Gutter TV meets opera

"Well, dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians!"

Last night, Richard, his friend John, Robert, and I were at Studio Theater to see their production of Jerry Springer The Opera. I can't remember when I last laughed so hard or so enjoyed a musical.

Jerry Springer The Opera is a send up of the notorious Springer television show. Years ago, Springer was a serious talk show host with credible and respectable guests discussing serious topics, but they had terrible ratings. His producers found that as they got more and more sensationalistic and outlandish, their ratings went way, way up. Now, the show is little more than pablum for trailer trash, a demographic amongst whom the show is still wildly popular. The formula show includes adulterers, fornicators, transvestites, bigots, drug addicts, freaks, and people with limited vocabularies (the F-word seems to be their only adjective or adverb) inclined to fisticuffs.

Composer Richard Thomas, who co-wrote the book and lyrics with Stewart Lee, has translated that television show to the stage in a highly controversial opera that opened in London in 2003. I remember a few years ago seeing a few minutes of the Springer television show, and the censor's beeps took up more that half of the audio track; the opera isn't censored, so the dialogue includes a constant stream of profanities from the "guests." In fact, one British journalist reported that there were over 3,000 uses of the F-word.

In the opera, act one is a taping of a typical Springer show. At the end of the act, one of the signature fights breaks out, and in the melee, Springer is actually shot by a guest. In act two (acts two and three are combined into one in this production), Springer first is seen in the hospital and then he is taken to Hell, compelled to be the host of a satanic show, "Jerry Springer In Hell." In Hell, Satan has a confrontation with a diapered Baby Jesus, and God himself makes an appearance. Needless to say, hard core Christian groups have objected to the show and most productions have had their share of picketers. While we didn't see any picketers at Studio Theater last night, I understand there were some on opening night.

What particularly amazed me about the "opera" is that the music was actually good. While Jerry speaks all of his lines, the rest of the show is fully sung by the cast. The opera opens with an audience chorus that was remarkably similar to Bach and Mozart Masses I've sung. At various other parts, there were very elaborate and complex musical numbers including a Dies Irae and a "Jerry Eleison" (Kyrie). When Satan and Jesus have their confrontation on the show in Hell, Satan and Jesus sing a long and extended duet in full Handelian style with a massive melissma on "fuh-" as the two sing "F- You." In other parts, cast members—especially female—have complex modern melodies to sing in full operatically trained voice style, and many of those bits of music reminded me of modern operas I've heard and sung.

And there was choreography. Lots of fight choreography was required, of course, but what really brought the house down was a stage full of tap-dancing Ku Klux Klansmen. The finale of the show was a full cast tap dance reminiscent of the finale of A Chorus Line. I found myself watching the end of the show with a big, silly grin on my face.

The real star of the show is well-known local actor Bobby Smith, who plays the dual role of Springer's warm-up man Jonathan in the first act and Satan in the second act. His portrayals were perfect and fit the roles with sleazy confidence. Dan Via as Jerry Springer, though, disappointed me a bit. He was okay, but he seemed a little too young for the role and lacked the sense of gravitas that the real life Springer has. Other standouts included Patricia Portillo as the Valkryie and Florrie Bagel as Baby Jane, both with some difficult operatic music to sing, and character actor Ron Currameng as a short, fat, diaper-clad Montel in act one and Baby Jesus in act two.

The local production is directed by Keith Alan Baker with choreography by Matthew Gardiner and music direction by Christopher Youstra. The work of both Justin Thomas as lighting designer and Kristopher Castle as costume designer was impressive.

I really would like to go see the show one more time before it closes next weekend, because there is so much to see and absorb. I'd also like to see a different audience. The paying audience actually becomes a part of the show, with much of the dialogue delivered from the house, and with the eighteen-member show "audience" actually seated out in the house amongst the paying customers. That audience sings and dances the whole evening, sometimes even interacting with the regular audience.

My one main criticism of the show is that the orchestra ensemble is too loud. It looked as though the singers were performing without microphones either on their bodies or on the stage floor, and many times the band covered their dialogue.

So, Jerry Springer The Opera turns out to be a surprisingly good and entertaining show. If you have a chance, go see it before it closes next Sunday night. Be aware, though, that there is a lot of raw language in the show and that very adult topics are discussed, much like the real life television show—but without the censoring bleeps!

Enormous bats and shadows

Finally I got around to going to see The Dark Knight more than a month after it opened to all the acclaim and hype about Heath Ledger's performance. Eh. There was no rush. I wanted to wait for the IMAX version to come to D.C.

The IMAX theater at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History is a great venue for blockbuster films, if only because the crowds are much better behaved than the ones at standard movie theaters. We get to sit in comfortable, high-backed chairs in steeply banked stadium seating facing an enormous 66' x 90' curved screen. In anticipation of an IMAX release, the director of Dark Knight actually shot some of the footage with special IMAX cameras. All I can say is that if you are the least bit acrophobic, put on your seat belt!

This movie was absolutely full of major stars. Christian Bale is Batman and Heath Ledger is the Joker, but the list doesn't end there. Morgan Freeman is the CEO of Wayne Enterprises, Michael Caine is butler Alfred, Gary Oldman is Commissioner Gordon, Aaron Eckhart is DA Harvey Dent, Maggie Gyllenhaal is Rachel Dawes, Eric Robert is gangster Sal Maroni, Anthony Michael Hall is a TV anchorman, Nestor Carbonell is the mayor, soap opera actor William Fichtner is the bank manager, and even other celebrities make cameo appearances such as WWF wrestler Tommy "Tiny" Lister and U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy.

Ledger acquitted himself well, and, given the sentimentality of the Academy, will probably get the best actor Oscar. It was odd, though; I had no sense that it was him up there on that screen. What with all the makeup and the weird voice he was using, plus the rather psychopathic role he played, I never really saw a glimpse of Ledger the person, not even in the way he moved.

The movie itself is entertaining and gripping. It's long—two and a half hours—but the time flew by and I never found myself checking my watch to see if it was over yet. The editing and cinematography are excellent. All of the technological tools and gadgets and toys Batman has are intriguing, though their use and some of the plot elements do stretch the limits of credibility. While special effects and makeup were great, my one big criticism was their decision to make Harvey Dent's Two Face makeup too comical and comic book, though I understand the director thought realism was too frightening. I'd have preferred the fright, since that would have helped to fill out Dent's character and explain his descent into criminal madness.

I'm not sure if it was the script or the acting, but I didn't feel much empathy for Christian Bale's Batman. I did not see Batman Returns, the immediately previous movie in the Batman franchise, so I can't compare his performances. His "Batman whisper" was almost comical to me. I also found Maggie Gyllenhaal's performance to be rather wooden. The script left me a bit dissatisfied, too, because we had no clue who the Joker was, where he came from, or how he got the skills and technological expertise he had to be able to pull off all his heists.

On a higher level, though, I found the overall movie disturbing for its underlying message. I haven't seen any of the Batman movies since Michael Keaton's first portrayal in 1989 (I can't remember if I saw Batman Returns in 1992 or not), so I'm not sure where things have been going. I remember watching Batman on television as a child, though, and the one thing I remember about Adam West's Batman is that he was always admonishing Robin about respect for the law.

Now we have a Batman who feels the ends justify the means, no matter the cost, no matter the laws broken, no matter the rights violated, no matter the property damage, no matter the lives lost. If Gotham City has a problem, Batman just throws more money and technology at the problem until the problem is solved, and heaven help the innocent citizen or police officer who happens to get in the way. Batman is a wealthy bully who gets what he wants by might and money, not by right. This is not the sort of message that we should be teaching our children. This is the very attitude that is causing us Americans so many problems on the world stage right now, too.

Perhaps we should not expect movies to inculcate morals and values in our children anymore like they used to do. People today claim to want gritty reality, not happy idealism. We must, though, be aware of what we show on screen and what those movies teach so that we can have a dialogue as a family, if not as a society, as to the ethos of fantasy. Doing any less will lead us into a generation of amorality.

Are this summer's movies anti-Catholic?

This month I actually got twice to the movie theaters to see new releases, in fact, the first and only movies I've seen in 2008. The lucky productions getting my theater going dollars were The X Files: I Want to Believe and Brideshead Revisited. It just so happens that I am intimately acquainted with the stories behind both of these movie plots, so I can see more in the scripts than many people.

In retrospect, what particularly struck me was the viciously nasty anti-Catholic tone of both movies.

It seems an eternity since The X Files was on television every Sunday night. I watched it religiously, even in its very first season. As the characters developed over the years, we knew that Agent Mulder was an agnostic Protestant and Agent Scully was a devout Catholic. Then we get to this movie, where we find neither as agents anymore, with Mulder in hiding and Scully working as a physician in a Catholic charity hospital. The movie, much like the shows, had two simultaneous plots, both dealing with the Catholic Church.

The major plotline for the movie involves the kidnapping of an FBI agent and what turns out to be a series of murders. A defrocked pedophile Catholic priest claims to have visions regarding the investigation, and appears quite unsympathetically throughout the movie. Dialogue from multiple characters snipes not only at the former priest but also at the Church (are we tired of pedophile priest jokes yet?), and Scully is particularly disrespectful. The secondary plot line involves a child patient of Scully's with some rare, most likely fatal disease, with no known cure. The hospital's administration, led by a particularly sour priest, wants to shuffle the boy off to a hospice-type facility for palliative care, but Scully somehow chooses to defy them and treat the boy with some highly experimental stem cell therapy (stem cell therapy, since it deals with cells from unborn fetuses, is vehemently opposed by the Catholic Church). There are a lot of unlikely scenarios in the plot and it just doesn't quite work when viewed as a free-standing work apart from the culture and tradition of the series.

Then we get to Brideshead Revisited, based on the 1944 novel by former popular British writer Evelyn Waugh. This happens to be one of the very very few novels I've ever read twice, I have seen multiple times the faithful 1981 BBC/Granada six-episode, twelve-hour mini-series, and I worked with many of my students to analyze the work in their papers on early 20th century British novelists. So, being so familiar with the twelve-hour treatment of the novel, I found myself spinning trying to keep up with the instant two-hour long movie. The screenplay writers took so many liberties with the story line, I took the novel with me to brunch today to reread it so I could refresh my memory.

In the "new" version, the entire story has been rewritten to focus on the Catholic faith of the family, giving it sinister and evil overtones, and having it ruin the lives and happiness of its adherents. Meanwhile, Teresa Marchmain (played by Emma Thompson) has become a vindictive and overbearing matriarch in the name of Catholicity, which is totally different from her character in the novel, and the narrator of the story, Charles Ryder, has become a staunch atheist who actively works against the family's Catholic superstitions and practices, again contrary to his novel character (in the novel, there's even a line where someone refers to him as an atheist, and he corrects them, saying he's agnostic, plus, he would have been way too polite to have acted in such ways).

So, what's the deal with all the negative treatment of the Church?

Anyway, let me give a brief analysis of the movies.

The X Files was both satisfying and disappointing. It was little more than a two-part TV episode, and an episode with a weak plot line, at that. Because of the length of time since the television show was in original release, the writers seemed compelled to use a whole lot of expository dialogue to explain the backstory, some of which was rather annoying (like when Skinner made his first appearance on screen, Scully says, "It's Assistant Director of the FBI Walter Skinner!" as if Mulder didn't know who he was). The writing was poor and plot elements weren't connected. The overall series story arc really isn't going in a good direction. The editing felt choppy (and as if much of the important plot development was left on the cutting room floor). The cinematography at times lacked focus while at other times it moved in a way that gave me a headache. The musical score was pretty hideous. But, at the same time, it was The X Files and Mulder and Scully were back together again. With a better storyline and writing staff, I'd be willing to go see another movie. Recommendation? If you're an X Files fan, go see it, you'll enjoy it well enough. If you're not already an established fan, it's okay, and it's certainly better than a lot of the trash movies out this summer.

Meanwhile, Brideshead is a beautiful movie, reminiscent of the Merchant-Ivory type movies. I've heard Emma Thompson has gotten some supporting actress Oscar buzz.

In the past, my alma mater Oxford University (where much of the novel is set) did not allow film crews at the university, so "Oxbridge"-type movies set at Oxford (Chariots of Fire, Oxford Blues, the Brideshead mini-series, et al.) were actually filmed at rival newcomer Cambridge University. I was very pleased to see this movie was actually filmed on location in Oxford, as it brought back many memories. I also thought it highly interesting that they chose to go to Castle Howard as the location site for the scenes of the fictional "Brideshead Castle," the same location where they shot the mini-series. Consequently, all the sets (as well as costumes) were beautiful.

Naturally, adapting a full-length novel to a modern two-hour movie time frame requires a lot of cutting and rearrangement. I realize this. This version, though, I found to take a few too many liberties not only with the plot but with the characters. I've mentioned Lady Marchmain; Rex Mottram's character was so changed, his now-minor character was a particularly nasty cad and opportunist; Anthony Blanche has become a cameo role with biting lines not in the novel.

Casting was also a bit of a problem. The novel spans twenty years, from the time Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) and Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) meet as 19-year-old undergraduates at Oxford, to a point about ten or twelve years after that for Charles and Julia's affair, to Charles' time as a 39-year-old Army officer in World War II. The movie appears to have shortened the intervals so the actors ultimately end up playing their real-life ages. Because of how so much of the story was truncated and compressed, more than half of the movie is devoted to the time when Charles and Sebastian are 19, yet the actors were much too old to convincingly play teenagers, with Goode at 30 and Whishaw at 28. I think I would have found younger actors, especially since—Goode's intensely clear and bright blue eyes notwithstanding—neither of these actors gave particularly memorable performances.

I've been looking for an intelligent, literary person who's never read this novel or seen the mini-series so I can have him or her watch this movie and then tell me how it works for them. If this description fits any of you, go see it and then write a comment. Meanwhile, for Waugh or Brideshead fans, you'll want to go see this movie just because it's Waugh and Oxford and Castle Howard and your unrepentant anglophilia.

Summer music al fresco

Several restaurants have patios around the big quadrangle at the Department of Commerce downtown. During the summer, they often have live musicians playing on the outdoor stage, and on this past Friday lunchtime, they had a jazz trio with a "lounge singer." One never knows where one will find free culture in the Nation's Capital.

Lodge hall

View of the East from the entrance to the lodge room.

Several people asked about the meeting room where we had the DeMolay investitures this past Sunday, seeing the hieroglyphics and stuff in the background of the pictures. We met at Naval Masonic Lodge on Capitol Hill. They have an old building that dates back to 1893. The lodge room is up on the fourth floor, and I think it's one of the prettiest lodge rooms in town. Probably a hundred years ago (it would be cost-prohibitive to do it today), someone painted Egyptian symbols, motifs, and hieroglyphics on the walls and affixed gold leaf stars on the ceiling. To my knowledge, there is no special Masonic "meaning" or secret to the designs; they are purely decorative. Now, up in the East (where the master or president sits during meetings), there are some Masonic symbols like trowels, books, squares and compasses, etc. painted around the opening, but that's it, and those aren't Egyptian.



Views of the West and the South in the lodge room.

Up in a balcony organ loft, they have a very interesting old pipe organ. It needs a little bit of maintenance (the pedal division is dead), but it could be a fun little instrument. It's only ten ranks, but that was probably a "normal" size for the space at the time it was installed. The swell and great each have only four ranks, and there're just two ranks in the pedal division, but they've got couplers to supplement things. It all sounds rather like a reed organ, and it has stiff tracker action. Couldn't find a manufacturer's label or mark anywhere, so I don't know who made it.

M.P. Möller was at the height of operation in nearby Hagerstown, Maryland, about the time the lodge room was built and furnished, so I'm curious whether or not this might be a small Möller. That would require opening up some things and digging around, though—dusty, dirty work.

One of the unique things about the building itself is the tiny, manually-operated elevator. Most people are going to prefer to use the stairs to walk up. The elevator is crowded with three people in it. This is the only manually-operated elevator I've been in in decades.

Anyway, that's the story about the room we used.