A dream, an observation, a question

I wrote the following three years ago for the now-defunct Desert Advocate and reprint it here because its subject is the roots of national culture. It ends with a question I would love you to answer in the form of posted comments.

***

I just returned from Kaua’i, the farthest west of the major Hawaiian Islands and, some would say, the most beautiful. (Don’t ask me — Kaua’i is my only experience of our 50th state.)

On the first night there, I had a disturbing dream, a nightmare vision wildly out of sync with the idyllic languor of the place.

I had fallen asleep with the smell of salt-sea breezes in my nostrils and the glow of strange, gold-and-vermilion flowers in my memory.  So, why did I dream of angry Hawaiian warriors rushing toward me in a kind of hypnotic trance? In the vision, they pushed passed me violently, and I felt their power as I fell downward into some empty place beneath them. I don’t usually remember my dreams. This one woke me up. And I remembered it.

As I discussed my nocturnal encounter the next day over lunch with my wife, our waiter felt it apt to interrupt.

“The Night Marchers,” he said.

The what?

“You saw the Night Marchers, the spirits of Hawaiian warriors killed in battle. They died too quickly to know they are dead, so they keep marching.”

Apparently, they are all over the Hawaiian Islands, a place that has seen as much violence as any other, less paradisiacal place — and not just after the white man came. There, where fruit drops freely from the trees and fish fill the warm ocean waters, where year-round tropical mildness means shelter and clothing may be minimal, and therefore cheaply provided, tribes battled bloodily against each other for centuries, over what? Never underestimate man’s ability to find excuses for war.

So, what does this have to do with the arts? Nothing, by itself, but it made me wonder just what we are doing when we talk of a country’s “culture” and by that mean its food, its crafts, and maybe some of its more pleasant music. You know: Japan is sushi, bonsai and some strains on the koto; Ireland is corned beef, step dancing, and maybe a crocheted leprechaun. Hawaii, of course, is all flower leis, kahlua pork and the ukulele (which, incidentally, is Portuguese).

We do it to ourselves, too. America is hamburgers, cool cars and rock ‘n’ roll, right? We reduce culture to things we can consume, and in doing so, we gloss over the purpose the arts have to connect us to the realities of human love, human joy and human failing. I don’t know if the Hawaiian people ever developed a theatrical or poetic form into which they might pour the saga of the Night Marchers, but if that were done, it would go far to dispel the Hallmark image of luau and the hula.

Every time a people looks at itself plainly and honestly in the mirror of art, great stuff happens. In the 19th century, a group of Italian composers, Verdi chief among them, stared down the violence and the intrigue of the Europe around them and put those elements into the music they wrote for the operatic stage. Long before that, the ancient Greeks found the rhythm of tragedy and composed dramas that live to this day as embodiments of human feeling at its most profound.

When one people oppresses another, it invariably makes the oppressed culture look “cute” through cheap art. While England beat up the Irish with one hand, they created silly music-hall ditties like “My Wild Irish Rose” with the other, songs that no more resemble real Irish music than Playboy pinups look like real women. Notoriously, the American South created blackface entertainment to keep the slaves looking less than dangerous.

The oppressed eventually get theirs back, and when they do, it’s through art. The Irish produced Joyce and Yeats, a literature that beat the English at their own game. The African-American experience compressed suffering into blues and jazz, still the most distinctive forms of American art. Some people would call this art’s “political” function, but it’s not that, really. Rather, it’s artists breaking through political (and economic and social) restraint to get to what politics and economics and society always try to guard us from: reality, in the form of unrestrained human experience. If anything, it’s anti-political.

What American art today looks past distractions to embrace the real world of feeling?

Let me know your nominations.

– Ken LaFave

Here and there in Phoenix arts

In The Next Room, or The Vibrator Play

Contrary to every review of it I’ve read, Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play, is not about Victorian mores and the treatment of women. It’s about how we – now as in the past – closet sex away and treat it, not as in integral part of our lives, but as something “in the next room” – literally in the play, figuratively in the play. The Actors Theatre production of the hit comedy, an Arizona premiere, ends its highly successful run this weekend, with last shows tonight (Nov. 13) and tomorrow.

There are many poetic moments in the script, brought out wonderfully by the production. The one that touched me most personally was when the character Mrs. Givings points out it is the “unfinished” woman, the incomplete female, who most deeply attracts a man. Exactly! (How’d she – I mean the playwright – know that?)

***

The use of surtitles for Arizona Opera’s recent production of The Pirates of Penzance prompts the question, “Do we really need to see the words as well as hear then, when the words both heard and seen are…English?” It’s standard practice, I know, for operas in English to receive sub- or surtitles, the reason supposedly being that operatic singing is not conducive to being understood. But it seemed odd-nigh-ridiculous for a Gilbert and Sullivan piece, with its emphasis on the humor of Gilbert’s clever rhymes, to have the words appear above the action in advance of their being heard.

For instance, in “A Modern Major General,” the general’s famous rhyme for “strategy” appeared a good ten seconds before the singer delivered it, stepping on the joke. (Yes, I know most of us already know what the rhyme is – that’s not the point.) I’m of a mind to try to ignore the surtitles for Arizona Opera’s upcoming production of Carmen, as I imagine many who know the opera well are also inclined to do. Would that Arizona Opera’s titles were not so IMPOSING, writ large as they are. Too bad Arizona Opera hasn’t the money to do what Santa Fe Opera does: provide titles on the back of the seat in front of you, with the option of turning them off.

***

The Balinese gamelan is one of the most mesmerizing aural experiences available on the globe. Our own Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) will present a rare opportunity to hear this consort of bells, chimes and gongs in concert Sunday and Monday, Nov. 14 and 15. If you haven’t taken the time to view the MIM yet, combine a visit with this concert. I guarantee you won’t soon forget it.

– Ken LaFave

 

 

Training the ears not to hear

From a somewhat rambling but useful entry at Canadian composer Colin Eatock’s blog, this spot-on observation:

“What concerns me is the hegemony of pop music, which has, I think, had a profound effect on the way people listen to classical music – indeed, on their ability to listen to it. People who have heard nothing but popular music all their lives (again, a considerable chunk of the population) will, of necessity, develop certain assumptions about what music is “supposed to” sound like. Someone who only knows a repertoire of three-minute Top 40 songs in verse-chorus form may find a lengthy, textless orchestral work daunting and interminable. Someone weaned on percussive rock or rap music at high volumes may hear a string quartet as feeble and wimpy. And someone who admires the “natural” voices of Bob Dylan or Tom Waits may experience Plácido Domingo as artificial and overwrought.”

Teaching general music K-8, I constantly encounter kids who find classical and jazz pieces “scary” (their word) because they’re long and they change tempo and dynamic and do other “weird” things. In short, Beethoven and Coltrane are not what music is “supposed” to sound like. It’s “supposed” to sound like the pop music they hear every day.

Pop music’s hegemony is destructive of musical diversity, and deadly to the ear. It should be understood to be one kind of music among many, many others. Instead, the culture represents it as the totality of the musical universe.

– Ken LaFave

Waiting hundreds of years for a premiere…

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA – coming soon to Arizona

Last weekend, listening to Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy in the form of Southwest Shakespeare’s single-shot condensation, Blood Royal, I pondered the fact these words had never before been spoken on a stage in Arizona.

Director Jared Sakren had announced prior to curtain that Blood Royal constituted the Arizona premiere of Henry VI. He then added that the company’s upcoming Antony and Cleopatra (slated for spring) would also be an Arizona premiere.

We somehow have the idea that everything “classic” has been done, that the great plays, operas and symphonies have received their exposure to all willing audiences. Not true. Not, at least, in Arizona.

George Bernard Shaw, for example, is grossly underproduced. Southwest Shakespeare recently brought us Pygmalion and Arms and the Man, and Arizona Theatre Company (ATC) once did a Candida. Saint Joan, Major Barbara, Heartbreak House – these have never been staged, so far as I can tell. Ibsen goes pretty much by the wayside as well. ATC did Ghosts about a decade back, and someone must have done A Doll’s House – right? But I can find no record of The Wild Duck or Enemy of the State having been produced here.

We’ve had an opera company for over 30 years, so all the major Mozart operas have been done, one might reasonably assume. (We’re not counting obscurities like Lucio Silla.) But no. When Arizona Opera stages Abduction from the Seraglio in the spring, it will be the Arizona premiere of that sparkling comedy. We’ll have to wait a little longer, I guess, for Idomeneo.

The list of symphonic scores never performed locally is too long to print. But it will soon be at least two scores shorter, courtesy conductor Warren Cohen’s Musica Nova group. Musica Nova’s upcoming season will include the Arizona premieres of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 6 and the Violin Concerto No. 2 of Shostakovich.

We often complain we don’t get enough new art, and I would second that emotion, adding that one can’t get enough new art. But it seems we could use a lot more of the old, too.

– Ken LaFave

Lenny’s Mercedes

Have you seen the new Mercedes-Benz commercial that includes a brief clip of Leonard Bernstein conducting? The ad is made of a series of clips of people with arms raised “in triumph.” Sports figures are also pictured.

I can’t say I really knew Lenny, though I met and talked with him on a few professional and personal occasions. But I can’t help but wonder at his association with a German car. His sensitivity to the history of the Holocaust was keen. While he dismissed Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana on musical grounds (he once called it “gilded shit”), those who knew him said part of his dislike was Orff’s connection to the Nazis.

Everybody’s different, but I have several Jewish friends who would never buy a German car. And then there’s Sarah Silverman’s bit, “Jewish people driving German cars.” (Warning: Strong language.)

Your thoughts? Any readers with an informed guess as to whether Bernstein would have approved? Or not?

– Ken LaFave

From the stage to the screen…no, wait, reverse that!

Time brings reversals, in the arts as everywhere else, and the new season at ASU Gammage underlines one of the more radical reversals on Broadway in my time.

Of the seven shows scheduled for ASU, two are old favorites: Fiddler on the Roof (1964) and Hair (1967). In keeping with the series’ extraordinary ability to bring us the latest from Broadway, the other five are more recent shows: Young Frankenstein; Billy Elliot The Musical; Shrek The Musical; 9 to 5: The Musical; and Mamma Mia!

All but one of the five is a musical based on a hit movie, and the fifth, Mamma Mia!, is a jukebox musical, a show put together from pre-written songs.

Both things barely existed until about 15 years ago. Now, they dominate new musicals. To be sure, shows that don’t fit those profiles still get done: Avenue Q, Light in the Piazza and Spring Awakening are three brilliant examples from the past decade. But musicals such as The Wedding Singer and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels simply would never have been produced had they not enjoyed instant audience recognition of their titles, and Jersey Boys and Rock of Ages trade wholly on the popularity of songs already drilled into theatergoers’ ears.

It used to be that musicals started on stage, became movies, and along the way provided popular music with the majority of its material. Now musicals follow rather than lead, tagging along after screen hits or grabbing pop songs for support.

Familiar stories and familiar songs are, frankly, a cheap way to do instant marketing. While that doesn’t necessarily mean the resulting product lacks merit, compare Wedding Singer and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels to Light in the Piazza and Spring Awakening and a case begins to gel for originality over rote adaptation. Easy commercial paths never lead to artistic success. Imagine someone telling Lenny Bernstein and Jerry Robbins in 1957: “Dump this West Side Story thing – do a show on Gone With the Wind!”

The Broadway series at ASU Gammage opens Monday with Young Frankenstein, with songs by the man who gave us one of the biggest of all movies-into-musicals, The Producers. Mel Brooks is a funny guy and some of his songs for The Producers hit home (though none hit like the original movie’s blockbuster, “Springtime for Hitler”). It’ll be interesting to hear what his score does for Young Frankenstein.

In the spirit of combining musicals based on hit movies with the idea of the jukebox musical, I suggest the following shows for future production:

The Godfather, featuring songs from the catalogue of Frank Sinatra. Imagine the Don’s big finale, “My Way.”

Animal House, with songs by Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. Think “Great Balls of Fire” and the John Belushi character; a perfect fit.

Silence of the Lambs, with a score comprising various ‘80s hits. The bad guy sings “Me So Horny.”

No Country for Old Men, incorporating Johnny Cash songs. How could one possibly improve on Anton Chigurh singing “Ring of Fire”?

– Ken LaFave

Shakespeare vs. Joan of Arc

Southwest Shakespeare’s Blood Royal, a one-evening adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, includes among its characters Joan of Arc. I plan to attend Blood Royal this week, and I look forward to seeing how the adaptation treats her, as The Maid of Orleans appears in Part One of the Bard’s original, not as an heroic figure, but as a conniving witch — a partisan of Evil France against the just reign of Good Ol’ England.

It’s only natural Shakespeare would have taken the part of his own country against her age-old nemesis. But it must be difficult today, given centuries of Joan-adoration, to portray her as anything other than a brave and holy warrior of mystical stature. More than a hundred novels have been written on her life, including one by, of all unlikely authors, Mark Twain. “She is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced,” Twain wrote – amazing words from cynical old Sam Clemens. Verdi and Tchaikovsky both composed operas about her, though no one does them any more, and even this year, Rhode Island composer Steven Jobe unveiled his operatic take on the subject.

Joan is the subject of many hundreds of visual portrayals, none of them accurate, since the only painting she sat for has been lost. Southwest Shakespeare’s publicity claims their Joan is “beautiful,” though there’s every reason to believe she was as plain as an ill-fed peasant girl of that era must have been. (The image above is pure conjecture by an artist working in 1485, decades after her death.) And of course there are movies, including the 1957 lemon with Ingrid Bergman looking ridiculously pretty in clunky plate armor, and a recent made-for-TV biopic for which those responsible should be burned at the stake. Figuratively speaking.

The best film by far is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), in which a mannish, anguished Joan doubts everything save the persistence and ultimate truth of her own inner vision. It is that vision which got her killed by the Church in the 15th century, and that selfsame vision which got her made into Saint Joan of Arc by the Church five centuries later. Just a matter of perspective, I guess.

– Ken LaFave