Carmina Burana

The local company returns with a glorious restaging of Septime Webre’s signature work, Carmina Burana, preceded by the company première of Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses. Wheeldon’s exploration of biomorphic forms (scored by György Ligeti) demands strong partnering by Luis Torres and Jared Nelson, while Sona Kharatian and Jade Payette display silky arms with steely strength. And how often do we get to see a ballerina use her fingers to such good effect? Payette and Kharatian evoke spiny critters of the ocean deeps. Mark Stanley’s lighting effects (recreated by Joshua Michaels), achieved by coloring the cyclorama while pulling open slits with the upstage travelers, are top-notch.

The magic spectacle of 1999’s Carmina is recreated with a full staging. Members of the Cathedral Choral Society and Children’s Chorus of the Cathedral Schools are arranged on industrial scaffolding, forming a U on the deck, altogether making four layers of dancers and singers, with two followspot operators on a tier above them. (Unfortunately, some of the stage machinery at Thursday’s performance was not noiseless.) The “Tanz” passage, a dance with pushbrooms used to clear the deck of rose petals strewn across the stage in the preceding dance, retains its sexy wit. The soloist for “Olim Lacus Colueram” eloquently thrashes, to evoke the throes of the roasting bird. And the reprise of “O Fortuna,” as the soul (much-buffeted Jason Hartley) binds himself to Fortune’s wheel and ascends into the heavens, is still a heart-breaker. Special recognition to vocal soloists Laura Lewis, soprano; Robert Baker, tenor; and Stephen Combs, baritone.

Charles Cave offers a wealth of background information on the “scenic cantata” that is Carmina Burana, debuted in 1937 by composer Carl Orff.

  • Carmina Burana with Morphoses, Washington Ballet, Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, Washington

Tumblehome and Six Line

Phil Patton reports on the specialized vocabulary of automobile designers.

Now that designers often move around the globe, their language has become more eclectic. Earlier in his career, [Peter] Davis [director of interior design for global compact utility vehicles at G.M.] worked in Europe for Fiat and G.M. In Germany, he learned gummidingers, a name for rubber thingamajigs that have no name. Mr. Davis defined the British-sounding mucketts as “complicated rubber moldings that hide nasty window-door frame areas or direct water drips to appropriate places.”

“In Italy,” he said, “what we call the plenum, the area at the base of the windshield where the wipers sit and run off is directed is called the vasca di pesce, or fish bowl.”

Digital, not digital

Roland’s crossword puzzle this morning had a reference to chisenbop, a manual reckoning system where you use your fingers like the beads of an abacus. I hadn’t heard about chisenbop for decades, not since I saw a TV ad for a book that would teach your kids how to count on their fingers. I think Fred MacMurray was the celebrity spokesman, but I could be wrong.

And I was thus reminded of Jakow Trachtenberg’s Speed System of doing multiplication and other arithmetic without pencil and paper. Somebody told me about it when I was a kid, I checked the book out of the library and devoured it. I don’t really remember any of it, except that multiplying by 12 was especially easy. Trachtenberg developed the system while he was held in a concentration camp in World War II and, if you will, didn’t have anything better to do with his time. The book is still in print.

Bioblitz!

Via Botany Photo of the Day comes word of the First Annual Blogger Bioblitz. In honor of National Wildlife Week, April 21 – 29, participants

… from across the country will choose a wild or not-so-wild area and find how many of each different species—plant, animal, fungi and anything in between—live in a certain area within a certain time.

Maybe the walls next?

before the renovationsSilver Spring Stage is getting a badly-needed makeover of the flooring and ceilings of its backstage areas, and some of the shabbier partitions are coming down, too. Decades of hard use have reduced the tile to a crumble, as you can see. I’ve been helping out shifting the movables from one place to another as the workmen move through. The new tile flooring is functional if bland, but it looks so much better than what it replaced—I promise to post an “after” picture soon.

Lessons learned

  • A headset does not fit over a cheap hairnet without shredding it.
  • Performing a relaxation exercise (yoga Corpse pose) on the deck—while sound is running through its cues (thunder, fire exits announcement, a eggshell crack for the elephant bird that sounds like a chainsaw) and while lights has one of the electric pipes pulled in to change an instrument—requires great concentration.
  • When you’re looking for the high note, close your eyes, relax (!), and just let go.
  • And most of all,

    When you’re jouncing along
    On a road full of ruts,
    Getting jeered by a throng
    And performing for nuts,
    Tell yourself how lucky you are!

Hazards

The special hazard on this show is confetti. In the Act 1 sequence where Horton sits on the egg through storm and changing seasons, the Cat pelts him with water from a super soaker, a bucket of autumn leaves, and a big batch of confetti. Half of the crew’s intermission cleanup consists of sweeping up little white dots of paper—from the deck, from the steps of the tree unit that Horton is perched on—and still the confetti goes everywhere. It may be worse than glitter. We find bits backstage in the green room, we find chips of it in the auditiorium, I find it in my slippers. There is show confetti in my back bedroom at home where I’m typing this.

This past Sunday was the day for more than one little thing to go wrong. In the Act 1 finale, Gertrude’s lengthy tail, made of feather boas glued end to end, parted in two. Suddenly Alexa found herself tugging against no resistance (from offstage, I’m usually holding the other end while Gertrude struggles in vain to get airborne). Alexa’s a trouper, she covered, and she yanked with all her might against nothing.

Then, late in the second Act, the Bird Girl who usually has the Who-bearing clover so that she can hand it off to Gertrude to restore it to Horton, didn’t have it. As they came offstage, there was a lot of muttering, “I forgot the clover!” and Kevin (the Cat) scampered back to find a substitute. He slipped to Horton during the next scene, and I wonder how many people noticed.

Probably the WATCH judges did. If something goes wrong in a matinee performance, 95% of the (traditionally less sophisticated) audience won’t spot it, but matinees are also peppered with adjudicators. They’re there on Sunday because they often have their own evening performances to deal with.

Sunday was also designated as an autographs in the lobby day. Don’t ask me why, but I just loathe autographs in the lobby in costume. So I got to show my “I’m crew” card, and I cleaned myself up while the rest of the cast Met Their Public. Which meant that I had to do some crew work. Now I don’t mind wet-mopping the deck, and with all that confetti (vide supra), mopping is always in order, and in fact I can Tom Sawyer myself into enjoying it a little bit. Water + swab, swab = things are cleaner.

I’m working on building up that same “hooah” attitude towards the orchestra pit cover. At CenterStage, there are two sections of the deck that you remove to make an opening for the orchestra pit. (This opening is only so that the conductor can be seen by the cast.) The first section is composed of several layers of hardwood, altogether making a slab 20 inches by 70 inches by 5 1/2 inches thick, and the other section (which forms the lip of the stage) is somewhat smaller.

To open the pit, what you do is this: walk downstairs with a buddy into the pit area; unbolt the first section from the girders that hold everything in place; on a count of three, with your buddy, push the section straight up until it clears, then slide it back (upstage) (it has casters to make this part a little easier, and usually there is crew above to help with this step); get a stance on the top of the railing that forms the conductor’s platform and push the smaller section up and out; climb out of the pit; lay the small section on top of the first section and roll them out of the way far upstage.

I don’t have a lot of upper-body strength, so I’m not one of those people that you look to first for jobs that require doing something on three. Usually Chris, Rick and Steve take this detail.

Okay, now that I’ve popped the pit cover a couple of times I can figure out how much it weighs. Figure generously on a specific gravity of 0.6 for the composition of the cover. Eurgh: 170 pounds.