Michael Janairo

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Month: June 2010

  • Big Picture: Theater that matters (Act 1)

    Times Union Studio shot of Entertainment Editor Michael Janairo for his upcoming Unwind “Big Picture” Arts Column, shot on Wednesday, June 16, 2010, in Albany, NY. (Luanne M. Ferris/Times Union)

    In an age of seemingly endless choice, is theater still relevant?

    In May, I spent 11 days in Los Angeles attending the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater (thank you, U.S. taxpayers!). The question of relevance — all too familiar for journalists — often came up as I and 24 other arts journalists were shuttled to about a dozen venues out of the 280 or so theaters in L.A.

    All that driving around, by the way, reminded me of the Capital Region, where theatergoers have to put in a lot of miles to catch the wealth of theater that’s an hour’s drive or less from Albany. Just this week, the motivated theatergoer can see 22 plays or musicals.

    What’s the last one you saw? A sobering report from the National Endowment for the Arts showed a double-digit decline in live theater attendance from 1982 to 2008. In other words, fewer people find theater relevant.

    At the institute, LA Weekly theater critic Steven Leigh Morris argued that what makes the arts in general — and theater in particular — relevant is that they help save our humanity.

    He gave examples of how artists have fought tyranny, such as playwright Vaclav Havel’s Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. And he said the arts take people outside daily routines, away from the crushing forces of media that serve the few and not the many. He also wrote about the subject in LA Weekly.

    Sports and religion, I think, also take people outside daily routine, though into another routine. The arts, at their best, thwart routine by being unexpected or difficult to understand.

    What makes theater different is that it is storytelling with a human connection. Morris stressed something that is obvious, though quite deep: Live theater is where people perform stories in front of other people. If an artist is concerned about people, then he or she should be in theater.

    The power of theater is that it strikes the heart first. For some, the emotional experience is enough. Relevance comes into play when the audience member asks: Why do I feel this way? What does this have to do with the things that concern my life now?

    Answering those questions, Morris said, is the mission of the critic. The critic doesn’t say something is good or bad, or I liked it or didn’t like it. The critic evaluates the work based on how well it realizes its potential to be meaningful to people right now.

    Of course, not all theater strives to do that. Some, like Capital Rep‘s current production of “The Marvelous Wonderettes,” just want to have fun. (The culture of escapism makes a good topic for a future column, though.)

    Morris recognizes this by making a distinction between relevant theater and popular theater. But that doesn’t mean popular theater can’t be relevant. Think of “The Lion King,” which is coming to the 2,600-seat Proctors next year. Few musicals are as popular. Few musicals are based on movies that have grossed nearly $800 million. True, success was never guaranteed. And Julie Taymor’s vision that included puppets was a risk. But it paid off. The musical is still running on Broadway.

    But is it merely popular? “The Lion King,” if done well, can be a thoroughly satisfying theatrical experience because of the engaging story of Simba’s journey from cub to king allows for a deep emotional connection as well as thoughts about universal themes such as parent-child relations and destiny: Who we are as people (or lions) depends on what is given to us and what we do with it.

    Another play that strives to do more, though it isn’t as well-known, is “The Whipping Man,” which recently closed after a string of sell-out shows during its New England premiere at Barrington Stage Company’s smaller 110-seat theater.

    The 2006 play by Matthew Lopez is set in a broken-down house in Richmond, Va., in April 1865 at the end of the Civil War. A Confederate soldier returns home to find two of his family’s former slaves living there. In addition to the familiar complexities of the “peculiar institution” that binds these men together, all of them are Jewish.

    At one point, one of the former slaves quotes a Leviticus prohibition against Jews owning other Jews as slaves and shouts: “Am I a slave? Or am I a Jew?”

    His question was his attempt at asserting an identity beyond the crushing forces embodied by his former master. In so doing, he not only enunciated what the L.A. Weekly critic was talking about, he gave audience members a chance to think about the legacies of war and religious beliefs, two powerful forces that have been on the forefront of most Americans’ minds since Sept. 11.

    The play was powerful stuff, and it was popular. That suggests to me that plenty of people in the Capital Region share my belief that theater matters.

    Act 2 will appear next week. 

  • Big Picture: The arts in our daily lives

    Times Union Studio shot of Entertainment Editor Michael Janairo for his upcoming Unwind “Big Picture” Arts Column, shot on Wednesday, June 16, 2010, in Albany, NY. (Luanne M. Ferris/Times Union)

    For two years now, I’ve had the privilege of working as the Times Union’s arts and entertainment editor.

    The post offers a unique perspective on the ceaseless flow of TV, film, video games, classical music, pop music, jazz, visual arts, theater, opera, literature and festivals available to the Capital Region, as well as access to people who curate and create the cultural landscape — artists, administrators, publicists and audiences.

    In this column, I want to add to the ongoing conversations about the arts in the Capital Region, and the conversations about the Capital Region in general. I believe too often the arts have been relegated to some fictional place outside daily life. I’ve often heard that the basic necessities are food, clothing and shelter, along with jobs to acquire those things and the laws to secure them. That kind of thinking, however, fails to value the basic necessity of the arts. The arts are the realizations of the imagination — of rich inner lives — which is crucial to what it means to be human.

    My title “editor” doesn’t quite get to the heart of what I’m describing. A better word is culturalist.

    By culturalist, I don’t mean the kind of -ist linked to a singular ideology (such as anarchist); rather, I see it as a mix of a profession (think dentist) and of someone who uses something (think guitarist).

    Culture, however, is a weighty word. It has separate and distinct meanings in the realms of humanities and science: The culture of a city is quite different from the culture in a petri dish.

    Or is it?

    The culture of a community isn’t static. It is a living organism that requires care to thrive — or else it dies.

    So if the Capital Region can be viewed as a petri dish, then what is its culture? I’m often asked that question when speaking with people outside the region. What I often say is the region is decentralized and has a bit of an identity crisis, meaning we have difficulty describing what it is (as opposed to what it is not).

    Let me explain: We have no cultural center. Instead, we have great institutions in all directions such as Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown to the west; the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake to the north; Tanglewood in the Berkshires to the east; and Art Omi in Ghent to the south. The region’s four core counties, as well, have many major institutions such as SPAC in Saratoga, Proctors in Schenectady, EMPAC in Troy and The Egg in Albany.

    Of course what I’ve named are just a few places, not an exhaustive list, and I apologize to all the worthy places I’ve left out. The point is that one defining characteristic of the Capital Region is that you need a car to explore the rich offerings of its wide geography.

    The region’s identity crisis is perhaps best summed up by the nickname “Smallbany.” Sure, the Capital Region exists in the shadow of the huge metropolises of Boston and New York City. And Smallbany has self-effacing charm and it sounds accurate, especially when people realize they are linked by a lot less than six degrees of separation. But it unfortunately makes Albany seem like the center of things, when it isn’t.

    The Capital Region’s identity crisis has manifested itself most recently in the online discussion about the Best of the Capital Region, especially in the arguments that pit local businesses against chain restaurants and stores. Some people have even expressed embarrassment over the presence of chains. (See for yourself at http://blog.timesunion.com/bestof2010 and read especially the comments about Best pizza and Best Italian restaurant.)

    Why? People want the Capital Region to have a distinct culture and to think of themselves as unique. Any individual’s experiences are unique, but as a group placed together by circumstance and geography, it is difficult to stand out when we are already shaped by the might of the larger American culture.

    The conversation about chain vs. local, however, is just one of the conversations going on now that help define our region — and ourselves. It is an ongoing conversation in which we can all take part. Join me.

  • Here’s an interesting quote

    Here’s an interesting quote that came to me courtesy of an e-mail listserve called You Cott Mail

    Quote of the Day:

    “True art is revolutionary”From “Die Kunst und die Revolution” [“Art and Revolution”], an essay written by the composer Richard Wagner in 1849, translated by William Ashton Ellis

    “Almost universal is the outcry raised by artists nowadays against the damage that the [French] Revolution has occasioned them. It is not the battles of the ‘barricades,’ not the sudden mighty shattering of the pillars of the State, not the hasty change of Governments,— that is bewailed; for the impression left behind by such capital events as these, is for the most part disproportionately fleeting, and short-lived in its violence. But it is the protracted character of the latest convulsions that is so mortally affecting the artistic efforts of the day. The hitherto-recognized foundations of industry, of commerce, and of wealth, are now threatened; and though tranquility has been outwardly restored, and the general physiognomy of social life completely re-established, yet there gnaws at the entrails of this life a carking care, an agonizing distress. Reluctance to embark in fresh undertakings, is maiming credit; he who wishes to preserve what he has, declines the prospect of uncertain gain; industry is at a standstill, and — Art has no longer the wherewithal to live….Yet Art remains in its essence what it ever was; we have only to say, that it is not present in our modern public system. It lives, however, and has ever lived in the individual conscience, as the one fair, indivisible Art. Thus the only difference is this: with the [ancient] Greeks it lived in the public conscience, whereas today it lives alone in the conscience of private persons, the public un-conscience recking nothing of it. Therefore in its flowering time the Grecian Art was conservative, because it was a worthy and adequate expression of the public conscience: with us, true Art is revolutionary, because its very existence is opposed to the ruling spirit of the community.”