Winberg left the symphony in good financial shape, still in the black after years of recession. As symphonies around the country go bankrupt or conduct punishing negotiations with their musicians, Eugene seems calm though the development team certainly works its (collective) butt off to raise the money necessary to stay in the black.
Scott Freck, via Polyphonic
Last week, the symphony sent out a press release to announce that it had hired a new executive director: Scott Freck, currently the VP for artistic operations and the general manager of the North Carolina Symphony, based in Raleigh. Freck will move to Eugene in June, and his family (he has a wife and two kids) will follow in July.
But he won’t be new to Oregon; he grew up “outside of Portland.” When he was young, he was a cellist with the Portland Youth Philharmonic, and he worked as artistic administrator for the Oregon Symphony in Portland for years before he moved in 2000 to that other, hotter, more mosquito-ridden coast.
I had the opportunity to talk to Freck about his return to his home state, his feelings about the Eugene Symphony and his plans for the future – and how to fill Winberg’s shoes and keep the Eugene Symphony financially and musically successful.
What stands out most vividly from the Northwest 10 might be similar to what stands out from last year’s Winter’s Tale, also at the Lord Leebrick Theatre: Local actors Tom Wilson and Dan Pegoda make a good comedic team, and Pegoda plays the banjo well.
Wilson’s not even onstage for their particular pairing in “Lunker,” but his voice echoes in the head long after the 10-minute play, by Kato Buss, comes to an end – an end slightly different, and far more amusing, than the tale on which it’s modeled.
You see, the Northwest Ten doesn’t contain 10 plays – it’s a festival of several 10-minute plays, mostly by Eugene playwrights. This is its fourth year, and the plan for attendees remains the same: Don’t like a play? Wait 10 or 12 minutes, and boom! New play, new characters. Like the weather in Eugene in the spring, I know. Actors and directors tell me it’s fun, and rather a lot of work considering the 10-minute result. This year’s playwrights responded to a theme: Writing on the Wall. In the results, that’s rarely a physical demonstration, more often an ominous phrase hovering over the characters’ actions.
The plays, with their need to set the scene rapidly, establish character and contain a reveal, have an uneven quality that can be charming or annoying. I found myself wishing that they were developed more like sketches, but perhaps I’ve been watching too many random pieces of Portlandia.
Still, playwrights, wouldn’t it be pleasant to develop the idea with your cast? That might create more seamless intentions and better performances. I haven’t asked Kato Buss, but I wonder if he had his two adult characters in mind when he wrote “Lunker” – his play, directed by Mary Gen Fjelstad, exhibited the closest fit between characters as written and actor ability (I should add that in “Lunker,” 8-year-old Nalua Manaois was admirably cute and had all of her many lines down – nicely done).
The bleak “Fool on the Hill” may be one of this year’s keepers, though I wasn’t a big fan of its tone – Ty (Jay Hash) seemed at first to be heading in a different emotional direction than where he ended up, and both Daniel Borson as the annoyingly panicked Steve and Paul Rhoden as the crazed Paul might have been more convincing with less flailing about.
I also kept wondering if these characters had ever read anything about survival in the wild, which was definitely not the half-existential, half-violent point of the play. Or am I taking it too much into the psychological realm when it was the hand of a malevolent spirit (Bob Buechler, the Tree) that caused them to lose their logic? In any case, like a lot of horror, it sticks around.
I suppose loneliness and loss worm their way into our memories and hearts more easily than something like “You Slay Me,” a comedic contribution by Laura Robinson. In that piece, Ron Judd pulls off quite the amusing transformation with a light, surefooted touch that’s fun to see. (Some of the stage business seems too big for the story itself, but it’s still an enjoyable little piece.)
In “Picketing for Pros,” Jorah LaFleur (literally) kicks some serious energy into the proceedings, making her character, Caroline, both outrageous and sympathetic – and hilarious. I admit to an extra laugh at the mention of “an Iowa City clinic” (wave to the fantastic Emma Goldman– is Portland playwright Ari Chadwich-Saund from the Midwest? Hm…). I didn’t think the revelation of Caroline’s actual job fit with her character in general, but again, I might simply want people to be more consistently good than any playwright would go for.
Paul Calandrino is the original NW10 idea guy and one of three producers behind NW10 this year. His contribution is “Cape Perpetua,” in which poor Jay Hash has to play another schlub and Sarah Papineau has to play the schlub’s annoyed girlfriend. I think this piece is a well-intentioned morality tale with characters who are a bit too stereotypical to work. The annoyed girlfriend redeems herself in a fashion that seems both naïve and overly sweet, which is not at all like the other 10-minute plays we’ve seen from Calandrino. I’m uncomfortable with the politics around asking someone who’s not from the disabled community to play a man with a severe disability, but Dale Light performs that character – unfortunately the vehicle for the girlfriend’s redemption – well.
Have you noticed a theme aside from writing on the wall? Many writers are directors or actors in the production. “Fish Climbs Tree”’ by Light features Tom Wilson again acting beautifully (that terrified whine!), but one of the two main premises, involving a gun and a computer, doesn’t make a lot of sense. The last play, “Inner Tube” by Fjelstad, had me laughing despite some awkward acting over the New Age/Western-style “Buddhism” bullshit its characters spout while one rips the other’s heart to shreds – such a perfect play for Eugene.
The turnEnsemble with Brandon Rumsey, James Bean, Sarah Pyle and Noah Jenkins, all students at the UO, provides music between and occasionally during the plays. It’s unobtrusive and provides small little hints about what’s to come in several of the plays.
The NW10 is always a mixed bag – but one that gets the brain spinning. You’ve got one more weekend, this one, to see the plays on Friday or Saturday nights or at the Sunday matinee (there’s a talkback after that one) – the tickets are $15, $12 for people 25 and younger, and you can get them by calling 541-465-1506 or clicking here.
From the mezzanine at 2:15 p.m. Sunday, just before it started.
I loved the Eugene Opera’s daring, amusing, smart, challenging production of Nixon in China. If I could see it every day for a week, I would.
Sadly for me, that tremendous effort – the rehearsing, the choral practice, the designs, the costumes, the tech rehearsals – ended when the curtain fell at 5:37 on Sunday afternoon, just about three hours after it all began. This is always the case with the Eugene Opera, which produces usually two shows a year (though I’d rank the semi-staged Il Trovatore, the extra show of 2009, up there with the best things I’ve seen in Eugene) with two or three performances of each show. I’ll save for another day my encomiums to the effort, because effort is not all – performance is all, in this case, at least for the audience members who pay $40 to $90 to see the opera. And in this case, the performances were well worth the money.
Once, when I was attending a fabulous arts journalism fellowship right at the beginning of the hemorrhaging of arts journalists from newspapers (we were the canaries in the coal mine; by the time the economy crashed in September of 2008 and then ad revenues crashed along with it, we were mostly long-gone, or a deeply endangered breed), I got schooled by Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times for reviewing a Handel opera as if it were theatre instead of opera. After Act I of Nixon in China, the guys sitting behind me said, “It’s more like a play than an opera, isn’t it?” (They didn’t say that after Act III, though, so I don’t know if they were still thinking it.)
Therefore, I know it’s possible that one of the reasons I liked this staging, and the Met’s 2011 HD broadcast staging, of Nixon in China is that the entire thing is more like theatre. It would be a postmodern-ly absurdist play, a play that wings off into poetry – Pat Nixon’s “This is prophetic” aria, more like an incantation, in Act II makes for a sweet, naïve, absurd, lyrically lovely late 20th-century reworking of “Howl” and it reminds me of Wallace Stevens’ ”Emperor of Ice Cream” – and a fully sung play. As music director Andrew Bisantz wrote in the program, “Nixon and his operatic entourage were not meant to be viewed as characters in a music-hall parody; rather, they were to be seen as historical and dramatic archetypes, as in the historical plays of Shakespeare and the operatic representations of ancient history by G.F. Handel.”
Also, I’m a believer in preparing for operas. The music isn’t usually super-duper complex in operas, but a. there’s a lot of it and b. I get very sleepy with music I don’t know well (I mean symphonic music & for that matter, chamber music – not pop/rock/alt so much, because, lyrics and short songs).
And it’s not as if Nixon in China has the advantage of its arias accompanying dramatic scenes in movies – because it’s newer (1987) and in English (that is, not mysterious), it’s not going to accompany a battle scene, or a romantic scene, the way many Italian opera arias do. OK, and it’s also because many people aren’t used to John Adams’ music. I overheard people saying “It was atonal!” or “It had no shape!” during/after the opera – I don’t agree with either analysis, but I understand that if they’re expecting Carmen, that’s not happening. I find Adams’ music plenty tonal – but that’s a whole big discussion I’m not musically qualified enough to have … others welcome to contribute here. If I think of tonality as the music having some central theme, then I can say I did enjoy hearing a theme from the first chorus repeat several times during the opera, the first time my ear has picked that out, probably because it was live and also Bisantz may have emphasized it a bit.
Anyway, I was prepared, particularly for the opening and for “I am the wife of Mao Tse Tung,” which is an aria of surpassing weird/wonderfulness. That preparedness helps. Also, I’m patient with performances. I’ve only ever walked out on one performance in my life, a god-awful theatrical production that made me furious with its stupidity, so I guess I’m not one to leave after the first act of an opera (apparently, many people did – which is a shame, as the second act is fabulous).
Musical interlude: I’m listening to this version of “This is prophetic” and smiling as I write this – “Let Gypsy Rose kick off her party shoes … let businessmen speculate further … let the expression on the Statue of Liberty change just a little; let her see what lies inland.” Oh, Pat Nixon! The things you miss in this scene! Such brilliant writing by poet Alice Goodman.
But back to the Eugene Opera’s version, which took a united effort from a rather stunning number of people in and out of Eugene. First of all, the scrim. The gorgeously printed, monumental scrim – I assume designed by scenery designer Peter Beudert – and the light on Nixon (Lee Gregory, whom we’ve seen in Don Giovanni as Leporello and The Marriage of Figaro as Figaro) as he gets changed/dressed in the plane. Speaking of that plane, I’m not sure what happened – I was under the impression there was a plane, but that was from a conversation with Bisantz and opera executive director Mark Beudert before Carmen in December, so anything could have occurred. In this case, it was weird after seeing the Met’s version not to have a plane on stage, but that moment of disappointment went away quickly as Gregory distracted the audience with his smile and waving.
… and I just realized that what I want to do is relive the entire opera as I write this. Not useful, Suzi. FYI, if you want to see the full Houston Opera version from 1987, it’s available on YouTube – in 17 parts – starting here:
So some of my favorite things about this performance and the libretto/score in general:
Mark Beudert has a lovely voice! And he was good as Mao. Not even close to frail, the way the usual Mao is played. But I want Mark to sing more and exec less. Well, that’s not true; I think he (with others) has done a superhuman job making the Eugene Opera a going concern again.
Ben Goodman of the Eugene Ballet choreographed the piece and danced in the Revolutionary Ballet scene. I am so pleased to see Ben in yet another Eugene performing arts group. Also, he whipped that Eugene Opera chorus into doing tai chi and singing – that was amazing (and no, he didn’t actually use a whip … in the tai chi scene, anyway).
The second act, wow. I want to see that second act again and again. Kelly Kaduce, whom we (and the Portland Opera) have enjoyed onstage several times before, didn’t have a Pat Nixon-like wig the way all of the other Pats I’ve seen (on the screen) have, but she made Pat seem like a party-loving, not-too-bright, sweet – and put-upon – woman, and of course, as usual, I enjoyed her voice.
In the Pat-on-tour scene, she charmed the audience with her ability to interact with the bicyclists, the children … and the pigs (I’m not kidding; that was fun, and as Mark Beudert said in his curtain speech, this was the first time the Eugene Opera had to thank Sweet Briar Farms “for livestock management”). And the juxtaposition of Pat’s wide-eyed attempts to connect to the workers with what they sing when the big elephant’s on the stage … wow. Killer libretto, Alice Goodman.
Then Laura Wayte made Chiang Ch’ing/Madame Mao such an impatient, annoyed, strong, intense personality in the ballet scene, not to mention her big “I am the wife of Mao Tse Tung” moment.
Why and how is this such a memorable/stunning/holyshitdidthatjusthappen aria? I don’t entirely know, but damn. The 2011 Met version:
The third act was a bit odd. It’s a different staging – as is the entire Eugene production, by (totally cute, not that I’m a strong judge of the men) stage director Sam Helfrich – than the Met’s staging, and I was at first waiting for the beds. Where were the beds? I mean, Peter Sellars talked about the beds being like coffins! I wanted the beds – nNot Kissinger (a befuddledly excellent Michael Gallup), Chou En-lai (Christopher Burchett, whom we’ve seen sing Masetto in Don Giovanni and Count Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro), Pat, Dick, Mao and Chiang Ch’ing in a post-party alcoholic funk at separate tables, slumped and out of it and lonely. Which was what we got. WHERE ARE THE COFFINS, SAM? was the thought bubble above my head.
Then I snapped out of it. I liked this staging. Part of the excellence of the third act (though not all of my companions felt this way or enjoyed that bleakness, trailing off into despair/nothingness) comes from the distracted, isolated, separate, weird, overlapping parts of the libretto. Who’s talking? To whom? Why? Why are they retelling stories they’ve told over and over?
Well, exactly.
I thought the orchestra performed well with this score. I know it’s a monster. When I said back there that usually operas don’t have super-duper complex music, I didn’t mean this opera. At least that’s the impression I got from some of the musicians, and from Bisantz when I briefly spoke to him at rehearsal. It wasn’t perfect, but they did well.
Some of the costumes (the secretaries, Pat, Dick, Henry, Mao) were gorgeous. Sometimes the chorus looked like it had simply brought clothes from home, but other times, it was a little more identical. I would have preferred a more similar look for all chorus members, all of the time.
Eugene Ballet! I think those dancers were all company members of yours? Well done. Nice collaboration (or just sharing?).
As some of you know, the opera just … ends. It’s not triumphal. It’s not big. It trails off. I loved that a lot … and then it took way too long to get the whole cast up there for curtain calls. Hey, if you’re not there in time, too bad. You don’t get to bow. (Unless you’re a principal, of course, in which case … yeah.)
I know some people didn’t like John Adams’ music. In addition, I heard that on Friday night, there was a lot of backstage noise – as in, things crashing around. I say that means not enough rehearsal time (as they are all too aware – and as I suspected, which was why I bought tickets for Sunday). I know that the chorus, though it did its best, occasionally looked sloppy and/or slapdash, even on Sunday. I know that a few scenes were awkwardly staged, at least with the chorus. (I also know that the people behind me and to the right needed to shut the hell up – “Honey, look! THAT’S PAT NIXON!” Yes. Thank you. Arglesmack.)
All of that is fair criticism. But overall, this was a moonshot for the Eugene Opera. Yes, like Nixon, I have to think of the Apollo astronauts .. ahem. Though it may not be reflected in ticket sales, the opera made it to the moon and back. I hope the board sucks it up, finds more sponsors and keeps on going because from this audience member’s point of view, it was well worth the effort.
Krislyn Wessel, Justin Feimster and Adam Haaga (all part of the Italy cast) in "The Tale of Zummurud" from Arabian Nights in January 2012. Photo by Jackson Hager, Vanguard Media
What do you do when Italy calls – but you don’t have a lot of money to fly there?
If you’re scrappy Eugene “chamber ballet” group Ballet Fantastique, you get to work on your funding. Guest dancer Alberto Liberatoscioli hails from San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy, where his mother directs a ballet school (though now he’s with Ballet Nebraska).
He played Lando (that is, Orlando) in the spring 2011 Ballet Fantastique production of As You Like It: A Wild West Ballet. According toBFan executive director Hannah Bontrager, he pitched the idea of taking As You Like It home with him to San Benedetto’s ministry of culture, which had for some time been wanting a U.S. company with Liberatoscioli to come present a ballet there. “Alberto showed them our DVD and our programs and photos,” Bontrager says. The minister was so impressed that the town’s ready to pay for the theatre, their production costs and their lodging.
Bontrager says, “It’s always been a dream of ours, like many ballet companies, to perform internationally.” And like any ballet company, Ballet Fantastique puts a lot of effort into creating each new show, Bontrager says. “To perform it just a few times is always sad for the dancers – and for my mom and me as choreographers and producers.” So heading to San Benedetto holds some serious appeal.
Ashley Bontrager as Annie Oakley, one of the added characters, in As You Like It: A Wild West Ballet in April 2011. Photo by Gregory Burns
Now all Ballet Fantastique has to do is come up with airfare for the 10 artists and their choreographer, BFan artistic director (and Hannah’s mother) Donna Bontrager. Since last summer, the group has been doing everything from a car wash to galas to other fundraising activities in order to get the money together.
“We’re happy with any contribution,” Bontrager said. Company dancer Leanne Mizzoniwas surprised and touched when one of her 7-year-old students brought her a handful of change one day and said, “It’s for the Italy fund, Miss Leanne!”
The latest – and most urgent – effort is the $4000 Kickstarter campaign. On the crowd-funding site Kickstarter, you can keep any extra money you raise over your goal, but if you don’t meet that goal, you get none of the money. And the Ballet Fantastique deadline is March 26. As of this writing moment, they’ve got 45 backers and about $3300 pledged – which is still far enough away from the goal that Bontrager admits to some nervousness. “We have our pie chart in the studio, and we’re sort of whittling,” she says.
The company recently concluded a sold-out Arabian Nights, the first time they created a full-length dramatic ballet, and the first time a show sold out before the day of the show. That probably bodes well for the company’s application to become a resident company at the Hult Center (they’re in the middle year of the three-year process). But the dancers and choreographers didn’t rest on their laurels.
“As as soon as we finished Arabian Nights, we resurrected last fall’s Incendio,” Bontrager says – because they’re going on the road, but this time just I-5 to Everett, Washington, where they’ll present Incendio. At the same time, she says, “we’re working on Cinderella: A Rock Opera Ballet, which is going to be one of the most collaborative things we’ve ever done.”
Amelia Unsicker prepares for Cinderella: A Rock Opera Ballet (May 12-13, 2012, at the Hult). Photo: Jared Mills, Woden Photography
So the dancers and choreographers are dealing with several shows at once. It’s not as if the dancers have time to focus solely on BFan rehearsals. Most of them have three or four jobs aside from Ballet Fantastique, where many also teach classes during the day when they’re not rehearsing.
“For us, it really is a labor of love for everybody involved,” Bontrager says. The company would love to raise enough money get to Italy for the planned July performance. “Every dollar really does make a difference to us. We’ve had a few people who have pledged $2 or $10. We have that shoestring mentality, and we’re proud of it. We do a lot with a little.”
Michael P. Watkins as Lawrence Jameson and Tom Wilson as Freddy Benson, the two con men. Photo by Rich Scheeland
What should you, arts loving person, do this weekend? My recs, in a vague order:
1. Nixon in China at the Eugene Opera. Two performances: tonight at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at the Hult Center. Tix here or at the box office (some are quite reasonably priced – and hint, if you scan the QR code on the opera’s poster and use the coupon code to get tickets, they’re even cheaper. Yes, I did that). I wrote about original opera idea guy Peter Sellars and soprano Laura Decher Wayte earlier in the week, and here’s Bob Keefer’s story from the Register-Guard.
2. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels at the Very Little Theatre. Tix at 541-344-7751 or at the door, if there are any left – this one is totally selling out, people. Get your tix for next weekend maybe?
3. The Crucibleat the University Theatre – tix here or at the door (free if you’re a student with a student ID starting at 7 p.m. tonight and tomorrow night). Last two shows!
5. Pina in 3D at Valley River Center 15 – yes, it’s coming to the Bijou, and I swear this will be the only time I pick a disgusting mall over the sweet little Bije, which I freaking adore … but it’s not in 3D at the Bijou (fingers crossed that this will happen someday). Both director Wim Wenders (swoon for Wenders!) and critics near and far have said the 3D is FANTASTIC for dance movies. (I am also not a big fan of 3D – I think it’s a gimmick, for the most part – but in this case, DANCE. 3D. Yes.)
Rye on March 15, 2012, about 8:15 p.m. - the night after opening.
This is not a review.
Seriously – Rye opened last night (March 14, 2012), and so I don’t think it’s fair to write more than my first impressions. Also, I don’t eat meat, so that means no reviewing of a restaurant like Rye. That said, here’s how it all went down this massively rainy evening in the gloriously green and pink Eugene – complete with hell of blurry iFon photos (I’ll work on the food p0rn for next time, people):
First of all, I had a Wry at Rye – I mean, I could not resist. A friend with us and two different servers made sure to tell me how to spell Wry. (“I am aware of that,” I said each time with an increasing lack of wryness.)
A Wry (rye whiskey and ... some apértif that I forgot to write down even though I thought I did) at Rye. Tasty, tasty, TASTY.
Laura Decher Wayte, soprano, who sings Madame Mao (Jiang Qing) in Nixon in China March 16 & 18 in Eugene, Oregon
Laura Decher Wayte is a soprano who lives in Eugene. She teaches at the UO’s School of Music, and she performs in recital and occasionally in operas, including the Eugene Opera’s Don Giovanni and this week’s Nixon in China.
I ran into her at rehearsal the other day and did a phone interview with her today.
Suzi Steffen: So what are your thoughts about presenting Nixon in China in Eugene?
Laura Decher Wayte: I’m more and more excited about it, in terms of the whole project. When I first heard we were going to do it, I was excited to do my part, but I thought the piece itself … well, I wondered if it would be OK for Eugene. I think more and more that it is an excellent choice.
And how did that change? Why?
I can see that as a company, we can handle it. It was lovely to have all the build-up through the university to bring more community members into the idea of it so it becomes interesting to more than to your traditional group of opera aficionados.
Madame Mao is an … interesting … character. How do you play this woman? What kind of research did you do?
I did read about a third of the biography written by Roxane Witca, who came to give a lecture, and while that was fascinating, it doesn’t necessarily inform the part because [Jiang Qing] isn’t an historically based part in its emotional details.
What we have to do as singers is use the score and text a lot in a nonhistorical way. We have to think of it as its own document that has its own goal of portraying the confusion of being in power [when you’re] a human being.
Let’s talk about what she’s feeling during the opera, and what she’s feeling during the famous aria ‘I am the wife of Mao Tse Tung’.
At any given moment in the opera, it’s obvious she’s either frustrated or feeling rejected or depressed by her history or the inflexibility of the people around her to do what she says. It’s easy to portray those kind of blanket emotions; I don’t find that challenging. What’s hard to do is to tie it together to make sense. But there’s a gift in this opera; it’s supposed to be a more impression of things, it doesn’t necessarily have to make sense.
What would you say to people who have a hard time with the story arc? I mean, in that it’s not a traditional opera story, with a Romantic arc or even much of a narrative arc?
Well, what I would say is they shouldn’t think of it as a story that’s supposed to parallel history but that it’s more of a fictionalized history. We’re using the structure of history to examine ourselves as humans, not to examine a particular moment in history. It’s no about would Mao have ever said that in real life – those kinds of questions I don’t find interesting. It’s more about the rhythms of humanity, the ways we expand and contract our societies.
How well should people know the opera before they come?
The thing I think that’s hard about this piece is that it’s so textually dense, and the librettist does not give away the meaning behind what she’s written very easily. No matter how much you know it, you’re going to get different levels of something from it. If you go to it with this being your only exposure, you will let go of struggling for plot and listen to the way the music manipulates us, the way the text makes us have thoughts that are not a linear story.
You allow your brain to let go and enjoy what happens because of what it’s being exposed to. But if you can prepare for it, whatever you do is going to help. There’s a lot of little references in the text to history, to different characters in history, but if you don’t know them, there’s still plenty.
I compare it to, I used to read a lot of Shakespeare, and at first it was work. I’d have to grab out a dictionary to figure out what was happening. Then I decided, I’m just going to read – and it became fun at a totally different level.
Because you’re relaxed?
Yes, because you’re relaxed.
What have you heard people in the community saying about Nixon in China?
I’ve heard lots of people say they’re interested in coming. I think it’s worthy of commenting on that I’ve heard more people say they’re interested in coming than in the other work I’ve been involved in with this company for. It’s new, it’s different, it’s not just Don Giovanni again – Don Giovanni, it’s a great thing; my dad would see Don Giovanni 50 times, but … [We both made noises of assent, and that was that.]
How do you feel about singing in English?
I love it; I absolutely love it. I love singing in the other languages as well, especially the ones I know, but I’ve lately been feeling frustration with having a language barrier between my work and what my audience can hear of the work I’ve done. I love that I can put all kinds of meaning into a word and somebody can actually get it. With German and French, I do all of this work, and I have so much relationship with the text, and I feel frustrated because nobody’s getting a portion of what I’m putting into it.
And on that note, do you think people will read the supertitles less and pay attention to the stage?
We had breakfast with Peter Sellars last week. He was saying that when he was younger, before there were supertitles, he would go to a foreign opera and let go of comprehension and be affected by the music, and he really misses that.
Do you think Nixon in China is a complex work, or does it feel that way just because it’s newer, and maybe we don’t know the music as well?
I’ve been asked that a lot. My answer has been that the music is that hard; it’s not that complex – I can learn any page easily. But the problem comes when you have to put it together. There’s the lack of an overarching structure to any moment. There’s not a coda, for instance. It doesn’t have all these labels we have for the way music feels and flows – that is gone. We all were looking forward to being staged because that would give us structure and put the structure into our bodies and into our brains where it didn’t exist musically.
The Eugene Opera and the University of Oregon have spent quite a lot of time collaborating on events surrounding the Opera’s presentation of Nixon in China – this weekend, Friday night and Sunday matinee, at the Hult Center, tix here – and I was lucky enough to go hear original Nixon conceiver and famous opera/theatre director Peter Sellars when he came on March 8 to talk with the executive director of the UO’s Confucius Institute at the School of Music and Dance’s gorgeous Beall Hall. Thursday was possibly the most gorgeous day Eugene will see until July, so many people with Sellars plans hung out outside, waiting for the doors to Beall to open.
As many of us await the opening of the Beall Hall doors, two women say, "Are they having an event?" "I think they are." #PeterSellars#yep— Suzi Steffen (@SuziSteffen) March 09, 2012
Peter Sellars and Bryna Goodman at Beall Hall, 03/08/12
After we got in to Beall and the program started, I recorded for a while. I was far away – you’ll have to turn this way up to hear him, but I think it’s pretty much worth it.
A few highlights from the recording:
Opera is a participatory art form “that everyone helps to shape”
Sellars had been working on Giulio Cesare in Egitto when he titled this opera. “Handel’s opera is Julius Caesar in Egypt, so, duh, Nixon in China, right?”
“I had to do a bunch of research, and so there I had the Kissinger memoirs, you know, a difficult book, just a monstrous, thick, oleaginous mass of self-aggrandizement. I was reading these things, and couldn’t believe I had the strength to turn each new page, and I said, ‘Something has to come out of this.’”
“Of course, my generation critiqued a lot of that [older Western] culture, so we wanted to make Nixon in China something intelligent, unlike French opera.”
“The opera isn’t about China, but about the fact that China … is part of American life, part of American history, and that our futures are linked.”
”What I love about the opera is that you know where you are at the beginning, and you don’t know where you are at the end. And to me, that’s what a great work of art should do.”
“This isn’t music that just goes into your mind; it goes into your body. It has a pulse. The rhythm is irresistible, and the tune is catchy, and all of that is happening at the same time that John [Adams] is painting really delicate, subtle psychological pictures of weather conditions, detente, and very fragile feelings of a sunset on a winter day that you would get in a Chinese poem from the Sung Dynasty.”
“Opera is an art form feast. It’s rich in layers; it’s rich in textures; it’s rich in meaning, and history is this rich, rich, layered, richly textured experience that’s ongoing. … The opera is way richer now than when we wrote it, and it has way more meaning now than it did then.”
“California in 1859 was black cowboys, slaves who came west on horses, and Chinese people. That’s the birth of California.” (Er, and the Californios who were already there … but that’s a different story.)
“For me, the future of culture in America is going to be Chinese opera.”
After a while, I couldn’t kill my phone battery that way anymore, so I turned off the recording and started live-tweeting instead, as follows (with one other person’s tweets as well):
"Significant events are always falsified, so if we want touch the texture of history, maybe we need to describe a leaf." – #PeterSellars— Suzi Steffen (@SuziSteffen) March 09, 2012
#PeterSellars talks about all-female musicals in Japan. "My favorite is 'War and Peace: The Musical,' by, that's right, COUNT Leo Tolstoy."— Suzi Steffen (@SuziSteffen) March 09, 2012
"Our ability to be human has to do with how well we can discuss difficult things," says #PeterSellars, advocating that we not be so polite.— Suzi Steffen (@SuziSteffen) March 09, 2012
"Wherever human beings have something to express, they'll express it, & the most inspired of them will express it in song." – #PeterSellars— Suzi Steffen (@SuziSteffen) March 09, 2012
#PeterSellars says @EugeneOpera is asking, "What else can we do? And how can we do it?" b/c of ambition of staging Nixon in China.— Suzi Steffen (@SuziSteffen) March 09, 2012
By that, I’m pretty sure he meant, “Many people wondered what in the world the EUGENE OPERA was doing, taking on such a complicated project, but now that it’s happening, the Opera’s going to keep on pushing itself even more.” Which is true – see the Q&A with Laura Decher Wayte for more on that.
Opera is about radical shared space. Where different gifts come together. #PeterSellars— Kit Alderdice (@KitAlderdice) March 09, 2012
This one I had to shorten obnoxiously in order to fit in the hashtag, dang the luck:
"1 of the coolest things abt poetry is that it doesn't require a Hollywood studio 2 produce it; U can do it alone w/a pencil." #PeterSellars— Suzi Steffen (@SuziSteffen) March 09, 2012
"Empowerment comes from holding your focus, deepening your focus. Writing or reading poetry is a supreme act of focus." #PeterSellars— Suzi Steffen (@SuziSteffen) March 09, 2012
I believe Sellars talked for about five minutes after I left (I thought it was over, but the woman holding the microphone asked one last question). Yay, UO and Eugene Opera and Peter Sellars! That was fascinating.
For most people (older than, say, 13 – though there’s plenty of swearing and graphic puppet sex, so your mileage may vary on how old your kid needs to be to see this show), Avenue Q means an evening of semi-shocked and delighted laughter. If you missed the production at the Lord Leebrick Theatre Company earlier this season but you like the songs and/or the characters and/or you’re interested in seeing how the Muppets on Sesame Street might have grown up, you need to get tickets to the Actors Cabaret of Eugene performance.
Despite the normal pain of dealing with recorded music instead of live musicians (that’s a cramped area – no way to fit in the live players), the ACE crew deftly handles the complexities of this puppet-heavy production and makes sweet, funny work of it. ACE is a dinner theater; if you eat, tickets are $41.95 or $35.95 at matinees – but you can also just buy drinks and dessert (which comes out at intermission) or only a ticket, and that’s $16-$27, depending on where you sit. More info and online buying here.
On Saturday of opening weekend, much of the audience clearly hadn’t heard the songs before, and many people emitted barks or snorts of surprised laughter at the sexually frank lines and songs like “The Internet Is for Porn.” The energy of the musical, with songs piling rapidly on top of one another and an enjoyably inventive puppet sex scene (I think Kate Monster has been watching the “Bend Over Boyfriend” DVDs quite a lot), doesn’t let up from the opening scene through the intermission. Post-intermission serves as a time for re-evaluation and rebuilding and rediscovery, and it’s a bit calmer, wiser, older – and it features the wonderfully apt “I Wish I Could Go Back to College,” which had every adult in the audience nodding wryly along.
Nicky and Rod, the bickering roommates; photo by Jim Roberts
Avenue Q won the Tony for Best Musical in 2004, but that doesn’t make it perfect. Its issues transfer to ACE as they did to the Leebrick earlier this season, though some things are different because of casting. When I first heard that ACE had cast a white actor in the role of Avenue Q’s Christmas Eve, I thought that was both weird and disturbing.
I don’t like it when people of other ethnicities get cast instead of Asian-American actors in roles specifically written for Asian Americans (see: Jonathan Pryce cast in Miss Saigon – a formative moment for Asian-American actors and the theatre community as a whole).
And yet Christmas Eve … well, let’s say the role itself has some problems. She comes onstage during the cast-introducing “It Sucks to Be Me” and instantly plays on stereotypes of Japanese accents during her part of the song. (Some people have wondered how a woman with two master’s degrees, as we hear her state several times, could sound as if she’d just started to speak English.) A portion of the show’s comedy focuses on Christmas Eve’s friends laughing at the way she pronounces the letter l, and more than a little of the laughter during the ballad “The More You Love Someone” comes from the audience laughing at the way she pronounces the word love. So perhaps the fact that ACE cast Melissa Miller in the role was intended to point up the bizarreness of this hipster-racist character? I don’t know, but Miller has a lovely voice and did a fine job playing the character.
When Avenue Q debuted back in 2003, I didn’t anticipate that parts of it would soon feel dated. All right, by “soon” I mean nine years later – almost a decade of Avenue Q?! – but seriously, even in the early 2000s, a song called “Mix Tape” wasn’t exactly right. I’ve always felt that the musical was written by, and for, people about my age (book writer Jeff Whitty, originally from Coos Bay, is about a year older than I). Would Rod still be in the closet if the musical were set in 2012? Doubtful.
But let’s look at late Gen Xers. We’re people who were indeed still making mix tapes in our late teens and early twenties, people who watched a lot of Sesame Street and The Muppet Show in our youth, people who left college during a recession (no, the mid-1990s weren’t a job picnic, Millennials – you’re not the only ones having a hard time post-college, as the character of Princeton makes it all too clear), people who started using the Internet when it was overrun by porn. Seriously, if you remember the search engine AltaVista (or Ask Jeeves, or any number of pre-Google searches), Avenue Q is like watching the history of our 20s spool out onstage. Generation X discovers alcohol, sex, disappointment; Gen X can’t get a job and falls into debt; Gen X can’t figure out its purpose, whatever that might be; Gen X can’t quite admit it’s gay and makes up a fake girlfriend (yes, I once invented a fake boyfriend, though not as fake as Rod’s “Girlfriend, Who Lives in Canada”).
That said, the actors playing the characters aren’t part of Gen X (we’re too old to play recent college kids – yep, it’s true). This cast does a fine job with it though. Props to Samantha White, who plays Kate Monster with a combination of bravado and vulnerability; Mark Van Beever, who plays Rod with a blunt sweetness; and Cody Mendonca, who makes a good privileged/frustrated Princeton, Cameron Walker as the icky Trekkie Monster and the rest of the cast.
Don’t take the kids, and do plan to be confronted with some potentially problematic songs (“Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” might be my least favorite musical number since “A Puzzlement” in The King and I), but for a funny, fast-paced, sexy romp, Avenue Q’s a good bet this weekend (or any weekend through April 7).
A little learning, as one character quotes to another in Fahrenheit 451, is a dangerous thing. So dangerous that no one should be learning at all – at least in the world of the 1953 Ray Bradbury book, adapted for the stage also by Bradbury (in the 1970s) and playing at the Lord Leebrick Theatre through March 24.
In the way of dystopian futures – though perhaps they all seem that way because Bradbury’s story influenced so many later writers – the world of Fahrenheit 451 is circumscribed, narrow, stifling and fairly violent. That violence and oppression come in the form of continuous government monitoring via wired, artificial-intelligence houses that can report whether their inhabitants are sleeping, eating, laughing or enjoying the forbidden – that is, reading books.
The firemen in Fahrenheit 451 don’t put out fires. All news houses are fireproof, so they’re not needed there. Instead, they make fires to burn books and burn knowledge. In Steen V. Mitchell’s clever set (a set whose generous size makes it clear how much the Leebrick needs to get into its new, larger space on Broadway), each house and building has a direct line to an incinerator, and that’s where books go.
Sorry if this is review – probably you know this already; most people seem to have read the book in junior high or high school, at a time when young people really feel the injustices of others controlling their lives and are ready to believe in a better, different world out there beyond the confines of the adults’ damned rules. That’s a good time to read dystopian novels about unfair, capricious authorities; Bradbury’s genius was to make those terrible authoritarian figures into a kind of rebellious teenage hater-of-books state, wherein videos are superb and books are outlawed. I never read it, but I’ve got my chance this year as Eugene and Springfield participate in the National Endowment for the Arts’ many-locality Big Read program – the Eugene Public Library had 100 free copies of the book, which is also pretty inexpensive at any local bookstore.
Back to the play. It’s long, y’all. But somehow (perhaps because Mary at the Leebrick told me the first act was an hour and 10 minutes, and I gulped half a cup of coffee before the play began) I didn’t find the first act boring or tendentious, though it’s not exactly subtle. Part of this is because I usually enjoy watching Cameron Carlisle act, and he’s on stage about 99 percent of the time as fireman Guy Montag. Montag’s not quite sure that he likes his job. Then there is Montag’s muse/ not quite seductress (as I said, Fahrenheit 451 is a little … heavy-handed) Clarisse (Arun Storrs), who feeds him sips of information and ideas that make his job a lot harder to do. And one of the absolute rewards of this production is watching Stanley R. Coleman, who plays fire chief Beatty with a menace and control that keep the wordy script going. I want to see Coleman a lot more. His playing of the cleverly revealed secrets of the fire chief – the war of quotations, especially – sustained the less interesting second act until he left the stage.
Montag looks sickly and withdrawn the entire play; that’s one part of the script, but still, Carlisle could play Montag with a little more vigor as he realizes that his life means nothing, that he’s been propping up a regime that only harms people, never helps them.
Aside from the acting, the star of the play is indubitably Ryan Rusby’s media design. Where I was sitting, I could hear someone, probably stage manager Jacs Bruscato, calling cues just about all night long, and that’s understandable: There’s a video every other second, and the incorporation of LOLcats and other cute animal videos as distractions from serious thought make for a modern update on the 1970s play. (Though what were those weirdly thick tabletphones? Pretty sure iPads would have worked better.)
The part of the play that gets too long, really, is the utopian end. OK, we get it. People memorize books. Oral culture. Also a hippie woods culture with free love, just in case you were wondering. (Not to spoil it – oh, but you’ve read it, haven’t you? Or you’ve read Scott Westerfield’s Uglies or Pretties, or Lauren Oliver’s Delirium, or any of the dystopian city/utopian country novels – I think there’s a paper in here for a scholar of young adult books, just in case anyone wants that idea. Shakespeare’s Green World, continued in dystopian lit.)
In any case, if you grab some coffee either before the play or at intermission, you will probably enjoy this DOOM WARNING play even if you wonder, as I inevitably did, what happened to all of the e-books? Can’t burn those.
Tickets run about $17-$20, and you can get them (if any are left – it’s selling out fast) here.
