Opening Night at the Oregon Bach Festival: Pretty Music, Then A Half-Wild Yawp

The Oregon Bach Festival usually kicks off with a great deal of excitement and buzz, at least for aficionados: Helmuth Rilling is back! Look, there’s our favorite OBF oboist! And oh, what a superb chorus!

The Bach Festival this year started not with a bang, but with a soft ramp up, an easy path that became more varied and interesting as the evening went on. But if not for a post-intermission piece of rather surprising programming, the entire thing could have been a particularly decent night at a (top) city symphony.

The Hills of Fake Iowa, And The Deadly Effects Of Marriage

Francie Ford (Robin Goodrin Nordli) and George Page (Ted Deasy) learn about their wives (Gina Daniels, Terri McMahon) schemes to have their revenge on Senator John Falstaff. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

At long last, and after much (internal, completely unnoticed by other humans) agonizing on my part, Part III:
Marriage

“I’ve never seen Christopher Liam Moore do anything – acting or directing – that I didn’t think was fantastic,” I said to my partner before we headed into the CLM-directed The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa. “Also, I’ve interviewed (Very Merry Wives writer) Alison Carey, and she’s brilliant, so I have hope for this play.”

Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaah.

I still think CLM usually kicks acting and directing butt (2010’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof should have won national awards), and I still believe Alison Carey is brilliant. Her ability to combine the script of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor with contemporary English should win her some kind of adaptation/reinvention prize, at least in terms of language. But dear god, this play? This farce gone overboard? This parody without end? No.

Play On: Oregon Shakespeare Festival Summer Season, Part II

Archbishop of Canterbury (Richard Howard) assures Henry V (John Tufts) that there is no bar to his claim to France. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

So I started off yesterday (well, Wednesday) with the Greeks as a theme, but Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella segues perfectly into the next two themes:

Music and Marriage

That bwessed awangement, that dweam wifin a dweam …

Right, that, but I want to start with the food of love: music.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Bill Rauch has never hidden his love for musicals; 2009’s Music Man was one of his first smash hits as artistic director, and he’s had a surprising number of live musicians onstage for many plays since. But I have noticed an uptick in music within the plays that aren’t musicals since Rauch came on board permanently in 2008.

Shakespeare, as I was told by my high school “Shakespeare on Stage” teacher (Ms. Berit Lindboe, if you ever read this, this entire thing is your fault, and by “thing,” I mean my life as a Shakespeare addictnerd), liked to put songs in his comedies. Thank god our high school class never had to make up tunes to go along with the lyrics. But I digress: The point is that under Rauch, the festival has gone hog-wild with the music.

Home Is The Place Where, When You Go There, They Have to Take You In: Sam Shepard’s Lie of the Mind At The Lord Leebrick

Jake (Kato Buss) and Lorraine (Rebecca Nachison). Photo courtesy of the Lord Leebrick Theatre Company

Forget the obvious age issues, the saggy middle of the play, the oddly cartoonish writing at the climax – the reasons to go see Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind at the Lord Leebrick Theatre (through June 3) number at least two: Kato Buss and Mary Buss.

Not to give short shrift to Jeffrey Cook’s evocative and flexible set or to Rachel Kinsman Steck’s lighting design – which without being intrusive works to illuminate both the actors and their emotions – or the strong direction of Richard Leebrick (who, like Kato Buss, adores Sam Shepard), but without the family Buss, this would be quite a different, and I suspect lesser, experience.

Both Kato – who now has his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon – and Mary have raised the bar for Eugene acting during the past few years. I know at least Kato (congrats on that job, but damn you for leaving) won’t be here next season, so it’s especially great that they’re the vital center of Lie of the Mind. The play trades in images of wounded, lonely, lost people who go on damaging one another past the point where anyone with a lick of rationality would fearfully call a halt.

Indeed, action opens with an anguished, slightly surreal and definitely nightmarish phone call in which Jake (Kato) tells his far-away brother Frankie (Jacob King) that he’s killed his wife. He doesn’t know where he is; he doesn’t tell Frankie how to find him; he just hangs up the phone and wails.

Frankie (Jacob King) and Mike (Mike Hawkins). Photo courtesy of the Lord Leebrick Theatre Company

Also wailing (though internally more than externally), Beth (Mary) awakens in a hospital bed, seriously injured. Her brother Mike (Mike Hawkins, who hasn’t been on the Leebrick stage since the tour de force Pillowman production a few years ago) falters between a deep wish to help her and an overwhelming desire for revenge.

Both Jake and Beth come from hardscrabble families; Jake is the scion of an alcoholic fighter pilot, with a mother (Rebecca Nachison) who both favors and abuses him, and Beth’s father Baylor (Achilles Massahos) is straight out of Small Western Town Central Casting, with his heads of cattle and his hunting shack and his inability to see anyone else but himself.

He’s not the only self-focused one. Beth’s mother Meg (Gloria Nagalo) can’t focus on the world around her or remember events well; perhaps Shepard means us to know she’s nearly as brain-damaged as her directly injured daughter from her years with the mercurial, grumpy, unloving Baylor. Massahos pulls off a tightrope act as Baylor, who’s both a crazy asshole and a man deeply dependent on women, and Nagalo as the alternately generous and vacant Beth. Their orbits are fixed; Beth and Mike don’t really figure into their lives.

Shepard’s message, perhaps? The arid, deadly West damages men, and its men damage women. I’m reminded of Joe Wilkins’ painful and powerful essay Out West  – “We hurt the land, and it hurt us. Sometimes it hurt us physically … and sometimes it struck us in other, deeper ways.”

But Wilkins handles the harshness of Montana’s outer and inner landscapes with a sensitively honed touch; Shepard, on the other hand, uses class and rural life as a bludgeon. At the first intermission, one woman in line for the bathroom said to another, “I don’t know how Shepard can write about these characters. They’re all so unlikeable.” To put it mildly.

Perhaps there’s something about shadow characteristics, in a Jungian sense, for women watching this, or any, Shepard play. Jake’s mother Lorraine (Rebecca Nachison) alternates between a horrid coddling and a just as damaging neglect of her son. She doesn’t care if he’s killed Beth; she doesn’t even care about Beth at all except as a rival who took her son away from her. She sends her daughter Sally (Michelle Nordella) away when Sally seems to upset Jake – and there’s more than a hint that she’s also been complicit in letting Jake molest Sally. Nachison bites into the role of Lorraine with relish, treating the kids, including the sweet and hapless Frankie (King plays Frankie with a good mix of courage and naïvete, but both he and Nordella, with their unlined faces and youthful energy, seem to exist in an entirely different world from the rest of the cast), with a terrifying mix of disdain, regret, anger, possessiveness, suffocating care, and displeasure.

Who would want to be Lorraine or Sally or Meg? And who would want to be Beth, the magical truth-teller, the victim, the helpless one? Beth takes on a quasi-mystical role in the second act as she explains and resists the pull of her childhood home, but she also desperately desires her husband, her abuser. Where is he, this man whom her mother can barely acknowledge meeting? Where is he, this husband, whom she misses and wants to see even through the fog of the brain injury he caused her?

Why, he’s sorting through memories in his childhood room. He’s plotting to escape his mother. He’s dealing with memories and mementos of his WWII veteran, asshole, alcoholic, abusive, wreck of a father – a man whom he essentially murdered.

Beth (Mary Buss), with Meg (Gloria Nagalo) in the background. Photo courtesy of the Lord Leebrick Theatre Company

Shepard embraces Big Symbolic Touches like Beth, wearing her dad’s shirt, talking about how the clothes make the man – or make a human a maaaan. Like Jake wrapping himself in his father’s American flag and setting out for Beth’s family house, 500 miles away from his home, with no pants because his mother hid them. Like Lorraine’s burning of memories, her abandonment of the past and all of its complicated emotions. Why, you could write many a paper – and oh yes, it’s been done – on Shepard’s Symbols.

At certain times, I find them a tad bit obvious, a tad bit trite. The headless deer carcass in the living room. The flesh wound poisoning the innocent boy. Shepard’s bludgeon comes out hard at the climax. Those who revere the physical flag neglect the wounded; men like Mike who claim to protect women often just want to dictate to them out of competition with other men.

Yet sometimes wild heart attracts itself to wild heart, and things go wrong in mean, hard, petty, soul-crushing ways that can’t even be epic because epic is too much for these characters to reach for.

Joe Wilkins: “Go over it again: how it begins with the whims of wind and want, or maybe just some quick moment of stupidity; how failure and shame, even in an instant, become so impossibly heavy, a sack of stones you must shoulder; how this then is fear; and how fear someday detonates you — the slow implosion, the breakneck explosion.”

That’s Jake. That’s Beth. That’s Mike, and Baylor, and Lorraine. That’s the death of the family and the death of the past – except the past, of course, is never gone at all. It’s right there, embodied in everything these characters plan, say and do, embodied in the ways Jake lives in Beth and Beth inside of Jake.

Shepard gives the theatre crowd an entire shadow region of life – while we’re the ones who don’t beat each other up, the ones who know how to get a wounded man to the hospital, the ones who take responsibility and serve each other with honor and compassion, we know we could be like that. Shepard’s repellent characters may then serve a purpose for those of us who feel mauled by his plays: the knowledge that we’re capable of anything. And we can choose to do better by each other – and by ourselves.

The play runs through June 3 at the Lord Leebrick, 540 Charnelton St. Tix available at 541-465-1506, here, or at the door (though Leebrick plays have been selling out this year).

Meet Scott Freck, New Executive Director of the Eugene Symphony

Last summer, while I was (ironically) in Chicago, the Eugene Symphony announced that its excellent executive director, Paul Winberg (here’s a Q&A I did with Winberg a few years ago), was leaving the symphony for a spot as the executive directorof the Grant Park Music Festival.

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.

A Gaggle Of Playwrights, A Gallimaufry Of Plays: Northwest 10 Hits Its Fourth Year

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.

Review: Eugene Opera’s Nixon in China

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.

Ballet Fantastique Wants to Kick(start) Its Wild West Way to Italy

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.”

What Should I Do This Weekend in Eugene? Top Picks!

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 Crucible at 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!

4. Fahrenheit 451 at the Lord Leebrick – tix here or at 541-465-1506, if there are any left.

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.)

First Impressions of Cocktails and Dinner at Eugene’s New Bar/Restaurant, Rye

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.

Readers, that cocktail was seriously good.