ArtsBeat

'Man of La Mancha' extended

 

John Fredo and John N. Kaczorowski star as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in MusicalFare Theatre's production of "Man of La Mancha." Photo courtesy MusicalFare Theatre. 

MusicalFare Theatre's edgy production of "Man of La Mancha," the musical based on Cervantes' "Don Quixote," has been extended for two performances, the theater announced today.

Because of audience demand, the theater will tack on two matinee performances on Dec. 5 at 4 p.m. and Dec. 6 at 2 p.m. My review of the musical is pasted after the jump.

-Colin Dabkowski

Bay Area poets headline "Big Night"

It's been more than a half century since what came to be known as the "San Francisco Renaissance" first reverberated through American poetry and post World War Two America, but its legacy runs deep through the culture of spoken word performance and the spirit of collaboration between various poetry, music, and the visual art forms extending into the 21st century.   Although Walt Whitman ("...a Kosmos, of Manhattan the son..") may have been the first American poet to write of "urban affection," it was in the mid 20th century San Francisco Bay area that a different social model for a distinctly American creative community evolved.

 

One of the youngest members of the "Beat generation" of writers closely associated with the San Francisco Renaissance visits Buffalo Thursday night as the headliner of Just Buffalo Literary Center's latest "Big Night" celebration.  David Meltzer, born in 1937 but already a prominent enough voice to be featured in Donald Allen's anthology The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, brings one of the most eclectic resumes in recent memory to the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative on 468 Washington St.(near Mohawk) at 8 p.m. for an evening that promises more than a few surprises.

'Beyond/In' artists announced

It's still a year away, but already the excitement surrounding the next incarnation of "Beyond/In Western New York," the ballooning biennial that launched in 2005, is palpable. This morning at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, director Louis Grachos, consultant Bruce Ferguson and project leader John Massier announced the size and shape of the coming exhibition, slated for Sept. 24, 2010.

Its broad theme, "Alternating Currents," is meant to reflect on the conflicting forces that make up the Western New York -- its glorious history and shaky present, its utopian idealism and dystopian reality, a desire to stay and a need to leave -- and in so doing hopes to both represent and catalyze the entire region.

What's different this year is that the organizers have decided to invite 14 international artists (as yet unnanounced, save performance artist Didier Pasquette) to complement, and hopefully not overwhelm, the host of regional artists whose work is at the heart of the ambitious project.

After the jump, you can take a peek at the selection of regional artists (defined as hailing from within an approximately 200-mile radius of Buffalo). As I'm able, I'll be adding links to previous Buffalo News coverage and criticism of the artists in the show.

There'll be much more to come on "Beyond/In: Alternating Currents" as it draws closer. Stay tuned.

--Colin Dabkowski

Zagajewski's poetry of the cosmic world and the human face

"Poetry summons us to life, to courage/ in the face of growing shadow./ Can you gaze at the Earth/ like the perfect astronaut?" writes Adam Zagajewski in "Houston, 6 p.m." from his collection Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002).  This creative tension between engagement and reflection--the sense of holding up a darkened mirror to the transfigured world--has made Zagajewski one of the most admired contemporary poets in Europe and North America.    
 
Zagajewski, the acclaimed Polish language poet (born in the city of Lvov in what is now the Ukraine), essayist, novelist, and 2004 winner of the biennial Neustadt International Prize for Literaturewill visit Buffalo to deliver the 33rd annual Oscar Silverman Memorial Reading at 8 p.m. this (Friday) evening in 250 Baird Hall on the UB North Campus.

Of goats and murderers and movies

Movies are not life. Any fool knows that. But sometimes the horrors on front pages and the 24-hour news stations are so brutal that it's almost as if we needed to be reminded.

Sometimes movies get lucky when they're caught in history's wake. Usually they're not.

The current case in point of a phenomenally unlucky movie is Grant Heslov's "The Men Who Stare at Goats," a wild, black comic satire on New Age military shenanigans in Iraq. It is being nationally released today, just as the nation is mourning the shocking and horrific deaths of 12 people Thursday afternoon in a massacre attributed to a soldier --an M.D. and a psychiatrist yet--unhinged by prejudice and imminent deployment to the Middle East.

In other words, an absurdist comedy about military nut jobs is going into theaters at the exact moment that banner headlines are reminding us just how much horror that derangement can cause in the world, even on military bases full of those charged with the nation's defense.

A movie can hardly suffer worse luck on its opening weekend. Unfortunately, it's a pretty good movie too --by no means a great absurdist film comedy but a good way to employ George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor.

The same ongoing history that can grind up a movie in reality's terrors, of course, can work to a movie's benefit. No movie in American history ever seemed more prescient than "The China Syndrome" whose opening almost perfectly coincided with the threat of nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island.

Not this time, though. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was probably not aiming at Hollywood, much less a specific American movie, but he might as well have been.

-- Jeff Simon

Erie County funding for the arts

This has been available for a couple of weeks now, but I want to post up the page of Erie County's proposed 2010 budget that outlines funding recommendations for arts and cultural groups. In all, the county has allocated $5,066,500 to 43 arts and culturals.

Check out the recommendations in a PDF below, or download it here.

Humanities-speak gone wild

Over at Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green links to the College Art Association's list of papers to be presented at its annual conference, summarized here by the Art History Newsletter. This is the kind of thing I love to read, simply for the utterly confounding, intentionally obfuscating and always entertaining terms certain writers and academics sometimes use to sex up the titles of their papers.

My fave: “Pray, Sir, Whose Dog Are You? Nobility and Animality in Eighteenth-Century French Hunting Pictures.”

This list, which is definitely one for the ages, reminds me of Gary Kamiya's much-circulated essay for Salon, jokingly titled "Transgressing the Transgressors: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Total Bull***," available here. It documents a successful attempt by physicist Alan Sokal to place a completely invented paper into a prestigious cultural journal simply by couching it in terms that appeal to what Sokal characterized as a group of lazy intellectuals.

Accentuate the positive

Anyone who's seen more than a handful of productions at Buffalo-area theaters will tell you that when it comes to accents, a select few actors can pull them off, and plenty of them can't.

It's not uncommon for a cast -- otherwise eminently capable and moving in their portrayals of German sergeants or cockney housewives -- to adopt accents that approach camp in their complete lack of resemblance to the source dialect. To my ear, and I suspect to many others, a lack of consistency in the accent department can have the effect of throwing even a fine production off-kilter. More often than not, productions that dispense with accents entirely (except in the rare case when actors have enough time and training to properly prepare) come off far better, and without that stifling sense dislocation we all experience when we hear Kevin Costner's half-hearted rendition of, say, Sir Robin of Loxley.

So it was with plenty of interest that I read a profile by Alec Wilkinson in this week's New Yorker of Tim Monich, dialect coach to the stars. It provides a fascinating glimpse into just how difficult adopting a foreign accent can be, just how much practice and discipline it requires, and how seriously Monich takes it. Here's an excerpt:

'Pictures Generation' wins odd new art award

A photograph by Cindy Sherman from her "Untitled Film Stills" series. Part of "The Pictures Generation,

" a 2009 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

"The Pictures Generation," a show that closed earlier this year at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been dubbed the best group show of the year in something called "Rob Pruitt Presents: The First Annual Art Awards." This new collection of awards -- part genuine contest, part performance art piece, part fundraiser -- was jointly sponsored by the Guggenheim Museum and Calvin Klein.

It's an unconventional award, to be sure. Pruitt, an artist whose work often deals with the machinations of the art world, organized the Oct. 29 awards ceremony to resemble a Hollywood affair. An account of the evening from the Guggenheim's Web site:

After a dinner of locally sourced cuisine culled from Brooklyn-based restaurants and chefs, presenters including Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum Richard Armstrong, Cecily Brown, Jeffrey Deitch, James Franco, Knight Landesman, Julianne Moore, and Guggenheim Chief Curator Nancy Spector announced the winners. On receiving her award, a statuette created by Pruitt resembling a celebratory bucket of champagne that also serves as a fully functional lamp, Heilmann acknowledged the significance of being recognized while also declaring, “The Guggenheim belongs to all of us."

Talking theater on WECK

Last Thursday, Constance McEwen Caldwell of the Theatre Alliance of Buffalo invited me to participate in the alliance's weekly radio segment with Loraine O'Donnell on WECK AM 1230. O'Donnell, a well known local actor who recently appeared in the Irish Classical Theatre Company's production of "Blood Brothers," grilled me about the News' star rating system, my background in journalism and theater and the challenges of critiquing Buffalo's wide-ranging and diverse theater community. Download the segment here, or listen below:

TAB-102909

--Colin Dabkowski