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'Ordo Virtutum' performance proves a memory challengeLOS ANGELES TIMES

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:37:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:19:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:55:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:32:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe) — Sun, 11 May 2008 21:55:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe) — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:49:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:47:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:18:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:14:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:11:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:30:00 +0000

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.”

Election, Stage LeftSF WEEKLY

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:00:00 +0000

Political theater may preach to the converted, but it can still teach us something about the world

Theater is a difficult business to be in at the best of times, but it's even more challenging in an election year. With the mass, commercialized media of television, the Internet, talk radio, and movies possessing an exponentially greater ability to reach voters, many people are apt to dismiss the intensely localized, live medium of theater as irrelevant to the democratic process. The fact that most political dramas espouse a liberal point of view and play largely to like-minded audiences only serves to further ghettoize the art form. Even those among us who believe in the stage's potential as a vehicle for entertainment and social change are annoyingly difficult to please. Some audience members regularly kvetch at producers and playwrights for being too preachy, while others harangue them for not being political enough. Caught between a ballot box and a presidential race, what's a poor theater artist to do?

This predicament is deeply ironic when you consider the intimate relationship shared by politics and theater over the years. Ever since the earliest known political satire, Aeschylus' The Persians, was first performed in the fifth century B.C., the stage has served as a pulpit for political commentary. From Shakespeare (Henry V) and Schiller (Wallenstein) to Brecht (Mother Courage) and Miller (The Crucible), playwrights have embraced the medium's reliance on metaphor and allegory to convey searing messages through subtle stage poetry. In the U.S., the birth of the Federal Theatre Project (a component of President Roosevelt's New Deal aimed at providing work for unemployed actors, directors, and playwrights) led to a more confrontational approach in the late 1930s. Agitprop plays like Marc Blitzstein's pro-union drama The Cradle Will Rock and Clifford Odets' labor strike play Waiting for Lefty had a transformative effect on the political landscape. More recently, hard-hitting works by the likes of Tony Kushner (Angels in America), Anna Deavere Smith (Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992), and Sarah Jones (Bridge and Tunnel) have sparked controversy and public debate. Meanwhile, the wide reach of theater activism endeavors like Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues and The Lysistrata Project (which sparked 1,029 simultaneous readings of Aristophanes' antiwar comedy Lysistrata around the globe on March 3, 2003) have spread awareness about such issues as violence against women and the war in Iraq through grassroots campaigning.

Theater has long possessed a reputation for being the most inherently political of art forms, thanks to its immediacy and mutability, and the relative speed and low cost with which a production can be mounted. With the possible exception of the musical version of Xanadu, it's hard to think of a work for the stage that doesn't have some kind of political idea buried somewhere beneath the surface, no matter how obliquely.

Documentaries like Fahrenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth might be weighty, well-made films of global significance. They certainly generated a great deal of buzz when they were first released. But how many filmmakers can claim to have reacted to world events with the swiftness of, say, the Living Theatre back in the 1950s, or, to give a contemporary example, local theater director Mark Jackson, who incorporated new lines into his play The Death of Meyerhold in reaction to news about the capture of Saddam Hussein?

Bay Area residents looking to galvanize their hearts and minds in the run up to November 4 could do a lot worse than seek inspiration from the theater. Some companies are dealing with the presidential election head-on. Political theater stalwart San Francisco Mime Troupe is developing an as-yet-untitled play: In the words of head writer Michael Gene Sullivan, it is about a small, dying Rust Belt town "which, because of an electronic balloting glitch and the Electoral College, becomes the deciding factor in the election." Unconditional Theatre is presenting Swing State Stories, a "documentary play" based on interviews with Northern California election volunteers, in political clubs and canvassing training sessions. Meanwhile, Climate Theater plans to send up both the democratic process and the media with the reality-TV-inspired America's Next Top President. Even plays with no specific connection to the election may take on new meanings this year, whether their creators intended them to or not. By virtue of the power of metaphor, several upcoming productions will doubtless assume a significance above and beyond what they might achieve in non-election years. Such plays include Gogol's satire about petty government officials, The Government Inspector, at American Conservatory Theater; Macbeth, Shotgun Players' take on Shakespeare's power-hungry Scottish thane; and Magic Theatre's world premiere of Wendy MacLeod's Birnham Woods, in which a middle-class dinner party takes a sinister Orwellian turn.

From the numerous conversations I've had with local theater directors and playwrights in recent weeks, it seems that everyone is united in a desire to create work that inspires people to think more deeply about the world. But with the exception of organizations whose output is directly inspired by the democratic process and/or party politics (Unconditional Theatre, the Mime Troupe, etc.), this aim has nothing in particular to do with the presidential race; it's simply part of their guiding philosophy. In a sense, every year is an election year in the world of theater. "All theater is political if it engages you," Edward Albee said in a 2005 speech. "If more people took theater seriously ... we'd have different election results."

But that's the problem. Most people don't take theater seriously. Even those who regularly attend do so more for kicks than because they're looking for a kick in the ass. Despite theater companies' good intentions, how much of the work produced this year (or, indeed, any year) can hope to make an impact beyond merely showing audience members a good time? All too often, theater fundamentally fails to engage audiences because it plays up to — rather than challenges — their expectations. Every now and again, someone will ask why the theater, given the largely liberal audiences the art form tends to attract, doesn't produce more right-wing plays as a means to shake people up and engender debate. But playing devil's advocate isn't the answer. When recently asked this by a Daily Telegraph journalist, Lisa Goldman, the artistic director of Soho Theatre in London, answered: "What would a right-wing play have to offer? Antidemocracy, misogyny, bigotry, nostalgia of all kinds? ... That the slave trade had a civilizing influence? That women should stay in the home? How can you produce innovative art if you basically believe that the past was a better place? In my view, what theatre needs is not more right-wing plays, but better left-wing ones."

Goldman is absolutely right. Many theater artists understand the need to provoke audiences. But in attempting to challenge expectations, producers frequently forget that they're supposed to be producing works of art rather than pieces of didactic rhetoric. This latter problem often stymies the Mime Troupe's efforts, for instance. Last year's production, Making a Killing, was intended to rally navel-gazing Bay Area audiences around the onus on the individual to take responsibility for the problems going on right in front of him. But the rambling subplot and easy potshots at Dick Cheney served to undermine the power of the message. The same could be said of Shotgun Players' latest production, The Shaker Chair, in which a middle-aged woman goes from apathy to activism. Predictable characterizations, self-conscious dialogue, and the poor use of what could have been a strong symbol failed to engage this reviewer.

Where is the contemporary theater's answer to movies like Jason Reitman's Thank You for Smoking, which forces audiences to question standard beliefs about the "evil empire" of big tobacco from an ostensibly smart liberal stance, and Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall, the claustrophobic yet eerily gentle portrait of Hitler's last days? I know stage plays with similar punch are out there. I've seen a few and heard about others, and I doubt that the people behind them are of a right-wing persuasion. David Edgar's epic political play, Continental Divide (which received its world premiere at Berkeley Rep in 2003), is a case in point. In Edgar's exhaustive examination of the U.S. democratic process, the fact that the most sympathetic character was a Republican candidate gave me pause for thought. Stephen Adly Guirgis' Jesus Hopped the "A" Train (produced locally last year by SF Playhouse) proffered a similarly complex viewpoint by espousing personal accountability and responsibility over radicalism. Meanwhile, Kerry Reid, a theater critic and playwright friend in Chicago, has been raving about Mickle Maher's The Strangerer, which explores the 2004 Bush-Kerry debate through the prism of Albert Camus' writings (whose The Stranger was on Bush's 2006 vacation reading list). The play caused Reid to declare: "The Strangerer accomplished what was perhaps impossible — it almost made me understand Bush. And it reinforced my deep distaste for John Kerry as a candidate." Not a bad outcome from a night at the theater, I'd say.

The Strangerer's impact on Reid illustrates a larger point: that the theater's current potential for opinion-shaping resides not so much in persuading right-wingers to change their minds (since I think they generally steer clear of theater anyway), but rather to mobilize lefties by helping them better understand what they're up against. It is to theater's great advantage that its core liberal audience is generally open to considering other points of view. The same cannot be said of, say, conservative talk-radio listeners, who are on the whole more inclined to stick single-mindedly to one way of looking at the world.

If the theater is attended largely by left-wingers today, it's because they're generally the section of the population that still cares about the arts. Perhaps this situation will change and audiences will become more politically balanced. But in the meantime, directors, actors, and playwrights must work harder than ever to grab our attention because we have become so anesthetized and stymied by world events that we're not easy to shake.

Forcing lazy liberal thinkers to sit up in their seats shouldn't be too difficult for anyone possessing artistic talent and a desire to engage the public. From universal health care to progressive income tax, there are dozens of policy ideas that many Democrats accept unquestioningly. Thoughtful theater makers need not look far for material. Whether they can leverage the issue to create art that provokes, entertains, and perhaps even brings about change is another matter. If Bay Area theater companies can meet this challenge in the coming months, I'll be happier than a Republican congressman handing out buttons at a high-school abstinence drive.

Les Waters: Explorer With An EarAMERICAN THEATRE

noreply@blogger.com (Chloe) — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 17:36:00 +0000

For the director, every play -- new or not -- is terra incognita

In March 2005, the artistic director of Berkeley Repertory Theatre Tony Taccone asked Les Waters if he’d be interested in staging The Glass Menagerie for the company’s 2005/2006 season. It wasn’t meant to be a difficult question.
Long before his arrival as associate artistic director at Berkeley Rep in 2003, the British-born Waters had proved himself adept at staging world premieres by the likes of Caryl Churchill, Wallace Shawn and Charles Mee as well as classics, having mounted productions of everything from Romeo and Juliet at the Public Theater to The House of Bernarda Alba at the Guthrie. He’d even done Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer in 2002 as his “audition piece” for the associate job at Berkeley Rep. But Taccone’s proposition was met by an unexpected pause from his second in command. “I don’t know,” Waters eventually responded. “I’ll have to read it first.”

That Waters could have worked for so long on the American stage and not be familiar with Menagerie – he’d neither read the play nor seen it produced when Taccone called – at first startled everyone at Berkeley Rep. Then it became a cause for excitement. “Les had no preconception of the piece. To him it was like a brand new play,” says Taccone. When it opened in April 2006, Waters’ take on Williams’ semi-autobiographical drama about the fractured relationship between a pushy mother, her fragile daughter and maladjusted son in 1930s St. Louis sent the mothballs flying. For one thing, it was bleedingly funny. Larger than life in gaudy frocks that had – like the spindly matron inside them – seen better days, Rita Moreno’s Amanda Wingfield bounded about the threadbare set smothering and goading her children without once upstaging them. For another, Waters’ production took the drama beyond the usual, frequently dull autobiographical revelations about the playwright. Both claustrophobic and sparklingly translucent, Waters’ Menagerie was as delicate as a tiny glass animal and as potent as the myth of the upstanding south. The production deservedly received two extensions.

All plays are, in a sense, new plays to Waters, regardless of when they were written or whether he’s read or seen them on stage. The director embraces dramatic texts like an explorer surveys terra incognita and approaches each one in the same way: by listening to it very, very closely. Waters’ extraordinary ear is the one thing that his collaborators comment on time and time again. It’s the quality that enables him to tackle both the architectural rhythms of classical plays such as Woyzeck and School for Scandal and the evasive shades of complex new works like Adele Edling Shank’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. “His real power as a director is as a listener,” says actor Erik Lochtefeld, who appeared in Waters’ Menagerie and The Pillowman at Berkeley Rep. “Les is very attentive to the play as it is written,” says Ruhl. “He keeps distilling until he approaches the essence of what is intended textually. He listens very intently to the play.” Meanwhile, Mee compares Waters to a friend of his who always reads a poem ten times before making his mind up about it. “Les has an openness to listen to something for a long time before passing judgment on it. He lets ideas emerge from a text rather than imposing some hasty preconception on it.”

What this means in rehearsal terms is a lot of table work. Waters’ desire to absorb the words of a play fully before attempting to block it and his mistrust of approaching a project with a pre-determined vision impresses playwrights in particular. Before Jordan Harrison worked with Waters on Finn in the Underworld at Berkeley Rep in 2005, the dramatist had spent time with directors from what he terms the “let’s get this thing on its feet school” or the “bada bing bada boom school.” He wasn’t prepared for Waters’ method of creating theatre as an Englishman might a cup of strong, black tea – through slow steeping. “I was really floored that this director who had worked with Caryl Churchill and Chuck Mee was diving that deeply into my play,” says Harrison. “He really seemed to be at the beginning of a long search.” The long search can be an ordeal for some of Waters’ collaborators, though. Especially actors. “We were there for a week in a four-week rehearsal period just reading the play over and over again,” recalls Moreno of the Menagerie process. “I was dying to get up on my feet but Les just sat there listening and listening. He wouldn’t look at the actors’ faces, he was so busy listening.”

The only child of a steelworker father and homemaker mother, Waters was born on April 18, 1952 in the northern English seaside town of Cleethorpes. When he was two years old, his family moved to Scunthorpe, which, with the possible exception of Cleethorpes, is the most frequently lambasted place in the whole of the British Isles. (When in 1981 Scunthorpe residents voiced anger at the inclusion of the town’s name in comedian Spike Milligan’s book Spike Milligan, Indefinite Articles and Scunthorpe, Milligan replied, “we should like the people of Scunthorpe to know that the references to Scunthorpe are nothing personal. It is a joke, as is Scunthorpe.”) Waters calls his hometown “Scunny,” articulating the word like it’s something gray and sticky he found under his shoe. He hasn’t been back to Scunny in years. The last time he was in England was 2003, the year his father died.

In some ways, Waters’ appearance and manner reveal little of his roots. His accent is English, but not especially northern. He dresses with care: the expensive-looking navy jeans say casual. The dark, rectangular-framed glasses say intellectual. The red-and-pink-stripped, cowboy-style, button-down shirt with the embroidered floral motif says, “I dare.” Yet Waters’ physique and conduct still suggest something of his native Lincolnshire. It’s there in the unruly mop of graying hair that froths above his temples like waves scuttering across the North Sea, as well as in his wiry build, aquiline nose and North Wind-chapped complexion. He could be a character in an Alan Sillitoe novel. He even behaved like a Sillitoeesque misfit as a teenager, distressing his mother by hitchhiking down to London on his own at the weekends to see shows like Ted Hughes’ adaptation of Seneca’s Oedipus directed by Peter Brook. He’d sleep in the forecourt at Euston station (“the floor was heated there”) before hitching back up north for a week of school.

Waters sometimes has trouble wrapping his head around his journey from his grammar school days in Scunthorpe to directing plays on many of the U.K. and U.S.’s most prestigious stages. Waters directed the world premieres of Shawn’s Marie and Bruce at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1979, and, for Joint Stock Theatre Company in 1984, Churchill’s Fen, which he mounted on both sides of the Atlantic at The Public in New York and The Almeida and Royal Court in London. Joseph Papp subsequently invited him to stage Keith Reddin’s Rum and Coke at The Public. Having found himself a U.S. agent, Waters spent some years living and working in England, while moonlighting to the U.S. to undertake directing gigs for American impresarios like Robert Falls and Des McAnuff. The last production he staged in London before accepting a position as head of the graduate directing program at the University of California, San Diego and moving to the west coast with his wife, theatre designer wife Annie Smart, in 1995, was Churchill’s The Skriker at the National Theatre in 1994. That production, with its malevolent sense of humor and twisted worldview, left a mark on many people, including American Repertory Theatre’s acting artistic director Gideon Lester. “I still remember Les’ production of The Skriker as if it were yesterday,” says Lester. “It was one of the strangest, funniest, scariest moments I’ve ever had in the theatre.”

“Before he left, Les Waters looked like he was going to be picked for one of the big directing jobs in England,” says The New Yorker’s senior theatre critic, John Lahr, who followed Waters’ trajectory on the London stage through the 1980s and early 90s. It’s taken some years, but Waters’ career now seems poised for a similar leap in this country. Since winning an Obie Award for his world premiere production of Mee’s Big Love, which he first developed with his students at UCSD in 1999, Waters has earned himself a formidable reputation for his work on contemporary drama in particular. “Les is perhaps the most accomplished directors of new plays in the country,” says Lester. Time Out New York named his off-Broadway staging of Anne Washburn’s Apparition as one of the Best Five Plays of 2005. Waters’ production of Eurydice appeared on The New York Times’ Top Ten Plays of 2006 list. “Eurydice was one of the best directing jobs I’ve seen in a long time,” Lahr says. “Ruhl has found her director in Lahr. She should sign him to a contract.” In the coming months, Waters will stage the American premiere of Will Eno’s Tragedy: A Tragedy and a workshop of Ruhl’s new play about the use of vibrators as a treatment for female hysteria in the 19th century, tentatively entitled The Operating Theater, at Berkeley Rep. Elsewhere, he will oversee the world premiere of Mee and Stephen Greenblatt’s romantic comedy about Shakespeare’s lost play, Cardenio, at A.R.T. His production of Harrison’s pop music-inspired Doris to Darlene is currently playing at Playwrights Horizons through December 23.

Waters’ growing success stems from several factors beyond his strength as a listener. One is his subtle yet powerful relationship with actors and playwrights. Dramatist Paula Vogel (who teamed up with the director for her play Hot ‘n’ Throbbing) has dubbed Waters “the Zen director” because of the way he gets the nuances he wants from actors and playwrights seemingly without trying. Ruhl is transfixed by the director’s way with actors. “He tends to give actors a great deal of freedom and gives very few notes,” Ruhl says. “Call it Svengali or some strange kind of mind meld, but I swear that the actors become better simply by being watched quietly by Les.” Moreno corroborates Ruhl’s observations: “I never heard Les say ‘don’t do it that way’ or ‘do it this way’ in rehearsal. As I got to know him and understand what he was after, I began editing myself in a way that I thought would be pleasing to him.” Harrison’s collaborations with Waters follow a similar vein. “If a director or dramaturg comes to me like a trial lawyer with a list of very logical reasons to make a change in the script, I’ll be inclined to mount an equally logical defense of the problem area. Les knows that if he simply directs my eye towards something by saying ‘what do you think about X?’ I’ll be exacting on my own.” Waters, for his part, takes a less benign view of his process. “Really, I’m manipulative. I’ll let people think they’re making choices but what they don’t realize is that I’ve quietly closed doors around them.”

Another reason behind Waters’ formidable talent is his ability to preserve the complexities of a play while inviting the audience in through the seamless marriage of visual and textual metaphors. In Eurydice, for instance, Ruhl’s blurring of certainty and enigma was memorably visualized in the vast shower room set, where blue-green wall-tiles inscribed with letters morphed over time to become messages from the dead to the living from Hades. Meanwhile, in the mesmerizing dinner party scene in To the Lighthouse, the characters articulated their internal thoughts out loud, while miming their external conversations with each other. This conceit simply and sublimely dramatized Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique, while allowing the characters and their conflicts space to dance like the flickering candle flames endlessly reflected in the mirrors on stage.

Waters’ profound personal connection with his material further strengthens his directorial vision. “I have to stick myself to the play in some sense,” Waters says. “I have to find something that I’m obsessed with in it.” Sometimes patterns in his work emerge subliminally from the director’s own life, often recognized only in retrospect. Seeing Eurydice as “a conversation with one’s father,” The Glass Menagerie as “a conversation with one’s mother” and To the Lighthouse as “a conversation with one’s family,” Waters acknowledges the resonance of these works with where he was in his own life at the time he created them, as the father of three growing children and a son adjusting to the loss of his parents. Sometimes he feels such a strong personal link to a project that it informs the creative process explicitly. Churchill’s Fen, for instance, contains references and direct quotes from Waters’ mother and her family. “In no sense could I say that the play was based on my mother but she did come from a long line of deferential workers, and the theme of thwarted desires and ambitions resonated with her in a deep way,” Waters says. Unsurprisingly, Waters’ mother felt betrayed by the play when she saw it at The Court.

During his eight years at UCSD, Waters would sometimes walk across campus to the cliffs in the sunshine, look out across the Pacific Ocean and say to himself, “I’m a working class kid from Lincolnshire who became a theatre professor at a southern Californian university. This is bizarre.” It’s been more than 12 years since Waters left England, but the director still feels ambivalent about his homeland. He says he misses London but thinks that the city “beats the shit out of people.” He’d be interested directing plays in England again, but wouldn’t want to live there permanently. “I’d be surprised if people know who I am there today,” says Waters of the U.K. theatre scene.

The founder of Joint Stock Theatre Company and artistic director of the Royal Court from 1979 to 1993, Max Stafford-Clark, for one, hasn’t forgotten Waters, even though the relationship between the director and his former protégée has been through ups and downs since Stafford-Clark first singled out the young, Manchester University graduate to be his assistant from a pool of mostly wealthy, Oxford and Cambridge-educated directorial hopefuls. “My relationship with Les was close. He was very promising,” Stafford-Clark reminisces. When Stafford-Clark was in New York this past fall directing J. T. Rogers’ The Overwhelming at the Roundabout Theatre, Waters popped in to say hello. It was the first time the two men had seen each other in over a decade. The reunion was brief but friendly. Reached over the phone, Stafford-Clark sounded pleased about Waters’ success in the U.S. “I backed the right horse all those years ago. I’m glad he turned out to be a winner.”