SPOLETO BUZZ BLOG

Who’d a thunk it? Despite being plagued by downpours and damp days throughout most of its length, the last-minute cancellation of jazz series headliner Shirley Horne’s concert, and a main theatre production so unpopular that box office administrators began discounting tickets for it as early as the festival’s opening weekend … Spoleto Festival USA managed to break yet another box office record — making this the third year in a row they’ve beaten the previous year’s sales. Total box office reciepts this year came in at $2.532 million: $2,000 more than 2005’s box office, but an improvement no less, particularly considering the weather and other programming factors that had many speculating sales would nosedive for this year. It’s nice to see the cynics were proved wrong.

Later Friday afternoon, I dropped by the last of Spoleto’s Intermezzi concerts at Grace Episcopal Church, where Emmanuel Villaume and the Spoleto Festival Orchestra were performing an all-Mozart program: his popular Concerto No. 2 for Flute and Orchestra and the Symphony No. 40, one of his most well known.

(Side note: last Tuesday, I stopped by the Charleston County Main Library downtown in the early afternoon to catch a few minutes of their American Film Series, which on that day featured Milos Foreman’s wonderful Amadeus. With two of Mozart’s operas in this year’s festival (Don Giovanni in Spoleto and The Abduction from the Seraglio in Piccolo), plus a host of other presentations in the two festivals, including Friday’s Intermezzi concert, it was interesting to watch once again Peter Shaffer’s fantastic film about one of the world’s greatest creative geniuses. Plus F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce are brilliant as Salieri and Mozart.)

Music in Time director John Kennedy came in a little late and joined me in the back of the church where I was standing. “I hate the seats in here,” he confided. “I’d rather stand in the back than sit.” Given that Mozart’s 40th Symphony is one of only two he wrote in a minor key (G minor) — and that because he was heavily influenced by the Sturm und Drang (”Storm and Stress”) movement prevailing in Germany and Austria at the time, it occurred to me afterward that Kennedy may also have been checking out the historical precendents for his own new work, entitled Storm and Stress, which opened the Festival Concert last Sunday. Didn’t have the chance to ask him, but he did apologize for not making it to A Perfect Ten the previous evening. Which I thought was awfully nice of him.

So what gives with the weather? I’m getting conflicting accounts of what we can expect for Sunday’s Finale at Middleton Place. Last year we got thoroughly rained out — even the F&B crowd, who were boozing it up right next to the City Paper spread (which was pimp, by the way), eventually threw in a very wet towl and said to hell with it. And you know that crowd doesn’t go down without a hard fight. And even the year before that was damp, if not completely wet. So we really, really deserve a nice day for Sunday’s festivities. We need the Piccolo stage to be dry so that Paul Scheer and Paul McBrayer can get up there and amuse all hell out of us. We need to be able to romance our girlfriends, boyfriends, and spouses with walks around sunny Middleton Place grounds. We need to be able to amble from picnic to picnic greeting friends and sampling food & drink without slogging through a muddy marsh of a Greensward. And we need to be able to hear the Spoleto Festival Orchestra perform its Prokofiev, its Shostakovitch, its Newman, and its, um, Newman unhindered by falling water of any kind. And most of all we need to see those badass fireworks. But weather.com is calling for a high of 85 and isolated thunderstorms, while over at the Post and Courier, Dave Munday says Arlene, the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season (did I not see this coming?) might bring yet more rain to Charleston late Saturday. Is there an anti-rain dance?!

It seems that as of today Spoleto box office administrators have decided to offer tickets for this Saturday’s big Spoleto Soirée — originally available only as a package with that night’s performance by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago — as a stand-alone option. Package tickets are still available for $75, but if you wish to attend the bash by itself, you can get tickets for a mere $35, which includes several open bars, Chi-town chow, and entertainment from the Joe Clarke Big Band. Not a bad deal. (Hint: get ’em at the Gaillard box office instead of ordering via the internet to avoid service charges.)

Hi there. You don’t know me, but I was sitting in a few rows front of you Tuesday night during the opening performance of Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise at Emmett Robinson Theatre. That was some show wasn’t it? Those five people really had the audience under a spell with their stories of living in Apartheid-era South Africa as children, didn’t they? Well, I guess that is until your cellphone began to ring. You remember, don’t you? It was right about when actress Bongeka Mpongwana was recreating a traumatic scene from her childhood when three gang thugs had her pinned to the ground with an automatic pistol shoved down her throat. (Yes, I know – you probably didn’t read the part of the program that explained how these were real stories from the actors’ youths in South Africa, what with worrying about what incredibly important phone calls you might receive during the show.) So when your cellphone started ringing – we could all hear it quite well over the sounds of Mpongwana pleading for her life, about to be raped onstage a few feet away – everyone in the audience all began looking around in disbelief, wondering just what sort of world-class asshole could possibly be so shameless and disrespectful. Congratulations on completely destroying Tuesday night’s opening performance. These five actors traveled with their company from another continent to perform for you. Their stories were about growing up abandoned, eating ants and insects for want of any other food throughout their childhood, suffering rape and torture, the joy of actually having indoor plumbing, watching everyone they know die at the hand of another human being. And here you are, living in the wealthiest nation in history, with everything you could possibly want, and you can’t even be bothered to turn off your cellphone before they tell you their story. Whoever you are, you definitely win the Biggest Jerkoff of Spoleto award this year. Congratulations.

As we creep up on the final weekend of the festival, the City Paper office is all atwitter with talk of the annual Spoleto Soirée, which we’re lucky enough to sponsor each year with Spoleto and which each year turns out to be the party of the Spoleto season. This year’s version goes down Saturday night, and since it’s paired with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s performance that night, we’re going with a Windy City theme. Big city flair Chicago-style highlights this year’s showdown, with signature drinks from Bacardi, Budweiser Select beer, wine from Maso Canali and DaVinci and authentic Chi-Town food. The Gaillard Exhibition Hall will be outfitted like a Prohibition-era speakeasy, with the Joe Clark Big Band providing the entertainment. Tickets are still available, but going fast, so if you want to go — and trust me, you do — you’d better move quick. They’re $75 each, which covers all you can drink and eat, plus an entire evening’s worth of fun. Get ’em at the Gaillard box office or online asap.

In today’s New York Times, critic James Oestreich write effusively about Spoleto’s Don Giovanni, as well as several of the festival’s other major productions:

June 7, 2005
A Don Giovanni Close to the Edge, Like Everyone Else
By JAMES R. OESTREICH

CHARLESTON, S.C., June 6 - In a wildly adventurous season of opera at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. here, the hottest topic of discussion is not “The Kingdom of Desire,” a compelling Beijing opera version of “Macbeth.” Nor is it “Die Vögel,” a little-known, effusively tuneful work by Walter Braunfels, or “La Bella Dormente nel Bosco,” a charming puppet opera by Respighi, as hot as all those have been.

Instead it is the most standard of operas, Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” in a staging by Günter Krämer. And rightly so.

This is, in fact, as much an installation as a production, and another triumph for the Memminger Auditorium, a dilapidated high school theater partly dismantled by Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and restored to use by the festival in 2000. The set designer, Ulrich Schulz, has removed the standard seating and turned most of the floor space into a stage, with 635 seats on the periphery.

The set is magnificent: undulating hills with trees, leaves, a pond and a few props. With the action dispersed everywhere, even into the orchestra and the audience, sight lines are sometimes distant or obstructed. Still, it is a magical place to stage an opera.

See the rest of the feature here.

There was a moment during the festival’s second weekend when one might have plausibly suggested the most buzzworthy aspect of Spoleto Festival USA 2005 so far seemed to be the weather. After all, you can count the cloudless, non-drenched days since the festival’s May 27 kickoff on one finger, although it’s likely to be a wet finger. But somewhere along the way – Monday afternoon’s fourth and final Conversations With program featuring Mabou Mines DollHouse director Lee Breuer might be a good place to put it – the 29th Spoleto Festival’s legacy became a product of Breuer’s self-perpetuating controversy machine. The director of Spoleto’s centerpiece theatre event and all-round touchstone of contention has injected at least as much drama into this year’s festival as he’s placed on the Dock Street Theatre stage. The buzz surrounding the play itself and its unconventional casting and staging choices, the myriad alterations it’s undergone since it opened on May 26 (with fellatio scene and without, plus or minus 45 minutes and a second intermission, naked lead actress vs. non-naked lead actress, all depending on the night you were there) and the polarized critical and audience reactions to it are enough to make one long for the genteel civility of the last presidential election.

When DollHouse opened, City Paper theatre critic Jennifer Corley gave Breuer’s avant-garde adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play A Dolls House the very highest of marks, and Post and Courier arts reporter Dottie Ashley raved about it. P&C Spoletoblogger Daniel Conover (who, by his own admission, is not a professional theatre critic – he just plays one on the web) called it “brilliant,” and even I had great things to say about the play. True, audience reactions to Breuer’s play have been all over the map (concentrating mostly at either end), but critical reception to the production, in Charleston anyway, has been overwhelmingly positive – with the single exception of last Thursday’s column from Post and Courier overview critic Blair Tindall, in which she savaged it, writing “…to me, Breuer’s treatment seemed one of those fabulous 3 a.m. concepts that look absurd in the morning. It’s a great idea. And I didn’t think it worked at all, an opinion seconded by the several audience members leaving at intermission.” There was much more, but essentially Tindall walked a critical line that managed to eviscerate, insult, and dismiss at once.

At Monday’s Conversations With program in Recital Hall, Breuer, who was joined by cast members Maude Mitchell, Mark Povinelli, and Ricardo Gil, greeted host Martha Teichner politely but clearly prepared to unload a bellyful of vitriol. And unload he did, in a mostly intelligent manner but with the wrath of a director spurned urging him on. The lion’s share of his fury was aimed directly at Ms. Tindall, whom he variously called ignorant, unqualified, “matronizing,” a “fake critic,” and clearly unversed in the history of avant-garde theatre. Breuer’s beef seemed to be mainly in the fact that, as a non-profit theatre, Mabou Mines is dependent on philanthropic funding from the kind of people to whom a review from me or Dan or Dottie or Jennifer is utterly meaningless – but Tindall’s column could well sink his ship. “We’re in a precarious situation,” he said. “Bad press like hers is national. Bad reviews of productions at major arts festivals can cut off your funding … My anger is directed at the fakery of [Tindall’s] politics and her feminism. She has a lot of power. And her points of view have become reactionary. And so she’s basically … the enemy.”

Breuer’s cast was wholeheartedly behind him. Ricardo Gil (Dr. Rank) took offence at Tindall’s suggestion that his director’s decision to cast the show based on size was a “circus-show steroetype.”

“For Blair to make judgments about us being oppressed without being informed is poor journalism,” he said to applause.

Povinelli (Torvald Helmer) agreed: “I’m being offered a role that’s one of the finest in the theatrical lexicon.”

Meanwhile, Maude Mitchell (Nora Helmer) wasn’t above suggesting, as tactfully as she could, that much of the negative audience reaction stems from a distinctly Southern (read “regressive”) sociocultural mindset: “This is a highly stylized piece of theatre. And – how can I say this? – we’re in a part of the country where the culture itself is highly stylized. I’ve been to a couple of luncheons where, at 11:30 am, I’m looking around and seeing women wearing my character’s makeup.”

Breuer’s either genuinely angry, slightly paranoid (which host Teichner suggested at least once), or a superb, unparalleled master of promotional agitprop – and having met the man and spoken with him alone and at length, I’m personally inclined to believe the latter. Does anyone reading this really think ticket sales to DollHouse are going to go down in light of the controversy and his comments earlier this week? Say what you want about Breuer, but don’t call him dumb.

Just in case there was anyone out there thinking Spoleto Festival USA, now more than a week old and entering the home stretch of its final seven days, had run out of fodder for the buzz machine, Emmanuel Villaume tonight proved that this festival still has energy to burn. At least until Lee Breuer decides to change his DollHouse again, what people are going to be talking about for the remainder of this week is the two hours that transpired on the Gaillard stage during this evening’s Festival Concert. Emmanuel isn’t above getting himself airborne during his more enthusiastic moments of conducting, especially when the music calls for it, and he had plenty of opportunity tonight.

John Kennedy’s Storm and Stress, an original commission for the festival this year, started things off. Kennedy’s musical roots are in percussion, and his 10-minute work was full of it, as well as a lot of other sounds evocative of nature’s wrath: wind, rain, thunder; he worked interesting snippets of jazz and what sounded like showtunes into the work, and at one point there was an unmistakable nod to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Some of the effects he pulled from the Spoleto Festival Orchestra musicians were completely new to me: at one point he had the double-bass players thwacking their bows against the bridge; elsewhere he had the violin section making sounds I’d bever before heard from an orchestra, but the effect was remarkably similar to a flock of birds chittering.

The work ended, literally, with a tremendous bang, and during the ovation Emmanuel was looking for Kennedy, who I eventually saw cruising down the aisle house right, toward the stage, where he disappeared into a door. That, I thought for a moment, was the wrong door. Sure enough, Kennedy seemed to become lost in the dark backstage area, because the crowd continued to applaud, and he continued to not appear. Finally, when Emmanuel held up a sheet of the music to stand in for John, the slightly flustered composer stepped through a door onto the stage and the ovation began all over again.

The real excitement was only beginning, though. When preternaturally gifted young pianist Andrew von Oeyen was finished playing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, the “knuckle buster,” the Gaillard crowd had leaped to its feet and was shouting its appreciation almost before the final note has sounded. On the third curtain call, I saw Emmanuel speaking to von Oeyen as they were taking their umpteenth bow; when he was called out a fourth time, von Oeyen marched straight to the piano, sat down, and knocked out a delightful Gershwin tune (can anybody tell me what this was exactly?) that had the audience positively giddy.

After then intermission, Emmanuel led the SFO through a thunderous Rite of Spring (which Kennedy’s earlier work had some interesting similarities to). I think this was probably the first time Stravinsky’s Rite had been a part of the Spoleto or Piccolo program since several years ago when Charleston Ballet Theatre performed a hair-raising version (it was written as a ballet, after all) beneath Angel Oak to much acclaim (and probably a few cold showers, if I remember right). Emmanual and the SFO gave it a hell of a return tonight.

My only beef with the evening: their air didn’t seem to be on during the first half of the program. If I was wiping my brow, I know von Oeyen was hot.