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Super Fly!ANGELENO MAGAZINE

2008-09-04T11:44:00.001-07:00

Will David Cronenberg's buzzy new operatic adaptation of his cult flick get swatted in L.A.?

Be Afraid. Be very afraid: David Cronenberg is Fly-ing blind. With the help of a singing teleportation machine, a puppet chimpanzee, and a 40-strong chorus, the 65-year-old Canadian film director has turned his 1986 cinema classic The Fly starring Jeff Goldblum as a mad genius who accidentally melds his body with that of an insect’s, into what may be the world’s first horror opera. The movie’s surreal metamorphosis marks Cronenberg’s debut as a stage director. Certain fans that caught the premiere at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in July were impressed by the transformation. “Someone’s six-year-old said, after seeing one of our rehearsals, that she thought she would have to sleep with her parents,” Cronenberg says. “So I guess it’s working.” The French critics, however, were less awed. Le Figaro’s Christian Merlin wrote that the production, “confirmed that cinema and theater, above all opera, are two very different arts.”

American audiences tend to be more forgiving than their European counterparts. But when the Los Angeles Opera/Théâtre du Châtelet co-production receives its US premiere this month, will diehard LA movie fans feel as let down as Parisian opera buffs? Horror aficionados may be particularly disappointed to hear that the opera version lacks the film’s lurid disintegrating fingernail and projectile vomiting scenes. But the “king of venereal horror’s” stage adaptation promises to make opera-goers cower behind their programs nonetheless, with its suspenseful new score by Oscar winner and longtime Cronenberg collaborator, Howard Shore, playwright David Henry Hwang’s foreboding flashback libretto, and extreme special effects. (Never has a primate been teleported across a stage with such grotesque results.) And that’s to say nothing of the potential shock caused by watching an opera singer emerge buck-naked from a teleporter and fly around the set impersonating a giant insect – something Pavarotti would never have attempted during his long career. “Opera singers generally aren’t used to being strapped into harnesses,” says Cronenberg of working with Daniel Okulitch, the audacious 32-year-old Canadian bass-baritone cast in the role of mutant scientist Seth Brundle. “When Daniel first tried scaling the wall upside down, he said I might get the vomiting from the movie whether I liked it or not.”

Though Hwang’s libretto draws on some of the film’s dialogue, Cronenberg isn’t remotely interested in regurgitating his movie on stage. The opera lacks video sequences, and, unlike the film, is told in flashback. The Fly may be the director’s biggest-grossing film (closely followed by 2005’s A History of Violence) and -- alongside last year’s Eastern Promises -- one of his most critically-acclaimed projects to date. But Cronenberg says he hasn’t watched The Fly since it first came out. Instead, he’s moved the story from the 1980s to the 1950s (as in George Langelaan’s original novella and Kurt Neumann’s 1958 movie adaptation) and focused on working with Shore and Hwang to bring out the story’s melodramatic narrative and intense emotions. “I always thought that the subject of The Fly was a good opera subject because of the classic love triangle relationship,” says Shore, who, having mulled over the idea of making an opera out of The Fly in the decades since composing the film’s soundtrack, kick-started the project by collaborating with Hwang before approaching LA Opera’s Plácido Domingo. With LA Opera on board, Cronenberg officially joined the team. Hwang adds: “The Fly contains all the ideas you associate with opera from the huge plot relating to birth, death and transformation to the tragic love story.”

In an attempt to attract new audiences, opera companies have lately sought inspiration from unlikely sources. In 2006, English National Opera transformed the life of Libyan dictator Moamar Gaddafi into an opera; Milan’s La Scala plans to operatize Al Gore’s eco-documentary An Inconvenient Truth for its 2011 season. “I think it’s absolutely critical for opera companies to stretch themselves artistically. LA Opera has often taken advantage of our rather unique opportunity to work with some of Hollywood’s brightest talents,” says Domingo of LA Opera’s own audience-expanding tactics, which have involved drafting in such Hollywood heavyweights as Franco Zeffirelli and Garry Marshall to direct projects. Woody Allen is making his operatic debut with the company this season, helming a production of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. As a result of Domingo’s star power, LA Opera has not only been able to attract the attention of film industry A-listers, but also the talents of some of the opera community’s most respected names such as Anna Netrebko and David Daniels. Yet films don’t always make smooth transitions into operas, as recent adaptations of the 1983 Meryl Streep vehicle Sophie’s Choice and David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway proved.

Despite what the French critics say, Cronenberg seems to have an appreciation for the differences between the two artistic mediums and has been more than willing to play rookie on the opera set. Although the director grew up in a musical household -- his mother was a professional pianist and he played classical guitar as a boy – his only previous operatic encounter was during the making of the 1993 film version of M. Butterfly, Hwang’s riff on Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. To his credit, Cronenberg has looked to his more operatically-experienced colleagues for guidance during rehearsals. “David is always willing to ask questions and listen to suggestions and would ask me things like, ‘can we do that on stage?’” says Okulitch. “There’s no artifice about the man.” Cronenberg, who generally casts everyone in his movies down to the extras, didn’t even attend auditions for the opera. “I don’t think anyone was interested in having me there,” he says, self-effacingly. “I’m used to being a benign dictator. But in this case I have to be a benign collaborator.”

Yet if The Fly is to create a buzz in – and beyond – LA, the director and his collaborators may need to reengineer the production’s DNA. Hwang plans to “make a few minor tweaks” to his libretto. “There were some lines I heard once too often in Paris,” he says. But the writer may have some trouble persuading the director to play along. “I’m very happy with what we did in Paris,” says Cronenberg. “I want the production to stay exactly the same.” Teleporters are notoriously temperamental machines, however. Brundle got a nasty surprise when he attempted to transport a chimp across his lab for the first time in the movie. Let’s hope Cronenberg doesn’t have to spend the rest of the year scraping the splattered remains of his first opera off the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage.

Magic ActSF WEEKLY

2008-09-03T11:35:00.001-07:00

A Q & A with a historic theater's new chief.

The Magic Theatre takes its name from a famous location in Herman Hesse's novel Steppenwolf: "Anarchist Evening at the Magic Theatre, for Madmen Only, Price of Admission Your Mind." For a while following its inception in 1967, San Francisco's new play bastion made a radical impact on the U.S. theater scene, nurturing the careers of dramatists like Sam Shepard, Charles Mee, and Michael McClure and the acting talents of Danny Glover, Woody Harrelson, and Sean Penn, to name a few. In recent years, however, the company has struggled to maintain its renegade reputation. A slew of big-name world premieres from David Mamet's Faust to Bill Pullman's Expedition 6 brought in a steady clientele but largely failed to stimulate. The Magic hired a new artistic director this summer in an attempt to reignite its spark. Loretta Greco comes to the Magic from New York with high-profile directing and producing credits at such institutions as the Public Theater and the Women's Project. She has also directed productions all over the country, including at ACT and the Magic. We caught up with her just before the launch of her inaugural season.

What inspired you to apply for the job at the Magic?

When I've directed plays in other parts of the country, three weeks into rehearsal I've usually itched to get back to New York. But when I've worked in San Francisco, I've never had that urge to leave. I have fallen in love with the city. I've always wanted to work at the Magic. I'm a Sam Shepard freak. I was spoon-fed all of his plays during my impressionable days. I also took the job because I love the Magic's intimate spaces: They allow audiences to see the sweat and tears on the actors' faces and feel like they're part of the show rather than mere observers.

How does the Bay Area theater scene compare to New York?

Nothing compares to New York in terms of scale, but the quality of what's on offer is comparable. You get a mixture of sublime work and dreck on both coasts.

What turns you on about theater?

As a practitioner, I feel like it's one of the few collaborative art forms. I love working with new writers — and occasionally dead writers, too. As an audience member, I believe that there's nothing like going to the theater. A small part of me is supremely critical. But mostly, I feel like I'm experiencing theater for the first time. When I was 8, my dad took me to a dress rehearsal for the local high school production of Oliver! in Miami where I grew up. I was overwhelmed. My heart was thumping and I had goosebumps. From that instant, I knew what I wanted to do. Eventually, I started organizing neighborhood "happenings" which included readings, dance numbers, and sketches. I would enlist everybody in the neighborhood to help and wouldn't take no for an answer. I like community and ritual. I go to church. I go to the theater, although sometimes I worry about the state of it.

What concerns you most about theater?

That it's lost its sense of adventure and is too commercial. That people go because they want to see their favorite stars. I'll always take a good story over a commercial hit with four big names in it. Still, you have to think about box office. But recently, since the economics have shifted in this country, theaters all too often base decisions not on artistry but commerce.

How do you plan to balance the box office with artistic integrity at the Magic?

I've always trusted my instincts. I've been doing this for 20 or so years. I know I have great taste. If you have a terrific script, fine actors, and a top production team, people will come. If the play's no good, I can hire 20 film stars and it still won't be heard.

How important is staging world premieres?

We're staging two this season — American Hwangap by Lloyd Suh and Mistakes Were Made by Six Feet Under writer Craig Wright. But I'm not just interested in doing world premieres. We need to do second and third productions. Premieres never get the work done.

How much directing do you intend to do?

I'm directing two shows this season — Evie's Waltz by Carter W. Lewis and Theresa Rebeck's Mauritius. I'm determined to maintain a balance between producing and directing.

Tell me about the season's inaugural play, Laura Schellhardt's The K of D, an Urban Legend.

When an agent friend sent me The K of D, I didn't know anything about the playwright. It's a great tall tale about a young girl's rite of passage set in a nowhere Midwestern town. I wanted to launch the season with a play that introduces audiences to a terrific emerging voice and reminds people about what's distinctive about the Magic: It's intimacy.

What about the rest of the season?

Bordering on naturalism, Evie's Waltz is not something I'd normally pick. But I found the play so honest and scary. It's about what happens to our kids in high school and how bad things can happen even to great families. Tough Titty by Oni Faida Lampley is about a woman's search for grace. Exuberant, buoyant, and heartwarming, it's a love letter to anyone who's ever had a cross to bear. I make the play sound like a Hallmark card, but it's nothing like that. American Hwangap looks at the immigrant experience through the lens of a Korean-American family in Texas. It's wonderfully poignant as well as madcap. Mauritius is constructed like a brick shithouse. Until I saw this play in New York, I never saw a heist work onstage. The plot, which concerns five people all after the same thing — a postage stamp — is extremely funny and heartbreaking. Screw The New York Times for comparing Rebeck unfavorably to Mamet. This lady is every bit the dramatist that Mamet is. If every first draft were as good as the one I have of Mistakes Were Made, we'd all die and go to heaven. Wright is a real wordsmith. The play asks big questions like, is there a God? And if our hours were numbered, how would we spend our time? For this first season, I won't push the envelope as far as I plan to in the future. I want to get to know the audience first.

Where do you see yourself and the Magic five or ten years from now?

In five years, I want the Magic to be financially triumphant and a destination for artists. In ten years, I hope to have bequeathed my job to someone much younger, smarter, and braver than I am. Perhaps I'll return to New York to run a theater there.

'Ordo Virtutum' performance proves a memory challengeLOS ANGELES TIMES

2008-08-10T14:37:00.000-07:00

Chloe Veltman goes behind the scenes as San Francisco Renaissance Voices works to wrangle the 12th century Hildegard von Bingen work.

SAN FRANCISCO — If you've ever struggled to learn a poem or piece of music by heart, you may have been abashed at the effort required. But consider how much worse you would have felt in medieval Europe.

"Medieval people reserved their awe for memory," New York University professor Mary Carruthers writes in "The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture." "Their greatest geniuses they describe as people of superior memories, they boast unashamedly of their prowess in that faculty, and they regard it as a mark of superior moral character as well as intellect."

What's more, the scarcity of books in the Middle Ages meant that the vast majority of information was exchanged aurally -- and that included musical knowledge. "Learning by ear was the only way music was absorbed, since manuscripts were never used as scores in the sense that we understand," says Benjamin Bagby, director of the Paris-based early music ensemble Sequentia.

A millennium later, such feats of recall can seem well nigh miraculous, or so I've concluded this summer. As a member of the a cappella group the San Francisco Renaissance Voices, I've spent more hours than I care to count learning and memorizing the part of the Soul in "Ordo Virtutum" (Order of the Virtues), a musical morality play composed around 1150 by the visionary German abbess, scientist, poet, musician and mystic Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179).

Hildegard's composition, which our group is presenting in a series of concerts this month, may have topped the monastic Billboard charts back in the 12th century. But to a classically trained singer weaned on Mozart, Morrissey and Madonna (in other words, music in recognizable keys, with hummable melodies and conventional time signatures), this archaic "opera" concerning the Soul's journey from temptation to salvation initially seemed to be the opposite of catchy.

The mere prospect of getting the random, meandering sequences of notes and impenetrable Latin lyrics down was daunting enough. But committing the stuff to memory, as our music director, Todd Jolly, had instructed us to do to create a freer interpretation, seemed about as likely as the composer's strapping on her wimple and putting in an appearance on our opening night.

First there was the issue of language. Although many singers in the U.S. are familiar with pronouncing standard church Latin, the medieval German that Hildegard used followed different rules. It took weeks for us to substitute the "kwids" and "kwods" that had been hard-wired into our brains from singing innumerable masses by Tallis and Byrd for more Germanic-sounding "kvids" and "kvods."

Remembering to pronounce an S at the start of a word as a Z was similarly tough. And I'm still confused by I. Sometimes it's pronounced "ih" and other times "ee," and remembering what sound to make when has been an ongoing struggle.

Then there was the problem of deciphering the musical notation. Scriveners in Hildegard's monastery wrote down the music and lyrics for "Ordo" shortly after her death. But even though the text features neumes -- basic marks dictating pitch -- and is peppered with unfamiliar flourishes denoting such things as trills and de-emphasized notes, it lacks most conventional modern markings, such as time signatures, note values and even bar lines. In this way, the composer leaves ample room for artistic license -- a scary prospect for musicians who don't regularly improvise.

Our early rehearsals were a dispiriting struggle to reach a consensus on the ebb and flow of Hildegard's melodies. We'd all start singing together in perfect monophony, but within a few phrases, the delicate thread of her plainchant would invariably snap. Attempting to memorize phrases as a group caused further chaos. On more than one occasion, we diligently broke chants into bite-sized chunks and worked on them intensively, only to find, by the end of the rehearsal, that we could barely recall a note.

Given the huge advances in printing technology since Hildegard's day and that most of us don't feel any strong moral or intellectual obligation to develop our memorization skills, why bother learning "Ordo" by heart at all? I can certainly think of better ways to spend my time than slavishly repeating dozens of chants in the hope that they might stick. Yet once I'd gotten over feeling intimidated by the sheer size of the undertaking, Hildegard's music and the memorization process started to make sense. Patterns began to emerge, and the music started to feel less like one of Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone compositions and more like part of me.

Options for learning

There are multiple ways of tackling a work such as "Ordo." Some of the foremost interpreters of Hildegard's music, such as Sequentia's vocalists, learn chants by listening to the director sing a phrase and then repeating it until it's in their heads. Demanding intensive effort over an extended period, this "call and response" system aims to replicate how medieval nuns would have learned the music.

If only my ensemble had the luxury of working this way. With a mere eight rehearsals to pull our "Ordo" together, we undertook as much of the memorization process as we could individually and relied heavily on our scores. Our memorization techniques included everything from singing small chunks with -- and eventually without -- the music to making and listening to recordings. One cast member even prepared a set of color-coded cue cards, one for every character, inscribed with the text for each chant. I focused on understanding the meaning and flow of the words before singing through a chant. Then it was simply a case of brute repetition. After a while, something would mysteriously click and I would suddenly go from half-remembering one or two phrases to knowing an entire chant by heart.

The music is no longer a chaotic jumble of notes to me, I am happy to report. There are clear motifs, even predictable moments. But remembering how individual phrases hang together continues to be a challenge. Many sections sound so similar that they frequently get transposed in my head.

The most fundamental trick to memorizing "Ordo" -- and indeed any piece of music that seems harmonically or melodically "foreign" -- is to embody it, to create an emotional relationship with it and thereby understand how it works. I don't mean to sound like a hippie. For many musicians, finding a way to connect to a difficult piece is the first step toward memorizing it.

For some, this might involve understanding at an intellectual level why the composer used a particular motif or chord progression to illustrate a particular phrase. "I've found my only success in getting this chant to stick is to know exactly what each word means and try to link the meaning of the text with the melody or texture of the phrases," says fellow singer Katherine McKee, who plays the role of Humility in our production. "Why does Humility sing 'Gaudete' [Rejoice] at the very bottom of her range? If I have an answer to that, I'll be able to remember the phrase structure."

Others get inside the music by referring to the composer's original manuscript. "If you can read Hildegard's original notation, you know there's a clear hierarchy to the notes in her chants, something that's often lost in transcription," says Cleveland-based singer Charlotte Landrum, who has performed many of Hildegard's works. "Once you get a sense of this hierarchy, you're able to make a connection with the music." For others still, it's a question of feeling the music vibrate in their bodies or visualizing the notes on the page.

The dramatic method

All of this would have made perfect sense to Hildegard and her contemporaries. According to Carruthers, emotion played a key role in helping medieval scholars remember important information. Many of them would use as a mnemonic the mood they were in the day they learned a chunk of text. Evoking that mood at a later date would help to bring the text back. Some scholars even went so far as to swoon or work themselves into intense emotional states at the time of memorization to help them trigger their future powers of recall.

It seems as if a little of the ancient scholars' sensibility has rubbed off on my group, though no one took to swooning in rehearsal. The night I got the first of several Hildegard ear worms -- what psychologist Oliver Sacks has described as the "automatic or compulsive repetition of musical phrases" in the brain -- I didn't sleep a wink because I was haunted by one of the chants. Now, whenever I want to remember how that segment begins, I picture myself reeling around the next day in an exhausted fog.

Fellow singer Emily Stauffer has reported experiencing visions. "The other night I actually had a dream in which 'Ordo' made an appearance," Emily told me. "In the dream, I had a chant absolutely stuck in my head. I awoke in a state of confusion and decided to give myself the day off from practicing so that my apparently weary brain could have a rest."

Toward the end of the rehearsal process, our director decided that it would be best to allow scores onstage for the bulk of the chorus sections. But he still charged us with committing all solos and some choruses to memory. "Ideally, we would have the whole piece memorized," Todd says. But chant, he admits, "is about a hundred times harder to memorize than music that came along later."

Somehow, we made it through opening night. It was a wing-and-a-prayer kind of experience. Especially prayer. Just two hours before curtain, a couple of the performers were still struggling to remember a tricky, seemingly endless passage at the end of the work. They clung to their scores like nuns to their chastity, afraid of what might happen if they let go. But let go they eventually did, and Hildegard's little-performed musical mantra rang out anew. The medieval mystic must have been smiling on us: Her music flowed as it had never done in rehearsal. And our memories served us well.

Just One FalsettoTHE GUARDIAN

2008-07-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

For putting people in the mood, there's nothing quite like hearing a man sing really, really high. Chloe Veltman finds out why we love wailing and warbling

In the 1994 film Farinelli, a pretty countess with a discourteous habit of reading books during opera performances, suddenly finds herself distracted from her latest volume. Agitated, she looks up to discover the source of the disruption, which turns out to be none other than Farinelli (aka Carlo Broschi), one of the most famous castrati of the 18th century opera stage. Belting out a florid aria in a register normally associated with collatura sopranos, burglar alarms and the dawn chorus, Farinelli instantly forces the bookish beauty to submit body and soul to the potent splendor of his voice. The next day, the countess is still reeling from the experience. “What I felt yesterday evening when I heard you sing is beyond my understanding,” she confesses. “I believe you were responsible for my first musical orgasm.”

When it comes to putting the female of the species (and in some instances, the male) in the mood, there’s nothing quite like hearing a man singing really, really high. Just as ladies swooned at the vocal pyrotechnics of the finest Italian castrati 250 years ago, so they have continued, over the generations, to scream on cue at The Beach Boys’ peppy refrains, gyrate to Michael Jackson’s banshee whoops and melt at the fragile sweetness of Coldplay frontman Chris Martin’s maudlin sighs. Vintage video clips depicting teenyboppers screeching at the falsetto bits in Beatles or Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons concerts provides a clue to the visceral impact of the high male voice on the pop music listener. But even staid classical music audiences can’t help but display their feelings when a great male singer soars into the stratosphere. The young Peruvian tenor, Juan Diego Flórez, sent opera-goers at La Scala and The Met into orbit recently with a row of nine perfectly-pinged high C’s in Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment, breaking long-standing embargoes on encores at both opera houses.

The primordial nature of listeners’ responses to men singing up high doesn’t make much sense from an evolutionary standpoint. At least as far as speaking voices go, scientific studies have shown that females tend to favor partners of the opposite sex with sonorous, James Earl Jones-esque timbres over effete squeakers like comedian Gilbert Gottfried. (There are always exceptions to the rule: David Beckham maintains his sex appeal in spite of his squeakiness.) Results from a 2006 Scottish study show that women generally prefer low, masculine male voices over high, feminized male voices. Meanwhile, findings released last autumn from an American-Canadian investigation indicate that men with deep voices tend to have more children than those who speak at a higher pitch. The research suggests that females might associate low tones with increased testosterone levels, leading them to think of men with low voices as being better hunters and providers.

Yet the pelvis-tingling burr of “Walrus of Love” Barry White and Tom Waits’ whiskey-laced rasp evidently aren’t the only voices capable of tickling listeners’ g-spots. At the most basic level, strong high-pitched sounds cause excitement in listeners’ brains. “When singers sing high and loud, the brain releases the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine causing a general increase in physiological arousal -- higher heart rate, faster respiration, increased perspiration and greater attentiveness,” says David Huron, professor of music and cognitive science at Ohio State University. Then there’s the fact that high male singing, like most great music, plays with our expectations. As the American neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin notes in his book This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, “music is organised sound, but the organisation has to involve some element of the unexpected or it is emotionally flat and robotic.”

When male vocalists, generally regarded as singing low-pitched notes, go up high, the thrill of these high-pitched notes is compounded by the fact that the sounds are so unanticipated. As such, the intoxicating power of the high male voice stems in large part from the tension between the “femininity” of the singer’s vocal range and the “masculinity” of its timbre (or quality.) “There’s a sort of ‘gentle giant’ idea at work in the combination of the normally aggressive male voice and the feminized high pitch,” says Huron. “High male voices appeal because they are assertive without being threatening.” For gospel music producer and author Anthony Heilbut, it is the gender-bending quality of the high male voice that renders it so powerful. “Both sexes are stimulated by androgynous sounds,” he says. “Something wild happens in the listener’s ear because the voice she’s hearing goes against nature.” Both theories extend to singers’ physical appearance. Part of the appeal of a hairy hard-rock frontman like Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler is the combination of the vocalist’s Viking warrior looks and bell-like falsetto. Meanwhile the androgynous appearance of such vocalists as A-Ha’s Morten Harket and the French operatic sopranist Philippe Jaroussky underscores the ethereal quality of their voices.

When the best high-voiced male singers sing in falsetto or what’s called the “head voice” (as opposed to the lower “chest voice” where most normal speech sits in both men and women) they fluidly reach the same notes as female vocalists without sounding remotely girly. There’s nothing feminine about Jimmy Somerville’s voice despite the singer’s waif-like appearance; its intense operatics suggest nothing if not wounded male pride. When Radiohead’s Thom Yorke curls his lips around the sky-scraping passages of songs like “High & Dry” and “Nude,” vulnerability bleeds into strength. Geddy Lee of Rush blasts out his high notes like he’s in free-fall, and Marvin Gaye’s seductive feline purr oozes testosterone. The same can be said of classically-trained singers. There’s a virile edge to the German countertenor Andreas Scholl’s sweet, warm voice. Meanwhile, when the sopranists of the famous, all-male American choral ensemble Chanticleer break into ecstatic descants during the group’s trademark gospel settings, it’s as if the voices of Mahalia Jackson, Prince and Farinelli had fused into one.

The second quality shared by the greatest high-voiced men (a rule which applies to great singers across the board in fact) is the intention behind every blood-curdling shriek or ethereal scat sequence. Singers across many different genres reach for the high notes to convey a particular feeling or create a special effect. When Bono of U2 yelps “please get off your knees” in the song “Please,” the words sound pitiful and pleading. The affectation in the refrain of Morrissey’s “The Last of the Famous International Playboys” thickens his lyrics with irony. As the American classical countertenor David Daniels puts it of the art of singing up high: “If you design your ornamentation or high notes to do nothing but thrill, you don’t end up giving the most organic performance of the story. It becomes all about histrionics and self-adoration rather than about the art itself.”

Not all high-voiced men understand this. Justin Timberlake’s bird-like vocal flights in songs like “My Love,” and “What Goes Around” sound canned. The singer possesses a classic soul vocalist’s range, but clearly lacks the emotional range to back up his forays into falsetto. When Mike Patton of Faith No More hits the high notes, he sounds like he’s being disemboweled with a blunt teaspoon. The nasal quality of Guns N’ Roses’ Axl Rose makes the singer sound like he’s been snorting helium. The only existing recording of an operatic castrato singing, which dates back to 1902, doesn’t exactly fill the listener with lust. Alessandro Moreschi’s gurgling-swooping voice sounds like a tipsy drag queen desperate to get out of her stilettos at the end of a long night. Meanwhile, the Australian singer Adam Lopez may be the holder of the world record for highest note sung by a male. But judging by the cringing facial expressions of the female audience members watching the singer attempt the feat on the Guinness World Records television show, Lopez’s ear-splitting, off-the-end-of-the-piano C-sharp broke more windows than hearts.

Of course, musical taste is highly subjective. What turns one listener on, sends another scurrying for cover. But beyond the peccadilloes of personal preferences, evolving attitudes towards gender roles coupled with growing musical cross-pollination and dissemination has led to the widespread acceptance of bearded warblers in recent decades. Until the British singer Alfred Deller kick-started the countertenor renaissance in second half of the 20th century, the high male voice was largely considered to be a freakish aberration of nature. “Now for a novelty!” reads the title card introducing a 1932 performance by British male soprano Frank Ivallo. “The man with a woman’s voice!” Even in the pop world, where falsetto singing has long been a staple, high male voices have occasionally inspired more ridicule than respect. During a guest appearance on the American television comedy series Friends, for instance, the singer Chris Isaak (best known for his heartfelt yodeling on the song, “Wicked Game”) swoops into falsetto mode in a moment of passion, only to be interrupted by Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe: “I think you might want to pick a more masculine note,” she says, with an alarmed look on her face.

It’s just as well that music history has generally ignored this kind of advice. Imagine how classic Bee Gees numbers like “Stayin’ Alive” and “Night Fever” would sound if the Gibb brothers had sung them an octave lower? The disco hits certainly wouldn’t possess anything near the same spine-tingling sex appeal. Or what about Al Green’s voice devoid of its trademark cries, hums and yelps? In spite of his religious awakening, Green thankfully still understands the orgasmic power wielded by a man singing up high. "Baby, there's love in it, out it, on the side of it, on top of it, on the bottom of it," Green recently said of his new album Lay It Down in a radio interview. "It's basically to evoke emotion — and love, love, love.”

An Excellent AdventureSF WEEKLY

2008-07-09T14:55:00.000-07:00

What you’ve always wanted to see--the stage adaptation of a Keanu Reeves movie.

Strange things are afoot at the Xenodrome. I'm not talking about George Carlin stepping out of a tricked-up phone booth to help Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter pass their history finals, though the link between the goofball 1989 movie Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and recent goings-on at the Potrero performance dive certainly suggest otherwise.

Keanu's legacy looms large over Point Break Live!, a most excellent theatrical spoof of Kathryn Bigelow's 1991 film about a Los Angeles cop who goes undercover to infiltrate a gang of adrenaline-junkie surfing bank robbers. Never mind that the shoestring budget puts hiring Reeves — who starred in the film as FBI agent Johnny Utah — beyond the reach of the show's producer, New Rock Theater. While the plucky theatergoer selected at the start of each performance by audience applause to fill in for Reeves may not necessarily possess the star's cheekbones or surfer's physique, he (or she) will very likely turn in at least as convincing a performance.

The conceit of casting a volunteer in Reeves' role is undeniably effective. Anyone who has seen Point Break — or, indeed, sat through most of Reeves' canon to date — will understand why the live version's audience participation gambit makes such a splash. With the possible exception of his turn as Don John in Kenneth Branagh's 1993 screen adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, it's hard to think of a more wooden performance in the actor's mixed bag of a career. As such, there's brilliant logic to the idea of putting an unsuspecting civilian with little if any acting experience — and, likely no prior knowledge of how the live version works — in this mediocre yet endearing actor's wetsuit for the evening. For both the audience member suddenly thrust into the limelight in neoprene and the rest of us sitting expectantly in plastic rain ponchos (thoughtfully provided to protect us from showers of water and worse), Point Break Live! turns out to be a wild ride.

Like Bigelow's movie, Point Break Live! hyperventilates. Familiarity with the film isn't mandatory, but it certainly helps us keep up with the hectic pace, not to mention grasp the rationale behind the serving of meatball sandwiches during intermission. (The snack plays a pivotal role in the movie; some filmgoers attest to having trouble differentiating between the sandwich and Keanu by the end.) The actors are so amped that they hardly ever stand still. As gonzo surfer Roach, Paul Leafstedt in particular seems to have lost control of his limbs. The rest of the Bermuda-shorts-clad surfers behave like a bunch of baby chimps on speed, slathering sun lotion on each other's torsos, fondling audience members, and waving guns about. The actors have a tendency to get overexcited, garbling their lines and shouting over each other in the drive to re-create action movie dynamics onstage. When Jamie Mayne's ditzy blonde production assistant, sporting a purple sports bra, gray shorts, kneepads, and terrierlike force, suddenly transforms herself into Utah's stunt double (think Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu meets dog whisperer Cesar Milian), her bank robber ass-kicking antics unfortunately get drowned in the tsunamilike melee.

Yet it's impossible not to get swept up in Point Break Live!'s glorious chaos. The show's high-octane energy offers some insight into why it has done well in New York, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles since first being conceived in Seattle by Jaime Kelly and Jamie Hook in 2003. Ingenious ways of staging some of the film's key moments abound. Kevin Vasconcellos' animation sequence projected on a theater wall illustrates a wild car chase; an explosion at a gas station bursts before our eyes in a cataclysmic live fire-breathing display; directors Thomas Blake, George Spielvogel, and Eve Hars even manage to pull off the movie's skydiving scene with daredevil aplomb, using a couple of dodgy-looking harnesses, a handful of party poppers, and a silver-sprayed bathtub. And when the idiotic surfer bums suddenly don masks and morph into a gang of dangerous, bank-robbing criminals, the intensity of their assault takes us completely by surprise. We do as we're told: hit the floor, hand over our cash and cower. In short, Point Break Live! keeps us on our toes.

I imagine that my adrenaline rush paled in comparison to that of Dana Long, the theatergoer charged with playing Utah the evening I attended when the production was at the Xenodrome (it has since relocated to Fat City in SOMA). The audience selected Long from a group of five self-appointed auditionees. We were impressed by his manly delivery of the line "Hi, my name is Johnny Utah" and superior jumping-jack skills. Just like Reeves' lovable yet naive character paddling out to sea for the first time on an amateurish surfboard, Long seemingly had little idea what he was getting himself into. Let's just say that reading lines off cue cards was the least of his challenges. Despite lacking a surfer's six-pack and being forced to ride the waves on a child-sized ironing board, he delivered a heroic performance. I don't know whether I'd eaten one too many meatball sandwiches, but there was something bodaciously Reevesian about him, in fact.

"We love you, Keanu, because you make it look so easy," says Sharon Rylander's Bigelow at the start of the show. It's a tongue-in-cheek statement, as anyone who has played FBI agent Johnny Utah onstage or onscreen will know.

Marco Barricelli: Star TurnAMERICAN THEATRE

2008-07-01T14:32:00.000-07:00

Hamlet and Heathcliff are on hold while the actor takes the reigns in Santa Cruz

When, in April 2005, Marco Barricelli announced that he was resigning his position as one of American Conservatory Theater’s four core acting company members, the San Francisco arts community went into shock. The actor’s decision to give up one of the few full-time, salaried regional theatre acting gigs in the country at the height of his powers seemed outlandish both to people in his profession and audiences alike. For eight years between 1997 and 2005, Barricelli’s booming, brooding presence had shaped both ACT, and, to a degree, the entire face of the Bay Area’s theatre scene. Possessed of swarthy good looks, an unassailable frame and a toe-tingling voice that feels like it’s coming at you in Dolby Stereo, the actor seduced audiences not just by virtue of his impressive physicality, but also with his alchemic approach to text and ability to shuttle between roles as wildly contrasting as the Leading Man in Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV’s Prince Hal.

Perloff once memorably referred to Barricelli as her “Stradivarius” for his ability to “play any kind of music there is.” Fellow ACT company member René Augesen, who co-starred with Barricelli in many productions including Buried Child, Night and Day and The Three Sisters, found him to be a generous collaborator: “Whatever choice you’d make, big or small, right or wrong, he’d take it, run with it and throw it back to you.” The playwright Tom Stoppard was also reportedly a fan. According to Perloff, Stoppard loved the performer for his clear intonation, charisma and sheer size. “I remember when Tom was commenting on an actor in another production of The Invention of Love, he said, ‘He wasn’t Marco. He didn’t have the inches.’”

Barricelli’s influence at ACT went well beyond his stage appearances. It was largely as a result of his encouragement that Perloff founded a core acting company in 2001. He was involved in the season planning and production process and directed several plays including Life is a Dream, The Collection, and Mourning Becomes Electra. And he worked as an educator, teaching ACT’s masters degree students and setting up a successful and ongoing international exchange program between the Italian actor training school Accademia Silvio D’Amico and ACT’s conservatory. (The Boston-born actor has Italian roots and speaks the language fluently.) “At ACT, I was part of Carey’s artistic team,” says Barricelli. “I helped with the selection of actors, directors and designers. I could see what it took to build a company and put together a season. Every bit of those eight years was instructional for me.”

But more than two decades of performing weighty roles ranging from Hamlet to Heathcliff on the nation’s repertory theatre stages eight times a week was starting to wear on the then-46-year-old actor. “I got to the point where I would think to myself, ‘why do I do this?’” says Barricelli. “What I should do is become a motorcycle mechanic. When you fix a bike, it either runs or it doesn’t. It’s not the same as doing a play, where people are always saying things like, ‘I enjoyed this but I didn’t go for that.’” Plus, living in California had put some strain on his personal life. His longtime girlfriend, Beatrice Basso, was living on the other side of the country working as the resident dramaturg and literary manager at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. Ready for new opportunities, Barricelli decided to move back to New York, where he had launched his career as an acting student at The Julliard School in the late 1970s. Barricelli had several immediate plans for his life post-ACT, including television work, returning to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (where he acted many leading parts before joining ACT) to play the title role in Laird Williamson’s production of Cyrano de Bergerac, and traveling to Italy to teach. But he also repeatedly expressed a longer-term desire to colleagues and the media: to become the artistic director of a theater someday.

One television series, several plays, and a few summers in Italy later, Barricelli has managed to turn this dream into reality. In October 2007, the Board of Shakespeare Santa Cruz chose the actor from a pool of four finalists to become the California-based company’s new artistic director -- the third leader in the organization’s 27-year history to come primarily from an acting background. Barricelli’s immediate predecessor, the British actor Paul Whitworth, got his start at the Royal Shakespeare Company, appeared in many productions at SCC (and elsewhere) during his tenure with the organization, and continues to perform on stages across the U.S. Another former SSC chief, Danny Scheie, is best known to Bay Area audiences for his work on stage. Though he intends to spend his first season at SSC focusing solely on producing, Barricelli plans to act and direct on the company’s two stages in future years. “I was quite surprised that we went down the same path by hiring another actor, but Marco was the clear choice,” says SSC’s managing director, Marcus Cato. “He has a distinguished career as a Shakespearean actor and amazing connections within the theatre world. He calls people up and they say yes to him even without knowing what project he wants them to work on.”

American theatre history has its roots in the “actor-manager” system of the 19th century. The successful U.S. tours of companies led by such British thespians as Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Henry Irving inspired American actors like Edwin Booth and Joseph Jefferson to run their own organizations. But despite the success of these endeavors, the actor-manager system gradually went into decline as stage managers and later directors replaced performers as company leaders. These days, with a few notable exceptions such as Steppenwolf Theatre’s Martha Lavey and Philip Seymour Hoffman of LAByrinth Theater, relatively few performers head major companies in the U.S.

Barricelli loves his new job not only for the idyllic California coastal setting of SSC’s two stages (including a picturesque outdoor amphitheatre) but also for the opportunities it provides to nurture all three of his passions -- producing, directing and performing. But to him, the scarcity of actors in leadership positions poses a serious problem. He’s particularly critical of artistic directors who don’t respect actors properly. Like most actors, Barricelli endured debilitating audition experiences, including being ushered to continue reading for a part while a director took a phonecall. As a result, he stopped auditioning for regional theatre roles entirely sometime in the mid 1980s and has since consistently won jobs based on the strength of previous performances. Now, as an artistic director, he tries to make the audition process as painless as possible for new actors and doesn’t generally ask veterans to audition for him at all. “Organizations are more likely to hire directors than actors as leaders because of their management experience. But this trend hasn’t gotten us very far,” Barricelli says. I know lots of actors who would make extraordinary artistic directors for their unique aesthetic, ability to communicate with many groups of people, respect for their colleagues and heightened sensitivity to the production process as a whole. It’s time for the American theatre to think outside the box.”

As far as planning his inaugural season goes, SSC’s new actor-manager is certainly doing what he can to shake up widely-held preconceptions about what constitutes Shakespeare Festival fare. The Bard’s works still form the backbone of the University of California at Santa Cruz-affiliated company’s compressed, six-week-long summer season. This year’s offerings include an old favorite, Romeo and Juliet, and a contrasting take on romantic relationships, the complex and less-frequently-performed comedy, All’s Well That Ends Well. But instead of complementing the Shakespeare with other works from Renaissance England or, say, the Comédie Française, Barricelli is devoting his attention to producing plays by established and emerging contemporary American dramatists. Lanford Wilson’s acerbic drama Burn This and Itamar Moses’ precocious take on 18th century mores, Bach at Leipzig, round out the season. “Everything we do takes its inspiration from Shakespeare,” says Barricelli. “But I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that we’re performing in America with American actors and for American audiences. Plays like Burn This are probably going to shock the constituency. I don’t think the word ‘fuck’ has been heard on SSC’s stages before. They may run my ass out of town.”

Whether the artistic director flourishes in his new role or finds himself thrown off campus depends upon his ability to persuade audiences entrenched in the classics to embrace new voices. Barricelli’s old mentor, Perloff, has warned him not to expect audiences to be automatically receptive to such a sweeping change of vision. Barricelli’s success will also owe much to how he manages certain ambitious organizational shifts. The artistic director aims to juggle a complex schedule of four productions for roughly the same budget that the company formerly produced three, mainly through efficient casting. In addition, Barricelli plans to strengthen ties with the university, such as through the creation of a documentary about SSC in collaboration with the institution’s media arts department. And to top it all, he hopes to have mapped out the entire ’09 season in time for this summer’s program. “This will help to get audiences hooked in early for next year,” he says.

Those close to Barricelli believe that there’s no one better equipped to run SSC and meet these ambitious goals. “I would venture to say that there are few people in the world who can do what Marco does,” says Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s former artistic director Libby Appel, who first worked with Barricelli in 1993, when she directed him as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. “All of his qualities as a person will stand him in good stead as an artistic director. He is devoted to the theatre, has a sharp eye, and possesses empathy for the process because he understands what it means to be an actor.”

Yet considerable challenges face SSC’s fledgling artistic director in the months and years ahead. Chief among these is his health. Two months after accepting the position at SSC, Barricelli was diagnosed with cancer. “It’s part of my life,” he says. “The downside is that I want to spend all of my time at the theatre but have to spend some of it at the doctor’s.” Despite undergoing chemotherapy, Barricelli looks and sounds as healthy and energetic as he ever did on stage. Dressed smart-casually in slacks, dark blazer, slate-gray button-down shirt and beige lace-up shoes, he appears both relaxed and alert. Only the hair on his head, now wiry, cropped close to the skull and graying slightly at the temples, where it once fell across his forehead in lustrous dark waves, hints at his inner state. “The act of producing theatre keeps my mind off the cancer,” Barracelli says, the sonorous cadence of his voice defying defeat with every vibrating vowel. “I have to move forward and the best tool I have is this job.”

Chanticleer Tours California's Mission Era MusicLOS ANGELES TIMES

2008-05-11T14:55:00.000-07:00

The renowned 'orchestra of voices' is taking its dozen male singers on the road -- the state's historic Camino Real that links the mission sites.

Most California schoolchildren learn the basic facts about the state's mission history in the fourth grade. Established from 1769 to 1823 by Franciscan monks from Spain to spread the Roman Catholic faith among the area's Native American population, the series of strategic-religious outposts spanned 650 miles of California coastline, from San Diego to Sonoma, providing Spain with a powerful presence on the Pacific frontier. Today, these monuments are among the state's oldest buildings and most popular tourist destinations.

Yet despite the importance of the missions to California's development, relatively little is known about the music that formed the backbone of Franciscan rituals and teaching. "The repertoire that was jotted into the mission choir books still remains largely unknown, even to musical historians," says Craig Russell, an expert on Mexican Baroque music at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. "Similarly, the musical archives in Mexico City Cathedral preserve stacks of gorgeous and erudite sacred music that are largely neglected but worthy of professional attention and performance."

This month, however, many Californians' knowledge of this music is due to expand, courtesy of Chanticleer, the San Francisco-based 12-member male vocal ensemble. Beginning Thursday in San Luis Obispo, the Grammy-winning group is undertaking a tour of eight of the 21 missions on the California coast's legendary Camino Real, including two concerts in San Francisco's Mission Dolores, where it made its inaugural public appearance in 1978.

"This music is part of both our history and California history. It forms the artistic and musical fabric of the West Coast," says Joseph Jennings, who joined Chanticleer as a countertenor in 1983 and became its music director in 1984. "The mission composers were way ahead of their time," says Chanticleer vocalist Eric Alatorre. "While on the East Coast people were writing hymns and part songs, in the Latin parts of the country they were composing full Masses and venturing into Classical terrain."

The roots of the Chanticleer tour were unearthed a few years ago in the vast archive at the Mexico City Cathedral, where musicologists discovered close to 50 lost manuscripts by Manuel de Sumaya, the most famous Mexican composer of the colonial period of New Spain. Sumaya (1680-1756) is credited with, among other groundbreaking achievements, being the first American to compose an opera. The cache of manuscripts, known as the Estrada Collection after cathedral organist and musicologist Jesús Estrada, consisted of a unique collection of Sumaya's villancicos -- folk-tinged church songs of a type popular in the 17th and 18th centuries that were a staple on Catholic feast days in the California missions.

"The find was a godsend," says Russell. "Sumaya is the American Handel. He was responsible for introducing many of the most up-to-date trends of the High Baroque into the New World. Like Handel, he was a spectacular keyboardist and mastered both sacred and secular genres with apparent ease."

In October, Russell brought facsimiles of the Estrada Collection to San Francisco to show to Jennings. The men had previously collaborated on several Mexican Baroque projects, including a Gramophone Award-nominated Mexican Baroque album in 1995, featuring the music of Sumaya and fellow New World composer Ignacio de Jerusalem, and a follow-up recording in 1997 of Jerusalem's Matins for the Virgin of Guadalupe. Together, Jennings and Russell sorted through stacks of music with a view to bringing the sounds of the California missions back to life.

A potent blend of Catholic and Native American traditions distinguishes California mission music from European musical trends of the day. Just as a striking ceiling at Mission Dolores depicting Ohlone Indian basket designs painted in ocher, red, green and white vegetable dyes offsets the florid European-style carved altarpiece, Chanticleer's Camino Real program reflects these dual influences. Parts of the "Missa en sol," a Mass in G minor attributed to Friar Juan Bautista Sancho, sound as if they could have been composed during the Classical period; the work features many of the qualities commonly associated with the music of Haydn and Mozart, such as varied surface rhythms, unstressed cadences and a top-dominated texture. Sumaya's villancicos, on the other hand, sung in Spanish and flavored with folk motifs, are ethnic in feel. The same goes for some of the processional pieces, such as "Para dar luz inmortal," transcribed by the renowned musician Father Narcisco Durán during his time at the Mission San José.

"This is sacred folk music," Jennings says. "It was written to appeal to the people." Some of the works on the program also feature very un-European-like percussion markings. The manuscript of the Feast of Pentecost piece "Alleluia & Veni Sancte Spiritus," for instance, goes as far as to ask the congregation to kneel "until the drum makes a ruckus like the big metal organ stop of the organ."

Russell sees the inclusion of percussion in mission music as a small sign of cultural exchange. "Apparently the drum was not discarded from Native American worship but instead was folded into the Christian liturgy at the appropriate moments," he says. Jennings, for his part, is still debating whether to reproduce that effect in Chanticleer's concerts. "It may be a bit much," he says.

Figuring out how to transform this utilitarian church music into a concert program was one of the biggest challenges facing Chanticleer. The group has performed in some of the world's grandest venues, among them the Musikverein in Vienna, London's Barbican Centre, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the adobe-walled California missions are much more modest structures, requiring a sensitive vocal approach.

"We're not attempting to re-create an entire religious ceremony, but we need to perform this music with regard to its original purpose and surroundings," says Jennings. "The trick is to let go of our grandiose ideas about huge cathedrals and opulent chapels." To that end, the singers are honing their Spanish pronunciation and working to match their sound with the space.

"The missions have very simple architecture, and the composers wrote music to fit the specific atmosphere of these structures," Alatorre says. "The buildings give you lovely, hard, reflective surfaces to play with. Music that's too busy for the echoey, light acoustic sounds like mush. But when things move a little slower harmonically, as they generally do in this music, you can pick out individual tints among the wonderful washes of color."

An inspired pairing

Known both for its peculiarly American countertenor-centric sound and its Mexican Baroque recordings, Chanticleer may be uniquely capable of connecting 21st century audiences with this historical repertoire.

"There's a kind of translucency to the ensemble's texture that allows you to hear the counterpoint that is at the heart of the music," San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joshua Kosman says. "The group doesn't produce sound in big, weighty blocks like a 'Hallelujah' Chorus. Each of the 12 parts can be heard and has a distinctive character. When the singers are on their game, they simultaneously enable us to picture the individual threads that make up the musical tapestry and the tapestry as a whole."

The irony contained in the idea of a group of mostly white choristers performing music in the very settings where European settlers once foisted that music on the native population is not lost on the missions' staffs. Andrew Galvan, Mission Dolores' curator, is a descendant of a Bay Miwok Indian who was baptized in the church -- the oldest intact mission in California and the oldest building in San Francisco. Galvan acknowledges the double-edged legacy of the Franciscan missionaries' use of music to "civilize" the local tribespeople. But he's enthusiastic about Chanticleer's efforts nevertheless.

"Mission choirs typically consisted of Native American men, so hearing an all-male choir sing this music is appropriate," he says. "It'll be great to hear the mission voices that have been silent for so many years once again."

The Barber of CivilSF WEEKLY

2008-05-07T09:49:00.000-07:00

Berkeley Rep's Figaro is light entertainment

It's hard to imagine a work of art more redolent of the cultural establishment than Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. The staple of international opera houses and "Top 10 Operas of All Time" lists has become so closely tied to the petrified world of "high art" that people forget the work's anarchic roots. "The name Figaro has somehow grown such a thick crust of operatic respectability that we have stopped thinking of him as a hairdresser," French-literature scholar John Wells wrote of the opera's wily, working-class protagonist in his book The Figaro Plays. "But Figaro is still capable of drawing blood."

Mozart's opera is based on a stage play of the same name, the second in a triptych of comedies written by the 18th-century French dramatist Pierre Beaumarchais. It tells the story of how Figaro and his fiancée Susanna — servants to Count Almaviva and Countess Rosina — manage to outwit the philandering count. Despite having abolished a hated feudal law giving aristocrats the right to sleep with brides on their wedding nights, Almaviva schemes to have his way with Susanna. The story all too clearly satirized life under Louis XVI, a monarch who made overtures toward social reform while still oppressing his people. Historians today widely consider the comedy's riotous April 27, 1784, opening night at the Comédie Française to have played a major role in instigating the fall of the Bastille five years later.

It is the revolutionary zeal at the heart of Beaumarchais and Mozart's works that audacious Minneapolis-based troupe Theatre de la Jeune Lune aims to restore and explore in its adaptation of the Figaro story. Set nearly 20 years after the events depicted in Marriage, director Dominique Serrand's music-infused production at Berkeley Repertory Theatre examines what it's like to live among the embers of a once-blazing revolutionary pyre, through a mixture of Mozartian melody, Beaumarchaisian bombast, and Jeune Lunian lunacy. But while this Figaro reveals thoughtful parallels between the staleness of post-revolutionary France and the widespread feeling of sluggish impotence that has become a hallmark of our own times, it succeeds more as light entertainment than as provocative satire.

One of the most status quo–knocking delights of Jeune Lune's adaptation is its debt to Beaumarchais. Though focused primarily on Marriage, the production draws on material from all three Figaro plays (The Barber of Seville and the largely forgotten A Mother's Guilt are the others) and takes a playful approach to the spoken word. The comedy derives much of its power from the acerbic exchanges and clownish horseplay between the two men who conceived the show and embody its main characters — Serrand, in the role of the now-decrepit count, and mercurial actor and longtime company member Steven Epp as his long-suffering servant. Through their hilarious time-and-space-bending conversations, the two forge a link between the worlds of late-18th-century France and early-21st-century America that is as contemporary as it is timeless. "Don't be too sensitive," Almaviva scolds his peevish lackey at one point. "You'll end up being a Democrat." Elsewhere, when Figaro utters the word "democracy," his boss snorts, "De-bullshit." The cast even goes as far as to intone "Yes we can!" — the battle cry of Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Yet the shouts for democracy sound like exhausted and hollow afterthoughts. The childish count may spend his days hiding in a closet in a perpetual bout of postrevolutionary anxiety, but he still exerts authority over Figaro. The servant, for his part, seems to have lost his lust for life. He continues to perform the serf's role begrudgingly, cooking his superior's meals and shaving his face. Serrand has all the best lines and many of the best moves, emphasizing the decidedly reactionary master-servant relationship. In a particularly agile display of physical prowess, the count throws himself headlong into a moving coffin. Meanwhile, Almaviva's response to Figaro's news about Susanna's defection to Virginia to work for "a gentleman named Jefferson" — "I hear they've got great ham" — fizzes with the sort of Jon Stewart-like wit you would expect from the once-wisecracking Figaro, not his bigoted boss.

Even though the revolution has initiated social upheaval of sorts — Figaro and Almaviva flail around in flea-bitten wigs on a derelict, empty set strewn with random bits of temporary-looking furniture, rather than poncing about in powdered pompadours in a gilded chateau — things remain unchanged at the play's core. "Surveillance" cameras projecting close-up mugshots of the performers point to the ominous realities of living in a so-called democratic society, and, much as Western nations continue to send young people to distant battlefields, so Almaviva still dispatches the young page Cherubino to war.

The production's message of post-revolutionary malaise is a powerful one. But for all its strengths, Figaro disappoints by pandering to the public's Mozart infatuation. While Almaviva and Figaro think wistfully of the good old days, we're subjected to lengthy flashback sequences in which the all-singing cast and small pit orchestra perform chunks of the opera with uneven skill. The production attempts to heighten the satire by injecting bits of English into the arias' original Italian. This conceit hints obliquely at the fractured relationship between Italian old-world values and the supposedly forward-looking views of the English-speaking new world. Nevertheless, the endless singing ends up swamping the more brazenly provocative spoken material, making us yearn for Almaviva and Figaro's vehement vaudeville routines, or to experience a more vocally polished Mozart at the Met.

Just like the well-heeled audiences piling into the War Memorial Opera House to enjoy an evening with Mozart (San Francisco Opera has staged Figaro no fewer than 30 times), we can easily feel seduced by the entertainment value of Jeune Lune's production. Instead of "drawing blood" by making us confront our apathy and suppressed rage in the face of failed revolutions past and present, this hairdresser provides a nice neck massage, a copy of Cosmopolitan, and plenty of pomade.

Comedic ContradictionsSF WEEKLY

2008-04-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

Billy Connolly: Britain’s Famously Juvenile Grandpa

Since forsaking folk music for stand-up comedy back in the early 1970s, Billy Connolly's career has taken on superstar dimensions. He's one of the most revered stand-up comedians in Britain, frequently selling out major venues. He has also been the subject of countless documentaries and TV specials; become a major TV personality in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand for his "World Tour" programs for the BBC; and starred in many movies, including Mrs. Brown and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Yet when it comes to making sense of his latest standup show, Billy Connolly Live!, one of his more obscure achievements springs most readily to mind: his performance of the theme song from Supergran, a British children's television show from the 1980s. The series focused on a feisty Scottish granny who performs daring feats atop a magic flying bicycle, and nothing characterizes the 65-year-old comedian's rapacious stage show quite like its discombobulating mix of the superhuman and the senile.

Connolly's very physical appearance embraces these two seemingly opposing forces. His flowing gray locks and goatee make him look like a Gaelic Gandalf, or an aging King Charles spaniel. Yet whether pacing and swearing angrily or clutching his stomach in mirth at the memory of some hilarious incident from his past, Connolly belies his bardic looks. He makes us feel we're in the presence of a naughty, prank-playing urchin rather than a Commander of the British Empire and the father of five grown children. Then there's his outfit. The sober black clothing says one thing; the leopard-print shoes boasting one-inch-thick crepe soles scream another. Even Connolly's plain T-shirt gives off mixed vibes. Though it looks ordinary enough from the front, its long, flowing "tail" at the back suggests a superhero's cape and a geriatric's hospital gown simultaneously. It's a puzzling combination.

The content of the show similarly counterbalances vibrant youth with slackening age. The old and infirm make innumerable appearances during Connolly's routine, often providing the butt of many of his jokes. In one of his most memorable — and merciless — anecdotes, he talks about visiting his dad in the hospital following Connolly Sr.'s seventh stroke. Contorting his jaw and bugging out his eyes in imitation of someone who has lost complete control of one side of his body, Connolly dissects with no small amount of glee the only word his father is able to utter from his hospital bed, which sounds very much like "fuck." Connolly was sexually abused by his father as a boy, and this sketch betrays more than a hint of filial rebellion.

But the elderly need not have molested Connolly to bear the brunt of the comedian's humor. In another skit, his Aunty Agnes comes under fire simply for smelling odd and knitting him an ill-fitting balaclava helmet (a tight-fitting form of headwear often favored by skiers). Elsewhere, a woman walking her dog gets her comeuppance, apparently for no other reason than being unattractive and old. Connolly, describing his days touring the U.K. as a musician on a clapped-out tour bus, merrily recounts how he and his cronies caused the woman to leap into the air (and her pooch to turn itself inside out) when the vehicle's malfunctioning exhaust let out a cacophonous bang.

In many ways, Connolly's sense of humor is that of a schoolboy's. He delights in the sound of the word "fuck" (which he can't stop himself from repeating to the point where you wonder whether he might be suffering from Tourette's), devoting about ten minutes of stage time to contemplating how satisfyingly the word rolls off the tongue. He rails against authority figures and institutions of all kinds, from his father to preachers to the antismoking lobby. He giggles intermittently at his own silly stories, often having to pause to compose himself midflow. He even makes jokes about poop.

At the same time, Connolly's delivery is in many ways reminiscent of that of a drunk old man regaling listeners in a pub with yarns from his past. He'll start talking about one thing, and before you know it, he's off on a wild journey through ever-perpetuating tangents. A section which begins with the merits of keeping your eyes open while sneezing suddenly veers off into an anecdote about a handsome one-eyed acquaintance from Connolly's youth who drove a puce-colored Porsche. This eventually evolves into a discussion about the most flattering way to wear bandages before heading into a brief interlude about Mozambique. But despite the many demented perambulations the veteran comedian makes throughout his show, he clearly has his wits about him. No matter how far Connolly veers from his course, he manages to steer himself back to his starting point without skipping a beat. This is no mean feat when you consider the fact that the verbal tirade lasts for more than two hours without intermission. Most comedians half Connolly's age would balk at the thought of going on for so long without a break.

There's nothing witty or even coherent about Connolly's comedy, yet somehow the man manages to be excruciatingly funny. In fact, he seems to get more hilarious with each passing year — maturing like a particularly ripe block of Scottish Cheddar. The slogan "Too old to die young" is painted on a backdrop depicting a graffiti-splattered brick wall, and it's hard to think of a more fitting a statement for this supergrandpa of stand-up. Ultimately, there's something to be said for the tension between the childishness of Connolly's humor and his steadily escalating age. That Connolly is a walking contradiction is partly what makes him so endearing, not to mention enduring, in his golden days.

Tir na nOgFINANCIAL TIMES

2008-03-04T10:18:00.001-08:00

Tir na nÓg, Magic Theatre, San Francisco

When Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls first appeared in 1960, the novel was banned in the author’s native Ireland for its candid portrayal of the sexual awakenings of two teenage Irish girls. If O’Brien’s narrative about the journey of the studious, romantic Caithleen Brady and her feisty childhood friend, Barbara “Baba” Brennan, from their small rural hometown in the west of Ireland to a strict Catholic high school and finally to independent life in Dublin seems innocent by today’s standards, her new stage adaptation of the book seems positively naive.

The lingering whiff of seediness and exploitation that caused a number of Catholic priests in Ireland to organise public burnings of O’Brien’s Bildungsroman in churchyards around Ireland back in the 1960s is largely absent from the theatrical version, re-dubbed Tir na nÓg. Meaning “Land of Youth” in Gaelic, the play, currently receiving its world premiere at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre in a spirited production directed by Chris Smith, vibrates with spring-like energy and self-empowerment.

From the giddy-breathless episodic structure of the plot to the play’s several flights of whimsy, including a midnight dormitory dance number performed to crooner Bobby Darrin’s “Under the Sea”, Tir na nÓg skips along like a childhood game of hop-scotch. The play affectionately captures the love-hate relationship between the two main characters thanks to the contrast between Allison Jean White’s understated Kate and Summer Serafin’s loudmouthed Baba. Meanwhile, the pervasive presence of Deborah Black as the bard-like “Singing Woman” (a mythical character created specifically for the stage adaptation) and jaunty, fiddle-accompanied renditions of many well-known Irish ditties such as “Whiskey in the Jar” and “Dirty Old Town,” steep the production in Irish lore.

As a result of its heartwarming optimism, O’Brien’s nostalgic homage to the pretty innocence of youth comes dangerously close to resembling a Disney musical at times. Audiences resistant to the idea of being transported through an emerald lens to Blarneyland may find themselves craving a touch of the peaty bleakness of O’Brien’s previous two Magic-produced dramas, Triptych and Family Butchers, to temper Riverdance alumna Jean Butler’s toe-tapping dance numbers and the low-life characters’ ebullient, whiskey-tinged camaraderie.

Lords of the DanceBBC CLASSICAL MUSIC MAGAZINE

2008-03-01T11:14:00.000-08:00

As the San Francisco Ballet reaches its 75th year, Chloe Veltman discovers how it has become a world-leading company

Right from the start, San Francisco Ballet always had to be first in line. Soon after it was established in 1933 to provide dancing talent for San Francisco Opera’s lavish productions, America’s oldest professional ballet company set about making dance history. The organization presented America’s first full-length productions of Coppélia (1938) and Swan Lake (1940). In 1944, it premiered the country’s first complete Nutcracker, kick-starting the tradition of presenting Tchaikovsky’s most popular work during the holiday season. San Francisco Ballet became the first American ballet company to tour the Far East in 1957 and the first, in 1978, to broadcast a full-length American ballet on the PBS television network (then co-artistic director Michael Smuin’s Romeo and Juliet).

A passion for premieres continues to govern the company’s programming to this day. While other arts organizations might take the advent of a major anniversary as the perfect opportunity to celebrate past achievements by dusting off mothballed classics, San Francisco Ballet’s 75th birthday season is defiantly forward-looking. Living choreographers feature heavily on the season’s lineup both in terms of the company’s own offerings and the showcase by three guest groups – The National Ballet of Canada, The New York City Ballet and Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo -- scheduled for early April. Audiences will glimpse works by such contemporary choreographers as artistic director Helgi Tomasson, Wayne McGregor, Yuri Possokhov, Matjash Mrozewski and Jean-Christophe Maillot. With the exception of a program devoted to the legacy of Jerome Robbins and a trio of pieces by George Balanchine (whose spirit looms large over the company’s history), the only truly nostalgic work in the entire season is Filling Station, a 1938 favorite choreographed by former artistic director Lew Christensen.

Tomasson’s deep-seated interest in working with new choreographers reaches its apotheosis at the tail end of the season with the company’s New Works Festival. Comprising of ten world premieres over three days by ten choreographers including Mark Morris, Christopher Wheeldon, Paul Taylor, James Kudelka and Margaret Jenkins, the event may be one of the most ambitious festivals of new ballets in U.S. history. “I’m hard pressed to think of a new works festival on this scale attempted anywhere else since New York City Ballet’s mammoth Stravinsky Festival of 1972,” says San Francisco Chronicle dance correspondent, Rachel Howard. “It’s going to be a huge challenge getting all ten pieces up on their feet all at once.”

The New Works Festival presents some particularly interesting issues for San Francisco Ballet’s music director and principal conductor, Martin West. The orchestra faces the task of sourcing 14 timpani for Philip Glass’ Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra, the music selected to accompany choreographer Jorma Elo’s festival piece. Obtaining the rights to perform Aaj Ki Raat from the late Bollywood composer Rahul Dev Burman’s soundtrack for the 1973 Indian film Anamika has proved similarly tricky. The Kronos Quartet performed an adaptation of the piece slated to accompany Possokhov’s festival contribution on its Caravan CD of 2000, but the group worked from sketched parts based on the movie score. Meanwhile, West alongside company music librarian Matthew Naughtin are completely re-orchestrating Bach’s Goldberg Variations in order to create a version that uses as many of the orchestra’s instruments as possible and better fits with the concept behind choreographer Julia Adams’ ballet.

To top it all, three of the ten choreographers -- Jenkins, Kudelka and Morris -- have opted to commission musical scores rather than work with existing repertoire, providing the orchestra with an unusually large amount of complex, new music to learn in a short amount of time. The American contemporary music ensemble Alarm Will Sound gave the world premiere performance of John Adams’ score for Morris’ ballet, entitled Son of Chamber Symphony, at Stanford University last December. As rhythmic as a runaway train and intricate as an advanced crossword puzzle, Adams’ music will test the Ballet orchestra’s skills to the limit. “It usually takes longer to start a work from scratch, with the orchestra having no idea of how it’s supposed to sound,” says West, a British national who until recently also served as the English National Ballet’s principal conductor. “The Adams piece in particular looks to be very technically challenging.”

Despite the company’s focus on breaking new ground (it’s possible, for example, to experience two or three different programs in a typical season before glimpsing a single tutu on stage) San Francisco Ballet remains ardently tied to its classical roots. The company’s founders -- Utah siblings Willam, Harold and Lew Christensen – cut their teeth in the 1920s and 30s under the tutelage of the likes of Balanchine and the great Russian choreographer Michel Fokine. The company’s two subsequent leaders, Smuin (who served as co-director alongside Lew Christensen) and Tomasson, grew out of the same tradition as the Christensens. Smuin came up through the ranks of Balanchine’s American Ballet Theatre. The Reykjavik-born Tomasson, meanwhile, became a protégé of both Robbins and Balanchine. Today’s San Francisco Ballet honors this legacy both through its stringent approach to classical technique and its repertoire, whose backbone consists of many works by such American ballet luminaries as Balanchine, Robbins and William Forsythe.

Thanks to sky-high technical standards, a diverse repertoire that encompasses everything from Marius Petipa to Mark Morris, and Tomasson’s choreographer-centric vision, what began as a provincial company has grown to become an organization of considerable international standing. “The San Francisco Ballet ranks as one of the top couple of companies in the country and one of the best in the world,” says dance scholar and author of the new book San Francisco Ballet at Seventy-Five, Janice Ross. The company’s boundary-defying reputation also owes much to a rigorous touring schedule that takes it regularly to New York, Paris and London among other places for several months every year. As the Sunday Times put it of the company’s 2004 engagement at London’s Sadler’s Wells theatre: “Helgi Tomasson’s outstanding artistic direction has transformed a regional American troupe into one of the world’s top ballet companies.”

The San Francisco Ballet’s trajectory to stardom hasn’t always been smooth. In 1974, the company faced bankruptcy, but was brought back from the brink by a grassroots community campaign. Scandal again erupted in 1985 when a dispute between Smuin and higher management led to the co-director’s dismissal. According to Howard, newly-appointed artistic director Tomasson received death threats from enraged Smuin supporters. “Smuin’s contract allowed him to remain in the building for a year,” says Howard. “As you can imagine, there was a lot of conflict.”

Undeterred, Tomasson set about transforming the company, defying expectations from the beginning. His Swan Lake of 1987 was an early surprise. “No one thought the company capable of dancing a major classical work at that time,” recalls Ross. “But Tomasson proved everyone wrong.” Following Smuin’s crowd-pleasing and often pop culture-infused view of ballet, the dance world expected the company to pursue a more traditional path under its new leader. Tomasson, though a classicist, soon proved himself to be as adept at expanding his audiences’ and dancers’ definitions of ballet as he was at staging fresh versions of antique works. “When Helgi Tomasson first came out to the west coast, many people thought he’d build a company on the Balanchine model, like a ‘New York City Ballet Left’,” says Howard. “But Tomasson created a new model, albeit with a Balanchine tinge – a play-box for choreographers from all over the world.”

As Tomasson looks ahead to the future, his focus on “firsts” continues. Beyond emphasizing touring in order to be seen as widely as possible, the company’s leader continues to foster relationships with choreographers from around the world. “It’s important for each season to feature new works,” says Tomasson. “I want to keep bringing in new choreographers and challenging dancers and audiences to experience new things.”

Method DancingSF WEEKLY

2008-02-06T11:11:00.001-08:00

San Francisco Ballet's Filling Station Pumped with Acting

Everyone knows that the members of San Francisco Ballet can dance. Now celebrating its 75th anniversary, America's oldest ballet company has earned itself an international reputation for the unparalleled technique and lyricism of its performers, as well as artistic director Helgi Tomasson's forward-looking yet steeped-in-the-classics vision. From the minimalist precision of Tomasson's beautiful 2004 work 7 for Eight set to a series of seven Bach keyboard concertos for eight black-clad soloists to the corps de ballet's shimmering collective port de bras in George Balanchine's "Diamonds" (part of the 1967 suite Jewels), the first program of the company's 2008 season cannot help but dizzy audiences with its eclectic and frequently exhilarating approach to movement. Stanford dance scholar Janice Ross recently told me that she thinks the San Francisco Ballet ranks as one of the top couple of companies in the country and one of the best in the world. Obviously I'm elated that its prima ballerinas can execute 32 continuous fouettés while appearing to exert about as much effort as you or I do when we're strolling to the shops. But the burning question on this theater critic's lips is: Can those dancers act?

The simple answer is yes. Though now corny in concept, the ballet's former artistic director Lew Christensen's 1938 classic, Filling Station, provides the perfect outlet for the dancers' thespian skills. As the first of the three ballets that comprise Program 1 (alongside 7 for Eight and "Diamonds"), it's a quirky, nostalgia-packed ode to small-town American life. In the same way that "Diamonds" fittingly celebrates the company's diamond anniversary, Filling Station is a touching homage to Christensen, who, along with his brothers, Harold and Willam, laid the foundations for the company's present success. But more importantly, this ballet serves to illustrate the power of movement as a vehicle for characterization.

Like many silent-movie stars, the Christensens had their roots in vaudeville. As a dance act known as the Christ Brothers, the siblings went on the road with the Orpheum circuit in the 1920s and eventually shared the bill with such stars as W.C. Fields, Jack Benny, and Bob Hope. Set against Paul Cadmus' vaultlike gas station backdrop to Virgil Thomson's wholesome orchestral score, Christensen's narrative ballet is steeped in the vaudevillian tradition. It follows a night in the life of happy-go-lucky gas station attendant Mac as he interacts with a series of larger-than-life visitors. Over the course of an evening, a family of lost tourists, a couple of local lads, a soused society dame and her only-marginally-less-inebriated beau, a cop, and a gangster all make appearances. Vaudevillian "bits" provide much of the work's cartoonish humor, from Mac and his sidekicks making fun of a tourist's obsession with golf by elaborately mimicking teeing off and other golf moves to the cast suddenly breaking out of their characters to perform a cheesy social dance number, a version of a popular 1930s boogie called the Big Apple. In nearly all of these moments, the performers imbue the effervescent atmosphere and Singin' in the Rain–like steps with cracking comic timing.

The only "bit" that lacks definition is near the beginning, where the tourists first enter the gas station to ask for directions. As Mac, Rory Hohenstein gives a jaunty, athletic performance. His perpetual high spirits come across through his gravity-defying leaps and the way in which he intermittently slaps his thigh, cocks his cap, and grins and wheels about the stage on his heels. But when faced with the tourists' blank looks, Hohenstein suddenly starts gesticulating wildly. His face does little to explain what he's doing, and it's not until after the tourists leave that we realize Mac was giving them directions. Even then, we don't know whether he is as clueless a map-reader as the vacationers, or whether he's trying to confuse them on purpose.

The most memorable creations in Christensen's ballet are the characters themselves. As the drunken swells heading home after one too many glasses of champagne, Katita Waldo and Val Caniparoli deliver hilarious caricatures that are as sharply drawn as they are technically virtuosic. Accompanied by a slurred cello line and, later, some honking melodic snatches from the orchestra's brass section, the two proceed to perform a drunken pas de deux in which traditionally serene classical steps comedically warp and wobble on the brink of collapse. Teetering on her toes with alternating looks of bliss and near-sickness on her face, Waldo lurches into a deep arabesque while Caniparoli props up his girlfriend as if her body were a sagging fence-post. He then clumsily clambers under her splayed legs and grabs her again, just in time to stop her from keeling over. The brilliance of the duo's performance stems from their ability to make their characters look completely out of control even while executing Christensen's technically audacious steps with perfect poise and timing. It takes a lot of skill to act drunk convincingly onstage. Dancing drunk convincingly demands even greater levels of accomplishment.

Why should ballet companies and audiences care about acting skills? After all, it's the dancers' bravura displays of athletic prowess, rather than scenes of dramatic depth, that cause convulsive waves of midshow clapping during any evening at the War Memorial Opera House. Yet a gripping performance, as the members of San Francisco Ballet well know, owes as much to the dancers' ability to communicate feeling and emotion to the audience as it does to their technical mastery of the steps. Even pure dance (i.e., non-narrative) works like 7 for Eight and "Diamonds" test the dramatic skills of their casts to a degree. Tomasson's piece comes alive for the audience in the tension between the formality of the choreography and Bach's music, and the ballet's chaotic heart. Meanwhile, the softness the dancers bring to the formulaic patterns of Balanchine's choreography almost entirely mitigates the blandness of the chintzy "Diamonds."

Early last year, I experienced a workshop production of The Tosca Project, a dance-theater collaboration between San Francisco Ballet and the American Conservatory Theater based on the colorful history of the Tosca Cafe in North Beach. As I watched theater-trained actors interact with ballet company dancers, I was struck by an alarming fact: The dancers were embodying their characters more convincingly than the professional actors were. This leads me to think that members of the Bay Area theater community should spend more time at the Opera House over the coming months. They might learn something.

Outlandish LandscapesFINANCIAL TIMES

2008-01-26T13:30:00.001-08:00

The Sonoma Valley is known for its rolling hills, boutique wineries and Mediterranean-style villas. It is not the kind of place one would expect to find a diseased Monterey pine tree festooned with thousands of plastic baubles or a mini-golf course whose most prominent feature is a giant, bubblegum-pink breast with a shiny red metal ball for a nipple. But since opening its gates four years ago, Cornerstone Gardens (pictured), in the heart of the California wine country, has rocked this otherwise genteel area with a riot of botanical bombast.

A showcase for experimental gardens by top landscape designers, Cornerstone is the first outdoor gallery of its kind in the US. Visitors looking for neatly planted rows and ornamental cherubs will be disappointed. Cornerstone is highly irreverent and playful, from American landscape designer Ken Smith’s “Daisy Border” – a display of candy-coloured plastic pin-wheels that both mocks and pays homage to the classic floral border – to Mexican architect Mario Schjetnan’s “A Small Tribute to Immigrant Workers”. With its regimented boxes of vegetables and rusty metal walls, Schjetnan’s garden delivers a strong political message about the plight of immigrant workers in California. Even the upcoming installation of a 1,000 ft-long fence around the perimeter of the site is expected to defy conventions. “It’s a white picket fence with a twist,” says David Aquilina, general manager.

The gallery’s founder, Chris Hougie, a former toy company owner, was initially inspired to create a series of evolving walk-through gardens in 1996, while visiting the International Garden Festival at Chaumont-sur-Loire in France. In collaboration with Peter Walker, an acclaimed conceptual architect whose credits include the World Trade Center Memorial in New York, Hougie invited 15 landscape luminaries, such as Martha Schwartz, Claude Cormier and Christophe Girot, to create exhibits that would connect art, architecture and nature. Each 1,800 sq ft display cost $15,000-$20,000 to create.

A few exhibits, such as Japanese landscape architect Yoji Sasaki’s zen-like “Garden of Visceral Serenity”, have been there from the start and remain much the same. But the forces of nature have greatly altered other designs. When it was first created in 2004, Roger Raiche and David McCrory’s “Rise” was dominated by a massive metal pipe through which visitors could see a perfectly framed vista of vines and blue sky. Today regular pruning is necessary to prevent encroaching hedgerows and a show-stealing willow tree from upstaging both pipe and view. Meanwhile, the Berkeley-based designer Tom Leader’s “Break Out”, which invited visitors to wander through a maze of hay bales interlaced with creaky screen doors while listening to Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” on a constant loop, was removed in 2005 owing to rotting hay.

Indeed, garden landscaping exhibitions form a tiny niche of the design world. Most showcases, such as the International Garden Festivals at Chaumont-sur-Loire, Emo Court in County Laois, Ireland, and the Jardins de Métis in Canada, run only during the summer months. The International Garden Festival at Emo Court closed early this summer because of poor weather conditions. Meanwhile, The Festival of the Garden, formerly held at Westonbirt National Arboretum in Gloucestershire, UK, under the auspices of the Forestry Commission, has been on hold since 2005. “The commission decided that it was not in a position to continue to hold the festival,” says Therese Lang, one of the organisers. “We have been very close to settling on a new venue for the festival on two occasions over the past three years, only to fail at the final hurdle. It is not a cheap event to stage...”

As probably the only year-round garden design show in the world, Cornerstone has some advantages over its peers. Sunny weather and enviable growing conditions enable the organisation to invest both in long- and short-term installations. Resident horticulturalist Dawn Smith says she never has to look beyond California to source plants no matter how outlandish a designer’s tastes might be.

Yet Cornerstone faces other challenges, such as the upkeep of ongoing exhibits. Some once-pristine installations, such as Martha Schwartz’s comical mini-golf landscape, “The Usual Suspects”, now look run-down. When Claude Cormier’s original “Blue Tree”, which resembles a giant piece of azure coral, became unstable last year, it had to be destroyed and rebuilt elsewhere.

Finding ways to attract more visitors is another problem. Attempts to market Cornerstone to wine tourists haven’t worked, though the number of on-site wineries is increasing. Its managers have also started experimenting with offering free admission this summer.

Retail has become an increasingly important feature. The site has a variety of high-end boutiques selling everything from designer jewellery to antique garden furniture. But, with less than half of its total footprint devoted to green space, achieving a balance between landscape design and upscale shopping might be the gallery’s biggest challenge. “Cornerstone is gradually becoming a destination – a place to go in wine country that goes beyond wine tasting,” says the Oakland-based landscape architect Walter Hood, whose “Eucalyptus Soliloquy” was one of the site’s original exhibits and continues to thrive in a corner of the gardens. “But it’s important that it maintains another dynamic beyond the selling of products to stop itself from becoming a glorified garden centre.”