tUF1he nItdtu&iIt Loud and Crazy Check out a loud, local band revving it up at the Blind Pig tonight. That's right, Reid Flemming, Peachfish and Melk are all playing. Tickets are available at the Michigan Union ticket office. aWednesday AL AKI& January 31, 196 Guthrie Theater not like old times 91wo new classic adaptations fail to communicate to audiences By Erin Crowley For the Daily When a double-billing weekend at the theater leaves you feeling dried-up, as fthe stage has become a vacuum of cold, incongruent silences and enig- matic visual metaphors with little fer- vor and no real bite tojolt our mounting Iepectations, one is reminded that drama not a synonym for theater. REVIEW Guthrie Theater Power Center Jan. 27 & 28, 1996 This past weekend the Guthrie Theater Minneapolis arrived at the Power Cen- terto stun and unsettle sold-out audiences with its prodigious productions of Harold Pinter's "Old Times" and Garland Wright's "K," an adaptation of Franz Kafka's "The Trial." If the audience's hushed wonderment seemed to attest to the poetic power of these productions, one can attribute that collective awe more to the audience's confusion than to these productions' success at exposing the meat *4these masterpieces. Commendably, the Guthrie has de- voted itself to performing classical the- ater in rotating repertory at its home bases of Minneapolis and St. Paul for the past 33 years and has achieved in- ternational recognition for its high ar- tistic and technical standards. Artistic Director Garland Wright's de- cision this season to pair Pinter and Kafka was undoubtedly an inspired choice. From Kafka's nightmarish world - where a hostile, dehumanized universe fights to stifle and wreck the human will - we enter Pinter's room where beneath the artifice of verbal simplicity and conven- tion, the presence of an equally threaten- ing kind of hell inflects and disrupts every uttered word and gesture. Unfortunately, the Guthrie's productions could not find asatisfactory stage-language to sound the alarming undercurrents and pitches of these chilling texts. That's not to say the productions lacked professionalism or artistic vi- sion. Kafka's "The Trial," the story of Joseph K.'s unexplained arrest and con- demnation for committing a crime never disclosed to him, became in Wright's adaptation a set of theatrical variations depicting prisons of all forms. Opening with aseries ofsilent, dream- like images - a bourgeois scene of croquet in the park, a squalid night scene in the dodgey corners of town - spliced together in arresting flashes of light and blackouts, we were introduced to a timeless world where every figure and every word echoed in a mirage of surreal imagery. As black flats moved silently and furtively and characters disappeared and reappeared within the evolving space, the boundaries between one space and the next dissolved, draw- ing us deeper and deeper into the illu- sory territory of Joseph K.'s mind. As visually intoxicating as the per- formance became, the imperfect pacing of the play created holes where there should have been a mounting sense of shared horror at Joseph K.'s inability to reclaim his life. One powerful moment found K.'s body lit from behind so that he became an intangible outline ofnega- tive space -a symbol of a man unable to verify his existence. If the movement of the play had managed to warrant the startled, throaty cry that K. choked down at the sight of his impalpable hand, perhaps we too would have been jarred out of our seats. Like the production of"K," Wright's interpretation of "Old Times" failed to layer the language and movement of the characters with the thick tension a Pinter play demands. When Kate's friend, Anna, comes to visit her and her husband, Deeley, at their home in the country, a linguistic battle ensues in which Deeley and Anna partake in elaborate reinventions of the past in a struggle to define and possess Kate and her affections. In this production, Anna's stately composure positioned against Deeley's blatantly aggressive and erratic attacks on Anna turned what should have been a well-matched duel of creative counter-maneuvers into an absurd overreaction on Deeley's part. The lesbian connotations written into Here we see a scene from Harold Pinter's' the text - consider that Anna used to borrow Kate's underwear - were in- appropriate, as Anna never seemed des- perate enough for Kate's attention and came across more as a matronly, stoic, mother figure than a potential ex-lover on the prowl. Deeley's almost comical jealousy and Anna's inability to make her sexual presence threatening pre- "Old Times." vented this battle from becoming a "knock-down-drag-out fight for the importance of Kate's life" - a fight in which the characters' own struggle for self-verification must also be at stake. What's more, the silences between the characters became more like comic interludes and charades of social awk- wardness than expressions of the char- acters' fear of disclosing the poverty within themselves. While the Guthrie Theater admirably professes to create theater that "deepen(s) our connection to each other and to the world we share," these two particular productions have made me more of a stranger than a friend to those connec- tions. No changes for Tesla Melos Quartett Jvorak's "American " Quartet Harmonia Mundi France In 1892, Antonin Dvorak was invited by a wealthy American patroness to come to New York in hopes that he would create an "American" school of music. Despite his subsequent musical success in the United States, he quickly began to feel homesick for his native *zechoslovakia and, after nine months here, he decided to visit Spilville, Iowa, where there is a settlement of Czechs. Duringhis first full day in Spillville, Dvorak jotted down the song of a local bird and within three days had begun work on his String Quartet in F, "The American," which introduced this song in its scherzo. Three days after its completion, he set to com- 'osing the String Quintet in E-flat, Which includes a fragment of Native American melody, which he learned from a Native seller of medicinal herbs. At the time, American composers almost exclusively followed European compositional styles. However, Dvorik felt that, "the new American school of music must strike its roots deeply into its own soil," and, quite prophetically, predicted that African ,merican music would provide this oundation. The African and Native American. influences in these two works, paired together on a new recording by the Melos Quartett, have been heavily modified by the composer, however, and the music doesn't really have the character of either. They are both lively, easily listenable pieces of mu- sic which have a countryside charac- , and make no great demands on the audience. The Melos Quartett's performance is emotionally dynamic without losing technical precision; the recording is clean, with a soundstage that is perhaps a little wide-but this is not unsuited to the music. Though I would not consider these two works essential to every mu- sic library, I would recommend this recording to someone who wanted to *wn them. -Craig Stuntz Brian McKnight I remember you Mercury Records With "One Last Cry," the first single off his debut 1992 album, a true ballad- ,er had become a star. Few could help coming addicted to his haunting voice - an attractive paradox of smooth roughness and strength-filled shyness. After a two-year hiatus, McKnight returned with his smash remake of Van Morrison's classic "Crazy Love." But a single just isn't enough to quench one's r 1 Mt F1 } - II A T .{ .1 1 /13P .: Y ( we'dexpect)isacool song. But, Ireally don't care. It's the ballad stuff I want, the stuff brothas can use when we don't feel like having to work too hard for some. McKnight, always looking out for his boys, knew exactly what to re- lease. After a few chords from "Still in Love," "Every Beat of My Heart" or "You," I guarantee the ladies will be too drunk on McKnight's musical ro- manticism to refuse. Just as bedazzling as McKnight's vocal and lyrical splendor is his intrigu- ing piano execution. A gifted pianist, McKnight is a magnificent self-accom- panist, coordinating his voice with his music to produce Siamese twin-like interplays. His musical repertoire is equally soul-snatching whether he's wooing a girl ("Your Love is Ooh") or praising the Lord ("The Day the Earth Stood Still"). In all honesty, with the exception of "On the Down Low" and a couple of others, most of the LP's 15 songs sound a great deal alike. It's as if McKnight cre- ated one musical measure and sped it up or slowed it down to match different cuts. Some will tire of what sounds like mo- notonous musical replay, while others will beenthralledby its slightdrowsiness. Regardless of how you react to this small shortcoming, if you know any- thing whatsoever about balladeering, you will certainly respect and come to love the class, style and romance cours- ing throughout "I remember you." As McKnight himself once said, "Poetic romance will always be the most beau- tiful music of all." After a peep of "I remember you," you'd be hard-pressed to dispute him. - Eugene Bowen See RECORDS, Page 9 By Tim Furlong Daily Arts Writer If you vould have gone to see Tesla back in their prime, say '89 or'90, you would have seen a semi-popular metal band playing radio-friendly hits to their loyal metal fans. Those fans would have consisted mainly of big-haired, leather-clad pseudo-rock posers with their fists in the air and their girlfriends held high on their shoulders, all trying to capture the attention of their favorite band member. Sad to say, if you were at the State Theatre on Friday night to catch the Tesla concert, you would have seen the exact same thing. Yes folks, it was like walking into a time machine and being magically thrust back to those carefree days ofAqua-Net and tight-fittingjeans. It felt like a bad dream from junior high. Tesla is a band that has managed to last for almost a decade. I figured that they must have modified themselves a little to keep up with the times, even if their fans hadn't. I was dead wrong, and I knew it when the guitar player came running onto the stage with his guitar blaring in a fury of note density. I turned to look at all of the fists in the air. I was in Detroit, the land that time forgot. This mass acceptance of a band long past its prime is the major reason why records labels tend to look elsewhere for bands they are going to sign. Apparently major labels feel that Detroit is just a bit behind the times when it comes to music, and the Tesla concert is proof positive that they are correct in that assumption. Not to take anything away from Tesla; MRK REVIEW Testa State Theater Jan. 26, 1996 they came on and played their little metal hearts out and they really seemed to con- nect with their audience. By the roars they were receiving I'm certain all of their fans left the show feeling very satisfied that they had seen a great band perform an excellent show. I myself was even im- pressed when Tesla put down theirelectric guitars and played a mini-acoustic set (mainly to showcase the songs ofthe"Five Man Acoustic Jam"). The problem is that people who go out to see a Tesla show still believe that there is a future for that particular genre of music; the fact is that there simply isn't. I hope there weren't any aspiring musicians at that show because they just might go home and try to copy that outdated sound with their own bands. If Detroit is going to have any say in the future of the music industry, then it is going to have to start letting go of all these past influences and begin to jump into the wave of the future. I have a newfound respect for bands like Sponge and the recently signed Hoarse because I am painfully realizing that the percep- tions of the music biz toward Detroit are not without merit. There's nothing wrong with being a Tesla fan, but if you are, could you please keep it to yourself, because the next time I review a Tesla concert in Detroit I hope that the only sound coming from the audi- ence is from the crickets. r{ _____ Brian McKnight wrote one great record. H M POT IAMN TO LAS VEGASY FROM PHILADuPHIA ID MIAMI FROM SALT LAKP CITY TO LOS ANGELES fROM ALIGH TO VERMONT 10$ I SATTE I" FROM MINNEAPOLIS TO DENVER! A __ _/m MALM Amrak's tudent Advantage drill 1.. I A, AU IIIL.. I ~mm ~s ~