Archive for December, 2009
Back to normal?
Posted by: | CommentsPATTI LUPONE in “Gypsy”
Now is the time of year when we all pretend we really liked the fact entertainment has been dominated for nearly a month by holiday fare. We smile when we say Nutcracker, we exult in A Christmas Carol, we sing Hallelujah for Handel’s Messiah, but we silently thank the deity of our choice or the coming of January.
Of course, some of us like to keep the seasonal flame alight. If you’re a holiday hanger-on, you may want to catch The Phoenix Symphony’s annual, traditional New Year’s Eve Gala: Viennese waltzes, Auld Lang Syne, and a flute of champagne. You may even wish to hear those Christmas carols one last time – I don’t blame you, they are like nothing else we hear the rest of the year. If so, check out the last two nights of Copperstate Dinner Theater’s Christmas Jukebox, an interactive event in which you choose the holiday tunes you want to hear.
On the other hand, if you’re ready to say goodbye to the holidays and hello to the middle of the theater/music/dance season, your Phoenix Symphony event of choice won’t be the New Year’s Eve Gala, it’s be the Symphony’s premier pops event of the 2009-2010 season: Broadway goddess Patti Lupone in concert Saturday, Jan. 2. ASU Gammage is also offering a sudden change-up from Christmas in the form of that chestnut of the Great White Way, Annie.
After this weekend, though, it’s back to normal – and a pretty good normal it is, too, with appearances by comedian Jason Alexander, jazz singer Dennis Rowland, the Ying Quartet and Marvin Hamlisch, plus productions of Ain’t Misbehavin’ and August” Osage County – and that’s all before Jan. 15. As usual, check out ShowUp.com to get a jump on planning your cultural month.
Behind the ballet
Posted by: | CommentsBallet is made of sweat and grace. As Ballet Arizona’s production of Ib Andersen’s The Nutcracker enters its final week for this year, the grace will be evident to anyone sitting in the audience at Phoenix Symphony Hall. To see the sweat, you have to attend rehearsal – or talk to someone in the company.
Click above to hear an interview with Ballet Arizona’s Ian Poulis talking about the production. The interview is from the radio show Arts on the Town from two years ago, but Poulis’ comments — about Nutcracker and Ballet Arizona, about Balanchine technique and the challenges facing young dancers — still apply.
From films to musicals
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A scene from Little House on the Prairie, the musical
Rachel Portman is used to writing music for the movies. The 49-year-old British composer has scored more than 50 movies, including Chocolat, Cider House Rules, The Lake House and Emma, which in 1996 won Portman the first Oscar for Best Original Score ever awarded a female composer.
She’s still writing music that helps tell a story, but instead of notes to backdrop spoken dialogue, Portman is composing music to be sung. Operas and musicals are her new world.
“I come from crafting subtle musical cues for film,” says Portman by phone from London.
“In the movies, music has a supporting role.”
But on stage, sung music moves plot forward, exposes characters, delineates themes. In Little House on the Prairie, the musical based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s famous novel (which plays through Sunday at ASU Gammage), she supplies music that fulfills a double, and seemingly contradictory, purpose:
“In a musical, the songs step out of the drama, even though they’re still part of it. Bizarrely, it seems to work. It’s the most amazing form, because you’re stepping into the spotlight each time, but you’re also moving the drama forward, making the audience feel something has happened.”
Before Little House, Portman composed an opera based on Antoine Saint-Exupery’s famous children’s novel. Of the difference between opera and musical, Portman notes:
Musicals are driven by commercial interest, operas aren’t. That gives the composer a lot more freedom in opera. In an opera, it’s up to the composer and librettist to decide everything. With a new musical, there’s all sorts of input from directors and producers. I come from working in films, and in film, you want your pieces of music to disappear as gently as possible. You let the music slide away. In musicals, that kind of training was no help at all. It’s all about how the songs ends, so as to make the audience applaud.”
Despite the challenges of the form, the musical has taken Portman away from film, at least for the present. Her next project is another musical – on a subject she’d rather not discuss until all the production details are in place.
Snow Queen is 19
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Amber Robins in the title role of The Snow Queen
Nineteen years ago, Frances Smith Cohen had the idea of blending Hans Christian Andersen, Sergei Prokofiev and Center Dance Ensemble into a holiday meal called The Snow Queen. The work, which began as a smallish one-act with no set, is now a staple of December in Phoenix.
A modern-dance alternative to ballet’s annual cash cow, Nutcracker, The Snow Queen relates Andersen’s tale of a love lost to the evil title character and a love regained by a young woman’s true heart.
The genesis of The Snow Queen is shrouded in two decades of changes. Cohen recalls choosing the story as holiday fare because of its relationship to winter. But she can’t remember why she chose Prokofiev’s music for the ballet, The Stone Flower, as backdrop to the story’s colorful parade of children, villagers, animal spirits, enchantresses and robbers.
“I heard the music on the radio, and in 1990 there was no CD of the score,” Cohen says. “I had to go to a record finder in New York to get it on vinyl.”
She set Snow Queen’s choreography to the vinyl, and today, though CD versions abound, she sticks with a tape of the LP because the dancers of Center Dance Ensemble are used to the tempos in that performance.
“Every once in a while, you hear a crack or a pop,” Cohen says, apologizing for the soundtrack.
By its third year, Snow Queen was a full-length piece, employing dozens and dozens of children on the stage of the Herberger Theatre. A lavish set was added in the late 1990s. As the years went by, characters came and went, choreography mutated, and dancers moved on. None of the original cast is left among the current crop of 15 adult dancers.
The children are the most ephemeral of all. This year alone, 165 of them from 47 different Valley dance schools, ages 7 to 18, will slide across the stage at some point in the three-week run.
Cohen’s choreography is at last in final shape – the “Lady Autumn” dance added five years was the last major change – but this year will bring some new costumes.
Snow Queen is a unique Phoenix dance experience. Says Cohen:
“To the best of my knowledge, no one else in the world does this story in dance.”
