There's nothing subtle about ‘Cats'

Chris Serface as Bustopher Jones and the cast of "Cats" 

Photo by Kat Dollarhide

The News Tribune, July 15, 2011
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” is one of the most popular musicals of all time.

It won six Tony awards and had the second longest run on Broadway. It is also the most joked about musical ever, the epitome of everything outlandish and presumptuous about Broadway musicals, and has been called the most overrated musical of all time – even by the person who is now producing and directing it for Tacoma Musical Playhouse.

It’s easy to see why people love it, and it is equally easy to see why so many make fun of it.

The music, dancing, costumes and set are all big in every sense of the word, combining for the kind of spectacle that TMP thrives on. But the story, while filled with high drama and quirky playfulness, is almost impossible to follow, a problem that is made worse because many of the lyrics are hard to hear. Among the huge cast, only Micheal O’Hara, Chris Serface, Karen Christensen and one or two others can be clearly heard. The rest are often either drowned out by the orchestra and chorus or they garble their words.

The music by Webber and David Cullen is wonderful and wide-ranging in style with hints of every musical genre from jazz to opera, played flawlessly by Jeff Stvrtecky and his orchestra.

The costumes designed by Janet English are wild, with multi-colored, skin-tight tights, long tails, big hair and even bigger coats.

The lavish set by Will Abrahamse is one of the biggest and best ever seen at the Narrows Theatre. The set is a junkyard at night with a huge moon and bright stars in the background. Everything from junk cars to tires and an old-fashioned child’s drum are hung to give the impression of how they would look to the cats. Never mind that the scale is totally out of whack – with, for instance, a car tire almost as big as the car next to it and a drum of the type used in the Revolutionary War that is even bigger than that monster tire – the overall effect is stunningly beautiful. It is like the barricade set in “Les Misérables” if done with whimsy.

Also outstanding are the lighting by John Chenault and the choreography by director Jon Douglas Rake with assistance from Lexi Scamehorn.

“Cats” is a poetic and musical re-interpretation of T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” It’s not so much a play as it is a musical revue with lots of dancing and a bit of magic. There is even one number near the end of the first act, “Song of the Jellicles and the Jellicle Ball,” which begins with a singer then turns into a long instrumental song with elaborately choreographed but abstract movement.

The cast is huge with 28 named cast members, many of whom have solos. None of the characters can quite be said to have lead or starring roles, but there are a few who stand out. Among these are Christensen, O’Hara, John Kelleher and Steve Barnett.

Christensen plays Grizabella, the old gray cat who left the junkyard they call home only to later return and find herself ostracized by the others. Her solos on “Grizabella: The Glamour Cat” and later on “Memory” with Mauro Bozzo as Munkustrap and Kim Lavoie as Demeter are among the saddest and strongest musical numbers in the show. Interestingly, Grizabella is the only character in the play that doesn’t look like a cat. Despite her tail, she is costumed not as a cat but as a bag lady with a ratty fur coat.

The only other time when the cats step out of their catness is when O’Hara as Gus, The Theatre Cat, and company perform as cat actors playing human roles. O’Hara is breathtaking in this show-stopping, two-part production number. With yowling and screeching and lovely singing, O’Hara shows that he’s a consummate actor as well as a great singer. Beginning as a palsied former actor way past his prime, he transforms himself back to his former glory in a highly stylized swashbuckling scene with pirates and Chinamen.

John Kelleher as Old Deuteronomy sings beautifully on the climactic number “The Ad-dressing of Cats,” and Barnett as the sexy tomcat Rum Tum Tugger has campy moves that are a joy to watch.

Many performances are already sold out, so call for tickets early. If you go to the theater without advance tickets, you may not get in.

WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday through July 31.
WHERE: Tacoma Musical Playhouse at The Narrows Theatre, 7116 Sixth Ave., Tacoma
TICKETS: $20-$27
INFORMATION: 253-565-6867, http://www.tmp.org

Lost and found

 

Mina Quevli, circa 1930. Gelatin silver print. Collection of the Washington State Historical Society, gift of the estate of Virna Haffer

"Franz Brasz, the Artist." A Virna Haffer photo from 1937. Collection of the Washington State Historical Society/Gift of the Virna Haffer Estate

Tacoma photography legend Virna Haffer
The Weekly Volcano, July 13, 2011

The exhibition of photos by Virna Haffer at Tacoma Art Museum is a marvel. I had no idea what to expect heading into the gallery to see these works by an artist I had never heard of, and it was like wandering into a studio shared by the greatest photographers of the early modern period, including Alfred Stieglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus and Man Ray.

Haffer, a self-taught artist from Tacoma whose career began in the 1920s, gained international prominence and then was lost to history. The TAM curatorial team of Margaret Bullock, Christina Henderson and David Martin searched through more than 30,000 of Haffer's negatives, prints and woodblocks to put together this astonishing exhibition.

Other than the overall excellent quality of the work, two things impressed me: first, Haffer's wide range of styles and her wild innovation and second, the graphic quality of her photographs. There is a brittle quality to these mostly high-contrast black-and-white photographs that make them look like drawings or etchings. This graphic quality is enhanced because there are some woodblock prints in the show and at least one photo of an artist, Franz Brasz, posed in front of one of his drawings. The Brasz portrait looks more like graphic art than photography, even though his face is clearly a photo. The artist's pained expression and wildly mussed hair, along with his pose in relation to the drawing, make this photo a precursor to the work of more recent portrait photographers such as Annie Leibovitz.

Haffer produced documentary photographs and almost conventional portraits and beautifully composed studio nudes with washed-out features and dark edges that make them look like strong contour drawings or dramatic silhouettes. And she produced a range of amazingly inventive surrealistic photographs.

She created many photograms, a process of creating images without a camera by placing objects on chemically treated paper and exposing them to light. Haffer called the process painting with light. Some of the photograms are surrealistic, and some are purely abstract, such as "Abstract #2," which looks like a Franz Kline painting with a big eye in it.

She also experimented with many odd angles and light effects and distortions, thus making many of her photos look like modernist paintings. Some are so wildly distorted that they seem to have been Photoshopped before there was any such thing.

Some of the more experimental works look a little dated now but were obviously out there on the edge when first created. The best works in the show are not the more experimental works, they are the portraits and the nudes, which, although apparently conventional, are beautifully and dramatically composed. One of the most striking of these is "Mina Quevli," a 1930 portrait of a beautiful woman with short hair lighting a cigarette. This image seems to me to capture the spirit of the jazz age.

This is a wonderful show, and it is just one of three new exhibitions at TAM. I'm also told, although I haven't seen it yet, that there is a catalog available. A catalog of Haffer photos would be something wonderful to have and hold.
A Turbulent Lens

Through Oct. 16, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday
10 a.m. to 8 p.m. third Thursdays, $8-$9
Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma
tacomaartmuseum.org

Old folks

"Six": Papermate pen and pencil by Bob Gillis, 

courtesy Art House Designs.

The Weekly Volcano blog Spew, July 12, 2011
The name of the latest show at Art House Designs in Olympia is "Three old guys and one old lady."

The good thing about old folks is they've been at it long enough to get good. Olympia painters Dale Witherow, Bob Gillis, Ron Hinson and Georgia Munger prove it with this show.

Witherow is a pure abstract expressionist. Young people might think that AE died way back in the '60s, which by now is also ancient history, but I'm one old guy who thinks the Abstract Expressionists were the best painters America ever produced and the movement will never die. Witherow paints light and movement - not angst, which AE is known for, but unbridled joy, with heavily layered and exuberantly brushed impasto and sparkling glazes. I've seen a lot of Witherow's paintings over the years, but there are some in this show unlike any I've seen before, including a painting of a single flower in a long-stemmed vase (imagine a flower as painted by Cy Twombly if you can) and a repetitive pattern of squares with letters reminiscent of some early Jasper Johns paintings.

The best of his work in this show is one called "Faded Glories," which has random blotches or circular marks both painted and scratched into the surface  of a pattern of overlapping white-on-white glazes (actually pink and gray, but it feels like layered sheets of snow and ice) and the mark making is like that of the above-mentioned Twombly, one of the last of the greats who died just last week.

Hinson is represented by a series of highly inventive and humorous illustrations from "Alice in Wonderland" and two powerful charcoal drawings from his series of mythology drawings, "Birth of Adonis" and "Prometheus Bound." These have been shown in other exhibitions, and I've reviewed them before. They are outstanding in both conception and execution.

Gillis is showing a suite of eight pencil and ink drawings titled "One," "Two," "Three"... and so forth up to "Eight."  These are totally unlike anything I've ever seen from him, more like graphic illustrations than the abstract paintings he's known for. They are highly stylized, high-contrast, black and white pictures of fronds, trees, flowers, and one of a flock of birds.

Munger is known around Olympia for her paintings of crows, but there's nary a crow in anyone of her little pastel drawings in this show. There are, however, one of two other birds and a horse, and a lot of abstract paintings with bright colors - some of which are based on landscape and remind me of Wolf Kahn and others which are arrangements of organic and geometric forms on a flat surface. My favorites are the landscapes, although there's something really enjoyable about that silly looking horse.

Art House Designs has expanded and renovated its gallery space in the past year providing a nice venue for some good art from three old guys and one old lady. See them at the corner of Fifth and Franklin in downtown Olympia through July 21.

[Art House Designs, Three old guys and one old lady," 420 Franklin St SE # B, Olympia, 360.943.3377]

Oleanna

Theater Artists Olympia does Mamet's "Oleanna"

In his book of theater criticism ““How Good is David Mamet Anyway?” John Heilpern writes:

“…the occasional hand to hand combat that broke out among warring factions in the audience following his drama of sexual harassment, ‘Oleanna,’ provocation seems to be the name of the game. …Mr. Mamet infuriates us knowingly. His psychological power plays, the repressed undercurrents of anxiety and simmering violence, the oblique, disjointed Mametspeak that has become his signature style, are meant to dislocate and disturb us.”

Yes, there have been reports of hand to hand combat among patrons following early performances of Mamet’s “Oleanna.” And yes, “Mametspeak” is an accepted term common among people who discuss theater.

“Oleanna” is a deliberately provocative play. It was written purportedly as a sympathetic look into sexual harassment in academia, but Mamet, who has been called chauvinistic, has been accused of turning the victim into the victimizer and patrons have waged war over the two characters.

A female college student, Carol (played by Deya Ozburn in Theater Artists Olympia’s production at Olympia Little Theatre) accuses her professor, John (Christian Carvajal) of sexual harassment. Since the play first opened in 1992 audiences have argued about which of these characters is right. Carol accuses her professor of harassment and attempted rape, an accusation that will surely destroy his career. Is he guilty or innocent? Is she a victim or has she falsely accused him, and if so for what purpose?

Director John Munn said that most productions have weighed more heavily in favor of the professor as the one who is being wronged, and Carol as a manipulative woman who is making false accusations, but Munn presents it in a more evenhanded way through directorial choices without changing Mamet’s words, letting the audience decide whose side they are on. He even asks audience members to vote their choice in the lobby after seeing the play.

Before writing more about this particular production, a few words about Mametspeak are called for. Obviously the term refers to a manner of speaking (or more literally writing dialog) that is so strongly associated with Mamet that it has taken on his name. In normal conversation, and most especially when confused or upset, people seldom speak in clear and logical sentences. They stammer, they repeat themselves, they cut sentences off midway and they interrupt one another. It’s not pretty, but it’s real.

It can be very frustrating to sit through two hours (with two 10-minute intermissions) of two characters arguing, misunderstanding each other, shouting at each other and being constantly interrupted not only by each other but by a constant stream of infuriating phone calls (Munn updated this version to use cell phones, thereby allowing his actors to be more mobile). It may be frustrating, but it is highly charged dramatic entertainment. And I use the word “entertainment” in its broadest sense.

Mametspeak must be hard to memorize, and with only two actors to share the burden learning their lines must have been an almost impossible task. But the nature of their speech patterns with all their backtracking and repetition and broken sentences makes it such that if either of them dropped lines it would be hard to tell, and Carvajal and Ozburn are good enough that they could easily cover for each other. I noticed only one tiny moment when Carvajal seemed to have stumbled on a line and quickly recovered. But who knows? Mamet may have written it that way.

Both actors do a great job. I expected them to because they’ve each proven their acting abilities in other performances, Ozburn most recently in “The Last Schwartz” at Harlequin and Carvajal in “Frost-Nixon” at Tacoma Little Theatre. I must say that they did not let me down - they exceeded my expectations in thoroughly inhabiting these difficult roles. Anyone who has been to college has known people just like Carol and the professor, and Carvajal and Ozburn play them so naturally and with such spot-on gestures, voices and body language that we feel we know these people. We can picture John at home with his wife and Carol at ease when she is with her fellow students, and feel the tension and confusion and anger as they confront one another in the electrified atmosphere of his office.

I’ve seen “Oleanna” only one other time, at Evergreen Playhouse in Centralia with Sara Henry as Carol and John Pratt as the professor. In that performance the characters went through noticeable changes in posture and demeanor with costume changes to enhance these changes. At the beginning Carol was hesitant and shy, and the professor was arrogant and full of himself; and as the play progressed she became more self-assured and he fell apart. In this version similar changes take place, but they are much more subtle and more natural.

This is some of the best acting I’ve seen this year.

This is an intelligent play that explores complex issues and opens up a multitude of possible interpretations. The language is harsh but without the over use of curse words which Mamet is known for - as in “Glengarry Glen Ross” as a prime example. There is also some violence that might be shocking to some viewers. It is not a play for children nor is it a play for squeamish adults.

When:  8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday, through July 24
WHERE: Olympia Little Theatre, 1925 Miller Ave., NE, Olympia
Tickets: $12 at the door or at http://www.brownpapertickets.com

See Molly Gilmore's article in The Olympian.

Bare-bones painting

Break O' Day" A painting by Susan Christian 

on display at Childhood's End Gallery. 

Photo courtesy Childhood's End Gallery

Susan Christian at Childhood’s End Gallery
The Weekly Volcano, July 6, 2011
I've been keeping up with Susan Christian's career for more than 20 years, and during that time I have watched her art change so gradually that it's like watching a mountain grow. I think she has finally reached her maturity as a painter. Her latest works - simple, bare-bones, abstract paintings of doorways and windows and corners of starkly empty rooms - are by far the best I have seen from her yet. They are now on display, along with brass and copper sculptures by Ron Hinton, at Childhood's End Gallery.

Also on display from Christian are a number of other paintings of curtains from a couple years back - odd little paintings of edges of curtains, some placed at extreme distances on either end of absurdly long canvases and others in conjunction with, in one painting, a pair of cut-off legs, and in another a window opened to a view of a black sea and a peach colored sky. These two are the best of the curtain paintings. The long paintings with so much space between the curtains are uncomfortable to look at because the viewer is forced to mentally connect objects that are too far apart in the painting to be part of a single composition. I don't know if that is the intention or not, but it doesn't work for me.

But the sparse interior scenes of windows and doors work wonderfully. They affect me in the way of an Edward Hopper painting or an Adolph Gottlieb or a Barnett Newman. They are minimalist to an extreme, in some cases no more than two flat rectangles centered in white space. But they offer mystery, a sense of deep spirituality, a playfulness of spatial relationships and a consummate artist's sensitivity to paint handling and awareness of edge.

This last quality, awareness of edge, is something I've come to associate with maturity as an artist. It is something artists develop only after years of work, and it's something I seldom saw in Christian's work prior to this latest series of paintings.

"The Upside of Loss" and "The Morning" each picture a flat rectangle that seems to be standing upright on an invisible ground with its shadow or another rectangle of a different color on a different plane jutting outward underneath it. In one of them there is the most subtle of hints of a line indicating the junction of floor and wall, as if the upright rectangle is standing against a wall and its reflection is on the floor. Paint is applied in a variety of ways within the parts of these pictures. Flat here, brushy there, scumbled and scraped in one area and liquid and mottled in another area.

"The Wound" and "Chagrin D'Amour" are pictures of partially opened doorways painted on dark backgrounds with hints of reflections as if they are standing on glass. These are portals to nowhere, mysterious doorways to infinity afloat in space. In these paintings the colors are darker and slightly heavier than in the others.

One of the best is "The Squirrel," an abstract painting of a part of a wall and floor with wonderfully scumbled white-on-white paint application.

The variations of hue and value, and contrasts of paint application and edge are so subtle in these paintings that they have to be seen in person and studied carefully to be appreciated.

Ron Hinton's sculptures are small etched brass and copper pieces with angular planes of metal and decorative surface etchings. They are well constructed but seem to me like studies rather than finished work. They look like they should be much larger and the surface decoration, while interesting in itself, seems superfluous.

through July 24, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday–Saturday
11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday
Childhood’s End Gallery
222 Fourth Ave. W., Olympia
360.943.3724

The TAM tour

Photo courtesy Tacoma Art Museum

Published in the Weekly Volcano blog Spew, July 5, 2011

I went to a gallery tour Q&A with Dale Chihuly at Tacoma Art Museum Thursday morning, and while I enjoyed the Q&A with Tacoma's most famous artist, the things that really knocked me out were 1) Chihuly's collection of Edward S. Curtis photographs, 2) the two Willits canoes suspended from the ceiling (much more impressive than the silly cars hanging from the ceiling of the Seattle Art Museum, 3) the Virna Haffer exhibition in the adjacent gallery, and 4) a huge painting (untitled) by William Ivey in the Safeco collection exhibition.

I've got to get back to TAM. There was not enough time Thursday to see all the wonderful art on display. There are three new shows at TAM, and one of them - Chihuly's - takes up all of two large galleries. This is a mind-blowing amount of art all in one place.

Readers who have followed my columns over the years know I have mixed feelings about Chihuly. He's like the nursery rhyme girl. When he's good, he's very, very good. And when he's bad he's horrid. There's a lot of both in this show. Among the best things are the surface decoration (essentially abstract expressionist paintings) on many of his blown glass baskets and cylinders. And did you know he is an avid collector of just about everything from Native American crafts to bottle caps? He shares large chunks of his collection in this show, including one huge wall of Pendleton blankets and another entire wall of Curtis photographs. And all of it is beautifully and tastefully displayed - kudos to curator Rock Hushka and his team for a great job.

If Chihuly is Tacoma's most famous artist, Virna Haffer is our least known. "Virna Haffer has been an all too well kept Tacoma secret," said museum director Stephanie A. Stebich. From the 1920s until her death in 1974 she was one of America's leading and most inventive modern photographers; yet she has somehow been lost to history. I for one am overjoyed that TAM has searched out a large sampling of her work for this show.

Haffer brings to mind the great Man Ray. She's that relentlessly innovative. Her surrealistic imagery and experimental distortions of figures and scenes are both daring and aesthetically pleasing. On display are works representing an amazing range of experimentation from overlapping images and strange viewpoints and even photos done without a camera in a process called the photogram (the same process Man Ray called a Rayogram). "Her artistic curiosity is palpable in her work, which in itself is staggering in its volume, diversity and range," said curator Margaret Bullock.

Finally, there is the exhibition from the Safeco collection featuring some 400 works by Northwest artists donated by Safeco Insurance. Included are works from established giants the likes of Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan and Morris Graves and more contemporary stars such as Michael Brophy and Michael Spafford. Is this the best collection anywhere of Northwest art? I don't know. If it's not it certainly runs a close second to anything else. The big painting by Ivey that I mentioned in the opening paragraph is one of the most impressive abstract paintings I've seen in a long time.

Who remembers Malcolm Ashton

Notes on a work in progress

Who remembers Malcolm Ashton and Sonny Staples from The Backside of Nowhere? Probably very few people who read the book remember them. People who attended the reading of the screenplay are probably scratching their heads and saying "Malcolm who?" They were such minor characters. They were completely left out of the screenplay. But like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in "Hamlet" they're going to emerge as major characters in the sequel -- not that I would dare be so audacious as to compare my writing to Shakespeare or Stoppard.

In the flood scene early in Backside they are the two would-be crooks who loot the electronics store and are caught, humiliated and scared shitless by Pop Lawrence. (More head scratching; the flood scene wasn't in the screenplay either.)

Sonny never shows up again but Malcolm is mentioned in two paragraphs at the end. First in a scene leading up to the hurricane:

Inside the closed and boarded-up Piggly Wiggly store in Freedom, Malcolm Ashton hunkers down in the employee’s lounge with one other employee, Fred Dalton, his supervisor. They are armed with shotguns and are prepared to fend off looters. From their position inside they can hear the constant battering of wind and rain outside. Malcolm is cold. His hands are shaking. He keeps glancing Fred’s way, trying to ascertain if his boss can tell he’s scared. He wouldn’t want to be thought a coward. Fred has not noticed Malcolm’s nervousness but would not think badly of him if he did. And he would not believe it if someone told him that twenty-five years earlier Malcolm had been one of the young hoodlums who looted the town during a flood. After that, Malcolm had been caught holding up a 7-Eleven and spent five months in a juvenile detention center, and two years after that he had spent time in the penitentiary farm up north in Parchman for robbing a gas station and had gone through a twelve-step program for drug addiction. Finally clean and sober, he got a job as a stock boy at the Piggly Wiggly and married Bitsy Gardner and had three children, and has remained responsible and out of trouble ever since.

And then after the storm:

Like soldiers surveying a battlefield after the fighting’s done, as soldiers did back when wars were fought with handheld weapons, they survey all around from their slight height advantage. The Lawrence store still stands across the street. The awning has blown away and the front windows are shattered, but the building is mostly intact. They see figures slowly emerge from inside the store and head their way. There are four of them, a man, another man, and a couple holding on to each other. David thinks they look like movie zombies. 

“Look, there’s people,” Shelly says.

They understand that the Lawrence store would be the place survivors would naturally gravitate to. 

“That’s Raymond Jenkins,” Randy says.

Mary says, “And Mr. and Mrs. Short.”

From far to the north two more people trudge their way. Randy identifies them as Malcolm Ashton and Fred Dalton. The battlefield may not be littered with corpses, but the survivors are shell shocked.
They have lain Pop on the ground. 

As the others gather round, Malcolm says, “Is he dead?”

“Yep,” Randy answers.

“That’s a shame. He coulda kilt me once when he had a right to, but he let me go.”

The sequel, Return to Freedom, takes up where Backside ended. The town is rebuilt and Sonny and Malcolm and their families move into the new condos built by David Lawrence, along with another character, Beulah, who was also a minor character in Backside. Sonny has supposedly seen Jesus and changed his sinful ways. He's an itenerant preacher with a clueless wife and a thing for young girls. Malcolm and his wife are decent people, but their family is falling apart because they don't know how to cope with a shared tragedy. And Beaulah is just about to discover ... well, I don't want to give too much away.

I suspect I have another year's worth of work ahead before I can publish this one.