Monday, March 30, 2015

A Musically Nostalgic Trip Through Our Favorite TV Memories

Guest Blogger Rebecca Klug is the Manager of Marketing for the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts and an enthusiastic advocate of the community-building power of the arts.

The Rainbow Chorale's As Seen on TV! showcase on Friday, March 27, was an entertaining romp through a range of favorite television theme songs and other classic TV moments. The rustic Arden Gild Hall setting and "heavy hors d'oeuvres"  which turned out to be a table laden with fried chicken, meatballs, mashed potatoes, corn, meatloaf, vegan polenta lasagna and a selection of homey desserts  established a feeling of an old-fashioned community get-together right from the start.

The chorus, under the direction of Elinor Armsby, led off with The Muppet Show Theme and moved on to other iconic openers like All in the Family's Those Were the Days, The Big Bang Theory's History of Everything, the Sesame Street Theme, and a medley of themes from classic shows like Laverne & Shirley, the Brady Bunch, Bonanza and I Love Lucy.

No lyrics, no problem! We heard vocal adaptations of instrumental pieces like the Theme from Star Trek, and — in possibly the strongest performance of the evening — Henry Mancini's Peter Gunn. In addition to full-chorus features, musical numbers ranged from a solo performance of David Bowie's Life on Mars sung by Denise Conner to a female quartet singing I Wish I Were an Oscar Mayer Wiener in barbershop style, to a rousing rendition of Friends' I'll Be There For You sung by a male sextet, all dressed in their respective Friend's part.

Between musical numbers, chorus members performed costumed skits — a conversation between Archie and Edith Bunker, a gender-bending Star Trek episode — and recreated classic commercials like "Where's the Beef?," "Mikey Likes It!," and even Saturday Night Live's "commercial" for New Shimmer Floor Wax/Dessert Topping.

Throughout the concert, the audience participated enthusiastically, overpowering "Ed Sullivan's" stilted introduction with shrieks and shouts of "Beatles!!" during a recreation of the band's famous performance of I Want to Hold Your Hand and singing along (with more energy than accuracy) with Schoolhouse Rock's Constitution Preamble. By the time the chorus closed with The Golden Girls' Thank You For Being a Friend, it felt like a genuine and heartfelt send-off to a room packed with still-laughing supporters.

The Rainbow Chorale, established in 1999, is an inclusive, nonprofit community chorus that provides LGBT individuals, friends and allies an opportunity to perform choral music while serving as a positive force for change.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Hands Applaud Lips Together Teeth Apart at WDL

By Guest Blogger, Hope R. Rose
Hope is a freelance photographer and photojournalist. She has been published in Next Level Magazine, Delawareblack.com, el Hoy and other regional publications.

I clutched my pearls at the beginning scenes of Wilmington Drama League’s performance of Lips Together, Teeth Apart (LTTA). The actors spewed uncomfortable words. The diverse audience did not know how to react at such horrific words. Most wanted to laugh but saw that we had neighbors that might not find the humor in it.

The play was directed by Rebecca May Flowers and assistant directed by Ivy Brock. LTTA was written by Terence McNally and takes place with two heterosexual couples spending Fourth of July weekend in a beach house on the very gay-friendly Fire Island. Main character Sally has inherited the beach house from her gay brother who recently passed away due to complications from AIDS.

As the play goes on, you laugh at the characters' close-mindedness. You realize that they live their lives as "what is right is who they are."  What’s wrong is people who are gay, other ethnicities, etc. They fail to acknowledge their own fragilities. They all live in isolation. All around them are people who are enjoying the festivities of the holiday weekend, and they are spending a miserable weekend together, isolated, because they are unable to find anything to celebrate about themselves.

The play continues at the Drama League until Sunday, March 29. Check out this introspective performance that examines the lack of diversity that some people live and their (resultant) isolated lives.

Monday, March 16, 2015

DSO Delivers Body and Soul

By Guest Blogger, Christine Facciolo
Christine holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Music and continues to apply her voice to all genres of music. An arts lover since childhood, she currently works as a freelance writer.


Great composers have a gift for looking backward as they push forward.

The Delaware Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Music Director David Amado, presented works by three such composers Friday, March 13, at the Laird Performing Arts Center at Tatnall School.

The program featured works by Johannes Brahms (Variations on a Theme by Haydn), Gerald Finzi (Clarinet Concerto) and Jean Sibelius (Symphony No. 2). Brahms knew his Baroque and Classical music well. His love of the old masters was instilled in him by his first important teacher, Eduard Marxsen. Brahms himself would go on to advise younger composers to obtain a thorough grounding in counterpoint. This work frequently refers back to earlier eras of music, using complex counterpoint in places, yet it remains firmly rooted in the late Romantic style.

Finzi’s Clarinet Concerto is everything that the Brahms isn't: Reserved and contemplative. Not surprising, since the composer was seriously traumatized by the deaths of three of his elder brothers in World War I. (He would leave London after the World War II to live in the country, devoting himself to composition, growing rare apples and editing the works of earlier little-known composers.) His work combines influences from the Baroque as well as English folk music tradition, yet like Brahms, his unique personal style shines through.

Sibelius’ Second Symphony is the first major step on a journey that would culminate in the Seventh Symphony which marked his true ambition: The fusing of form and content into an organic and natural unity.

The orchestra was fully engaged from the first note of the Brahms, infusing the graceful march-like theme — which actually is not by Haydn but apparently enough like him to have fooled both Brahms and Haydn scholar Karl Ferdinand Pohl — with a hymn-like solemnity that pervaded the entire work.

Eight compact and wonderfully diverse variations follow, expressing dark brooding mystery in some and joyful exuberance in others. The entrance of the strings in the first variation fast forwards the listener from the 18th Century to late Romanticism. The boisterous variation 6 has all the character of the hunt with horns coming to the fore. The finale is a stirring passacaglia itself a set of variations with the larger variations after which the theme returns triumphantly in full orchestral mode — replete with triangles and piccolos. If ever there was a transcendental moment in music, this is it.

The result was a transparency of sound which kept all the parts in balance and playing off each other nicely.

In the end, the work does have a direct link to Haydn: In the code of the finale, Brahms quotes directly from the second movement of Haydn’s Clock Symphony which he regarded as one of the greatest symphonic movements of the Classical period.

The Finzi Clarinet Concerto was the astute choice of DSO’s principal clarinetist Charles Salinger. His virtuosic playing did this imaginative but rarely performed work proud, being properly assertive in the opening movement and delightfully playful in the rondo-finale. Both soloist and strings were most impressive in their execution of the concerto’s beautiful second movement.

The highlight of the evening was a glorious rendering of the Sibelius Symphony No. 2. In accordance with the composer’s intentions, Amado kept themes restrained in the first three movements, including the touching elegy embedded in the third movement, beautifully introduced by principal oboist Jeffrey O’Donnell.

This restraint gave way to the rising power of the finale, sending the orchestra soaring with a pronounced sense of majesty and bringing the audience to its feet.