Charlene and Brenda in the Blogosphere

Fall, Trombones, Moon, Mr. Green and Comedy of Errors

2012-02-27T08:58:00.000-08:00

Monday, Feb. 27, 2012

Ken Howard photo

Fall, Trombones, Moon,Mr. Green and Comedy of Errors

The power weekend

Herewith you will find evidence of what’s known as the powerweekend, which began Thursday night, Feb. 23, with Diversionary’snot-to-be-missed production of Next Fallby Geoffrey Nauffts. The blitz of theatre, self-inflicted, continued Saturday withUCSD’s June Moon and North Coast Rep’s Visiting Mr. Green, and, at long last, New Village Arts’soon-to-close Comedy of Errors.

I do what I can. Lest you think my steps are lagging andthere’s green stuff growing under them, I’ve been traveling and also interviewed artists from theatre and opera in preparation for feature articles, in additionto working on personal projects involving my late daughter’s poetry.

Next Fall continuesDiversionary’s ascendancy

Note: Playwright/producer/actor Geoffrey Nauffts, author of NextFall, is a former artistic director of off-Broadway’s Naked Angels Theatre.Diversionary Theatre’s Executive Director, JohnE. Alexander, came to Diversionary nearly a year ago, following two yearsas managing director of the Naked Angels. The two met in 2008 when Alexanderwas a student at Columbia University. Nauffts hired Alexander, who was on thestaff of Naked Angels in 2010 when NextFall transferred to Broadway, where it was critically praised and muchnominated for awards, including the Tony. NextFall received the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award for best newplay.

The rise of San Diego-based director James Vasquez (The Old Globe’s RockyHorror Show, Cygnet’s Sweeney Todd,are examples) is definitely like cream floating to the top. Vasquez assembles asplendid company of actors for Next Fall,including Matt McGrath, who was alast minute replacement as Dr. Frank “N” Furter in Rocky Horror.

Next Fall is rife withgreat lines and pithy humor that issue from loving and well-intentioned, ifself-centered, characters that grapple with issues of faith and homosexuality.

Up close and portraying a human being this time, McGrath hasimmense range as Adam, a 40-year-old New Yorker who works in a candle shopowned by a self-described “fag hag” named Holly (Jacque Wilke). Wilke’s Hollyhas heart, humor and empathy for all the characters gathered in the hospital toawait the fate of Adam’s partner, Luke (Stewart Calhoun), who suffered anepidural hematoma in a traffic accident and is in a coma following surgery.

Others gathered at the hospital are Luke’s friend andpossibly former lover, the Bible-toting Brandon (Tony Houck); Luke’s unbending and self-righteous fundamentalist Christianfather, Butch (John Whitley); andBrandon’s mother, Arlene (Shana Wride),a former drug addict who’s been divorced from Butch for 20 years but stillhovers over him co-dependently. She is delightfully adrift and compassionateand sees much more than she lets on. The characters are so fascinating and full-blownthat one sees a tacit play in each.

The story is told in a series of flashbacks staged upon MattScott’s cleverly adaptable set, which swiftly changes from hospital toapartment and back again. Adam and the much younger Luke meet at a cateredaffair at which Luke, an aspiring actor, is a server. At Adam’s suggestion, Lukegoes to work at Holly’s candle shop, falls in love with Adam, and they moveinto a new apartment together. Luke’s career as an actor becomes promising andAdam begins teaching, something he loves.

Calhoun and McGrath
Photo: Ken Jacques

Luke is a devout Christian who prays after sex and beforemeals. Because Adam has no belief system, he is confounded by the conflict, andseeks to understand how Luke reconciles being gay with the fundamentalistinterpretation of the Bible. He also discovers that Luke has never come out tohis family, and that the overtly religious Brandon has a secret or two toimpart regarding his own reconciliation of issues.

Nauffts is not afraid of having his characters mix it up,sometimes heatedly. Whitley, who portrayed all the adult male heavies in arecent production of Spring Awakening,and who has portrayed quite a string of fathers lately, has the toughest assignment and the most one-note character, butonlookers feel compassion even for Butch.

Wilke and McGrath
Photo: Ken Jacques

Based in Los Angeles, Calhoun impresses in his Diversionarydebut as the sweet yet hardly confrontational Luke. Houck is chilling in hisrevelation scene with McGrath, and Wride runs a delightful gamut betweenquirkiness and sincere human devotion. The company achieves fine ensemble,surely attributable to Vasquez and the actors’ acumen. Design assignments arehandled by Michelle Caron, lighting;Kevin Anthenill, sound; and Shirley Pierson, costumes.

Burgoo rating: Five ✪✪✪✪✪

There is a performance tonight, Monday, Feb. 27, at 8pm. Next Fall continues at 8pm Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 and 7pm Sundays through March 25at Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Blvd., San Diego, $31-$33, www.diversionary.org or (619) 220-0097.

Trombones raisesthe roof of ECC

Really, it seems so far away and is really so near – theEducational Cultural Complex – where Ira Aldridge Repertory Players (IARP) presentJames Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons inVerse, as adapted and directed by IARP’s founder, Calvin Manson.

God’s Trombones isglued together in parables that range from Act One’s go-to-meeting, gospeljubilance to Act Two’s Babylonic decadence (the Prodigal Son, played and sungby Benjamin Roy, experiences sin bigtime in this segment, brilliantly written by Manson), and the Crucifixion. Theshow lasts a bit over two hours and is packed with dynamite performances andsome great music making, albeit plagued at times with electronic imbalance.Babylon is like a Broadway show and really picks up the pace of the evening considerably.

God's Trombones
Courtesy IARP

Two listed on the program cover as musical directors – Patrice Rieves and Stephen Gooden – hold forth throughout on piano and organrespectively. The third musical director, listed as sole such inside theprogram, is Eric Overstreet, whosepresence is certainly felt. In the flesh he is seen and heard in the exceptionala cappella vocal group, Redeemed, and is lead singer on one of the concludingnumbers, “Tell It.” The conductor is Roderic “Ricky” Johnson. The musicalnumbers are accompanied by Rieves and Gooden plus Adrian Lahaie on lead guitar, NateYoung on bass, Leon Matthews onsaxophone, and Paul L. Shaw III ondrums. No trombone; go figure.

Preachers are RodgerVarner, Benjamin Roy, Hassan El-Amin, Alyce Smith Cooper, Ricky Jackson, Deborah Roy and Grandison Phelps III. Others in the company are Marion George, and Debra Roy. Four groups − SanDiego County Gospel of America Choir, Bayview Baptist Church Gospel Dance Troupe,CAC Dance Theatre, and Redeemed – swell the company to Broadway size. UnderManson’s direction and Stephen Beardand C. Anthony Cole’s choreography,there were no opening night collisions.

In the old and new world departments there were plenty ofonstage and audience shout-outs, texting, cellphone picture taking andrecording; some of it discomfiting to white audience members who may not haveexperienced shouting out and other behaviors. My advice: get used to it,embrace it and revel in the culture and the sound.

Let’s hear a big shout out for the onstage, colorful zootsuits and shoes, the hats, and the women’s ingenious headdresses and exotic raiment.Mostly, though, let’s revel in the spirit. I haven’t had such a wondrous timesince Dr. Floyd Gaffney’s going home.

Burgoo rating: Four for sincerity, enthusiasm and spectacle ✪✪✪✪

God’s Trombonescontinues at 8pm Fridays-Saturdays and 3pm Sundays through March 11, San DiegoContinuing Education Educational Cultural Complex, 4343 Ocean View Blvd., SanDiego, 92113, $20-$25, www.iarpplayers or(619) 283-4574.

Quinn Martin Endowed June Moon at UCSD

I don’t know why I went expecting a musical. What I got isGeorge S. Kaufman and Ring Lardner’s JuneMoon, which always was and is a comedy with songs that play an intrinsic role inthe plot, and that’s a good thing.

University of California San Diego offers an MFA in theatre,not musical theatre, and the only person in the company who might be able tosing legitimately does not do so in this production. Nonetheless, first-yearMFA student Vi Flaten presents animpressively still and unforced character, Edna, in the madcap comedy. Sherepresents everything good and true.

Edna, a Manhattan dental assistant originally fromSchenectady, meets an aspiring lyricist named Fred Stevens (Jack Mikesell), who’s leavingSchenectady, he hopes, for wild success on Tin Pan Alley. “June Moon” is a songtitle he invents on the train ride, even though it’s winter.

Both Edna and Fred, who is armed with a letter ofrecommendation to the Friars Club, are incredibly naïve and begin a friendshipthat turns to love, at least for Edna. Fred quickly gets sucked up into theworld of songwriting and song selling and the gold-digging females that aspireto hang their dreams on a star.

Edna (Vi Flaten) and Fred (Jack Mikesell)

Photo: Jim Carmody

Composer Paul Sears (DanielRubiano), who had a huge hit three years prior with a quirky success titled“Paprika,” is looking for a new partner and gloms onto Fred, much to Fred’sdelight. Paul’s wife, Lucille (NgoziAnyanwu) is impatient with her husband’s non-success and wants the highlife; so does her sister, Eileen (JenniPutney), who’s living with and mooching off the married couple. Eileen isthe discarded mistress of a song producer named Mr. Hart (Ronald Washington), who can make or break careers. It is Hart whodecides “June Moon” is just the hit song he’s been looking for.

In short order, Lucille and Eileen are spending Paul’smoney, insisting he take them to nightclubs, along with Paul, as research forhis lyrics.

Others in the large company directed by Jonathan Silversteinare adorable Matthew MacNelly asMaxie Schwartz, Hart’s in-house pianist; NatalieBirriel as Hart’s office manager, Goldie; Maurice Williams as aspiring composer/lyricist Benny Fox; Danvir Singh as the Window Cleaner; Dustin Bayers as Brainard; and Brianna Hill as Miss Rixey, Hart’scurrent mistress.

The comedy revolves around Fred’s innocence in allowinghimself to be taken in by the machinations of gold-diggers. The good guys areSchwartz, Paul Sears, and Edna. Being a comedy, there is a happy ending, butthere is, nonetheless, a certain built-in sadness.

In the coincidence of the century department, one notes thatplaywright Geoffrey Nauffts (Next Fall) portrayed Paul in the 1997 Broadwayrevival, evidence of the larger world coming together on San Diego stages.

Orli Nativ’scostumes are colorful and fringy, but fail to take into account that women inthe Roaring ‘20s bound their breasts. Especially Putney has cleavage and knowshow to use it. One enjoys the production of this dusted-off classic.

Burgoo rating ✪✪✪

June Moon continuesat 8pm Tuesday-Wednesday, Feb. 29-30; 8pm Thursday-Saturday, March 3 in theMandell Weiss Forum, Theatre District, UC San Diego, $20 general admission, http://www.theatre.ucsd.edu or (858) 534-4574.

Visiting Mister Greena gentle look at old age, homosexuality and friendship

Playing through March 11, North Coast Repertory Theatre’s(NCRT) production of Jeff Baron’sgentle comedy, Visiting Mister Green,is perfectly cast and directed by ChristopherM. Williams, who has co-directed several NCRT productions with Artistic DirectorDavid Ellenstein, including My Name Is Asher Lev and Tally’s Folly.

A two-hander starring CraigDe Lorenzo as Ross Gardiner and RobertGrossman as Mr. Green, the play, a worldwide success, concerns two Jewishmen, one old, devout and widowed, and the other young, non-observant, andunmarried. Mister Green walked into Upper West Side Manhattan traffic and wasalmost struck by a car driven by Ross, who was charged with negligence. Ascourt-appointed community service, Ross must visit Mr. Green weekly for sixmonths.

Craig De Lorenzo and Robert Goodman
Photo:Aaron Rumley

The apartment (brilliant work by Marty Burnett and props and set dresser Annie Bornhurst) is a mess. Though he won’t admit it, Mr. Greenhasn’t eaten much since his wife died. Ross plies him with soup from the kosherdeli nearby and eventually the two men talk about their lives, their loves andtheir observant/non-observant practice/non-practice of Judaism. Each strives tounderstand the other. Healing and understanding are achieved but not withoutdisputation.

It may be formulaic, even manipulative, but there is nodoubt Visiting Mister Green istouching, especially as performed by these two esteemed actors. As overheardwhen De Lorenzo portrayed Asher Lev – a performance I considered award-worthy –I once again heard voices behind me muttering, “He’s Italian,” as if an Italian actor, no matter how fine and sensitive,is not capable of playing a Jew. One would think theatregoers might have movedbeyond that kind of thinking by now. Apparently they have not, which makes oneponder what hope there is for the world. The play is about tolerance andunderstanding, and because of the excellence of Williams’ direction and DeLorenzo and Grossman’s acting, it’s a must see.

Burgoo rating ✪✪✪✪✪

Visiting Mister Green continues at 7pm Sundays and Wednesdays, 8pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2pm Saturdays and Sundays,through March 11, North Coast Repertory Theatre, 987-D Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Solana Beach, $32-$49, www.northcoastrep.org or (888) 776-NCRT.

Comedy at NewVillage Arts

I thought I was going to see Shakespeare and I got Hollywoodcirca 1950 instead. It’s a cute premise but in execution it further confuseswhat is one of Shakespeare’s most confusing comedies.

Two sets of twins, one pair (the Dromios) bought to be theother’s (the Antipholi) servants, were lost at sea a long time ago andseparated from their parents, who were separated from each other as well. Theirfather, Egeon (Jack Missett) comesseeking them in Ephesus, which does not tolerate those from Syracuse. Egeon isclapped into chains by the Duke (MannyFernandes). At the same time Antipholus of Syracuse (Max Macke) and his servant Dromio of Syracuse (Kyle Lucy) come to Ephesus on business. Quickly they are mistakenfor their opposites Antipholus of Ephesus (JohnDeCarlo) and Dromio of Ephesus (AdamBrick) and swept up into various plots that include infidelity, commerceand a gold necklace.

Hollywood comes in between scenes, when various entitiesenter to yell “cut,” powder the players and countdown for the next scene. Asstated, this does nothing to advance the horrendously complicated scenarios,only adds to the general confusion. Fortunately, director Justin Lang saw fit to coordinate his sets of twins, the mastersgarbed in identical polyester leisure shirts, and the servants in navy bluevests and distinctive headgear. Kristianne Kurner and Amanda Sitton, who playsisters Adriana and Luciana, design the costumes. Adriana is married to thefaithless Antipholus of Ephesus and Luciana is wooed by Antipholus of Syracusewhen he shows up.

Lucy, DeCarlo and Murray
Photo: Daren Scott

Others in the huge company are Dana Case, Jonah Gercke, Frances Regal, Chris Renda and Durwood Murray.

Evidence that this might be Shakespeare and not mereslapstick is provided by Macke, a member of the late, lamented Poor Players,who grows in prowess and stature with each outing. He is a fine, fine Shakespeareanactor, a fact that shines through all the shtick and shenanigans, some of whichI found amusing if not ultimately tiring amid all the shouting, which grewincreasingly cacophonous. NVA is nothing if not sound reflective, and wheneveryone yells, all is obfuscation. Let’s just hope that the audiences arefamiliar enough with the play that they already understand the happy unraveling.

Burgoo rating ✪✪✪

The Comedy of Errorscontinues Thursday-Sunday March 1-4 only, at 8pm Thursday-Saturday, 3pmSaturday, and 2pm Sunday, March 4 at New Village Arts Theatre, 2787 State St.,Carlsbad, www.newvillagearts.org or(760) 433-3245.

See you next week.

More Moby

2012-02-22T09:38:00.000-08:00

February 22, 2012

Ken Howard photo

Revisiting Moby-Dick

Because heldentenor Ben Heppner bowed out ofthe San Diego Opera production due to illness, I returned to Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick last night in order to hearthe Captain Ahab of Jay Hunter Morris, who was originally scheduled to performthe role here and who sang the Adelaide performances of Moby-Dick in September-October.

Now, though what the composer terms “thehigh wire act of opera,” the show goes on. One shudders to think what couldhave happened. Morris – currently the onlyother Captain Ahab in the operatic universe – was flown in to replace Heppner.In addition to the fact that he was available, the real miracle − and a realtribute to young heldentenor − is that he was able to get the role back intohis voice and body, peg leg and all, following numerous Siegfrieds at theMetropolitan Opera.

Morris brought out numerous facets of Ahabthat I failed to see in two previous viewings, one at the 2010 opening inDallas and the other here last Saturday. His Ahab is not so much insane as heis obsessed and there are many tender moments when we actually empathize withhim despite his megalomania. He is especially appealing when he showscompassion for Pip, the cabinboy (soprano Talese Travigne), and the suddenlystricken Queequeg (bass Jonathan Lemalu); and most appealing and human in his“Nantucket” duet with Starbuck, in which he sings of his wife and his boy andvery nearly agrees to return home.

Boyd and Lemalu
Photo: Ken Howard

Trevigne as Pip
Photo: Ken Howard

This is a marvelous moment vocally, thisduet with Morgan Smith’s Starbuck – two virile guys singing their hearts out,obviously delighted at their onstage reunion. In the orchestral accompaniment Heggie brings together previously stated themes, haunting melodies that follow you home.

Morris’s diction is impeccable, so crisp andpresent that it precedes the sound of his voice, which is exceptionally brightand far forward but not nasal. And final consonants? Yep. What he may lack in baritonequality is made up for by his physicality, sheer beauty of tone and thespianchops. He is quite simply thrilling all around, and because of his physicalprowess is able to present a more painfully crippled Ahab.

Perhaps because the listener didn’t have towork so hard with worry over Heppner's voice, everyone else’s performance seems morerelaxed and improved, especially that of Jonathan Boyd as Greenhorn. Trevigneis a gem, her role absolutely needed to exacerbate the tension and testosteroneso rife elsewhere. The men’s chorus seemed more wondrous and secure as well,and the climbers are amazing. San Diego Opera's scene shop created another miracle with the construction of a rehearsal "wall" that enabled these guys to perfect their feats even prior to hitting the Civic Theatre stage.

Tuesday’s full house greeted the stunning,multimedia evolution of The Pequodwith spontaneous applause. Well they should. It’s the most astonishing stagecraft ever witnessed on the operatic stage, the Met’s “machine”notwithstanding.

I applaud the miracle of this commandingwork and also the miracle of the operatic high wire act.

Morris as Ahab
Photografia

Lemalu as Queequeg
Photo: Ken Howard

Additional performances of Moby-Dick take place at 8pm Friday, Feb. 24,and 2pm Sunday, Feb. 26. Go to www.sdopera.comor phone (619) 533-7000.

Raisin and In the Wake

2012-02-20T11:50:00.000-08:00

February 20, 1012

Charlene goes to the theatre

Two things theatrical were managed despite all the “noise”of such a musical week as last: Moxie Theatre’s excellent A Raisin in the Sun on Thursday, and San Diego Rep’s matinee performanceof In the Wake on Sunday afternoon.

As preface to seeing Moxie Theatre’s production of LorraineHansberry’s 1959 drama A Raisin in theSun, I went to the Garden Fresh Café on ElCajon Blvd., where they have inexpensive and delicious lamb kabobs (plus allkinds of more complicated Mediterranean meals). The owner was delighted to seeme after so long an absence and gave me one of their terrific cocoanutmacaroons. The kebab is served with salad, hummus, pita bread and rice. Mediterraneanfood has nothing to do with A Raisin inthe Sun, but lamb is good.

After so long a time, the play does not disappoint, either. Itwas the first play by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadwaywhere it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award as best play of the year.

The work reverberates still. Some things have changed andothers, not so much.

Walter Lee Younger (MarkChristopher Lawrence) is a chauffeur. Walter’s wife, Ruth (Yolanda Franklin), and his mama, Lena (Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson), do otherpeople’s laundry and housekeeping chores to help pay the rent on their smallapartment on Chicago’s South Side. Walter’s daughter, Beneatha (Kaja Dunn), aspires to become a doctor;his son, Travis (La Tahj Myers) isstill in his teens. Two men woo Beneatha, the wealthy George Murchison (Dail Desmond Richard) and an Africanimmigrant student, Joseph Asagai (LawrenceBrown). The one offers financial security albeit with compromise of ideals,and the other, dreams and idealism.

Sylvia M'Lafi Thompson as Lena
Mark Christopher Lawrance as Walter
Courtesy of Moxie Theatre

Lena’s hard-working father has died. His $10,000 insurancecheck is in the mail, made out to Lena, who wants to buy a house big enough forthe family. The ideal house happens to be located in the Chicago South Sidecommunity of Clybourn Park. Soon Karl Linder (Kent Weingardt) of the Clybourn Park Community Association comesknocking on the door with an offer to pay Lena not to move in.

Meanwhile, Walter wants to invest the insurance money in aliquor store. He doesn’t care whether Beneatha gets to med school, belittlesher aspirations, mistreats Ruth, and urges Beneatha to marry Murchison.

Directed by DeliciaTurner Sonnenberg and greatly supported by production designs, the company assembledat Moxie proves itself far better than competent. Lawrence explores the rangeof his character’s frustrations and intimates there may be some humanitylurking in Walter. On the other hand, Brown is exceptionally persuasive asAsagai, and though it took me a while to warm to Dunn’s performance asBeneatha, she won me over eventually. Not easy to be a young woman stuckbetween futility and feminism. Franklin and Thompson convinced me of theirbond, as deep as that of Ruth and Naomi. Both are luminous actors. Myers isadorably akimbo as Travis; Weingardt, appropriately oily as Mr. Lindner; andRichard, as one-note as his character, though not entirely his fault.

Sean Fanningcreates a set redolent of the era and the family’s social standing. Alina Bokovikova’s costumes are spot onand so are Luke Olson’s lighting andKevin Anthenill’s sound.

Burgoo rating: ✪✪✪✪✪

A Raisin in the Suncontinues at 8pm Thursdays-Saturdays and 2pm Sundays through March 4 at MoxieTheatre, 6663 El Cajon Blvd, San Diego, $25-$27, www.moxietheatre.com or (858) 598-7620.

In the Wake makeswaves at Rep

Playwright Lisa Kronwas once a frequent guest at La JollaPlayhouse, performing touching and poetic monologues about family and hersearch for love.

Jo Anne Glover and De Anna Driscoll
Photo: Daren Scott

Sunday afternoon February 19 I heard Kron’s alwaysintelligent frequently poetic voice again in the protagonist of her play titledIn the Wake. Brainy, politicallyaware, and not altogether likable, Ellen (award-winning actor Aubrey Saverino) lives in an apartmentin Manhattan’s East Village with her sweet, laidback boyfriend Danny (Francis Gercke). Danny’s sister Kayla (Jo Anne Glover) and her lover Lauria (DeAnna Driscoll) live in the samebuilding. Kayla shares Ellen’s interest in society and politics on CNN andMSNBC. Danny likes sports as his TV fare. It’s Thanksgiving and the assembledgroup is told that Ellen’s friend Judy (StephanieDunnam), who works for an aid organization in Guinea, is arrivingunexpectedly and will join them.

Soon after, Ellen’s neat and rational little world is turnedupside down by passion and longing. We’ve learned that she had “a couple” oflesbian encounters in college. Now lesbian love in the form of a gorgeous,aggressive, intelligent woman named Amy (KarsonSt. John) arrives full force. Ellen thinks she can have it all, sweet Dannyin Manhattan, and exciting Amy in Boston, and so she arranges her scheduleaccordingly. She continues both affairs even though each lover is aware of theother. Eventually, Ellen’s overwrought state so affects Danny (Kayla and Lauriehave moved to Wisconsin, a decision perhaps helped along by Ellen’s behavior)that he forces her to choose. No matter what choice she makes, Ellen will beunhappy.

Throughout the play Judy is Ellen’s sounding board, and whenJudy returns to her work, Ellen talks to the audience as if she were Krondelivering a complicated, many-path monologue. This would be irritating if thecharacters weren’t so bright and fascinating.

Be that as it may, what irritates this viewer most about In the Wake is the news coverage thatspans the play, shown in film clips from 2000 to the present – naturaldisasters, war, ethnic cleansing, hanging chads, 911 and all – and theattendant political and harangues. You either go along with Ellen’s views ormeet up with endless refutation, not my idea of entertainment. Take away thepolitical content, however, and you may wind up with something approachingsitcom.

Ellen’s rationale is that there is blind spot that affectsus all when we try to see ourselves and figure out why we didn’t get it all. Alongthose lines, I adore Amy’s “negative space” speech: color in everythingsurrounding an object, and it appears. That’s enough to send the poet intoparoxysms of metaphorical delight – and another aspect of Kron’s work, itspoetry.

And yet, as interesting as these characters are, and as muchas I admire their intellect and language, I don’t much like them, with thepossibility of the older, no-pretense Judy, who may be another facet of Kron’spersonality. No matter how you slice it, Kron expects a lot from her audienceand much is given – things to take home and ponder. But that risks beingponderous.

Dunnam and Saverino
Photo: Daren Scott

Insofar as surface appeal is concerned, St. John is thewoman of everyone’s dreams. When she lets her hair down in that Boston bedroom,even I could become a believer. What a perfect role for this amazing actor.

I adored Dunnam’s performance as Judy, who indeed became myfavorite character. The others present believable, deeply drawn characters aswell, and Gercke turns in a rare, non-quirky, comic performance as the affableDanny, proof that working with different directors brings out the best in all.The director in this case is Delicia Turner Sonnenberg. One wonders how shefinds the mental and physical space to stage two such character-driven playssimultaneously.

Victoria Petrovich’sscenic design is ingenious, revolving between East Village and Boston. Kate Stallons’ costumes are a delight. Ross Glanc is lighting designer and Tom Jones, the sound designer. The Repshould be inordinately proud of these artistic elements and the director’s finecompany.

Four burgoos ✪✪✪✪

In the Wake playsat 7pm Wednesdays, 8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, and 2 and 7 pm Sundays throughMarch 4 in the Lyceum Space, San Diego Repertory Theatre, 79 Horton Plaza,Downtown, $29-$53, www.sdrep.org or (619) 544-1000.

This coming week I revisit Moby-Dick,attend Next Fall at Diversionary,God’s Trombones at Ira AldridgePlayers, June Moon at UCSD, Visiting Mr. Green at North Coast Rep and TheComedy of Errors at New Village Arts. Look for my reviews Monday, Feb. 26. Tillthen, Charlene

Moby and me plus Boccanegra and concerthall

2012-02-20T09:08:00.000-08:00

Monday, February 20, 2012

Ken Howard photo

Brenda goes to the opera

Moby-Dick opening February 18

Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s new opera, Moby-Dick, opened a four performance run at the Civic Theatre Saturday, Feb. 18. The production magic was even more “wow!” than it was at the world premiere in Dallas in April 2010. I know. I was there. There's no doubt that this second viewing afforded me an opportunity to appreciate subtleties of text and orchestra that didn’t sink in the first time.

Moby-Dick was co-commissioned by a consortium of five opera companies: San Diego Opera, Dallas Opera, the State Opera of South Australia, Calgary Opera, and San Francisco Opera. Its first round of engagements end at San Francisco Opera in October. Word is there are additional companies lined up. This was true of Heggie's sensational operatic hit, Dead Man Walking, which has now been performed worldwide and still is.

In addition to composer Heggie and librettist Scheer, kudos go to Moby-Dick scenic designer Robert Brill (who long ago was a design associate at the Old Globe), projection designer Elaine J. McCarthy, lighting designer Donald Holder, fight director James Newcomb, choreographer Keturah Stickann (a former Malashock dancer) and stunt/climbing coordinator Fletcher Runyan. The team of ten climbers and athletes is amazing. British costume designer Jane Greenwood is responsible for period ship wear.

Aboard the Pequod at San Diego Opera
Photo: Ken Howard

To smoothly bring off so complicated and astonishing an opera – fraught as it was with changes, some long-term and others last minute and as of late Sunday unexpectedly midrun – is a great credit to San Diego Opera. The 11^th hour challenge last week was the departure of resident conductor Karen Keltner, reportedly due to illness. Fortunately Joseph Mechavich, who conducted the recent Moby-Dick performances in Calgary, was available. He not only saved the day, he excelled, creating a seamless musical sweep from beginning to end. San Diego Symphony and the all-male opera chorus (chorus master Charles F. Prestinari) are thrilling. Leonard Foglia, frequent Heggie collaborator (he staged Dead Man Walking) and dramaturgical guiding light from the get-go, stages Moby-Dick.

Sadly, heldentenor Ben Heppner, who created the role of Ahab in Dallas, was not in top form opening night (see breaking news below).He was unable to sustain phrases to their endings and cracked in both high and mid-range throughout the evening. Worries about Heppner’s vocal instability are exacerbated by concern over the singer’s stability on Ahab’s peg leg. The artist seems damn tired and unable to control his gifts.

Jonathan Lemalu as Queequeg
Ben Heppner as Capt. Ahab
Photo: Ken Howard

I know that comparisons are odious, but I can’t resist comparing the Greenhorn (eventually Ishmael) of tenor Jonathan Boyd to that of Stephen Costello, who sang the role in Dallas and brought the house down at the curtain call. Dramaturgically Boyd’s bumpkin-like Greenhorn may be more appropriate to the role, and he sings very well, but he lacks the presence, the passion and the sheer vocal beauty of Costello, who is off in the world of international stardom.

Jonathan Boyd as Greenhorn
Jonathan Lemalu as Queequeg
Photo: Ken Howard

Heldentenor Jay Hunter Morris, who performed Ahab in Australia, was to have sung the role of Ahab here, but through a complicated series of events and switcheroos, he went to the Metropolitan Opera where he stepped into the Met's Ring Cycle as Siegfried, singing in the recent Live in HD transmissions of Gotterdammerung. Morris, too likely be off to the world of international stardom. Morris is more physically fit than Heppner and I had looked forward to seeing his Ahab, which he is scheduled to sing in the opera's final San Francisco outings.

Virile baritone Morgan Smith, who created the role, is outstanding as first mate Starbuck, whose encounters with Ahab provide some of the opera’s most affecting writing both dramatically and musically. Vocally resplendent bass Jonathan Lemalu, who created the character in Dallas, repeats the role of Queequeg, creating a loveable, authentic character whose friendship with both Greenhorn and the cabin boy Pip (Trevigne in trousers) provide contrast with the tense and obsessed Ahab and his relentless search. Mention must be made of Heggie veteran Robert Orth’s finely realized Stuff and also of the amazingly beautiful singing of Malcolm MacKenzie as the unseen Captain Gardiner.

Talise Trevigne, who made her San Diego Opera debut last year as Michaela in Carmen, portrays the role she created, that of Pip, the cabin boy. She flies, she nearly drowns, and she goes mad. No matter what happens, Trevigne soars not only vocally but dramatically. Her trio with Queequeg and Greenhorn is one of Moby-Dick's most affecting moments. To hear her voice cutting through those of male shipmates is truly thrilling and a masterstroke of writing.

Moby-Dick is a triumph of art, a distilled and musically inspiring interpretation of a great literary classic few ever read in full.

Viewers will not soon forget the creation of The Pequod during Heggie’s overture; it is redolent of sky, stars and the unforgiving sea. Thrillingly, themes from the overture become leitmotifs, later enriching the longing for home.

Truly, this is breakthrough, must-see opera. As the young women (17-24?) seated behind us said, it made for an ideal, first opera experience. In the same breath, they expressed the fear that anything from here on could be a letdown.

Additional performances of Moby-Dick take place at 7pm Tuesday, Feb. 21, 8pm Friday, Feb. 24, and 2pm Sunday, Feb. 26. Go to www.sdopera.com or phone (619) 533-7000.

Breaking news

It was announced late Sunday night that Heppner is ill, and that Jay Hunter Morris will sing Ahab at all remaining performances in San Diego. This is great news for those who planned a trip to San Francisco to see his Ahab in October. Grab those tickets while ye may, me hearties.

Below is a photo of Morris as Ahab in Australia. Expect a report on his performance Wednesday

Morris as Captain Ahab
Photografeo

A Pip of a recital at Sherwood

Talise Trevigne is a ravishingly beautiful woman, full oflife and joy and sensitivity, who appears in trousers as Pip, the cabin boy Moby-Dick.Because she is here performing in the opera, and because GPR Records justissued a CD titled Talise Trevigne at theStatue of Venus, and because Sherwood auditorium is set amid art − theperfect venue − and because composer Heggie was also in town, someone thoughtit highly appropriate to celebrate. It was. It certainly was. The time was 2pm Sunday, Feb.12.

Heggie was commissioned to write the concert piece titled “Atthe Statue of Venus” in 2005 to celebrate the opening of Denver’s EllieCaulkins Opera House, home of Opera Colorado. The operatic scene is a perfectvehicle for Trevigne’s stagecraft and voice, It concerns a young woman namedRose, whose friends have arranged a blind date for her at the art museum, whereshe regrets wearing slacks, regrets meeting in the shadow of legendary beauty, andimagines what the young man will be like. He is late, so she has plenty of timeto ruminate. The great American playwright Terrence McNally wrote the librettofor what in fact is a mini-opera that ends with the unseen man’s arrival andthe word “Rose?” spoken from the piano by none other than Heggie, a master ofhumor, uncertainty and pathos, all beautifully captured in “At the Statue ofVenus.” My favorite part is when Rose reminisces about her father. It alwayselicits tears and fond memories of my dad singing me to sleep with “It’s a LongWay to Tipperary.”

Singers love Heggie because he so thoroughly understands the voice. With excellent diction andmarvelous vocal control, Trevigne captures Rose.

Jake Heggie and Talise Trevigne
Photo: Christian Jessen

The recital included Emmy Award-winning Glen Roven’s Santa Fe Songs with texts by Jimmy Santiago Baca, Christopher Buckley, N. Scott Momaday and Valery Martinez. Roven accompaniedTrevigne in their performance. In addition to its lyricism, several things hitme about Roven’s song cycle: I adored the moment where the poet in Buckley’s“Flying Backbone” declares “…we are unknotted — Arms white and wide for/theascending air…” Roven accompanies this with lovely harmonic comments. He alsoproves himself an unusual songwriter when he allows the singer of Momaday’s“The Boy Soldier” to finish the song, followed by silence.

The CD may be purchased at Amazon.com. For mp3 download goto http://www.amazon.com/Heggie-Roven-Talise-Trevigne-Statue/dp/B0077FP0G0

Also in the concert hall – Learning to love Janáček

Friday February 17, under the auspices of La Jolla Music Society(LJMS), we heard young pianist Jonathan Biss in recital at MCASDSherwood Auditorium. There’s a family tie here: Biss was brought as a child tothe first LJMS SummerFest by his parent performers, violinist Miriam Fried andviolist/violinist Paul Biss. Music must have rubbed off on him: here he is, anaward-winning pianist, 25 years later, playing recitals and performing with orchestrasall over the world.

Pianist Jonathan Biss
Photo: J. Katz for EMI Classics

Biss, 31, is engaged in recording what will be the completecycle of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 32 sonatas, a process that will take ten years.It came as no surprise, then, that his La Jolla recital began and ended withBeethoven, namely Piano Sonata in C Minor, Opus 10, No. 1, and Piano Sonata inE-flat Major, Opus 81s (“Les Adieux”). Also unsurprising is that the youngartist’s development his approach is more cerebral than it is passionate. Perhapsit always was and this listener merely failed to notice. This was also true inhis playing of Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne in E Major, Opus 62, No. 2 andPolonaise-Fantaisie n A-flat Major, Opus 61. The playing here was refined andprecise, even amid the chaos of Chopin’s desperate search for resolution.

Cerebral and precise go just so far and the two sections ofmusic by Leoš Janáček – the first comprising In the Mists, the second, Sonata: 1.X 1905 From the Streets – though still cool were the most satisfying ofthe evening. Seasoned performer that he is, Biss prevented premature applause,hands lingering over the keyboard to prolong the silence at closure.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Photo: Todd Rosenberg

Talk about cerebral and precise: LJMS presented Chicago Symphony Orchestra Sunday night at Copley Symphony Hall. Music director and conductor Riccardo Muti Led the orchestra, part of LJMS's Celebrity American Orchestra Series. Between immaculately played, cerebral performances of Franz Schubert's Entr'acte No. 3 from Rosamunde D.797 and Symphony No. 9 in C Major, D.944 ("Great"), Muti and the Chicago performed Anna Clyne's (b.1980) thrilling Night Ferry, full of fury and passion and, yes, precision. The piece was commissioned for Chicago Symphony Orchestra by the Louise Durham Mead Fund for New Music and was enthusiastically received by the sellout audience. The young composer was present.

LJMS presents two concerts this week

8 pm Saturday, Feb. 25, Sherwood Auditorium: Takács Quartetin a program of Dvořák, Britten and Debussy

3pm Sunday, Feb. 26, The Neurosciences Institute: 21-year-oldTchaikovsky Competiton gold medalist Daniil Trifonov plays Schubert, ClaudeDebussy’s Images, Book 1, andChopin’s Études, Opus 10.

Daniil Trifonov
Photo: Courtesy LJMS

Tickets and more information: www.ljms.orgor (858) 459-3728.

Simon Boccanegra at Los Angeles Opera

Plácido Domingo is a treasure, a legendary and indefatigablesuper-human who, as general director, runs LA Opera in addition to a phenomenallybusy international career as a singer. We heard him just recently as Neptune inthe Met Live in HD re-showing of TheEnchanted Island.

The esteemed tenor has lately been performing the title rolein Giuseppe Verdi’s 1857 Simon Boccanegraaround the world. We traveled to Los Angeles Opera Wednesday, Feb. 15 to hear for ourselves. Boccanegra is a role Verdi wrote for baritone. Domingo fancies itdramatically and vocally, and as I said recently in my Enchanted Island commentary, at age 71 he’s entitled to do justabout anything he wishes. Domingo recently celebrated his 40^thanniversary at the Met, where he sang Boccanegra two years ago. As The New York Times noted, he has alwayshad a baritone quality to his voice, but he was always and even now is a tenor.

Singing the role of Amelia, Boccanegra’s long-lost daughter,is the lovely soprano, Ana Maria Martinez. She embodies the feminine ideal,sings beautifully and looks marvelous in Peter J. Hall’s costumes, especiallythe pale blue. When Domingo performed his extravagant and generous outdoorconcert at then-Verizon Arena in Chula Vista (with San Diego Symphony and Mariachi Champagñe Nevín) abouta decade ago, Martinez was on the program. She is a terrific actress, so atease on stage, and her scenes in Boccanegra with Domingo, especially the recognition scene,were most affecting. I covet her wig, constructed at Los Angeles Opera’s wigdepartment, though I admit it would look rather silly on me at this point soremoved from jeune premiere.

Domingo and Martinez
Photo: Robert Millard

Amelia’s beloved, Gabriele Adorno, is sung by Italian tenor Stefano Secco, who makes his LA Operadebut. He enjoys a brilliant career in Europe in such operatic capitals asBerlin, Munich, Paris and Milan, and has sung with San Francisco Opera. Seccoemploys a far-forward vocal production that can be a bit nasal for my taste;however, his pitch is always reliable and he is an acceptable actor of the oldschool.

The lower vocal registers really take this production’scake, with bass Vitalij Kowaljowperforming the role of Jacopo Fiesco, who has particular bones political andpersonal to pick with Boccanegra. In one of opera’s most convoluted libretti(by Francesco Maria Piave and Arrigo Boito), Fiesco turns out to be the fatherof Boccanegra’s one-time inamorata and intended wife, Maria (no longer with us)and therefore Amelia’s grandfather. Dramaturgically, this requires certainsuspension of disbelief due to the actual ages of the singers. Suffice it tosay that Kowaljow has gravitas, presence and a magnificent voice.

The other outstanding lower register performance is that of Italianbaritone Paolo Gavanelli as PaoloAlbiani, who really is the villain; he administers a fatal dose of poison toBoccanegra at the 11^th hour. Again, this is a voice of great beautyand a singer of remarkable acting chops. No moustache twirling here. As aresult of all these singers and the fine singing of the chorus, the ensemblenumbers are thrilling.

Scenic designer MichaelYeargan creates a long, steeply raked floor from way upstage to the lip ofthe pit for his towering Genoa settings, columns, entryways and sky. Duane Schuler’s lighting design gives asense of Italian warmth and light, though I found his insistent use of shadowsa bit of overkill, no doubt supported and encouraged by director Elijah Moshinsky. James Conlon conducts the musically superb production, whichcontinues at 7:30pm Tuesday, Feb. 21; 2pm Sunday, Feb. 26; 7:30pm Thursday,March 1; and 2pm Sunday, March 4 at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. GrandAve., Los Angeles, www.laopera.com or(213) 972-8001.

Photo:Plácido Domingo and Ana Maria Martinez Photo: Robert Millard

Tuesday morning addenda Golden Child

2012-02-14T15:31:00.000-08:00

Golden Child and Lamb’s news

The Year of the Dragon
Photo Ken Howard

Chinese Pirates are the best

Monday night, Feb. 13, I went to 10^th AvenueTheatre for an excellent performance of David Henry Hwang’s 1997 Obie Awardwinning Golden Child produced byChinese Pirate Productions anddirected by Andy Lowe.

Embarrassing admission: It wasn’t until after theperformance that I realized that two of the major roles were played by understudies.I merely wondered why Albert Park’s lines seemed so slow to arrive at times andmarveled that his obvious weight gain had so drastically altered his facialstructure. He almost looked like a different actor. He was. Now I wish that there were an opportunity to return so that I mightsee the excellent Mr. Park, whose understudy, Michael Chen, was just fine. Asfor Monica Flores, who stepped in for Karen Li as Wife Number Three, EngEling,” I had never seen either Flores or Li before.An announcement might have been made along with the cellphone entreaty prior tothe show.

The story is set mostly in flashback to 1918. The modern-dayAndrew is an expectant father who doubts his ability parent. The spirit of hismother allows him to travel back in time to take courage from the life of hisgrandfather, Tieng-Bin Eng (Chen), who was a traditionalist and had three wives,Siu-Yong (Kym Miller), Luan (Jyl Kaneshiro) and Eling (Flores). Tieng-Binreturns from a three-year business trip to the Philippines, where he is asuccessful manufacturer, eager to make love to Wife Number Three, Eling.

Janny Li and Kym Miller
Photo:Christina Rogers

Thewives, who all have bound feet, are wily, jealous and punitive, making lifemiserable for each other as much as possible and particularly bad for Eling.Siu-Yong enlists 10-year-old niece Ahn (the excellent Janni Li) as a spy. WhenTieng-Bin is converted to Christianity by Rev. Baines (Michael Nieto) he ordersthat Ahn’s feet be unbound. She is the modern China and, in truth, becomes thegrandmother of Andrew. A ghostly 1918 ancestor, garbed in white, hovers overmuch of the action, portrayed by Dana Byrne. The ancestors do not want to beforgotten, and obviously they still speak, at least to Andrew. The story istold with affection and great humor. Miller and Kaneshiro are long familiar,consummate veterans who know how to temper wrath, and the rest of thecompany is also a joy in this impressive production.

Jennifer Imbler’s spare scenic design works for the spaceand situations. Caroline Rousset-Johnson’s costume designs are colorful and areal asset. Lace Lila Flores-King is lighting designer. Jane Lui’s sound designis lovely, koto with some lush orchestrations, lots of ancestral voices. It’san intelligent and enjoyable theatrical experience. Co-producer is the SanDiego Chinese Center.

Golden Child isperformed in the 4^th floor cabaret space at 10^th AvenueTheatre, 930 10^th Avenue, San Diego, through February 25. There isan industry night performance at 7:30pm Monday, Feb. 20. Regular performancesare scheduled through February 25. See Chinese Pirate web site for times, whichvary.

Jyl Kaneshiro and Kym Miller
Photo: Christina Rogers

Golden Child openedoff-Broadway in 1997, nine years after Hwang’s amazing success with M. Butterfly, which received Tony, DramaDesk an Outer Critics Circle Awards and was a Pulitzer finalist. He is also theauthor of Yellow Face and Chinglish, which just ended a successfulBroadway run January 31.

Of special interest to the opera fan, Hwang was librettistfor Philip Glass’s 1000 Airplanes on theRoof, which played San Diego more than a decade ago, and is librettist for OsvaldoGolijov’s Ainadamar, recipient of twoGrammy awards, which will be produced Long Beach Opera http://www.longbeachopera.org/ May 19and 26.

From Dragons and Pirates to Lamb’s

Starting April 1, Lamb’s Players Theatre will no longermaintain a resident company. It’s the end of an era, in which the third largest(budget-wise) theatre company in town offered year-round employment with fullbenefits. The new measure is expected to save the struggling, 40-year-old Lamb’sabout half a million each year. Producing Artistic Director Robert Smyth callsthe decision to end the decades-long practice “painfully tough.”

The next day Lamb’s announced extensions of its currentmusicals. Mixtape, a delightfulsurvey of the ‘80s greatest hits playing at the Horton Grand, will continuethrough Saturday, March 31. Frank Loesser’s classic musical Guys and Dolls, playing at Lamb’sCoronado, has been extended through Sunday, April 1.

Enchanted Island, Blasted, Wonderettes

2012-02-13T07:04:00.000-08:00

Photo Ken Howard

Enchanted Island, Blasted, Wonderettes

Brenda and Charlene and various friends were enchanted, blasted and filled with Wonderettes this week. In chronological order, here's the week. Brenda takes the lead.

Encore of TheEnchanted Island, Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, seen Feb. 8 at MissionValley 20

The Enchanted Islandis an amazing gift to Baroque-loving singers and to their fans, to say nothingof Shakespeare lovers and lovers of theatrical magic and spectacle. That’s agift to just about everyone in my world.

As my friend David said, if the Met mounts futureproductions, they’ll never have a better company of actor/singers. Only PlácidoDomingo, as god of the sea Neptune, is playing himself, but he’s 71, so he has permission.Besides, ancient gods don’t have much range; they’re merely gods,vindictive, foolish and condescending.

Devised and written by Jeremy Sams with production by PhelimMcDermott (remember him from La Jolla Playhouse?) and associate director/setdesigner Julian Crouch, the opera is a pastiche that cleverly mixes charactersfrom two Shakespeare comedies – TheTempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream– then puts them on Prospero’s Island, along with music by Georg Frideric Handel,Antonio Vivaldi, Jean-Phillippe Rameau, Henry Purcell and others not sofamiliar. The text of arias and ensembles is sung in English with supertitles,so not a bit of the wild plot and scintillating interaction is lost, unless ofcourse you’re not a fan of the Baroque and fall asleep during the course of the2-hour, 30-minute broadcast.

The relationship between enslaved islanders Sycorax (the divine JoyceDiDonato) and her son Caliban (Venezuela born, Italian bass-baritone LucaPisaroni) is the created opera’s most poignant. In this contrived plot Prospero(countertenor David Daniels) once loved Sycorax, then spurned her, stole her magicalassistant, Ariel (Australian soprano Danielle de Niese), and put her grotesque progeny,Caliban, in chains. Caliban is made up here to resemble a perpetually weepingclown, in white face with white tears dripping from the black holes that arehis eyes.

Pisaroni as Caliban
Photo: Ken Howard

Pisaroni, in truth a dashing and handsome singer, is a fine,fine actor. Daniels, too, does an amazing job, even with the spoken speech(“Our revels now are ended”) that ends the opera. And how can I possiblyexpress my admiration of DiDonato’s extraordinary, fine portrayal of themotherly Sycorax, attempting to console Caliban when his first experience oflove, which she has arranged, goes sour? It’s the opera’s best scene, and ifthere were an Oscar for opera singers, these two would get my vote. So would the libretto.

Pisaroni and DiDonato
Photo: Ken Howard

That’s what’s so wondrous about grand opera in HD: we get tosee and appreciate these intimate moments, even though played in a 3,800-seatopera house with a 54-foot wide proscenium and a stage that measures 80 feetfrom the back wall to the lip.

Here’s the glorious mish-mash. Prospero orders up asuper-duper storm from Ariel, telling her there’s a ship bearing certainkinsmen, including a young man named Ferdinand (countertenor Anthony RothCostanzo) who is destined for Prospero’s daughter, Miranda (Lisette Oropesa).Wrong ship. Instead, the shipwrecked vessel carries honeymooners from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Helena (LaylaClaire) and Demetrius (Paul Appleby) and Hermia (Elizabeth DeShong) andLysander (Elliot Madore). Ferdinand is still at sea, and the not-knowing Arielpairs first Demetrius and then Lysander with Miranda. And meanwhile, Sycoraxarranges a lover’s tryst between the ill-fated Caliban and Helena. All theselove mix-ups are the result of potions and are destined to fade.

Eventually Ariel calls upon Neptune for his assistance inlocating and bringing Ferdinand to Prospero’s island. All is sorted out in duecourse, with various subplots either once over lightly or non-existent. Whatbecomes of the sad Caliban and the rejuvenated Sycorax is not rounded out, butcut off by Prospero’s closing speech.

Blasted – at theother end of spectacle – Five Burgoos

You will be warned. You will have a chance to escape. Butonce this experience begins you won’t dare move.

In her explicit yet enigmatic 1995 three-hander titled Blasted, British playwright Sarah Kane wrote aboutthe black side of human character. Set in Leeds, the work premiered in Londonand was written, some say, in response to the war in Bosnia. The detritus of war and the personal human atrocities Kanedepicts are things most people do not want to gaze upon, and therefore the SanDiego premiere production, directed by Claudio Raygoza and played by actors RonChoularton, Gemma Grey and Steve Lone, continues only through February 18 at iontheatre company’s BLKBOX at 6^th @ Penn. Part of ion’s Off-the-Radarseries, it is relentless, hopeless, increasingly violent, and challenging toendure.

Gemma Grey
Photo courtesy ion theatre

When Blastedpremiered most all critics excoriated it. When Kane died a suicide four yearslater, she was hailed as a genius. Go figure. Does a kind of poetry exist inHell? Who are these people caught up in chaos? To decide, one must experiencethe play. That’s what Off-the-Radar is all about.

Gemma Grey makes her ion and San Diego debut as Cate, who’sbrought to a posh Leeds hotel room by a much older man named Ian (RonChoularton). It seems they were lovers or almost lovers at one time long ago.The foul-mouthed Ian, a tabloid journalist, is intent on sex. Cate is a severely troubled young woman, frail in every way andsubject to seizures. Having smoked too many cigarettes and drunk too manybottles of gin, Ian is dying. Cate shows no pity, he rapes her while she is catatonic, and when she wakens and sees her wounds, she escapes.

Gemma Grey and Ron Choularton
Photo courtesy ion theatre

There are worse things outside the door, like war, like thebomb that hits the hotel, like the soldier (Steve Lone) that enters the hotelroom after Cate leaves. Unspeakable atrocities ensue. Lone, got up in battle fatigues, face to match, does marvelous scary and violent. The mind reels.

The theatrical effects employed to create this horrifyingnightmare are due to dedicated actors, the unflinching direction ofRaygoza, Karen Filijan’s lighting, Melanie Chen’s superb sound, Raygoza’sscenic design, and Danita Lee’s costumes.

Needless to say, Blastedis for mature audiences only. No one under 18 is admitted. Running time is 100minutes with no interval. Performances at 8pm Thursday-Saturday and 4pm Sunday,BlkBx at Sixth & Penn, 3704 Sixth Avenue, Hillcrest. www.iontheatrecompany.com or (619)600-5020.

Guys and Dolls and Wonderettes to the rescue

As antidotes to the blackness of Sarah Kane’s extraordinaryproduction of Blasted seen at iontheatre company, the theatrical universe provided two musicals, a remarkableproduction of Frank Loesser’s classic Guysand Dolls at Lamb’s Players Theatre(Five Burgoos: my review will run in the March 12 issue of San Diego Uptown News) andRoger Bean’s 2008 off-Broadway show, TheMarvelous Wonderettes, presented by SanDiego Musical Theatre in its newdigs, The Birch.

Bets Malone and company
photos by Megan & Ian Swanson

Undemanding to the nth, TheMarvelous Wonderettes, which does forgirl quartets what Stuart Ross’s 1990 ForeverPlaid did for the boys, played at Moonlight Stage Productions in Vista lastsummer. It worked wonderfully well there, but in my opinion is much bettersuited to a venue the size of the The Birch.

Bean’s amusing and sometimes-poignant book to is merely anexcuse to tie together 30-plus songs from the ‘50s and ‘60s. The first act isset in the gym at Springfield High School’s 1958 prom, where all four girlsbrim with hope. The second takes place at the reunion, same locale, ten yearslater. The girls are women now, with more bouffant hairdos and encumbered bythe realities of life – but not too many. Unsurprisingly, all plot threads endhappily and neatly and hopefully. Just like life, eh?

Add caption

The Wonderettes – Missy (Misty Cotton), Betty Jean (Beth Malone), Suzy (Bets Malone) and Cindy Lou (Lowe Taylor) − are competing forprom queen. Like the Plaids, they don’t even try to keep their own personalitiesand problems to themselves. Their insecurity and incompetence on the firstnumber, “Mr. Sandman,” is purposeful.

As Suzy, the delightful BetsMalone well nigh steals the show; her appealing character chews gum allthrough the show, parking it on the microphone whenever she sings a solo. Sheis in love with the lighting guy, who blinks the lights when she acknowledgesand sings to him.

True vocal chops reside in Misty Cotton’s engaging Missy, who soars to legit heights and beltswith the best of them. The quirky character loves to establish order and isinappropriately in love with a teacher, Mr. Lee. But weren’t we all?

Lowe Taylor, whohas the distinction of having played all four Wonderettes over the years,portrays Cindy Lou, the boyfriend stealer. And Beth Malone plays Betty Jean, who is Cindy Lou’s best friend, atleast until she finds out about the theft.

Misty Taylor, Beth Malone, Misty Cotton
and in front, Bets Malone
Carol Rosegg Photo

Wonderettes madeits initial bow in 1999 at Milwaukee Repertory Theatre and played off-Broadwayin 2008. All these actor/singers are veteran Wonderettes and played in theoff-Broadway production.

Where the Plaids’ potential was thwarted by death, theWonderettes’ is destroyed by rivalry and societal roles. As the very pregnantSuzy proclaims proudly yet ruefully in the second act, “I’m a housewife now!”Without pounding home the point or exploring the changes afoot, Beanacknowledges women’s “proper place” in the ‘50s and ‘60s, something thatresonates with those raised at the time despite the women’s liberationmovement.

Bean, the corny and carefree show’s writer/creator, directs.Don LeMaster is musical director ofan unseen four-man band – LeMaster and RaymeSciaroni on keyboards, Isaac Crowon drums, and Bill Kilpatrick onguitar – and Bets Malone is the choreographer. Larry Esau’s sound design and ChristinaL. Munich’s sound design support the production, played upon Michael Carnahan’s set for MusicalTheatre West, with costume design by BobbyPearce. Musical numbers include “Allegheny Moon,” “All I Have to Do IsDream,” “Sincerely,” “You Don’t Own Me,” and “Respect.”

The MarvelousWonderettes continues at 8pm Thursdays-Saturdays (added matinee at 2pmSaturday, Feb. 18) and 2pm Sundays through February 26, Birch North ParkTheatre, 2891 University Avenue, North Park, $26-$52m www.sdmt.org or (858) 560-5740.

Read Baldridge features

In Gay San Diego, regardingJake Heggie and Moby-Dick

Coming soon: reviews of Chinese Pirate’s The Golden Child and Moxie’s A Raisin in the Sun;San Diego Rep’s In the Wake; and inthe music department, reviews of Talise Trevigne’s recital and CD; L.A. Opera’sSimon Boccanegra; Jonathan Bisspiano; and Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s Moby-Dick.

Enemy of the People, American Night and Mahler

2012-02-08T10:01:00.000-08:00

Ken Howard Photo

Behinder I am

People keep asking, “Have you seen [fill in the blank] yet?”

The answer is “No.”

I’ve decided the local theaters, dramatic and musical, aretrying to kill us critics with openings. Local seasons really didn’t start tillJanuary 7. It’s only February 6 as I write this, and already, in San Diegoalone, I’ve seen 11 plays and one opera.

Because I chose lately to have a cultural life outside SanDiego – both in HD and in person, I’m behind. There are some things I’ve even missed.As the Pennsylvania Dutch used to say, “The hurrier I go the behinder I get.”And it doesn’t appear to getting any better.

In the past week, Wednesday through Sunday, Feb. 1-5 – from locales as farflung as Encinitas, Hillcrest and Los Angeles – I saw five plays and the LAPhil’sperformance of Mahler’s 8^th (“The Symphony of a Thousand”) at theShrine Auditorium. That’s a lot of mileage and a lot of intellectual input. I’moutputting just as hurrier as I can. But I’m terribly behinder. And I'm on my last good nerve.

Here’s the second installment of the past week:

Intrepid Enemy

An Enemy of the People,produced by Intrepid Shakespeare Company atSan Dieguito Academy through February 19. Five Burgoos.

Its move to the recently completed Clayton E. LiggettTheatre on the campus of San Dieguito Academy augurs well for IntrepidShakespeare Company. The acoustic in the black box theatre is good, it’s ashort walk from the parking lot, and there are restrooms adjacent instead of acountry mile’s distance. Additionally, a cozy lobby affords space for an indoorbox office and concession.

What more could one ask? Nothing other than fine theatre,and Intrepid provides that with their current production, Arthur Miller’s 1950adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 AnEnemy of the People, so finely done it’s a must see.

The action is moved from its original setting in a smallNorwegian town to 1954 Riverton, Maine. Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People as a rebuke to public condemnation of hisplay Ghosts, which deals withsyphilis. TMI at the time. Miller adapted AnEnemy of the People as a condemnation of the McCarthy Trials. So, we havetwo protests, 60-some years apart. You don’t have to know that, just take theplay as it is and it illuminates the human in any modern era.

Doctor Thomas Stockmann (Matt Scott) and his brother Peter (Eric Poppick), the town mayor, have spearheaded development andenhancement of Riverton’s hot springs, intending that the town become popularas a spa that restores and cures. When the play opens, Doctor Stockmann meetswith newspaper publisher Anderson (DannyCampbell), his editor, Hovstad (BrianMackey) and junior editor Billing (RobertBiter) to discuss an article the doctor has written about the waters.

Brenda Dodge and Matt Scott
Photo: Daren Scott

Dr. Stockmann has long suspected that the intake from thesprings was placed too far downstream, that the water could be contaminated bywaste products issuing from the tannery upstream. This theory is upheld bytesting that Stockmann ordered (many who took the waters became more illinstead of being cured or improved). Those present, including the newspapermoguls, extol Stockmann and declare he will be venerated as a hero for hisdiscovery. Stockmann’s father-in-law (AntonioTJ Johnson), who owns the tannery, is not happy at all; nor is the mayor,who threatens to ruin the doctor. When those in the know realize the true costof re-doing the springs, including loss of revenue due to a two-year shutdownand loss of goodwill when the contamination is announced, Dr. Stockmann’s moralground becomes shifting sand.

Nonetheless, Stockmann stands firm and insists on the rightcourse of action. Eventually he is vilified rather than venerated, and his wife(Brenda Dodge) wavers, seeing only areturn to the privation she suffered when the doctor long ago tended toresidents of a primitive village in the far north. The Stockmann children,schoolteacher Polly (Erin Peterson)and the prepubescent Morten (Aidan Hayek),support their father and are respectively fired from teaching and beaten atschool after Stockmann hires an unused warehouse owned by Capt. Horster (SeanCox) to defend his theory and the town’s moral obligation to do the rightthing.

An Enemy of the Peopleis a classic play that is unafraid of contention. At Intrepid it isexceptionally well cast, well directed (by Christy Yael and Cox) and wellproduced, with Brian Redfern’s airy scenic design redolent of comfort, largesseand generosity. Lighting designer is Christopher Renda, sound designer AdamBrick, and costume designer Beth Merriman.

Scott is an excellent Stockmann, passionate and wounded andincredibly vulnerable when he sees how his stand for the right is placing hischildren in harm’s way. With Cox’s Horster at his side, one can almost see theeventual triumph of right. Well, maybe. Poppick is rapidly becoming San Diego’sman you love to hate. He seethes with repressed animosity. And the others are fine.

An Enemy of the Peoplehammers home the realization that these kinds of battles are fought around usevery day. Just turn on your radio, your television or read the newspaper to learnabout the virtue of doing what’s right for our city. Question the source of theexhortations, and look for the leader in whom you believe. Is there a man orwoman out there like Stockmann? Would we believe the truth if he or she spokeit?

An Enemy of the Peoplecontinues through February 19 at Intrepid Shakespeare Company, Performing ArtsCenter, San Dieguito Academy, 800 Santa Fe Dr., Encinitas, $19-$38, 8pmThursdays-Saturdays, 3pm Saturdays, and 2 and 7pm Sundays, www.intrepidshakespeare.com (760)652-5011.

Culture Clash in La Jolla

American Night: TheBallad of Juan José at La Jolla Playhouse’s www.lajollaplayhouse.org Sheila andHughes Potiker Theatre through February 26. Five Burgoos.

Like a Sunday evening benediction, this piece of hilarity wasmuch needed following the engaging yet intellectually demanding week described above. That is not to say that farce ismindless entertainment, just that there is no way in this case to possibly get itall.

One relaxes, catches what one can, and enjoys the clever,up-to-the-minute topicality of the writing, a musically adept company ofchameleons that includes author Richard Montoya and Herbert Siguenza, Esosa’s riotously funnycostumes, and the familiarity of the style. We are familiar with Culture Clashfrom the troupe’s beginnings in San Francisco and its numerous San Diego appearances from the ‘80sto the present. The comedy has deepened; sadly, the topics endure.

The ballad concerns a legal Mexican immigrant named Juan José,who is cramming for his citizenship exam. He wants to achieve citizenship so hecan reunite legally with his pregnant wife.

José’s fitful dreams sweep him back in history to thesigning of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which resulted in the cedingof Mexican territory that became all or part of ten states. The treaty alsooffered citizenship to 80,000 Mexicans living in the southwest, plus a promiseto protect their rights. We move forward in history, the humor laced with glimpsesof the Manzanar internment camp, Woodstock, Elvis, Sonny and Cher, Neil Diamante, Jesus,racist government officials, and Tea Partiers.

I adored the performance of René Millán in the title role.Funny, yes, but poignant as well, he also embodies nobility of purpose, love andintegrity amid the chaos. All the others, including Stephanie Beatriz(possessor of a lovely singing voice), Rodney Gardiner, David Kelly, TerriMcMahon, Montoya, Kimberly Scott, Siguenza and Daisuke Tsuji, portray numerousothers.

Daisuke Tsuji and Rene Millan
Photo by Craig Schwartz

A co-production with Center Theatre Group American Night: The Ballad of Juan José premieredat the Oregon Shakespeare Festival last summer. It was written by RichardMontoya, famously and familiarly of Culture Clash and developed by CultureClash and director Jo Bonney. Culture Clash’s most recent at the Playhouseappearance was the 2006 production of Zorroin Hell. Montoya’s Water & Powerwas seen in 2008 at San Diego Repertory Theatre.

From the Culture Clash bio in the José program: “…Recipientsof numerous awards, commissions and grants, Culture Clash is named along withShakespeare in a lawsuit by the Arizona Attorney General as material and playsunsuitable for Tucson High School students. The case goes before the 9^thCircuit Court of Appeals this spring in San Francisco.” Culture Clash was founded in San Francisco in 1984 by Montoya, Ric Salinas and Siguenza.

Brenda goes Shrine

Saturday, Feb 4, my friend David and I went to hear GustavMahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” played by Los Angeles Philharmonic and theSimón Bolívar Orchestra of Venezuela under the baton of LAPhil music director and conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who also employed eight soloists and 16 choruses, allof them adding up to more than 1,000 musicians.

The Shrine Auditorium

In order to accommodate all the aforementioned The MahlerProject staged the 80-minute symphony and spectacle at the 6,300-seat ShrineAuditorium. http://www.shrineauditorium.com/ The choruses alone took up theentire stage where three-ring circuses have performed in the past, just to giveyou an idea of size. They built a forestage to accommodate the two orchestrasand soloists; a brass choir took up the huge opera box house left, and in theopposing box, at the appointed time, appeared the feminine ideal (MaterGloriosa, or Virgin Mary, sung by soprano Kiera Duffy), clad all in white andsinging like an angel.

Part I of Symphony No. 8 is a Latin invocation titled Veni creator spiritus. It involves allthe assembled forces and contains the most glorious soprano passage work andduet ever written, sung by German soprano ManuelaUhl and Santa Monica native JuliannaDi Giacomo, who sings at the Met. Part II takes its text from the finalscene from Goethe’s Faust, Part II.The text is sung in German with projected translation.

Gustavo Dudamel
Photo: Courtesy LAPhil

My experience of this grand, musically complicated andredemptive work induced goose bumps that assailed the physical body as ifpropelled by an electric current. That’s the wonder of the nervous system, toafford an emotional experience of Mahler’s emotional intent a hundred yearslater. It was joy and catharsis and brought to this one woman among thousandsthe assurance that regardless of belief, station or experience we are one.

I first heard “The Symphony of a Thousand” live at theopening of San Francisco’s DaviesSymphony Hall in September 1980. Any live experience is worth a thousandrecordings. The gathering at the Shrine, conducted without a score, was sogargantuan one could declare it overkill. But one won’t. Goosebumps prevail.

Mahler's 8th Symphony of a Thousand
Photo Courtesy of Shrine Auditorium

The entire Mahler Project www.laphil.com – all nine symphonies plus what we haveof the 10^th – now moves to Caracas, Venezuela. The Eighth will bebroadcast live in HD from Caracas at 2pmSaturday, Feb. 18. Mission Valley 20 is among the venues. Running time of thebroadcast is 2.5 hours. For tickets go to Fathom Events www.fathomevents.com

Charlene will see you nextweek with reviews of Blasted, Guys andDolls, and The Marvelous Wonderettes. Brenda plans to attend the Live from theMet HD broadcast of The Enchanted Islandand Jake Heggie and Talise Trevigne’s joint recital next Sunday at 2 pm atSherwood Auditorium.

Behanding, Spring Awakening and a recommendation

2012-02-04T09:56:00.000-08:00

Ken Howard Photo

Early post for week ending later

Look, ma, no hand

The most brilliant visual concept that director LisaBerger applies to her production of Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding inSpokane – playing at Cygnet Theatre through February 19 – is neateningleading lunatic Jeffrey Jones’ hairstyle as Carmichael, the shadyprotagonist. The second and third most brilliant decisions are, no doubt,Peter Herman’s wild wigs for Kelly Iversen, who portrays a floozynamed Marilyn, split-ends and all, and Mike Sears, who inhabits awhacked-out desk clerk in the small town America hotel in which McDonagh setshis dark, dark comedy. Carmichael’s mother is a vivid presence even though shenever appears. We merely imagine her voice during several phone calls, sovividly is her situation recounted. The phone answerer is Vimel, whoplays a hyperactive lowlife named Toby. He’s Marilyn’s boyfriend. The actor wasand may still be a one-name singer whose biography indicates that his stageexperience consists of a role in Storyville at the Rep last year. He hasyet to achieve ease, articulation and competence comparable to that of his castmates, but he’s in excellent company.

Jeffrey Jones, Vimel and Kelly Iversen
Photo: Daren Scott

Christopher Ward’s scenic design is another ofBerger’s visual coups, along with her meticulous casting and Jessica JohnGercke’s giggle-inducing costumes, especially for Sears, who looks like anovergrown boy scout (his ankles and shoes are a scream). Michelle Caron’slighting gives onlookers a feel for the hotel’s neon sign and the fire escapejust outside the room’s enormous window, which has a working sash.

All visual things are impeccable, the acting in the main skilledand appropriate to the style – four numbskulls, all in over their heads, allticking time bombs on the verge of exploding. They should surprise eventhemselves and in most cases they do.

Jones’ Carmichael has been looking for his hand 27 years. Itwas cut off by a train, running on a track upon which he was forced to lie bysome punk kids, who then had the audacity to steal the hand. Toby and Marilynare sucked into the plot when they promise to sell Carmichael a hand theymaintain is his. Even though he knows it can never be reattached after allthese years, the heat-packing Carmichael, who is well-dressed and surface calm,wants what he feels is rightfully his.

Jeffrey Jones and Mike Sears
Photo: Daren Scott

However marvelous the actors are, the premise and even thesuspense burn out early on and the train loses speed. Even the 11^thhour surprise, which reveals that Carmichael is no smarter than the rest, doesnot deliver. It must be said, however, that at the performance February 1, manypeople laughed at the absurdities all the way through the 90-minute, one actplay.

In my opinion, the problem lies in the play itself – theonly one McDonagh set in the U.S. It has McDonagh’s usual “ick” factor and thepremise is funny. Even the outrageously excessive use of “language” includingthe “N” word (Toby is black) is funny for a while. This kind of language issomehow easier to take issuing from Irish characters. After all, it is ourculture McDonagh is sending up this time, and it is not a pretty sight.

McDonagh’s other plays, all of which have been producedlocally, include The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Cripple of Inishmaan, ASkull in Conemara, The Lonesome West, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and ThePillowman. McDonagh’s films include In Bruges and the upcoming SevenPsychopaths.

Recommending TheRecommendation

Highly recommended, but not for the feint of heart, is theOld Globe’s exceptionally well-produced and riveting world premiere productionof Jonathan Caren’s The Recommendation,which rates five Burgoos. My review will be seen in the February 10 issue of San Diego Uptown News. The play recountsthe relationship of three diverse men over a period of 15 years. Though theplaywright never staggers, his truth, a bleak view of humanity, is staggering.

The original SpringAwakening

Friday night we attended the opening of UC San DiegoDepartment of Theatre and Dance’s production of Frank Wedekind’s 1892 Germandrama, Spring Awakening (FrülingsErwachen). The drama is performed in Jonathan Franzen’s translation, published in 2007.

At the time, Franzen called Steven Sater and Duncan Shiek’s 2006hit Broadway musical, which was based on Wedekind’s play, “insipid” and “instantlyoverpraised.” The musical has been performed frequently in San Diego, professionally and in various student productions.

Tm Patterson as Mauritz
Photo: Jim Carmody

Nineteenth century audiences were shocked by Wedekind’splay, which deals frankly with a group of kids and their lack of informationregarding their budding sexual selves. It was an era in which bodily urges simplywere not discussed.

The three major characters in Wedekind’s play, as in themusical, are Melchior Gabor (third-year MFA actor Zach Martens), Moritz Stiefel(first-year MFA actor Tom Patterson), and Wendla Bergmann (Sarah Halford).Megan Robinson, a third-year MFA actor, is outstanding as the provocative butwell-meaning Mrs. Gabor, one of the few women in town aware of what’s going onvis-à-vis the young people and their repressive society. Assistantdirector/first year MFA director Kate Jopson also fares well as Ilse, afree-spirited young woman who has left school to become an artists’ model.

Unsurprisingly, the plots of the play and the musical areextremely similar, but the play’s emphases are much more on the boys’characters and their deep friendship. In the musical the adults and parents,painted with broad strokes, are much more culpable for Mauritz’s tragedy andthe injustice done to Melchior. The boy’s friendship here is deeper and Mauritzis not so much odd and nervous as he is confused. Though some may find theplay’s final scene more to their liking than that of the musical, this onlookerwas unmoved. Despite its nearly three-hour running time the play is worthseeing if only to enhance one’s understanding of German Expressionism.

Director Anthony Luciano, a third-year MFA director, makessome questionable choices, among them the use of a text-obfuscating microphone inthe scene that incites the school board to expel Melchior for his honestdocumention of sexual intercourse.

The production elements, which use the work of MFAdesigners, are excellent. Christopher Scott Murillo’s set, though challengingfor the MFA actors because of its size (they tend to speak into the wings), isindeed handsome, with upstairs devoted to rooms in various homes and a hayloft,the main playing area for scenes in the street and classroom, and the forestagerepresenting a verdant meadow and river. Nicholas Drashner’s sound design iseffective. Halei Parker is costume designer and Sherrice Kelly, lightingdesigner.

“Spring Awakening” continues in the Mandell Weiss Theatre atUC San Diego’s Theatre District (shared with La Jolla Playhouse) at 8pmWednesday through Saturday, Feb. 8-11, $15-$20, http://theatre.ucsd.edu or (858) 534-4574.

God willing, there will be a special edition of this blogMonday, Feb. 6, covering Intrepid Shakespeare Company’s An Enemy of the People and La Jolla Playhouse’s American Night: The Ballad of Don José. Meanwhile, you may wish to visit my personal blog which this week features poetry inspired by Mahler and travel.

San Diego Symphony, LAPhil and The Mahler Project

2012-02-02T15:42:00.000-08:00

Brenda goes phil

Wednesday night (January 25) ere we departed for Los Angelesand Gustav Mahler, we went to Copley Symphony Hall to hear the RoyalPhilharmonic Orchestra, brought in through the auspices of San Diego Symphony.The hall looked to be pretty well sold out and friends who went looking for the leastexpensive tickets were forced to split up.

The main attractions were the orchestra itself, conducted byPrincipal Conductor Charles Dutoit, andthe brilliant French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, whom we recently heard in performance ofLiszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 under the baton of Miguel Harth-Bedoya with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (LAPhil).

This time out, Thibaudet – who plays in the sound track forthe film Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – played Camille Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 5 in F Major(“Egyptian”), which neither Brenda nor David recall ever hearing inperformance.

Thibaudet is magnificent, an understated whirlwind ofdomesticated, yet passionate filigree. This concerto is all about the piano,and as they say “the pianist’s hands were a blur.” So far as we were concernedthe orchestra might not have been there, though there were some lovely phrasesfor the first violins and the writing contains some ravishingly beautifulpassages tinged with exoticism that Saint-Saëns soaked up during his travels toEgypt.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet

Dutoit has a strange, reserved conducting style with verylittle body movement visible to an audience seated behind him. He keeps it alltight to the vest, seeming to conduct with eyebrows and glare, even in the bigmoments of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor. This is truly a passionate,romantic symphony, filled with luscious melodies and sudden contrasts. Where isDutoit’s passion? Truthfully, kids, it left me cold. The strings are good, butthe brass and winds don’t hold a candle to San Diego Symphony.

Ben Heppner and Talise Trevigne in Moby-Dick
Photo: Karen Almond

There are things one does while waiting to be moved. One maycount: Of the orchestra’s ten cellists, at least six are women. Appreciatebeauty: In the third stand of violins, first chair, sat a lovely young womanwith great posture, a slim body and Breck Shampoo hair. Note to self: Envy herfor being so beautiful. One may also wish to be offended: The woman seated inthe next seat unwrapped hard candy during a quiet section of the Saint-Saëns. Acell phone rang during the Tchaikovsky.

Currently, San Diego Symphony is occupying the Salome pit at the Civic Theatre, playing for San DiegoOpera’s magnificent production through Sunday, Feb. 5. The orchestra returns to Copley the first week in March with Beethoven. See the web site for theseand other events. San Diego Opera opens the world premiere production of JakeHeggie’s Moby-Dick at 7pmSaturday, Feb. 18 at the Civic Theatre.

Dudamel, the Bolívars and Mahler

Thursday and Friday nights were spent in Walt DisneySymphony Hall listening to GustavoDudamel (in his third season as LAPhilmusic director) conduct Gustav Mahler’s Fifth and Sixth Symphoniesrespectively, played by the Simón Bolívar Orchestra of Venezuela and the LAPhil, respectively. Dudamel is in his 13^th season as musicdirector of the Bolívars, as they are affectionately called.

The 175-member Simón Bolívar Orchestra of Venezuela,formerly the Simón Bolívar YouthOrchestra of Venezuela, filled the entire Disney stage Wednesdaynight to play the Fifth. We sat in the raised orchestra section at house left.We had a perfect view of most all the orchestra, but especially the entirepercussion, brass and wind sections, plus strings at house right and most ofthe strings below us house left.

When they played they swayed, those Bolívars, strings bowingin unison as if they were one living organism aboard a ship heaving in theMahlerian sea. Seeing became a part of hearing, their playing was passionateand inspired, and thus were we, falling in love with the players and wanting tohear them again, which David did when he returned January 31 for Mahler’sSeventh. The applause at the end of the Fifth lasted until we reached thestreet. Never have I experienced so many thrills and so magnificent a receptionfor an orchestra.

Gustavo Dudamel

The Sixth (Friday night) featured the huge hammer that sopoignantly represents the inevitability of death. For this part of the score, alarge, resonant chamber is built, and at Disney a LAPhil percussionist climbeda flight of stairs to access the chamber’s top, where he wielded the immensemallet, surprising all the youngsters seated above the rear of the orchestra.Later, four percussionists clashed four sets of cymbals and the youthfulaudience members could barely contain their surprise and excitement. Howwonderful that their parents took them.

Lest you think the Sixth is all doom and gloom, the work isalso scored for bells and cowbells, which kept the percussion section scurryingfor “sessions” in yon fields (most likely the upper reaches of Disney Hall).

There are many amazing things about The Mahler Project. Number one is that Dudamel conducts in most casesmultiple performances of all nine symphonies, plus what we have of the Tenth,from memory. And he does so indefatigably. Okay, so he’s only 30, but still, wheredoes all that energy come from?

When the Mahler Project reaches its climax – the Eighth Symphony (“The Symphony of a Thousand”) – the project, including bothorchestras and all the instruments, moves to Caracas, Venezuela, to do it allover again. The international apogee will be the February 18 live in HD telecast of theEighth from Caracas. Select U.S. theaters will offer an encore performanceWednesday, Feb. 29. Meanwhile, if tickets become available, you may wish tojoin the audience of 5,000 at the Shrine Auditorium at 8pm Saturday, Feb. 4,for the “Symphony of a Thousand,” so called because two orchestras, sixteenchoruses and numerous soloists are employed. Or hear the LAPhil perform the Ninth at 8pmFriday or 2pm Sunday. Go to http://www.laphil.com/tickets/mahler/index.cfm to check ticket availability and to learn more about the magnificent Mahler Project, the orchestras and theiramazing maestro.

Salome and Maria de Buenos Aires

2012-01-30T09:38:00.000-08:00

Brenda as seen by Charlene

Brenda goes to the opera

Brenda attended two operas on sequential evenings. Bothfeature bloody heroines with bare breasts and extremely short lives. One is a virgin, the other a slut.

Salome in San Diego

San Diego Operapresents three additional performances of Richard Strauss’s Salome,which is based on Oscar Wilde’s earlier play. When Wilde’s tragedy went intorehearsals in London in 1892, the censor banned it from performance, citing theprohibition of presenting Biblical characters on stage. It was not produceduntil in 1896 and then in Paris, not England.

Oddly enough the story is told in the Bible, but Salome isnot mentioned by name. Both Wilde’s play and Strauss’s 1905 opera shockedaudiences of the times because of their erotic nature and bloody ending, whenHerod demands Salome dance for him and the virginal teen, having exactedHerod’s promise she may have anything she wants, and aroused by her passion forthe holy, inaccessible Jochanaan (John the Baptist) performs the Dance of theSeven Veils. The price is Jochanaan’s head on a silver platter.

The music, too, was a shock in an era accustomed to Puccini,Rossini and Verdi and their dependable forms, recitative to advance the storyand arias, duets and ensembles to provide lovely and lively melodies.

And then there was Strauss, whose Salome unfolds like a symphonic tone poem, with leitmotivs,sweep, luscious orchestration, and none of the comfortable guideposts to whichoperagoers were accustomed. So not only were patrons confronted with ascandalous story, they experienced sounds and seeming formlessness that madethem uncomfortable and even furious. And, in many cases, that still do.

Their contemporary, composer Richard Wagner, influenced bothStrauss (1864-1949) and Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). All wrote symphonic musicthat was rife with then-startling harmonies and complexity far beyond the norm.Genius, I say, admitting to passion for all three composers. I am not alone inmy passion. Los Angeles audiences are buying out most performances in thePhilharmonic’s current Mahler Project, which culminates next month in Caracas,Venezuela (see forthcoming post titled “Brenda goes symphonic”).

I wish I could say that San Diego Opera’s thrilling openingnight performance of Salome Saturday,Jan. 29, was sold out. Alas, there were numerous empty seats behind us in theorchestra section.

Lise Lindstrom as Salome
Photo: Ken Howard

Lise Lindstrom, whoperformed Princess Turandot last season, is an amazing Salome. She captures thegirl’s innocence and naïveté and also her cruelty. Lindstrom uses her voicebeautifully – wondrous, petulant pianissimos, lustrous, penetrating big soundwhen called for. She lusts for three things, Jochanaan’s hair, his body and hislips, and when she is spurned she changes her mind, disparaging each physicalattribute in turn, but still swearing she will kiss his lips. She does this,but only after his head is severed. “Ah, if only you had looked at me, youwould have loved me,” she laments.

Lindstrom moves exceptionally well throughout the opera,giving one the impression that this precocious teen loves to dance and does soall day. As staged by director/choreographer Seán Curran the Dance of the SevenVeils is performed voluptuously, utilizing large, variously colored veilsmanipulated by two male dancers and the diva.

Greer Grimsley
Photo: Ken Howard

Even though he does not look at Salome, Greer Grimsley’s Jochanaan from time to time seems to indicateattraction, which the prophet fights down. Ultimately he cares enough tosuggest that Salome go to the desert to seek the One who can change her lifeand offer redemption and salvation. Grimsley’s large, luscious and expressivevoice is perfectly suited for the role. His physical presence is truly a bonus,though I admit feeling his extra head is a bit too small, and the staging, withSalome stepping over his restraints numerous times, grows tedious.

American-born Sri Lankan tenor Sean Panikkar, whom we heard in Santa Fe Opera’s recentproduction of Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Last Savage, made animpressive San Diego Opera debut as Narraboth, a young soldier who admiresSalome and is persuaded to bring Jochanaan from the prison so she can see him.

Sean Panikkar and Lise Lindstrom
Photo: Ken Howard

American tenor Allan Glassman is extraordinary both vocally and dramatically as Salome’s lasciviousstepfather, King Herod. He’s got the clarity and range and also the feel forthe macabre to make the performance stand out. Russian born mezzo-soprano IrinaMishura makes her company debut asHerodias, a rather thankless role, well sung, but to which she brings nothingof dramatic distinction. The company of Cappadocians, Jews, soldiers andNazarenes contains an amazing array of noted comprimario singers, among themcelebrated Metropolitan Opera tenor Joseph Frank.

The production, designed by Bruno Schwengl, is visually stunning, all walls apparently beingsucked into the vortex of Jochanaan’s place of captivity, a cistern on edgeupstage. Christopher Maravich’slighting is wondrous, creating immense shadows and a world of color upon theconverging walls. Steuart Bedford,who has conducted Peter Grimes and Albert Herring at SDO, returns to lead the Strauss-sized San DiegoSymphony.

Remaining performances are scheduled at 7pm Tuesday, Jan.31; 7pm Friday, Feb. 3, and 2pm Sunday, Feb. 5, at the Civic Theatre, 3^rdand B Street, downtown San Diego. The 100-minute opera is performed without intermission,in German with English text projected above the proscenium. For tickets, $50and up, go to www.sdopera.com or phone(619) 533-7000.

Read Baldridge features about Salome at North County Times and Gay San Diego:

Maria in San Pedro

Sunday, Brenda and Mr. Twonkie, GPS, who recently underwentsex-change surgery, headed for San Pedro’s Warner Grand Theatre, a 1931 Art Deco movie theatre for Long Beach Opera’s (LBO) production of AstorPiazzolla and Horacio Ferrer’s 1968 “operita,” Maria de Buenos Aires.The opera, in a new LBO version by Andreas Mitisek, is 70 minutes long and wasconducted, conceived and directed by Mitisek, artistic and general director ofthe company.

This version’s four characters, Maria (Peabody Southwell), Older Payador (Gregorio Luke), Younger Payador (Gregorio Gonzales) and Marco (Mark Bringelson) are assisted by the Nannette BrodieDance Theatre, whose dancers inhabit otherresidents of Buenos Aires and perform a bit of tango as well.

Gregorio Gonzalez and Peabody Southwell
Photo: Keith Ian Polakoff

Argentina itself is not a “good” girl. Neither is the tango.Neither is Maria, who does what a slum-born girl must do to survive the meanstreets. Payador, whose fever dream this is, loved Maria 30 years ago, and thenshe became one of the Desaparecidos, or“disappeared” youth of the Dirty War(1976-1983), during which, it is said, as many as 30,000, many mere infants,were abducted, tortured and possibly annihilated. She returns to Payador now, aspirit, and we are taken on her sad journey, part of which Younger Payadorshared. Marco is Maria’s apparent abductor, chief torturer and rapist.

Mitisek says that Piazzolla took the tango from the brothelsand turned it classical. Indeed he did. The playing of the LBO musicalensemble, even without the requisite bandoneón (accordion is used) is richindeed. The violin and flute are particularly poignant.

In the opera as originally written, Maria represents thetango, national dance of Argentina. Ferrer describes the tango as two wounds,into which a finger is inserted, then twisted, to reopen them, soul and body.

In LBO’s current adaptation, Maria represents the tangostill, but also the people of Argentina, specifically those who disappeared,whose photographs are shown at the beginning of the opera. My friend was quitemoved by the piece and thought the projections brilliant. Perhaps because ofour location in Row E and the condition of my aging eyes, I found the projections blurry(granted they are period images) and thus difficult to watch.

Southwell and company
Photo: Keith Ian Polakoff

The singers are magnificent. Southwell is a beautiful woman,voluptuous in form and certainly in voice. She recently made an acclaimed debutat Central City Opera and will be seen in LBO’s forthcoming Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar.

As Younger Payador, Gonzalez displays a sumptuous vocalquality, a thrilling top, and enough Latin machismo to fill one’s dreams for alifetime. He delivers Ferrer’s poetry beautifully and sensuously. Sounddesigner Bob Christian’s amplification – surely a challenge in an old moviehouse – was not kind to any of the artists, but in Gonzalez’s case, it seemedto indicate, at least to these ears, that the singer might be pressing too hardfor the situation.

Bringelson’s portrayal of Marco is glitteringly dangerousand Luke provides a sympathetic and poetic Older Payador.

The opera is 70 minutes, 125 miles, and several hours’travel well spent. Those who’ve not experienced this adventurous company mightmake the experience their own at the remaining performance at 8pm Saturday,Feb. 4, but hurry. It will sell out the 1523–seat theatre, a spectacle all itsown. There are restaurants near by, the Warner Grand, which is located at 478West 6^th St., Los Angeles 90731-2632.

No more opera this week, folks, but there’s plenty coming upincluding Simon Boccanegra at L.A. Operaand Moby-Dick at San Diego Opera.Brenda will provide eyewitness accounts, God willing.

Next up: Mahler. ETA? Haven’t a clue.

Programme, Menagerie and Dividing the Estate

2012-01-23T15:32:00.000-08:00

Jim Carmody photos of Menagerie

Ken Howard Photo

Programme reprise ation

Brilliant San Diego actor Linda Libby is remembered forrecent performances as a heart-breaking Fraulein Schneider in Cygnet Theatre’s Cabaret and her human Mama Rose in ion theatre’s Gypsy. And now, starting off a new year at ion theatre and playingthrough January 28 only, fans are offered a revival of Libby's 2008 Craig NoelAward-winning performance as Miss Rasch in Franz Xavier Kroetz’s wordless one-womantour-de-force, Request Programme.

Prior to curtain, someone asked me if I’d seen the show inits original production down in the valley. Answer is “yes.”

Further question, “What’s the show about?” Not much to tell.The play concerns a lonely middle-aged woman, that’s all. She comes home fromwork, obviously an office job to judge from her attire (hose, heels, businesssuit), performs her evening tasks robotically, displays a rather quirky andengaging routine of cleaning, eating, listening to the radio, indulging in teaand biscotti and undressing – just like any of us who are alone and unobserved.Then she performs her nightly ablutions, paying special attention to anincipient zit, laying out clothes for tomorrow, setting the table forbreakfast, and at last climbing into bed. She is sleepless. Was it something thatdid not happen? Was it something that did? Something we missed?

Linda Libby as Miss Rasch
Photo courtesy ion theatre

Request Programmeshowcases a fine San Diego artist who is able to convey surprise, dismay,disappointment and resignation with minimal facial and body movements. Libby’scharacter, after all, has no “audience.” Being still requires a solid techniquefew are able to deliver. Libby is reactive, and minutely so, to life’schallenges and hard knocks.

As directed by Glenn Paris, Libby is so still she appearsnot to be acting, just as Philip Glass’s minimalist pre-curtain music appearsnot to go anywhere, but contains the entire universe of inner dialogue each ofus inhabits every day. Request Programme is a rare experience in theatre, an object lesson incraft. Go.

Five Burgoos http://iontheatre.com/#/2-box-office/0-january-17-28-request-programme Book your tickets now for this amazing 70-minute journey with Miss Rasch.

Another extraordinary experience

Regan Linton as Laura Wingfield
Photo: Jim Carmody

Yet another Glass Menagerie? What possibly could draw a theatre critic weary of the piece?

When I read the UCSD cast for this MFA workshop production,I could not resist. Two years ago I heard Kyle Donnelly talk of accepting awheelchair traveler into the MFA program. A risky challenge all around, yetDonnelly extolled the talent and determination of her new MFA actor, ReganLinton, whom readers may have seen in UCSDproductions of The Storm, The Threepenny Opera and Small Prophecies. To showcase Linton’s extraordinary talents, Donnellycast her as Laura Wingfield in a workshop production that includes threethird-year MFA actors: Gabriel Lawrence as The Gentleman Caller, Mark Christineas Tom, and Taylor Shurte as Amanda.

Gabriel Lawrence as the Gentleman Caller
and Regan Linton as Laura
Photo: Jim Carmody

Because the production is a workshop, this is not a review.However, if you want to check out Ms. Linton, now’s the time. There are threemore performances at the Mandell Weiss Forum, 8 pm Thursday, Friday andSaturday. Tickets and information: http://www-theatre.ucsd.edu/

By contrast, the exceptionally large

Everything about The Old Globe’s production of HortonFoote’s Dividing the Estate is large –the humor, the southern stereotypes, the company, and Jeff Cowie’s amazingwall-to-wall antebellum home. Director Michael Wilson, Cowie and designersDavid C. Woolard (costumes), Rui Rita (lighting) and John Gromada (originalmusic and sound design) recreate the Broadway production of 2008-09, in whichseveral of the current company’s actors also appeared, including Foote’s to-the-manner-born daughter and frequent interpreter, Hallie Foote.

Cowie’s home presents the front door, the parlor and thedining room, plus an intimation of the world beyond in fictional Harrison,Texas, 1987. For instance, we feel the little house in the backyard, inhabitedby 92-year-old family retainer Doug (Roger Robinson), still serving despiteextreme tremors. Doug has lived there and served the Gordon family since he was5 years old. We imagine the kitchen beyond the pantry glimpsed through theswinging door as Doug goes to and fro with young Cathleen (Keiana Richàrd),who’s “trying to take his job away from him,” and the middle-aged Mildred (PatBowie), setting the table for meals.

Elizabeth Ashley as Stella Gordon and Roger Robinson as Doug in the West Coast premiere of Horton Foote's Dividing the Estate, directed by Michael Wilson, at The Old Globe Jan. 14 - Feb. 12, 2012. Photo by Henry DiRocco.

Eighty-two-year-old family matriarch Stella Gordon(Elizabeth Ashley) presides here, along with her daughter Lucille (PennyFuller) and Lucille’s alcoholic brother Lewis (Horton Foote, Jr.). Lucille’smiddle-aged son, merely called Son (Devon Abner), competently handles estatematters and has done so since college.

Having arranged to ambush Stella in the hope of avoidinginheritance taxes, the avaricious third sibling, Mary Jo (Hallie Foote),arrives with her realtor husband Bob (James DeMarse). In tow are their insipid,self-centered adult daughters, the divorced Emily (blond and busty Jenny Dare Paulin)and the engaged Sissie (Nicole Lawrance), who’s expecting a big wedding toresult from the imminent settling of the estate. The estate consists mostly ofproperty and has little cash flow to support the siblings, two of whom – Lewisand Mary Jo – have borrowed heavily against their potential inheritance.Currently Lewis is demanding an additional huge chunk of change.

The company of Dividing the Estate
Photo by Henry DiRocco

Potential income might be earned by granting oil leases tooffset the impending tax bill. Stella is against oil leases and against divisionof the property prior to her death. She watches agitatedly as her childrenargue loudly and vehemently over the estate she and Son have so carefullypreserved thus far. The house itself is one of the few remaining neighborhoodarchitectural relics. She does not want it sold, and besides, the current realestate market is depressed. One wonders as the play unfolds just how much orhow little cash will be realized by Stella’s grasping, privileged offspring,none of whom has worked a day in their lives.

Two additional characters stand by, awestruck over thegoings-on: Son’s sensible, socio-politically aware fiancée, Pauline (KellyMcAndrew), and Lewis’s friend, the teenage Irene (Bree Welch). They are both witness to and interested in the family madness.

Anyone who’s spent time there knows these small townsoutherners and how they operate. A genteel gloss covers the sharp edges anddarker realities and motivations. These are the women who get their hair done at Truvy’s beauty shop in SteelMagnolias. Though Foote’s observations arehysterically funny and his characters deadly accurate, they are not as finelydrawn or as profound as those of Tracey Letts’ August: Osage County.

The company of seasoned pros is fine and so is the lavishproduction. The play itself requires patience, but the rewards are great.

Four Burgoos. Plays Tuesdays-Sundays through February 12 atthe Old Globe Theatre, 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park, www.theoldglobe.org or (619) 23-GLOBE.

See you next week with Brenda’s coverage of the RoyalPhilharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s continuing Mahler survey, andproductions at San Diego http://www.sdopera.com/Homeand Long Beach Opera http://www.longbeachopera.org/2012-season, Richard Strauss’s Salome and AstorPiazzolla’s Maria de Buenos Aires,respectively. Theatre coverage returns the following week.

On vacation

2012-01-16T17:40:00.000-08:00

Ken Howard Photo

Charlene and Brenda are in the Pacific Northwest, looking at the snow outside the window, praying for snowplows and sand.

Brenda is out in the front yard, packing tight snowballs and Charlene is hovering over her laptop.

Theatrical columns will resume the week of January 22, provided there are snowplows, a scattering of sand, and no unexpected visits to the fabled Lummi ditch. Travelogue with photos is posted at www.charlenebaldridge.blogspot.com

Safe return last Thursday. Theatrical sightings this weekend will include The Glass Menagerie (not for review at UCSD), Request Programme at ion theatre company, A Hammer (not for review) at San Diego Rep, and Dividing the Estate at the Old Globe. I'm in featureland right now. Plan to file reviews on Tuesday at this point.

The ‘Lion,’ the ‘Bitch’ and a new wardrobe

2012-01-09T09:47:00.000-08:00

Trying on a new year

Ken Howard Photo

Flash!

They tell me that The Lion in Winter, reviewed below, is extended through February 5. Don't miss this marvelous show.

Flash #2!

French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, discussed below, plays with Charles Dutoit and the Royal Philharmonic, presented by San Diego Symphony at 7:30 pm Wednesday, Jan. 25 at Copley Symphony Hall.

During the week I enjoyed a lovely transition from relativeinactivity to full-on life as usual, including an interview with a man whotends to lose his head; revisiting a favorite musical; and seeing the touringcompany of Cats (see my interview withassistant dance captain Larry Lozier, Jr., in this week’s Gay San Diego.Because of my impending trip I won’t have time to write a review.

On Thursday I’m outta here for a week that includes a tripcommencing in Bellingham, WA, and proceeding to Portland, OR, and – they tellme – to Vancouver, Canada. In Portland Friday night, I’ll hear Jake Heggie's song cycle, Winter Roses, performed by Angela Niederloh Haywardand 45^th Parallel, a new chamber music group whose artistic directoris Greg Ewer. The song cycle contains two Charlene Baldridge poems, along withpoems by Emily Dickinson, Fredericavon Stade and Raymond Carver. Sometimes it’s nice to be a poet and mom for aweek.

LAPhil plays with Harth-Bedoya and Thibaudet

Thursday, Jan. 5, Brenda’s boyfriend David took us to hearthe musical bridge to 2012 at Disney Hall. Under the baton of Peruvianconductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya, the resplendent Los Angeles Philharmonic playedAntonin Dvorák’s Hussite Overture, FranzLiszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in A major, and Camille Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No.3 in C minor, Op. 78 (“Organ”). We adored Harth-Bedoya's involvement, energy and finesse.

Miguel Harth-Bedoya, courtesy Ft. Worth Symphony

The concert was the most sonorous, thrilling and satisfyingin many moons, perhaps in any moon. It was my first chance to hear the gloriousDisney pipe organ (played by Joanne Pearce Martin), and it was a perfectconcert and evening, including the dinner company of two women named Gloria,who were seated next to us at Kendall’s Bistro.

French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who is alwayssurprising, is not new to me, but I experienced his banter for the first timein the pre-concert chat in the lobby. Because of his ability to play “extremely soft and incredibly far away” (L.A.Times writer James C. Taylor) he recentlyrecorded, evidently transparently so, music for the highly praised 9/11 film Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. This was effected on a last minute basis when thefilmmakers decided no one else’s pianissimo would do.

Thibaudet’s filigree was the complete sonic opposite ofMartin’s Saint-Saënsational fortissimo organ. When paired with Ben Hong’sexquisitely performed cello passages in the Liszt, it was indeed transforming.

Thibaudet, photo courtesy San Diego Symphony

All this and the red socks, too!

During the lecture, the personality plus Thibaudet revealedthe truth about his trademark red socks, how they came to be, and why they wentaway. When his then-youthful career was still in the ascendant phase, hiseclectic schedule found him in a hotel away from home with no black socks, adiscovery made too late for shopping. So he donned the only clean socks, which happenedto be red. His performance was a knockout. Like the ballplayer’s luckyunderwear, the socks played on until, on the eve of the millennium, Thibaudetdecided he was sick of reading about them and put them into retirement.

The ‘Lion’ Roars and rates four Burgoos

Great acting and casting of North Coast RepertoryTheatre’s production of James Goldman’s1966 Broadway hit The Lion in Winter make it a must see and alsoimbues the work with qualities that make it seem an even better play than itis. Watching guest director Andrew Barnicle’s company is indeed a true joy forthe seasoned theatergoer who’s seen many less illuminating productions.Motivations are evident here, and though many exchanges are barbed, lovefrequently shines through, even as the queen declares to the regent, “I don’tmuch like our children.” Who ever likes all their children all the time?

Though based on the lives of its historical characters –Henry II of England (the first Plantagenet king), his wife, Eleanor ofAquitaine, and their three surviving sons, Richard, Geoffrey and John – theaction of the play is entirely of the playwright’s devising. Some of theattendant joy is attributable to Goldman’s witty repartee and some to the factthat Eleanor in particular seems to know that she’s in a play about herselfthat’s inconsistent with onlookers’ ideas of period style, language anddecorum.

Goldman sets the play at Christmas 1183 in Henry’s castle atChinon, France. At the time, the English empire included much land later becamepart of France.

Richard Baird, Kyle Sorrell, Jason Maddy,
Alexandra Grossi, Mark Pinter,
Kyle Roche and Kandis Chappell
Photo: Aaron Rumley

Beleaguered as Lear with old age and the disposition of hiskingdom, the lusty, 50-year-old Henry (potent Mark Pinter) convenes a Christmas court, during which heintends to untangle various succession and real estate knots. He invites hiswife, Eleanor (Kandis Chappell),whom he imprisoned ten years before for her part in an uprising. The coupleknow each other well, sharing a glittering and brainy love-hate relationshipthat rivals that of Shakespeare’s Benedick and Beatrice. Who’s on top changeswith quicksilver frequency. Also invited to court is the young French king,Phillip (Kyle Sorrell), whosehalf-sister, princess Alais (Alexandra Grossi), Richard II’s mistress of ten years, is to be wed,not to Richard II, but to one of his sons.

When Alais was a mere child, Richard and Eleanor took onraising the girl, who was promised at age 8 to their strongest, mostwarrior-like son, Richard (Richard Baird),who was destined to become Richard the Lionhearted. As for which of the threesons succeeds his father and marries Alais, Eleanor favors the youngest, John (KyleRoche), and Richard favors his namesake.The middle son, perhaps the most conniving, is Geoffrey (Jason Maddy), whom Eleanor envisions as John’s chamberlain. Thetwo Richards will have none of that. Weapons – real and verbal – are drawn,making for a heady evening of Who’s on First.

I can think of no company or director more equally matchedthan these to bring off this tricky piece, which can become sodden and boringin the wrong hands. The chance to see Baird, Chappell and Pinter again andtogether is worth the price of admission. Vocally, this trio of seasoned actors– wow, what fortissimos! – is in top form, and Chappell’s successive duets,emotion-freighted scenes with father and son, are the best in the play, addingcredibility to what otherwise might not make sense. And maybe still doesn’t,but who gives a damn.

Chris Luessmann’s sound design adds to the suspense indovetailing with Jason Bieber’s amazing lighting design: music, special,blackout in impressive succession. Only one miscue on opening night marredperfection. Marty Burnett’s scenic design employs arches and draperies todifferentiate place, dressed with Annie Bornhurst’s props and set dressing, andRenetta Lloyd provides mid-winter, period costumes with appropriate leather forRichard Lionheart. Yummy. Bravi, bravi, bravi!

‘Spring’ awakens again

Last year, Music Theatre International released theperformance rights to Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s Spring Awakening, unleashing a flood of productions by local youththeatres, the most recent of which, that of California Youth ConservatoryTheatre (CYCT), directed by Shaun T. Evans, is playing now through January 15 at WelkResort Theatre.

Spring Awakening isbased on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play (to be produced at UCSD February 3-11). The tragic story concerns pubescent kids living in sexuallyrepressive late 19^th century Germany.

There are three major characters, Melchoir, Moritz andWendla. Melchoir is extremely smart and self-assured and has radical ideasabout how kids are treated by parents and teachers. It is an autocratic,authoritarian, morally self-righteous society in which the biblicalspare-the-rod, spoil-the-child theory is practiced with vengeance.

Moritz is failing in his studies because of sleepdeprivation. Moritz has had his first “sticky” dreams, doesn’t understand, anddoesn’t have anyone with whom to talk. Melchoir defends Moritz when he bombs inLatin class, then provides him with advice, including a handmade book withillustrations of his own devising. It’s a kind of sex manual for the pubescentboy.

Schools are segregated according to sex, so Wendla and hergirlfriends, too, are going through pubescent angst without a compass. Wendla’solder sister has just given birth to a second child and Wendla insists on thetruth about conception. Her mother is unable to articulate the truth, so Wendlaremains ignorant. Ignorance and raging hormones lead to tragedy. No one tellsthe truth except the enlightened and curious Melchoir.

Among others, the rock musical received 2007 Tony Awards forbest musical and best music and lyrics. I’ve now seen the Broadway tour, LeighScarritt’s Coronado School of the Arts (CoSA) production in August, and bothcasts of the Ira Bauer-Spector directed American Rose Theatre production at SanDiego Repertory Theatre in November.

With its virtues and demerits, CYCT’s production, seen Sundaynight, supports my theory that the musical is nearly indestructible. If I hadmy druthers I’d take the best elements and performances of the threeaforementioned local productions and make one perfect show. Alas, druthers arenot mine.

The strength of Evans’ production lies largely in the vocalperformances. Merri Baehr as Wendla, Cydney Rothblatt as Ilse, Ivan Peña asMelchoir and Josh Pinkowski as Moritz are tops. Francesco Valenti as Hanschenand Ethan Eichman as Ernst provide a touching, well-sung scene. In fact, whenEichman unleashes his real, un-belt voice in one phrase of the duet reprise of“The Word of Your Body” it is a vocal moment to remember.

Eichman and Valenti
photo: Paul Smithand

Note: I have changed the caption on the above photo and also comments about the "unbelt" voice to reflect yet another request. The photo caption and the copy now reflect what I had captioned and written originally, then changed. No further changes will be made. I regret any errors and misattributions. CB

The acting of these principals is largely excellent. The production,however, has distracting imperfections. My friends, both new to the show,complained they understood at most only 60 percent of the text.

Sound and articulation, over the course of all my SpringAwakening viewing, is my constantcomplaint. Even though it is orchestrated for only eight pieces, amplificationand balance present problems.

With the orchestra in the back, the chorus spread out acrossthe entire Welk proscenium and the principals center stage, the disparategroups seem to have difficulty hearing one another, with several instances ofunder-pitch entrances and ragged tutti delivery. Gross offenders in the spokendiction department are the two actors portraying all the adults. KaceyRoss-McGrath in particular is almost impossible to understand because shepossesses a high-pitched, unfocussed speaking voice and never projects aconsonant. It doesn’t need to be louder, only lower and more defined by tongueand teeth. Much the same can be said for Matthew Roehl in his vocally unfocuseddelivery of the adult male roles.

Though comparisons are odious when it comes to youthfulperformances, Rothblatt, Baehr, Peña, Pinkowski, Valenti, and Eichman woulddefinitely be cast in my dream company for their touching portrayals and vocalbeauty.

My favorite songs are Wendla’s “Mama Who Bore Me,” Wendlaand Melchoir’s “The Word of Your Body,” Ilse’s “Blue Wind,” and Moritz, Wendlaand Melchoir’s devastating “Those You’ve Known.” And who could resist theensemble numbers “Bitch of Living,” “Totally Fucked,” and “The Song of PurpleSummer”?

I’m still waiting for the perfect production. Perhaps itdoes not exist. But I intend to keep trying. Meanwhile, kudos to CoSA, AmericanRose and CYT for bravely putting up this extremely complicated musical.

Spring Awakeningcontinues Thursday-Sunday through January 15 at Welk Resort Theatre, 8860 Lawrence Welk Dr., Escondido. Tickets and schedule at www.welktheatresandiego.com or(760) 749-3000. Additional information at www.cyctheatre.com.

A blast from the past

The Playbill® Club online newsletter, Inside Track, reports that onSunday last Richard Easton, Victor Garber, Patrick Page and Paxton Whitehead were joined by MamieGummer, Benjamin Walker and JenniferEhle in a reading of Tom Stoppard’s newadaptation of Pirandello’s Henry IV, directed by Jack O’Brien.Surely Raúl Moncada and Craig Noel were hovering somewhere nearby. That must be why I missed Raúl sokeenly this week. Under the auspices of Red Bull Theater’s Revelation readings,the event took place at Playwrights Horizons.

That’s all for this week, folks. I’ll file again after myreturn from colder climes.

Cultural 2011

2012-01-01T10:50:00.000-08:00

Ken Howard photo

The most stimulating cultural experiences of 2011

In no particular order and regardless of locale, the mostexciting and surprising cultural experiences of 2011 were as follows:

MUSIC

David Lang’s 2002opera The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, Long Beach Opera

Gian Carlo Menotti’s1963 operatic/cultural send-up, The Last Savage, directed by NedCanty, Santa Fe Opera

Santa Fe Opera

Antonio Vivaldi’s 1735 opera Griselda, directed by Peter Sellars, Santa Fe Opera

Art of Élan’sperformance of Wynton Marsalis’s A Soldier’s Tale with HassanEl-Amin as narrator.

La Jolla Symphony & Chorus’ excellent “noise”-making in December, whichcomprised Bela Bartok’s Cantata Profana, Györgi Ligeti’s PoèmeSymphonique for 100 Metronomes, IgorStravinsky’s Les Noces and DavidLang’s startling Grind to a Halt.

THEATRE

Leigh Scarritt’sproduction of Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s 2006 musical Spring Awakeningseen at Coronado School of the Arts. Staged with San Diego professional actorsplaying the adult roles and young people from local and regional trainingprograms as the students.

Ion theatre’sproduction of Angels in America, seen at San Diego RepertoryTheatre. Deserves kudos for bravery and excellence.

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival production of JesusChrist Superstar, directed by DesMcAnuff and seen at La Jolla Playhouse prior to its Broadway opening, set for March. Musically and vocally itwas the finest Superstar in my experience.

The Old Globe’sproduction of Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, a stunningensemble headed by the amazing Lois Markleas the family matriarch.

Foxworth in Superior Donuts

San Diego Repertory Theatre production of Tracy Letts’“lesser” play, Superior Donuts, with anextraordinary performance by Robert Foxworth.

New Village Arts’ production of John Steinbeck’s Of Miceand Men, a directorial breakthrough for DarenScott, a marvelous ensemble, and astonishing performances by MannyFernandes as Lennie and JustinLang as George.

Overlooked in the hubbub: Moxie’s fabulously funny production of Marisa Wegrzyn’s TenCent Night, featuring Karson St. John, Jennifer Eve Thorn and Justin Lang.

Linda Libby in ion theatre company's Gypsy.

Helena Marie Woods as June, Linda Libby as Mama Rose
and Katie Whalley as Louise
Photo courtesy ion theatre company

North Coast Repertory Theatre’s moving production of David Posner’s My Name IsAsher Lev, an adaptation of Chaim Potok’s novel, with outstanding performances by David Ellenstein and Craig De Lorenzo.

And let us not forget Ellenstein’s theatrical coup inbringing together Jonathan McMurtry, Ray Reinhardt and Ken Ruta for his production of Heroes plus an unforgettable nightof theatrical chitchat, even more memorable than the men’s performances.

Rosina Reynolds’performance as Amanda in Sean Murray’s Cygnet Theatre productionof The Glass Menagerie.

Francis Gercke, Rosina Reynolds and Amanda Sitton
in The Glass Menagerie
Photo J.T. MacMillan

The extraordinary ensemble of La Jolla Playhouse’s production of David Schweizer’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.

A new kind of musical that invites one to imagine: SleepingBeauty Wakes by Rachel Sheinkin,music by Brendan Milburn and lyrics by ValerieVigoda.

In the most promising category: Matthew Lopez’s Somewhere at the Old Globe.

Diversionary Theatre’sproduction of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II directed by RichardBaird.

For the Shavians among us: The Old Globe’s well spoken,gorgeously designed production of John Morogiello’s Engaging Shaw.

B. Slade’sperformance in the title role of The Who’s Tommy at San DiegoRepertory Theatre.

A vow for the new year: As much as time and stamina allow, Iwill attend more concerts presented by San Diego Symphony, Mainly Mozart and LaJolla Music Society.

Nightmare and what I did for love

2011-12-15T08:43:00.000-08:00

Ken Howard photo

Charlene Baldridge sketch

This will be Charlene and Brenda’s final communiqué for theyear; that is, unless Brenda convinces Charlene to produce a year-end bestlist, which Charlene hates to do. Such a list usually becomes a “Charlene lovedit; everybody else hated it” affair. And Charlene always leaves someone out.Truly, excellence is frequently overlooked, even when it smacks us rightbetween the eyes.

One of the Critics Circle members just sent the rest of us a list of openingsfor the first two months of 2012. Again, theatre companies schedule productionswith little awareness what the other guy is doing, occasioning pileup weekendswhen the conscientious critic must see five productions just to keep up.

My schedule is complicated by San Diego Opera openings, San Diego Symphony concerts. Plugging into activitiesin the nearby elsewhere becomes an enormous challenge – things like trips northto hear operas in L.A. and Long Beach, and Gustavo Dudamel’s realization ofGustav Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousandat the Shrine Auditorium. These cannot be missed if I’m to live my “one wildand precious life” (Mary Oliver) to the fullest. I intend to smell the roses and if my theatre coverage isnot timely or even becomes non-existent, so be it. Besides, I’m getting extremely crankyand hard to control. Just ask Brenda.

Let’s blame it on Brenda

Out of the goodness of her heart, Brenda persuaded Charleneto see Talent to aMuse’s Emilia’s Sugarplum Nightmare, written by George Weinberg-Harter and Gail West.Weinberg-Harter wrote lyrics, and the music is composed by Marje Fiene andarranged for keyboard by Pam Monroe, who accompanies the show. O.P. Hadlockdirects the piece, which features Dacia Bond as Emilia; Sandy Hotchkiss Gullansas Gramma/Mrs. Claus; West as Balthazarina; Weinberg-Harter as Gaspar; ChrisFonseca as Melchoir; Lena Jones as Effie the Elf; and Markuz Rodriguez asSanta.

As Brenda looks over Charlene’s shoulder, begging her to bekind and constructive instead of tired and cranky, Charlene considers andrejects use of the word Nightmare.

The 90-minute Emilia's Sugarplum Nightmare is presented in the nicelyappointed and comfortable Liberty Hall Theatre, located on the second floor ofthe reception building at Paradise Village retirement community, 2700 E. 4^thAve., National City. It sure beats Talent to aMuse’s former venue, which hadfolding chairs. Liberty Hall was Brenda’s major inducement. One may think, ugh,National City, but really, it’s only a15-minute drive from Hillcrest.

Fonseca and Bond

The script, which attempts way too much, concerns Emilia’snightmare characters, the three Magi, Santa Claus and an obstreperous elf, whoengage in Trial by Jury-likedisputations over each group’s self-perceived ascendancy in the hierarchy ofreligion and myth. It is extremely fraught and convoluted, requiring much ofthe listener, especially as delivered by community actors at full throttle.Less would be more. There are eight musical numbers. More music would bewelcome along with less disputation and dialogue.

West, Weinberg-Harter and Fonseca

The funniest visual of the show concerns the Magi’s trip tothe South Pole to debunk the Santa Workshop myth. Weinberg-Harter becomes thesled dog, Fonseka the sled, and West the driver. West’s costumes andheaddresses are eye-catching. Hadlock and Gullans’ choreography is a plus,especially for Gramma and Emilia’s opening number, “Beware of Sugar Tango.”There is also a nice arrangement of Harold Darke’s “In the Bleak Midwinter.” Bond,a sophomore at San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts, has a sweetvoice and presence to match.

The players and creators work very hard to entertain. Theirsincerity is overwhelming. The production exemplifies the true meaning of the word“amateur,” which is “lover of.” It’s what we pursue because we must, regardlessof the reward.

Emilia’s Sugarplum Nightmare continues through December 22. For information go to http://www.talenttoamuse.com/ All Sugarplum production stills courtesy Michelle Johnson, Photo Baby Photography

Happy Holidays

I wish happy holidays to all my readers and to all theatrelovers and music lovers everywhere. In case you missed seeing it on my personal web site,here is my grumpy Christmas poem:

Drink your milk

Must I drink the milk you left out with those cookies?

It’s started to curdle, and I’m lactose intolerant.

Besides, I’m not in a giving mood.

Furthermore, I left a lump of coal in your stocking.

You’ve not been very good this year.

Some Lovers, Superstar, Mayhem and Faust

2011-12-12T09:48:00.000-08:00

Ken Howard photo

An eclectic week

The last show of the year in a local LORT (League of Resident Theatres) theatre openedFriday night at The Old Globe. Saturday at the cinema, I caught the Live in HDbroadcast of Des McAnuff’s MetropolitanOpera production of Faust and, that evening, this year’s version of Mayhem, Music and Mistletoe at North Coast Rep.

Thursday, Dec. 9, I revisited McAnuff’s Jesus ChristSuperstar. Arelative came to visit and asked me to get tickets – and not a moment too soon.I was fortunate to purchase the last three tickets in what turned out to beThursday’s sold out performance. It also turned out to be the first publicperformance by Tom Hewitt in therole of Pontius Pilate.

JCSS redux

Tom Hewitt courtesy La Jolla Playhouse

Tom Hewitt, whoplayed the title role in Dracula sodeliciously at La Jolla Playhouse has stepped in to perform the role ofPontius Pilate in Jesus Christ Superstarat the Mandell Weiss Theatre. The production, which originated at the StratfordShakespeare Festival last May, continues through December 31. My review appears at La Jolla Village News.

A press announcement dated December 7 states that Broadwayveteran Hewitt will play Pontius Pilate for a limited engagement at the Playhouse. According to Pam Kragen in The North County Times, Hewitt willplay the role only briefly, perhaps to place him in consideration for Broadway casting.Meanwhile, Jeremy Kushnier will return to the role to complete the Playhouserun.

In a switcheroo redolent of San Diego Opera’s Ahab (Moby-Dick), Kushnier replaced the originalStratford Pilate, Brent Carver, who withdrew due to vocal fatigue. The Moby-Dick switch had more to do with contracts and releasesthan with vocal difficulties. As for Jesus Christ Superstar, contracts for the Broadway engagement, beginning inMarch, have not been finalized.

Pilate, which Hewitt plays with gravitas and subduedsardonic flair, suits him wonderfully. His voice is exceptionally solid addingeven further vocal excellence to the production, which on second viewing Istill believe is the best JCSS I’ve everheard musically. As I told my friends last night, these people sing solegitimately that they are in it for the long haul – in this show and whateverthey do for the rest of their lives, their voices will remain healthy.

Hearing Jesus Christ Superstar again – this time as a “civilian” –

allowed me to relax and to further appreciate the fine workdone by all. I’m even more impressed with Lee Siegel’s immense presence asSimon Zealotes. And I’m even more convinced that McAnuff and actor Paul Nolan’sunconventional concept of the SuperstarJesus is intentional and to be treasured. Everyone around Jesus is so intense.Jesus says he’s tired now that it’s almost over, and no one believes him. Theperformance reflects Jesus’ fatigue and resignation.

Jesus Christ Superstarcontinues through December 31. Go to www.lajollaplayhouse.org

Some Lovers

Based on the performance Friday, Dec. 9, Burt Bacharach’snew musical, Some Lovers, is a pleasant,relaxing evening staged by Will Frears, well sung by four performers, andorchestrated by the great Jonathan Tunick. I know what musical staging (DenisJones) is, and also what music supervision (Lon Hoyt) is, but I was brought upshort with a credit called vocal design (AnnMarie Milazzo). That’s a new one on me, so I asked someone whocalls himself one, got no response, and then checked out Milazzo’s web site.She’s a composer/lyricist/vocal arranger and singer whose credits as anarranger include Spring Awakeningand Next to Normal. Maybe vocaldesign is a new, highfaluting term for arranger.

(left) Michelle Duffy as Molly and Jason Danieley as Ben and (right) Jenni Barber and Andrew Mueller

Photo: Henry DiRocco

Whatever. Chock-a-block with new Bacharach songs that soundlike one song through sung (you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, I guess) anda book by Steven Sater, who also wrote lyrics for the 18 songs. The best are atrio titled “Ready to Be Done With You” and the closing tune “This Christmas.”During the course of the two-hour show, the book strives to make a meaningfuland true connection with O. Henry’s classic short story, “The Gift of theMagi.” Shallow as they are, sacrifices are made.

Some Lovers concernstwo couples that are actually one couple, Ben and Molly, at different ages.It’s a cute invention. The mature couple’s interaction with naïve youngerselves that can’t possibly foretell the outcome and who chide and think theyknow better, is protracted.

Danieley and Duffy
Photo Henry DiRocco

Why didn’t this couple just move on when things didn’t workout? Neither is a prize. And what, exactly, did they/do they see in oneanother? She is not George Sand – so, she gives him a hugely expensive Steinway– and he is not Chopin, just a hack songwriter. When it is apparent his connectionwith a successful female singer might bring him the recognition he deserves,the jealous Molly insists he forsake that relationship. So, with Molly and Benit must be physical attraction, then, right?

Demonstration of physical attraction is mostly assigned tothe younger selves (appealing Andrew Mueller and Jenni Barber) and they do aconvincing job. When the other couple (Jason Danieley and Michelle Duffy)finally gets it on in the curve of the grand piano, it is steamy.

All four singers deserve better material. Danieley couldsing War and Peace and I’d listen to allsix hours. Ultimately this is not War and Peace, merely a musical trying to find a song, or two, oreven three. And then there’s the book: Do Ben and Molly have a chance? Nah.Does this little musical? Not in my book, but it is Bacharach and people lovetheir Bacharach.

Two baby grand pianos – one white, one ebony – and akeyboard are scattered around the stage in the Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre.The white piano is situated in the cocktail lounge where Ben and Molly meet,and the ebony represents the Steinway she gives him as they head towardcohabitation. Takeshi Kata is scenic designer; Jenny Mannis, costume designer;Ben Stanton, lighting designer; and Leon Rothenberg, sound designer.

Lon Hoyt is music supervisor and presumably conducts thesubterranean eight-piece orchestra, a feat of theatrical magic. Such feats aregrowing more common these days.

In case Bacharach is your bag, this world premiere musicalcontinues through December 31. See www.theoldglobe.orgor phone (619) 23-GLOBE for details.

Mistletoe, Music & Mayhem

Last season, North Coast Repertory Theatre commissionedstaffer Matt Thompson to write a holiday piece, which evolved into a musical. Thompson enlisted as co-creators a cadre of local artists. Comic Phil Johnson andcomposer/pianist Rayme Sciaroni joined Thompson in the book writing andSciaroni, who wrote the music, directs along with Thompson.

The evening begins with pre-curtain warm up delivered by animpersonal, unseen voice, which gives ridiculous instructions, then says “Dothis now.”

Mistletoe, Music & Mayhemis a series of gleeful, wacky sketches that involve five facilesinger/comedians, Kevin Koppman-Gue, Tony Houck, B.J. Lawrence, Heather Patonand Jacque Wilke. First the audience is swept into a wild trip around the worldto discover holiday customs in Sweden, Spain, Japan, Germany, and Russia. Eachun-PC sketch sends up holiday practices and national character. ValerieHenderson’s costume designs are hilarious. And one assumes that prop designer AnnieBornhurst is responsible for Houck’s outrageous Baby Jesus puppet.

Tony Houck

Lawrence portrays Santa, and it is worth the price ofadmission just to watch him wriggle his girth into imaginary chimneys orencounter a tough lady gangster who lies in wait for him. Santa’s sleigh isguided by GPS throughout the universe. Santa has a sweet scene with a younggirl (Paton), who insists that he “Dance with Me, Santa,” one of Sciaroni’sbest songs. Wilke is a master comedian and Koppman-Gue is everyone’s adorablestraight man.

My favorite sketch is the last, which involves the company portraying individual carolers who claim the same territory” “This is where Ialways sing,” says Koppman-Gue. When the singers collide Sciaroni masterfullyinterweaves carols, among them “Silent Night,” “Deck the Halls,” “Away in aManger,” and “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.”

Jacque Wilke

Performed without interval, the 90-minute show is just thething to lift one’s spirits when they flag from too much sugar plums and fruitcake. There’s something to offend justabout everyone here. Five performances remain at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, Dec.15-17, and 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday, December 18, North Coast Repertory Theatre,987-D Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Solana Beach, www.northcoastrep.orgor (858) 481-1055.

Other productions

Coming to NCRT: Impro Theatre presents An UnscriptedCarol December 19-20, and Sister’sChristmas Catechism plays December 21-24.

Again this year, Daren Scott portrays a misogynist elf in DavidSedaris’ The Santaland Diaries. Thispiece plays through December 24 and it might just turn your crank at 8 p.m.Thursdays-Saturdays, 3 p.m. Saturdays or 2 p.m. Sundays, 2787 State Street,Carlsbad Village, www.newvillagearts.orgor (760) 433-3245.

McAnuff’s Faust seenin Met Live in HD

Jonas Kaufmann and Rene Pape watch the villagers
Photo: Ken Howard

Opera lovers gathered at AMC Mission Valley to see DesMcAnuff’s production of Charles Gounod’s Faust, starring a company of notable singers: German tenor Jonas Kaufmann inthe title role, Russian soprano Marina Poplavskaya as Marguerite, Canadianmezzo-soprano Michéle Losier in the pants role of Siebel; Canadian baritoneRussell Braun as Valentin, Marguerite’s brother; and German bass-baritone RenéPape as Méphistophélès.

In McAnuff’s sharply criticized concept, Faust isan atomic scientist tortured by what his science has wrought. As he sings hisbaritone-range lament, victims of the devastation cross the stage. When the godupon whom Faust calls for succor fails to answer, Méphistophélès appears,offering the suffering scientist youth in exchange for his soul. Briefly,Méphistophélès and Faust time-travel back to WWI – a simpler time – and thereFaust seduces Marguerite, whose brother goes off to war leaving Siebel toprotect her. Youthful ardor and good intentions are no match for youth andbeauty abetted by Beelzebub.

Faust abandon’s Marguerite and her unborn child, which shedrowns in the baptismal font in McAnuff’s staging. Faust is conscience stricken and insists thatMéphistophélès take him to Marguerite, who by this time insane, awaitsexecution. Heavenly hosts sing of salvation as Marguerite ascends to heaven,and Méphistophélès and Kaufmann descend on a stage trap elevator to the netherworld. McAnuff returns the older Faust to his laboratory at this point and hedrinks the poison he prepared in the first scene – oh, no! The entire opera wasmerely a flashback!

Of course this “take,” which doesn’t consistently hold up,incensed both puritans and critics, and in the HD broadcast one can hear theboos that greeted the former Playhouse artistic director. Robert Brill designedthe industrial framework with spiral staircases and two levels of balconies onthe sides. There is a striking similarity between Brill’s set and that of JesusChrist Superstar, soon to hit New York City.McAnuff does large awfully well.

We witnessed two other productions of Faust this year, a traditional concept in San Diego andtime-tampered production in Santa Fe. Neither was so wonderfully sung as the Met’s, whichenjoys the benefit of conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin in the pit.

Pape has a blast with Méphistophélès. McAnuff’s idea ofclothing him and Faust identically after the transformation is a hoot. All Ican say about Poplavaskaya is she’s got the biggest jaw since Sutherland. Hersinging is fine but she is not a beauty. Braun was a powerful Valentin andLosier just fine as Siebel.

I find Kaufmann an extraordinary artist, extremely ardent upclose in HD. Though he has been singing Wagner of late at the Met and Faust isa lyric tenor role, he puts any doubts to rest with a magnificent vocal feat inthe love duet – the diminuendo made in heaven. Surely Faust goes to heaven,just on the strength of that moment.

As the Woman in the Ladies Room said afterwards, she intendsto return, and Kaufmann will be exactly the same next time. That’s oneadvantage of Met Live in HD. I still say there is no substitute for the liveexperience, but you know, I may just return myself.

In further news

Andreas Mitisek, artistic and general director of Long BeachOpera, has been chosen to take over as general director of Chicago OperaTheatre when their current director, Brian Dickie, retires. Mitisek will remainat Long Beach Opera, leading both companies beginning in September 2012. Bothof these opera companies perform fare that is off the beaten path. There willundoubtedly be some sharing in the future. This year, we saw Mitisek's extraordinaryproductions of Philip Glass’ Ahknatenand David Lang’s The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. The coming LBO season includes the U.S. premiere ofGavin Bryars’ The Paper Nautilus tobe performed at the Aquarium of the Pacific, and Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar, to be performed outdoors against the backdrop of adeserted six-story office building in downtown Long Beach.

Andreas Mitisek, courtesy Long Beach Opera

Mitisek believes that while opera companies nationwide haveretreated to safer, more conservative repertoire, audiences are longing formore than standard repertoire. He must know something: since the recessionbegan in 2008 LBO has seen a 500 percent rise in subscriptions.

That's all for this week, folks. Check out my personal blog if you wish. And happy holidays to all.

Shostakovich, Stravinsky and George Bailey

2011-12-06T06:22:00.001-08:00

Ken Howard photo

The Russian weekend

Initially, the weekend took Brenda and me around the world –from an uncompleted Shostakovich opera titled Orango to an old woman’s hovel in Vigil. When our friend David asked if we’d like to stayover after Orango and see a playwith Olympia Dukakis at the Mark Taper Forum the next day, hecouldn’t remember the name of the play; but I said I’d see Dukakis in anythingso he made the reservations and off we went.

The Music Center Plaza was filled with tulle-clad toddlerson their way to see their first Nutcracker.David and I settled down with memories and chicken salad sandwiches, ponderinghow many Nutcrackers we’d seenand heard in our journalistic careers.

Sunday found us at UCSD for La Jolla Symphony & Chorus. Afterwards, I had dinner with my best girlfriend and then solo went on to see Cygnet's It's a Wonderful Life.

All this and more, below:

Vigil at the MarkTaper Forum

I was delighted to note that one of my favorite actors, MarcoBarricelli, was playing opposite OlympiaDukakis in Vigil, and aboutfive minutes into Morris Panych’s 1995play, which he also directs at the Taper, I realized this is the two-hander sosuccessfully played by Ron Choularton and the late Katherine Faulconer in SanDiego. They did the play three times in San Diego (beginning in 1996 with the U.S. premiere at the Fritz) ere they departed to a month-longsuccess at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1998. “She loved every minute ofit,” Ron says. Ron reminds me he received a Fringe award for acting, andKatherine, 81, was honored as the oldest actor.

When Ron first told Katherine he had a two-person script shemight like to do with him, she pleaded the difficulty of learning lines. He saidthat all she had to do was lie abed for most of the show, and that the playcalled for only 14 lines. She said, “Give me the script.”

One imagines a similar appeal for Dukakis, who was born in1931. How better to celebrate your 80^th birthday year? She isbrilliant, of course, and so is Barricelli, whom I’ve seen at OregonShakespeare Company, American Theatre Company, and the Old Globe. Theproduction originated at American Conservatory Theatre last March. Barricelli is artistic director ofShakespeare Santa Cruz and Dukakis is perhaps best known for the televisionseries “Tales of the City.” Veteran of hundreds of productions on and offBroadway, she received an Academy Award for Moonstruck. She couldmake the phonebook engrossing.

Dukakis is mute and multifaceted as the auntie, who speaksonly a few lines. It isn’t that she can’t speak, she’s just afraid to. Mostly,the part consists of reacting to the nephew’s monologue about an awful, misfitchildhood as an incipient homosexual and his asexual, unfulfilled and damagedadulthood. “And where were you?” heasks, recalling her one unforgettable visit. She smiles and stays mum.

More than, or less than, a play, Vigil begins with series of macabre one-liners and punchline blackouts. As in San Diego, the actors are the play’s raisond’etre. I like Panych’s turn from blackness to ultimatesentimentality and pathos. The Saturday matinee audience accorded the actors astanding ovation. And like many others at the Forum Saturday I was deeplytouched. The decade-plus since I’d last kept Vigil had been just long enough for me to forget the exactunfolding of the surprise, so I was surprised anew.

The design team does exemplary work here, one supposesrecreating their work for ACT. Ken MacDonald’s costumes are redolent of long days and nights abed and, inBarricelli’s case, self-absorption to the point of hygienic neglect. Dukakisnight/day clothes are priceless.

MacDonald’s creepy flat, with a million windows on thestreet below, each pane with its own patina, might be Violetta’s last apartment inParis, or the garrett in La bohème; thedetails transmit a great sense of the world beyond, which apparently is just asjumbled as the world within. The set dressing reminds one of ThePrice at The Old Globe’s temporary ArenaStage in 2009. Here, as there, ushers discouraged audience members tempted topoke around at the interval and following the play.

Vigil continuesthrough December 18 at the Mark Taper Forum, Center Theatre Group at the MusicCenter, 135 Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles, www.centertheatregroup.org (213)628-2722.

The first of the weekend’s Russian encounters

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s world premiere performance ofthe recently discovered Prologue to Dmitri Shostakovich’s never-written opera, Orango, was theprimary reason for our weekend excursion to the Music Center. The Prologue didnot disappoint, and it set up a certain, sad and an irrational longing for whatnever came to be, namely, the rest of the opera. When director Peter Sellarsexpressed this sentiment in the lecture prior to the performance he became positively verklempt.

Director Peter Sellars
Photo: Courtesy of the artist

The concert also featured a stunning performance ofShostakovich's Symphony No. 4, which was described in the lecture as an extensionof the Orango Prologue. Many times, the powers thatwere had suppressed performance of Shostakovich’s symphonies, interruptingthe rehearsal process with an edict that it would not be performed.Shostakovich withheld performance of the Fourth Symphony for 25 years.

The story of Orango comesfrom an era (1932) in which much fiction and film worldwide concerned itselfwith fear of rampant scientific experimentation. Orango is half ape, half man,created by the insemination of a female ape with sperm from a biologist. Withlibretto by Alexander Starchakov and science-fiction writer Alexei Tolstoy (English translation, copyright 2011 byGerard McBurney), the Prologue introduces, among others, A Voice from the Crowd(bass Jordan Bisch), Orango (baritone Eugene Brancoveanu), a kind of emceeknown as The Entertainer (baritone Ryan McKinney), a Zoologist (tenor MichaelFabiano), and Susanna, a victim of attempted rape (soprano Yulia Van Doren).

Baritone Brancoveneau
Photo: Robert Bengston

Orango escapes his cage (Brancoveneau is impressively agile), incited by Susanna’s red hair.Sellars seats the soprano in the front row of the audience, from whence shesings her initial pleas for help. An actual Disney Hall guard attempts to restrain theeducated ape man, who is eventually soothed and re-caged.

Orango was intendedfor the official celebration of the 15^th anniversary of the OctoberRevolution. The music itself is noisy, rambunctious wildness (on the podiumEsa-Pekka Salonen managed the chaos, which included an immense percussionsection, so fun to watch). If the music were not enough to cause censure, thebook is so incendiary that it likely would have gotten Shostakovich and theothers into even hotter water.

Esa-Pekka Salonen
Photo: Karen Robinson

Director Peter Sellars stresses certain resonances, then andnow, with projections of street demonstrations then and now. Shots of thestreet traffic and buildings puts one in mind of the Godrey Reggio film, Koyaanisqatsi(Life Out of Balance). Seated behind theorchestra and backed by a tremendous projection screen, the Los Angeles Master Chorale represents workers, who extol the1917 Bolshevik victory and celebrate their release from serfdom. We also see the great ballerina Pavlova juxtaposed monkey experiments. Protest images are projected from Russian history and from present day OccupyWall Street (OWS) demonstrations in L.A. and elsewhere.

Two days before the concert, 1,200 undercover police hadcleared out the OWS encampment near City Hall and arrested 200. We heard that OWSwas reforming Saturday, and indeed, as we ate our sandwiches helicopters hoveredover the City Hall area, several blocks from the Music Center.

The preconcert lecture and further encounters

Sellars hosted the pre-concert lecture titled UpbeatLive. Others were Dmitri Shostakovich’swidow Irina Shoshtakovich, British composer Gerard McBurney, who wascommissioned in 2008 by Mme. Shostakovich to orchestrate the surviving sketchesof the Prologue to Orango; leadingSoviet-era musicologist and chief archivist of Dmitri Shostakovich, Dr. OlgaDigonskaya, who discovered the manuscript in 2004; and Laurel E. Fay, author ofShostakovich: A Life (OxgordUniversity Press, 2000). Fay translated remarks by Digonskaya and Shostakovich.

The three women appeared Saturday morning as theybreakfasted in our hotel. We did not wish to intrude or to impose upon Fay tobe our translator, so we just smiled, nodded, mimed applause and said, “Bravi.”They had more lectures to deliver, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon.

We encountered arts patron Jeannette Stephens who’d come toL.A. to see the Joffrey Ballet’s Nutcracker. And at Disney, also hearing Orango, Ian Campbell and his wife Ann Spira Campbell. It’s a smallworld, after all.

Another Russian

Steven Schick

Sunday afternoon my friend Liliane and I attended LaJolla Symphony & Chorus’ AncientNoises, a fascinating blend of what Music Director Steven Schickdescribed in his pre-concert talk as noise and the attempt to make sense ofnoise through ritual. He admitted his fascination with noise, quoting composerJohn Luther Adams statement: “Noise is the breath of the world.” In answer to aquestion Schick said, “Noise is never not music. It is the agency of art and the essence of poetry.”

The concert program began with Bang on a Can co-founderDavid Lang’s Grind to a Halt, which was originally commissioned by SanFrancisco Opera. Upon receiving the completed work, the conductor decided hedidn’t like it, a blow to any young composer (b. 1957). Six years later, Lang(he wrote the opera The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, performed at Long Beach Opera last year and reviewedhere) received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for The Little Match Girl Passion. Hemade two phone calls, according to Shick. The first was to his wife, somethinglike “Honey, guess what?” The second was to San Francisco Symphony, some thinglike, “Hey, I was just awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Are you going to play thatpiece now?”

Grind to a Halt is anangry, relentless, explosive piece written in response to the death of Lang’steacher Jacob Druckman. It begins with percussive, industrial sounds likeanvils accompanied by ascending, long bow-strokes on the strings. There arecertain moments in which an almost vocal sound emerges from the orchestra, likewomen singing as they wander through the noise, but I was not able to identify the source ofthe sound. The piece ends loudly, wildly in mid-phrase. Much to my delight, the sudden silence caught someone talking very loudly. Moments like this make the concert experience unique.

Next we heard Bela Bartók’s lovely 1930 Cantata Profana, conducted by David Chase, who led orchestra,antiphonal chorus, and soloists, tenor Chad Frisque and bass Philip Larson.Sunday afternoon the English text was largely unintelligible.

Larson, who portrays the patriarch of seven sons so feralthey turn into stags, managed to convey the text in a section that implores hisfavorite son-turned-stag (Frisque) to lead the others home to their unhappymother. Alas, the slender bucks’ antlers have grown so large they would not fitthrough the door; besides, they’ve crossed the bridge into the forest. Poeticsymbolism to be sure, and it is the lament of every parent who must letoffspring go, to grow and become themselves and sometimes never to return.

Sadly, instead of allowing his voice to be free, Frisquecovers it with an odd, manufactured sound that has no “point” or“masque” and obfuscates articulation of the text. It’s a shame because this isbasically a lovely voice.

During the interval, the stage was cleared to accommodatefour pianos with a platform upstage to hold a small number of musicians andsingers. Dancers from Lux Boreal (choreographed by Allyson Green) placed 100metronomes around the periphery of stage and two areas on opposite sides of theaudience. This set up for Györgi Ligeti’s 1962 work, Poème Symphonique for100 Metronomes, which were provided byMusiqa. Each wind-up device is set at a different speed and all are set offsimultaneously. Metronomes and tempi being what they are, the originalcacophony trails off, eventually leaving only a few, which gradually expire.

Just before the last tick is tocked, Schick gave thedownbeat for Igor Stravinsky’s 1923 Les Noces (The Wedding). The composer called it a theater piece and subtitledit “Russian choreographic scenes with song and music.” The score utilizes fourvocal soloists, a four-part chorus, percussion (provided by Red Fish Blue Fish,UCSD’s percussion ensemble), four pianos and a dance troupe. Again, we have thesadness that comes with departures. On the parts of the reluctant bride andbridegroom, it’s the sheer terror of the ritual and the fear of leaving home.Briseda Lopez and Matthew Armstrong of Lux Boreal Contemporanea Danza portrayand gloriously dance the wedding pair.

Attractively costumed in folkloric style, 28 additional dancersand players fill the dramatic ritual, enacted in four scenes that attempt tomake sense of the chaotic rituals attending the ceremony that changes every life forever. The bells areincessant; the most unforgettable scene that of the two mothers, gathering upthe long ribbons that bound their offspring.

The juxtaposition of all the weekend’s images, visual andmusical, which include Orango, TheVigil, the Shostakovich symphony, noise byLang and Ligeti and the ritual tying it all together – the gathering oflisteners and watchers seated to attend – would have filled any psyche andpoetic sensibility to overflowing. In the case of this particularwatcher/listener, I, as Sellars, am verklempt.

The last radio play

Through December 31, Cygnet Theatre presents its sixthannual production of Joe Landry’s adaptation, It’s a Wonderful Life: A LiveRadio Play. Many of the usual suspects –Tom Andrew, Jonathan Dunn-Rankin, Melissa Fernandes, Veronica Murphy, AmandaSitton and Tim West – are joined by Jason Connors, Patrick Osteen, and musicdirector/keyboardist Billy Thompson to enact the classic film, set at a NewYork City radio station on Christmas Eve.

It’s about to snow outside, and indeed it wouldn’t havesurprised me Sunday night to emerge from the theatre and see flakes falling impossibly from a clear, cold sky.

Tom Andrew as George Bailey
Photo: Daren Scott

Shirley Pierson’s costumes are always a delight and so areMichelle Caron’s lighting and Matt Lescault-Wood’s sound. Director Sean Murraydesigned the detailed set. The performances of these seasoned actors are soassured that after a number of years they wear their characters like gloves.Connors steps in as sound guy for former sound fx guy Scott Pearson and Osteen is in for DavidMcBean. Both are cast in other local projects this holiday season. A Wonderful Life survives, but only for this year. Then Cygnet is onto other fare. It was a great run.

Jonathan Dunn Rankin, Tim West, Veronica Murphy
Photo: Daren Scott

Each year one expects to be blasé about the piece, but like AChristmas Carol it touches new places inthe heart, depending upon what the year has brought in the way of joy, painand sorrow. When George Bailey finds he’s lived a wonderful life after all, it makes us feel better too. What a great family show this is and what agreat holiday afternoon or night out – dinner in Old Town and a heartwarmingshow. For tickets and schedule, go to www.cygnettheatre.com.

Just one more time, for the road.

That’s all for this week, folks. Coming up next week arereviews of The Old Globe’s world premiere Burt Bacharach musical, SomeLovers, and North Coast Repertory Theatre’sMistletoe, Music and Mayhem! Thelatter has music by Rayme Sciaroni and book by Phil Johnson and Matt Thompson.

Then we might go “home” for the holidays!

Art of Elan, Jesus and runaway criminals

2011-12-02T08:39:00.001-08:00

Thoughts ere I depart

Ken Howard photo
Charlene and Niki de Saint Phalle sculpture

Out of the Gallery

Art of Élan movedits November 29 program – and apparently the remainder of its season – from theHibben Gallery to Copley Auditorium at The San Diego Museum of Art.

The setup is warm, with projected logos on the wall behind acommodious platform and the audience on three sides, seated in the auditorium’snicely padded chairs. As a bonus, beverages are available before, during andafter the concert, but blessedly, no popcorn.

The program comprised the entirety of jazz artist Wynton Marsalis’1998 Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center commissioned work titled AFiddler’s Tale, written with musicwriter/author Stanley Crouch. A Fiddler’s Tale is their response to, or American “take” on, IgorStravinsky and Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz’ L’histoire du soldat. Crouch’s spoken text concerns Beatrice Connors’encounter with the Devil, a “player” known as BZB (get it?), a record companyexecutive who sweet talks the innocent young woman into letting him manage hercareer. He delivers fame and fortune, and she, everything.

The text is deliciously seductive and rhythmic as deliveredby Hassan El-Amin, who varies pitch andintensity beautifully. His 11^th hour rap is wondrous. My favoritelines are BZB’s “Learning to whore might be a chore, but you’ll never be poor”and “Corruption is just a job, like everything else.”

Influenced by L’histoire dusoldat (A Soldier’s Tale) Marsalis expandson Stravinsky’s original elements of jazz, ragtime and classical, composing awork that utilizes Stravinsky’s orchestration, and scoring the piece for aseven-piece chamber group, here Kate Hatmaker, violin; Jory Herman, doublebass; Terri Tunnicliff, clarinet; Valentin Martchev, bassoon; Andrew Elstrob,trumpet; Kyle Covington, trombone; and Andy Watkins, percussion. The playingwas joyous, evincing a true camaraderie, one of the hallmarks of Art of Élan.

Art of Élan’s season continuesMarch 27 with a program titled Lianjie,which incorporates Jean Isaacs’ San Diego Dance Theatre and music by Bright Sheng, Steve Reich and anarrangement of the Korean folksong “Arirang” by local jazz pianist GeoffreyKeezer.

Jesus Christ Superstar in La Jolla

Josh Young as Judas Iscariot
Photo:David Hau

La Jolla Playhouse presents the Stratford Festival production of Jesus Christ Superstar through December 31. Don't miss seeing this fantastic musical revival before it goes on to a March opening on Broadway. Musically it's the best JCSS I've seen, and I've seen a few. I've been a fan since the first, 33-1/3 concept album came out.

Chilina Kennedy as Mary Magdalene,
Paul Nolan as Jesus of Nazareth
Photo: David Hau

There are numerous Jesus Christ Superstar albums, ranging from the original London conceptalbum to the London and Broadway productions, the 1973 film score, ananniversary recording and various others, but the day the Stratford ShakespeareFestival’s Broadway cast album hits the market, this particular writer will befirst in line, or on line. It’s the best-sung production I’ve ever heard. SeeCharlene’s review at La Jolla Village News next Thursday.

Bonnie & Clyde opens on Broadway

At least two New York reviewers made much of the ampersandused in the musical’s title, Bonnie & Clyde. They might have put their space to better use by more thoroughlyexploring the music and the performances, and it’s quite obvious those two haveaxes to grind.

The show, which premiered at La Jolla Playhouse last year,is directed/choreographed by Jeff Calhoun, was generally trashed by the NewYork critics, including The New York Times’ Ben Brantley. The stars are Laura Osnes, who created the role of Bonnie in LaJolla, and Jeremy Jordan, recently seen on Broadway in Rock of Ages.

Something about Frank Wildhorn sets off animosity whetherhere or in New York. The most balanced and thorough review I’ve read so far isthat of Associated Press drama writer Mark Kennedy.

I'm spending the weekend in Los Angeles again and Brenda promises a full report next week.

Ragnarok and Anne Frank

2011-11-28T06:15:00.001-08:00

Turkey, Ragnarok and AnneFrank at last

Dave Siccardi Photo

I'm recovering from two days of turkey proffered by friends Garry and Rick, whose board groaned with roasted birds and beasts and whose home on separate days of celebrating was filled with warmth, extraordinary camaraderie, brainy and loving people, two placid Labs and wondrous, handsome, life-affirming children.

Charlene come lately

FLASH, THIS JUST IN: OnStage performances listed below are all sold out! They have just added another performance at 7 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 4.

Despite the urging of colleagues there was no way I couldmake time in June for Circle Circle dot dot’s inaugural production, TheBreakup Breakdown.

Currently through December 10, the geometric companypresents a tristesse original comedytitled Ragnarok, set in San Diegoand featuring actors that wheedle their way into one’s affections in just 90minutes. Playwright Katherine Harroff makes sure of that.

Prior to Ragnarok –which takes its title from Norse Edda mythology but has little to do with theend times and the twilight of the gods – the lobby of the 10^thAvenue Theatre was filled with young people. Like my reluctant companion and I,many ate at Pokez, which has been for many years the trough of starving actorsand artists.

All evening Brenda and I felt like fossils, what with herdyed red hair and my natural white. With her love of wildness and fantasy shemay have fit in much better than I, and she insisted on writing the review, sohere it is.

Ragnarok, or the endtimes

By Brenda McGillicutty Burgoo

The play is framed by Neil (Patrick Kelly), who opens an oldtrunk in the first scene. His wife is waiting for him to shower so they can goto her parents’ house for dinner. Neil lifts an old, faux saber from the trunkand carries it to myth and memory. At the end of the play, he puts it back intothe trunk and closes the lid on the past. Everything in between makes up theplay, which is funny and sad and nerdy and imaginative.

In the flashback Neil and Clayton (Brendan Cavalier) are best friends and co-leaders of a group ofadult role players, kind of like Our Gang for adults. They are LARPers – LiveAction Role Players – kind of like those costumed Renaissance people one seesin Balboa Park, only with outrageously large weapons, lances and bludgeons andshields made of foam rubber and such. They specialize in camaraderie, combatand fantasy. And they are so serious about it that they are training for theRagnarok Games in Ohio.

Brendan Cavalier, Patrick Kelly and Soroya Rowley
in Ragnarok

Others already in the ragtag band are Danny (James P.Darvas), a crazy nerd with long hair whopresides over D & D (a game named Dungeons & Dragons), which they playon rainy days, and the unflappable Gerald (Adrian Brown). In order to swell the ranks, challengethemselves, and prepare for the games, other warriors are enlisted from adsplaced in social media.

Tiny but mighty Bri (Samantha Ginn) and her mute sister Dot (KatherineHarroff) join the group and fit in quitewell, initially knocking the guys out of hand-to-hand. Then along come a trioof others, who are experienced LARPers: the fierce and sexy Lilly (SoroyaRowley), her hothead boyfriend Lionel (EvanKendig) and their tall peacemaker friendJeremy (Rich Soublet). And did Imention the green-faced giant named Travis (Julio Jacobo), who looks and acts a bit like Shrek?

This pantheon of pugnacious Gods is brought down by theirown jealousy and uncompromising attitudes. We knew it was coming from themoment of creation and yet the inevitable breakup of the group is redolent of FirstCorinthians: “When I was a child…and when Ibecame a man, I put childish ways behind me,” evidenced by Neil’s closing ofthe trunk and capitulation to the shower.

Harroff’s script is based on interviews with actual LARPers,so it rings with truth. Because interviews tell, the play also tells, in bits of direct address during which variouscharacters relate their versions of the “truth” about the others and whatcaused the cataclysm. I can think of no way this device could be avoided, butit occasionally rankles the viewer.

As for that youthful audience, they had a rip-roaring goodtime. Kristen Flores’ scenic design,three platforms of various heights, served the piece well. MelissaColeman-Reed’s costumes provide continuousdelight. Kelly and Cavalier are responsible for the outrageous props and StephenSchmitz directs. There is no credit forfight director. One assumes the movement is a collaborative effort and it isgood, funny and borderline scary.

Ragnarok fits rightin with Circle Circle dot dot’s mission to tell stories you may not haveconsidered worth your while and that give onlookers a glimpse into the lives ofdifferent communities. These small stories, become epic and are every bit aspoignant as the destruction of Valhalla in the final scenes of the RingCycle.

Certainly, these young people on the other side of thefootlights are worth watching.

Ragnarok continues at8 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays through December 10, 10^th AveTheatre, 930 10^th Avenue, San Diego, $10-$20, www.circle2dot2.com, before the show orby emailing circle@circle2dot.com.

The Diary of Anne Frankexquisitely done by OnStage Productions

By Charlene Baldridge

Colleagues were also insistent that I see OnStageProductions’ The Diary of Anne Frank,which continues only through December 5. So southward we went, my friendLiliane and I, for the matinee Sunday, Nov. 27. Third Avenue in Chula Vista isa charming neighborhood and we vowed to return. Neither of us is in the marketfor a wedding dress, but this is the place. The shops opposite the storefronttheatre are full of bridal and bridesmaid gowns, some as if out of a fairytale. Grimm.

OnStage produces Wendy Kesselman’s 1997 Broadway adaptationof Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s original stage adaptation of the book,Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,which was produced at Broadway’s Cort Theatre in 1955 and won the Tony Award,New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Otto Frank (Sven Salumaa) gives his fountain pen to his daughter, Anne Frank (Lucia Vecchio)
in Onstage Productions' staging of The Diary of Anne Frank. Photo: Paul Savage

Lucia Vecchio, who approximates the title character in age(she ranges between 13 and 15 in the play), gloriously portrays Anne, who wasgiven a diary on her 13^th birthday by her father, Otto Frank(marvelous, understated Sven Salumaa). Anne’s life, hiding from the Nazis inthe secret annex of an Amsterdam office building once owned by Otto, fills thediary. Also packed into the tiny annex are Anne’s shy, quiet sister (RachelThroesch), her mother (Laura Preble), a boy slightly older than Anne namedPeter Van Daan (Mitchell Pfitzmaier), Peter’s self-centered mother (TeriBrown), and his father (Greg McAfee). Dr. Dussel (Nick Young) is a dentist andlatecomer to the group that is sustained by Miep Gies (lovely Anya Tuerk) andMr. Kraler (Rob Conway), to whom Otto transferred ownership of the businesswhen the Nazis cracked down on the Jews. Kym Pappas directs.

Rachael Throesch as Margo Frank and Laura Preble
as her and Anne's mother, Edith in
OnStage Productions' staging of The Diary of Anne Frank,
photo Paul Savage

Eventually discovered, all but Otto perished in the campsjust weeks before the liberation. Gies had preserved Anne’s diary and otherpapers for her eventual return and gave them to Otto, who had them published,thus giving humankind an extraordinary account of inhumanity and bravery duringthe Holocaust.

With poise way beyond her years, Vecchio is quite wondrousas Anne, and there are additional performers worth watching, particularlySalumaa, whose great gift is stillness and strength when tension overwhelms theeight people who became an unwilling family over the course of two years.

The Diary of Anne Frankcontinues at 8 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 1, Friday, Dec. 2, and Saturday, Dec. 3, andat 2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 4, OnStage Playhouse, 291 Third Avenue, Chula Vista, www.onstageplayhouse.org or (619)422-7787.

Next

Coming up are two fairly intense weeks of theatre (several of them holiday productions) and music, both here and in Los Angeles. I shall report. Aswe approach the holidays, everything slows down except the malls, and I may announce a Brenda andCharlene retreat. Brenda, who is badly in need of a makeover, may go to a spafor two weeks. Charlene just needs some time away from Brenda.

That’s all for this week, folks.

Grandeur this week

2011-11-23T06:01:00.001-08:00

Grandeur to the nth

Charlene in Balboa Park
Photo: Ken Howard

Charlene and Brenda had a wild week of six productions in four days, Thursday, Nov. 17—Sunday, Nov. 20. There was indeed grandeur, from UC San Diego’s visually arresting production of The Storm, to the Metropolitan Opera in HD production ofPhillip Glass’s Satyagraha, toion theatre’s day-long production of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize and TonyAward-winning Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Parts 1 and 2. Thursday included a foray to Disney Hall for music by Handel with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Saturday's junket was a trip to Normal Heights for the Diversionary Theatre's opening of Learn to Be Latina.

Charlene and Brenda soaked it all up, wrote copiously, and then collapsed in the midnight blue recliner at the Rainbow Cave, dreaming of angels

Charlene’s reviews this week may be read at the followingsites: different reviews of Learn to Be Latinaand UC San Diego’s production of The Storm at La Jolla Village News (may not be up till Thursday) and Words Are Not Enough and Angels in America at WordsAre Not Enough.

Additionally, a Q & A with Angels co-directors Glenn Paris and Claudio Raygoza may befound at Gay San Diego.

Hear tell

Last week in an informal chitchat at North Coast RepertoryTheatre, actor Ken Ruta made remarks concerning the transcendence of a goodperformance, one in which the performer becomes unaware of his/her body andpsyche until it’s over, making the whole what might be termed a holyexperience.

In The New York TimesFriday, Nov. 18, tenor Jay Hunter Morris recounted a similar experience uponhis recent unexpected performance as Siegfried in the Metropolitan Opera’s Götterdämmerung:

“In the run-up to opening night I was a nervous wreck untilthe music started; then I got to disappear into the role and sing.” As for thetranscendent part: “It’s all dark until the end. Then the house lights go upand all of a sudden you see the auditorium and the audience. It didn’t reallyhit me until the final curtain call: Look at that.”

Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried and Deborah Voight as Sieglinde
in the Metropolitan Opera production of Gotterdamerung
Photo: Ken Howard

Morris, who hails from Texas and lives in Los Angeles,became part of a recent and complicated tenor switcheroo affecting what was tohave been his Ahab in San Diego’s production of the new opera, Moby-Dick.

Moby-Dick is aco-production of Dallas Opera, San Diego Opera, San Francisco Opera, The StateOpera of South Australia, and Calgary Opera. At the time performances of composer Jake Heggie and librettist GeneScheer’s hit opera were scheduled, heldentenor Ben Heppner, who createdthe role of Ahab at Dallas Opera in 2010, was unable to sing in Adelaide andSan Diego due to his previous commitment to sing Siegfried in Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerungat the Metropolitan Opera. And so, Morris was signed to sing Ahab in Adelaideand San Diego.

Then, earlier this year, Heppner decided retire the role ofSiegfried from his repertoire and withdrew from the Met production. His replacement,Gary Lehman, also withdrew, in his case due to illness. The Met put out anemergency call to Morris, who had just performed Siegfried in San Francisco's Ring Cycle.San Diego Opera released Morris from his contract here so he could do the prestigious gig at the Met, and since Heppner was nowavailable due to his Met withdrawal, he will be San Diego’s maniacal whalechaser. Whew, how's that for an operatic saga?

Ben Heppner (left) as Ahab and Talise Trevigne (left center) as Pip
in the Dallas Opera production of Moby-Dick, April 2010
Photo by Karen Almond

Moby-Dick, which isselling like gangbusters according to SDO representatives, makes its West Coastdebut at the San Diego Civic Theatre February 18-26. Others in the company areMorgan Smith as Starbuck, Jonathan Lemalu as Queequeg, Jonathan Boyd asGreenhorn and Talise Trevigne as Pip, the cabin boy. Karen Keltner conducts theSan Diego Symphony Orchestra and Leonard Foglia directs. To hear excerpts ofthis magnificent and melodic new American opera go to http://www.sdopera.com/Operas/MobyDickand if you’ve not purchased tickets yet, do so now while you still may.

Extended productions

North Coast Repertory announces a three-performance extension of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, now to be experienced in additional performancestonight, Nov. 23 and Friday, Nov 25. Catch this marvelous production while youcan!

San Diego Repertory Theatre announces an extension of The Great American Trailer Park Musical through December 11.

Talk about contrasting tastes.

Providing our existing schedule does notchange, the next Brenda and Charlene column will include reviews of Ragnarok and The Diary of Ann Frank. Right now the girls, neither of whom is roasting a turkey, are arguing over reviewers’rights. Some days it's hard to keep the peace.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Where to find Charlene and Brenda this week

2011-11-17T12:38:00.001-08:00

We're over there this week!

Ken Howard photo
Niki de Saint Phalle sculpture

It happens this week that Charlene's reviews of The Great American Trailer Park Musical and The Dybbuk are found at Words Are Not Enough. Brenda's write up of her evening with theatrical giants Jonathan McMurtry, Ken Ruta and Ray Reinhardt may be read here and Brenda's brag for the week is at Charlene Baldridge. You may find Charlene's interview with Glenn Paris abd Claudio Raygoza in Gay San Diego this week.

It is hoped that the girls--Charlene and Brenda--settle down a bit and we can get back to normal, whatever that is, next week.

Heroes: McMurtry, Reinhardt and Ruta

2011-11-16T05:36:00.001-08:00

Ruta, McMurtry and Reinhardt

Where were all the actors and where were all the writers and theatre critics when North Coast Repertory Theatre (NCRT) presented West Coast legends Jonathan McMurtry, Ray Reinhardt and Ken Ruta in concert? By "in concert" I mean three old men sitting around gassing about the theatrical giants that inspired them in their youth.

The three actors, whose collective on stage experience spans more than 150 years and whose combined ages total 230, are starring in Gerard Sibleyras' Heroes at NCRT. There are only four performances remaining, 7 p.m. tonight, 8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday. If you haven't seen McMurtry, Reinhardt and Ruta work together, you've missed one of the great theatrical events of the decade. Their off stage camaraderie Tuesday night and their love and respect for one another and for director David Ellenstein were palpable. Their ease, candor and good humor, remarkable.

Each actor introduced himself, told where his principal experience on stage occurred, and then answered questions posed by Ellenstein and the audience. We heard how each got started, how the career progressed, who influenced him the most, and, thanks to actor John Tesmer, what each looks forward to. With the off-handedness to which we've grown accustomed, McMurtry said, "Heh. Just waiting for the phone to ring."

Perhaps the most fun were stories of forgotten lines and, as youthful aspiring actors, sneaking backstage. The names dropped were legion: the Lunts, Vivien Leigh, Joe Papp, Tyrone Guthrie, Bill Ball, Jack O'Brien, Edward Payson Call, Sandy McCallum, and Craig Noel, to name just a few.

Reinhardt told of the choice that affected the rest of his life. He was acting in New York when both Bill Ball (founder of American Conservatory Theatre) and Joe Papp (New York Shakespeare Festival) offered him a job, though Papp wouldn't be 100 percent certain till Friday. So he went with Ball, which effected his move to San Francisco, where he had a 27-year run at ACT.

Ruta, who said he thought at first he might become a priest, said that some moments in the theatre make you feel you are a priest, moments in the dark when someone is pulled out of their lives and personal tragedy and given hope and the knowledge they are not alone. All spoke of transcendent moments and performances where one is unaware of self and body. Hearing them talk of these moments was, indeed, like being in church.

McMurtry as Prospero in the Mira Costa NCRT production

Each talked of favorite roles/productions -- Lear and The Tempest were right up there. McMurtry spoke affectingly of the late Craig Noel, who brought him to San Diego from Milwaukee. I saw Reinhardt as Lear ten years ago in San Francisco. Ruta acted at the Globe during the time I worked there. And of course we all know and love McMurtry.

The young Craig Noel
Courtesy Old Globe

Thanks to Ellenstein and NCRT and da boys for providing an unforgettable evening of warmth, laughter and wisdom.

Flash!

Brenda just tapped me on the shoulder to say she's received a bulletin from Kristianne Kurner at New Village Arts, who's added a Sunday 7 p.m. performance to its run of Of Mice and Men. The show stars Manny Fernandes as George and Justin Lang as Lennie. Not to be missed, a five burgoo event!