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All in the Mind

Across the Boards Dept.: Amidst the summerlong festival of music, Bard College also throws in a worthy theaterical production or two. Here’s my review of a significant one from last year.

                                                                                           

WERE YOU TO LAUGH hard enough at this production to be-merde yourself, it would only be in keeping with the spirit of the play. Molière’s “Imaginary Invalid,” the valetudinarian Argan (Ethan Phillips), leads us at the top of the show through a monologue in which he details no end of scatological disorder, punctuating the diatribe with a long, silent, lovingly rendered fart.

Peter Dinklage and Ethan Phillips
Photo by Cory Weaver

The temptation to overdo it must have been considerable, but Phillips and director Erica Schmidt found the right confluence of character and delivery to allow the laughs to emerge from the heart of the show. Molière gives plenty of room for stylization and stage business, and the ensemble that tore into this piece must have used up most of that space.

This marked the return of Schmidt and her actor-spouse Peter Dinklage to the Bard stage since their 2008 “Uncle Vanya.” Dinklage’s PR stock since has soared with “Game of Thrones,” but he was every bit the ensemble player in this rollicking farce.

And the ensemble was made up entirely of men, as we learned during the sung prologue that brought out the nine cast members in period undergarments, soon to sport costume designer Andrea Lauer’s true-to-the-spirit suits and gowns. Beyond Commedia dell’arte tradition itself, there was little in the way of camp to this production. In a very short time you forgot that lovesick Angélique was being played by a man, because Preston Sadleir informed the character with a core of truth.

Daly Theatre

Guest Blogger Dept.: Augustin Daly was a theatrical producer in the late 19th century, working in New York and London, known for his melodramatic adaptations of popular works and for his (usually trimmed) productions of Shakespeare’s plays. The success of his “Taming of the Shrew” was celebrated, after its one hundredth performance on 13 April, 1887, with a dinner party. Held on the stage, it featuring the show’s stars, John Drew and Ada Rehan, and including such luminaries as Rose Eytinge, Horace Porter, Elihu Vedder, May Irwin, Otis Skinner, and General Sherman, who, as toastmaster, introduced fellow-guest Mark Twain. Twain gave the following speech.

                                                                               

I AM GLAD TO BE HERE. This is the hardest theatre in New York to get into, even at the front door. I never got in without hard work. I am glad we have got so far in at last.

Mark Twain

Two or three years ago I had an appointment to meet Mr. Daly on the stage of this theatre at eight o’clock in the evening. Well, I got on a train at Hartford to come to New York and keep the appointment. All I had to do was to come to the back door of the theatre on Sixth Avenue. I did not believe that; I did not believe it could be on Sixth Avenue, but that is what Daly’s note said—come to that door, walk right in, and keep the appointment. It looked very easy. It looked easy enough, but I had not much confidence in the Sixth Avenue door.

Well, I was kind of bored on the train, and I bought some newspapers—New Haven newspapers—and there was not much news in them, so I read the advertisements. There was one advertisement of a bench-show. I had heard of bench-shows, and I often wondered what there was about them to interest people. I had seen bench-shows—lectured to bench-shows, in fact—but I didn’t want to advertise them or to brag about them.

Dose of Oates

I’m Telling You Dept.: Let’s wander back 23 years for a visit to Union College and a talk by Joyce Carol Oates, and an opportunity for Dr. Helen Caldicott to piss off the kind of folks who deserve to be pissed off daily.

                                                                                   

SCIENCE, WHICH BEGAT the annual National Conference on Undergraduate Research four years ago, has been moving aside during recent sessions to accommodate the humanities. And the talk by Joyce Carol Oates that concluded this year’s conference at Union College deftly and charmingly punted one area of science out of the picture when she confessed that she recently got rid of her word processor “because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life staring at this little screen.”

Joyce Carol Oates
Photo by Marion Ettlinger

I don’t think Science – or any of the scientifically minded who helped fill the Memorial Chapel – was offended.

Oates, prize-winning author of over 30 volumes that comprise novels, short stories, essays and criticism, examined aspects of writing and the writer’s experience, reading excerpts from an essay that she punctuated with wise and amusing commentary.

Although she alluded to the boring nature of essays as if to explain a need to depart from her own, it was an artless performance that presented one of our most dangerously insightful literary talents in a vulnerable light.

Research was the focus of the conference, and research showed in Oates’s material. Not in any unpleasantly dusty sense, but rather in an artistic style that emphasized the need to enhance the recorded findings of others with interpretations and amplifications of our own.

Return to Kovacsland

From the Tube Dept.: Ernie Kovacs essentially invented television comedy through his creative use of a medium still in its rudimentary technical stages. But, like Buster Keaton with silent movies and Stan Laurel with talkies, he figured out how to push the limits. Here’s my review of a couple of worthy Kovacs items.

                                                                                              

THE SIX-DVD SET that Shout! Factory released last year was as wonderful a bounty of Ernie Kovacs material as you could desire, righting the wrong inflicted by an earlier collection that chopped his shows to smithereens.

Ernie Kovacs
Drawing by Drew Friedman

This new collection, which is half the size, is very much a supplement, concentrating its contents on the morning show Kovacs hosted through most of 1956. Eight episodes were part of volume one; here are eight more technically crude monochrome programs minus most of their musical guests (to avoid paying licensing fees), most of them culminating in a sketch too labored to seem as funny today as it might have come across back then. It doesn’t matter. Every show has elements that transcend the limitations of time and technology, showcasing the nonstop inventiveness of TV’s first great comedy talent.

Kovacs was a one-off, an original, whose innovations during television’s crude adolescence (he worked from 1951-1962) showed promise that took years for the medium to fulfill. He blasted the small screen with surreal gags, blackout sketches, musical essays and an amazing ability to ad lib.

The Music Goes Round and Round

Date and photographer unknown

Turkish Delight

One Man’s Meat Dept.: My review of a recently opened Turkish restaurant in a former Friendly’s in a Saratoga Springs strip mall. Improbable but delicious.

                                                                                       

THERE’S CONSTRUCTION IN THE PARKING LOT. The restaurant has yet to get its liquor license. Service is provided by a mix of articulate pros and wide-eyed youngsters. And it all comes together in a repurposed Friendly’s, nicely redecorated on the inside but still giving off that corporate eatery vibe.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

But chef-owner Rauf Ziya is unperterbably enthusiastic about his new restaurant – open just over three months – in Saratoga’s Congress Plaza. It’s the city’s first Turkish restaurant, but it’s something like the 15th restaurant that Ziya has opened in 30 years, beginning with what he believes was the first Turkish restaurant in the United States, which he opened in Brooklyn way back then.

He has a nephew who runs a pizzeria in the area; when Ziya visited, he fell in love with the area. As to putting together the offerings, “I looked at the menus of my other restaurants and tried to choose the items that I think work best,” he says, “and that the customers seem to enjoy the most.”

Daft Complicity

On the Boards Dept.: My review of the frolicsome production at Shakespeare & Co. in Lenox, Mass., that runs through Nov. 10. I took an inspiration from Nabokov’s “The Vane Sisters” in writing it, recognizing that, where Nabokov offered the ultimate, mine could be penultimate at best.

                                                                                 

SO MAYBE THE GUY isn’t who we – ah! I see. I should have guessed it. And that’s because she was wishing all along that he’d – wait. Maybe not. Because now she’s – shit. Didn’t see that coming.

Elizabeth Aspenlieder & Jason Asprey.
Photo by Enrico Spada

There’s good reason that director Stephen Rothman is offering a free dinner to anyone who, without prior knowledge of this piece, can successfully declare at intermission how Act Two is going to end: There’s no way in hell to guess it.

Yet clues are staring at you as obviously as words on this page.

Dorping Mill is close enough to London to allow a commute, but the cottage in which “Accomplice” unfolds has no near neighbors. No one to help. No one to hear you. This is where Derek and Janet have conveniently rusticated themselves, although Derek’s business partner, John, and his (possibly) round-heeled wife, Melinda, are expected momentarily.

There’s just enough time to attempt a murder. After all, Janet will inherit the business from Derek. Ditto Melinda from John. But who wants whom out of the way? And why?

A Tuneful Tour of the 20th Century

Once upon the Web Dept.: Classical music, that poor bastard, supports little in the way of serious journalism. For a brief while, a decade ago, I was paid fairly nicely to write for the short-lived web-based magazine andante.com. Here’s another of my vintage reviews.

                                                                                          

WRITTEN FOR DAWN UPSHAW, Kaija Saariaho’s Château de l’âme has the Upshavian stamp all over it thanks to the soprano’s recent recording. For its Boston Symphony premiere two years ago, soprano Valdine Anderson took the solo, and reprised her performance at Tanglewood as Robert Spano conducted a 20th-century-spanning program. How does Anderson compare? She does what’s absolutely necessary: she makes the piece her own.

Kaija Saariaho

Which isn’t easy when you’re going up against Upshaw, whose mannerisms are well suited to a work like this. If Anderson was more reserved with portamento, her clear, well-focused voice carried its own brand of emotional intensity.

It’s not just the voice that counts: it’s voice-with-orchestra and voice-with-chorus, the latter an ensemble of eight women drawn from the Tanglewood Music Center. Singing (or chanting or speaking) softly, and therefore lightly miked, they reinforced the images of womanhood evoked by the songs.

Although the texts are drawn from ancient Hindu and Egyptian sources, the themes are timeless: woman as lover, as mother, as child of the earth, a more complete portrait than women tend to get in love song cycles. Saariaho’s musical language is lean and mysterious, often discordant, but ultimately summoning a hauntingly beautiful overall effect.

Fate

Guest Blogger Dept.: Another visit to the whimsical world of Saki, the Farsi name of the great Scottish-born writer H. H. Munro.

                                                                               

REX DILLOT WAS NEARLY TWENTY-FOUR, almost good-looking and quite penniless.  His mother was supposed to make him some sort of an allowance out of what her creditors allowed her, and Rex occasionally strayed into the ranks of those who earn fitful salaries as secretaries or companions to people who are unable to cope unaided with their correspondence or their leisure.  For a few months he had been assistant editor and business manager of a paper devoted to fancy mice, but the devotion had been all on one side, and the paper disappeared with a certain abruptness from club reading-rooms and other haunts where it had made a gratuitous appearance.  Still, Rex lived with some air of comfort and well-being, as one can live if one is born with a genius for that sort of thing, and a kindly Providence usually arranged that his week-end invitations coincided with the dates on which his one white dinner-waistcoat was in a laundry-returned condition of dazzling cleanness.  He played most games badly, and was shrewd enough to recognise the fact, but he had developed a marvellously accurate judgement in estimating the play and chances of other people, whether in a golf match, billiard handicap, or croquet tournament.  By dint of parading his opinion of such and such a player’s superiority with a sufficient degree of youthful assertiveness he usually succeeded in provoking a wager at liberal odds, and he looked to his week-end winnings to carry him through the financial embarrassments of his mid-week existence.  The trouble was, as he confided to Clovis Sangrail, that he never had enough available or even prospective cash at his command to enable him to fix the wager at a figure really worth winning.

Loud & Leon

Strange Stagefellows Dept.: Sometimes you’d like to be a fly on the wall of a booking agent’s office during the “aha!” moments. But the juxtaposition of Loudon Wainwright and Leon Redbone proved to be as endearing in concert as it seemed far-fetched on paper. They performed on the same bill in Albany six years ago. Here’s my report:

                                                                                   

TWO WILDLY DIFFERENT, cult-beloved singers played the Egg last Saturday, both easily veering from poignant to hilarious in their songs and patter. But where Leon Redbone’s repertory centers around venerable vaudeville and minstrel songs, Loudon Wainwright draws from a considerable catalogue of original material.

Leon Redbone

Stage settings emphasized the contrast. Redbone, sporting his traditional sunglasses, stick and hat, sat with his guitar upstage center, flanked by mute-laden cornetist Scott Black and pianist Paul Azaro, both barely discernible in dim blue light. All that was missing was a smoky haze.

Wainwright played much further downstage, a presence that invited a more vigorous volley of audience comments – and led, surprisingly, to more requests fulfilled than in any earlier performance I’ve seen.

The fans who filled the small Swyer Theater knew their artists and repertory, and six songs into Redbone’s set, a request for “At the Chocolate Bon Bon Ball” instantly provoked the singer into his most garrulous moment, praising the work of bandoneón virtuoso Alfredo Pedernera, who was featured on Redbone’s recording of the song. “I don’t know where he is now,” Leon muttered, strumming the opening of the chords of the song, then stopping to note, “This is where he’d come in. It just doesn’t sound right without him.” And then going on to the next number.

Working in Coffeehouses, Part Daddy

DURING THE MAGICALLY CALM MINUTES between nine and ten in the morning, downtown Lenox, Massachusetts, sparkles in autumn sunlight, its New England-white buildings looking so appropriately placed that it takes some moments for me to realize that this is the picture compelled into our subconscious by the ubiquitous work of historic neighbor Norman Rockwell. What’s missing is the bumpkin perfection of the people he portrayed, but they’re crowded into Haven Bakery and Café, over on Franklin.

This I discover – this I should have known – after finding a parking spot directly across from the establishment, a parallel-park place into which I effortlessly placed myself despite the selfconsciousness-inflicting stare of a fellow on a park bench beside my spot. I reviewed the place favorably after a lunch visit many months ago, but this morning I’m in no mood for its goofy order-at-the-counter, find-yerself-a-seat protocol, especially given the glacial pace of prep that I’m seeing (and the complaint of my counter-neighbor, whose coffee has yet to arrive).

Lenox Coffee, located a parking-lot away from Main Street, has but a handful of customers, clustered at the tables in the rear, none of whom sports an electronic device. More specifically, they’re each scaling a Sunday Times. I delay producing my computer as long as possible, which isn’t very long.

Innocenti

Montefiesole | 11 October 2005 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Anatolia, I Told Ya

Culinary Tomb Dept.: Some of the shorter-lived restaurant ventures enjoyed merciful closures. Here’s one I regretted seeing go under, so let’s revisit what I had to say about it seven years ago.

                                                                                        

SEVERAL LEVELS REVEALED THEMSELVES during the course of a visit to Anatolia. First, and simplest, is that of a pizza joint. Pies emerged from the oven, flew into boxes, headed out the door. Then there’s the family-dining eatery. People were schlepping their kids in and out. Pasta and wings were served, sodas chugged. As befits the building’s legacy as the onetime Colonial Restaurant.

We were there because of rumors of Mediterranean fare, rumors well confirmed when my urfa kabob arrived. It’s a skewered sliver of lamb and beef, ground and seasoned and grilled ($10). It’s served on a plate dressed with tasty rice pilaf, alongside another, yellowish pilaf with a contrasting flavor – more nutty – that turned out to be bulghur.

Alongside was a puffy loaf of lavash bread, with a garlic-yogurt dipping sauce. If this sounds like Ali Baba, the wonderful Mediterranean restaurant on Troy’s 15th Street, it’s no coincidence. Anatolia owner Max Baikal worked in Albany alongside Ali Baba owner Huseyin Cakal a few years ago, and Cakal urged his friend to start his own place.

Seeing Red

What Are You Axing? Dept.: My review of last weeks’s horribly underattended recital by violinist Elizabeth Pitcairn and pianist Barbara Podgurski.

                                                                                 

THOSE WHO EXPECTED to be awed by the legendary Red Violin learned an important lesson last week. Elizabeth Pitcairn, who owns and plays that particular Strad, gave a recital at SUNYA Performing Arts Center, under the aegis of Renaissance Musical Arts, proving (as if it needed more proving) that it’s the performer, not the fiddle, that makes the magic.

Elizabeth Pitcairn

Still, it’s a great marketing hook – or should be. Albany responded with its usual high-culture yawn as its already dangerously low brow crept even closer to its nose. Which was a shame, because some worthy magic was made.

The performers kicked off with one of Fritz Kreisler’s tuneful salon pieces, the Preludium and Allegro. It’s a perfect piece for the opening slot, its stately first section suggesting pomp and nobility before it sails into an increasingly fingerbusting set of variations. It also served to assure us that Pitcairn had the chops to take on the challenging works to follow. If it gave pianist Barbara Podgurski not much to do, as is typically the case with such showpieces, no matter: her moments were about to come.

Mozart’s Sonata No. 15 (or 32, or 40, depending on which crazy numbering system you favor) in B-flat, K. 454, has a more sweeping, symphonic feel than its brethren, and celebrates a partnership between the instrumentalists that grew throughout the preceding 14 (or 31, or 39).

The Burden of Humor

Guest Blogger Dept.: Let’s see what the Sage of Baltimore, H. L. Mencken, had to say on the topic.

                                                                                 

WHAT IS THE ORIGIN of the prejudice against humor? Why is it so dangerous, if you would keep the public confidence, to make the public laugh? Is it because humor and sound sense are essentially antagonistic? Has humanity found by experience that the man who sees the fun of life is unfitted to deal sanely with its problems? I think not. No man had more of the comic spirit in him than William Shakespeare, and yet his serious reflections, by the sheer force of their sublime obviousness, have pushed their way into the race's arsenal of immortal platitudes.

H. L. Mencken

So, too, with Aesop, and with Balzac, and with Dickens, to come down the scale. All of these men were fundamentally humorists, and yet all of them achieved what the race has come to accept as a penetrating sagacity. Contrariwise, many a haloed pundit has had his occasional guffaw. Lincoln, had there been no Civil War, might have survived in history chiefly as the father of the American smutty story—the only original art-form that America has yet contributed to literature.

Huxley, had he not been the greatest intellectual duellist of his age, might have been its greatest satirist. Bismarck, pursuing the gruesome trade of politics, concealed the devastating wit of a Molière; his surviving epigrams are truly stupendous. And Beethoven, after soaring to the heights of tragedy in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, turned to the sardonic bull-fiddling of the scherzo.

Orpheus of Troy

Well-Noted Dept.: What, you may ask, was a Capital Region cultural highlight five years ago around this time of year? I’m happy to share my impressions of an event I found noteworthy.

                                                                                             

TROY CHROMATIC CONCERTS kicked off its 112th concert-presenting season – its 90th in the Troy Music Hall – with as elegant and feisty an orchestra as they’re likely to present. And the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra repaid the favor by presenting a something-for-everyone program that teased and toyed with its superannuated audience before finishing with a socko soloist triumphing in a barnstorming piece of musical fluff.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet | Photo by Hilary Scott

Orpheus performs without a conductor; the musicians listen to one another, look at one another – the sense of communion is easy to see and especially easy to hear. So even a tried-and-true piece like Haydn’s Symphony No. 59 came to far more vivid life than might be expected. Every hairpin of crescendo and diminuendo added unexpected luster, and it’s only unexpected because the modern classical orchestra isn’t too often inclined to take even the easy risk of accentuating the dynamics.

The Haydn also fit a theme of the evening: Each of the four works was masquerading as something else. This work masquerades as a classical symphony even as it slyly breaks the rules. All of the expected elements are there, but, as was so characteristic of this composer, they don’t always play out as expected.

Family Benchemark

From the Vault Dept.: Like any freelancer, I’ve done more than my share of work to order. Writing for the short-lived Capital Region magazine in the late 1980s gave me a chance to flex some straightforward reporting wings, although it was always under the threat of some of the most insanely unpredictable editing I’ve ever endured. This was written for a cover story about fathers and sons – seven portraits of area legacies. I was asked for a much longer piece. Here’s what resulted. I’m happy to note, by the way, that Benchemark continues to thrive under the direction of the two Bobs, and Brian Kosineski also has joined the team.

                                                                               

BOB KOSINESKI – Bob K to his clients – wears a hundred-candlepower grin as he discusses his business “When I decided to buy Benchemark as a printing operation two years ago, I was faced with the problem of getting good people to help me.”

Photo by Mark McCarty

He sits at one of two large desks in the office of his Schenectady shop. At the other is a younger man with a grin so similar it might have been run off one of the Benchemark presses.

“He said he'd buy it only if I came to work for him,” the younger man says. This is Bob Jr., the boss’s son. “Or J. R., or just Junior,” he explains. “I graduated from Buffalo State with a degree in biochemistry. I’ve certainly put it to good use here.” He takes a beat, and gives a deadpan nod at his dad. “I mixed five pounds of inks once for a special color we needed.”

The combination of father and son in the front office has been financially salutary: their first year together brought in $1.2 million in sales and this year is expected to top $2 million.

“We’ve got two different styles,” Bob Sr. says. “My son has a dry sense of humor and his own way of handling customers. Everyone we deal with seems to like either him or myself. But the best part about it is that were both enjoying the job.”

Super-Size Brunch

From the Fridge Dept.: Sometimes hotel restaurants get the fine-dining thing right, but they need a regular clientele that supports it. Others have hit-and-miss success, constantly experimenting, usually settling for a fairly mainstream continental experience. The Albany Hilton used to have a fine-dining venue called Truffles (it’s now named Charter) that put on a very nice dinner. The brunch I sampled back in 1987, however, was a different story . . .

                                                                                      

THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE the year in which a plague of locusts (cicadas) descends. We had a foretaste of that last Sunday at the Hilton.

What proclaims itself the area’s most elegant brunch makes the proclamation with the best intentions. Truffles is an elegant-looking restaurant with a good reputation.

Photo: Shutterstock

But the elegant Sunday brunch is as mythical as a morning coat: we suspect they once existed, but you just can’t be sure. When I was a snooty waiter a decade and a half ago it happened much too often that I poured complimentary brunch champagne for endomorphs in yellow slacks.

As it was, Susan and I stood in line at Truffles behind a flock of porcine gents in polo shirts, each with one change-jingling hand in a pocket.

“It looks like a rough day at the brunch buffet,” Susan murmured as we were led past the banquet table. What must have started out as a stately row of gleaming chafing dishes was now a cockeyed, soiled mess. Two or three cooks in paper toques tried grimly to keep after the table, but there was no stopping the onslaught.

Checking In with the Girls

10 Oct. 2013 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson