Tag Archives: Chekhov

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, Food, General, Music, Theater

What wedding? — on Chekhov, string quartets, bridges, drums and locavores

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  • The royal whatzis
  • The Cherry Orchard at Artists Repertory Theatre
  • Noble Viola on Opus at Portland Center Stage
  • Brian Libby on the failed Columbia River Crossing
  • Portland Taiko tells a tale
  • James E. McWilliams on eating locally and globally

Portland Taiko. Photo: Rich Iwasaki/2009Portland Taiko. Rich Iwasaki/2009

By Bob Hicks

We’re given to understand some sort of white-tie wedding is taking place in the wee hours of Friday morning, and much of the world is agog. Art Scatter does not plan to cover it. With any luck — if the cat doesn’t come slapping at our cheek with her paw, demanding to be let outside — we’ll be snoozing.

And now, on with the news.

Chekhov the composer: On Wednesday night the Scatters took in The Cherry Orchard, playwright Richard Kramer’s world-premiere adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s final dramatic masterpiece, at Artists Rep. It struck us again that, like so many leading playwrights, Chekhov thought like a musician.

Like a string quartet: Linda Alper, Tim Blough (background), Michael Mendelson and Tobias Andersen in "The Cherry Orchard." Photo: Owen CareyThere isn’t much story to The Cherry Orchard, but there are themes, counter-themes, motifs. It’s chamber music, and the way we hear it can be startlingly different from production to production, depending not just on our own life experiences (interpreting Chekhov relies to an extreme on what the audience brings to it) but also on the emphases of interpretation on the stage: Do we concentrate on the cello tonight, or the bassoon? In truth, I suspect that even more so than ordinarily, every member of the audience sees a different play when watching Chekhov.

Kramer’s intermissionless adaptation, which I like quite a lot, sets out to rough up the Chekhov-as-wistful-yearning school of thought, and it succeeds. To extend the musical metaphor, it’s a bit like Bach rearranged by Bartok: depths and balances and gorgeous tones, but syncopated and spiked up.

Continue reading What wedding? — on Chekhov, string quartets, bridges, drums and locavores →

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Run for your life: Curtain call coming!

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UPDATE: The Oregonian’s Marty Hughley has posted a terrific, insightful review of of “August: Osage County” on Oregon Live. Give it a read.

Stampede, Mural, Odessa, Texas, Post Office, Federal Works Agency

There are many wonderful things about Steppenwolf Theatre‘s touring production of Tracy Letts‘ August: Osage County, which opened Tuesday night at Keller Auditorium as part of Portland Opera’s Broadway Across America series. One of them was not the ending.

I don’t mean the ending onstage, when actress DeLanna Studi cradled the remarkable Estelle Parsons in her lap on an attic bed and crooned to her as the lights went down.

I mean the stampede in the audience to beat the crowd and get out the door quick, as if it were late in the third quarter of a 55-0 football game and all that mattered was getting out of the stadium parking lot and hitting the freeway before 30,000 other cars followed suit.

Clockwise from left: Angelica Torn, Libby George & Paul Vincent O’Connor. Photo: Robert J. SaffersteinThe rush began during that final fade, when the proper response was to sit still and let the emotional accumulation of this three-and-a-half-hour American journey sink in. It hit full throttle when the lights came up for cattle call … I mean, curtain call. As many in the audience were rising to their feet to applaud the work of this talented company of actors, many others were bumping and bruising their ways to the aisles, trodding on toes, trailing their belongings, urging their fellow longhorns on so they could get out first. Show’s over. Drinks and bathrooms calling.

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Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Ashland 1: tilting at windmills with Clifford Odets

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Armando Duran as Don Quixote, with his steed Rocinante. Photo: David Cooper/Oregon Shakespeare Festival/2009

Armando Duran as Don Quixote with his noble steed Rocinante. Photo: David Cooper/Oregon Shakespeare Festival/2009

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There aren’t many towns in America where you can spend the afternoon with Paradise Lost and then watch Don Quixote braying at the moon come night.

But this week I’m in Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and that was Tuesday’s bill of fare. No, it’s not just Shakespeare, or DeVere, or whoever wrote that great body of plays we call Shakespearean, on the festival stages.

In the case of Paradise Lost it isn’t John Milton, either. This is a latter-day variation on the theme of the Fall of Humankind — a 1935 play by the Golden Boy himself, Clifford Odets, who around this time was perhaps the most lionized young playwright in the United States, with almost concurrent productions of Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! at The Group Theatre in New York. If it’s tough now to figure out exactly why Odets was such a god, well, the world and its styles have changed.

Sarah Rutan and Mark Bedard in "Paradise Lost." Photo: Jenny Graham/Oregon Shakespeare Festival/2009The festival’s Don Quixote is a world-premiere adaptation by the playwright Octavio Solis, whose plays Gibraltar and El Paso Blue the company has produced in the past, and you could hardly come up with a pair of shows more different in texture: Outwardly, their personalities seem as different as the old knight-errant’s and his squire Sancho Panza’s. Paradise Lost is mostly sober-sided declamation and the anguished shredding of hair shirts. Don Quixote is mostly whimsy, pratfalls, stage tricks and elaborate horseplay (in the case of Quixote’s steed Rocinante, literally).

But the two plays also have a curious connection, and it’s one of the things that makes a trip to Ashland so stimulating, even if you don’t much like a particular play or production. The two heroes — Don Quixote in Cervantes‘ tale, the inattentive businessman Leo Gordon in Paradise Lost — are dreamers and innocents, civilized men in uncivilized ages. And both, at least in their critics’ eyes, have been lured into foolishness by their odd attachment to reading and knowledge.

In a rude world the idealist is a failure and a fool — often a holy fool, as in the case of Dostoevsky’s Idiot and these two men. In both Don Quixote and Paradise Lost the central characters seem ineffectual at best and catastrophically detached at worst, but one suspects in both cases an even deeper authorial frustration with the modern cultures that have made these dreamers so out of touch with reality. How can Cervantes not regret a 17th century Spain in which the ideals of chivalry are nothing but a joke, or Odets the 20th century America of the Great Depression in which the cheaters and brutes prosper while the honest and earnest land on the streets? For Cervantes and Odets, humankind’s fall from grace is as much a corruption of a once nobler civilization as it is a stumbling of individual sinners on their spiritual paths. How can it be anything else when these two most graceful of men are outcasts and fools?

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Bob Hicks, Film, General, Theater

Hair today, gone tomorrow: Ugly on the face of it

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Credit: THE DAILY BEAST

When I was not quite 19 and in fall term of my sophomore year in college I returned home for Thanksgiving dinner, bringing a housemate with me. I’d been growing a beard since beginning of term, two months before.

At dinner (and beforehand, while bustling over the Brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes in the kitchen) my mother kept staring at me oddly, as if something strange was going on and it just wasn’t quite computing. Finally I asked her what was wrong.

“You have a smudge on the side of your face,” she said.

She wasn’t kidding. I was crushed. So much for my hirsute abilities — and I heard that line repeated, with guffaws, for the rest of the school year from my turncoat housemate.

At last Monday’s Drammy Awards I ran into actor Todd Van Voris, who’d been playing Andrey Prozorov, the henpecked brother, in Tracy Letts’ adaptation of Three Sisters at Artists Repertory Theatre, and was sporting a suitably Chekhovian growth.

“How long until you get to shave?” I asked him.

“One more week!” he replied enthusiastically.

Then he added that it never fails: In the dead of winter he’s cast as someone clean-shaven and maybe even bald-pated; once the weather turns warm he’s cast as someone with facial hair in full sprout.

Apparently he can do full sprout.

In the movies, of course, you don’t have to grow ’em, although of course you can if you want. If you don’t, makeup will cheerfully slap a facial growth on you. That’s why I liked this post (the photo montage above is just a sneak peek) from The Daily Beast, of the worst movie facial-hair moments. You could adapt this to country-western singers and male perfume and underwear models, too — those guys who have the perfect two-day stubbles around their gorgeously dimpled chins no matter what. John Travolta is a double winner (or double loser) in the Daily Beast sweepstakes, but I’m quite fond of the Jack Black growth, too.

P.S.: I’ve been wearing a beard for most of the past 40 years. Every now and again someone looks at me and says, “When did you start growing a beard?” I refer them to my mother.

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Bing bong bang: Here comes the weekend

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It’s almost here, and whatcha gonna do? Weekend planning’s SO much more complicated than it used to be, partly because in Portland there are so many more choices than there used to be. So here are a few of many, many possible suggestions:

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Portland Taiko. Copyright Rich Iwasaki/2008PORTLAND TAIKO’S “A TO Z”: That’s not A to Z, the negociant-style Oregon wine blenders. It’s A to Z, Ann to Zack. Portland Taiko‘s first big concert of the year will be a drum-banging stroll down memory lane with Ann Ishimuru and Zack Semke, back for a reunion gig with the company they founded 15 years ago. The repertory for these two shows, at 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday in the Fir Acres Theatre at Lewis & Clark College, will be drawn from the troupe’s first decade. Big drums, sweet violin, a rousing, joyful noise. Come join the fun.

Bias alert: I’m a member of Portland Taiko’s board. Then again, if I didn’t really like what this company does, I wouldn’t be on its board.

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Aurora Chorus“WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN RARELY MAKE HISTORY”: But in Portland, rowdy women make very good music. In two shows Saturday, 4 and 8 p.m. at St. Mary’s Academy Theater, the 100-plus-voice Aurora Chorus will raise the roof with a program celebrating “women in history who boldly colored outside the lines and didn’t care what was written into their permanent records.” Among those ceiling-busters are locals including Portland police chief Rosie Sizer, artist Lillian Pitt, and Gennie Nelson, founder of Sisters of the Road.

The Aurora Chorus is led by Joan Szymko, who’s been misbehaving her own historical path in Portland and Seattle for many years, creating a rambunctiously engaged musical career that’s also seen her lead the Seattle Women’s Ensemble and the women’s chamber ensemble Viriditas, and act as musical director for the irreverent acrobatic and aerial theater artists of Do Jump! Extremely Physical Theatre. Through a quarter-century or so Szymko has also been a serious and talented choral composer (she has more than 50 octavos in publication), and this spring the American Choral Directors Association chose her as composer for next year’s Raymond W. Brock Commission, a task that’s gone in the past to the likes of Daniel Pinkham, Gian Carlo Menotti, Gwyneth Walker and David Conte. Excellent, if possibly ill-behaved, company.

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TRIPLE-THREAT TICKETS: You’ve got your Third Angle. You’ve got your Third Rail Rep. And you’ve got your Three Sisters. Somewhere in there lies an exceedingly un-square root. Let’s take ’em one at a time:

Third Angle New Music Ensemble with Jennifer Higdon: As I type I’m listening to a recording that Third Angle artistic director Ron Blessinger gave me of Philadelphia composer and double Grammy winner Jennifer Higdon‘s Celestial Hymns and Zaka, and I’m liking it a WHOLE lot.

higdon_pcard_webIt’s jangly, insouciant, nervous, brash yet somehow introspective music. It’s thoroughly American. And it’s accessible, which in this case means not dumbed down but smart and extroverted — speaking, like Gershwin and Copland and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and many others, in a voice that would actually like to be heard by an intelligent general audience. Makes me think of Bartok crossed with Charles Lloyd, maybe because of the clarinet and flute.

What’s more, from everything I’ve heard and read, Higdon’s a delightful person, exactly the sort of public ambassador that contemporary classical music (I know; that sounds like an oxymoron. Can you think of a better way to say it?) needs. This concert, with Higdon on hand and Third Angle playing music by her and some of her talented former composition students, is at 7:30 p.m. Friday in The Old Church. Should be a barn-burner.

Fabuloso at Third Rail Rep: I caught this last Saturday on its opening weekend, and it’s an odd little duck of a play, with just the right quack to put its appeal over. John Kolvenbach‘s closely cropped comedy is about two couples — one staid and settled; the other impossibly improvisational — who somehow wind up sharing a one-bedroom apartment. It’s about growing up but not giving in, and maybe even about deciding to have children, and in spite of its extremities it’s a sweet domestic little waterfowl when you get down to it.

Fine performances by Third Rail regulars Stephanie Gaslin, Philip Cuomo and Valerie Stevens, and a true bell-ringer of exuberantly controlled excess by Tim True. Tim gets the juicy parts, but there’s not a touch of self-indulgence in what he does: The show would fall flat if he didn’t stay in tune with the other three instead of winging off into the wilderness on his own. Once again from Third Rail and director Slayden Scott Yarbrough, a model of ensemble theater. Things start almost itchy-slow, but that’s part of the geography of the play, which soon enough goes bang-bang-bang. It’s worth catching, and you have through May 31 to do it.

Three Sisters at Artists Rep: In one corner, Anton Chekhov, subtle and masterful progenitor of contemporary drama. In the other corner, Tracy Letts, brash Steppenwolf rabble-rouser and Tony- and Pulitzer-winning author of August: Osage County.

How does Letts handle Chekhov in this world-premiere translation? “This Three Sisters starts as a drama about quiet desolation, then takes the quiet behind the barn and shoots it,” Aaron Mesh writes in Willamette Week.

Not sure what that means, but it sure makes me want to see the show and find out. It keeps brawling through June 14 at Artists Rep.

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THE HUNCHBACK OF MANTUA: Better known as Rigoletto, Giuseppe Verdi‘s operatic potboiler from 1851 that’s fabled for the nefarious duke’s lilting La Donna e Mobile, which everyone knows and comparatively few realize comes from Rigoletto. (Nor do most people know it’s one of the most flippantly sexist pop tunes ever written, but then, that’s the duke: What a guy. If you’re sensitive, it’s best not to understand Italian — or to read the supertitles.)

Portland Opera‘s current production, which ends with performances Thursday and Saturday evenings at Keller Auditorium, is straightforward and traditional and, despite a problem here and there, a welcome affirmation of what a gorgeous score Verdi wrote. Good, solid drama, too: The three hours muscle their way through with no flabbiness. In theater and opera, if you’ve got a hump or a limp or a big nose you tend not to get happy endings. Think Quasimodo, Rigoletto, Cyrano, Richard III. Well, there is Tiny Tim. But he can’t sing, and Rigoletto can. Huge difference.

I caught last Friday’s opening night performance and fell in love, once again, with the score. David Stabler’s positive-with-reservations review in The Oregonian seemed spot-on.  Two more chances to soak in that glorious sound.

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