Avenue Q, March 17, 2012, Horizon Theatre

Talk about the little musical that could. This show started out off-Broadway in one of the smallest theaters in that location, and then took Broadway (and the Tonys) by storm. It's easy to see why. Funny, smart, risque, and with a huge heart, this quickly became one of my most memorable theater experiences.

I remember hearing how great this show was when it came out, but since it won its three Tonys back in 2004, that and the puppets was about all I recalled when I bought the tickets. (I did not actually recall the awards.) The central character is a recent college graduate named Princeton with a degree in English. He had a starting job lined up that falls through at the beginning of the show. He then spend the rest of the show getting to know his neighbors in the low-rent part of town (hence the play's title) while trying to figure out what to do next. What with the downturn in the economy being so hard on recent college grads, and the fact that the internet is still used for porn (the subject of one song), this musical remains as topical today as 9 years ago. Each song was as good or better than the last, but my favorites, in addition to "The Internet Is for Porn," were "It Sucks to Be Me," Everyone's a Little Bit Racist," There's a Fine, Fine Line," and "Schadenfreude."

The date of this show was part of an extended run, so it's no surprise that the actors had mastered the puppetry arts. It was a little odd watching the speaking puppets while also looking at the actors for additional facial expressions, but the duality was surprisingly enriching, like watching two faces of the same person at one time. A special shout-out to Nick Arapoglou (Princeton) and Mary Nye Bennett (Kate Monster) as the leads. Dustin Lewis was endearing as the "questioning" Rod. And let's not forget Spencer Stephens as Gary Coleman!

Snow White, Cobb Energy Center, February 18, 2012

Atlanta Ballet puts on one "family-friendly" show a year, and this is the first one I've been too. I attended it with the reason I took a 3 1/2 year break from blogging: my 3-1/2-year-old daughter. She has been coming to ballet class with Mommy since before she was born and started taking her own class last fall. She loves dancing, and I love sharing it with her. Snow White turned out to be a perfect show for her.

It was interesting seeing this fairy tale ballet just after Twyla Tharp's The Princess and The Goblin. This Snow White was choreographed by  Bruce Wells of the Boston Ballet. It is about 45 minutes long, total, and included a live narrator positioned to the side of the stage. (His mike was set a little loud. Come on people, there are KIDS.) Most of the cast were students at the Atlanta Ballet Center for Dance Education. They did quite a respectable job, including Emily Docherty, who danced the title role. A few roles were danced by members of the Atlanta Ballet, including the enjoyable Evil Queen (Melissa Mitchell) and the forgettable Prince Charming (Benjamin Stone).

It's no surprise this production was more accessible than The Princess and The Goblin; it's aimed at children, after all. Maybe I just expected less, but I enjoyed the dancing Tree Spirits and Forest Creatures more than most parts of Ms. Tharp's work. The movement was both freer and more formal, and the production kept my daughter's interest, in spite of us being almost high enough up in the balcony to require air masks.

The Princess and The Goblin, February 12, 2012, Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center

What do you get when you cross an obscure fairy tale, decent music, and a famous choreographer? Atlanta Ballet's new production of The Princess and the Goblin, choreographed by Twyla Tharp. I had high hopes for this show, because, well, TWLYA THARP. In The Upper Room. Nine Sinatra Songs. Come Fly Away. Am I right?

Sort of. The Princess and the Goblin is a well-executed piece. The music of Schubert, put together by Ms. Tharp and the music historian Richard Burke, makes a score that flows well from one scene to the next. The choreography is suitably complex, with interesting moments and some striking scenes. The costumes, by Anne Armit of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, are hit and miss - the purposefully outlandish costumes on the adults in the first scene hit the mark, but the modern street clothes on the children did not mesh with the more classical costumes on the adults. The story was not elaborated in the program and left me somewhat confused.

Here's the synopsis (from what I gathered): The adults at court, including the king, ignore their children to focus on "adult" things, to the extent that the children are abducted without their notice. Only Princess Irene and her friend Curdie see what happens, and they follow the abductors, a race call Goblin, to their possibly underground kingdom. For some reason, the Goblin King and Queen are played by Irene's father and her sisters' nanny (are they evil?). The ghost/spirit of Irene's great-great-grandmother guides her to womanhood by teaching her some smooth moves and how to wear pointe shoes. Irene then teaches said skilz to the Goblin to gain their trust, and they turn on the King and Queen long enough for her to help the children escape. Then everyone dances together, the human adults are redeemed and no longer ignore their children, and the Goblin leave them alone for the rest of eternity. Or something.

Alessa Rogers as Princess Irene was lovely, although she has the sort of freakishly arched feet that leave me wondering how she stays on pointe at all. She was feisty and believable as someone who could outwit the Goblin. John Welker was suitably unyielding as both King Papa and the King of the Goblin, and danced a nice pas de deux with Tara Lee (the Queen) that was unfortunately overshadowed by other action on the stage. Rachel Van Buskirk stood out in a pas de deux (with ???) in which she comically breaks in her new Goblin-style pointe shoes. My favorite performance was that of Jesse Tyler, who along with Christian Clark was a royal guard who eventually converted to Princess Irene's side. He had just the right mix of attitude, goofiness, and charm to really define his character. (Mr. Clark, one of my favorite dancers, played it too straight.) Jacob Bush, playing Curdie, was pleasant, but did not have much of a part to work with. Christine Winkler rounded out the cast as great-great-grandmother Irene.

I suppose it's not fair to complain that this was not enough like a traditional story ballet. The world has moved on, and no one will ever create another Swan Lake or Coppelia. But given the hype that surrounded this production, with the emphasis on the goal of creating a new story ballet, I wanted more than I got. Somehow Ms. Tharp managed to both play it too straight and not straight enough.

Just because

In response to my being tagged at something shiny disorder, here is a random sample of information about me:

What I Was Doing 10 Years Ago
Graduate school at Cornell, I believe working on time of flight Monte Carlo.

Five Snacks I Enjoy
cookies
apples and peanut butter
cheese and crackers
nuts
applesauce

Five Things On My To-Do List Today
pick up Gretchen's medicine
fill car up with gas
gestate
determine ionospheric structure functions
write a thank-you note

Five Favorite Recipes
Corn Potato Chowder
Cranberry Orange Apricot Bread
Crusty Chicken Breast Topped with Salad
Apple Betty Pie
Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Bar Cookies

Five Jobs I've Had
teaching assistant at a summer science program
modern dancer
nuclear physicist
ballet teacher
senior research scientist

Five Bad Habits
cookies
staying up late
leaving my shoes all over the house
not emptying the dehumidifier when I think of it (hey, it's in the basement)
paying bills late

All the Places I've Lived
Texas
California
New York (upstate)
Georgia

Five Random Things About Me
I enjoy Willie Nelson's music
I'm right handed, but my left eye is dominant and my left foot is bigger
I spend a significant fraction of my income on health care for my dog
I secretly long to work in movies
I'm allergic to cats (that means you, Mr. Bigglesworth)

Jon Stewart, May 10, 2008, Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center

Yes, it's been almost two months since I saw this standup performance by the host extraodinaire of The Daily Show. What with Mr. Silvershoes starting a new job that requires him to be out of town a great deal AND with a baby on the way, blogging just hasn't risen to the top of the list lately, so I have a few things to catch up on. Don't expect much; I simply didn't want to leave this performance off the list.

What can I say? Jon Stewart is a funny man. While some of this routine was lifted from The Daily Show, most of it was new to me. Of course the joke lineup included several pointed political observations, but the funniest part was when Mr. Stewart started talking about his pets. I nearly rolled into the aisle when he went on a riff about his dog getting sick, having experienced something similar with Gretchen in the not-too-distant past. Isn't it funny (peculiar) that something so disgusting can turn funny (ha ha) in retrospect?

Atlanta Ballet, March 14, 2008, Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center

The Atlanta Ballet has a new home. Much as I liked the Fox Theater, their former home, it isn't the best venue for ballet performances. There's also the fact that parking was a pain and I didn't always feel safe walking to my car at night. The shiny, new Cobb Energy Center offers improvement on all fronts, plus it's closer to my house! It's not quite as chichi as the Wortham Center or even the Hobby Center, but it's still quite nice. I have hopes that the move will elevate Atlanta Ballet's stature and ambitions.

But enough about that. AB's first production in its new home was a mixed rep of pieces by George Balanchine, Diane Coburn Bruning, and Twyla Tharp. The first piece was Balanchine's "Serenade," which was performed for the most part rather sloppily. I also simply CANNOT get over the fact that the dancers use rosin on a Marley floor and, as a result, squeak like rusty huinges whenever they move, something that's particularly unappealing against the exquisite calmness of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings. While dancers must feel secure for their comfort and safety, other professional companies routinely find a quiet way to achieve this goal. I mean, come on!

Fortunately squeaky shoes were not a distraction in the rousing "Ramlin' Suite" by Diane Coburn Bruning. Set to music by the Red Clay Ramblers, the piece was a lighthearted fusion of contemporary ballet and Appalachian charm.

Tharp's "In the Upper Room" closed out the show and, frankly, left me stunned at the choreographic accomplishment of the piece. As far as I can tell, the music was written by Philip Glass specifically for this piece. It reminded me of the music for the film Koyaanisqatsi, which was also written by Mr. Glass at about the same period. Or at least I think it did; it's been a reeaallly long time since I've seen that movie. The music contrived to have a beat without having a rhythm; the driving sounds evolved from one place to another but did not develop. Going on for a continuous 40 minutes, it had the drawn out qualities of Ravel's "Bolero" without the repetition or crescendo (a plus, in my blog). Tharp's choreography was divided into sections, and there was some development as the costumes lost layers to go from black-and-white with red highlights to red with black-and-white highlights. This helped things from becoming monotonous. The set was two stories, but the dancers stayed on the floor, dancing underneath an ever-present fog that added mystery to the proceedings.

I confess that it has been long enough since I saw the piece that I am unable to characterize the movement beyond saying that it was athletic but clearly ballet. The dancers largely directed their attention out to the audience rather than towards each other. The entire experience was mesmerizing and rather like watching a particularly fascinating screen saver. The dancers gave it their all and received a well deserved standing ovation at the end.

Houston, we have a problem (but it could be worse)

I've always thought of Stanton Welch as a competent but not great choreographer, so I was interested to see a reviewer's opinion of his latest work, which premiered last night as part of the San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival. Writing in today's New York Times, Alastair Macaulay was not shy about saying what he thought of the four works on the program. Mark Morris's piece fared the best with adjectives including "awkward," "tepid," and "static." At least (for Welch's sake) Welch's piece didn't come out at the bottom of the "ghastly" pile.

Welch's new work was title "Naked" and set to Poulenc's "Concerto in D minor for Two Pianos." Macaulay's main criticism was lack of dynamics: fast music got fast movement and slow music got slow movement.

Macaulay's comments on James Kudelka's "The Ruins Proclaim the Building Was Beautiful" fall in the "no, tell us what you really think" category:

[It] lasts no more than 30 minutes, but only by clock time. While you watch, you begin to feel that Bill Clinton probably eloped with Michelle Obama long ago, that the problems of Palestine and Iraq and Afghanistan must have all been sorted by now, that whole generations of human life have passed and aliens have surely taken over the planet and then departed, all while you are stuck there in the theater trying to find the least interest in watching the same tepid floozies doing the same limp steps.

Wow.

The other piece on the program was by Julia Adam, who choreographed "Ketubah" for Houston Ballet in 2004.

Maybe you should use a mug?

Here's some sophomoric (maybe even grade school) humor for you. While I understand the image the author is trying to convey in these lyrics to The Shin's "Those to Come," I can't help but giggle every time I hear them:

Eyeless in the morning sun you were
pale and mild,a modern girl.
Taken with thought still prone to care
making tea in your underwear.