Arms and the Man
UVA Drama Department
Through December 2
 Autumn Shiley and Joel Grothe star in UVA’s production of Shaw’s "Anti-Romantic Comedy," which seethes with bitterness behind its jaunty humor. |
Stage Watching a play by George Bernard Shaw is a double pleasure. On the surface, he dabbles in formula, producing effects that are heavenly for being familiar and safe, while underneath all hell breaks loose. The supposed ideals by which a society operates are cracked open and dissected, and out of a commanding insight a new world seems to spawn—not from the perspective of his faulty characters, but from the rarefied viewpoint of the audience.
Shaw subtitled Arms and the Man, first produced in London in 1894, an “Anti-Romantic Comedy,” and indeed its jaunty humor, when looked at closely, seethes with bitterness. Set in Bulgaria in 1885 during a war between Bulgarians and Serbs, the play opens with a young lady, Raina Petkoff (Autumn Shiley), tucked away in her bedroom, elated over the Bulgarian victory and dizzily envisioning the heroics of her fiancé, Sergius (Joshua Rachford). At which point Captain Bluntschli (Joel Grothe), a Swiss professional soldier fighting for the Serbs, enters the bedroom, leading to an eventual love triangle and a happy resolve. Along the way, empty heroic action and hollow patriotism hand in hand with flighty romance don’t stand a chance against Shaw’s acid mind.
Multileveled plays are the right stuff for university drama departments to produce. What’s the point if there’s no challenge? While this production is directed by visiting UVA Professor Edward Morgan and features a performance by the drama department’s Head of Acting Richard Warner, the eight-member principal cast includes five people gunning for their MFA in acting. All five do a more than credible job. As is perhaps inevitable, however, the audience may feel they’re taking part in a learning experience. The performances often project only one facet of Shaw’s vision—“Romantic Comedy” purged of the “Anti-“ or vice versa. There are moments when the outright comedy is too blatant, or when the social commentary is too faint. Some of the responsibility goes to the director, whose touch, in such situations, must be magical.
All this doesn’t mean that the production isn’t worth seeing. There’s a great deal of budding talent on display. As always with the drama department, the set design (this time by Shawn Paul Evans) is on a level of generousness and sumptuousness that one can find nowhere else in Charlottesville. And, of course, there are the shatterproof treasures of Shaw, whose exposure of human idiocy and shallowness still has the power to sting.—Doug Nordfors
Bonfires of São João
Forro in the Dark
Nublu
cd A nimble bass line alternates between two notes, sounding vaguely like a polka; a high-pitched pifano—that’s Portuguese for “fife,” the flute-like wind instrument—darts left and right, mimicking the movement of feet; a lightly distorted guitar plays an evocative high-plains chord progression out of a Sergio Leone western. The tune is “Índios Do Norte,” the band is the Brazil-by-way-of-New-York outfit Forro in the Dark, and the style of music is forró.
Forró is indigenous to Brazil’s northeastern coastal region. The traditional instrumentation of the form, as set down by Luis Gonzaga, the man who popularized forró in the 1940s and ’50s, consists of bass drum, triangle, and accordion. Imagine this lineup playing peppy rhythms accented on the 1 and 3, and you can understand why forró is sometimes called the zydeco of Brazil. It is above all social music, meant to get people on to the dance floor.
But Forro in the Dark are not traditionalists. For the past several years they’ve played regularly at Nublu, the Manhattan club that serves as a petri dish for all manner of global fusion. Accordingly, they play a version of forró that combines inherent danceable tendencies with an arty New York twist. Eschewing accordion, they add guitar and bass, fold in horns, and add layers of additional percussion. Here on their second album, Bonfires of São João, David Byrne contributes vocals to two tracks, Miho Hatori, formally of Cibo Matto, sings on another.
But despite the presence of artists from other realms and the non-trad instrumentation, Bonfires of São João doesn’t sound watered-down. The pifano, which serves at the melodic lead on most tracks, ensures a rootsy vibe, its pure, piercing tone reinforcing the music’s clarity and directness. A slinky, loping reggae beat shows up on “Limoeiro do Norte”; “Oile le La,” dominated by a gritty sax out from, is slow, deliberate and sensual; but it’s blazing, body-moving tracks like “Que Que tu Fez” and “Lampião do Céu” that define this record.
Byrne sings “Asa Branca,” Gonzaga’s most famous composition and a national standard in Brazil. He translates the lyrics to English, telling the woeful tale of a farming boy forced by poverty to move to the big city. His instantly recognizable diction now sounds natural in such a setting, since the music of Brazil has become the template for his solo work. In another multicultural twist, Miho Hatori ably translates the light and bubbly Gonzaga composition “Paraíba” into Japanese, leaving it to Bebel Gilberto and various Forro in the Dark shouters to realize the music in its language of origin.
That languages from three continents appear is important. Bonfires of São João is in a sense a harbinger of the age of globalism, picking a very specific regional folk art, mixing and matching it with styles, languages and forms from elsewhere, and exporting the whole thing to a club many thousand miles away and then to your home CD player. But the album as a whole is so distinctive—not to mention relentlessly fun—such cross-pollination is nothing to fear, and not a sign of compromise. This is the musical melting pot done right, without concession to prevailing taste.—Mark Richardson