So - What Did You Think About “Tommy” at the DTC?

The Who’s Tommy at the Dallas Theater Center with Nehal Joshi and Heath Williams II. Photo by Brandon Thibodeaux.

Guest Blogger Gail Sachson owns Ask Me About Art, is Vice-Chair of the Cultural Affairs Commission and a member of the Public Art Committee. She is an auxiliary member of the Dallas Theater Center Board of Trustees.

So, What did you think of Tommy?

And what were those costumed jesters all about? And the water? And the bombed out stage set? Did you cry? Will you see it again? And again?

The Who’s Tommy, the first rock opera and the first show directed by the Dallas Theater Center’s new Artistic Director KEVIN MORIARTY, opens the season with a BANG! Actually, it opens with LOUD ROCK MUSIC!

Upon entering the theater, signs warn us that there will be LOUD MUSIC, CIGARETTE SMOKE, ADULT LANGUAGE…AND GUNSHOTS. We know immediately this will not be Rodgers & Hammerstein. But… when last Wednesday’s preview audience, many of whom are used to turning up their hearing aids, were offered earplugs…well..”it’s a little frightening”, said one.

Moriarty doesn’t want to scare us, but he surely does want to wake us! He wants to make us hoot and holler- yes- this audience did- even in the Frank Lloyd Wright designed theater. When Oso Closo keyboard player Adrian Hulet shouts, “Is everybody ready to rock?” you’d better be ready! And yes, turn off your cell phones, but from that moment on, you wouldn’t be able to hear it anyway.

For the next hour and half, with no intermission, your body will be taut. Your heart will beat faster. Your head will reverberate with the memorable music and words to songs such as, “Christmas,” “Go to the Mirror,  Boy” and “Cousin Kevin.”

So what did you think of Tommy?

Tell me. Tell your date. Tell a stranger. Tell the guy in row B and the woman in Center seat 110 who has tears in her eyes. Tell the person who you just overheard saying, “This is the best show I’ve ever seen” and the man who said he couldn’t understand the words and the two people disagreeing about the loudness of the band. Moriarty wants us to talk. Not to him, but to each other. Every night. Every performance.

Stay in your seats and schmooze with fellow theatergoers. Comment, criticize, cheerlead and discuss the play. The Tommy Talk facilitators wil be fellow audience members. So no political correctness required. No cast members. No hurt feelings. Just us. I will be leading the discussion on Saturday, September 13th. Get your tickets now and talk Tommy with me!

Arthouse 5X7, The Dallas Show

Guest blogger Brad Ford Smith is a Dallas artist and art conservator.

Some of the work available at 5×7 Art Splurge in 2006

The 5X7 Art Splurge and Exhibition is happening tonight, so grab your purse, your wallet or that jar of loose change and get ready to grab some great art at great prices for a great cause, that being the annual fund-raiser for the Arthouse at the Jones Center, Texas’s oldest non-profit visual arts organization.

At this year’s fund-raiser, which is being held at the Dunn and Brown Contemporary, there will be 1100 works of art on display, donated by over 600 Texas artists. All of the artwork follows a 5”X7” format and are priced at only $100 each. There is a complete list available of the participating artist, but since the artworks are signed on the back the whole exhibition is displayed anonymously. This encourages you, the art collectors, to purchase the art based solely on what you like.

This is the ninth year for the 5X7 fund-raiser, and it consistently has high quality artwork done by Texas artists that seem to really care about what they have donated. There is always lots of new talent participating as well establish artists who have donated artwork year after year after year.

I asked some of the local Dallas artists why, when there are so many cultural fund-raisers and good causes to support, do they donate and keep donating to this particular organization? Most of them said that they donate artwork to several fund-raisers each year, but that they always do the 5X7 show. So why? “Because the format makes me think out of the box,” “Because I always enjoy being part of the event,” and the top reason “It’s just fun to do.”

Well, nothing too deep there. No saving the polar bears. No rightings of political injustices No anti this or anti that. “It’s just fun to do.” A simple reason with no attachments. A masterpiece of marketing and management by the staff at Arthouse.

Barrett Collection at Dallas Museum of Art

Catfish Moon by David Bates, 1986, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art and the Barrett Collection

Nona and Richard Barrett’s latest donation to Dallas Museum of Art: 180 works by contemporary Texas artists.

Acquired in January, the collection is on display in the museum’s Tower Gallery through Sept. 14. Lone Star Legacy II: The Barrett Collection of Contemporary Art includes painting, sculptures, photographs and drawings from the 1970s to the present, focusing on the ’80s and ’90s.

The exhibition is a follow-up to Lone Star Legacy, which featured the Barretts’ gift of 60 pieces of earlier Texas art.

The War Over “Lovable George”

The Aug. 25 issue of New York magazine features its “Approval Matrix” on p. 184 — a rather Spy magazine-like device in which recent cultural events are mapped out on a grid according to how “highbrow” or “lowbrow” they are and how “despicable” or “brilliant.” In the “brilliant” but “lowbrow” quadrant, for instance, New York places Stephen Colbert’s droll campaign against American towns named Canton (including, of course,  that “incorporated outhouse,” Canton, Texas).

But right spang on top, prominently displayed in the “highbrow and despicable” region, is the Dallas Opera’s recent hiring of “lovable executive director” George Steel, hiring him away from Columbia University’s Miller Theater. Considering the hordes of  Texas artists who mosey up to the Big Apple every year (see, for example: Sime, Tom), one might think they’d recognize their own omni-cultural thievery — which New York accomplishes without even actually working at it — and cut us a little slack. We successfully lured away one arts manager.

But, no. “Damn you, Texas,” is what we get. With an image, naturally, of some horse-riding cowboy twirling a lariat. Mighty original, New York. You’ll get no sympathy here. We’d expect others to “cowboy up.” But you can just go sit in your season seats at the Met Opera and sniffle softly through the next production of La fanciulla del West.

Buck Jones image from bearalley.blogspot.com

Changes Brewing at Annual Wagner Festival

Changes are afoot at the Bayreuth Festival, the annual Bavarian event devoted exclusively to the operas of Richard Wagner. The 2008 festival concludes today, signaling the end of the long directorship of Wolfgang Wagner, the composer’s grandson. He will turn 89 on Saturday and is reported to be in poor health. His resignation takes effect after the current festival.

Two branches of the Wagner family are competing to succeed Wolfgang Wagner and take control of the festival. Involved are three great-granddaughters of the composer plus a non-family member, Gerard Mortier of the New York City Opera. The New York Times has some of the details.

Like the composer himself, the Wagner family has had a contentious history. John Ardoin, the late music critic of the Dallas Morning News, once joked that someone should stage a Ring cycle in which each character would represent a member of the Wagner family.

McCain v. Obama on the Arts and Arts Education

It’s difficult to assess the presidential candidates’ differences on the arts, arts funding and arts education for a simple reason: Senator McCain doesn’t seem to have spelled out any stand on these issues, other than a general opposition to funding “obscenity.”

This isn’t meant as a partisan statement in support of Senator Obama. If you do not agree with federal subsidies for the arts, then you’d certainly oppose his advocacy for an increased NEA budget. You can read the Obama campaign’s official arts policies spelled out on page 3 of the PDF here. Interestingly, these stands include amending the Internal Revenue Code to permit artists, when they’re making charitable contributions, to deduct the fair market value of their works, rather than just the materials. When the current code was adopted in the ’90s, it was widely seen as a significant hindrance to private donations to nonprofit organizations.

In contrast, Senator McCain has made very few public remarks about art subsidies — or any arts issue at all and certainly nothing in print. Determining his view from what can be found online is akin to sifting tea leaves to find a philosophical framework. In 1999, he said, ”I have opposed federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts because I believe it is not proper to use tax dollars for what many Americans feel are the obscene and inappropriate projects this organization has supported. I support providing federal block grants to the states for arts education and artistic endeavors pursued by state and local authorities, while assuring that federal tax dollars are not spent on obscene or offensive material.”

This, at least, is fairly plain. He actually indicates a support for art subsidies — only when directed mostly to arts education and with local-community restrictions in place. This is , more or less, the direction the NEA has been cautiously (and, arguably, successfully) pursuing since the overheated culture wars of the ’90s.

There is always the National Review Online’s attack on Senator McCain for being  an “ideological multiculturalist,” but this has more to do with his views on bilingual education and free speech than anything specific to the arts. The ArtsVote website, which linked to candidates’ policies during the primary races, lists a McCain arts policy as “pending” – from back in April. And when it comes to arts education, the Educator Compensation Institute unearthed a single item about the senator’s belief in teacher testing and merit pay for the best teachers.

Otherwise, there is nothing of substance to be found, certainly nothing official.

Education Week, which tracks issues and government policies for teachers, could find only vague answers about education — back in January. They conclude that “McCain is a campaign-finance, foreign-relations, anti-abortion, tax-cut candidate. Education is not his thing. Depending on your perspective, McCain’s relative silence on education may be a good thing. If you think the federal government has grossly overreached into the state business of education, then he may be your guy.”

The same, it would seem, is true for the arts in general.

CORRECTION/AMPLIFICATION: Because of that single statement about obscenity and federal subsidies, I attributed to John McCain a willingness to fund the arts (while making certain that anything “obscene” is not funded) . It’s a willingness that, in fact, may not be there at all, at least as demonstrated by some of his legislative actions.

According to Elizabeth Currid of the  University of Southern California, writing for USC’s Election 2008 website (”a special resource for journalists”), McCain “has a historical track record of supporting anti-arts legislation, including the 1999 Smith-Ashcroft Amendment, which would have cut all funding for the NEA; and the 1989 Helms Amendment, which aimed to deny funding to art considered ‘obscene.’

McCain, she concludes, “doesn’t have an arts policy, other than a desire to eliminate spending directed toward the arts.”

Thanks to CultureGrrl for the inspiration. Obama photo from readwritenow.wordpress.com. McCain photo from donkeydish.com

Cliburn Competition Tickets Go on Sale Friday

It’s still nine months away, but subscriptions to the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition go on sale at 9 a.m. Friday. This edition, the 13th, will last more than two weeks, opening on May 22 and closing on June 7. The venue is, of course, Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth.

An international lineup of 30 young pianists, still to be chosen, will compete for concert engagements valued at more than $1 million plus cash awards and other prizes. This time all six finalists will receive concert management contracts from the Cliburn organization, which should considerably lessen the pain for those not winning the top awards.

In addition to solo recitals, which all must play, semifinalists will play chamber music with the Takacs Quartet and finalists will add concertos with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra conducted by James Conlon.

Subscription packages include preliminaries (10 sessions) for $90 gallery or $175 mezzanine, preliminaries plus semifinals (18 sessions) for $210 or $408, or all 24 musical sessions plus awards ceremony for $357 or $712. Single-ticket sales will open on March 13.

Sevan Melikyan, director of marketing for the Van Cliburn Foundation, says “We receive inquiries through the Internet for subscriptions every day. People from all over the world are making plans to attend.”

Tickets will be available Friday by calling 817-335-9000 or going to the Cliburn ticket web site.

Dallas Video Festival Preview

Still from Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation

News of this year’s lineup at the Dallas Video Festival has begun trickling out, starting with Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, a shot-by-shot remake of the original Indiana Jones movie by a trio of Mississippi teenagers. Actually, the boys were 12 when they started re-creating the film in 1982, a process that took seven years.

As Hollywood prepares a feature about their quest, producer Chris Strompolos and director Eric Zala are on the festival circuit this summer and fall. The now-grown men will be here for a screening at the 21st annual Dallas Video Festival, Oct. 3-5, at the Angelika.

Festival director Bart Weiss says The Adaptation is an early example of the media culture’s obsession with re-cutting and remaking. “There’s more media that imitates media that ever before. There’s something now in our culture about re-contextualizing material.”

Also at the festival:

Mr. Bill creator Walter Williams, who is still working with the Play-Doh character of 1970s Saturday Night Live fame, with segments about New Orleans and Katrina.

Guts N Glory, a 16mm version of the 24-Hour Video Race, now in its third year.

The Albert Maysles Award to an emerging documentarian of the legendary filmmaker’s choosing, with Maysles and the winner attending.

The London International Advertising Awards, one of the most popular recurring features of the festival.

The Texas Show, a juried compilation of shorts that traditionally closes the festival.

Arts on the Cover

This week’s issue of the Dallas Observer (not yet available online) features not one but two sizable arts profiles, cover boy Kevin Moriarty, the new artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center, and an inside “City” column on George Steel, the new general director of the Dallas Opera. The usual talk of a watershed moment in Dallas’ cultural history appears in both stories — with reference to the new buildings in the Arts District.

Obviously, the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts is going to make a major impact on the local scene. But here’s another, probably even more significant reason that this is a “watershed moment”: Many of the major players have new talent at the top. In addition to the fresh faces at the DTC and the opera, Bonnie Pitman took over as director of the Dallas Museum of Art in June and Jaap van Sweden makes his official debut as the conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra Sept. 11-14.

[Interesting  side note: Steel at the opera and van Sweden at the DSO could have a friendly chat about Leonard Bernstein. Both cite the late conductor/composer as a major, early inspiration, both had direct dealings with him.]

Dallas is obsessed with the new, with the big and the shiny, with reinventing itself as new and big and shiny. But as much as the buildings will draw attention, it’s those directors who must transform those institutions and audiences, they are the ones who have to maintain any momentum or excitement for their art in Dallas.  Much the same mega-transition happened in 1993, when the city gained six new arts managers in the space of a year and a half, including Andrew Litton at the DSO, Graeme Jenkins at the opera, Jay Gates at the DMA and Richard Hamburger at the DTC. Look who remains from that crew, look how many “world class” ambitions were fulfilled, thwarted or acted upon.

As for the Observer’s profile of Moriarty (the cover is cleverly made to look like a torn issue of Playbill), author Elaine Liner justly extols her former teacher, Paul Baker — the founding artistic director of the DTC — but then barely mentions the tenure of Adrian Hall in the ’80s and early ’90s.

[Read more →]

Trinity Arts Guild Looking for Amateur Artists

Trinity Arts Guild, one of the oldest membership organizations for visual artists in North Texas, has called for entries to its annual New & Emerging Juried Show. The 47-year-old Bedford-based nonprofit is looking for paintings and sculptures (but not photographs) from accomplished amateurs.

To qualify, you must be at least 18 and not make your living as an artist. That means you don’t teach art or earn more than $500 a year from your work. And you can’t have more than five years experience.

The entry deadline is Oct. 21, with the show running through Nov. 18. Trinity Arts Guild is located at the Bedford Boys Ranch.