This morning I finally finished this week’s Listener puzzle, “Sinecure” by Franc. Not a very hard puzzle at all, really, but I got a late start on Friday and then was busy with other things much of Saturday. Still, by bedtime on Saturday I’d solved everything except for unscrambling the ten-letter theme word. Turned out I didn’t have quite the right combination of letters. This morning I spotted where I’d made an unjustified assumption and got the right combination and found the word. I’d never heard of it, but it was a nice surprise to discover that it meant exactly what I’d suspected it had to mean, given the rest of the puzzle. (Turned out that it was a familiar word to Dave, though.)
“Sinecure”
18 March 2012Weekend Update
14 March 2012What a weekend! It’s Wednesday and I’m still tired.
Thursday, Dave and I went to the American Mavericks opening concert at Davies — works by Copland and Harrison and Ives, the last being the wonderful Brant orchestration of the Concord Sonata.
Friday night was the second performance of The Manga Flute. A very full house and a great performance. Dave and I watched it from the back row of the balcony, where the visuals are less effective but the sound is better. The supertitles are party obstructed from there, but I thought you hardly needed them — the sound of orchestra and singers is better blended up there and it was easy to make out the words. Of course, I can usually remember what people are singing on any given line, so I’m not necessarily the most accurate judge of that.
The performance was very polished — the whole show zipped along happily, acting was sharper, everybody’s characters seemed a notch or two more focused and intense than they were on opening, the music (both singing and orchestra) was confident and full of detail and nuance, and set changes and other cues were crisp. Lovely.
Saturday night, Dave and I headed to the Castro Theater to see a beautifully restored print of Children of Paradise. It’s a favorite of Dave’s. Me, I like parts of it enormously but other parts seem kind of silly to me, and the whole movie strikes me as being at least a half hour too long for the story it’s telling. But the story is rich and many-layered, and I’m never bored by it, even in the places where the story and characters feel a bit too dry and mechanical for my taste.
Sunday afternoon was the final performance of Manga Flute, and it was even better than Friday’s. Tempi were more energetic, transitions between scenes were tighter and smoother, the dialogue scenes were brisker and more focused, and the whole show felt like its energy level had been cranked up a notch or two.
Monday, the SF Chronicle‘s review came out — overall a rave, though with a few qualifications. The prize paragraph for my résumé is this:
Chief among the pleasures of the piece is the sleek virtuosity of Marley’s English libretto, which — like his many previous efforts for the company – turns the foreign-language original into a faithful, witty and effortlessly naturalistic translation. The rhymes all fall where they should and the sense of the text remains intact — and all without any impression of strain.
I’m a bit startled, though, that he calls the libretto “faithful”, says in the above quote that “the sense of the text remains intact”, and writes elsewhere that “the plot remains largely intact”. It seems to me that — after you get past the first musical number, at least — my plot is just about entirely different from Schikaneder’s and only gets more obviously so as it progresses, and that the few places where the English words are more or less faithful to the German original — the Queen of the Night’s second-act aria, for example, and some individual lines and couplets here and there in Papageno’s second-act solo scene (the one leading to the entrance of the Raccoons and then Papagena) — are very much the exceptions.
But I shall choose to interpret this as meaning that Mr. Kosman found that the story and the words fit the music so well that they create the illusion in the theater of being exactly right for the score, and thank him for the compliment.
The Manga Flute on The Do List
9 March 2012Two friends have told me that The Manga Flute was mentioned on KQED’s The Do List today. Woo hoo!
Chambers 12th Edition
7 March 2012Woo hoo! My Chambers Dictionary iPhone app is updating free to the new 12th edition! I wasn’t expecting that — if you buy a print dictionary, you don’t get a free update to a new edition, so I was just figuring they’d bring out a separate app for the new edition.
As I cannot even remotely afford to buy the new edition at the moment, and as I don’t seem destined ever to have any of my entries drawn in the weekly competition for the Listener crossword, this is very welcome. Thank you, Chambers people!
Review of The Manga Flute at Repeat Performances
7 March 2012There’s a lovely rave for The Manga Flute at Repeat Performances, a website I hadn’t come across before. Some excerpts:
… [T]he ever-adventurous West Edge Opera commissioned a complete and artistic reworking of this staple of the stage, re-titled The Manga Flute, with a poetic and fanciful English libretto by David Scott Marley. The opening … was not only a success, but surprising in the scope of its originality.
And:
… fetchingly illustrated in backdrops by Megan Willis …
And:
The magic of the comic book format was as unlikely as it was an effective vehicle for our time, while the wind score accommodated the vocal range without sacrificing the meaty overtures.
(Did he mean overtones? Only one overture.) And:
[T]he real success of this venture was at least partly due to the talented cast, led by Eugene Brancoveanu as Papageno. I have no idea why that huge-voiced and velvet-tongued baritone is still in the Bay Area, instead of piling up fame and fortune at the Met or La Scala, but I suspect he chooses creativity over earthly desires …
And:
The princess Pamina was played to the hilt as a blue-haired manga vision, by Heidi Moss Sali … with the charm and purity that also makes her a darling of concert repertoire. Opposite her, Tamino bumbled about as a briefcase-toting Tokyo businessman who painfully transforms into her hero, sung with warmth and a sense of natural ease by tenor Darron James Flagg. And Elyse Nakajima popped out amazing high notes with crystal clarity in that most difficult of all coloratura soprano parts, the vengeful Queen of the Night.
And:
At first it was surprising how many young children attended, but it was a great fit for young audiences …
Woo hoo!
Is Repeat Performances a new website? Not many reviews up. Nice to see they plan to cover theater and dance as well as music and opera.
Look What Somebody Thinks Is a Collector’s Item!
7 March 2012I just spotted a copy of the libretto for Daughter of the Cabinet for sale on Amazon.
“Very tight binding with no sign of use,” says the seller’s description. Yep, that’s Daughter of the Cabinet, all right.
If you want a copy of this or any of my other librettos, check with me first — if I haven’t run out of a title myself, they’re just ten bucks each.
First review of The Manga Flute
5 March 2012A review by Janos Gereben is now up at the San Francisco Classical Voice website. A couple of excerpts:
David Scott Marley’s The Manga Flute, a new English adaptation in Japanese comic style, is bold, outlandish, delectable entertainment. Add a wonderful cast, with some major vocal/stage performances, and there is a must-see Flute in the El Cerrito Performing Arts Theater.
And:
Among Marley’s many “innovations,” perhaps the best is his substitution of three young-soprano raccoons for the Three Boys, another puzzlement in the original. The raccoons don’t just float in and out — they are essential parts of the story, playful and destructive one minute, wise and problem-solving the other ….
Opening Performance
4 March 2012The premiere of The Manga Flute is this afternoon at 3:00 pm. The theater will be very full — as of yesterday morning the orchestra section was full except for a handful of singles around the edges, but there were still seats available in the balcony.
The show looked great at the dress rehearsal on Friday. Megan Willis’s art is glorious and vibrant, and the costumes play beautifully against her backdrops. The prologue, a manga sequence created by Megan and beautifully assembled by Jeremy Knight, is terrific — you don’t want to miss the overture.
The cast was terrific, despite some dialogue flubs and nerves. Eugene is a hoot as Papageno. The Three Ladies were stronger and funnier in the opening scene than I’ve seen them before. All of act one feels like it is working beautifully all the way through. Act two felt like it might be five minutes or so too long. Caroline, the stage director, Jonathan, the musical director, and I talked Friday about the possibility of cutting a few minutes out at the dress rehearsal to see how it went, but Caroline decided it was wiser not to, and while I was open to the experiment, I don’t mind at all not making it after all — it’s easy to make a poor decision when you haven’t played the show before a real audience. Seeing how the show works for an audience may make clear exactly what it would be best to trim (if not for this production, then for the next), or could reveal that some other adjustment than trimming is what’s needed, or even that the show works fine as it is and we’ve just gotten to know the show too well to see how it will play.
And of course making changes is a burden on the memories of the performers and makes it that much harder to be acting and singing at their best. Given that the potential improvement to the script is somewhat minor, it may well be wiser to let it go for this production and make a note of the change for use in the next production, should there be one.
“O Gather Twelve”
2 March 2012I don’t have much time today for working on the Listener puzzle, as I’ve got to finish laying out the libretto for Manga Flute so I have printed copies for sale on Sunday, and then there’s the final dress rehearsal tonight. But I took the puzzle (“O Gather Twelve”) with me on a break from work, and in five minutes had solved one clue and figured out from its answer what the theme of the puzzle is. So it doesn’t look like it’ll be a tough one this week.
That’s good for me, as I may not have much time for it till after the show Sunday, and I try to get my entry in Monday’s mail if I can so it has a decent chance of reaching England by the deadline.
Sunday morning: I started on the puzzle again last night, after I picked up the printed librettos for The Manga Flute, and I’d finished all but 29 Down by bedtime; this morning I saw what I was overlooking and finished it. Now to get ready for the show.
Random Thought on Looking at the News of the World This Morning
2 March 2012We all seem to be born with an instinctive hunger for an understandable view of the world.
The reality is that the universe is complicated beyond our fathoming and we don’t know very much about anything, and that’s scary. So out of the infinitely complicated raw data of our existence, we distill stories about the world that seem to make things understandable and make us feel less small and helpless and stupid.
Some of us have very simple stories that are a very poor fit for the universe, and some of us have very complicated stories that are a better fit, but I feel pretty sure that if we could perceive the grand scheme of things in its entirely, all these stories we have would be clearly seen as massively pathetic approximations of reality, and the difference between my worldview and the worldview of the most narrow-minded fundamentalist would from that cosmic viewpoint be seen as one of degree only, and an incredibly trivial one at that.
As we get older, though, some of us do get better at facing up to the fact that we really are small and helpless and stupid, and accepting that and learning to make the most of our lives anyway, and at realizing that the stories we make up in our heads are nothing more than that. And others of us seem to get more and more frightened and cling more and more to their stories.
