At Engine28 there was a “confessional” room, a video set-up where we could rant and argue and otherwise unload. Here’s one I never pushed to put on that website since there was a backlog of video projects. It actually works better here.
Having a Wonderful Time, Wish You Were Here
I’m still in L.A. The pop-up Engine 28, for which I and 20 fellow Fellows from USC Annenberg’s NEA Arts Journalism Institute for Theater been working all week, has popped back down and won’t be adding any new stories or posts. The site was a purposefully short-lived thing, which we loaded up with hundreds of articles, posts and videos in a mere five days. Those stories will remain up, so go read ‘em and let us know how we did. Some of the shows reviewed by us, particularly at the Hollywood Fringe, are still running for another week, and the The National Asian American Theater Festival is just getting started. The Theatre Communications Group conference and the Radar L.A. festival—the main events we covered at Engine28—finished up over the weekend.
I’ve seen 11 shows since I’ve been here. Links below are to my own writings, but there are plenty of others weighing in on most of these shows at Engine28:
Tuesday: Travis Preston & Poor Dog Group’s stage adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s Brewsie & Willie in a loft space downtown.
Wednesday: Rude Mechs’ The Method Gun at the Kirk Douglas Theater in L.A. (part of the Radar L.A. festival).
Thursday: Teatro Linea de Sombra’s Amarillo at Redcat (Radar L.A.)
Friday: Three Hollywood Fringe pieces: Cynthia Glucksman’s one-act comp CODA: The Debut Album at Complex Theatre, the gay glam rock murder mystery Charlie! The Death of Nancy Fullhouse and Girl Band in the Men’s Room (both at Fringe Annex).
Saturday: Paul F. Tompkin’s live Pod F. Tompkast at Largo at the Coronet.
Sunday: Back to the Fringe for Larry Blum’s idiosyncratic stageside career retrospective BLINK and You’ll Miss Me (Theatre Asylum), the musical comedy karma of Lost Moon Radio Episode 10 (Fringe Mainstage) and Hungry River Theatre Co.’s credulity-challenged Cowboy Mouth (back to Theatre Asylum). Then I caught the calming if kinetic coda of Chelfitsch’s Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech at L.A. Theatre Center (Radar L.A.).
Not to mention all those lectures, symposia, parties, pitch proposal round tables and late-night HBO in the hotel room.
On the other hand, I missed The Fleshtones at Cafe Nine back in New Haven.
Categories: Film, West Coast Theater
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Chris Arnott is in L.A. riding Engine 28
If my output on this site dims this week, yet you still wonder what I think of the state of American theater these days, head to the just-launched Engine28.com.
The site, which magically appeared last night at midnight and will last for just a week, represents the hopes and glories of dozens of journalists who’ve gathered under the banner of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s 2011 NEA Institute in Theater and Musical Theater.
That onerous academic-sounding title scares me, as does the mere concept of school, yet I was the guy responsible for threading it as nimbly as possible through the introductory article which you’ll find on the site’s homepage today.
Luckily for me, thus far this NEA/Annenberg experience (which began Monday and lasts through June 22) has resembled a newsroom more than it has a classroom. We’ve been on the ground covering stories since day one. Even when we do amass for a lecture or discussion, there’s usually a fancy meal involved.
Categories: West Coast Theater
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A Strong Second: An Interview with Cecily Strong of the Second City Touring Company, at Long Wharf
The press materials for the Long Wharf’s six-performance visit from the seasoned Second City improv troupe ballyhoos that “Belushi, Colbert, Carell, Murray, Radner, Myers, Fey, Meadows, Farley, Aykroyd all came through Second City.” But the institution, which has formalized a distinctive brand of scripted sketch comedy with improv incursions, is grander than any one of them,
“It’s still a school,” says touring company member Cecily Strong (front and center in the photo above) in a phone chat from the company’s Chicago home base a few weeks ago. “We’ve all been through classes for every level. Going to classes is not a requisite for being cast, but doing it is certainly not a guarantee.”
The company’s used to one-night stands, so doing six shows over five days in the same space should be a class in itself. “I was excited to hear about it,” Strong says. The last time she played Connecticut was what sounds like an oxymoron—a clean one-nighter. It was a single performance for family audiences at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford. “For students and parents,” Strong explains. “A clean show. That sort of thing is decided ahead of time. It’ll be a different show for this crowd.”
Strong’s done other Second City projects—“I just understudied a role on the mainstage here. I do videos. I play at other theaters around Chicago. Your headshot is always floating around the building”—but says the touring company has become “my main focus.” Strong honed in on a comedy career as a student at CalArts, where she got a degree in theater. “There, I focused on comedy, so I was told, ‘Go to the Groundlings.’ Moving Midwest, she fell in with Second City. The workload can be intense, and Second City members are always second-guessing which projects might lead to bigger opportunities. “Lorne Michaels comes every year” to assess the Second City troops for possible Saturday Night Live duty. Strong hasn’t done that audition yet, seeking to prepare herself more first, but she has been at Second City when a writer was chosen for SNL.
The touring company does scenes from the classic Second City repertoire; “time-tested,” as Strong puts it, “a lot of old standard favorites.” Second City’s been around since the ‘60s, but to many “classic: means the era when current TV stars like Tina Fey were there. One of the sketches she wrote for the company before she landed on SNL (along with the sketch’s co-writer, Scott Adsit) is in the set for the Long Wharf run.
Days before the show was set to open, the Long Wharf announced that local TV and radio personalities would be guest performers in the shows: Channel 8’s Chris Velardi tonight, WELI’s morning drive-time guy Vinnie Penn on June 16 and, onSaturday, Geoff Fox (whose brand new home is the local Fox TV—a coincidence bound to inspire mirth among the Second Citizens) on Saturday the 18th. (The Friday night and Sunday matinee performances will be bereft of broadcasters.)
The Second City groups which get sent out on tour often fly from Chicago for a weekend, and seldom need to do the rock band thing of getting in a van for weeks at a time. That can of course add to the improvisational insanity, but there’s also the security in all the members having gone through the same training. In the case of the company Long Wharf’s getting, Strong says “I joined with the rest of them about a month ago. Some have been together for a while. We do travel together and stay at the same hotel. This group appears particularly close.”
When the New Haven run is up, it’s back to Chicago for the troupe, and a new round of assignments and workshops and auditions. “It can get crazy,” Strong says, meaning offstage this time, “but this is such a dream. You make it work.”
Categories: Connecticut Theaters, Long Wharf Theatre, Previews, Uncategorized
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Bands Which Share Names with Sam Shepard Plays
1. Cowboy Mouth. This one could be genuinely confusing to clubgoers/theatergoers, since the play the band is named after is a rock-and-roll affair developed by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith that actually gets staged in rock clubs fairly often. That’s what inspired this list, actually.
2. Angel City: Australian rock band, aka The Angels. Known for the moody metal track “Face the Day” (about not wanting to). Shepard’s play Angel City debuted in 1976. The Angels, who had been around since 1970 in various forms, took the new band name Angel City in 1980 to distinguish themselves from similarly named bands such as Angel.
3. Buried Child. The title has its own rock resonance since it’s a song by the influential and extremely loud band Swans. There’s a band called Buried Child with five songs (including “Self-Caesarean” and “Crucifiction”), but very little bio info, on Facebook.
4. True West. Pop band of the Paisley Underground psychedelic pop scene in the early 1980s.
5. Savage Love. Blues rock trio from Seattle.
6. Inacoma. There’s a Youtube video of this young Malaysian band playing at the IVM Band Battle in Australia in 2009. Sam Shepard wrote a play called Inacoma in 1977.
7. Mad Dog Blues. There are Mad Dog Blues Bands Chapel Hill, North Carolina, London, England, and Edmonton, Canada and throughout the known world. Sam Shepard wrote his play Mad Dog Blues in 1971.
8. Can’t find a band called The God of Hell (one of Shepard’s more recent works, from 2004). But I can’t hear Shepard’s title without ’60s supergroup The Crazy World of Arthur Brown leaping into my brain: “I am the god of hellfire—and I bring you…. Fire!” (Well, what are we expecting the god of hellfire to bring? The communion water?)
Categories: Lists, Rock Theater
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Too Tony
I had some 12 straight hours of traveling yesterday: by car to the Hartford airport, by plane from there to Dallas/Fort Worth, by foot roaming around the Texas airport during a delay of the next plane, by plane again to L.A., where I’ve never been. The highway trip from the airport to the downtown hotel was my introduction to the storied vastness of the city. Feeling tiny and lost but mostly exhausted, I holed up in the hotel room rather than venturing out. My main excuse: Couldn’t miss the Tony telecast.
It’s still somewhat bewildering to me that in this age of Glee, Broadway still is forced to put all its eggs in one three-hour basket. Why there wouldn’t be demand for a more streamlined advertorial “We Love Broadway” type of special bewilders me. The hometown humblings and shout-outs and weepy breakdowns of the speeches have their own appeal, but abut messily with the dance spectacles. And there’s really no room for song-and-dance numbers built around the movie or TV stars the ceremony has on hand, but they’re compelled to do them too. “Overwhelming” would be the word, but in McLuhanist TV terms it’s not overwhelming at all, just crushingly, busily quaint.
Still, in all that kitchen sink pell-mell (the everything-but kind of kitchen sink, not the John Osborne kind) there were major elements missing. The most obvious one was the word “Fuck,” When you have given Samuel Jackson license to talk about a show properly titled The Motherfucker with the Hat and there’s not the hint of a bleep, it’s more notable than if he HAD said something censorable. Same with the South Park creators, who were eerily in synch with all the harmony and love and backpatting that is the common language on Broadway. They were on better than their best behavior; they seemed like whole other people with different cultural values. It reminded me of the similar spectacle of Pete Townshend accepting an award for The Who’s Tommy years ago. He seemed sapped of all satirical urges. Thank goodness for the down-to-earth, self-mocking star attitude of Bono and The Edge then. And for Brooke Shields—when Brooke Shields is your shock element, I guess you’ve really shocked.
I honestly didn’t think The Book of Mormon would do as well as it did. If you accept the common view that Tony voters vote for what helps their bottom-line in the long run, honoring shows which could rate a national tour if they only got a little more attention… well, Book of Mormon’s fortune was already made.
In any case, I’ve never minded that Broadway producers are crass opportunists. Somebody in the theater has to be. What you could take away from the overwhelmth of this year’s Tony’s is a sense of genuine and dogged innovation, whether you’re talking about grand-scale puppetry, coarse drama titles or even the dreaded yet technologically intimidating Spider-Man.
So that’s how I spent my first night in L.A. Today I begin hobnobbing with the small theater and regional theater types to whom that sort of diversity and progressivity and innovation is an everyday thing. I’m turning off the TV and happily heading to the trenches.
Categories: Television
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Turn Off Your Cell Phones, ‘Cause Whoopi Says So
Is It Just Me? Or Is It Nuts Out There?
By Whoopi Goldberg (Hyperion New York 2010)
Whoopi Goldberg’s scattershot career has probably disappointed more people than it has impressed. She has the distinction of being one of the only African Americans to win an Oscar and one of the only African American characters on Star Trek. She’s had talk shows, Broadway shows and minstrel shows (her infamous blackface act at the Friar’s Club with then-beau Ted Danson).
The first to be unnerved by the odd twists and turns of her professional life were her very first fans, theatergoers. Whoopi Goldberg’s first wide success was in a one-woman show written by her and directed by Mike Nichols. That’s an impressive calling card, and she should be congratulated for revisiting it a few years ago.
Goldberg has some stage notes in her book Is It Just Me? Or Is It Nuts Out There?, and she’s definitely in her autopilot, mass-commodification mode here. The book is about pet peeves, from toe-nail clipping to “stadium behavior,” with frequent “Civil Person’s Handy List” and “Self-Test” interludes.
Right in the middle, there’s a chapter called “Louder, They Can’t Hear You in the Lobby,” with a sub-section entitled “The Stage Theater” (a lovely layman’s expression for “not a movie theater” which I hadn’t encountered before). It begins:
“As a performer on the live stage, one thing that irritates me is people coming in late.” Never mind that’s there’s an unstoppable theater legend about Goldberg keeping Meryl Streep and the rest of the cast of a reading of Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter waiting while she reportedly shopped; this is not a book about self-berating, or details. Goldberg’s instructions on how to behave in the theater could be taken from the program of any smug regional theater, lightly translated into Whoopi’s voice:
“As a performer on the live stage, one thing that irritates me is people coming in late… Ringing cell phones are also a pain…
Then the screed turns into a much more personalized, impassioned spiel against those who shoot video on their phones at live shows. She rightly complains that doing so is “stealing my work,” and says she’s not afraid to break character and stop shows cold if she catches someone videoing her:
Am I the first one to wonder when a nice night in the theater stopped being just a night in the theater?
This cell phone recording is why so many comics and solo performers have changed the way they do things now. For instance, there’s a whole lot of stuff now that I just won’t say. I won’t say it because I don’t want my performance on YouTube out of context. And I can’t even find you. It’s anonymous. And that’s cowardly. You can edit it, you can cut it, you can do whatever you want to it and take my work someplace maybe I wasn’t going with it. But not one else knows that because they weren’t there.
Excuse me for turning this into something other than a diatribe against copyright infringement, but this idea of audience members distorting the effect of a live performance by sharing their personal recollection of bits of it—isn’t that the entire history of world theater? And here’s another deep insight inspired by a shallow peeve screed: Mightn’t performers acclimate themselves to the new technology rather than self-censor around it? If you need to preserve context, figure out the medium and the method in which you can do—including enlisting the understanding of audiences.
I’m showing my colors here. I’ve always detested those theater-manners guides in programs because I think that audiences should determine those groundrules rather than the theater’s managing director. A rowdy performance might incite some rowdiness among the groundlings. Not sure how cell phones will eventually fit in to the theater landscape, but I’m tired of warnings about them (and the titters which always greet the caveat to “unwrap your candy”) upstaging all other emotions in the theater, just moments before showtime. Not sure there’s any easy answer here, but am pretty sure we’ll well past Whoopi Goldberg’s mere glance of disdain and “Folks are so rude” folksiness.
Categories: Books & Magazines
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What is this dagger I see before me?
Excerpt from Campus Tramp by Andrew Shaw (a pseudonym of famed mystery writer Lawrence Block), a 1959 softcore porn novel newly reissued as a trade paperback (Creeping Hemlock Press, 2010):
She kept working, knowing that she would have to withdraw at the end of the term anyway, knowing that the work she was doing wouldn’t keep her in school and wouldn’t really do much of anything for her. But she had to prove to herself that she could do it, had to keep her head above water and wind up with her courses passed. Proving her point to Dean Maples was secondary; proving it to herself meant a lot more to her for the time being.
Besides, as it turned out it was easier to keep going than to stop. It was like the line in Macbeth about being so far steeped in blood that to go on is easier than to return. She was in the study habit now for better or for worse. It was normal to go to classes, normal to read and write, normal to spend all her waking hours at her desk. Learning was becoming an end in itself, strangely enough, and she was actually beginning to enjoy the whole thing.
It was ironic, she thought. Now that there was no more opportunity for her to go on with her work, now she was getting a kick out of it. If only she had approached the whole problem that way from the beginning! She was just starting to realize how different the wholething might have been. If she had worked on her schoolwork while she was with Don, if a secondary interest in the academic part of school had kept her busy when she wasn’t with him, then she might have had a chance to keep him. If she hadn’t been so damned possessive because he was all she had, then he might not have been quite so anxious to get her off his neck. Well, whatever had happened had happened. There was no sense crying over spilled milk…or over a fractured maidenhead, for that matter.
Read and study and sleep.
Sleep and study and eat.
Eat and read and sleep.
That was about all she did, right up to the week of exams, right up to the last and hardest week of the term.
Just read and study and eat.
And sleep with Joe Gunsway.
Categories: Books & Magazines
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NHTJ on WNPR
HOW I’LL SPEND MY SUMMER VACATION: ALICE COOPER, THE VERY PERSONIFICATION OF SCHOOL BEING OUT, IS COMING TO FOXWOODS CASINO.
Hey, I just spent an hour yammering live on the Colin McEnroe show on WNPR. I guess they post podcasts of past episodes here.
The topic was “Summer Arts Preview,” and the other guests were Frank Rizzo of the Hartford Courant and Maurice Robertson of the Hartford Jazz Festival (July 15-17 this year), poet Tony Hoagland (who’s reading at the Sunken Garden Poetry Series June 8) and, in a whimsical ‘phone interview, Terry Adams, who’s bringing his new line-up of NRBQ to the Clang Thang weekend at the Best Western Colonial Inn in East Windsor June 24-26. I was the token Southern Connecticut correspondent.
Eveyone had an Arts & Ideas fave to plug: mine was Bang on a Can All-Stars. But I also got to hype the O’Neill Center’s Puppetry Conference (June 11-19), the Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival (June 23-Aug. 12), Alice Cooper at Foxwoods (Aug. 13) and The Wiggles at the Oakdale (June 19). Totally missed a chance to get in a word about the Ideat Village festival or the New Haven/Leon Sister City Theater Project, but whoosh!—how these radio things fly by.
Categories: Previews, Radio, Rock Theater
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Twenty Bands Named After Shakespeare Plays
Summer is the time for multi-stage, stylistically diverse rock festivals. It’s also the time for multi-stage, stylistically diverse Shakespeare festivals. Why not combine the two? All the world’s a stage, after all.
- Titus Andronicus. Rabble-rousing rock/punk outfit from New Jersey. Their album The Monitor has Civil War undertones, and a character in the video “A More Perfect Union” is shown reciting from a 19th century edition of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus. The band Titus Andronicus is currently on tour with Okkervil River. They played here in New Haven just this past Saturday, and in Hartford earlier this month at the B.O.M.B. Festival.
- Cymbeline. British/Spanish acoustic folk-indie duo.
- The Much Ado Band. “Barn dance band” from Hereford/Shropshire, UK.
- Taming the Shrew. Jazz/metal act from Lewiston, Maine.
- Pericles. Contemporary punk band responsible for the album Fuck Your Etiquette.
- Macbeth. Self-proclaimed “Gothic metal band” founded in Italy in 1995.
- Merry Wives of Windsor. Celtic/folk ensemble from Pasadena.
- Cressida. British prog-rockers who recorded for the Vertigo label in the late 1960s.
- Gentlemen of Verona. Post-modern garage rock band from Belgium.
- Comedy of Errors. 1980s prog-rock quartet from Glasgow, Scotland.
- As You like it. An emo band from Belgium.
- As You Like It. Arock band from Denmark.
- As You Like It. A wedding band from Boston, Mass.
- Love’s Labour’s Lost. German gothic/”medieval” foursome formed in 2005.\
- King Lear. Blues band from Arizona.
- Coriolanus. American industrial/electronica with heavy string sounds.
- Romeo and Juliet. Self-described as “a long-distance psych-rock collboration between Jon-Michael Kerestes of Pittsburgh and Leeni of Seattle.”
- Othello Band. Romanian keyboard-heavy pop/rock.
- Merchant of Venice, Canadian alternative/punk band.
- Hamlet, a heavy metal five-piece from Spain.
Categories: Lists, Rock Theater, Shakespeare
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