Happy Ho-Hos

Off to Valparaiso, Indiana to do Yule with one side of the family, then on to Irvine, Calif. (est. 1975) for the better half's side. Blogging will be even lighter than usual until my return. Till then, please enjoy some holiday tunes I cooked up special for the occasion. Merry merry!

Sleepwalk Noel
Christmas Time Is Here
Xmas Fugue

Planning My Trip Now

The scrappy L.A. Opera is the next place John Doyle will work his magic, in a February production of Brecht and Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny featuring Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone (not, I don't think, playing the tuba this time). The news takes me back; Mahagonny was one of the first things I wrote about for the Downtown News, in a 1989 production designed by Robert Israel, conducted by Kent Nagano, and directed by Jonathan Miller, who in a pre-show press conference memorably called Brecht "a great bully." (The translation was by Michael Feingold; I found an old NY Times review and even one in Time, which barely covers theatre in New York these days, let alone opera in L.A.) There's a good Variety bit from last June about the new production here; official link here.

Twigger's Holiday

Found this five-minute short on the site of a former Back Stage West colleague, Scott Chernoff, and it made me smile. (Scott's the one with the blonde wig and the fireman's hat; the short's creator and star is Rob Schrab of Heat Vision and Jack semi-fame.)

They Asked, I Answer

I never fail to find something interesting at Terry Teachout's blog. Here he directs us to the "musician's questionnaire" at the blog of the Bad Plus, a great NY-based jazz trio. And I can't help but play along.

GIVE US AN EXAMPLE OR TWO OF AN ESPECIALLY GOOD OR INTERESTING:

1. MOVIE SCORE. Pyscho, Entr'acte/Relache, The Grifters.
2. TV THEME. Johnny Quest, The Practice.
3. MELODY. Love theme from Vertigo, "I'll Follow the Sun," "Stardust."
4. HARMONIC LANGUAGE. Ravel, Radiohead.
5. RHYTHMIC FEEL. Hot Club of France, Silvestre Revueltas "Night of the Mayas," Tala Quintet.
6. HIP-HOP TRACK. Public Enemy "Fight the Power," Missy Elliott "Wake Up."
7. CLASSICAL PIECE. Beethoven's Third Symphony, "Rite of Spring," Janacek String Quartets.
8. SMASH HIT. Aerosmith "Sweet Emotion," Dell Vikings "Come and Go With Me," Bob Dylan "I Want You."
9. JAZZ ALBUM. Marcus Roberts, Deep in the Shed.
10. NON-AMERICAN FOLKLORIC GROUP. I have no idea precisely what this means...I do own a record by a Korean orphans choir and one by the Fiji National Police, but not for their musical, let alone their folkloric value.
11. BOOK ON MUSIC. Alec Wilder, American Popular Music.

Puttin' On the Ritz!

Among many other things, the late Peter Boyle gave a great interview.

Not Netty's!!!

Really, sometimes small things like the closure of an old favorite haunt can really unmake your day. (Tip to LA Observed.)

Jézus Krisztus!

That's Hungarian, in case you're rusty on your Slavic languages, and it's the way one key lyric will sound when the unstoppable boy-band juggernaut Altar Boyz goes to Budapest in March. The stars, according to a release I just received, will be "two well-established Hungarian musical theatre stars, Attilla Dolhai and Arpad Zsolt Meszaros, along with three new discoveries." There will be a cast recording in Hungarian, too, "marking Altar Boyz's first-ever foreign language recording to be released." (Are there recordings in other languages that haven't yet been released? Don't tease us!)

I caught the show at New World Stages last week for the first time and loved it. Maybe the pre-show drinks helped, but I think an adolescence spent among some very white teenagers in Arizona, some of whom tried to sell me on the virtues of Christian rock, was more pertinent preparation for the show's glorious, oddly sincere winking.

But will the irony translate? Attilla and Arpad's pictures provide a kind of answer.