The Dressing

Where has the Dresser been lurking lately? The whacky Centre Pompidou in Paris. The parched Hoover Dam outside Las Vegas. A town hall event in Sheffield, Vermont, with their local poet Galway Kinnell read poems dedicated to other locals living and dead. The Power Center at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh for the "Lifting Belly High" poetry conference. And more recently September 28, 2008, Ceylon by way of Washington National Opera's offering of Georges Bizet's Les Pécheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers).

WHAT AUDIENCES VERSUS CRITICS LOVE

The production came to the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, from the San Diego Opera where the SDO General Director Ian Campbell for their 2004 season asked Andrew Sinclair to create a new production of The Pearl Fishers, Bizet's fourth opera. Bizet, of course, is best known for his eleventh and final opera Carmen, which premiered in 1875. Neither of these two operas fared well for the composer. Having only one production run of 18 performances in Bizet's lifetime, The Pearl Fishers, though popular with its audience, was panned by the critics. Carmen, which addresses the racy lives of gypsies and bullfighters, ran into a wall of censorship and for 10 years it was not part of the operatic repertoire.

For the most part, the Dresser was satisfactorily entertained by Sinclair's version of The Pearl Fishers. Having recently enjoyed the strange architecture of the Pompidou Center where all the utility pipes are on the outside of the building in eye-catching primary colors, the Dresser thoroughly admired the surreal sets of Zandra Rhodes. If palm trees in arid Vegas tend to be less on the green side and more to the brown, the landscape of the pearl fishers' village was vibrant with red and blue palms.

And who is Zandra Rhodes? Besides also being the costume designer for this opera, she is a British fashion designer. Her choice of costume fabrics is enough to make this show worth seeing. In a single glance, the sari in graded shades of orange and pink that the high priestess Leila wears makes her sexual attraction to the main men of this story completely understandable.

ONE GIRL, TWO GUYS

The story is about two friends--the hunter Nadir and the newly appointed village chieftain Zurga--who had a falling out over a woman they both wanted. The popular Nadir shows up in the pearl fishers village as Zurga accepts his new leadership role. Zurga is guarded about welcoming Nadir back to the village, but the two agree to preserve their friendship by foregoing the pursuit of this woman. Immediately, the veiled Leila as the sacred virgin shows up to bless the village against the dangers of the sea. Zurga doesn't recognize her, but Nadir does. Meanwhile, the high priest Nourabad reminds Leila of her vow of celibacy, which is soon broken when Nadir shows up in her bedchamber at a highly protected castle. They are quickly discovered and sentenced to death by Zurga. Zurga's jealously and rage is fanned by Leila's plea to release Nadir and let the punishment be hers alone. The outcome of the story hangs on a necklace Leila was given by a refugee she risked her life for when she was child.

The Dresser who likes to be surprised as a story unfolds thought for sure that Leila's necklace was a gift from Nadir and that was why the sexual attraction was strong. Jump now to the next paragraph, if you don't want to know the sex of the baby, oops, the original owner of the necklace. No, the twist is that Leila as a child had saved the life of Zurga and once he sees the necklace, he knows that he must prevent their execution so like any maverick, he sees the trouble he has caused and causes more--he sets his village on fire. The lovers escape and Nourabad and his men, bang! bang! off Zurga.

NADIR AS THE HIGH POINT

The star of this production is tenor Charles Castronovo as Nadir. He is the same singer who performed this role in the San Diego Opera's production. His execution of Bizet's uplifting, lyric music inspires breath in the listener and the Dresser felt thoroughly rested in hearing Castronovo sing.

Continue reading "The Highs and Lows of Pearl Fishing" »

This summer the Dresser skirted the Capital Fringe Festival 08. That is, she was on the edge of the edgy goings on, being preoccupied with judging several poetry contests, writing her paper on Gertrude Stein--medievalist, futurist, or both, and collaborating on an Exquisite Corpse poem for an art show. Nevertheless, she was still interested and had the opportunity to conduct this interview with Diana Tokaji, who was the principal creator choreographer and poet of Crashing Home.

How did the sequence of Crashing Home and its four parts come about?

Crashing Home is partly a show featuring Annie Johnstone, singer, who is essentially coming out into the public with her beautiful voice for the first time. She was featured very briefly in my show last year, but these songs are her own, and coming onto the stage is new for her. So that was one focal point, and this is why you see several of her songs on the program.

Is there an overriding theme or mood between the four parts that was particularly important for the audience to leave with?

The audience gets to leave with whatever is appropriate for them at that viewing...perhaps they leave delighted by the funny bits, or thrilled by the singing. Perhaps they leave in tears. Although I avoid any pretense that I should be telling other people what to leave with, when I look at the overriding or undercurrent theme of the show, it's reflected in the title, Crashing Home. Coming home, finding your right way in the world is not necessarily a gentle path...even if it's aligned. The last words of "Poem of Trust. Poem of Fearless." say it one way...."small boat, breast wide, enters open sea." It's huge out there. Taking our fears in stride and moving out anyway, takes balls.

And the few words of "The Letting" says it: "...this hard bark, that is warm." The piece speaks about an epiphany that occurs while leaning into a tree, the hard bark "digging without apology" into her back. Learning "how to learn, how to ask, how to focus" when life stabs us where it most hurts. How can we at that moment, feel, breath, and realize that we are learning - even then - how to love. So if I had to offer a sound bite for my theme I would say it is, "Find a path of love for the world and the self. But don't expect pretty."

As a dancer, who are the dancers you take your inspiration from? Does the dance style in Crashing Home represent the style of your overall choreography or were you working within a particular timeframe?

My early inspiration was Judith Jamison, of Alvin Ailey's Dance Company. I saw her perform in San Francisco during my gangly teens, and was encouraged: If she, with her tall body and unusually long limbs, could integrate her movements that beautifully, perhaps there was hope for me. Meeting Josephine Nicholson much later in life, (my original Weerd Sister and co-founder), was equally encouraging, as her limbs are perhaps even a touch longer than mine. When I saw her move, I thought, 'oh that's why it takes so much to organize my body...it's long like that amazing creature!' Currently, all art forms and rhythms inspire and inform my choreography...it can be looking at water or a squirrel, that inspires the movement for my piece, as easily and likely as it can be some style of dance.

The "style" of choreography I select for any particular work is not conscious. My first training was in Afro-Caribbean dance, and folkdance. Then I studied jazz, modern, and classical ballet. I performed professionally in musical theatre, and in operas with Pavarotti, Leontyne Price, Plácido Domingo, and I toured nationally dancing the roles of five women throughout five centuries of social dance. As for comedy, I think that was a survival technique, naturally learned and developed in the family kitchen.

Words inform my choreography as well, because I hear them physically. I began combining and performing text, dance, and odd combos of recorded music in my teens at Berkeley High School, back in the days when we had to splice a reel to reel tape, if we wanted to edit, as I did, Santana with Tchaikovsky's violin concerto. My writing was a secret most of my childhood, stuffed behind bookshelves where no one could see it. I came out as a writer in my twenties, and just after I declared my major to be writing upon returning to college, that same week, I discovered in a trunk of my mother's belongings that she had been a writer, that was her profession. My writing teaches me how to choreograph, because if I listen to it honestly, I pull gesture from "out of the box," accommodating but not dancing to, those words.

As a performer. what do you hope to achieve by blending dance, movement, dramatic and comic action, and poetry?

I don't go about this complex blend because I hope to achieve anything, but because these different art forms satisfy what is required by a particular piece, a particular expression that I'm feeling must be delivered. As humans, we seem to think that we should be identifying what we are by a single title: I am a poet; I am a dancer; I am full of music; I am ridiculous; I am dramatic, serious. But look, it wasn't until I understood how to focus on my upper palate in voice lessons that I finally began to understand how to focus in yoga poses. And when I started ballet late in life, in order to fake my way across the floor doing 'brise', I depended on a combination of musical timing and a background in folkdance. Or this: if you understand how to waltz, you might hear ¾ time in Shakespeare's sonnets, or you might see trees in the wind and perceive the leaves as waltzing. It is we who feel more comfortable compartmentalizing, but if we look back in time to people dancing and chanting around a fire, dressed up, made up, playing instruments, and perhaps telling serious or funny stories, we realize the blend and overlap of art forms is in our nature.

Continue reading "Long Limb, Upper Palate Inform Crashing Home " »

Suddenly the Dresser is sorry she never learned Norwegian, not even one word when she was smitten in high school with a Norwegian exchange student who called himself Sandy. This sorrow followed the one-performance-only concert premiere of the musically rendered Love's Comedy by composer Kim D. Sherman and librettist Rick Davis based on Henrik Ibesen's play and adapted by Leon Katz.

BE MY KITE STRING

While the Dresser does not agree with the creators that June 21, 2008, premiere of Love's Comedy is an opera, but rather a highly entertaining and satisfying work of music theater with a dash of Sondheim (think "Green Finch and Linnet Bird" from Sweeney Todd), this disagreement in no way diminishes the accomplishment. For starters, the setting of Katz's adaptation and Davis's libretto is beautifully rendered. Though the libretto and the performance delivery of the text did not always match, clearly indicating a work still in progress, the overall effect was impressive and made the Dresser wish that she could understand Ibsen's play written in verse to compare the two scripts.

What is the story about?--Svanhild, a young woman unable to break the bonds of home and community that keep her from realizing her potential. (Yes, this is typical Ibsen fare.) Her chance arrives when Falk, a young poet staying at her mother's boarding house and eschewing conventional love and marriage pursues her as his muse. He wants her as his kite string and she says get lost. However, after he confronts her community concerning how marriage kills love and the community ostracizes him, she falls for the poet and is ready to hit the road. However, Gulstad, an older businessman stops them and questions what happens after the first flames of love die and says that she has a choice. The choice is run off with Falk and see how long love lasts or let Falk go and marry the financially comfortable Gulstad (the gold man as his name seems to indicate).








Photo by Rick Davis

MONKEY WRENCHES IN THE STEW OF LOVE

The story of Love's Comedy reminds the Dresser of Scott Wheeler and Romulus Linney's Democracy: An American Comedy, another tale of love, marriage, community mores, and choice. Both of these musical works offer characters who throw a monkey wrench into the stew of love. In Love's Comedy both Gulstad and Falk stir the pot in what the Dresser would say is a community divide between acceptable (Gulstad) and unacceptable (Falk) behavior. In Democracy, the Baron Jacobi, who also acts as a narrator talking directly to the audience, plays a naughtier role and spirits more than one woman away from a conventional marriage.

What is also significantly different about these two works is the musical styles. Though predominately tonal, Democracy with its under current of dissonance and diatonic harmonies makes it clearly a contemporary opera. Although the second act of Love's Comedy offers a darker mix of lyric music, the overall effect of the work demands little of the audience and falls squarely into the category of entertainment and not art that pushes the boundaries. The Dresser does not think this a failing on the part of the composer but merely a choice. After all, Stephen Sondheim refuses to call his musical works operas and the Dresser thinks Sherman and Davis should be proud to name Love's Comedy, a work of music theater.

THE PULL OF POETRY

When the Dresser's friend Janet Peachey told her about Love's Comedy which was having its premiere at the George Mason University Center for the Arts, the Dresser was hoping that Internet research would indicate no particular incentive to trek out to Fairfax, Virginia, taking time away from a paper she is writing for Lifting Belly High: A Conference on Women's Poetry Since 1900. However, the Dresser was immediately intrigued by the composer's website listing the accomplishments of Kim D. Sherman. Furthermore, the concert performance was fluidly stage directed by Rick Davis and musically directed by Stanley Engebretson with outstanding performers, particularly in the roles of Svanhild (soprano Abigail Shue), Falk (baritone David Schmidt), Svanhild's mother Mrs. Halm (mezzo-soprano Linda Maguire), Svanhild's sister (soprano Danielle Talamantes) and Anna's fiancé Lind (tenor Matthew Loyal Smith. And quite frankly, the Dresser grooved on the ensemble which kept bringing back the refrain "soft, soft summer's day" which made her think of beloved medieval songs about nature and also the current summer's day in DC which was temperately warm and a joy to experience. Then too, this is a play dealing with writing plays and is suffused with well-turned phrases. What more could the Dresser want for a engaging entertainment?

Continue reading "Love's Comedy--An Opera with Strings Attached" »

Is cabaret music ugly? Should it be unpleasant? These were questions raised by Washington Musica Viva's Sex Appeal program that took place on June 18, 2008, at DC's Busboys and Poets. The Dresser stands scratching her head because, generally speaking, she enjoys the clever but raunchy turns of this kind of music.

The program included songs by cabaret greats: Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Friedrich Hollaender. It also included new cabaret music by sax man composer Charley Gerard based on the lyrics of Judith Weinstock. The musical ensemble included: Clea Nemetz, mezzo; Charley Gerard, composer arranger, alto saxophone; John Jensen, trombone; John O'Brien, banjo; and Carl Banner, piano. Featured were three songs by Hollaender: "Sex Appeal," "Take it off Petronella," and "Falling in Love Again," the song from The Blue Angel made famous by Marlene Dietrich. While the Dresser grooved on the moves and throaty voice of Clea Nemetz, the musical accompaniment seemed thin (not ugly) and spiritless. The Dresser was told that Busboys, for whatever reason, didn't allow the musicians time for a sound check and so musical balance didn't happen.

Perhaps this is unfair, but in the Dresser's experience the touchstone for cabaret is The Three Penny Opera by Kurt Weill with libretto by Bertolt Brecht. And yes, the WMV program included "Mack the Knife," the most well known song from The Three Penny Opera and no, Clea Nemetz sounded nothing like Lotte Lenya or Ute Lemper. Nemetz was squeaky clean sexy in her English and interesting to watch, but she didn't have that German cabaret edge with the guttural rolls of the Rs and that insane vibrato that causes audience to scoot up on their seat and wonder what this singer would be like in bed. Oops, the Dresser can't help it if the raunch slips out. And yes, the Dresser likes a squonky sax and 'bone with the strumming of the banjo and the beating of the ivories but she really missed a bass to ground the overall sound.

The second half of the program featured mostly original songs by Gerard and Weinstock. The Dresser's favorite was "I Hate My Ex" but in truth this piece sounded like contemporary opera and not cabaret. So the Dresser thinks Charley Gerard and Carl Banner should put their heads back together and do up another program like The Weary Blues, which was a smash hit at Busboys.

In a meditation on perfection, Bryan Penberthy looks at the world of the artist in the nightclub in his poem "Expatriatetown."

EXPATRIATETOWN

Every building a café, a nightclub,
both, languid beauties tonguing the lips of
cappuccino cups, feeling if it's cool
enough to sip. Every statue is a
writer you've gotten drunk with, a painter
you've laid, carved by a sculptor who respects
you. Everyone here has read all your books--
even the bad ones--and loved every phrase.
Every sandwich you order is perfect--
the Reubens not soggy, the Romaine crisp.

Nights are opiate in their languor--warm,
narcotic. Every woman adores you.
The violinist at every café
plays your favorite songs, sad ones, music
to make your life seem a good decision.
Luckily, bars never run out of wine,
low conversation, and exotic brands
of cigarette. The only province you
can't leave is the country of suspicion.

The papers have it right: celebrity
is the only politics. Happily,
your reputation has grown mildly
comfortable. You are writing a great
novel, an epic about the war years,
which you can't seem to recall in any
great detail anymore--not in this town.

Bryan Penberthy
From Lucktown

Copyright © 2007 by Bryan Penberthy

Recently the Dresser has heard musical works that have been created with a limited segment of instruments normally played in most classical compositions or with an unusual emphasis on an instrument or selected instruments. For example, Philip Glass in his opera Satyagraha used only winds and strings, cutting out the brass and percussion sections of the orchestra. On June 4, 2008, at the Église Saint-Eustache in Paris, France, the Dresser experienced the all percussion work Le Noir de L'Étoile by Gérard Grisey and on June 8 at the Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland, she heard two pieces by Maurice Saylor: Concerto in A for Cello and Vocal Orchestra (one cello and 32 human voices) and The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits (two separate choruses totaling 68 voices and a collection of unexpected instruments not generally employed for a classical composition, such as accordion, harmonica, and banjo.)

IN TOUCH WITH THE NIGHT SKY

Le Noir de L'Étoile concerns the death of a pulsar and had its genesis when French composer Gérard Grisey met the astronomer and cosmologist Joe Silk at University of California Berkeley in 1985. Silk introduced the composer to the sounds of the Vela Pulsar. Grisey, who died in 1998 at the age of 52, taught at UC Berkeley from 1982-1986.

In the gothic Saint-Eustache church, the 60-minute concert began shortly after 10 p.m. In France at this time of the year, it's not dark until 10 p.m. and the Dresser and her friends surmised that the producers wanted the audience to be in touch with the night sky. In the dimly lit church under its 112-foot vaulted ceiling, the Dresser felt her attention directed away from things terrestrial. Six platforms of percussion instruments were stationed around the perimeter of a large energetic audience. After the concert, the Dresser told her seatmate composer John Supko, when he asked what she thought, that L'Étoile gave a whole new meaning to crescendo.[Percussionist Olaf Tzschoppe talks with John Supko]

Being the daughter of a dad who played drums in a dance band, the Dresser has a certain appreciation of rhythm, sound texture, and silences before a mallet, drum stick, or brush strikes. Le Noir de L'Étoile was not jazz, rock, or heavy metal. There were moments of shocking explosive sound. Still, what impressed was the integrity of the work that measured silence against audible impact. In addition to the percussion, there were bits of a recording from the Vela Pulsar, which came across as static. In certain ways, the concert in its arrangement of where the instruments were stationed and the subject matter reminded the Dresser of a Paul Winter Consort concert that she heard in Washington, DC, at the National Cathedral. Where Winter had wolves in the voice of his soprano sax, Les Percussions de Strasbourg--the same group of percussionists who premiered Le Noir de L'Étoile--produced explosive flames of the dying star. When the concert finished, the audience produced a thunder of appreciation.

This concert was the opening night of the Festival Agora, which runs until June 20 in various locations around Paris and is a production of the IRCAM-Centre Pompidou with the support of the SACEM (an organization like ASCAP here in the United States). The IRCAM (Institute for Acoustic and Musical Research and Coordination) is a musical research institute that past French president George Pompidou asked Pierre Boulez to create in 1970 in association with a national center of contemporary art that would eventually be built and named the Centre Pompidou. Serendipitously, the Dresser decided to visit the Pompidou the day of the Grisey concert to see "Les Traces du Sacré," an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos that covers the history of art in the twentieth century addressing, in the face of an intellectual world believing God is dead, the questions of who are we, where do we come from, and what will happen to us. (This exhibition runs May 7 to August 11, 2008.) Needless to say, this exhibition handsomely dovetailed with the intellectual construct of the concert. Also it was no accident that the Festival Agora began with Grisey's work. Grisey, who was first known as a Spectralist and later renounced that pigeonholing as Philip Glass refuses to be called a Minimalist, was influenced by his teacher of four years Olivier Messiaen as well as Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis. In 2008, Festival Agora has built their programs around the work and philosophy of Gérard Grisey.

OF SNARKS, CELLO AND VOCAL ORCHESTRA

When Gisèle Becker asserted to Maurice Saylor that she wanted her Cantate Chamber Singers to mount another production of his The Hunting of the Snark (Cantate commissioned and then gave The Snark its world premiere), she also commissioned Saylor to compose a companion piece. Because The Snark with its ever-changing rhythms is a hard piece to sing, Saylor wanted to make its companion a work of worthy duration, difficulty, and invention that would "not put undue strain on a group that will already be burdened with hunting a Snark." Concerto in A for Cello and Vocal Orchestra is the four-movement work featuring the cello and using a vocalizing chorus in place of a traditional orchestra of strings, winds, horns, and percussion that resulted from this commission and the composer's vision of what works with The Hunting of the Snark.

The opening movement entitled "Moderato" created a mood similar to the cemetery scene in Thornton Wilder's Our Town and as set by Ned Rorem with a libretto by J. D. McClatchy. In keeping with Saylor's predilection, the "Moderato" has a fair amount of syncopation. The singers vocalized a variety of vowels and the cello wove in and out. The second movement "Scherzo-cadenza" featured the cello alone with an interesting mix of pizzicato, strumming, and the more traditional bowing. It allowed cellist Nancy Jo Snider to strut her ample talents. Movement three "Elegy" mirrored the mood of the "Moderato" and brought back the choral orchestra with some standout solo parts particularly in the soprano section. The final movement named "Allegro" had the most energy of the four pieces. As often is the case with a new work, the singers seemed to gain energy and confidence as the piece progressed. Saylor said afterwards that he plans to add a choral score for the "Scherzo-cadenza" and make some other adjustments to the overall work. Plans are in the works for a couple of other productions at DC university concert halls, including American University where cellist Nancy Jo Snider teaches.

Continue reading "Gérard Grisey & Maurice Saylor--Creating Music for Other Worlds" »

But a Passage in Wilderness by Margo Berdeshevsky captured the Dresser's attention in the same way as Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century did. The Dresser lingered over Berdeshevsky's words refusing to turn to the next poem until fully sated with the meaning, imagery, and beauty of her language. The Dresser believes each poem could bring forth many pages of commentary. Perhaps there is a doctoral thesis in this work.

CASTING THE BONES OF SELECTION

Since the task of properly reviewing this important new work is so large, the Dresser has decided in a random fashion to look at three poems that speak, though not primarily, to themes of music and opera. These poems: "In Possibility," "Every Afternoon," and "Lautrec, I've Heard, Shot Spiders" appear one each in the first three sections of the collection which is divided in a total of five parts entitled "On Frailty," "Whom Beggars Call," "The Story," "On Breaking," and "Best Love." In the world of assembling a collection of poetry, poems that open and close a section and the poem from which the title of a section is drawn tend to indicate important themes and strong individual poems. Therefore, the Dresser will make references to other poems in the collection as they inform the three poems she has chosen to look at in detail.

INVENTING A LOVING: PREY TO PRAY

At first glance, the title "In Possibility" resonates with the word impossibility. Berdeshevsky is nimble at making the reader slow down to hear what she is saying. This making the language new, in the Dresser's experience, comes from Gertrude Stein and this poem turns a Steinian phrase in the sentence: "Let the rose beetle/ invent a loving." The sentence, which appears divided over the last two lines of this poem, harkens back to the opening line "Nighthawk, beetle, how do you pray?" The word "pray" is carefully chosen and leads to "Is landscape your good silence, your breviary" but it is the homonym "prey" that grounds the complex working of the poet's intention. In nature, the beetle is prey of the nighthawk while the rose is prey to the rose beetle. But something sexual and not gastronomic happens in this poem as evidenced by such words and phrases as: "passion," "the first to bite back at spring's dark nipple," "love thrust," and "the pagan's skirts are lifted."

So how does one access the underbelly story of this poem? The Dresser decided to have a look at other poems in this section and noticed that the poem "On Frailty," (also the name of this section) contains the following lines:

Beware oh my Philomel who is not mine, but the sky's,
(am I and am I
tongue-cut and not
nightingale at all?)

Who or what is Philomel? How much time do you have? Short answer: nightingale. Long answer: In Greek mythology, Philomela (also known as Philomel) was raped by her sister Procne's husband King Tereus of Thrace and then when Philomela threatened to tell the world of his misdeed, he cut out her tongue. Through a tapestry, she told her sister what had happened and Procne decided the best way to punish her husband was to sacrifice their son who was his spitting image and serve the child up as Tereus' dinner. All three were turned into birds: Tereus, a hawk, and Procne and Philomela, alternately a swallow or a nightingale depending on whose story of Greek mythology one reads.

What happens in "In Possibility" is not a dwelling on the rape of Philomela, but a suggested transformation that comes with prayer first mentioned as "your breviary" and then in these words "Schubert-singer, ready for the first high G of 'Ave Maria.'" The Dresser discerns a nearly blasphemous irony in juxtaposing the Virgin Mary, mother of the Catholic God's child Jesus, with the rape of Philomela and the sacrifice of Procne and Tereus' son for the sin of the father. What alters this irony is this iconic image: "Let the protector of truth come down from her mythic hill, battered cloche and staff to pierce the ground so swollen with story." Who is this woman in a battered bell hat piercing the ground like Moses descending from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments? Is this Philomela, transformed to seer, with her tapestry? And what about the beetle? In "On Frailty," the Dresser noticed that a beetle rebuilds "her home in the mound" after the recitation of these losses: the village, child, notebook, faith. Therefore, the rose beetle of "In Possibility," always in danger of being plundered and eaten by the hawk, must "invent a loving" and create anew the "vernal nest."

Continue reading "Listening to Margo Berdeshevsky" »

On May 4, 2008, the Dresser ventured out to Mt Rainier, Maryland, to see Jacqueline Lawton's new play Mad Breed, commissioned, developed, and produced by Active Cultures Theatre in their Maryland Focus Initiative. The Dresser was lured by the subject matter which centers around the family of John Wilkes Booth when Booth was just turning thirteen (more on this interest later) and by the new play's able director Juanita Rockwell, who happens to be a good friend of this sassy critic (full disclosure here).

EXPLORING HISTORIC & IMAGINED TERRITORY

What the Dresser hadn't been prepared for was that Joe's Movement Emporium, the venue of the play, is only a few blocks around the corner from Thomas Stone Elementary School, where the Dresser attended part of third and all fourth grades. She hadn't been on that section of 34th Street since she was a little girl and wow, that long, hilly street of charming little bungalows looked waay smaller now versus when she walked it at ages eight and nine from Rhode Island Avenue to the school. The Dresser wonders if critics are influenced by these personal encounters on the way to review a new production. If so, the Dresser walked into Joe's feeling like she belonged in the neighborhood.

Another aspect of what the Dresser liked about this play is that it was encouraged by the Active Cultures Theatre artistic director Mary Resing to explore an historic subject that plays into the politics about how people of diverse backgrounds and cultures get along today. Mad Breed is about Maryland's racial past. The story focuses on John Wilkes' (or Wilkes as he preferred to be called) brother Edwin who falls in love with the black woman Adah Francois. The character of Francois is based on the legendary actor and poet Adah Isaacs Menken. Although Menken knew Edwin Booth as a fellow Thespian, the love story is Lawton's invention.

Still, that doesn't subtract from how unconventional the family of Wilkes was in real life and the play reflects this. Junius Brutus Booth, the renowned actor and patriarch whom we do not see on stage in Mad Breed but hear a lot about, is about to marry the mother of their ten children. (Wilkes is their ninth child.) This marriage is occurring 25 years after Junius eloped with Mary Ann Holmes to Maryland and abandoned his first wife and their only child in London. In Bel Air, MD, Junius and Mary Ann raised their brood on an organic farm, eating vegetarian meals, refusing to allow animals to be killed, and inviting their slaves to their dinner table. The Dresser hadn't known all this about the family of Lincoln's assassin and was left wondering how could such a well-raised son in a family who didn't believe in killing or slavery murder a president upholding the tenets of freedom and equality for all men?

In the middle of writing this review, the Dresser met in Annapolis with some poets who are long time pals of hers to celebrate her birthday and that of Jim Beall's. In the course of swapping stories about what each of us were doing lately, the subject of the Booth family arose. Jim Beall said, "Have you heard my story about my distant relative John Beall who was executed for being a Confederate spy?" "Well, no," said the Dresser, "tell me more." It turns out that John Wilkes Booth and John Beall were fast friends ever since they attended the hanging of the militant Abolitionist John Brown, that Booth pleaded with Lincoln to pardon his friend Beall, believed that Lincoln was going to grant that pardon and when he didn't, Booth carried out the assassination. Of course the story is more complicated than this, but this aspect of why Booth killed Lincoln has received considerable press in recent times.

WHOSE STORY IS THIS?

What Mad Breed does is raise questions about who John Wilkes Booth was and how he could be such a misfit in his family that was not like any others of that time. To be fair though, the Dresser needs to reiterate that the play centers on Edwin Booth and his deep love for a black woman playwright and actor. Furthermore, Wilkes is just turning thirteen and he is full of himself, having just joined a secret society. Oops, the Dresser is still wandering into that will-the-real-John-Wilkes-Booth-please-stand-up grind.

Without much trouble to substantiate this, one could say Mad Breed is really the story of Adah Francois. Anastasia (Stacey) Wilson cuts a commanding figure as Adah. As the play opens, the stage divides between Edwin (Danny Gavigan) and Adah who occupy separate times and places. Edwin implores Adah in a letter to come to him in his hour of need. He is about to play Shakespeare's Hamlet, a role he has long coveted, and he is beside himself given what his brother has done. Adah, who has long ago fled the United States for England, is well established and respected, something she could never hope for in the U.S. When the next scene occurs, we see Adah being booted out of the minstrel show she has been the playwright for as well as an actor. More interestingly she had been doing this as a man, but her colleague (played by Lee Liebeskind) has outed her accidentally and the show is in danger of being closed down by the authorities since women were prohibited from engaging in such activities. So Adah has to run and decides to take a train to New York. However, she has missed the last train and this is how she meets Edwin who takes her home to his father's farm, promising he will take this stranger whom he believes is a man back to the train the next day. Almost immediately the chemistry occurs between Edwin and this stranger and when he finds out she is a woman, he is forever hooked.

The tension of this play revolves around this forbidden white-black relationship for numerous reasons. Edwin's sister Asia (Amanda Thickpenny) has a frivolous friend named Blanche (Kristen Egermeier) who has marked Edwin for marriage though he knows nothing about this. Asia, although being pursued by Edwin's friend John Sleeper Clarke (also played by Lee Liebeskind), takes an immediate romantic liking to the stranger and, of course, is upset to find out that he is a she. Wilkes is vindictively angry with Edwin for falling for a "darkey" and later he apologizes for that disparaging label, but only because Asia insists and because Wilkes at heart is a gentleman doing what is politic. What redeems Adah for everyone is that she creates a minstrel show entertainment for the wedding of the senior Booths but then in seeing it rehearsed realizes she is disparaging "Negroes" and herself.

Here the Dresser will pause to say that the stick-in-memory minstrel show performance reminded the Dresser of Spike Lee's film Bamboozled and was not surprised to see later in the program notes that Lee's film was one of the resources that inspired Mad Breed.

Continue reading "Mad Breed: A View of a Teenaged John Wilkes Booth" »

The Dresser hesitates to say any musical group could sound like angels (after all, doesn't one have to be dead to know this sound?) but because she now has a rudimentary understanding of baroque versus standard tuning thanks to her friend Janet Peachey, the Dresser will venture into deep waters to make this assertion.

PERFECT PITCH BAROQUE

On May 2, 2008, American Opera Theater, currently in residence at Georgetown University, presented the first fully staged North American production of David and Jonathas by Marc-Antoine Charpentier with libretto by Père François Bretonneau. The work, originally interwoven with a spoken drama in Latin entitled Saul by Père Etienne Chamillard and first performed in 1688 for the Jesuit Le College Louis-le-grand in Paris, tells the Biblical love story between David (slayer of Goliath and Bathsheba wife-stealer) and Jonathan, son of King Saul of Israel.

The driving force behind American Opera Theater, originally named Ignoti Dei Opera, is Timothy Nelson who is the AOT artistic director. Nelson's production cuts out the spoken drama to provide a sung-through work that is enlivened by appealing tableau vivant staging and semi-dance/body movement styling and heavenly musical interludes on period instruments.

Now, back to this deep-water assertion about the music of angels. Janet's theory, which she explained to me mathematically (starting with Pythagoras' two-to-one tuning theory that involves octaves), boils down to this: modern tuning is slightly flat, but eventually that flatness is compensated for in Pythagoras' math. [NOTE: See Janet Peachey's comment below. While modern tuning is slightly flat, baroque tuning adheres to what might be heard as pure intervals versus the modern tuning which offers tempered intervals of tone.] Baroque tuning achieves a perfection of sound by avoiding certain keys and therefore sounds more harmonious than standard tuning. However, music created by baroque "perfect pitch" tuning is much more limited than music played with the standard "relative pitch" tuning.

In addition to this specialized tuning, set on the key of A at 415 cycles per second (we talked to baroque violinist Andrew Fouts who confirmed this lower pitch tuning versus the A440 tuning used in most modern concert tunings), the 230-seat Gonda Theatre in the Davis Performing Arts Center at Georgetown University provided an intimacy that made the Dresser and her friend feel bathed in the music in a way that was energizing and what the Dresser would call healing. This was especially apparent at the end of the opera when the full chorus, divided in half, sang from both sides at the back of the auditorium.

SINGING TRANCENDING GENDER

To take one's breath away (even as it was restored by the perfect-pitch tuning and acoustically satisfying Gonda Theatre) was the singing of countertenor Brian Cummings as David and soprano Rebecca Duren as Jonathas. Nelson has emphasized the sensual and sexual side of this story, which may not have had this gay relationship interpretation when Charpentier and Bretonneau presented this piece for the Parisian Jesuits. Dare the Dresser mention that in Charpentier's day, countertenor roles were usually roles for castrati, which probably put another slant on male relationships that we don't think about today. For the Dresser as she watched the barefooted cast, the figures of Cummings (boyish, slim, and tall) and Duren (childishly androgynous and petite) in combination with their high-pitched voices provided a sexual sublimeness that transcended gender. In short, the Dresser didn't care if these were two male characters or a mix of male and females actors playing males. The love story moved above the who's-who body orientation.

The Dresser should also pause here to note that she has been swept up before in the heavenly sound of baroque opera such as hearing Ann Hoyt sing Venus in John Blow's Venus and Adonis with the Rebel Baroque Orchestra, but at that time she didn't have the benefit of Janet Peachey's tutorial about what makes baroque music, especially that music played by period instruments, so appealing. As it turns out, the Dresser engaged in conversation last night with John Moran, a Rebel viola da gamba musician, who attended David and Jonathas, to not only witness this fine production but to also hear his wife violinist Risa Browder. The world of early and baroque music is an awesome but small community.

MORE NOTABLES

Craig Lemming as the Philistine general Joabel delivered a notable singing and acting performance. Joabel's hatred against Saul, which David did not share, was palpably felt by Lemming's performance. Lemming as Joabel vented this hatred to David, practically spitting his venom. Particularly pleasing was the pastoral scene that turned love to violent capture and enslavement. The Petit Choeur of Bonnie McNaughton, Matthew Heil, Kristen Dubenion-Smith (she also gave an outstanding delivery of La Pythonisse, the witch of Endor who in the Prologue forecasts Saul's demise and the death of his son Jonathas) was led in the pastoral scene by Emily Noel and Colin Levin (he also played the menacing Ombre de Samuel--the ghost of Samuel, the Biblical storyteller responsible for the story of David and Jonathas). [NOTE: Correction was made here about who led the pastoral scene.] The Dresser also loved the Petit Choeur's skillful fight/dance scene done with red flags.

Continue reading "The Angelic Voices of David and Jonathas" »

In the Chinese Year of the Rat, Scena Theatre has premiered on April 14, 2008, Otho Eskin's adaptation of Albert Camus' most popular novel The Plague. While the Dresser does not wish to negate the generally shared idea that the plague-ridden rats of Scena's current offering in their Nouvelle Vague 20th Anniversary Season are horrifically bad, she will say that a Rat Year is a time of hard work and renewal and that this play adaptation speaks admirably to both hard work and renewal.

How so?

RATS AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

Before the Dresser can talk about what the playwright and co-directors Elle Wilhite (Ms. Wilhite is also an actor and she played Inez in Scena's recent production of No Exit) and Robert McNamara have done to develop this work for the stage, some background information is necessary. Despite the agreement among fans of Camus that La Peste (The Plague) is his most accessible novel, this existential classic about the Algerian town of Oran under lockdown after a plethora rats turn up dead everywhere and then people start dying offers multiple interpretations.

Kim Curtis (Monsieur Othon), Karen O'Conell, Michael Vitaly Sazonaov (Dr. Rieux)





It is a grim allegory about the human condition--who's morally good or bad, who's physically weak or strong, who's civically helpful or destructive. In keeping with the time during which Camus wrote this work (World War II and the German occupation), the novel, published in 1947, has been read as a metaphorical statement of the French resistance to the Nazi occupation. On top of these layers, which seem straightforward by comparison, is the philosophic edge of the absurd dealing with things over which we have no control (death and pestilence, for example).

And two more things about the location of this story and the characters. Camus' Oran is a town where nothing happens, nothing grows like trees or flowers. Just a dusty town where "even love is banal." This is important to know because how people change under the siege of bubonic plague is what Camus was interested in studying. Also and unlike most small theater productions, there are fourteen actors in the cast and some play multiple roles.

Considering the complexity of the work and its large role call of characters, this is not what the Dresser would call an easy novel to adapt to the stage.

So how has the adaptation been done?

OF RAT SYMPHONY AND COFFIN BALLET

Eskin has boiled the five-part novel (about 320 pages) down to an intermission-less one-and-half hour play. The Dresser believes the strategy of no intermission essential to building the tension of the play adaptation. The playwright has also reassigned some of the didactic dialogue from Doctor Rieux, who is the narrator of the story, to Jean Tarrou, a philosophic outsider who seems in many respects to mirror Albert Camus. As directors, Wilhite and McNamara have created what McNamara calls a "corps de ballet" having the cast effect stylized movements backed up by a sound track that McNamara calls the "rat symphony."
The cast interacts with telephone-booth-sized cubes. Does everyone know what a telephone booth looks like since the cell phone has rendered these edifices unnecessary? Segments of the cast climb into these cubes while others move the occupied structures around. Designed and built by set designer Leon Weibers, the cubes look like display cabinets or Sleeping Beauty's glass casket upended. Without the constant repositioning of the cubes filled with the stop action players (think of mannequins in a department store window), the Dresser thinks this play would not offer enough emotional variety to keep the audience engaged.

Why?

The news keeps getting worse. First there are the dead rats, then people start dying and no one wants to admit a plague is happening much less do anything to counteract it. Soon the officials wake up and the town is gated so no one can leave and no one else can enter. The town's preacher says the plague was brought on by the sins of the town and later after a child dies an agonizing death, the preacher recants and says this is a test of faith. A criminal who otherwise would have been arrested is now free to operate a service for people who want to leave the quarantined town. The only ray of hope is that Dr. Rieux's colleague Dr. Castel will find a serum to counteract the epidemic and that Joseph Grand, a quirky friend of Dr. Rieux's, will make progress and finish his novel.

Samantha Merrick and Joe Lewis (Joseph Grand)

When the story ends, the plague has ended, but Dr. Rieux knows and says that plague just goes into hiding.

Continue reading "Camus' The Plague as Coffin Ballet" »

Opera Alterna, a spanking new opera company, opened Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas on March 28, 2008, as it's first production. Using the intimate Callan Theatre of Catholic University of America's Hartke Theatre building, this professional opera theater company is presenting young talent predominately associated with CUA, but also Maryland Opera Studio of the University of Maryland. The goal of Artistic Director Jay D. Brock
is to "bring provocative and intimate opera to new audiences." Bravo, shouts the Dresser.

LINING UP FOR OPERA

Imagine her delight, laced with a little frisson of fear, when she arrived at the Callan to see a line of people, some of whom were being told to wait because they were not sure there were enough seats for everyone. Yes, indeed this theater is intimate--only 60 seats. The Dresser is sure that among her readership who attend operas by small companies that all will agree that a respectable showing is twenty-five to thirty people.

To sum up quickly, the story of Dido and Aeneas follows these events. Aeneas arrives in Carthage and courts Dido. She falls for him, but he abandons her to fulfill his destiny in Italy. Heartbroken, she commits suicide. Purcell modeled his opera on John Blow's masque (also called a semi-opera) Venus and Adonis.

What's different about Brock's approach to opera is that he comes from a theater background. That was apparent in how the cast moved and communicated with each other and from what vantage point the players performed. While Purcell's opera has dance numbers, opera aficionados expect Dido and Aeneas to be a static work in which the singers stand and sing but do not do much moving.

UPPING THE EMOTIONAL RESPONSE

Perhaps some of the standard audience expectation regarding this first English opera that premiered in 1689 has to do with Nahum Tate's libretto for Dido and Aeneas. Tate based his libretto on Book Four of Virgil's The Aeneid. Critics complain that Tate and Purcell concentrated too much on making the libretto short and thereby lost important emotional content by the main characters. The key scene from Brock's production that will forever be etched in the Dresser's memory is Dido (as sung by Sarah Phillipa) chasing Aeneas (Michael Weinberg) with her suicide knife.

Talk about up close and personal. The Dresser scooted to the edge of her seat as Phillipa-cum-Dido breezed by as she backed Weinberg-cum-Aeneas into the black curtains at one end of the staging area. For a split second, the Dresser believed an intervention was needed against a diva out of control. What played oddly against the Dresser's adrenalin rush was seeing Dido "slash" her wrist and from her wrist fell a ribbon of red paper representing blood. So in that succession of actions, the audience experienced real-time danger (Dido threatening to knife Aeneas in the gut) and theatrical bloodletting that smacked of another era, maybe as old as the opera itself.

Other theatrically inventive scenes included the "shadow puppet" lovemaking of Dido and Aeneas (the couple interact behind a curtain with back-lighting making them appear as shadows on the curtains) and the witches' dance auguring trouble for the lovers. Brock placed a circle on the floor not far from the feet of audience members including the Dresser. The witches annotated the magic circle by chalking it with various symbols. The lead witch used a stick to inscribe the circumference of the circle and to beat an incantation alive. The witches were wild and primal in bare feet. What the Dresser understands is that while Blow's Venus and Adonis had gods manipulating their fate, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas had witches and that witches are an English preference over gods.

Continue reading "The Intimacy of Dido & Aeneas" »