Category Archives: Theater

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Scatter spruces up on Sitka and the weekend

Leave a comment

Mr. Scatter had coffee today with Deborah Elliott (actually, she had tea, something in a purply-roseish hue) and she reminded him that the 16th annual Sitka Art Invitational Exhibit and Sale is coming up this weekend.

I shouldn’t have let it slip my mind. This annual bash in Miller Hall at the World Forestry Center, up on the hill by the Oregon Zoo, is a very rootsy, Northwest-feeling thing.

The 2008 Sitka Invitational. Sitka Center for Art and EcologyIt’s the big yearly benefit for the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, a hands-on arts retreat and workshop center on the Oregon coast, and it always has a generous cooperative feel. Plus, if you play your cards right, you can go home with a good deal on some good art.

The Sitka Center was begun in 1970 by artists Frank and Jane Boyden, and its link between artists and naturalists just seemed, well, natural. I like the way that tie has continued, and the way the invitational brings together a lot of people and ideas that don’t ordinarily cross paths but seem very comfortable sharing the couches in this great big living room. Established artists and up-and-comers, city and rural, contemporary and traditional, a lot of people who fit into that increasingly loose category called craft.

Among the long list of artists whose pieces you can buy (or just appreciate): Frank Boyden, Ron Cronin, Dennis Cunningham, Pat Courtney Gould, George Johanson, Liza Jones, Royal Nebeker, Richard Notkin, Andy Paiko, William Park, Hilary Pfeifer (Bunny with an Arts Blog), Lillian Pitt, Tom Prochaska, Laura Ross-Paul, Judy Vogland, Margot Thompson Voorheis, Sherrie Wolf, Christy Wyckoff. And, as they say on late-night TV, much much more!

The public exhibit/sale is 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 14 and 15. An opening night party with the artists runs 6:30 to 10 Friday the 13th, and costs more.

Check out the details here.

********

Oregon Music News is off the ground and flying into the blogosphere.

omn_logoThe new online news and reviews service is an attempt to bring pretty much the whole Portland area music scene under one big umbrella, from classical to hip-hop to jazz and blues. Tom D’Antoni, a longtime music freelance writer and producer/reporter on OPB’s Oregon Art Beat, is editor-in-chief. Nancy Glass is publisher.

A lot of what’s here might be of utterly no interest to you. But the beauty of it is, it’s easy to go straight to what does interest you: logical navigation is a wonderful thing.

The breakdown is: classical (editor: James Bash of Northwest Reverb), jazz/blues, rock, acoustic, indie, DJ/electro, soul/hip-hop, experimental. A lot of familiar music-writing names have signed on board.

Welcome, OMN! Here’s the link.

********

Voices of Our Elders, the theater piece from Well Arts Institute that opened last weekend, continues with two shows Saturday and one Sunday. You might recall having read about it here.

elder51It’s the result of a 10-week workshop with older residents in care centers, listening to their stories and helping them set them down. The results are by turn comic, sentimental, regretful, nostalgic, and sometimes harrowing — the way life looks when you’ve traveled a long way down its path. A cast of good professional actors and musicians is interpreting the stories.

Final shows are at 3 and 7 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 14-15, at the Olympic Mills Commerce Center, 107 S.E. Washington St. Each performance includes a guest reader or two who wasn’t part of the workshop project; I’ll be doing a piece at Saturday’s matinee. Details here.

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music, Theater

Friday Night Live from the Keller: ‘Orphee,’ Part 4

2 Comments

Philip Glass in Florence, 1993. Photo: Pasquale Salerno/Wikimedia Commons10:10 p.m., this joint is emptying out.

I think they want to kick us out.

A couple of things first:

In the film that Glass adapted, Cocteau was revitalizing the “fairy tale,” which even in the 1940s and 1950s had been relegated to the children’s shelf, and giving it back its spirituality and wonder. He was after the source of power in the universe. And, yes, it seems to have something to do with love. Maybe the Beatles were right. Or Jesus. Or whoever. Why is it these questions are usually left to “kids” tales?

No rock ‘n’ roll Glass in Orphee. This is beautifully crafted, and beautifully orchestrated, music, with some gorgeous vocal lines, and the singers’ volume got better as the evening progressed.

And it was ACTED — no Fat Lady planting her feet and belting here. Lisa Saffer as the Princess and Philip Cutlip as Orphee lead a truly good cast.

There’s mysticism here, folks: After a reference to “the one who gives the orders,” we’re told:

“Some believe he thinks of us. Others that we imagine him.”

And, of course, dry humor, as in this exchange between Orphee and a friend:

“The public loves me.”

“They are alone.”

This has been an odd way to write — fleetingly, conjecturally, without time to contemplate or shape. There’s much more to say, and quite a bit I did say that truly belongs on the cutting room floor. Well, too late. And too bad.

That’s all, folks, except for the bonus tracks below.

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #8

On NOT introducing himself to Cocteau in Paris in 1954, when the poet was living there and Glass had moved there for the first time. This was shortly after Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville had collaborated on the movie version of Cocteau’s 1929 novel Les Enfants Terribles:

“I don’t think I could have. I think I would have been terrified of meeting him.”

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #9

On today’s multimillion-dollar special effects and the way Cocteau did it in his films:

“I suppose Cocteau probably had a budget of five dollars and thirty-five cents for special effects. Yet those effects are magical.”

*****

xxxxxxx

Photo: Philip Glass in Florence, 1993. Pasquale Salerno/Wikimedia Commons

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music, Theater

Friday Night Live from the Keller: ‘Orphee,’ Part 3

Leave a comment

"Orpheus in the Wilderness," anonymous woodblock

9:53 p.m.: After the show, after the applause, after the standing ovation.

“I actually liked it a lot,” Mrs. Scatter said. “I found it surprisingly moving.”

Yes, it is. This is an opera that’s hardly been produced since its debut in 1993, and now it seems ready to join the repertoire. It stands up to the test of time.

And time, of course, is part of what Glass/Cocteau are talking about. A miracle occurs in this story, the miracle of moving time itself backwards after it’s already played out its events. The book of life and death is wiped clean — returned, if not to the beginning, to a point that allows a second chance. Wouldn’t we all love that? And why Orphee, who seems an ungrateful, selfish sort? Because. And “because” is enough.

Why isn’t this opera called Orpheus and Eurydice, as so many other versions of the myth have been? Because, although the two end up together (is it a “happy” ending? — in Ovid and most versions, Eurydice is lost forever when Orpheus glances back) this version isn’t really about Orpheus and his wife. It’s about Orpheus and Death, the Princess, who sets the whole thing in motion by falling in love with the poet.

This is a vigorously dramatic version of the myth, with fine stage direction by Sam Helfrich that is emotionally taut but not above a good sight gag. Once Orphee and Eurydice are returned to life under orders that he can never look at her, Eurydice pops behind chairs and crawls around the floor to avoid his glance: It has an I Love Lucy tinge to it.

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #5

On the musical establishment and making it as a musician:

“You’re better off going out on your own than going through the establishment. The establishment, the price is too high.”

But he added that economic conditions make that much harder than when he was young, especially if you want to work in a place like New York, which is the sort of talent pool you want to immerse yourself in.

“In my business, anyone who makes a living, I say, ‘Hats off.'”

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #6

On the pathfinders when he was building his career:

“The jazz world was the real avant-garde. These were people who didn’t make any money and lived for their art.”

He mentioned Ornette Coleman among the jazz geniuses. But there were many others the public never knew, he added, and there still are. He runs into them all the time on the streets of New York: black, white, Hispanic musicians who are doing genuinely exciting work but can’t get a break.

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #7

On the business of music:

“I was never the kind of person who was going to write a work of music that would never be played. I never, in fact, have written a piece of music that I didn’t KNOW was going to be played. It just seems like too much work.”

*****

Photo: “Orpheus in the Wilderness,” anonymous woodblock print, 1500s

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music, Theater

Friday Night Live from the Keller: ‘Orphee,’ Part 2

Leave a comment

Photo: French poster for Jean Cocteau’s film “Orphee,” the inspiration for Philip Glass’s opera. Wikimedia CommonsFrench poster for Jean Cocteau's film "Orphee," the inspiration for Philip Glass's opera. Wikimedia Commons

8:38 p.m., Intermission: No smoke yet, but lots of mirrors.

One of the coolest things about this opera is the way that it uses the image of the mirror. Very important to Cocteau, and Glass and the set designer, Andrew Lieberman, have picked up on it. The mirror has magical properties. It’s the doorway between worlds, the world of the living and the world of the dead. And that is the journey that Orphee and his put-upon wife, Eurydice, must take. As Death’s chauffeur, the dashing Huertebise (Ryan McPherson) tells Orphee: “You don’t have to understand, only believe.”

The music: Of course you know the Philip Glass joke:

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Philip Glass.”

Well, it’s not true. At least, not in this opera. Sure, he uses a background of repetitions. So did Bach. Listened to any of those organ-grinder Bach numbers lately? Here, that’s just the backdrop for a palette of impressionist sound that somehow seems very French to me — maybe because this is, after all, a French tale, at least in its Cocteau interpretation. I find the music very restrained but opening up at key times, and beautifully sung, although I’d like a little more oomph now and then from some of the voices. That’ll be all balanced out in the recording, and it should sound terrific. Lots of craft in this piece!

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #3

On Cocteau’s reputation as a flighty man incapable of settling into one discipline:

“My view is that … he wasn’t a dilettante. … He in fact had one idea. His idea was that the transformation of the world comes through magic. And the magic comes through the artist.”

Or, he added, through anyone else who chooses to use it.

*****

I was worried about not having the film itself, because Cocteau is such an amazing poet of the moving picture, and his film of Orphee has some utterly ravishing, untranslatable moments. Glass’s adaptation of La Belle et la Bete uses the film itself — the musicians are below the screen, playing and singing — and there’s a ghostly effect to it. This one’s … different. And not at all in a bad way. The dialogue is word for word from the movie script, but this is a stage drama.

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #4

Asked whether other composers influenced the music in Orphee, he brought up Gluck’s 1762 opera Orpheus ed Euridice:

“I came across a beautiful melody in that. I tried to write it from memory, and I failed. I ended up writing something that wasn’t like Gluck at all.”

*****

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music, Theater

Friday Night Live from the Keller: ‘Orphee,’ Part 1

5 Comments

Philip Glass in Florence, 1993. Photo: Pasquale Salerno/Wikimedia Commons6:14 p.m. Friday, Nov. 6, Keller Auditorium, in the lobby: One hour and 16 minutes to showtime, the show being the West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’s Orphee, by Portland Opera.

A crowd’s assembled outside the doors, early birds waiting to claim their spots.

I’m sitting between Byron Beck and Storm Large — rare company.

Time to stop and head for the stage. To be continued. Ha. Nobody’s stopping. Keyboards away!

You’ll find scattered through these posts several Philip Glass Bonus Tracks, outtakes from my Tuesday morning group interview with Glass and from his talk Tuesday night at the Portland Art Museum. They’re interesting, and they fill space nicely when I have nothing to say!

I’m quite looking forward to seeing this — I’ve heard the Paul Barnes solo piano version of some of the music, and I like it. I saw the first of Glass’s Cocteau operas, La Belle et La Bete, on a Halloween night in Eugene — perfect timing. David Stabler and I once went to Eugene to double-team a review of Glass’s A Thousand Airplanes on the Roof, a collaboration with playwright David Henry Hwang. David: Thumbs down. Me: Thumbs up. We had a great time disagreeing. And I remember vividly a solo piano concert by Glass when I realized, he’s a superb pianist, he really knows music history, and he respects the past.

Byron yells: “Cynthia, are you hash-tagging this thing?!” What in god’s name can he be talking about?

Tour time.

We go backstage. It’s a raked stage — one to twelve, as Cynthia Fuhrman says, which means a one-inch drop every foot. Not too bad when you’re standing around, but I wouldn’t want to have to find my mark on it while I was singing. It’s a very chic, uptown Manhattan-style, midcentury modern sort of set. Laura Hassell, the opera’s production manager, points out that there’s a ceiling — not a usual thing — which creates a sense of confinement but also acts as a shell that will help project the sound into the auditorium. It’s a single-set show — originated at Glimmerglass Opera in New York — and most of the action will be downstage. There’s a big mirror that’s crucial to the plot; it has a handprint on it. It’ll be polished shortly before curtain. Because all four performances are being recorded to make a CD of the show, a few small mikes are hidden discreetly around the stage. For the dialogue, mostly.

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #1

On the appeal of Orphee and the Orpheus myth:

“Life, death, immortality and art. I mean, c’mon. That’s pretty heavy stuff.”

*****

7 p.m.: Friends keep dropping by, saying hi, shaking hands. “Pardon me, is it all right if a take a picture of some of you?” a nicely dressed gentleman asks. “Absolutely,” I reply. “Go ahead.” I suspect he’s going to be aiming at Storm, not me.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the auditorium is now open for seating,” that muffled voice over the microphone announces, but nobody seems to be paying much attention.

This is the lively time: the buzz, the happy rumble, the pre-show pump-up. I love this sound, this bright roar where only a rare word comes through intelligibly, but you can tell everyone’s pumped. This is the lively preamble to a live show, that human factor that only live performance — a play, a dance, an opera, a ballgame — brings out. Communal. I see composer David Schiff standing a few feet away. Love to hear what he has to say afterwards. Mark Mandel, too, who just dropped by. Mark knows more about opera than anyone I know. He should be doing this! Or David Stabler, who just stopped by with his wife Judy.

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #2

On the parallels between Cocteau’s poet-hero in Orphee and his own life as an artist largely forgotten by the younger generation of artists:

“This film is the autobiographical film. This film is about Cocteau himself.”

*****

7:11 p.m.: I fear this is blather. I’m feeling a bit like Roland Hedley, the fatuous newsman in Doonesbury, who’s just published a book of Twitters. Jim Cox strolls by, dashing in a tux with a silvery Bret Maverick vest. Or is it Bart?

Mighty Toy Cannon is lurking about, mocking my two-finger typing technique. Marc Acito, who’s IN THE CAST, for crying out loud, is behind me hugging Storm. “Shouldn’t you be in makeup?” I ask. “I’m not on until the second act,” he replies.

And now writing guru Mead Hunter is making the rounds. And playwright/filmmaker Jan Baross. And here’s music writer Brett Campbell and his wife.

Oh my god: I’M BECOMING RONA BARRETT!

“I’m Flickering right now, Tweeting, I’m Flickering. I’m having a hard time!” That’s Byron, next to me. Again: What in blue blazes is he talking about?

7:24 p.m.: The opera’s Julia Sheridan comes over. “It’s almost curtain time. Time to wrap up and get to your seats.”

Huzzah!

Photo: Philip Glass in Florence, 1993. Pasquale Salerno/Wikimedia Commons

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music, Theater

Mr. Scatter steps out from behind his wall of Glass

3 Comments

"Orpheus and Eurydice," Nicolas Poussin, 1650-51

ABOVE: “Orpheus and Eurydice,” Nicolas Poussin, 1650-51. Musee de Louvre, Paris. INSET: Philip Glass, composer of “Orphee.” Wikimedia Commons.

DON’T LOOK BACK. Bob Dylan gave that sage advice, possibly after considering the experiences of Lot’s wife, who turned into a pillar of salt after peeking back at the lost pleasures of Sodom, and of Orpheus, who doomed his wife to the Underworld by glancing over his shoulder as he was leading her back from the far side of the River Styx.

Well, Mr. Scatter’s made a couple of rash decisions lately, and he’s determined not to look back: Mrs. Scatter would be seriously ticked off if she turned into a salt lick in Hell. Onward and forward, eyes on the prize.

*************

RASH DECISION #1: I’ve agreed to be one of Portland Opera’s speed-bloggers on Friday night at the opening performance of Philip Glass‘s Orphee, a 1991 opera (premiered in 1993) based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and on Jean Cocteau‘s mysteriously poetic 1949 film adaptation, also called Orphee. Portland Opera‘s production will be the opera’s West Coast premiere.

Philip Glass/Wikimedia CommonsWhat this means is that, while you’re filing into Keller Auditorium before the show, I’ll be in the lobby seated at a table with several other bloggers, dashing out immediate impressions and committing them to cyberspace before I have time to repent and delete. I’ll have a backstage tour beforehand, and yes, I do get to see the show, after which I’ll dash back to my laptop and blog some more. This will be either the rough draft of history or outtakes of an unsifted mind, but I will Not. Look. Back.

To prepare, I’ll be on hand for Creativity and Collaboration: An Evening with Philip Glass, a Tuesday night gathering with the composer at the Portland Art Museum’s Kridell Auditorium, where Glass will talk about his music and career. The evening’s sponsored by the opera, the Northwest Film Center (which screened Cocteau’s Orphee last night) and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, which has a long history with Glass. I’ll also get a chance to talk with Glass in a group interview Tuesday morning with a quartet of musically savvy Portland writers: Marty Hughley, Bob Kingston, James Bash and Brett Campbell. Glass’s trip to Portland will be pretty brief: By opening night of Orphee he’ll already be in Mexico City, performing some of his chamber music.

My fellow bloggers (sounds like the beginning of a political speech) on opening night will be actress/rock star Storm Large, man-about-town Byron Beck, arts marketer extraordinaire Cynthia Fuhrman, and someone (not sure who) from PICA. Our compensation, I’m told, will be “plenty of beer, nuts and cookies during intermission.”

I don’t have a Facebook account and I do not Twit, so here’s how it’ll work: I’ll start a Glass/Orphee post on Friday evening and write everything on it, hitting “publish” at regular intervals so the post gets longer as the night goes on. I’ll mark each new entry by its time, so you can get a sense of the “running” part of the running commentary.

And I will not look over my shoulder. Someone might be gaining on me.

*************

RASH DECISION #2: My friend Susan Jonsson sits on the board of Well Arts Institute, a group of theater and other artists who use writing and theater to, as they put it, “generate well-being, hope, and meaning for people in life-altering health situations.” Some very talented people are involved in this project, and the transformational possibilities of storytelling are near the core of what they do.

Well Arts Institute: hand to handSo when Susan asked whether I’d be a guest performer in Well Arts’ fall show, Voices of Our Elders, I said yes. The process is fascinating. Well Arts people do a 10-week workshop on memoir and creative writing with older people in care centers, listening to their stories, transcribing them, helping them shape them. The result is a show of monologues and a few dialogues from people looking back on their lives, on what was important, and contemplating what’s to come. It’s a fundamental form of personal history and an emotionally involving form of documentary theater.

Well Arts director Lorraine Bahr has assembled a good cast to present these stories: John Morrison, Ritah Parrish, Deirdre Atkinson, Steve Boss, Andrea White, Wendy Westerwelle and writer-performer Vince Falco. Each performance will also include a revolving lineup of guest readers: singer Shirley Nanette; actors Delight Lorenz, Luisa Sermol, Tom Gough and Susan Jonsson; onetime Broadway hoofer and legendary Portland director/teacher Jack Featheringill; Oregon Arts Commissioner and longtime theater supporter Julie Vigeland; and me.

I went to a rehearsal on Halloween afternoon at the Olympic Mills Commerce Center, a rehab development housing arts, food and design businesses at 107 S.E. Washington St., near the riverfront in the close-in East Side light-industrial district. This is where the show will be, and it’s an interesting new creative hub, worth visiting: We rehearsed in front of the Zimbabwe Artists Project, a space covered with gorgeous appliques and fabric paintings created by women of the Weya region of Zimbabwe.

Voices of Our Elders runs at 3 and 7 p.m. Saturdays, Nov. 7 and 14; and at 3 p.m. Sundays, Nov. 8 and 15.  I’ll do my reading — a piece I like quite a bit, called The Day I Went to Enlist — at the Nov. 14 matinee. Ticket and other info here.

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Scatter’s Halloween/Day of the Dead rotogravure edition

Leave a comment

Mr. Scatter anticipates an evening of answering doorbells and dispensing mass quantities of solidified high fructose corn syrup when the lights go down tonight. But there are other, possibly better, ways to celebrate Fright Night. A visual selection, not one of which has to do with overturning outhouses:

"Canta y no Llores" at Miracle Theatre. Photo: Russell Young

Miracle Theatre Group’s original Day of the Dead play “Canta y no Llores” continues through Nov. 15 at Teatro Milagro. Performed in Spanish and English, it looks back on the trials of the Great Depression. Ticket information here. Photo: Russell Young

Halloween at Disjecta: a night of the living dead

Disjecta, the big barn of an art and performance center just a swing of the ax from the Paul Bunyan statue in Kenton, has a Halloween two-fer. Kid-and-family-friendly stuff rules from noon to 4 on Saturday, with proceeds going to benefit Chief Joseph Elementary School. Then, starting at 9 in the evening and continuing ’til the graveyards empty, all inhibitions are off for a dance party of ghoulish proportions. Details here.

At Onda Gallery, a photograph by Paulina Hermosillo

In the Alberta Art District, Allan Oliver’s Onda Gallery specializes in the art and craft of Latin America. His Day of the Dead exhibit, continuing through Nov. 22, gathers work from nine Hispanic artists from Portland and the Willamette Valley, plus several others exploring similar ideas. The photo above is by Paulina Hermosillo. More information here.

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Theater

Whose play is it, anyway? On authors and interpreters

9 Comments

Sartre's "No Exit" on the tilt, at Imago Theatre. Photo: Jerry Mouawad

Sartre’s “No Exit” on the tilt, at Imago Theatre. Photo: Jerry Mouawad

Who wrote that play?

I don’t mean, did the modestly talented actor Will Shakespeare really write all those great stageworks, or was he just a convenient front man for Edward de Vere or some other dandy of the ruling class?

I mean, is the production you just saw actually of the play the playwright intended, or did it get reinvented so much in production that it actually became something else?

Charles Deemer has been gnawing on that bone as it relates to Jerry Mouawad’s critically praised production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit at Imago Theatre — a production that places the actors on an intricately balanced platform that shifts with every movement, echoing the tensions and balances among the characters.

Portland playwright Deemer first raised his objections in an Oct. 18 post on his blog, The Writing Life II. “Imago usually does original work, and brilliantly so,” he wrote. “It does original work here — it’s just misnamed. This production needs a little truth in advertising. It’s not Sartre. It’s variations on themes developed by Sartre. It’s interesting. It’s engaging. It just isn’t what the playwright intended and, as a playwright, I think this needs to be said.”

Deemer then followed up with comments on Martha Ullman West’s recent Art Scatter post about No Exit and a clutch of dance performances. “Composers do variations on a theme all the time and own up to it,” he wrote. “… What if someone went to the theater wanting to see the wonderfully grim original? What’s wrong with grim and cynical anyway?”

Then he added:

Let’s say a director resurrects Christmas at the Juniper Tavern and puts all the actors on roller skates because s/he believes it depicts the fluidity of their life journeys. Would I be amused? Guess.

“Edward Albee once closed down a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf because George and Martha were presented as a gay couple.

“I once had the opportunity to ask Arthur Miller what he thought of an all-black version of Death of a Salesman that was done here with Tony Armstrong in the lead. ‘This is not the play I wrote,’ he told me.

“An advantage of the business of playwriting, as opposed to the business of screenwriting, is that playwrights retain ownership of their work. You legally can’t make changes without permission. Consequently I’ve long suspected that many, perhaps most, directors prefer their playwrights dead.”

Theater fans aren’t as volatile as opera fans, and it’s the rage these days in opera circles to boo directors and designers for undermining the music with conceptual approaches. Theater directors have been doing that for years (often, as Charles points out, with the work of dead playwrights who can’t fight back) and are lauded for it.

Interpretation is huge in the theater. But where does interpretation stop and something related but fundamentally different begin? Sometimes it seems like directors and designers use pre-existing works like especially fertile junkyards, discarding what they don’t want and mining them for treasure they can turn into something of their own. Novelists do that sort of thing all the time. But John Gardner didn’t call his book Beowulf. He called it Grendel.

What’s the essence of a play? Is it words? Is it tone? Is it the look of the thing? Or does it shift with every play, according to the play’s own core and elasticity? Putting the actors on roller skates for Christmas at the Juniper Tavern would absolutely change the play into something else. It MIGHT not irrevocably alter The Comedy of Errors.

Continue reading Whose play is it, anyway? On authors and interpreters →

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West, Theater

Up, down, all around the town: ‘No Exit’ from the dance

5 Comments

Tim True and JoAnn Johnson in "No Exit." Photo: Jerry Mouawad/Imago Theatre

Art Scatter’s indefatigable chief dance correspondent Martha Ullman West, fresh from a sojourn in the Big Apple, hit the ground running on her return to Portland. In a week and a half she took in the Northwest Dance Project’s fall show, White Bird’s presentation of the Hofesh Shechter Company, Jim McGinn and Carla Mann’s “Exquisite Corpse,” and Imago Theatre’s teetering version of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit.” Herewith her report on her adventures:

**********************************************

In the past 10 days I’ve witnessed four performances, three of them easily classified as dance, the fourth, if we must be Aristotelian about this, as physical theater.

For my New York colleagues this would have been a light schedule. For me it was pretty packed.

Not that I’m complaining — it’s terrific, particularly in these times, that we get to see so much performance in our town. Portland artists are brave and bold, even when the work may not be, and White Bird continues to provide us with dance that ranges from the phenomenal (Baryshnikov and Ana Laguna) to the intriguing (Hofesh Shechter).

Let us begin with the Northwest Dance Project, which I attended opening night at the Newmark, on Friday the 16th. In a pre-curtain speech, executive director Scott Lewis stressed the importance of presenting new work, pointing with considerable pride to a program made up entirely of “world premieres” — a term which, like “world class” and pre-curtain speeches themselves, I wish would get lost in the stratosphere.

A cascade of water soaks Andrea Parsons in Sarah Slipper's "Not I." Photo: BLAINE T. COVERTHis pride in Dance Project artistic director Sarah Slipper’s new work, Not I, is justified.  While I wish I had known when I was watching Andrea Parsons perform this very demanding and emotion-laden solo that the monologue she was dancing to was the uncredited Samuel Beckett’s —  and while the video monitor on stage was a bit too reminiscent of Bill T. Jones’s controversial Still/Here, which also dealt with bodies raddled by illness and minds sinking into dementia — Slipper’s jitter-laden, despairing movement has stayed with me. And it’s passed this sure test: I’d like to see it again. Moreover, it was the only piece on this program that had a discernible beginning, middle and end.

But new does not necessarily mean good. Nor, necessarily, bad. Except for Not I, the work commissioned for this concert ranged from the mediocre to the ordinary. There were moments in the second part of Edgar Zendejas’s Bu Ba Bee when I began to hope he was going to make use of the energy of the dancers in this young company, and he did create a quite fine solo for Patrick Kilbane. But nobody moved much in the three-part work, and what’s more, I never did figure out what any of them was about, or their relationship to each other.

Continue reading Up, down, all around the town: ‘No Exit’ from the dance →

Bob Hicks, General, Television, Theater

Soupy Sales, 1926-2009: one last pie in the face

4 Comments

piesh8

A moment, please, to remember comedian Soupy Sales, who is with us no more, although the image of whipped cream cascading thickly from some passing celebrity’s pie-toss’d kisser remains vivid in our mind’s eye.

Sales, born Milton Supman on Jan. 8, 1926, in Franklinton, North Carolina, reportedly tossed 20,000 pies into the pusses of willing victims ranging from Frank Sinatra to Shirley MacLaine during a career that peaked in the 1960s and just kept coming back for more. He died Thursday in the Bronx, at age 83.

Soupy Sales schlepping his book. Nightscream/Wikimedia CommonsI don’t remember much about Sales. He was mostly a television figure — he had an extremely popular comedy show — and in the 1960s and ’70s I watched even less TV than I do now. But in the same way you know Britney Spears even if you couldn’t pick out one of her songs from a criminal lineup, I knew Soupy — that dopey elastic mug, the fading pie-in-the-face routine that he revived … well, 20,000 times.

The great, ill-fated movie actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle is said to have taken the first filmed pie in the face, back around 1912 or 1914, as one of the Keystone Cops. Whether the whole routine was dreamed up by Mack Sennett for the silent flickers I don’t know, although there certainly seems a rough country humor to it. It has a vaudeville feel, and vaudeville ruled when farm and small-town folk were just starting to feel the tug of bright lights and manufactured sin in the big city. Imagine doing that with Aunt Mabel’s blue-ribbon banana cream pie! The waste! The wonderful waste!

The pie-in-the-face routine has settled into American culture at a largely subterranean level. Politicians and the obscenely wealthy occasionally get one in the kisser as an act of political theater, although exactly what point it makes that a traditional razzberry doesn’t manage more cheaply and just as well is a little tough to figure out. Pitcher A.J. Burnett has apparently revived it in the clubhouse this baseball season, and it seems to be working some sort of mojo: His New York Yankees appear to be heading for the World Series. (I refrain from expressing the depth of my regret over that probability.)

Even at his height of popularity, Sales was a throwback. Comedy was mostly going in other directions, and he was in a weird way a conservator, carrying on the tradition of the Three Stooges and Jerry Lewis in his astonishing prime on early television with Dean Martin, and — going further back — to the likes of Buster Keaton, Abbott and Costello, and Charlie Chaplin. Well, sort of. If you lack the genius of the greats but have a burning ambition to succeed, you do what you have to do. You toss a pie in someone’s face. It’s the art of the unexpected, and, once you get known for doing it, of the expected: the big payoff.

Fatty Arbuckle with Mabel Normand: What's cookin, good-lookin?Physical comedy — and what is more physical than smacking a pie in someone’s kisser for laughs? — has been around at least since the early-Renaissance beginnings of commedia dell’arte. Shakespeare thrived on it. You find it everywhere from kabuki to Punch and Judy shows to I Love Lucy and the buff posturings of pro wrestling. Imagine Hulk Hogan as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The tradition’s continued, if not often with the aid of actual pies, with the likes of Robin Williams (in his astonishing “nanu nanu” phase), John Cleese, John Bulushi, Bette Midler (non-weepy version), Danny DeVito and, I am sorry to point out, Adam Sandler.

A lot of comedy, of course, comes out of tragedy, or at least tough times. Many of our best comedians have led tortured lives. I don’t want to stretch out poor Soupy’s body on an analyst’s couch, but it struck me, reading his Associated Press obituary, not just that the Supmans were the only Jewish family in Franklinton at a time when that was a dodgy thing to be in the Carolinas, but also that Sales’ parents, who ran a dry-goods store, sold sheets to the Ku Klux Klan. Go ahead: Laugh that off.

Sales seemed genuinely liked in show-biz circles, but he did have an edge. According to one story, he once told the kids watching his TV show to take out all those green papers with numbers on them from their parents’ purses and wallets and send them to him. Astonishingly, a lot of kids did. Sales didn’t think the joke would work so well. He returned the money. When he couldn’t figure out where it came from, he donated it to charity.

Privately, he must have laughed his rear end off. He’d just tossed a pie in the whole nation’s face.