Author: David Gorsline

Are you watching?

In addition to the shows that I see for fun, especially those with my friends in them, I’m an adjudicator for WATCH, also known by the backronym Washington Area Theatre Community Honors. (As I’ve posted elsewhere, generally I don’t comment on the merits of community theater productions that I see, for a number of reasons.) This means that I do a lot of driving around the extended metropolitan area, judging six or eight shows in the course of a calendar year. I see companies with a wide range of physical assets to work with, everything from the two well-appointed theaters in Fairfax County community centers (the Alden and the CenterStage), the modest but scrappy facility at Silver Spring Stage, high school auditoriums where some of the semi-nomadic groups work, and some spaces that are just modest.

And I see a wide range of material, about 40% of it musicals. And this is a good thing, because sometimes I’ll see a really great script (we don’t judge the script, just what you do with it) that I otherwise wouldn’t have gone out of my way to see. Sometimes I’ll notice something really interesting on a schedule and I will ask my adjudication coordinator, “Do you need an alternate to judge that?” I also see things that I am far too familiar with. By the end of this year there will be at least two plays for which I have adjudicated multiple productions. (One of the favorite war stories passed around WATCH is that of the judge who was assigned three productions of A Streetcar Named Desire in one year. We’ve tweaked the scheduling algorithm since then.)

Here’s what I’ve seen in the past few years, and what I expect to see this year. There’s some really chewy stuff here:

  • The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson
  • All My Sons, by Arthur Miller
  • The Sound of Music, Rodgers and Hammerstein
  • Hotbed Hotel, by Michael Parker (hotel-room farce)
  • The Memory of Water, by Shelagh Stephenson (family ties)
  • The Piano Lesson, by August Wilson
  • The Boys Next Door, by Tom Griffin (issue-driven comedy)
  • A New Brain, William Finn and James Lapine (urban musical)
  • Intimate Apparel, by Lynn Nottage (family history)
  • Aida, Elton John and Tim Rice
  • The Pajama Game, Adler and Ross
  • Moon over Buffalo, by Ken Ludwig
  • The Complete History of America (abridged), Long, Tichenor, and Martin
  • A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams
  • Arsenic and Old Lace, by Joseph Kesselring
  • The Full Monty, David Yazbek and Terrence McNally (steelworker stripper musical)
  • Stalag 17, Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski (WWII drama)
  • Chapter Two, by Neil Simon
  • Floyd Collins, Adam Guettel and Tina Landau (Baby Jessica as folk opera)
  • The Last Five Years, by Jason Robert Brown (reverse-chronology relationship revue)
  • Jesus Christ Superstar, Webber and Rice
  • Catch Me If You Can, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert
  • Rumors, by Neil Simon
  • A Christmas Carol, adapted by John Mortimer
  • Becket, by Jean Anouilh
  • A Grand Night for Singing, Rodgers and Hammerstein
  • Run for Your Wife, by Ray Cooney (cab driver farce)
  • The Vagina Monologues, by Eve Ensler

Oh, yeah, and WATCH is throwing a big party next Sunday night.

Adaptation

… a cult of religious veneration for the wishes of the composer now rules the musical roost. [Richard] Wagner himself played a big part in promoting this by putting out a lot of self-serving propaganda about art being pretty well the sole purpose of life and the wickedness of tampering with the work of an artist, especially a great artist such as himself. To be authentic, to do exactly what the scholars say Scarlatti, Schubert or Monteverdi would want you to do, if necessary going to the length of building a sixteenth-century ophicleide—this today is pretty well the holy grail. Never mind that the piece would sound much better played another way or that modern acoustics are different, that pitch has gone up, musical taste changed, musical marathons don’t fit into our culture—never mind anything at all, just stick a harpsichord into the Albert Hall and not on any account a Steinway. If you can’t hear it at least you know what you’re not hearing is authentic. The real obstacle to producing a sensibly revised version of The Ring is not the chorus of outrage that would go up, but the difficuly of finding a musician of genius to do it.

—Sir Denis Forman, A Night at the Opera: An Irreverent Guide…, p. 555

How much easier we have it in theater! No one would demand seeing Shakespeare only according to 16th-century performance practices, played by men only, en plein air (though it is certainly fun to see a simulacrum of this at the Blackfriars in Staunton), with Elizabethan pronunciation. The moment the first line is read at the first read-through, something of the playwright’s original intention has been betrayed. This betrayal might be an essential quality of theater.

Does this mean that ensemble pieces like The Laramie Project or An Experiment with an Air Pump could be played with no doubling? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: the film version of Laramie worked. Or that Arthur Miller can be reset in outer space? Well…

Erased

Via wood s lot comes the sad news that the French avant garde writer Alain Robbe-Grillet has passed away. Robbe-Grillet, as far as I can remember, was one of the first novelists that I discovered completely by myself. I was browsing in my college bookstore and I saw a copy of his Instantanés (Snapshots), pieces shorter than his nouveaux romans. I picked it up and thought, “well, this looks interesting.”

Sugarloaf circuit

Pleasant weather and I’m off for a hike in Shenandoah National Park. New weather was coming in, so I had clouds and breezy conditions, warmth only when the sun broke through, and even a few sprinkles of rain.

I walked an easy-rated 5-mile loop starting with the Sugarloaf Trail (hike #3, short circuit, in PATC’s Circuit Hikes in Shenandoah National Park). The footing was definitely soft in spots, due to overnight rain. The Sugarloaf Trail descends 700 feet through an impressive tract of mountain laurel (not in bloom at this time of the year, alas).

braided streamThe trail crosses a braided stream (Piney River, which feeds into the Thornton) that seemed determined to follow the trail bed for a stretch. The circuit then ascends gradually on the Keyser Run Fire Road. Crossing Skyline Drive, you pick up the Appalachian Trail for a climb of Little Hogback. After a dip, a series of short, stiff switchbacks climbs 400 feet to the ridgeline of Hogback Mountain.

sun and shadowSome fine prospects along this stretch.

the valleyOff-season so I had the trail completely to myself, with the company of an occasional raven, woodpecker, or flick of juncos (that’s something smaller than a flock). Otherwise, very quiet, with sometimes nothing but the creaking of bare trees in the wind.

Short bits of string: 6

Via robot wisdom: find the elevation and lat-long of any Google-mapped location with EarthTools. The UI is not 100% intuitive: you have to drag the map so that the location you want information about lies in the crosshairs; you can’t drag the crosshairs, but you can double-click to move them. But that’s a quibble. I could use this tool to describe new nest box locations for The Birdhouse Network.

Once around the block

Napier Shelton walks an eight-mile nature loop around Northwest D.C. for the current issue of Audubon Naturalist News. (Alas, Audubon Naturalist Society has moved its web site into a new URL- and page title-mangling content management system.)

Since the days of my childhood, some tropical migrant birds have been lost, but barred owls and red-shouldered hawks still live in Glover-Archbold; black-crowned night herons still roost by day along Rock Creek; and deer, beavers, and coyotes have moved in. A big difference from the past, however, is the lack of kids (and adults) exploring the woods by themselves like I did.

Action at a distance

Spookiest thing that’s happened to me since I saw the flying saucer on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (but that’s another story):

I was just getting settled in to the recording booth to read Ben Bernanke’s macroeconomics textbook for undergraduates (which promises to be the best such that I’ve recorded) and Kathryn was there to check my recording level. She likes to play back the previous reader to make sure that there’s not a big jump in levels between readers. The previous reader had a nice rumbly, confident baritone; he sounded to be a bit older than me. So his track ran out and I said, “Well, that’s a very reassuring voice.” And then, in a snap, his voice returned on the headphones to say, “Thank you, sir.”

Of course, what it was was his version of “Okay, monitor, we’re finished recording for today.” But Kathryn and I played it back again to make sure that the booth hadn’t acquired a haunt.

Good on ya: 4

Good customer service karma, ultimately, for Audio-Technica’s U.S. operations parts department. I had just started using some new ANC-7 headphones at work (why do I need noise-cancelling headphones at work? good question) when one day my IT guy arrived to do a memory upgrade on my workstation. In the process of pulling the case open, he managed to break the plug at the computer end of the headphones’ cable. (Well, actually it worked just fine, if you’re deaf in the left ear.)

I scampered off to Radio Shack for a replacement cable. Seven bucks, no big deal. Except that the shell of the replacement cable was too fat to fit into the headphones. So after some online browsing turned up nothing different in the way of 1/8 stereo mini-plug cabling, I went back to the source at Audio-Technica. No info on the web site about replacement parts, no e-mail address, but there is a phone number. I called, phone-treed into the parts department, and talked to a real person. I explained the situation and asked what I could do about ordering a replacement cable. He said, “what’s your address? I’ll put one in the mail today.” And at the end of the week, a free replacement arrived, no questions asked.

I am not making this up

It just gets weirder and weirder. The former CFO of my homeowners association’s previous management company, Jeffrey Koger, who is generally believed to be responsible for embezzlement of funds between 2004 and ’06, has been charged in connection with a shootout involving police this past weekend.

In October, a lawsuit alleged that a large portion of the missing homeowners association money might have been invested in a sushi and steak restaurant that opened on Capitol Hill last summer.