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Memorial for Gene-Gabriel Moore announced
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A memorial service for Gene-Gabriel Moore has been scheduled for Monday at the Alliance Theatre’s Hertz Stage. The program begins at 6:30, but folks are invited to begin gathering at 6.
Moore, founder of the Suzi Bass Awards and one of the most admired men in Atlanta theater, died peacefully at his Lutheran Towers apartment on July 26. He was 72.
At the time, his friends and colleagues said a celebration would be announced later and held at 7 Stages, so it’s important to note that the event has been moved to the Alliance. (Moore had an office for years at the Little Five Points playhouse, where he held forth as artistic director of Not Merely Players, the professional ensemble he founded for disabled artists after suffering a series of strokes and other catastrophic health problems.)
“Even though it was Gene-Gabriel’s theater home, 7 Stages is in production, so the good folks at the Alliance have offered the Hertz Stage for our gathering,” says Deadra Moore, a local stage manager who worked with Mooore on the Suzi Bass Awards from the very beginning. The two were not related.
“We plan on a simple, informal event, and anyone who would like to say a few words or share a memory will be welcome,” the Suzi Bass Awards chair said in her email shout-out to the theater community. Alicia Quirk, who looked after Moore in his final years and considered herself his “adopted granddaughter,” is planning the event with Deadra Moore.
The two have requested photos and memories to be shared at the celebration. Anyone who would like to share but can’t attend can send emails to Suziawards@comcast.net.
Meanwhile, the Suzi Bass Awards is seeking contributions in Moore’s honor, and plans to use the funds to endow its playwriting award, already named for Moore. Anyone wanting to make a donation in his memory can contact the Suzis at SuziAwards@comcast.net.
On a personal note, I’ll miss Gene-Gabriel’s raucous laughter and delightful presence. He was at the theater all the time, and his empty chair will be impossible to fill. He was truly one of a kind.
Good night, old chap. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
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A book trailer as good as a movie trailer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The book trailer — a short promotional video to promote an upcoming book — has been around a bit, but the techniques are getting more sophisticated. I have never read anything by the historical thriller writer Brad Meltzer, but I saw his new trailer and it worked on me just like it is supposed to:
I can’t wait to read the book.
It’s called “The Book of Lies,” and it sounds like nonsense, but cool nonsense (it connects the Bible and Superman!) as folks like”Buffy” creator Joss Whedon, curmudgeon Christopher Hitchens and “Lost” producer Damon Lindelof explain it breathlessly.
This is the future of blurbing for certain kinds of books.
“The Book of Lies” comes out Sept. 2, and Meltzer will be at the Decatur Library on Sept. 19 to talk and sign. In the meantime, check out this cool trailer.
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‘Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps’ at 7 Stages
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: A-
As a camp counselor in Costa Rica a few years ago, Scott Turner Schofield suffered a serious blow to the head that required a detailed medical examination and extended hospital stay. When his doctor realized the athletic young man had the body of a woman, he thought the kid was just confused.
“Son, you have a terrible brain injury,” the doctor said sternly.
After having a heart-to-heart conversation with another doctor about his quest for a sex change, Schofield was informed that Costa Rica is the cosmetic-surgery capital of Latin America. And the surgeon offered to remove his breasts on the spot.
In his autobiographical solo performance piece, “Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps,” the Atlanta-based artist describes the comic absurdity, social stigma, emotional imperilment and sheer-naked vulnerability of the transgendered life.
Suggesting an image of physical rebirth, the show begins with Schofield emerging from a cocoon of billowing fabric suspended from the ceiling. After a precarious aerial ballet, he bounds to the floor like some newly minted Peter Pan and describes the messy medical details of getting a sex change. In a metaphorical gesture that signifies the total soul-baring to come, he disrobes completely and tapes a sign to the set that says: “No secrets allowed.”
By turns fiercely comic, brutally honest and deeply moving, the 7 Stages show is beautifully written, choreographed and performed. Like some sexually ambiguous Scheherazade, Schofield unspools the action as a series of stories chosen willy-nilly by the audience from a list of numbers assigned to various words (“queer,” “straight,” “butch,” “femme” and so forth). Directed by Steve Bailey, the intermissionless 75-minute piece feels so artfully balanced and delicately nuanced that it makes you wonder if Schofield really has 127 stories in his repertoire or is just pretending.
From the little girl forced to wear a Minnie Mouse costume when she really wanted to be Mickey to the young man standing in front of a Texas judge begging to have his sexual designation legally changed, from the complicated family relationships to the three suicide attempts, “Becoming a Man” is raw, urgent and honest. Much to his credit, Schofield comes across more as a loveable neighborhood kid bursting with energy and insight than an agenda-waving political zealot.
With great humor and pathos, he describes his alienation from his biological father, relates his adventures as a baby-sitter and describes his close calls with Atlanta cops and skinny-dipping European males. During the performance, he sings “Like a Bird on a Wire” while tethered to a swinging rope, and has a live telephone conversation with his stepfather.
In a democracy that boasts great freedom of expression, transgenderism may be the final frontier of sexual politics. Going from female to male can’t be an easy process, and this 27-year-old artist never pretends that is. Schofield — winner of an off-Broadway Fruitie Award and a prestigious Princess Grace Foundation acting fellowship —says the titular number 127 is part of his Social Security number, and jokes that he wants someone to steal his identity.
As it turns out, the man born as Katie Lauren Kilborn has sculpted a personality so unique that it would be virtually impossible to replicate.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday. 5 p.m. Sunday. Through Sunday. 7 Stages. 1105 Euclid Ave., Little Five Points. 404-523-7647, 7stages.org. (Note: Features adult material and full-frontal nudity.)
Bottom line: One of the year’s most essential theater experiences.
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Review from Bayreuth’s Wagner Opera Festival
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Bayreuth, Germany — Soprano Adrienne Dugger, an Atlanta native, was schedule to sing the role of Brunnhilde in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, but canceled, citing personal reasons, with only three weeks notice.
Attempts to reach her were unsuccessful.
This would have been an important milestone in a career that has carried Dugger to some of operas most important roles at major houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, where she sang regularly before moving to Europe. Her parents still live in Atlanta.
Dugger is a dramatic soprano, possessing one of opera’s rarest voices, and capable of singing the cruel and demanding roles in Richard Wagner’s operas. The Bayreuth opera house, built for Wagner by King Ludwig II, is the high temple of Wagnerian singing. Dugger has sung here for the last few years as Senta in “The Flying Dutchman,” to mixed reviews. But the role of Brunnhilde, dominating the 16-hour, four-opera “Ring” cycle, is paramount.
With her departure, the festival turned back to the singer it had abandoned, Linda Watson. A problematic singer, with a large but shrill sound and huge vibrato, Watson is still a practiced singer who can get through the entire “Ring” honorably. She was joined by a cast of mixed virtue, with perhaps the best singing coming from the Siegfried, heldentenor Stephen Gould, another American.
But the musical highlight was the conducting by Christian Thielemann. Rarely has a conductor so closely understood the peculiar demands and opportunities of this magic space, with its covered pit serving as a sort of mute for the giant Wagner orchestra.
Rather than struggling to make his orchestra heard, he went out of his way to support his singers, and to focus on simple passages that go unnoticed in a more brash interpretation.
At Bayreuth, when talk is about the “new” it’s not about a contemporary opera, it means a new, often radical re-staging of the Wagner canon. That’s all they do here. In his 10 or so mature masterpieces, Wagner (1813-1883) seemed to presage everything from Freudian psychoanalysis to fascism, Marxism and the liberal environmental movement.
Thus since the end of WWII, Bayreuth has emerged as a stronghold for complex, intensely psychological productions which demand much from the audience, in terms of familiarity not only with the operas but with literature and a vast range of references.
This “Ring,” directed by Tankred Dorst, a theater director who had never before directed an opera, suggests that the gods, and all myth, don’t die at the end of the final opera, but are always with us, often unnoticed but imbedded in our psyche, and forever a part of the landscape of our lives. We learn this metaphorically through the ruined sets, now part of a contemporary world, with children, lovers, and other real people wandering about as the cycle progresses.
But the opera world’s most talked about production is that of “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg,” which had its debut here last year. Directed by Wagner’s 30 year-old great-granddaughter Katharina Wagner, it upends the opera, making Beckmesser, generally the laughingstock of this opera, into a radical artist who assaults the stuffy world of the erudite masters with his performance art. The latter includes the creation of an onstage “Adam and Eve” scene with frontal nudity.
Over the course of the opera, various icons of German culture are parodied as giant dancing puppets, complete with naughty exposures and a group of strippers. There are more ideas, some brilliant and many questionable, than can possibly fit into any single opera production, and things just become grotesque.
It was all a bit much for the Germans, who booed lustily, some even making it a point to exit noisily in the middle of the second act, when things were at their wildest.
Singing was generally mediocre, although the Beckmesser, Michael Volle, was outstanding. Sebastian Weigle conducted without subtlety, shape or form, although he managed some significant changes and questionable cuts to accommodate the conceits of the production.
Stefan Herheim’s production of “Parsifal,” making its debut this year, is simply brilliant. In it, the opera becomes a parable about the role of the past, and how to reconcile it with the present. Parsifal’s unconscious dream of his past is suggested, rather controversially, in Freudian settings where he returns again and again to the bed of his mother, always at the center of the stage. And each of the other major characters undergoes a psycho-sexual examination of sorts.
Meanwhile Germany’s history overlays everything, from the early 20th century through the Nazi years and into the time of Konrad Adenauer, the beginnings of modern Germany and modern Bayreuth, whose own history also overlays everything, just to keep the complexity going.
Given the history of Bayreuth, which embraced Hitler and served as his summer retreat, there is something especially disturbing about seeing Nazi banners unfurled on the stage here, even when they are about to be pulled down.
“Parsifal” was conducted by Daniele Gatti, who found a way to inject energy into the score but retain it’s feeling of spaciousness and clarity. Singing was mostly sub-par, with no one really distinguishing themselves.
Offstage, a dramatic and often bitter struggle has been going on as members of the Wagner clan battle for control of the festival. Wolfgang Wagner, the composer’s 89 year-old grandson, has run the festival with an iron fist for the last 57 years, and has announced that he will step down. He has insisted that he be replaced by his youngest daughter, Katharina, but the festival’s board, which meets in November, has balked at her lack of experience.
Until this year, the main other faction consisted of Wolfgang’s estranged elder daughter, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 63, who has worked at major opera houses and is currently on staff at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, allied with his estranged niece, Nike Wagner, daughter of Wieland (Wolfgang’s brother), whose brilliant abstract productions led Bayreuth into a new era after World War II, and greatly influenced stage design around the world.
It’s a family a little more dysfunctional and than most; you can read about them in dozens of books, which seemed to appear on an annual basis.
Lately, apparently sensing the direction in which things were moving, Eva switched sides, suddenly was reunited with her father, and allied herself with Katherina.
Nike has been complaining loudly about this betrayal. But the Eva/Katharina bid seems to have the inside track, so we can probably expect to see more of Katharina’s work here. Things are definitely interesting in this little Bavarian town.
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New Marsalis Symphony Postponed, Again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
He’s missed another deadline. The whole thing is now pushed back a year or more.
Jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis has been commissioned to write a full scale, all-orchestral work by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, to be conducted by music director Robert Spano.
It’s been on the books for more than two years. The world premiere was originally scheduled for July 19, part of this summer’s National Black Arts Festival at Midtown’s Woodruff Arts Center, with repeat performances in November on the ASO’s main subscription series.
But in early June, Marsalis broke the news to the ASO: he wasn’t finished. The premiere was pushed back to November. The new work was be recorded by Telarc. It’s a co-commission by the ASO and Boston Symphony, with additional funding from the NBAF.
Not so fast.
This afternoon the ASO announced that the world premiere of Marsalis’ symphonic work has now been postponed until the 2009-10 season due to his delay in writing the work, and that a new date for the premiere will likely be part of the 2009-2010 season.
The new work is tentatively called “An American Symphony.” All along, Marsalis has been curiously silent about progress on what’s been billed as a 40-minute, six-movement symphony, where each movement evokes an indigenous American style of music, from ragtime to the blues to 4/4 swing. This will be his first score for purely orchestral forces, without Marsalis’ on-stage participation and with no jazz combo in the mix.
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