Sunday, February 21, 2010

Stew and Heidi "Making It" at St. Anne's Warehouse


We caught Stew, Heidi Rodewald and their great band (Marty Beller-drums, Michael McGinnis-woodwinds, Joe McGinty-keyboards, Dan Peck-tuba, Brian Dry- trombone) at St.Anne's Warehouse. Although the Tony-award winning success of "Passing Strange" as it moved from workshop in Berkeley to off-Broadway, to Broadway as well as Spike Lee's film of the Broadway performance, has virtually associated them with new musical theater, the current show is essentially a concert, featuring a song cycle, soon to be an album, called "Making It" that follows the complications that life can take when Stew and Heidi began to achieve the dreams from the earlier years that they sang about in "Passing Strange." It features a number of new tunes, very expansively developed with the wind section and the entire band.

On Saturday, Stew was wearing a bright orange coverall. Was this comfortable concert wear, like Pete Townsend, circa Pure and Easy, or like something you would wear in Fresno County Jail, a metaphor that asks the question, even after "Making It," is Stew a prisoner of the road?

As Stew made clear, it was a concert not a theatrical event ("Plays close. Concerts don't.") It was a somewhat abbreviated concert at that, an hour of the new music, followed by a few songs from the catalog (including "Ken" about a gay "Ken" Doll). Still, although Stew asserts his identity as a musician over that of a dramatist, the show managed to feature some interesting stage-crawling theatrics and multi-media moments by set and video designers Jim Findlay and Jeff Sugg.

But, still, abbreviated it was. Maybe it was the full-day they had spent in the studio, but before the show was even over, Stew was griping a bit over the scheduled "talk back" moderated by Bill Bragin, a producer and apparent goombah of Stew and Heidi from Public Theater days. This appeared to be part of St. Anne's "Meet the Composer" program. As Stew kept saying, who needs the talk anyway, don't the songs say it all? In fairness to the performers, since "Making It" was commissioned by St. Anne's this chat appears to have been contracted as a part of the run.

Once the lights went up and the musical portion ended, things got interesting and a little wild, even for St. Anne's. In the chaotic littoral between the actual set and the subsequent gabfest, and not knowing how long the "talk back" would last, some folks, since things appeared to be in motion, got up and made a beeline for lobby. Others in the audience also made their move, either to hit the streets looking for a drink or for a quick run to the rest room.

I couldn't tell if Stew was amused or annoyed, but he began to lead the band in a down and dirty improvised vamp of "They Don't Want to Hear the Talking!" which frankly was among the more amusing, unscripted moments of the night. Some retook our seats. The moderator made his way to the stage. Some folks left for good and Bragin led a fairly brief, tame and mildly informative chat with Heidi and Stew, seeming to rely too much on the audience's input. Stew alternately complimented the audience's intelligence for not asking questions, and chided us, for being afraid to ask. But, like Stew,and Her Majesty, once the show was over, the audience didn't have a lot to say.

But there were two interesting nuggets culled from the "Meet the Composer" talk back: Heidi Rodewald had a strong solo in "Making It," seeming to share the spotlight more fully with Stew (at least for one number) than occurred in "Passing Strange." She observed that, because it was a concert, she had that featured role but wondered if it went to a full-blown theatrical production, whether she would be allowed to retain the spotlight. Stew laughed but, as with all ex-es, no doubt there was more than a twinge of truth in the humor.

Also, when a youngster in the audience asked what inspired him to turn to music, Stew mentioned the usual rock fare of The Beatles in Hard Day's Night, but then he came clean with a great great great great bit of 1960s honesty:

Stew's early and important inspiration? Glen Campbell.




Glen Campbell performs classic Wichita Lineman

"Making It" is at St. Anne's Warehouse through February 22.

Current Reading

  • Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War- Tony Horwitz
  • A Sultan in Palermo - Tariq Ali
  • Hitch-22: A Memoir - Christopher Hitchens
  • Negropedia- Patrice Evans
  • Dead Funny: Humor in Nazi Germany - Rudolph Herzog
  • Exile on Main Street - Robert Greenfield
  • Among the Truthers - A Journey Among America's Growing Conspiracist Underworld - Jonathan Kay
  • Paradise Lost - John Milton
  • What Is Your Dangerous Idea? Thinking the Unthinkable - John Brockman
  • Notes from the Edge Times - Daniel Pinchbeck
  • Fringe-ology: How I Can't Explain Away the Unexplainable- Steve Volk
  • Un Juif pour l'exemple (translated as A Jew Must Die )- Jacques Cheesex
  • The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
  • Pale King - David Foster Wallce
  • David Bowie: Starman bio - Paul Trynka
  • Tobacco Stained Mountain Goat - Andrez Bergen
  • The Future of Nostalgia -Svetlana Boym
  • Living in the End Times - Slavoj ZIzek
  • FIrst as Tragedy Next as Farce - Slavoj Zizek
  • How to Survive a Robot Uprising - Daniel Wilson
  • Where is My Jet Pack? -Daniel Wilson
  • Day of the Oprichniks - Vladimir Sorokin
  • Ice Trilogy - Vladimir Sorokin
  • First Civilizations
  • Oscar Wilde -Andre Maurois
  • The Beats - Harvey Pekar, et al
  • SDS - Harvey Pekar, et al
  • The Unfinished Animal - Theodore Roszak
  • Friends of Eddy Coyle
  • Brooklands -Emily Barton
  • Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahme-Smith - Entertaining and historical
  • Dictionary of the Khazars - Pavic
  • Sloth-Gilbert Hernandez
  • War and Peace- Leo Tolstoy
  • Charles Addams: An Evilution
  • Life in Ancient Greece
  • Time - Eva Hoffmann
  • Violence - S. Zizek
  • Luba - a graphic novel by Gilbert Hernandez
  • Life in Ancient Egypt
  • Great Apes - Will Self - riveting and disturbing
  • Lost Honor of Katherina Blum - Heinrich Boll - could not put it down
  • Yellow Back Radio Brokedown - Ishmael Reed (author deserving of new wide readership)
  • Living in Ancient Mesopotomia
  • Landscape in Concrete - Jakov Lind - surreal
  • 'There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor's Baby'-Ludmilla Petrushevskaya - creepy stories - translation feels literarily "thin"
  • Mythologies - William Butler Yeats (re-read again & again)
  • How German Is It ? - Walter Abish
  • The Book of Genesis - illustrated by R. Crumb - visionary
  • "Flags" - an illustrated encyclopedia - wish I could remember all of these. Flag culture
  • Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
  • Ubik - Philip K. Dick
  • Nobody's Fool - Richard Russo
  • Hitler's Empire - Mark Mazower
  • Nazi Culture - various authors
  • Master Plan: Himmler 's Scholars and the Holocaust - Heather Pringle
  • Eichmann in Jerusalem - Hannah Arendt
  • Living in Ancient Rome
  • Traveling with Herodotus -R. Kapuszynsky
  • Oblivion - David Foster Wallace - Some of his greatest work
  • Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace - still wrestling with this great book
  • Netherland - Joseph O'Neill - staggeringly great read
  • Renegade - The Obama Campaign - Richard Wolffe
  • Mount Analogue - Rene Daumal
  • John Brown
  • Anathem - Neal Stephenson - love Stephenson but tough slogging first few chapters
  • 7 Deadly Sins
  • ALEX COX - Alex Cox
  • FIASCO by Thomas Ricks
  • I, Fellini - Charlotte Chandler & Federico Fellini
  • Best of 20th century alternative history fiction
  • Judah P. Benjamin - Eli Evans - Confederacy's Secretary of State & source of the W.C. Field's exclamation
  • Moscow 2042 - Vladimir Voinovich - Pre-1989 curiosity & entertaining sci fi read; love his portrayal of Solzhenitsyn-like character
  • Gomorrah - Roberto Saviano - Mafia without the It-Am sugar coating. Brutal & disturbing
  • The Sack of Rome - Celebrity+Media+Money=Silvio Berlusconi - Alexander Stille
  • Reporting - David Remnick - terrific journalism
  • Fassbinder
  • Indignation - Philip Roth
  • Rome
  • Let's Go Italy! 2008
  • Italian Phrases for Dummies
  • How to Pack
  • Violence - Slavoj Zizek
  • Dali: Painting & Film
  • The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight - Jimmy Breslin
  • The Good Rat - Jimmy Breslin
  • Spook Country - William Gibson
  • A Blue Hand - The Beats in India - Deborah Baker
  • The Metaphysical Club - Louis Menard
  • Coast of Utopia - Tom Stoppard
  • Physics of the Impossible - Dr. Michio Kaku
  • Managing the Unexpected - Weick & Sutcliffe
  • Wait Til The Midnight Hour - Writings on Black Power
  • Yellow Back Radio Brokedown - Ishmael Reed
  • Burning Down the Masters' House - Jayson Blair
  • Howl - Allen Ginsberg
  • Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
  • The Palace Thief - Ethan Canin
  • John Adams - David McCullough
  • The Wooden Sea - Jonathan Carroll
  • American Gangster - Mark Jacobson
  • Return of the King - J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Gawker Guide to Becoming King of All Media
  • Jews and Power - Ruth Wisse
  • Youth Without Youth - Mircea Eliade
  • A Team of Rivals - Doris Goodwin
  • Ghost Hunters -William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death - Deborah Blum
  • Dream -Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy - Stephen Duncombe
  • Love & Theft - Eric Lott
  • Exit Ghost - Philip Roth
  • Studio A - The Bob Dylan Reader

Current Listening

  • Alexi Murdoch Wait
  • Wilco Summer Teeth
  • Wilco The Album
  • Carmina Burana - Ray Manzarek (& Michael Riesmann)
  • Polyrock - Polyrock
  • 96 Tears - Garland Jeffries
  • Ghost of a Chance Garland Jeffries
  • Yellow Magic Orchestra
  • Mustang Sally Buddy Guy
  • John Lee Hooker
  • Black and White Years
  • Together Through Life - B. Dylan
  • 100 Days 100 Nites - Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings
  • DYLAN: 3 disc Greatest...
  • Glassworks - Philip Glass
  • Wild Palms - Soundtrack -Ryuichi Sakamoto
  • Dinah Washington - Best of..
  • Commander Cody& His Lost Planet Airmen Live at Armadillo