Looking Ahead:
The Rabbit has returned. Just in time to start your summer frolic, Bunny Gumbo’s Combat Theater is back this weekend for two evenings of short plays that fall somewhere between heads-up, free-form improv and well-crafted playwriting. The Combat crew creates a piece in 24 hours based on randomly selected locations and situations. Then, in one of theater’s great masochistic traditions, does it all over again for a second evening of shows. The crowds have been steadily growing in the last few years, and the rainy weekend points to two full houses. Get there early.
If you’re feeling a bit more serious, perhaps politically reflective now that the Presidential campaign has lurched into its second phase, check out the world premiere of Small Pieces Fly to Heaven, a new play about women and the Iraq war. Developed by former Milwaukee Poet Laureate Peggy Hong and former Theatre X stalwart Deborah Clifton, the show is based on diaries, blogs and memoirs of women who have been touched in some way by the war in Iraq. An ensemble of actors and writers has spent a year developing the show from the documents and writings, and it’s only being staged this weekend.
Olivier Messiaen used to transcribe bird song and insert it into his music. Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony makes you imagine the twittering and buzzing of the countryside, even if it doesn’t recreate it. Our own Present Music takes this non-human canoodling one step further with its final concert of this season, “ZooMusic.” Before the group retires to an indoor venue for a concert of “animalistic” contemporary music, the musicians will wander the zoo and try to engage the animals in some sonic banter. Will your favorite baboon turn out to be a fan of Bach, or of bassoon bleats? This is probably the only chance you’ll get to find out.
Looking Back
Fantasy Island
In the middle of act two of The Girl in the Frame, the onstage mayhem slows for a bit to allow Allison Mary Forbes to sing a sweet little love song. “Man of our Dreams” is one of those numbers that catalogs the less-than-perfect quirks of a beloved, and while it may not have the pizzazz of “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” it’s easily the show’s highlight. Forbes has a fine musical-theater voice, and here it’s in a soft and sensitive mode – she’s able to capture the song’s sweetness without being cloying. It’s a lovely moment.
The road to that highlight is a bit rocky, though. In Tandem’s production, directed by Jane Flieller, is uneven and downright trying at times. Jeremy Desmon’s chamber musical, which first appeared in 2001, has a great idea at its core, but is lacking the kind of imaginative details to turn that idea into a two hour piece of theater. The story focuses on Laney (Forbes) and Alex (Simon Jon Provan), a couple in the relationship doldrums. Desmon brings each one of their fantasy mates, and the two lose themselves in romantic nirvana, until it becomes predictably tedious.
It’s not exactly Sondheim, but it’s an idea with potential. Unfortunately, Desmon’s tunes aren’t memorable, and his “song-play” doesn’t really grab you (except “One Big Happy Family,” the second act opener, which has some wit and energy). The production has its problems, too. The actors – Travis Knight and Courtney Jones play the fantasy mates – throw themselves into their roles and have some fun. But many of them handle the music uneasily, probably because the piano is so far off stage that they lose their bearings in mid-song. In Tandem’s 10th Street Theatre seems like a good venue for “little musicals,” but some adjustments need to be made.
Photo: Allison Mary Forbes sings to her less-than-fantastic fiancé, played by Simon Jon Provan. Photograph by Mark Frohna.
Run for the Border
As the Presidential election (finally) moves into phase two, it seems like a good idea for museums to visit some of the political questions of our time. But Caras Vemos, Corazones no Sabemos: The Human Landscape of Mexican Migration suggests the limits of an issue-driven exhibit. Jointly produced by Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art and Latino Arts, Inc., the show was curated by Amelia Malagamba-Ansótegui for the Snite Museum at the University of Notre Dame.
While the curator calls the work examples of “expressions seldom experienced or acknowledged in official discourses on migration,” most of the work is quite conventional, representing stories or experiences that are common to journalism or mass media. Social realist images of suffering, political cartoons about bi-lingual prejudice, there’s a lot of preaching to the converted here. And Malagamba-Ansótegui’s notes – one jargon-laden handout for each of the five sections of the museum – do little to put the art in a political or social context. (“The artists’ insistence on a human geography that articulates the emotional and mnemonic repertory of the migrants result in a conglomerate of deep associations with the memorialization of personal as well as spiritual records,” she writes.)
Still, there are some notable pieces here. Exodus Graphicus, a massive, swirling mural by Artemio Rodríguez, José Hugo Sánchez and Poli Marichal, captures the rich energy and emotional complexity of cross-cultural migration. There’s sly wit in Isabel Martinez’s V.G. Got her Green Card, a kind of Virgin Mary holy card with the prized documentation at its center. And Dulce Pinzon’s photographs of immigrant workers in superhero costumes are both a sentimental celebration of the immigrant work ethic, and a sweetly surreal reimagining of everyday life.
For all its problems, a “cross-border” collaboration between a group like Latino Arts and a major area museum is a good thing for our own community, fraught as it is with cultural fractures. Let’s hope there are more to come.
Looking Way Ahead….
This will be my last Culture Club column until August, when the arts scene starts to heat up again. There certainly are things going on between now and then, so get out there and enjoy.
