Holy Reposting Batman

And in an odd turn of events, the National Post picks up the press release I sent out about my last blog and runs it in their blog...

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/theampersand/archive/2010/02/03/whiskey-bars-conflicting-pull-quotes-make-bremner-duthie-happy.aspx

the web is almost as strange as show business

Crazy Corrupt Carnival

In my show Whiskey Bars there's a line I stole from David Mamet; "Show business is a crazy corrupt carnival, and always will be." He's saying that if you want to be part of the business that is what you have to sign up for. I think he's right. The unpredictability of the whole thing is truly astounding.

Ten years ago I did a version of Whiskey Bars at the Toronto Fringe. The first evening was terrifying. I had sold quite a few ticks and I had five reviewers in the audience. The evening probably changed my life. The audience liked the show, a lot, and it began a run of growing numbers in the audience. I actually made money from my own work and creativity! The reviews however showed me how crazy the industry was.




The same show on the same night resulted in five completely different reviews, ranging from four stars and wild enthusiasm in Eye Magazine to 'nice show, could use some work on the script' in Now Magazine (which honestly I think was the most accurate for the state of the show at the time) to a strange almost hysterical attack in the Toronto Star. It was like they had seen five different shows. It cured me forever from taking reviews seriously. I suddenly realized 'oh, it's not about some intrinsic artistic worth of the show, it's totally subjective.' Since that time the show has made a lot of people laugh and cry around the world, and that is what has made it worthwhile for me.

Last week the show got another hysterically negative review, which read more like an attack than an artistic assessment of the work. It was wonderful and awful at the same time. Exhilarating and affirming that a show I wrote (which, if you've seen it, is a fairly simple proposition - I put on a tuxedo and sing a bunch of old songs)can inspire vitriol that seems out of proportion to the event. And a total drag, since I figured with only that one review it would kill the audiences and I'd have to cancel the run.





I turned up for the show last night and told the gang not to set anything up until we knew if we had an audience. I brought cake so we could have a little 'closing night party'. We sat on the stage and waited and chatted and stared at the cake and waited. And then, an hour before the show, Lisa poked her nose out to see if anyone was there. We had two people. Then another. Then another. The stage crew convinced me that since there were more people in the audience than on stage (not hard with a one-man!) I had to do the show. I was not thrilled, but we set up the stage and I retired to the back stage.

To cut a long story short, living up the unpredictable nature of show business, we ended up with the largest crowd we've had for the show. Not a sell out, but a great audience who seemed to love the show and who had come because of the review. That really awful review.





Maybe Oscar Wilde said it best... "The only worst thing than being talked about, is not being talked about"... or, less eloquently, but more to the point, as PT Barnum said, "All Publicity is Good Publicity"






or maybe I'll just never understand this surprising show business carnival...

Rites

In Paris was lucky enough to have ticks to the premiere of Igor and Coco, a docu-movie about the brief love affair between Stravinsky and Chanel. Honestly, I was dragged to it. Historical romance. Not my thing.

What I didn't realize was that the movie was a very non-romantic look at two immensely talented, creative people and how that creativity affected the way they lived their lives. The first long scene - a recreation of the riot caused by the Rite of Spring - is simply extraordinary. I think most amazing since the director managed to capture how the event might have actually felt.. inspiring and scary... I'm working on a new piece and I've been watching it again for that reason..

I put the trailer for it here (though honestly it makes it look like an overly dramatic chic flic)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As64A0vo7MM&feature=fvw



and the St. Petersburg Mariinsky's recreation of the dance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHiyVSuDJzg

The Room

Nice article on Cabaret in Art News - discusses an issue I always find difficult to explain - i.e. just what the hell is Cabaret anyway. Naked Girls in Feathers? Guys in Tuxedo and Whiteface? An unconnected set of skits? Provocation? Entertainment?

I think he's still defining it against that mainstay of US Cabaret - the aging singer hacking their way through a bunch of broadway songs in a wood paneled hotel bar - an entertainment form in which I have less than zero interest - but it's got some nice points...

"Main Entry: cab·a·ret
Pronunciation: \ˌka-bə-ˈrā, ˈka-bə-ˌ\
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from Middle French dial. (Picard or Walloon), from Middle Dutch, alteration of cambret, cameret, from Middle French dial. (Picard) camberete small room, ultimately from Late Latin camera -- more at chamber
Date: 1655
1 archaic : a shop selling wines and liquors
2 a : a restaurant serving liquor and providing entertainment (as by singers or dancers) : nightclub b : the show provided at a cabaret

There's only a small scene here in San Francisco. Mostly it's based out of a venue called The Rzazz Room, a low-ceilinged nook in a corner of the Hotel Nikko downtown. But other venues host cabaret-like events such as Yoshi's, Bimbo's, The Exit Theatre, The Eureka Theatre and the Marine's Memorial Theatre.

It's really a very amorphous artform that seems to feed on the outer edges of other more well-defined genres such as musical theatre, jazz and singer-songwriting. Few artists these days can be said to be truly indigenous to cabaret. I suppose that's not surprising when the word itself means a container for art -- the walls between which it exists -- than the art itself."

here's more of the article

Longer than a minute

A while ago I was cutting down some footage from Whiskey Bars and I showed it to a friend. He saw that it was three minutes long (cut from an hour long show). He shook his head and said, 'No one will ever watch this. It's too long. Get it down to below a minute." I took his advice, for better or worse, but lately it's been nagging me. When did our concentration level get to the point where more than a minute of focus seems like an effort. I recently watching the opera Les Troyens - all five and a half hours of it - and I can't say I really got into it until the second hour.

Anyway... enough ranting. I write that just because I'm putting up a new video for a song from the new album, 'The Sky Was Blue', and its four and a half minutes long. Quite a stretch for the new age. An homage to The Talking Heads, and the songwriting skills of David Byrne. Heaven.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvkRycrxro8



filmed in the Yukon in Dawson City, and at the best bar in Canada, the Pit, at the Westminster Hotel.

Unforgettable

Just back in from the most extraordinary piece of theatre. A Chilean troup performing 'Sin Sangre' (Without Blood) based on a book (short story?) by a Chilean writer. The most exquisite mixture of film and theatre. The whole performed behind one transparent movie screen, and in front of another, allowing them to layer amazing effects. And combined with a beautiful, simple, heartbreaking script. Just amazing. I am still in shock from how powerful the whole thing was. Combining video and theatre is hard enough at the best of times, but making a piece based around this combination, and then making it into real theatre.... wow!

I post the trailer for the piece, which does it no justice, and link to a film (of the film) of the whole piece from a festival in France.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BocoVCpVYpE



and an 'arte' video of the whole show

http://liveweb.arte.tv/fr/video/Sin_Sangre_au_festival_Temps_d_images/

You never stop

The end of the year coming up and I'm trying to wrap up a million projects, while do the admin for a million projects coming up and strangely enough I don't have a million hours in the day to do it. Sometime I curse the fact as an artist you stumble out of bed, wash your face (not compulsory) and then there you are, working. And the day continues until late at night you find yourself... working. And sometimes I bless that fact. Since if you love your work, it means you get to keep on doing it, and doing it, and doing it.

Here's Baryshnikov in his 50's working and working...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIZ0KLLzs5U



If I'm lucky, I'd like to be doing what I do, like he's still doing what he does. That would be amazing.

Most boring, and most documented?

Sometime in the ancient pre-history of the 1980's I had the pleasure of seeing the first North American gig of the band New Order (the reformed Joy Division, after the suicide of their lead singer). The excitement was intense, the crowd was pumped up and we were jammed against the edge of the stage desperate to see what was going to happen.

About half an hour into the gig, I started to notice my attention, along with most of the crowd, start to wander away. Skinny hipster musicians (ok, they weren't called hipsters then, but you know what I mean) staring at the keyboards and synthesizers and pressing buttons. I don't think they even looked up at us or said anything. The rest of the gig was spent at the bar, with the rest of the crowd, occasionally checking over our shoulders to see if they were 'doing anything'.

Not until this iphone concert have I considered that there could be much, much more boring ways of making music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BfPHs-hdkU

Amazing review for Lisa's new (first!) novel

Read the whole article here.





a couple of choice quotes

"Toronto-based Lisa Pasold's debut novel is as enticing as the lit-up Las Vegas strip and as satisfying as a winning hand at poker."

and

"Millard is an exceptionally refreshing heroine -- wonderfully independent and completely unwilling to rely on anyone else for her needs. Millard's first-person account of her story is wonderful. Though she's celebrated for her bluffing skills during games of poker, she's thoughtful and straightforward with the reader."

Mathew Herbert, 1st prize for obsessive and wonderful recording methods

I wish I could say the final result was more amazing. I mean, it ends up being well crafted and listenable ambient dance music, and considering how many crappy versions of that exist, I guess that's already great. But, whatever you think of the final result, the means he uses to get there are amazing and beautiful. In this video he's up in a hot air balloon, or sitting in the ocean waves recording drum tracks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktBApsVyCm4



These days I'm all about process... the means justifying the ends... and what a wonderful process this would be... I'm gonna make sure my next project ends up with me doing research in a hot air balloon!

books come alive

Thanks New Zealand film board for this extraordinary piece of animation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_jyXJTlrH0

Theatre Fails America... Canada too?

Great essay by Monologist Mike Daisey on American theatre. Or perhaps the slow death of the possibility of ever having a paying career in the theatre in America.


"The regional theater movement tried to create great work and make a vibrant American theater tradition flourish.

That dream is dead. The theaters endure, but the repertory companies they stood for have been long disbanded. When regional theaters need artists today, they outsource: They ship the actors, designers, and directors in from New York and slam them together to make the show.

Not everyone lost out with the removal of artists from the premises. Arts administrators flourished as the increasingly complex corporate infrastructure grew. Marketing and fundraising departments in regional theaters have grown hugely, replacing the artists who once worked there, raising millions of dollars from audiences that are growing smaller, older, and wealthier. It's not such a bad time to start a career in the theater, provided you don't want to actually make any theater."





when I think of some of the amazing, huge, beautiful theatres I have performed in all over the world that sit empty most of the time because it is simply too expensive to program theatre in the spaces that were designed to perform theatre, I wonder how true this essay is everywhere right now.

you can find the whole article here

Playing in the sandbox

A few shots of the wonderful production of Hamlet with Forward Theatre. I had the pleasure of playing Hamlet's Father (aka 'the ghost') and the Player King.





It was a great production. Sometimes, when you're doing a show, you just have to put your head down and ignore some choices that the production team are making and just do your best job with your part.





Chris Legacy (the director) managed to pull off a great looking production that was an amazing present for the actors and for the audience. It was smart, challenging, inventive and tragic. A huge sandbox surrounded by tiers of risers with chairs and cushions, and the whole scattered with piles of lovely red and gold autumn leaves that Chris must have been collecting for weeks.





In behind Chris hung a huge curtain that served a dozen purposes - a backdrop to anchor the set, the closet in which Polonius hangs, a ghostly shade in which the Ghost appears, a red river of blood when Hamlet kills Polonius, the shroud for his body after it falls.... etc etc The Fight Choreographer for the show was remarkable - the various kinds of violence that are so necessary to this piece looked extraordinary.

Jeremy Trite, our technician, took a pic of the end of the Player King's speech... you can recognize me by the top of my head...




I'm not in the final scene of slaughter at the court so I was able to race into the balcony and snap a quick pic of the final scene before racing back down for the bows. Here's a blurry shot of the final kill of Claudius. (Dagger to the throat... ouch!)

The most amazing scat

I think I've posted this before. But couldn't resist again. The scintillating young Louis Armstrong in the prime of his invention...

hacking at the brazilians

Sick like a dog this weekend, had tickets for the amazing Brazilian singer Gal Costa, so took at taxi down and sat huddled up with a huge smile on my face in the back of the amazing Massey hall. Sadly she didn`t do my favourite, `Baby`written with Caetano Vaeloso, but she was simply wonderful.



now I`m heading to bed with a hot toddy and whole bunch of aspirin and some beautiful bossa nova rhythms dancing in my befuddled brain...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTUnRlW_rVE