Friday Concert Clip/Theatre Discussion

For those who noticed that the song "Jet Airliner" appeared as Tuesday's post title, but that I listed "Paul Pena" in the tags rather than the Steve Miller Band, well...I actually doubt anyone noticed, and that is a shame. Paul Pena was, until his recent death, one of the most unique musicians in the world, and I say that without any sense of exaggeration. Blind since birth, he became famous for writing "Jet Airliner" and any number of other songs (apparently, some people have covered "Gonna Move" on American Idol). Blind blues musicians, however, are something of a famous subcategory, so that could hardly be called unique. No, the unique part is that after hearing Tuvan throatsinging on a shortwave radio, he taught himself to sing that way without any formal training. The result can be seen in this clip. Wait for the 1:23 and 1:53 marks for the reason his nickname is "Earthquake". The story of his journey to Central Asia was captured in the documentary film Genghis Blues, and the film's soundtrack is mindblowing. The most impressive song on the album, and perhaps the most original blues song I've ever heard, is the song that won an award at the throatsinging competition featured int he movie, "Kargyraa Moan", and it can be found at this blog. Stop what you are doing and go listen to it. I can wait, and you'll be a better person for it. Seriously, click the link now.

Tonight, my wife and I went to the local community college for an evening of locally written one-act plays. In many places, this would be painful, but we happen to be in a college town with several active theatre departments and theatre companies, so the quality was surprisingly good. While not perfect, it's still a neat experience to catch local theatre, especially since you never know quite what you'll get, unlike just about every Hollywood movie out there. She was surprised to find that we both liked the two dramas more than the one comedy, but we figured out that this makes a lot of sense. Writing plays must be an immensely difficult task. For one thing, the length works against you; a good short story is often harder to achieve than a good novel, since you have less room with which to work. In some inadequate amount of time, you have to introduce characters, invest the audience's sympathies or distaste into them, and then make up enough plot to keep people interested but still allow for some kind of catharsis or conclusion. That's a big task for a 15-page short story (or even an 80-page novella), and is even harder to put on stage, where the dialogue has to carry the action rather than the descriptive passages. In these settings, comedy is especially tough. Comedy generally works if it's very smart or very dumb, but can fall very flat anywhere in between. The dumb stuff works well on film, but requires a great deal of physical effort from a cast, usually more than a local theatre can be expected to pull off given limited resources. Smart comedy, on the other hand, can be just as tough. Some of the jokes in tonight's one-act were pretty sharp, others a bit less edgy, so the final product was good but not great. It had potential, sure, but there are very few new jokes under the sun, and it didn't really find many. Dramas allow for a bit more leeway, since they can be funny, melodramatic, or philosophical in parts, and it just adds to their breadth. The risk always seems to be that after a good opening, it is hard to keep the level up throughout the middle, and then end strong. The first play we saw managed the former but came up short on the latter, whereas the second got a little overcooked in the middle but saved itself with a good ending.

All in all, though, it was a lot of fun. Local productions may lack the funds needed to design elaborate sets and lighting setups, but the play's the thing, not the background. So long as the people speaking the lines are competent, and many, many people in this town greatly exceed that threshold, you don't really lose out seeing something nearby instead of off-broadway, and you can save some serious dough. Of the plays we've seen, several have been very good (Copenhagen, a three-person all-dialogue drama about physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr at the beginning of WWII, was excellent), and the ones that fell flat typically did so more from failings of the playwright than of the cast. Musicals are a bit more hit and miss, since strong singers seem to be rarer than good actors. If there were more great singers, after all, American Idol would never be able to weed down all their applicants. I do have to recommend Urinetown, which we caught at the community college last fall, to anyone who gets the chance to see it. It had to be difficult getting the backing to produce a musical about urination and the economic theories of Malthus, but they managed it, and it's becoming something of a community musical theatre favorite apparently. The best thing about local theatre may be the fact that of all the forms of popular entertainment out there, it supports the best group of people. I pretty much figure the money i spend on movies and CDs goes directly to Big Media, and even new books come out of large publishing houses. Professional sports teams are some of the most odious forces in the world when they blackmail local governments, getting tax breaks left and right that would be better spent anywhere on public services rather than modern day bread and circuses. Local theatre supports...educational institutions, the local arts and culture scene, and even the actors themselves. There is literally no down side. As for tonight, all the people who put on tonight's show can take a bow, they did some very nice work indeed.