Between Stages

Friday, January 05, 2007

Restoration

The restoration of City Hall seemed particularly cozy in the March-like weather of an unseasonably warm January in Milwaukee. The spire was still covered in scaffolding. From the window high above Water Street, the wire frame of the spire was clearly visible. They'd taken off all of the metal paneling . . . apparently to be replaced later on. It was late in the morning. You could see people scurrying about working on the restoration. On the other side of the window, an entirely different kind of restoration was being done on my teeth.

The woman cleaning them was telling me about her experience rehearsing with the Florentine Opera for its upcoming production of Macbeth. The woman who cleans my teeth will play one of the witches. The Artistic Director of Milwaukee Shakespeare will be directing the Florentne’s production. Apparently the woman cleaning my teeth had briefly served as her yoga instructor some time ago during pregnancy. The production has been mixing theatre people with opera people who are unfamiliar with the superstition surrounding a production of The Scottish Play. They apparently spent some time discussing the specifics of when it was superstitiously ethical to mention the name of the opera. Some of this had apparently been quite new to performers with the Florentine. One woman (A Born Again Christian) spoke quite eloquently about how the production had nothing to fear for various pious Christian reasons. It had been explained to her and the rest of the cast that certain superstitious standards must be maintained just by way of respect for those who WERE superstitious about the bad luck surrounding Macbeth. They were actually being taught superstition in the service of etiquette. Strange.

The woman cleaning my teeth continued, gently scraping calculus away from the edges of my teeth as lines of workmen moved about various levels of scaffolding outside the window near the top of city hall. Apparently, a substantial chunk of the opera has been edited down "for Milwaukee Audiences." This turns an extremely long opera into one that is only reasonably long. Certainly there have been some rather tasty bits of music that have been tossed out in the process. The yoga instructor/opera singer commented on how much better my gums looked this time than the last time I was in. No cavities. I still need to deal with my wisdom teeth. They’re still working on City Hall.

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Monday, January 01, 2007

Unseasonal

The first day of the year in Milwaukee and it’s 40 degrees out. The only litter outside the home this morning was an empty Styrofoam cup from Grecian Delight. No snow. This morning I saw a scrap of wrapping paper tumbling down a very vacant Cramer Street. You never survive the holidays the same way twice. It’s different every year, but it’s always a blur. Local theatre is a parade of shows that all look startlingly familiar to the ones see onstage last year. It’s the details that change. Maybe different people are playing the roles. John McGivern is performing the same stuff he did last year. It’s old even if you haven’t ever seen it before. Somehow there’s a sense of reverence for tradition, even if you’re only watching the parade and aren’t actually in it.

The new isn’t always novel. It’s always interesting pointing out the condos and upscale housing units that have popped-up to people who haven’t been in Milwaukee since last year. Weeks ago, I saw a young woman who helped me into the freelancing gig with the free weekly metro ages ago. She claims to have gotten apparently random death threats in a rather prominent position over there. That was years ago. Now she’s looking for more rewarding work. She’s on track to become a social worker in New York. The local press can be a real heartbreaker. I ran into her in the elegant disarray of Historic Turner Ballroom before what could end up being one of the last Insurgent Theater shows. Everything’s so much more dramatic in a huge, ancient place that’s weathered a couple of ceiling fires decades ago.

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Monday, December 04, 2006

Childhood Winter Memories

As I sit this morning drinking coffee, recovering from a head cold along with the aches and pains of dealing with the first snowfall of the year, I am reminded of the chapped, giddy daze of head colds in the winters of my early youth. (I may not remember everything that happened there with exact precision, but I grew-up on casseroles and TV dinners in the addled miasma of prescription asthma medicines under the heavy influence of 1980’s network television, so give me a break.) I went to grade school in northeastern Wisconsin’s Fox River Valley. At the time, the town I went to school in was a major hub of the US paper industry. Birthplace of the Double Wrapped Tampon, I remember the Fox River Valley as being home to every end of the paper industry.

The Fox River Valley featured the full range of the socioeconomic spectrum. There was wealth there, but not in great enough numbers to allow for a sizeable private school system. As I recall, the only reason you would’ve been sending your kids to private school up there was because of your Catholicism, there being no other private schools to be found. As a result, I (who grew up well below the lower end of the spectrum on food stamps and medical assistance) went to school with students from every income level—everyone from Paper Princes and Princesses (sons and daughters of rich paper chemists and industry executives) to the paper poor (sons and daughters of truckers, mill rats and service sector workers.)

With everyone from every income level sharing the same schools, ours was a very progressive school district--the pride of everyone that prided itself on everything. From grade school to junior high school to high school, every school I attended had won a national recognition award from the US Department of Education at some point in the recent past. The district had also prided itself on very, very few days missed due to weather. Our school was always the last to declare a Snow Day. This could seem very, very cruel to a short, un-athletic asthmatic kid who had to stand outside and wait for a school bus in near blizzard conditions while the cold air constricted his bronchi to an infinitely small diameter, roughly the length of an attention span cut short by TV, frequent trips to the video arcade and the vicious prescription heart-attack that was regularly administered Theophylline. The cold weather often came bearing head colds with their massive, consciousness-jarring congestion. The early ‘80’s cold medicine never seemed to work and I always ended up with a good portion of my upper lip chapped from frequent brushes with tissue and/or recycled scraps of paper.

Having gained some time and distance from the primary school district, I’ve come to understand that it wasn’t cruel with respect to the snow—it was cocky. Winter came at the same time every year and the district was always ready for it. It had the salt and the snow plows to deal with any kind of snowfall and competent people who were paid well (err . . . paid, anyway . . .) to deal with it. There was no reason to keep students home from class. To their credit, they rarely did. Many of us suffered for it. And as the snow begins to fall again outside the window, I feel that same sort of cockiness swelling within me . . . challenging the snow to accumulate enough for me to show it who’s in charge of those sidewalks just one more time . . .

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Saturday, December 02, 2006

Parting Abuse

And somewhere around its final walk out the door, the year gets pretty serious about being abusive. Ten inches of snow fall because they can. People ski on the back of slow moving cars rolling down snowy, out of the way streets on the fashionable Upper East Side. Muscles ache from hours spent moving ridiculous amounts of snow only a few feet from where they landed. House cats have strange problems with their digestive systems. Cat litter and sidewalk salt are everywhere amidst the lingering smell of unleaded gasoline. Tabloid celebrity faces from the warmer side of the continent make strange team-up appearances in the mass media completely devoid of underwear. People make questionable decisions at the box office and go inside to talk amongst each other during conspicuous moments.

Some several days after my wife and I sat discussing French conspiracies beneath a stuffed deer’s head somewhere in Bay View, I found myself alone in a crowd at the Walker’s Pont Center for the Arts. It was a festival of ten-minute plays presented by the Playwrights Studio Theatre. Some of the stories were pretty good, but the last one was awful: a parody of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol that critics have hailed as “humorless” (The Journal Sentinel) and “forgettable,” (The Shepherd Express . . . okay: me, actually but it was still the Shepherd Express.) The 10 Minute Christmas Carol was greeted coldly with silence and polite applause. It was almost inexplicable. People with real talent like Susan Currie, Alice Wilson, Rip Tenor and Andy North find themselves in a piece written by someone who has real talent like Michael Neville, yet somehow the show is only marginally tolerable and someone in the intimate space of that theatre . . . someone only one row back and a few chairs to my left quite clearly says in a deafening, polite whisper, “It’s NOT very funny.” And a few of the actors might’ve been within arms reach of the audience member in question. As the 10-minute Christmas Carol wound to its close, one could read quite a bit into Rip Tenor’s face beneath the hunter’s hat and glasses of his character Art Kumbalek in the role of Scrooge. A dozen emotions could be seen on his face and not a one of them were very cheery. Clearly he wasn’t having a good time.

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Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Early Holidaze

The holidays drizzle together onstage. Four shows this past weekend opened in four different theatres scattered all over the theatre district. Four shows in three days isn’t usually the kind of blur it was this past weekend. (It’s busy, but it isn’t usually a blur.) The set design of Dickens In America made the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre resemble the Pabst with crystal chandeliers and luxurious curtains. There we were at the Pabst later on that same night . . . balcony seats with candies unwrapping and people talking. So many go to see A Christmas Carol . . . people who are evidently unfamiliar with the whole “theatre-audience-quiet” thing. The Sunday matinee of South Pacific wasn’t much better. They had me sitting in front of an older couple who would talk in a perfectly clear conversational volume between songs. Kurt Ollmann finishes the last notes of Some Enchanted Evening and I can clearly hear two voices behind me in dialogue:

Elderly male voice: “He’s very good.”
Elderly female Voice: “Yes, Very Good.”

Jennifer Swiderski and company finish their cute rendition of I’m Going To Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair complete with equally cute, sub-Sarah Wilburian choreography and I can clearly hear two voices behind me in dialogue:

Elderly male Voice: “I thought that was very nice.”
Elderly Female Voice: “Yes, Very Nice. . .”

Plenty of shows between here and the new year. Here’s hoping for an appropriate level of silence in every auditorium . . .

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