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The Year on Stage
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 29, 2002
Spectacle ruled the performing arts in 2002 as The Lion King and Cirque du Soleil came to the Tampa Bay area within a month of each other.
Cirque's Quidam was new to me, and I was bowled over by its surreal mix of acrobatics, clowning and conceptual flair under the whimsical blue and yellow big top. With a pulsating score and loosely structured narrative on a young-girl-coming-of-age theme, it felt like a new kind of theater for our sports-crazed age, a visual poetry with muscles. It was unlike anything I'd ever seen and expanded my view of the arts.
The Lion King, on the other hand, was a known quantity because I had seen it twice on Broadway before the tour finally arrived here. Still, no matter how many times I see it, Julie Taymor's visionary staging seems like the experience of a theatergoing lifetime. This time around, I was struck by how powerfully African it was, much more so than the animated movie, and the brilliant primary colors of Donald Holder's lighting scheme. I've even come to like, or at least not mind too much, the Disney shtick. If I have to listen to a few Elton John-Tim Rice pop tunes to hear Lebo M's choral arrangements and Zulu chant, it's a small price to pay.
However, for all the artistry of The Lion King and Quidam, they are also commercial juggernauts with pricey tickets that siphoned a lot of disposable income that might have been spent on other bay area productions. In many ways, 2002 was a year of caution and cutbacks in the performing arts, as the weak economy took its toll.
A year ago, Opera Tampa was riding high after making a splash with the premiere of Anton Coppola's Sacco & Vanzetti. This year, the company opened its eighth season by scaling back. Even with two performances instead of three, attendance lagged for an excellent production of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci. Judi Lisi, president of Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and the driving force behind Opera Tampa, sounded the alarm that opera is at a turning point.
The search for an elusive audience did in David Rowell, former executive director of the Mahaffey Theater Foundation. Rowell had been on notice from the board of trustees that this season was make-or-break for him, and he was gone by November after sparse turnouts plagued his shows. It was back to the drawing board for the Mahaffey, whose efforts to emulate TBPAC and Ruth Eckerd Hall have never panned out.
Who would have ever thought that the bright spot in a tough economy would be the Florida Orchestra? Remarkably, at a time when orchestras all over the country were reporting deficits, it finished this past fiscal year in the black, though the musicians are still underpaid.
The most important happening in the performing arts this year was the orchestra naming Stefan Sanderling as its next music director. His appointment was announced on May Day, but the decisive moment had come two months earlier when he conducted the orchestra for the first time in a program anchored by the Brahms Fourth Symphony.
Ho hum, another Brahms symphony, a concertgoer might have been excused for thinking. Except that midway through the first movement, it became obvious this one was special. Sanderling brought out individual strands of the symphonic texture while still keeping a taut momentum. He took some daring pauses that allowed the music to breathe without losing intensity. Here was a vibrant young conductor with a clear idea of what he wanted and the talent to communicate it to the players.
Sanderling, who officially takes over as music director next season, has the potential to make a huge impact on the Tampa Bay cultural scene for years to come.
That said, it's also important to remember the contributions of Jahja Ling, who wound up his 14-year tenure with Mahler's Third Symphony just a few days before Sanderling's appointment. Ling upheld musical standards when the orchestra was on the ropes financially in the mid 1990s. Nobody would have blamed him for bowing out when payrolls couldn't be met, guest artists canceled because their fees weren't paid and the orchestra almost folded, but he hung in there and laid the groundwork for an impressive recovery.
Another deeply felt departure was that of Thomas Wilkins, the resident conductor who was the orchestra's most popular figure. His grass-roots involvement with the community and schools set a standard that will be hard to match. In fact, replacing Wilkins proved such a problem that the resident conductor search was extended into this season.
Of orchestra concerts in 2002, my favorite was the Verdi Requiem, with an exceptionally well-matched vocal quartet of Camellia Johnson, soprano; Gigi Mitchell-Velasco, mezzo-soprano; Jianyi Zhang, tenor; and Thomas Potter, bass. Usually, there's a clinker among the soloists, but not this time.
I also enjoyed hearing the orchestra in a rare foray into minimalism, a performance of John Adams' Harmonielehre under guest conductor Michael Christie. Garrison Keillor's appearance was another highlight, especially his acerbic reading of the Young Lutheran's Guide to the Orchestra.
Among other classical performances, violinist Maxim Vengerov's recital at the Palladium was a complete delight, from his expressive treatment of works by Schubert, Strauss and Kreisler to his blithe endorsement of the pine-cone extract that moved him to do the benefit for the Tampa Bay Research Institute, which manufactures the elixir.
The three-day International Ernst von Dohnanyi Festival at Florida State University in Tallahassee was a significant scholarly initiative to rehabilitate the reputation of the composer, once thought to be a Nazi sympathizer before his emigration from Hungary to take a teaching post at FSU. The festival also was a good showcase for his music, with the first performance of his symphonic cantata Cantus vitae since its 1941 premiere in Budapest.
In the shadow of high-profile tours like The Lion King and Quidam, theater companies in the bay area were sometimes overlooked. Nor did a lot of their programming cry out for attention. There were productions of The Zoo Story and Waiting for Godot, which once would have constituted a bold season, but they seem passe now.
American Stage is probably in the best position to do theater that matters, but without an artistic director in place, it drifted along doing pleasant but inconsequential plays such as Camping With Henry and Tom, The Pavilion and Over the River and Through the Woods. Hope is in the wings, though, as the company named Todd Olson, an actor, director and educator from Tennessee, as its next artistic director. He arrives in January.
Even without a leader, American Stage scored a sensational hit with last spring's Shakespeare in the Park production, The Bomb-itty of Errors. To rap or not to rap, that was the question in this hip-hop treatment of The Comedy of Errors, and the answer was a resounding, hilarious yes. The production went on to have successful runs in Chicago and Edinburgh.
Finally, there was a performance that proved that some artists only improve with age. In the 1960s, I was enthralled by Twyla Tharp and her company, which barnstormed college towns in a station wagon, bringing a generation her propulsive modern dance set to music of the Beach Boys or Frank Sinatra.
Twyla Tharp Dance, the choreographer's new chamber-sized company, performed Surfer at the River Styx at Ruth Eckerd Hall. Set to a hard-driving percussive score by Donald Knaack, it had an apocalyptic force that was stunning. With John Selya as the surfer, hanging 10 on the Underworld river, the performance was so emotionally loaded, so original in its use of the stage, that it had to be either an amazing con job or a masterpiece.
And coming across that sort of exhilarating experience makes all the nights spent at humdrum performances worth it for me.