Interview Outtake Files: Dizzia & Her Dad

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Sacre It To Me

Tomorrow, May 29, marks the 100th anniversary of the debut of Le sacre du printemps, the ballet by Igor Stravinsky that revolutionized modern music, or so legend has it (this piece by Matthew Sigman doesn't quite debunk the legend, but it does put it in perspective). I don't recall exactly when I became a fan, but I recently revisited it in its entirety (for a short-lived formative-album-replay project on my other blog) and was stunned anew:

Heard nearly a century after its premiere, Rite still shudders and snarls and seethes; it is music's great Primitivist ur-text, the orchestral equivalent of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. But much as Picasso's once-jarring pictorial gestures have been domesticated by familiarity, the explosive dissonances of Rite, while still imposing and effective when heard in context, have become nearly a film-score lingua franca; their power to jolt is unabated, their power to shock is not.

Two things, though, struck me this time around: The metrical and rhythmic irregularities are arguably far more unsettling than the dissonances. This piece never really settles down, even when it slows down, and the few times it does amble into a comfortable 4/4 groove, watch out—it's almost always the calm before another storm of whoop-ass. Along these lines, it's telling that the percussion largely doesn't drive this rhythmic free-for-all; until the final few movements, the drums and cymbals are followers, not leaders. Indeed, I think what's ultimately so deeply disconcerting and powerful—in other words, irreducibly badass—about Rite is that it often sounds like Stravinsky is playing the whole orchestra like a drum kit, and he's using it to play a wild, unpredictable drum solo, not lay down a toe-tapping beat.

But that image may sell short the other great achievement I noticed this time around: how different, even alien the orchestra sounds from its 19th-century antecedent. The strings may be the least altered, and the horns mostly fill a familiarly forbidding, foreboding role, but Stravinsky's writing for the winds--the bassoons and oboes in particular, but also the clarinets and flutes--still sounds fresh and raw, writhing and slippery and profoundly exotic, like the music of no earthly place at any time in history. Except, of course, his own and our own, and we're all the richer and stranger for it.

Years ago, while noodling on the guitar, I discovered that the opening bassoon melody of Rite can stand alone quite nicely, and be reharmonized into a catchy tune, and there are a few other snippets that can play nicely with others. I worked up an arrangement for my band at the time (and even sprung it on the little church band I play with a few years back). But then I thought to add lyrics. And so, today, for your delectation, and in the spirit of such Spike Jones classical-deflating novelties as "Pal-Yat-Chee," I offer a little tune I call, with as much apology to "Laugh-In" as to old Igor, "Sacre It To Me." Long may the revolution roll in its grave.

The Real Malloy

I first heard about musical Renaissance man Dave Malloy when I graded the reviews for Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage for Critic-O-Meter back in 2009; the repeated comparisons of his rocking score for the show to Tom Waits piqued my interest. I finally met him doing this preview of Three Pianos, the oddball Schubert party he concocted with Alec Duffy and Rick Burkhardt, and we've exchanged our views about the state of musical both in person and online. Along the way somewhere he mentioned an opera based on War and Peace.

And now, in a scandalously short amount of time for a musical, it's here: As you no doubt have heard by now, a little show called Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, which was a sensation last fall at Ars Nova, is now an even bigger sensation in a custom-built tent under the High Line (and not just because of l'affaire de telephone). I interviewed Dave at length some months ago for my epic overview about band-performed musicals for American Theatre, a trend piece I included him in because, like Stew or the Lisps, he largely performs in what he writes, and I'd argue that that gives his shows a special frisson (and the Waits comparison is apt, by the way, though vocally I hear as much Elvis Costello croak as Waits gravel), not to mention a literal immediacy (more on that in a second). Here's how he replied when I marveled at how quickly his show had gone from page to stage:

Q: How long have you worked on the show?

Dave: I’ve been working on it about a year and half between writing the first song and opening night. 

Q: That is so quick.

Dave: That’s what people say. But, for me, coming from a jazz world, especially, we would write songs in a day. Sgt. Pepper was done in a couple of months.

Q: I think this has something to do with the professionalization of musical theatre, or what Cesar Alvarez calls "over-curation."

Dave: I very much came from the mindset of the devised theater company where you go, "OK, this is our next show, and here’s the show date, so we have these six months to develop this show and create it from start to finish." It’s only in recent years that I’ve started working on pieces that don’t have firm commitments from theaters to produce them, and they go on and on, and it’s awful because you lose that immediacy.

There are those who may point out that the comparative speed shows in the final product—that Natasha, Pierre's libretto and lyrics don't work the way a traditional book musical does, that there aren't all that many song-songs with identifiable hooks; perhaps the best and fullest expression of this dissent is this well-considered review of the original Ars Nova run by David Barbour. But I would argue that what is gained from this immediacy—from literally removing obstacles from the process and allowing an artist's impulses and affinities to spring more directly from his musical/theatrical brain to the stage—is a quality of musical fluency and pungency that is as akin to a rock 'n' roll experience as theater (or at least musical theater) gets. Indeed, I was surprised, given how little of Natasha, Pierre is conventionally hummable, how much of the music kept buzzing in my head the next day and beyond; I guess I'd have to guess that it makes a palpable difference when music feels like it came from the gut and hasn't been overthought, and no amount of dramaturgical fussing or "development" can layer that viseral feeling into a work (I felt much the same about Here Lies Love).

The direct and full realization of all of his and director Rachel Chavkin's ideas is one theme I pick up in my new Times feature on Malloy. There's a sense in which writing about theater is a job, of course, but I'd kid myself if I didn't also see it as a privilege, and I must say I feel grateful for the chance to write about Dave and his work—to nerd out about orchestrations in the paper of record, for one, and more importantly to note the arrival of a major musical-theatrical talent.

Lee Melville, R.I.P.

One of the subtexts of the recent news that Backstage would discontinue theater reviews altogether is that it was never inevitable that an actors' trade paper would review theater. Clearly Backstage's corporate overlords had looked at the metrics and at their readership—basically, beginning actors—and asked the common-sense question, Why are we covering all this theater?

This anomaly could be particularly glaring in film- and TV-dominated Los Angeles, where the local theater scene gets about as much respect as head lice. But when I started up Back Stage West in 1994, it was simply understood: We would write about film and TV casting opportunities...and write theater reviews and features. I never thought to wonder why, even if, in later years, my publishers certainly seemed to wonder why I, as editor, had become so singularly focused on L.A. theater, founding an awards show to honor it and even crossing the footlights on occasion.

The reason Back Stage West was on the theater beat, of course, was because Drama-Logue had paved the way, and we were competing with them. Drama-Logue, a scrappy mom-and-pop casting paper, founded in 1972, had grown up along with the rise of the "Equity Waiver" theater movement in L.A., and though I don't know the exact date that Lee Melville began as Drama-Logue's editor in chief, by all accounts it was he who made covering that burgeoning theater scene a priority and a mission for Bill Bordy's little paper. In 1977 he founded the (in)famously generous Drama-Logue Awards and headed a stable of critics that covered the scene with a thoroughness unmatched by any other publication.

I didn't know about this pre-history when I started at Back Stage West, as Lee was no longer editor of Drama-Logue by then. But by the time we founded our own awards to compete with Drama-Logue's, and soon after bought out Drama-Logue, the lore had reached my hearing (the late, great critic Polly Warfield, one of Lee's close associates, who came to write for Back Stage West after the merger, certainly had something to do with that). I can't claim in any real sense that Lee passed a torch to me; when we did eventually meet, he was gracious and pleasant and advisory, and after I left Back Stage West, he had me write a fair amount for the magazine LA Stage, which he had founded. But the environment in which it was simply taken for granted that L.A.'s actors' trades would cover the local theater scene with thoroughness and respect, and with the great honor of honest criticism—in short, the critical environment that largely shaped me and my sensibilities, and gave me a career—was to a large extent Lee's creation. So, though we didn't know each other well, I owe a great debt of gratitude to the late Mr. Melville.

For a more personal recollection, I turn playwright Luis Alfaro, who offered these lovely recollections on Facebook:

A few years ago I was invited to speak at a Grantsmakers in the Arts conference and Lee pulled me aside to interview me. He said, "I have a lot of questions, but I guess I am just wondering, what's in your heart?..." He just had a lovely way of being in the world. Another time we were taking the elevator up at the Getty Villa to see a performance and he introduced me to his friend saying, "This is one of those people that make the things that make me most happy." What a lovely spirit and it was always a pleasure to see him at opening nights with his pad and pen. Rest in peace, sweet man.

Indeed.

The Mamet Q&A: The Customer Isn't Always Right

Remember when the most blazing controversy about David Mamet was his heterodox approach to acting training? The publication in 1999 of his terse, contrarian True and False, which posited, in essence, that 20th century acting training's emphasis on interiority and emotional truth had led actors astray, was the one occasion I had to interview him, for a piece in Back Stage West. I hadn't looked back on the entire Q&A until recently, and I think it's worth revisiting in full. I started by asking the obvious question about the acting school and theater Mamet co-founded, which, last I checked, is still charging students to learn to act.

Q: Has the Atlantic been a place where you’ve observed some of the problems you inveigh against in True and False--the students not wanting ever to graduate from school, or seeking something that training can’t really give them?

Mamet: Well, this is not a plague I’m talking about in the book. Rather, it’s the condition of students. First off, the ideas in the book aren’t just mine; they’re simply opinions. They happen to be opinions which I firmly believe in, and to which I trust for, among other things, my livelihood, but at the end of the day, they’re my opinions. Whatever articulateness or concision that is involved in the expression of those opinions comes from many, many years of thought about them. A student, by definition, is someone who hasn’t had the benefit of those years of thought and experience. Therefore, they’re going to be a little bit confused, and they’re going to be subject to a lot of countervailing influences. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have to study, they wouldn’t have to wonder, they wouldn’t have to work, they wouldn’t have to read this or any other book. In a long way, roundabout, responding to your question: It’s the condition of students to be confused, and to be searching for an answer.

Q: Did you write this book more to correct the bad acting you see onstage and in films, or more to address what you see actors put themselves through in rehearsal?

Mamet: Both. First off, I always wanted to write a book about acting. I grew up reading many, many books about acting, and that was always an ambition of mine, to add to that canon. Then, I think it’s in the nature of people as they age, if they have insufficient control over themselves, to become garrulous, and to say, “Oh, things were much better when I was a youth.” That may or may not be true. I think it may also be coincidentally true is that, as I mention in the book, is that something rather drastic has changed, which is that actors now do not as a rule come up through the fiery furnace of the theatre. Spending your time in trying to earn your living in the theatre will teach you a lot of lessons pretty quickly, because you’re working with an audience. The people working exclusively in movies and television, or in a studio, for that matter, don’t get the opportunity.

Q: I wonder, though, if saying that actors can learn only from the audience is a bit like saying, The customer is always right. I mean, it’s been pointed out that before the Stanislavski system, acting was very stagey, and there are still actors who seem to have learned from an audience only to be hams.

Mamet: That’s a very good point, but I disagree with you. It’s not saying the customer is always right. Learning from the audience does not mean learning necessarily to placate the audience. Many times, one has to make the decision that one is correct and the audience is wrong. But the point is, when you’re working with a paying audience, you’ve gotta be pretty goddamn sure you’re right, because your livelihood depends on it. In weak people, it may build subservience, but in people who are other than weak, who are building strength, it builds character.

Q: In your criticisms of the Method in the book, you seem to avoid naming names, other than Stanislavski. Essentially, you say that a lot of the techniques associated with Lee Strasberg, Uta Hagen, Stella Adler are hogwash and don’t work--but without naming their names, it seems that you’re pulling the punch a bit.

Mamet: It’s not my place--it would be impolite of me to name people’s names. But I’ve spoken very, very specifically about the practices which I think are deleterious, which I think are beside the point, and anyone who is interested can recognize those practices and determine for him or herself whether they think I’m right or not.

Q: Whenever there’s controversy about these issues, actors always say, “Whatever works,” and always stress that it’s important to respect the process of the actors they’re working with.

Mamet: Of course.

Q: But you’re putting out a strong point of view about what works and what doesn’t.

Mamet: No book is going to teach people to act, and frankly, no class is going to teach people to act. What the book concerns itself with is a way of thinking about acting, and I wrote it to express my opinions, certainly, but also, I hope, to help student actors with whom I work quite a bit, and of which company I was at one time, to think about acting, to enable them to profit from the application of observations of mine, which I hope are simply common-sensical.

Q: Your point about a lot of preparation--sensory techniques, historical research--seems to be that they’re ways for actors to hide, to shield themselves from the spontaneous. But aren’t some actors into preparation simply because they love it, and it’s their life--I think of someone like Kevin Spacey, or of Uta Hagen’s exercises, which were developed mainly to fill her time between acting jobs.

Mamet: Well, I’ve yet to see it make any difference for good. I mention my observation that a lot of people use the exercises--sense memory, emotional memory, and so on--as kind of a talisman, as magic to ward off fear. I think it’s very possible that some people do, as you say, use them as if they were a word-search puzzle to fill an idle hour. I’ve yet to see them do anything good. I think that good actors may act well in spite of them--once in a while, and perhaps more than once in a while. But I’ve yet to see--again, from my final prejudice as a member of the audience, and a director and playwright--anyone profit from it, and I have definitely seen quite a bit of harm from it.

Listen, finally, it’s not my business how anybody prepares to do what they do. Finally, I think, either as an audience or as a teacher, I’ve got no axe to grind that they’ve got to prepare a certain way; as an audience member, I love to be delighted by the fresh, the unusual, the intuitive, the spontaneous. It’s been my experience when I saw what was going on, working with actors, it generally does not come from the methods of preparation that I enumerate in the book, which is why I don’t employ them. But on the other hand, I go to the theatre, just like you, to be delighted. I don’t care how anybody prepares.

Q: How would you respond to the criticism that yours is very much a playwright’s perspective--that all this about simplicity and getting out the way is just a playwright’s way of protesting, “Just say my damn lines.”

Mamet: Yeah, well, Blah, blah, blah, I respond to that. I’m writing the book for actors, and people who may find my words and my ideas inappropriate certainly aren’t going to use them. Why should they? On the other hand, someone who might have been confused and/or shamed by a technique which he or she did not understand may garner hope from my observation that of course they were confused because, as far as I can see, it’s a bunch of gibberish.

Q: I also wonder if you think there may now be an audience for what you might call Method performance?

Mamet: Hey, listen, there’s an audience for network television.

Q: Point well taken. One of the points my critic, Matthew Surrence, makes in his review of your book, which I’m printing along with this interview, is that it doesn’t seem all that heretical to bash the Method--that the notion that the Method is bankrupt or hogwash is not a new point.

Mamet: If that’s a not a new point, then I’m thrilled, and I would suggest that the critic who’s taking me to task take a big Magic Marker and cross out the part of the subtitle where it mentions "heresy." I couldn’t be happier it’s supererogatory.

I guess you might say that one of the people it was written for was me 30 years ago, who studied and went to all these goddamn classes, could never understand a word they were talking about, and felt like a complete fool and a failure because of it. It took me many years of constantly working with actors as a director and as a teacher, much more than as a writer, to come the conclusions, through trial and error and a great deal of observation, that are in the book.

Q: The quote on the back from Alec Baldwin--""I agree with almost nothing Mr. Mamet says in this book and encourage you to devour every word"--is classic. Have you spoken to him about his disagreements with you? Is there a story behind that?

Mamet: Well, we seem to work very well together. I love to have him do my stuff; he seems to like doing it a lot. I’m thrilled that he enjoyed the book, and I’m thrilled that he likes my work. Listen, I have a friend, Donald Sultan, who’s a painter, and we were in the Louvre, looking at some magnificent paintings, and I said, “Oh my God, how did they do that?” And he said, “They didn’t know either.” And the same is true of actors. Not to say that actors are anti-intellectual, but that with any art--the only art I know anything about is writing--you strive and you work, bat your head against the brick wall, and sometimes something happens that makes you say, “My God, did I do that? Where the hell did that come from?” And I think that the same is true of acting--that the art of actor, which is a great, great art, is finally a mystery. Again, what I’m suggesting in the book is that my experience is that it’s easier to approach this mystery from the standpoint of simplicity, coupled with a certain humility, an acceptance of fear--rather than saying, "If I work hard enough, everything’s in my control, there’s nothing which I can’t influence."

Q: You compare acting in the book to athletics, music, dance, and obviously, athletes and musicians and dancers have to go train a great deal, and go through a lot of coaching. They’re not always in the arena, learning in the arena.

Mamet: So your question is, Shouldn’t people get into studios? I’ve spent a lot of time in every aspect of this business; I started as a child actor in the 1950s. And I’ve never seen an idea more terrifying than a group of mutual criticism; it brings out the worst in people. In the theatre, we should be colleagues and supporters to each other, we shouldn’t be each other’s critics. And we shouldn’t be performing for each other. It brings out not only the worst in us as actors, it brings out the worst in us as an audience. So what I suggest, as was my very fortunate experience as a young man, is: Get out of those goddamn studios and start a theatre company, write your own plays, put on your own plays, and do something for an audience.

Q: The mutual-critique model, though, is contrasted with the masterclass model, in which the teacher does all the criticism.

Mamet: But also you have to understand, and I make the point in the book, you have to really use your common sense and look at who that teacher is. That teacher, with a few exceptions, is not someone who’s successful at their profession, but is successful in getting a job as a teacher in a school which he or she did not work to found. At the beginning, whether it was Lee Strasberg or Sanford Meisner or Vakhtangov or Joan Littlewood--those people attracted colleagues to themselves and their way of thinking through a great deal of energy, inventiveness, and some degree of charisma, and through the ability of having their tenets put into application. Most people who are teaching in schools nowadays--and God bless ’em, I spent a lot of time out of work myself--have joined ongoing institutions that have the imprimatur of longevity about them. And that’s a different kind of person than the first group I mentioned.

Again, what the book is about is, I’m not trying to damn anyone to hell, or be holier than thou. The book is written for actors, and I hope one of the things I’m doing is suggesting an alternative, and further suggesting that to embrace such an alternative is not foolish, but is, not only laudable but probably more geared to individual success than devoting oneself to the institutional model.

And the other thing you find out when you start working with a real theatre company, which is to say a theatre company made up of actors, directors, and writers, is that they cross-pollinate. The wonderful of the last couple of years have all come out of theatre companies, and most of them started out as actors. And that’s as it should be: It’s not only how you learn to act, it’s how you learn to write.

See also: "Mamet Vs. Brecht: The Wrong Fight."

Breaking Silence!

Jenn Harris and Paul Kandel in Silence! (photo by Dixie Sheridan)

Last week I got a news release that Silence! The Musical just clocked its 500th performance, and I couldn't be happier for the show, albeit for weird reasons. Let's call it reverse (or perverse) vindication.

When I was sent to review the original production of this unauthorized parody of The Silence of the Lambs at the New York Fringe Festival in 2005, I had just arrived in Brooklyn from L.A., and had begun freelancing for the New York Times. I didn't much care for the show, and I think my review lays out my case fairly well (basically, I thought the show's one joke—they're singing! and dancing!—wore thin quickly).

There was one glaring and painful exception, though. While I've been mostly happy with how the Times editors have handled my prose in the years since, the way one of my early points was edited made me sound like a bluestocking, and I still wince when I read it:

"Silence! The Musical" winks so hard it's nearly blind. Taking large swatches of Ted Tally's film script for the Oscar-winning 1991 thriller "The Silence of the Lambs" and weaving in intentionally cheesy songs and dishy asides, the librettist Hunter Bell and songwriters Jon and Al Kaplan miss as many opportunities for laughs as they hit.

The targets that they do aim for are dubious. The diabolical psychiatrist/killer Hannibal Lecter (Paul Kandel) delivers a terrible (and vulgar) power ballad about the scent of a woman. 

Yes, it's the infamous "If I could smell her cunt" song, and I think I understand why the Times trimmed my description of it—I made it too clear what the offending word was, right up to supplying a rhyming adjective. I wrote:

The diabolical psychiatrist/killer Hannibal Lecter (Paul Kandel) delivers a terrible power ballad about the scent of a woman, employing a blunt four-letter word for the female anatomy that loses it meager punch with each repetition.

Maybe the difference seems petty—the editor cut my all-but-spelling-out-the-word description, then tried to tuck it all into that parenthetical "and vulgar." But that's the phrase that sticks in my craw. It's not a word I typically use, at least not to describe profanity, and that turn of phrase is among the few things that have appeared under my byline I don't recognize as my own writing. My not liking the show was one thing, but coming off like a clueless fuddy-duddy stung. As did this comment:

“Silence!” is a brilliant pop culture spoof that appeals to everyone’s lewd, crude and prurient interests. Too bad Mr. Kendt couldn’t have embraced his inner sociopath to come out and play with the rest of us. Someone should buy him a “South Park” box set for Christmas.

I'm not sure how I stumbled onto the website of Silence! songwriters Jon and Al Kaplan, but some time later I noticed, on the show's press page, that they included a tiny squib of my Times review and followed it with a telling comment:

"Terrible (and vulgar)." —Rob Kendt, The New York Times"A negative review in The New York Times is the kiss of death." —Buddy Thomas, ICM, in his final correspondence with us

Critics are not (all) bitter parasites who wish ill on their art form, and it pained me a little to see my own dubiously edited words thrown back at me as what seemed at the time like the show's sure death knell. So I was strangely heartened to see that my review didn't kill Silence! after all, and that it in fact returned for an Off-Broadway run in 2011, got great reviews (an A- on StageGrade), and is still packing 'em in.

There have been shows I've hated enough to heartily wish they would die, but Silence! was never one of those, and I'm glad it's found its audience—though I also had to smile in noting that my colleague Jason Zinoman greeted the show's return with yet another lukewarm Times review. What the hey, if that can further the show's meta-narrative—it's the musical that's a hit despite the Times!—more power to them.

And while I'm sharing original drafts that the Times editors redacted, I can't resist recalling another one from the same Fringe Festival that they were probably wise to change. At the end of my review of the Neo-Futurists' delightful The Last Two Minutes of the Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen, I reached for a terrible pun:

Would Ibsen approve? I think the Norwegian would.

John Lennon's ironic tale of infidelity and mod apartment design had nothing to do with this show, of course, so the pun was cut to simply, "Would Ibsen approve? I think he would." Now that I look back on that unambiguous affirmation of a show I sincerely liked, I do, too.

Ann vs. Imelda

For America magazine I've done a combined review of two entertaining and popular shows about iconic women leaders at either end of New York's nonprofit stage spectrum: The Public Theater's Here Lies Love, the dance-party musical about Imelda Marcos (which I already posted briefly about here), and Lincoln Center Theater's Ann, the old-school solo show about Texas guv Ann Richards. The links between the these two women, it turns out, go beyond shoulder pads and immovable hair:

Neither show is entirely successful, even on its own terms; but both are worthy efforts with their share of entertainment value and food for thought, in varying proportions. Both depict women who at first reluctantly, then wholeheartedly, seize the reins of power with all its gratifications and complications and discover their mission (or their self-justifying rationale, as the case may be) only in the doing of it. This is not just a matter of biographical coincidence; in this shared motion from second fiddle to first-chair violin, the lives of both women dramatize a huge generational shift.

Born just four years apart, they were both transitional figures, straddling the pre- and post-feminist generations. They began life assuming, as Ann puts it, that “taking care of my husband and my children was my profession,” but soon enough realized not only that they could do anything men could do but that they were needed at the wheel after feckless male leadership had driven their governments into a ditch. As Imelda (Ruthie Ann Miles) defiantly sings, her decrepit, philandering husband Ferdinand (Jose Llana) cedes her more and more power, “It takes a woman to do a man’s job.

Read the whole thing here. Oh, and there's also a review of Here Lies Love in an unexpected place: HowlRound, which officially dips its toes into review-style, show-specific criticism with W.M. Akers' very fine inaugural effort. W.M. raises some of the same issues I had with the show (basically, that it's too much fun for a show about a brutal dictatorship), but I especially loved this bit about David Byrne:

In the last decade, Byrne has dabbled in conceptual art, producing work like 2008’s Playing the Building, a pleasant-enough art installation in southern Manhattan that probably did not deserve the attention drawn by its creator’s name. In his eagerness to cross genres, Byrne is like a much more talented, much less irritating James Franco. Conceptual art is best left to the professionals, but rock is Byrne's beat, and Here Lies Love is a sparkling reminder of why he became a downtown icon in the first place. His name may get them in the door, but the music will make them stay.

I rather liked Playing the Building, but the overall point sticks. Read that whole thing here.