Kansas-based preacher Fred Phelps, an ultra-right-wing activist best known for parading with his followers at the funerals of victims of AIDS and gay bashings while shouting through a megaphone and waving signs reading “God Hates Fags,” is taking on a Colorado Springs arts center that has accepted funding from a gay/lesbian action group. The reverend’s merry band says that the arts center has signed on to promote “the radical homosexual agenda” by accepting the money. The reality of the situation, unsurprisingly, bears little resemblance to the Phelps interpretation, but that isn’t deterring protest organizers in their crusade to wipe out the “sodomite juggernaut” that is apparently running rampant in Colorado Springs.
Blog
Return of the Chicago Ring
Nine years after staging Wagner’s complete Ring Cycle to international acclaim, Chicago Lyric Opera is reviving the production this week, and the team in charge of the staging is enjoying a rare opportunity in the opera world: the chance to review what does and doesn’t work about a particular production, and actually make the show better. “The performances are musical marathons, the final three operas running for more than 5 hours including intermissions. But Lyric has the benefit of having already performed it as a complete cycle three times, and many of the staff members and orchestral musicians who made that 1996 “Ring” so successful are still with the company.”
Pulling Strings
Puppetry has not traditionally been one of the more respected theatrical forms (witness the hapless practitioner in the hit movie, Being John Malkovich), but in recent years it has begun to emerge from a fifty-year malaise in which puppeteers were relegated to entertaining young children who presumably didn’t know any better. “In the era of special effects and computer-generated imagery, it is unabashedly low-tech. And it’s an art form that stubbornly refuses to die.”
Opera’s Answer To Trekkies
“Some 10,500 Wagner lovers from 50 states and 27 foreign countries, along with a sizable contingent of international press, are making the pilgrimage to Chicago to catch the four-opera, 16-hour epic. Lyric is hawking Ring T-shirts, caps and socks in its lobby boutique to fan the flames of their enthusiasm. Such encouragement hardly seems necessary. Wagnerians are famously obsessive in their devotion to this marathon masterpiece, perhaps even more so than the Hobbit-ear-wearing Tolkienites who have made a cottage industry out of a certain other ‘Ring’.”
Aussie Orchestras Won’t Be Scaled Back
Australia’s symphony orchestras have received official assurances from the government that their rosters of musicians will not be scaled back in the wake of a report which recommended severe cuts. Of course, that doesn’t solve the problem of where the money to maintain the orchestras in their current form will come from, but with the downsizing issue behind them, all sides sound more amenable to compromise.
The Artist Who Became New York
It’s not so much that Edward Hopper was a product of the city he loved. It’s more that Hopper’s paintings of New York took on such a life of their own that it is almost impossible to conjure up a mental picture of the Big Apple without at least a little bit of Hopper in it. “Nearly four decades after his death, and many decades after he created some of his most evocative works, Hopper sites and Hopper moments can still be found everywhere in this city of steel bridges, concrete walls, asphalt roadways, old warehouses, empty roofs, brick buildings and small rooms.”
Does 12-Tone Music Sound Better When The Critics Shut Up?
More than a half-century after Arnold Schoenberg pioneered his twelve-tone system of composition, the world of classical music is still embroiled in a raging debate over the direction of compositional form, centered on the thorny question of just how much complexity audiences can and will tolerate. But two of America’s leading composers point out that the debate may be less about music at this point than ideology. “Most of these perceptions [of serial vs. tonal music] come not from hearing or knowing the music but from reading what someone has written about it… the biggest problem with the perception about the 12-tone system is absolutely akin to the perception of Schoenberg – that it’s become a journalistic cudgel.”
Is American Idol Killing The Broadway Sound?
The way performers sing in Broadway musicals is changing, and not for the better, says Ben Brantley. “Close your eyes and listen as their larynxes stretch and vibrate with the pain of being an underdog and the joy of being really loud. Bet you can’t tell them apart. For that matter, bet you can’t distinguish the heroines of the current Broadway musicals Wicked, Little Women and Brooklyn from the average female finalist on American Idol… The accent is on abstract feelings, usually embodied by people of stunning ordinariness, than on particular character. Quivering vibrato, curlicued melisma, notes held past the vanishing point: the favorite technical tricks of Idol contestants are often like screams divorced from the pain or ecstasy that inspired them.”
A Soprano Writ Small(er)
Acclaimed soprano Deborah Voigt, fired from a production of Ariadne auf Naxos by a London opera company last March because she was too fat to fit into the costume that had been designed for her character, underwent gastric bypass surgery in June 2004, and has since lost 100 pounds. Voigt had made the decision to have the procedure done before she was sacked by the Royal Opera House, a public humiliation compounded by the fact that Ariadne is her signature role. The surgery was not without risk: “Opera singers who lose significant amounts of weight have been known to lose vocal luster as well, Maria Callas being the most notable example.” But Ms. Voigt has been performing regularly in the months since her recovery, and has been continued to garner rave reviews.
Rescuing Cities From Themselves
“Architects grab more attention with their imposing skyscrapers. But landscape architects are emerging as the heroes of modern urban existence. They reclaim the wastelands,” of which there are certainly no shortage in America’s big cities, and turn them into, well, whatever you like, really. “After 53 years, mountains of garbage piled 225 feet high on New York’s Staten Island have begun a slow transition to parkland… In Duisburg, Germany, a derelict iron mill was reborn three years ago as a sort of theme park of the Industrial Age… In Beirut, a Garden of Forgiveness (Hadiqat As-Samah) is being constructed on a 5.7-acre site that was reduced to rubble by Lebanon’s 16-year civil war.”