Jay Harvey Upstage

As a theater outsider since my school days, I've often wondered how directors and actors handle the leap from rehearsal to public performance, especially when it comes to anticipating audience response to comedy. [A more general consideration of laughter, its wellsprings and benefits, can be found here. ] Outbursts of merriment can be planned for, though not precisely. How long will they laugh? How much will they laugh? Knowing what's likely to generate laughs and what to do to keep the response from covering the next line or action is part of the preparation. Getting it right must be something like having a cast member who never shows up for rehearsals but is undismissably part of the show. Phoenix's 'Old Jews Telling Jokes': laughing along with the crowd A comedy audience is indelibly a player, and if you're doing something like  Phoenix Theatre's "Old Jews Telling Jokes,"   you wouldn't have it any other way. Laughter is infectious...

Don't let your mental focus on the hackneyed hags of legend tempt you to think of EclecticPond Theatre Company 's "Macbeth" as the ideal classic play for the Halloween season. The piously clothed "weird sisters" impart  dark secrets in 'Macbeth.' With four more performances (all of them after the holiday) at Irvington United Methodist Church , this production's witches are identified visually with their most common epithet in Shakespeare's Scottish play — "the weird sisters" — and so here they are nuns (a decision fully explained in the program). They're working both sides of the sacred-secular divide, in a sense. But then, "Macbeth" is a tragedy full of unsettling contrasts — with willed ambition shading into fated prophecy, political legitimacy fading across the borderline into bloody usurpation. Directed by Catherine Cardwell in modern dress (1950s, to be precise), the play bristles with a bellicose atmosphe...

The "brand" of Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" is unlike anything else in 20th-century classical music: People go wild over it, its repertoire position is almost as secure among chorus-orchestra pieces as Handel's "Messiah," and its opening chorus, "O Fortuna," has been pressed into service to sell things. What David Hochoy has done with it benefits from representing the spirit of the piece without following its context except through an imagery prism of his own devising. There are no monk's robes to suggest to us the Goliard poets who accessed their secular side through the poetry Orff drew from manuscripts discovered at the monastery of Benediktbeuern in southern Germany. Dance Kaleidoscope represents formidable Fortune in "Carmina Burana" In the current revival by Dance Kaleidoscope at Indiana Repertory Theatre, I enjoyed the removal from anything devoted to the Middle Ages in central Europe. There is instead a timel...

Rich Komenich (from left), Sara Riemen, Daniel Scharbrough, Adrienne Reiswerg, Eric J. Olson. One thing is indisputable: the Phoenix Theatre 's new production in its comedy-oriented season has the most marketable truth-in-labeling title of a local show since Theatre on the Square 's "Naked Boys Singing" of two seasons back. "Old Jews Telling Jokes" — OK, maybe the first two words don't apply 100 percent to the five-person cast —  opened Thursday night in the cabaret-style Basile Theatre. The underground setting is perfect for belly laughs to rock the foundations of the conclusively deconsecrated church the Phoenix calls home. Since the Borscht Belt and vaudeville heritage went national in television's golden age, there have been  two iconic figures in American Jewish humor: George Jessel and Milton Berle. Not the most talented of a distinguished lot, Jessel and Berle each stood for two characteristics that established their genre as folklor...

Co-artistic directors Gregory Martin, David Bellman, Ingrid Fischer-Bellman Overshadowed by the even greater level of carnage and atrocity of World War II, the "Great War" — which began a century ago this year — probably defined the modern era in Western Civilization more crucially than the cataclysm that followed a generation later. The 1914-18 conflict certainly disrupted or destroyed millions of lives, upset a long-lasting sense of security and values, and set the arts on several new courses — redefining, and sometimes casting aside, definitions of "masterpiece." For "In Memoriam: The Great War," the Ronen Chamber Ensemble played two outright masterpieces by composers deeply affected by World War I. Maurice Ravel's "Le Tombeau de Couperin" (in an arrangement for woodwind quintet) and Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1, op. 9 (arranged by the composer's illustrious student Anton Webern) represented the program's...

Newspaper reviewing having become a quaint journalistic subspecialty, reminiscence and reflection bubble up naturally whenever a former colleague in those trenches and I get together. The other day, he and I were talking about the immediate audience "review" of performances that's represented by the standing ovation. What audiences think they should do if they really, really liked it Neither of us, I  am bold to claim, was indulging in the curmudgeonliness expected of critics in finding regrettable the near-invariability of the standing ovation nowadays. A rarely encountered level of awfulness apparently must be sunk to for Indianapolis audiences not to stand, it would seem. I'm far from the only one who used to think of an on-its-feet audience response as "the ultimate tribute" — an honor accorded a performing artist for an extraordinarily satisfying, perhaps even transcendent, display of his/her/their art. Recently, "ultimate" has become ...

Somewhere back around the time Bob Dylan was starting his long apprenticeship toward rock elder- statesman status, he released an album called "Self-Portrait," with hideous, self-daubed cover art and two discs of humdrum music inside. How Dylan saw himself, truly or not. A friend of mine solemnly said of it: "I think he's finally being true to himself." A notorious review of "Self-Portrait" in Rolling Stone opened with: "What is this s---?" Somewhere between those polarities lies the world of "Lightning and Jellyfish," a seriocomic meditation on late adolescence by Lou Harry. On the one hand, it almost affectionately recalls the Cape May resort town he hails from, seen through young, hopefully maturing eyes.  On the other, it riffs on the transient nature of Jersey Shore summers and the ebb and flow of seeking permanence versus moving on. Rachel (Allyson Womack) and Angela (Abigail Gilster) keep it real. No better mi...

Having admired some of its recordings for many years, I looked forward to my first Orpheus Chamber Orchestra concert largely because I had to test the truth of what I'd been hearing. Of course, there was also the draw of Jonathan Biss as piano soloist at Saturday night's Palladium concert. Recording technology has permitted so many nudges toward perfection over the years that only the concert experience can allay suspicions that a lot of the excellence we hear has been engineered. The Orpheus in fact does produce ensemble excellence without a conductor — every musician is engaged with the music and reflects well-practiced agreement on articulation, tempo, and dynamics. Performances that cohere and have vitality are the result. Bloomington-born Jonathan Biss has often collaborated with Orpheus. When these qualities are linked to what a top-drawer soloist has to offer, the result can be stunning. So it was with the Biss/Orpheus performance of Beethoven's Piano Con...

Funny how certain pieces of music acquire symbiotic pests the way old ships used to acquire barnacles. Two such pieces form the bulk of this weekend's Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra concerts: Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No 3 in D minor and Sibelius' Symphony No. 2 in D major. I've scraped the barnacles off with difficulty in both cases. I was somewhat familiar with them decades ago, before the associations I'm about to relate complicated matters. Geoffrey Rush goes manic as pianist conquering "Rach 3." The Rachmaninoff was almost spoiled for me by the 1996 movie "Shine," a feverish biopic about the struggles of a manic-depressive Australian pianist named David Helfgott, played by Geoffrey Rush. Well-received by eminent critics, "Shine" was enthralling but effortful, taking its place in a long series of Hollywood interpretations of classical music unfortunately suffused with a cheesy aura. We may be a popular art, moviemak...

The question John Logan's Mark Rothko asks his assistant twice at crucial points — "What do you see?" — receives the same answer: "Red," the play's title. Dressed for success, Ken arrives at Mark Rothko's studio in IRT's "Red" In between the artist's tantrum the first time Ken says "red" and his musing silence the second time falls the shadow. In Indiana Repertory Theatre 's new production, the shadow is the deepening anxiety of a modernist hero confronting the place of his celebrated art in the parallel universe of Manhattan wealth and prestige. "Red" takes place at the end of a decade in which Rothko had come into his own, along with a crowded generation of abstract expressionists who made New York the world art capital for the first time. In 1951, Rothko had posed with other new stars for a photograph, giving the camera a guarded, slightly pained look. "The Irascibles," they were dubbed. Lo...

The goal of every chamber-music group is to project a personality all its own while not pouring it like a sauce over a wide range of repertoire. Jerusalem Quartet played itself as well as three distinctive pieces. It can be a tricky proposition, but the Jerusalem Quartet showed how it's done Wednesday night at the Indiana History Center. The Israeli group opened the 71st season of Ensemble Music Society with a program of Ravel, Beethoven, and Brahms — giving a distinctive profile to each of the three string quartets enjoyed by a near-capacity audience in Basile Theater. I'm resisting picking up online evidence of the JQ's affinity for the likes of Shostakovich and Bartok. But I'm betting that violinists Alexander Pavlovsky and Sergei Bresler, violist Ori Kam, and cellist Kyril Zlotnikov have a unified vision of those composers as well. Founded in the 1990s with one change of personnel since (Kam joined in 2011), the Jerusalem Quartet has been well-received fo...

Martin Pearlman and his Boston Baroque launched their recording sessions for Haydn 's "Lord Nelson" Mass on the day of the Boston Marathon bombing . Martin Pearlman leads Boston Baroque in Haydn. A program note in the CD booklet ( Linn Records ) makes mention of that fact, and draws a link between the singers' and instrumentalists' work on the piece and that day's terrorist event. After all, the name the composer gave to the work was Missa in angustiis — "Mass in time of trouble or anxiety." What Haydn alluded to was Napoleon's imperial ambition and its effect on the composer's beloved Vienna. An English military hero led forces that turned back the French forces' advance, thus providing the work with its nickname. April 2013 doesn't necessarily hold more than an incidental place in the long history of troubling events. What else is history besides trouble? one sometimes wonders. But the understanding and commitment of the...