I am back in Minneapolis this week for the Thanksgiving holidays; it’s the city I lived in when I first moved to the US for graduate school back in the days when no one could fathom that stringing the letters b-l-o-g together could stand for something significant or meaningful (way back in the mid-90s to be honest). It’s a city that I will always hold close to my heart, not just because of the vivid, life-altering memories I have of my life here, the numerous close friends I still have living here, but also because, and it may come as a surprise to many, it’s thriving and interesting cultural and artistic life. Minneapolis isn’t just the city of Larry Craig’s tea-room shenanigans, of the Coen brothers’ surreal, darkly funny Midwest, or the place where bad clothes happen to really good-looking people; it’s a city where theatre is alive and booming and where major art exhibitions are created and sent out to the world. The Guthrie Theatre, majestic in its new building, and the Walker Arts Center, are two cultural institutions that are heads above shoulders of many of its peers in the North America. No Guthrie play for me this trip, but I do have tickets for the Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s latest production, a re-invention of Marivaux’s infrequently produced farce, “The Deception”. I am also planning to take in the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Walker. Look out for my blog entries on both soon.
Interesting reading on my Google reader this morning: Rob Kozlowski’s various postings on theater critics, Charles Isherwood of the New York Times, and Hedy Weiss of the Chicago Sun-Times, in particular. There have been lots of blog ink spilled over the past week on Jon Robin Baitz’s scathingly passionate hazing of Isherwood primarily and Ben Brantley, secondarily, in response to a typically moronic Isherwood article on playwrights and the Writer’s strike. I am surprised that the New York Times continues to think it is the final arbiter on artistic taste when it provides valuable newsprint space to types like Isherwood and Brantley, who obviously abhor the theatrical creative process, and who also obviously are envious of the playwrights, actors, and directors that they mercilessly skewer. Baitz’s description of Brantley’s theater reviews as ”gushy and woozy and adrift in a language derived from OK!, or Teen Beat…” is classic.
Rob also has a post a couple of blog entries down about how Hedy Weiss’s non-review of the Court Theatre’s “What the Butler Saw” (which I loved and am encouraging people to go and see) was indicative of her anti-Joe Orton bias and whether it was appropriate for her to even review the play when it was apparent that she would not like it, and would have nothing to say about it, regardless of how well-staged and well-acted the piece was. It’s a question to ponder, I agree: why would a critic even say bother saying something when what he or she is saying is really nothing? In my mind, a critic gets paid for expressing an informed opinion, for providing education and advocacy, for being one funnel for audiences to make educated choices as to where they would spend their disposable dollar on, not, yet again, for wasting valuable newsprint space.
On more pleasant topics, I read through Mark Geelhoed’s wonderful “Giving Thanks” blog entry today. I share many of his gratitudes (good health, good mental health, family, friends and new friends, friends in far-flung places, opera, and yes, linen pants in the summer, regardless of the spectacle mine made during BFF Sydney’s birthday party a couple of years ago) but the blog post made me think of my own small graces. I am thankful also for the following:
- for those moments during the course of the past year where my heart stopped and I had to literally pick my jaw and other pieces of my anatomy off the floor - the strewing of garbage on the stage in Ivo Von Hove’s radical reinterpretation of “The Misanthrope” or the dining room sequence of “August: Osage County” or Jennifer Hudson singing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” in Dreamgirls;
- for sharing the experience of seeing Philip Glass perform his music live at Ravinia with my brother Judd who was awe-inspired by it all;
- for small generous acts and kind words;
- for friends who I learn from, not only about new things and of new information, but who also teach me that it’s a heck of lot easier to not be petty, or dramatic, or unreasonably demanding, or passive-aggressive, then it is to be;
- for living in Chicago and its multitude of opportunities;
- for being maddeningly, contradictorily, but undeniably Filipino - in how I relate to people, and in my worldview;
- for this blog which has provided me with the satisfying channel to be creative, reflective, disciplined, and coherent; and to be able to share these modest writings with a group of people who hopefully find them interesting and thought-starting (with a very special and grateful shout-out to my dear friend Tom, without whose encouragement and hard work, this blog would not exist).
Recent Comments