|
Written by Christopher Arnott
|
|
Friday, 13 August 2010 15:07 |
|
The Big Bad Johns reunite tonight, Friday, Aug. 13 at Café Nine. This is a band I covered extensively throughout the 1990s, when they really stood out by eschewing the ubiquitous grunge and indie punk sound of the time to heed the smaller but nimbler trend of rockabilly revival.
When I first met Buzz Gordo and Nervous Chet Purvis, they’d just begun a band named Gone Native. They were awkward in our first interview, trying to create a mystique but uncertain how to proceed. They handled this much more comfortably in their music—fully original yet history-stoked roots-roots with smart lyrics and college-town cockiness.
To be part of a scene around here, Gone Native had to create it themselves. They invited rockabilly rebels from far and wide—New York State, often, but also the Midwest. They joined up on bills with other misfit acts, like female punk bands and ‘60s garage acts. They continued to stand out—they seemed more focused and mature than a lot of the other fast-paced old-school rock acts, though without outgrowing a sense of devilmaycare insouciance. Buzz Gordo had a dry wit and a storyteller’s verve that seemed at odds with the traditionally nonloquacious rockabilly style. But rules were made to be reinvented. Gone Native combined respect and renewal in ways that still rocked.
When Detroit Dick joined the band as lead vocalist, I felt at the time that Gone Native had taken a step backwards, towards more conventional bar-band party rock.
Dick was the star of a storied local punk band, The Dum Dum Boys. Around the same time he joined, the band found a steady drummer in Jim Balga, a tremendous talent but one long associated around here with cleanly driven power pop (The Excerpts, 100 Faces) rather than scruffy roots rock. (When Balga was in search of a Big Bad Johns nickname, I told him there was no other possibility than “Gentleman Jim.”) I didn’t even like the new name the band had chosen, referring to it in the Advocate’s “Music Notes” column as “Big Bad Name for a Band.”
I was wrong to doubt, I realized later. Jim Balga’s beats brought power and stability to the band, just as they did for another extra-tough band he joined, The Botswanas; neatness counts even in the roughest rock bands. I missed Buzz Gordo’s whimsical patter and his idiosyncratic rock crooning when Dick joined up, but the guitar leads started to sizzle when Buzz wasn’t so aware of being behind a microphone. He wrote a riff which I haven’t been able to get out of my head for over 15 years (though I can never get the title of the song right—it’s really something about roads, but I still refer to it “A Long Walk Off a Short Pier”).
And Detroit Dick was a masterful ringleader. He growled and grinned and made manly gestures and turned into a rampaging monster before your eyes. The band remained original, fearless and—most comforting for me—funny in unexpected ways. These were tough guys with a silly side, an articulate side, a New Haven side.
The Big Band Johns broke up when Detroit Dick moved to the West Coast. Jim Balga also moved out of town. There was a story that the right record deal might have kept the band together, but it never materialized. Despite the acclaim, and the common wisdom that this was a band that transcended its roots and genre-label, the Big Bad Johns seemingly couldn’t get arrested outside the rockabilly realm.
“Nervous Chet,” who’d shown himself to be a master diplomat, able to keep imploding bands together longer than others could dream to, now does the same trick by running one of the most encouraging and community-conscious rock rooms in the state, Café Nine, under his mild-mannered alter ego Paul Mayer. Buzz and Chet, and then just Chet, forged on as the Swaggerts with Bill Collins. Big Bad Johns reunions were rumored whenever Dick was back in the East. Some materialized, some didn’t.
The memories are powerful: Gone Native raging through Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy” live for a Toad’s local-band Christmas spectacular. A rowdy roadhouse-type gig somewhere on the Post Road with Alex DeFelice in the band somehow while Gone Native was in transition. Detroit Dick joining The Gravel Pit for a cover of Miracle Legion’s “Closer to the Wall” on a Liberty Bell booze cruise at Long Wharf. Receiving a a new Rhino box set of rootsy R&B classics and bringing it to a Gone Native set at Cheri’s that night, where its contents were lovingly debated with the band (including drummer-at-the-time Buddy Zone of the Poodle Boys). Gone Native playing one of my birthday parties for me at Rudy’s, with Fran Fried growling “Goo Goo Muck.” And the Big Bad Johns itself, the assured powerhouse which came to rule Café Nine and inspire greatness in all bands which dared play on bills with them.
Contrasted with the dated fashions and techniques of the commercially hotter regional scenes they stood aside of in the ‘90s, the Big Bad Johns fully deserve the last laugh. They turn out to the timeless ones, the pure, the true, the native, the big, the bad. Tonight’s Café Nine reunion will be no nostalgia but an honest homecoming. 9 p.m., $10, 250 State St., 203-789-8281, cafenine.com.
|
|
Written by Christopher Arnott
|
|
Thursday, 12 August 2010 14:37 |
|
My cultural interests often intersect in interesting ways, and it’s not like comic books have never been adapted for the stage before. (Thank you, Yale Cabaret, for glimpsing the dramatic possibilities of Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot and Fraction/Sanders’ Five Fists of Science.) But the other day, an email from Marvel Comics was offering me (and the millions of other diehard Marvel fans) discount tix for the Amazing Spider-Man musical. I got the Marvel spam before I’d even heard the news about the long-gestating Broadway musical’s now-official opening date from my usual theater sources.
Broadway fans can be at least as impetuous and obsessive as comics fans, and the four-panel geeks won this round over the three-act ones.
The Spider-Man show, in case you haven’t heard, is a return to quasi-anthropomorphism for Lion King and Green Bird director Julie Taymor. The woman who turned The Beatles’ canon into a narrative film, Across the Universe, settled for U2 to write the Spider-Man score.
The show’s been in the works for years—a reading of an earlier version was held three years ago—but a reported $50 million price tag led to financial problems, which in turn led to production delays and, now we learn, some cast changes. Alan Cumming, born for the role, is no longer on board as Green Goblin. Cumming’s replacement is Patrick Page, whom Long Wharf subscribers will remember as Sergius from the hurriedly arranged production of Shaw’s Arms and the Man which director Greg Leaming rustled up when previous artistic director Doug Hughes abruptly left the theater in 2001.
There’s another Long Wharf—and Yale Cabaret—connection to the Spider-Man musical. Glen Berger, who shares the “Book by” credit with Taymor, is the author of the longrunning Off Broadway hit Underneath the Lintel, a vaguely superpowered pondering about the legendary Wandering Jew. Berger presented the one-man show himself as a late-night Yale Summer Cabaret treat in 1999, the work’s world premiere. It’s had well over a hundred productions since, including a 15-month New York run. The Long Wharf gave the sparse piece a grand drippy-ceilinged production, directed by resident whiz-kid Eric Ting, in the theater’s Stage II space in 2006. Nobody writes about anxiety and science like Glen Berger—he’s an ideal choice for Spider-Man scribe (though I do wonder if Yale School of Drama alum Roberto Aguirre-Sarcasa, who’s actually written dozens of Spider-Man comics stories for Marvel while continuing to further his playwriting career, wanted a shot at the gig.)
For the moment, it seems that Spider-Man’s Broadway debut is more stable than the esteemed web-spinner’s film franchise, which has had to rebuild its cast and creative team with the defection of Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is due to begin previews Nov. 14 at the Foxwoods Theatre on Broadway, starring Reeve Carney as Peter Parker. Opening night (when they let the critics in) is scheduled for Dec. 21.
|
|
Written by Christopher Arnott
|
|
Wednesday, 11 August 2010 19:48 |
|
I just got back a few days again from a month-long vacation in Vermont, Michigan and Ohio. Considering how many robocalls we got in the last few days, I’m more grateful than ever for that 25-day vacation from TV ads, fliers, phone solicitations, gladhanding and junk mail.
“Primary winners highlight political inexperience” is how the Associated Press headline put it, with Linda McMahon as its proof. There she is in the second sentence of the story, saying “The support of the voters of Connecticut isn't bestowed by the establishment or the pundits or the media. It isn't a birthright.”
Yes, it’s wonderful to live in a country where you still can buy an election. There are other establishments that can bestow things, Linda, as you well know. Lets see how inexperience plays out against Blumenthal in the next few months.
Even if you buy into the concept, the “political inexperience” trend in Connecticut begins and ends with McMahon. Another moneybags, Ned Lamont, failed utterly in his latest quest to assume public office; this time, unlike when he ran against Joe Lieberman, he didn’t even win the primary. I’d wager that where Lamont’s concerned, experience is what’s required, not this odd new brand of beginners’ luck. The Lamont/Lieberman showdown was shorthandedly dubbed a moratorium on the war, but it was when virtually any other issue came into play that Lieberman struck many as better prepared. Same with Malloy this week.
Instead of investing in campaigns, Lamont might want to maintain a prominent political persona between the elections. He should start foundations, serve on committees, keep the activism up year-round. Those measures wouldn’t sully his treasured inexperience, and they might make him look more like someone who wants to do the job rather than just rent the office.
When it came down to it, voters got wary of inexperience. Or at least, it's as easy to argue that as saying they embraced it.
The punchline of the local’s media’s primary coverage was that, poll-wise and commonsense-wise, only the Lamont/Malloy race seemed too close to call. But it’d be treasonous to give people another reason to NOT vote, wouldn’t it?
How, for instance, can the New Haven Register reflexively brand the 96th district bout between Roland Lemar and Debra Hauser “hotly contested” when Lemar’s final vote tally was nearly double Hauser‘s? Was Gerry Garcia’s campaign for Secretary of State ever the real threat to Denise Merrill that it was portrayed as? Yes, his ads “went negative” in the last few days of the campaign, but it’s not like they were substantial in any way before that, simply couching Garcia in Grateful Dead puns and vague uplifting tropes. That guy may have a political future, but he needs a new campaign manager.
Mike Jarjura’s unseemly attempt to unsettle Kevin Lembo also could have been covered many other ways if reporters weren’t so fixated on the sportslike winner-take-all qualities of elections. What made Jarjura’s courtside-insult smear tactics particularly amusing for me was that this was a race for Comptroller. You want your state’s comptroller to play nicely with others and not grandstand in meetings. You don’t want an accountant that exaggerates and passes the buck.
So, having been thrust back into election-time consciousness after a mind-clearing out-of-state sojourn, color me unimpressed and unexcited. I wouldn’t have missed voting for the world—I just LOVE voting—but I am happy to have missed a lot of hopped-up hyperbole and come-from-behind fantasizing. If I could only avoid it again until November.
|
|
Last Updated on Wednesday, 11 August 2010 20:16 |
|
Written by Christopher Arnott
|
|
Thursday, 15 July 2010 19:12 |
|
It’s tempting to write an obituary of Harvey Pekar in comic form, showing him from the waist-up, unexpressive and unmoving as so many of his own text-driven autobiographical comics did. Only this time he’d be dead, eyes shut.
Pekar’s still-life, minimalist style was often parodied, but those put-ons could never be deep. The more you turn his work into gags and punchlines, the more impressed you are at how he could build a comic-style narrative without them.
Hard to live in a college town and not have a thing for Harvey Pekar. The academic world is where his self-produced American Splendor comic book thrived, where it was analyzed in Humanities journals and lionized in modern literature courses. Some could call this ironic, since Pekar came off as an anti-intellectual, and his narrative medium of choice was one that, until fairly recently, was considered the very antithesis of “serious” literature.
Yet to write Harvey Pekar off as some working-class slob who’d somehow been noticed by the gatekeepers the ivy towers is to get the guy completely wrote. In many ways, Pekar was a model intellectual. He was a widely published jazz critic. He was as existentialist (and depressive) as Sartre, as free-verse as Bukowski, with as deep a memory as Proust.
What he didn’t do was play the game. When he became a regular guest on David Letterman’s old NBC late show in the ’80s, Pekar could have settled for the limited role of goofy curmudgeon everyman which the show was pushing him into. Instead, he used it as a platform to criticize NBC’s owner General Electric, and got permanently disinvited. He could have used his notoriety in the comics field to create more commercial projects; instead he created a graphic novel about his wife’s battle with cancer. Long after his literary career took off, he continued to work his white-collar job, not understanding why one would give up retirement benefits.
Most of the major obits which ran this week when Pekar died at age 70 from cancer named American Splendor, the movie based on that comic, and the Our Cancer Year graphic novel as Pekar’s career milestones. That’s a fair breakdown, but there were lots of other worthwhile projects in other media. The American Splendor film, for instance, began as a stage play, and just last year Pekar wrote the libretto for a jazz opera. My personal favorite is Pekar’s non-fiction books Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History and The Beats, illustrated by Ed Piskor. His scholarly interest in the counterculture was genuine, and his are some of the most insightful histories available.
His influence on late-20th graphic storytelling is profound, well beyond what you might suspect if you think he had only one main comics title and a few books to his name. Even more than, say, Garry Trudeau, Pekar made it acceptable for a comics character (himself) to sit still and do nothing but talk. He fomented a revolution of comics-style memoirs which turned “average” lives into illustrated adventure tales.
He also gave New Haven’s own Paul Giamatti, languishing in typecast fat-goon roles, the star turn that propelled him into the leading-man ranks. Splendiferous, very real, and some legacy—humanizing comics, humanizing Hollywood, and staying real while doing it.
|
|
Written by Christopher Arnott
|
|
Sunday, 27 June 2010 16:07 |
|
"Here we are on the Village Green. That’s what these greens were made for—this sort of social communal dance.”
Thus spake Dan Zanes, who went further with this celebratory oratory by directing children to squeeze through an opening in the gated-off “special seating” section at the front of the stage. Hundreds of kids and their parents took the invitation. And Zanes was still acknowledging the barrier late in the show: “I’m sorry about the gate. It wasn’t my idea.”
Dan Zanes opened the gates and turned the final hours of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas into a popuist, family-friendly frenzy Saturday night. Thousands upon thousands of filled the Green despite a serious threat of rain.
Pre-show acts, young hard-rocking victors in a statewide battle of the bands, challenged the crowd with metal madness. Zanes’ set was more amiable, starting with “Let’s Shake!” and (as he’d confessed he would in the preview article that ran in this week’s Advocate) featuring almost nothing from his band’s recent album of showtunes, 76 Trombones. Zanes & Friends’s long show did conclude with that album’s title song, for which the festival had attempted to rustle up an actual 76 trombones. It ended up being more like 7 + 6 (plus a smattering of other brass instruments), but was nonetheless impressive, especially when Zanes and his four bandmate marched the ensemble around the Green for a finale. Also in the parade were other local guests who’d joined the concert earlier: the African Drum Ensemble and the Betsy Ross Magnet School Choir.
Dan Zanes often uses his onstage patter to redefine his shows as “parties,” and he’s a consummate host. He remembers to thank the guests, as well as the presenters and even local politicians—and he remembers all their names without having to read them off slips of paper. As for his music, he’s carefully constructed it to have universal, multicultural appeal. His arrangements appeal to folk scholars, both the band and the sets (which always figure in several Spanish-language songs, and well as gospel and African folk tunes) are ethnically diverse, and the players make music-making look fun, switching styles and instruments constantly. Zane’s elaborate jaw-harp solo on “Jump Up” was a mindblower for those of us who’ve never been able to get a single sound out of that deceptively simple-looking twist of metal. “You’re a Shining Star” had Zanes on mandolin, violinist Elena Moon Park on spoons, and the rest of the band—bassist Saskia Sunshine Lane, guitarist Sonia de los Santos and drummer Colin Brooks—on ukulele (two of which were Connecticut-made “Flea” ukes).
As the father of two young girls, I know firsthand how few “family” acts truly have cross-generational appeal. Arts & Ideas has now given the Green to two of them, both acts whom I’d seen develop before adult audiences long before they (and I) became kid-friendly. There are very few other obvious choices you could get to continue this worthy A&I tradition. Unless Yo Gabba Gabba or The Wiggles could be convinced to scale down their stadium-sized tours to New Haven Green dimensions, only Laurie Berkner springs to mind.
But that’s a problem for next year. I’m still basking in the rain-stalling glow of Dan Zanes, and of watching the joy in my daughter Sally’s eyes as she cavorted in a conga line to “Catch That Train.”
|
|
Written by Christopher Arnott
|
|
Sunday, 27 June 2010 15:21 |
|
Again, this is not a review—as Mark Brokaw, director of this workshop (he’s also the artistic director of the whole Yale Institute for Music Theatre shebang) clearly instructed at the outset of this 90-minute seven-actress Greek myth makeover, “we are stopping the rehearsal process arbitrarily at the two-week point.” The audience understands, and is rewarded for their understanding with a rehearsal that is as close to a performance as possible under the circumstances.
This one had a three-woman singing-and-strumming chorus of Greek “Graces” featuring Christina Robinson (nee Christina Acosta, now married to fellow Yale School of Drama alum Ken Robinson, who she co-starred with in memorable productions of Jelly’s Last Jam and Dancing in the Dark), Sarah Sokolovic and a Yale undergrad talent, Emily Jenda. The leads were Jo Lampert (a composer in her own right, as well as an arts adminstrator) as a baseballcapped Aphrodite, Carrie Manolakos (who has toured through Connecticut as the daughter in Mamma Mia) and Broadway trouper Rachel Stern (Shrek the Musical, High Fidelity, Tarzan) as Artemis is Shaina Taub’s modern club-concert take on ancient female-empowerment mythology. Zeus was, fittingly, Aisha de Haas, seen in everything from Rent to Julie Taymor’s movie Across the Universe to “Mazee” in the workshop of the comic strip musical Kudzu at the Goodspeed’s Norma Terris Theatre back in 1997. De Haas even played Aphrodite herself once, in a very different pop musical, Randy Newman’s Faust.
The talent was pulled from such diverse areas of entertainment—and yet gelled so well on Yale’s small Off Broadway stage—that my head swum trying to remember where I’d seen all these women before. So much of Arts & Ideas festival programming is such fresh stuff—newly written, imported from other countries, not yet discrovered by other theaters or festivals—that I scramble for familiarities where I can. This one was really quite comfortable in that respect.
The Daughters held its second and last workshop performance yesterday, on the final day of the both the 2010 Yale Institute for Music Theatre and of the 2010 International Festival for Arts & Ideas. The show has had successful workshops elsewhere as well, like at Joe's Pub in NYC, so expect to encounter it again sometime.
|
|
Written by Christopher Arnott
|
|
Saturday, 26 June 2010 16:17 |
|
I know the rules, and believe in them. Workshop readings of new plays and musicals are off-limits to critics and reviewers. I go when I can for my own enlightenment and what Arts & Ideas exec director Mary Lou Aleskie described neatly yesterday as a chance to participate in the process of artistic development and not just the finished product.
So I’m not going to say a word about the actual performance of Stuck Elevator. But I will take this space, as the International Fesival of Arts & Ideas festival of 2010 winds to a close, to compliment the fest for this canny collaboration with the Yale School of Drama & Yale School of Music’s still newish Institute of Music Theater.
Thanks to key players like New York director Mark Brokaw, the institute’s choices for new works to develop have been progressive and proactive, aware that new ideas and formats must be found to keep the musical theater genre thriving in the 21st century. Both of this year’s offerings, Stuck Elevator and The Daughters, have to adapt to the obvious problems of scale and scope—it is no longer possible to assure that your musical vision can accommodate a large chorus or even a full orchestra. But more importantly, beyond the economic concerns there are genuine efforts to find new ways of telling stories, creating characters through song, and arranging those notes for a wider range of instruments.
OK, so I will reveal one thing about the performance of Stuck Elevator: It’s about a Chinese food delivery person, so among the arsenal of instruments beat by percussionist Candy Chiu was a bicycle wheel which she bowed like a spinning violin.
You'll be hearing more about this show no matter what I withhold today. Its librettist, Aaron Jafferis is a local boy made musical. An Advocate intern (I'm always proud to write that) back when he was in high school, he now teaches at the Education Center for the Arts magnet school which he used to attend. Widely acknowledged to be going places in the musical theater realm, his local connections and community-based theater roots were particularly heartening as the Yale Institute of Music Theater broadened its reach off-campus this year through this cross-promotion with Arts & Ideas.
The Friday evening audience for this clearly advertised work-in-progress was in the best spirit of the exercise: up for anything, encouraging, festive. (A post-show reception in the courtyard outside the Off Broadway space behind Toad’s Place helped.) A most worthwhile addition to the Arts & Ideas agenda, I hope this joint effort persists.
|
|
Written by Christopher Arnott
|
|
Saturday, 26 June 2010 15:52 |
|
Andrew Dawson’s handy-dandy recreation of the Apollo 11 moon landingm Space Panorama, isn’t just an impressive upper-body mime exhibition. It’s gracious and sweet and fanciful in its storytelling. The recorded voiceover which accompanies Dawson as he lets his fingers do the walking (and launching and soaring and orbiting) doesn’t turn this historic adventure into a competitive “space race,” as so many other Apollo narratives have. It is unencumbered by jealous Russians or Chinese. Neither is it rah-rah pro-American. It is its own direct story of how cool it must have been to fly off to another planet and walk around it.
Dawson acts the story mostly with his hands spread over a dinner-sized table in the middle of the dark and empty Long Wharf Stage II. He gestures with both galactic grandiosity and intimate speck-in-the-universe fragility. But he’s not so fixed in this hands-on aesthetic that he won’t use his face to lip-synch the stirring space challenge of JFK. Where his hands are graceful, and his finger-sweeps fluid, his face is rubbery and craggy—when he makes a facial expression, it dominates the scene. Dawson knows to keep such special effects to a minimum. He also knows about how long his audience is likely to last, and presents the entire spaceflight in half an hour.
Moments after he bows and exits, Dawson bounds back to chat with the crowd about what they’d just seen him do. For someone we’ve just seen commit himself to silence, he is surprisingly loquacious and gracious. He’s chipper, up for any question. The facial features he carefully kept in check for the show are now effortlessly cheery and bright-eyed.
His moonscape has made us feel small and insignificant. His post-show chat restores humanity and intimacy. Without ever playing the “spiritual” card, Dawson has got the whole world in his hands.
Two more performances of Space Panorama occur on this, the International Festival of Arts & Ideas’ last day, June 26 at 3 & 6 pm. at Long Wharf Stage II, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. www.artidea.org.
|
|
Written by Christopher Arnott
|
|
Saturday, 26 June 2010 02:29 |
|
"I am family! I have none of my sisters with me!”
Granted, the act has been called Sister Sledge, singular, not Sisters Sledge plural, since the early ‘70s. Still, the title “Sister Sledge Show featuring Kathy Sledge” seems a touch disappointing even in an age where everything’s getting downsized. The youngest of the four sisters Sledge, Kathy (who was 12 when the singing act started, and is now 51) sang lead on several Sister Sledge hits and went solo in 1992. Her "Sister Sledge Show” leads off the just-announced Music on the Green summer concert series for 2010, July 17 at 7 p.m.
A 6 p.m. opening act, yet to be announced, is promised. That’s significant, since recent Music on the Green programs, not to mention Arts & Ideas concerts on the selfsame Green, have begun to dispense with luxuries such as opening acts. Besides budgetary concerns, there’s the argument that if you bring people a shorter concert, they will be obliged to stay and find other things to do downtown, like shop or go to a restaurant or club.
Makes you long for the days when the summer concerts on the Green (which were once branded the New Haven Jazz Festival until the bookings became so broad that they could no longer classify them as “jazz”) were huge affairs: Ray Charles, with full band plus Raelettes! Chaka Khan with a symphony orchestra! Duke Ellington’s band, led by his snappy grandson!
There may be an insufficiency of Sledges, but otherwise this summer’s other two Music on the Green shows are impressively grand, without qualification. The New Haven Symphony, which once had its own separate summer-in-the-parks series, gets the July 24 slot, playing Alan Hovhaness’ And God Created Whales to the accompaniment of “a family of humpback whales.” Presumably the beasts are recorded, not live, but still!—take that, Sister Sledge. “We are family! I’ve got my Cetaceans with me!” The symph’s also doing standards by Strauss, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn, sans ungainly acquatic mammals.
From whales to wolves, the series ends July 31 with Los Lobos. If memory serves, they’ve been downtown before, on the Green but also in the Shubert and at Toad’s, when of course they could easily bypass our fair city completely and just play the casinos. There’s a huge fanbase for the band here, and this is an outstanding booking. Again, opening act expected, TBA.
The point of the summer concerts on the Green has always been to demonstrate that New Haven’s not dead yet. In the ‘80s, it said “We’re not as crime-ridden as you suburbanites think!” In the ‘90s, it said “We are the cultural capital of the state!” In the ‘00s, it said “We’re an institution. Why wouldn’t you want this?” Now that penny-pinching has threatened everything from the Christmas tree to fireworks, and with many other Green traditions (film series, local band shows, etc.) having bitten the dust years ago, Music on the Green needs to not just justify itself but cover its costs with big-deal sponsors. This year, show presenters Market New Haven and CAPA have landed the new Smilow Cancert Hospital at Yale-New Haven. Not the happiest brand name to put on a banner, but deep thanks all the same.
|
|
Written by Christopher Arnott
|
|
Friday, 25 June 2010 23:12 |
|
It took me a while to egress Chautauqua, the staggering mindfuck of stunts and stump speeches engineered by the National Theater of the United States of America at the Long Wharf.
First I had to sit in stunned silence. Then I had to tell the people sitting behind me how blown away I had been. Then I had to put it in context of other Arts & Ideas events I’d seen in the last few days—it’s such a perfect fit for what the festival’s become. Then, because this was such a community-rousing event, I felt compelled to interact with more people in the crowd than I otherwise would. Then I had to deal with the space—I’ve seen some amazing and progressive things on the Long Wharf mainstage, but when’s the last time I saw something aggressively non-linear, not driven by narrative or plot or even character?
Then I noticed the show’s director (also one of its most energetic actors), Yehuda Duenyas, who’d emerged from backstage and was surveying the exiting crowd from a quiet corner at the front of NTUSA’s makeshift stage. As I was attempting to articulate all my reactions into a clear compliment, a woman in her 60s (I’m guessing) rushed over and upbraided him. She was visibly upset at what she had seen, and started to express the wonders of actual Chautauqua shows she had seen in her youth. She was livid at what the National Theater of the United States of America had done to her memories.
I’d argue that what they did was much stronger. After first acclimating you to the style and structure of a typical Chautauqua oratorical revue of the early 20th century—a presentation full of local history, namedropping lots of locals and even handing the lectern over to a guest Connecticut speaker (Thursday it was Doug Rae, spouting one-liners about old Yale), the show gets into speeches that fascinatingly ramble, get chaotic, or get exhilaratingly, dangerously dull. Once you’re fully sucked in, and have experienced all the ups and downs, advantages and pitfalls of live presentation, the show begins to deconstruct and self-destruct before your eyes, brilliantly illustrating a point that it had made in passing during its purposefully fusty introductory address. The original Chautauqua movement succumbed to crass sensationalism which eroded its steady sonorous reliably.
Building up a tribute so carefully, and not tipping the audience to how the whole temple could tumble at any juncture, is an art so profound and selfless that I’m still gobsmacked by this show a day later. How could I not see it coming? How could they effect such a revolution on such a low-budget, low-key, intimate scale? Meaningful and mad. No wonder that woman in the audience was so unnerved.
Chautauqua was susceptible to exactly the same problems which ruined another Arts & Ideas theatrical event—Comme Toujours Here I Stand, by Big Dance Theater—for me. But NTUSA had foreseen these problems, solved them, and their show ended up transcending the point where they could even be registered as problems. It all had to do with having a clear understanding of the style and culture that was being expounded upon in the piece (for BDT, it was ‘60s Europop culture, for NTUSA the lost oratorical phenomenon of Chatauqua), then authoritatively communicating that authoritative mastery to the audience. I found Comme Toujours confounding and couldn’t access it as more than artifice. Chatauqua!, on the other hand, illuminated and enlightened everything it touched upon. First, it gained my trust by being so earnest, so true to the Chautauqua style of discourse. Then, as it began to stretch its aesthetic with historical recreations (the Aaron Burr/Alexander Hamilton duel, enlived by an actor who won’t shut up) and burlesque, it was genuinely, non-ironically entertaining. Then it invited modern elements, courtesy of guest artists from the Yale Summer Cabaret hip-hopping and banging on drums.
Another local music act, Caravan of Thieves, who played pre-show and between-scenes instrumentals, countered all countercultural moves by dressing in old-fashioned garb and keeping it acoustic and fiddly. Caravan of Thieves, anchored by renowned local jam guitarist Fuzz, is capable of some serious culture-mashing themselves; last year, Arts & Ideas audiences on the Green were treated to their four-part acoustic adaptation of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
To say more about Chautauqua! would be to give away surprises. I missed a chance to see this show last winter in New York, and though I usually like to be better informed about new work, I am ecstatic that I didn’t see it until it came here, with all that precious New Haven content. I am in its thrall. It turns temperance lectures into Greek tragedy, village folk dances into fraught tribal rituals, and cultural celebrations into apocalypse.
I wish I could have Chautauqua! in book form, to put on the shelf where I keep all my Marshall McLuhan and Greil Marcus books. It’s a living, breathing social history text I’ll be consulting for a long time to come.
Just three more performances of the New Haven rendition of Chautauqua!: June 25 (Friday) at 8 p.m. and June 26 (Saturday) at 3 & 8 p.m. www.artidea.org.
|
|
|
Arnott of the Arts