I stand still waiting
light travels across the floor
from the setting sun
(I may or may not have computer access the next several days. Back in a few!)
13 April 2011
12 April 2011
beauty and sadness
I hadn’t heard Dubravka Tomsic in several years, possibly not since I left Boston, so I was glad to attend her San Francisco Performances recital last Saturday at Herbst Theater. They present her fairly often, according to the program, so I guess I just wasn’t paying attention. The first half of the program was all Beethoven (piano sonata in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2, “Tempest” and piano sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 81a, “Les Adieux”) and the second half was the Four Chopin Ballades. There were three encores, two by Liszt (Valse Oubliée, S215/No. 1 and Concert Étude S145/No. 2, Dance of the Gnomes) with Chopin’s Minute Waltz in between.
Tomsic seemed to have a cold or allergies, since she coughed a bit and wiped her nose between numbers, as did the audience, but it made no difference in her attitude or her performance. She is a stolid player, one of the most unhistrionic pianists I’ve ever seen, but when she sits down and plays, pure glorious streams of precise and poetic sound flow into the hall. The evening needs no impertinent commentary from me. Sometimes the concerts you enjoy the most are the ones that leave you with the least to say.
Like many opera lovers yesterday, I was shocked and saddened by the sudden death of Daniel Catán. I discovered his music at the old Tower records on Bay and Columbus, when I saw a cut-out of his opera Rappaccini’s Daughter, which interested me because I assumed (correctly) it was based on Hawthorne’s short story. The music was so rich and immediately attractive. Later I went up to Seattle and enjoyed Florencia en el Amazonas very much. The older I get, the younger seem the ages at which people die. He was only 62. He should have had many more years of composition.
Tomsic seemed to have a cold or allergies, since she coughed a bit and wiped her nose between numbers, as did the audience, but it made no difference in her attitude or her performance. She is a stolid player, one of the most unhistrionic pianists I’ve ever seen, but when she sits down and plays, pure glorious streams of precise and poetic sound flow into the hall. The evening needs no impertinent commentary from me. Sometimes the concerts you enjoy the most are the ones that leave you with the least to say.
Like many opera lovers yesterday, I was shocked and saddened by the sudden death of Daniel Catán. I discovered his music at the old Tower records on Bay and Columbus, when I saw a cut-out of his opera Rappaccini’s Daughter, which interested me because I assumed (correctly) it was based on Hawthorne’s short story. The music was so rich and immediately attractive. Later I went up to Seattle and enjoyed Florencia en el Amazonas very much. The older I get, the younger seem the ages at which people die. He was only 62. He should have had many more years of composition.
Program 7
I made my first trip this season to the San Francisco Ballet last Friday, for the opening night of Program 7. First up was Petrouchka, to Stravinsky’s music, staged by Isabelle Fokine with the choreography by her grandfather, Michael Fokine, and scenes and costumes after Alexandre Benois. Since I’d recently finished reading Apollo’s Angels, Jennifer Homans’s history of ballet, I was eager to see this landmark. It’s much more of a pantomimed play than the other more abstract pieces on the program. There’s a very specific story (it helps to read the synopsis beforehand) about the sad clown Petrouchka (the Nijinsky role, danced by Pascal Molat) and his hopeless love for the Ballerina (a peerlessly doll-like Clara Blanco), who is in love with the more vigorous Moor (Daniel Deivison, his face painted blue).
Petrouchka in love is a bit of a sadsack, with his shoulders drooping and his big mittened hands often held in front of his crotch, suggesting the physical frustration behind his unhappiness. Though he is unhappy in love and subjugated by the Charlatan (Ricardo Bustamente), he is ultimately triumphant: a sadsack, but also a trickster. This was a treat to see, with colorful and elaborate sets and costumes in a folk Russian style; it’s interesting to get a glimpse of what it might have been like to attend the Ballets Russes.
Emil deCou conducted and the music was excellent, though what I remember most vividly is the sustained drumming between scenes. The second piece, Underskin, was set to Schoenberg’s elegant and mysterious Transfigured Night, choreographed by Renato Zanella in an elegant and mysterious way. I thought this was the most powerful segment. The setting is just some large shafts set leaning in the middle of the back of the stage. The lighting (designed by David Finn) is low throughout. A woman (Sofiane Sylve) enters, dressed in a tight black outfit that glitters like snakeskin. Her movements (she enters again past the halfway mark and then again at the end) are bold and outward in a way the movements of the others are not; even when there are six or seven couples on stage their movements are more intimate than hers, as they shift and struggle. There are suggestions of stories, but no specific plot. At the end, the dancers turn their backs to the audience and form a fist in their right hands, which are bent upwards at a 90 degree angle. They start moving towards the back, except for one woman, isolated in a spotlight to the left, who stands there, while the woman in black moves towards her. Large red petals fall on the woman in the circle of light. It’s very striking and enigmatic and powerful.
The third and final piece was the world premiere of Number Nine, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon to Michael Torke’s Ash. This was the first time it had been danced in public, and even though I thought the piece wasn’t living in the dancers the way it would after further performances, it was still vivid and joyful and ended the evening on a high note. It’s fairly brief but packed full of moves that sometimes seem balanced between classic ballet poses and gymnastics. It’s vigorous and athletic as well as graceful. The backdrop is a series of bright jewel-like colors, and there are four main couples, each wearing matching bright colors, along with the corps de ballet. “I just love all the colors!” I heard one man exclaim, as the audience let out.
Petrouchka in love is a bit of a sadsack, with his shoulders drooping and his big mittened hands often held in front of his crotch, suggesting the physical frustration behind his unhappiness. Though he is unhappy in love and subjugated by the Charlatan (Ricardo Bustamente), he is ultimately triumphant: a sadsack, but also a trickster. This was a treat to see, with colorful and elaborate sets and costumes in a folk Russian style; it’s interesting to get a glimpse of what it might have been like to attend the Ballets Russes.
Emil deCou conducted and the music was excellent, though what I remember most vividly is the sustained drumming between scenes. The second piece, Underskin, was set to Schoenberg’s elegant and mysterious Transfigured Night, choreographed by Renato Zanella in an elegant and mysterious way. I thought this was the most powerful segment. The setting is just some large shafts set leaning in the middle of the back of the stage. The lighting (designed by David Finn) is low throughout. A woman (Sofiane Sylve) enters, dressed in a tight black outfit that glitters like snakeskin. Her movements (she enters again past the halfway mark and then again at the end) are bold and outward in a way the movements of the others are not; even when there are six or seven couples on stage their movements are more intimate than hers, as they shift and struggle. There are suggestions of stories, but no specific plot. At the end, the dancers turn their backs to the audience and form a fist in their right hands, which are bent upwards at a 90 degree angle. They start moving towards the back, except for one woman, isolated in a spotlight to the left, who stands there, while the woman in black moves towards her. Large red petals fall on the woman in the circle of light. It’s very striking and enigmatic and powerful.
The third and final piece was the world premiere of Number Nine, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon to Michael Torke’s Ash. This was the first time it had been danced in public, and even though I thought the piece wasn’t living in the dancers the way it would after further performances, it was still vivid and joyful and ended the evening on a high note. It’s fairly brief but packed full of moves that sometimes seem balanced between classic ballet poses and gymnastics. It’s vigorous and athletic as well as graceful. The backdrop is a series of bright jewel-like colors, and there are four main couples, each wearing matching bright colors, along with the corps de ballet. “I just love all the colors!” I heard one man exclaim, as the audience let out.
I wanted magic
I had been undecided about going to Aurora Theater’s production of Tennessee Williams's Eccentricities of a Nightingale, but then they combined a 7:00 start time with a bargain price, so off I went last Tuesday. The hook was that live theater is “the ultimate 3-D viewing experience” so the ticket prices were $12, which is apparently what a movie costs these days, which is yet another reason to stay home with a big-screen TV and a pile of DVDs. Actually, I think 3-D movies might cost more, making the Aurora’s price a real bargain, even with the $5 service charge for calling the box office, which you have to do because their website uses the idiotic “best seat available” method instead of letting you see every seat available and deciding which one you think is best. In fact it was buying a ticket for an Aurora show a few years ago that made me determine never to buy tickets on-line unless I could see every seat. That time I clicked about three or four of the “best seats available” until I finally found one that really was the best, waiting there all along. The woman I spoke to at the box office was very nice. And when I arrived (with plenty of time to spare before the curtain rose – the Aurora is a small theater with four rows of seats on three sides of the stage, so that’s very much a metaphorical curtain) they had free bags of popcorn in the lobby, to keep with the movie theme, which was very charming.
On to the show. I realized with some surprise that I had not actually seen many Tennessee Williams plays. In fact, except for the Glass Menagerie on Broadway with Jessica Tandy as the mother, this might be the only one. I’ve seen the film of Streetcar Named Desire many times, but I’ve never seen it on stage (I’m excluding the operatic version, which I did see). In the pre-VCR days I used to go to the Harvard Square Cinema every time they showed Streetcar, but I haven’t even seen that many of the other movies. Sometimes I wonder what it is I do with my time.
And yet, I already knew all the characters we saw in Williamsworld, as surely as if they were a commedia troupe: the domineering mother; the young man who is somehow . . . sensitive, and therefore slightly weak; the rejected eccentrics and the unimaginative conventional people who rejected them; and above all, the slightly frantic yearning virginal woman whose desperate efforts, as her youth passes under the lengthening and lingering shadow of death, to find a moment, however brief and transitory, of the fleeting poetry, the only true and living poetry in this harsh and unforgiving world, that is a soulful union with a kindred and understanding spirit, a quest which leads her, like moth to flame, into rash and self-destructive acts, whose burning fire at least convinces her that there is some vivacity possible amid the ashes. (Please, I’m not just dashing this stuff off – go back and read that last part again, and this time do it with a lilting southern accent.)
The woman in this case is Alma Winemiller, daughter of the Episcopal priest in the small Mississippi town of Glorious Hill, shortly before the First World War. She sings (hence the Nightingale), but with an excess of emotion that is considered strange by her neighbors (hence, among other causes, the Eccentricities). She loves, hopelessly, the handsome young son of their neighbors. He is a doctor like his father and though he is clearly interested by Alma’s unusual character he is also dominated by his dainty snake of a mother, who objects to Alma’s oddity even though her own grotesquely obvious and psychologically incestuous interest in controlling her son is clearly the oddest and most perverse thing we see. The story is told through a series of holiday scenes, starting and ending with Independence Day, with Christmas and New Year’s Day in between. In the epilogue (look, I’ll issue a spoiler alert, but really you can see this coming) we find that Alma is now, if not actually a prostitute, pretty much the equivalent, picking up traveling salesmen, Blanche duBois-like, with a smooth line of patter. In this scene Alma seems subtly stronger and more centered than before, finding some measure of peace in rebelling against the restrictive conventions of the town.
According to the program book, Williams used to proclaim in interviews that he was Alma. Yeah, no kidding. I think that’s the problem – he didn’t quite manage to separate her from himself enough to get a convincing perspective on what her life would be like outside of his wishful view of what it should be like. He’s too indulgent with her; take the concept of her “eccentricities” – that’s such a charming and endearing way of putting it. Try “the annoying and endless affectations of a nightingale” or “the relentless speechifying of a nightingale” – not quite so charming and endearing, is it. It’s all a matter of phrasing things a certain way, and then maintaining that perspective so that we see things in a certain light. Williams convinces you with his sinuous purple rhetoric, but once the swirling poetic clouds start to clear away, it’s difficult to remain convinced. (Sometimes Williams’s poetic effects themselves are piled on too thickly; there’s one scene in which a remarkably cooperative fire burns, dies, and revives in perfect harmony with the sexual emotions in the room, just as in a 1940s film.)
Despite the immense skill of Beth Wilmurt as Alma, I found it a little hard to accept that a life of impoverished promiscuity/prostitution was really what you might call empowering or even satisfyingly rebellious for an aging solitary woman in that particular time and place. But if we take that point of view, we’re clearly siding with the awful and unimaginative inhabitants who reject Alma’s essentially harmless ways. When she's criticized by her father for such alleged eccentricities as feeding the birds in the public park, you of course are going to sympathize with her, even as you can't help feeling that the deck is being stacked. As with the recent production of Albert Herring, I felt that we’re encouraged to take an overly simple view: we’re looking back, and down, at restrictions that seem obviously ridiculous to us. The program book assures us that this is a timeless, universal story, but that’s always an attempt to distract us from the specific situation of a particular story. Given the period costumes, the period attitudes, the southern accents, the Williams mode . . . the story starts to feel nostalgic,and even a bit campy, and Alma doesn’t feel dangerous or rebellious in any seriously threatening way. So we end up not taking her too seriously. There's a scene in which she starts drinking a little too freely, to keep her courage up, and there was lots of chucking in the audience. I don't really understand why: it's pretty clear this is not a woman who's going to have the occasional sip from the wise and Rabelaisan glass; this is a woman who's going to have major problems with alcohol. It shouldn't be cute or endearing when she starts drinking.
That’s why I felt that the play was sentimental rather than compassionate. Compassion is like a religious discipline; it’s a long-lasting way of accepting others (and ourselves) while acknowledging their (and our) awfulness. Sentimentality is more of a short-term mood, a way of overlooking anything that would keep you from seeing Alma and her circle of fellow artistic rejects in a certain noble light. You sit there admiring their brave efforts to find some beauty and dignity in life, and you walk out, start thinking of people you know like them, and have to confess you couldn’t stand living with them for very long. I felt that my judgment of them was temporarily suspended rather than deepened or changed.
These are after-thoughts. I enjoyed the play quite a lot while watching it. But despite the excellent performances, the elaborate costumes and furnishings, the smooth and effective staging, I couldn’t help feeling that it was all too safe and nostalgic. If they can reboot Spiderman and Batman, why not Williams? Strip away the period dresses, rethink the staging in a more stark and abstract way, and, above all, get rid of all the southern accents. I know they’re fun to do, but they place the speakers in a certain time and place which is automatically distant from our time and place. Yes, I’m asking for regie theater – thoughtful, provocative regie theater.
(This has been more about the play than individual performances, so I’m just going to list all the actors here, since they were all very good: Beth Wilmurt as Alma, Charles Dean as her father and Vernon, Amy Crumpacker as her mother, Marcia Pizzo as Mrs Buchanan from next door, Thomas Gorrebeeck as her son the doctor, Ryan Tasker as Roger and a Salesman, Leanne Borghesi as Mrs Bassett, and Beth Deitchman as Rosemary. Aurora Artistic Director Tom Ross directed.)
On to the show. I realized with some surprise that I had not actually seen many Tennessee Williams plays. In fact, except for the Glass Menagerie on Broadway with Jessica Tandy as the mother, this might be the only one. I’ve seen the film of Streetcar Named Desire many times, but I’ve never seen it on stage (I’m excluding the operatic version, which I did see). In the pre-VCR days I used to go to the Harvard Square Cinema every time they showed Streetcar, but I haven’t even seen that many of the other movies. Sometimes I wonder what it is I do with my time.
And yet, I already knew all the characters we saw in Williamsworld, as surely as if they were a commedia troupe: the domineering mother; the young man who is somehow . . . sensitive, and therefore slightly weak; the rejected eccentrics and the unimaginative conventional people who rejected them; and above all, the slightly frantic yearning virginal woman whose desperate efforts, as her youth passes under the lengthening and lingering shadow of death, to find a moment, however brief and transitory, of the fleeting poetry, the only true and living poetry in this harsh and unforgiving world, that is a soulful union with a kindred and understanding spirit, a quest which leads her, like moth to flame, into rash and self-destructive acts, whose burning fire at least convinces her that there is some vivacity possible amid the ashes. (Please, I’m not just dashing this stuff off – go back and read that last part again, and this time do it with a lilting southern accent.)
The woman in this case is Alma Winemiller, daughter of the Episcopal priest in the small Mississippi town of Glorious Hill, shortly before the First World War. She sings (hence the Nightingale), but with an excess of emotion that is considered strange by her neighbors (hence, among other causes, the Eccentricities). She loves, hopelessly, the handsome young son of their neighbors. He is a doctor like his father and though he is clearly interested by Alma’s unusual character he is also dominated by his dainty snake of a mother, who objects to Alma’s oddity even though her own grotesquely obvious and psychologically incestuous interest in controlling her son is clearly the oddest and most perverse thing we see. The story is told through a series of holiday scenes, starting and ending with Independence Day, with Christmas and New Year’s Day in between. In the epilogue (look, I’ll issue a spoiler alert, but really you can see this coming) we find that Alma is now, if not actually a prostitute, pretty much the equivalent, picking up traveling salesmen, Blanche duBois-like, with a smooth line of patter. In this scene Alma seems subtly stronger and more centered than before, finding some measure of peace in rebelling against the restrictive conventions of the town.
According to the program book, Williams used to proclaim in interviews that he was Alma. Yeah, no kidding. I think that’s the problem – he didn’t quite manage to separate her from himself enough to get a convincing perspective on what her life would be like outside of his wishful view of what it should be like. He’s too indulgent with her; take the concept of her “eccentricities” – that’s such a charming and endearing way of putting it. Try “the annoying and endless affectations of a nightingale” or “the relentless speechifying of a nightingale” – not quite so charming and endearing, is it. It’s all a matter of phrasing things a certain way, and then maintaining that perspective so that we see things in a certain light. Williams convinces you with his sinuous purple rhetoric, but once the swirling poetic clouds start to clear away, it’s difficult to remain convinced. (Sometimes Williams’s poetic effects themselves are piled on too thickly; there’s one scene in which a remarkably cooperative fire burns, dies, and revives in perfect harmony with the sexual emotions in the room, just as in a 1940s film.)
Despite the immense skill of Beth Wilmurt as Alma, I found it a little hard to accept that a life of impoverished promiscuity/prostitution was really what you might call empowering or even satisfyingly rebellious for an aging solitary woman in that particular time and place. But if we take that point of view, we’re clearly siding with the awful and unimaginative inhabitants who reject Alma’s essentially harmless ways. When she's criticized by her father for such alleged eccentricities as feeding the birds in the public park, you of course are going to sympathize with her, even as you can't help feeling that the deck is being stacked. As with the recent production of Albert Herring, I felt that we’re encouraged to take an overly simple view: we’re looking back, and down, at restrictions that seem obviously ridiculous to us. The program book assures us that this is a timeless, universal story, but that’s always an attempt to distract us from the specific situation of a particular story. Given the period costumes, the period attitudes, the southern accents, the Williams mode . . . the story starts to feel nostalgic,and even a bit campy, and Alma doesn’t feel dangerous or rebellious in any seriously threatening way. So we end up not taking her too seriously. There's a scene in which she starts drinking a little too freely, to keep her courage up, and there was lots of chucking in the audience. I don't really understand why: it's pretty clear this is not a woman who's going to have the occasional sip from the wise and Rabelaisan glass; this is a woman who's going to have major problems with alcohol. It shouldn't be cute or endearing when she starts drinking.
That’s why I felt that the play was sentimental rather than compassionate. Compassion is like a religious discipline; it’s a long-lasting way of accepting others (and ourselves) while acknowledging their (and our) awfulness. Sentimentality is more of a short-term mood, a way of overlooking anything that would keep you from seeing Alma and her circle of fellow artistic rejects in a certain noble light. You sit there admiring their brave efforts to find some beauty and dignity in life, and you walk out, start thinking of people you know like them, and have to confess you couldn’t stand living with them for very long. I felt that my judgment of them was temporarily suspended rather than deepened or changed.
These are after-thoughts. I enjoyed the play quite a lot while watching it. But despite the excellent performances, the elaborate costumes and furnishings, the smooth and effective staging, I couldn’t help feeling that it was all too safe and nostalgic. If they can reboot Spiderman and Batman, why not Williams? Strip away the period dresses, rethink the staging in a more stark and abstract way, and, above all, get rid of all the southern accents. I know they’re fun to do, but they place the speakers in a certain time and place which is automatically distant from our time and place. Yes, I’m asking for regie theater – thoughtful, provocative regie theater.
(This has been more about the play than individual performances, so I’m just going to list all the actors here, since they were all very good: Beth Wilmurt as Alma, Charles Dean as her father and Vernon, Amy Crumpacker as her mother, Marcia Pizzo as Mrs Buchanan from next door, Thomas Gorrebeeck as her son the doctor, Ryan Tasker as Roger and a Salesman, Leanne Borghesi as Mrs Bassett, and Beth Deitchman as Rosemary. Aurora Artistic Director Tom Ross directed.)
11 April 2011
10 April 2011
09 April 2011
08 April 2011
07 April 2011
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