Last summer, I finally saw Les Misérables. The musical? Maybe you’ve heard of it? It has been circling the globe since there was still a Soviet Union and Reagan was denouncing its evil empire. Dallas Summer Musicals brought in the farewell tour of the famous show, and I had been looking forward to reviewing it. I sat there in the Saturday matinee, trying to keep up (luckily, I had read the synopsis in the program), but I was unable to hear much of it, which would have helped with the plot. Soon—all too soon—I was bored to distraction with the draggy histrionics.
True, the lowlife Thenardiers punctured the wearisome earnestness with their comedy. The actors playing Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert boomed out a few rousing solos; the fighting on the barricades had its bracing moments. But on the whole? Give me a movie, a Rangers game, a bike ride, a good novel—a better Saturday. And don’t tell me I didn’t get it. Redemption and sacrifice are good things. I get it.
Finally, when the end came, I clapped politely and turned in my seat, ready to get out of there—when, to my astonishment, the entire audience stood up, applauding like a stadium full of people just saved by Superman from being obliterated by an asteroid. Cheers, as someone once said when the metaphor was young and brassy, rang out.
The show wasn’t that good. What was going on?
The same thing that goes on at many shows in Dallas. Standing ovations have become routine, both in my experience and from the reports of others, primarily at the Dallas Theater Center, Dallas Summer Musicals, and WaterTower Theatre’s mainstage productions. Of the performances I’ve seen in the past year, only three—Crowns, at the Dallas Theater Center, and Urinetown and The Crucible, at WaterTower—seemed to me worthy of such audience praise. Standing up to applaud was a natural response, even for a critic. After a superb performance, you can’t help it. You want to honor the seamless way the actors, the director, and everyone involved have realized and enhanced the playwright’s vision, which is substantial in itself. Take Me Out and Into the Woods, also at WaterTower, didn’t deserve standing ovations—but they got them anyway.
Audiences apparently think that not bestowing one would be an insult, a “B-“. When everybody else gets an “A+”, they’re right. For example, at opening night of the Dallas Summer Musicals production of Brooklyn in July, the audience held back a little, maybe because Melba Moore as the Brooklyn diva Paradice (emphasis on the dice) had said some uncomplimentary things about the DSM demographic in her street character’s scripted rants, or maybe because the musical doesn’t have a sufficiently soaring conclusion. Despite Diana DeGarmo’s huge voice and winsome performance, the ovation had a ragged contour, I imagine, to producer Michael Jenkins’ discerning eye from the back of the Music Hall. Some patrons in the expensive seats down in front actually stayed in their seats. But they must have felt guilty about it, because when young Miss DeGarmo gestured to the orchestra to rise for recognition, they thought she meant for them to stand up and clap, so they did.
I asked Susan Sargeant—a longtime veteran of Dallas theater, founder of WingSpan, and one of the city’s most sought-after directors—what she thought about the ovation phenomenon, and her answer had to do with the almost anti-Dallas nature of the audience’s investment in entertainment.
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| Not Your Grandmother’s Knickknacks The Goss Gallery mounts a cutting-edge exhibition of British glass and ceramics. This month, the Goss Gallery hosts “Naturally Formed: Works by Angela Jarman, Neil Wilkin, Kate Malone, and Junko Mori,” a show conceived by Filippo Tattoni-Marcozzi and Adrian Sassoon, a London contemporary and ceramics dealer. “The art world is rediscovering glass and ceramics and not relegating them anymore to so-called ’arts and crafts,’” says Tattoni-Marcozzi, the gallery’s curator and director. The exhibit showcases the works of four London-based sculptors works connected not by one singular thread but by many intersecting ones. “[The artists employ] a wild combination of nature and fantasy to inspire the shapes and form they produce,” Tattoni-Marcozzi says. Angela Jarman creates glass pieces that echo nature’s own creations (leaves, sprouts, buds, and cells), inviting and disturbing viewers with her sculptural vision and technical prowess. Neil Wilkin builds bulbous and spiky blown -glass sculptures, ranging from massive chandeliers to naturalistic garden pieces that seem to bloom and regenerate. Kate Malone’s ceramics, often “pebbled” or crystallized, include leaves and bulbs clinging to bulging pots and pitchers caked with repeating designs. Junko Mori, working in forged steel and other metals, hand hammers his pieces and designs as he creates, resulting in pieces that seem to evolve of their own accord-prickly, round, earthbound, and compelling. The works are organic and appear more grown than crafted. Tattoni-Marcozzi calls them “objects of common use but with a twist. And that is where the fun starts.” —JENNY BLOCK |
“At Fair Park, these are Broadway imports and that ’label’ translates to higher quality for some,” she says. “The Dallas Theater Center also brings in so many New York artists—actors, directors, designers—and that could also translate into a higher appreciation by patrons. Both the DTC and Fair Park patrons pay a hefty sum for their tickets. I really think they want to be part of the evening. Just the math of it—ticket prices, out to dinner, babysitters, gas prices, parking. I’m sure for a lot of Dallas folks, Fair Park and the DTC may be as close as they will come to a Broadway experience. By partaking in an ovation, they have earned some ownership.”
In her 10 years of putting on productions, she told me, only one play—the first WingSpan production—received a standing ovation. “My audience is obviously not the type to jump to their feet. They come to see WingSpan for a different kind of theatrical experience. I tend to produce plays that are lesser-known, or less frequently produced.”
Marianne Galloway, artistic director of Risk Theater Initiative and the new president of the Dallas Theatre League, agrees that it all depends on where you go.
“Theoretically, at least,” she says, “there is an audience for every type of theater out there. The audience that attends an Uptown Players production is probably not the same audience you’ll see at the Dallas Children’s Theatre. Nor is the DTC audience likely to show up at an Echo production. Some patrons like the experience of exclusivity, which is cultivated at some arts institutions. Others hate it, and either seek out theaters where they don’t feel so alienated—or go to a movie. I think it comes down to where you’re having your experience. I’m not going to be the same audience member at the Theater Center as I am at Pocket Sandwich. One lets me throw popcorn. The other doesn’t. Audiences are such a vital, ever-changing organism.”
In a way, the ovation crowd goes for the ovation. What is an audience supposed to do? Be rude to the actors? Maybe so. It might help us get over the way that movies and especially television have given going to live theater a walking-on-eggshells feel. Phones ring in your house, and the TV show goes on. You can talk all you want, shout upstairs, leave to make popcorn. You can watch it or TiVo it for later. In movie theaters, strangers might tell you to sit down and shut up, which means that for some people, seeing Pirates of the Caribbean II on the big screen isn’t worth it. In live performances, it’s even more sensitive, as the people most likely to go realize. They might even overvalue the unmediated, unedited risk of what the actors are doing. When live entertainment was the only kind there was, you suspect, audiences weren’t quite so polite if what they saw wasn’t good enough.
Saw—notice the word. All of us tend to be spectators rather than auditors. People go to see a show, even if it’s live, which implies a kind of spectator’s distance from it, as though it were a football game. Ask, “Have you heard Les Misérables?” and the answer will probably be “You mean the soundtrack?” By contrast, Shakespeare’s Hamlet says, “We’ll hear a play to-morrow.” No doubt widespread illiteracy had something to do with it, but people gathered in theaters to hear the clashing variety of voices and arguments, as well as the rich poetic rhythms of spoken words. In the history of the English language, an audience has always been about presence—an audience with the king, for example, which means getting a hearing. Being an audience is about people coming together in a complex judging relation to each other, as full of mixed emotions as Catullus was when he wrote, Odi et amo—”I hate and I love”—to his lover. How can you love what you can’t hate?
All this about audiences reminds me of Melina Mercouri playing the merry prostitute Illia in Never On Sunday. She always goes to the productions of tragedies in the summer, and she enjoys them immensely because she misunderstands, say, Medea, entirely. For her, despite all the bad things that happen, the children and their mother get together at the end and wave at the audience. The ending is always the same: “And they all go to the seashore!”
Maybe when it comes down to it, that’s the true ovation mood—the need to enjoy what you’ve come to enjoy, regardless. And if you can’t? You end up as one of the miserable at Les Misérables.
Save the Dates
September 29-October 29
After James McLure’s Lone Star / Laundry & Bourbon back in August, Sue Loncar’s Contemporary Theatre of Dallas keeps the Texas humor coming, right where the sanctuary used to be in their Sears Street building. As they put it, “CTD ain’t no church no more,” and Exhibit A is the Tony-winning The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, about the Chicken Ranch. James Lemons directs. 5601 Sears St. 214-828-0094. www.contemporarytheatreofdallas.com.
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| Photography courtesy of Dallas Theater Center |
October 4-8 and 11-14
Remember how hot it was at Samuell-Grand Amphitheatre this past summer during that run of 100-plus-degree days? Shakespeare Dallas had the great idea of saving a play for October, when it actually cools down at night. Marianne Galloway directs Much Ado About Nothing in this outdoor production. If you miss it in Dallas, catch it in Addison the next weekend. 1500 Tenison Pkwy. 214-559-2778. www.shakespearedallas.org.
October 11-November 5
Tennessee Williams could have single-handedly powered the Age of Steam, especially with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a play about family tensions in the pre-air-conditioned South. The 1958 movie starred the young Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. Check out the revival at the Dallas Theater Center. 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd. 214-522-8499. www.dallastheatercenter.org.
