The fruits are they of holy Christmas tide,
But baked indeed, for children's use designed.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Friday, December 16, 2011
Christmas Poinsettia Snowflake Cookies
The fruits are they of holy Christmas tide,
But baked indeed, for children's use designed.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Thursday, December 15, 2011
A Very Special Player
He was, indeed, a very special player.
I am sorry I was too young to see him in his prime—and I am not even a baseball fan.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Chekhov In Repertory
Yesterday we did something fun: my mother, my sister-in-law, and Joshua and I went to the Rarig Center on the main campus of the University Of Minnesota to see two Chekhov plays, “Uncle Vanya” and “The Cherry Orchard”. The plays, presented by the University Of Minnesota Department of Theatre Arts And Dance, had been running in repertory for the previous ten days, and yesterday’s performances marked the final day of the repertory run. We caught “Uncle Vanya” at the 2:00 p.m. matinee and we caught “The Cherry Orchard” at the 7:30 p.m. evening performance.
The student actors were taken from the BFA Actor Training Program jointly sponsored by the University Of Minnesota and The Guthrie Theater. The casts were directed by two out-of-town professional stage directors known for expertise in Chekhov.
We enjoyed the performances. They were high-quality student performances, nothing more, but the plays came across fully. Texts had been discreetly pruned, and the stage designs were not particularly good and not particularly imaginative, but the productions were definitely worth experiencing. The “Uncle Vanya” production was better than the production of “The Cherry Orchard”.
It had been a long time since any of us had attended a production of “Uncle Vanya”. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I saw “Uncle Vanya” on stage.
My mother and Josh and I had most recently attended a performance of “The Cherry Orchard” in London in August—and, further, Josh and I had seen “The Cherry Orchard” in Baltimore in March 2009. Yesterday having been our third “Cherry Orchard” in less than three years, Josh and I intend now to give the play a rest.
Between performances, we ate dinner at a Greek/French restaurant within walking distance—a long walk—of the Rarig Center.
Like the restaurant itself, we mixed Greek food and French food. Since we had plenty of time on our hands, we ordered four courses: Phyllo triangles with three different Greek fillings; Greek salad; Bouillabaisse; and Baklava. Our dinner was slightly disappointing, especially the Bouillabaisse, but we did not go hungry.
Everyone else in my family camped out at my parents’ house yesterday.
They did not go hungry, either.
Prior to the Chekhov performances, we all sat down to a lunch of homemade tomato-cream soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.
For dinner, my mother left behind chickens ready for roasting, vegetables ready for steaming and new potatoes ready for boiling, along with a fresh cranberry salad and a Boston Cream Pie. It was a snap for my father and my brothers to do what little additional preparation remained.
The student actors were taken from the BFA Actor Training Program jointly sponsored by the University Of Minnesota and The Guthrie Theater. The casts were directed by two out-of-town professional stage directors known for expertise in Chekhov.
We enjoyed the performances. They were high-quality student performances, nothing more, but the plays came across fully. Texts had been discreetly pruned, and the stage designs were not particularly good and not particularly imaginative, but the productions were definitely worth experiencing. The “Uncle Vanya” production was better than the production of “The Cherry Orchard”.
It had been a long time since any of us had attended a production of “Uncle Vanya”. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I saw “Uncle Vanya” on stage.
My mother and Josh and I had most recently attended a performance of “The Cherry Orchard” in London in August—and, further, Josh and I had seen “The Cherry Orchard” in Baltimore in March 2009. Yesterday having been our third “Cherry Orchard” in less than three years, Josh and I intend now to give the play a rest.
Between performances, we ate dinner at a Greek/French restaurant within walking distance—a long walk—of the Rarig Center.
Like the restaurant itself, we mixed Greek food and French food. Since we had plenty of time on our hands, we ordered four courses: Phyllo triangles with three different Greek fillings; Greek salad; Bouillabaisse; and Baklava. Our dinner was slightly disappointing, especially the Bouillabaisse, but we did not go hungry.
Everyone else in my family camped out at my parents’ house yesterday.
They did not go hungry, either.
Prior to the Chekhov performances, we all sat down to a lunch of homemade tomato-cream soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.
For dinner, my mother left behind chickens ready for roasting, vegetables ready for steaming and new potatoes ready for boiling, along with a fresh cranberry salad and a Boston Cream Pie. It was a snap for my father and my brothers to do what little additional preparation remained.
Thursday, December 08, 2011
From The Dutch Golden Age
Pieter Janssens Elinga (1623-1682)
The Reading Woman
Date Unknown (Probably Circa 1657)
Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Oil On Canvas
30 3/16 Inches By 25 3/8 Inches
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
Potsdam 1945
A group portrait of the principal players at the Potsdam Conference, held at the Cecilienhof Palace in July 1945.
Truman looks ridiculous. His attitude and demeanor are those of a puffed-up penguin, a hick newly-released from the boondocks, with no idea that he reveals himself to be both boob and buffoon.
British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, not the sharpest tool in the shed, does not come off much better.
Standing are American Admiral William Leahy, British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, U.S. Secretary Of State James Byrnes, and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov.
Leahy was the least prepossessing of American admirals of the World War II era. Bevin, not the brightest bulb in the closet, and Byrnes, a lightweight whose tenure—happily—was very brief, were singularly under-whelming administrators of foreign policy and international affairs.
It is frightening to think that this group of men was responsible for the post-war direction of Europe.
Stalin and Molotov, a couple of dismaying criminals, appear to be the only competent persons in the photograph.
That, too, is frightening.
Sunday, December 04, 2011
Towers Of Angst
Last evening, Joshua and I went to Saint Paul to hear the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in music of Beethoven and Frank Martin.
Pianist Christian Zacharias was both guest conductor and guest soloist.
Josh and I last heard Zacharias in November of last year, when he had appeared with the Boston Symphony as conductor and pianist.
That 2010 occasion had not been a happy one. Zacharias, making his Boston Symphony debut as a conductor (Zacharias had debuted as a pianist with the Boston Symphony in 1979; that 1979 Boston appearance had marked his American debut), had been assigned two late Haydn symphonies and two Mozart piano concertos, far too heavy a remit for a conductor working with an orchestra for the first time. In hindsight, I am surprised that those Boston performances did not fall apart (which they came close to doing).
Zacharias was on much friendlier turf last evening, because he has worked successfully with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in the past. Last night, it was clear from the start of the program that Zacharias and the musicians worked well together.
Martin’s Etudes For String Orchestra began the concert (and was the attraction that got us into the concert hall). Composed in 1955 and 1956, the composition is just one of many masterpieces that flowed from Martin’s pen, starting when the composer was in his early fifties and ending with his death at the age of 84.
It took Martin a long time to acquire his individual voice, longer perhaps than any other major composer. Martin was fifty-one or fifty-two years old when his individual voice finally emerged during the early years of World War II. That he lived and worked in neutral Switzerland enabled Martin to write without letup during the war years. Once he found his voice, Martin’s output significantly accelerated; almost all Martin works performed today come from the last thirty years of the composer’s life.
The Etudes For String Orchestra are marvels of invention. It would be accurate to classify the composition as Neo-Classic in the Stravinksy mode, but such is a very limiting—and almost misleading—classification. Martin was one of the century’s great masters of counterpoint (he studied the music of Bach his entire life), and he was one of the century’s great masters of serial writing. Both disciplines are on ample display in the Etudes.
Martin was a mathematician and physicist by training as well as a devout Calvinist. His music is both innately logical and deeply spiritual, qualities entirely in keeping with his scientific background and deep religious faith.
The SPCO performance of the Etudes was technically brilliant, but it shortchanged much of the expression written into the score. I suspect the SPCO does not play enough Martin to come to grips with the full range of content in Martin’s music. The Etudes sounded impersonal in the Saint Paul performance, as if the musicians had accepted the work’s title at face value.
Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 followed the Martin.
The orchestra’s playing in the Beethoven was, once again, impersonal—but this may have been the fault of the conductor, who could hardly play the piano part while looking out for the orchestra at the same time.
Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 may be performed with a single conductor/pianist because it is very much an on-the-surface piece. Beethoven’s last three piano concertos, however, require both a conductor and a pianist—and a conductor and pianist with distinct personalities, personalities strong enough to realize fully the tension and battle of wills Beethoven consciously wrote into the concerto form in his mature efforts. To call upon a single musician to perform both roles will, inevitably, limit the scope of the performance—and, on occasion, even trivialize it.
The orchestra was a non-factor in last night’s performance. The notes were played, beautifully, but nothing happened. The orchestra provided a supporting, not a contrasting, presence.
It was, nonetheless, an interesting performance, but only because Zacharias the keyboard artist had very definite ideas about how to shape the piano part.
Zacharias dispensed with the niceties of Classicism. His tempi were all over the place, and his very pronounced and very personal use of rubato would not have been unwelcome in the music of Chopin. Zacharias played the piano part as if it represented Early Romanticism, where deep expression and heightened drama count for more than classic equipoise. Significantly, I thought that Zacharias was trying to find outright tragedy in a piece where there is none.
Zacharias certainly held my attention—but any musician that offers a highly unusual reading of a standard work will, by definition, hold the listener’s attention. Such cannot be the sole—or even the primary—standard by which a musician’s work is to be judged.
Simply put, Zacharias’s too-Romantic style of play shoved Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 thirty or forty years into the future. The result was that the work’s formal perfection disappeared, its chaste qualities swelling to towers of angst. Zacharias’s interpretation would have been better suited to the Schumann Piano Concerto.
After intermission, the orchestra played excerpts from Beethoven’s “The Creatures Of Prometheus”, one of the composer’s least interesting compositions. Played complete (overture and sixteen numbers), the score takes approximately 70 minutes to perform. Happily, the selections offered last night required only half that time—yet the work nonetheless seemed to go on forever.
It is easy to understand why “The Creatures Of Prometheus” is seldom encountered in concert halls. The music is not inspired; the composer seems stuck in his early contredanse mode of writing.
What is not easy to understand is why the SPCO placed “The Creatures Of Prometheus” last on the program. It was the weakest music of the night. It should have served as the concert’s opening work.
Zacharias will return to the SPCO in two weeks time, conducting music of Haydn, Weber and Stravinsky. Josh and I may try to attend one of those concerts.
In the meantime, Zacharias will make his long-overdue Carnegie Hall recital debut on December 13, a debut that should have occurred thirty years ago. When I read, a day or two ago, that Zacharias had never previously been invited to perform a solo recital in Carnegie’s main auditorium, I was dumbfounded. Zacharias has been an important pianist for more than three decades. He should have logged a dozen Carnegie recitals by now.
Pianist Christian Zacharias was both guest conductor and guest soloist.
Josh and I last heard Zacharias in November of last year, when he had appeared with the Boston Symphony as conductor and pianist.
That 2010 occasion had not been a happy one. Zacharias, making his Boston Symphony debut as a conductor (Zacharias had debuted as a pianist with the Boston Symphony in 1979; that 1979 Boston appearance had marked his American debut), had been assigned two late Haydn symphonies and two Mozart piano concertos, far too heavy a remit for a conductor working with an orchestra for the first time. In hindsight, I am surprised that those Boston performances did not fall apart (which they came close to doing).
Zacharias was on much friendlier turf last evening, because he has worked successfully with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in the past. Last night, it was clear from the start of the program that Zacharias and the musicians worked well together.
Martin’s Etudes For String Orchestra began the concert (and was the attraction that got us into the concert hall). Composed in 1955 and 1956, the composition is just one of many masterpieces that flowed from Martin’s pen, starting when the composer was in his early fifties and ending with his death at the age of 84.
It took Martin a long time to acquire his individual voice, longer perhaps than any other major composer. Martin was fifty-one or fifty-two years old when his individual voice finally emerged during the early years of World War II. That he lived and worked in neutral Switzerland enabled Martin to write without letup during the war years. Once he found his voice, Martin’s output significantly accelerated; almost all Martin works performed today come from the last thirty years of the composer’s life.
The Etudes For String Orchestra are marvels of invention. It would be accurate to classify the composition as Neo-Classic in the Stravinksy mode, but such is a very limiting—and almost misleading—classification. Martin was one of the century’s great masters of counterpoint (he studied the music of Bach his entire life), and he was one of the century’s great masters of serial writing. Both disciplines are on ample display in the Etudes.
Martin was a mathematician and physicist by training as well as a devout Calvinist. His music is both innately logical and deeply spiritual, qualities entirely in keeping with his scientific background and deep religious faith.
The SPCO performance of the Etudes was technically brilliant, but it shortchanged much of the expression written into the score. I suspect the SPCO does not play enough Martin to come to grips with the full range of content in Martin’s music. The Etudes sounded impersonal in the Saint Paul performance, as if the musicians had accepted the work’s title at face value.
Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 followed the Martin.
The orchestra’s playing in the Beethoven was, once again, impersonal—but this may have been the fault of the conductor, who could hardly play the piano part while looking out for the orchestra at the same time.
Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 may be performed with a single conductor/pianist because it is very much an on-the-surface piece. Beethoven’s last three piano concertos, however, require both a conductor and a pianist—and a conductor and pianist with distinct personalities, personalities strong enough to realize fully the tension and battle of wills Beethoven consciously wrote into the concerto form in his mature efforts. To call upon a single musician to perform both roles will, inevitably, limit the scope of the performance—and, on occasion, even trivialize it.
The orchestra was a non-factor in last night’s performance. The notes were played, beautifully, but nothing happened. The orchestra provided a supporting, not a contrasting, presence.
It was, nonetheless, an interesting performance, but only because Zacharias the keyboard artist had very definite ideas about how to shape the piano part.
Zacharias dispensed with the niceties of Classicism. His tempi were all over the place, and his very pronounced and very personal use of rubato would not have been unwelcome in the music of Chopin. Zacharias played the piano part as if it represented Early Romanticism, where deep expression and heightened drama count for more than classic equipoise. Significantly, I thought that Zacharias was trying to find outright tragedy in a piece where there is none.
Zacharias certainly held my attention—but any musician that offers a highly unusual reading of a standard work will, by definition, hold the listener’s attention. Such cannot be the sole—or even the primary—standard by which a musician’s work is to be judged.
Simply put, Zacharias’s too-Romantic style of play shoved Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 thirty or forty years into the future. The result was that the work’s formal perfection disappeared, its chaste qualities swelling to towers of angst. Zacharias’s interpretation would have been better suited to the Schumann Piano Concerto.
After intermission, the orchestra played excerpts from Beethoven’s “The Creatures Of Prometheus”, one of the composer’s least interesting compositions. Played complete (overture and sixteen numbers), the score takes approximately 70 minutes to perform. Happily, the selections offered last night required only half that time—yet the work nonetheless seemed to go on forever.
It is easy to understand why “The Creatures Of Prometheus” is seldom encountered in concert halls. The music is not inspired; the composer seems stuck in his early contredanse mode of writing.
What is not easy to understand is why the SPCO placed “The Creatures Of Prometheus” last on the program. It was the weakest music of the night. It should have served as the concert’s opening work.
Zacharias will return to the SPCO in two weeks time, conducting music of Haydn, Weber and Stravinsky. Josh and I may try to attend one of those concerts.
In the meantime, Zacharias will make his long-overdue Carnegie Hall recital debut on December 13, a debut that should have occurred thirty years ago. When I read, a day or two ago, that Zacharias had never previously been invited to perform a solo recital in Carnegie’s main auditorium, I was dumbfounded. Zacharias has been an important pianist for more than three decades. He should have logged a dozen Carnegie recitals by now.
Herbert Von Karajan Directs Anna Tomowa-Sintow
Herbert Von Karajan directs the Elsa of soprano Anna Tomowa-Sintow in "Lohengrin" at the Salzburg Easter Festival in 1976.
Saturday, December 03, 2011
Dining
Theater In The Round is not having a good season.
Last evening, my middle brother and Joshua and I stayed downtown after work and attended a performance of Theater In The Round’s current production of A. R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room”. It may have been the weakest presentation I have ever encountered at Theater In The Round.
“The Dining Room” is more series of vignettes than fully-formed play. The script presents several different families from several different time periods (the early 20th Century through the late 1970s) in several different scenarios experiencing several different family problems, all set in the same dining room. The author’s theme has often been interpreted as depicting the decline of WASP America and the corresponding deterioration of the American upper-middle-class, but I am not so certain that such was the author’s intent.
“The Dining Room” was written in 1980, just as The Reagan Revolution was gathering steam, and premiered on January 31, 1981, ten days after President Reagan’s inauguration. Under such circumstances, for theorists to attribute to “The Dining Room” an examination of the decline of WASP America and the deterioration of the upper-middle-class is a case of grievous mistiming of circumstance at best or boneheaded misreading of history at worst.
In all likelihood, Gurney, in “The Dining Room”, was writing about his own family, as has always been Gurney's practice in his plays (as the playwright has admitted on multiple occasions). Gurney no doubt took as his starting point various family dramas he personally witnessed or heard about, and used his imagination to proceed from there.
Many of the vignettes are funny, but more than a few leave a sour aftertaste. I suspect that Gurney, in his private life, was caught between loving his family members and loathing them.
The play calls for six actors to play fifty-some roles ranging in age from small children to elders in their dotage. The vignettes are played without pause, and on occasion overlap. What with all the role-switching, “The Dining Room” is not an easy play for actors—and this is especially so since the scenes are too short for any of the characters to emerge as anything other than archetypes. Actors, I believe, must find the play as much frustrating and pointless as challenging to their craft.
The play is frustrating for audiences, too, because there is no depth underlying its rapid-moving surface. The charm of the play quickly pales as the vignettes go on and on (and I believe that at least one of the vignettes was cut from the Theater In The Round production). Sitting through two-and-a-quarter hours of thin vignettes is akin to dining on course after course of puff pastry.
For “The Dining Room” to succeed, the play must be expertly cast and expertly directed. The play must also move with great swiftness, because audiences cannot be allowed an opportunity to analyze the play as it unfolds or else the play fails miserably.
The cast in the Theater In The Round production was not good. None of the actors was up to the many demands called for by the playwright.
The director of the Theater In The Round production did not know how to shape the material or bring it to life. There was silent thud after silent thud as each vignette ended. Some scenes were ponderous, others were too cute by half, most simply fell flat.
In short, everyone associated with this production seemed to be wrong for the project. I had seen productions of “The Dining Room” before last night, but until last night I had never seen a production in which literally nothing worked.
This was the third consecutive Theater In The Round production we found acutely disappointing. Earlier this season, we sat through Theater In The Round’s “Bus Stop” and “The Reluctant Debutante”, productions that were not necessarily embarrassing but productions that had little to recommend them. “The Dining Room” production, in contrast, was very much an embarrassment. Something has gone wrong with the company—Theater In The Round is the oldest repertory theater company in the Twin Cities, preceding The Guthrie by well over a decade, and has a long and distinguished history and tradition—and something must be done to right the ship.
Before the performance, we ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant downtown.
We started with fresh corn chowder with roasted Poblano peppers and queso fresco, and continued with tomato salad with watermelon, queso fresco and red chili vinaigrette.
We ordered (and shared) three different plates of seafood: crab empanadas with salsa verde and avocado; red snapper ceviche with avocado, radish and orange; and sugarcane-skewered tequila shrimp with lemon-ginger mojo.
We finished with grilled chicken quesadilla with roasted corn and Poblano peppers.
Our food was pleasing, but we shall never return to the restaurant. The servers were aggressive liquor-pushers, and would not take “no” for an answer.
After we declined to order cocktails upon sitting down, our waiter informed us that he would bring us tequila cocktails anyway, but that he would remove them from our bill if we found them displeasing.
“If we want cocktails, we will be sure to let you know” was my brother’s response.
The waiter nevertheless promptly brought us cocktails. As the waiter placed them on our table, my brother told him, very quietly, “You can remove these, or I can remove them. If I remove them, you will need to call a busboy to clean up the mess on the floor.”
The waiter lowered his eyes, and said, in a very smarmy tone, “Teetotalers, are we?”
My brother looked him right in the eye, and responded, “Minimum-wage employee, are we?”
My brother’s response froze the waiter in his tracks, which had been my brother’s intent. After more than thirty seconds of total silence, my brother motioned at the cocktails and, without again looking at the waiter, said, “Remove these. And send a different server to our table.”
The waiter complied—and, five minutes later, we were greeted by a different waiter.
The second waiter started out just as smarmy as the first. In a high-pitched, singsong voice, drawing out his syllables to interminable lengths, he said, “OK. I understand NO COCKTAILS here. No cocktails AT ALL. OK. We can work with that.”
My brother looked the new waiter in the eye, and asked, very pointedly, “Do you always talk like this?”
My brother’s question froze the second waiter, too. My brother allowed the waiter to stew in his discomfort for thirty seconds, and then my brother, without again looking at the waiter, said, “Give us five minutes, and we’ll be ready to order.”
When the waiter returned to our table, precisely five minutes later, he did not say a word. He stood, in silence, and waited for my brother’s instructions.
My brother placed our order, telling the waiter what we wanted, in what sequence we wanted the courses, how many minutes we preferred between the various courses, and what—if any—beverages we wanted with each course.
The waiter said nothing, but he nodded—and the waiter followed my brother’s instructions to the letter. The waiter served us, faultlessly, for the rest of our meal—and he never said another word.
When we were done with our dinner, we demonstrated noblesse oblige, and tipped the waiter 50 per cent of the bill.
This morning we will all go to the local nursery/greenhouse and pick out our Christmas tree. In my family, my mother has the privilege of selecting the tree.
At the nursery/greenhouse, we will meet up with my older brother and his family, because they, too, will be selecting their Christmas tree.
Once the trees have been selected, we will take my parents’ tree home and place the base in water, after which we will all go over to my older brother’s house and spend the day.
We shall help my older brother and his family trim the tree and hang evergreens (they will return the favor at my parents’ house tomorrow). My mother and my sister-in-law plan to bake a few Christmas cookies, simply to add to the kids’ excitement about the Christmas season getting underway. A dinner of prime rib is planned.
Dinner will be over by 6:30 p.m., because Josh and I plan to attend tonight’s Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra concert, which starts at 8:00 p.m.
Last evening, my middle brother and Joshua and I stayed downtown after work and attended a performance of Theater In The Round’s current production of A. R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room”. It may have been the weakest presentation I have ever encountered at Theater In The Round.
“The Dining Room” is more series of vignettes than fully-formed play. The script presents several different families from several different time periods (the early 20th Century through the late 1970s) in several different scenarios experiencing several different family problems, all set in the same dining room. The author’s theme has often been interpreted as depicting the decline of WASP America and the corresponding deterioration of the American upper-middle-class, but I am not so certain that such was the author’s intent.
“The Dining Room” was written in 1980, just as The Reagan Revolution was gathering steam, and premiered on January 31, 1981, ten days after President Reagan’s inauguration. Under such circumstances, for theorists to attribute to “The Dining Room” an examination of the decline of WASP America and the deterioration of the upper-middle-class is a case of grievous mistiming of circumstance at best or boneheaded misreading of history at worst.
In all likelihood, Gurney, in “The Dining Room”, was writing about his own family, as has always been Gurney's practice in his plays (as the playwright has admitted on multiple occasions). Gurney no doubt took as his starting point various family dramas he personally witnessed or heard about, and used his imagination to proceed from there.
Many of the vignettes are funny, but more than a few leave a sour aftertaste. I suspect that Gurney, in his private life, was caught between loving his family members and loathing them.
The play calls for six actors to play fifty-some roles ranging in age from small children to elders in their dotage. The vignettes are played without pause, and on occasion overlap. What with all the role-switching, “The Dining Room” is not an easy play for actors—and this is especially so since the scenes are too short for any of the characters to emerge as anything other than archetypes. Actors, I believe, must find the play as much frustrating and pointless as challenging to their craft.
The play is frustrating for audiences, too, because there is no depth underlying its rapid-moving surface. The charm of the play quickly pales as the vignettes go on and on (and I believe that at least one of the vignettes was cut from the Theater In The Round production). Sitting through two-and-a-quarter hours of thin vignettes is akin to dining on course after course of puff pastry.
For “The Dining Room” to succeed, the play must be expertly cast and expertly directed. The play must also move with great swiftness, because audiences cannot be allowed an opportunity to analyze the play as it unfolds or else the play fails miserably.
The cast in the Theater In The Round production was not good. None of the actors was up to the many demands called for by the playwright.
The director of the Theater In The Round production did not know how to shape the material or bring it to life. There was silent thud after silent thud as each vignette ended. Some scenes were ponderous, others were too cute by half, most simply fell flat.
In short, everyone associated with this production seemed to be wrong for the project. I had seen productions of “The Dining Room” before last night, but until last night I had never seen a production in which literally nothing worked.
This was the third consecutive Theater In The Round production we found acutely disappointing. Earlier this season, we sat through Theater In The Round’s “Bus Stop” and “The Reluctant Debutante”, productions that were not necessarily embarrassing but productions that had little to recommend them. “The Dining Room” production, in contrast, was very much an embarrassment. Something has gone wrong with the company—Theater In The Round is the oldest repertory theater company in the Twin Cities, preceding The Guthrie by well over a decade, and has a long and distinguished history and tradition—and something must be done to right the ship.
Before the performance, we ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant downtown.
We started with fresh corn chowder with roasted Poblano peppers and queso fresco, and continued with tomato salad with watermelon, queso fresco and red chili vinaigrette.
We ordered (and shared) three different plates of seafood: crab empanadas with salsa verde and avocado; red snapper ceviche with avocado, radish and orange; and sugarcane-skewered tequila shrimp with lemon-ginger mojo.
We finished with grilled chicken quesadilla with roasted corn and Poblano peppers.
Our food was pleasing, but we shall never return to the restaurant. The servers were aggressive liquor-pushers, and would not take “no” for an answer.
After we declined to order cocktails upon sitting down, our waiter informed us that he would bring us tequila cocktails anyway, but that he would remove them from our bill if we found them displeasing.
“If we want cocktails, we will be sure to let you know” was my brother’s response.
The waiter nevertheless promptly brought us cocktails. As the waiter placed them on our table, my brother told him, very quietly, “You can remove these, or I can remove them. If I remove them, you will need to call a busboy to clean up the mess on the floor.”
The waiter lowered his eyes, and said, in a very smarmy tone, “Teetotalers, are we?”
My brother looked him right in the eye, and responded, “Minimum-wage employee, are we?”
My brother’s response froze the waiter in his tracks, which had been my brother’s intent. After more than thirty seconds of total silence, my brother motioned at the cocktails and, without again looking at the waiter, said, “Remove these. And send a different server to our table.”
The waiter complied—and, five minutes later, we were greeted by a different waiter.
The second waiter started out just as smarmy as the first. In a high-pitched, singsong voice, drawing out his syllables to interminable lengths, he said, “OK. I understand NO COCKTAILS here. No cocktails AT ALL. OK. We can work with that.”
My brother looked the new waiter in the eye, and asked, very pointedly, “Do you always talk like this?”
My brother’s question froze the second waiter, too. My brother allowed the waiter to stew in his discomfort for thirty seconds, and then my brother, without again looking at the waiter, said, “Give us five minutes, and we’ll be ready to order.”
When the waiter returned to our table, precisely five minutes later, he did not say a word. He stood, in silence, and waited for my brother’s instructions.
My brother placed our order, telling the waiter what we wanted, in what sequence we wanted the courses, how many minutes we preferred between the various courses, and what—if any—beverages we wanted with each course.
The waiter said nothing, but he nodded—and the waiter followed my brother’s instructions to the letter. The waiter served us, faultlessly, for the rest of our meal—and he never said another word.
When we were done with our dinner, we demonstrated noblesse oblige, and tipped the waiter 50 per cent of the bill.
This morning we will all go to the local nursery/greenhouse and pick out our Christmas tree. In my family, my mother has the privilege of selecting the tree.
At the nursery/greenhouse, we will meet up with my older brother and his family, because they, too, will be selecting their Christmas tree.
Once the trees have been selected, we will take my parents’ tree home and place the base in water, after which we will all go over to my older brother’s house and spend the day.
We shall help my older brother and his family trim the tree and hang evergreens (they will return the favor at my parents’ house tomorrow). My mother and my sister-in-law plan to bake a few Christmas cookies, simply to add to the kids’ excitement about the Christmas season getting underway. A dinner of prime rib is planned.
Dinner will be over by 6:30 p.m., because Josh and I plan to attend tonight’s Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra concert, which starts at 8:00 p.m.
Friday, December 02, 2011
Mitchum, Miles And Lean
Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles confer with director David Lean during the filming of "Ryan's Daughter".
