DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER/DURHAM—There’s no musical juggernaut like The Phantom of the Opera: The touring version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s great show has been on the road for 17 years. Its upcoming month-long stand at Durham Performing Arts Center represents the fulfillment of one of the facility’s objectives, and DPAC officials are betting that they’ll be able to fill seats for the 32 performances that begin on Thanksgiving Day.
Although the show doesn’t open for another week, the huge work of loading it in began this morning. The famous decorative elements of ThePhantom of the Opera-the chandelier, the underground tunnels and everything else-will fit easily onto DPAC’s massive stage and will no doubt thrill audiences. But behind the opulence is a lot of grunt work that goes into laying the foundation for the complex, notoriously mobile set.
This morning at DPAC, the load-in began-a full week before the show’s opening (it’s still running in Tempe, Ariz., with the actors using a second set). There are about 75 people working under the direction of David Hansen, advance stage manager.
When we enter the facility, we are greeted-awed, even-by the proscenium arch that jutted at a forward angle toward the audience seats. The structure is decorated with friezes depicting Pan-like creatures bearing maidens who are, in turn, surrounded by angels aloft. These figures successfully evoke the Neo-Baroque style of the Opera Garnier setting of Gaston Leroux’s 1911 novel. We watch as the workers expertly assemble this grand bit of scenic fakery with the aid of hydraulic lift.
Behind the proscenium lay a tangle of lights, cables and black-painted metallic structural supports. During performances, a stagehand will sit atop this structure to man the lights.
We then see the famous chandelier looming menacingly in a corner. It weighs nearly 1,000 lbs. and incorporates 35,000 crystal beads. For all its delicate gold filigree work, Hansen concedes, the chandelier doesn’t look that great up close-perhaps the result of crashing to the floor nearly 7,000 times. By opening night, 141 candles will have been built into the floor, and there will be footlights designed to resemble gaslights of the period.
The cast won’t have to worry about dancing on an unfamiliar stage at DPAC. “The dancers have the same surface in every city to dance on,” Hansen said. Indeed, the DPAC stage is covered with stacks of floor panels labeled “Phantom III Advance,” with the direction “upstage” marked on the side. We watch as eight to 10 stagehands maneuver each panel, weighing between 80 and 120 lbs., by using a pulley system suspended on a chain hung from the ceiling. Another stagehand wields a T-shaped instrument to push two panels together. Other hands help by pushing their sneaker-clad feet against one panel. Hansen tells us a track is built into the panels to ensure quick fastening and subsequent removal.
Hansen says that it took the show’s designers eight months to prepare such an elaborate, yet portable set. Preproduction costs ran close to $11 million (in 1992 dollars), with $3 million of it devoted to costumes.
The tour travels with 20 48-foot trailers, and nine were unloaded this week. Since the production sends out trucks to the next tour stop while the present one is running, the total number of trucks used is around 30.
Hansen said the advance time is necessary for troubleshooting any problems that may arise. Here in Durham, he’ll check dressing rooms and sinks to ensure that they are in compliance with expectations, do paperwork and establish telephone contact with the venue in Ft. Lauderdale, the next stop on the tour.
The Phantom of the Opera will end its Durham run on a Sunday and open in Fort Lauderdale the following Wednesday. By then, Hansen and company will go to work all over again, laying the groundwork for the Phantom’s next stop, Orlando.
Magician David Copperfield’s greatest adversary isn’t the sort of technical snafu that reportedly had him scrub one of the most amazing effects from his 5:30pm performance of An Intimate Evening of Grand Illusion at DPAC yesterday afternoon:a 50’s model Lincoln convertible that we saw him, somehow, suddenly produce—not only out of thin air but set squarely in the middle of it, atop a set of pillars—despite a group of witnesses standing all around during the late show Tuesday night.
Tight like that: David Copperfield
His true nemesis isn’t the 8-foot industrial fan whose whirring blades he walked through at another point on his way to…somewhere else, let’s say.
It’s not the stinger of the live black scorpion—or the attitude it copped at one point in the proceedings, leaving us in suspense before finally obliging our host with the payoff of another illusion.
It isn’t even some wiseguy local critic in the second row, who had the foresight to bring along a magician of his own—Joshua Lozoff, whose stage show Beyond Belief had two sold-out runs at Manbites Dog Theater and whose new show, Parlor Magic, is now playing at the Siena Hotel.
No: David Copperfield’s real opponent is the age of jade.
From the printed record we surmised that magician David Copperfield wasn’t the easiest interview. The taciturn answers we’d read in most of the recent published pieces suggested a subject intent on his talking points—and, apparently, just not into most of the conversations.
But perhaps, I thought, that’s because no one poses the right questions. I mean, if everyone insisted on asking you the one thing you could never answer while still keeping your job—So, uhh, how’d you do that neat trick on stage?—you’d probably get a bit peevish yourself after a while.
So, in advance of “An Intimate Evening of Grand Illusion,” his performances Tuesday and Wednesday at DPAC, I started thinking about questions that might be useful—and even answerable—by a world-class magician.
Then we were informed that Copperfield would not be available for phone or personal conversation—a barrier seemingly lowered, almost like magic, for a stringer at one daily paper, but not a columnist at another.
We could, however, e-mail him.
And then wait a week for his answers.
So we did.
Ironically, for an artist interested in presenting something intimate and grand to the public, the experience was noticeably less than both.
Below:the transcript of our e-mail exchange, and our conclusions at the end.I’d call it Exhibit A for the case against e-mail interviews, but you’ll be the judge.Nothing up our sleeves; the rest, after the jump.
Professional greasers (no teenagers need apply) Photo by Joan Marcus
DPAC/ Durham-My first encounter with Grease lasted precisely 24 minutes.
It was 1998 and I was in sixth grade in Western North Carolina, still getting used to my new contact lenses and wearing my hair all the way down my back. It was also the year the movie version of the “girl meets boy, boy breaks out in song, girl and boy shimmy and shake into what they think the other wants them to be” love story was re-released into theaters-just 20 years after Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta (the great-grandparents of Brangelina) first rocked spandex and lettermen jackets around the hallowed halls of Rydell High.
My mom must have forgotten over those two decades the not-so-subtle sexual innuendo and backseat car scenes of the film, because it wasn’t long after the movie’s animated opening credits that we were out the door and onto the mall in pursuit of more age-appropriate and morally suitable entertainment, like the new Spice Girls CD.
The film, based on the Broadway musical, seemed forever doomed to be a covert sleepover staple until we hit senior class musical gold: Grease would be the word in the halls of my high school and everybody was pumped. Finally, we’d be able to put all those hours of hand-jiving and hip-thrusts to good use. However, we quickly figured out the movie and musical versions have different songs, characters, scenery and dialogue.
The footage you see here is of Beloved Renegade, as rehearsed by the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the 2009 American Dance Festival. Paul Taylor established his company in 1954 in Manhattan along with five other dancers. The dance company since then has performed in 520 cities and 62 countries. Among other accomplishments, Taylor has won an Emmy award for outstanding choreographer for 1992’s Paul Taylor’s Speaking in Tongues.
Beloved Renegade premiered in 2008 and is inspired by the works of the great American poet Walt Whitman, and set to Francis Poulenc’s Gloria. Reviewing the work in February, The New York Times‘ Alastair Macauley called the piece “one of the great achievements of Mr. Taylor’s long career and one of the most eloquently textured feats of his singular imagination.”
The company will also perform two pieces in addition to Renegade. Mercuric Tidings (1982) uses excerpts from Franz Schubert’s first and second symphonies while Scudorama, an ADF-commissioned-work created in 1963, is described by the festival as a “gem most Taylor devotees haven’t seen, complete with a jazzy-classical score by Clarence Jackson.”
A male dancer catapults himself onto a small table on center stage. He slowly moves into a handstand, then contorts himself to lay perpendicular to the stage, supported by one hand. The audience clapped and cheered. It could only be a Cirque trick.
But which Cirque?
Obviously, what comes first to mind is Cirque du Soleil. I’ve never seen Cirque du Soleil live, but I grew up devoted to it on TV. Back in Bravo’s pre-Project Runway days, they used to air a lot of Cirque du Soleil specials, thus providing one of my first introductions to what I considered avant-garde theater. However, after the movie Knocked Up associated Cirque du Soleil with a bad mushroom trip in Las Vegas, the company probably lost a little of its claim to hipness.
In the past three weeks, I’ve seen two different cirques. However, neither was a Soleil. One was a media sneak peek at an upcoming show at Durham Performing Arts Center, and one was a performance with symphony accompaniment at Cary’s Koka Booth Amphitheatre.
The sneak peek was for a Florida-based outfit called Cirque Dreams, which has a new production it’s calling Illumination. Naturally, light is a major portion: The video consisted of glow-in-the-dark objects that resembled flags and a line drawing of stair-steps reminiscent of a page from Harold and the Purple Crayon. A character called The Director features prominently, whose main characteristic is blowing a whistle with such frequency to rival the Grandmother in The Triplets of Belleville. As much as we could glean from the film, the show is devoted to acrobatics featuring one-handed balancing acts and aerial spinning with rings and scarves.
After the video screened, three performers came onstage to entertain the audience. Two of the dancers in red hounds-tooth suits performed a pantomime involving one being controlled by the other. The third, clad in a sparkly tank top and sailor pants, balanced on a small platform and did the ever-popular one-handed handstand, gaining applause from the assembled media.
Cirque Dreams takes the stage at DPAC from Sept. 15-20. Here’s video from Illumination:
“But…it looks really different when it’s placed on ballet dancers!”
That’s what ADF sources told us when we asked about the differences between the version of Decadance that festival goers saw here in 2004 and the version Cedar Lake Contemporary Dance performs this week at DPAC.
Though the company provided us with the 30-second clip above, you can view a 5½ -minute excerpt from the company’s website here.
The work constitutes a potent fast-forward through ten years of choreography Naharin created for his Batsheva Dance Company in Israel. Vivid sequences excerpted from works including Naharin’s Virus and Anaphaza pointedly critiqued the politics of coercion, surveillance, intimidation and religious extremism, while others probed the questionable ethics of erotica. Its original decanting at ADF gave audiences an example of artistic protest as bracing as Maguy Marin’s One Cannot Eat Applause—and possibly more entertaining.
We’ll let you judge the differences between the ballet dancers above, and the original version, below:
Collaboration with Sarah Ewald and Belem Destefani.
Welcome back to the Indy’s ADF blog. This year, we’ve revamped our arts blogging as part of a site-wide redesign. We’re not blogging full-time (yet) about the arts, so we decided to create a “seasonal” arts blog that could be activated on big cultural occasions, such as the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and ADF.
Byron Woods is returning to be our primary correspondent from the stages at Reynolds Industries Theater on the Duke University campus and, for the first time, the brand-new Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC).
Last night, Indy arts interns Belem Destefani and Sarah Ewald accompanied me to DPAC to see the technical rehearsal and photo call for RE-, a long-gestating piece by Shen Wei Dance Arts. Of particular interest is the first part, titled “III,” which gets its world premiere this weekend in Durham. Here’s the first of our preview videos.
The acid-tongued comedian has strep throat, according to her Web site, forcing the cancellation of three shows this week, including her gig Thursday, April 23, at Durham Performing Arts Center.
No confirmation yet from officials at DPAC.
UPDATE 3:59 p.m.: DPAC confirms the cancellation and says the show will be rescheduled.
UPDATE Thursday, April 23: Word comes from DPAC that Griffin’s performance has been rescheduled for Friday, October 16, at 8 p.m.
Lisa Creech Bledsoe on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": "Speed dating for the tech set," funny! Nice write up of an incredible event. I'm voting for Scrubby next year. Scrub-by, Scrub-by, Scrub-by!
Lisa aka @glowbird (the boxing chick)
DK on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": Just moved back to the Triangle from Seattle, which is where Ignite started. It kind of caught on and blew up really fast, and organizers had to keep upping the venue.
I think people have been looking for this kind of cabaret for a while. They like going somewhere and being a crowd together, and it's
Christine Fawley on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": A fabulous night highlighting the diversity of talent and intellectual pursuits here in the Triangle. An event like this could be held every month and still barely scratch the surface of the passions of our community.
We were honored to be included and appreciated the support and enthusiasm of the crowd as we delivered "20
From the printed record we surmised that magician David Copperfield wasn’t the easiest interview. The taciturn answers we’d read in most of the recent published pieces suggested a subject intent on his talking points—and, apparently, just not into most of the conversations.
The acid-tongued comedian has strep throat, according to her 
