From the Ledge

The new decade arrived somewhat inauspiciously last week, but who would have thought on January 8, 2000 that on January 8, 2010 I would be heading into the third year of writing an energetic Chicago arts and culture blog?  Certainly not me.  It’s been a busy couple of weeks between holiday madness, recuperation from a nasty fall on Christmas Eve (don’t worry, dear readers, no broken bones!), and a business trip during the first week of the new year.  But I’ve been catching up on my potential Oscar-contending films (look out for an upcoming blog post with capsule comments on those I saw over the holidays) and planning my cultural expeditions for the next month (which may include a trip to Minneapolis to “experience” the cutting-edge theatrical piece, Call Cutta in a Box:  An Intercontinental Phone Play by the German performance group Rimini Protokoll, part of the Walker Art Center’s “Out There” theater series).  The most exciting news I heard this week was the confirmed off-Broadway transfer of Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, whose Chicago world premiere last fall was my pick for the Best Theater of 2009.  There’s no announced casting yet, but with Chicago director Eddie Torres, Artistic Director of Teatro Vista, taking the helm of the Second Stage production once again, and with the Chicago designers from the Victory Gardens production already confirmed to participate, I think the possibility of New Yorkers’ socks (and underwear, belts, scarves, lucky amulet necklaces, and all) being blown away by Desmin Borges’ stunning lead performance is a pretty real one.  So who’s still contradicting my vehement assertion that Chicago is the theater capital of the US? 

Tags: Second Stage, Teatro Vista, Victory Gardens Theater, Walker Art Center

In my day job as a business and organizational transformation consultant for a major consulting firm, I’m proud of the fact that I always seems to be at the right place at the right time.  Everytime I’m wrapping up a client project, a Chicago-based project seemingly miraculously appears.  Although I tell the candidates I interview for the company that our management consulting jobs are 100% travel, I really haven’t been on the typical Monday-Thursday consulting travel grind since late 2003. The cliche “good things never last” is a cliche, yes, but it’s true!  Last week, I started a client project that will have been travelling to the great Buckeye state for the next six weeks.  I’ll only be in Chicago from Friday to Sunday, which will mean less opportunities to go to arts and culture events, which will translate to a slowdown on blog posting.  It’ll be an adjustment (especially since summer in Chicago is quite lively with the Grant Park Music Festival, the season wrap-ups of the theater companies, etc.), but it’s the right move for me in terms of where my “real” career is right now and where I want it to be.  I’ll still try my hardest to post at least once a week, and if it’s not on an arts and culture event, it could be on my perspectives regarding things I’m reading, hearing, thinking about. I’ll also be attempting shorter blog posts as compared to the novella-like lengths that I sometimes go to.   I’d like to continue the dialogue and engagement with you my dear blog readers, so please feel free to continue leaving comments.  It could be a slow summer….but it’s not going to be a lifeless one.

Yep, blog posting has been sparse since the beginning of June, unfortunately, since I seem to have jumped on a careening, brake-less Metra train between dealing with lots of organizational transitions going on at my day job, helping the rest of the Board and the company of TUTA Theatre Chicago put on our annual fundraiser benefit (which we successfully pulled off last Sunday, June 7, yay, despite lots of anxiety and hairpulling, de rigueur for non-profit fundraisers of all kinds, I’ve come to find out), and co-chairing this year’s Steppenwolf Theatre Red or White Ball (which benefits the theater’s educational outreach, the Steppenwolf for Young Adults Program).  The Red or White Ball is tonight, and boy, if I was exhausted last year after the event, I’m not sure what state of physical and mental being I’ll be in tomorrow.  Putting up a fundraising event of this scope and scale is pretty intense, with lots of hard work and time commitment required, but I think it’s going to be a spectacular event for a cause I’m passionate about – as my blog readers know, I feel very strongly that the arts can only survive if we are able to successfully enthrall, convert  and immerse new audiences.  I’m psyched!  Despite all kinds of crazy busy schedules though, I still have a lot of things on my mind, so I’d like to give a shout out to these below (and there’ll be more blog posts starting next week!) Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: French Laundry, Guerrilla Truck Show, Hypocrites, Mary-Arrchie, Steppenwolf Theatre

Manny Pacquiao wins the title of World Light Welterweight Champion and is selected by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world. Kalamansi, a small, tart, lime-lemon-orange-type fruit indigenous to the Philippines and a staple of Filipino food and drink has started it’s ascent as one of this year’s fine dining ingredients du jour – Chef Curtis Duffy at the Peninsula Hotel Chicago’s five-star Avenues restaurant pairs it with king crab and steelhead roe and sends foodies into paroxysms of ecstasy.  Then, on Sunday, at the closing ceremonies of the Cannes Film Festival, arguably the most important cinema event in the world, Brillante Mendoza cemented his growing reputation as one of the future bright lights of world cinema by winning Best Director at the Festival for another divisive film, Kinatay (The Execution of P), his second time out at the Main Competition, beating out heavyweights such as Quentin Tarantino, Ang Lee, Pedro Almodovar, Alain Resnais, Jane Campion, and Lars von Trier, in a dream-team competition slate that film pundits had dubbed the auteur’s festival.  So is everything Filipino the new black???  Seriously though I am very very proud of Mendoza’s win, the first for a Filipino director, despite the fact that the most internationally-renowned Filipino director of all time, the late Lino Brocka, also competed for the Palme D’Or twice in the 1980s (for Jaguar and Bayan Ko).  From all accounts, Mendoza’s win was the one that caught everyone by surprise (and was allegedly booed by some attendees at the closing ceremony), since Kinatay, an unflinchingly violent tale about the abduction, rape, murder, and dismemberment of a prostitute by a gang of corrupt Manila policemen had been universally reviled at the Festival.  Roger Ebert called it the “worst film ever shown at the Cannes Film Festival”, even worse than The Brown Bunny, which he had previously, and famously, pronounced as the worst ever, causing the notorious media war with it’s director Vincent Gallo. Variety called it “unpleasant” and “banal”.  I remember seeing Mendoza back in 2005 at the Chicago International Film Festival, nervously and inarticulately leading a talkback after the screening of one of his first features, The Masseur, which I found then (and still do) to be derivative and exploitative.  He has made quite a name for himself since then, though, winning major festival acclaim in Cannes and Toronto for his subsequent features, Tirador (SlingShot) and Foster Child.  Last year’s Cannes main competition entry Serbis, a jawdroppingly outrageous story of a family running a theater which functioned as a meeting place for underage male hustlers and their gay johns, complete with explicit gay and straight sex, a boil on a lead character’s ass being popped in extreme close-up, and a goat chase through the theater, equally repulsed and delighted cineastes.  I personally really, really liked it, and found it to be a mature, socially-conscious, intricately-structured work.  I can’t wait to see Kinatay, which, with it’s Cannes win, will probably be highly visible this year in the film festival circuit and in art film theaters across the country, and really, why should I give a rat’s ass to what Roger Ebert thinks, right?  But, more importantly, as a Filipino and an arts and culture lover, I really would like to celebrate Brillante Mendoza – he has loudly and deservedly claimed his own exalted place in contemporary world cinema, but he has also, almost single-handedly, demonstrated the talent, imagination, sophisticated vision that Filipino artists have, and has made the world sit up and take notice of the Philippines once again.  The country has an abundance of talent and a rich history of artistic innovation, sometimes overlooked by a world which has devoted its Philippine-related headlines only to failed coup d’ etats, Imelda Marcos histrionics, or governmental graft and corruption.  It’s about time to change all of that.   Here’s a list of 2009 Cannes Film Festival winner, led by the Palme D’Or for Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon.  Photo:  Oh my, Mendoza receiving his prize from Terry Gilliam!  Faint and fall with a thud.

Tags: Brillante Mendoza, Cannes Film Festival

After years of Oscar-watching, soothsaying, trend-spotting, kvetching, and celebrating, I FINALLY know someone who is up for an Academy Award.  And in a major acting category at that.  Here’s a heartfelt, awe-inspired congratulations to Michael Shannon, A Red Orchid Theater founder/ensemble member, for his nomination in this year’s Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role category, for his terrific, film-stopping performance as Kathy Bates’ mentally unstable son in Revolutionary Road.  I’ve been volunteering with A Red Orchid Theater over the years through the Arts and Business Council of Chicago and it’s a Chicago theater company that is very close to my heart.  With Mike’s nomination and soon-to-be widespread name recognition, I am equally thrilled for Red Orchid since it was on their stage that Mike brought a lot of indelible performances to life such as the lead role in the original production of Tracy Letts’ Bug, as well as his first directorial effort, Ionesco’s Hunger and Thirst.  Although Mike is now an Academy Award-nominated movie star, I still think of him as a Chicago theater actor through and through, so his Oscar nomination is also fantastic for the city’s theatrical community.  Very, very cool!

Tags: Academy Awards, Red Orchid Theater

I remember the very first play I went to.  I was ten years old, and it was Annie, staged by Manila’s pre-eminent English language theater group, Repertory Philippines, and it starred an eight year old Lea Salonga, pride of the Philippines and future Tony winner (for Miss Saigon).  I remember being awestruck through it, as well as inspired and uplifted.  I remember keeping the show program for years, a habit that I continue to have to this day, just to keep on reminding me of the magical experience of that evening.  My mom brought me and my brother Judd to see it, because she loved musicals and live performance. I fell in love with the theater that night, and it has been a full-time love affair ever since.  My mom also loved looking at paintings and sculptures, and one of my most vivid memories is the two of us silently walking, inspired and immersed, among the Philippines’ national artist Juan Luna’s works in the National Museum in Manila, and staring open-mouthed at the splendor of his most famous work, the Spolarium.  Every year that my mom came to visit me in Chicago from Manila, we would have the MCA or the Art Institute AND a musical on the agenda (one year, we gushed all over Chita Rivera, when she was doing The Visit at the Goodman, and we told her we also both saw her in Kiss of the Spider Woman in New York oh so many moons ago).  Passion for the arts isn’t acquired overnight, it’s nurtured, cultivated, deepened over the years of continuous exposure to theater, or film, or art, or music, opera, literature.  It’s built upon a sense of intellectual curiosity, an open-mindedness to new experiences and to soak them in like a sponge, an ability to reflect and construct and deconstruct honed continuously and regularly.  I owe a lot of who I am today to my mom who was tireless in shaping her son’s life with new, interesting, different experiences; who encouraged interest, curiosity, and endless questions.  My mom passed away more than two years ago at 66 years old.  She never saw this blog come into being, but I think she’ll be pleased and tickled pink with it - she was always convinced that I could write exceptionally well, and was so proud all those years ago when I contributed feature articles to the Philippine Daily Inquirer as a lark, and when I wrote plays in high school and college that actually got staged and won awards.  Today, the day I turn forty, is a day for reflection and gratitude.  Thanks Mama!