Bad Medicine and the RTCC

I attended the Richmond Theatre Critics Circle award program on Sunday evening and submitted my article on time the next day. But for various newspaper-y reasons, it didn't run until Friday and was cut slightly.

Here's the published version. The online version doesn't include the full list of winners, which did run in print. Here are a few additional remarks:

*Aaron Gilchrist captured the spirit of the evening [or maybe he set its tone] with his unaffected charm.

*Tuxes, yes—which is not to say the jacket-over-jeans or the man-in-a-dress looks were absent.

*Shawls and scarves, yes-- with a few evening gowns and a knock-out Rita McClenny of the Virginia Film Office in thigh-high boots and a teeny blue dress.
[Sure, these last two bits are throw-away lines, but isn't the clothing part of the fun? Plus, I'm so fashion unconsicous, I had to work really hard on those lines!]

*For some reason, I thought Ms. Squire's line was the funniest of the night, so I had to end the article with "And who doesn't need an escape from that?" But it's true, if I were the editor trying to make the article fit, I would have cut that line too.

Also, I had written a whole part about Tom Width's speech when he accepted the lighting design award on behalf of Joe Doran. (Mr. Width is now on my list of People I'd Like to Meet.)

Tom Width, artistic director of Swift Creek Mill Theatre, accepted the Artsy for lighting design on behalf of Joe Doran, who was in New York. Doran did the lights for the Mill’s production of “Altar Boyz.”
“Joe told me, ‘I need $60,000 for lights.’ I said, ‘Go buy a Mega Millons ticket,’” Width told the audience. He gave Doran a budget, and Doran borrowed and rented equipment, bought things off eBay and created a design for the Mill’s “Altar Boyz” production that “put $60,000 of lighting design on stage for $5,000.”

I thought the story was both charming and indicative of the resourcefulness, creativity, and energy of Richmond theater that was so evident throughout the evening. But I realized I couldn't send those paragraphs in for publication and risk readers interpreting it to mean the Mill is somehow unprofessional. (I know, nonsense!--but my eyes were opened last year when I read an online comment elsewhere. Someone wrote that a Richmond Shakespeare production was "shoddy"--it was clear that person thought the absence of thousands of dollars worth of costumes and set means a production is automatically not good.)

So what's with the title of this post? Well, isn't that what critics are? I opened the paper on Thursday, sure that my RTCC article would finally appear in the Weekend section. Alas, no. But there was a nearly half-page article about the Bon Jovi TV special! 
 
Don't get me wrong: I think Melissa Ruggieri is a good writer, and statistics do support the notion that Bon Jovi is of more interest to a greater number of people than Richmond theater. But I consider it part of my job to grouse about such freakish injustice!

Richmond Symphony: Debussy, Prokofiev, Berlioz

My review of this concert appeared in Monday's Times-Dispatch, but there's no appearance of it online, so I'll post here. Read through for a few additional thoughts at the end.

Imagine a cup filled so full that the water makes a dome above its brim. The liquid trembles, bulges—but stays within the cup’s edge, held in place by surface tension until some outside force intervenes.

Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 is music that plays, metaphorically speaking, at the edge of the cup. The emotional tension was portrayed keenly on Saturday night by the Richmond Symphony and guest pianist Jeremy Denk, under the baton of conductor Christian Knapp, a candidate for the postion of music director of the symphony.

Written in C Major, but with melodies that quiver at the brinks of various minor keys, the concerto strains at the boundaries of simple categories like “happy” and “sad.” Denk’s performance showed this brilliantly. The piano cavorts into the first movement, but as the music spills over the edge of glee, Denk played with a near-vicious ecstasy. When a brooding equilibrium is reached, he didn’t let the music become complacent.

In introducing the concerto, Knapp remarked on Prokofiev’s fascination with machinery. The concerto does have passages of mechanical insistence, musical figures that get repeated like a step on the assembly line of sound, but Denk’s no automaton. He translated such moments into a manic playfulness that let the audience marvel at both his skill and the larger context of the music itself.

Denk performed with sensitivity to the orchestral voices, and the musicians played in harmonious partnership with him. At moments in the first and third movements, the violins and woodwinds seemed to have trouble hearing each other. Knapp worked quickly to bring them together.

The theme of tension at the threshold connected the first and last pieces on the program as well. “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune” by Debussy and “Symphone fantastique” by Berlioz both explore the boundary between dream and waking worlds.

In Debussy’s dreamy afternoon, the surface shimmers, but doesn’t break. It’s easy to imagine the flute, oboe and other solo parts as light-footed fauns and nymphs. The musicians voiced these passages beautifully against the lush backdrop of harps and strings.

The opium-fueled dream Berlioz depicts is in sharp contrast to the languid eroticism of the Debussy. The music is by turns graceful, plaintive, violent and comic—and more—and requires quick mood shifts, which the musicians handled with ease.

Knapp directed emphatically, often using his full body, as if he were inside the dream himself. When the music ended, there were murmurs and sighs from the audience as we returned to the world of the concert hall to applaud.

Except that the sounds I heard were not so much murmurs and sighs as little gasps and burbles. That last movement's music is pretty crass, after all. But I couldn't use those words in a review, as they'd convey entirely the wrong meaning to readers who don't know the music.
 
(Burbles: you know, that sound some Educated People make when they laugh at something they think only Educated People realize is funny.) 
 
I also deliberately didn't use the word "animated" to describe Knapp's conducting. It's such a cliche, and I worried some readers would read it as a positive commentary ("Yay! the conductor is entertaining!") or as a negative commentary ("Humph. Too wacky. Undignified.") depending on their inclination. I hope "emphatically" came across as purely discriptive.
 
There were several points in the Berlioz and even once or twice in the Prokofiev that I thought the music sounded bottom-heavy. (Were six basses really necessary?) Personally, I'm all for a conductor who likes cellos and basses, but they were occassionally distracting in this performance.

Critical Analysis

There have been interesting exchanges over the past several days between readers and writers of the blogs Richmond VA Theater, by Style Weekly freelance critic Dave Timberline, and The Barksdale Buzz, by Barksdale Theatre Artistic Director Bruce Miller. So interesting, in fact, I'm going to join in. How'd you guess?

"What are critics good for?" is a fair paraphrase of the central question. Although some commenters would answer simply, "Nothing," the real discussion involves the role of a (theater) critic in relation to theaters, audiences and potential audiences.

One could argue that a theater critic, reviewing a play on the first night of an at-least-3-week run, has a different role than a music critic reviewing a one-time performance. (Since the Richmond Symphony switched to only Saturday night and Sunday afternoon performances, reviews don't appear in the Times-Dispatch until after they could affect attendance for that particular concert set.)

But in the big picture, I think none of us are critics so much as we are intermediaries between the artists and the vast, vast number of people who haven't ever gone to a live performance but who we desperately wish would. These are the people I write for.

To get more specific, I'll play a number game:

• 1,250,000
  Number of people in the Richmond-Petersburg MSA.
• 1,000,000
  Number of those people who are a lost cause as far as attending arts performances goes.
• 2,500
  Number of people who actually attended the last Richmond Symphony concert set. (Bump that down by about 60% for the Modlin Center or other venue.)
• 7,500
  Number of regular or occasional classical music patrons who may decide to attend a concert in the next month or so. (These are the people--less than 1% of the general population--that arts organizations worry will be put off by a "bad" review--which is reasonable, as they're the people most likely to read reviews.)
• 240,000
  Everybody else. (I know, of course, that they're not all reading my reviews, but just play along with the game, please.)

These are the people I'm so eager to reach, because I feel deep in my sweet little optimistic heart that if only they would release their preconceptions, let down their guard, truly listen and watch with their emotional, human core, they would be, yes, converted.

They are people who probably do not know the setting of "Carmina Burana" and have never heard of Philip Glass, let alone Mark-Anthony Turnage. They don't know (as I didn't, really) the plot of "Children of a Lesser God" and, because they're reading the newspaper, they are very unlikely to look up any of these things.

That's why I spend some of my precious word count on description, even if I'd rather not. I recognize the need to put my comments in context, because little is more off-putting for me than feeling like I'm on the outside of some exclusive coterie--I feel sure I speak for a few other readers.

That's why, when I sort out my thoughts after a performance before writing a newspaper review (as opposed to my ramblings on this obscure blog), I ask myself, "What will catch the attention of the non-patron? What will most usefully prepare a potential audience member's expectations for a future performance?"

In short, I don't write for musicians or their bosses. I don't care if my words are blurbable or not. I don't expect to be helpful in any kind of technical or promotional way, although I'm delighted on occasion when I feel I can be.

A few other thoughts:

1. I wouldn't be reviewing, as a critic, any concert or production that wasn't professional. I work under the assumption that professionals know what they're doing. However, as an editor, I know that even the best article benefits from a set or two of fresh eyes.

2. The quality of professional performances in Richmond is high. The question is never "Was the performance good or bad?" Instead, I address questions such as "Does this particular interpretation seem to be communicating with the audience, starting with me?" "Does this performance help me reach beyond the little box of my existence? If so, how? If not, why not?"

3. I have a vested interest in getting readers to go to concerts--after all, they keep me in work, in an indirect way.

4. Did you notice those quote marks around the word "bad" up there? Partly that's because I believe any free publicity is good publicity. (Of those 240,000 people, several thousand of them have never even heard of your organization/group/company.)

But partly it's because, Richmonders, if you ever think you've gotten a bad review, you need to stay the heck out of New York City. Tosca at the Met? Try this choice review with its opening line: "The Metropolitan Opera opened its new season last night with a shabby new production of Puccini’s 'Tosca' and a soprano who fit right in." And later: "Bondy’s new production is short on tassels and ormolu. That would be fine, but it’s also short on sets and costumes and imagination. How did this dopey show get on stage?"

Wonder how many tickets that sold?!