Black Midnight

Yesterday as I stepped out of my door, I found that the organic produce fairy had left me a little package. Since the fruit flies have been going a bit hog wild lately, I decided the best course of action was to take the box inside and empty it, before they set their beady little red eyes on my fruit. Inside the box: the usual assortment of leafy greens that I always mean to eat and never manage to in time, a couple of zucchini, a pineapple, and a bunch of black midnight grapes. The fruit flies were all a twitter. I thought, "Cool. Maybe if I don't get to these in time, I can make wine from them," as I so frequently think when I encounter fruit these days. Then I tasted one.

They will not last long.

Today, Sam alerted me to the fact that the 2005 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest results are in. Named for Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), who coined the phrase "it was a dark and stormy night," the contest sets itself the goal of coming up with the worst possible opening paragraph for a novel. The first place winner this year:

"As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual."

Of those that I have read, however (and the list does go on and on and on), my favorite so far is:

It was high noon in the jungles of South India when I began to recognize that if we didn't find water for our emus soon, it wouldn't be long before we would be traveling by foot; and with the guerilla warriors fast on our heals, I was starting to regret my decision to use poultry for transportation.

But there's pages and pages to be read.

In other news, I bought a computer yesterday. It comes with a printer and a four-year warranty, which should prevent it from crapping out like all the other computers I've bought in the past couple of years.

And the Sun Times Weighs In

The Sun Times review is in. I dare say, it's one of the fairest reviews I've ever read. Read on!

'Slide' sounds great but slips on story line
July 26, 2005
BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic

"Somewhere on the dark highway between a rock opera and a bar act." That's how the Tantalus Theatre Group describes its new musical, "Slide," now onstage in the little back room of the Joy-Blue Club on the corner of Southport and Irving Park. It would be difficult to improve on their given compass points, except to add that the show attempts to serve as a reminder that with freedom comes the need for responsibility.

The question remains: Is this highway that the Tantalus artists talk about a smoothly paved and pothole-free one? By no means. The songs in the troupe's musical odyssey -- primarily the work of musical director and keyboardist Ed Plough and guitarist Steve Clark -- are full of promise, with some soulful, soaring harmonies melded to alternately poetic and sophomoric lyrics.

As for the show's "book" -- the work of Kalena Victoria Dickerson -- it has a few clever sequences that bear echoes to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, but is in need of a massive overhaul. The narrative line is needlessly opaque at times, and the characters' relationships need considerable clarification.

Yet watching this two-hour production unfold, it's possible to imagine that this may have been what the earliest workshops of musicals like "Urinetown" and "Rent" looked like -- raw, ragged, even laughably incoherent at moments, but with a genuine spark of talent and a tremendous amount of energy behind it all.

The story line for "Slide" (at least as much as could be deciphered) is as skewed and needlessly patchy as the program's cut-and-paste graphic design. Ostensibly it was inspired by Upton Sinclair's muckraking classic The Jungle, which exposed the horrors of the Chicago meat-packing industry and the exploitation of those who labored in it. But the "factory" referred to here seems to be a cross between a corrupt and corrupting music production corporation and a Wal-Mart. Its monstrous Boss Man (the deftly enigmatic Isaiah Brooms) undermines both the hapless aspiring artist Jurgis (Austin Oie, working in a kind of James Dean mode) and the vocal princess known as the Frail Woman (the graceful, silvery-voiced Joanna P. Lind). These two fall in love and are quickly torn apart by nothing less than the sheer cruelty of the world.

This pervasive human cruelty wounds all the characters, including Jurgis' mentally slow younger brother Stanislovas (played with sweet guilelessness by Brian Troyan) and the brothers' much-abused mother, Antanas (the forceful Mikalya Brown, who at one moment literally tap-dances her rage). Everyone in "Slide" is brutalized, and not surprisingly, most of them behave brutally in response.

The score, featuring more than three dozen songs that range in style from grunge anthems to lyrical confessionals, is played by an onstage band that includes Plough, Clark and percussionist Ed Dalton, with many of the actors picking up instruments along the way. Glen Cullen has directed, with sets and stark lighting by Marc Chevalier and nifty costume design and choreography by Symphony Sanders.

'SLIDE' SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED When: 8 p.m. Mondays and Tuesdays through Aug. 30 Where: Tantalus Theatre Group at Joy-Blue Club, 3998 N. Southport Tickets: $10 Phone: (773) 960-2066

And the reviews just keep coming...

From the Chicago Reader:

Slide: Very freely adapted from Upton Sinclair's meat packing expose, The Jungle,Tantalus Theatre Group's ambitious two-hour rock opera/bar act delivers a strong score and dedicated performances. The company transforms Sinclair's muckraking depiction of the Chicago stockyards circa 1905 into a brutal, but maddeningly indeterminate portrait of a "music plant." Wannabe star Jurgis, an immigrant as in Sinclair's book, pursues his dream and loses his way, his wife, and his family. Finally he acheives a perverse peace by surrendering to the status quo of the music-making machine. Ed Plough (and Steve Clark)'s songs, well-performed by the tenecious ensemble unleash a ton of eloquent anger and end with a lovely lament. Though this adaptation is too abstract, never arriving at specific parallels for the abuses Sinclair detailed, its progressive spirit rings as true as Sinclair's did 100 years ago.--Lawrence Bommer

Through 8/30: Mon-Tue 8pm. Joy Blue, 3998 N. southport, 773-960-2066. $10.

I'll keep posting reviews as they come. This show has been more reviewed than any other Tantalus show, largely through the efforts of Leah Fox, our PR person. She did a marvelous job of selling us around, and it shows through in these reviews. Cool.

More Reviews and a Slew of Bad News

The Chicagoist reviewed Slide this week. Very positive review. Here it is.

You don't have to convert, but you can't stay gay...

Bonnie blogged about this NY Times article (for those of you without a password, bugmenot). To summarize it for my non-article-reading slacker friends, after a teenager came out as gay to his parents, they ordered him into Refuge, a Christian program designed to cure kids of gayness. The program is sponsored by Love in Action, "a group in Memphis that runs a religion-based program intended to change the sexual orientation of gay men and women."

I can't even begin to comment on how wrong this whole program is without preaching to the choir, so instead I'll quote the article. Hopefully that will, you know, get the point across:

The goal of the program, said Mr. Smid (the executive director of the program), who said he was once gay but now renounces homosexual behavior, is not necessarily to turn gays into practicing heterosexuals, but to "put guardrails" on their sexual impulses.
"In my life I've been out of homosexuality for over 20 years, and for me it's really a nonissue," Mr. Smid said.
"I may see a man and say, he's handsome, he's attractive, and it might touch a part of me that is different from someone else," he said. "But it's really not an issue. Gosh, I've been married for 16 years and faithful in my marriage in every respect. I mean I don't think I could white-knuckle this ride for that long."

So the point of the program, if I read Rev. Smid's words right, isn't to give people a health sexuality, at all. It doesn't argue that homosexuals deserve a healthy sex life and that this can only be acquired if they go straight. No no. If I read Mr. Smid's quote correctly, the whole point of this program is just that they shouldn't be gay. If they can't be straight, by God and His Son Jesus Christ, they can't have any sexuality.

Also interesting is that he says he isn't a homosexual anymore. And then goes on to say that he's attracted to men in a way that touches him differenly than other people. Well...I mean, surely there are other success stories. Let's see:

"It's like checking into prison," said Brandon Tidwell, 29, who completed the adult program in 2002 but eventually rejected its teachings, reconciling his Christian beliefs with being gay.

Oh wait...no, not him. Let's try:

Occasionally, recalled Jeff Harwood, 41, a Love in Action graduate who still considers himself gay...

Uh...nope...not him, neither. Oh, okay. Here's one:

"In my experience people who struggle with their sexuality are more mature in general," Ben Marshall, 18, said. He recounted being in turmoil, growing up gay in a conservative Christian household in Mobile, Ala.
In 2004 his parents sent him to Refuge. "I went to Memphis kicking and screaming," he said. "I had grown to hate the church for the militant message it gave off toward homosexuality...But even success comes only through continuing struggle. Although he plans to date women in the future, Mr. Marshall said, he is avoiding any romantic relationships for the time being. "In all honesty, I'm just trying to figure out how to deal normally with men before I start to deal with women," he said.

So after all that, you still don't know how to relate "normally" to men and women? Here's a suggestion: You already knew how you relate normally to men...you were normal. Imagine being normal and different. Baffling to the folks in Alabama, I know.

Dangerous biker gangs...

But enough about the horrible things that people do to their children in Red States (why didn't we just let them secede when they wanted to? Why???), in this lovely city I call home there's a doings a happenin'. Also sent to me by Bonnie (or my own private Harvard research assistant, as I like to call her). Read this article (or wait for the bullet points to follow):

Police spent six hours Tuesday on bike patrol in Lakeview, giving out 37 warnings to bicyclists for running red lights, riding on sidewalks and, indeed, going the wrong direction on a one-way street. Next month, police will start handing out tickets, with fines that range from $25 to $250.

The article goes on to say that it's for reasons of safety and because bicycles need to obey the rules of the road like every other vehicle. Which is great, if we're given the same rights as every other vehicle. Which we aren't. Police aren't, for example, upping the number of fines they give out to cars who pull into the bike lane in order to get ahead of the rest of traffic. Or the folks who cut me off and run me off the road. Which is ultimately why cyclists break traffic laws in the first place: because it's the only advantage we have to keep ahead of the rest of traffic. By and large, motorists don't treat cyclists like they are legitimate vehicles. They cut us off, pull into our lanes, don't pay attention to us when pulling into traffic, etc. This makes biking according to the rules inviable and even dangerous. If one car cuts another off and they collide, there's likely to be a minor fender bender. If a car cuts me off and we collide, I'll probably be injured--maybe seriously so--and my bike is going to end up in shit condition.

The things cyclists do that are being complained about in the article--riding on the sidewalk, running stoplights when traffic isn't coming, etc.--we do because it makes the ride safer for us. I don't pull up on the sidewalk unless some fucker has run me off the road and my choice is sidewalk or crash. I run reds because it gives me the chance to get ahead of traffic. And obviously I don't do it if there's cars coming. The few times I have almost been hit on my bike, incidentally, happened when I was obeying traffic laws--once notably when a truck driver came barreling through an intersection after my light had turned green.

I don't know how serious all this is. It could be just another story in a newspaper. And I certainly haven't had any problems with cops. But if I were just starting out as a cyclist, I sure would be thinking again about it. It's weird in a city as bike-friendly as Chicago (which this city really is) to have cops effectively deterring people from taking up biking.

Sensitive Subject

I just received a fairly unprecedented phone call from Glen Cullen, the director of Slide, in which he said that my review of Slide hurt some feelings and could I edit the entry so as to express, perhaps, a different opinion or express my opinion differently. I told him I won't do that, and gave him these two reasons: First, the opinion I expressed in that review is my opinion, honest and true, presented without malice and without ulterior motive. To edit that, to change that would be a sort of lie on my part. Secondly, because I feel that to simply edit what I wrote without saying anything about it would be a sort of cowardice on my part. It would be like an attempt on my part to gloss over something I said, without taking actual responsibility for it. For better or worse, I did write what I wrote.

So, without editing the text below to cover up anything, I'm writing this, which is a sort of apology for where I went wrong in my review and a clarification of those points I feel might have made my review sound less positive than I meant it to sound.

So, first things first, to anyone who had their feelings hurt by my review, please accept my apologies. If you know me, you know that I certainly didn't aim to do so, and you should also know that I didn't write what I wrote callous to the fact that people I cared about might read it. I understood clearly that might happen and that, in writing a review that wasn't universally praising, I might step on toes. It's a risk that comes with writing in a public medium, but I feel that if I start censoring myself to avoid controversy, I miss the entire point of having a blog to express my opinions on.

Where I went wrong, and what I will apologize for is this: I wrote the review below fairly hastily and in-so-doing, perhaps didn't make clear some of the arguments I was making. For that, I am sorry. There was a good reason for the haste (the computer I wrote it on has a habit of spontaneously rebooting, particularly when I'm on the last sentences of a long and unsaved essay), but still it would have been better of me to have taken more time and state my case in a more thorough fashion. I take responsibility for not having done so, and I apologize. This is, alas, a problem in writing time-sensitive reviews and such.

In rereading my review, I can see where people would think it was meant to be a negative review. It wasn't. I meant it to be a fair and balanced review. When I wrote that it was a little like a staged concept album, or something along the lines of The Darkside of Oz, I meant that as praise. Slide isn't an excerise in straight narrative story telling. It tells its story through flashbacks, through Pinteresque dialogue in which more meaning is contained in the unspoken than in what is laid plain, through the movements of its ever-present underscoring. Unlike, say, The Wizard of Oz or Carousel, the song lyrics in Slide don't drive the narrative directly forward. Instead they utilize deeply image-based poetry and semi-psychedelica to infuse the audience with the mood of a location, a character's emotional state, an idea, or just the rollicking good time of a rock show. In a couple of places, this made the show difficult for me to follow from a standpoint of story, but by and large I didn't mind. What I got instead of your standard musical story was a primarily visual and auditory experience, loosely bound with a story. The same sort of thing I would get out of, say, a concept album like Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (which is a fantastic exercise in sensory story telling, and I defy anyone who says otherwise) or a film, like The Wall (which has a plot, but not one told in anything resembling your standard narrative).

Where I was genuinely critical of the show, I stand by. The scope of the story is, in my opinion, far too large for the space it's in. That's no fault of anyone in the show or involved with the show. Tantalus Theatre Group is a small company with a limited budget, and we simply couldn't afford more. What we do have, the cast and director have, as I said in the review, used admirably. But on occassion, the limits of space did come through, and when they did, the stage seemed cluttered and I was jarred out of my pure enjoyment of the music.

Similarly, having worked on the writing team for the show, I can say that the script could have used a bit more time to develop. Kalena Dickerson wrote the script in less than a month, an extraordinarly short period of time for anyone to write anything (I've been known to take a year on just a few pages...a month to write an entire play would mean a marathon bout of writing for me). She did well with the time we gave her. She would have done better with more time. That's the pitfall of the Tantalus show. If I hadn't been quite so intimately involved in Ragnarok, I probably would have written something similar about it (and, in fact, I spoke with several people through the run and after, suggesting the same thing as I suggested for Slide: that we take it back to workshop after the run and iron out the kinks and fix what didn't work, tighten what did, etc.).

Finally, to anyone who still wants to talk about this with me, please do so. I'll be at most of the shows and I'm happy to talk to anyone about my opinions. Or if you'd rather not talk to me in person, feel free to e-mail me or discuss things on this blog. That's why I allow comments and that's why I allow you to post anonymously.

Slide

I'm a little late in posting this, but better late than never.

I caught the opening of Slide on Monday and Tuesday of this week, and have to say I was really impressed. The show has grown considerably with the addition of actors, such that what was an extraordinarily rough script with music that didn't quite manage to tie in when last I was involved in the project, has evolved into a very interesting sort of staged concept album. The music and the script still don't tie together in a neat little brown-paper package, but on an abstracted level, they work together, they feed each other, and the end result is something like The Darkside of Oz, which is to say it is rather like ...i think not generated an album that happens to fit a play written by Kalena Dickerson, as opposed to being like a musical the two wrote together. For an audience willing to give up concise narrative story telling for a looser more sensory experience, it's a bitching show. But only if you're willing to do those things.

This is not to say I felt that Slide is complete yet, or that it's reached its full potential. For a show designed to be a bar act, it is far too large in scope. Bar acts are intimate, minimal affairs, wanting for nothing more than a front man and a band to tell their stories. While Slide makes an admirable attempt at keeping the cast tiny, through double casting and by employing any actor not present in the scene to play in the band, the stage is still too small to comfortably hold the eight cast members/band members, and the stage frequently feels cluttered.

In all, Slide is well worth the price of admission, and is a good reason to get out and have a drink on a Monday or Tuesday night, but if I were in the company performing it, I would suggest that it go back into workshop for a month or so after the run to iron out the kinks, tighten script and music, and to figure out this crazy thing that isn't quite a bar act and isn't quite a full-theater musical. If that happens, it will become a full-on cult phenomenon, ready to stand among Hair and Rocky Horror as one of the greats.

A Little Too Ironic

The Reviews are In...

From the Chicago Reader:

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM You'd think that having three different directors would make for confusion beyond what Shakespeare had in mind: Sabrina Lloyd stages the court scenes, Don Johnson directs the fairies, and Devin Brain rules over the rude mechanicals. But GroundUp Theatre's choice of a Mardi Gras theme and New Orleans setting creates a giddy milieu that easily encompasses accents from Elvis to Yosemite Sam, fashions from goth to Tammy Faye, and characterizations from a nerdy teenage Bottom to a cheerful voodoo-mambo Puck. Ninety minutes long, this outdoor production touring Chicago parks throughout the summer more than makes up for its lack of polish with its invention and exuberance, particularly during the rough-and-tumble horseplay on the grass before friends and lovers are peacefully reunited. --Mary Shen Barnidge

Excellent...

The Time of the Season for Contests...
Yesterday I was running late for work, which naturally meant that I hit every red light I possibly could on my way there. For some reason, it made me think of Alanis Morrisette's song "Ironic" and how the true irony of that song is that it demonstrates with great clarity that Alanis has (or had) no real concept of what irony is. Because not a single thing listed in that song qualifies as irony.

Irony, strictly speaking occurs when someone says the opposite of what they mean. Situational irony is possible, too (although it's usually literary); it happens when actions have the opposite effect of what they should reasonably have. To take an example from the song, rain on your wedding day isn't ironic because there's no reason for anyone to believe weather patterns will change, just because it is their wedding day. That isn't irony, it's just an unfortunate coincidence. However, if a person took great pains to make sure they had their wedding in the Gobi desert in the middle of a drought, inconveniencing everyone in their party to ensure the perfect weather for their wedding, then rain would be ironic.

The real problem with Alanis's song is that, although every line in it has the potential for irony, each is missing a key situational factor to make it truly ironic. Thus, I pose a contest. Take a line from "Ironic" and come up with the circumstances under which it would become true irony. Correct Alanis's omission and e-mail your situation to mlrossi80@hotmail.com. I'll post the best of them here in, say, three weeks.

Nah...make it two.
Fuck it. Just send them to me and I'll post them for as long as they come in.