Genius!

There’s a lovely passage in Mark Morris’s Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes (1988) where something happens that you don’t often see: the dancers look down at their feet. The ballerinas on pointe, arms outstretched, step forward daintily, their eyes demurely cast down, as if they were moving from one rock to another to cross a mountain stream in spring spate. That’s the fresh feeling of this ensemble piece, set on Virgil Thomson piano etudes.

After spring must come summer and fall, and both of the latter seasons are represented in the superb There Where She Loved (2000) by Christopher Wheeldon. Cheery sexy pieces set on Chopin songs (performed by soprano Kate Vetter Cain with Glenn Sales’s accompaniment) (e.g., Brianne Bland’s post-coital joyful rolls on the floor) alternate with dark ruminations on love gone wrong by Kurt Weill. The most heart-breaking of these is “Surabaya-Johnny” (wrenchingly interpreted by mezzo Shelley Waite): serially monogamous Luis R. Torres dances through three girls, Diana Albrecht, Morgann Rose, and Jade Payette. Unfortunately the background scrim created some nasty moire patterns when it was hit by the follow-spot.

I have a weak spot for Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs (1982), and not in a good way, as it is scored with some of the worst late-career excesses from the singer Frank Sinatra, chief among them the smug attitudinizing of “My Way.” But it’s hard to resist Erin Mahoney-Du as the comic drunk girlfriend who won’t leave the bar, her trapeze dress failing to stay in place to cover her bottom, in “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road).” Or the adolescent fumble of “Somethin’ Stupid” by Maki Onuki and Zachary Hackstock. Ball gowns for the women, designed by Oscar de la Renta, are stunning.

  • Genius!, The Washington Ballet, Sidney Harman Hall, Washington

The comfy seats in the Harman Hall steeply-raked balcony have extra-high backs.

In medias craze

Sarah Boxer reviews the current crop of books about blogs for The New York Review of Books. I find it a little odd that she finds it necessary to explain emoticons to NYRB readers, but no matter. Boxer is most drawn to the snarky, neologizing sector of the blogosphere:

Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. ;-)

She manages some nice turns of word herself, and pulls off a neat comparison to Plato.

Better boarding

One more thing to look out for in the park: a weathered sheet of plywood lying on the ground might be a snake board, sheltering small mammals and the herps who eat them, reports the Winter 2008 number of the Fairfax County Park Authority’s newsletter, ResOURces. Tony Bulmer’s checklist for boards at Ellanor C. Lawrence Park (he’s a naturalist and interpreter there) includes nine species of snake, as well as skinks, salamanders, and toads. Caution: if you find a board, don’t disturb it. If you flip it over without knowing what you’re doing, you may find yourself nose-to-nose with a copperhead.

A charge to keep

Via kottke.org: Sometimes they just write themselves. As blogged by Scott Horton, George Bush’s favored painting, which to him looks like a Methodist evangelist riding into country to spread the good word, was originally made by W.H.D. Koerner to illustrate a Saturday Evening Post short story about a smooth-talking horse thief.

Bush has consistently exhibited what psychologists call the “Tolstoy syndrome.” That is, he is completely convinced he knows what things are, so he shuts down all avenues of inquiry about them and disregards the information that is offered to him. This is the hallmark of a tragically bad executive. But in this case, it couldn’t be more precious. The president of the United States has identified closely with a man he sees as a mythic, heroic figure. But in fact he’s a wily criminal one step out in front of justice.

Good on ya: 3

Three of my projects from last year have been honored with nominations for outstanding achievement from WATCH: Seussical, Never the Sinner, and Guys and Dolls. I was especially pleased to see the directing and technical work on Sinner receive its due recognition.

And Leta has the wow moment: she picked up a nomination for her work as Alma in Taking Leave for Vienna Theatre Company. I am very proud of her.

A clean, well-lighted place

beforeafterCheck out the spiffy new tile and furniture (at right) in the main men’s room at Silver Spring Stage. Renovations were completed to the men’s and ladies’ rooms just in time for the opening of Seascape. The best thing about the rehab is that the classic-era tulip-shaped urinal (see the “before” picture, at left) was retained. Second-best thing is that there is once again light in the stalls. Your contribution dollars at work! Thank you!

Another friend gone

This always happens when I check back with a morning news source later in the day: bad news. Sommer Mathis of DCist links to a column by Hank Stuever about the closing of the last of D.C.’s crackerbox art movie houses, the AMC Dupont Circle 5. The Dupont 5 never had the scope of the Biograph or the two-story interlock of the lovable Key, but attending a movie there always brought with it the challenge of getting there early enough to secure the one seat in each auditorium with decent sightlines. Apparently the cinemas’ closing has been quietly scheduled for some time. The doors close forever this weekend.

The Dupont 5 was a few dozen extremely familiar steps away from the south escalators of the Dupont Circle Metro station, between a Cosi and a Ben & Jerry’s, and not far from Olsson’s Books & Records. Here you had a perfect world of second and third dates. You could always see someone standing in front of the Dupont 5, wondering if his or her date was going to show up. (This was before everyone owned a cellphone.) A few hearts were broken in front of the Dupont 5.

Egregious muzak: 1

It’s been a while since I heard something piped in that made me say, “Aww, why did they have to do that to that song?” But there I was, walking into the Reston Chick-Fil-A this evening, and as I stood in line, I thought, “that sounds like… is that… yeah, it is…” The mooshy mix made it hard to tell whether the solo instrument was strings, or an organ, or a reed instrument, but the languid, swoopy intervals were unmistakeable: “Naima,” by John Coltrane, originally recorded on the Giant Steps album.

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind

Chicago’s performance collective, The Neo-Futurists, returns to the Woolly stage with its 19-year-running Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, a post-modern amalgam of mime, politics, sketch comedy, audience participation, depredations of food, and general “what the hell was that that just was?” The objective of each aleatory performance of TMLMTBGB is to execute 30 mini-plays (in rotation from the group’s repertory) in the course of an hour counted down by an onstage darkroom timer. Some pieces are silly, some bits are straight. I was particularly taken with the wordless “Why This Why,” an examination of a dysfunctional love relationship with red noses and a whiff of Beckettian futility; and Jessica Anne’s “Food Related Play #2,” a blackly comic anecdote about a loved one’s untimely passing. Easily the best-dubbed play is “Kristie and John perform two lines of text from Our Town, yes the one by Thornton Wilder…” In a triumph of self-referentiality, it is one of the rare works of art with a title, the recitation of which constitutes a performance of the work. The crowd-pleaser of the evening is the goofy bit of nerdcake “Ryan Walters: Bad Ass Bike Messenger.” Obviously, the secret to making this work is to give each piece as much time as it needs and no more, whether it is “Replay of a Long Distance Relationship,” which requires the two performers to sprint from the orchestra to the balcony and back to perform its scenes (with impromptu audience color commentary from several rows behind us explaining that running downstairs takes less time than going up); or the mercifully short “Republican Compassion in Action.” But the genius of the group’s writing is that each play is never talky, never there just to make a point, but rather finds its own unique elements of theatricality.

  • Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, created by Greg Allen; written, directed, and performed by The Neo-Futurists, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Washington

Cool, not cool

Paul Conley (thanks, J Luc!) has produced a fine profile for NPR of the wistful alto, the “swinging introvert,” saxophonist Paul Desmond. Desmond wrote “Take Five,” which appeared on the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s phenomenally popular Time Out, the jazz record that broke out of the 4/4 groove. Brubeck and Desmond, with their laid-back West Coast sound, were my gateway into jazz in college (the only thing I heard at home was a little Cal Tjader), but lately I’ve listened more to their bebop and post-bop contemporaries. Maybe it’s time to go back and give another listen.

Good things

Gloria liked rules, rules were Good Things. Gloria liked rules that said you couldn’t speed or park on double-yellow lines, rules that told you not to drop litter or deface buildings. She was sick and tired of hearing people complain about speed cameras and parking wardens as if there were some reason that they should be exempt from them. When she was younger she used to fantasize about sex and love, about keeping chickens and bees, being taller, running through fields with a black-and-white border collie. Now she daydreamed about being the keeper at the gates, of standing with the ultimate ledger and ticking off the names of the dead as they appeared before her, giving them the nod through or the thumbs-down. All those people who parked in bus bays and ran the red light on pedestrian crossings were going to be very sorry when Gloria peered at them over the top of her spectacles and asked them to account for themselves.

—Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn, p. 22

Believe it or not, Leta was flattered when I told her that I read this passage and thought of her.

Rana temporaria

Via Boing Boing: Perhaps this Modern Mechanix article (by S. L. Schutt, May, 1934) on raising frogs in the backyard inspired the delightful monologue Chug, by Ken Jenkins.

The advantage of frog farming is the fact that you can start practically anywhere and expand gradually as your profits mount. A vacant city lot, an old orchard or even a back yard can be utilized. Due to the cannibalistic nature of adult frogs, the frog farmer needs three separate ponds, segregating the breeders, tadpoles, and small frogs.