Emilia, You're Breaking My Heart

Photo by Armin Bardel
I almost forgot to comment on this: In David Cote's Q&A with Peter Sellars re: his new Othello, now at the Skirball and starring those LAByrinth dudes, Sellars drops a rather big bombshell: He's spun a few lines of Iago's ("And it is thought abroad, that 'twixt my sheets/He has done my office", and "For that I do suspect the lusty Moor/Hath leap'd into my seat") into a real flesh-and-blood affair between Othello and Iago's wife, Emilia. So much for the enigma of Iago's motives. As Sellars puts it, with his signature breathlessness:

Suddenly, it’s totally human. It’s not abstract and celestial. And you see that Othello also mentions it, and that’s the shock. That’s Shakespeare’s point: Iago is not crazy, not paranoid, not insane. He’s human. And his best friend is having an affair with his wife. And so it creates this tension that is unbearable and finally, of course, explodes. Because violence is all about what can’t be talked about.

I can't find the reference he mentions, of Othello citing hanky-panky with Emilia. Can any Shakespeare scholars help me out here?

Not that the finer points of text would necessarily matter to Sellars. This is the guy who set Debussy's ethereal Pelleas et Melisande in a Malibu beach mansion and had a chorus of homeless men shuffle through (it was beautiful, actually); who set Figaro in Trump Tower and had Don Giovanni sing "Fin' chan al vino" while shooting up heroin. And of course the John Adams stuff, good (Nixon, El Nino) and bad (Dr. Atomic, Klinghoffer). In short, I've loved his work nearly as much as it's driven me crazy, and it's heartening to see that his often heedless, always heartfelt iconoclasm hasn't softened with age. No American director I admire walks the sometimes infuriating, often exhilarating line between genius and flake so well, and I wish we saw more of his work stateside.

And that distinctive flying-V hair only seems to have gotten more vertical as it's acquired more gray.

Bowie Meets Brecht, Part 1

I had long owned and enjoyed the LP soundtrack from the BBC's 1982 film of Brecht's Baal, not least because it interpolates a rendition of the Brecht-Weill "Drowned Girl" song alongside some sparkling Muldowney settings of vintage Brecht. Just today while chatting with a fellow Weill-head, I realized: Hey, maybe this stuff's on YouTube.

Sure enough, it is. Enjoy!

The Waters of Oblivion

I've got a soft spot for Peter, Paul & Mary. Yeah, I know now that they were a cobbled-together and commercialized facsimile of a "real" folk band, the kind of protest singers even Mitch Miller could love. And I don't care if I never hear "Puff the Magic Dragon" or "Lemon Tree" again--ugh. Still, ever since a hippie second cousin gave me his old LP of Album 1700, I've been more or less in. I later binged on PPM again during an obligatory high school folk phase (and you'd never guess whose record collection I plundered for its Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, etc.). I now like to think of vintage Mary Travers as the good-girl doppelganger of Nico, and though I'm not particularly into blondes, her vigorouos performance above is pretty savory. It also happens to be one of those timely/timeless, quasi-Biblical Dylan lyrics she's tearing into with her soulful soprano:

Too much of nothin' can make a man abuse a king
He can walk the streets and boast like most but he don't know a thing.
It's all been done before, it's all been written in the book.
But when it's too much of nothin', nobody should look.

TNC Keeps His Cool

Responding to righteous outrage at conservative race-baiting, the Atlantic's indispensable Ta-Nehisi Coates says he feels not rage or disgust. In fact, he says he feels "a little giddy":

Barack Obama, bourgeois in every way that bourgeois is right and just, will not dance. He tells kids to study--and they seethe. He accepts an apology for an immature act of rudeness--and they go hysterical. He takes his wife out for a date--and their veins bulge. His humanity, his ordinary blackness, is killing them. Dig the audio of his response to Kanye West--the way he says, "He's a jackass." He sounds like one of my brothers. And that's the point, because that's what he is. Barack Obama refuses to be their nigger. And it's driving them crazy.

It's about time.

But Will It Have Legs?

The LA Times has an eye-grabbing slide show from Berkeley Rep's preem of the American Idiot musical--sorry, "punk opera." (Pictured: Choreographer Steven Hoggett; photo by Lawrence K. Ho.)

The Color of Kitsch

This diverting LA Times profile of multi-hyphenate Allee Willis and her outsized kitsch collection, which has now become some kind of Internet social networking thingy to augment her "kitsch of the day" blog (of which the above is a choice sample), strangely fails to mention that this oddly cropped eccentric, whom one source memorably dubs "Martha Warhol," was also co-songwriter of the musical The Color Purple. Insert your own ultimate-kitsch joke here--except I happened to be one of the few critics who quite admired that underrated show (I was reviewing for Broadway.com, which has taken all its old reviews down).

The other thing the Times story made me think of is that kitsch and trinket collections are, if not a uniquely L.A. thing, then something greatly enabled by 1. more spacious living quarters and 2. the car. I can't tell you how many hours of impulsive yard-sale and used-record-store browsing I did in my salad days there (Aron's, we hardly knew ye!), nor how many irresistible car-hauled tchotchkes I shed before my cross-country move to NY in 2005. And it wasn't just the kitsch I happened to own that I remember fondly from L.A.: When I was a poor college grad, a visit here was nearly as good as a pass to LACMA.

Avenue $

Garrett Eisler of Playgoer notes an interesting facet of the just-announced Avenue Q re-transfer (its six-year run on Broadway will be followed by a move to Off-Broadway's New World Stages):

There is a little known clause in Actors Equity contracts that if a production "moves" to a smaller venue, actors must still be paid their original salaries. Broadway AEA salary-minimums are indeed higher than those Off-Broadway. So any of the actors who performed in the Broadway run (and I believe at any time in that run) are legally entitled to that same salary if the show transfers whole to New World Stages.

Note this would not be true in the case of a "revival", in other words a whole new production built from scratch. But if the "new" Avenue Q is judged by AEA to be the same production merely "transferred" then the rule should apply.

Of course, if the Q producers simply hire an all new cast...then I assume they can hire them at Off Broadway rates.

UPDATE: Well, whaddaya know: AEA bows to Avenue Q producers.