Saturday, October 09, 2004

 

Au Revoir

Derrida has died.

But he didn't fully understand what he meant by that.

PHILOSOPHY JOKES KICK ASS!!!

posted by Dan 9:44 PM
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Friday, October 08, 2004

 

Permit Me a Moment of Spousal Pride

My wife Julie recently shot a 30-second PSA for GLAAD's "I Do" competition. It won 1st runner-up. Go here and click on the "1st Runner Up" link ("Reflections") to see the ad.

That's right, I am married to America's favorite lesbian bride! Me and George Costanza are driving them away in droves!

That other girl in the photo is our friend Lynne. I am now emailing this video to her very Catholic grandmother...

posted by Dan 10:31 AM
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Thursday, October 07, 2004

 

Dan Trujillo vs. The New York Times

You have no idea...what theatah-related tripe follows. Only for those interested in updating Greek comedy. For those who would spare themselves, I offer the following picture, in honor of fellow NYU student Kirk Faulkner: Pirate Ninjas.

Dan Trujillo vs. The New York Times Pt. I

A three-part series, in which a bumpkin takes on the Intellectual Goliath

* * *

The Frogs
By Aristophanes; music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; freely adapted by Burt Shevelove; even more freely adapted by Nathan Lane; directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman

A friend tells you, "It's the greatest show ever." Inevitably, it isn't. Conversely, a friend tells you, "It's the worst piece of garbage in Lincoln Center's history." Inevitably, it isn't, garbage. Confused, maybe, certainly problematic, but garbage? That's not what it smells like to me.

When I read Ben Brantley's review of The Frogs (reg. req'd.)a second time, I admit it didn't seem as bad as when I'd first read it. After all, he doesn't exactly call Nathan Lane fat and stupid, so that's positive, right? It's a rough review, though. It's rough in that way a football coach speaks to his championship-caliber team when they've just lost the first round:

"There's no finer group of football players in the continental forty-eight than you guys...but look at you now. You call that blocking?! You call that a passing game?! You call that BETTER THAN CATS?!"

I think he was trying to lighten the blow, but it came off as shame-on-you. Of course, he isn't the only one who has given The Frogs the deepest thumbs-down. Isaac at Parabasis won't even talk about it, so scarred was he.

And here I am, the cavalry, riding to the defense of The Frogs...on the week it closes. The cast must be so relieved.

Okay, I'm not going to defend it. As I said, it's a problematic play. It's the story of Dionysius -- god of drama and wine -- descending into Hades to bring back a great dramatist to help save the divided, war-weary world. While down below, he judges a debate between the Greek poets Aeschylus (think grand old poet) and Euripides (think young wiseacre intellectual). In the updated version, the dueling poets are George Bernard Shaw and William Shakespeare. The winner of the bout returns to the world with Dionysius, ready to write new plays. It's a comedy. No, really.

I think Brantley misses the point with this salvo:

Much of the score of ''The Frogs'' exhales his [Sondheim's] musical complexity. Even many of the choral numbers, with their use of dissonant counterpoint and lonely solo lines, convey somber, barbed introspection. (One of them, ''It's Only a Play,'' is a beauty.) This inwardness unfortunately clashes like cymbals with the flashy outwardness of Ms. Stroman's floor-show staging and of the gag-driven book.

Yes, it's a mish-mash, a collision of wildly different styles, kind of like...Aristophanes? Kind of like...Vaudeville? Which were the two main ingredients thrown into this gumbo?

I would say welcome to 21st century American theatre, except this collision of forms has been going on since for over four hundred years. When Shakespeare does it, he's celebrated for embracing the breadth of human experience. Apparantly, it's not allowed in a musical at Lincoln Center.

Mr. Lane's Dionysos turns out to have a strong sentimental streak...He sings a lovely new ballad about his dead wife, ''Ariadne,'' but it registers like a harp in an oompah band.

Perhaps a harpist wouldn't be a great guest accompanist to Der Schaumpfen Flort, but it'd be one of the most interesting oompah band concerts I've seen, and I've seen...okay, none, but if you told me they had a harp I'd be more likely to go.

If I stop grinding this pencil to a nub, I may get to my point. My point is that Lane & Co. were trying for something different. Evewn Brantley admits as much:

...[Nathan Lane] clearly hoped to turn the show into a profound parable for our time, however silly its outer trappings.

If any producer of a big showbusiness musical hopes to do something more than sedate the audience with sparkly goop, they should be at least mildly praised, even as we bemoan their failure to measure up to their dream. I almost wish there was an award for "Best Failure of the Year." In other words, The Frogs can't be the Worst Show of the Year, because the Worst Show wouldn't even try.

Part of the label had to do with the number of talented people associated with the project. You pack a train with celebrities, and it starts to wobble on the track, people don't just want to see a derailment, they want to see cars piled up like matchsticks. A catastrophe is far more enjoyable when successful, important people are involved.

Brantley comes within spitting distance of what I consider the real failure of the play:

And the climactic debate in hell between Shaw (Daniel Davis) and Shakespeare (Michael Siberry) becomes a middlebrow quote-fest that condenses vast talents into shrink-wrapped platitudes.

This debate is in the original play by Aristophanes, and we know that Athenian audiences found it endlessly amusing. It's a killer now, though, in part because Shaw and Shakespeare are less familiar icons to today's audiences. Spielberg and Stone might make a more familiar battle, if totally inappropriate. There's also the difficulty of trying to create a coherent scene out of famous quotes spliced together.

What makes The Frogs croak is a Drama 101 problem: there's nothing at stake at the climax. The people I care about in this story are okay at the point of the debate. Nothing good or bad will come out of the debate for them, except perhaps on a philosophical level. I sure don't care about the Shaw-Shakespeare simulacrums: they arrived on stage ten minutes before the debate started.

Bad reviews drove me away from this play, for reasons that I found to be bogus. After my classwork forced me to see the play, I took something valuable away, from a craft perspective, and it's this:

In adaptation, we play very loose with source material. We update, we add themes, we shuffle characters and give them new, politically correct motives...but sometimes we ignore problems with the source that have nothing to do with altering the piece to the taste of a modern audience. The Frogs may be frivolous, it may be over-the-top, but it clips along until the debate, at which point it dies.

Why did Lane & Co. pay fidelity to this debate? It doesn't work. It can't work. It's a boring, dramatically meaningless argument between supporting characters dominating the last third of the play. Why not drastically alter it? Or get rid of it? Something?

I can't expect this kind of analysis from a critic at the New York Times, or any major publication. The Editors would fire them for writing about these issues (although I'm sure they'd handle them more eloquently than I would). Yet for me, these matters are what actually make or break a show, not whether or not a tone is consistent or identifiable.

Any aesthetic can be sold if the heart if healthy and pumping. A sick man in a fancy suit is pathetic, but he isn't garbage, and we might make him well.

posted by Dan 1:21 PM
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Tuesday, October 05, 2004

 

Guest Star Day IV

Generation Whatever at 30
by guest-blogger Matthew Subotnick
Today's Topic: Hurricanes

Disclaimer:

If you're offended by the suffering of others, read no further. Yes, there has been loss of life, tragic loss of life and suffering, but mind you, if you've had anything at all to do with the theatre, you should be well-versed in suffering. And I've not only given money to the Red Cross, but I'm a disaster services volunteer locally, so there's my disclaimer.

So it is with a "look at the four-car pile-up, I watch Nascar for the crashes" mentality that I have become a hurricane junkie.

And what a season it has been!

Four major hurricanes making landfall, two tropical storms, billions of dollars in widespread damage, and the best reat of all, hours of live reporting on the weather channel!

If you haven't had a chance, log on to www.nhc.noaa.gov for hurricane tracking. The discussion part is particularly interesting in that the people to track these storm anthopomorphise them. It's not unough to give them names like "Frances" or "Jeanne", they give these storm personality.

I'm particularly fond of Ivan in that it became "Ivan the Terrible".

Hurricanes don't simply come in or go out like your regular low pressure system, oh no, these babies swirl, geerate deep convection, fight shear, and cover hundreds of miles.

That's what's so interesting. Sure, you have your tornadoes, and they can generate winds in the hundreds of miles per hour, but they're like a surgeons scalpel, or a laser, cutting with eeerie precision, leaving this house standing, while next door is transported miles away, or smashed to bits.

Hurricanes are the "Hulk-SMASH!" sledgehammer of weather, and proof positive that no matter how cool we think we are with the internet, Spaceshipone, or other advances, we are organic creatures at the mercy of the planet we live on.

I have a friend, Sammy, who lived through Frances, she says hurricanes bite, or "blow", and having been though a gale of 60 mile hour winds, a big windstrom is frightening, and I'd hate to be in one.

But from the comfort of my armchair, watching CNN and such, it's fun to see debris flying, horizontal rain, weathermen gleefully trying to stand-up as they report of what's to come.

Jeanne (same spelling) is my mother's name. She's always been a force of nature to me.

Hurricane season ends in a month, and right now Lisa is spinning off into oblivion in the Atlantic, with nothing on the horizon.

Which is unfortunate, as the next one is to be named "Matthew".

I wonder if he's anything like me....

* * *

Editor's Note: Matthew lives in Portland, Oregon, by car 2 1/2 hours SW of Mt. St. Helens. All I'm saying is ours is a Just and Awesome God.

posted by Dan 10:47 PM
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