Straw Hat Circuitry

Summer on the Boards Dept.: Once upon a time, summer was the season of an incredible array of plays presented in repertory at venues seemingly everywhere. While the number of such things has dwindled, the greater Albany area teems with promise – if you don’t mind driving to Massachusetts and Vermont and beyond. And you shouldn’t. Here are a couple of shows I reviewed at theaters that still, 26 years later, are going strong.

                                                                                        

OSCAR WILDE'S The Importance of Being Earnest meets Noël Coward's This Happy Breed in a new play at the Dorset Theatre Festival. Thom Thomas wrote Without Apologies as a whimsical suggestion of what may have happened to the main characters of Earnest some two-score years later.

And so, surprisingly, Algy is married to Gwen and Earnest has wed Cecily – not what we were led to expect as the curtain went down in 1899.

Furthermore, Algy and Gwen are making do in a smallish house in a not entirely fashionable part of London with octogenarian Lady Bracknell tucked into an upstairs room except for her weekly pilgrimage downstairs to listen to the wireless. And they let rooms to a lodger, a musician.

Into this set-up come Earnest and Cecily and their blowsy, 30-year-old daughter, Brenda, desperate for lodgings.

Byron’s Listening Den

Cool & Strange Dept.: I had the pleasure of contributing to Dana Countryman’s Cool & Strange Music! Magazine during its brief, glorious run. I wrote features about song-poems and Ian Whitcomb, and also contributed CD reviews. Here’s a pair of unlikely reviews from Issue #15.

                                                                                         

Louis Philippe: Delta Kiss/Sunshine
CDMRED 156
Cherry Red Records

An industry unto himself, Louis Philippe shares a moniker with pre-Revolution French royalty and a singing style with countless Vegas crooners who warble with Wayne Newton-esque intensity.

“Delta Kiss” and “Sunshine” put two ten-year-old albums in one two-disc CD package, and they’re two of Philippe’s more relentlessly pop excursions, with lots of easygoing percussion, not-at-all-bashful use of echo, and the Covent Garden String Orchestra for that extra taste of smoothness.

"Anything Goes"

Singing at Proctors Theatre on Cole Porter's birthday.
Photo by Patrick Dodson/Schenectady Gazette.

In Praise of Counsel

Poetry Slam Dept.: Not that I haven't enjoyed my time on the alienist's couch, but it does seem as if we're lately unable to function in any capacity whatsoever without the salve of such sessions. At least that's how it seemed when I wrote this several years ago.

                                                                                   

(To the tune of “McNamara’s Band”)

O, MY BROTHER tried some fratricide when I was only three,
My father changed my underwear, my mother watched me pee;
I had a hunch I’d hate the bunch for what I’ve undergone,
But now that I’m in counseling, I know I led them on!

There’s a counselor for him and her, and one for little Jane;
There’s one for when you’re happy and there’s one if you’re in pain;
And on the street you’re bound to meet a counselor or two,
They counsel one another when there’s nothing else to do!

It’s a splendid thing, this counseling, it crawls into your mind,
You never know what secrets all the counseling will find;
What Doctor A may say today is like the third degree,
And then it’s contradicted when you talk to Doctor B!

O, it feels so good I'd hope you would consider what I say,
And find yourself a counselor to talk to every day
To ease your pain and dull your brain and make the world look nice –
Consider me a counselor, now take my damn advice!

– 24 January 2005

Danny Rides Again

Once and Future Jazz Dept.: Dan Levinson is as protean a talent as they come in the jazz reeds department. He plays regular gigs in the NYC area, as the schedule on his website indicates, and every recording of his I’ve heard is a winner. He has performed in the Capital Region many times; here’s my account of small-group concert in 2005.

                                                                                        

BY THE TIME THE BAND got to “Fidgety Feet,” they were in such a swinging groove that each solo topped the one that came before, topped it in inventiveness, intensity and that looseness of rhythm that would give any metronome a nervous breakdown.

Dan Levinson | 30 September 2005
Photo by Andrzej Pilarczyk

Dan Levinson is a Manhattan-based clarinet and sax player with a passion for vintage jazz and the chops to play any of it in any style. At Friday night’s performance as part of Schenectady’s “A Place for Jazz” series, he sounded like Goodman, he sounded like Pee Wee Russell, he even, during his solo in “Satanic Blues,” aped the style of Sidney Bechet without the nervous vibrato. And that was just on clarinet.

Protean though his playing can be, he also sounds like Levinson, a player who has assimilated those classic styles and sees them through a post-bop lens. He can reharmonize a solo in a surprising way (although it’s arguable that Bix Beiderbecke already was doing that in 1924). As a leader, he assembled a septet of some of the finest players from his neighborhood and ours and led them through a series of tight, tricky arrangements paying tribute to a group that performed and recorded together for one year only, in 1939.

. . . And Everything Nice

From the Spice Rack Dept.: My kitchen is a wonderland of herbs and spices, from the commonplace to the exotic, expanding each time I experiment with a new cuisine or pass another street-fair display of possibilities. Here’s my 2006 disquisition on the topic.

                                                                                        

SPRING CLEANING, in my house, starts in the kitchen. Even as I’m tossing out crusty old jars of Gulden’s and those desiccated piles of capers that collect in the corner of the fridge, I’m considering the most formidable of my culinary battlegrounds: the spice cabinet, which also serves as an extended pantry.

Street Fair, NYC | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

It’s a cabinet not far from the stove (bad idea number one: storing the spices near heat), with three shelves of herbs and spices, tea and powders in a mish-mash of old jam jars, tiny Tupperware caskets and crumpled glassine bags. They’re arranged in something that once was alphabetical order, a habit I’d might as well confess to, but that order deteriorates with each fancy meal.

Consider, first, the herbs and spices. I grew up, as you probably did, with a spice rack in the kitchen, a rack that boasted a dozen and a half identical containers cheerfully labeled and faded with age – especially the spices themselves. For years I thought paprika was a tasteless powder of dull orange, and didn’t see its brilliant redness until I got into the restaurant business.

My American Diary

Guest Blogger Dept.: Here’s a curio by Noël Coward, the first chapter of Terribly Intimate Portraits, published in the U.S. in 1922, reworking material from A Withered Nosegay, published earlier that year in the U.K., and adding what’s below. I won’t annotate the references because you should do your own damn research.

                                                                                         

SATURDAY

Noël Coward, author of My American Diary
Drawing by Lorn MacNaughtan

I felt that some sort of scene was necessary in order to celebrate my first entrance into America, so I said “Little lamb, who made thee?” to a customs official. A fracas ensued far exceeding my wildest dreams, during which he delved down – with malice aforethought – to the bottom of my trunk and discovered the oddest things in my sponge bag. I think I'm going to like America.

I have very good letters to Daniel Blood, Dolores Hoofer, Senator Pinchbeck, Violet Curzon-Meyer, and Julia Pescod, so I ought to get along all right socially at any rate.

It would be quite impossible to give an adequate description of one’s first glimpse of Broadway at night – I should like to have a little pocket memory of it to take out and look at whenever I feel depressed. I shall feel awfully offended for Piccadilly Circus when I get back.

God! How I love frosted chocolate!