If Charleston Day 1 was primarily
touristic in nature, day two was more cultural. A visit to the Charleston
Museum, a tour of an historic house, and two shows at the Spoleto Festival
dominated the second day, though there was a chance for Dottore Gianni to do
some strolling as well. Eccola!
Dottore Gianni was up early and one of
the first down to breakfast at his hotel. After bolting some not-very-good eggs
with ham (but where was the ham?) and cheese, a couple of sausages and some toast,
he had a cup of coffee outdoors and was back in his room before 7 am. He then
pored over the guidebook he’d bought to strategize his busy second and last day
in the city.
The first stop was
the Charleston Museum, which opens at 9, and which I
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| entrance to the Charleston Museum |
entered at about 9:05, one
of the first to arrive there. In fact for the near hour I spent at the Museum I
encountered only two or three others – too bad, as it’s an interesting place,
and an hour is not nearly enough time to cover it. There’s a not all that
interesting section on pre-history, flora and fauna etc, but once you get into
Colonial America, the Revolution and of course the Civil War Charleston has a
lot to recommend it. I discovered that this museum was the FIRST museum in
the…I was going to write U.S. but we weren’t there quite yet…in the
English-speaking colonies, built in 1773. That in itself is impressive, but it
comes with a qualifier. The museum, which burned in 1776 and suspended activity
throughout the Revolution, did not open to the PUBLIC until 1824. Membership
was limited to “distinguished South Carolinians and scientific figures.” http://www.charlestonmuseum.org/about
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| Model of a Confederate submarine, the first ever to sink an enemy (read Union) ship at the Charleston Museum |
Which brings up the
question: Why does a museum exist? Dottore Gianni does not want to get
sidetracked, but he did do a little digging. According to the eminent
Wikipedia, the word derives from Greek, a place or temple dedicated to the
Muses. While there were museums in the ancient world,
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| One of the rooms in the Charleston Museum |
all were opened to an
elite few only – the ancient Alexandria Museum is described as a sort of
graduate school. In the modern sense a museum is an institution that cares for
or conserves artifacts scientific, cultural, artistic or historic (I would add
curiosities to that list – Barnum and others opened primarily to show “freaks”
of nature…as well as of humankind) and makes them available to the public. Yet
in its introduction to a laundry list of the earliest museums, Wiki notes that while
the first two modern (“early modern” is the academically correct but ridiculously
vague term, referring to a time beginning with the Italian Renaissance) museums,
the Capitoline and Vatican collections, were open to the public from their
beginnings (two popes, Sixtus IV and Julius II, made “gifts” of sculptures to
the people of Rome), most began their lives as private collections. Just a few
famous examples: the British Museum opened in 1753, but did not allow the
public in until 1759. The Uffizi in Florence had been in operation since the
sixteenth century, but while it had allowed some of the public in upon request
it did not open to the general public until 1765.
Not completely
uninteresting, yes (?), if only tangential to the topic of Charleston.
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| On the left, a plaster cast from the British Museum, early aquisition at the Charleston Museum |
Some of the
earliest artifacts (if you could call them that) of the Charleston Museum were mere
plaster casts from its model the British Museum.
But it has amassed a
collection of real artifacts that is unique to the city/area. At an admission
price of $10 it may not have been worth the approximately 50 minutes I had to
spend there, but had I more time I would certainly have thought I’d got my
money’s worth. While there was not much on the history of theatre in Charleston
to be had, the piano used by George Gershwin when he was composing Porgy and Bess is on display, and that
made this old theatre professor’s day!
From the museum I
made a stop that I had not thought to make on the first day. The Visitor
Center, just across the street from my hotel, is a well-restored railroad
warehouse. It struck me that I might be able to pick up the tickets I’d
purchased for the Spoleto Festival and sure enough within minutes I had my
tickets for my 11 am concert and my 3:30 pm play. This saved me a good bit of
worry, as one never can tell how long a line there will be to pick up tickets
at the venue itself.
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| The Charleston Visitor Center |
So I strolled leisurely
down towards the Dock Street Theatre via the famous shopping district of
Charleston, King St, parallel and next to Meeting St.
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| Charleston's main shopping district, King St |
Store after store, some
very posh, began to be boring (to my mind) after a bit, but just as boredom was
about to set in, the street turned, as I neared the Battery, into one of
beautiful and often historic houses, equal at least to those on Meeting St.
I was not certain
what to expect from the concert at the Dock Street Theatre,
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| One of several reminders around town of the festival, and also a schedule of events |
although I know
that Spoleto Charleston has a fine reputation. For those of you not familiar
with it, Spoleto was and remains a pan-performing arts festival, also known as
the Festival dei due Mondi (of two worlds, those of America and Europe) founded
in 1958 by opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti in the Italian town of Spoleto.
Invited to Charleston, he and other like-minded people were tempted to
establish an American counterpart, and did in 1977. The U.S. version of the
festival has been going strong ever since, although quarrels between Menotti
and his Charleston counterparts separated the two until Menotti’s death in
2007. A relationship has been attempted again, beginning with the Mayor of
Spoleto, Italy’s visit to the Charleston festival in 2008, but it is still
somewhat troubled. A third city, Melbourne Australia, was added to the mucked
up mix by Menotti in 1986, but that city changed its affiliation and the name
of its festival in 1990.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festival_dei_Due_Mondi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoleto_Festival_USA
So due Mondi or
even tre Mondi seems, looking back, a bit of a dream. But three separate
festivals are producing quality music, dance, opera and theatre in three
different parts of the world, and that cannot be a bad thing.
The concert
consisted of three pieces each emphasizing “song” and or “dance.” Geoff
Nuttall, violinist, director of chamber music for the festival,
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| The stage and a bit of the auditorium of the Dock Street Theatre |
and also a
charming, witty host, played impromptu in the lobby before the concert. I was
already seated in the auditorium, so missed any visuals but certainly heard the
music. Then he and fellow violinist Livia Sohn played again as they marched
into the auditorium through the audience. Nuttall is the founder of the St
Lawrence String Quartet, which has been playing regularly for years at the
Spoleto Festival and has established itself as a world-class ensemble.
For this concert
Nuttall was joined by Sohn on the other violin as noted above, violist Misha
Amory and double-bassist Anthony Manzo. This more or less stuck-together group
greeted us delightfully with a piece by Josef Lanner (1801-1843) called Die
Romantiker Waltz, Opus 167. Nuttall was having a particularly good time playing
into the schmaltzy tenor of the music. In Vienna Lanner was just as well known
in his own time as was his rival, Johann Strauss I, but as Strauss toured
regularly and Lanner did not, the latter (Lanner heh heh) was and remains
somewhat in Strauss’s shadow, though his music is of a similar quality. Both of
these waltz specialists were overshadowed by Strauss I’s son, who became known
as the Waltz King. So it goes.
The group played the
energetic piece rousingly and very well. An EXCELLENT start to the concert.
Nuttall is quite the showman and explained wittily and eloquently why the piece
was chosen after it was finished, and while the stage as being re-set for the
next piece, he explained the nature of the second of three pieces we were to
hear.
This was a duo called
“Mariel” that featured the unusual combination of cello, played by Alisa Weilerstein
and marimba, played by Stephen Schick. The composer is Osvaldo Golijov (b.
1960), born and bred in Argentina, moved to Israel in 1983, then three years
later settled in the U.S., where he teaches at the College of the Holy Cross in
Worcester MA. Schick is listed as an avant-garde and chamber music musician, an
Iowa farm boy who became Distinguished Professor of Music at UCSD as well as
music director of the La Jolla Symphony. Among other interesting works he has
commissioned (including the one we heard) a Concerto for Florist and Orchestra
(wtf???) by Mark Applebaum was performed at La Jolla. The florist who appeared
with the orchestra was brought in from Mississippi, a man Schick called “the
Yo-Yo Ma of performing florists.” You’ve gotta at least smile at that.
Apparently while the music is being played the florist assembles, a "15-foot cornucopia of spruce fronds, apples, flowers and tinsel." You’ve gotta at
least smile at that.
In case you think
I’m making this up, here’s the link:
http://www.lajollalight.com/2011/03/03/next-‘face-of-music’-concert-will-engage-ears-eyes-…-and-noses/
“Mariel” wasn’t
nearly as visual as the work for florist and orchestra, though Ms Weilerstein
has an ample bosom which certainly caught my attention. She is rather young,
born in 1982, but not too young to have recorded with the likes of Daniel
Barenboim. In 2011 she was named a MacArthur fellow, very prestigious indeed.
The music was unusual, but at times quite lovely and moving, and the mix of the
two instruments was not at all unpleasant. It was written in memory of a friend
of Golijov’s who died quite suddenly. I must confess that I would not have
guessed that had I not read it in researching this piece, but there you have
it!
The reason I bought
a ticket to this concert was for the final piece, Dvořák’s
Piano Quintet in A major, Opus 81. I was not disappointed! Pianist Pedja
Muzijevic joined forces with the renowned Brentano String Quartet in a
rendition of this beautiful music that was as dramatic and exciting as Dvořák
might have dreamed it should be.
It is written in
four movements, marked as follows:
I. Allegro ma non tanto
II. Dumka: Andante con moto
III. Scherzo (Furiant) Molto vivace
IV.
Finale: Allegro
Anyone know what a
dumka is? No it’s NOT a dummkopf, you dummkopf! It’s a folk tune of Ukrainian
origin that was exploited by several nineteenth century composers, no one more
successfully than Dvořák. But while tone of
the folk tune is generally a melancholy ballad, Dvořák
and others added stark contrasts, so that musically it has come to mean a form
that moves instantly from melancholy to exuberance…and back again. “Furiant” is
another less than usual musical marking, originating as a swift and fiery
Bohemian dance, also exploited by Dvořák
and others writing in the classical mode.
Muzijevic and the
Brentano Quartet really emphasized the contrasts in the dumka and furiant,
which Dottore Gianni knows is what the composer had in mind. He just bought and
listened to while typing this a well-reviewed MP3 of the piece with the Emerson
String Quartet and Menahem Pressler and it can’t hold a candle to what he heard
in the Dock Street.
A quick note on the
Brentano Quartet. Formed in 1992 it is the first quartet-in-residence at
Princeton University, and its members teach there. Mark Steinberg and Serena
Canin play the violins, Misha Amory the viola, and Nina Lee the cello. Of the
same generation as the St Lawrence String Quartet, they are even better known,
partly because they are the group that actually performed the music in the film
A Late Quartet, which features
Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener and Mark Ivanir. I
haven’t seen it (though it’s now on my Netflix queue) but Nina Lee herself
comes in to play late in the film.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brentano_String_Quartet
All right! After
that exhilarating concert I made my way to Market St,
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| my lunch spot - shrimp 'n' grits |
where I found the
Charleston Crab House, a place that featured the local specialty shrimp and
grits on its menu, so I thought, what the hell! It was…fine, but while I’m not
sad that I tried it, I think I’ll pass on any future offers. The part I liked
best was the sausage which was also a part of the concoction. I did wash it
down another local brew, by an apparently fairly new place called Westbrook – I
had their IPA which I found very tasty.
After lunch I
hurried down Church St to catch a 1:30 tour of the Heyward-Washington House.
This would be my only house tour of the trip, and I chose it carefully, in part
because it was one of the oldest on display (built 1772) and in part because I
wondered if the guide would have anything to say about DuBose Heyward. It is
somewhat unique in that it is a “double house,” whereas most of the others in
the historic section are designed as “single houses.” I had to look this up, as
it does not as you might expect (at least Dottore Gianni did) mean the
difference between a duplex and a single family dwelling. This is what I found:
“A Charleston single house is a
home built one room wide with double covered
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| Two Charleston houses - the one on the right is a good example of a "single" house |
piazzas or porches. Although
it can be many rooms long and multiple stories high, it is typically no wider
than 10 to 25 feet with the length of the house perpendicular to the
street. The house sits asymmetrically along one side of the lot line
allowing most of the undeveloped area to be used as a single side yard.”
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| The lovely John Ravenel House on East Battery is another example of a "single" house |
“Double houses face full length to the street and
are characterized by a central hallway running through the house with four
rooms on each floor. Two in the front and two in the back with living
areas assigned to the first floor and bedrooms on the second. It too has
covered piazzas running along the length of the house.”
The word “piazza” also confused Dottore Gianni. His
Italian, which wavers from good-ish to non-existent, leads him to understand a
word meaning a public “square” – an outdoor area that might be used for shade
or as an outdoor market. Not so in
Charleston! So what is a “piazza” in Charleston…thought you might ask:
http://www.buysellchs.com/blog/charleston-single-house-vs-double-house/
“Whether a single or a double house, the piazza is
unique to homes of Charleston, South Carolina. As you approach and enter the
“front door”, you are actually entering a side porch and not the house itself.
The piazza is a covered open veranda, supported by columns or pillars, that
stretches down the long side of the house offering additional outdoor living
space where homeowners enjoy the views of the side garden.” (same source as above)
But looking the word up he found that while the
first meaning IS indeed a public square, the word can also mean an “open-sided”
passageway” or…get this…”a porch.” OH! A PORCH!
Those wealthy Charlestonians, as I noted in part 1,
are different from you and me.
At any rate, while I know very little about
furniture styles, the guide did,
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| The Heyward-Washington House a good example of a "double" house |
and gave us detailed descriptions of the
woodwork, which is in some cases simply stunning, and never unattractive.
Apparently some of the furnishings are amont the finest examples of American
furniture of this period. She also had a good bit to say about the history of
the place. Daniel Heyward, the wealthy owner of a rice plantation had the house
built as a town home for his son Thomas, who was a rather impressive fellow: a
patriot, signer of the Declaration of Independence, artillery officer during
the American Revolution, and judge. Our guide pointed out that in one of the
two rooms one sees on first entering the house, where business would be
conducted. Thomas and his compatriots might well have conspired in these rooms
during the revolution, and in fact Thomas and others were arrested by the
British when they took the town in 1780, and sent to prison in St Augustine FL.
JUST in case anyone’s interested there is a short-ish but well written bio of
Thomas here:
http://colonialhall.com/heyward/heyward.php
Another quick note – when one thinks the American
South, what is the first crop that comes to mind? Cotton, right? And after that
I would venture tobacco. But as I learned in the Museum that morning in the Charleston area rice was a tremendously
important crop (at tourist venues all over town you can buy bags of Charleston
yellow rice), as was indigo! Come to think of it, as you can buy bags of
Carolina Rice in any grocery store, I guess Dottore Gianni should not be so
surprised!
The house is called Heyward-Washington for a very
good reason. In 1791 President George Washington actually slept here – there is
an old joke to the effect that in most of the places where it is claimed
Washington slept he never visited. But he DID sleep in this house during his
week-long stay in Charleston. Interestingly, the Heyward family was not in
residence during that week, as it was planting season and they were all out at
the plantation. The city of Charleston rented it to the president in the
family’s absence, so he had it to himself, along with members of his staff and
the servants/slaves that served them.
Our guide did not mention DuBose Heyward, so at the
end of the tour I asked her about him. He was indeed a descendent of the
family, and is probably better known today than his ancestors. He it was, as I
noted in my post on my first day in Charleston, who wrote a novel called Porgy, then,
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| the lovely gardens behind the Heyward- Washington House |
with his wife Dorothy
adapted it for the stage. That version caught George Gershwin’s eye and he and
Dubose created Porgy and Bess, the
great American musical/opera. Gershwin wrote the bewitching score (on the piano
in the Charleston Museum, as noted above), Heyward the libretto and lyrics to
the songs.
But NOT in the Heyward-Washington House, which
passed out of the Heyward family’s hands in 1794. In 1929 the house was
acquired by the museum, and in 1930 it was the first house in the city to be
opened as a museum. In 1978 it was named a National Historic Landmark.
The half-hour tour complete, I was allowed to
stroll in the gardens behind it and did so for a bit, as the gardens behind
Charleston homes are known for their beauty. This one lived up to expectations.
As the Charleston rich ARE very different from you and me, I suspect it’s the
last one I shall see unless I pay to take a tour of another historic Charleston
residence.
I had some time to kill before
the play I was to see, so instead of heading to a tavern for a drink, I
continued my walk down King St.
I was able to get
all the way to White Oak Garden (see my first post on this trip for info),
seeing more beautiful houses along the way before I realized I needed to turn
back towards the Dock St. in time to catch the play I had booked.
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| One of my favorites is this beautiful house just across from White Oak Garden, and beyond that the Battery the tree alone is a gem! |
That play,
Shakespeare’s brilliant comedy A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, was being performed by the Bristol Old Vic. This
was one of the most important theatres in England, dating from the eighteenth
century, and for a time many famous actors trained and performed there. Bristol
is in the west of England, very near Bath, a city I’ve been to many times. But
alas, I have never been to Bristol…maybe one day…
The Bristol Old Vic enticed me to an extent, but it
was the company they were collaborating with on the project that lured me to
Charleston. This is the Handspring Puppet Theatre, an experimental troupe from
South Africa that for two decades has been producing innovative theatre mixing
human actors with puppets
in extraordinary ways. I first made their
acquaintance only recently, at the Edinburgh Festival in 2009, where I attended
a very early opera written by a man who is acknowledged creators of the form,
Claudio Monteverdi. It goes by the not-so-short title of Ritorno d’Ulisse in
Patria (the return of Ulysses to his homeland), and if you’re into early opera,
it’s a beautiful example of the form. But what fascinated me was the use of
puppets and projections. The story is told by the dying Ulysses, a puppet laid
out on a slab downstage, and is enacted by singers manipulating puppets
approximately four feet tall. As the actor is handling the puppet s/he is also
singing the arias and it nearly seems as if the puppet and the human have become
one. It was stunning to see, and also beautifully sung, a truly memorable
theatrical experience. Handspring went on to world fame with its production of
War Horse, based on a novel for young people about a boy and his horse,
separated by World War I. The intertwining of puppets and humans in this piece
was even more astonishing than that which had been invented for the Monteverdi,
and I became a true believer.
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| The "forest" in Midsummer was created by the actors and slabs of wood -- this was interesting |
So I had high hopes for this production of one of
my very favorite Shakespeare plays – and one I know very well – collaborated on
my one of the most innovative groups I’ve ever seen.
Alas, my hopes were dashed early on, though I kept
hoping for a miracle in act two, three, four, or even five. And there were
several momentary miracles, but for the most part either the use of puppets
seemed strained and frankly superfluous to the action, or the ideas embodied,
while they may have worked in the minds of the creators, were not being well
translated to the audience. Two examples should be enough to illustrate my
meaning. The four young lovers each carried a puppet of her/his own. As each
entered there was a sort of hushed magical moment as actor and puppet swept
onto the stage. But the puppets were at most 18 inches to 24 inches tall.
Dottore Gianni was seated dead center of the orchestra in row K
and had a great
deal of difficulty seeing how and to what end the actors were handling the
actors. (Granted the good doctor is gradually going blind due to faulty
retinas, corneas, irises…but that’s another story). The Dock Street is a very
small theatre, and for action to be too small to be seen well from row K is not
good. To continue with the four lovers, gradually their puppets were discarded,
in what may have been an intentional manner, but if so I missed the intention.
The last to hold her puppet was Helena, who comes into the brilliant Act III
scene 2 to find that both young male lovers are in love with her, while her old
friend Hermia, who had been beloved by both men at the beginning of the play,
was being spurned by them now. It is or should be a very active scene, and it
was played very well, but early on in the action Helena simply discarded her
puppet, placing it on a set piece. So one of the best-performed scenes in the
play was played without puppets. The other example I’ll share is that of the
characterization of Puck. For those of you not familiar with the play, he is a
naughty but clever sprite who serves Oberon, the Fairy King. He has one of the
most famous and familiar lines in the play, “Lord, what fools these mortals
be!” which may be familiar to those of you who would otherwise not know the
play at all. Three actors, standing, kneeling, crawling, hold stick-like non
representational puppetic forms (LOVE puppetic…don’t think it’s a word, but love
it!) to create this one character. I could not tell why, or what, except that
at one point Puck seemed dog-like…to further complicate things, different
actors played the three-figured sprite at different points in the play. I
actually liked this during Act Two, when all twelve players (there was a lot of
doubling and tripling in the production) were involved in forest scenes, and
took one character on in one instant, another in the next. I thought to myself,
“Ah, now it’s coming together…” only to have it fall apart again.
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| the lovers and their puppets, being coached by a Handspring company member |
I won’t go into the transfiguration of Bottom into
an “ass” that had at least twenty members of the audience out of the theatre at
intermission – and no, they never returned – except to say that he was placed
on a crazy bicycle of sorts, in an almost upside down manner, so that the
ass-head was literally his ass! I actually found that inventive in crazy
obscene way, but a lot of the audience took offence. And it seemed to be part
of a different production of the play.
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| another puppet that worled for me was Oberon, large puppet hand and head dominating |
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| Titania's "head" too was interesting -- and puppet head or not, she was terrific...not to mention beautiful - both Oberon and Titania doubled as Theseus and Hippolyta, which is often done |
It was a very well- and clearly-spoken play, and as
I noted earlier had its moments, but overall a disappointment for me. Not an
angry, “why did I get sucked into this” sort of ire, but…well, let’s just say
that my heroic Handspring was knocked off the pedestal that I had placed it upon, and that’s always a sad
thing…at least for Dottore Gianni.
After the play I tried to decide where I should
have a very light supper when I found myself on Market St and lured into an
Italian restaurant called Mercato (there’s one in Ithaca as well, but while the
name’s the same, it’s not a chain) by a pretty woman inviting me in not merely
by being pretty, but by telling me that there was live jazz playing. I could have
sat at a table, but chose the bar, near the musicians a duo oplaying stand-up
double-bass and guitar. I had a tasty green salad, bread, and of course a glass
of wine. Then slowly I strolled home in the twilight, returned to the hotel and
after watching some insipid television again fell asleep.
I awoke earlier than expected and checked out
almost instantly, arriving back in Greenville before 10 am. And thus ends the
story of Dottore Gianni’s quite pleasant if not quite perfect trip to
Charleston and the Spoleto Festival.
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