The “star” system for grading performances feels woefully inadequate.  What exactly does it mean when something gets “Four Stars”?  Doesn’t it mean two entirely different things when a critic gives 4 stars to two entirely different films like, for example, Bridesmaids and The Artist?

It’s bad enough that we’ve “progressed” from letters to emails to texts to 140-character tweets.  But today, major media sources flirt with constraining critics to just five characters: * – *****.  Well, here’s a new system: I’m going to give your performance a grade based purely on whether you successfully fill your seats.  For arts organizations, isn’t that part of your test?

“As for love, no thanks.”

I recently saw the Samford University School of the Arts do a highly entertaining version of White Christmas.  Let me tell you, the Samford folks don’t seem to do small.  Last year, I saw their version of Thoroughly Modern Millie and was pretty impressed.  They said Millie was “one of our largest productions in the last 10 years,” but this version of White Christmas was an extravaganza.

According to the program, it was maybe forty performers, fifty-something listed members of the University Chorale, about twenty artistic staff, a thirty-something piece orchestra, and around a hundred production staff.  Huge, stunning sets with multiple glittery and sparkly costume changes for the whole cast.  (From my notes: “The clothes are good or even great.”)  The show’s iconic snow was actual diamond dust, imported specially from Detroit.  Birmingham’s tiny, struggling theatre companies can eat their hearts out.

“Breakfast all day and waffles all night.”

So how many people showed up to the (rather large at ~2500) Wright Fine Arts Center?  Depends on how you count it.  Opening night was sold out – so that would be a grade of 100% (or an A+).  When the lights went down, my count was around 90-95% of actual people in non-balcony seats – so that’s still a solid A.  After intermission, though, a notable chunk of people left.  I’d say it filtered down to around 85% full after the break.

“There’s a little bit of larceny in all of us.”

I wouldn’t believe anybody left this show because they thought it sucked.  College shows are a little different.  A chunk of the audience is students.  Most wouldn’t go to an on-campus musical unless 1) a friend or family member was in the show or 2) they’re getting extra credit.  Once that friend is offstage or they’ve seen enough of the show to write a one-page report, they’re outtathere.  I guess I could draw a conclusion about the show not being quite entertaining enough to keep students engaged, but then again, not everyone likes musical extravaganzas.

“Love and the weather can’t be depended upon.”

Why is this a good way to judge a performance or an organization?

• Arts groups shouldn’t work their tails off only to give subtle, beautiful performances that no one sees.  The audience is half of the equation; trees that fall in the forest make no sound.  You want people to show up because you believe in it, right?  If your show stinks, no one will come – so attendance is a fair reflection of how good your product is.
• Attendance is also a good reflection of your last few shows.  If you’re consistently entertaining, ticket buyers will trust you and come see whatever you’re doing currently.  It works in reverse, too.  It’s a relationship, baby.
• I’ve worked in restaurants; I recognize that attendance fluctuates randomly.  So I might just be taking a snapshot of an off-night.  This is why the mission is always: sell out the venue.  If you’re shooting for half-full, then some nights you’ll get a quarter full – and that’s no fun for your audience or anybody else.  Also, the quality of live performances fluctuates night-to-night, so that’s no excuse.
• I guarantee that David Bowie must have created otherworldly performances for sleepy, quarter-full clubs before he was David Bowie.  Still, this method would be a fair snapshot of how well he was doing in, let’s say, 1967.  And some shows sell out, but totally suck.  That’s the critic’s job: to recommend that more or fewer people should be seeing any particular show.
• Administration must pick the right venue for the job.  A positive for this measurement is that it grades the people behind the scenes.  I understand that Samford has a bigger production and advertising budget than places like Theatre Downtown.  The ASO has more money than the Magic City Choral Society.  No matter, the mission is always the same: sell out the venue.

“Falling out of love can be falling in love again.”

Which is why Samford’s White Christmas gets high marks.  It wasn’t challenging or unsettling in the slightest, but I smiled pretty much the whole time.  There’s a clean, unironic Miss America-ness to having such reputationally wholesome kids perform a wholesome musical set around our most wholesome war and the most wholesome of holidays.  You’d have to be a grump not to appreciate this level of earnestness – or to leave at intermission.

“That oughta sweeten your pancakes.”

A couple of quick notes.  I’ve now seen two different musicals at Samford where the dance was notably terrific.  If I knew who else to compliment as most responsible, other than Choreographer Roger van Fleteren, I would.  Since the dancers are students – not professionals – it’s obvious that they have a wide range of talent and skill.  It’s a gift to find the right combination of Goldilocks choreography that isn’t too basic for the advanced, isn’t too hard for the amateurs, uses the students’ natural enthusiasm, and looks great for the crowd.

“I think we could turn that guy into an opera.”

Lastly, oh please, either fix any technical issues with the microphones or stop using them.  If a person auditioned that was otherwise a beautiful dancer, but had a trick knee that would make them fall over six or seven times during a performance, you couldn’t cast them.  Then why do we insist on microphones that repeatedly fail – jarringly – in the middle of performances?

“If you had better legs and some personality, I’d marry you.”

Thank you very much to Lisa Gibbs and everyone associated with the Samford University School of the Arts.  Check out the related article in the Samford Crimson.

They’ve got some new chairs at the Red Mountain Theatre Company.  (And apparently, Theatre Downtown has gotten a parallel seating makeover.)  For the recent production of Sweet Charity, my backside got to enjoy the sweet seats on the side of the stage.  My cheeks give ‘em a non-raspberry, hopetimistic bravo.

“I hope his tight Italian pants choke him to death.”

It probably says a lot about me that – if it’s an option – I often prefer sitting off to one side of the stage.  Draw your own conclusions.  One reason is that it gives me a good angle (and a good excuse) to look back at the audience before and during the performance.  I’ve said it before: the audience is a big part of any show.

“For a weirdo, he’s very nice.”

One thing you can notice from this perspective is that audiences are usually deadishly sedate as compared to the action on stage.  In particular, Sweet Charity requires boatloads of energy.  Morgan Smith (Charity Hope Valentine) had every bit of the effervescence required for this part.  I’ll bet she collapsed into bed every night and prepped by running marathons.

“That girl’s built for everything but conversation.”

Is that a big reason we like watching theatre and dance?  Because they involve “acting out” in a way that we can’t?  Most people’s daily lives are one kind of drudgery or another.  Maybe yours isn’t.  Maybe it is.  But I’ll bet it’s not the exuberant kind of six-year-old running around the room fun.  I’m not usually a brass band.  What do most adults do that involves the same kind of explosive energy expended by dancers, singers, and actors?

“We defend ourselves to music.”

So if I don’t get to spend that kind of energy, it’s at least fun to get to watch it.  It’s one part of the release.  It must be strange for hard-working performers to look out and play against a reserved audience.  I read or heard the other day that watching a person do something can stimulate the same part of the brain as if you were doing that thing yourself.  Most people’s days involve some eating, some hygiene, some commuting, some paperwork, and some sitting.  Possibly running or biking or yoga for fad people, but otherwise we don’t get any long periods of extended bounce and sparkle.  Maybe this is the secret of the arts – capitalizing on our ability to use others to empathize an experience or a feeling?

“Without love, life has no purpose.”

I like to imagine that there are real world couples out there that are constantly meeting cute.  Making eyes at each other.  Dancing in elevators.  Singing quietly in her ear.  Gentle fingertip drumming.  Drawings on napkins.  Adorable texts.  Planning appreciable outfits.  Appreciating those outfits.  Nothing but a Sweet Charity-ish bounce and sparkle all day long.  But probably not that many.  The rest of us are the audience.

“You’re lucky to have someone worried about you all the time.”

Regarding the meet cute, I’ve got to praise Isaac Lamb (Charlie/Vittorio Vidal/Oscar Lindquist).  Terrific on his own and especially in any scene where he was allowed or encouraged to move – notably as Oscar Lindquist.  I’m not positive who would be most responsible (Stephanie Lang?), but the quality of the movement at Red Mountain Theatre Company is second to none.  Darien Crago (Helene) was another notable standout.

“What the hell was up with all that hand kissing?”

Here’s to Nicole Smith and all the future Red Mountain Theatre Company audiences who get to enjoy the new chairs.

All these links should be to an .mp3 file for you to listen to or download.  These are all covers.  This is not my work.  Thanks to the original artists for writing good songs.

• California On My Mind (Wild Light)
• The General Specific (Band of Horses)
• Shocker in Gloomtown (Guided By Voices / The Breeders)
• Walkaways (Counting Crows)
• Wild Thing (Liz Phair)

If anybody engineering-oriented is listening, my method this time is a lone SM-57 microphone in the bathroom.  I equalized the track, used hard limiting to cut off the tops of the waveform, and then normalized it to fill the space.  For these, that’s it.  Nothing fancy.

I liked the song and video (by sugartooth) quite a bit, so I thought I’d share.  The concept for the video could’ve been way lame, but I think it works very well.  I wish I’d've seen it earlier.  I still find it so hard to get good information about our homegrown arts and artists.  Who are the best, most reputable sources?

I had a fantasy once – probably from back when I DJed at WEGL – that one day, musicians and bands and artists would actively let me know about their stuff or send it along and – like Prometheus – I would get an opportunity to shepherd the really good stuff through to everybody else.  I, too, have faith in Alabama.  So if anyone wants to send me their good stuff, I’m right here and already crowing.  *whistles*

It’s all patterns.  People behavior: you and me.  Animal behavior: dogs and cats.  Tornadoes: first them, then us, then them again.

And since the arts are inseparable from everything – you know, ’cause it’s everything – there are an awful lot of patterns in there, too.  Part of it is just baked into the cake, I suppose.  But a larger part is because we intentionally use creativity to reflect what’s going on around us.  To pass a feeling forwards to someone else.

John Lennon had a feeling about his Mother and wrote it into a song.  Forty years later, I still “get” it, don’t you?  Most of us have had these conflicting feelings.  Goodbye, goodbye: Mama don’t go, Daddy come home.  Roger Waters had some thoughts about his Mother.  Even Glenn Danzig and Carrie Underwood.  If it’s good, it’ll seek out the same part of you that it touched in them.

So there’s really no good reason to think that we’re more modern or much different than long-dead guys like Gaetano Donizetti, Salvadore Cammarano, or Sir Walter Scott – the guys responsible for the opera, Lucia di Lammermoor.  Our own Opera Birmingham recently did a version and it was thoroughly terrific.  The story is like Romeo and Juliet: forbidden love between two families in opposition.  Lucia is the fragile sister, tragically caught in the middle.  Bad things happen.  Like other narratives, the lesson is to be careful with your heart.  Still good advice, almost two centuries later.

“The unhappy girl has lost her reason.”

I like thinking that I have a lot in common with those dead guys.  And I like believing we may still have a lot in common with the people who’ll be around in 2186.  Who knows, maybe they’ll like my poems?

We’ve had even more in common.  Writers seem to have a soft spot for the opera.  In particular, writers may be prone to crushes on actresses and singers.  Charles Foster Kane had his fondness for Susan Alexander and I’m probably not the only one with a crush on Susanna Phillips.  I’m not embarrassed to admit it.  If you’re a professional artist or entertainer who doesn’t cause some degree of swooning and attraction, you’re probably not doing it right.

“Whoever is not deeply moved by her has no heart.”

It’s a natural fantasy, really.  Writers need long blocks of completely focused and uninterrupted time.  That’s good, because singers are almost always on the go.  Being a traveller, a singer needs a companion who’s got a way with words.  That’s most of what you get – emails and telephone – and doncha know that love letters are a writer’s best trick?  Writers appreciate expressiveness, but especially in a different medium, because it doesn’t compete with or jostle an ego that’s unbuoyed by applause or direct adoration.  Actresses can’t help but have a natural appreciation for composition.  There’s already a bond, because everything she’s sung, acted, or appreciated was probably written by some solitary guy banging away on a keyboard.  God frequently works through pale, homely men.  Writers can appreciate someone who is looked at or listened to in a way that he isn’t.  Finally, both the singer and the writer need someone with a deep understanding of artifice (AKA bullshit).  An acute awareness of the gauzy line between earnestness and performance.  A knowledge of that self-defining space between the parts of yourself devoured by an audience and who you actually are.  When to tell the truth and when to lie.

“If she is overcome by sadness, do not be surprised.”

[Enter Lucia: bloody]  Susanna Phillips is always the best part of the opera.  There’s no need to find a variety of frilly ways to say it.  She sings beautifully.  She acts – and interacts – beautifully.  Her characters are passionate and sexy.  She’s beautiful on and off stage.  She’s responsible for the two most spontaneous, lengthy, and heartfelt ovations I’ve ever been a part of.  What else is there to say?

One thing I’ve noticed in covering the arts is that space is a tricky thing.  It’s  true in writing and the visual arts, but it’s emphasized in music or theatre.  The issue is, when things hesitate, will your audience stay with it?  What if I start to color outside the lines – will you stick around?  Let’s say I’m up on stage and acting my heart out.  If there’s a tiny pause, you’ll probably wonder if I’ve messed up.  It can feel like a million awkward years.  Am I faltering?  Your mind may wander.  Or think about some guitar solos, where the musician gets way off track.  But great artists will hold you.  That might be the best test of how good they are.  She could stop in the middle and you’d be right there with her.  She’s one of those.

From The Shawshank Redemption: “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about.  Truth is, I don’t wanna know.  Some things are better left unsaid.  I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it.  I tell you those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream.  It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.”

From all of us at Shawshank, thank you to John D. Jones and everyone associated with Opera Birmingham.