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2/23: Cowboys, Cukes, Bachelors ‘n Blues
February 23, 2012
Upstairs, Downstairs: In a career that presaged the whole Ameri-cousticana thing, Cowboy Junkies have had their share of…well, you know…but when they hit Monmouth U on Friday night, they’ll be bringing some delightful stylistic swerves from just this side of No-Mad’s Land…
It’s no exaggeration to suggest that it took an obscure band from Canada, recording with a single microphone in an old church, to chart a new course for American music in the new millennium. That the band was rather casually named Cowboy Junkies should never detract from the seriousness of the accomplishment.
Arriving as it did in the thick of a decade defined by synth drums, moussed hair and video playlists, 1988’s double platinum album The Trinity Session came as a breath of cool and refreshing air, from a place where “roots” didn’t necessarily refer to a problem for one’s stylist to address.
On Trinity, the Ontario-based Junkies — siblings Margo, Michael and Peter Timmins on vocals, guitar and drums respectively, plus Alan Anton on bass — brought a deceptively simple, quiet power to a set of originals and covers that ranged from Hank Williams and Patsy Cline to the Velvet Underground; propelling their next four albums to gold or platinum status, and helping to blaze a trail for the back-to-basics Americana musical movement of the 21st century.
Still together in its original lineup, the band has logged many miles on the road and issued many more releases on its own Latent Records label — including 2007’s Trinity Revisited, a new version of the breakthrough album recorded with guests that included Ryan Adams and Natalie Merchant. In 2010, the members of Cowboy Junkies embarked on an ambitious, four-album project entitled The Nomad Series — a cycle of self-released works that includes an entire set of songs by the late Vic Chesnutt (Demons) and the surprisingly hard-edged, electric Sing in My Meadow. Really, at a time when a new hypie generation trips over itself to come off Rootsier Than Thou, the folks who pretty much started this whole thing have taken a turn for the Sonic Youth side of the street.
Just days before the scheduled release of The Wilderness, the fourth and final entry in the series — the musical nomads from Toronto journey to the West Long Branch campus of Monmouth University, for an 8pm performance on the stage of the Pollak Theatre this Friday night, Feb the 24.
Presented by the Center for the Arts at Monmouth as part of the 2011-2012 Performing Arts series, the concert will showcase numbers from the new, all original set of songs; many of which have been part of the band’s live sets in recent years (and several of which are said to have been inspired by Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead).
With the core quartet joined by multi-instrumentalist Jeff Bird, audience members can expect an evening that runs the gamut from the folky intimacy of the band’s earliest efforts, to an always surprising selection of covers (Springsteen, Stones, Talking Heads, The Cure) to the “acid blues” and sonic experiments of recent seasons — although to be sure, delivering “the expected” has never been part of the Cowboy Junkies playbook. Pollak Theatre at Monmouth University, Cedar and Norwood Aves., West Long Branch • Friday 2/24 at 8pm/ $35 – $55
But why stop there? Flip the rekkid over for MORE picks toward the weekend ahead…
2/20: It’s the Crane House Movie Club!
February 20, 2012
Acclaimed mystery novelist, suspense genre authority, former newspaperguy (and O.G. original gangsta) WALLACE STROBY is the guest programmer for the first in a new series of Crane House Movie Club events, happening on Sunday, March 11 right here at the Stephen Crane House! (Photo by Patti Sapone)
Over here at the Stephen Crane House — the historic and literarily legendary Asbury Park landmark that also serves as the home office of this bloviatin’ blog — the sluggish segue from mild winter into mucky Wet Side spring is charged with a certain Spring Cleaning energy that can’t wait for that narrow window between Too Cold to Work Around This Un-insulated House and Too Hot to Work Around this Un-insulated House.
We’ve been getting back into gear in recent days, scraping some of the accrued barnacles off this 19th century “cottage” that’s served as everything from a proper Christian lady’s parlour to a post-nuke Asbury flophouse (and almost-scuttled squat) and reorganizing some of those out-of-control rooms back into some semblance of a reclaimed public space — about which more in a moment.
We’ve also got some thoughts and plans regarding the Crane House theater and screening room, the downstairs in-house venue that’s hosted all manner of quirky stage plays, readings, house-party concerts and a monthly words-and-movie series programmed by Crane House owner Frank D’Alessandro. It’s there that “Mr. D” presented a birthday salute to Charles Dickens this past Sunday (with featured film George Cukor’s sparkling MGM take on David Copperfield) — and it’s there that we’ll be introducing a new film-buff’s series that could ONLY be called The Crane House Movie Club.
Offered up free of charge and open to the public, The Crane House Movie Club is a not-so-secret society dedicated to the viewing, digestion, discussion (and, sometimes dissing) of Film — conceivably any kind of film, from Janus-collection French Nouvelle Vague and wartime Euro-exile Hollywood, to stuff that wouldn’t have been out of place at old-school Asbury grindhouses like the Park and Baronet. It’s a real-world place to gather, enjoy some refreshments and argue balls ‘n strikes with your fellow cinema enthusiasts — as well as meet and participate in a Q&A with a special invited guest programmer, and take in a roomful-of-people screening of a feature presentation that’s been personally selected by our guest.
We’re pleased and proud to announce the early evening of Sunday, March 11 as the first call-to-meetin’ of the Crane House Movie Club — and we’re just as pleased to announce that our guest programmer for that inaugural event will be the award-winning mystery novelist (and eminent authority on all things crimey and suspensey) Wallace Stroby.
Now open to public perusal for the first time in a dog’s age, the upstairs library at the Crane House is a work in progress that boasts one of the area’s most extensive collections of works by and about Stephen Crane — as well as works by his friends and contemporaries and a number of historically fascinating antique volumes.
A resident of Ocean Grove, Stroby used his background as a classic old-school newspaperman (breaking-news reporter for the Asbury Park Press; arts editor at the Star Ledger) — to say nothing of his life experience on the mean streets of O.G. and its “evil twin” A.P. — to craft his debut novel, The Barbed Wire Kiss, a thriller of misplaced loyalties and overdue paybacks that starred a former state trooper, and used the tired, peeling Tillie-face of our local seaside haunts as an effective backdrop. Asbury Park (and that same ex-cop) figured heavily in his followup effort The Heartbreak Lounge — and since taking the plunge into a full-time career as a working fiction master, Stroby’s traveled the country making personal appearances, and picked up massive raves for such recent-vintage hardboilers as Gone Til November (a book that The Huffington Post said “puts author Wallace Stroby in the company of noir masters like Dashiell Hammett and Elmore Leonard”) and Cold Shot to the Heart. With his latest novel Kings of Midnight (in which a female thief who’s trying to go straight and a “retired” mobster cross paths with five million bucks in “buried” heist money at stake), Stroby has truly arrived: as witness his book’s recent plug in New York Magazine’s The Approval Matrix; an appearance that positions Kings at pretty close to BRILLIANT (if just this side of LOWBROW).
Stroby, a genuine movie fan with whom we’ve had the pleasure of co-hosting a showing of Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing at The Showroom a few years back, will be introducing a screening of one of his favorite suspensers on March 11 — and while we’re unable to announce the title right at this moment, chances are excellent that it’ll stand as a Stroby-stamped example of effective book-into-film translation (unless of course he opts for a newish find like The Man From Nowhere). We’ll have a pre-film talk with the author, with signing copies of his books available for purchase and complimentary ‘freshments + face time before and after the screening (feel free to contribute to the snackpile).
Again, that’s Sunday, March 11, with the Crane House door creaking open at 4:30pm; pre-show starts at 5, the film screens at 5:30 and it’s open-ended from there. Admission’s free as we mentioned, although it’s not a bad idea to give us a RSVP via the Facebook link at top of the page. Stay tuned for more details on this and future assemblies of The Crane House Movie Club, right here on the upperWETside!
In other Crane House news: the upstairs library “red room” is, as referenced in the photo caption above, once more open to the public after a fairly extensive tearing up/ hosing down/ putting back together again that involved what amounted to an archaeological dig through the boxes, grottoes and crannies of this circa 1878 structure. While it’s still a bit rough around the edges — books are not arranged to any approved librarian standard, and we promise to gradually replace all the Post-Its and Ziploc bags with classier versions of same — the room has an appropriately muted and musty vibe that frames one of the area’s finer collections of novels, stories, poems and nonfiction pieces by Stephen Crane, the American novelist and journalist best known for the Civil War tale The Red Badge of Courage. We’ve got first and early editions of his books, vintage magazines with his stories, a host of bios and critical studies, along with selected volumes by his major influences, friends and contemporaries (including Dickens, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde and Henry James) as well as those who were influenced in turn by Crane (Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather and more). Lots more where that came from, including some other vintage literary volumes and other fascinating printed artifacts of period life (some of them as old as 1818).
It’s on view in what’s officially branded “The Chris Hayes Room” (various rooms in the Crane House are named for members of the Hayes Family who purchased the home at 508 Fourth Avenue and rescued it from wrecking-ball oblivion) — and our plans for the coming months involve a freshening up of many of the other rooms at the Crane, with progress reports right here as things, uh, progress…
2/20: Phoenix Rises to the Occasion
February 19, 2012
Dan Peterson reprises the PRODUCERS showstopper “I Want to Be a Producer,” when Phoenix Productions celebrates its 25th anniversary this Saturday at the Count Basie.
They come from all walks of life — suits and students; public servants and professionals; homemakers and hobbyists. Some have even made a go at show business as a career — but if the hundreds of actors, singers and dancers who have appeared with Phoenix Productions have one great thing in common, it’s that they get to strut their stuff on the same stage that’s hosted the likes of Tony Bennett, George Carlin, Al Pacino, Cary Grant, and a Boss named Bruce.
That stage is of course the Count Basie Theatre, where for eight weekends out of each year the folks at Red Bank’s resident community theater company offer up an array of musical favorites that have ranged from old favorites (Annie, Fiddler, The King and I) to new phenoms (High School Musical, Hairspray, Rent). It’s an affiliation that has spurred the borough-based Phoenix phalanx to artistic and technical heights undreamed of by church-basement troupers — and here in 2012, it’s a self-set standard that’s expected to be met and exceeded during the company’s milestone 25th season (the company has also done performances of select shows at Lakewood’s Strand for the past few seasons).
This Saturday night, February 25, the Basie building will serve as host venue for 25 Years of Phoenix: An Evening of Music and Memories — an event in which over two dozen veterans of past Phoenix productions perform a set of signature tunes from 20 of the more than 100 shows that Phoenix has mounted since their first summer-stock endeavors in 1988. Scheduled to appear are such returning guest stars as David Weitzer (last year’s Sweeney Todd), former Miss New Jersey Amy Polumbo (Cinderella) and Debby Dutcher (Broadway’s Phantom), along with such Phoenix phaves as Todd Aikens, Jennifer Forziati, Martin Grubman and Michael Kroll.
The 8 pm concert event is preceded by a 6 pm VIP Cocktail Party in the Basie’s Carlton Lounge, and followed by a 10 pm reception with the cast inside the Phoenix Rehearsal Center, the troupe’s HQ (and the one-time “other WaWa” for Red Bank old-timers) located right next door to the Count’s castle at 111 Monmouth Street.
Also on the agenda is the endearingly traditional raffle drawing, conducted by Phoenix founding father, board chairman and Red Bank resident Tom Martini. A silent auction boasts some fairly star-kissed items up on the block; fitting for a troupe of “weekend warriors” whose list of Honorary Trustees includes the likes of Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman and Olympia Dukakis. UpperWETside put in an early bid for an interview with the not-easily-shaken Mr. Martini.
2/12: Dropping In, with Chocolates
February 12, 2012
Everything old is new again — and so’s the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the new lineup of which (Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens and Hubby Jenkins, with guest cellist Leyla McCalla absent on picture day) visits the Pollak Theatre at Monmouth U on February 17.
Carolina Chocolate Drops, you had us with the spoons. Or was it the bones? The jugs? The quills?
Whatever. Just because a band gets period-precise (or rummages the kitchen junk drawer) in pursuit of an authentic “old timey” sound doesn’t make them any less than hypercurrent — provided the music is purveyed in the raucous spirit of a fruitjar corn-squeezins barndance shivaree, rather than a sleepy sermon or a fusty lecture.
Rest assured that the Chocolate Drops are THAT old-timey, thanks to their collective scholarly specialty — the black string band/ jug band music that began to capture the nation’s fancy right around the time that scratchy radios and 78 rpm Victrola records started replacing battered pianos and sheet music in American homes. Call it “dirt floor music” — but reckon that a dirt floor can be a firm foundation on which to construct a happy house made up of field-recording folk, crossroads blues, hayride bluegrass and speakeasy jazz, with a permit posted for new additions like hipster alt-country and houseparty hip-hop.
And yeah, the Chocolate Drops are THAT new-fangled, thanks to a deft mastery of social media and post-musicbiz meltdown marketing — a DIY savvy that’s allowed the Piedmont-spawned combo to top the Billboards, play the Grand Old Opry (first black string band EVER to do so, if you can believe that) and win a Grammy for their 2010 major label debut Genuine Negro Jig, nary five years from the time that founders Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson first made each other’s acquaintance via a Yahoo group.
They’ve even got a new lineup — with NYC-based multi-instrumentalizer Hubby Jenkins replacing Robinson in the core trio — and it’s this troupe of troubadors (augmented by cellist Leyla McCalla) that visits the Upper Wet Side for the first time on Friday night, February 17, for a concert at Monmouth University‘s Pollak Theatre.
The 8pm show — for which the opening act is the hot ‘n spicy bluegrass blueplate specialties of the Brooklyn-bred M Shanghai String Band (look here for our past interview with Monmouth County mandolin master Richard Morris) — occurs just under two weeks in front of the “drop date” for Leaving Eden, the band’s followup release on the Nonesuch label and the first recorded evidence of the current CCD configuration.
Recorded in the home studio of lately legendary Americana-man Buddy Miller — producer of Solomon Burke’s Nashville and some seminal sessions by Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris and Robert Plant — Leaving Eden finds the Carolina Chocolate Drops fortified by McCalla plus human beatbox (and occasional tourmate) Adam Matta for a set of fifteen chestnuts and original seedlings that run a gamut and a gauntlet between instrumental and a capella; mournful plaints of loss and gleeful declarations of independence; barndance breakdowns and rocking-chair reveries.
We got an advance listen to this warm and inviting (but still playfully boundary-busting) platter, and we dug especially the band’s driving rip through the high-mileage hillbilly chestnut “Ruby Are You Mad at Your Man;” the jaunty bee-sting twang of “Mahalla” (we swear it sounds like one of Jonathan Richman’s friendly folk instros) and the ominous back-country detour through “West End Blues.” Taking the majority of the vocal leads, singer-fiddler-banjobelle Rhiannon Giddens is in awesome form, as evidenced on the trilling Ethel Waters strutter “No Man’s Mama” and her self-penned “Country Girl,” a hiphop-infused spotlight track that stakes a claim to new corners of the band’s stylistic turf.
Flemons, the Arizona-born banjo expert and former National Poetry Slam competitor whose multi-faceted contributions also include vocals, African gourd and the aforementioned quills (think of an Irish tin whistle’s African cousin), stopped to chat for a spell somewhere on the road between the Piedmont and Eden.
2/9: Your Weekend Forecast on the 7′s
February 9, 2012
The Glamour Girls canvases of Holly Suzanne Rader — exemplified here by a detail from DICK & CANDY — are on display during a reception for GLAMit, this Saturday evening at Glen Goldbaum’s two neighboring Bridge Avenue salons.
His parties, alive with art and music and anybody-who’s-anybody people, are precisely the sort of under-the-radar events that you’d spend all night seeking out if you were looking for that elusive “something completely different” — the kind of happenings that should by all rights be too-cool and impossibly exclusive, were it not for the fact that they’re fully free of charge and open to friends old and new.
Last we looked in on Glen Goldbaum, the superstar Manhattan stylist turned catalyst for a creative new vision on Red Bank’s west side was hosting an event branded as Bewitched, a “magical evening of fantasy, hair, art and more” that transformed his two neighboring Bridge Avenue hair/ eye/ makeups (Glen Goldbaum 72 and Lambs & Wolves Den of Beauty) into an environment populated by winged fantasy characters, live mannequins and guest conceptualizers from Asbury Park’s Cookman Avenue “Arts Bloc.”
This Saturday, Feb the 11, the “Left Bank” block opposite the NJ Transit station stop will be the scene for GLAMit, a solo art installation (keyed to New York Fashion Week 2012) that celebrates “old Hollywood glam with a modern feminine edge” through the paintings and three-dimensional work of Holly Suzanne Rader. The Tennessee-bred artist will be on hand for a reception that spotlights her unique miniature paper dresses (composed of paper mache, vintage book pages, clip art and assorted items) as well as her Glamour Girls paintings — a series of homages to “retro bombshells, lusty pin-ups and the timeless Hollywood divine” that are “candy coated” with the artist’s engagingly repurposed found objects.
“I feel that the dress is more than a garment…it tells a story,” says Rader of her magnificent minis. “This collection is inspired by nature, poetry, fairytales, historical heroines, daydreams and other romantic notions.”
The Saturday reception, too groovy to be contained within a single storefront space, runs from 7 to 10 pm — with Rader’s art remaining on display through February and March — and we get off on telling you where else to go this weekend, beginning with a Friday fricasee that lies right around the clickable corner.
2/4: Save the Roller Disco!
February 5, 2012
TRAGEDY returns to Asbury Lanes, as the ONLY metal Bee Gees tribute you’ll need see this weekend puts on their bowling shoes for a bit of Saturday Night Kegler — while lensman Mike McLaughlin is among the vibey visionaries represented in PINK NOISE, the 3rd Anniversary group show opening at Parlor Gallery.
All in all, it wasn’t the best week in which to be PINK.
Between the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s face-reddening “Pink-Gate” PR debacle, and the viral backlash against the infamous McNuggets “Pink Slime” photo, the once-proud color of Barbie and Elvis and Quisp was looking a beat-up and pulpy shade of purple by Friday. Which is why Pink Noise, the official Third Anniversary group show installation at Asbury Park’s pop-art paradise Parlor Gallery, could not have arrived with better timing to pull the PINK back from the BRINK.
A chance to feel “In the Pink” is especially needed here in a week with the news that Asbury Lanes — that Cold War-era tenpins taproom turned kitschy-cool alterna-arts odditorium — had been sold by its longtime owner to local developers Pat Fasano and Vince Gifford. It’s a bit of news that set off brain-alarms in anyone for whom the Lanes has served as everything from Fellini-esque corner bar, to a destination worth crossing several state lines to reach — and, justified or not, it was a potential tragedy that put many of us on a reflexive “Save the Roller Disco” alert straight out of 80s movies like Xanadu and Lunch Wagon.
Of course, the Lanes is no stranger to Tragedy, having hosted this hemisphere’s premier all-metal tribute to the music of the BeeGees many times over the years. Tonight, February 4, the 2012 edition of the continent-crossing metalizers (brothers Barry Glibb, Mo’Royce Peterson, and Robin Gibbens, with little brother Andy Gibbous Waning on bass and family patriarch The Lord Gibbeth, on drums) retakes the center Lanes in a late-skewed setsnack for which your award-winning DJ Jack the Ripper will serve as “amuse bouche.”
Before that, however, the windows of the Cookman Avenue arts bloc’s Parlor Gallery will be steaming up like an electric casserole dish, as First Saturday rages in downtown Asbury and some dozen music-minded artists (including DEVO poindexter Mark Mothersbaugh) team up for a de-waxing blast of Pink Noise.
1/31: It’s a Regular Life, for Carol(yne) Mas
January 30, 2012
Carol Patricia Mas of Pearce, Arizona — better known as singer, songwriter and rockonteur CAROLYNE MAS of New York, Nashville, Asbury Park and many other coordinates on the GPS — has some songs for sale, a smile for her faithful fans, and a slew of stories for the asking.
A few weeks ago we let slip in this space the fact that Carolyne Mas had floated the idea to her Facebook friendbase that she was “looking to sell my portion of my publishing for all of my songs…all of them.”
“I am ready to walk away from music for good and get on with my life at this point,” said the singer best remembered for the rollicking, sax-driven minor hit “Stillsane” and the eponymous 1979 album it hailed from. “Perhaps my music can provide me with one last parting gift.”
It was a bolt from the blue as regards the veteran singer-songwriter (and onetime Jersey Shore resident) — one that elicited a strong “don’t do it” response from a lot of her musical brethren and sistren, and a report that left her “appalled” that we would share her public-forum post in such a fashion.
While we hadn’t spoken personally to the diminutive rock diva since her original, largely strugglesome tenure in and around Asbury Park in the 1980s, we reckoned it warranted a conversation — a chance to reboot and catch up; a forum in which the singer (who prefers to be called Carol Mas these days) could update everyone back here on the upperWETside as to her current whereabouts and activities, as well as her reasons for putting the fruits of her creative labors up on the block.
This is a woman who’s been dealt more than her share of adversity in a public life of more than 30 years. It’s a run of lousy luck that’s ranged from the standard music biz chew-ups and spit-outs (misbehaving management, radio playlist politics, piss-poor promotion) to protracted financial/ legal woes, health issues, busted relationships, family illnesses, crazy stalkers and a 2009 controversy that landed her in the headlines in Florida’s Hernando County, where she and her husband then operated an animal rescue operation known as Our Animal Haus (the couple’s disputes with county Animal Control resulted in the seizure of most of the animals in their care; Mas lays out her side of the story in detail here on her blog).
Then there was the 1986 incident in which she was attacked and stabbed nearly to death inside her home (by an assailant who remains unidentified and uncaught to this day) — an event that served as a bad bookend to a Shore area tenure during which ongoing legal hassles with management kept her from performing as a professional musician, forcing her to make the nut by doing everything from waiting tables and stocking shelves, to dancing in some of the many lovely go-go bars that dotted the Monmouth County coastline in those days.
Now relocated to rural Arizona with her husband and son, 56 year old Carol Mas is nothing if not a consummate survivor — this is no hermit in exile or broken shell of her old self, but an outgoing, active parent and community member who’s worked hard to achieve what is anymore the only real promise of American life: the chance to reinvent oneself, in as many ways and as many times as you damn well please. She’s someone who has no problem reminiscing, discussing and laughing about her life as a next-big-thing pop star — while making it evident that she’s able to do all this because she’s succeeded in taking the pressure off herself.
In there somewhere, of course, there still resides the ambitious, stage-savvy performer who emerged out of the same NYC troubador scene that gave us Steve Forbert, Willie Nile, Garland Jeffreys and Cyndi Lauper’s Blue Angel; a songsmith who could pen a radio-ready original like “Quote Goodbye Quote” or deal an authoritative cover of Forbert’s “You Can Not Win if You Do Not Play.”
There was “mucho mas” to Mas of course than those early Mercury LPs (finally released to a double CD set just last year). There were several well-received live recordings, fueled by a strong following in Germany (apparently, one does not Hassel the Hoff OR the Mas). There were self-released, Europe-only studio albums in the late 1980s and early 1990s (one of which, Action Pact, teams her with the greatest garage/barband in the observable universe, the Missouri combo known primarily as The Skeletons). And there was her participation in the JAM (Jersey Artists for Mankind) project, joining the likes of Bruce, Clarence, Max, Southside and Glen Burtnik on the Band Aid-style single “We Got the Love” (catch her solo spot at 4:12 in the clip).
Carol/ Carolyne isn’t at all shy about hooking old and new fans up with her recorded works (in a variety of formats, including flash stick) on her official website — and as we found out when we rang her up at her Grand Canyon State getaway, she’s got a story or two to tell. Read on…
1/26: A JITNEY to the Big Time for TRTC
January 26, 2012
Tony winning actor-playwright Ruben Santiago-Hudson (pictured in his recent stint on TV’s CASTLE series) directs the Two River Theater Company staging of August Wilson’s JITNEY, going up in previews beginning January 29.
The scene is the storefront dispatch office of an unlicensed “gypsy” cab service in Pittsburgh’s Hill District — a neighborhood unserved by the city’s major taxi companies, and an unlikely setting for one of the truly game-changing works of the modern theater.
When he wrote Jitney in the late 1970s, August Wilson was a largely self-educated impresario who came from far outside the theatrical and academic establishments to found his own shoestring stage troupe in the Hill District. What he didn’t yet realize was that this (short on plot, long on vivid characters) ensemble drama would develop into the cornerstone of a project that would see its author hailed by many as the greatest American playwright of the last 50 years.
Before his 2005 death from liver cancer, Wilson managed to complete the ambitious work that would serve as his legacy: The Pittsburgh Cycle, a set of ten plays — each one set in a different decade — that encapsulate the African American experience in the 20th century in ways that are tragic, comic, mystical, musical, realistic, hardbitten, hopeful and, in the case of Jitney, maybe all of the above.
Beginning with a matinee preview on Sunday, January 29, Two River Theater Company makes its first foray into Wilson’s world as Jitney takes the stage for a three-week run. Heading a heavyweight ensemble of nine professional players is Tony winner (for The Life) Chuck Cooper as Becker, boss of the dispatch depot and a man whose relationship with his recently paroled son Booster (J. Bernard Calloway of Broadway’s Memphis) boils over into violence. Anthony Chisholm, who won an Obie as Fielding in the play’s original Off Broadway production, reprises the role of the alcoholic ex-tailor here — and the frankly awesome cast is rounded out by Harvy Blanks, Brandon J. Dirden, Roslyn Ruff, Ray Anthony Thomas, James A. Williams and Allie Woods Jr.
Most exciting of all is the identity of the director attached to this project — Ruben Santiago-Hudson, a longtime friend and professional associate of August Wilson who won a Tony for his acting in Wilson’s Seven Guitars (and who went on to co-star in Gem of the Ocean as well as direct numerous Wilson revivals). The busy stage and screen pro, who turned playwright for his autobiographical Lackawanna Blues (and who’s also familiar from three seasons of Castle, a TV series in which his character was rather disconcertingly bumped off), has been busily overseeing rehearsals in Red Bank even as he continues his current Broadway stint in the Alicia Keys-produced Stick Fly. UpperWETside managed to get in a few minutes with Santiago-Hudson as he jitney’d his way between two high profile projects.
Ruben Santiago-Hudson announces JITNEY in Red Bank last spring, as Greg Brown and Rona Figueroa (of TRTC’s production of JACQUES BREL) look on. (Photo by John Ward)
upperWETside: Flashing back to when you took part in the new season announcement at Two River Theater, it was very exciting to learn that they’d be taking on JITNEY, and that they’d be working with you — somebody who’s as much an authority on August Wilson as Michael Cumpsty is in the works of William Shakespeare.
RUBEN SANTIAGO-HUDSON: I’m glad to be coming here and working with John Dias, Michael Hurst and everyone, to be part of the new movement that they’re doing here.
One of the things that makes JITNEY so interesting is that it was written before Wilson’s whole grand concept of the ten-play cycle really came together…it has, I think, a looser sort of feel that allows it to be considered a standalone sort of work.
That’s true about all of the plays, really…Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Gem of the Ocean are singly great plays by themselves. What’s magnificent about the ten plays is the collective line that runs through them…the links to certain characters, certain businesses, places and events. When you see them all produced together you pick up on those things, see how one relates back to another. But I can put up any one of those plays by itself and blow your mind!
A few years back you took part in a TV show panel discussion where you said something to the effect that “August Wilson is the star” when it comes to putting together productions of his work — something that seems very much the case at Two River, with his name before the title and his picture on the ads. Would you agree that, now more than ever since his passing, the August Wilson brand is crucial to getting these plays in front of an audience…especially something like JITNEY, which calls for a lot more actors than most Broadway dramas these days?
Jitney is the only one of the ten plays that was not produced on Broadway, and even now…I don’t necessarily look at this as a plan to be bringing it to Broadway, but even if I brought them a dynamite production, the first thing the producers would ask would be ‘who’s starring?’ You know, is Denzel available?
But August Wilson IS the star. While he was living, he earned every kind of Broadway, Off Broadway accolade; every kind of national and international acclaim. His effect on the history of theater, the architecture of theater…really American anthropology over the past few decades…can’t be exaggerated.
You’re working with a really amazing cast in JITNEY, and I noticed right away that all nine of your actors have experience in at least one high profile production of a Wilson play. That’s certainly not uncommon for actors of this generation, but is it a factor that you were looking for when the show was being cast?
In this case, with not a lot of time to get this thing together, I wanted to work with actors whose work I knew, who were comfortable with this, who could handle the poetic nature, the melody of his language…straight off, I felt that the cast must have a feel for that language.
The version of JITNEY that we’ll be seeing onstage in Red Bank kind of evolved considerably since it was first written in the 1970s, correct?
When he submitted it in 1979, it got rejected because the play was less than 90 minutes. He added to it over the years, added a lot of the Booster and Becker stuff…and he rewrote it from different perspectives, with more of a focus on Becker, and then Booster later on.
Some of the things that wound up in Jitney later on were actually taken from some of his other plays…he took speeches from Seven Guitars, including things that my character said. I was there when he took them out! I was so angry at him, I didn’t speak to him for two whole weeks. But of course he did the right thing.
August did what he did not to satisfy Ruben, but to serve the play, and serve his vision. And our friendship lasted til his death.
And SEVEN GUITARS turned out to be a real career milestone for you.
After the Tony nominations were announced, I found myself sitting on a bus near some ladies, a couple of old white ladies talking about the nominees — they had no idea that one of the actors they were talking about was sitting right there.
One of them said about me that ‘he SHOULD win the Tony, but he won’t because he was just being himself.’
I had to speak up and say that the actor was NOT that character; that he wasn’t someone who knew how to play the harmonica, he wasn’t from ‘the country,’ he was from Lackawanna up near Buffalo. And I know these things because I am HE…I am the actor of which you speak.
When I auditioned for August Wilson, he didn’t ask me about my background doing Moliere or Shakespeare…he asked me for my roots, and I gave him everything I had.
I’m struck by how many people…including artists like yourself, producers, professors…have this common story where they felt compelled to be a part of this work that August Wilson was doing; they all wrote to him, approached him and established these long-term working relationships that were built on genuine respect and trust. Even after you got to know him well, did Wilson come across to you as this magnetic, larger than life figure?
August Wilson WAS life itself. There was a mysterious side to him, but if you opened up a dialogue with him, you found yourself trapped with him for two hours, just held captive by his storytelling; his passion for his people and his art.
This was a man who never stopped working, one that fought his whole life to ‘get from tit to tat’ as he said…he’s the only playwright I know who dropped out of high school and got his degree from a public library! The library in Pittsburgh where he got so much of his education, they presented him with his diploma. He’s a man who found his place among the storytellers, the men who kept the culture alive.
To my thinking he had this amazing eye and ear for detail; for things like regional dialect and folklore and history…
In one play there’s talk of one of the characters being brought up on charges of ‘worthlessness,’ which has gotten a laugh from some audiences — they assume that August was being creative about it, but for many years it was a very real thing for African American men to be charged with being ‘worthless.’ August Wilson understood this, and it’s those kind of details that make the play so powerful.
And each of the plays has something different to offer; he had many ways of telling a story. Broadway producers like plays that are linear in their storytelling, but when you think about it Fences, which is the most linear, the most sound in its structure, is not one of the most liked of the ten plays. And Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which is probably the least linear, is also probably the most liked.
Being involved with the work of August Wilson changes people. People of all colors, all religions, all backgrounds…he brings them into an arena and sends them out changed. When you study his work, produce his work, you understand things just a little bit more. I consider myself a disciple of August Wilson…a colleague, a mentee, a brother of August Wilson.
And from the looks of things, a man who carries on Wilson’s staggering work ethic!
I’m still on Broadway, you know, so yes, it’s a hectic schedule. But it’s worth it…I get to dance with August Wilson!
Jitney presents the first of five previews on Sunday, January 29 (3 pm) and Tuesday, January 31 (8 pm); opens Saturday, February 4 (that performance is SOLD OUT), and runs a schedule of evening and matinee performances, Wednesdays through Sundays until February 19. Tickets are $37 – $57 (with a new discounted price of $24 for anyone 30 years and younger) and are available by calling the TRTC Box Office at 732.345.1400, or visiting the TRTC website for schedule details and availability — as well as info on dinner/show packages and other special-event performances.
1/23: Live, from Asbury Park, it’s…
January 23, 2012
Carlos Armesto, Alecia Brooks and Michael Thomas Murray are the trez-savvy triumvirate behind Live! Asbury Park, the theatrical entity about which you’ll be hearing much in the near future.
It was a seasonably frigid but frightfully eventful week down at The Press Room, the downtown destination rockbar launched just a week or so ago (by Alecia and Trip Brooks with Tim Donnelly) in the Bangs Avenue bailiwick most recently occupied by Asbury Blues — and, another lifetime ago, by the Asbury Park Press (which reminds us: what the hell is a press room?).
First they packed the place for a first-nighter on a dreadful Jerseyshore January night better suited to Scrabble, Snuggies and Sunny marathons. They brought in migrating Shore songbird Nicole Atkins for an official kickoff that caught a healthy amount of solar wind from the concurrent Light of Day hullabaloo going on about town. They introduced a staff that boasted every unimpeachably accredited music heavy from Hinge to (program director of the much-missed Modern Rock FM 106.3 back in th’ day) Rich Robinson.
Oh, and they accommodated a daytime walk-in customer by the name of Bruce Springsteen, who lensed part of his new video in and around the bar — although we’re told that this well-circulated clip (an effort that’s copyrighted to the Boss himself rather than to Sony) is a “place holder” for a forthcoming, formalized vid that’s expected to feature more than a glimpse of the Press Room.
We’ve had our say on the new Bosssong in this forum, of course, and we could surely be babbling over any one of a number of Brooks-based excitements in the works (including a new Italian ristorante, the ongoing restoration of the Savoy Theatre, and another development so brain-tilting that we’re not sure we hallucinated it all). Still, the next time we ventured over to the Press (as the kids are most surely not calling it), we had an altogether different reason for being there — and a meeting about a pretty intriguing new project that involves Our Mrs. Brooks with two of the more dynamic personalities we’ve encountered on the regional theater scene.
If you’ve come across mention of something called Live! Asbury Park in regard to The Press Room, let it be known that the name connotes a professional company for the presentation of theatrical and performing arts productions at venues around town — with the accent on the ever-morphing sonic legacy of the seaside city Where Music Lives (and laughs, and loves).
The endeavor reunites three creative people who were involved to various degrees with ReVision Theatre — former ReVision producing partner Alecia Brooks as Creative Producer, Carlos Armesto (director of several of the most acclaimed ReVision offerings — including a Spring Awakening that we described as the show in which the troupe had “truly hit its mark”) as Artistic Director, and Michael Thomas Murray (music director for the majority of the company’s rock-infused musicals) as what could ONLY be called music impresario.
Together they’re teaming up to fight crime — or at least the criminal lack of live professional theatrical productions in an arts-charged city that by all rights should be dripping with dramaturgs — with The Press Room as headquarters for the initial phase of the project.
While we’re confident that you’ll be hearing a lot from the Live! Asbury Park triumvirate in the coming weeks, no specific events have been announced or scheduled just yet — that said, upperWETside was pleased and proud to be the first boutique media outlet to introduce you to this crew, and for the deep-dish detail we respectfully turn the floor over to Carlos, Alecia and Mike…
1/19: We Take Crumbs That We’re Thrown
January 19, 2012
So yesterday (January 18) the SOPA de la Dia down at the Farcebook luncheonette centered around the latest threat to our internet way of life, the often uneasy separation of Liberty and Piracy, and the take-THAT whammy of A Day Without BoingBoing.
All this with an underlying note of buzz in anticipation of “We Take Care of Our Own,” the new track from Bruce Springsteen — and a first whack from Wrecking Ball, the long player now taking pre-orders in advance of an early March blitzkrieg.
Comes January 19, however, and the Friendscape is strangely subdued regarding the newly free-range tune, an arena-scale rallystarter with just enough button-pushing repetition of the title to suggest that the author means it to be taken at face value — and just enough spaces between the buttons to suggest that Boss is being just a gentle bit ironic here.
Our pal John Ward put it best, we think: “More product from the anthem factory. I have deep respect for the towering artistry of Springsteen’s youth, but for years he’s been thematically, melodically and rhythmically unimaginative and cliched, playing to the crowd and curating his legacy. What are we supposed to do with this other than punch the air? ‘Yeah! We take care of OUR OWN! Unlike those OTHER guys!’ I’m bored already.”
Dustin Racioppi, a young old-school journalist whose spot-on work generally runs rings around the rest of us mired in the mangroves of the local media, had this to say: “It’s been comedic to watch the proportionate growth of stagnant, hackneyed songwriting and cloying reverence from media and soccer moms from Colts Neck to Belmar. It’s hard to be a fan anymore.” And Sledger-spawned sleuth Wally Stroby correctly points out a distinct note of “Always Something There to Remind Me” (maybe the Naked Eyes version)
Of course, just because these guys sum things up so succinctly doesn’t mean that we could resist chiming in with another 20,000 or so words of our own…
