In our busy daily lives, we don’t often have the opportunity to be immersed in anything outside of the regular stuff… I mean transported, outlook altered, mood changed. I sampled a couple of cultural experiences offering such a chance this week, Minneapolis-based Morgan Thorson’s Heaven at PS 122 which closed Oct 3 and Kurt Hentschläger’s Zee at 3LD Art & Tech Center.
As the audience entered, the tightly bunched group of performers walked very slowly around the periphery of the stage, quietly demanding all attention. Everything was white—the marley, the curtains that lined the walls, the columns (with pleated skirts around their bases), the dancers’ costumes, crafted of quilted fabric with Ace bandage accents. White lace even trimmed all of the industrial audience chairs. Lenore Doxsee designed the superb lighting; Emmett Ramstad the costumes; the two with Thorson designed the visual setting. read more
Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’re by now well aware of Glee, the new Fox TV show whose first full season starts this fall. The comedy centers around Will Schuester, a young high school teacher played by Matt Morrison, who tries to resuscitate the school’s ailing show choir, and judging from the one promo episode that aired last May, it is riotously funny—P.C., the show is not. (The creator of the show is Ryan Murphy of Nip/Tuck and Popular fame.) Fox has waged an unusually long, intense P.R. campaign that started with the airing of that single episode, followed by relentless advertising, online contests, and other promos. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Jane Lynch, who plays a wickedly cutthroat cheerleading coach at the fictional high school, is in the cast—my kids have been endlessly repeating her waterboarding and hepatitis jokes all summer. Yes, in the middle of the most serious economic mess we’ve seen in a long time is an extremely silly television show about … singing. Interesting.
A few weeks before Glee was set to air on television, I spoke with Ralph S. Opacic, who is the founder, president, and executive director of the Orange County High School of the Arts. Matt Morrison graduated from OCHSA in 1997, and went on to do music theater, including South Pacific, Light in the Piazza, and Hairspray.
Opacic and I spoke about how he went about starting an arts school back in the 1980s, the ongoing effort to get funding for his school, what Matt Morrison was like as a high school student, and what on earth “show choir” singing is. Full disclosure: I am old enough that when I attended public high school “show choirs” did not exist. read more
Cleveland? We don’t need no stinkin’ Cleveland! At least when it comes to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, because Soho now boasts its own Annex of said Hall of Fame, and it’s a pretty decent (if necessarily curtailed) overview of this genre’s history.
The Annex takes advantage of technological advances inexorably making their way into museums. Visitors enter the foyer-like Hall of Fame, lined with brushed metal plaques bearing the signatures of inductees. As a soundtrack plays, the featured artist’s name glows in neon colors, so you can kind of ‘follow the bouncing ball’ around the room. The hall leads to a screening room where visitors watch a short history of the honored artists, supplemented by slides and footage of each subject—concert posters, photographs, even live footage of us in the audience, superimposed on the main projection—which add to the speakeasy-like experience. read more
I’ve been kicking myself for having missed a number of music events in New York this spring featuring ETHEL, the New York-based amplified string quartet. They don’t do a huge number of gigs—like all working musicians they have packed schedules filled with other musical things, and don’t exclusively devote themselves to ETHEL-ing. So as it turns out, the only performance I actually caught was their world premiere performance—with laptop composer Jay Flower and hyper-accordionist Michael Ward Bergeman—of a new work by Osvaldo Golijov at the April opening of WNYC’s Greene Performance Space.
The latest self-kick came after hearing a stunning new CD called John the Revelator, Phil Kline’s eerie and strangely uplifting modern-day mass, on which ETHEL performs with the all-male a cappella group Lionheart (hear the third movement from John the Revelator after the jump). read more
Why do we hear music the way we do? Why do human beings make music in the first place? Are its various components things that can even be explained by science? These were topics covered in just one of the events, “Notes and Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus,” at this year’s five-day World Science Festival from June 10 to 14. The festival was packing them in at events on topics like fMRI brain research, dark energy, quantum mechanics, microbiology, and behavioral science. Many of the presentations were affairs bringing together experts from diverse fields to bring their joint creative focus to commuter traffic, the earth’s atmospheric levels of CO2, and the question of nothingness.
So judging from the sellout response, New Yorkers are pretty interested in science—as entertainment, anyway, with renowned scientists mixing it up with Hollywood actors and poets and journalists and Juilliard-trained musicians in a sort of cross-cultural musico-scientific extravaganza. read more
Lincoln Center has become an elder statesman of New York. At least, that’s the conclusion I reached after coming back from the opening celebration that just concluded yesterday morning at Alice Tully Hall—the kickoff event of “Lincoln Center 50 Years.” The event felt the way I imagine the annual Al Smith Dinner feels. That is, you put a bunch of power players in the same room and give each of them the floor for about five minutes. Big applause after each one finishes.
Here, attention was paid to important people like David Rockefeller—brother of the late John D. Rockefeller III, who spearheaded the campaign to create Lincoln Center—who acknowledged applause from his seat in the audience. Among those in Tully Hall were members of Lincoln Center’s twelve resident organizations and students from the inaugural graduating class of local High School for Arts, Imagination, and Inquiry (founded by the Lincoln Center Institute), who cheered loudly when their school was mentioned. Architect Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (co-architects of Tully Hall with FXFOWLE Architects) was seen flitting about the room, smiling and chatting.
The morning started with Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” performed by the definitely uncommon brass players and percussionists from the New York Philharmonic. Emcee for the event—which was streamed live—was journalist Tom Brokaw, himself an elder statesman. read more
On this past Tuesday, the curtain went up for the first time at the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, WNYC’s new street-level set-up at the corner of Varick and Charlton streets. Or rather, the indoor space went from dark to light as the shades went up on windows looking out on both streets—at 7 p.m., it was still light outside.
In case you had missed the news, the Greene space for broadcasts and live performances is finally open, after years of planning. This small room looking out on two streets has all the technological bells and whistles, a curvy wooden backdrop to its small stage, a Fazioli piano from Italy, a soundproof broadcast booth in the corner, and several high-definition video screens. It can broadcast radio or television and live to the internet. WNYC is celebrating its opening with a ten-day festival ending on May 8 that will include broadcasts of the Brian Lehrer and Leonard Lopate shows; the launch of “The Next New York Conversation Series” with Dr. Eddie Glaude and Dr. Cornel West; and a Cinco de Mayo celebration with food, music, and dancing. read more
Red Fly/Blue Bottle, the title of a music-theater show at HERE, recurs in a memorable song that bookends the work. Christina Campanella wrote the haunting, melodious music, with words by Stephanie Fleischmann; Mallory Catlett directs. Old meets new in the Jim Findlay-designed set that resembles an attic, dense with antique clocks, audio/visual equipment, insect imagery. The detritus is interspersed with geometric white panels that serve as screens or scrims and slide laterally to create or take apart rooms.
Video elements by Peter Norrman and Mirit Tal are scattered across the theater, at times serving as a kind of tangible memory, sketchpad, or remote scene. The cast (including vocalists Jesse Hawley and Chris Lee, actor Black-Eyed Susan, plus music/text performed by Campanella, Sam Baker, and Erich Schoen-Rene) inhabits all corners of the set, appearing and disappearing with regularity, aided by Miranda Hardy’s lighting.
The team behind Red Fly/Blue Bottle (presented by HERE and Latitude 14 and developed through a HERE Artist Residency Program) has put together an intriguing, richly layered work of music-theater that resists categorization, for better or worse. It’s a problem faced by new multi-media or cross-genre performances that are ostensibly created to shatter convention, and do. read more
If you visit McGovern’s website, the first thing you’ll see is a header in huge, red, loopy script, “THE STRADIVARIUS VOICE.” At about the same moment, you will will be hit with the sound of that instantly recognizable voice ringing out—her cover of a Bob Dylan tune, “The Times They are a-Changin’.”
That song is part of McGovern’s latest show, “A Long and Winding Road,” which is named after her latest CD; she’s been touring the show following that recording’s release last summer. The songs are some of McGovern’s early favorites from her years growing up, including songs by Joni Mitchell (“The Circle Game, “The Fiddle and the Drum”) Lennon & McCartney (“Let It Be,” “Rocky Raccoon”), Jimmy Webb (“MacArthur Park,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress”) and Carole King/Gerry Goffin (“Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”). These represent her roots as a folk singer; the songs are what she listened to as a girl and teenager before she rocketed to fame as the “Morning After” singer from The Poseidon Adventure. The photo on the CD cover is current, but inside there’s a photo of a 20-year-old McGovern, with long hair and guitar, taken in 1969.
This winter, McGovern chatted during a New York visit about life at her own pace—she lives full-time in her home state of Ohio, when she’s not on the road. read more
Attention spans are definitely getting shorter. The whole internet thing, Google, texting, Twitter – how much shorter can the essence of a thought get than 140 characters or an emoticon? And now brevity has ferociously seized the performing arts with 60×60 Dance.
This free event, at the World Financial Center’s Arts>World on November 14 at 12:30pm and 7pm, is perfect for those of us with ADD. Founded by composer Robert Voisey, it pairs 60 choreographers with 60 composers to create 60 works 60 seconds in length. Voisey, director of new music group Vox Novus began the project in the shape of a one hour concert, one composer per minute.
The composers, from far and wide, were paired with choreographers from New York gathered by Jeramy Zimmerman, a contributor as well. The fact that there are 60 choreographers in the city able and willing to participate in this project is pretty remarkable, a testament to the city’s cultural chops. read more
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