SunBreak staffers will be all over the Northwest (and beyond) this Memorial Day weekend. Kelsey and Josh are going to the Gorge for Sasquatch!, I’ll be at SIFF, Tony will be moderating panels at Crypticon, etc. But our presence will also be felt at Seattle Center for the annual Northwest Folklife Festival. We’re media sponsors, with the very benevolent folks at KSER 90.7 in Everett, of the Bluegrass: Hot Pickin’ and Harmonies showcase. It takes place on Saturday, May 24 from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM on the Mural Stage. Please do come for our shout out from the stage, but stay for the exceptional bluegrass music.
Here’s the agenda:
Cliff Perry Band, 1:05 PM – 1:35 PM. Folklife sez: “Cliff sings lead and harmonies, for 50 years performing and teaching bluegrass, founded Southfork B-G Band, performs with Laurel Bliss, teaches B-G Band at Shoreline CC.”
FarmStrong, 1:50 PM – 2:20 PM. Folklife sez: “Bringing together about 150 years of bluegrass performance experience, with bands Prairie Flyer, One More Ride, Blue Rooster, Janglebones, Armstrong Lawton Katz, Rural Delivery, Brother’s Keeper, Me & the Boys, and Runaway Train…”
Barleywine Revue, 2:35 PM – 3:05 PM, Folklife sez, “Barleywine Revue, based in Tacoma, was started in 2010 by several musicians who shared a passion for songwriting and performing high-energy bluegrass music.”
Renegade Stringband, 3:20 PM – 3:50 PM, Folklife sez, “From their base in Portland, Oregon, Renegade Stringband plays hard driving bluegrass on stages and in the streets. Their repertoire runs the gamut from original ballads to covers of songs by Tom Waits, and Ella Fitzgerald.”
Spend An Evening with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Half of a Yellow Sun tonight at the Egyptian.
Here’s hoping that the weekend’s mixed weather provided you ample opportunities to get a first taste of #SIFForty, but perhaps not so many that you’ve already memorized the full series of three to five SIFFvertisements that precede every screening. Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. There will be plenty of time for that in the remaining twentyish days still ahead.
This week starts off with a tribute to Chiwetel Ejiofor at the Egyptian followed by a screening of Half of a Yellow Sun. If this event even holds half a candle to the exceptional conversation between Laura Dern (the other recipient of this year’s SIFF Award for Outstanding Acting) and Elvis Mitchell on Saturday, it should be a real treat for all.
On Thursday, ShortsFest opens at SIFF Cinema and Megan Griffith’s Lucky Them is the opening selection for the Renton contingent. The film is followed by a party and SIFF hangs out at the IKEA Performing Arts Center through Wednesday the 28th.
Below, a few other picks for your weekday film agendas:
The recently-restored Last Year at Marienbad is one of only three films shown on 35mm at SIFF this year.
Last Year at Marienbad : Alain Resnais time-space puzzle in a grand hotel won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1961, probably confused and intoxicated you on DVD, and is now available in newly-restored 35mm print. Fall under its spell again and dissect the hypnotic logic of the film with fellow fans over cocktails.
May 20, 2014 6:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
Mirage Men : Unpack your “I WANT TO BELIEVE” poster, don your Lone Gunmen t-shirt, and fire-up your tin-foil helmet for this documentary that alleges that the government wasn’t covering up UFOs, but instead was planting and encouraging stories to distract from other more secretive affairs. Conspiracy theorists and counter intelligence officers try to make sense of the origins and consequences of UFO mythology.
May 20, 2014 9:30 PM AMC Pacific Place
May 21, 2014 4:00 PM Egyptian Theatre
A Brony Tale : Meet the dudes who unironically love “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” as they meet one of its voice actress stars (Ashleigh Ball)without the trouble of attending BronyCon yourself. Director Brent Hodge will be there to answer all of your pony-related questions.
May 22, 2014 9:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
May 24, 2014 11:00 AM Egyptian Theatre
Chris’s picks:
Razing the Bar : A documentary from director Ryan Worsley that pays loving tribute to the Funhouse, the great dive bar/rock club across the street from Seattle Center that was torn down to make way for another apartment building. The film examines gets musicians and bar staff to rhapsodize about what its closure means for the direction of Seattle’s music scene.
May 20, 2014 9:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
May 27, 2014 9:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
My Last Year with the Nuns : Local theater bigwig Bret Fetzer’s very funny feature debut reminds viewers who are nostalgic for “Old Capitol Hill” are reminded of a time when Catholics controlled the neighborhood. This story is told as a memoir of a year in monologist Matt Smith’s childhood of teenage rebellion.
Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory: In this doc, technology helps elderly Alzheimer’s and dementia patients reclaim pieces of their souls, as social worker Dan Cohen introduces iPods to a nursing home.
May 19, 2014 7:00 PM Pacific Place
Rags and Tatters: A fugitive in revolution-spattered Egypt scrambles to get horrific cell phone footage of police brutality out to the rest of the world in this critically-lauded Egyptian drama.
May 20, 2014 6:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
May 24, 2014 11:00 AM Harvard Exit
Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus: Think this country treats its subversive artists crappily? The Belarus Free Theatre’s endured KGB bullying and exile for thumbing a nose defiantly at the implacable monster that is the Communist dictatorship strangling their homeland.
May 21, 2014 9:30 PM Pacific Place
May 23, 2014 4:00 PM Pacific Place
Rigor Mortis: If you’re the right kind of nightcrawling cinephile, the prospect of a new Hong Kong hopping-vampire shocker will fill your soul with much joy.
May 23, 2014 Midnight Egyptian
May 24, 2014 10: 00 PM Pacific Place
May 25, 2014 8:30 PM Renton IKEA Pac
If your weekend was overcrowded, these previously recommended films have additional screenings this week: Tom at the Farm : (May 20, 2014 4:00 PM Harvard Exit); Witching and Bitching (May 20, 2014 9:30 PM Egyptian); Ida (May 21, 2014 7:00 PM Harvard Exit)
Keep track of the SunBreak’s SIFF coverage on our SIFF 2014 page, plus news updates and micro-reviews on Twitter @theSunBreak.
When Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia premiered in 1993 chaos theory was still relatively new to popular culture having its most popular debut with the publication of James Gleick’s book less than a decade earlier. The play is showing its age. The Public Theatre production does justice to the script but also highlights its flaws (at the Bathhouse on Greenlake through June 8) delivering the text with inconsistent acting and questionable direction.
Stoppard is the lead practitioner of a class of plays, still flourishing today, that aspire to extreme cleverness, and some pithy statements on the human condition. Stoppard is both the most accomplished playwright of the genre and the most overtly erudite and allusive. For those of us who are less than fully enlightened, who were not bred in the halls of Oxbridge and Eton, have not studied Latin and philosophy, or read the suggested reading list, Stoppard’s works pass as a river. They are recognizable in their entirety and even in the grosser details but much rushes past in a torrent of verbiage and allusion. It makes for a delightful swim for those who can happily accept and admit to a degree of ignorance. It can be rough going for anyone who sometimes finds himself feeling stupid and dislikes it.
Arcadia presents a pair of academics sleuthing after new discoveries in harrowed soil. Hannah Jarvis (an excellent Alyson Sadron Branner) is measured and careful, establishing relationships and collaborating on others’ pet projects to facilitate access to materials supporting her own pet theory. Enter Bernard Nightingale (Evan Whitfield), brash, arrogant, rude, and every bit as ambitious as Hannah, who jumps into her carefully prepared research grounds. Their paths cross in the library of a Derbyshire estate where, two centuries earlier, Byron was Byronic on a brief visit, and a host of other possibly significant minutia may have occurred.
Stoppard keeps things more dramatic than dry by dramatizing the history dug up by this misfit pair. The actual (fictional) events surrounding and resulting from that brief bardic visit play out in alternating scenes with those of the late 20th century research. This produces several effects that pique audience interest.
Dramaturgically the play unfolds as a mystery in which we see the detective’s attempts at solving the problem while we see the actual problem unfold. Here the late 20th century academics play the detectives and early 19th century aristocrats and their retinue play the problem so the play leaps back and forth across two centuries finding the rhymes in history. We enjoy the involvement of attempting to solve the mystery on our own all the more so because we get to see where the detective goes wrong. The difference between truth and hypothesis illustrates the detective’s character and something of human nature.
The suspects and witnesses of this particular mystery include Thomasina (the young Izabel Mar all but steals the show) the genius daughter of an aristocrat. Her tutor, Septimus (a flawless Trevor Young Marston), is nearly as volatile and virile as his (unseen) school chum, Byron. Of prime interest to the researchers is the estate’s resident poet, Ezra Chater (Brandon Ryan).
Stoppard overplays his hand in this. The historical characters turn out to be more interesting that the more contemporary ones. Nonetheless Bernard’s interest in Byron takes center stage while Hannah’s research gets short shrift in the plot and feels more like a device to establish rivalry. More thematically important is research by a member of the modern generation of aristocrats, Valentine (Trick Danneker), who is attempting to further understanding of chaos theory using the estate’s centuries of data on grouse hunting.
In both centuries there is a lot of pining, sex, and suggestion that also helps keep the audience’s interest, but women tend to come off as sluts or icebergs in these situations. The direction doesn’t try to counteract this tendency in the script. Jocelyn Maher has the thankless task of playing Chloë, who makes after Bernard like a cat in heat when she isn’t ordering people about. Maher shows fine ability in her earlier scenes.
The production frequently walks the line between professional and community theatre standards. Chelsea Cook’s costumes are often ill-fitting or ill-conceived. Craig Wollam’s set aims for more than its materials support with fluttering, unintentionally translucent flats. Robert Aguilar’s lighting is good and will look better with more practice for the board ops. One hopes that practice is all that’s needed by a sound design that lacks nuance.
The real damage is done by director, Kelly Kitchens, who often pushes the farcical elements of the play beyond the breaking point. She is adept at slapping classical lazzi onto a scene but does not execute comedy. The gags don’t grow but only repeat with pointless variation and poor execution—the clown roles are pawned off on the least expert members of the cast. The script stops while the gags play.
Kitchens does not drive the script into a consistent farce—despite the trio of doors—and each turn of hijinks quickly gives way to wit and intellectual pursuit. Unfortunately it sometimes sags when it returns to wit, especially in the 20th century parts. The production as a whole is inconsistent.
Whitfield demonstrates this inconsistency most dramatically going from curried bombast that bludgeons the audience into mild amusement to sharp wit that lands every joke when he’s allowed to scale down his performance. The effect is less of an arrogant blowhard than a manic-depressive.
Danneker bravely soldiers through the least showy role and wins our sympathy. If anything he underplays, which might be delightful in another production but gets lost here. Emily Goodwin does a lot of shouting as the 19th century Lady Croom and becomes interesting and engaging when she gives up the angry-equals-loud approach.
Even through the roadblocks of this production, and despite its flaws, Stoppard’s script both tickles and mesmerizes—more a laughing brook than a raging river. With any luck we’ll get to watch that stream rush by again soon under direction that doesn’t dam up the flow.
Although the title of Brahms’ great work is Ein deutsches Requiem, the composer later felt he should have called it just a Human Requiem. It is very human in its conception. Composed around 1865-6, Brahms chose texts from the Bible which are less about mourning the dead and more about comforting the living left behind. In all of its seven sections, it talks of patience and hope, how blessed are the dead to be with the Lord, that those left behind can be consoled by the thought that they will meet again.
These beliefs are mirrored in the music Brahms composed for the texts and he always considered the Requiem to be his masterpiece.
It is a masterpiece. It is comforting. It soothes the frantic soul and eases the pain of grief for those who hear it.
Saturday night, at a nearly full St. James Cathedral, Seattle Pro Music, with an orchestra and two soloists, performed the Requiem, conducted by its artistic director Karen P. Thomas. As always with this group, the result was technically excellent and musically thoughtful, with balance between the singers themselves and with the orchestra. The Requiem is largely for chorus, but in three of the sections, solo voices join in.
The young soprano Alexandra Picard, currently undertaking her doctorate in vocal performance at the University of Washington, let her voice fill the cathedral and soar above the small accompanying choir in “Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit” (“You now have sorrow”) which ends “I will console, as one is consoled by his mother.” It’s a very high role which Picard sang pitch-perfect.
Bass-baritone Charles Robert Austin used his strong rich voice in the prayer “Herr, Lehre doch mich” (“O Lord, You have shown me my end”), with the full chorus, and again with them in the dramatic “Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende Statt,” (“For we have here no continuing city”), which heralds the rising of the dead to the sound of trumpets, when death is swallowed up in victory.
This section ranges from thrilling drama sounding like the heavens opening and splitting the temple to complete exuberance to prayerful pauses. One would think this to be the end, but Brahms creates one more chorus coming almost full circle back to the beginning, from “Blessed are they that mourn” at the start, to “Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord” at the end.
The Requiem uplifts and moves the spirit, as it did in this performance by this stellar group and an excellent orchestra with an insightful conductor. My only quibble might be that the interpretation was almost too robust in places, being after all a Requiem for the dead in which we may be comforted, but are not necessarily jumping for joy.
Seattle Pro Musica’s performances of the Requiem this weekend were dedicated to the memory of Peter Hallock, long time organist and choirmaster at St. Mark’s Cathedral who died April 27th aged 89.
“Okay, we GET IT,” my friend whispered to me during Friday’s performance of Semele by Pacific Music Works. She was referring to what felt like the 90,000th time we had heard the words “If I persist in gazing” from the aria “Myself I Shall Adore.” Quickly shushed by a cranky old man sitting next to us (and rightfully so), I couldn’t help thinking that her remark was a succinct commentary on the entire performance.
Now, I have to give Pacific MusicWorks some credit. As you might have picked up in my last review, opera is more or less my lifeblood; because of this, I have a vested interest in seeing local mid-size companies succeed. Pacific MusicWorks has worked incredibly hard under what at times have been difficult financial circumstances; congratulations are due to them for mounting what is a fully conceptualized and professional feeling production with the assistance of the UW School of Music. It will certainly appeal to their core crowd of subscribers and the early music crowd in Seattle if only because there aren’t many other games in town that have the resources to put on this kind of show. From the outside, it looks impressive – an exposed ensemble led by conductor Stephen Stubbs, professional vocal talent, and a set complete with rich visualizations.
However, the production is only irritatingly close to successful. I really want it to work out, because it has some good bones – musical and theatrical ideas are tantalizingly close to the surface of excellence. I sympathize with the Herculean task of putting something like this on – an opera has so many moving parts that it can be challenging to get everything to work. But on the other hand, I’m not sure this excuses obvious artistic choices.
Chorusters rehearse for Semele
I particularly dislike staging for its own sake and unfortunately, this show is full of the pitter patter of little chorus member feet as they hit their marks. While on the one hand, I can see what director James Darrah is trying to achieve – dramatic use of dance elements and what appears to be shredded paper to create the otherworldly feel of the realm of the Roman gods to contrast with a devout but gritty public – but it doesn’t work. The dancers haven’t had enough time to rehearse or don’t have the skills to make this polished enough for performance. Furthermore, the dance elements dramatically just don’t make sense. There are transitions and interesting ideas inherent, including a nice moment in the second half when Semele walks across a sea of goddesses, but there is a finite limit to the number of times I can see a slowly outstretched arm before it ceases to be dramatic. By the end of the performance, I had gesture fatigue. I’m not even interestingly alienated – just tired of seeing the same thing over and over.
At times, Adam Larsen’s visual choices are spectacular – including the introduction of a multi-video projection of the god of sleep restlessly tossing and turning. But then this little genius moment is immediately undermined by a sleeping chorus not only rolling onto stage, but then getting dragged off by their feet. We have no idea where they are going or why they are being dragged off and the image is so weirdly hilarious that what should have been a somber moment gets laughs from the audience. There’s also a great idea of using a flame projection during the first half of the show. This works for about twenty minutes – I’m entranced by the flame of Jove! – before it started to remind me of the Mac “Flurry” screensaver.
Overall from a directorial standpoint, there is also a tendency to portray the text: the aria mentions an arm, so he’ll make a chorus line with outstretched arms. Okay, we GET IT. This kind of slavish attention to the text is really insulting to an audience member because it assumes that we’re not able to understand what’s happening and instead have to be told what to see. It also does not illustrate an understanding of the deeper themes of the opera from the director because he’s not able to elevate the meaning away from the referent. By the end of the performance, I just wanted to FedEx him a copy of Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text.
Musically, there are also some challenges. And once again, I sympathize: baroque and early music aren’t always the most accessible art forms. Dramatically, it can be challenging to mount a production which is so entrenched in Affektenlehre, particularly in our twitter-addled era of short attention spans. Musically, it also isn’t easy for the average listener – the real joy of this music is listening for all the delightful crunchy key changes, deceptive cadences, and the like. While there’s something to be said for the splendor of baroque runs, without the proper staging to make this music meaningful, to a novice it can feel like listening to the squeaky buzzing of a Sonicare toothbrush. As the knowledge of how to listen to classical music becomes an increasingly rarefied talent, the ability to enjoy this kind of music texture is waning in the general public. And, unfortunately, appealing to the general public is exactly what the opera needs – Peter Gelb’s alarming statistics of an aging audience highlight this fact. So I wonder how successful any performance of a baroque opera can be if it alienates the audience which it desperately needs to attract.
Conductor Stephen Stubbs and harpist Maxine Eilander during a Semele rehearsal
But what if you do have the musical background to appreciate it? “Hence, Iris, hence away” is my jam. (Some people blast dubstep while driving, I have peppy Handel runs.) Granted, I’m not a Handel expert but I think I have enough to go on. I just can’t excuse the ensemble’s musical stumbles. Granted, it’s a mix of professional players and student players, but it is not a very clean performance – it lacks the crispiness of perfect tuning and exact entrances that make Handel pleasurable. It also has difficulty at times working with the performer – there’s what in the culinary world would be criticized as a lack of fat in some of the more exposed arias. I wanted the buttery exposed melodies to come through in “Turn Hopeless Lover,” and soprano Peabody Southwell brought it, but the orchestra couldn’t quite match her. Stubbs himself, it has to be said, is dynamic on the period instruments, but I wish he had worked with the ensemble more to solidify the music. My friend, who to her credit does have a solid musical background, commented that parts of this performance were out of tune. The choral singing also leaves something to be desired– although they are students, I can’t give them a pass for their lack of blending because individual voices stand out unpleasantly.
Overall the professional vocal talent is solid. If this were remounted as a sitzprobe instead of a performance, I think I would have more time to appreciate the solid work invested here. Countertenor Nathan Medley is excellent – crisp, clean, exacting in all the most satisfying early music ways. I was really enjoying Colin Ramsey’s “O Sleep” but then got a spotlight right in the eye while the chorus was milling about doing who knows what disturbing the curtains in the back. So it goes.
Haeran Hong rejoices in endless pleasure and endless love in UW/PMW’s presentation of Handel’s Semele
Haeran Hong deserves high praise for her vocal talent. Though diminutive in stature, she holds her own on the runs – actually doing a spectacularly clear job in “Myself I Shall Adore” despite the music’s repetitive nature. I was dutifully impressed by her intonation as well as the quality of her vowels – nothing here falters, she’s the solid rock holding this performance together. Once again though from a dramatic standpoint, her hubristic transformation from young innocent mortal to power-hungry near goddess is obscured by questionable staging choices.
To conclude, the best summary of the performance is written by Stubbs himself in a director’s note in the program – “I am more convinced than ever that this initiative holds amazing promise. In such a large and complex innovation, there may be room for improvement in the details of this collaboration, but I’m convinced that the vision is sound and promising.” All in all, this production rests on some very solid foundations – musically and dramatically it’s almost there. There is real thought put into this performance, but the execution and moreover, the editing that a dramaturg could have provided, is lacking. I’d like to encourage the UW and Pacific Musicworks to continue this collaboration they’ve started and I am very much looking forward to seeing what they have planned for the future.
Keiko Green in Chaos Theory at Annex Theatre photo by Ian Johnston
Who really wants to live in a universe in which characters make organic choices and adhere to a plausible plot? Audiences who insist on these standards will lose out on a wonderfully satisfying evening during the run of Courtney Meaker’s Chaos Theory (at Annex Theatre April 18-May 17)—in full disclosure, Meaker is a former theatre critic for TheSunBreak.
This play has a lot going for it including an excellent set, by Robin McCartney, but needs better support from director Pamala Milstoy. The broad comic style that establishes major events via instructional guides winked enough on its own without any help from the actors.
Those instructional guides are intended to help Frannie, (Keiko Green), who’s girlfriend, Mack (Jana Hutchison), has left her; Frannie’s not coping well. To get her out of her funk Frannie’s friends, Seth (Drew Highlands) and Bach Evelyn Dehais), give her a book on cosmology. This choice may be more quirky than logical but it moves the plot forward, inadvertently inspiring Frannie to create a machine that will allow her to travel to a different universe in which she and Mack are still together. This works—with the aid of some plutonium from the neighborhood nuclear reactor—but also results in unintended consequences and questions of identity that never quite resolve.
While multiple universes are the topic on hand the unlikely details, such as the book on cosmology, and the casual plutonium hook-up, establish a world that is off-kilter from the get-go. Nonetheless later developments are sufficiently surreal to take us to universes farther beyond the looking glass.
In addition to the high-minded quirkiness the script often traffics in sensationally stupid comedy, which Mijatov’s direction inflates. Highlands as Seth, the straight guy, nails both the high and low humor and keeps us engaged. Dehais overdoes the butch as the transgender Bach. She sounds less masculine than crooner smooth and Guy Smiley announcer slick. This delivery makes the stupid comedy feel strictly cornball without relief from either irony or excessive earnestness.
Green delivers a strong performance as Frannie, finding the tricky balance between playing an annoyingly megalomaniacal character and actually annoying the audience. We never believe in Frannie’s mission but Green helps us want Frannie to succeed, if only in hopes that it will help her move on.
Hutchison also navigates challenging waters in playing an unambiguously obnoxious character (or characters) with whom we come to empathize.
Frannie’s depression gets a light touch. Her friends care and worry but frontload the exasperation. The depression is played for laughs and wins knowing smiles. Yes, the presentation is extreme, but in retrospect any of us who have subjected our friends and family to the moping of our heartbreaks will feel sheepish recognition.
The script is at its most engaging after intermission when the rules of the multi-verse loosen—at least in the minds of the characters—and much comes to rest on questions of identity.
Meaker shifts the audience/performance relationship drawing us into the concerns of the characters by resting our entire understanding of the play on the question the characters must answer. Their search goes from frivolous to effective, but Meaker is wary of copping out with a deus ex machina or a simple twist (a la Sixth Sense or Fight Club). As with the rest of this very real universe of soft-edged gender and orientation this is not a world of either/or, but of multiple possible answers. Meaker suggests the possibilities without committing to any one. In Chaos Theory uncertainty is, for once, both comforting and satisfying.
