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howeirdWhen I was the A&E editor of my campus paper, my policy was to never review a performance unless there was going to be another one the readers could see for themselves. I hate to break this rule because regardless of what I think of a show, someone out there will enjoy it, and may go just to see if it could possibly be as bad as all that.
I'll break the rule here, because the only show I was able to attend was the final performance of a very short run of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Sorcerer at Stanford, presented by the Savoyards.
Standard disclaimer: I have been onstage twice, backstage several times, and directed once for this group.
Advertised as a "Bollywood" style production, I wanted very much for this experiment to work. I thought it was a fun idea, and would have worked on the production if I hadn't been in the throes of changing jobs and moving.
It didn't work. Or I should say it fell well short of its potential.
The idea was to dress up a G&S show as set in India, and with a big cast of singers and dancers with more choreography and over-the-top acting than most Americans see in a decade.
Where they succeeded: The four women dancers were excellent, and their costumes superb. The one male dance was excellent. The three women dressed up as male dancers, and their costumes, left much to be desired - they looked like Pakistani prison uniforms. They needed far more dancers, and much more Indian style dancing to make this work. They also needed Indian instruments in the orchestra. Instead of Bollywood, the show seemed like The Sorcerer with women in saaris and men in whatever you call those Indian tunics. After the female dancer costumes, the best outfits in the lot were two of the Victorian women's dresses.
There was a lot of Bollywood style dancing in the first few scenes, but much of the G&S music did not lend itself, and it looked like by the time they got to Act II they had pretty much given up on the theme.
But more disappointing for me than the experiment not working, the show as a whole did not work for me either. Stanford Savoyards used to mount professional quality shows with a mixture of the best talent from the community and students and staff. They altered that a few years ago to favor students, but now it appears they will cast students in major roles whether or not they are capable of performing their parts. The role of the Vicar was painful to listen to. This is a part for a middle-aged man, was played by a boy who looked like he was not yet old enough to drink, and had no idea what notes he was supposed to be singing. The other leads were okay, but just okay. Musical direction was not very good, lots of wrong notes in the orchestra and poor intonation in the multi-part songs. The set was just a simple series of flats, a set of steps, and a cartoonish mural of an Indian elephant-headed god with his trunk in what appeared to be a bowl of popcorn. Special effects featured two smoke machines which sounded like a 747 taking off, and produced about 10% as much smoke as was needed. There were no real lighting effects, though the play calls for several.
In short, it was like an average college production. Sigh.
I'll break the rule here, because the only show I was able to attend was the final performance of a very short run of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Sorcerer at Stanford, presented by the Savoyards.
Standard disclaimer: I have been onstage twice, backstage several times, and directed once for this group.
Advertised as a "Bollywood" style production, I wanted very much for this experiment to work. I thought it was a fun idea, and would have worked on the production if I hadn't been in the throes of changing jobs and moving.
It didn't work. Or I should say it fell well short of its potential.
The idea was to dress up a G&S show as set in India, and with a big cast of singers and dancers with more choreography and over-the-top acting than most Americans see in a decade.
Where they succeeded: The four women dancers were excellent, and their costumes superb. The one male dance was excellent. The three women dressed up as male dancers, and their costumes, left much to be desired - they looked like Pakistani prison uniforms. They needed far more dancers, and much more Indian style dancing to make this work. They also needed Indian instruments in the orchestra. Instead of Bollywood, the show seemed like The Sorcerer with women in saaris and men in whatever you call those Indian tunics. After the female dancer costumes, the best outfits in the lot were two of the Victorian women's dresses.
There was a lot of Bollywood style dancing in the first few scenes, but much of the G&S music did not lend itself, and it looked like by the time they got to Act II they had pretty much given up on the theme.
But more disappointing for me than the experiment not working, the show as a whole did not work for me either. Stanford Savoyards used to mount professional quality shows with a mixture of the best talent from the community and students and staff. They altered that a few years ago to favor students, but now it appears they will cast students in major roles whether or not they are capable of performing their parts. The role of the Vicar was painful to listen to. This is a part for a middle-aged man, was played by a boy who looked like he was not yet old enough to drink, and had no idea what notes he was supposed to be singing. The other leads were okay, but just okay. Musical direction was not very good, lots of wrong notes in the orchestra and poor intonation in the multi-part songs. The set was just a simple series of flats, a set of steps, and a cartoonish mural of an Indian elephant-headed god with his trunk in what appeared to be a bowl of popcorn. Special effects featured two smoke machines which sounded like a 747 taking off, and produced about 10% as much smoke as was needed. There were no real lighting effects, though the play calls for several.
In short, it was like an average college production. Sigh.
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Were is Ashawaria Rai when you need her?
Date: 2006-11-20 01:50 pm (UTC)Ana cheya cheya chey a chey a
Re: Were is Ashawaria Rai when you need her?
Date: 2006-11-20 04:10 pm (UTC)The "student production" argument doesn't hold water here, Stanford Savoyards is a community theater which uses minimal student body funds, and has enough faculty and staff participation to justify using campus space for its activities. Again, the producers just did not take this project seriously.
It's kind of ironic, that. You have to take the project seriously in order to have the most fun doing it.
Re: Were is Ashawaria Rai when you need her?
Date: 2006-11-20 06:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-21 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-21 08:00 am (UTC)Sorcerer--you had to be there
Date: 2006-11-21 04:37 am (UTC)The Savoyards has had almost a complete turnover since you were in the group, with Keith and me being among the few "old-timers" left (and I took a break for a few years and came back). It's really good to see so many students involved--even if they look "too young", they are the fresh blood the Savoyards has needed desperately for years.
I'm really pleased with how well the production came out, both "in spite of the problems we had" and in general. Everyone really worked hard on it. True, it's not perfect. Yes, it would have been nice to have had more male dancers and maybe other cast members, but we can only choose from the people who come to audition, as always.
As for the set, I designed it to be really simple for two reasons: 1) lots of people and dancers on the stage meant I had to leave as much space for them as possible. 2) I had to assume I'd be working with a skeleton build crew (which was true), and that I'd be painting most of it myself (and definitely all the "skilled" painting), which I did. I spent 13 hours painting just the Ganesha. And btw, he was very true to representations I found on the web, with one broken tusk, the various things he is holding (the trunk is in a bowl of an Indian sweet called modok), and so on. You might want to read up at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganesha. :-)
Anyway, I'm sorry you were disappointed in the show. We had a great time doing it and were quite pleased with how it came out. --Sara
no subject
Date: 2006-11-21 08:47 am (UTC)If we once or twice had a professional-looking show, it was a fluke.
I beg to differ. There was a stretch there where we had two master carpenters building sets, a couple of very fine artists making them look great, and veteran G&S stars coming from all over the Bay Area to audition. The orchestra was a fine group, directed by masters and doctoral students in the conductors' program (which I understand no longer exists).
The reason there has been a complete turn-over is the group's charter changed from putting an emphasis on the quality of the production to putting an emphasis on student participation. When this change of direction started, I was all for it, since the attitude of the board was to cast students who auditioned well enough to perform the parts. But this has changed to pretty much block out members of the community in favor of students, whether they can perform the part or not.
I've been in several Palo Alto productions with excellent young leads - Annie, Oliver! (twice) and Peter Pan (twice). The last Pirates I was in featured a 14-year-old Mabel who knocked my socks off. There were a couple of fine young voices in Sorcerer as well (Constance, for instance), but there were some who just should not have been playing leads.
The "too young" comment was more to do with makeup, costume and directing than the chronological age of the performers. I have been playing old man parts since I was 15. Part of that experience was learning how to apply liquid latex, create natural-looking wrinkles, using shoe polish as hair coloring, and learning to walk and talk "old". The fellow who played the Notary did an excellent job, so why not everyone else in an older role?
Yes, it's difficult to find male bodies for any theater group, but who shows up at auditions is not magic - it depends on how well the staff publicizes. This particular production needed lot of word of mouth in the Indian community which it didn't seem to get. Bollywood requires a huge cast of dancers, I was very disappointed there were only eight of them.
As for Ganesha, yes, it's accurate and I apologize for calling it cartoon-like. While a lot of work went into it, you have to understand that I lived in SE Asia for about three years and saw a ton of Indian art work, and expect a lot more illumination around a god painting. And bare sponged-on or rollered-on paint for the walls was also not up to the Bollywood theme. It needed more time and more artists than were available, but finding people to do the work is part of the fun.