Stage

The first week of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts PIFA had people lined up outside of the Kimmel Center to go through the interactive time tunnel that takes up much of the lobby. A point of picture destination is the crystals that pulse to your heartbeat and the musical Flash of Time by choreographer Myra Bazell has revolutionary soldiers, inventors, clowns, space cadets past present and not to mention a Mastodon and computer malfunction. There is no danger Will Robinson. Meanwhile some real life figures are providing some engaging theater.

Everyone And I
Hamilton Garden in the Kimmel Center

‘Everyone And I’ is part of the last line of a famous poem and if you remember the next line then you must not miss this play. The Azuka Theater and creative partner The American Poetry Review are debuting Elisabeth Scanlon’s poetically poignant theater piece is premiering in the glass-vaulted Hamilton Garden. Scanlon an editor at APR brings to life poet Frank O’Hara and jazz singer Billie Holiday in intertwining narratives about how O’Hara came to write his most famous poem The Day Lady Died.

The players occupy the same stage, but are in different worlds. Holiday debriefs on how she took the money and kept quiet about her infamously ghost written memoir Lady Sings the Blues, her beginnings as a prostitute, how she became a singer because she couldn’t dance. Her artistry and her bad luck with men, drugs and show business. Kimberly S. Fairbanks doesn’t sing, but otherwise projects the Holiday’s depth and peerless aura. She wears a gorgeous, low-cut, champagne hourglass satin cocktail gown, perfect gardenia in her hair completes the iconic picture.

Holiday mocks her persona as a hard-luck chanteuse, and flashes poses of two of the most iconic photos taken of her. The vivacious jazz diva, with gardenia in her hair and eyes cast up and next the bent over wreck, hair pulled back, face ashen and grim, hands clutching a rocks glass. O’Hara similarly jokes about his image and the trials of living an insular writer’s life. Like Holiday, he is also part of a minority group expressing themselves in a repressive society. He relates how grand the gay life if, but dealing with the reality that being visible could mean getting arrested. Kevin Glaccum directs these actors with a light hand, reflecting Scanlon’s script that never lets them over dramatize.

Mike Dees is just as dynamic as O’Hara, not to give anything away, when he eventually recites the poem, it is so logically connected to Scanlon’s portrait of these two artists. Holiday died at age 44 and was an icon in decline and O’Hara was on the rise as curator at the Museum of Modern Art and becoming one of the poets of his generation. He talks about why he has to write every day and about his affair with the married with children Larry Rivers, and about being in the closet, but on the make as a 34-year-old gay man in New York in the 50s.

The Life (and death) of Harry Houdini
Plays and Players Theater

Brenna Geffers wrote and directed The Life (and death) of Harry Houdini as part of EgoPo Theatre’s American Vaudeville Festival. Geffers is a specialist in bygone theatrical eras; the beaux-arts trappings of Vaudeville are brought to eerie life not only by the claptrap theatrics of Houdini, but by setting the play in the entire house of Plays and Players Theater on Delancey Street. The inventive set design by Doug Greene has the audience seated on tiers upstage and the action of the play on the stage skirt and in the empty house. It is a backstage perspective to tell the very theatrical story of Houdini’s act, his life and his obsessions onstage and off.

The 75 minute play tracks Houdini’s life from his modest beginnings in the mid-west, the son of a “failed” Rabbi and his wife, the family moves to New York, where Harry and his brother Dash try to break into show business as a team, instead of working in the garment district, the only trade that was welcoming to Jews. The brothers have modest success, but are competitive. Dash (for dashing) squires around the prettiest of a singing sister act, but Houdini wins her heart. The brother team breaks up & Houdini and his new wife (no justice would marry them because she was Catholic, he Jewish. But as Harry proclaims, “no piece of paper” need tell him they are married.

Houdini starts to take off as he moves from card and hankie tricks to the master of escape. After several years, he is headlining on the Orpheum Circuit and expanding his fame to Europe. He starts to devise more dangerous escape tricks of suspension and submersion. Haunted by memories of his dead father and paranoid about loosing his mother, Houdini is a bundle of self-doubt. When his mother does die, he can’t accept it and he spares no expense to contact her through medium, but soon becomes disillusioned and exposes every fraud in his path. Houdini’s famous demise looms over the back half of the play.

Robert DaPonte has the bottled energy (and that dark gaze) for a formidable incarnation of Houdini. He rushes his dialogue a bit, but is otherwise completely charismatic. Griffin Stanton-Ameisen’s Dash is a pitch-perfect performance, destroyed at the death of his parents or hiding behind his intensely suave backstage lothario bit. The ensemble could be tighter with there lines, owing to all the stage business would be my guess. Geffers uses cabaret devises and physical theater mis-en-scenes to advance the story. Meanwhile, the cast is ever nimble with those trunk, straitjacket and cuff tricks.

Wide Awake: A Civil War Cabaret
Innovation Studio, Kimmel Center
photo:LW

The Bearded Ladies cabaret troupe travels from its Weimar Republic German roots, where the Ladies reimagined Metropolis and Marlene Deitrich to the ghosts the Confederate South. Only Jarboe’s maniacally surreal mind could imagine for Wide Awake: A Civil War Cabaret, an off the hook PIFA centerpiece ensconced in their lower- level Innovation Studio, rather ingeniously to accommodate a dilapidated façade of a house and a Dixieland band. Whether you are there for the period drag, or the songs or the political humor, The Beardeds- Kristen Bailey, Oona Curley, Liz Filios, Jenna Horton and musical director Heath Allen, take no prisoners.

Jarboe appears regularly around Philly in performance as Edith Piaf and then there are those James Bond sex parodies by the Beardeds at the Wilma Theater. The Ladies are not only talented singers and comic actors, they put political satire back in cabaret.

John Jarboe is a 9- foot Scarlett O’Hara knockoff par excellence, just to hear her sing the medley of southern ditties that build to a climactic The Night They Drove of Dixie Down would put Rhett in the corner. The long set up of Dixie, being released from her excavated mansion and the ghost busters banter could easily be trimmed, but by the time James Ijames is leading a Love Train as Lincoln and hearing Filios’ Walt Whitman, a tie-stick dropping out of her beard, singing Gimmie Shelter, there is no escape, and who would want to.

Poetries

the clouds come in 2.28.2013

Au revoir, les homme

Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Song to a Siren by Tim Buckley

Are you livid
Are you quiet
Are you drown in my dream
Over Damascus
Over Jerusalem
Over Atlantis
Quiet enough
To get by
Without me
Have you got a
Shield for me,
a lyre
For me
An all gods
Dead or alive
godless prayer
That keeps us safe
Leads me inside
Your Amsterdam
Where we
Drink grappa
Stumble into Paris
liberate me over
The fields of the dead
Are you with me
Are you with me
This time as you were before
In Cologne
Where we didn’t leave that
bombed villa for two weeks
Before we were both starving
In the woods
Are we quiet enough
Running along this river
Not to see anyone else
I know you don’t want
To hear me
Because you think you can
Save us another way
But you did come to me in a dream
to tell me not to
Listen to you
That I would have to know
whenever we are going to
Be able to leave
On the night boat to Capri
Or vanish here.

MetroScape

Tooling around Rittenhouse on the bike because it just started to snow & can try out my new camera.

1st photo~ Uncaptured snow

Elegy

Usually write an essay for Dec 1, World AIDS Day, but this year a remembrance
Chamber dance
(item- fr 1988. Two ballet dancers jumped from their midtown apartment…in an apparent… at press time, their names have not…)
The cobalt realm
vanquished                                              dying in a dream
Earth fire water air        indigo               before the corps de ballet
With their hands reaching to infinity
The dancers of the promontory past Balanchine
The ladies of enlightenment                          blue

A split infinitive of           aloneness because it would           always be revisited

remembered, dreamed
It was the same fever only two nights  before except

With a replay of the conversation

“I’m a little afraid, not all but”   “yes, what should we do?”

“Nothing, go back to sleep Hold me

don’t see anybody until we know what we already know”
So that was our life.                                    Cold, together, hunted.
In a couple of weeks it

all changed before we knew it-

the skipped classes
last minute calls of performance subs

the pretend dinners and rehearsals.
“we should tell them” I said.   “nothing, they already know” he said.

I got the sickest first but we found out later

that medically he was in much worse shape

that anything could happen.

It was going to be slower with me.

It was the last time we made love

then we opened all the windows

heard Serenade

Tchaikovsky morning finally
The Ladies of the ensemble
weren’t saying goodbye.

MetroScape

A Special Salon

 

“We had strong interest in American modern dance and also in the culture from Miles Davis to Andy Warhol and Alvin Ailey. So we came here in 1968 and the rest is history.” The eternally youthful Manfred Fischbeck told the audience at the anniversary celebration of Group Motion hosted by composer Andrea Clearfield in a special Salon at her loft in Center City last week. The ethereal environs was the perfect setting for a company victory lap, with performances of music, poetry and very game GM dancers Marie Brown, David Konyk, Lesya Popil, Hedy Wyland and Lindsay Browning.

In attendance were current and former dancers, colleagues breaking bread, talking about art in general and Group Motion in particular. Clearfield’s historic 18^th century Alpine ceiling loft, home for 25 years of monthly Salons, bringing together collaborative arts by local, national and international artists.

In his introductory remarks, Fischbeck provided a little company history. “We started in Berlin in 1962 and we’ve had 44 years of American existence, the three of us came over here in ‘68… to check out the situation. Someone who had worked with us in Berlin, had a sense that our work would go over well here, so we took a chance.”  Fischbeck, then and now, with co-founders Brigitta Hermann and Helmut Gottschild, were not just pioneering in the dance world, but as part of a new artistic and cultural landscape in Philly.

“It’s great to see such a beautiful mix of friends and people who have been involved with Group Motion these 44 years.” Fischbeck said.  As company director, choreographer and composer, Fischbeck is as hands on as ever as he spoke to “Vital importance to have your support for the coming years.”

Loretta Witt, attending Salon for the first time, was catching up with Group Motion and reminisced that she actually presented the troupe at Chestnut Hill College  in 1969 as part of an arts festival that she organized while still a student.

Witt said she doesn’t remember how they hooked, but that they “were so thrilled, it was one of their first performances in the US. I was a senior, organized this festival, we had everything from Louis Cahn, speaking about architecture to drama and all of the arts schools in the area involved, the blues singer Buddy Guy. Really great stuff, but I remember Group Motion was the highlight of the festival.”

Fischbeck recalled those earliest years as artistic émigrés in his opening comments “The performance in 1968, our first year, we had a performance at Judson Church in New York, at that time it was the most important place for contemporary dance. We crunched in there and we got noticed, with strong response from the important critics. From there we felt encouraged, and decided to make Philadelphia our home. Which was a good choice because New York was crowded.”

In capping off the evening Fischbeck presented Augurs based on what 44 could represent from the Numerology dictionary and the dancers picked the words at random. To music by Steve Reich, they expressed the given word and repeated each gesture, accumulating a choreographic phrase that broke into improv variations. Fischbeck, standing to the side, seemed delighted with the results, as was the audience.  He read out the words afterward- inspiring, honor, expressive, joyous, adversity and faith- all numerogically connected to 44. The mysticism wasn’t lost on this loyal audience. It also was a fine representation, robustly conjured, of Fischbeck’s imprimatur of liberated dancer centric movement.

What is a Salon without liberated literati, Fischbeck, accompanied by Clearfield on piano, read a poetry cycle titled The Rim of Love (Cliff-Canyon-Edge-Rim) inspired by a stay in Arizona, full of atmospherics and raw emotion, dramatic evocations, some of which seemed to evoke his sensibilities.

Dance in the mirror of clouds.

and this

You’re not waiting anymore/I’ll be there/

when you are not waiting”  

 

MetroScape

Nothing erases a Philly grey day, like a clouds breaking up & a misty over the Schuylkill River. Biking over the South St. Bridge, hard to keep my eyes on the road- stealing moments of the gorgeous skyline, mysterious and rather luminous tonight when that old devil moon, directly overhead, was breaking through those Universal Studio clouds. Then on the serenely beautiful Penn Campus for the Eddie Palmieri Latin Jazz Orch. concert at the Annenberg which was pretty much sold out. Great crowd & just master musicians. Even though there were sound/tech problems, it was bothering no one but the 75 year old master of Afro-Carribean music, who said that the audience and his superb band deserved that it should be correct. There were equalizing problems and feedback moments, but over-riding them with sheer musicianship, Mr. Palmieri & co. cut their losses and played one sizzling, scintillating and memorable set. Mr. Palmieri’s piano just wending every which way to take us to that silvery moon and back before we knew what was happening.

MetroScape

I’ll be home (alone) for Christmas

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 ~

MetroScape

Just got back from Ghenady Meirson’s free concert version of Tchiakovsky opera Iolanta at AVA with a fine cast of wonderful voices. It is always instructive to hear Tchiakovsky when Ghenady is at the piano. There are two more chances to hear some great voices singing this rarely performed masterpiece. Rarely performed because of its length 90 minutes- It was originally was on a split bill with the Nutcracker- and the complexity of the score, Ghenady said afterward, rubbing his hands.

Russian week continues two nights later with the first every appearance in Philly of the Russian National Orchestra playing Shostakovich, Khatchaturian, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glinka and of course Tchaikovsky. Some of the selections accompanied by Cirque de la Symphonie, the mostly Eastern European troupe of acrobacts and aerialists.

The Mann Center was pretty jammed for a sultry and overcast night, with a game crowd, young and old. A most surreal moment came when Jarek and Darek, two strongmen in gold body make-up and Grecian corinthian briefs, posed on a platform and executed a an adagio gymnast routine set to Shastakovich’s Symphony no. 5- one incredible movement had Darek aloft in a one-arm handstand on Jarek’s head- doubly impressive because his body was splayed past any vertical balance, it was a purely strength move.

Not to be outdone, RNO was so vibrant that the performers in front of them didn’t completely steal the show. The highlight for me was the Borodin’s Polovisian Dances, surpassing its famous theme ‘Stranger in Paradise’ which was just enfolded into such a rousing, very earthy, very Russian epic.

Continuing Russian week to stave off the hot weather, I’m reviewing a new novel set partially in St. Petersburg and other winter wonderlands. Although I can’t divulge the book because it isn’t out ’til Sept. I can say that it is a fantasia of cultures, countries and conflicts as lived and recounted by the gay brother of famed 20th century Russian novelist. A fabulously inventive and unexpected novel, which could easily slide into the pantheon of classic gay literature.

Classical Philly

Mann Center | July 9

The Pittsburgh Symphony last performed in Philadelphia in 1976 and they were back last week at the Mann Center for nothing less than a triumphal return for an evening of Beethoven. PSO immediately stated their musical authority in their Egmont opening, with strings that just retooled the acoustics at the open air Mann Center, which has more than one traveling wormhole. When the humidity is high, as it was on this night, there can be string haze and wayward horns, but if conditions were not ideal for these musicians, they weren’t showing it. PSO looked smaller on the Mann stage, than the home team, but size isn’t everything and this orchestra carved a huge, cohesive and sustained sound. Egmont was instantly vibrant, the strings just sliced through the air with power and dimension and the horn heralds had such dramatic impact. Conductor Arild Remmreit wanted to be inside the subtleness of Beethoven, not rely on the classical theatricality alone, his pacing thrilling and the fanfares built on a humming orchestral drive.

The exuberance was tamped down for soloist Teo Gheorghui, the Swiss-Canadian 19-year old studying at the Curtis Institute in Philly with Gary Graffman. His entry into the Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 seemed too soft, tentative, as opposed to subtle and for some of the 1st movement seemed detached from the orchestra, with one or two vaporous hand-offs. But, presently, he was just fully engaged, past virtuosity and with luminous interpretative skill. He completely entranced with his encore of a piano transcription, Fritz Keistler‘s Lebenstand, in an altogether magical performance, so filled with artistry and humanity.

 But, the marquee draw of this concert was Beethoven’s Symphony No 5 and PSO delivered nothing less than its metaphysical and visceral power. Easy to anticipate the symphony’s theatricality, but Remmreit illuminated the many aspects of it that are easily missed by its grandeur.

Maestro Remmrelt didn’t have to rely on the 5th known profundity, he gave it all the organic transcendence that puts it on a category of its own. Beethoven hanging in the sultry air under a hazy moon with the city skyline glittering in the distance made this a magical night in Philly. Remmreit looked exhausted at the end of it and as he moved through the orchestra to present each section, the applause was lusty and expressing warm appreciation that the Pittsburgh Symphony was back in town.  .

We Love NY

New York Does the Right Thing

Gay couples in New York and their straight friends poured into

Sheridan Square on Friday to hear the roll call from Albany for the New York State Senate vote on marriage equality. They gathered in front of the Stonewall Inn, the flashpoint in 1969 when gays rioted for justice for GLBT citizens.

The vote was 33-29, in the Republican controlled legislature, giving gay couples the right to marry in New York. It is not only a landmark victory for not only gay New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo, led political proponent of the measure, gay-rights advocates, but all GLBT people. It is further proof that we will never go back to the closet, no matter what tactics antigay politicians use to speciously demonize gay America or separate us from Constitutional equity.

Uber-conservative groups have done everything to de-legitimize our lives, but it hasn’t worked in the marriage equality fight in New York and the victory there is so big, that it is a tipping point for all other states.

The arguments against legalization brought out all of the usual arias, that the mere fact of gay marriage erodes the institution of marriage. The fact that if you are straight you can get an Elvis-impersonator marriage and divorce in Vegas all in the same weekend didn’t seem to enter into it. (See Britney Spears). But, mostly religious groups and families that prefer their gay relatives to suffocate in the closet brought out those specious, though high selective passages from the Bible — condemnations about other matters dealing with eating shrimp, divorce and menstrual exile, for instance, have been since ignored.

Mark Grisanti (R-Buffalo), the 33^rd vote, grew up Catholic stated

“I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.”

But, as much as there is reason to celebrate, there is still much work to do for GLBT equality. The religious and political reasons against same-sex marriage continue to be built on bigotry and perpetuated myths completely disconnected from social reality. And politically, it is a great divining line. The central argument put forth by antigay conservatives that allowing gay marriage would erode straight marriage, is pathetic, but politically effective. Outside of a minister on the down low, this argument is in fact so vaporous, that no evidence to prove its merit is ever produced. As millions of people experience every day, there are no negatives in someone living an open and out life, the negatives are all inventions of the morbidly homophobic.

In the week leading up to the vote, it seemed that it could have failed passage unless concessions were brokered to appease religious groups. Mark Segal, editor of the Philadelphia Gay News (who was Stonewall in 1969) notes in his op-ed this week “The last issue to resolve to pass gay marriage was how to protect the financial interest of religious organizations. New Yorkers have been debating this issue long enough that it has surpassed knowing the community to the point of just an assurance that it will not affect the dollars for the church.”

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan called gay marriage initiatives “Orwellian Social Engineering and launched a righteous crusade to warn Catholics, GOP brass sent communiqués to their brethren that there would be consequences in the next election if they voted for equality and NFL’s David Tyree gravely predicted that gay marriage would lead us down the road to “anarchy.” We’ll keep an eye on that David.

Meanwhile, last weekend, The New York Times ran a video profile of Julliard voice teachers Richard Adrian Dorr and John Mace who have been together since 1948. They told the Times “To be able to start a new phase of life, after 61 years of togetherness…is wonderful. We feel we have the right to be married in New York. A marriage is sanctified by what each partner brings to it.” Haven’t these gents waited long enough? About time they were able to get hitched, don’t you think? Bring flowers, good champagne and your dancing shoes.