Ever Present Orchestra with Alvin Lucier / 2019

the music of our own ears

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ever Present Orchestra with Alvin Lucier, at REDCAT (the Roy and Edna Disney / CalArts Theater / March 26, 2019, I saw the performance with Marjorie Perloff

 

Born in 1931, Alvin Lucier was one of the central composers (along with Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman) of what was called the Sonic Arts Union, comprising works that dealt with acoustical properties of music and highly structured compositions which are manipulated through computers and the relation of acoustical variances of the instruments involved, which, in last night’s REDCAT concert, consisted of electronic guitars, glockenspiel, saxophones, violins, and piano.

      Lucier’s work requires a closely knit gathering of musicians, each of whom must work in tandem and simultaneously to echo and reverberate the sounds of the others, or, in the case of the first work of the evening, Ricochet Lady (2016), where player Trevor Saint (for whom the piece was written) works with the ricocheting sounds of the wall against which the instrument is placed.

     The group, the Ever Present Orchestra, founded by Bernhard Rietbrock in 2017 (and consisting of Oren Ambarchi, Jan Thoben, Trevor Saint, Charles Ng, Valentine Michaud, Joan Oliver Arcos, Vera Weber, Christina Moser, Beatrice Harmon, Kris Rahamad, and Rebekka Thies), brilliantly bring to life a tonal tonic.

     To listen to Lucier’s music one must have patience and an ear for subtle shifts of harmonics created by the other players. For this composer no sound is pure; it lives in an environment of rooms, other players, and distortions of air, artificial machines, and our own eardrums. Somewhat like Cage—yet using almost the opposite tactics of Cage’s renowned “silence”—this composer reveals how the listener has a major role in creating the music—no matter how precisely performed—is perceived. Even a cough, a yawn, or an exiting audience member alternates what we hear. Fortunately, the mostly young and enthusiastic crowd in the filled theater sat raptly, clearly enthusiastic to hear the orchestra’s West Coast premiere.

      While Saint’s glockenspiel playing as surely an early crowd-pleaser, repeating 3 and 4 note chromatic changes along with the wall’s reverberations, my favorite piece of the evening was the third piece, Two Circles from 2012, wherein four electronic guitars span a range of 18 ascending and descending semi-tones, creating, as the program notes suggest, “audible beating at speeds determined by the closeness of the players’ tones and those of the sweeping waves.” The beats occur when the instruments differ slightly in their harmonics, and the waves are produced by unison passages which, alternating, create the title’s “two circles,” almost as if recreating a slightly oppositional and communal antiphon, the music pulling at moments apart to then return to modulate once more.

      In many respects Two Circles is related to the other two works presented here: Braid from the same year, and the more recent Semicircle (2017). In the first, the interchanges occur between the electric guitars whose tones rise and fall in a four-strand pattern, what musicians describe as a “braid.” But as in Two Circles a tension (a harmonic and rhythmic beat) arises through the introduction of three wind instruments. Once again, the further apart of the musical score, the greater the “beating,” which playing in unison quickly resolves.

     Written for this very orchestra, Semicircle, in which 12 musicians play up and down the harmonic register, presenting what the composer describes as “sweeps” in unison. It is only the pianist who at one-second intervals, reveals these or, perhaps, “tracks” them by reminding us sonically of the tensions or “beats.” Perhaps it was the near unanimity of this piece, which shifts Lucier’s composition into the realm, almost, of a tone poem, that led me to feel less generous about this work.

      But, obviously, Lucier’s work is a cerebral experience, a great demand for a somewhat elderly man late at night.

 

     The last piece, one of his most famous, makes that cerebral requirement quite clear. Lucier himself performed his 1969 work, after the intermission, I Am Sitting in a Room. In this famed piece the composer speaks into a tape recorder, simply explaining his process and intentions:

 

            I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am

            recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it

            back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies

            of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my

            speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What

            you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the

            room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as

            a demonstration of the physical fact, but more as a way to smooth

            (here the composer stutters the first letters of smooth, s-s-s-s) out

            irregularities my speech might have.

 

     Apparently Lucier sometimes stutters in his everyday life. But the lesson of this rather amazing work, once again, is how sound travels, and how we perceive it, particularly, as in the old telephone game of information passed from one to another and another and another, when repeated again and again. By the end of this work, quite obviously, the message has been lost, the network that we all rely upon for comprehension broken simply through the process of our abilities to hear and assimilate it. Inflections, rhythms are all we have left to make sense of the message.

     The simple statements spoken into a tape recorder before us become near gibberish, and we are left with the fact that meaning is simply transitory. A story told to us by a friend will never be the same story we tell to another friend or what that friend tells to another, and so on. Sound is immediate; but, of course, it never truly is that either.

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2019). 

Gore Vidal | The Best Man / 2012

the compromise

by Douglas Messerli

Gore Vidal The Best Man / New York, Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, the performance I saw was a matinee on May 5, 2012

 

The Best Man is a play of political demands, subterfuge, lies, blackmail, and, most importantly, compromise—although the hero of Vidal’s witty political parable, William Russell (John Larroquette), refuses compromise with his arch-enemy, Joe Cantwell (Eric McCormack) or with his own conscience, and in that respect both Cantwell and the out-going President Arthur Hockstader (James Earl Jones) are correct in insisting that Russell is not a political beast!

     The compromise that Russell makes is a rare one for any political contender, sacrificing his own career and his political battle for power for moral victory and, possibly, a reaffirmation of his relationship with his wife.

      In this star-studded revival of Gore Vidal’s 1960 comic-drama Candice Bergan, Kerry Butler, Angela Lansbury, and Jefferson Mays together with Larroquette, McCormack and Jones, act up a storm, somewhat cloaking the fact that, for all its noise and hoopla (the sound of booming applause of convention goers and cackling reporters being broadcast through the theater’s sound system even during intermissions) the play is really a series of drawing-room comedic skits of wit and bluff.

     Like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the revival of which I witnessed a night earlier, The Best Man encapsulates, moreover, a vision of a world that no longer exists: the whirl of backroom politics, where decisions for party nominations were played out in convention hotel suites, votes bought and sold through a series of brokerings based on individual reputations smeared with lies, rumor, scandal, and partial truths.

     If, given today’s preordained presidential campaigns where all has been long-decided before the convention’s bland rhetorical flourishes and flag-waving remonstrations, we might feel superior to the nasty bloodbaths of earlier party gatherings, we might take note that, at least in Vidal’s fantasy, politics still mattered and the individual candidates, freed from appealing to the whole of the American populace, could at least imagine (even while recognizing the reality was something far different) that their personal values might matter.

     While Vidal remains, ultimately, cynical of that process—awarding the nomination to a “best man” whom neither of the leading candidates seem to have met and who know nothing of his values—both Russell and Cantwell, as different as they are, attempt to forge their campaigns based on very personal visions.

    Today elections are won more on “general” appeal—which one might describe as campaigns based on generalities and artful waffling as opposed to personal integrity and individual history. One need only note how current Republican candidate Romney attempts to cover over his own tracks regarding his Massachusetts support of health coverage and silence his family roots in Mexico—ancestors of his whom engaged in polygamy, or perceive Obama’s attempts to downplay his Indonesian childhood and diminish his real accomplishments on such issues as health care, currently unpopular with right-leaning independents and aspects of which may soon be overturned by the Supreme court.

     It is true that in Vidal’s play both major candidates have something to hide: Russell, his nervous breakdown and its attending medical history, as well as the subsequent failure of his marriage; Cantwell, his possible involvement in his young military days with a homosexual roommate. But, in real terms, it hardly matters whether the latter was involved in sexual acts or in merely squealing on his roommate, for in the context of the play either action  demonstrates his moral hypocrisy and his commitment to “the ends justifying the means.” Russell’s bout with mental exhaustion, it is clear, has little to do with his career, including in his more recent performance as Secretary of State, and, in reality, may simply indicate his inability to accept simple solutions to complex issues. And both men, despite their real and implicated blackmail, still stake their claims on their political careers and personal values reflected in their public service. While Cantwell’s politics are ruthless, opportunistic, and play directly to the ignorance of public perception, he is nevertheless a man of action, a true political beast who will clearly accomplish whatever he sets out to do. Despite Russell’s superior sense of ethics and his erudite comprehension of American and world history, he is, as his campaign advisor and the current President point out, a man who when faced with critical choices, wavers—or, to express it another way, is a man who stops to think before acting— a fatal flaw, evidently, for any leader.

     While one might be tempted to compare Vidal’s rivals with today’s presidential candidates, accordingly, Obama is no Russell, despite his intelligent projection of moral issues, just as Romney is no Cantwell, despite his obviously expedient shifts to the far right in order to appeal to those constituents. We live today in a time where everything is far more prepackaged and, consequently, morally blurred.

     The politics of Vidal’s parable, represented by the enormous compromise of candidate Russell, are no longer possible in our society of political and social extremes. As in the Miller play, I suspect, very few members of the audience under sixty—none of whom I spotted at the Schoenfeld matinee I attended—would be able to comprehend a drama so centered on one man’s moral scruples. When did morality and politics ever share the same bed? today’s voters might scoff. While in 1960 Vidal might have pointed to John Kennedy (even if mistakenly), today we have “hot mic” statements from our President admitting to Russian President Medvedev that during the election he needs the “flexibility” of not saying what he eventually might. And anyone reading the daily papers perceives that even expediently political compromises rarely occur in the chambers of congress. Morality today, apparently, often has little to do with a truly thought-out position. A man like Vidal’s Russell, sad to say, is either a political dinosaur or a literary fabrication at best. And a man of compromise, as Republic Senator Dick Lugar's defeat yesterday confirmed, is someone to be shunned.

 

New York, Minetta Tavern, May 6, 2012; Los Angeles, May 8, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2012).

Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh | “I’ve Got Your Number” from Little Me / 1962

my favorite broadway musical songs: “i’ve got your number”

by Douglas Messerli

Composers: Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh

Performer: Sven Swenson (original cast recording, 1962

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnNzeYVYrVE

Composers: Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh

Performer: Cy Coleman and the Cy Coleman trio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4x-Puo9ef0

Composers: Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh

Performer: Cy Coleman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiauDSB0Q4o

Composers: Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh

Performer: Peggy Lee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE-rgcAORRg

Composers: Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh

Performer: Tom Wopat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltVaOzRfrTs

 

Originally produced on Broadway in 1962, with a book by Neil Simon, based on Patrick Dennis’ fiction, and music and lyrics by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, Little Me was dominated by the presence of one man, Sid Ceasar, who played all of Belle’s lovers and husbands, young and old.

     Yet the one song that stood out in the musical was not performed by Ceasar, but by the handsome, openly gay (he died of AIDS in 1993), Sven Svenson, playing George, a nightclub owner who seductively does something like a striptease (choreographed by Bob Fosse) as he courts the forlorn Belle, promoting his cause that they should hook up:

 

I've got your number,

I know you inside out,

You ain't no Eagle Scout,

You're all at sea.

Oh yes, you brag a lot,

Wave your own flag a lot,

But you're unsure a lot,

You're a lot

Like me.

 

He succeeds of course, Belle is most certainly no “Eagle Scout,” getting her pregnant.

     If Leigh’s lyrics are quite clever, it is Coleman’s jazzy score that makes this song so powerful. Just to hear his own jazz rendition of it, played by his Cy Coleman trio, makes this utterly apparent.

     The original version was not a big hit, but was revived in 1982, with Victor Garber and James Coco co-sharing the original Sid Ceasar characters (it lasted only 36 performances, but when I stopped by the boxoffice, I couldn’t get a ticket), and revived once more in 1998 (this time lasting for 99 performances), with Martin Short and the great Faith Prince playing the major roles.

     The song has been recorded extensively by various singers, including Jack Jones, George Chakiris, Nancy Wilson, Tom Wopat, and Peggy Lee; but Swenson’s version still rings right in my ears, although the sung version by Coleman is so good that it seems as if he might have written it for himself.

 

Los Angeles, December 21, 2017

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance

Lula Washington Dance Company / 2020

pleasure and faith

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lula Washington Dance Theatre / the performance I saw was with Lita Barrie at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Bram Goldsmith Theater on January 30, 2020

 

As I recently wrote in another review, Los Angeles has suddenly been blessed by a plethora of dance performances in the manner of our long-time wealth of art exhibits, theater presentations (we do not have a Broadway here, but we do have dozens and dozens of smaller venues that might make New York independent theater envious), and, the always plentiful presentations of great music throughout the city. The Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Redcat (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in the lower level of the grand Walt Disney Center), the Broad Theatre in Santa Monica, the downtown Amundsen Theater, the UCLA series, and numerous other venues have suddenly perceived, thank heaven, that Angelenos also have a desire to experience dance in all its various manifestations.

       How wonderful, accordingly, that the Wallis determined to celebrate a local, but internationally-famous African-American company that has been here, under the tutelage of Lula and Erwin Washington, now for 40 years.

  

     This primarily black company, moreover, does not itself lack diversity in its company, which in the performance I saw the other night, includes Joniece Boykins, Quron Clarks, Tehran Dix, Danny Guerrera, Ongelle Johnson, Kozue Kasahara, Martez McKinzy, Haniyyah Tahirah, Michael Tomlin, III, and Jack Virga-Hall—which to these tired old eyes seemed to represent also Hispanic and Asian dancers.

       The diversity of the company is a perfect fit with Washington’s own choreographic achievements.

     First of all, the dances of this program—“Hands Up: A Testimony” (choreographed by Tommie Waheed Evans), “King” (by Washington), “To Lula with Love/Warrior” (by former company dancer Christopher Huggins), “Zayo” (by Esie Mensah), “Fragments” (by Washington), and “Reign” (by Rennie Harris)—suggest Washington’s ability to incorporate a wide range of choreographic partners, which strengthens her vision. Two of the “world premiere” performances—“Hands Up: A Testimony” and “To Lula with Love/Warrior”—are the most exciting works of this event, although Washington’s “King” is a dance one desires to see over and over again.

    Like many a youthful company, Washington’s dancers grandly leap into air to return nearly effortlessly to ground, rolling across the stage floor only to stand and express their energy yet again. This is a company of true dance pleasure, a joy to behold, and in accordance which Lula herself attempts to engage the audience, getting them to stand at their seats, clap in rhythm, and basically enter into the process of simple movement. It is almost as if she were turning her obviously brilliant abilities as a teacher upon the visitors witnessing her results. Brava.

     But there is something entirely different here from most other dance companies. Dancers, even some of the most contemporary, generally express their art as a series of group simulations of congruities. Yes, there are always alterations to the more patterned dancing, the grand jetés of male and female performers, the constant shifts of patterning and deconstruction. Yet Washington’s company seem almost to represent a paring of mismatches, women of height and wide girth, with thinner males, taller males poised against delicately dainty females.

        And because of this, most of Washington’s dancers work in what I might describe (and my theater-going partner, Lita Barrie, described) as a kind of syncopation. At moments it appears that each dancer is performing slightly to a different beat from the others, which creates another kind of energy based on the individual instead of the corps de ballet. In Washington’s works, bodies themselves are diverse, and they move differently from one another.

        There is a kind of honesty here, a revelation of the difference as opposed to the similarity of most dance companies. It is almost as if she has invited a group of remarkable dancers onto her stage to figure it out for themselves.

         I found the least interesting work of the evening to be Washington’s long and evolving political commentary, “Fragments.” It was not that I—or anyone in the audience in which I sat—disagreed with her dancer’s stated sentiments which they then transformed into emotional expressions through the movement of their bodies. Indeed, they applauded them. They were powerful, but perhaps too plentiful. We all got the idea, in the era of Trump, immediately; yet in her attempt to give each of her company members their own attempt to express their anger and love, we eventually lose interest in something we might all care very much about.

       Yet, the last piece, “Reign” seemed to redeem it all, as the dancers attend a wild Saturday night evening before returning to church the next morning to express those same emotions in a completely new manner. Pleasure and faith for most of us do not always make a perfect fit; but for this community, which Harris created for Lula Washington’s 30th anniversary in 2010, we suddenly perceive that the two are the very same thing. The expression of the body is both pleasure and faith, and we cannot help but believe that one is totally necessary for the other.

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2020).

Frank Loesser, Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, and Willie Gilbert | How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying / 2011

the company way

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frank Loesser (music and lyrics), Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, and Willie Gilbert (book, based on the work by Shepherd Mead) How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying / New York, Al Hirschfeld Theater, 2011 / the performance I attended was a matinee on May 7, 2011

 

I will admit to a certain sentimental attachment to the American Musical Theater, although I feel, given the quality of the musicals for which I care, there is no reason for apology. Most of my friends who cannot comprehend my love of this genre have perhaps never seen a musical comedy before 1970, when the genre, as far as I'm concerned, almost died. The handful of good musicals since that time have been so few (most of them composed by Stephen Sondheim) that one might almost say that the form has died out. Today, except for revivals, musical comedy is for audiences who like songs consisting of three memorable notes, repeated through chorus upon chorus of driveling lyrics sung at very high decibels. But then, we do, from time to time, have wonderful revivals of the older works of this genre that remind us of what the musical theater was all about.

     How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, the 1961 New York Drama Critics and Pulitzer Prize-winning gem by Frank Loesser, was not, I am afraid, one of the "wonderful revivals." I do not mean to suggest that it was not worth attending, for, at moments, this version was absolutely delightful, but overall it simply couldn't live up the standards of the original and the movie version.

    I have never before sat in an audience with so many first-time theater-goers, mostly teenage girls and their slightly stunned families in tow. The girl next to me was celebrating her sixteenth birthday and "just had see" Daniel Radcliffe, this revival's star attraction, "in the flesh." In some senses the freshness of the fans was a treat. And Radcliffe, a trouper already at age 22, was not about to disappoint them.

    Radcliffe, who I suspect has by this time quite settled into his performance, was better by far than the critics led audiences to believe. Although, as the New York Times suggested he is not a natural "song and dance man" (I am not quite sure what that means, and when I think of such figures I can only conjure up Robert Preston and Robert Morse, the original J. Pierrepont Finch, neither of them great singers or even able dancers!), he can now belt out a tuneful song and, with the help of the able chorus, jump, leap, and hoof it across the stage quite ably. Once in a while you can still see him grimace a bit, as if muttering deep within, "I'm gonna be great!" And, at moments, he is! If nothing else you have to recognize that Radcliffe is giving his all, which unfortunately, if you have seen Robert Morse in the role—I saw only the movie version, but listened to the original cast recording so many hundreds of times in my youth that the old wax stereo recording is all scratches and scrapes—is just not enough.

    Oddly, given the fact that he has now been nominated for a Tony for a supporting role (while Radcliffe was ignored), John Larroquette seemed far less engaged in the piece, speeding through his lines at times as if he were trying to catch a plane, and other times performing on cruise control. When Larroquette "woke up" once or twice in his role as J. B. Biggley, as he did in "Grand Old Ivy," he was quite charming, with both him and Radcliffe performing brilliantly. Unfortunately, director/choreographer Rob Ashford could not leave a good thing alone, bringing a whole chorus of football players to dance along, wiping away one the few enchanting character encounters.

     Most of the other cast members are quite excellent, particularly Ellen Harvey as Biggley's executive secretary, Miss Jones, Mary Faber as Smitty, and, although a little young for the role, Rose Hemingway (at 27 she seems more a neophyte than Radcliffe). Christopher Hanke makes the nasty Bud Frump almost likeable. And, although her humor switched on and off at times, Tammy Blanchard is basically a hilarious Hedy LaRue.

      Perhaps the most serious problem about this revival is that, despite its obvious satirical intentions, the work seems extraordinarily outdated and unnecessarily coy today. For those who have never seen the musical, I'll briefly relay the plot: window washer J. Pierrepont Finch, enters the executive suites of the World Wide Wicket Corporation in search of a job, armed with a little book that promises immediate success, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. Within minutes he has literally bumped into the president of company, J. B. Biggley, encountered a woman, Rosemary Pilkington, who falls in love with him at first sight, and captures a job in the mailing room by transforming the unpleasant encounter with Biggley into what the employment head interprets as a friendship.

     Finch is highly likeable, even charming, but he is without a single moral principle in his desire to rise up the corporate ladder, and within hours, so it seems, he shifts into the positions of a junior executive, advertising manager, and, even after a disastrous failure, is elected Chairman of the Board, all before you can say, ROSEMARY, the woman with whom, along the way, he has reluctantly fallen in love.

    Biggley's nincompoop nephew, Budd Frump, tries his best throughout to trip up Finch, as the other executives, terrified by Ponty's swift rise in the company and fearing the discovery of their own ineptitudes, plot to destroy him; yet Finch (as he reminds everyone F-I-N-C-H) miraculously survives each battle, primarily because he is so self-centered that he fails to see the restless men on the prowl.

    The most famous song of the musical is Finch's love song to himself, sung into a mirror of the men's room as he shaves:

 

                                                 finch: Now there you are;

                                                             Yes, there's that face,
                                                             That face that somehow I trust.
                                                             It may embarrass you to hear me say it,
                                                             But say it I must, say it I must:
                                                             You have the cool, clear
                                                             Eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth;
                                                             Yet there's that upturned chin
                                                             And that grin of impetuous youth.
                                                             Oh, I believe in you.
                                                             I believe in you.

 

 

    Women in this male-dominated world are all secretaries, whom the males are reminded, should not be treated like toys—but nonetheless are. In today's world, it is clear that the efficient and trustworthy Miss Jones, the smart Smitty, and the quick-plotting Rosemary would be at the head of the World Wide Wicket Company instead of out bowling or wickedly spinning webs to find husbands. But in 1961...well, those gender lines were at the musical's satirical heart. Today the plot appears somewhat as a stale joke with little resonance.

      For all that, I think the audience was willing to overlook the datedness of the piece if only the actors could come together and enjoy their own spoof. But time and again, it seemed, Radcliffe was not the only one grimacing. Everybody seemed to be playing it "the company way," refusing to get excited about anything. Two of the best dance numbers of Lambert and Fosse's original, "Coffee Break," (such a difficult number that the movie dropped it), and the sprightly "A Secretary Is Not a Toy," seemed lackluster in Ashford's staging, while at other times, as I mentioned, the director seemed to suck all the attention away from the actors through the introduction of gratuitous routines.

      Finally, despite Radcliffe's pluck and elfin charm, I kept missing the puckish comedy of Robert Morse, the silly imperiousness of Rudy Vallee, and the jazz inflections of Michele Lee's voice. 

      One piece, alone, came to life and created for its few minutes the magic that might have stood as a beacon to these young performers. The last full number of the musical, "Brotherhood of Man," was so richly sung, punctuated by Ellen Harvey's coloratora soprano, and so thrillingly danced that it almost redeemed everything else. If only the cast might have realized that "brotherhood" earlier in the show, How to Succeed might have gone straight to the top!

      In the end, however, it didn't matter. The young girls and their families stood up in celebration and absolutely roared (I've never heard as loud of an applause) as Radcliffe bowed appreciatively to his fans.

 

Los Angeles, May 13, 2011

Reprinted from USTheater (May 2011).