Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Fierce tragedy
Intricate but uneven Scott Joplin’s New Rag at Mo`olelo
Scott Joplin's New Rag
Scott Joplin's New Rag
- Tenth Avenue Arts Center, 930 Tenth Avenue, East Village
- $25 - $32
Now in its world premiere, Robert Barry Fleming’s 75-minute, “fierce tragedy in one act” pays a multi-media tribute to one of the greats of American music. The complex form uses different kinds of storytelling, from prose to poetry/rap to visuals, songs sung and played on piano, and expressive silences. The opening night had yet to work out the many intricacies.
To hear Scott Joplin’s music, you’d think he only knew the sunny side. His syncopated tunes plink and percolate with uninhibited joy. You probably know “The Entertainer” (1902); Marvin Hamlish adapted the “piano rag two-step” for the movie The Sting.
But who Joplin was and how he lived are less known, even to musicologists. And his story is indeed a “fierce tragedy” of exploitation (Irving Berlin “borrowed” a melody for “Alexander’s Rag Time Band” and made a mint), betrayal, abuse, and heartbreak. In fact, every time he got a step up the mountain, something slammed him to the flatland.
His first child died months after being born. The love of his life, Freddie Alexander, died 10 weeks after they were married. And his music became so reviled by white pundits, “the King of Ragtime” never wore the crown with ease.
He wrote an opera, Treemonisha (published in 1911) about an 18-year old African-American woman who crusades for education in rural Arkansas. For the rest of his life, no one would produce it. He died on April Fools’ Day, 1917, from third-stage syphilis.
Scott Joplin’s New Rag begins near the end. Beet-red lights bake him as he trembles with disease. What follows, often in the manner of a silent film with titles and dialogue flickering on a screen, are flashbacks. With few exceptions, each is a piece of pain.
The various ways of telling the story suggest a tour de force. Fleming’s poetry, for example, is often quite good. But the script assumes that the audience already knows a lot about Joplin: how he died, the fate of Treemonisha, who Julius Weiss (his teacher) and John Stark (his publisher) were. The portrayals often add to, rather than introduce, basic information. And present it only once, when theater, as in public speaking, requires everything said at least three times to make it stick. The telling also leaps about in fits and starts, the early scenes in particular, which also makes it hard to follow.
Fleming, a local legend for doing a great opening night at the Rep with only two days’ rehearsal, can be a spectacular performer. Some of his most eloquent moments in Rag come when he physicalizes Joplin’s anguish, be it whirling around the stage, or the tremors of a half-corpse in delirium.
He plays the piano unevenly (so did Joplin), but didn’t have all the lines down on opening night.
Scott Joplin is cue-intense and needed more coordination. When Fleming spoke softly, piped-in music — or even his own piano — drowned him out.
On the plus side, Joplin says a great deal about the era. The text, Fleming, and excellent projections convey the viciousness of racism on, or just beneath, the surface.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Fierce tragedy
Intricate but uneven Scott Joplin’s New Rag at Mo`olelo
Fierce tragedy
Intricate but uneven Scott Joplin’s New Rag at Mo`olelo
Scott Joplin's New Rag
Scott Joplin's New Rag
- Tenth Avenue Arts Center, 930 Tenth Avenue, East Village
- $25 - $32
Now in its world premiere, Robert Barry Fleming’s 75-minute, “fierce tragedy in one act” pays a multi-media tribute to one of the greats of American music. The complex form uses different kinds of storytelling, from prose to poetry/rap to visuals, songs sung and played on piano, and expressive silences. The opening night had yet to work out the many intricacies.
To hear Scott Joplin’s music, you’d think he only knew the sunny side. His syncopated tunes plink and percolate with uninhibited joy. You probably know “The Entertainer” (1902); Marvin Hamlish adapted the “piano rag two-step” for the movie The Sting.
But who Joplin was and how he lived are less known, even to musicologists. And his story is indeed a “fierce tragedy” of exploitation (Irving Berlin “borrowed” a melody for “Alexander’s Rag Time Band” and made a mint), betrayal, abuse, and heartbreak. In fact, every time he got a step up the mountain, something slammed him to the flatland.
His first child died months after being born. The love of his life, Freddie Alexander, died 10 weeks after they were married. And his music became so reviled by white pundits, “the King of Ragtime” never wore the crown with ease.
He wrote an opera, Treemonisha (published in 1911) about an 18-year old African-American woman who crusades for education in rural Arkansas. For the rest of his life, no one would produce it. He died on April Fools’ Day, 1917, from third-stage syphilis.
Scott Joplin’s New Rag begins near the end. Beet-red lights bake him as he trembles with disease. What follows, often in the manner of a silent film with titles and dialogue flickering on a screen, are flashbacks. With few exceptions, each is a piece of pain.
The various ways of telling the story suggest a tour de force. Fleming’s poetry, for example, is often quite good. But the script assumes that the audience already knows a lot about Joplin: how he died, the fate of Treemonisha, who Julius Weiss (his teacher) and John Stark (his publisher) were. The portrayals often add to, rather than introduce, basic information. And present it only once, when theater, as in public speaking, requires everything said at least three times to make it stick. The telling also leaps about in fits and starts, the early scenes in particular, which also makes it hard to follow.
Fleming, a local legend for doing a great opening night at the Rep with only two days’ rehearsal, can be a spectacular performer. Some of his most eloquent moments in Rag come when he physicalizes Joplin’s anguish, be it whirling around the stage, or the tremors of a half-corpse in delirium.
He plays the piano unevenly (so did Joplin), but didn’t have all the lines down on opening night.
Scott Joplin is cue-intense and needed more coordination. When Fleming spoke softly, piped-in music — or even his own piano — drowned him out.
On the plus side, Joplin says a great deal about the era. The text, Fleming, and excellent projections convey the viciousness of racism on, or just beneath, the surface.
Comments