The Ravi Coltrane Quintet finished their stellar concert with an extended version of ‘I’m Old Fashion’ which accommodated memorable improvisations from each of the musicians and then was brought back to its famous refrain by Coltrane, in a completely lush, unshowy cadenza. The piece did seem like a commentary on what had just transpired through the ensemble’s two hour set- they were old fashion in delivering a full throated, musically invested and cohesive set. Among the many musical riches was Ornette Coleman’s Bird Food and really, showed such understanding of that era of hard bop, delivering it joyously and with warm, quicksilver articulation. More later, for now that image of the cloud scalloped full moon low in the sky over the city makes me want to do my homework.

After he triumphed in a razor-close victory in the Iowa caucus, former PA Senator Rick Santorum is close to the top of the GOP heap and his campaign is $1 millions richer overnight. The next day, Santorum was singing his same old songs to students at the College Convention in Concord, NH, he faced boos and hisses when a young woman asked him how he could be against same-sex marriage and for individual freedoms, he so cherishes as put forth in the US Constitution.

In Rick Santorum’s world, the question of the legitimacy of gay relationships is put in his own hypothetical meat grinder that if you are talking about two men or two women getting married than why not 6 men, four cats, siblings, polygamists and in fact whole communities of people who love to watch reruns of All in the Family.

As soon as the young woman asked, he was countered by the response “we’re not talking about polygamy’ that’s not what we’re talking about’ he shut down the Socratic session ‘I ask the questions and I call on you,” he said, obviously miffed. (Just for the record Rick, Socrates was gay.)

Of course, Santorum was infamous when he was PA Senator, for his homophobic views and his antigay agenda, more than anything else he did. Although he is claiming to have brought a $1 billion in urban renewal revenue to the blighted Chester, Pa., which bears repeating if it is in fact, true. He’s been singing this marriage equality threatens real straight marriage as a logical dictum to anyone who will listen.

But now I feel like it can’t be dismissed as morbid stupidity. Santorum is obviously a mouthpiece for the ultra-conservative, evangelicals who get rich demonizing gays. What Santorum does in effect is not address the fact that you can’t win elections by demonizing a class of people in 2012.

Rick, do you really think that millions of GLBT identified, tax paying, law-abiding Americans are going to stand by and let you trash them with hackneyed myths and lies about their lives in a national presidential campaign? Who does he think he is going to be facing on stump speeches in New York City, San Francisco and other gay populated metropolis? He also completely ignores their thriving communities, locally, statewide, nationally and internationally.

No matter how hard you try Rick, the world if full of people with same sex attractions and they are going to live their lives. The closet will exist only in tyrannical, oppressive regimes, not in ostensibly free societies. You forget, even in the queer baiting 50s and 60s, of J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy, when gays were summarily rounded up and thrown in jail (a right of passage for gays, lesbians and drag queens of a certain age) the sub-culture thrived and grew into the political force it is today. No one is talking about marriage to their pets, or multi-partners ala old-time Mormonism, they are talking about committed consenting adults, who in some cases have been together for decades.

Marriage equality will not lead to the disintegration of the institution of heterosexual marriage. Straights will still be able to get weekend arranged Elvis officiated weddings in Vegas in between Barry Manilow shows. Marriage equality is a reality that is happening all over the globe.

But, Rick, politically, if you want to advance, you are being too stupid to be an idiot. Even Michele Bachmanm, the other hysterical homophobe among the candidates, immediately started to pull out of her previous antigay statements, because she knew that even though that queer baiting money got her where she was, it would cost her on the national political stage.

Yes, Rick, even if you do end up at the bottom of a Romney ticket you still have to accept that there are radical, lesbian, feminist Americans who have a power base now. The military didn’t fall apart when DADT was repealed and when there is marriage equality everyone who is in a healthy heterosexual marriage is going to continue on. That Rush Limbaugh even paid the biggest queen in the world $2 million to sing “Your Song” at his wedding.

You have survived in your homophobic, no contraceptive bubble for so long that you refuse to accept certain facts. If you want to continue your campaign, seek therapy for your homophobic tendencies, it is not normal to harbor such negative views about individuals that you obviously know nothing about.

What’s it to ya~!

Alternate traditions have always been a part of gay Christmas (whether the straight family at home was aware of it or not). Eventually there is either a G=SHA (gay-straight holiday alliance) between old family traditions and new inclusive ones that feature same-sex couples at family functions for starters- then the holiday mixed nuts of all stripes~

~Anyway when you find yourself a onesie again, under whatever circumstance, relatives and friends express concern that you might be brooding, soused & ready to take the long swim, if you are alone on major holidays. Well that is much appreciated, I guess, you wonder why it doesn’t occur to people that being alone in a group at say, holiday feasts, makes you feel worse. Togetherness isn’t the answer to everything. Besides, home alone on a holiday in the city really can be magical~

~When xmas falls on a Sunday, this is a city alive with such serenity and urban calm. There is no traffic. I can seek out new architecture on my bicycle, craning in pan and scan. I’ve been discovering new old buildings in this city for 30 years and it continues to teach me where and who (thank you gayborhood) I am~

~First there is always WRTI & fab programming of holiday music with Basie, Ellington, Ella, Louis, Nat, Eartha & Giraldi; Bob Perkins always has something new from the old days. Then there is YouTube for guilty favorites- this year- scenes from Valley of the Dolls & selected celeb Christmas camp starting with Bing & Bowie~

{Mostly you miss the old gang on the return from home holiday bar crawl, course most of all your missing partner & drinking, dancing, and the possiblitily of sex under the tree, last dance at Equus~ then a nightcap at Roscos on Spruce~}

~No regrets, c’est la vie. But if you are lucky enough to live in Philadelphia when xmas falls on a Sunday – alone can be bliss~

~these sugarplums dancing as I stroll through Rittenhouse with, finally, a tree befitting the center of town for Christmas and a Menorah sculpture for Hanukka and the lights in the trees for everybody, including the blue deco lazars atop Liberty Place~ 

~as I tool through town to catch the French silent film hit The Artist at the Ritz Five for the 2:40, with a pocketful of dark choc Godiva balls (thanks Liz!)& my heart on the sleeve of my 20s ratty hounds-tooth overcoat. I’m pretty sure I was the only one there alone, but I felt so much part of the crowd.  Let’s see, even though I saw Chaplin at the old TLA when they showed movies, this is the first silent I’ve ever seen on the big screen, so it was a transcendent experience.  More about that in a separate piece… well it had FACES as Norma Desmond would say-  the star Jean Dujardin, a cross between John Gilbert, Gene Kelly & Fred Neblo (of silent Zorro fame). Berenice Bejo luminous in Adianesque noveau.  Not only was there a Jack terrier and a big dance finish~ the music, entranced. This is not stylized cinema, but a work of cinema art. I wept.  

~Biked down to Penn’s Landing and tapdanced a bit on the causeway perch over the Delaware, at sunset with the skyline cut with a pink burnished and mauve sky.  Back through town able to ride without stopping for 12 blocks without a car in sight and such gorgeous silence.  and even the bars aren’t open until tonight, but detox boy will have to be content on being drunk on the Artist.

Merry Christmas Jack,
see you at the movies
or in a dream
~ t’amo darling j’taime ~

Pennsylvania Ballet
The Nutcracker
Academy of Music, Dec. 11 

Pennsylvania Ballet opened their celebrated production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker in Ottawa, Canada this year and are now back home for a three week run in the Academy of Music, with rotating lead casts.

Even with the tour warm-up, the Sunday matinee performance in the Academy had a subdued, rote air for much of Act I. After all, Mr. B’s long Christmas party scene is pantomime-heavy and through Balanchine, has lineage that dates back to the Imperial Russian Ballet, which can look dusty.

All of the gestural work with relatives and guests can get wheezy without sharp character embellishments, and the mice war with the toy cadets needs to be sharpened, if not retooled.

But livening things up were the junior corps girls, who really dug in with charm and excitement. And former principal William DeGregory appeared as a very animated Herr Drosselmeier, who wielded his cape and a wand a la Liberace.

Leah Hirsch and Phoebe Gavula as Harlequin and Columbine held to razor-like doll moves. Alexander Peters as the soldier, dancing to Tchaikovsky’s dark drill, was all bolt and technical fire.

Act I’s erratic quality was completely jettisoned by the Waltz of the Snowflakes; these ladies had glittering carriage and supple precision in their point work, especially when serenaded by the silvery voices of the Philadelphia Boys Choir from the gilt Academy box.

Act II is all about the dancing. The full flow that had been missing was now very much onstage. At the center, there was a great performance by Amy Aldridge as the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier Zachary Hench. Except for minor corrections en balance, their chemistry and sublime technique pretty much nailed one of Balanchine’s most demanding pas de deux.

Sparking things up was William DeGregory as a very animated as Drosselmeier, who wields his cape and a wand a la Liberace.Advertisement
Aldridge kept floating diamond-hard pirouette runs and her adagio turns were a dream. Hench, a most attentive partner, executed steel-centered grand pirouettes and unfussy jetes.

Among the hightlights of those Balanchine jewel box divertissements: Riolama Lorenzo burning the floor without even trying as Coffee, the harem seductress with finger chimes- How many ways can you say sultry and luminous?

James Ihde and Rachel Maher were the strong leads for the tarantella Chocolates dance. Brooke Moore looked tentative in her Waltz of the Flowers, pitching out of a couple of turns, but recovered on her second entrance along with ensemble of flowers, locked in with Balanchine’s showgirl classicism.

Peters, who just became an apprentice this year, was back leading the Candy Cane Brigade with plum hoop jumps for the Russian Dance presto. The Shepherdesses held tight, rhythmic patterns framing the gorgeous pacing of lead Holly Lynn Fusco and Jermel Johnson nailed those signature tea dance jumps with mile-high aerial splits.

Among the child leads, Mary Lee Deddens kept her dancing fleet while reflecting the evening’s wonder in her eyes even as the smitten Christian Lavallie stole her heart as her valiant prince.

And the party girls from Act I were back as the gliding Angels orchestra and The Polichinelles, who appear out from under the sails of Mother Gingerbread. These lovies showed tight unison work and airy jumps. Needless to say, it takes a lot to upstage this yuletide Dragzilla.

The orchestra played textbook Tchaikovsky, although that could have spiked a little more in key moments. And again this year Luigi Mazzocchi’s fine violin solo just bathed the opera house

somewhere in the 20s
astronomers started to know that
expansion of the universe was speeding up,
Cassandra half heard it on NPR or
a rerun of The Cosmos
she remembered this fact
as she put the note to
Mercury under her cobalt blue pyramid
tried to sleep.
The dream vortex
has her remembering to
keep thinking about it as a
a profound enigma
or colors of a racid pool
or intellectual burlesque
then she recalls a snatch
of dialogue
that snagged her mind unformed
but with the knowledge
that dark energy
is revealed in the 1995 volumne
of 450 other stars
She asks Mercury to deliver
the letter to Edwin Hubble on his
regular route
?Was he in fact carrying the communique about the 250,000 observable galaxies like ours?
there is no mystery they say with
their eyes at the same time
Night is over
Cassandra starts another note to Mercury
with the droll line
Course we don’t have the atmospherics charts
Part of my–
–she thinks that she
Work is about this–
Push the plans for the universe as a hole
Physics and the math push farther and reach back
with supple math
Does your mother know that our existence is more miniscule
She knows our minds go on to discover she still gets us the meals and releases us daily
even when she haunts
She knows how our brain works
in its revolutions
the days of dim return
unannounced she braces us to the
bluish way of
Delusions that are quantum
ordering dark energy
expanding, she forgets to think
beyond infinite promises of doomed light imploding

Composer-pianist Taeko Kunishima’s Late Autumn starts with her stream of jazz consciousness style. It instantly feels both musically liberated and firmly rooted in multi-era reverence. Then the seven-minute scorcher Return To Life. Inside of its retro-progressive ascensions, shakuhachi virtuoso Clive Bell evokes a Japanese classicism which then vanishes, jarring the imagination. Sean Corby’s trumpet and flugelhorn slash through like a comet, tempered by Bell’s flute. This culminates to a thrilling, primal statement. The atmospherics are a fine example of Kunishima’s style, mixing eras with sublime naturalism. She has a concrete points of musical view and isn’t afraid to carve out unexpected territory.

The Waves has a swirling percussive drive by way of Bell’s flute, which conjures a reflexive, cathartic jazz pool, then shifting as Corby’s horn crashes in like a tidal wave. Kimie has an afterhours feel, and lifts the harrowing mood with Kunishima’s meandering before being sent aloft by Bell’s firebird flute and Corby’s runaway horn.

Later, the elegiac Dusk featuring Bell’s shakuhachi, has its musical roots in antiquity, as Kunishima’s strums the piano wires and Moylan essays lush sonorities, next to the bassist’s bone-dry bowing, for arresting contrasts. There is a haunting and haunted serenity in the after burns.

The finale is the title track’s plaintive and elegant vocal by Rio Roberts; great interplay of Kunishima’s lyricism around her whispering vocals leaves hope that this is a teaser for a full session next time around.

“Double Life A Love Story from Broadway to Hollywood“
By Alan Shayne and Norman Sunshine

TV producer Alan Shayne and painter-sculptor Norman Sunshine may have been an A-List gay power couple in the 1960s, but they were not publicly out, not only because of their careers, but because they came of age in the era of internalized homophobia.

Their journey together started in the antigay 1950s, and they tell their story in their touching memoir Double Life. The title refers to their lasting relationship and having to remain publicly in the closet.

Now, as they mark their 50 year relationship, they are a relatively newlywed couple, having tied the knot in Massachusetts where gay marriage is legal. Norman and Alan tell their stories in alternate first person chapter, with their view of who they were individually and what they were doing as a couple.

When they met, Shayne was a struggling Broadway actor and told he would never be a star by a powerful agent. Sunshine, a Los Angeles émigré who escaped the suburban life to become a graphic artist in New York and meet men out of the purview of his family who wanted him to go into the family furniture business. Even though they were instantly attracted to each other, they couldn’t have seemed more incompatible when they clumsily started dating and looking for every reason not to be together. Their attraction won out.

Both men had experienced traumatic same-sex incidents as teens and in adulthood remained conflicted about embracing their gayness. Shayne was in fact seeking de-gaying therapy, but his analyst was more progressive, encouraging him to pursue his relationship with Norman.
Shayne married a high profile lesbian, as a marriage of professional convenience, to a star of New York café society, but after she met another woman, the arrangement dissolved with bitterness. The pre-Stonewall period in New York, when they were first exploring their relationship in a closeted world and an exciting gay town, is vividly recalled.

Sunshine was responsible for the career defining ‘What becomes a legend most’ ad campaign for Blackgama furs, left the high pressure ad world to become a full time artist, but had to make up for a lot of lost time in the fast changing contemporary art world. Shayne left acting to become a casting director, working with David Susskind and the notoriously difficult producer David Merrick, before becoming a producer and eventually powerful head of Warner Brothers television. Even though it was an open secret, his high stakes money job forced him to be pretend Norman didn‘t exist.

The stresses of their jobs eventually strained their relationship, but outside of a few painful flirtations and a bout or two of cheating, the couple continued to strengthen their relationship. Sunshine even returned to New York at the behest of Frances Lear, recently divorced from TV producer Norman, to launch her magazine. Frances, the real life model for Bea Arthur’s character “Maude” had a love-hate relationship with him.

Celebrities pop-up in some hilarious anecdotes. Shayne never forgot what it was like scrapping by for acting jobs and was known for fairness and respect in his treatment of actors, even as a mogul. He was also one of the first casting agents to hire blacklisted writers at the end of the McCarthy era. He punctures some sacred stage and film stars, but not maliciously- including Marlon Brando, Lena Horne, Katharine Hepburn, Lee Radziwill and one priceless encounter with Bette Davis. Actually Shayne’s Hollywood stories, mostly about highly commercial TV shows (Bourne Identity, The Thorn Birds) are not as interesting as Sunshine’s descriptions of the ad and art worlds of the time.

The couple only touch glancingly on the devastation of AIDS in the arts, mostly recounting the heartbreak of watching the decline of their neighbor and friend Rock Hudson. Mostly though, this is a candid and inspirational memoir of love and commitment told by both men with heart and humility. Actually, their story could make a hell of a mini-series. Let’s see, Rock would be easy to cast, but who really could play Davis?

from Leafground

This is finally
caustic ground
pliant and unyielded
lush and acrid
generous and hateful
senuous and putrid
outside the
reality of dreams
comes in with an
anonymous law
barren of logic
rich with iniquity
its silence
vaquished
disremembered
corrupted by fetid truth

Clocking in at almost four hours and basically, three separate one-act operas,Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann may seem outsized for the Academy of Vocal Arts’ intimate Helen Corning Warden Theater. Actually, AVA proved they were more than up to the challenge in realizing the musical scope of the latest version by Offenbach musicologist Michael Kaye. The cast of the Nov. 15 performance showed the depth of the talented pool of singers and digs in past the buffo tenor role and divas-to-die-for divertissements.

Kaye’s added scenes, clarified by recently discovered Offenbach notes, move the opera closer to the composer’s artistic intentions. Conductor Christopher Macatsoris illuminates the score with reduced instrumentation, but otherwise there is nothing scaled musically, and certainly not vocally. AVA Orchestra marks this with a pulsing tempi and details the unique expansiveness of the lyrical French line. Stage director David Gately also keeps the squirrelly plots crisply moving forward (no built-in applause beats, for instance).

Those woeful tales of the poet Hoffmann are conjured as he sulks and pines for Stella, an opera singer, in a tavern. The muse, disguised as Nicklausse, escorts him through his three tales of love lost: first, he is humiliated over loving a perfect, mechanical woman; then, smitten with a consumptive singer, who must choose between his love or her music; and finally, entranced by the courtesan who steals his soul in a mirror (don’t ask).

Maria Aleida is hilarious as Olympia, the automaton ballerina, her arms flailing around in “danger Will Robinson” fashion at Hoffmann’s touch and her singing those F-flat scales bone-chilling. Alexandra Maximova, in the brothel scenes that contain most of the new music, makes the most of the comparatively underwritten courtesan with lusty soprano trills to ensnare Hoffmann.

Chloé Moore’s warmth as Antonia, between coughs, and icy as Stella, is skilled in classic divadom. Margaret Mezzacappa‘s luminous mezzo floats in behind the portrait of Antonia’s dead mother, to great effect. Moore is very well paired by Patrick Guetti, whose powerful unfussy basso is so well folded into his performance as Antonia’s protective, hapless father.

Other than the dark dexterity of his voice, bass Scott Conner is operatic noir with each of his four villains, most drolly impressive as Le docteur Miracle, popping up in unexpected places. Also standout supporting tenors Jeffrey Halili, playing outrageous stereotypes for his comic voice tricks in the servant roles, and John Viscardi, the zany and slightly creepy dollmaker.

In the title role, William Davenport, 2011 Bel Canto Competition winner, is convincing both vocally and as an actor. Davenport has a big voice with a powerful, very warm center, even with some shakiness around the technical edges. Most important, he didn’t rely solely on his towering tenor to carry him through this very demanding role. The sketchier role of his muse, who reacts to the action, mezzo Crystal E. Williams, has soaring control, not to mention superb French diction and beautiful stage presence.

Gately and Macatsoris together have orchestrated a uniformly strong cast for this Hoffmann, a chorus with muscle in their brief appearances and breakthrough roles from Williams, Guetti and Davenport