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The Magician's TaleAMERICAN THEATRE MAGAZINE

2011-12-01T10:34:00.000-08:00

The trick for these performers is using illusion to tell a story

A conjurer is not a juggler; he is an actor playing the part of a magician.
—Jean Robert-Houdin

On a bright afternoon in early August, around 70 professional magicians crammed into a windowless, 60-seat room at the Magic Castle, an exclusive Hollywood-based magic society and supper club that is widely regarded as ground zero for the magical arts in this country. They were there to hear a lecture about the intersection of magic and theatre.

"A trick is a little puzzle," began lecturer Rob Zabrecky, a regular performer at the castle since 2002, who is known for combining mentalism (a form of magic that includes clairvoyance, hypnotism and other psychic elements) with a macabre sense of humor wrapped up in an eccentric-yet-strangely-approachable Norman Bates—like persona. "But the second we inform it with our point of view," he went on, "it becomes a piece of theatre."

Zabrecky is part of a small but growing enclave within the U.S. magic community that believes that great magicians are first and foremost theatremakers—and that their power lies as much in the way that they script, act, direct and design their performances as in their ability to deceive audiences with mirrors, mind games and dexterous sleights of hand. These theatrically inclined wizards are working hard to redefine what most people think of as a magic show, and in so doing are raising appropriately puzzling questions about the potential and limitations of magic as a theatrical art form.

"There's a tendency for the average person who doesn't know about magic to presume that it is something for children, akin to circus. While there is certainly a lot of magic that fits into that category, there's a lot that doesn't," Los Angeles—based illusionist Max Maven tells me in a phone interview shortly after my trip to the Magic Castle. Maven is an erudite magician who often peppers his mentalism-oriented performances with anecdotes about Pablo Picasso and Alexander Woollcott. In one routine, he reenacts part of a 17th-century Kabuki drama as a framework for unnerving audience members with his psychic powers.

The image of a tailcoat-wearing, wand-wielding magus dazzling audiences with flabbergasting stunts—pulling a rabbit out of a hat, causing a lion to disappear or hacking a bikini-clad lady into bits with a saw—still spring readily to mind when most of us think of magic shows. The Las Vegas extravaganzas of David Copperfield, Criss Angel and Siegfried & Roy, alongside the work of countless other conjurers plying their trade at corporate events and children's birthday parties, have been largely responsible for molding perceptions of magic for the past 70 or 80 years. The majority of acts at the Magic Castle tend to hail from this school. (According to Zabrecky, most lectures at the castle focus not on theatricality but on techniques for executing ever-more-complex tricks.)

The popularity in recent decades of magicians like David Blaine and Penn & Teller has helped to broaden people's understanding of what magic can do, and paved the way for the reconsideration of icons like Harry Houdini (a new exhibition, "Houdini: Art and Magic," at San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum through Jan. 16, positions the escape artist as an edgy performer and "showman of raw physicality"). The bare bones, intimate nature of Blaine's "street magic" shows and his superhuman feats of endurance, like being encased in a block of ice for nearly three days, have shaken up standard notions of magic, as have Penn & Teller's canny exposure of the inner workings of illusions. But the activities of even these boundary-pushing performers share the same essential mission as their more traditional counterparts: to elicit amazement among audiences in response to a stunt.

Magicians who are steeped in theatre are attempting to place their focus elsewhere. "I think one of the obstacles to growth and self-expression in magic is that magicians tend to become fixated on the technical, deceptive elements—the sleights and moves and gimmickry—to the exclusion of all other aspects of the performing arts—scripting, lighting, sound, blocking, sets, costume, character," says the Chicago-based magician David Parr, whose shows include Visions of Poe, an interactive journey into the tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, and Haunting History, which explores the intersection of history and folklore. "The techniques we use to mislead the senses are a necessary part of magic, but they're not the only tools that contribute to effective communication with the people in our audience. When the technical, deceptive aspects of magic dominate our discourse, and when they become the sole focus of our performances, the message of magic is limited to 'Ha! I fooled you! See how clever I am?' I think magic has deeper waters to explore."

Instead of making a trick the be-all-and-end-all of a magic show, in the same way a comedian treats the punch-line of a joke, magicians like Parr who are interested in exploring the theatrical process see their illusions as part of a larger whole. This approach usually involves the embedding of magical illusions within a strong narrative framework that often builds to a climax; the development of sustained characters or stage personas; and the use of dramatic metaphors. The goal is to provide the audience with a multilayered experience, one that seamlessly combines astonishment at the magical effects on display with a broader message about the world we live in.

For the solo shows of San Francisco—based magician Christian Cagigal, metaphor, narrative and character play at least as important a role as prestidigitation. In Cagigal's solo show Obscura, the magician adopts an understated persona akin to a fastidious widowed uncle, and gracefully weaves card tricks into a variety of quirky cautionary tales about ordinary people who play games of chance with the Devil and invariably lose.

Each story is more confrontational than the last, so that by the end of the hour-long show, the room feels almost claustrophobic, as if there is no escape from Satan's clutches. Cagigal's intermittent use of an old-fashioned wind-up music box underscores the innocence and naïveté of the average human being when confronted with forces he or she can't fully understand. The fact that all of Cagigal's card tricks are projected at close range from above on a video screen enhances the theatricality of the experience—watching the magician's every move up close, we, too, feel like we are being watched.

For Michael Fraughton, a magician based in the Salt Lake City area, metaphor is also crucial. Fraughton miraculously conjures water to extinguish a candle flame that comes to represent the "life" of a small Kansas town. The magician intends audience members to make the connection between the dousing of the flame and the disastrous flooding of the town.

And in Todd Robbins's Play Dead, a production directed by Teller (of Penn & Teller) that had a nine-month run Off-Broadway through July 2011 (it then played Mexico City and will have a 2012 London tour), Robbins couched ghoulish illusions within the framework of real-life ghost stories. Robbins's design team decked out the Players Theatre in New York's West Village to make it look like it was abandoned, which created a fittingly spooky setting for a show that used shock tactics to explore notions of death and loss. In one scene, the performer chewed a light bulb until his mouth bled.

"You can put magic in a theatre, but that doesn't make it theatre—that involves more than just telling stories while you do a magic trick," contends Robbins. 'The stories have to have some thematic meaning, ideally tied into an overall thematic arc so people have something to walk away from the production with beyond 'That was fun!' That's when magic goes from being a form of entertainment to a form of art."

The conflation of drama and magic isn't new. According to the Chicago-based magician Neil Tobin, the relationship has existed for thousands of years. "Though theatre scholars may be late in their appreciation, performance magic is one of the original forms of drama," Tobin points out. "Consider its use of metaphor: The fakir of centuries ago who thrust sword after sword into a primitive basket containing his son, only to have the boy emerge unharmed, was metaphorically enacting a primal drama—that of the triumph of life over death. He had only dirt for a stage and sold no seats, but it was powerful theatre."

In more recent times, the relationship has become explicit. In the 1870s, the magicians and theatrical impresarios John Nevil Maskelyne and George Cooke created a string of popular "magic plays" at the Egyptian Hall, and later, St. George's Hall, in London. Special effect—infused productions, with titles like Will, the Witch and the Watchman and Mrs. Daffodil Downey's Séance, served as climactic finales to evenings of conjuring featuring famous illusionists like Buatier De Kolta, Paul Valadon, Charles Morritt and Martin Chapender. "The scripts contain descriptions of interesting sets where people could go out one side and come in immediately on the other," notes the Bay Area—based magician Tobias Beckwith of these works.

Some of these magic plays toured the U.S. And before long, special effects started cropping up in homegrown productions. The 1927 production of Dracula on Broadway (an adaptation by John L. Balderston of the Bram Stoker novel, starring Bela Lugosi), for example, included a scene in which the title character disappeared "into thin air," his empty cape crumpling into the hands of his adversaries at the climax of a tussle.

More recently, magicians and the theatre community have collaborated successfully on many occasions. The conjurer Ricky Jay's long-standing partnership with playwright-director David Mamet is a case in point. Mamet has directed several of Jay's solo shows—Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, On the Stem and A Rogue's Gallery—and has cast the magician in a number of his films. The magicians Guy Hollingworth and Paul Nathan have had their magic-plays produced at the Broad Stage in Los Angeles and San Francisco's Climate Theater, respectively. David Hirata, another Bay Area—based magician, serves on the board of the Marsh Theatre, a 22-year-old presenter and producer of mostly solo plays.

Many recent theatre productions have relied upon the talents of conjurers to create spellbinding effects. The famous levitation sequence at the end of the Broadway production of Beauty and the Beast and the scene in Broadway's Mary Poppins in which the protagonist removes unfathomably large objects from her suitcase were made possible by the skill of Jim Steinmeyer, a master magician and scholar of magic history. These effects not only create a sense of wonder in the audience but serve to move the plot along and develop our understanding of the characters.

Meanwhile, magicians are often key collaborators in productions of classic plays. Last summer, Cagigal helped create the special effects for the Marin Shakespeare Company's version of The Tempest. And Teller co-created a horror-theatre production of Macbeth with director Aaron Posner. The drama was co-produced in 2008 by Two River Theater Company in Red Bank, N.J., and Washington, D.C.'s Folger Theatre.

Yet despite these synergies, the relationship between the "legitimate" theatre and magic shows has always been complicated and fractious. "Magic is a sort of bastard cousin of theatre," Zabrecky suggests, in an interview after his Magic Castle lecture. "The fact is that theatre people don't always view the genre as an art form."

"I love magic shows," offers Tony Taccone, artistic director of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. "But in their traditional configuration, they qualify for me as purely entertainment." So the rapport between magic and theatre ebbs and flows. As Alain Nu, a magician based in Washington, D.C., puts it: "I think it's something that trends in and out of favor, depending on a variety of factors, such as market demands, the overall respect for the art by the public and so on."

The effort among contemporary magicians to "legitimize" their craft has its roots in the rise of the "bizarre magic" movement in the 1970s, which has since been shaped by changing cultural tastes and economic trends. (Last month in Connecticut, the Inner Circle of Bizarre Magick held the latest in its series of annual conventions.) Bizarre magic is a branch of conjuring that employs narrative and wordplay to a much greater degree than traditional magic shows, while de-emphasizing a performer's technical dexterity and complex props. Major exponents of the genre, like Tony Andruzzi and Eugene Burger, developed a following for their intimate and dark approach to magic. Often unfolding in a small space in a close-up format, bizarre magic shows employ storytelling as a means to establish an otherworldly mood and entice audiences to believe in spirits.

"Bizarre magic came about as a rebellion against what magic had become—frivolous entertainment, something to accompany a cocktail during the dinner hour at a corporate event," reasons Robbins. "Some magicians decided to put the content back in, so they came up with this whole new form that was more theatrical and story-driven. It demanded people's focus and attention rather than a noisy environment with a DJ in the corner."

Just as the original bizarrists reacted against the relegation of magic to "sideshow entertainment" status, so the present generation of theatrically inclined magicians is reacting against the big Las Vegas—style spectacles of Copperfield and company. Their reasons are partly artistic and partly economic, and are in keeping with other countercultural trends that surfaced in the early 1990s, like grunge music's rebellion against saccharine pop tunes.

"As money sinks and magicians are scaling back, and the love of glitz for glitz's sake seems to be ebbing for the time being, many magicians have been asking themselves, 'What the hell is the point of all of it?' and, 'So what if I can do this big illusion, what does it mean?' " says Cagigal. "They want more out of their routines and shows and themselves."

Many contemporary exponents of theatre-oriented magic have serious theatrical backgrounds—Robbins holds a degree in theatre from California State University—Long Beach; Parr co-founded an experimental theatre company in Milwaukee; the San Francisco—based magician Walt Anthony was an Equity actor in Chicago for 20 years before deciding to merge his passion for magic with his stage career. Despite that, melding theatre with magic isn't easy. Efforts in this direction often fall flat. As such, magicians who seek to use theatrical elements like storytelling and character as a means to create a work of art face multiple challenges.

One key issue lies in the wildly contrasting ways in which the two genres handle the expectations of their audiences. Admittedly, even the most basic trick includes such elements as the establishment of a relationship between a performer and an audience and the creation of a stage persona, and many magic shows also include spoken text, a plot, lights, a set, costumes and props—but the two genres place very different demands upon audiences' understanding of reality that are often difficult to reconcile.

In most forms of theatre, audiences understand that they are witnessing a make-believe world, but choose to suspend their disbelief in order to enter fully into that world and potentially be transformed by it. Magic, by contrast, requires audiences to completely buy what they're seeing on stage as hard reality: They have to be convinced that it is truly possible to saw people in half and put their bodies instantly back together again, or for an illusionist to read the secrets of their minds. "In the theatre, a special effect is designed to be subsumed within the fantasy of the production," writes Steinmeyer in his 1998 book Art & Artifice. "An illusion seeks the opposite. It starts with a basic reality and attempts to make it deliberately special or surprising. In a magic show, there is no willing suspension. The magician cannot risk the audience ignoring his illusions or accepting them as a part of a larger context; they must be held apart and treated as unique."

So when magicians focus on storytelling, stage metaphor and other theatrical elements, they risk sacrificing the very thing—the "wow factor" that a skillfully executed illusion elicits in the spectator—that often draws in audiences off the street to see a magic show in the first place. "So much of the work of a magician is to convince someone to believe," Ryan Majestic, a magician based in Los Angeles, tells me during an interview in a West Hollywood café. "With theatre, you have to suspend your disbelief. Overcoming this obstacle forces a magician to work extra hard."

Majestic has become so disenchanted with magicians' current love affair with the theatre that he tries to remove the trappings of stage performance from his work whenever possible—including, curiously, the audience. Every night for nearly two weeks in April 2010, the magician broke into an abandoned house in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles late at night to perform his act. Majestic deliberately didn't tell anyone about his activities. "I did the show at midnight each night regardless of whether anyone walked in or not," Majestic says. "I hoped that if someone did come by, it would be a truly organic moment rather than feel fake, like a theatre performance."

Majestic's experiment didn't work out as he expected it to. Even this most anarchic and anti-theatrical of illusionists found himself yearning for the most fundamental characteristic of the live theatre experience: the relationship that exists between a performer and his audience. "I realized that I wanted people to come," admits Majestic of his lonely nights spent doing magic tricks before an invisible audience in a derelict building. "And when they didn't come, I felt ashamed that I wanted it so badly."

Voices From On High: Countertenors to ColdplayWQXR

2011-11-19T14:54:00.000-08:00

Men who sing in the stratosphere always hold a certain fascination over music fans, whether it’s the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson or countertenors. Here in New York, countertenors -- men who sing above the tenor range -- are having a banner season, being featured in two productions at the Metropolitan Opera: Handel's Rodelinda and the upcoming Baroque pastiche The Enchanted Island.

Meanwhile, more countertenors are turning up in contemporary music (including new works by Thomas Ades and Peter Maxwell Davies), on recital series and in choruses alongside mezzo-sopranos and altos (often much to the latter's dismay).

So what is it about the appeal of the high male voice? In this podcast Naomi Lewin asks three experts: Andreas Scholl, a countertenor who is currently appearing in Rodelinda at the Met; Brian Zeger; a pianist who is head of the Vocal Arts department at Juilliard and the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Development Program; and Chloe Veltman, the host and producer of VoiceBox, a radio program and podcast about the singing voice.

Singing in Tune The anatomy of choral intonation and the techniques for improving itTHE VOICE

2011-10-03T17:11:00.000-07:00

“Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.” - Carl Jung

Of all the nightmares that can disturb a choral conductor’s sleep, the one concerning the opening section of the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Wagner’s Tannhäuser must be among the most feverish. “There is none among us that can conduct or listen to that piece without muscles tensing as each passing measure leads to possible disaster,” said Tim Seelig, artistic director of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and former conductor of the Dallas-based Turtle Creek Chorale.

The bad dream begins a few seconds into Wagner’s slow and intense introduction scored for a cappella male chorus, as the thickness of the men’s harmonies gradually yet palpably drags the sound southwards like a crank-operated gramophone recording in its final sonic throes. By the time the orchestra enters around the two-minute mark, the chorus director’s muscles are as tense as the strings on Tannhäuser’s harp, for Wagner never intended this section of his opera to be performed in multiple keys.

The human voice is one of the most pitch-flexible of instruments. Our voices can vary tuning with no restraints and make adjustments in the middle of a performance without needing to retune like most other instruments. Yet intonation is undoubtedly one of the most pervasive problems facing singers. Few people really notice when a vocalist sings in tune. But poor intonation can clear a concert hall.

The issue is troubling enough for a solo singer. For an ensemble composed of multiple abilities and personalities, wayward tuning can be even more difficult to recognize and correct. Lacking the intonation “barometer” provided by an accompanying piano or other instruments, a cappella groups can easily slide or spike without knowing it. And even accompanied singing can fall prey to erratic intonation. It only takes a mismatched vowel, a bar or two of overblown vibrato, or an acoustically challenging room to render a passage flat or sharp.

The Anatomical Basics

At the physiological level, human beings are equipped with varying degrees of sensitivity to pitch. According to Dr. Psyche Loui, an instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School who has done extensive research on pitch, people who possess a strong connection between the parts of the brain dedicated to matching pitch and perceiving feedback are better able to sing in tune than those with a weaker or absent link. “People who are tone deaf have a smaller or missing branch between the areas of the frontal lobe used for producing sound and the temporal lobe, which is important to perception,” she said.

There are therefore at least two fundamental ways in which the brain needs to work to stay in tune: “One is storing a kind of template that you need to move the vocal cords in a certain way to get a certain sound,” Loui said. “The other is being able to hear yourself sing.”

With these anatomical basics in mind, it follows that most of the reasons that choral music experts cite to explain why choruses go out of tune fall into two categories―producing sound and hearing it.

Not being able to hear oneself or others sing is a major issue when it comes to tuning. “Clearly, it's impossible to tune if you can't hear the singers around you,” said Karen Thomas, artistic director and conductor of Seattle Pro Musica. According to Thomas, there are many possible causes for this, such as the acoustics of a rehearsal or performance space and the specific placement of individual singers within the group. “Singers can often hear the whole better when in mixed quartet formation,” Thomas said. “Likewise, an imbalance of singers’ volumes can create a situation in which those with softer voices are unable to hear themselves, or can only hear a few overly-loud singers near them.”

Feedback is such a subtle mechanism that sometimes an audible hum from a lighting fixture is enough to wreak havoc on an ensemble’s careful intonation. But while a chorus might not be able to do much about the various mechanical and acoustical challenges of a room, there are many factors that cause meandering intonation that are well within the singers’ control.

These factors mostly fall under the category of vocal production, and more often than not, out-of-tune singing can be blamed on sub-par technique. “Any lack of rhythmic vitality and precision will cause intonation problems, as will poor singing posture, lack of breath support, and lack of mental and aural concentration,” said Pearl Shangkuan, director of the Grand Rapids Symphony Chorus. “It also takes everyone working toward producing the exact same vowels at the exact same time to tune well.”

The Tools for Fine-Tuning

Being acutely sensitive to unwelcome leaps and dives in pitch, chorus directors and pedagogues use a diverse set of tools to improve intonation. Techniques range from simple breathing and diaphragm support exercises to making micro-adjustments to vowels in certain parts of singers’ registers to help make specific words in a song sound more in tune.

One fundamental goal shared by all choral directors in the struggle to perfect intonation centers on improving choristers’ listening skills. “I build chords from the bottom up to get the singers to listen to the correlation of intervals,” said Ragnar Bohlin, director of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. “I often ask the singers to change places and mix up,” said Seelig. “This absolutely forces the group to listen.”

Conductors frequently use warm-ups aimed at improving singers’ listening skills, drilling them on whole tone and chromatic scales, arpeggios, and chord clusters among other musical devices. “I love the Robert Shaw warm-up in which the choir takes 16 beats to move up or down a half-step, moving just a few cents per beat, all attempting to move at the same small increments precisely together,” said Thomas. “It's virtually impossible to do this exactly, but it certainly wakes up the ears!”

No matter how idiosyncratic these activities seem, they all exist in the service of rehearsing and performing repertoire. Every piece of music, regardless of its style and genre, poses particular intonation challenges on singers. Poor intonation may be more immediately apparent in monophonic music because of the transparency of the texture. But it’s equally hard to sing in tune on a fast atonal piece with difficult leaps.

A chorus working on music that veers away from the classical western convention of “equal-tempered” tuning (where each of the 12 half-steps of the octave scale is exactly the same distance apart) has to adopt and hone particular strategies for precise tuning. The members of the France-based Harmonic Choir―a chorus founded in 1975 by the American composer, singer, and meditation teacher David Hykes that specializes in overtone singing―often listen to their pitches over headphones to achieve their amazingly complex tunings.

Meanwhile, Anonymous 4, an a cappella vocal ensemble that specializes in Medieval repertoire, focuses its intonation efforts on the perfect fifth―the only consonance allowed in Pythagorean tuning, one of the oldest known methods of defining musical pitches that informs the performance of much pre-17th century music in the west. In Pythagorean tuning, all perfect fifths must be in tune, even at the expense of the other intervals. As a result, the perfect fifths sound resonant, while the thirds are unexpectedly brighter and more complex than in the equal temperament we’re used to today. “It simply sounds best if we tune the fifth just a little bit higher than it is tuned on the piano,” said Marsha Genensky, who sings with Anonymous 4. “Our tuning starts with this bright fifth. We then work outward from there, whether we are singing monophonic music or music in multiple parts.”

When to Go with the Flow

Hearing slight deviations in pitch and devising techniques to correct them can be incredibly subtle work. But just as there are occasions where it pays for a conductor to simply tell vocalists that they’re singing sharp or flat in a particular spot to instantly rectify matters, so there are times when it’s better to let a chorus fall or rise a semi-tone or two than attempt to resist the herd mentality. This is particularly sensible advice for choral singers with perfect pitch. “I don't feel I can do very much of anything as a single singer to influence the pitch group-think during large ensemble performances,” said Cecelia Lam, a San Francisco-based vocalist with perfect pitch. “If pitch sliding occurs, I usually slide along because holding my ground just makes me sound out of sync with the choir.”

As painful on the ears as tuneless singing can be, choruses often get away with freewheeling intonation. The reality is that some audiences are completely impervious to defective pitching. Ultimately, if a chorus sings with commitment and overall musicality, flawless tuning may not be the most important element of the performance. Indeed, some choral professionals even welcome the times when choruses slip. “Imperfection is being human,” wrote Chris Rowbury, a chorus leader and the founder of WorldSong, a community choir based in Coventry, England, in his blog. “When listening to a choir, it is the small imperfections, the differences in vocal quality and tiny errors in tuning, that give the overall texture and richness of sound that we all love.”

Jeffrey Kahane brings team spirit to L.A. Chamber OrchestraLOS ANGELES TIMES

2011-09-10T16:47:00.000-07:00

After a period of convalescence, the conductor-pianist returns to lead the ensemble for its 43rd season.

When Jeffrey Kahane decided to undertake a survey of Mozart's mature piano concertos to celebrate the composer's 250th birthday, he didn't expect to play all 23 of the works himself. But when scheduling conflicts made hiring other leading soloists impractical, the pianist and music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra decided to take on the feat on his own.

"I didn't think of it as a huge project about me, so I wasn't daunted," the musician said at his home in Sonoma's wine country. "It was a collaborative venture with the orchestra."

In a classical music world peopled with celebrity soloists and megalomaniacal conductors, Kahane stands out as a team player. While most music directors of world-class ensembles rarely spotlight musicians from the ranks, Kahane frequently invites many of the 40 LACO players to perform solo concertos. He has commissioned several instrumentalists to compose works for the orchestra and offered LACO's concertmaster, Margaret Batjer, the opportunity to curate her own "Westside Connections" music series.

"Jeffrey understands the depth of talent in the orchestra and gives us an opportunity to shine," said Richard Todd, LACO's principal horn, whom Kahane commissioned to write a piece for the ensemble's 40th-anniversary season. The 43rd season — 30 concerts in venues across the region — begins Sept. 24.

Playing the keyboard while leading an orchestra requires special skills. Murray Perahia, Daniel Barenboim and Kahane are among the few musicians who have excelled at this task in recent history.

LACO's respect for Kahane is such that when the music director, who turns 55 Monday, was forced to withdraw from performing for six months last season after being diagnosed with mononucleosis and hepatitis, the musicians felt as if they had temporarily lost a limb.

"There was nothing to do but rest, and it was incredibly difficult, depressing and painful, but also an immensely important learning experience," Kahane said of his period of convalescence.

Thanks in part to LACO's strongly collective nature, however, the group continued to flourish.

"Jeffrey's absence gave us a chance to really bond," said Batjer, who sometimes led the orchestra from the first chair during Kahane's time away. The synchronicity was so strong that by the time Kahane returned to the stage in full health last spring, the orchestra hadn't lost its luster. "His absence has seemingly hurt neither the organizational spirit nor ensemble," wrote Times music critic Mark Swed, reviewing a LACO concert in May.

Kahane's team spirit stems from his deep engagement with chamber music, a genre that generally promotes a more cooperative environment than symphonic music, where the conductor rules from the podium. But Kahane's sensibility extends further back, to his childhood passion for improvisation. This skill would not only stand him in good stead as a vibrant improviser of Mozart cadenzas in the classical realm but also as a musician working in the collaborative genres of rock and jazz.

Born into a Jewish family in Los Angeles (his well-to-do mother escaped Nazi Germany shortly after Kristallnacht, and his father was the seventh child in a family of working-class Russian Jews based in New York), the pianist, who took up the piano at 4, grew up surrounded by music of all kinds.

"I was taken as a kid to Royce Hall, which had one of the great recital series in America in the 1960s. There I heard Rubinstein and Du Pré," Kahane said. "We also went to Ash Grove, a club on Melrose that eventually burned down, where I heard legendary bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and bluegrass greats Doc and Merle Watson."

Kahane played the guitar in rock bands during his teen years, only deciding to focus exclusively on a classical music career when he enrolled as a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Although he soon excelled in the classical realm, placing highly in major international competitions, making his Carnegie Hall debut in 1983, performing as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic and other top-tier orchestras, accompanying Joshua Bell, Dawn Upshaw and Yo-Yo Ma and launching his conducting career at the Oregon Bach Festival in 1988, he continued to feed his peripatetic musical passions. Kahane recently performed with the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright at the Ravinia Festival and in 2008 recorded a CD with the Gypsy jazz outfit the Hot Club of San Francisco. His dog's name is Django.

"Growing up in a house where there was equal reverence for Paul Simon as there was for Brahms gave me permission to ignore traditional boundaries between genres," said Kahane's son, the singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane. The pair recently collaborated on a concert program that interspersed Jeffrey's interpretations of four Schubert impromptus with songs written by Gabriel. In April, LACO will premiere Gabriel's 30-minute song cycle.

"I always dreamt of being able to go back and forth with ease between musical genres," said Jeffrey Kahane, who, with his receding orb of curly hair, affable grin and diminutive stature looks like he'd be as comfortable wielding a miniature fishing rod by a garden pond as sporting the starched tuxedo of a concert pianist or a rocker's ripped jeans. "I did that, but never as fully as Gabe."

Kahane's roving interests extend way beyond music. Tomes by Plato and Proust in their original languages line the bookshelves of the sunny, low-slung home that the musician shares with his wife, Martha, a clinical psychologist, reflecting his wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. Kahane recently completed a master's degree in classics at the University of Colorado, inspired by a desire to understand the relationship between classical literature and music more deeply.

"At age 50, Jeff had decided that Beethoven and Mozart were still not quite enough, so he'd determined to read Greek for himself," said the composer John Adams, who has known Kahane for almost 40 years. "That's a measure of the man."

Notwithstanding his ever-careening extra-curricular pursuits, Kahane's commitment to classical music has achieved startling results. When he began his tenure as LACO's music director in 1997, the organization, founded in 1968, was at a low point. (Kahane was hired after a two-year search following Christof Perick's resignation.)

"The orchestra was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. The musicians were demoralized, and the relationships between the players, staff and board were abysmal," said Kahane, who until recently also held down long-standing music directorships with the Santa Rosa and Colorado symphonies. "I wasn't oblivious to the challenges, but I was convinced that by sheer force of will and love of music I could turn things around."

Things have indeed turned around since then. According to Rachel Fine, the orchestra's executive director, subscriptions have more than doubled during Kahane's tenure, as have the number of concerts the orchestra presents each season. And LACO's budget has soared, growing from around $1.5 million to $4 million. LACO is one of few established chamber orchestras in the United States, comparable in some ways with the St. Paul (Minn.) Chamber Orchestra and Orchestra of St. Luke's (in New York).

But LACO's renaissance has not been easy. Kahane has struggled to broaden the musical palate of the orchestra's largely conservative-minded audience. "At the beginning of Jeffrey's tenure, LACO regularly received negative audience feedback when new works were performed," said Fine, who followed Kahane's career for years before joining LACO last November.

Today's concertgoers seem more open. The orchestra's "Sound Investment" commissioning program attracted funding from 55 audience members last year, up from a handful a decade ago. The upcoming season's first program includes works by Osvaldo Golijov and LACO's composer-in-residence Derek Bermel, alongside Kahane's take on Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. In 2012, LACO will present the composer and pianist Timothy Andres' mash-up of Mozart's "Coronation" Concerto, which irreverently re-imagines Mozart's incomplete left-hand part.

"I think of the 'musical experience' as the product of multiple collaborations," said Kahane, who in addition to leading LACO will be spending much of the fall in New York, undertaking a residency at the Juilliard School and conducting the New York Philharmonic. "I want our audiences to be active participants in the process of music-making. And I think that an interest in the new goes a long way towards fostering a culture of living music, without which the art form is doomed."

'Four Saints in Three Acts': Lovely NonsenseBAY CITIZEN

2011-08-19T16:13:00.000-07:00

Gertrude Stein-mania continues with a new staging of her extremely untraditional opera

Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s 1928 opera, “Four Saints in Three Acts,” currently running through the end of the weekend at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, makes so little sense that you have no choice but to surrender to its nonsense.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad night of theater. There’s pleasure and catharsis in the process of letting go and simply allowing the festive tunes and nursery rhyme-like words wash over you like bath-time in childhood.

“Gertrude was wonderful to set to music because there was no temptation to illustrate the words,” Thomson, an American composer who was an expat in Paris along with Stein in the 1920s, once remarked of his chief collaborator. “For the most part you didn't know what it meant anyway, so you couldn't make it like birdie babbling by a brook or heavy, heavy hangs my heart.”

Ensemble Parallèle, a San Francisco-based producer of avant-garde operas, captures much of the madness of the heavily abstract work – which, despite what the title says, features some 20 saints and spans four acts – with a playful, exquisitely sung and elegantly designed production. The opera is being produced in collaboration with YBCA and SFMOMA, which has extended hours for its popular exhibit of Stein’s art collection currently running through September 6.

The only thing that gets in the way of complete submission to the opera’s many charms is the creative team’s insistence on imposing heavy-handed visual imagery on a scenario that is better left inscrutable.

Packed with kitten-chasing-its-own-tail locutions like “St. Ignatius and more. St. Ignatius with as well. St. Ignatius need not be feared…,” Stein’s gibberish-laced text certainly posed a challenge for Thomson. He was forced to hang his music on its sounds and rhythms rather than its meaning. Stein didn’t even bother to assign parts in her libretto to individual singers, causing the composer to refer to her effort as “a quite impressive obscurity.”

Yet it would be disingenuous to label “Four Saints” as totally abstract. Underneath the folly of the wordplay, which Ensemble Parallèle’s unintimidated ensemble cast articulates with utmost clarity and a strong dose of humor, lies the vague contours of a thematic framework.

Over the course of the 50-minute work, a master and mistress of ceremonies (Compère and Commère) lead us through a series of tableaux in which the 16th century Spanish saints (Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Avila) consort with a coterie of saint colleagues in various monastic and garden settings. Stein and Thomson use the earthly struggles, deaths and transmogrifications of the beatified pair, as metaphors for the lives of artists.

When “Four Saints” was first performed in 1934, initially at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and then on Broadway where it enjoyed a very successful run, the work’s various abstractions must have seemed of little consequence in comparison to the revolutionary nature of the staging.

“Four Saints” was unlike any opera that American audiences had seen up to that point. Stein’s nonsensical words and the pastoral simplicity of Thomson’s music were just part of the modernist package. The fact that the opera featured a genre-defying all-black cast (“Porgy and Bess” wouldn’t appear until the following year) was enough to keep people talking about the import of “Four Saints” long after the performance ended.

As operagoers have grown accustomed to seeing non-white performers on stage in the ensuing decades, contemporary producers habitually look for other ways to get audiences thinking.

In the case of Ensemble Parallèle’s production, director and designer Brian Staufenbiel attempts to arrest modern sensibilities by inserting several strong scenic tableaux centering on the character of Saint Ignatius into the loose narrative structure. Imposingly played by the stately baritone Eugene Brancoveanu, the saint, dressed against type in satanic red, has an unusual career trajectory for a saint: he performs surgery on a prostrate dummy in an operating theater, is tried in court by his peers and ends up in the electric chair.

According to Staufenbiel’s short statement in the playbill, the mise-en-scene is meant to “explore some of society’s irrational views regarding life and death and the contradictions that surround murder and our concept of justice.”

But Brancoveanu sticks out so vividly against Staufenbiel’s plain white set brushed steel furnishings and most of the other performers on stage (who, with the exception of the gaudy, Commedia dell’Arte-outfitted Compère and Commère, are dressed in more subdued tones) that the search for meaning becomes distracting.

The visual imagery associated with Ignatius also overpowers Teresa’s place in the opera. The luminous soprano Heidi Moss paints a sympathetic portrait of the mystic, trussed up by her fellow saints as they persistently follow her about and surround her on every side, even pushing her about the stage on a giant four-poster bed. But Teresa’s flowing, lemon yellow dress can’t hold the eye while Ignatius’s crimson zoot suit roams the stage. And Staufenbiel doesn’t create as strong a symbolic narrative for the female protagonist as he does for the male one, making her fade into the background.

Overall, though, Ensemble Parallèle’s formidable creative team makes the action work. The stage is peopled with strong performers who can sing, act and dance – and draw out the silly side of the opera. The lusty bass-baritone John Bischoff as Compère and Maya Kherani, the warm-voiced and graceful soprano who plays Saint Settlement, give particularly engaging performances. Led by Nicole Paiement, the chamber orchestra plays Thomson’s folksy score with similar abandon, infusing the composer’s honky-tonk melodies with spirited lightness and precision.

Everyone involved in the production seems to revel in the opera’s cheerful strangeness. It’s a pity to ruin the fun by picking through the red robes and gibberish dialogue for meaning. As Thompson himself remarked, “The two things you never asked Gertrude, ever, were about her being a lesbian and what her writing meant.”

Classical Music Moves From Concert Halls to CafesNEW YORK TIMES

2011-08-05T10:42:00.000-07:00

Ever since Classical Revolution, a loose collective of top-notch, classically trained musicians, started playing chamber music at the Revolution Cafe a few years ago, this Mission District bar has been packed on Mondays — not generally a big party night in town.

“It’s usually so crowded in here that people can’t get to the bar,” said Joe Lewis, who programs the Revolution Cafe’s eclectic musical offerings, which include classical, jazz and Eastern European concerts.

While classical music performances in nontraditional spaces are nothing new — the Kronos Quartet played weekly concerts in a Mill Valley restaurant as far back as 1978 — such events have proliferated in the last decade. Lately, it has been hard to go anywhere in the Bay Area without stumbling across a wind ensemble essaying John Adams in an art gallery or a string quartet playing Beethoven in a wine bar.

In the less than five years since Charith Premawardhana, a violist, founded Classical Revolution, that organization has presented more than 500 local events featuring around 600 musicians at the Revolution Cafe; Red Poppy Art House; Yoshi’s, where it will release its first CD in October; and other spaces.

The model has proved so popular with musicians and audiences, especially young crowds, that there are now about two dozen Classical Revolution chapters worldwide, in cities including New York, Montreal and Amsterdam.

Word has spread among musicians and music lovers of the advantages of the low production costs and the pleasures of presenting and listening to classical music in a casual atmosphere. Often, musicians who experience a Classical Revolution show on their travels return to their hometowns and host similar events.

The exponential growth of Classical Revolution and other innovative chamber music entities, like the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music and Opera on Tap, point to a broader trend in classical music — with its traditionally lofty image and high ticket prices — of making it more approachable.

Even orchestras are adopting Classical Revolution-style tactics. The San Francisco Symphony’s “Davies After Hours” program features orchestral musicians playing edgy repertory in the second-tier lobby at Davies Symphony Hall, transforming it into a nightclub-like setting with a cash bar, trendy furniture and a display of local artworks. The Napa Valley Symphony is collaborating with Classical Revolution to produce events in schools and wine bars.

The Cleveland Orchestra’s chamber concerts at a bar called the Happy Dog inspired two busloads of bar patrons to attend a concert at the orchestra’s home, Severance Hall, last season.

At Monday’s soiree at the Revolution Cafe, the appealing genre-bending quality of Classical Revolution was in full force. Assorted clusters of musicians read through a variety of works, including a concerto grosso by the Baroque composer Arcangelo Corelli and the Schumann Piano Quintet. A more polished performance by another part of the loose collective, the Musical Art Quintet, a string ensemble that specializes in playing music with a Latin flavor, followed the ad hoc jam session. Players switched in and out of the lineup throughout the evening and laughed when they made occasional mistakes.

“Classical Revolution isn’t your typical classical concert,” said Matthew Scherb, a lawyer based in San Francisco who said he had attended five Classical Revolution events to date. “The venue feels more like a large living room than a concert hall.”

For musicians with regular orchestra jobs, Classical Revolution provides a low-key setting for music-making. “It is very refreshing to just roll up to a bar in jeans and a baseball cap and read some music,” said Adam Luftman, the principal trumpet of the San Francisco Opera orchestra, who has participated in around 15 Classical Revolution events.

Classical Revolution also gives struggling musicians looking to build their careers some vital opportunities to perform, network and even make a little money. According to Mr. Premawardhana, musicians generally split audience donations, which amount to anything from $200 for the average Revolution Cafe session to $750 for playing at the Legion of Honor.

Despite the surge of classical music performances in alternative spaces, there will always be a place for the traditional concert hall experience, of course. Some forms of music simply demand a different kind of environment. “Certainly you can’t do a major symphonic work in a small coffee house, and a string quartet would be lost in a large armory,” said Jesse Rosen, the president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras, a national support organization for symphonies. “Where the concert hall experience has an edge is that it gives complete focus and concentration to the music.”

Plus, performing classical music in nontraditional spaces often comes with drawbacks like poor acoustics, drunken audiences and the frequent comings and goings of makeshift concert settings, which can hamper the ability of a grassroots music organization to build a following. For example, Socha Café and Coda Lounge, two locations in San Francisco where Classical Revolution used to stage events, are now closed.

Not that these issues faze Mr. Premawardhana much. When the Revolution Cafe temporarily lost its entertainment license two years ago, he decided to move to the Make-Out Room, the bar across the street. Being a loose-knit shoestring operation comes with certain advantages after all. “We’re flexible,” Mr. Premawardhana said. “When things like that happen, we just make do.”

'The Verona Project' Turns Lackluster Shakespeare Play into Gay Coming-of-Age Story Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/12PIT)BAY CITIZEN

2011-07-11T16:23:00.000-07:00

Changing a central character's gender injects new life into 'Two Gentlemen of Verona'

Of all the letters in the English language, the one that seems to have made the biggest impression on Shakespeare is “o.” In the prologue to “Henry V,” Shakespeare famously describes the theater as being like a “Wooden O” and in the Quarto of “King Lear,” the vowel conveys the titular character’s unspeakable grief as he howls it four times in a row upon hearing of his daughter Cordelia’s murder.

In “The Verona Project,” Amanda Dehnert’s world premiere musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Two Gentleman of Verona” at California Shakespeare Theater, the letter “o” has a similarly transformative effect. Through the mere act of turning “Silvia” into “Silvio,” Dehnert not only changes the gender of the character at the apex of the play’s love triangle, but in so doing, also performs a refreshingly contemporary—albeit musically inert—makeover on Shakespeare’s early comedy.

Written around 1590, “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” doesn’t show many signs of its author’s genius for plotting or poetry. Riddled with heavy-handed puns about footwear and livestock, it tells a stiff story about two young men (Valentine and Proteus) falling out over a girl (Silvia) that ends in a flurry of hard-to-buy forgiveness on the part of Proteus’ long-suffering girlfriend (Julia.)

By playfully using a simple vowel switcheroo to create a homosexual coming-of-age narrative that sees Valentine and Proteus vying for a male version of Silvia, Denhert imposes upon the play a nuanced vision of romantic love and self-knowledge that’s reminiscent of the clever identity politics in later Shakespeare comedies like “As you Like It” and “Twelfth Night.”

Like Orlando being forced to question his love for Rosalind in “As You Like It” by romancing Rosalind’s male counterfeit, Silvio in “The Verona Project” puts Proteus to the test, forcing him to question his sexual identity and discover what it truly means to trust his instincts.

This is all very zeitgeisty, of course. “The Verona Project” falls in line with several other new musical theater works recently seen on Bay Area stages such as “The Lily’s Revenge” and “Tales of the City.” These productions all focus on gay self-identity stories and implicitly call for the broader legalization of gay marriage through yawping a Whitmanesque view on bold individualism.

Dehnert’s vowel-changing antics are just one way in which “The Verona Project” shows off its individualistic colors. Set in a steampunk-inflected, cutesy-hipster fairytale landscape in which characters grow geraniums in their ovens, speak to each other long-distance using empty food cans connected by string and attempt to step out of the nightmarish shadows of their parents, the production draws in equal parts on Shakespeare, Hans Christian Andersen and Carl Jung.

Unlike Shakespeare, Dehnert delves deeply into the back-stories of the characters. If Silvio reacts badly to being discovered in a clinch with Valentine by his stern father, it’s ultimately, we discover, because the father hasn’t gotten over the death of Valentine’s mother. And if Julia likes to guard dark secrets about her home-life, it’s because she’s struggling to cope with the loss of both of her parents at a young age.

It’s a risky approach: in updating and transforming Shakespeare’s play in such an iconoclastic manner, Dehnert’s production can feel at times like an interactive undergraduate psychology project crossed with an endless open mic night.

Music plays a big role in the production. The stage is set up like an underground rock concert, littered with guitars, drum-kit, keyboard, amps and other musical paraphernalia. The performers sing, play and act their way through the whole musical, a feat that requires tremendous skill.

Sadly, neither the songs in “The Verona Project,” which are composed by Dehnert, nor the actors’ musicianship skills, are strong enough to support the storytelling. The mostly unmemorable musical numbers are built on tired pop music chord progressions and riffs. With the exception of the strong, lustrous voices of Adam Yazbeck and Marisa Duchowny, the singing generally verges between the unremarkable to the out-of-tune.

And there seems little reason to include lines for clarinet, French horn and trumpet when they can barely be heard over the relentless guitar and pounding drums.

Still, there’s enough that’s endearing about “The Verona Project” to make for an entertaining and thoughtful evening. One delightful aspect of the production, for instance, is Elena Wright’s Thuria, a sweet and ultra-feminine mutation of Thurio, Shakespeare’s frumpy, old male suitor to Sylvia.

Though “The Verona Project” derives much of its narrative drive from the switch from Sylvia to Sylvio, and Thurio/Thuria is only a secondary character in both the original and adaptation, Wright steals the show with her bird of paradise-like, hat-topped outfits and cheeky personality. The character might be a clotheshorse, but at some levels she’s the wisest of all. In an unexpected and thrilling departure from “Two Gentleman of Verona,” Thuria immediately sees Silvio for who he is and easily sets him free. Coming from an essentially trivial character, this statement of understanding and compassion is particularly powerful.

Over the course of three hours, “The Verona Project” travels a good distance away from Shakespeare’s text. But thanks to the letter “o,” which crops up most explicitly in the production in the song “Meaning of O,” the musical’s one engaging musical number describing the loss of words that comes with falling in love, the thread connecting Shakespeare and Dehnert remains intact.

I say O when I see you.
Oh when you see me too
Oh, oh will you turn away
If all I know to say is
Oh

For Christine Brewer, the diva act stays onstageLOS ANGELES TIMES

2011-07-10T15:07:00.000-07:00

She is one of opera's great dramatic sopranos. But other artists praise her lack of pretense and her homespun personality.

It's hard to imagine one of the world's greatest dramatic sopranos singing out of tune.

But when Christine Brewer was a child growing up in the tiny Illinois town of Grand Tower her musically inclined mother was so appalled by her daughter's apparent inability to sing properly that she made her learn to play the violin, an instrument that demands a particularly rigorous ear.

The vocalist's education in string playing clearly paid off. It is the instrumental quality that Brewer, one of today's leading interpreters of the music of Strauss and Wagner with title roles in "Ariadne auf Naxos" at the Metropolitan Opera and "Tristan and Isolde" at the San Francisco Opera to her name, brings to her singing that makes her stand out.

Conductors frequently refer in rapturous tones to Brewer's unusual ability to both soar above — and blend flawlessly with — a symphony. "Her voice is like an instrument. It interacts seamlessly with the orchestra," said conductor Donald Runnicles, general music director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin since August 2009, chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and one of Brewer's frequent collaborators. "The tremendous focus of her voice is able to cut through an orchestra," said Richard Gaddes, the founder of Opera Theatre of St. Louis, where Brewer got her professional start in the 1980s as a chorus member before going on to perform solo roles in such works as "Peter Grimes."

Brewer's affinity for singing as if she were an integral member of an ensemble rather than its temporary glittering ornament extends to her personality. There isn't a trace of the haughty diva about the singer, despite garnering such accolades as a Grammy Award and a place on the BBC's "Top 20 Sopranos" list alongside Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland.

Though she was by far the most well-known soloist involved in a series of performances of Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" with the San Francisco Symphony last month, Brewer was a team player. The vocalist has performed the work around 30 times, but she paid close attention to conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and smiled encouragingly at her fellow singers, two of whom were new to the piece. "She's a wonderful human being without the pretensions of a prima donna," said the pianist Craig Rutenberg, who has accompanied Brewer in recitals since 2002.

Brewer exuded the air of a Midwest soccer mom as she kicked off her shoes and settled onto a hotel room sofa during a break from rehearsing the "Missa Solemnis." The 55-year-old singer talked at greater length about her 27-year-old daughter Elisabeth's nursing career, her conversations with the sixth-graders at a school that she regularly visits and her family's upcoming annual Labor Day cookout at home in Lebanon, Ill., ("My husband, Ross, will get the whole yard looking beautiful with hay bales and colored lights") than she did about her musical activities.

Yet Brewer's gregariously homespun persona and raucous sense of humor (she's known among her colleagues as a notorious teller of naughty jokes) is matched by a fearsomely meticulous attitude toward her work. The singer's musical scores, some of which she has been carrying around for decades, are thickly covered in penciled notes. When traveling, she never checks these prize possessions with her luggage. When a score starts to fall apart, she makes a copy and leaves the original at home.

The vocalist has been equally punctilious about her choice of operatic roles. Brewer's appearance with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic on July 17 at the Hollywood Bowl in the title role of a concert performance of "Turandot" — a part she has never played before — is the result of careful consideration.

Brewer prefers to premiere a role in a concert hall where she can focus solely on the music or in a new stage production where rehearsal time is typically longer than for a remount. So when the Met offered her the chance to sing Princess Turandot a few years ago in an existing production, she turned it down. "Singing a Strauss or Wagner score is second nature for me, but something like 'Turandot' challenges me in so many ways," she said. "It's not just that it's in a different language. It's in a different musical language."

After working with Dudamel on Strauss' "Four Last Songs" at Disney Hall in 2008, the conductor and singer tossed around ideas for their next collaboration. Dudamel suggested "Tosca." But Brewer wasn't keen. The artists reached a consensus with "Turandot." "After that," said Brewer, "it was a matter of waiting until I had time to get it into my bones."

Brewer's career serves as a study in the art of waiting. When her daughter was in her teens, Brewer took time out so she could focus on parenting. And like most sopranos destined to play heavy Germanic roles, she had to wait for many years before her voice reached maturity.

The great dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson, with whom Brewer studied in her early 30s, offered the then-budding vocalist important advice: "Birgit said, 'Even if it means you have to wait until you're 40 to do Strauss and Wagner, keep singing Mozart because it will keep your voice healthy and youthful.'"

Brewer took Nilsson's words to heart, patiently dividing her time between singing lighter operatic fare and working as a substitute teacher until her husband (also an educator) forced her to concentrate on her vocal career by deliberately not renewing her teaching credential when he renewed his own, an action that angered her. "I saw teaching as an insurance policy, but Ross thought it was a crutch, and he was right," Brewer said.

Brewer's path since then has not always been easy. Like many emerging artists, her early career was marked by tough financial decisions ("Sometimes it was a case of 'Do we buy groceries this week? Or do we buy a score?'") And more recently, a knee injury forced her to withdraw from playing the career-defining role of Brünnhilde at the Met in what would have been her first complete "Ring" cycle. "I don't know if a complete 'Ring' is in the future for me," said the singer, who frequently performs extracts in concert from Wagner's seminal operatic cycle.

Still, Brewer's full schedule, which includes appearances at London's Wigmore Hall, a collaboration with the jazz pianist Peter Martin and a recording of "Der Freischütz" with Colin Davis, testifies to the singer's enduring appeal.

Dudamel, for one, can't wait for his date with Brewer at the Hollywood Bowl. "The role of Princess Turandot is notoriously difficult to cast. You need power, but also great flexibility. You have to project strength, but also vulnerability," he said in an email. "Christine is one of the very few sopranos who has all of these qualities, and to hear this work at the Bowl should be something unforgettable."

Michael Tilson Thomas's First 'Missa Solemnis'BAY CITIZEN

2011-06-24T15:44:00.000-07:00

A nearly flawless performance is marred by discordant soloists

There are few masterworks in the choral repertoire that are as packed with contradictions as Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis.”

The composer looked to earlier liturgical traditions to compose his 1823 mass, but with its unexpected harmonies and at times almost polyrhythmic feel, the work seems strikingly modern. Heroic fugues burst out of the texture only to recede suddenly into moments of hushed silence. The closing sentiment of the final movement, the Agnus Dei, is a call for armistice—“dona nobis pacem” (“grant us peace”.) And yet, with the Napoleonic Wars a close memory in the composer’s mind, it’s riddled with the echoes of the battlefield. Picking up on the restless strings and distant trumpet calls of earlier in the movement, an ominous kettledrum intones a hollow death knell on a foreign-sounding note.

In his take on the “Missa Solemnis” with the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus this week at Davies Symphony Hall, Michael Tilson Thomas throws himself feverishly at the conflicts in the work, which articulates the composer’s own spiritual struggle. (Beethoven grew up in a Catholic household and believed fervently in God, but was generally hostile to the trappings of formal religion.)

At last night’s concert, the first of four happening through Sunday, it was as if the conductor was trying to channel the desperate energy of a composer in the twilight of his life yearning for spiritual guidance in a world beset by war.

The effect of this approach was breath-taking in its intensity and packed with sublime musicianship from the chorus and orchestra.

But some of the tension encoded in Tilson Thomas’ bravura effort was misplaced owing to discord of a less desirable sort from the quartet of solo singers.

Containing what the musicologist Michael Steinberg describes as “probably the most difficult fugue ever written for voices,” the “Missa Solemnis” is as rewarding as it is hard to perform. “I have a very strong love-hate relationship with the work,” Christine Brewer, the solo soprano for this week’s performances, told me a few days ago. “It’s not a very singer-friendly piece but it has so much depth.”

This is the first time Tilson Thomas has helmed the piece (it was last performed by the San Francisco Symphony in 1995 in Herbert Blomstedt’s last season as music director) and he seems acutely aware of its challenges. A chorus member told me that the conductor worked more intensively with the group to prepare for these concerts than is customary, adding extra rehearsals and providing each singer with detailed, marked-up scores.

The work paid off: Tilson Thomas’ command of both the instrumental and vocal ensembles shone through.

The opening Kyrie movement, with its rolling waves of D Major chords and pleading sobs from the singers in the “christe eleison” section, perfectly articulated the sentiment scrawled by the composer on the first page of the score: “Von Herzen—möge es wieder—zu Herzen gehen!” ("From the heart—may it therefore—go to the heart!”)

The Gloria unfolded in an adrenalin-fueled blazon of sound with the chorus engaging in a head-on skirmish with the strings. The anarchy gave way to moments of pitiful intimacy when the soloists emerged from the dense texture with their whimpered cries of “O Miserere.” Prefacing “Miserere” with “O” is a Beethoven innovation. Painfully human, the sequence is one of the strongest declarations in the work of the composer’s extremely personal spiritual views.

Tilson Thomas made the most of the work’s many jolts and shocks. The Credo in particular delivered the musical equivalent of a hit and run on the audience. The weird, arrhythmic start of the “crucifixus” section ballooned into a sonic landscape that swung with abandon between fortissimo blasts and disturbingly lyrical quiet passages. When the tenors entered a cappella with ecstatic yelps during the “crucifixus” section, the effect was nothing short of blindsiding.

The overwhelming push-pull of this arresting piece demands complete unity and precision from all the forces involved. But while the chorus and orchestra faithfully followed Tilson Thomas on his seat-of-the-pants mission through the wild jungle of Beethoven’s score with brave unity, the soloists seemed at times to be scattered.

The “Sanctus” movement in particular suffered from poor intonation as well as ragged phrase endings. The blend in the quartet passages frequently jarred as the vocalists appeared to be duking it out for supremacy like pontiffs in a religious debate. The female voices were given to overly-dramatic swoops and tenor Gregory Kunde’s voice sounded strained —as if it were being shoved through a juicer or meat-grinder. There was little that Tilson Thomas could do to reign in the divas.

If this issue added an undesirable slant to an otherwise satisfyingly hair-raising performance, all was redeemed towards the end of the evening by Alexander Barantschik’s spiraling, romantic violin solo in the “Benedictus” and bass soloist Ain Anger’s velvety opening to the “Agnus Dei” in the swarthy key of B minor. Terror and rhapsody fused in these passages dragging us, willing or not, closer to God.

Eric Whitacre soars beyond world of choral musicLOS ANGELES TIMES

2011-06-19T10:26:00.000-07:00

The classical composer broadens his reach with forays into the modeling and movie industries, plus a successful online project.

Classical composers don't generally attract hordes of screaming fans. But when Eric Whitacre appears at a convention, concert hall or college campus, groupies have been known to line up around the block hours in advance for the chance to meet the man with the flowing locks.

With his latest album, "Light & Gold," debuting at No. 1 on the classical charts on both sides of the Atlantic, an enormous global following and a modeling contract to his name, Whitacre is arguably the first bona fide rock star to have emerged from the decidedly unglamorous field of contemporary choral music.

The composer, who counts Björk and Radiohead as influences alongside Bach and Debussy and tends to polarize classical music aficionados for his populist stance, is fast developing a reputation for himself beyond the stuffy church halls where choruses are most often heard.

Earlier this year, 2,052 singers from 58 countries participated in Whitacre's "Virtual Choir" project, uploading videos of themselves singing the soprano, alto, tenor and bass parts from the composer's 2000 piece "Sleep" to YouTube, which were then spliced together into an online performance conducted by the beatifically smiling maestro. Whitacre spoke about the project, which has grown exponentially since he launched it last year with 185 singers from 12 countries, at the high-profile TED innovation conference in March.

Whitacre's recent collaboration with Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer ("Inception") on the choral sections of the "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" movie soundtrack is further broadening the conductor's reach. The same can be said of his involvement with the 80th-anniversary celebrations of Abbey Road Studios, for which he is judging and conducting an anthem-writing competition with the London Symphony Orchestra this year.

"The composer in me wants to think that it's happening because I'm tapping into the deepest part of our collective psyche with my music," said Whitacre, who grew up in Reno and lives for the moment in Los Angeles with his singer-wife, Hila Plitmann, and their 5-year-old son, of his exploding popularity. "But the marketer in me thinks maybe it's the hair."

Tall, athletic and endowed with golden, surfer-boy tresses that belie his reputation as the world's biggest choir nerd, the 41-year-old Whitacre is as good-looking as he is self-deprecating. "I don't feel like I'm an artist with a capital A," the composer said over an egg-white omelet at a Studio City cafe. Yet behind the Jon Bon Jovi smile and form-fitting T-shirt are serious musical chops.

One of the most frequently performed composers of his generation, Whitacre has received commissions from vocal ensembles, including the Kings Singers, the Berlin Rundfunkchor and Chanticleer. "Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings," his music theater work about an angel's dreams of flight involving seven soloists, a DJ, a solo cello and a chorus of angels, was presented at Carnegie Hall in 2010 and will receive a concert performance conducted by the composer at Walt Disney Concert Hall on June 25.

The U.K.-based Decca label, to which Whitacre signed last year, has gone as far as to create a professional chorus, the Eric Whitacre Singers, specifically to record and perform the composer's works. In August, Whitacre is moving his family to London where, in addition to moonlighting as a composer-in-residence at Cambridge University, he will work with the Whitacre Singers on his upcoming Decca album.

"Eric Whitacre is the defining voice of American choral music at the start of the 21st century," said Matthew Oltman, music director of Chanticleer. He said that only a few choral composers, such as John Rutter, David Willcocks and Morten Lauridsen, carry similar name recognition in choral music circles.

The composer's instantly recognizable musical style, which frequently employs dense chord clusters requiring singers to split into as many as 18 parts, soaring soprano accents and polyrhythmic meters, has spawned many imitations. Oltman said half the entries Chanticleer receives for its annual student choral composition competition are "Whitacre-esque."

Singers relish the lushness of Whitacre's sonic palette. "Eric has this extraordinary ear for vocal color," said Grant Gershon, music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, which is launching its upcoming season with a Whitacre piece, "Her Sacred Spirit Soars." "I think of him as a painter of sound with the human voice."

The composer's use of clear-cut, emotionally upfront poetry by authors such as Octavio Paz and e.e. cummings also wins him admirers. "The voicing is very natural. The phrasing and dynamic swells seem inevitable," said Rebecca Schonberg, a Bay Area-based singer who has performed many of Whitacre's works.

The son of a Nevada state unemployment benefits manager and a graphic designer, Whitacre didn't get off to a particularly illustrious start as a musician. The composer made several half-hearted attempts to learn the piano as a child and spent his high school years writing what he describes as "Erasure and Depeche Mode rip-offs" for a pop group in which he played synthesizer and drum machine. He was persuaded to join the chorus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas when a fellow undergraduate lured him with promises of cute sopranos and an upcoming choir tour to Mexico.

As soon as Whitacre sang bass in Mozart's "Requiem Mass" as part of that ensemble, he became hooked on choral music. He began creating pieces for the university groups, which he used as "laboratories" to develop his skills. At that time, Whitacre also started writing for wind ensembles, which impressed him for their sheer volume. Soon, his music started gaining the notice of vocal and wind music aficionados beyond campus. "He at times made the impression of being a bit of a flake," said Virko Baley, a music professor at UNLV. "But whenever he was really interested in something, he worked extremely hard."

It took Whitacre seven years to complete his undergraduate degree because he kept dropping out of classes. But by the time he enrolled at the Juilliard School for a masters in composition in 1995, the composer had already received commissions and published pieces.

He also cultivated a canny business sense. Unlike many composers with burgeoning careers, Whitacre chose early on to retain copyright control over most of his works and avoid hefty publisher commissions by self-publishing with the aid of a distributor. He entered into a deal with a traditional publisher in 2007 (G. Schirmer) only under terms that would allow him greater copyright control than is typical and was marketing himself online long before other composers understood the power of the Internet. (Today, Whitacre streams all of his works at ericwhitacre.com free and maintains close contact with his fans through social media.)

Focusing at the start of his career on writing for choruses and wind ensembles instead of orchestras also proved to be a smart business decision for the composer, who has branched out to symphonic music more recently as his reputation has grown. "A young composer writing a symphony struggles hard to get that symphony played," said the composer John Corigliano, who taught Whitacre at Juilliard. "But Eric wanted to get his music out to people and wrote for bands and choruses where there was a real demand."

Unsurprisingly, Whitacre's enviable commercial success has earned him some detractors. His recent signing with the London-based Storm modeling agency, which counts the pop musicians Lily Allen and Michael Bublé among its talent roster, hasn't improved the composer's reputation in classical music enclaves. Singers and conductors sometimes question his artistic sensibility. "While his music is aesthetically beautiful on the surface, it has all the depth of a Hallmark greeting card," said one New York-based chorus director. "He's like the Deepak Chopra of choral music."

Yet alongside "Glee" and "The Sing Off," Whitacre's efforts are undeniably making a profound impact on the world of ensemble singing. Many welcome the composer's appetite for marrying the rigors of classical music with a populist approach.

"Choirs are typically about the power of the collective, so it's not often that stars emerge," said Ann Meier Baker, president and CEO of Chorus America, a choral service organization. "Eric Whitacre is an unusual exception. He understands the potential of choral music to connect people, and that reaps benefits for all of us who care about the future of the art form."

Kim Nalley Takes on Nina Simone, With Mixed ResultsBAY CITIZEN

2011-06-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

San Francisco jazz singer kicks off five-week series of Simone covers

When Kim Nalley finished leaning into the final poignant lines of “I Loves You Porgy” during her tribute to Nina Simone at the Rrazz Room last night and her band’s final chords and cymbal tings rippled to nothingness, the jazz vocalist abruptly changed gear and launched into a lecture on the art and business of the musical arrangement.

“John Coltrane made ‘Favorite Things’ his own, but arrangers rarely get paid for their work,” Nalley said, with a note of complaint in her voice. “The royalties go to the original composers.”

Arranging, or “the art of giving existing melody musical variety,” as the American Federation of Musicians describes the term, is the currency of jazz, even if its practitioners lack financial rewards. No self-respecting artist would dream of getting up on stage to perform a standard in exactly the same way as one of his or her forbears.

But if last night’s performance reveals anything about the art of vocal arrangement, it’s that sometimes there’s no shame in singing a tune “straight.”

Simone herself is a member of the elite club of jazz performers whose versions of previously written tracks have come to be seen as definitive. Ever since 1958 when she shot to stardom with her breakout hit version of George Gershwin’s soulful love song from “Porgy and Bess,” Simone’s interpretive skills were on display, even though some jazz aficionados might argue that most vocalists merely imbue songs with their stylistic colorings rather than create arrangements in the technical sense of the word.

Nalley, too, is known for putting a strong spin on her source material. Her feisty renderings of familiar melodies, whether Christmas carols, gospel songs or jazz standards, toy with the lyrics, displace traditional climaxes and experiment liberally with techniques like yodeling and scat. Even when she played the role of Ella Fitzgerald in a musical drama she wrote herself about the legendary singer’s rise to fame (“Ella: The American Dream,” performed at the Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma in 2008 and 2010), Nalley eschewed imitating the singer’s vocal approach.

At its most engaging moments, “She Put a Spell on Me: Kim Nalley sings Nina Simone,” the title of Nalley’s five-week-long Rrazz Room residency which runs through July 17, walks this narrow line. All too often, however, Nalley’s desire to imbue songs that Simone famously sang with her own imprimatur undermines their strength.

Her set changes nightly. It’s based on Nalley’s own 2006 Grammy Award-shortlisted Simone tribute album and blends the vocalist’s freewheeling interpretations of numbers from the Nina Simone songbook with narration about the historical context surrounding the music.

The most memorable parts of last night’s two-hour-long journey occurred when the singer seemed to stop trying to create radical “rearrangements” of Simone’s efforts.

For instance, Nalley’s refreshingly unaffected version of the Oscar Brown Jr. ballad, “Forbidden Fruit,” had a zesty-cheeky slant that is absent from Simone’s more plodding take. The accomplished band members (pianist Tammy Hall, guitarist Greg Skaff, drummer Kent Bryson and bassist Michael Zisman) gave the song’s Adam and Eve story a sweetly naive undertow with their staccato interjections between verses.

Nalley performed “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” with similar unpretentiousness. The musicians swung Billy Taylor’s song with energy and commitment, making the melody and lyrics resonate freely beyond any specific interpretation.

Most of the rest of the show didn’t live up to these sparkling moments, however. Nalley worked hard to create a unique vision for “Feeling Good,” a song penned by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse from the musical “The Roar of the Greasepaint – the Smell of the Crowd” which became closely associated with Simone when she covered it on her 1965 album “I Put a Spell on You.” But Nalley’s scrambling of the lyrics and climaxes seemed forced.

Her take on the 1920s Broadway tune “Love Me Or Leave Me” was also unsatisfying. It was as if the singer was deliberately trying to undermine the rhythmic drive that Simone brought to the number with her more monotone recasting that lacked the pulse necessary to give the ostinato-like melody shape.

Moving about the space in a flowing black strapless sundress and headscarf (in a nod to her muse’s style), Nalley radiated a sense of drama and fun throughout. The connection with her audience was palpable. However, Nalley’s vocal stylings seemed more affected than artistically engaging on the whole. Habits such as singing slightly flat on held notes and then using vibrato to right the pitch, injecting short yodels and overdoing a rasping, Louis Armstrong-like “growl,” neither did justice to Simone’s legacy nor made us hear the songs in exciting new ways.

New ‘Ring’ Straddles Two VisionsNEW YORK TIMES

2011-06-10T09:12:00.000-07:00

“The Ring of the Nibelung,” Richard Wagner’s monumental, four-part opera cycle chronicling the battle between gods, heroes and monsters over an all-powerful, magical ring wrought out of a mystical hoard of gold, is opera’s answer to extreme sports.

The grand scale and huge costs involved in staging the masterwork provide the ultimate test for opera companies. With a budget of $23 million and 415 people involved in the production, San Francisco Opera is doing the equivalent of a base jump off Coit Tower with its current version of the 17-hour epic.

And in a time of fiscal crisis for opera companies nationwide, San Francisco Opera’s decision to mix traditional and experimental production elements — thereby not committing to either — represents the calculated risk of the whole endeavor.

“The Ring” has the potential to draw large crowds and make headlines; this production has already nearly sold out its run at the War Memorial Opera House, which goes through July 3. But San Francisco Opera is struggling to fill a $7 million budget shortfall and had to create the final part of the cycle, “Götterdämmerung,” alone when its co-producer, the Washington National Opera, encountered financial difficulties.

“When the Washington National Opera pulled out about 18 months ago, we thought we might not be able to complete the cycle,” said David Gockley, the general director of the San Francisco Opera, who is mounting “The Ring” for the first time in his career. “But we were already in it up to our necks with ticket sales and contributions and would have lost more by canceling.”

The very nature of putting on the epic “Ring” serves to announce an opera company’s creative values.

There are some “Rings” that favor anachronism, like Stephen Wadsworth’s 2000 production for the Seattle Opera (scheduled to be remounted in 2013) with its robed characters cavorting amid picturesque pastoral landscapes. Meanwhile, the neon light-gashed, abstract version for the Los Angeles Opera in 2010, directed by Achim Freyer, exists at the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum.

The San Francisco Opera’s take on “The Ring” tries a multifaceted middle ground. This approach reflects the populist vision of its general director, whose tenure since 2006 has combined bringing in big stars like Placido Domingo and instituting simulcasts at the ballpark with occasional world premieres, like the coming opera about the Sept. 11 attacks, “Heart of a Soldier.”

In contrast to the company’s solidly traditional previous production of “The Ring,” in 1999, which sought inspiration from the lushly Romantic landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the director Francesca Zambello’s relatively low-tech, character-driven new cycle — featuring set designs by Michael Yeargan and conducting by Donald Runnicles — has elements that are at once traditional and contemporary.

The San Francisco Opera is trying to help modern audiences connect with Wagner’s complex work.

“You can see this ‘Ring’ and get right into the mythology of it,” Mr. Gockley said. “It creates a bridge to the mythology that’s more familiar to our audiences today than the lofty gods with horns and spears.”

Actually, Wotan, the head deity (played by the American baritone Mark Delavan) does carry a spear on stage, proving that some traditions die hard.

But Ms. Zambello’s “Ring” breaks with custom and connects with audiences through its innovative use of multiple settings. Instead of unfolding in one time and locale, the action occurs over four distinct periods of American history.

“Das Rheingold,” (which received a “preview” run in 2008) takes place in the Gold Rush era, partly in a cavernous gold mine where the power-hungry dwarf Alberich holds sway. For “Die Walküre” (which audiences saw in preview last season), the story moves to the boom-and-bust years of the 1920s and ’30s with Wotan presiding over a vast corporate empire. “Siegfried” picks up the story in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

“Götterdämmerung” is staged in a dystopian future. “It’s like ‘Mad Max,’ Ayn Rand and ‘The Handmaiden’s Tale’ rolled into one,” Ms. Zambello said.

But the overall feel, with the emphasis on psychological realism, is one of approachability. Unlike the Metropolitan Opera’s in-progress production of “The Ring” directed by Robert Lepage, which has so far alienated many audience members by emphasizing cumbersome design concepts over the storytelling, Ms. Zambello “tells the story straight,” said Steven Sokolow, president of the Wagner Society of Northern California, one of around 150 fan clubs dedicated to the composer around the world.

In this “Ring,” little separates gods from humans because of the intimate interactions between the characters. Wotan and his wife, Fricka (Elizabeth Bishop), go from being the perfect romantic couple in “Das Rheingold” to sworn enemies in “Die Walküre.” And the top god relates to Brünnhilde (Nina Stemme) like a soccer dad chastising his offspring for missing practice.

But trying to be all things to all people comes with drawbacks.

The production is unlikely to attract many “Ring” newbies with its hefty $120 price tag. And while bold approaches to “The Ring” often garner criticism, they also get people talking: opera buffs are still arguing over Patrice Chéreau’s 1976 version set in the Industrial Revolution.

Ms. Zambello’s middle-of-the-road production may satisfy audiences and opera accountants today, but as any X-Games gold medalist knows, with less risk comes less reward.

Clichés Drag Down Otherwise Exuberant 'Tales of the City'BAY CITIZEN

2011-06-03T09:30:00.000-07:00

A musical based on Armistead Maupin’s beloved novels premieres at American Conservatory Theater

When Mary Ann Singleton sets down her suitcase in San Francisco at the start of the new musical-theater adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City,” we instantly know that things will never be the same again for the young Cleveland transplant.

She’s a different person from the moment that her flamboyant transsexual landlady, Mrs. Madrigal, hands the ingénue her first joint.

With characters swapping genders, adopting children and joining religious sects in Guyana with the same level of pragmatism that most of us bring to switching up toothpaste brands, change is one of the few constants in Maupin’s well-known series of novels set in a San Francisco boarding house.

Librettist Jeff Whitty’s quick-witted adaptation of two of the novels in the series — “Tales of the City” (1978) and “More Tales of the City” (1980), which is currently receiving its world premiere production at the American Conservatory Theater — captures the sweeping current of breathless transformation at play in Maupin’s interweaving plotlines with exuberant force.

The three-hour musical, which offers a snapshot of the hash brownie-fueled highs and love-addled lows of the occupants of Mrs. Madrigal’s Russian Hill building, passes in a happy blur of bell-bottom jeans, homosexual bathhouses and bongs. Every major character (and most of the minor ones) undergoes an apotheosis, not to mention more costume changes than there are patent-leather, knee-high boots in the average drag queen’s boudoir.

If only the same lust for transformation could be found in the musical’s depiction of the city in which “Tales of the City” is set.

San Francisco’s global reputation today arguably rests, in part, on Maupin’s books and the television miniseries they spawned. It’s a place of restless vitality and constant flux. When viewed as a whole series with a time frame stretching over several decades, Maupin’s novels suggest as much.

But you wouldn’t know it from the musical, which presents a version of San Francisco that’s steeped in tired nostalgia.

The stage version of “Tales of the City” certainly makes an effort to transcend the clichéd confines of its hippy, West Coast setting.

Chief among the production’s assets in this regard are the songs. Composers Jakes Shears and John Garden of the modish, New York-based pop band “Scissor Sisters” don’t relegate themselves to regurgitating the disco beats and glam rock guitar licks of the 1970s. The eclectic musical score includes touches of tango, torch song and vaudeville. Careening saxophone solos suggest the 1980s, while the soaring ensemble number “Atlantis” and the intense, quasi-spoken aria “Dear Mama,” look to the influence of Jonathan Larson’s 1990s musical “Rent.”

Powerful vocal performances, such as from Betsy Wolfe (as a happy-go-lucky Mary Ann Singleton) and Mary Birdsong (as the plucky boarding house tenant Mona Ramsey) further enhance “Tales of the City’s” musical punch.

Whenever Judy Kaye’s Mrs. Madrigal sings, the character’s entire, richly lived life seems to pass before our ears and eyes. The performer’s combustion-engine contralto, heard in its full glory in the solo number “The Next Time You See Me,” has enough of an edge to make us understand the time-bomb ticking away just beneath Mrs. Madrigal’s put-together exterior and a layer of velvety warmth.

The only drawback to the production’s engaging music is the length of the songs. In keeping with the overall restlessness of Maupin’s source material, which flits from one staccato scene to the next, Whitty and his collaborators have devised a fast-changing structure punctuated with musical numbers that disappear in a flash. One barely has time to get into the swing of the often-ingenious melodies and spicy lyrics before a song is done.

Unfortunately, the clunky way in which the production depicts 1970s San Francisco undermines the muscial’s many transcendent qualities. Douglas Schmidt’s nondescript scenic design depicting the back of an apartment building fringed on both sides by vapid curtains of greenery is a bland version of Maupin’s famous Barbary Lane.

The musical also piles on an unfortunate number of stuck-in-time stereotypes about San Francisco as being an “alternative” kind of a place. At one point, bare-chested male cast members caress and cavort in a steamy bathhouse wearing nothing but low-slung towels. At another, a trio of transsexuals dressed as oversized poodles do an empowerment dance. Intermittently, characters in colorful, shapeless clothes consume illegal substances.

Only “Homosexual Convalescent Center,” a show-stopping number staged under Pepto-Bismol-hued lights about what it means to be old, gay and entitled takes the tropes associated with San Francisco’s 1970s underground culture in an unexpected and deliciously louche direction.

Needless to say, there’s a lot more variety and depth to Maupin’s vision of San Francisco than the musical conveys. If this “Tales of the City” adaptation is to have anything near as wide an appeal as the source material, or even the chance of a future beyond the American Conservatory Theater, the creators may need to take the theme of transformation further and change up their depiction of the city by the bay.

Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City – ReviewTHE GUARDIAN

2011-06-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

When the young Cleveland transplant Mary Ann Singleton sets down her suitcase in San Francisco at the start Tales of the City, things will never be the same again. With characters swapping genders, adopting children and joining religious sects in Guyana, change is one of the few constants in Armistead Maupin's series of novels set in a California boarding house. The first two books have now been turned into a musical, with a score by John Garden and Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears, and libretto by Avenue Q's Jeff Whitty.

At its best, the evening exuberantly captures the sweeping current of transformation in Maupin's work. A snapshot of the hash brownie-fuelled highs and love-addled lows of the occupants of Mrs Madrigal's building, it passes in a happy blur of flares, gay saunas and bongs. The music does more than just regurgitate the 70s: as well as disco beats and glam rock guitars, there are touches of tango, torch song and vaudeville. When Judy Kaye sings, Mrs Madrigal's richly lived life seems to pass before our eyes. Her combustion-engine contralto is velvety warm yet edgy.

As a portrait of the city at a particular time, however, Tales of the City is superficial. Douglas Schmidt's nondescript set depicting the back of an apartment building doesn't give us many clues about 70s San Francisco. A couple of Hari Krishna devotees floating across the stage in the middle of Mary Ann's opening number help confirm the location, but from that moment onwards the musical piles on stereotypes. Bare-chested male performers cavort in a steamy bathhouse; a trio of trannies do an empowerment dance; characters in colourful, shapeless clothes consume illegal substances. Only Homosexual Convalescent Centre – a show-stopping number staged under pink lights about what it means to be old, gay and entitled – challenges our expectations of the city's underground culture.

There is a lot more variety and depth to Maupin's vision of San Francisco than this musical conveys. If it is to have anything near as wide an appeal as the books, or even the chance of a future beyond the west coast, this adaptation may need to heed its own message about change and transform its depiction of the city by the bay.

Boys To Men: Singing Through Voice ChangeTHE VOICE

2011-06-01T09:33:00.000-07:00

An influx of new programs recognize the value of keeping boys singing—through changing voices and for a lifetime

It’s hard to imagine the music director of the Grammy Award- winning, all-male vocal ensemble Chanticleer failing an audition. But when Matthew Oltman, who sang tenor with Chanticleer for 10 years before becoming the group’s artistic leader, tried out for a spot as a tenor in Iowa’s All-State Chorus at the age of 14, he didn’t make the cut.

Oltman had recently graduated from his children’s chorus and the All-State group was the next logical step for a promising young chorister growing up in Des Moines. The only problem was that the choir only admitted male vocalists as tenors and basses and Oltman’s voice was still in flux. “Just two months before, I’d been singing first soprano,” said Oltman. “I would have been more comfortable auditioning for the All-State Chorus as an alto, but that wasn’t acceptable. So I auditioned as a tenor and didn’t get in.”

It used to be that as soon as boys’ voices began to break, their opportunities for group singing suddenly dried up. With children’s choirs only catering to pre-pubescent voices, and high school glee clubs and youth choirs seeking full-throated male tenors and basses, boys going through the period of vocal transition entered a choral “blind-spot.” Their choices essentially amounted to being forced by their instructors (or forcing them- selves, like the young Oltman) to sing in a grown-up register before their time, or, more commonly, stopping singing altogether.

“Unfortunately, too many teachers, especially choir teachers, believe students in the stages of change should not sing at all,” said Leslie Leedberg, a Boston-based choral and vocal instructor. “Even worse, teachers may ask the students with chang- ing voices to force or belt through breaks in the vocal register.”

Lacking encouragement not only from choral institutions but also from their communities, adolescent boys have been quick to turn their backs on singing. “They’re torn because many parents and peers would prefer that they played sports,” said Francisco Núñez, artistic director and founder of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City. Of the nearly 500 choral teachers surveyed in a 2007 research study conducted by the National Association for Music Education (MENC), 69 percent replied that they had seen a drop in boys’ participation in chorus in grades six to nine and 50 percent blamed the fall in attendance on the boys’ embarrassment about the change in their voices.

A New Day for Boys Who Sing

These days, however, enlightened choral organizations have started to recognize the value of keeping boys singing—and singing healthily—throughout the period of vocal transformation. “Our goal is to make as many lifelong singers as possible,” said Jena Dickey, founder and artistic director of Young Voices of Colorado, which runs a Boychoir for young male singers of grades four and up alongside its mixed choruses. “We hang onto those boys, helping them through the changing voice so that they don’t lose confidence in their ability to sing. They are welcome to say, ‘I’m a soprano’ one week and ‘I’m a low alto’ the next. The boys are greatly rewarded by their expanded ranges and their admiring friends.”

In recent years, ensembles dedicated to nurturing boys through this major upheaval in their musical lives have started to spring up all over the country in cities as diverse as New York, Los Angeles, Charlotte (NC), and Minneapolis/St. Paul. These young men’s groups are singing a wide-ranging repertoire, from Thomas Tallis motets to covers of songs by the indie rock group Radiohead. And far from treating the devel- oping singers like cocooned larvae, many choral directors are putting their young men’s choruses under the spotlight to great acclaim. This July, the Graduate Chorale of the San Francisco Boys Chorus, an ensemble of around thirty 14-to-18-year-olds that rehearses once a week and was founded in 2002, will sing in the Glinka Capella in St. Petersburg, Russia. The 50-member Young Men’s Division of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City recently sang with James Taylor at a gala at Carnegie Hall and earned standing ovations for their 2009 and 2010 appearances in Switzerland and Japan.

“Many children’s choir programs are very successful with the treble voice and provide wonderful experiences for singers who use that part of their voice, but we wanted to provide a place to foster the growth of the changing and changed male voice,” said Joseph Stillitano, conductor of the Handel and Haydn Society’s Young Men’s Chorus. The Boston-based ensemble currently has 31 students ranging in age from 14 to 18 and meets for weekly rehearsals on Saturday mornings during the school year. “Instead of thanking boys for singing and sending them on their way when their voices begin to change or lumping them in with treble instruments and demand that they sing in their falsettos all the time, we provide a place for boys to become young men. We teach them how to use their instrument, guide them through this tough transition, and build healthy, musical, and confident male singers so they will continue to sing for the rest of their lives.”

A proliferation of workshops, conferences, and festivals catering to the changing male voice are further helping to foster knowledge about and enthusiasm for choral activities for teenage boys. The Providence Singers of Rhode Island and the Handel and Haydn Society run annual Young Men’s Choral Festivals. Next February in Dallas, the Cambiata Institute of America (a University of North Texas-based early adolescent vocal music research organization) and the American Choral Directors Association will co-host the first national conference designed specifically for middle school and junior high school choristers. Meanwhile, the Charlotte Children’s Choir’s yearly Boys to Men Choral Workshop encourages boys in grades 8 through 12 to participate in musical activities. “Current male members of the choir serve as mentors to the boys who participate in the workshop, which focuses on developing performance techniques and allows the boys to learn songs in a non-threatening, all-male environment,” said Nancina Pope, executive director of the Charlotte Children’s Choir.

The American choral world’s increased attention on adolescent boys is clearly starting to pay off. Retention rates are quite high. Since Stillitano launched his Young Men’s Chorus in 2006, the group has lost only five students other than graduating seniors. As many as 45 percent of participants have stayed with the ensemble for at least three years or joined the group after participating in one of Handel and Haydn Society’s junior choruses. “Most of our Graduate Chorale members stay for four years, and others, having decided to leave before the four years are up, miss it so much that they come back to continue,” said Claire Quinn-Duggan, program manager of the San Francisco Boys Chorus.

Meanwhile, participants appear to value the experience of singing in a chorus that caters specially to their needs. “The teachers have great ways of helping us overcome difficulties as our voices change, and because I was surrounded by friends going through the same thing, losing my soprano voice wasn’t traumatic,” said David Kerns, 15, a member of the Pacific Boychoir Academy in Oakland, California. The institution boasts a Changed Voices ensemble for boys aged between 13 and 18, and Continuum, a more select 16-member group encompassing the same age range. “I enjoy singing in my choir because it is a different experience from singing in the SATB choir at my high school,” said Jeffrey Hammonds, 18, who sings in The Handel and Haydn Society’s Young Men’s Chorus. “I enjoy the ability to be further divided into TTBB vocal ranges which better suits some of us young men who are not exactly tenors or basses or feel comfortable hitting the notes in the extreme ranges that they are known for.”

The Anatomy of Change

Both girls and boys go through a period of vocal change during puberty, but the trans- formation is much more pronounced in males. “The vocal folds grow in length and bulk and can increase in size by as much as 60 percent,” said Sarah Schneider, a voice- speech pathologist at the University of California, San Francisco. “The instability or pitch breaks that boys experience in the voice are secondary to the rapid growth of cartilage and muscle and inability to balance opposing muscle groups that are required for speaking, and especially for singing. Because of this, boys have to constantly recalibrate how they produce their voices.”

On average, the voice-changing process in boys takes from one-and-a-half to three years and occurs between the ages of 12 and 15. However, because youngsters’ voices can begin transforming as early as age nine, and still not be fully developed as they graduate high school, working with adolescent young men requires special skills and carefully chosen repertoire. According to Steven Kronauer, emerging voices choir director with the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, who founded a Young Men’s Ensemble in September 2009 to cater to children’s chorus members who were experiencing vocal change and wanted to continue singing with the organization, instructors working with adolescent boys must possess, “an intense knowledge of the physiological changes the boys are undergoing, strong knowledge of vocal development, knowledge of choral repertoire suited to this unique time, and a sensitive, kind soul who builds an environment of trust alongside artistry.”

Tony Marx, a professional singer in his 20s, credits the care and sensitivity of his chorus director for helping him navigate the challenging vocal change period. As a member of the Kantorei boys’ chorus during his formative years in Rockford, Illinois, Marx moved between no fewer than four different parts during his time with the group, switching from alto to second soprano to baritone before settling on bass, where his voice sits today. “Being in an all-guys choir, all anyone wanted to do was sing the lowest parts — the “real men’s parts — as soon as our voices started to change,” Marx said. “Of course, it takes a lot of work to build your support up and to tailor your tone. Our director, who was very supportive, helped me figure out the steps to get to where I needed to be.”

Working with boys at this stage of their development is undeniably intense. Keeping teenagers singing healthily requires constant monitoring and flexibility, qualities that are especially hard to maintain along- side a performance schedule where voices typically need to be locked into parts. “It’s a matter of finding where their voices sit, putting them on a part that matches the notes they can sing comfortably, then checking in monthly or so. We often ask certain guys not to sing certain notes so they’re not straining their voice,” said Kevin Fox, the founder and director of the Pacific Boychoir Academy. “Aside from the initial voicing and constant monitoring, going through and making sure every guy marks which notes in which measures of which songs he shouldn’t sing, or should sing a certain way, is definitely labor-intensive.”
Repertoire must also be specially tailored to suit these voices. Directors like Fox use a combination of pre-existing arrangements of songs for boychoirs and often transpose pieces themselves to suit the singers’ shifting ranges.

Although a few music publishing companies like the Arkansas-based Cambiata Press distribute works transcribed for voices in transition, there isn’t yet a tradition of composers writing specifically for choruses comprised of adolescent boys. But the growing wave of interest surrounding this area of choral activity—more children’s choruses, such as the Vivace Youth Chorus in San Jose and the Silicon Valley Boychoir either recently launched or are exploring the idea of launching their own teen boy ensembles—suggests that it might not be too long before there’s an entire canon of original works devoted to boys with changing voices.

“It’s encouraging to see so many more opportunities that fill the gap between children’s choirs and high school ensembles than there were when I was young,” said Oltman. “After all, it’s not like every single person turns 14 and magically becomes a tenor or bass.”

From Poland, An Obtuse but Powerful WorkBAY CITIZEN

2011-05-20T17:17:00.000-07:00

Teatr Zar delivers an incomprehensible, beautiful three-part performance on life and death

Sometimes when you go to the theater, you just have to surrender.

As the alternative is to spend an evening in a state of apoplexy and confusion, this is the only possible course of action when encountering a work like “Gospels of Childhood: The Triptych,” a ritualistic, three-part meditation on death and mourning by Poland’s Teatr Zar.

The performance draws on a variety of sources including the story of the resuscitation of Lazarus and the “Gospel of Mary Magdalene.” But to anyone who isn’t steeped in Slavic languages, early Christian theology and the work of the seminal Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski (Teatr Zar’s main influence), this San Francisco International Arts Festival presentation may be a grueling experience.

There’s little in terms of conventional plot, character and setting to help the audience orient itself during the three-and-a-half-hour performance, which is punctuated by a pair of precipitous ten-minute walks around San Francisco’s Potrero Hill. The rotund St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church houses Acts One and Three and Act Two is performed in the nearby, Julia Morgan-designed Potrero Hill Neighborhood House.

Teatr Zar’s young company members sing most of the text, sourced from the ancient liturgies of a variety of remote, Eastern European and Caucasian orthodox traditions. Half of the remaining dialog is spoken in frenetically paced Polish.

The physical action is similarly obtuse. The actors frequently fling themselves on the ground as if their spines had suddenly turned into melted wax. On the sparse, wooden set littered with a few pieces of decrepit looking furniture, they shovel dirt, spill red wine and move about on all fours under sepulchral lights. Their faces register a wide range of emotions from pain to incomprehension. But they rarely smile.

The whole experience is akin to being thrown blindfolded and handcuffed into a room full of madmen or feverish religious zealots speaking in tongues.

The trick, therefore, to getting the most out of the production is to give up using the eyes to try to make sense of it all and instead allow the performance’s predominantly a cappella vocal score to hijack the senses and induce a trance-like state. Then, the visual elements start to assume vague shapes in the mind’s eye.

The music of “Gospels of Childhood” is by far the most accessible and beautiful aspect of the production.

The score is woven from centuries-old liturgical hymns and chants from Georgia, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, the Chechen Republic and other places that Teatr Zar’s company members started researching in 1999. With its unwavering homophonic contours, exposed fifth intervals and plentiful use of microtones, this music requires a challenging combination of supreme technical control, a sense of total ensemble and enraptured emotional abandon to work its magic on the audience.

Teatr Zar’s performers embody the music completely. Balancing perfect intonation and clarity of line with depth of harmony and unfettered passion, they traverse their careening sonic landscape so sublimely that even the most stalwart of atheists cannot help but be transported to a state of quasi-religious euphoria.

Under the hypnotic spell of the singing, “Gospels of Childhood” begins to induce a response that is far removed from the world of empirical thought and analysis. Whatever subtle meanings emerge, do so more through a process of feeling one’s way in the dark for points of warmth and luminosity rather than drawing clear conclusions based on intellectual cues.

Take the production’s portrayal of death, for instance. Tapping into the undulating lines of the music helps one to understand mortality as a constantly shifting state.

In the first act (“Overture. Fragments on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,”) which centers on siblings Marta and Maria mourning the passing of their brother Lazarus, actors light and snuff out candles and put on and remove shirts as if to suggest the intimate and almost interchangeable relationship between life and death.

In the second act, (“Caesarean Section. Essays on Suicide,”) sex and death collide as a female and male duo executes a Tango that, with its jagged steps performed amid shards of broken glass, is as sensual as it is violent.

The idea of transition, of things constantly being in motion, reaches its apotheosis in the final section of the work (“Anhelli. The Calling,”) The movement begins with what resembles a ride across the River of Styx, as cast members make sweeping motions with long wooden poles under a billowing, sail-like canopy. It ends with half of the actors lying inert on stage and the other half, walking off.

There are even moments of black humor that rupture the funereal mood. In the second movement, for instance, an actor tries to hang herself from a potted sapling, absurdly attempting to wait out the decades until the tree grows big enough to act as an effective gallows.

“God created theater for those for whom church does not suffice,” wrote the renowned Polish actor and stage director Juliusz Osterwa. With practice playing successfully before audiences all over the world, Teatr Zar’s theatrical sermon provides a taste of what it means to surrender to a higher power.

Seattle’s SaviourBBC CLASSICAL MUSIC MAGAZINE

2011-05-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

The outgoing director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz, leaves behind him a world-ranking ensemble, as Chloe Veltman discovers

Around midnight on a chilly February evening, conductor Gerard Schwarz is regaling violist Pinchas Zukerman with jokes in a high-end Seattle bar. It’s nearing the end of a day that would be considered gruelling by most people. Schwarz has wedged meetings in between leading rehearsals with a sprawling, musically-challenged regional youth orchestra in the charmless Seattle suburb of Bellevue and helmed a Seattle Symphony Orchestra (Seattle SO) concert at the Benaroya Hall, its downtown home. The conductor has just finished hosting a dinner and has run into Zukerman, the viola soloist of that evening’s performance. If Schwarz is tired, it isn’t showing. He looks like he could go on all night.

This summer Schwarz retires from his job as music director of the Seattle SO, a position that the 64-year-old conductor has held for 26 years. Over that period, the indefatigable maestro (whose other career achievements include playing principal trumpet with the New York Philharmonic and music directorships with the Mostly Mozart Festival, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic) has barely paused for breath. From overseeing the construction of the 2,500-seat Benaroya Hall, a highly praised $118.1m development project which kick-started the urban renaissance of downtown Seattle in the late 1990s, to making more than 140 recordings with the Seattle SO, resulting in one of the largest recording catalogues of any American orchestra, Schwarz has worked tirelessly to raise the profile of his organisation. ‘Jerry has been enormously ambitious,’ says Simon Woods, the newly appointed executive director of the Seattle SO. ‘You don’t build an orchestra and recording legacy like this and one of the best halls in the US without a high degree of passion and determination.’

These qualities have undeniably helped to put the Seattle SO on the map. Founded in 1903, the Seattle SO flourished in the 1940s under Thomas Beecham. But by the time Schwarz took over in 1985 it was languishing. As a result of his vision and drive, the organisation has grown from being a part-time regional orchestra playing 12 subscription weeks a year, to becoming a major if not top-tier presence on the American symphonic scene with a full 47-week season and programming that extends from Baroque to new music, of which Schwarz has been a particular champion. Schwarz has conducted nearly 300 world premieres to date, with 100 of them being with the Seattle SO. He is especially known for recording and performing the music of otherwise underplayed 20th-century American symphonists such as David Diamond and William Schuman. His farewell season features performances of short, newly commissioned works by 18 living composers including Bright Sheng and Philip Glass, creating a panoramic view of new music in America. ‘Jerry inherited the Orchestra at a time of disarray,’ says Melinda Bargreen, the former classical music critic of The Seattle Times. ‘He hired better players, refined the sound and forged deep friendships with the donor community. The orchestra made great strides forward under him.’

But like most long-reigning leaders, Schwarz’s ambition and strength will have also caused discord. The main issues, which have been well- documented by the media, include his controversial decision to install John Cerminaro as principal French horn in 1998 against the wishes of the orchestra hiring committee and his unorthodox system of having four concertmasters in 2007-2008 before eventually settling on Maria Larionoff in 2008. (Larionoff is stepping down at the end of this season.)

‘Jerry is an efficient conductor who gets right down to business but he can be prone to tunnel vision,’ says Jordan Anderson, the Seattle SO’s principal bassist. ‘The concertmaster search was stressful because there was never a sense of true leadership. It was like musical chairs up there.’ For his part, Schwarz sees himself as a team player. ‘I accepted everyone else’s ideas,’ he says, chatting in his Mercedes on the way to a youth orchestra rehearsal in Bellevue. ‘Only on rare occasions was I insistent.’ The musicians’ rebellion against the hiring of Cerminaro remains a mystery to the music director. ‘We’re talking about maybe the greatest horn player that ever lived,’ says Schwarz, who, with his round face and business casual attire, cuts a genial and unimposing figure. ‘I couldn’t understand why he was not accepted. Perhaps people thought he was arrogant. It couldn’t have had anything to do with his playing.’

Born in New Jersey in 1947, Schwarz started learning the piano when he was five. At eight, much to the consternation of his workaholic physician parents, he took up the trumpet. ‘My parents were Jewish Viennese immigrants,’ says Schwarz. “‘My son, the trumpet player? Give me a break.’” Nevertheless, Schwarz stuck to his passion. Five hours of practice a day led the young brass virtuoso to Juilliard and eventually to trumpet positions with the American Symphony Orchestra, and, at the age of 25, the New York Philharmonic.

But he soon grew restless. ‘I loved music but I wanted to be more involved,’ Schwarz says. Inspired by New York Philharmonic maestros Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez, Schwarz developed an affinity for the podium, drawing attention for his inventive programming and go-getter attitude. Schwarz founded the Waterloo Music Festival in New Jersey in 1976 and co-founded the Y Chamber Symphony (later the New York Chamber Symphony) in 1977. ‘Mr Schwarz is an American conductor of increasing and deserved prominence,’ wrote The New York Times critic Bernard Holland in 1987.

The opportunities flowed from there. Schwarz snapped up directorships at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Mostly Mozart Festival, where he remained for nearly 20 years. He was in demand as a guest conductor all over the world, leading such ensembles as the London Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

When Schwarz was initially summoned to Seattle in 1983, it was as music advisor in the wake of the unexpected death of the orchestra’s then-music director, Rainer Miedél. Eventually he was persuaded to stay. ‘Moving here was huge,’ says Schwarz, who lives with his wife Jody in Seattle’s genteel Queen Anne neighbourhood. ‘This is my home. Two of my children were born here and all four of them grew up here.’

Schwarz quickly entrenched himself in Seattle’s civic life. He forged relationships with the city’s most powerful figures including celebrity artist Dale Chihuly, Seattle Opera general director Speight Jenkins and real estate developer Jack Benaroya (the namesake of Benaroya Hall) and championed music education. Unlike most prominent American music directors, he regularly led youth music endeavours and was a generous mentor to young conductors. ‘I’ve worked with various conductors, but Jerry and Marin [Alsop] were the only ones who came to my rehearsals,’ says Carolyn Kuan, the assistant and associate conductor at the Seattle Symphony Orchestra from 2006 to 2009.

Over the last decade, Schwarz’s high standing in Seattle has somewhat eclipsed his musical reputation elsewhere. With the exception of the Seattle SO’s appearance at Carnegie Hall in 2004, Schwarz has been estranged from the New York classical music scene since he left the New York Chamber Symphony in 2002. That organisation folded soon after Schwarz’s departure owing to financial challenges. Meanwhile, for several years before leaving the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2001, Schwarz saw his involvement with the annual summer event dwindle as the management increasingly emphasised touring period instrument ensembles.

Schwarz’s spell in England between 2000 and 2005 didn’t greatly enhance his footing abroad. Sandra Parr, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s head of programming, credits the conductor for launching a well-attended Sunday afternoon concert series. ‘The decision to start the series was not popular with the orchestra but Jerry went ahead and it attracted an immediate audience,’ says Parr. ‘It’s our biggest growth area today.’ Ultimately, though, the organisation chafed against Schwarz’s unconventional ideas and they parted company in 2005. ‘He got the orchestra to think again about how it worked,’ says Parr. ‘But maybe it wasn’t ready to take that on board.’

Back in Seattle, the symphony orchestra is excited to welcome its new music director, Ludovic Morlot, an energetic, 37-year-old Frenchman who has been praised for his strong artistic vision and personable demeanour. The organisation is also embracing the arrival of Woods, a seasoned executive, following a period of administrative turbulence. Since the departure in 2003 of longtime executive director Deborah Rutter, the Seattle SO has had six executive and interim executive directors and dealt with considerable financial woes. The current deficit stands at $4.4m. ‘We are launching an ambitious fundraising campaign and working to reduce our line of credit,’ says board member Leslie Jackson Chihuly. ‘We intend to finish the year with a balanced budget.’

As the Seattle Symphony Orchestra prepares to leap into a new era, so, in his own way, is Schwarz. He will maintain his ties with the orchestra as conductor laureate and continue his ongoing directorship of the Eastern Music Festival in North Carolina. But Schwarz is primarily focusing on two activities: composing and launching an educational TV series devoted to exploring canonical classical works with an ensemble of high-calibre players from across the country. Schwarz hopes to lead the initial recording sessions with this new group, dubbed the All-Star Orchestra, this August in New York. ‘I’m obsessed with finding ways to get classical music to more people,’ says Schwarz. ‘Will things slow down for me? Probably not.’

Conversations: Armistead Maupin and Jeff WhittyAMERICAN THEATRE MAGAZINE

2011-05-09T13:27:00.000-07:00

Their much-anticipated Tales of the City musical will debut—where else?—in San Francisco

Writers Jeff Whitty (Avenue Q) and Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City) have joined forces on a new musical version of Maupin’s best-selling series of novels populated by colorful characters occupying a San Francisco boarding house in the 1970s. The musical, directed by Jason Moore, with music by Jake Shears of the alt-rock band the Scissor Sisters, begins previews on May 18 and opens on June 1 at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Whitty and Maupin discussed their collaboration in a conference room at ACT’s downtown offices in early February (at which point casting for the show was not yet complete). Arts reporter Chloe Veltman moderated their conversation and edited it for print.

ARMISTEAD MAUPIN: I guess this whole thing started when you were on a red-eye flight to London.

JEFF WHITTY: Yes. That was five or six ago. I was on my way to oversee auditions for the West End production of Avenue Q. On the flight, I decided to watch a DVD of the mini-series—it was then that I realized that Tales of the City would make a great musical.

MAUPIN: That was the first time you saw the mini-series?

WHITTY: I had read the Tales of the City books when I moved to New York in 1993. I loved the characters so much that I didn’t want to see them replaced in my head by actors, which is why I avoided watching the mini-series on television. But seeing Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney embody Anna Madrigal and Marianne so well on TV changed my mind completely.

MAUPIN: Those two actors took over my vision of the characters they played, too. But in the old days, I would hear myself in every one of the characters.

WHITTY: Every writer does that to some extent. What made you climb on board so quickly with the project when I first approached you about it?

MAUPIN: I felt a sense of kinship with you when I saw Avenue Q—I responded to its humor, compassion, bawdiness and big cast. So when you contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in a musical version of Tales, there was no hesitation.

WHITTY: I was terrified on my way to meet you in San Francisco for the first time. I had this whole presentation worked out in my head that I kept going over. I didn’t know what to expect.

MAUPIN: I got you stoned on the spot as I recall, and your presentation flew out the window.

WHITTY: Yes, that’s what happened.

MAUPIN: You’ve turned bright red!

WHITTY: We went for a walk in the park and I felt immediately comfortable. I had been worried about asking you, “Can I write dialogue for your characters?” I wasn’t sure how to tell you that I’d be incorporating tons of dialogue from your books, but that there would also be times when I would need to break away from it. It was intimidating asking you if this would be okay.

MAUPIN: That’s scary for the person on the other side of the equation, too. There’ve been times when people have tried to write dialogue for my characters that made me cringe. But I’ve never cringed over your writing. You know how to channel a pre-existing character. What did you think would be the biggest challenge adapting Tales?

WHITTY: The sheer volume of the material. I was worried that the musical would be 16 hours long and come out in 2046, if I wasn’t careful.

MAUPIN: Actually, I was hoping for a Nicholas Nickleby–style epic, but never mind.

WHITTY: My goal was to keep it under three hours. I wanted to slenderize Tales, but do so in a way that would not make fans of the books feel short-changed. It was a tricky process because I didn’t want to reduce the material to two story lines. Part of the magic of the books is the many interweaving stories. The challenge was figuring out how to keep the forward thrust of the narrative in a musical format without feeling rushed, or overwhelming the audience with too many story points. But I still wanted to create an epic feel. I love epic musicals. I’m a big fan of Les Misérables. The storytelling is so rich!

MAUPIN: I love Les Miz too. I don’t like the way in which that musical is trivialized as a bit of fluff. I met its English-language librettist, Herbert Kretzmer, at a party and told him that the lyrics spoke to me. He sent me a handwritten copy of them, which I still have hanging in my office to this day.

WHITTY: That musical makes a huge emotional impact and covers a huge amount of ground. Sometimes these epic adaptations don’t work so well, though. Rehearsals for Tales begin in two months and I’m still wrestling with the story.

MAUPIN: I understand the challenges. When I first started writing Tales as a newspaper column in 1974, Christopher Isherwood—who was a fan, and eventually became a friend and mentor—said that Tales of the City and its sequel, More Tales of the City, should be one big novel. There’s a story that joins both books together—Anna reuniting with Mother Mucca. You’ve brought that link to the musical. So you’ve actually found the story in its purest and most effective form, and I’m very grateful to you for that.

WHITTY: There are plotlines that I would have loved to include but couldn’t, though, like the subplot where Mary Ann works at the suicide hotline. I had to make some tough choices. I’ve focused on the stories that eventually bring us back to a sense of family.

MAUPIN: And you’ve enabled us to have a big whorehouse number, which no great musical can do without!

WHITTY: Yes, that’s been one of the most fun parts of the development process so far. You enjoyed the workshop process at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, right?

MAUPIN: It was like summer camp. You had two weeks to hammer the show out with the actors. I was jealous. Everyone had formed their friendships by the time I arrived.

WHITTY: That was the golden period of the development process. I had previously workshopped Avenue Q at the O’Neill Center. Because it’s a nonprofit theatre, it’s the kind of place where you can throw anything at wall and see if it works. The ability to take those risks allows you to find your goal in a way that would be much more difficult in a commercial situation, where there are investors hanging around.

MAUPIN: I am impressed at how you and the guys in the creative team have such little vanity about what’s precious to you. You work like a team, and you’re not afraid to throw things out.

WHITTY: I had a preexisting relationship with Jason Moore—he directed Avenue Q, so we didn’t have to deal with the “how dare you criticize me” thing. I didn’t have to go to a defensive place. We work as a team and accept each other’s criticism, because there’s nothing worse than seeing a new musical thud in front of an audience.

MAUPIN: Two of the biggest challenges we faced when we first sat down to talk about how the musical would take shape was choosing a composer and figuring out what form the music would take. Would it be a traditional Broadway musical? If so, would the material fit with the old form, or would the old form make the material look tired? I remember when you asked me if I knew who the Scissor Sisters were, and I, being the hopelessly unhip person that I am, remembered only one song—“Filthy / Gorgeous.” You lent me a couple of their albums and I fell in love with them. There was this amazing amalgam in the Scissor Sisters’ music of the sexual and the sentimental. I walk that line myself in my own work as a writer, and it made sense that the guys in the band would know what to do with Tales. I read an interview yesterday in which Jake Shears [lead singer of the Scissor Sisters] and Rufus Wainwright were conversing about their musical ventures. Jake said that he didn’t realize the power of Tales until he set it to music and heard someone singing his songs. I’m embarrassed to acknowledge the same feeling.

WHITTY: Sometimes the actors in the workshops we’ve done for Tales can’t get through some of the songs because they’re crying. I think some of the purity and simplicity stems from the fact that Jake lifts the songs out of the rhyming scheme.

MAUPIN: Do you remember when we heard the script for the first time?

WHITTY: When we had that first reading at Jason Moore’s place? I think it was in 2005 or 2006. The actors read 180 pages with no rehearsal. We played demo tracks in the places where we thought the music would go. It was terrifying to hear the text for the first time.

MAUPIN: Well, I felt like a pig in shit seeing all these talented people doing amazing things with my material!

WHITTY: I came out of it feeling exhilarated about what still needed to be done. When you’re sculpting in the dark, you can’t see what you’re doing.

MAUPIN: Are you a mess at your opening nights?

WHITTY: I skip them half the time and go out to have a drink.

MAUPIN: I confess to doing the same thing at some of the performances at the O’Neill.

WHITTY: While we’re in development on Tales, we have to sit here and keep working. But when we open this summer and I realize we can’t do any more work on it, I’ll just give it up to the gods and have a laugh over a drink at a nearby bar. Tell me, how did your relationship with ACT develop?

MAUPIN: My personal relationship with ACT goes back a long way. When I got here in the early ’70s and was working as a mail boy at the agency that would eventually become the model for Halcyon Communications in Tales, I thought that my big break would be a job working in the promotions department at ACT. It was an illuminating moment for me when I realized that I could work in the theatre and not be an actor. But I couldn’t get my foot in the door. Still, I felt lucky to live in a town that had such a serious theatre organization. Since Tales, I’ve developed a more direct relationship with the company. Carey Perloff [artistic director of ACT] has been whispering in my ears about making this happen for years. She saw a stage production of Tales as something that could grow out of this town in a natural way. When she realized that there was this work-in-progress, she hopped on it. It was a natural marriage.

WHITTY: After the O’Neill workshop, we spent about five seconds wondering where to take the project next, and then the phone rang and it was Carey—she whisked us off in her carriage to San Francisco.

MAUPIN: Tales is the most expensive production ACT has ever mounted. They’re going to pitch a tent in Union Square on opening night. The plan is for people to walk from the tent to the theatre.

WHITTY: That sounds very glamorous.

MAUPIN: It sounds very San Francisco, which is what I like best about it.

WHITTY: There’s really no other town where this project could happen. And to be able to do it in an amazing nonprofit theatre here is so important. This is not an “out-of-town run”—this is the town, and no production of Tales will be as cool as this one.

MAUPIN: The assumption people make is that a musical theatre team’s greatest desire is to get their work seen on Broadway.

WHITTY: Launching the show at ACT makes it possible to insulate ourselves from that kind of talk. I am a kid of the regional theatre. I’ve been happiest and most comfortable in that environment. When you say to people that you haven’t thought about a Broadway run, they always look at you askance.

MAUPIN: To be honest, I’m fantasizing about a West End run for Tales more than a Broadway run right now. The fact is that I was ignored as a writer for many years over here until I had cultivated an audience in England—the hard-cover and omnibus editions of Tales came out of England. These eventually led to the Harper Collins editions here in the U.S. The Tales of the City miniseries was even created over there—by Channel 4 and Working Title productions.

WHITTY: There’s a whole world out there! There have been some great productions of Avenue Q in Israel, Spain and Turkey. My dream is to sit in a theatre in Istanbul and see Mrs. Madrigal hand Lucy her joint.

MAUPIN: It’ll be a hookah.

WHITTY: The cast we’ve started to assemble should be enough to bring people in droves. Betsy Wolfe, who’s playing Mary Ann, is a perfect actress and singer as well as a brilliant comedienne. And another actor I instantly fell in love with is Mary Birdsong—she owns Mona. I had liked her take on Judy Garland in a show I’d seen and called her in for a cold read of our gigantic script. I had no idea that she had such a tremendous depth, and an amazing rock voice, too. I’m also thrilled about Wesley Taylor playing Mouse.

MAUPIN: Where did you find him?

WHITTY: In auditions. We had been looking for a long time for Mouses.

MAUPIN: Mice.

WHITTY: We saw a lot of great actors, but Mouse has a specific quality about him—a combination of a sort of wryness, darkness and irony mixed with a wide-eyed openness about the world—and it proved very difficult to find the actor who could embody all of this. Then Wesley walked into the room and did one bit of business that I always imagined myself doing if I were 15 years younger and auditioning for Mouse.

MAUPIN: Or me, 35 years younger. One more question: In addition to working on Tales, you’ve been busy with your cheerleading musical, Bring It On. How have you managed to juggle the two projects?

WHITTY: I just opened Bring It On in Atlanta, and so now I’ve been able to dig back into the Tales script and sew up some loose ends.

MAUPIN: It’s probably been helpful to throw yourself into multiple projects at once.

WHITTY: But it can be confusing. Bring It On is still bouncing around in my head, but we don’t want to end up with a full-scale cheerleading routine for Mrs. Madrigal!

Kate? Will? Who Cares! The Lily's Wedding is Much More Fun Source: The Bay CitizenBAY CITIZEN

2011-04-30T09:20:00.000-07:00

The extravagant "The Lily's Revenge" at the Magic Theatre takes flower power to a whole new level

San Francisco is more than 5,000 miles from London. Nevertheless, the level of excitement around here surrounding the Royal Wedding has been palpable of late.

The local press is advising Bay Area residents about how they can feel connected to Friday's events at Westminster Abbey with the help of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The British consulate is hosting a ceremonial ball. Pubs are offering free beer and champagne to customers whose names are William and Kate.

But anyone looking for some critical distance on primetime TV’s endless pontification regarding the bride’s wedding gown might do well to attend “The Lily’s Revenge,” a new theatrical production currently playing at The Magic Theatre through May 22.

Conceived, written by and starring the New York-based drag cabaret artist and playwright Taylor Mac, the five-act show is like a wedding reception on quaaludes. A carnivalesque cornucopia of sparkly costumes, strewn rose petals and energetic song, “The Lily’s Revenge” makes theatergoers feel as excited as a bridesmaid who’s unexpectedly caught the lucky bouquet.

At the same time, Mac’s call for equal marital rights — through the telling of a narrative about a naïve, young lily whose greatest desire is to shed his petals and become a bridegroom to a beautiful bride — is clear. His overbearing theatrical extravaganza repulses us, undercutting the institution of marriage altogether.

Running about the same length as the average wedding party at five hours (don’t worry – it feels somewhat shorter) and employing the services of 31 cast members and six directors, “The Lily’s Revenge” is more like an over-the-top celebration than a traditional play.

This Bridezilla-like undertaking is a formidable achievement for the modestly sized Magic Theatre, proving artistic director Loretta Greco’s fearlessness and sense of fun.

These qualities are most obvious in the stunning visual appearance of the production, which makes a drag queen’s boudoir look like a nunnery.

Festooned with antique clocks and floral wallpapers, Andrew Boyce’s set design resembles an old lady’s living room or a trendy Valencia Street boutique, depending on your point of view. The lurid makeup design of Monique Jenkinson, best known as biologically female drag performer “Fauxnique,” favors sky blue eye shadow and glittery lips.

Lindsay W. Davis’s gorgeous costumes are equally arresting. Trussed up for most of the show in a baggy, sequined pea-green onesie and turbaned headdress encircled in detachable petals with fluffy layers of pink tulle anchoring his feet, Mac makes a formidable flower. The splendidly ridiculous get-up perfectly offsets Mac’s melodious voice and graceful movements. Davis’s other floral creations, such as a crimson feather-wigged rose and several shiny, yellow silk gown-wearing daisies, are so ravishing to look at that they threaten to upstage the performers inside them.

The play benefits greatly from the production’s seamless and imaginative engagement with the audience.

In the second and most memorable section of the drama, the petaled protagonist teams up with a bunch of renegade, iambic verse-speaking organic flowers on a quest to destroy the factory farms that manufacture genetically-modified white roses for wedding bouquets in Guatemala. At one point, the actors hand out large green leaf-shaped papers with words on them, and the audience, finding themselves co-opted into the scene as a field of forget-me-nots, dutifully chant wholesome lines evoking the floral community’s gung-ho spirit.

Meanwhile, the three action-filled intermissions (staged by director Jessica Heidt) offer many opportunities for audience-cast interactions. Among other activities, theatergoers can obtain advice from a sock puppet seated in an alcove, travel up and down a freight elevator while being serenaded by accordion-playing actors singing Annie Lennox songs, participate in line-dancing or watch a lineup of naked butt-cheeks clenching in time to Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero.”

As one audience member astutely put it, “It’s like a magical wonderland… or a wonderful magicland. I’m not sure which.”

But even the most wondrous and magical of lands can become tiring after a few hours. The decibel levels remain ear-searingly high throughout the evening. The actors scream a lot (especially in the third part) and the live band doesn’t hold back.

With the action being so relentlessly full-on, one yearns for a quiet corner to collect one’s thoughts in between acts, instead of rushing from one carnie hipster side-show to the next. Alas, there is no place in Fort Mason Building D to hide. Even the restrooms serve as sites for intermission performances.

Yet drag cabaret theater wouldn’t be drag cabaret theater without a large measure of lily gilding.

While the overbearing nature of “The Lily’s Revenge” can be off-putting, it also helps to underpin the playwright’s central, Proposition 8-driven point about marriage as being a nostalgia-driven institution hopelessly in need of an overhaul.

Even with a rather bland finale, with Mac moving from crazed periennial to prototypical bridegroom, any particle of interest that one might have had in the British royal nuptials before experiencing “The Lily’s Revenge,” will have completely evaporated in a haze of genetically modified flower petals by the time the performance is through.

From Ringside, Gay Man’s Play Packs a PunchNEW YORK TIMES

2011-04-28T16:58:00.000-07:00

In a boxing gym in San Francisco on a recent Sunday afternoon, a trainee and his coach sparred, verbally and physically.

Although the trainee, Peter Griggs, and Michael Onello, the gym owner and Mr. Griggs’s coach, work out together in real life, they were acting out scenes from Mr. Griggs’s new play, “Killer Queen: The Story of Paco the Pink Pounder,” which is being performed through May 8 in the cramped, sweat-stained Michael the Boxer Gym and Barbershop in SoMa.

“You know, kid, when they learn you’re gay, they’re going to want to kill you,” said Mr. Onello, deftly parrying his student’s left hook with a sparring mitt.

“That’s O.K.,” Mr. Griggs said, in character as Paco, swiping at the mitt through the pain of a swollen nose and a bruised forehead. “I might want to kill them back.”

The staging of the scene might have been a bit over the top (think pink gloves), but the emotional reality was undeniable — Mr. Griggs began boxing eight years ago after conceiving the idea for a screenplay about a gay boxer. He later abandoned that plan owing to a flood of boxing dramas coming out of Hollywood, like “Cinderella Man,” and turned to writing a stage drama.

Born in Seattle, Mr. Griggs lived on the streets after being cast out by his family for failing to “fit in,” and he has incorporated some of these painful experiences of youth into his moving tale of a boxer’s journey.

“Killer Queen” packs such an emotional punch, in fact, that it has inspired the creation of a nonprofit organization, the Empowerment Center for Youth, that specializes in training young gay boxers.

“The play intertwined with a strong belief I had that boxing can help disempowered gay youth to make an informed decision about how to handle themselves,” said Mr. Onello, who was so taken with the play that he decided to start the center with one of his students, Steven Mele.

Mr. Griggs, a 42-year-old dramatist and performer in San Francisco, trained at several gyms before meeting Mr. Onello, 44, two years ago. Their chemistry inspired him to write Mr. Onello into the play, a one-man show (except for Mr. Onello’s cameo) about being gay in the hyper-heteronormative world of boxing.

The play was first performed at Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory in January 2010; this version uses Mr. Onello’s gym as a theater.

“Growing up not the most masculine kid, I always felt that I wasn’t included in extreme sports like boxing or hockey,” Mr. Griggs said. “I decided to write a play that would explore the idea of an out gay boxer as a means of looking at my own feelings of inadequacy as a kid and encourage young gays to gain self-esteem.”

“Killer Queen” tells an archetypal story about the struggles of a young gay man who discovers boxing and, with the help of a dedicated coach, a kindly uncle battling AIDS and the music of the rock band Queen, overcomes homophobia — and his personal demons — to turn pro.

“When I first started boxing, the gyms I went to were extremely homophobic,” Mr. Griggs said. He was shocked, he said, when he met Mr. Onello, who is straight and did not care that he is gay. “He just wanted to know that I wanted to box.”

The opening of the first outpost of empowerment center, scheduled for May 20 in West Hollywood, will enable Mr. Onello and his colleagues to train many more gay youths for the ring.

Mr. Onello and Mr. Mele hope to open a second center next year in San Francisco.

With gay teenagers being up to four times as likely to attempt suicide as straight teenagers, according to The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention hot line for gay youth, finding ways to foster a sense of well-being and safety has become urgent.

“Last summer, I’d been training with Mike for a few months when that rash of suicides happened,” Mr. Mele said. “Gay youth were taking their lives because they were being bullied in school.”

The macho sport of boxing has not attracted many openly gay participants. Mark Itell, a boxer based in Indiana, and the British boxer Charles Jones, whose Pink Pounder nickname serves as the inspiration for Paco in “Killer Queen,” are among the few high-profile amateur boxers who publicly identify as gay.

“Killer Queen” could help to change that. The satire-tinged script unabashedly sends up what the author feels are negative aspects of gay culture, like the dating habit of selecting partners according to a narrow set of aesthetic preferences.

Mr. Griggs’s stage presence, complemented by bubble-gum-pink hand wraps, could inspire some audience members to start doing time with a punching bag.

“Many of the youth who went to see the play felt an immediate affinity with the protagonist,” said Peter Carpou, the arts program manager at Larkin Street Youth Services, a support organization for at-risk youth in San Francisco, an estimated 40 percent of whom identify as gay.

On Mr. Griggs’s invitation — the actor was himself a beneficiary of Larkin Street Youth Services in the 1980s — Mr. Carpou took 10 teenagers to see the play last year.

“We had a great discussion afterward,” Mr. Carpou said. “Everyone wanted to get involved.”

In LINES Ballet's New Work, Mickey Hart's Music is Weakest LinkBAY CITIZEN

2011-04-19T22:08:00.000-07:00

Choreographer Alonzo King, architect Christopher Haas and the Grateful Dead's famous drummer collaborate on world premiere performance

Choreographers have long collaborated with visual artists —but the world of contemporary Western dance seems to be particularly enamored lately of architects. Merce Cunningham’s 2009 dance piece, “Nearly Ninety” featured designs by Italian architect Benedetta Tagliabue and in 2010 for its “Architecture of Dance” program, the New York City Ballet commissioned Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava to create sets for a handful of new pieces.

That Alonzo King chose to couch the title of his new dance piece, “Triangle of the Squinches,” in architecture-speak (a “squinch” being a tool to make a square room able to host a dome) testifies to the intimacy of the relationship between the choreographer’s steps and the San Francisco architect Christopher Haas’ set design for the work.

“Triangle of the Squinches” largely came from the work of three people – King, Haas and Mickey Hart. A longtime drummer for The Grateful Dead, Hart is undeniably the biggest name of the three. Yet his musical score very much plays third wheel in this particular artistic marriage.

Haas provides King’s powerful corps of dancers with a pair of tantalizing physical landscapes with which to interact. In the first half of the piece, a rectangular frame strung from top to bottom with a dense fringe of white elastic strings dominates the otherwise bare Novellus Theater stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In the second half, a honeycomb-like wall made of tessellating, textured bricks replaces the initial structure.

The two objects create contrasting moods when activated by the dancers. Alternately bringing to mind tall grasses undulating in a light breeze, plucked harp strings and a spider’s web, the vertical elastic cords on the first structure are permeable to the eye and pliable to the touch. The dancers weave in and out of the strings, get tangled up in them and pull them in every direction.

The second structure is much more rigid in comparison. Calling the horizontal rather than vertical plane to attention with its rows of static bricks, the wall provides a strong surface upon which the dancers climb, hang and sit.

In combination, the architectural objects and choreography suggest a largely symbiotic relationship between human beings and their physical environment. There’s something benign about the way in which the dancers interact with the architectural objects on stage. When a performer collapses into the elastic strings, another supports her weight. When a dancer walks shimmies his way along the brick wall, hands appear from behind the structure to gently guide his feet to the foot-holes.

In the first half, as if mimicking the parallel lines of the strings, the performers rarely touch. They observe each other quietly from a distance and mostly execute King’s steps – a combination of melting, earthbound movements with flexed feet and pristinely-elongated geometric arabesques and pirouettes – solo. After the intermission, the wall bricks set the tone for the choreography, in which dancers in tight-knit trios and duets press flesh to flesh as if trying to inhabit each other’s skin.

But there’s a sinister undertow to the dance-architecture collaboration in “Triangle of the Squinches.” With performers frequently peering out through the gaps between the strings and bricks, Haas’ homely habitats start to resemble prisons. This less than bucolic quality expresses itself fully at the at the end of the work, when company members trundle an enormous primeval-looking wheel structure across the stage as a dancer windmills his right arm around as fast as he can in a frustrated gesture of forward motion while another dancer holds him back. If the appearance of the tank-like wheel suggests “human progress” driven by technology, then the dancer’s hectic arm gesture, reminiscent of a car spinning its tires helplessly in mud, represents the drawback of civilization and a yearning for a simpler time and space.

King, Haas and Hart supposedly developed “Triangle of the Squinches” in tandem. Yet what subtle meanings can be derived from the predominantly abstract work come as a result of the deep interplay between the architecture and the dance. Hart’s music shows scant evidence of the collaborative process. The mostly ambient score, with its musique concrète-inspired vocabulary of samples from experiments that the composer has recently been undertaking with sounds recorded from outer space, lacks definition beyond isolated interjections from an Indian flute and drum.

Besides a gradually escalating rhythmic drive as the work builds towards its climax, the music mostly seems to have little to do with the movement and design.

The most arresting choreographic explorations of architectural space don’t lose sight of music – which, ultimately, carries the closest kinship to dance of all the art forms. In Brenda Way’s “Speaking Volumes: Architecture of Light II” which premiered last month as part of the ODC’s 40th anniversary “Dance Downtown” season, Jay Cloidt’s atmospheric musical score helped to breath multi-dimensional life into the simple geometrical forms expressed by the set design and choreography.

If Hart should ever attempt to work with dancers again in future, he should consider consulting with Cloidt. George Bernard Shaw once defined dance as “the vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music” — a role that has been supplanted in this piece by the architecture. It’s fine for the three art forms of dance, music and architecture to riff off each other but the design elements should never eclipse the music entirely.

When Female Artists Were Storming the GatesNEW YORK TIMES

2011-04-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

In “!Women Art Revolution,” Lynn Hershman Leeson’s new documentary about the female artists of the 1970s and ’80s who fought to break through into the male-dominated American art world, a film crew asks people outside the Whitney Museum in New York in 2008 and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2009 if they can name three female artists.

No one can.

Demonstrating how little museumgoers know about female artists, this scene is one of many in Ms. Hershman Leeson’s documentary that shows why she, a San Francisco-based feminist artist and filmmaker, wanted to make the film.

“We’re not talking about a piece of history that had been erased. It hadn’t been written about in the first place,” said Ms. Hershman Leeson, whose works are in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

Ms. Hershman Leeson’s work is usually very experimental. But with “!Women Art Revolution,” she decided to go more mainstream.

“I was worried that people would think that a documentary about feminist art history would be too angry and weird,” she said, “so I decided to make it enticing in order to reach a lot of people. I didn’t want it to be so experimental that people wouldn’t understand it.”

Already the movie has earned the distinction of being presented at the Berlin, Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals. And reviews in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter have generated buzz ahead of the June general release by Zeitgeist Films.

“Showing a film at all three festivals is exceptional,” said Sean Uyehara, a programmer at the San Francisco International Film Festival, which is presenting the documentary on April 23 and 25. “People think it’s important to show.”

Ms. Hershman Leeson is known for her esoteric projects. For nine years in the 1970s she lived as her blonde-wig-wearing alter ego, Roberta Breitmore; she repurposed a pantsuit by Jean Patou, the French fashion designer, for a 2008 exhibition at the de Young Museum; and in the early 1980s she created one of the world’s first interactive laser discs.

Her films have also been offbeat. A quirky exploration of biogenetic reproduction, “Teknolust” (2002) features kimono-wearing clones (all played by Tilda Swinton) drinking sperm-infused tea and trying to buy doughnuts, using condoms for currency. “Strange Culture,” Ms. Hershman Leeson’s 2007 documentary about bioterrorism accusations surrounding the artist Steve Kurtz, mixes real-life interviews with surreal reconstructions of Mr. Kurtz’s story.

“!Women Art Revolution” tells of a raucous, rule-breaking era when female artists, in order to get their message across, protested outside museums and created outlandish performance pieces often involving nudity. But the documentary is basically traditional, with a straightforward, chronological structure. It tells the stories of major figureheads in the feminist art movement like Judy Chicago, Nancy Spero and the Guerrilla Girls collective through a blend of archival footage, artist commentaries gathered by the filmmaker over 35 years and narration by Ms. Hershman Leeson.

Carrie Brownstein, the vocalist and guitarist of the now-defunct indie-rock band Sleater-Kinney, provides the soulful soundtrack.

When Ms. Hershman Leeson does break out of the standard third-person narration in the film and speaks candidly about her own struggles as an artist — a collector once returned one of her pieces after he discovered she is a woman, for example — the effect creates a feeling of intimacy and shared experience.

“Lynn’s approach to the material is much more strategic than in her other work,” said B. Ruby Rich, a feminist film critic. “She’s concerned with restoring the feminist art movement to visibility.”

“!Women Art Revolution” goes further than other films about the feminist art movement — like Chiara Clemente’s “Our City Dreams” (2008) and Joan Braderman’s “The Heretics” (2009) — in its efforts to engage audiences beyond the movie screen.

There is an accompanying comic book by Spain Rodriguez, the renowned underground artist, and videos, transcripts and biographies of artists in the documentary are available online on a dedicated section of the Stanford University Library Web site (Ms. Hershman Leeson sold her archive to the university in 2004).

The project is also deeply interactive. The “RAW/WAR” Web site enables contemporary artists to add their own stories and images to a growing archive. The site currently features nearly 400 works by more than 230 artists.

Now, things seem to be changing for female artists — somewhat. In 2010, for the first time, the Whitney Biennial featured more female artists than men. And exhibitions of feminist art, like “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2007), are proliferating.

But “!Women Art Revolution” is a call to the next generation of female artists to keep forging ahead.

“We had the great fortune to emerge as artists when there was a feminist wave sweeping the country,” said Joyce Kozloff, an artist featured in the film.

“The courage of that history gives tremendous impetus for creating a future,” Ms. Hershman Leeson said. “The women in the film invoke the message that artists should remain vigilant.”

'The Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven' Playfully Forces Audience to Examine Cultural ClichésBAY CITIZEN

2011-04-06T09:52:00.000-07:00

Young Jean Lee's play is both deeply distancing and intimate

In a recent blog post on the Crowded Fire Theater Company’s website, one of the actresses from its new play, “The Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven,” by the New York-based dramatist Young Jean Lee, opined on her experience with the play’s main theme of cultural identity.

“Even though I’m a Chinese-American actor, I’ve played a Korean mother, a Japanese lounge singer, a British divorcee, and a German cabaret dancer,” wrote Lily Tung Crystal, a Chinese actress who plays a Korean character, “And if I’m lucky sometimes I get to play a Chinese person who is not a doctor or a prostitute.”

Plays like “Yankee Dawg You Die” by Philip Kan Gotanda and David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” also deal with Asian typecasting issues. But the disarming lack of specificity that runs through Lee’s spiky-spunky theatrical presentation has a far more disconcerting effect on the viewer than many other dramas covering similar thematic terrain.

Lee’s sharp exploration of cultural cliche forces —in a playful way —the audience to confront the modern urban truisms while showing how pointless it is to try to make sense of them. She uses a variety of tools — subtle humor as well as in-your-face shock tactics — to drive home her points.

At the same time, the work remains as inscrutable as a smiling Buddha.

The play, largely plotless, uses a “vaguely Asian” flavor of the dramaturgy and mise-en-scene to satirical effect. The bare, plywood-lined stage with a single floral mandala scratched into the center of the floor — the only defining feature of Emily Greene’s set design — gives very little away about setting or style.

The script notes call for actors in the parts of Korean 1, Korean 2 and Korean 3 to be played by “actresses who are one-hundred percent Korean, Chinese or Japanese (or any mix of the three, for example half Chinese/half Japanese.)” Crowded Fire and the Asian American Theater Company’s slick, sensitively staged co-production includes Korean characters played by actresses with ethnic roots and linguistic abilities in Mandarin (Lily Tung Crystal), Cantonese (Katie Chan), and Japanese (Mimu Tsujimura).

And you of course have no clue (unless you are fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese or have read the script) that the chatter between the doll-like Asian ladies, rambunctiously choreographed by director Marissa Wolf, is largely about sex and violence. It’s the perfect theatrical metaphor for ignorance.

The homogenization of cultural difference extends beyond the Asian characters. Lee engages in white stereotyping too. Every now and again, a heterosexual Caucasian couple, White Person 1 (Alexis Papedo) and White Person 2 (Josh Schell), holds angst-ridden conversations on themes like their relationship, the state of the environment and a wishful aspiration to visit Africa. In addition to the subjects of conversation, which could have been ripped from the “Stuff White People Like Blog,” the use of harsh, sickly pallor-inducing fluorescent lights, exclusively reserved for the scenes featuring the Caucasian couple, take the concept of “whiteness” to an extreme.

The effect of all of this is, at one level, deeply distancing. The play’s opening scene, in which disembodied voices (a recording of Lee and some of her friends) chat about how to capture the playwright being hit repeatedly in the face on video camera further compounds this feeling. The experience, then, of watching the video of Lee in close-up reeling from the punches adds an element of nasty surprise that’s at once appalling and compelling.

At another level, the intimacy of this scene counterbalances the play’s bland characterizations of cultural identity. One character in particular embodies this struggle. The Korean American, played with a winsome matter-of-factness by Cindy Im, clad in jeans, sneakers and a t-shirt, is the picture of a conflicted soul. When the three “pure-bred” Korean characters perform a graceful traditional dance in their delicate, bubble-gum-colored dresses, she tries to join in, but is mocked by the others for her clumsy movements.

At the same time, Korean American constantly derides Koreans. She calls her parents “retarded monkeys” and makes “Chinese eyes” gestures in front of the Korean trio. But then she turns around and makes grandiose statements about Korean supremacy that hilariously make her sound like a comic book villain: “The wiliness of the Korean is beyond anything that you could ever hope to imagine. I can promise you one thing, which is that we will crush you.”

These lines are particularly striking because at heart “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven” is a play about how attempts at self-empowerment only lead to self-sabotage.

In one of the most memorable sequences from the production, Korean American joins Koreans 1, 2 and 3 in a ghoulish game. Like break-dancers showing-off their physical prowess surrounded by a circle of peers, the characters mime various hideous forms of self-harm. Smiling and laughing throughout, one drinks a bottle of beer, smashes the bottle over her knee, and uses the broken bottle to cut her wrists. Another decapitates herself with a wire. A third cuts off two of her fingers with a pair of scissors, then cuts out her tongue and stabs herself in the eyes. Then they scuttle off-stage.

The play ends up being hijacked by the white characters, babbling interminably about self-improvement against the backdrop of a mournful indie rock song. As a concluding statement for a work of art exploring Korean identity politics, this is strange. But that’s just the point. As Lee’s warped dramaturgy so insightfully shows, attempts to understand the intractable culture surrounding us are bound to end in frustration and negation, regardless of our ethnic background.

But like Lee being hit in the face on video and, in spite of the pain, coming back for more, we can’t help continuously trying to make sense of the world.

Airport Art Is Not an Oxymoron, at Least Not at SFONEW YORK TIMES

2011-04-01T08:45:00.000-07:00

Even in these hard economic times, the Bay Area overflows with vibrant art institutions, among them the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cartoon Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California and the San Francisco International Airport. Yes, that last one is correct.

With an annual budget of more than $3 million and 27 full-time employees, about 20 gallery spaces housing six-month-long temporary exhibitions on a variety of esoteric subjects like Japanese pottery and platform shoes, an Aviation Museum dedicated to commercial air travel and a vibrant commissioning partnership with the San Francisco Arts Commission, SFO is home to a world-class art collection.

Although not a museum in the traditional sense, the collection includes museum-quality works by top Bay Area artistic talents like Wayne Thiebaud, James Torlakson, Roy De Forest, Hassel Smith and Lee Mullican, all of whom can be found in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The holdings also include works by international art stars like Arnaldo Pomodoro and Seiji Kunishima.

Many airports display art — the San Jose International Airport has a cutting-edge video installation on the sensitive theme of surveillance, for example — but the San Francisco International Airport’s exhibition program is the only one in the country to have received accreditation from the American Association of Museums.

Few airport galleries have the resources to undertake the process, which takes two to three years. But for SFO, which initially received accreditation in 1999, it was worthwhile.

“The accreditation is a valuable check to see that we continue maintaining the highest professional standards in both policy and practice,” John Hill, curator of the Aviation Museum, said.

Now, with the opening of the remodeled Terminal 2 on April 14, the art experience at the San Francisco International Airport is becoming even more enticing.

In addition to reinstalling 20 works from the airport’s permanent 60-piece art collection, the San Francisco Arts Commission is introducing five newly commissioned pieces.

Passengers in the airy, naturally lighted $388 million terminal will be able to propel iridescent-winged acrylic “butterflies” up wires using a mechanical hand crank in the local artist Charles Sowers’s interactive kinetic sculpture “Butterfly Wall.” Visitors with long layovers can take a cellphone audio tour covering the terminal’s complete art collection. Local musicians from the airport’s "You Are Hear" music program like the alt-cellist Zoe Keating and the Nice Guy Trio, a jazz group, will perform live.

The integration of art into Terminal 2 is a bold move in an era of tightening budgets and aviation-industry woes. But airport officials say that culture improves the quality of service.

“Our investment in the arts provides an engaging and less stressful experience to our passengers and employees,” said John L. Martin, director of the San Francisco International Airport.

The new works were financed through $3.7 million in “art enrichment funds” from a city ordinance that earmarks 2 percent of the total cost of civic public works projects for public art.

The airport’s emphasis on art also points to the increasingly blurred line between traditional cultural institutions and other destinations for high-quality art.

“I think airport museums are gaining the stature of more traditional museums,” said Ford W. Bell, president of the American Association of Museums, a service organization in Washington D.C. “Every major museum realizes the importance of bringing art to the people, as well as the other way around.”

Artists are drawn to the vast, diverse audience that airports attract. According to Mr. Martin, nearly 39 million passengers passed through the San Francisco International Airport in 2010 and an estimated 10 percent actively engaged with the airport’s art. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art welcomes an average of about 700,000 visitors a year.

“I am excited about the chance to interact with so many people,” said Janet Echelman, the creator of the newly commissioned artwork “Every Beating Second,” a trio of giant red and purple woven sculptures that hangs in the concourse, post-security.

But audiences can be uneven and unpredictable.

“It gets eerily quiet,” said Chuck Prophet, a singer-songwriter who has performed at the airport. “Then it heats back up out of nowhere.”

The design of Terminal 2, a close collaboration between the Gensler architecture firm, airport staff and the San Francisco Arts Commission, melds the utilitarian aspects of the space and its arts offerings.

Instead of hard, institutional seats, airport visitors can sit in cozy armchairs surrounded by a triptych of colored tapestries depicting Bay Area gardens by Mark Adams.

It may be awhile before people start viewing the San Francisco International Airport as a cultural destination. But things seem to be heading that way.

“Two of our performance areas are pre-security,” said Marc Capelle, the curator of “You Are Hear.” “So we get folks that come out and listen to music and dine at the airport.”

Lady Gaga in Oakland: A Bossy, Euphoric Monster MotherBAY CITIZEN

2011-03-23T10:29:00.001-07:00

At last night's show, the pop singer made "Norman Bates’s mother look like the Virgin Mary"

The video for “Born this Way,” the title track from Lady Gaga’s soon-to-be-released album, is full of grotesque birthing imagery. Pulsing, vagina-like forms swirl around the screen, wombs explode and sticky objects emerge from the space between the performer’s splayed legs.

At just 24 years old, Lady Gaga has somehow come to represent motherhood for millions of people around the world.

But like cultural history’s most divisive maternal figures – a line which spans from Medea to the pushy stage mom in Darren Aronofsky’s movie “Black Swan” – the performer sends out mixed messages to her children. She is exceedingly hard to please.

Over 15,000 of Gaga’s “Little Monsters” (as the performer affectionately likes to call her fans) turned up at the Oracle Coliseum last night to pay homage to their “Mother Monster” on the Bay Area leg of her “Monster Ball Tour 2011.”

Many attempted to gain the star’s affection by alluding to her lurid sense of style. Brightly colored wigs dotted the arena. Fans posed for photographs in assorted nun’s habits, sparkly unicorn horns and skeleton faces. Recalling the dress fashioned from hunks of meat that Gaga wore at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, one woman even had on a belt fashioned from miniature plastic cuts of beef.

Other fans threw offerings for the performer on the stage. Adoring text messages poured out on the huge screens that flanked the auditorium before the concert began.

Though she cooed over some of the gifts, humbly thanked the crowd for buying tickets to her concert and, at one point, interrupted the music to have a conversation with an audience member on her cell phone, Mother Monster reciprocated with a tough version of her progeny’s apparently boundless love.

In some ways, Lady Gaga is the most doting of parents. She spent a great deal of time during her two-hour show massaging egos with statements that sound like they come from a soap opera script. She told us we’re heroes from the moment we come into this world, that we can be whoever we want to be and that we should love ourselves however we are.

This message comes across most palpably in Gaga’s soulful acoustic version of “Born this Way,” the only down-tempo part in an otherwise bestially high-energy performance. A beatific blue light bathed the artist, momentarily softening her mustard gas-hued tresses as she sung at the piano.

My mama told me when I was young
We are all born superstars
She pulled my hand and put my lipstick on
In the glass of her boudoir
"There's nothin wrong with lovin who you are"
She said, "'cause he made you perfect, babe"

This marked the only point in the show when Gaga sung with unmannered ease. There’s a depth and sweetness to her voice that runs completely counter to the throaty, machine-like tone that she adopts for many of her aggressive hit songs including “Bad Romance” and “Poker Face.”

But the lullaby was short-lived.

For the rest of the performance, Gaga created such a terrifying vision of parenthood that she makes Norman Bates’s mother look like the Virgin Mary.

There’s nothing remotely maternal about Lady Gaga’s appearance. All of the many costumes she wore on stage exchange feminine curves for sharp angles. At the start of the show for the number “Dance in The Dark,” the performer strode out in a navy blue biker jacket with shoulder pads that would make Colin Powell cower. For her performance of the plucky disco anthem “Love Game,” Gaga wore a translucent rubber nun’s habit with protruding hips and an outsize beast claw on one hand. And she made an appearance towards the end of her show sporting her signature brassiere and panties —that shower sparks.

So much for mother’s milk.

She’s also extremely domineering and bossy. Gaga’s songs might be peppered with monosyllabic utterances reminiscent of baby talk like the “Ga-ga-ooh-la-la” of “Bad Romance.” But when she yelled, “Put your paws in the air!” to the crowd, everyone obeyed instantly.

Coupled with the air punches, writhings and squats of Laurieann Gibson’s fecund-aggressive choreography, Gaga’s show ends up being less of a pep talk for her Little Monsters than a place they are sent to get a good whipping.

If this is motherhood in the 21st century, then it’s a maternal nightmare worthy of a Philip Roth novel.

Yet Gaga’s approach to parenting is intoxicatingly compelling. Her energy and charisma induce a state of euphoria and songs like “Alejandro” and “Telephone” force even the most flat-footed of her fans to get up and dance. Just as there’s a little of our parents in all of us – both good and bad – so Gaga dramatizes the relationship between mother and child through exploiting its dual humanizing and monstrous sides.

Try as we might to sever the bond, we can’t help but be tied to Mother Monster’s warped umbilical chord of pounding beats, flashing lights and acres of flesh.