This is not even a rant. It’s a quote from Eschaton, my favorite liberal blog:
White evangelicals and regular churchgoers are the most supportive of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies. Their moral priorities are apparently different than mine.
There you go. If I could fit that on a bumper sticker, I would.
Here we are at Day 200. Feels like it should be a goalpost of some kind.
Oh well. Today was the first day of my winter break, so I took this opportunity to do a little computer maintenance. I haven’t been working on my music much since getting the new computer, a delicious irony, I’m sure, because Finale 2007 has not functioned smoothly with the Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds. I decided to fall back on Finale 2006 until GPO is finally updated, but then it wouldn’t work because the authorization didn’t travel from the old laptop to the new one.
So I started the day with that issue, and it didn’t take long to fix. I haven’t had time to play with Finale 2006 to see if it’s all OK, but maybe I’ll do that tomorrow.
Then I began to update WordPress, the software that runs this blog. That went smoothly, updating both this blog and the Lacuna blog. You will also notice the new look to this blog. That was a new theme uploaded yesterday, and I liked it.
Then it got messy. I wanted to move the Lacuna blog over to lacunagroup.org, and then split it into two blogs, one for general Lacuna use, the other for Marc’s theatre training stuff. Easier said than done. Moving was not too difficult, but then things went squirrelly. The blog still functions, and Marc’s new blog seems to work, but the admin pages were incomplete. That’s where you actually write the blog posts, edit stuff, import all of Marc’s stuff from the Lacuna blog, etc. Pieces were missing, and I can’t make them show up. I got stymied at that point. I was supposed to do our taxes today too, but I worked off and on all day on getting WordPress to show me its stuff. Reminds me of my dating days.
Otherwise, the only other thing I did, not especially creative either, was to visit a travel agent and try to start piecing together the Honea/Lyles/Shankel trip to New York. I’ll spare you the details.
Another source of ideas for William Blake, this one pure serendipity.
We were sharing with Marc and Mary Frances about our trip to L.A., and I happened to mention that apparently some of the women in the group thought that James Conlon, the music director of L.A. Opera, was good-looking. I googled him and found several images of him. Not bad. But one of the images led me to Tobias Picker’s website, an American composer the premiere of whose American Tragedy Conlon had conducted.
And there’s where I found this image:
Aha! I cried and shared with everyone else. This is a possible solution to the Inn: bilevel, with sliding panels. I’ll do some sketches this week and play with the idea.
Today I also tided up around the Lacuna website and my own, especially, the What I’m Reading Now bits.
One of my goals for my winter break this week is to knock off a whole stack of reading from the media center. I finished The Schwa Was Here, by Neal Shusterman, last night. It was very very excellent, honestly funny and thematically rich, a much better choice for the Newbery Award than, say, The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron (which did win this year’s Newbery.)
Today I knocked off The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, a thick, black book that is shorter than it looks: it’s a combination of cinematic/storyboard pencil drawings interspersed with the actual story. Very clever and well written. The plot leads back to the early French filmmaker Georges Méliès, and yes, you already know who he is, because you know this image:
This is from his classic A Trip to the Moon. At the end of the book, the hero Hugo Cabret attends a retrospective of Méliès’ films, and the book shows the following images, which I could not find on the internet and so had to photograph from the book. Continue reading “Some images (Day 198/365)”
So Mahagonny, despite blurbs from the L.A. Opera that it has been reviewed as “red-hot” and “like Las Vegas on steroids,” was a bore. (I reiterate that all participants were excellent; the piece itself is what sunk them.) What does that have to do with us?
I was struck by the fact that Mahagonny was originally a collection of poems by Bertolt Brecht, which were then set to music by Kurt Weill, and then wrestled by the two into a full scale performance piece.
Sound familiar?
On one front, John’s directorial choice to freeze the stage picture most of the time, I think we’re free and clear. His deliberate, static staging was supposed to appear monolithic, I guess; all these free spirits who were living with abandon in Mahagonny were in fact straight-jacketed by their own choices, maybe? Perhaps it gave a different impression from the orchestra section. In the balcony, it was stifling. (General note to directors: check your blocking from the balcony. It looks different from up there.)
At any rate, I don’t think we have that problem. Yet. Of course, we haven’t put any of our three pieces on their feet yet, but at the moment it looks as if we have all three of them moving throughout.
A second issue was that the characters were internally inconsistent. Was Lumberjack Jim an innocent or a debauchée? Did he have hope for the future or did he want, Samson-like, to pull it all down around their ears?
Again, we don’t have that problem. The rabbit is always officious, the tiger is always sweet-natured, the King of Cats is always pompously silly.
However, I think we will have to be careful with our decision to allow each piece to have its own universe, its own mise en scene. It may sound kicky for us to allow the tiger to be a human in “Sun & Moon Circus,” a puppet in “Milky Way,” and a Chinese dragon in some other piece, but we will need to be thoughtful about how the audience will tie these together. (I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it, just be deliberate.)
Finally, like William Blake, Mahagonny didn’t have a plot so much as an aggregate of incidents. I think that this was a problem for Mahagonny because they didn’t add up and in fact fought against being stitched together by the mind into a whole. Of course, that may have been deliberate on Brecht’s part, but it’s not something I would advise for any theatre practitioner.
William Blake is even less plot oriented than Mahagonny, but this is probably to our advantage. Because there’s no seeming build-up (the city gets larger, Jim meets Jenny, the hurricane approaches), the Inn is freed from that audience expectation. Instead, we can afford to drift from one piece to the next, like a kaleidoscope. In fact, I think we are well-advised to avoid trying to piece together any kind of bridge or storyline to try to tie them all together in some kind of coherent beginning-middle-end “plot.”
And that’s what I learned from Bertolt Brecht last week.
Last Friday, we went to L.A. to visit with friends, many of whom we had not seen for many years. The specific occasion was the opening of Kurt Weil’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the L.A. Opera. It starred Patti Lupone and Audra Macdonald and was directed by an old schoolmate, John Doyle. You may remember John Doyle from his winning the Tony last year for Sweeney Todd, also starring Ms. Lupone.
Mahagonny is supposedly the pinnacle of the brief but fruitful collaboration of Weill and Bertolt Brecht, which also produced The Threepenny Opera. Brecht’s theory of theatre was basically political. He wanted you not to be involved emotionally with the characters of his work, but to be completely alienated from that attachment and to think about the ideas he was putting on stage, all of which were Marxist.
Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn’t. It works best when, against his will, he gives you characters to care about and root for and then breaks out of that framework to force you to examine their moral/political situation.
Mahagonny was not one of these times. Originally a set of poems about a completely immoral pleasure city where the only sin is to be poor, it has little plot and such a total inconsistency of character development that there’s precious little to be alienated from. Weil’s music is not especially tuneful, though I found it to be mostly interesting.
L.A. Opera struggled mightily with the piece. Singers were topnotch, as was the orchestra. Set, costume, and lighting design were first-rate. Direction was consistent, but not illuminating. In fact, I have never seen such a static production ever, and I watch opera for fun. It didn’t work.
We knew all this going in. We skipped the preshow lecture, because, after all, we have degrees in theatre. We can verfremdung with the best of them. What we were hoping for out of the evening was something new that would force us to pay attention to the ideas. We did not get it.
Afterwards, what does one say to a world-famous director when the show sat there like a lump in one’s stomach?, John said that the hardest thing was getting the political content to shock, which it definitely had not. I suggested that the biggest problem with the piece altogether was that the ideas are no longer shocking: untrammeled capitalism is not a good thing, the poor are economic victims, tomorrow is not another day. We know these things to be true; they are part of the popular culture, and trotting them out as terrible simply no longer works.
Case in point: the next day, as Mike Funt was driving us pell-mell down Laurel Canyon Blvd, Bailee Desrocher laughed at how the hill residences (perched precariously on their mud-slides-to-be) reminded her of the cartoon show The Oblongs, in which a deformed family lives at the bottom of the hill, and the pollution from the rich above them sinks down to them. (Her point was that on smoggy mornings, you could see where the smog stopped; the rich live above that line.)
But there you have it. When Brecht’s ideas are part of a friggin’ cartoon show, how can you hope to pretend that they are shocking? And if they’re not shocking, and the script in question is no more than a set of polemical texts, and the music is not pretty on the surface, then what do you have to work with? I guess I would try to dazzle the audience with elaborate directorial choices, so at least they could say my efforts were interesting, entertaining, or even pretty. But John, for whatever reason, did not do that.
I would have made the stage smaller, too. So there.
What does this all have to do with us? More tomorrow.
Nothing real organized today. I put together a couple of posters at school, and for a quasi-romantic meal adapted a really delicious soup recipe, but other than that, I didn’t really get anything “real” done.
I am anxious to get back to the music, but it will probably be next week when I’m on winter break and have time to work out the kinks in Finale.
Tomorrow I’ll debrief on all the things I came across in L.A.
You may have noticed, if you’ve been paying attention, that I’ve missed blogging since last Friday. This would be because my server blocked access from the hotel’s server, so although I could get and receive email and surf the web, I could not get to my own website.
That’s OK. I didn’t really do anything creative during this time anyway. Well, maybe some thinking and planning. And definitely some observations about performing plotless poems set to music, which I’ll get to late this week. But create something of my own? Not a chance.
I was in Los Angeles, to attend the opening of the L.A. Opera’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, lyrics by Bertoldt Brecht and music by Kurt Weill. It’s one of those titles usually mentioned in reverent tones by theatre and music folk. It starred Patti Lupone and Audra Macdonald, and it was directed by an old UGA friend, John Doyle. John won the Tony last year for Sweeney Todd, also starring Patti Lupone, and two of our friends out in L.A. prompted a whole bunch of us to make the trip out to see the show, reacquaint ourselves with John, and just generally have a reunion.
We had a great time from beginning to end, and we just flew in from the Left Coast. I will post more about this lost weekend during the rest of this week.
Today I designed my Hogwarts reading cave.
This is like a cardboard “fort” for March 2, Read Across America Day, not coincidentally the birthday of Dr. Seuss. Mine is one of about ten such structures being designed and built by various classes at Newnan Crossing. On March 1, we’ll assemble our reading caves, and on March 2, classes will come to the media center and snuggle into the cave of their choice to read for a while.
It ought to be very cool. We did this before, a couple of years ago when I just plain forgot about Read Across America Day. Usually media centers schedule people to come read to classes. I get friends and theatre folk, plus cheerleaders and high school athletes. It’s a big deal, and it’s a lot of work, so when I realized that RAAD was one week away, I had to punt.
It was about as cheesy a ploy as you can imagine. Carol Ward and I turned tables on their sides, dragged stuff around, and covered all kinds of spaces with sheets and bulletin board paper. We borrowed lamps and extension cords from teachers. We put out a sign-up list, turned out the lights, and the kids had a fabulous time.
The prototype of the idea comes from A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al., which is a 70s kind of grammar in urban/living space. It moves from “small towns separated by green space” (…oh well…) to “well-defined neighborhood areas” to ideas for rooms in individual houses. One of these ideas is “Child Caves,” because children like to have places they can hide from everyone.
So it doesn’t matter that what we provided last time was just bulletin board paper taped over overturned tables. It was a “secret place,” and the kids snuggled in just fine.
This time, of course, we’re using cardboard rivets and getting fancy. I’m putting two tables at opposite ends of an aisle and surrounding them with cardboard. Outside, it will have some semblance of Hogwarts drawn/painted onto it. Inside, there will be four “rooms”: the entrance hall and the Slytherin commons room beneath the tables, and the Dining Hall and the Gryffindor commons room on top of the tables.
I’ll collect the cardboard over winter break, and maybe get it drawn out and painted as well. If not, then I can always con the members of the 100 Book Club into helping out in some kind of “special meeting” that week.
Tonight I finished putting together the DVD of all the UGA Period Dance Group photos I have. Next Monday night, we’ll gather at the home of Paul Gendreau and watch the 20 minutes of slides and period dance music. And we’ll cry. Too many people gone, and too many people unaccounted for. And damn, we were beautiful.