Author: doug-nordfors

stage

Talk about pedigree. A Little Night Music, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, was inspired by the late Ingmar Bergman’s exquisite, angst-free-except-in-a-brilliantly-understated-comic-way film, Smiles of a Summer Night, which was inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And then there’s this: In the words of an audience member in the Live Arts lobby before the show, "Stephen Sondheim rocks!" Translated into nonlayman’s terms: Since the 1950s, Sondheim’s lyrics have injected new life—uncommon grit, silliness, erudition, you name it—into the American musical, and his music has added classical splendor and inventiveness to the traditional show tune regimen.
 

Send in the clowns, sure, but let’s not overdo it: The music hits home, but the comedy of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music hits just a tad too hard.

In short, the opening night of Sondheim’s 1973 A Little Night Music (book by Hugh Wheeler) was crawling with high expectations. Would this Live Arts production bring to life the 19th century Swedish world of Fredrik Egerman (Dan Stern), who’s saddled with a frigid teenage wife (Rosa Parma Brown) and whose mind keeps wandering to a former lover, the actress Disiree Armfeldt (Linda Waller)?

The answer is a limp, though not quite frigid, "sort of."

It’s time once again to dust off Oscar Wilde’s famous warning to comic actors to play their parts with an unconscious seriousness. In other words, the comedy falters if the audience is aware that the actors are aware that they’re in a comedy. Director John Owen’s principal actors are prone to exaggerating their characters and dressing up their lines, and therefore the audience doesn’t have the chance to joyfully teeter on a subtle edge. Owen is in an unenviable position: Encouraging too much seriousness can lead to flatness. But good productions of comedies are all about brewing up some thespian magic to create a fine balance. The lack of balance also seems to have affected the pacing. The whole production vacillates between moving with a stately grace and moving in slow motion.

The good news is that the 15 cast members and Owen and musical director Greg Harris are adept at presenting the elaborate toying with show tune conventions in Sondheim’s lyrics, as well as the often cunning and always bewitching rhythms of his music. All this despite the fact that the four-person ensemble led by Harris at the keyboard off to the edge of the stage sounds at times like it’s behind a concrete bulwark.
 
In short, an enjoyable night at the theater is tempered by the sense that Live Arts has a ways to go before it can claim to be the No. 1 place in town to see a musical.

The London-based company, Rolls-Royce, which no longer makes cars that only 99 percent of the population can afford, has announced plans to build a jet engine manufacturing plant in Prince George County, southeast of Richmond. End of story? Hardly. With the company’s decision to include Virginia in its future comes a sweet deal for the University of Virginia. In addition to Virginia Tech and the Virginia Community College System, UVA will form what it’s calling an "innovative partnership" with Rolls-Royce on a number of engineering and business fronts.

Rolls-Royce jet engines like this one in Great Britain will soon be rolling off assembly lines in Prince George County. UVA will receive state funding for new profs and renovated facilities to provide training for the plant.

In a University press release, UVA President John Casteen III explains how Rolls-Royce can not only provide an economic benefit to Virginia, but also impact higher education around the state. "Rolls-Royce has an impressive history of collaborating with universities to support and develop research in academic centers of excellence to develop the company’s workforce, as well as to create new technologies." Casteen says that the educational and research activities will be substantial and will involve faculty and both graduate and undergraduate students. The School of Engineering and Applied Science and the McIntire School of Commerce will be particularly impacted.

Underneath Casteen’s statement lies a whole other dimension. A huge part of the reason Rolls-Royce chose Virginia over seven other states involves, in addition to direct financial incentives to the company, Commonwealth funding to UVA. The University will provide Rolls-Royce, as Virginia Secretary of Education Thomas Morris puts it in a press release from the Governor’s office, "research and development capabilities with a continuous pipeline of engineers," and in turn the state, in support of the partnership, will shower the University with $3 million over a five-year period beginning in July 2009. The state will fund six chaired professorships, three in engineering and three in the McIntire School, as well as graduate fellowships and undergraduate internships. They will also provide the means by which UVA can introduce a manufacturing minor to the engineering school and renovate mechanical engineering laboratories. And one of the two major research centers that will be created—The Center for Aerospace Propulsion Systems—will have its headquarters at the University.

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

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I’m all in favor of complex phrases that, as Wallace Stevens said, "resist the intelligence almost successfully." But I just can’t wrap my mind around the title Bullet for Unaccompanied Heart. Because a heart, unlike a lung, has no twin, I can’t see how it can’t be accompanied. (Sure, I know that "heart" stands for lost or lonely human being, but still…) By entering the heart will the bullet give it accompaniment? Is death what the incomplete heart needs to be complete? Ah hell, I don’t know.

Cross your heart and hope to die: Blues run the game for Dugan McBane (Allen VanHouzen) in Cakes’n’ale Theatre Company’s Bullet for Unaccompanied Heart.

Fortunately, the title is the only real weakness in Robert Wray’s play, Cakes’n’ale Theatre Company‘s premiere production, which had a three-day run last weekend at a fourth-floor space at Live Arts, and will have two performances at the Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative early next week. Wray, a veteran writer and actor who has paid his dues in New York City and Los Angeles, employs a device that not only helps give his play an uncommon flavor, but also serves to express what introducing a new theater company to a city is all about: extending the bounds of artistic freedom.

Bullet takes place in the country of the mind—specifically, the mind of blues singer and guitarist Dugan McBane (the name blues lover Van Morrison would adopt if he wanted to announce his Irishness to the world), played by Allen VanHouzen. McBane, haunted by the ghost of his muse and ex-girlfriend, Anya Magnifico (Claire McGurk), is locked in what looks like an ordinary urban apartment building living room—in fact, it’s the prison, so to speak, of his botched past, complete with a guard named Milo (Don Gaylord) who waves a gun in McBane’s face every time he thinks about trying to let go of his thoughts.

Just as the mind contains innumerable possibilities, the play is like a blues song that hints at the standard lyrics while also flourishing beat poet rhythms, David Mamet-speak, Samuel Beckett-like existential ghoulishness and just about anything else Wray can think of. The task he’s presented himself is to keep all this indulgence from spilling over into self-indulgence, and for the most part he succeeds (director Sean Chandler chimes in by keeping the tone and atmosphere tight and consistent). And even when the play threatens to disappear in the heavy mist of its influences, it maintains a hearty individuality that’s an entirely welcome contrast to much of what’s available for Charlottesville theatergoers.

It should also be noted that the play, with its lengthy monologues that aim to exhume with words a buried past, and its emotional intensity, presents a huge challenge for actors, and the always-surprising pool of local acting talent has delivered. While Gaylord in the supporting role is solid, VanHouzen and McGurk do all the heavy lifting with unwavering confidence and professional panache.

Cakes’n’ale Theatre Company present Bullet for Unaccompanied Heart again at the Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on November 26-27 at 8pm. Tickets are available in exchange for donations at the door.

words

While many North Americans are familiar with South America through traveling or lineage or other means, the majority, it seems, view it as nothing more than a reflection of a surface name. And it’s not only the complex history of that distant continent that feels so, well, distant. What is its current identity? What in the world does "South America in the 21st century" mean?

How many quarters are there in a year? C-VILLE takes on the Virginia Quarterly Review. From cover to cover. Again!

That’s what’s emblazoned in red letters across the cover of the new Virginia Quarterly Review, and it’s a comfort to know that this empty phrase is backed up with 322 pages of a special issue on the subject (a nice break, by the way, from the journal’s usual dizzying eclecticism—rewarding though it is). The issue, co-edited by VQR helmsman Ted Genoways and Peruvian journalist and fiction writer Daniel Alarcón, has 17 contributors, and the focus of the pieces ranges from an enduring symbol of poverty in Buenos Aires, Argentina, called the White Train, to a nonfiction love story originating in a neighborhood in Lima, Peru, to a 2002 anti-Hugo Chávez protest in Venezuela that turned deadly, to the connection among soccer, Holland and the tiny country, Suriname, to a "mysterious albino town" in Argentina, as well as work by an Argentinean cartoonist and two fiction selections.

Readers who get through every page won’t end up graced with a manageable understanding of contemporary South America. Rather, seemingly countless details will continue to thrash and churn in their brains, along with a realization: The cultural and political panorama of North America, though different in significant ways from its counterpart, is just as sprawling and untameable. South America will become not just a mysterious continent, but a mysterious, sister continent.

And if such a wide approach is too hot to handle, immersion in any single piece is a way to cool and calm down. Julio Villanueva Chang’s profile of the former blind mayor of Cali, Colombia, who came "under suspicion for crimes he claims he never saw," is evidence of the almost mythical reality that pervades South America. Peruvian-born artist Ana de Orbegoso’s images of saints with their faces replaced by the faces of Peruvian women of today and Hwa Goh’s photographs of Inca descendants work as visual tools to chip away at the essence of the continent. "Soy in the Amazon," by Californian Pat Joseph is far more fascinating and trenchant than it appears. And finally, Marjorie Agosin’s series of poems, while not as graceful as her famous countryman Pablo Neruda’s, get at the bare bones—literally and figuratively—behind recent Chilean politics.

stage 

As far as I know, the theater lexicon doesn’t contain a word comparable to “chick flick,” so I guess that’s what I have to call Sarah Ruhl’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize-nominated play, The Clean House. As every movie (or theater) buff knows, there are three kinds of chick flicks: art house fare that any man with three quarters of a brain appreciates and even wants to discuss afterwards; sappy romances; and stories that are strictly about women, which can make some men feel like they’re observing a sociological experiment involving aliens from Venus. While The Clean House is intelligent enough to fit in the first category, it’s firmly placed in the third. Yet Ruhl’s sly and sometimes silly humor, as well as an unexpected plot and tonal twist that’s too good to give away—all captured nicely by the cast and crew of Live Arts’ production—extend a welcoming hand to anyone and everyone.

Under where? Christianna Queiroz (left) and Cynthia Burke (right) uncover a few domestic secrets in The Clean House at Live Arts.

Real-life sisters Susan and Cynthia Burke play sisters Lane and Virginia. Both live a suburban life in what Ruhl describes as “a metaphysical Connecticut.” (Lane’s house, designer Krista Franco’s main set, looks like it’s straight out of an empirical Hollywood Hills, but it does the trick.) Lane is dealing with two problems: Her Brazilian maid, Matilde (Christianne Queiroz), doesn’t actually like to clean, and her doctor husband, Charles (Bill LeSueur, who by day is C-VILLE’s art director), is having an affair with one of his patients (Kay Leigh Ferguson). Virginia, who absolutely loves to clean (read: she’s a germaphobe), befriends Matilde and takes over her job, absolutely loving the fact that she can order her sister’s life behind her back.

The first half of the play, delightful though its jokes are, seems mired in a generic domestic dramedy, especially when director Amanda McRaven’s touch in the fairly serious moments fizzles a bit. It’s just a staging ground, however, for Ruhl to unleash a flurry of surprises, and for McRaven to keep up with her step-by-step by piling on ideas and making what can only be described as a sumptuous mess.

But the production really belongs to two Live Arts veterans, Cynthia Burke and LeSueur. Burke’s delicious comic timing keeps the first half buzzing, and she practically oozes the neuroses of a woman who wants to tidy up the whole world or, better yet, sweep it all into a plastic bag. And LeSueur, with his dead-on portrayal of a man who believes floating on a cloud of love nullifies all manner of sins, injects a dose of energy into the second half that carries through all the way to the end.

music

With all the excitement surrounding the return of Bob Dylan to Charlottesville, it’s easy to forget that his foundation—straight-ahead folk music—has been largely banished to the shadows. New folk singer-songwriters, awash not in Dylan’s resplendent history, must scrape together bits of acclaim here and there. Lord, they might as well be poets or intellectual novelists.

Who puts the “lounge” in Gravity Lounge? It’s Anais Mitchell, who delivered an intimate set to an equally intimate crowd on Tuesday night.

Well, at least the foundation is still alive. And in the case of the new women folkies, blood is seriously flowing. Antje Duvekot tops some people’s lists, and many others stand out, such as Kris Delmhorst, Meg Hutchinson, Miranda Stone, Lizanne Knott—and Vermonter Anais Mitchell, who performed a gorgeous set for a sparse audience at Gravity Lounge last week.

That audience likely fell into two camps: those who had been exposed to the baritone sax riffs and other high-production elements (roughly akin to Ani DiFranco’s recent concoctions) sprinkled throughout Mitchell’s 2007 Righteous Babe Records release, The Brightness, and those who had no other experience of Mitchell but as a woman with a guitar on a raw stage—the foundation’s foundation, so to speak.

Make that a woman with a guitar and a man with a guitar: Michael Chorney, who produced The Brightness as well as—with less extracurricular fireworks—Mitchell’s first album, Hymns for the Exiled for the lesser-known folk label, Waterbug. His ear for adding subtle and befitting textures to sometimes traditional/sometimes innovative rhythms was on display in Mitchell originals such as “Your Fonder Heart” and “Shenandoah.”

Mitchell has played for much larger audiences, but it’s clear she’s comfortable with pouring her heart out to coffee house-sized samplings of people, and working hard to engage them. Asking the audience for some local news and hearing about the drought prompted her to move up on her playlist her take on Hurricane Katrina, “Out of Pawn.” The song is just one example of the way she extends that famous singer-songwriter angst outward toward the concrete world without overreaching into hollow objectivity. It was hard to tell at several points in the set what was our world and what was her creation. In a live setting even more so than in her recordings, such conscious artifice seemed to flesh out the natural power in the uncommon timbre of her voice—almost a female version of a Neil Young effect.

Private concerts by Neil or Bob—that’s what public concerts of great folk music are often like these days. More than a little bitter. Though very sweet.