Another juried show

Sixth annual juried art exhibit at TCC

Published in the Weekly Volcano, July 17, 2008
Pictured: "For the Old Men," painting by Tracy Heron-Moore and "Not Eating," acrylic and charcoal by Marilyn Bedford. Photos courtesy The Gallery at Tacoma Community College.

All juried shows are alike: a few outstanding artworks, a whole bunch of so-so stuff, and a few really bad pieces. The sixth annual juried art exhibit at The Gallery at Tacoma Community College is no exception.

I’ll talk about the good stuff.

Ron Hinson’s untitled painted construction does not stand out in his larger body of work, but it certainly stands out here. Typical of Hinson, the piece balances disparate elements in ways that would never work at the hands of a lesser artist. Odd shapes are stuck together and painted with a delicate blend of intense and dull colors with — dangling by a thread at the bottom, something that has become a Hinson trademark — a glob of dried paint scraped off his palate.

Also outstanding are two abstract paintings by Tracy Heron-Moore. The best of these is For the Old Man, a classical design of gray bars in a grid pattern over a white background interwoven with a couple of delicate pink line drawings and held on the surface with transparencies and overlapping forms. This piece is understated and powerful.

Sandra M. Farmer has two painted stoneware figures in the show. One is brown in color and depicts what looks to be a naked African woman squatting down in a field of tiny ceramic pots. The other is a seated white woman with dark hair. Both are thin almost to the point of emaciation. The seated woman in particular is startling in her nakedness (think back two weeks to my review of Paul Uhl’s Naked Tacoma for the difference between nudity and nakedness).

Marsha Glazière’s Freeway Exit is an abstract painting with collage depicting rushing traffic on an exit ramp. There are few visual clues to the subject, which I probably wouldn’t have recognized without the title, but having been given that hint, the blur of speeding traffic was obvious. Glazière does a nice job of integrating all kinds of collage elements from cardboard and wood to computer circuit boards. The overall look is harsh. To many viewers it may be a discomforting painting, but I like it.

Bill Colby’s woodcut, Marker One, is atmospheric and iconic. Three large poles stand in a teepee-like tripod in a field with misty clouds at their tip and water or mist at their feet. This is a nice piece that evokes a feeling of both comfort and mystery.

Also outstanding is one of two acrylic paintings of dogs by Marilyn Bedford. Actually they’re both well executed, but one is fairly typical while the other, Not Eating, is unique in its use of blank space and its combination of paint and charcoal. The dog is painted in broad planes of loose strokes and stands far to the right. To the left is a vast expanse of white space with a food dish drawn in looping charcoal lines and above it the printed title done with the same kind of charcoal line and reverberating pentimenti.

There are also some nice ceramic pieces by Gail E. Kelly and Melissa Balch and one turned wood piece by R.R. Taylor. That’s about it for the good stuff. There’s very little in the show that’s really bad, but there’s a lot that is mediocre — meaning competently done but with nothing of any real interest either by way of content or form. So-so stuff we’ve all seen before. But then, as I said in my opening line, that’s what juried shows are always like.

[Tacoma Community College, Sixth Annual Juried Art Exhibition, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday-Thursday, through Aug. 15, 6501 S. 19th St., Building 5A, Tacoma, 253.460.4306]

TMP program tells story behind the show

Published in The News Tribune, July 11, 2008

On the Sunday before the opening of each new show at Tacoma Musical Playhouse, the theater offers an entertaining and informative preview event called Behind the Curtain. Managing artistic director Jon Douglas Rake describes Behind the Curtain as “a very informal presentation with the audience being able to ask questions about the production or anything they want to know about TMP.”

I asked a couple of people who have long been associated with TMP about these events. Kat Dollarhide said, “People seem to really enjoy them, and participation seems to be growing as more and more people become aware of them. Jon gives a brief history of the show, including often some amusing trivia of which the average theatergoer would be unaware,” she said. “He usually shows examples of costuming – if the show calls for something unique. If the lighting is particularly complex, he goes into detail regarding what might be needed. Often our costumer and lighting director are in attendance, and expand further on what Jon has presented.

“If the show is a difficult one to mount, he describes directorial challenges, and gives the audience an idea of how (he) overcomes such obstacles,” Dollarhide said.

Lighting designer John Chenault explains and demonstrates the lighting for the upcoming show, and musical director Jeff Stvrtecky goes into detail about musical styles by demonstrating on the keyboard. Then cast members perform selected songs from the production, and finally the audience is offered the opportunity to ask questions of both the directors and the cast.

“A favorite question is always what each actor does to earn a living,” Dollarhide said.

“I’ve had the good fortune to be a part of the Behind the Curtain events and think that they are a wonderful benefit to the community,” actor Chris Serface said. “It’s been amazing watching the attendance grow and the variety of patrons that attend it. The first one that I took part in was lightly attended by more of an ‘older’ crowd. As the years have gone by, the attendance has grown tremendously.

“What has been the most memorable for me is the Behind the Curtain for ‘Beauty and the Beast,’” Serface added. “As you can expect with that show, a large number of the patrons were youth and their parents. For many of them it was a first time experience at a theater, and they were full of questions for the cast about what it’s like to be on stage and what we do in real life. For that show in particular, they were allowed to come up on stage and see the set up close along with some of our costumes. You could see the awe in the eyes of the kids and an interest in theater that wasn’t there before.”

This week I attended the Behind the Curtain for “Grease.” It was a wonderfully entertaining event. Rake began the presentation by giving a brief history of the play, which was written by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey as a parody of early 1950s rock ’n’ roll with characters based on their high school chums. It opened in a tiny community theater in a barn near Chicago and eventually went to Broadway where it ran for 3,381 performances. It was nominated for seven Tony Awards but did not win any.

Rake mentioned a few of the many stars who have appeared in “Grease,” from John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John to former Monkees Mickey Dolenz and Davy Jones.

He talked a lot about trivia, slang and pop culture of the time in which the play is set, 1959, which he said he had to teach the cast because none of them were alive in 1959. One other interesting sidebar he tossed out was that, once when he was touring South America, he kept hearing talk about a play called “Vasolina” and finally figured out that was what they were calling “Grease.”

Stvrtecky gave an entertaining demonstration of the music, showing how the songs (and nearly all rock ’n’ roll songs of the time) were all based on the same four-chord progression with a strong bass line and simple harmonies.

Finally, a dozen of the 32 cast members entertained the audience with seven songs from the show, and then they took questions from the audience. Questions ranged from how much did the rights to the play cost (a whopping $17,000) to the expected “What do you do in real life?” Of the dozen performing Sunday night, two are theater professionals and many are students – some of theater and some of other things such as psychology, education or nursing. One works in a taco shop, another drives a beverage cart, and one is a mortgage loan officer at a local bank.

Overall, I was impressed with the event, and I would definitely recommend attending a Behind the Curtain event before the next Tacoma Musical Playhouse production. And based on what I saw and heard Sunday night, I also highly recommend “Grease.”


INFORMATION: 253-565-6867, www.tmp.org

ICONcepts

Local icons at Two Vaults Gallery

Published in the Weekly Volcano, Jul7 10, 2008

Pictured:
"Dale" by Lynn DiNino
"War Creates Peace (like hate creates love)" by R. Mutt
"Our Lady of Perpetual Transit" by Kimberly Sparks-Wilmer
Photos courtesy Two Vaults Gallery

The show is called ICONcepts, but it could just as well be called the beatification of Dale Chihuly and Lynn Di Nino.

The term “icon” is one of those words the meaning of which has been so expanded through common usage and misusage that it can mean almost anything, from Hannah Montana to Jimi Hendrix to the Coca-Cola logo. Dictionary.com defines icon as “a representation of some sacred personage, as Christ or a saint or angel, painted usually on a wood surface and venerated itself as sacred.”

The curators of this show apparently gave the artists a lot of leeway. Most chose to iconize the Tacoma arts scene. As I implied in the opening paragraph, a lot of these artists chose to make living saints of Di Nino and Chihuly, the former because she has done so much to enliven the Tacoma arts scene and the latter because he has focused the world’s attention on Tacoma and the Pacific Northwest.

And it doesn’t hurt that portraits of Di Nino and Chihuly are so easy to do. A shock of orange hair for one and an eye patch for the other are all that’s needed to make either immediately recognizable.

There are 50 icons in the show by 38 different artists. They are crowded into a couple of small spaces in Two Vaults Gallery. Some of the icons are serious, but most are humorous; a number are by professional artists (and it shows), and a few are by amateurs (and it shows). In purely aesthetic terms, there’s not much good art here. But there are a lot of good ideas and a lot of self-deprecating pokes in the eye of Tacoma art.
A few examples:

St. Dale by Don Mayhre is a collage or Photoshop portrait of Chihuly with one of his trademark (or iconic) glass balls with tendrils shown behind his head. It’s orange. It looks like a halo. It also looks like Di Nino’s hair — intentionally or not.

Speaking of Di Nino’s hair, one of the funnier tributes to her is Queen of Arts (get the pun?) by Elayn Vogel. This is a portrait of Di Nino with metal scrubbers for hair. She’s wearing a crown and a monkey sits on her head in recognition of the 100th Monkey parties, which were her creation.

Di Nino herself iconizes Chihuly in her papier-mâché portrait of the glass artist with some of his works, including the glass flowers in the window at Union Station.

Photographer Chip van Gilder iconizes another Tacoma arts supporter, sweet pea from King’s Books, with a simple photograph. This picture demonstrates how easy it is to make a typical portrait photo into an icon by putting it in a deep frame.

One work I like a lot is Perpetual Transit by Kimberly Sparks-Wilmer, a homage to Pierce Transit and the people who take the bus. A saintly Madonna in the center cuddles a little bus as if it were a baby. Transit tickets flare out behind her head like a halo. Surrounding her are street people, including mothers with children, a man with a walker and a woman in a wheelchair. These are all delicate line drawings cut from a magazine or catalog and pasted over a street map. I heard from Di Nino that Sparks-Wilmer is her cousin, who “is not an artist.” You surely can’t tell it from looking at this work.

Another favorite is War Makes Peace (like hate creates love) by R. Mutt (the fictitious name Marcel Duchamp gave to the “creator” of his famous Fountain). This is an irony-filled tribute to soldiers and the military filled with military images and a crucifix. I will not attempt to interpret it here, but I encourage readers to see it and make your own judgment.

[Two Vaults Gallery, ICONcepts, through Sept. 12, 602 South Fawcett, Tacoma, 253.759.6233]

When the elastic goes

The elastic is gone from by Sylvester and Tweety Bird pajamas. Yes, I have Sylvester and Tweety Bird pajamas. They're shorts, and they're green. They're still OK to sleep in, but if I try to walk around in them, they don't stay up. They slip down, down, down. That doesn't bother me too much. What bothers me is wondering where the elastic goes when it goes. Just wondering.

200 Plays

The critic critiques himself

I’m constantly surprised that nobody ever questions my qualifications as a theater critic. So what are those qualifications? I can write. That’s about it.

I was working a temporary job as an assistant features editor at The News Tribune when I was asked to write the community theater column. My editors knew I could write because I had written feature articles and art reviews and book reviews. But never theater reviews.

Did I have any previous theater experience? Hardly.

In the first grade I played one of the seven dwarfs in “Snow White,” and sometime during elementary school my twin brother and I did a silly skit on stage singing “Brothers,” an adaptation of the old Rosemary Clooney hit “Sisters” from “White Christmas.” We were terrible singers, but we were cute.

In high school I joined the drama club because everybody had to be in some club and I had friends in that one. I was just in the club; I never took part in any dramatic production in any way. But years later when I got my first teaching job in a tiny town in Missouri, I listed the drama club on my resume, which was good enough for them to ask me to direct the school play. They offered me an extra $200, so I took it. The play that was handed to me was a horribly stupid comedy about a bunch of boys dressing as girls in order to crash a girls’ spend the night party. During rehearsals the kids started adlibbing like crazy, and a lot of their adlibs were funnier than anything in the script, so we kept them in, and the play was a big hit — mainly because as a director I pretty much let the cast do whatever the hell they wanted to do.

In New York in 1973-74 I had a good friend who worked in theater and I went to a lot of off-off Broadway shows with him, and a few cast parties, and even once went to dinner with a theater critic at the New York Times whose name I can’t remember. It was all fun, but I don’t think I learned anything about theater other than that actors surely know how to have a good time.

Finally, if I ever learned anything about theater before taking this job, it was what I picked up from watching and listening to my son. He started acting when he was 9 years old, and Gabi and I, of course, went to all of his plays — at least until he went off to college, and even a few at Western Washington University where he majored in acting. Now he works as a stagehand at the Seattle Repertory Theatre, and since getting this gig I’ve started quizzing him a lot on technical stuff.

Truth be told, I was not at all qualified for this job when it fell in my lap. But I’ve learned a lot on the job from talking to directors and actors and from reviewing approximately 200 plays over the past four years. And by golly I believe I’m beginning to get the hang of it.

‘Swinging on a Star’ falls short in 21st century

Published in The News Tribune, July 4, 2008

The season finale at Paradise Theatre in Gig Harbor is “Swinging on a Star,” a musical tribute to Johnny Burke. Burke was one of America’s favorite songwriters beginning in the 1920s and going well into the 1950s. Most famous, perhaps, for his collaboration with Jimmy Van Heusen and for writing the songs for the many Bing Crosby and Bob Hope “Road” pictures, Burke is known for such songs as “Pennies from Heaven,” “Moonlight Becomes You,” and “Misty” – as well as for silly novelty songs the likes of “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe” and the old Fats Waller hit “You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew.”

This show runs well over two hours. I really enjoyed 20 to 30 minutes of it, but the rest I found to be either too maudlin or too silly. Burke wrote some wonderful songs, but a lot of what may have been considered terrific in the first half of the 20th century has since lost its appeal. Some of his more romantic numbers are overly sentimental, and the skits these songs are woven around are like corny bits from 1950s television variety shows. “Don’t Let That Moon Get Away,” the song that opens Act Two, for instance, features some really bad dancing – intentionally bad, I might add, with a lot of stumbling and falling down. It wasn’t funny; it was juvenile. Similarly, there was a long scene with parodies of Crosby and Hope movies with six songs and a reprise of the first one that was like a “Saturday Night Live” skit gone bad.

On the upside, the cast is good overall and a couple of them, Krista Curry and Carrie Nelson, are outstanding in certain numbers. But Adam Randolph, whom I have thoroughly enjoyed in performances at Encore! Theatre and Capital Playhouse, was not at his best opening night. Although his singing was nice, his acting was stiff and histrionic. It was as if he were doing a parody of a bad ham actor, and perhaps he was in the “Road” movie skits, but if that was the case it didn’t work in other numbers.

The show is cleverly arranged to represent different ages of Johnny Burke music. The first scene is in a 1920s speakeasy. It opens with Nelson in a sexy dress doing a Mae West-type come-on to “You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew” followed by Randolph and K. James Koop mimicking trumpet players in the upbeat and jazzy “Chicago Style,” while Curry and Stacee Cramer tap dance in hot red flapper dresses. (Throughout the show these two hoofers show off some impressive tap skills, as does Koop on a couple of songs.)

Overall, this 1920s scene lacks verve and excitement. Things pick up in the next scene, a Depression-era street scene, when George Ngo solos on one of Burke’s most beloved tunes, “Pennies from Heaven.” Ngo sings it in a subdued manner and with heartfelt expression. This may be the best song in the show.

Things pick up even more in the next two acts, which are similar. The third act is presented in the form of a 1940s radio show and is very similar in style and humor to the stage play “1940s Radio Hour,” which, coincidentally, both Randolph and Nelson have appeared in. And the third act is based on a USO show during World War II. These acts are more lighthearted and have a nostalgic pull that the first two acts lack, perhaps because few people today remember the 1920s and ’30s but many have fond memories of the ’40s. One of the hottest numbers in the show comes in the USO portion when Nelson solos on the sultry blues “There’s Always the Blues.” Then Randolph (as a soldier) pops out of the audience to sing a very sweet rendition of “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” and the whole cast swings on the title tune, “Swinging on a Star.”

Act Two starts with a lush ballroom scene and the aforementioned fall-down dancing, followed by the “Road” film scenes and a swank supper club in the ’50s.

Sets and lighting are minimal and sufficiently set the various scenes. Likewise the costumes go a long way toward setting the scenes. The best touch in costuming can be seen in the numerous wigs the women wear, which really nail some of the period styles. Betty Boyd (props) and Vicki Richards (director and costume design) deserve credit for creating the various period looks.

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 4 p.m. Sunday

WHERE: Paradise Theatre, 9911 Burnham Drive N.W., Gig Harbor

TICKETS: $20 adults, $17 seniors, $10 students 25 and younger, group discounts

INFORMATION: 253-851-7529, www.paradisetheatre.org

Lily Kin and Gene Phillips invade Gallery Madera

by Bilge Rat Robby and Alec Clayton published in the Weekly Volcano, July 3, 2008

Note: in celebration of Tall Ships Tacoma, all articles in this week's Volcano were written as if by pirates.

pictured: painting from the Garden Paintings series by Lily Kin, courtesy Gallery Madera

I was standing by the pool outside the Museum of Glass Thursday noon, enjoying the new sculptural installation, Mirrored Murrelets by Joseph Gregory Rossano, when a pair of pirates burst out of the pool like breaching whales and trussed me up with rope so old it was sprouting barnacles.

“Measure the landlubber for his chains!” shouted Bilge Rat Robby to One Eye Elmer, and they keelhauled me between a pair of petards and hauled me to Gallery Madera to see the latest show by Lily Kin. They thought forcing me to look at art would be torture, like when they pirated Malcolm McDowell away in A Clockwork Orange and forced him to watch porn while listening to Beethoven. Little did the scallywags know I had seen Kin’s previous show of abstract paintings and was sufficiently impressed that I wanted to see more.

(Bilge Rat Robby butts in ... )

Arrr! Belay that crap. This show is called From the Garden, and it’s all frilly girlie stuff. Flowers and rainbows. Arrr! But at least there’s a snake or two in the garden.

Kin has an interesting way of combining two different types of painting. She paints concentric circles and rainbows in pastel pinks and yellows and blues and flowers and leafs in yellow and a sickly yellow-green, all of which are kind of sloppily painted in flat tones with no modulation or transparencies. And she paints delicately modulated patterns of overlapping floral shapes that in places look like stencils and involve a lot of transparent areas. I don’t like the stuff painted with flat colors. They are sloppily done, and not in a good way. But avast, me hearties, I really like her sketchy abstract patterns with all the overlapping. These are like an extension of her earlier paintings. Some of these are graphite, acrylic and watercolor on paper, and they are particularly delicate with a deft touch, especially in the drawn graphite contours.

In some of her larger, multi-panel paintings, Kin combines the two styles. Her three largest paintings each have three panels. On each end of these paintings there are canvases that are relatively flat against the wall painted with repetitive floral patterns and the overlapping stencil look, and in the center of each is a canvas that extends farther from the wall and is painted in the flat style. Two of these, untitled Garden Painting II and Scene from the Garden I, are fairly successful paintings; the third, Garden Painting V, is not.

Garden Painting V is minimalist in style. The center panel is a target, and the outer panels are fluffy blue clouds on a white sky. Any painting that is this sparse needs to have more fascinating shapes or color combinations. This one has neither. The outer panels of untitled Garden Painting II are excellent by themselves. They are densely patterned with an intriguing surface quality and a terrific reversal of positive and negative shapes (pink and white flowers that visually operate as open space). But the central target painting is not very good. The third of these paintings, Scene from the garden I (which judging from the title must actually be the first), is by far the best. This is a beautiful painting that combines the opposing styles successfully.

Also showing are ceramic sculptures by Gene Phillips. He’s showing a small selection of stoneware pots with embedded surface designs. A couple of his pieces look like they are based on human forms — two in particular very obviously so. They are Torso, a green vessel with a rounded shape based on a woman’s hips and very short legs, and Kimono, a vessel obviously shaped like what it’s named after. All of Phillips’ pots are put together with flat slabs of clay and are each about two inches thick and glazed in solid colors, mostly blue and green.
The best thing about these pots is their form. They remind me somewhat of Brancusi and somewhat of Al Held. The surface decoration is superfluous and detracts from the form.

[Gallery Madera, From the Garden, through Aug. 2, 2210 Court A, Tacoma, 253.572.1218,