By Artie Capshaw

Peter Orsoni, cultured frontman of local legends Orson and the Welles, has a funny relationship to wine. “My father was an importer, a real wine connoisseur. He’d have these collectors over for tastings, and when I was a kid all our summer vacations were based around visiting vineyards, all around the world.” So Peter’s rock/roll rebellion took a different shape than most. “I was part of this cultured crowd—little bowls of fruit to cleanse the palate, lounge music on the hi-fi. I heard all these early rock songs about wine and thought, “it sounds different, but I know this world. I didn’t realize that they had just, you know, found a word that rhymes with ‘fine,” and all they probably knew about wine was, you know, two-dollar-a-bottle house reds from diners. I didn’t know cheapo wines existed. I honestly thought these songs were about my laugh.” He laughs so hard he nearly knocks over his goblet of—gosh, we forgot to ask, but something white and dry and fancy.

Orsoni’s first attempts at rock songwriting were therefore comical. “And then I wrote… ‘California Cabernet,’ which everybody thought was ‘Cabin A,’ like it was a joke on some song about a hotel I’d never heard. I probably used the word ‘chateau’ more times than any songwriter ever. But, you know, some people write about love and some people write about, what, overcoming adversity or something. I wrote about wine.”

He finally scored with one of those “chateau” songs, “Chateau Neuf du Pape.” The title’s pronounced like “nerve do pop,” which is what many people thought it was about, and it became one of those insensible garage-band standards. Orsoni acts surprised when he’s told that phrase, “my nerves do pop,” has found its way into at least a couple of songs by other bands, without attribution.

“*I guess you could say it was a regional hit, like what used to happen in the old days. I’d get a lot of play on college radio stations that were 500 miles away from each other, and nothing in between.”

An acquired taste, then. Vintage. For connoisseurs. Of pop! What nerve.

Orsoni replants some of his old cuttings for a rare solo show (he rarely plays out in any configuration, actually) Thursday at the Bullfinch. He’s been uncorked by his old friend and erstwhile bandmate Joe Mank (aka Jomank, aka J. Mankiewicz), better known as half of the Mank Brothers. No Orsoni/Mank collabs are currently planned, but who knows? Maybe they’ll drink a lot of wine and get, uh, inspired.

Fresher vines:

Goodyear has had one, getting their home pressed debut album rereleased on an actual (albeit small) label. They play the old songs Tuesday (Tuesday? Yes, Tuesday) at the Finch, with Wrangler, SR-a and The White Walls, who have their own album release to celebrate. You might remember the Walls as The Rims– someone finally explained to them what that name meant in sexual parlance, and singer Lippy Lisa (we know, we know) made the rest of the band reconsider. You know a punk band will have picked up the old moniker by Tuesday, so remember: Walls.

The university campus cavorts Sunday–a school night, but do you think they care?– to a metal spectacular (locally speaking) of V8, Endurance and Off Road. The first fan to collect 27 red booze cups will be… Average.

Pilot has been my pen brand of choice since sometime in the sixth grade. That’s a dozen years before I moved to Connecticut, where they were made. That added a patriotic element. The longtime Pilot president Ron Shaw, a former stand-up comic and salesman who, in his businessman philanthropist mode, was an especially artful chairman of the board of trustees for New Haven’s Shubert Theatre.

Pilot no longer is a Connecticut-centered enterprise, and this past summer marked the end of the grandest thing they’d stuck their name to that wasn’t a writing implement: the Pilot International Tennis Tournament. (The tournament will continue as a women’s-only event under the sponsorship of Yale and others.)

I still use Pilots more than any other pen—mostly the G2 retractable, but occasionally the Varsity disposable fountain pen and the classic razor point. I find the Dr. Grip a bit bulky and silly (when I am forced to think of a gripping, groping medical practitioner, I don’t want to imagine a pen as part of the scenario) and am still coming to terms with the new G7 models. I can’t comment on their ballpoint line, just their gel and roller ball pens, as I haven’t used a ballpoint in decades except under duress.

For me, the point of Pilots is that they have a range of sturdy non-ballpoints that tend not to leak when they accidentally get laundered. And when I’m in a strange mood, I can indulge with G2 variations like green or purple or light blue ink.

Especially green. Hard to find a trustworthy pen with dark green ink. So I was startled when browsing the writingware selection at the Playtime art supply store in Arlington to find two brands of green pen I had never encountered.

The Pentel EngerGel NV BL27  o.7mm ball Metal Point is tough yet lightweight, sleek yet not pretentious. Not as pretentious a Pentel, anyhow, as the EnerGel deluxe, described on the company’s website as “beyond the next generation.” The NV BL27 isn’t a dainty diary-keeping pen; you can stab someone with it, or scribble shopping lists on the back of a Netflix envelope.

The Yasutomo pen company’s Liquid Stylist Fine Point Pen says right on its fat tubular trunk that it’s “for drawing, sketching, illustrating, writing, cartooning.” I’d like to visit the lab where they rate such abilities. (“Nope, lousy at accounting, and definitely not recommended for spirographs. Let’s test it again for crossword puzzles.”) A softer tip than the EnerGel, and not as energized. I don’t think I’ll use it as often. I’m a little worried about it. But it pretty much dares you not to see it as an art object (rather than an object that makes art), since the clear plastic cap acts as display case for the stylish Liquid Stylist tip underneath.

Enough pent-up pontification.  Now it is time for me to go draw some grass, or money.

After The Faded Effect’s efficacious set Thursday at the Finch, the question we all had for singer Jaspe was not “Where did that new song come from?” (we knew it was a cover of “It Will Surge” by obscure French New Wavers Charmante) but “Who dressed you?”

Jaspe’s not known for his sartorial skills. In fact, nobody’s ever seen him in anything but black jeans and a T-shirt touting one of his own bands. (Before Faded Effect came Fustian, Kelt and the truly atrociously named Drap-de-Berry; before he became a frontman he also played keyboards for the vocal duo Linsey-Woolsey.)

Turns out his stylist is his three-year-old daughter Moire. (A final “e” is a requisite of all names in this happy family. Mom is Georgette, formerly of The Tricotines.)

“We took her to this fabric shop—actually, it was a place where you get material to reupholster furniture. That’s kind of my day job. And Moire [Jaspe pronounces it ‘Morry,” with a kind of Scottish roll of the ‘r’] just went wild. She got to take home all these samples, and she and Georgette stitched them together into that jacket. It’s my miracle coat.

It certainly held together for a (excuse us) seamless set which Jaspe insists was the last time you’ll ever hear the songs from the first Faded Effect album, Ticking…. “I know people who really like that record, and I respect that,” Jaspe says. “I’m not taking that away from them. I won’t be destroying the records! Those songs, that whole recording experience, came from a very bad time in my life. I just don’t see the point in doing them live anymore—it’s not like I’ll ever do them better. We’ve got like two or three sets of new material that nobody seems to mind”—not to mention that Charmante cover.

You’ll soon be able to spin those new tunes at home as well: The Whipcord EP was supposed to be out for last week’s show, but had “processing delays”; you’ll be able to find it by the end of the month at Stop (re)Tiring Anymore Records, or at the next Faded Effects show, whichever comes first. The FE also contributed a song, “Sicilienne,” to the Stammel Records’ new local comp. (And they’re all ready if anyone’s putting together a Charmante tribute disk—OK, we’ll stop with that now.)

A full-length, tentatively titled Saxony Say Scarlet, is expected by next summer. Jaspe promises it will have cover art of him in the new homemade. “This was the missing ingredient,” he says. “Now I’m unstoppable.

Dig in:

There was a subpoena, so Prunella has changed their name to Zanella. Same line-up, same textured rainy-day tunes, Thursday at the Finch…. Friday the Finch Bandfinder series starts promptly at 7 p.m. with—in this order, assuming they all show up—Swansdown, Shantung (Shantung! What’re they doing on a “new band” bill?!), Rumchunder, Musterdevillers, Moreen and the already widely known Pongee, who won the High School Battle last month. Seriously, Shantung have been around as long as the kids in Pongee have been alive; if they haven’t been “found” yet, who has? … Friday at Hamilton’s: College nite with The Barateens, which is better than those snotty frat boys deserve. … For their acoustic show at Dollaire’s, internationally on-the-way-down two-hit-wonders Baft requested a solo acoustic opening act. The honor went to Nan Keen, who should blow those blowhards off the unamplified stage. …

Broadway Musical: The Biggest Hit and the Biggest Flop of the Season, 1959-2009

By Peter Filichia. Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2010. Trade paperback, $19.99.

Besides Ethan Mordden, Peter Filichia’s just about the only Broadway-focused theater writer I can stand. He talks the showtalk and dishes the gossip, but doesn’t buy in too baldly. He writes the way theatergoers chat when they’re leaving the theater: in bold, general strokes, interrupted by telling details that prove he knows what he’s talking about. The best Broadway writers assess that type of theater as if it’s a major league sports, complete with stats-trading and fantasy teams. Filicia’s great at putting shows in their cultural and historical contexts, and great at imagining what else might have happened.

The odd, seemingly extreme format he’s taken for this latest trip down the Great White memory lane is to assess each Broadway season by highlighting its greatest success and its suckiest mistake. The middle ground is immaterial. Since books about Broadway flops have become an established genre, there’s a ready audience for Filicia’s appraisal of four decades of worsts. Playing them against the acknowledged hits turns out to be a brilliant gambit.

In some chapters, you see theater history being transformed before your very eyes. Filicia’s pick-hit for 1973 is Stephen Schwartz’s The Magic Show, a newfangled yet nonethless old-fashioned stage revue starring mustachioed magician Doug Henning. The pick-flop of the same year is Paul Jabara’s ill-fated disco musical Rachael Lily Rosenbloom (and Don’t You Ever Forget It). Filicia makes the useful point that glam/camp disco silliness became a prevalent style of Broadway in the ’90s and ’00s. Extending his point, if you revived both Magic Show and Rachael Lily Rosenbloom in the current theater climate, their fortunes might well be reversed.

I’m not in a position to concur with Filicia’s feelings regarding the opening night excitement at these shows He’s the longtime theater critic for the New Jersey Star-Ledger, and a prolific online Broadway-gossip columnist, so he personally witnessed many of the triumphs and disasters he chronicles here. His scholarship, however, is excellent, so even if you suspect he’s exaggerating the wonderments of some shows, you feel grounded by the basic data.

There are a few shows on his hit and miss lists which I did see, however, like Civil War, which is justifiably deemed the biggest flop of 1999 not just for its own qualities but for how it stalled the career of rising golden boy composer Frank Wildhorn. That show had a frenzied out-of-town try-out at the Shubert in New Haven. Other shows where I can validate Filicia’s astute analysis include Sweet Smell of Success, his choice for the biggest flop of 2001, a section he subtitles “What people don’t need after 9/11.”

I realize that I’m just as familiar with the flops in this book as I am with most of the hits, a weird realization since of course the hits have lasted much longer and made it into the regional theater territories where I do most of my theatergoing. This is what makes this book so fascinating: A lot of us who try to find things to see on Broadway will make a beeline for a show like Sweet Smell of Success, even though we’ve heard it sucks, just because we want to know what compelled John Guare and Marvin Hamlisch to make a musical out of a downbeat Tony Curtis/Burt Lancaster movie. It’s a stronger urge than the one that draws us to a see a show we know will be touring for years, or made into a movie, or be seen on high school and college and community stages ad nauseam.

Broadway Musicals: The Biggest Hit and the Biggest Flop of the Season 1959-2009 gives you the whole story. It respects the process of musical-making while acknowledging commercial and critical realities. It’s full of flukes and flashes-in-pans and happenstance, working in useful anecdotes at the drop of a brickbat. Ultimately, it shows you how many different workable historical perspectives can be applied to Broadway. As Filicia says in his coda, while Stephen Sondheim is widely thought to be the greatest Broadway name of the exact 50-year period the book covers, only three of his shows are among the 100 discussed. And all of them are in the “flop” category.

This revelation would seem to undermine Filichia’s method, but it merely demonstrates how written-in-stone the conventional Broadway hit histories are, and how we need more alternate histories like this one in order to truly see where theater has gone and where it’s going.

That beatific guitar-playing grin. We all know what it means. Sure, it looks happy enough, but it’s such a resolutely fixed expression that it can’t possibly be sincere. If you do something to try to change it—make a joke, make up new lyrics and chant them loudly, smear make-up directly on that insipidly smiling face—it only grins more broadly.

Depending on whether you’re a friend, a fan, or the bartender who’s in charge of making sure the set ends before closing time, that face can mean:

1.     Don’t talk to me while I’m playing. No, really, don’t talk to me. By smiling, I’m pretending you’re not here.

2.     Don’t look at my face. Look at my hands. That’s where the action is. I could be doing all manner of wild expressions with my face for you, but I’d just be playacting. I do not have a large repertoire of facial tics; that’s why I get to wear sunglasses on stage. Hands is where it’s at.

3.     I am not getting off this stage until this solo is over.

(And of course drugs don’t enter into it at all.)

In some societies, this somewhat anti-social behavior is known as “being in the zone.” But who oversees these zones, sets their boundaries, monitors their use, issues their parking passes? We happily volunteer for the chairmanship of such a zoning committee. There are abuses that we feel it is our civic duty to correct.

Other sites to behold: Wanco, Eagle Fence and The Traffic Lane Closures all showed up to a gig last weekend at the Dwight (which you might know better as That Old Elementary School with the pig graffiti) and nearly backed into a ditch. Nobody’d told ’em ’bout the broken water pipe and subsequent upheaval on the street. The pipe’s been sealed and reburied, the club has running water again (this might be a good time to clean the bathrooms, guys) and the gig has been graciously rescheduled for next month…

In further vehicular obstacle news, management planted one of those upside-down trees in the parking garage in the dance club district. It lasted three days before a partygoer jumped atop a van and brought the whole thing pounding down. No hospitalizations, unless you count a trip to the tree doctor… On Demand, Roku Box and Nearest Shipping Facility all play at the Finch Thursday. It’s a video release party; yes, you read that right….

Yeah, I know they’re anti-gay and weirdly militaristic and stuff, but Mabel’s got me digging the musical Guys and Dolls again, so I sauntered into the Salvo on Crown Street yesterday to see if I could borrow a tambourine.

Truthfully, it was because I remembered they had LPs of plays like Antigone (with Dorothy Tutin), The Cherry Orchard (with Jessica Tandy, of all people), Shaw’s Misalliance (Mermaid Theatre production) and Pinter’s No Man’s Land (with two Sirs, Gielgud and Richardson) hidden amongst all those Peter Nero and Ferrante & Teicher albums. They’ve been there for months, and I don’t know what I was waiting for—I’m the one for whom they’re fated.
While there was a pair of brand new Rockport shoes caught my eye—and then my feet, since they were just my size. They enter my closet just as my thrift shop pair of Doc Martens are breathing their last.
There is a God, though I still doubt that it’s one the Salvation Army thinks it is.

By Artie Capshaw

Last time the Spitters played, they were goaded into actually spitting on a guy. One barely dodged civil lawsuit later, which you’ve read about to death already in other publications (stories through which you can barely discern whether they’re talking about a band or a street gang—honor the music, journos!), the band has paid the fine (a dry cleaning bill) and done the time (writing an apology). But the temptation to live up to their name remains, since they’re not changing it. Any publicity is good—or is that gobbed?—publicity. Spot The Spitters at Hamilton’s Wednesday, and hopefully you won’t be seeing them in court on Thursday….

Another high-security band battle:

Cop till you drop: a benefit for Friends of Police Statewide (FOPS—seriously, they couldn’t be Comrades and not Friends, for the sake of the acronym?) at the VFW Sunday. Five bands!: The Hassetts, Barney, Edgewood Day, The Howard Winchester Band and I Would Rather Not Be Using My Gun. What, they couldn’t get the Carey Mahoneys?

At the end of it all, the winner of a popularity contest gets an hour of recording time at Bolt Studios and a police escort to shows. (Kidding, kidding—a band-friendly police force only goes so far.)

On what she imagines Rihanna to be singing about: “You’re a dirty rat, and so am I. I love you, even though you’re a boy in a bikini and you look fat.”

On Usher: “He looks like a cool man. Does he have a gold earring?”

On the announcement that Miley Cyrus will perform next: “Oooh! Hannah Montana! She has a purple streak in her hair. I wonder if she has golden earrings!”

On the Black Eyed Peas: “What?! I wouldn’t put them in a bowl and eat them up!”

On the Black Eyed Peas winning a trophy for Favorite Pop/Rock Band: “That guy has a cool baseball hat. He must like Legos. Is he a cool guy? Does he have a gold earring?”

By now you’ve all seen the shows where bands play out of the backs of cars, plugging the guitars and amps into the lighter socket or wherever. Last week we glimpsed (and a glimpse is all you get) the latest intimate acoustic trend; closet concerts. You go to someone’ s modest house, wander about in the corridor, then get to figure out where  the music is coming from.

Jordan Crew, whose tunes are so gentle they already sound like he’s singing them under a pile of sweaters, has done a number of these gigs, to crowds ranging from one to four. He tells us “that hide and seek element is something I choose to bring to it. Basically, you know, these shows exist because that is the space you’ve got to work with, right?”

Bathrooms have better acoustics, as all us shower singers know, but Jordan quickly points out the disadvantages: ‘people need to use the behind, man. No better way of pissing of the housemates than not letting them piss, plus, you know, we’re talking about crowded houses here. Like, no maid service. Rooms can be rank. I mean, if we could play in a living room or a bedroom we would, but the houses are so  crowded.”

Counterintuitive modern social instinct: Embrace the closet. Next big venue of choice: under the bedsheets with a flashlight.

Bigger rooms, shorter sets:

Somebody finally got it together and stuck Firestone and Bridgestone on the same bill, Friday at the old (even better) fire station on Station Avenue (they were so clever with street names back in the day). Their names pile up neatly like bricks, but the bands also sound alike in other ways. They even shared a bassist, “Pladdy” Ver Planck, for a while. Discover and Destination complete the blow-out, though expect one or two  sets to get truncated since the hall’s only booked for three, count ’em three, hours. Whoever thought they could cram such auditory extravagance  into a mere 180- minutes  must’ve been -stoned… University Properties unveiled two new songs last  Tuesday at the Bullfinch: ‘Yo world,” a parody/rip-off of Liberry’s ‘Tasty Delite”: and “Gant,” about  scarf-clad college kids hanging on the corner where the convenience suite used to be….

Der Rosenkavalier

Comic opera by Richard Strauss, libretto revised from Hugo van Hoffmannsthal. (Closed). Performed last week at the reopening of the Thomas and Martha Wayne Performing Arts Center, Gotham City.  www.tanwpac.com.

Gotham City has a grand tradition of aggressively updated classics, and several of the better ones have invariably been interrupted by the city’s best-known superhero. Batman sometimes seems to be as inveterate a first-nighter as is local philanthropist Bruce Wayne himself.

It was at the reopening of the Thomas and Martha Wayne Performing Arts Center, named for Bruce’s deceased parents, that Batman’s most recent crime-fighting cameo appearance took place. By crashing this one, Batman was doing the audience, and Richard Strauss, a favor.

Batman, not to mention fellow caped party-crashers Catwoman and The Cavalier happily upstaged the allegedly “avant-garde” production of Der Rosenkavalier. Where the production was overdone and overprocessed—body mics! For a Strauss opera?!—the onstage abduction of the show’s rose-gartered diva was visceral and thrilling. (The diva in question, whom I won’t name since it would be unfair to criticize a performance marred by a sword pressed against her neck, survived the attempt on her life and is likely signing a deal for a major tour as I write this.)

We will defer to other authorities as to the relative villainy or heroism of the three interloping members of the alternative nightlife set. Batman, Catwoman and The Cavalier have all been accused of serious crimes, mitigating circumstances notwithstanding. Regarding their stage presence, however, The Cavalier is clearly the most openly ingratiating, and the only one who, in the midst of a real-life battle, acknowledges the entertainment aspects of the encounter and considers the aesthetic interests of the audience.

Certainly his rivals were more appropriately dressed for modernized opera. Their leather attire (Vinyl? It’s hard to tell in that lighting) matched the Madonna-esque or Moulin Rouge-retro costumes worn by the principal characters, while The Cavalier looked like a stereotypical supernumerary from William Tell. But it was the musketeerish Cavalier who had the most assured swashbuckling style.

Not only did The Cavalier ultimately escape through the backstage flyspace and catwalk,  getting the best of Catwoman and Batman, The Cavalier was in far better shape than this sorry Rosenkavalier. Bad blocking, overblown projections, rose imagery that would make Bette Midler vomit—where do we begin? Fortunately, we don’t have to, since no one will remember the show now, just the kidnaping attempt.

This is not to say that some shows do not stay with you even after serious crimes have become associated with them.

An outdoor production of Macbeth conceived by Dennis O’Neill and designed by Irv Novick and Dick Giordano in July of 1972 also featured an unexpected appearance by the Batman at one performance. But for those of us who saw that production again on nights when it was not uninterrupted by non-Shakespearean murderous intent, its own dark side (a condemnation of the drug-addled extremes of the Peace & Love era) resonated strongly.

The Batman himself, it’s been suggested, could be seen as a living tribute to the title character in another comical Strauss work, Die Fledermaus. That operetta, which has its own criminal justice overtones, was a particular favorite of Thomas Wayne. One wonders what the late Wayne would make of this Rosenkavalier, at a theater named in his honor. For that matter, what would Thomas Wayne think of Batman?

In any case, could we humbly request that the next time Batman interrupts a Gotham City performance, could it be something a bit more upbeat and modern and godfearing, for variety’s sake? Bruce Jay Friedman’s SteamBATh, perhaps, or Bat Boy—The Musical?

For further coverage of the opening of the Wayne Center, consult Batman/Catwoman: Follow the Money #1 by Howard Chaykin (January 2011, DC Comics.)