saw TRAGEDY @ Single Carrot on Friday, and am heading to closing weekend of THE GOAT, OR WHO IS SYLVIA @ Rep Stage today. It’s the end for THE GOAT, but TRAGEDY still has performances left, through July 11, and is wonderful. It’s Will Eno’s absurdist play about the sun going down and not coming back up, as reported by a crew of bewildered newscasters.
I read THE GOAT the year it came out, but have never seen it. I’m very excited, especially since the man playing the lead is a friend.
“The Tony nominating committee had to go scrounging under the couch cushions to fill out the important category of original score this year, resorting to the rare tactic of including music from two straight plays among the four entries. ”
– Christopher Isherwood, “The Musical Has Lost Its Voice,” NYT. Via AJ.
His take comes in contrast to David Kamp, also in the NYT this week, who is more sanguine about the “Glee Generation,” the new audience for musicals, and the new writers and lyricists of musicals:
“The Broadway babies are not the passive, bused-in tourist young people of yore who went to see “The Phantom of the Opera” or “A Chorus Line” simply because it was what one did when visiting New York. They’re true believers for whom love of musicals brings happiness, transcendence, and, strangely enough, social acceptance. “
Good, good ||8ve session yesterday: we worked on Dylan Thomas and revisited some Donne and Stevens. Piano and soprano saxophone. The energy of the group, yesterday, was much more about having the text function as one musical element in a sea of musical elements–a direction I don’t always go in, myself, but it was good to be pushed there. I think the results were wonderful. I left the session feeling really exhilarated.
After, went to JoeSquared on North Avenue and saw Second N8ture, a funk group (wonderful slow-paced cover of “Let’s Get It On”), and a horn-driven ensemble called the Chris Pumphrey Sextet. Their warmup reminded me of the experimental horn music Beth and I saw in Chicago, once upon a time — the three clarinetists in an art gallery, with everyone sitting around intently listening, and run after run after run of notes blurring together. But the actual set, once it started, was more traditional and programmatic — is that the right word? It had a lot of narrative elements, to my ear.. I liked them both. It’s good to be hearing more music.
Second N8ture plays at JoeSquared every second Saturday.
I also reread THE REAL THING (Stoppard) yesterday, which is what the title’s from. It’s Annie screaming at her producer into the phone, from a scene I directed for a class in high school. Scene 11. The first scene, I believe, I ever directed. With ED. I’m pretty sure. There are funny notes in my script, blocking and pacing notes. On the first page, someone has written (+ William Shakespeare) under the author’s name, (I think that was ED) and on the last page, “Kronk and Zadok Memorial Day,” after the oddly-named soldiers that Annie’s playwright lover is writing a bad television show about. (That was F.) The book is wrinkled and beat-up with weeks of rehearsal. It looks like what it is.
Concert was great on Friday, and I went to two panel sessions and a play for the New Russian Drama conference at Towson yesterday. More panels and plays today. I’ve been taking lots of notes and will put a more detailed report up here when it’s over.
My graduate classes are finished: all that remains in the semester is grading and studying for the final in an undergraduate music theory course I’ve been unofficially auditing. Not nothing, but considerably less something.
Thursday: Last class of the spring IFP section, followed by more of the Levis paper, followed by the end-of-first-year department conversations, followed by rehearsal for the Choral Society concert tomorrow, followed by more of the Levis paper.
Concert info:
Love and Madness: Choral Society Spring Concert
Come out to the Choral Society’s free spring concert, Love and Madness, on Friday, May 7 at 7:30 p.m. Concert held at First English Lutheran Church, on the corner of North Charles and 39th. Featuring works by Brahms, Schumann, and Britten. (The Britten’s text is Christopher “For I Will Consider My Cat Geoffry” Smart’s Jubilate Agno.)
Tonight is our department party, followed by the concert, followed by the department after-party.
Finally, this weekend I am attending a conference on new Russian drama, to be held at Towson, at which I’m going to see a number of East Coast friends who I haven’t seen since the trip to Poland last year. I’m really happy to be able to go.
I should blog about this. The chorus meeting on Saturday was really special. One of the collaborators brought in some different musical themes related to the content of “Emperor of Ice-Cream,” like ice-cream truck jingles combined with a moving left-hand bass, to layer together, so that the music with the words had the same sense of multiple voices. With just three of us, over time, we built up lots of layers: a humming voice, two speakers, two people on piano and trombone. I have discovered that I don’t mind using technology to achieve multiple layers as long as the vocal track has simultaneity that is genuinely recorded in one take, or track. (Many takes, fine, but multiple voices on the same track. You know what I mean.)
At any rate, it was wonderful. Lots of dense musical layers, two male tenor spoken voices with a really similar timbre, just blending together. Intense use of volume. It was good, good, and we’re meeting again Wednesday. I don’t know how, exactly, I have time for this. I don’t. I just don’t have time to not be doing it. Chorus jams, chorus impromptus…something. A place where voices, people with instruments, actors can be combined for the sake of the sounds. I hope, if it’s not hoping too much to hope this, that I never have to stop doing this kind of work.
Never is a lot. I wish that when I had gotten the chance to know the man who was the composer for the show I worked on in Denver that I had talked to him about some of this. I have thought about him a bit since starting this, and the way that his own music had so much simultaneity to it. I mean, all music has some, I suppose, but his really featured it. (He died months after the show was up.) He worked very closely with the text. For weeks while he couldn’t be in Denver, I wrote a sort of private rehearsal journal for him, telling him what we worked on in terms of character. He said it helped him write the music.
It doesn’t do any good to sit around thinking about what may or may not happen. It only does good to keep working.
The two readings of BWBS have now both happened. Amazing how two shows makes a run. We got to have both the opening-night and the closing-night energies, out of just two events. Some audience members at the talkback last night said some nice things about the juxtaposition of words and music, and how verse takes to music and vice versa, that made me feel that our work was worth it. A well deserved something-like-a-break coming up?
…Little more than a glance
Is enough to show
You just how small you are.
– Sondheim, “There Are Giants In The Sky,” INTO THE WOODS
When I think of it, which is always — okay. When I do more than think of it, I would like to write something about the Sondheim quote that gets requoted everywhere, the one that says that words when set to music must necessarily be simpler so they can be understood. I don’t entirely agree with it.
A free semi-staged reading of a new play, written by Matthew Smith (MFA – Poetry, Johns Hopkins)
This new drama imagines the last days of life on a ship of condemned Athenian youths sailing to Crete to be eaten by the Minotaur. Blue Water, Black Sails asks us to consider under what conditions we remain human and whether fidelity, sexual or scriptural, can retain meaning in the absence of hope.
Directed by Dara Weinberg
with Nathan Cooper, Genevieve de Mahy, Nathan Fulton, and Kaveh Haerian
and featuring musical guests Anne-Marie Thompson and Patrick Franklin
Saturday, March 27, at 2:30 PM and Wednesday, March 31, at 7:30 PM
Performances at Single Carrot Theatre. Both readings are free and expected to be full, please arrive 15 minutes prior to performance time. No reservations. Free parking in rear lot on Howard Street.
Call 443-844-9253 with any questions.
We hope that you’ll join us for this FREE reading of a new work!
www.singlecarrot.com
twitter.com/singlecarrot
This afternoon, we held the first meeting of the lyricist/composer collaboration group, which is what I’m calling it now instead of “musical theater collaboration group.”
We heard both recorded and live music, and had actors present to read aloud the lyrics. Spontaneously, some lyrics were read to some improvised music on the piano. This was more than I had hoped for, and exactly the kind of thing I wanted to make happen with this.
Apart from the usual obstacles, which serve to remind us that it’s still theater – bagel logistics*, enormous reception in lobby of Mattin confusing people, unopenable CD drive on monolithic scary Mac, one participant being down for the count with a kitchen injury – today’s meeting was very successful.
It remains to see what will come from this, but the mere fact of having put words together with music, in the presence of other people, is more than enough. I am becoming more a follower of late-period Grotowski, I think, in that the participants compose an audience. Not the only audience: but, still, an audience.
We’ll meet again in April.
*Economics of cream cheese: complicated.
A: How much cream cheese do you need for twenty people?
B: It depends how much they put on the bagels.
Dara Weinberg 