2007-09 Vital Source Mag – September 2007
Raise the Curtain!
The performing arts season bursts open with a half-dozen theatre groups launching productions this month. The Milwaukee Rep opens no less than three shows, including its centerpiece – Lee Ernst as Cyrano De Bergerac. The Rep’s cabaret opens its season with this year’s Roger Beane show Life Could Be A Dream. In more edgy local theatre, Wisconsin Lutheran College presents a couple of compelling one-acts, including Tickless Time, about the nature of time, and The Illuminati In Drama Liber, an experimental piece that explores the nature of linearity. Further out, Madison’s Mercury Players Theatre presents a comic musical production of Reefer Madness. Also in Madison, The Madison Rep opens its season with Death of A Salesman. Death sings a bit closer to home with The Skylight Opera Theatre’s production of The Midnight Angel. Local stages animate with intense drama as Dramatists Theatre and Milwaukee Shakespeare launch Orpheus Descending and 2 Henry IV respectively, both productions of some pretty heavy work by two of the greatest playwrights in history.
Sep 1st, 2007 by Russ Bickerstaff
The Anatomy and Physiology of Arts and Entertainment
Living in our bodies can be a terrifying prospect. Their epic mechanics – hundreds upon hundreds of bones and muscles, tens of thousands of feet of blood vessels, 45 miles of nerves, a quadrillion chemical synapses in the brain – allow them to toil 24 hours a day at daunting projects to which we are mostly oblivious: turning food into energy, repairing wounds, building new cells and tissues, fighting viruses, rocketing oxygen through the whole system every 10 seconds. In one hour, the human heart works hard enough to lift one ton of weight one full yard off of the ground. Human bodies are so strong, so impressively engineered, and yet so unpredictable and delicate. To live in one is to stumble the earth, assaulted by stimuli and impelled by mysterious impulses, able to process your surroundings just enough to know that your body could be destroyed – or could destroy itself – at any moment. Life would be pretty joyless if it weren’t for the wonderful things our bodies let us do, like taste food, see shapes and colors, walk around, explore and communicate with other people. When we experience something pleasurable, we feel it everywhere in our organism. The fine arts offer perhaps the most comprehensive of these sensory satisfactions. Fusing the kinesthetic, the tactile, the visual and the auditory, art funnels all of the onslaughts and inklings of everyday life into something that even our bodies can understand. It is no wonder that we so frequently describe our impressions of art in physical terms – the taste we have for music, or the warmth of a color. Indeed there may be few other ways to describe the arts with such accuracy. The body of work produced on local stages over the course of a season itself showcases an infinite array of physical and emotional properties. It can be dizzying to consider the vast spectrum of living art breathing through the many and varied chambers employed as venues. The vitality of performance has been known to thrive in small spaces as few look on and languish in a teeming crowd. Here, then, is the city’s fine arts season – dance, theatre, music and visual arts – dissected and presented in an anatomical and physiological guide. Let this be an attempt to catalogue the Anatomy and Physiology of Arts and Entertainment. We know that your arts experience this year, transmitted through your body’s remarkable five senses, will be felt most keenly in your heart. To read all of our Fine Arts season previews, check out the current issue.
Sep 1st, 2007 by Vital Archives
“Keep guard over your EYES AND EARS as the inlets of your heart …” — Anne Bronte
The percussion of two eyelids meeting during a blink is not audible to the human ear, which consists of fibro-elastic cartilage covered with skin and fine hairs. In contrast to the eyes, the ears are always working. Visual reality is limited to a single, blinking field of vision and sight requires the tireless work of the ears to give it direction. Thus sight is aided by the ears, but rarely are the two given equal attention onstage. The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra will address the disparity between sight and hearing this season by presenting two concerts featuring music written specifically for the eyes. In April, the MSO performs the score to Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights as the film is projected overhead at The Marcus Center. Earlier on, the MSO will perform a special Halloween concert featuring scores written for Alfred Hitchcock films. Hitchcock worked with such influential film composers as Bernard Hermann, Dimitri Tiomkin and Franz Waxman, so this could be profoundly good. The work of another composer who wrote largely for the eye will be included on a concert at the Wilson Center in September as visually appealing Grammy-nominated vocalist Monica Mancini performs on the 15th. Included will be songs written by her father Henry, who wrote scores for over a hundred films in his lifetime (The Glenn Miller Story, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Pink Panther ). Monica will perform some of her father’s songs (such as “Moon River” and “Dear Heart” ) to clips of the films in which they appeared. In the realm of more contemporary film music, The Waukesha Symphony Orchestra will present Corigliano’s Suite for Violin and Orchestra from his Academy Award-winning score to The Red Violin. The WSO will be joined by American virtuoso Maria Bachman – one of Corigliano’s favorite violinists. In a similar hybrid of film and music, The Skylight Opera closes its season with Nine: The Musical. Written by Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit, this Broadway hit is an oddly skewed adaptation of film legend Frederico Fellini’s autobiographical masterpiece 8½. The musical adaptation of Fellini’s highly surrealistic and self-referential film may seem like something of a curiosity, but the show was a big hit on Broadway. The Skylight has a flair for putting together visually appealing presentations, so it will be interesting to see how they render what should prove to be a very interesting evening of musical theatre.
Sep 1st, 2007 by Russ Bickerstaff
“Music’s golden tongue Flatter’d to tears this aged man and poor”
By Barry Wightman If the tongue is a muscle of love, a notorious logo of leering lascivious brown-sugared rock & roll, the taste it produces in our mouths, the perception of flavor, is simultaneously a deeply personal perception of quality, an aesthetic discernment, a judgement we use to assign value in art, literature and music. Like a snake’s tongue testing the dry desert air, a tiny flickering antenna on some strange, primitive wavelength, each of us unfurls an antenna of taste, unique to ourselves, difficult to explain but critical to the art of being human. Extend your antenna, and taste new flavors. Like a bite of breakfast at Tiffany’s, Mancini at the Movies, a sumptuous spread of classics by Henry Mancini performed by his Grammy-nominated daughter Monica Mancini comes to the Wilson Center’s Kuttemperoor Auditorium this month. Mary Wilson, one of the original Supremes, brings her tasty, glittery Motown licks to Wisconsin Lutheran College in October. Taste the bittersweet of War and Remembrance: Music in the ‘40s, the still strong, fervent melodic flavors of Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughn Williams performed by the Waukesha Symphony Orchestra have aged well. From two or three dusty menus from old but familiar countries, the krazy klezmer kosher kings of souped-up Yiddish music, The Klezmatics, come to Alverno’s Pitman Theatre in December and stir Woody Guthrie’s corn-fed lyrics with matzoh and Manishevitz and come up with a blintz of Hanukkah cheer. Sugary and toothsome as a favorite Christmas cookie, the Milwaukee Symphony Pops can’t miss with its traditional Holiday Show at the Marcus Center. The Bel Canto Chorus sings Latin American holiday music by Ariel Ramirez at the Hamilton Fine Arts Center and Basilica of St. Josaphat. Then in the depths of winter, savor the classic kitchen table American fare of the imposing bluegrass artist Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder at the Schauer Center and Randy Newman, composer, performer and humorist at the Marcus Center in March. His voice is like a gumbo from Lake Charles, Louisiana by way of Southern California, a Tabasco’d taste of America.
Sep 1st, 2007 by Vital Archives
“THE HEART has reasons that reason cannot know.” — Blaise Pascal
Radiance and darkness come from the same place. If the mind is the brightest place in the human body with its constant storm of electrical impulses, perhaps the human body’s darkness exists in the heart – a place of absolutely essential, tireless labor. The heart creates enough pressure in the course of its constant pumping to shoot blood out of the body up to 30 feet. It can continue pumping even after 1/3 of its muscle mass is decayed. In spite of this, what is strong and durable from within is also quite fragile from the outside. It only takes 25 to 75 watts of electricity to stop the heart from beating. Somewhere in every beat lurks the final one, pumping blood to darker veins on the other side of human consciousness. This season promises some particularly dark moments. In May, Windfall Theatre travels into a conspicuously bleak autobiographical musical with William Finn’s A New Brain. Finn chronicled his battle with brain cancer in a musical filled with more heart and true human emotion than most musicals ever aspire. The Skylight Opera launches a completely different take on the dark side of musical theatre with a production of The Midnight Angel at the end of September. It’s the story of a wealthy 18th century woman so bored with life that she throws a lavish, decadent ball, inviting Death itself as a guest of honor. A similarly dark specter descends upon the Waukesha Civic Theatre’s Concert Series this season with Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldiers Tale. It’s a brilliantly dark piece usually performed by seven instruments. Composed in 1918, it’s based on an old Russian folk tale about a deserting soldier who meets and loses his soul to the Devil. In February, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents its stage adaptation of the dense, gritty work of Russian darkness that is Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The heavily intricate story of the brutal axe murder of two women will be played out sparingly. It will take a particularly deft scalpel to bring the extensive complexity of the original novel to the stage with three actors in a 90-minute show, but with the unique talents of Drew Brhel, Leah Dutchin and Mic Matarrese under the direction of Patrick Holland, Milwaukee Chamber’s Crime and Punishment could be one of the better shows on local stages this season. Under an even deeper pall of surreal darkness, The Milwaukee Rep presents Samuel Beckett’s vision of The End next March. Mark Corkins stars in Endgame as Hamm, who sees the final curtain falling and a new one rising. Another classic tale of dystopia makes its way to Wisconsin Lutheran College’s Theatre Department with George Orwell’s 1984. The title may be out of date, but the concept of a world watched over by the all-seeing Big Brother is a very interesting choice for WLC. Earlier in the season, WLC also presents a pair of one-acts about the darker aspects of time, including playwright Susan Glaspell’s intriguing short drama Tickless Time. Written […]
Sep 1st, 2007 by Russ Bickerstaff
17 Hippies and Dobert Gnahore
By Blaine Schultz Dobert Gnahore Na Afriki Cumbancha There is a pulsating sense of energy just beneath the surface of Dobert Gnahore’s music. Her fluid vocals are gently propelled by musicians led by acoustic guitarist Colin Laroche de Feline. With roots in Africa’s Ivory Coast, it is no surprise that the English translations for Gnahore’s songs tackle some heavy issues – dipping into gender politics, economics and war. A percolating battery of percussionists and vocalists adds up to some intriguing music with a message in any language. Appearing Sunday 5:30 p.m. Global Union festival at Humboldt Park 17 Hippies Heimlich Hipster Records The title cut of 17 Hippies Heimlich “tells what happens when a strong feeling should be kept a secret, so as to keep that feeling alive and strong; whereas blaring it out would destroy it.” But there is nothing secretive about this tribe. While many kids went techno when the Berlin Wall fell these folks went the other route picking up ukulele, dulcimer, violins, accordion and various horns to form this moveable feast. Alternately rollicking and melancholy, they pick and choose influences from Morocco, Romania, France and Germany. This rag-tag bunch is hard to peg unless Cajun-Balkan-Indian is a new genre. One of the members even dated the Velvet Underground’s Nico. Appearing Saturday 1 p.m. Global Union festival at Humboldt Park
Sep 1st, 2007 by Vital Archives
“The LEGS are the wheels of creativity” — Albert Einstein
In tribute to their strength and versatility, legs are used metaphorically in a variety of different cultures all over the world to indicate strength or mobility. Consisting of thousands of flexible muscle fibers grouped into numerous muscles, the legs are capable of impressive range of motion and are used for a wide array of different movements from walking to running to jumping to dancing. In any given performing arts season, local dance groups celebrate dances from cultures all over the world. In September, Madison’s Kanopy Dance Company hosts Riad Middle Eastern Dance Company to blend disparate movements from two sides of the world. From further south, Ko-Thi performs its annual African-styled harvest show at Alverno. The bite of December’s cold blows in the Russian heat of not one, but THREE productions of Tchaikovski’s The Nutcracker. The month opens up with The Minnesota Ballet at the Schauer Center. The next day, the Moscow Ballet comes to the Riverside Theatre while later on in the month The Milwaukee Ballet brings Michael Pink’s vision to the Marcus Center. Things continue to heat up in January as the fleet-footed and colorful Ballet Folklorico Mexico comes to the Waukesha Civic Theatre. In March, legends from Russia mix with puppets and contemporary choreography as Kanopy Dance presents Dark Nights: Baba Yaga and Other Dreams – a collaboration with mask and puppet artist Heidi Cooper. The range of motion broadens even further in February as Alverno Presents the return of David Nieman’s Advanced Beginner Group in a show featuring dance inspired by the rules and tactics of sports. In April, Alverno Presents also welcomes the work of highly accomplished choreographer Karole Armitage and her Armitage Gone! Dance Company. Also in April, Danceworks presents a fusion of dance and new musical compositions as it collaborates with fresh art music gurus Present Music in what should be an extremely refreshing evening of dance and music. Milwaukee Ballet also has a few premiers coming up, including its annual trip to the Pabst Theatre for a concert featuring new work and the season-closing La Bayadere, featuring new work by Artistic Director Michael Pink.
Sep 1st, 2007 by Russ Bickerstaff
Chris Abele
‘Chris Abele’ and ‘Argosy’ may draw blank stares from the average Joe or Jane; ask a local arts supporter, though, and you’ll get a knowing nod. Abele is the 41-year-old head of the Argosy Foundation, established by his father John, co-founder of Boston Scientific, in 1997. The foundation moved from Boston to Milwaukee, where Chris was alerady living, in 2003. Since then, he has generously given his own time and money here and nationwide, supporting the work of groups like Planned Parenthood and the Boys and Girls Club and making appearances at political functions around the world. The Argosy Foundation supports the arts, but its broader mission is to improve the human condition through better access to healthcare, education initiatives for children, environmental protection, improving public safety and more. In the interest of full disclosure, Chris Abele is VITAL’s only financial investor to date, having purchased a (very) minority share of the magazine several years ago. Since then he has made himself scarce, letting us do things however we see fit. He says it’s his way of supporting something he believes in strongly – the enduring relevance of a diverse media. How did the arts become a focus for you? The arts have been part of my life as long as I can remember, largely because I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family who provided plenty of opportunities to experience and learn about music, theater, dance and visual art, [and] shared their passion for it. Our family has supported various arts groups for as long as I can remember. My personal involvement started with the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, but has developed into far more here in Milwaukee. What do you hope to achieve with your contributions of money and time in the arts community? For the groups themselves, I hope to encourage them to strive for ambitious goals; one aspect of Milwaukee that I love is a temperament of relative understatement, which can sometimes mistranslate into diminished expectations of just how much we can achieve and how high we can aim. I would love to see a greater level of pride and celebration of some of the great art that does happen here. For the city writ large, I would love to help people realize just how much we have here and foster a more collective understanding that a life without art is a life deeply diminished. Why is it important to foster the arts at the local level? Our foundation supports arts nationally and internationally, but we are headquartered here in Milwaukee and we believe that part of good corporate citizenship is support for the local community. Personally, I think we have a better arts scene than many people outside Milwaukee imagine, and I’m very excited about how much it continues to grow. What do you consider your greatest achievement as an arts supporter? I’m not sure if it’s for me to declare anything in particular a “great achievement” but I feel good […]
Sep 1st, 2007 by Jon Anne Willow
“THE BRAIN is a commodity used to fertilize ideas.” — Elbert Hubbard
The mind is run by the brain through an extraordinarily complex series of bioelectric reactions. Much like local arts groups, the brain does remarkable things with profoundly few resources. The brain runs an individual’s body and arguably everything abstract going on in his/her mind on very little quantifiable physical energy. If, for instance, a waiter (who we’ll refer to here as Mark) decides to become the artistic director of a new theatre company, he can find a space in Bay View and start the Boulevard Theatre. The brain in its near-infinite complexity allows this individual to adjust to the new role. If, years later, this same individual and his theatre company are pushed out of a season-opening production of playwright David Mamet’s very modern and ridiculously acclaimed Glengarry Glen Ross by a larger theatre company, said individual will adapt to the situation (through a dizzying set of neurological interactions) by planning a production of David and Amy Sedaris’ irreverent comedy The Book Of Liz. Leaping from Mamet’s serious and deeply engaging glance into the heart of human motivation to a comedy that briefly involves a person in a Mr. Peanut costume by the side of the road seems a bit nonlinear, and as the process of adaptation took its course The Book of Liz was rescheduled. The new season-opening work finally rendered was Will Eno’s Thom Paine (Based on Nothing), which opened last month. While the Sedaris’ piece is no longer the Boulevard’s replacement for Mamet’s brilliant drama (it may have never, in fact, ever really been intended for this purpose), it remains on the Boulevard’s season schedule this September. The comedy tells the story of a woman living in a fictitious, secluded religious commune who makes the cheese balls for which the commune is so well known by the outside world. Featuring some pretty deft dialogue, Thom Paine is a brilliant fusion of the distinctive comedic voices of both writers. Thus, thanks to the process of adaptation, Milwaukee theatre is host to the comedy AND the drama of both Eno and Mamet. The adaptability offered through the constantly changing architecture of the human brain can produce astonishing versatility within a single individual as well. For instance: say a young man from New Jersey (we’ll call him Jim) gets a job on a fishing boat. He dreams of being a captain of his own boat, so he graduates from high school and goes to the local community college to perfect the math skills he will need for navigation. If, in the process of going to said college, he finds himself in a theatre watching someone onstage and thinks, “I want to do that,” neurological adaptation at a cellular level kicks in, allowing him to travel across the country to Wisconsin and attend UWM’s professional theater training program. Years later he’s a successful actor/playwright/author. This year, Jim DeVita has a tremendous amount going on, thanks to the basic fundamentals of neurologically-fueled human adaptation. The fall arrives as DeVita’s summer season as […]
Sep 1st, 2007 by Russ Bickerstaff
Your papers, please
In August, Lucky and I went to Monterey, California, to visit our dad. We had an amazing time driving the coastal highway through Big Sur, picnicking on a friend’s private beach and cooking like the three of us were still the big Italian family we grew up with. But it wasn’t all just for a lark. My dad’s been sick since last fall, though he didn’t tell us until recently, and all of us are starting to think about the impending “future.” Lucky and I saw my dad in a new light this time: no longer entirely the Pacino-channeling, devastatingly charming, problem-fixing free spirit we grew up with, the man who met us at the door this time was a little too thin, with pure white hair and a big smile that caught me off guard with its open expression of joy at our arrival. In many ways, I like this man better. He’s mortal at last, which probably clears the road for both Lucky and I to look at ourselves and the people we choose in a more realistic way. And even if you’re not into psychoanalysis (sadly, I think it might be a blossoming obsession of my own middle age), it was so nice to be able to really talk to him without the layers of external image that have previously defined him for us. We traveled on relatively short notice, so to save almost $200 per ticket we chose to land in San Jose, then rent a car and drive the 90 minutes to Monterey. For those who’ve never experienced the pleasure of SJC firsthand (though I should note that a renovation is underway), the terminal is the size of a postage stamp and equally useful to air travelers. There’s one bathroom past the secured area – and by that I mean ONE unisex, one-toilet bathroom serving hundreds of people at all times. There’s no place past security to buy water or anything else (and as in airports everywhere, you can’t bring it in with you); there’s one tiny “food court” near the main entrance and it’s a fairly long bus ride to the understaffed rental car building. Needless to say, the security lines were looong, winding the equivalent of several city blocks when we entered the queue to catch our ride back to Milwaukee. We had plenty of time to chat up our fellow travelers, but when the novelty of that wore off after about five minutes, I daringly made eye contact with an attractive black woman in a sharp navy blazer and impossibly well-tailored khakis. She was in a kiosk, positioned under a sign that read “Now You Can Fly Through Airport Security.” The woman was stylishly hawking Clear, a pay service that allows member travelers to expedite airport security checks by whisking through Clear’s own “designated security lane with special benefits,” bypassing the teeming masses and leaving plenty of time to make gratuitous cell phone calls at the gate while waiting for everyone else. […]
Sep 1st, 2007 by Jon Anne Willow
“Human salvation lies in the HANDS of the creatively maladjusted.” — Martin Luther King
Some of the oldest words in human language relate to the hands, suggesting a fundamental linguistic link between the human mind, the human hand and the world in which they exist. Hands, being the fundamental organ of corporeal interface between a human being and the outside world, have much to answer for in this respect. Throughout history hands have built monuments, started wars and saved and ended lives. Many scholars have elected to pin the blame for many of the hand’s indiscretions on the opposable thumb, thus freeing the rest of the hand from any guilt. Actually, any monkey (or chimpanzee for that matter) can oppose a thumb against an index finger. It’s the fact that the human thumb can oppose ANY of the other fingers including the small and ring fingers that make the human hand unique. Clearly, all the fingers can take both blame and credit for getting humanity to where it is today. And many hands have taken great pains to place performances all over greater Milwaukee this season. Hands have put together a new space for In Tandem to perform in as it opens its first comedy at the newly opened Tenth Street Theatre this season. Meanwhile, Milwaukee Shakespeare is still more or less without a central home as it stages a season featuring a couple of rarely performed pieces. It opens with 2 Henry IV (in September) and Cymbeline (in March) at the Broadway Theatre Center and Twelfth Night at the Wilson Center. Many hands have adapted Shakespeare’s work to other stage forms. The Milwaukee Ballet, for instance, performs dance adaptations of two plays by Shakespeare at the Marcus Center: Hamlet in November and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in February. Two months later, completely different hands place an adaptation of a completely different piece by Shakespeare as The Florentine Opera presents Bellini’s Romeo and Juliet.
Sep 1st, 2007 by Russ Bickerstaff
“If only we could pull out our brain and use only our EYES.” — Pablo Picasso
The human eyes are small but wondrous – a pair of infinitely complex sensors that allow us to experience wavelengths of light as fully formed, instantaneous impressions of color, shape and depth. The nerves and cells in the eye are some of the body’s most sensitive, the muscles that allow the eyes to move the most rapid. Even in sleep, when our eyes are closed, their rapid motion allows us to dream. And they are beautiful – shiny and variegated, an object of poetry, curiosity, perhaps even a window into the soul. And never are the eyes put to better use than to witness beauty, to drink in sights previously unseen and thereby engender a deeper understanding that enriches the soul. Test the soul-altering power of your eyes in September by taking in the universe as Villa Terrace presents a collection of Renaissance star charts and maps of the cosmos. The Racine Art Museum, one of the nation’s foremost craft museums, explores the beauty of shoes with Icons of Elegance, the first exhibition in North America to pair the most important shoes of the 1900s with the history of modern design. At the Tory Folliard Gallery, in the first solo Tom Uttech exhibition since his 2004 retrospective, you can see awe-inspiring elements of the natural and the fantastical. Turn your gaze into the past and see how it shaped the present at the Milwaukee Art Museum with Foto, a winter exhibition of radically modern photography from Central and Eastern Europe in the years between World Wars. Squint and you’ll pierce the dark veil of winter to focus on the delicate consequences of cross-cultural communication at MIAD with This Land is Your Land, a diverse group of shows about boundaries, shifts and perspectives. In the spring let your eyes roam over interpretations of the urban landscape we navigate every day with a group show at the Katie Gingrass Gallery featuring work in sculpture, neon and photography, or get a visual sense of the 19th century at the Haggerty Museum of Art with an exhibition of illustrations from Harper’s.
Sep 1st, 2007 by Amy Elliott
