what brought the house down was a surprise add to program, phenom tap dancer Jason Janas of Tapestry Dance Company, who blasted out a brilliant tap solo to “David Danced Before the Lord.” Janas’s storm of sound — all loose legs and furious footwork — begat a spontaneous standing ovation.
Good things — glorious music — happen when people collaborate, Sunday’s concert proved. Now, how about an annual Ellington ‘Sacred Concert’ here?
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Review: 'Heroes'
Don’t go to “Heroes” looking for Tom Stoppard. Although the French play, originally by Gerald Sibleyras, was translated by the writer of “Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead,” it has almost none of his characteristic complications or often bitter wit. And it would be a mistake to miss them. Instead, in Austin Playhouse’s new production, we’re treated to wistful banter and a story about French veterans of World War I looking for a better life than their retirement home.
Within the first few moments of the play, we already know essentially what will happen: Michael Stuart as Henri will capitalize on his hangdog eyes and gentle nature; David Stahl’s Phillipe will drift between paranoia and epileptic flashbacks; and Don Toner’s Gustave will provide a brusque, curmudgeonly counterpoint. Those patterns and personalities play out as the three plan for a getaway—“a commando expedition”—to a hill some miles away where the wind blows through the poplars.
There are other events that happen off stage, but what action there is is constrained to a garden terrace and three old men arguing with each other. What keeps it from becoming “The Odd Trio” is a more measured, paced, and friendly tone to the group’s ribbing. Felix and Oscar have grown up, developed a sense of nostalgia, and found a friend
There is zaniness to be sure, ranging from a canine statue that takes on an imaginary life to physical comedy as the threesome preps for its trip, but it’s always balanced by more heart and pondering than Neil Simon or Stoppard usually managed. There’s a sentimentally that threw me off initially when I was expecting more bite than warmth, but under Lara Toner’s direction, the veterans don’t so much grow so much as grow on you.
Indeed, there isn’t much variation, and that’s the only real problem with the production. The trio’s comic timing is by and large on point, but, by the end, that means you can see more than a few of the laughs coming. It has the effect of building affection, but in the same way you grow to love a grandfather who tells the same jokes over and over again. It can be amusing, comforting, and a little wearying all at once.
Fortunately, the play itself is short and the three never really wear out their welcome, even through an ending that carries the one heavy handed note of symbolism in the play. Instead, we’re left, as after a pleasant visit, with fond memories and good laughs.
(“Heroes” continues Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 5 p.m. through March 15 at The Austin Playhouse, Larry L. King Stage, 3601 S. Congress, Bldg. C. $10-$20. 476-0084, austinplayhouse.com)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance critic.
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Review: Philip Glass 'Book of Longing
Philip Glass and his ensemble only had about two-thirds of an audience at the 3,000-seat Bass Concert Hall Saturday night. That’s a departure from years past when the famed composer has usually filled the house for many of his concerts here.
What gives? Is it the recessionary economy? Or is Austin over its infatuation with everything Glass does? Then again, perhaps there just wasn’t much interest in “Book of Longing,” Glass’s musical treatment of poems by Leonard Cohen from Cohen’s volume of the same name.
Though the piece was co-commissioned by the University of Texas’ Performing Arts Center, the ‘Book of Longing’ premiered in 2007 and has toured since then. Both the live show, and the CD, have garnered mixed reviews. (The UT showing of ‘Book of Longing’ was on hold while Bass underwent an 18-month renovation. Bass re-opened in January.)
Glass and Cohen are longtime friends, artistic equals and their work shares essential similarities: Glass builds with essential musical elements repetitive; Cohen also reduces language to its rudiments.
But none of it seemed to gel in Glass’s 22-song series Saturday night, and while likeable, “Book of Longing” seemed ultimately too disparate.
Behind the nine musicians (including Glass and his longtime collaborator, Michael Riesman, both on keyboards) on stage were large images of Cohen’s drawings arrayed on a backdrop with a central video screen showing a constantly changing stream of yet more drawings.
The four vocalists, Broadway regulars, had strong, distinctive voices, alternating solos with quartets and duets. But the bright show-style vocals didn’t mesh with Glass’s mostly minor-chord machinations nor with Cohen’s terse, often humorously absurd lyrics.
Cohen and Glass each had their own solos of a sort. Cohen’s voice was heard on recordings reading some of his shorter poems. And Glass delivered lovely idiomatic solos for several members of the ensemble which provided the true highlights of the evening’s performance.
Cellist Wendy Sutter cello rendered an hauntingly beautiful melody. Saxophonist Andrew Sterman had an appropriately jazz inflected turn. And violinist Gloria Justen evoked a classical concerto.
But inbetween the solos, Glass’s music was at its most formulaic and repetitious. In the end, the individual pieces — the Broadway voices, the broken arpeggios and rhythms of Glass’s distinctive style, the spoken words, the instrumental solos — never melded.
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February 22, 2009
Review: 'An Ideal Husband'
Would that Oscar Wilde could be a media pundit for our times. The ultra-clever Victorian wordsmith and incisive observer of human behavior could inject some sorely needed wit and ironic humor into today’s culture of unceasing and shallow chatter.
Alright we can’t resurrect Wilde the man. But we do have Austin Shakespeare’s current smart and charming production of “An Ideal Husband,” Wilde’s comedy of blackmail and political scandal, to enchant us with — and remind us of how timely and relevant Wilde’s criticism of politics and society is today.
A co-production with the University of Texas’ theater program, and directed by Austin Shakespeare artistic director Ann Ciccolella, this “Ideal Husband” snaps thanks to uniformly sharp acting. And played in the round in the Long Center’s Rollins Studio Theatre (the first production to take advantage of the black box theater’s flexibility), Wilde’s intrigue-filled drawing room comedy clips along briskly. And sumptuous period costumes by Abbey Graf aptly suggest the materialistic milieu.
A rising young member of parliament, Sir Robert Chiltern (Mark Scheibmeir) has the ideal career, the ideal adoring wife (Sydney Andrews) and the ideal society ranking in the hyper class-conscious London of the late Victorian era where, just like today, politics is celebrity.
But all of Sir Robert’s social and political eminence is suddenly endangered when the scheming Mrs. Cheveley (Verity Branco) — a mysterious woman from his wife’s past — threatens to blackmail him and expose the youthful act of corruption that leveraged his fortune.
“Everybody turns out to be somebody else,” Wilde’s one-liner filled script quips.
Indeed. The ambitious upstanding Sir Robert isn’t exactly what he seems. And to rescue his career, marriage and social standing he must rely on best friend, Lord Goring (Shaun Patrick Tubbs), a dandy who spends his days dressing fastidiously for one silly social event after the other. Yet for all his foppery and carefree lifestyle, it’s Goring who saves the situation thanks to his supreme understanding of the follies of human nature, particularly the vagaries of love.
Branco makes a devilish icy beauty of the kniving Mrs. Cheveley while Scheibmeir’s Sir Robert is suitably full of a combination supreme self-regard and total naiveté.
But it’s Tubbs, one of five UT graduate student actors in the show, who shines brightest as Goring, combing impeccable comedic timing with a dollop of psychological complexity to make the dandy Goring well-rounded.
“Ambition is unscrupulous always,” Goring observes. Indeed. More than a century after Wilde penned his satire of political ambition, its incisive observations still ring true.
“An Ideal Husband” plays 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3p.m. Sunday at Rollins Studio Theatre, Long Center, 711 W. Riverside Dr. $20-$32. www.austinshakespeare.org.
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February 16, 2009
Review: 'Shooting Star'
We’d all like to think we’ve escaped our youth. Actually, we’d all like to think that everyone else forgot us too when we were flush with idealism, when we were confident that our life would go exactly according to a grandiose plan, when we were certain we would do great and different things.
Steven Dietz sends a tender valentine to middle-age in “Shooting Star,” a smart and sweet comedy from one of American theater’s most-produced playwright and now getting a polished premiere at Zach Theatre.
Years ago, when they were in college, Elena Carson (Barbara Chisholm) and Reed McAllister (Jamie Goodwin) were madly in love and living the bohemian life together. Elena was the ultimate free-spirit and Earth mother-in-the-making; Reed tried be a free-spirit, but wrestled with his more thoughtful nature. They experimented with an open relationship, they told each other they were both destined for significant and soul-changing lives.
Then they broke up. And they didn’t see each other for 20 years. Now they’ve run into each other again, both stuck at a snowed in airport.
Dietz’s gift as a writer is an acute attention to our modern language. He elevates ordinary conversation to a kind of music with precise rhythms and exquisitely timed phrases. In Dietz’s hands conversation sounds natural, but smart.
That kind of linguistic precision could weigh down an actor. But Chisholm and Goodwin deftly handled the clever banter, never letting the energy slide during the 80-minute intermission-less play. And though the plot may see the characters traverse a mountain of emotion — the regret, the unfulfilled dreams, the acceptance of the reality of one’s present life — Chisholm and Goodwin shoulder it with sincerity.
Played tightly in the round on Zach Theater’s Whisenhunt Stage, “Shooting Star” doesn’t let you get far away from the bittersweet actuality of life considered at middle-age. But then why try to? Dietz makes reality poetic.
“Shooting Star” continues 8 p.m. Wednesdays—Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays through April 5. Whisenhunt Stage, Zach Theatre, 1510 Toomey Road. $15-$39. 476-0541. www.zachtheatre.org.
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Review: Ballet Austin's 'Hamlet'
Opera and ballet fans often overlap: both forms tend toward spectacular extravagance. While story ballets may be replete with costumes and sets, it’s rare to see a production where choreography and design work together as well as Ballet Austin’s “Hamlet.” Artistic Director Stephen Mills’ 2001 rendition of iconic Shakespeare returned to Austin on Friday at the Long Center. The staging and the stage picture were always stunning and smart.
“Hamlet’s” design, created by Jeffrey Main and Mills, and lighting, designed by Tony Tucci, manipulated space to tell the story of the despairing prince and his wounded lover. Hamlet could be the story of one man’s tightly wound mind, and Phillip Glass’ swirling music kept focus on Hamlet’s (Frank Shott) journey. The set’s sense of scale, a mix of openness and elements that are so large they are monstrous, makes Hamlet’s intensity more painful.
When the second act opens at Ophelia’s funeral, the white hammock-like bed for Ophelia (Ashley Lynn) floated high above the mourners against a huge blue-lit scrim. Ophelia and Hamlet are always cast as outsiders in the ballet. In the opening moments, Hamlet sits on an elevated platform similar to Ophelia’s funeral bier. Then he moves through the crowd largely unseen. Ophelia dances with everyone, but her hair is down; the other women’s hair is tightly bound. Her dress is light pink; the other women wear deep colors.
Hamlet and Ophelia serve as observers and mirrors to a community unaware it has been unleashed from ethics in the wake of the murder of the king, Hamlet’s father. The people’s unfounded innocence unfolds most obviously from Ophelia’s brother Laertes. As Laertes, Johntuart Winchell’s fluffy blonde hair and earnest attack at movement made Laertes’ connection with the new King Claudius (Edward Carr) believable.
The completeness of the ballet’s narrative has much to do with the intelligent coupling of design and dance, but Shott and Lynn bring nuance to roles that can be stereotypical. In several solos, Shott foreshadows Hamlet’s breakdown through energetic choices. His knees suddenly jerk and bend. Hamlet’s ground is being torn from beneath him. Lynn’s Ophelia seems doomed by vulnerability Her open chest and deep lunges speak to her sensitivity, but also her undoing.
Choreographically, Mills’ work for Ophelia might be the best in the production. Her steps tap the softness of the other women’s classicism, but Ophelia’s are rooted. The combination illustrates how Ophelia is a woman who chooses to be different. Perhaps she goes insane because she, like Hamlet, is honest.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance critic.
Photos by Tony Spielberg.
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February 9, 2009
Review: 'The Secret Live of the InBetweeners'
“The Secret Lives of the InBetweeners” launches with a musical number exploring the mind of the urban hipster as an artist, two women, a gamer, and rich Lothario pine for a breakthrough, love and independence, the next level and sex. Unfortunately, the mind of a stereotype doesn’t leave much room for secrets.
The new musical from Aaron Brown proceeds largely according to the pattern set by its first song. Joe is struggling to get his play and love life together. Tina, his sort-of sweetheart, wants affection, but falls for slime ball Harry. Her friend Charlotte, a computer programmer with dreams of the stage, warns her off but becomes caught up with video game fanatic Waldo instead.
Were it not for the addition of personified Hope and Fear, the plot would run like “Rent” revised by the “Sex and the City” team—with less of a sense of humor. Even these, though, are more clichés than archetypes. Hope, played by a doe-eyed, Raphaelite Betsy McCann, is indeed hopeful, but Fear, played as a snarky goth by Rudy Ramirez, doesn’t exactly set the knees knocking.
That may be part of the point. His opening number — in the vein of “Sympathy for the Devil,” but with less bravado — establishes him as the source of history’s problems, though he’s reduced by modernity to playing on personal insecurities rather than terror. Regardless of how the last eight years might stand against that, it makes for a less-than-compelling emotional conflict.
That’s particularly problematic as the second act of the play makes an abrupt jump from an urban relationship story to a supernatural wager, replacing Job with Joe. Except where Job had boils and a family massacre, Joe is a 30-year-old director with an overbearing mother who, in his moment of catharsis, he runs away from before getting scared and hungry after an hour.
The music itself is prone to quick switches, with most songs bouncing wildly around the thematic map and to the border of or out of many singers’ ranges. Instead of catchy hooks, it feels more like a mash-up collection of Muzak.
That’s too bad because the book and score obscure some performers that could do well elsewhere. While I found Waldo’s constant video game references annoying (or, as a gamer who also enjoys musical theater, almost frustratingly mocking) at first, Errich Petersen’s bouncy enthusiasm for Waldo’s lack of shame is winning. And when Charlotte, even more charmingly energetic and strong in Jo Beth Henderson’s jazzy numbers, finally sees that in him, the love story gets one of its few “awww” moments.
Musicals don’t have to be big and epic — Penfold Theatre Company’s recent staging of “The Last Five Years” proved that — but “Secret Lives” just doesn’t feel original.
(“The Secret Lives of the InBetweeners” continues at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Sundays through March 7 at the Vortex, 2307 Manor Road. $10-$30. 478-5282. vortexrep.org.)
[Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance critic.]
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Review: KDH Dance and Mary O'Donnell
Saturday brought celebrations of arrival and longevity in Austin dance. Choreographer Mary O’Donnell introduced herself to Austin with “Eyes of Innocence” in the afternoon, and KDH Dance Company continued its 10th anniversary season with performances at Café Dance in the evening.
O’Donnell refers to “Eyes of Innocence” as an example of “responsible anarchy.” Some movement and ideas are set and remain the same across the piece’s rehearsals and performance, while some performers work to challenge that stability.
Five performers, embodying ideas more than characters, moved largely oblivious to each other. As the severe, black-suited Thunder, Kent de Spain was a constant presence around which Derrick Washington bopped, eyes darting. Julie Nathanielsz seemed Washington’s counterpoint; her movements were equally detailed. But where Washington settled into curves, Nathanielsz felt angular, though paradoxically soft. As Angel and Addiction, Lucila Velez and Seunghee Yang performed oblivion more consciously. Bellydancer Velez floated through curving paths, her turns signaled by the soft jingle of her costume. Yang’s sunglasses and a remote control truck, which had several crossings prior to Yang’s appearances, provided an aloof, but comedic layer. Teen-ager Lariza (identified by only her first name) functioned as audience surrogate, walking amidst the random environment, sometimes trying out performers’ movement and other times ignoring it.
KDH continues to build toward its 10th anniversary gala, slated for June 18-20. The current walk down recent memory lane features the company, led by artistic director Kathy Dunn Hamrick, in excerpts from four pieces made during the past seven years. A close-up view and Dunn Hamrick’s friendly introductions to each piece make the studio show a good way to ease in to dance spectatorship, even though Saturday felt more like a reunion of company family and friends.
KDH repeats the Café Dance program for the next two Saturdays, Feb. 14 and 21, at 6 and 8 p.m. For tickets call 512-934-1082 or go to www.kdhdance.com.
[Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance critic.]
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Review: Jupiter Quartet
Friday night at the University of Texas’ McCullough Theater, the Jupiter String Quartet demonstrated again their exceptional technical and artistic quality. Following two previous engagements at the Austin Chamber Music Festival (in 2005 and 2007), the Jupiter on this visit offered a strikingly organized program performed with the tonal intensity and refined expression that are becoming familiar.
The first and last of the three works played were both in A minor and shared more than simply a key. Beethoven’s towering Quartet no. 15 in A minor, among his last compositions, is in five movements with a large central slow movement inscribed by Beethoven, “Holy song of thanks from one recovered to the Divinity.” This rewarding, uncompromising quartet received a young people’s performance, though these young people grasped the technical problems of the music almost flawlessly and were persuasive and self-assured in their expression. Their readings of it should be tremendous before long.
The 18-year-old Felix Mendelssohn intensively studied Beethoven’s last quartets when they were new publications; the boy’s Quartet in A minor, published as no. 2, was his response. Containing several allusions or quotations to the Beethoven quartets, especially no. 15, Mendelssohn’s is ambitious, with his artistic reach exceeding his grasp a wee bit. The Mendelssohn opened the evening, getting a serious, sophisticated treatment from the Jupiter that wanted a sharper interpretive focus.
Bringing the first half to an intriguing conclusion, ‘Arcadiana’ by the British composer Thomas Adés had the players acting independently of each other, producing unusual sonorities laced with numerous allusions to other composers, most notably Edward Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations. The players executed the piece with care and enthusiasm, sounding both angular and sweet.
Between having the Mirò Quartet in residence at UT’s Butler School of Music and receiving periodic visits from the Jupiter Quartet, Austin’s chamber music scene is blessed these days with high-quality string quartet playing.
[David Mead is an American-Statesman freelance critic.]
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February 4, 2009
Review: 'Legally Blonde the Musical'
Make way for chill-bump inducing major chords and overly earnest, but oddly touching love duets.
Broadway’s back.
Tuesday’s performance of the movie-made-musical “Legally Blonde” marked Broadway Across America’s return to UT’s Performing Arts Center. Over the next seven months, musicals take over Bass Concert Hall for at least one week per month. (In August, “Wicked” gets two weeks.) As “Legally Blonde’s” central character, Elle Woods would say, “Oh my God!”
While the bevy of musical theater might be reason for excitement, there’s not much to exclaim about in “Legally Blonde.” The 2001 movie allowed Elle, played by Reese Witherspoon, to have a bit of pluck, even in her earliest, pinkest scenes. The musical’s Elle (Lauren Ashley Zakrin) lacks depth for far too long. When boyfriend Warner chooses Harvard, then a brunette, over Elle, she responds vapidly. Only when Elle’s Harvard law school mentor Emmett Forrest (D.B. Bonds) — an older student with a hard-luck story — forces a study routine on Elle does she exhibit intelligence or tenacity.
The only early onstage evidence of Elle’s intelligence comes in an early showdown with a conniving saleswoman at a dress store. Shopping sets the scene for another key moment in the musical: Elle and Emmett sing their way to tentative love in a department store, belting “Take It Like a Man” as Elle helps Emmett transform from corduroy elbow patches to a Brooks Brothers clone. The musical’s message: love (and shopping) will keep us together.
Jerry Mitchell’s directing and choreography don’t do much to deepen the show — quite literally. Most of the musical uses only the front half of the stage, and the choreography is two-dimensional. Dancing the cast looks militaristic: They face front, then flip to face the wing. The musical’s movement palette, contemporary cheerleading, is constricting, but anyone who’s seen “Bring it On” knows dance for cheerleaders can be more creative.
The set, designed by David Rockwell, also suffers from flatness. The only time the overall stage picture feels expansive comes courtesy of the backdrop of a jail, where Woods visits the second-act celebrity defendant, Brooke Wyndham (Colleen Sexton). Why would jail be the site for a stage space to open up?
“Legally Blonde” eventually proves that Elle has more to her than her valley girl squealing suggests. There is no similar secret buried in the musical.
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February 3, 2009
Bass's brave new world of sound? Not quite
A couple of weeks ago, the Bass Concert Hall welcomed its first audience since undergoing an 18-month $14.5 million renovation.
The primary venue of the University of Texas Performing Arts Center — and for more than three decades, the primary performing arts venue for any symphony, opera, ballet or other fine arts in Austin — the Bass was ordered shut by the state fire marshall to update fire and safety features. While closed, UT officials opted to tweak the acoustics and upgrade the lobbies.
So how does the new improved Bass sound? After all, the 1981 3,000-seat hall was always criticized for the way in which it seemed to swallow and flatten sound.
The first concert a couple of weeks ago — featuring Grammy Award-winning singer John Legend and rising star Estelle — was over-amplified. Road shows not only bring their own systems, but artists insist on using their own sound people who are typically not familiar with individual halls. The result? Like in the past, Legend’s amplified show just sounded loud and monolithic. The only improvement could be heard from a little bit better amplified sound absorption. But once again, it seemed like that in place of making subtle adjustments, yet another a road show dropped into the Bass and merely cranked up the volume.
Last Friday night, the Bass’ re-opening was celebrated with a show produced by UT’s Butler School of Music. Getting top billing were opera singers Frederica Von Stade and Samuel Ramey, who together sang an all-too-brief program of arias and show tunes.
Also on the roster was special guest Barbara Conrad, the mezzo-soprano who, as one of the first African American students to attend UT in the 1950s, was denied the chance for a lead role because of prejudice.
That Conrad was featured center stage for Joseph Schwanter’s “New Morning for the World” — a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for wind symphony and narrator — gave Friday’s concert, dubbed “World of Sound” a meaningful resonance.
Too bad, then, the hall itself didn’t have more acoustical resonance.
Despite the improvements made — there’s a new prosenium, new adjustable acoustical curtains and a more open ceiling construction — for an acoustical or classical show, the Bass sounds dry, dry, dry. There’s none of the reverberation or resonance that a good hall should have. Sound comes at you. It doesn’t surround you.
As something of an encore, Austin indie band Ghostland Observatory came on for two songs at the end of the overly long show (a half dozen Butler School of Music ensembles and choirs performed). And not only were the oddly compelling duo accompanied by a zoomy laser light show, but the Longhorn marching band made a surprise visit for Ghostland’s song “The Band Marches On,” the orange-uniformed band members filling out the front of the stage and trickling out in the aisles of the first few rows.
Judging by the screams coming from the balcony, plenty were there to just to see Ghostland. Those fans got at least a fun mini show that sparkled. The Bass, however, didn’t get the sparkling sound improvements it could have.
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February 2, 2009
Review: Austin Lyric Opera's 'Rigoletto'
For any readers who have been waiting for an excuse to get tickets for Austin Lyric Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Rigoletto” that opened Saturday, I’m giving it to you now: This is a vivid and exciting realization of one of the blazing masterpieces of the operatic repertory, and you must get to Dell Hall at the Long Center to see it. This is a “Rigoletto” staged (pretty much) as specified in the score with musical artists who can perform it well.
Let the record show that every single opera with an orchestral introduction performed before 1950 was intended to be played with the curtain down; while the staging of the Prelude by stage director Kay Walker Castaldo was unobtrusive, it was completely unnecessary. But once past that, her staging frequently satisfied the requirements of the score in a dramatically credible fashion.
The three principal singing actors — baritone Todd Thomas in the title role of the hunchbacked court jester, soprano Lyubov Petrova as his daughter Gilda, and tenor Chad Shelton as the charming, licentious Duke of Mantua — are human, and they get a single try each night to sing their roles straight through. Each of them had an insignificant number of notes slip out of control, but each voice was appropriate to its role, and they brought the characters to life. In the crucial supporting role of the professional assassin, Peter Volpe was the Sparafucile of one’s dreams (or perhaps nightmares), with a steely gaze and a low register that seemed to go off the charts.
Also excellent were the remaining members of the supporting cast, the ALO male chorus prepared by Marc David Erck and the ALO orchestra, outdoing itself in this production. Richard Buckley, as on most other occasions with ALO, makes this piece work — but understand that, for a conductor, making an opera “work” involves understanding a score’s strengths and weaknesses, making the orchestra a participant in the drama without swamping the singers, and providing an artistic foundation upon which the singers can sound their best.
I also want to give a special shout-out to lighting designer David Nancarrow, who makes just about every ALO show look great, but in this show he makes visual sense of an opera about half of which takes place outdoors at night. And his effects for the storm in the last act will have you reaching for an umbrella.
Austin Lyric Opera’s ‘Rigoletto’ continues at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Friday and 3 p.m. Sunday. The Long Center, 701 Riverside Drive. $20-$175. 472-5992, www.austinlyricopera.org.
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January 30, 2009
Review: 'Leslee Fraser: No Sure Footing'
Leslee Fraser is a humorously irreverent commentator. The San Antonio-based artist — currently featured in a solo exhibit at Women & Their Work — pulls from the most commonplace commercial realms to twist well-known images into funny but often dark new scenarios.
Specifically Fraser — whose artmaking practice had to change radically when she was diagnosed with chronic reactive arthritis several years ago — collects kitschy pastel ceramic figurines and toys then arranges and modifies them to startling effect. Fraser does her collecting while power walking around inside malls. In effect, shopping has become her mode of artmaking. And yet it’s the commercialization — the bland mass reproduction, the numbing sameness — of popular imagery that Fraser’s art critiques.
Take, for example, “Precious Little.” The tiny staged scene features one of the strangest of the Precious Moments figurines — the mass-produced teardrop-eyed, pastel-hued little statues of children — this one in spacesuit, a helmet in its hands. Fraser has placed this baby astronaut about six inches from a pile of fool’s gold. In a darkly humorous way you can’t help but feel sorry for the tiny space-traveling tot and what she represents — she’s an allegory for our collective starry-eyed dreams of discovering material riches.
Everything in Fraser’s mini tableaux is topsy-turvy, ironic, upside-down; the titles of miniature installations, pure double-entendre. In “Forbidden Love” a rosy cute ceramic mother pig nurses a dog while her piglets look on in surprise. In “Cock Fight 2” two rooster figurines, slightly altered with craft clay, pair off, one in patriotic American garb, the other in the robes of a Islamic imam: two titans of political and religious faith as warring animals.
Despite their handmade-and-heartfelt look and despite their commercial origins, these odd scenes unnerve. Maybe it’s their miniature scale. Maybe it’s the way in which Fraser, with very deft artistic antics, complete subverts the shallow kitsch of pop culture to weave compelling visual commentaries.
‘Leslee Fraser: No Sure Footing’
When: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays through Feb. 21
Where: Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca St.
Tickets: Free
Information: 477-1064, www.womenandtheirwork.org
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January 29, 2009
Review: Austin Chamber Music Center
As if we needed further proof that Michelle Schumann and the Austin Chamber Music Center take classical music to a new level in Austin — Saturday’s concert at the Long Center’s Rollins Studio Theatre was sold-out and then some.
Two extra rows of seats had to be added last minute when more than the projected 180 audience members showed up. Good thing that the Rollins, a flexible black box theater with multiple seating possibilities, is nimble. The extra seating didn’t prove a problem.
In fact, it just made the entire concert feel more festive.
Perhaps appropriately,then, Schumann announced that program would start with an encore of sorts by the evening’s featured guests, the lively Carpe Diem String Quartet.
Before they dug into the program’s first piece - Dohnanyi’s String Quartet No. 3 — with a flourish, the quartet whisked off Monti’s ‘Csárdás,’ a frisky, virtuosic piece based on a Hungarian folk dance.
Indeed, frisky characterized the mood of the evening. So did virtuosity. The Ohio-based Carpe Diem not only delivered a vigorous and polished show, they projected an aura of openness
Maybe it was because for the first half of the program, the quartet did without their seats and, except for cellist Diego Fainguersch played standing up. That may seem like a small thing, but it’s really not. Too often the formalities of concert presentation stifles performers - and that in turn colors the audience. But violinists Charles Wetherbee and John Ewing along with violist Korine Fujiwara didn’t hold back on physically expressing their clear joy of playing, swaying swayed and otherwise And how could we not feel that enthusiasm?
The enthusiasm and outward virtuosity really popped when Schumann was joined by Wetherbee and Austin Symphony Orchestra principal clarinetist Stephen Girko for Schoenfeld’s crazy klezmer-infused Trio Freylakh.
Before tackling a mesmerizing presentation of Dvorak’s masterly Piano Quintet, the Carpe Diem strings showed us more of their fun side with Fujiw][=ara’s own homage to her Montana ranching roots with a brilliant burst of fiddle music.
But it was Dvorak’s Quintet that was the gem of the evening. In parts warm and lyrical, in others dramatic and moody, and still at other times folksy, what makes the Dvorak Quintet a masterpiece is ultimate unity. And Schumann and Carpe Diem handled it superbly, with loads of finesse and also with heartfelt soul.
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January 26, 2009
Review: 'The Bird' and 'The Bee'
“The Bird and The Bee” is essentially two very good plays within one great production.
“The Bird,” by Al Smith, and “The Bee,” by Matt Hartley, were originally staged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as two separate offerings, giving audiences the chance to view them a la carte or take in the double billing. In Capital T Theatre’s new take, it’s hard to imagine them apart.
Each play tells the story of a different teenager and how they came to meet, fall in love, and die. In “The Bee,” Chloe, played by Tayler Gill, weathers the death of her brother in a traffic accident and is confronted by the insincerity of her friends and neighbors’ mourning. While Gill stands silent, lost in her own feelings, her fame-seeking friend Hannah, played to comically loathsome hyperbole by Melissa Recalde, sets up a virtual memorial, trite pop songs and all.
In “The Bird,” we meet Jakob, who appears only as a silent figure on the other end of Chloe’s instant messages in “The Bee.” While his looming presence there makes him seem a predator taking advantage of Chloe’s suburban discontent, we soon find out that the poor teen’s life is in a whole new category of misery. The crippled son of an immigrant Russian prostitute, Jakob’s only father figure is a teacher who quickly chooses to become a John instead of an inspiration. And yet Jakob remains, for the most part, hopeful and romantic.
I won’t give away the rather dramatic plot revelation that ties the two pieces irrevocably together, but it certainly makes viewing them individually hard to understand. The playwrights add in other little motifs and themes that run across both works, but the more impressive connections are brought out by director Kelli Bland.
“The Bee” is a quiet, bitterly comic play. Chloe is precocious and naïve and prone to ruminating on the nature of public and private spaces, online and off. It’s a work of sweet, subtle connections, with conversations between a drawn-in Gill and her brother, friends, and silent Jakob filling the time.
“The Bird,” however, is largely a monologue by Jakob, played here by Chase Wooldridge giving the best performance that I’ve seen from him. As Jakob relates his life story, he begins with a child’s magical perspective on the world: the clothes left behind by his mother’s visitors are relics of ghosts, the bees in an ever-expanding hive reminiscent of their spirits. The narrative builds like a sad fairy tale until, in a burst of rage, Wooldrige explodes on the ghosts, trying to stop their visits and save his mother. It’s portentous, but disquieting in its own sudden transition.
That switch is the key to the two plays that Bland and her talented ensemble have found to unlock their strengths. On its own, each play is poignant and well executed. As a dual offering, they take on a new tenor of both beauty and horror. “The Bee” strings out the audience’s tension as Gill goes through an arc of ennui to happiness even while the play itself grows tragic. While the cast wrings out all the comedy they can from the horrible townspeople, it can still be a slow build, focusing more on thoughts than actions. That it’s punctuated by the gut punch of “The Bird,” though, makes it a perfect prelude and the pair a wonderful, if emotionally exhausting, combination.
(“The Bird and The Bee” continues at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 28 and at 7 p.m. Jan. 30 at the Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Road. $10. 479-PLAY, fronterafest.org)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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Review: 'Kill Will'
“Kill Will” is an entertaining, though derivative, new play. For better or worse, though, it’s at its funniest when it feels most like a pastiche of other works.
The play opens with, as a sign of things to come, a man lying on the floor, a gunshot, and an ominous threat that there’s more on the way. By the end of the play, it’d be tough to find space for one more body. Mickey, the man on the floor, is a sometime East Ender coke dealer who has uncovered an earl’s storage unit full of priceless artifacts and begun moving them for greater profit. Of course, he still has some loose ends from the drug world threatening to do him in, so along with his slow-witted, aspiring actor partner, he’s out for one more big sell to make good. Unfortunately, everyone from Russian assassins to a museum curator named Ophelia is after him before he can sell the diary of William Shakespeare, which would prove the Bard’s existence and authorship.
If you can already see the touches of Quentin Tarantino, the close parallels to Guy Ritchie, and the influence of playwright Martin McDonagh, you’re well ahead of the game. Tarantino and McDonagh both earn mentions in Austin Alexander’s script, but the similarities to Ritchie’s “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” may have been a bit too close to home for a mention. Or, as Mickey is told by his limerick-obsessed bartender, the caper would make one hell of a movie. No matter that there’s already plenty out there like it: They all make good money, so throw in a bit of Shakespeare, and you’ve got an interesting twist.
Oddly, though, there’s not much Shakespeare. Ophelia argues over and over again for the importance of his existence and significance as an English author, but everyone else is more interested in the money than the history. That’s probably for the best since her repetitive lectures come off less like Ron Rosenbaum’s engaging book on the question of authorship, “The Shakespeare Wars,” and more like an angry Wikipedia commenter.
Alexander seems obsessed with saying something, though, and peppers “Kill Will” with rambling meditations on pop culture and self-aware in jokes. There’s talk of the boredom of watching theater and movies, musings on the pointless existence of one-line characters, and, after a hazy first act that killed any nostalgia I had for pre-smoking-ban dive bars, a joke about fiddling with cigarettes to look cool on stage and fill up dead space. The meta-jokes do more to rub in the play’s problems than evoke laughs.
And that’s really too bad. When Alexander surrenders to the riffy style of Tarantino and Ritchie, “Kill Will” can be quite funny. As arch crime lord William Slate, Justin Scalise finds comedy in cruelty and a sardonically low value for human life. It feels at times more like an impersonation of Brick Top, Alan Ford’s role in “Snatch,” than an original character, but it doesn’t matter when you’re laughing. Likewise, Sesar Sandoval and Devyn Ray are laugh-out-loud awkward as the fairly stock Russian assassins, and co-director Nathan Osburn finds little gems scattered throughout a variety of bit characters.
Martin McDonagh has long been heralded—or jeered, depending on your tastes—as the Tarantino of theater. He didn’t earn his fame by name-checking his influences or borrowing their broad plots, but by taking the best of their styles and adapting it to his own stories. When Alexander does that, he’s genuinely funny and very much so. Of course, there’s always a place for homage, and it’s worth pointing out that Shakespeare himself is the most famous and talented copycats of them all. Still with the glimmers of originality and a clever sense of humor running throughout “Kill Will,” maybe this is one time where it’s best not to look to Shakespeare for inspiration.
(“Kill Will” continues at 8:45 p.m. Jan. 29 and noon Feb. 1 at the Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Road. $10. 479-PLAY, fronterafest.org)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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January 21, 2009
Review: 'Dance Carousel'
‘Dance Carousel’ has become a staple of Austin’s winter dance season. Part of Frontera Fest, Ellen Bartel, ‘Carousel’s’ curator, brings together 10 choreographers, and each choreographer makes four one-minute dances.
This year’s ‘Carousel,’ which opened Tuesday at Salvage Vanguard Theater, offers some familiar choreographic lessons: short time periods work well for comedy, and a selection process that involves pulling names out of a hat makes for an evening of varied quality.
The funniest and one of the most unified contributions came from Matt Williams. His four vignettes formed an ode to Michael Jackson from the Jackson 5 years with a little ‘Thriller’ thrown in. To the skips and hops of Jackson’s young voice a quintet that included Williams danced in unison. Their jazzy performance felt like a wink at the audience, reminding us dance snobs that people dancing in perfect unison is odd and, yes, funny.
Humor took a quirky turn in other pieces. Bartel’s Spank Dance Company offered “Meet the Emilies,” a collage featuring five women in winter clothes appropriate for Northern childhoods. Stillness was a prominent choreographic choice here: One or two dancers would stand as others slowly carried tree branches across the stage. In the last section, the women helped each other through a strip tease, yanking fuzzy hats and warm gloves off each other, before heading into a jazzy, comedic, almost unison dance. (Are we seeing the emergence of an Austin dance aesthetic?)
In a series of dance videos, Sarah Richison and Kevin Lovelady out-quirked Bartel. Bulbous coats made floating dancers look like snowmen, drifting in front of patriotic New York landscapes: the New York Stock Exchange wrapped in red, white and blue, and the Statue of Liberty. In all four mini-films, Mariah Carey’s syrupy “Hero” accompanied the slow-motion snow people. Thank God for dance that does not take itself too seriously.
Other comedic notables were Jennifer Micallef and Chell Garcia-Trias’s vaudevillian wrestling match and Mari Akita’s “pyongyang robo girls + in an intersection+”, where Akita and Erin Meyer directed traffic with a light saber in heeled, military dress.
Of course, there should be room for serious dance, but Andrea Ariel’s duets with Steve Ochoa was perhaps the only section that was not funny, but still developed a theme through finished movement. Much of the rest of the program lacked development and polish. Many pieces eschewed connection across each choreographer’s four slots, which was confusing from an audience standpoint. And several works suffered from amateurish composition, basic patterns repeated with little point, or dance technique that lacked polish.
‘Dance Carousel’ continues at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 23, 1:45 p.m. Jan. 25 and 4:15 p.m. Jan. 31 at the Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Road. Tickets are $10.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance dance critic.
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January 19, 2009
Music review: Chamber Soloists of Austin
The performance of Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio for violin, cello and piano that formed the second half of the concert by the Chamber Soloists of Austin on Saturday at the First Presbyterian Church was a tour de force. From start to finish, violinist Elise Winters, cellist Douglas Harvey and pianist Gregory Allen as individuals confidently controlled their instruments and parts, and as an ensemble projected an artistic idea of the music that was vivid and expressively rich.
Allen, never indulging in mere display, breathed life into each note, each melody, each chord. He gave the audience the sort of “total” music making that these ears haven’t heard from Allen in quite some time and have missed keenly, due I hope to bad luck in my choice of performances to attend. I particularly enjoyed the variety of colors and characters he brought to the dozens of trills that are scattered through the Trio’s 40 or so minutes.
Allen’s contribution formed the foundation of this reading, both because of the nature of the composition and the fact that he is by some years’ distance the senior member of the ensemble. This is not by any means to minimize Winters’ and Harvey’s contributions, both of which had the same technical and musical substance as Allen’s. Every tempo seemed to find the sweet spot between spaciousness and compelling forward motion. The tuning in the string parts was wonderful (aside from one nasty spot in the slow movement), balances were sensible and the rhythmic sense in the playing was lively and secure. This was a magnificent performance.
The two works on the first half were pleasant, but the executions simply didn’t get to the level of the Beethoven. For Friedrich Kuhlau’s Quintet for flute and strings, Karl Kraber, flute, Leigh Mahoney, violin, and two violas, played by Joan Kalisch and Ames Asbell, joined Harvey. The five string players also came together for Ralph Vaughan Williams’ early and interesting Phantasy Quintet. These two readings had the occasional slips in tuning and generic characterization that produce good, not excellent, results.
— David Mead is a freelance music writer for the American-Statesman
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Theater review: 'Beehive' at Zach Theatre
What is there now to say about “Beehive” after 16 years and multiple incarnations at Zach Theatre? Since opening in 1992, the show has celebrated the singing women of the ’60s, from Motown soulsters to British invaders to Woodstock psychedelics. Now in its “Farewell Performances,” the company is showing its age, but longtime fans are still finding something to celebrate.
“Beehive” is more a revue than traditional musical, breaking up song and dance numbers with patter instead of story. The banter and jokes are passable, but mostly take a shotgun approach to nostalgia, riffing through “I heard Sandra Dee got married,” “I remember where I was on Nov. 22,” or “Here’s Brenda Lee!” before bursting into song.
Fortunately, the songs are more plentiful for a reason. When the girl group of girl groups is on, they’re on. The original cast members sing with an obvious affection for the familiar standards. In particular Judy Arnold’s turn on Tina Turner and Andra Mitrovich’s Janis Joplin, which she’ll reprise for Zach next summer for “Love, Janis,” shine as re-creations of the ’60s sound. The competition is tough, though, with their own duet of “A Natural Woman” and “Do Right Woman,” two divas battling it out and trading verses before coming together in resolution.
The new cast members, Amani Dorn and Noellia Hernandez, show more energy and flair in their dancing, but their song interpretation pales a bit to the older members, who may actually remember the ’60s. With the bouncy, campy atmosphere of “Beehive,” there’s a general tendency to winkingly play up humor in songs that found their way into the canon through growls of pent up aggression or bluesy wails.
In spite of a few off notes throughout the performance, the audience still had fun and seemed to enjoy the jokes — not too surprising as many are based around flirting with or flopping into another boomer’s lap. As a farewell run, “Beehive” seems to be finding the right mark. After 16 seasons of singing hits from one 10-year span, it’s probably time to move on, but only after one more song.
— Joey Seiler is a freelance theater writer and critic for the American-Statesman
(“Beehive” continues at 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sundays through Feb. 22 at Zach Theatre, Kleberg Stage, 1510 Toomey Road. $32-$46. 476-0541, zachtheatre.org.)
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January 12, 2009
Review: 'The Last Five Years'
It’s a little early in the year to be calling out bests, but Penfold Theatre’s production of “The Last Five Years” will undoubtedly be on my list by the time all things are said and done.
In fact, I was close to that point in the first few minutes when Annika Johannsson’s Cathy draws her leg up to sit on a chair and read the goodbye letter left by David Gallagher’s Jamie to the first strains of a violin melody. It’s a simple, sad moment, and if you don’t get goose bumps, something’s broken.
The five years in the title are the whole of Jamie and Cathy’s relationship. As the only characters in the story, you get to know them well, but never together. Writer and composer Jason Robert Brown puts them at odds both in love and in time. We see Cathy’s story work backwards from the moment she finds Jamie’s wedding ring on the kitchen table to end on their first date while Jamie’s moves forward.
While the two share the stage with melting chemistry, they rarely interact. It’s part of the written chronology, but stage and musical director Michael McKelvey uses it to great effect. Jamie, a wunderkind novelist, sings a holiday fable while Cathy, a Christmas or two ahead of him, sits idly at the table. She then sings about coming home from her unsuccessful musical auditions to a loving home while staring straight past an unaffected Jamie. The staging tweaks the already heartbreaking performances with bittersweet irony.
In fact, the only duet comes when couples time lines converge at their wedding. It’s clear that life is moving in opposite directions. The only question is whether, in those rare and beautiful moments, when it synchs up, everything becomes worth it. The only other bit of shared song at the end when each says goodbye to the other, Cathy until their second date and Jamie forever, leaves that open to both optimistic hope and pessimistic hindsight.
That the distance between Jamie and Cathy is so palpable is surprising in the tiny Larry L. King theater. With audience seating surrounding the stage on two sides and the scaled down orchestra, lacking nothing with Steve Saugey on the keyboard and Amy Harris violin, on the third, it’s easy for us to feel closer to the characters than they are to each other.
In that small space, warmly appointed by set designer David Utley as a New York artist’s apartment, Johansson and Gallagher excel. At close range every moment of pain, love, and humor is broadcast at almost overwhelming force without losing any nuance. With no amplification between their voices and our ears, Gallagher’s energetic rendition of the bouncy tunes and Johansson’s riveting, emotional takes on Cathy’s loss are even stronger.
Forgive me for gushing, but this is the sort of production that audiences are lucky to see: unique, intimate, beautiful, painful and wonderful.
(“The Last Five Years” continues Wednesdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m, Sunday, Jan. 18, at 5 and 8 p.m., Jan. 24, at 2 and 10:30 p.m., and Jan. 25, at 8 p.m. at the Austin Playhouse, Larry L. King Theatre, 3601 S. Congress, Bldg. C. $10-$20. 476-0084, penfoldtheatre.org.)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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Review: 'Miss Witherspoon'
For all its status on the short list for the Pulitzer in 2006, Christopher Durang’s “Miss Witherspoon” is a shambling, rambling mess of a comedy, now getting a production by Different Stages. It has its moments of meaning and, more frequently, humor, but for the most part it feels like “It’s A Wonderful Life” for Generation Irony.
Miss Witherspoon herself, nicknamed after that grouchy type of character nobody likes in Agatha Christie novels, commits suicide sometime in the ‘90s. Her death, which begins the play, is a belated reaction to Skylab’s crashdown on Earth, itself only the last straw in a life spent wondering what else could go wrong. Unfortunately, the powers that be in this afterlife, which include Gandalf, Christ and an Indian spirit figure named Maryamma, want her to go back for her own karmic adjustment and the betterment of the world.
This leads to a lot of didactic arguments that are occasionally funny, but often too slow paced to engage. The problem with Witherspoon, played by Jennifer Underwood, is that her “brown tweed aura” just isn’t that compelling when left to simply bicker back and forth with spiritual leaders. Fortunately, to some degree, Durang has always been better at writing one-joke sketches, often very well, than scenes that build to a plot.
That’s where Different Stages’ new production has a chance to shine. While Underwood manages arch quips against Suzanne Balling’s serenely effervescent Maryamma, it’s hard to feel involved. When she’s finally cast back to Earth, though, her permanently crabbed expression finds new life as a baby to suburban yuppies, tragic child to white trash burnouts, and even a dog.
Each vignette gives the cast a chance to break out of the debate format, though, and inject some life into the production. Rotating through a range of parental figures are Derek Jones and Camille Latour, both funny as both the pampering Connecticut parents and, more bleakly, as the OD’ing abusers.
While the emphasis on most of Witherspoon’s lives is ironic, dark humor, as Underwood grows up in the rundown home, she finds some real pathos as well. Watching the older Underwood who last shone as the gleeful Duchess in Rubber Repertory’s “The Casket of Passing Fancy” descend into sullen adolescence brings the play to an emotional, if brutal, turning point.
Unfortunately, we’re quickly brought back to mildly absurd, tiring spiritual debates that rob the production of a satisfying close. Instead of a life as an example, we’re given rapidly aging pop culture quips and pedantic talking heads. As Miss Witherspoon might ask, “Why bother?”
(“Miss Witherspoon” continues at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through Feb. 1 at the City Theatre, 3823 Airport, Suite D. $15-$30. 474-8497, main.org.)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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January 11, 2009
Review: 'Delta Dandi'
Some playwriting needs to be rolled around in actors’ mouths.
Sharon Bridgforth’s writing needs, even relishes, bodies.
Bridgforth’s newest work ‘Delta Dandi,’ in its premiere Saturday at the Long Center, has a roundness and thickness to it. The layers of language move and merge with song and dance as the actors conjure mostly momentary characters in the creation of a poetic landscape.
Bridgforth designed the play with the tone poems of African American musicians such as Mary Lou Williams in mind. The result is a performance that feels like a series of poems held together by a loose sense of place: a hot bayou rich with juke joints and simmering collard greens. From this place arises “Delta Dandi’s” funniest character, Honey Pot, a seductively wild pianist Bridgforth describes as “the kind of woman who will steal your girlfriend.”
The ensemble gives full-bodied attention to the humorous sensuality, aided by choreographer Baraka de Soleil, who also dances in the production.
But bodies break and tear in Bridgforth’s bayou, ripped apart by racism’s violence. Florinda Bryant, who generally seems to be “Delta Dandi’s” lead character, shudders with sadness, chest sinking, chin dropping. Yet in the face of lynchings and random violence, the actors tap defiance in their stance. The female chorus evokes women warriors: delivering many lines with feet spread, knees bent, pelvises sinking.
Children speak back — almost spit back — at racial trauma. Azure Osborne-Lee holds one shoulder back, pumping it as she yells at the unseen white man who beat her younger brother. And then there is Helga Davis, whose bold, deep, slipping/sliding voice proves the perfect compatriot to Bridgforth’s language. Davis can touch deep pain, but she also gives quick, mischievous glances over her shoulder, reminding the audience that she always retains control—and a sense of humor.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
‘Delta Dandi’ performed Jan. 9 and 10 at the Long Center.
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December 17, 2008
Review: Austin Shakespeare's 'Celebrate'
“Celebrate,” Austin Shakespeare’s musical revue, has little to do with Shakespeare or, as one might expect from the timing, the holidays. Instead, it’s a sampling of musical theater selections, from “Peter Pan” to the newer, opera-esque “The Light in the Piazza” to Austin’s own “The Bat.”
It’s, as the always-charming MC Jill Blackwood puts it, meant as more of a “kaleidoscope of delight.”
Kaleidoscopes can be a bit disorienting, though. And that’s the only real, however minor, flaw of “Celebrate.” While the music is beautiful, so many of the songs derive at least part of their power from the stories they serve as high points and punctuation for. Here they’re presented largely in isolation — an onslaught of delight and catharsis. That may be why some of the best pieces come from bossa nova master Antonio Carlos Jobim. You don’t need context, just the strong, jazzy stylings of Stephanie Delk and Kirstin Dorn.
The benefit of filling a musical revue with actors from the Austin stage, though, is that they can recapture some of the momentum of the larger stories in each song. While in the preview performance there were a few sour notes, each performance brought something extra, whether love or wit or pure brassy energy, to the song. Blackwood herself has an especially nice turn on the bubbly, confused “Vanilla Ice Cream” from “She Loves Me.” Likewise, Molly Wissinger’s take on “Always True To You” from “Kiss Me Kate” is not to be missed, filling the studio theater with energy to more than make up for the absence of a backing chorus.
Of course, anything Broadway would be lacking without dance routines. Interspersed throughout the evening are comedic numbers from Rocker Verastique and Liz Newchurch. The choreography from Danny Herman ranges from ballet to swing and provides a bouncy, humorous set of interludes.
The lineup of performers and songs will change from night to night, so the only unifying element may be the champagne toast at the end. It’s a fitting constant, though, for an effervescent night.
“Celebrate!” continues at 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday and at 3 p.m. Sunday through Dec. 21 at Austin Ventures Studio Theatre, 501 West 3rd St. $12-$30. 474-8497, www.austinshakespeare.org.)
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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December 15, 2008
Review: Viola By Choice
Viola By Choice does everything a classical music group should be doing in the 21st century.
And what is that?
Offering smart and alluring programs that feed the brain and the soul — and do so with polished, enthusiastic musicianship.
That’s what the ensemble, led by violist Aurelien Petillot, did Sunday night at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection with a brilliant selection of music, a mix of work from typically overlooked yet captivating composers and surprising pieces by familiar composers.
The latter came first in Puccini’s haunting Chrisanthemi string quartet, so jewel-like in its melodic structure (and so vastly different from the sweeping histrionics found in the arias of the composer’s masterworks such as “Madame Butterfly” or “Tosca.”).
Ned Rorem’s Serenande for Five English Poems — featuring the lushly melodic voice of mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Petillot, wife of Aurelien Petillot, was complex, twisting and dark. With aplomb, Elizabeth Petillot (who also sings with Grammy-nominated chorus Conspirare) brought uncommon emotion to the dark, edgy piece — a highlight in an evening of polished performances.
The mood didn’t get any lighter with Philip Koplow’s Sonata in Memoriam Martin Luther King Jr. for Viola and Piano. If Koplow’s academic approach sometimes bested the emotional depth, Aurelien Petillot brought a profoundly personal attachment that brought emotion to the sometimes over-intellectualized dissonance.
And as a perfect finish, Paquito D’Rivera’s Village Street String Quartet flaunted the brio and enthusiasm this ensemble has. Inspired by a Greenwich Village street fair that the composer observed shortly after moving to New York City, the one-movement piece is a celebratory multi-cultural mash-up with strains of tango, klezmer music, African rhythms, jazz and other music combining in a joyous spree.
Violinist Jennifer Bourianoff played with an open and confident presence that never wavered while pianist Nikki Birdsong had a quick elegance. And adding more energy to the already energetic group, Petillot and the violin players performed standing up — forget the fussy static of staying seated.
For its next program, Viola By Choice (Petillot is a passionate champion for his often second-fiddle instrument) takes on new compositions and world premiere pieces. Be prepared to be surprised and enlightened.
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Review: Vestige Group's 'Gorilla Man'
The Vestige Group’s new show, “Gorilla Man,” has a punk theater vibe to it, for both better and worse.
The bar venue, the wafting in of cigarette smoke, the live rock band competing with music drifting in from next door and the rest of Sixth street, and high-energy performances on a claustrophobic stage make for an excitingly different sort of playgoing experience. But punk can be messy, too, and energy isn’t always funny.
“Gorilla Man” tells the story of a young man named Billy who discovers that he’s not only becoming a man, but a Gorilla Man. Like his father before him, Billy will grow increasingly hairy and angry. The question is whether he can manage his impulses and be more man than gorilla. At least that would be the question if “Gorilla Man” was aiming to answer any.
Instead, it’s a campy rock musical comedy. But while the live band is energetic and some of the singers can push out a catchy tune, it’s not as funny as it could be. It’s hard not to laugh at a guy in a gorilla suit and cod piece — played with as much charisma as you can in that situation by Benjamin Wright — but too often other jokes get lost in the frantic pace of the staging and sung laugh lines run over in the cramped choreography.
It’s the punk element of the production again: Instead of letting bits breathe, Vestige Group throws more and more energy at them. It’s still funny, but they’re getting chuckles instead of the big laughs the piece can bring.
That works well in a few notable exceptions. Kathleen Fletcher, whether as an enthusiastic, big-faced background dancer, alcoholic fatalist, or B-movie fortune teller, goes so over the top as to move from camp to hilarious parody. Andrew Varenhorst is only slightly more subdued as a politician inciting a riot among a town full of toy action figures, but nails the odd character of a born-again truck driver with a gutturally creepy manner of proselytizing.
Overall the music is catchy, but it’s at its best in the finale, when Billy, played by Bobby Torres, insists on ending with a song and dance number. The cast is given a chance to vamp and groove together all at once. Even if the movements come down to a simple can-can line, it’s infectious. It’s the free-for-all energy that the group has been pushing the whole time.
With a one-act show and the barroom venue, I would almost prefer to watch “Gorilla Man” standing up, dancing (or shifting awkwardly from side to side) with the music, beer in hand, than sitting in rows just feet from the stage. Instead, we’re given a mix of a good bar band performance and traditional theater. One gets by on energy and fun, but the other takes a little more refinement. I get the feeling Vestige Group could do one or the other fairly well. As it is, we get a little bit of both, but with less success.
(“Gorilla Man” continues at 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday through Dec. 20 at Creekside Lounge, 606 E. Seventh St. $15-$25. 474-8497, vestigegroup.org)
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December 10, 2008
Reviews: Austin Symphony Orchestra's Handel's 'Messiah'
How is that two nights of back-to-back choral concerts can offer such radically different experiences?
Monday night, Conspirare thrilled with their Long Center debut of their holiday concert.
Tuesday night at Riverbend Centre, Austin Symphony Orchestra’s presentation of Handel’s ‘Messiah’ failed to thrill.
Much — but not all — of that failure rests with fixable things: venue and production standards. More suited for amplified sound, Riverbend’s acoustics cast a damp layer over the sizable Parish Choirs of St. David’s Episcopal Church and the chamber orchestra led by guest conductor David Stevens. The resulting overall sound was muffled, lacking the necessary clarity and resonance to invigorate Handel’s much-performed oratorio.
The audience management didn’t help. Well into the fourth movement, latecomers were still being seated. Doors clanged and ushers flickered flashlights. It was an inexcusable level of noise and distraction that was disrespectful to both the audience and the musicians. And then 40 minutes into the music — just as Stevens and the ensemble were finally starting to gain some momentum with Handel’s joy-filled music — there was an intermission. There’s no reason ASO’s roughly 90-minute version of Handel’s masterpiece needs to be interrupted with an intermission. And doing so, as Tuesday’s concert showed, only depletes the energy and dramatic trajectory of the piece. Indeed, it took awhile for Stevens to re-build focus in the second half.
Not that there was an abundance of focus and energy to this ‘Messiah.’ Stevens wrested some commendable dynamics from the orchestra and there were some crisp moments that were nonetheless muffled by the bad acoustics. But some shaky soloists and a sometimes timid chorus disappointed.
A sturdy warhorse of a Christmas music tradition, Handel’s ‘Messiah’ should sparkle, not just fill a date on the holiday entertainment roster.
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December 9, 2008
Review: Conspirare's 'Christmas at the Carillon'
It’s time to declare it: Conspirare is Austin’s most original classical music group.
And if you want to dispense with misleading, and empty, descriptors, let’s just drop “classical.” Conspirare is one of Austin’s most original musical treasures.
Monday night, Conspirare artistic director and founder Craig Hella Johnson and his Grammy-nominated choir made their primacy on Austin’s cultural landscape abundantly clear. With singer-songwriter Eliza Gilkyson as a special guest, Conspirare brought its beloved annual “Christmas at the Carillon” concert to the Long Center for the first time. Though the holiday concert was originally conceived in the mid-1990s to fit the intimate Carillon chapel, Johnson and the singers perfectly transported an abundance of warmth and soul to the 2,400-seat Long Center.
Part of the reason Conspirare brought its holiday concert to the Long Center was to test the waters with a wider — and more affordable — range of ticket prices than is available at the Carillon. The experiment paid off. Monday night’s concert was virtually sold-out. (Maybe that was also due to the excitement generated by last week’s announcement that Conspirare is up for two Grammy Awards this year for its latest CD ‘Threshold of Night.’)
Against a backdrop of towering potted oak trees, decorated with strands of white lights, Johnson, Gilkyson and the 22-member choir thrilled with a 100-minute concert that seamlessly blended everything from plainsong chants to gospel hymns to traditional carols to Bach motets.
In lesser hands that collaging of different musical styles can come off as forced and usually treacly. But Johnson’s touch is supremely artful. A combination of surprising arrangements and masterful direction — coupled with an unerring instinct never to overdo it — makes Johnson’s always collaging glorious, fresh and full of sincerity. A blending of Madonna’s “Deeper and Deeper,” Bach’s “Alles was Odem hat” and the freshly minimal work of Eric Whitacre? Sure, it’s all sounds good and glorious in Johnson’s hands.
With only Johnson accompanying on piano (Thomas Burritt provided light percussion) and Gilkyson occasionally on guitar, Conspirare kept the audience captivated. These are singers so dedicated and in love with what they do their devotion spills from the stage. Powerful solos came from Kathlene Ritch, Lauren Snouffer and David Farwig. And Gilkyson mesmerized with her haunting song “Beautiful World” and delighted with the upbeat “Day of Jubilo,” by her father, noted songwriter Terry Gilksyon.
But soprano Nina Revering (who also directs Conspirare’s youth choir) brought the audience to tears with her achingly beautiful treatment of the folk pop song “Child in Me Again.”
Indeed there’s a depth of emotion — a sense of occasion — to Conspirare’s concerts that’s missing from just about most other classical music event in Austin. Through talent, creativity, dedication and accessibility, Conspirare makes a diverse range of music absolutely vital.
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December 8, 2008
Review: Ballet Austin's 'The Nutcracker'
Something magical happened to Ballet Austin’s production of ‘The Nutcracker,’ now at the Long Center for the first time.
It glitters like never before.
After years in the University of Texas’ Bass Concert Hall — and last year spent at the Paramount Theatre while the Long Center finished construction and the Bass was under renovation — ‘The Nutcracker’ has landed in its new home with a re-invigorated splash of sugar and spice.
Maybe it’s the Long Center’s sharp acoustics that make Tchaikovsky’s romantic score sparkle. (The necessary use of recorded music last year at the Paramount gave the show a dreary feel.) Guest conductor Jeff Eckstein led the Austin Symphony Orchestra in an engaging performance.
Maybe it’s the excitement of performing in a new permanent venue built just for Austin’s top trio of performing arts groups (Ballet Austin, Austin Symphony Orchestra and Austin Lyric Opera). Across the cast Saturday night, the dancers projected verve and excitement. They have room to breathe on the Long Center stage and it showed Saturday night with bright, animated performances. Rebecca Johnson and Edward McPherson gave an inspired and flirty performance as the pair of Arabian dancers. As the Sugar Plum Fairy, Aara Krumpe kept the multiple pirouettes full of pop. And Allisyn Paino’s Snow Queen was utter elegance.
Then again maybe it’s Tony Tucci’s refreshed lighting scheme that gives this ‘Nutcracker’ a pretty new shimmery look. Tucci washes the magical Land of Snow with soft violet shades and adds some fun special effects when Clara’s house morphs into a dreamlike world. And to the Land of the Sweets, Tucci adds nice touches of subtle motion and shifting mood.
Thanks to the Long Center’s superb sight lines, the pretty freshness of this ‘Nutcracker’ projects even up in the balcony where the budget-minded can find seats for $12 to $45. (The show runs about 2 hours and 10 minutes including intermissions.)
And after a year’s hiatus, the guest Mother Ginger role is back. Who doesn’t enjoy watching a local personality goof it up while dressed in a giant red hoop skirt?
And who wouldn’t enjoy letting this ‘Nutcracker’ transport them away?
Ballet Austin’s ‘The Nutcracker.’ Photo by Jay Janner.
‘The Nutcracker’ continues 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Dec. 18-23, 2 p.m. Dec. 20-21 at the Long Center, 701 W. Riverside Dr. Tickets are $15-$71. 512-476-2163, www.balletaustin.org
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Review: 'Still Fountains'
“Still Fountains,” a set of two one-act plays, shows both the strengths and weaknesses of Austin playwright Michael Mitchell. One feels like an intellectual exercise in metaphor, while the other is a touchingly simple bit of humanity.
The first selection, “Highway Home,” tells the story of a dysfunctional family gathered to mourn a lost matriarch, sitting outside her home by a fountain long-since broken, but still emotionally loaded. The group’s alcohol-fueled, courtroom-themed wordplay and interactions has a clear precedent in the work of Edward Albee and Eugene O’Neill. That’s a style, though, that’s gone somewhat dormant, and the barbs of the family and their hunt to score points, explicitly kept and monitored, for aggressive puns seems unnatural. Likewise their fascination with making metaphors explicit, ranging across the entire geography of the backyard from the fountain to the imposing highway on the horizon, seems heavy-handed. It’s telling that at several points different characters ask, “Why can’t we just talk like normal people?”
Still, while it can be hard to see the forest for the constant imagery, it’s still there. Gina Houston as the African-American lawyer who’s married into the decidedly Texan family provides an often cold riposte to the rest of the group, but also still, quiet moments of support for her husband, who is holding on to the fountain as a last bit of familial memory. Garry Peters, on the other hand, plays the old uncle who raised the family with a mix of bitterness and regret. A monologue of reminiscence forces him to consider what about the geometry of the house’s windows he finds beautiful and sad. The metaphor is, again, a bit much, but Peters makes the differences between squares and rectangles worth noticing.
The strengths of “Highway Home” are exaggerated in “Them,” which tells the story of two men who meet at a fountain known for anonymous sexual hookups. In a largely two-man show, Jude Hickey as a young possible hustler and Douglas Taylor as a questioning pastor show what Mitchell can do when he sticks to simple, direct human interaction.
To be sure, the fountain is a central metaphor, representing everything from the waters of life to diving into new experiences, but the story is lived by these two instead of spun out in wordplay. Mitchell’s dialog for young people—my own 25 or so—across both plays, is peppered with more “likes” and “dudes,” than I find natural, but Hickey’s flirtations with the older man carry a mixture of sexual and philosophical intentions. Likewise, Taylor’s pastor is as powerful, both physically and spiritually, when he’s pushing himself on Hickey as offering to wash his feet.
To work with the theme of the diptych, the fountain that looms large over both plays, simplicity wins out: When the cast is forced to climb over the fountain, hopping up and down and focusing more on the thing and its imagery than story, they suffer for it; when they can simply sit in front or dangle their feet and talk, we get a refreshing look at a promising new playwright’s work.
“Still Fountains” continues at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. through December 14 at Salvage Vanguard Theatre 2803 Manor Rd. $15-$30. 389-0315, salvagevanguard.org.
Joey Seiler is an American-Statesman freelance theater critic.
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December 3, 2008
Review: Two concerts at UT's Butler School of Music
Two rewarding nights at UT’s Butler School of Music started Monday with the UT Symphony Orchestra’s final concert of the semester.
Under the direction of Gerhardt Zimmermann, who is now in his third season at UT, the student orchestra sounds better than ever of late. And Monday’s concert at Bates Recital Hall proved that. Full of brio and vigor, here was a group of orchestral musicians that charged the music they were playing with excitement. No, it wasn’t just youthful energy on display (though that’s certainly a factor). More, it was an orchestra ardently engaged with its conductor.
With its sweepingly broad melody and short one movement length, Sibelius’s Andante Festivo for a string orchestra suggest that it might slip away before arriving. But Zimmermann gave the Festivo an immediately festive and noble feel. And he proved one this orchestra’s best talents: It can play quietly with great clarity and emotion.
Clarinetist Sarunas Jankauskas thoroughly impressed with Crusell’s dramatic and demanding Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra which the 18th-century Finnish composer and clarinetist wrote for himself. Jankauskas knew exactly what to do with the technically demanding piece to make it sparkle and not overwhelm with fussy virtuosity, by bringing a rich tone to even the most breathlessly fast passages.
The symbiotic artistry between Zimmermann and the orchestra shined in the concert’s second half, first with Kodaly’s stirring Varitions on a Hungarian Folksong “The Peacock.” The confident, clean-sounding brass section nicely punctuated the cinematic swoops of Kodaly’s defiant yet celebratory score.
But with Bernstein’s lively Divertimento for Orchestra, Zimmermann and the musicians let the élan explode. A vigorous light-hearted piece that Bernstein composed in 1980 as gift for the 100th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Divertimento demonstrates how Bernstein liked to throw in everything — and the kitchen sink — into many of his works. With the stage crammed with musicians (the piano only poked out about halfway from the wings) Zimmermann kept Bernstein’s blithe and musically witty celebration in sharp focus. And the orchestra responded with sonorous clarity.
Tuesday, again at Bates Recital Hall, the UT New Music Ensemble, directed by Dan Welcher, delivered an engaging program.
The stand out was Dries Berghman’s Archetypes, a cerebral yet beautiful three-movement piece for chamber orchestra. Berghman took an elegiac theme and unwound it through different moods and styles moving from swirling gestures to jaunty stylings to pretty explosions of joyful sounds. Archetypes was artistically mature — remarkable that it came from a 22-year-old who has yet to graduate.
Also receiving something of a premiere was Yevgeniy Sharlat’s revised Concertino for Viola and Eight Players. The viola — played by guest artist Sharon Wei St. John — tussled with the chamber orchestra through a series of complex movements. High Classical harmonies and structures came together than slid apart into shades of dissonance. The viola slipped into and out of unity with the ensemble. This Concertino was intellectually and compositionally an interesting exercise if didn’t always solicit big emotion.
Also on the program was Jacob Druckman’s Come Round to which Welcher gave a clear and tight presentation.
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December 2, 2008
Review: 'The Santaland Diaries'
Santa’s got a brand new elf this year. And he’s full of fresh, sardonic spirit.
Espie Randolph stars as the unemployed writer who one Christmas season must take a job at Macy’s Santaland in David Sedaris’s “The Santaland Dairies,” now getting its 11th annual production at Zach Theatre.
Over the years, Zach artistic director Dave Steakley has honed the presentation of Sedaris’s monologue, which first gained popularity on National Public Radio before being adapted for the stage by Joe Mantello. into a neat comedic package for the stage. And even a decade later, the show continues to deliver entertainment and laughs. (Though admittedly I’ve taken a break from seeing the show in the past few years.)
Still, Zach’s “Santaland” is droll, sarcastic and spirit-affirming all at once.
At the heart of the show is a witty yet touching tale — based on Sedaris’s actual stint working as a Macy’s elf — that mocks the hyper commercialization of Christmas while also reminding us of what kind of goodness can emerge if we all stop to celebrate peace and understanding.
To the roughly one-hour monologue, Steakley adds a 45-minute first act of irreverent and slightly naughty Christmas songs sung with great comedic timing (and considerable polish) by Meredith McCall. In the midst of the musical mix this year is another Sedaris monologue, “Six to Eight Black Men,” an odd rumination on the Dutch Christmas tradition of Saint Nicholas and his attendants, performed with considerable comedic brio by Randolph. And with comedic elan, McCall gives us “The First Thanksgiving,” a very oddly funny monologue by Sarah Vowell, another NPR comedic darling.
A regular with comedic troupe Esther’s Follies, Randolph pops as Crumpet, Sedaris’s elf self. Randolph unrolls a wonderland of character voices and body language from badly behaving children to a socially awkward co-worker to a self-righteous parent. Ricocheting around Zach’s round Whisenhunt Stage, he pops among the cheesy candy cane Santaland decorations, plops into the lap of an audience member or two and otherwise energetically claims the whole space for himself.
And that’s just fine because this elf delivers laughs.
“The Santaland Diaries” continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays through Jan. 11. Whisenhunt Stage, Zach Theatre, 1510 Toomey Road. $31-$43 (discounts for seniors and students). 476-0541, www.zachtheatre.org.
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November 17, 2008
Review: 'Ophelia' at Blue Theatre
Edgar Allan Poe wrote that “the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” If that’s so, “Ophelia” gives us poetry five times over. The new work, written and directed by Dustin Wills for Tutto Theatre, gives us five different aspects of Ophelia, makes the audience come to sympathize with or even share Hamlet’s love with each, and then kills her off.
Poe continued that “equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.” That’s certainly true in the original “Hamlet,” where the prince himself hauntingly wails her death in the graveyard, but here the bereaved is Ophelia herself.
That’s both a strength and a weakness. At its lowest, “Ophelia” can seem overly introspective, insidery, and academic, all of which goes with the territory. It’s easy to lose the sense of real relationships and emotions unfolding in the, admittedly clever, allusions to, echoes of, and twists on “Hamlet,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Macbeth,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and more.
At its best it’s just as easy to forget all that and simply watch a young girl, or five, slowly descend into madness on her own.
The play opens ominously. The five Ophelias sit on a starkly white, wooden framed stage, designed by Lisa Laratta , under the boughs of a weeping willow made of tangled ropes and swings that grows, of course, aslant a brook. They dangle their feet, splash each other, and laze about until, sharply, they join in song and spoken word to recite Queen Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s drowning.
From there the story follows Ophelia as she falls deeper in love with Hamlet, is warned away by her father, and devises a plan to trick him into madness. The plan, though I never could figure out why, is meant to both appease her father and win Hamlet’s heart — letting Ophelia please all the men in her life at the cost of herself.
While the plan itself may not make much sense, though it’s certainly no less confusing than Hamlet’s original device of feigned madness, the presentation is touching. Wills, a stronger director than writer, has an eye for beautiful and poignant scenes, bringing strong performances out of his entire cast.
Sofia Ruiz, as Ophelia in Love, opens the play with charming naiveté and innocence. Each subsequent Ophelia teeters closer to the line between madness and reason, adding conflict to her aspect of the psyche as saner, balancing aspects are removed, until finally all that’s left is Kim Adams’ Ophelia, undone, and a moving rendition of madness set to violin by Emily Tindall as Ophelia, in water.
Gabriel Luna, as both Hamlet and Polonius, offers the male side. While he’s occasionally childish and jokey as Hamlet, Luna retains sincerity and power, particularly in Will’s unique twist on the classic “Get thee to a nunnery.”
Separating most of the Ophelia’s time on stage are dreams of lyrical dances, choreographed by the ensemble. Coming after a scene of high hope and love or one of despair and anger, they offer moments of quiet reflection that set the tone for “Ophelia” as much as any of her conversations.
“Ophelia” as a play may occasionally be more academic than human in its exploration of Ophelia outside of the male-dominated “Hamlet.” As a production, though, it manages, as its lead character struggles to, to balance the head and the heart.
(Joey Seiler is a freelance theater writer and critic.)
(“Ophelia” continues at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Sundays through Nov. 23 at the Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Rd. $12-$15. 927-1118, tuttotheatre.org.)
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Review: 'The Nina Variations' at Dougherty Arts Center
“The Nina Variations” is a sort of quantum Chekhov. It takes one of the most emotionally charged, and unfulfilling, moments of “The Seagull” and proceeds to unpack it, twist it, and turn it around in every way possible. From a literary perspective, it’s enlightening and entertaining. From a human perspective, it’s simply moving.
In “The Seagull,” a diverse group gathers at a lakeside estate, squabbles, and, in various forms, falls in love. Nina, a young actress, is pursued by the brash, young writer Treplev, but follows an older rival, Trigorin, to Moscow. In one of the final scenes, she returns briefly to visit Treplev, they say almost nothing clearly, and she leaves before he shoots himself.
Playwright Steven Dietz now gives the pair some 40-odd variations to try and find the words that Chekhov didn’t give them or, in some instances, explain those that he did.
If you’re not familiar with “The Seagull,” it’s all right. “Nina” provides a brief summary of the relevant highlights complete with charming illustrations. If, like me, you’re not a fan of Chekhov, that’s also fine. Dietz certainly riffs on the Russian’s style at various points, but the wit and emotion is his own.
As the semi-Sisyphean pair Rachel McGinnis and Aaron Hallaway are vibrant. Both are mercurial, to say the least, shifting through variations of emotion and action that seem almost exhaustive. At his heart, though, Hallaway’s Treplev seems nervous, nebbishly intelligent, sad, and a little hopeful. Nina is more bittersweet, alternately laughing and solemnly reminiscing.
However, and it’s a credit to both actors that it works, the characters become both figuratively and, occasionally, literally interchangeable. That’s the spectrum that Dietz provides while plumbing the possibilities of where Chekhov’s scene could have gone, and the pair makes every alternative, whether charming or frightening, seem plausible.
That comes across in the more human moments of the play, where Nina and Treplev seem most real — screaming at, laughing with, and loving each other — more often than in the moments where Dietz breaks the fourth wall. Those can offer witty commentary, including some humorous banter about critics, but they’re less affecting.
The exception is, for me, the most powerful moment of the play. Nina and Treplev dissect Chekhov’s lines, he reading them with only a hint of emotion on top of what’s obviously contained inside and she offering an exegesis of what that Nina might have meant. The simple, blunt, feeling interpretation could make for a successful essay. It would also likely move at least one reader to tears.
Each transition is highlighted by a number projected on the back wall. While at first it seems like some changes come on haphazardly, often silently switching moods mid-conversation, they later serve as punctuation. Director Will Hollis Snider and Dietz flow from long, discursive dialogs where changes may go unnoticed to short scenes made up of only “I love you,” a pause, and a flash of changing numbers that cut off any possibility of a response.
Of course the question left at the end of “The Nina Variations” is whether other scenes might return that possibility or simply come back to the inevitability of a gunshot.
(Joey Seiler is a freelance theater writer and critic.)
(“The Nina Variations” continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through Nov. 22 at the Dougherty Arts Center, 1110 Barton Springs Road. $12-$15. 708-1893, gobotrick.org)
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November 12, 2008
Review: Met Opera's "Damnation of Faust"
NEW YORK — Berlioz’s “Damnation of Faust” vexes as a most dramatic choral and symphonic works that rarely makes it successfully to the opera stage. But the current technology-infused production at the Metropolitan Opera, which had its second show here on Monday night, made innovative opera of it nonetheless.
Working with interactive video designer Holger Forterer, director Robert Lepage, in his Met debut, created an uncanny dreamlike world in which scenic images morph and ripple across screens, the action triggered by the movements of the chorus, orchestra and cast.
A four-tiered scaffold wall subdivided into 24 cubicles by industrial-looking trusses fills the entire stage and serves as the playing field for all the action. Scrims roll over the cubicles to create a larger surface when needed. Projections cast from behind and onto the front.
The effect is a liquid-like visual environment, hallucinatory in feel and cinematic in its pacing. The theatrical effect? There are now bridges between the narrative gaps in Berlioz’s episodic re-telling of Goethe’s “Faust.”
Those bridges drive a live performance that is theatrically wholly engaging. And most of the time, they don’t overwhelm Berlioz’s romantic and complex mix of fantastical flights of fancy and a refined melancholy.
Stained glass cathedral windows kaleidescope gently in and out of different patterns. Soldiers fall gracefully down a grassy embankment only to march perpendicularly up in slow motion again and again, the blades of grass shimmering with every footstep. A lonely library of solitary scholars morphs into a rousing tavern. Méphistophélès, the bass-baritone John Relyea, rows Faust, (tenor Marcello Giordani) across a glassy moonlit lake, only to capsize the boat sending Faust underwater into a surreal acrobatic pas-de-deux with a nymph.
If at times the soaring actors on wires reminded a little too much of Cirque du Soleil, there’s a reason: Lepage is the director of Cirque’s Las Vegas show “Ka.” (Lepage’s Quebec-based multidisciplinary production company, Ex Machina, has a long list of noted theater and film credits as well.) And if at times those acrobatic stylings overwhelmed, there’s also a reason: A little of the artistic conceit of this “Faust” goes a long way.
Still, Lepage’s vision adds just enough to make this “Faust” have the feel of an opera and the look of cinema-inspired performance art.
Conductor James Levine drew a superbly clear and refined sound from the orchestra, keeping things sublime even in the wilder moments, when odd harmonies and blaring moments rattle. Indeed this “Faust” had a beguiling ethereal and cool sound.
As Faust Giordani, while not always vocally even, nevertheless gave an impassioned performance. Sure and commanding Relyea as Méphistophélès projected a successful blend of cunning, romantic charm and power. As Marguerite, Graham brought a restrained richness and soft lyricism to the role.
Under the direction of Donald Palumbo, who rightly garnered ‘bravos’ from the audience, the chorus also exuded a sure, sophisticated and rich sound that deftly made the most Berlioz’s many musical moods.
Critics have often described Berlioz’s creative musical tale as more cinematic than operatic. Perhaps Lepage’s high tech spin has now realized the things Berlioz imagined in his music.
“The Damnation of Faust” will be presented live in HD on Nov. 22 at 12 noon at four Austin area movie theaters: Metropolitan 14, Southpark Meadows, Tinseltown USA Pflugerville, Cinemark Cedar Park and Cinemark Hill Country Galleria . For more information, click here.
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November 10, 2008
Review: 'Fantasmaville' at the Long Center
“Fantasmaville” is a play about ghosts. Unfortunately for a play that can otherwise be charming, funny, and topical, it has a few of its own as well.
“Fantasmaville,” a new project from playwright Raul Garza and Teatro Vivo, focuses on an East Austin neighborhood undergoing gentrification, from a new mixed-race family moving in to defend the traditions to the city pushing a dog park on an empty lot. For the families involved, its less a referendum on economic statuses than cultural and personal histories — at least it’s meant to be.
Tensions run high between Flor, filled with sass and sweetness by Patricia Arredondo, and her mildly estranged daughter Celeste. While Celeste and her gringo husband, Martin, played by Karinna Perez and Chase Wooldridge, epitomize bleeding heart yuppiness, bordering on cliché, other locals like Gustavo and Freddy, laconically drawled out by Donato Rodriguez III and Rupert Reyes, are content to sit in a re-imagined Scoot Inn drinking the day away.
The first half of the play introduces the whole cast of characters, switching mostly easily among them. Stylized animations projected on the back of the stage, loosely connected conversations and monologues, and, of course, an Austin focus give the progression a “Slackers” feel. With some that feel more rambling than ambling, though, that brings the good and bad side of Richard Linklater.
Overall they remain largely enjoyable through the first act, and Garza balances well, switching between domestic conflict, sitcom laughs, bilingual cursing, and simply pleasant vignettes. As the neighborhood begins to clash over the proposed dog park and undercurrents of racism, though, the conversations have a tendency to sound more like formal debates or Socratic dialogs than parts of the building story.
The second half, with its literal ghosts and fixation on the past, exacerbates the situation. “Fantasmaville” becomes more about what has happened than what is happening. The transition gives David Blackwell, as a bigoted white resident of the neighborhood, a chance to shine as he recalls better times, evoking humanity under his bitterness. Sadly, the narrative twist involved in the revisionist reminiscing undercuts the moment.
It’s perhaps appropriate that a story about a community with so many different approaches to life, politics, and culture has so many ups and downs. Fortunately, the warm jokes and conflicted neighborhood still make it worthwhile. And, oh yes, the preachy, life-size racoon spirit guide doesn’t hurt either.
(Joey Seiler is a freelance theater writer in Austin.)
(“Fantasmaville” continues at 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday and 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Sundays through Nov. 16 at the Long Center Rollins Studio Theatre, 701 W. Riverside Drive. $14-$18. 474-5664, thelongcenter.org.)
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Review: Dame Edna at the Paramount Theatre
“How do I know, possums, that this theater is so lovely? Because they tried to tear it down.”
Just one of Dame Edna Everage’s many kernels of truth proffered by the self-described giga-star (mega-star seems so plebian). Like nearly everything else articulated by the Melbourne housewife-turned-celebrity in her Austin debut, it was delivered sardonically, ironically or satirically.
And what better pairing than storied performer Barry Humphries (the mensch behind Edna) with the equally storied Paramount Theatre? Humphries performance — the first stop on Dame’s “My First Last Tour” — enacted many of the same dynamics that the theater, built in 1915 as the Majestic, featured during its days as a vaudeville house.
The two-act, two-hourish show presented songs, improv, costume changes, multi-media displays, a talk show, political commentary, floral distribution, ribald humor, a wedding and audience digs. Drawing from today’s headlines, Humphries’ artistic tour de force also referenced life in Austin (Carole Keeton Strayhorn and John Kelso got skewered).
Edna quipped that she recently obtained an African infant “from the same place Madonna shops for hers.” The good Dame also said she sent Sarah Palin an atlas, only to be contacted later by the Alaskan governor because, in looking at the index, she couldn’t find “overseas.”
Humphries debuted another character from his palette of personalities, Sir Les Patterson. The self-described “Australian Ambassador to the U.S.” strode on stage, cocktail in hand, in a mysteriously stained powder blue suit, with some strategically placed padding that would make Spinal Tap’s Derek Smalls blush. The would-be love child of Winston Churchill and Lenny Bruce, Patterson’s jokes were decidedly naughty, easily offending the bluenoses and Mrs. Grundys in the packed venue.
In the end, those acquainted with Dame Edna & Company were undoubtedly rewarded. Barry Humphries is a master at his craft. Let’s just pray that Dame Edna stops in Austin for “My Next Last Tour.”
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Review: Austin Lyric Opera's 'Cinderella'
Austin Lyric Opera’s production of Gioacchino Rossini’s La Cenerentola (his treatment of the Cinderella story - cenere is Italian for ashes or cinders) doesn’t have many illogical moments.
Considering that the work being performed in Dell Hall at the Long Center is an Italian opera buffa first performed in 1817 and re-set in early-1930s Hollywood, you should understand the first sentence as a compliment. But you might want to know in advance that Rossini has no pumpkins, nor a clock striking midnight.
This re-set opera is carefully worked out. The sung Italian is conveniently mistranslated in a number of the projected English captions. Ramiro is a movie director, originally a prince, who wants a new actress who is beautiful and sincere to star in his next film. The movie studio, “Palace Pictures,” was originally the prince’s palace. Magnifico, the nasty yet comical stepfather, lives with the stepdaughters in a run-down vaudeville theater. That’s odd. Dandini, Ramiro’s cameriere (originally his manservant), is now his chauffeur.
The staged overture is intelligent, with events and gestures plotted carefully to the shape and rhythm of the music. The captions during the Overture made it feel more like a silent film from Hollywood of the 1920s-which was not the date in the program, but that’s OK.
The entire production was first presented at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City in 2004. Most of the time, the sets, costumes and lighting look marvelous. Only little details bothered, such as Cenerentola’s dress for her audition that looked like a business suit and lacked the pizazz that her gown for the last scene had in spades. Garnett Bruce’s direction got a little busy later in Act I, but the rest was tasteful and well motivated.
The cast is consistently excellent, with voices suited to the style. Sandra Piques Eddy as Cenerentola is a mezzo-soprano with an apparently endless range, warm in the middle and lower registers, yet well-focused at the top. As Ramiro, Michele Angelini’s light tenor was agile, princely, and expressive. John Boehr’s chauffeur was brilliantly sung, and his character had sly fun spoofing his boss while they traded identities. Also top-notch were Kristopher Irmiter as Alidoro, a producer, and Steven Condy as Magnifico. Thanks to conductor Robert Tweten’s lightning pace, you’ll hear where Gilbert and Sullivan got the idea for patter.
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November 3, 2008
Review: KDH Dance Company
Dancers can do a lot of pirouettes in 10 years. KDH Dance Company showed off a decade of dancing wares Saturday at Café Dance. The performance begins a month-long celebration of the company’s 10th anniversary, which includes Café Dance shows for the next two Saturdays at 6 and 8 pm.
The evening traced KDH’s repertory from 1999 to the present, an intriguing time travel through the company and director Kathy Dunn Hamrick’s shifting aesthetics. “So Close,” the first work Hamrick ever made for the company, was more aggressive than more recent pieces, which tend to be softer, more gentle.
Part of KDH’s ongoing success derives from dedication to hiring dancers and providing classes for them. Saturday’s entire cast displayed the ability that makes KDH performances so consistently lovely and loving: dancers use their entire bodies — every fingertip dances. Shari Brown had a standout evening Saturday. In “So Close” she was strong, but quick, inflecting the piece with a sense of danger. In evening opener “Co-Conspirator,” Brown found angles in the looping circles of a solo choreographed by KDH associate director Kate Warren, the only piece on the program not choreographed by Hamrick.
Much KDH work has more mood than story, but “The Bystander” suggests a loose narrative. Five dancers sometimes care for, other times dismiss, and sometimes actually step on Roxanne Gage, who is finally left standing alone, arm outstretched. The gesture resonates with the memory of the other dancers, who repeatedly entered with one arm similarly stretched out, but with the other arm wrapped over it, holding back help.
(KDH Dance Company performs dances from its first 10 years at 6 and 8 p.m. Saturday and Nov. 15. Café Dance, 3307 Hancock Drive. $10. www.kdhdance.com; 934-1082)
(Clare Croft is a freelance critic who reviews dance for the American-Statesman.)
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October 27, 2008
Review: Round Rock Symphony Orchestra
If it wasn’t exactly auspicious, the debut of the new Round Rock Symphony Saturday night at First United Methodist Church was at least a commendable effort that resulted in an able though not perfect production.
About 300 turned out to hear the new non-profit 40-member professional orchestra — Round Rock’s first — give a concert of lush, pretty Romantic-era symphonic pieces.
Led by music director Silas Nathaniel Huff (also one of the organization’s founders), the orchestra started Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides with a certain timidity, the horns entering the first few times with a nervous wobble in pitch. Eventually, the ensemble got its footing, but still never seemed to quite settle into the piece with full confidence and conviction.
The violins struggled with the quieter sections of Wagner’s gentle Siegfried Idyll, not always staying on pitch. A relatively intimate piece compared to the rest of Wagner’s oeuvre, the Idyll is a spaciously romantic musical poem of sorts, Waqner’s symphonic birthday greeting to his wife. But — perhaps in an effort to entertain? — the Round Rock Symphony’s presentation was accompanied by a slide show featuring the work of wedding photographer, Roy Allen Stagg, an orchestra donor. Rather than add artistically to the understanding and experience of Wagner’s music, the slide show proved a bad distraction and just an advertisement for Stagg.
The orchestra re-couped its dignity with Schubert’s Italian Overture giving it a lively if not fully spirited rendition, though its hard to say if that was because of timidity or a certain directorial passivity.
After intermission, the orchestra was joined by the Round Rock Rock Community Choir, pianist Brett Bachus and six vocal soloists for Beethoven’s sweeping Choral Fantasy. Bachus brought on an invigorating flare, the first real fire of the evening, as did the vocal soloists (sopranos Elizabeth Schwab-Fike and Amy Mathews-Muttwill, mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Petillot, tenor Scott Blackshire, baritone Bryan Bolzenthal and bass C. Houston Hill) who performed with confidence and clarity. And that energy made for a finale that had some flourish and flare.
While certainly commodious, the First United Methodist Church has perfectly decent though not super sharp and dynamic acoustics. The result — at times, the orchestra sounded ever so slightly muffled.
It’s admirable that those behind the Round Rock Symphony have the desire to start a new professional orchestra. Certainly, it bodes well for the entire greater metropolitan area that new professional arts groups find the means — or at least the interest — to launch.
The next step? Amping up the gusto and finesse.
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Review: 'Hansel and Gretel'
Composer Engelbert Humperdinck (not the pop star Engelbert Humperdinck) and his librettist explicitly designed their opera ‘Hansel and Gretel’ for an audience with children. Like a brand clearly carved into all the gates of a ranch, a musical proverb is sung near the start and at the very end of the piece like an inscription: When we’re in trouble, God helps us.
It’s one thing to be in the forest at night and afraid of the dark. Hansel and Gretel are helped through the night by 14 guardian angels, a sandman, and a dew fairy (I admit, it’s a curious mixture of Christian and pagan beings, but they’re all on our side). In the morning light the children face real evil, a witch who bakes children into gingerbread. Now it’s their wits that save them.
So what happens when Richard M. Isackes, director and designer of the production in performance by the University of Texas’ Butler Opera Center, systematically inverts the entire moral order of the world in which this piece takes place? The various ministering spirits become bag ladies, complete with a pair of grocery carts, and the same bag ladies return in the last scene as the gingerbread children. Economic, yet illogical. The witch is visible overseeing the action at the opening and — explain this, please — at the end, AFTER she has been baked in her own oven. (That means that evil wins in the end, doesn’t it?)
As a visual experience, this forest is some sort of dystopia, a collection of objects, a few of which can be seen to serve a purpose in the story. But light and dark are really important in this story, and nightfall comes only AFTER the sandman has put the children to sleep.
Unlike other elements of this production, the musical elements are quite good. Let the record show that the Witch was portrayed by a mezzo-soprano, obeying the composer and contrary to the vile American habit of using a tenor. George Garrett Keast, conducting his third production at UT and a kind of principal guest conductor, draws a rich, full tone from the orchestra. Particularly on Friday evening, he was able to pull back into line players and singers who fell victim to opening night jitters.
David Mead is a classical music freelance critic for the American-Statesman.
‘Hansel and Gretel’ continues at 8 p.m Oct. 31 and 7 p.m. Nov. 2 at McCullough Theatre, 23rd St. and Robert Dedman Dr., UT campus. $20 general public; $17 UT faculty/staff and seniors; $10 students. www.utpac.org
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Review: Ballet Austin and 'Episodes'
Ballet Austin has a knack for choosing good bedfellows. Working with Washington company the Suzanne Farrell Ballet elevated the company’s dancers and brought a rarely seen, but important dance work to Austin audiences. The company’s season opener Friday at the Long Center featured George Balanchine’s 1959 ballet “Episodes,” reconstructed in partnership with Farrell and her company. The dancing, like the ballet, was clean, clear, and smart. (The season opening program also included Artistic Director Stephen Mills’ premiere “Liminal Glam” and Twyla Tharp’s “Nine Sinatra Songs.”)
Balanchine built “Episodes” from intelligent couplings, too. Originally the ballet had two sections: the former choreographed by modern dance matriarch Martha Graham and the latter by Balanchine.
Musically Balanchine paired the sparse dissonance of Anton Webern with the lush baroque of Bach, arranged by Webern, and played this weekend by the Austin Symphony. Graham’s portions of “Episodes” lasted only two years, but what remained — Balanchine plus Webern and Bach — feels like a revelation, a palate cleanser of ballet.
“Episodes” featured dancers from Ballet Austin and Farrell. Ballet Austin’s Ashley Lynn and Paul Michael Bloodgood were excellent in the ballet’s first section, “Symphony,” which turns an investigative eye to the body’s joints, exploring how limbs move. The leads, accompanied by a corps that included Austin’s Orlando Canova and Christopher Swaim, suddenly break their legs at the knee or the ankle. Then Lynn and Bloodgood move on to the hips; he holds her as she swings her legs in ever-widening circles. Individual bodies break into pieces and then reform into coherent wholes as Webern’s equally segmented “Symphony Op. 21” spits notes into the air. Knees bend. A triangle tinkles. They connect.
If “Symphony” assembled the body, “Episodes” second movement assembled a couple. Austin’s Allisyn Paino and Farrell’s Momchil Mladenov play with moving together, rarely to graceful effect. Paino has had so many comedic roles in various Ballet Austin programs, and she is funny here, too. But it is not a character that makes her funny, but rather the placement of her body against Mladenov. The dancers take full advantage of the choreography’s intended awkwardness, coming together like the pieces of an old jigsaw puzzle. They fit together, but not so cleanly that the lines between them disappear. “Episodes” final sections, “Concerto” and “Ricercata,” feature Farrell dancers as the leads, though some of the most beautiful work comes from “Ricercata’s” corps, which included many Ballet Austin dancers.
Six women stand frozen for the ballet’s beginning, then start a series of arm and leg movements, visually and kinetically layered over the rest of the corps, who are on their knees, extending and circling their arms and legs. Bach’s music buoys Balanchine’s simplicity, and “Episodes” threatens a pleasurable overflow. All the pieces of Webern and Balanchine get added together, the precision of arms and legs in unison or in canon suddenly offer emotional sustenance.
Clare Croft is a dance freelance critic for the American-Statesman.
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October 13, 2008
BAM Festival review: 'Viva La Diva'
Pro Arts Collective spread its reach far with this year’s Black Arts Movement Festival. And Sunday’s “Viva La Diva” concert at Huston Tillotson University proved that. The impressive recital by three up-and-coming opera singers broadened BAM Festival’s reach into the classical fine arts.
Mezzo-soprano Lori Brown-Mirabal, soprano Othalie Graham and contralto Judith Skinner drew progressively more rousing shouts of ‘bravo’ from the audience Sunday as they presented a very tight and polished program of well-known arias and songs.
The trio started the program together with a lovely interpretation of the traditional gospel hymn “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” before rotating through their individual repertoire.
Skinner stood out, making a sure-fire first impression with the dramatic “Re dell Abisso” from Verdi’s “Ballo in maschera,” her voice rich and mellifluous. She later returned for a sensitive rendition of “The Feeling We Once Had” from the 1970s musical “The Wiz” only to later finish the first half of the program with stirring and almost fierce-sounding a capella version of the hymn “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?”
In the program’s second half, Skinner again demonstrated her ample artistic range with another Verdi aria (“Stride la Vampa” from “Il Travatore”) followed later by an utterly scintillating presentation of “Afraid, Am I Afraid” from Menotti’s histrionic 1946 opera “The Medium.”
Brown-Mirabal garnered the first of the afternoon’s calls of “bravo” with her graceful yet spirited handling of the “Habanera” from Bizet’s “Carmen.” Later, Brown-Mirabal impressed again with a nuanced “My Man’s Gone” from “Porgy and Bess,” deftly handling the song’s jazzy dramatics.
Graham impressed with her sheer volume, if not always the control of tone, especially on “Dich tuere halle” Wagner’s “Tannhauser” and again on ‘in Questa Reggia” from Puccini’s “Turandot.”
As they began, the trio finished together, this time with a heartfelt and humorous version of “Scandalize My Name” that even allowed accompanist Eldon Little to get on the spirited call-and-response.
The audience demanded an encore from the singers. But unfortunately it seems planning didn’t permit for that. Still, it was clear sign that Pro Arts inclusion of opera and classical music struck a high note with their audience.
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Review: 'Casket of Passing Fancy'
You know you’re in for something different when you’re handed a legal release form along with your program, and Rubber Repertory’s “The Casket of Passing Fancy” is definitely that.
As you walk into the Blue Theatre, you’re funneled into a tight, closed space. Set designer Anne Marie Gordon has turned a small fraction of the theater into a parlor that, with its arm chairs, tables and board games, would feel homey if you hadn’t just promised not to hold your hosts responsible for physical or emotional damages. The back walls, filled with files and plastic tubs of props, holds out the promise for even more variety.
The premise of the event is that the Duchess, played by Jennifer Underwood, will offer the audience a series of opportunities, drawn as cards from her casket. Each audience member will choose one. Once you’ve chosen your offer, it’s fulfilled, and you leave the theater. The offer will never be made again. Not only is each performance guaranteed to be different, each viewer’s experience is as well.
The tone is set consistently, though, by an opening song from the Duchess’ servants, rotating through an open window with blankly cheerful faces, and a monologue from Underwood herself on the nature of pleasure. “I do everything in my power to make them happy,” she says of those she meets, “and yet…. And yet.”
That seems to be the underlying theme of “Casket.” A buffet of choices await you, each offer