Damn you Disney Hall. Damn you to Hell!
I attended the Toyota Series for youth concert with my 9-year-old daughter and her friend yesterday morning. I lucked into the tickets, and was grateful for the chance to do something cultural for a change. The program was to feature Debussy and Ravel under the title of “The Impressionists,” and it was the L.A. Philharmonic sawing on the fiddles, so I figured it had to be good.
Having been forced into many such Philadelphia Orchestra events as a kid, I felt for my daughter’s friend, a boy of 10 who seems to spend half of his waking hours gripping an imaginary machine gun and making shooting sounds. So I tried to keep him interested by telling him what was going to happen: The warm-up, the entrance of the first-chair violinist – the last to be seated – before he struck a note and the entire orchestra would tune to it. Then the conductor would come out, shake his hand, raise the baton and the hall would be transformed, the many instruments becoming the one voice of the composer.
And so it went, up to about measure 14 when an actor, dressed as a surfer dude (his name, appallingly, was “Dude”), carrying a beach chair and wearing a Madonna-style headset mic, set the chair up on the stage. A bone-thin lady actor, posing as the stage manager and also wearing a headset, stopped everything to act out a scene with him.
What followed was unwatchable. They portrayed stereotypes, him the nit-wit Spicoli who wants the orchestra to have him “see the music” as advertised, her the bitchy schoolmarm who, against her better judgement, wants to “reach” the moron with music.
And while the orchestra was supposed to be in on it – the conductor stiffly read lines into a hand mic, with the slow-motion forced enthusiasm of a single person trying to hold a baby for the first time – the musicians looked increasingly distressed by each interruption. Though the scene was acted poorly, you could tell it was rehearsed because the first and second chair violinists would roll their eyes and slump in their seats just before anything happened. At least the audience only had to sit through it once.
The music was Debussy;s “La Mer,” and when it wasn’t parsed by instruments it was accompanied by cheesy, lo-resolution shots of the ocean that dissolved back and forth with pans and glides on famous Impressionist paintings. The overall effect was to contextualize those great works with 1970s van art.
Maybe it’s cultural, but I was taught never to talk down to kids. Although, come to think of it, the few classical musicians I’ve known tend to talk down to everybody, so maybe they were just customizing the condescension to suit the program. Add to that the obnoxious kid behind me who kicked my seat the whole time, and it felt like trying to enjoy the Mona Lisa while sitting on a Southwest Flight from Vegas to Reno.
They could have taken a page out of the Nickelodeon Manifesto, or even shown it to one child before staging this show, because, even with the thundering crescendos of the third act and the Dude and the Stage Manager yelling ever more loudly, the young crowd grew more and more restless and upset as the morning wore on. Just like the violin section.
In any event, it sucked ass.
On the way out we ran into another school family, and the grandmother in the group summed it up best when she said, “Do they think so little of Los Angelinos that they have to explain the music to an idiot for the rest of us to understand it?”
Maybe it was the influence of the Patrons on the event. After all, it is Disney Hall, and this brief foray away from more highly-produced Disney products sent the 1,000-or-so kids in attendance screaming back to the Disney Channel or, for the rich ones, to “High School Musical III” at the El Capitan. At the very least, many of the families had to pop a Disney DVD into the player in the minivan to restore calm.
Today they did the second half of the concert, featuring Ravel’s “Bolero.” Maybe it’s The Dude having a fistfight with Bo Derek, but I doubt it because that would be entertaining.
Quel horreur. That’s French for fucked up. Glad I wasn’t there and you were, though, so we got another blog entry out of you!