ARTS PREVIEW/SEPTEMBER

RESCUED BY THE ARTS

The upcoming cultural season offers sweet relief from the rest of the gloomy news

by D. L. Groover

What are we to do? The stock market's tanking. The Russian mafia controls Olympic ice dancing. West Nile virus is marching into Harris County. Martha Stewart makes butter molds in the shape of Sing Sing. We're still waiting for Ken Lay to do the perp walk. And the heat index for our Bayou City still hovers near the temperature to the entrance of Hell.

The answer, of course, as always, lies in the arts. Why care that asteroid X23 is on a collision course to Alvin, when we can escape into the theater or museum and watch the royal court of Denmark self-destruct, or lose ourselves in the beauty of Impressionism, or meet sexy fame at the Meat/Bar? By no means a complete list, what follows is a selected overview of the 2002-2003 arts season. This may not be the gayest season ever, but there are enough wonders for everyone to savor. If nothing here makes you forget that J. Lo is now dating Ben Affleck, there's just no hope for any of us.

ALLEY THEATRE

615 Texas

713-228-8421

www.alleytheatre.org

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

January 10-February 8, 2003

Edward Albee's American classic seems younger than 40 years old, but this kind of ripe beauty is ever-fresh and still capable of shocking. Directed by Alley artistic director Gregory Boyd, the production's casting hasn't been announced. No matter. Prepare for a wild ride. Once George and Martha get their sweaty hands on you, you're never the same.

The Trip to Bountiful

April 11-May 10, 2003

We look forward to actress Jean Stapleton, director Michael Wilson, and author Horton Foote's return to the Alley after their Carpetbagger's Children collaboration last season. Here, in Mr. Foote's most audience-friendly drama, feisty Carrie Watts journeys farther than just to her smalltown roots. She discovers herself.

Hamlet

May 23-June 22, 2003

The world's greatest play is so good, it can take anything the conceptualists wish to apply. Olivier threw Freud at Shakespeare, Burton a smoldering violence; Gielgud painted with intellect, Barrymore a theatrical passion, and Branaugh glitzy film technique. Whatever happens to this great Dane, it's not to be missed. There's nothing in the world like seeing this most sublime poetry enacted live.

COUNTRY PLAYHOUSE

Town & Country Village

713/467-4497

www.countryplayhouse.org

The Man Who Came to Dinner

September 14-October 6

Kaufman and Hart's insanely funny spin on celebrity ego and the damage it inflicts, knowing or unknowing, hasn't been bettered since its premiere in 1939. Here, Sheridan Whiteside, shamelessly based on New York theater critic and bon vivant Alexander Woollcott, knowingly inflicts sublime damage and giggles with glee at how wide a swath of destruction he can create. He gets his well-deserved comeuppance by curtain, but by then so does everyone. There are penguins, mummy cases, Hollywood puffed-up stars, an ugly nurse, smalltown romance, a most exasperated husband, and one of the best comic roles ever written.

A Streetcar Named Desire

January 17-February 8, 2003

"I don't want realism," screams Blanche DuBois as her carefully crafted fantasy world collapses. She is the architect of her own demise, much more so than the brutish Stanley who forces his world upon her, ripping away flimsy protective veils of propriety and lies. This Tennessee Williams drama is certainly one of the great American plays, and its hothouse poetry and power has a haunting intensity unrivaled by few.

Deathtrap

May 9-31, 2003

Ira Levin's gay black comedy shocker is about a dried-up playwright who schemes to get his own name on the title page of his talented student's work. The dead come alive, the spider becomes the fly, and the bitchy humor and homoerotic situations rush pell-mell toward a murderous climax.

DIVERSEWORKS

1117 East Freeway (Main at Naylor)

713/223-8346

www.diverseworks.org

Dyke Action Machine

November 1-December 14

Armed with buckets of wheat paste, a hefty dose of irony, subversive talent, and well-worn Birkenstocks, the dynamic dyke duo of Carrie Moyer and Sue Schaffner have gleefully transformed their Dyke Action Machine into the stuff of legend. Once a year, they take commercial advertisements, insert lesbian pictures, and then post them all over New York City, right next to the real thing for GAP or the latest movie. See the best of their provocative work in this 10-year retrospective exhibition.

Transgender Fest

May 30-31, 2003

Set those chiming calendars so you won't miss this annual festival of drag kings, queens, TGs (post and pre-op), and a hermaphrodite or two. Last year's celebration brought drag king extraordinaire Mo B. Dick and gender professor Judith Halberstam to enlighten and entertain. The guest list hasn't been settled, but this is one party you must attend-informative, educational, and great fun, too. Don't bother shaving.

THE GRAND 1894 OPERA HOUSE

2020 Postoffice, Galveston

409/765-1894, 800/821-1894

www.thegrand.com

Flamboyant rock icon Little Richard gets down and pounds the piano on September 28-29. Taking a cue from our own Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, a holiday screening of the sing-along Sound of Music will no doubt bring out the hidden nun in all of us (December 26-29). If you have never experienced that innovative duo Jaston Williams and Joe Sears as they bring to wondrous life all the inhabitants of the third-smallest town in Texas, by all means rush to A Tuna Christmas (December 17-22) and Greater Tuna (April 8-13, 2003).

HOUSTON BALLET

Wortham Center, 500 Texas

713/227-ARTS, 800/828-ARTS

www.houstonballet.org

Madame Butterfly

September 19-29

Australian choreographer Stanton Welch takes Puccini's ravishing opera and transforms it into a theatrically thrilling dance drama. We hardly miss the singing. Paired with Ben Stevenson's achingly lyric Five Poems, set to Wagner's ultra-romantic Wesendonck Lieder, this program proves that song into dance is a most satisfying art indeed.

Winter Repertory

February 27-March 9, 2003

Paul Taylor created his WWII-inspired Company B with Houston Ballet in 1991, and ever since it has been a signature piece for both choreographer and company. The work has his patented humor, sadness, and irony as the songs of the Andrews Sisters are dissected and glossed with rueful anti-war sensibility. The Four Temperaments is one of Paul Hindemith's greatest musical compositions as well as one of George Balanchine's greatest neo-classic ballets. Its dance movement is refined, elegant, and powerful beyond words. If you're not moved by the arcing lifts of the finale, you are dead.

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA

Wortham Center, 500 Texas

713/228-OPERA, 800/62-OPERA

www.houstongrandopera.org

Ariodante

November 1-17

The title role of this exquisitely Baroque Handel opera from 1735, like many others of the time, was sung by a castrato, in this case a male contralto, the famous Carestini. His deeper voice was preferred by Handel over the high pure soprano of Farenelli, Carestini's rival in London. Since that peculiar and drastic method of producing singers is no longer employed, a female now takes the castrato vocal line. Renowned Texas mezzo Susan Graham sings the eponymous hero who is in love with the princess of Scotland, under the Baroque-loving hands of conductor Christopher Hogwood, founder of the Academy of Ancient Music.

The Little Prince

May 31-June 22, 2003

HGO's world premiere is from Academy Award-winning composer Rachel Portman (Emma). Saint-Exupery's fairy tale about the little guy from asteroid B612 and his journeys to Earth is probably more beloved by adults than children, as it is filled with misty poetic ruminations on the wonders of life. HGO's newest work has to be better than that poor excuse for a movie musical cobbled together by Stanley Donen and Lerner and Loewe.

INFERNAL BRIDEGROOM PRODUCTIONS

The Axiom, 2524 McKinney

713-522-8443

www.infernalbridegroom.com

Phaedra's Love

September 19-October 12

We have to recommend any play that comes with a warning label. Because it's by Sarah Kane, England's angriest bisexual playwright, it should be designated with skull and crossbones. Suffice it to say, Ms. Kane never wrote a happy play. Blasted, a cause célèbre in 1995 when it opened in London, was so controversial that the kindest words from the conservative press were "disgusting feast of filth" and "devoid of artistic and intellectual merit." Lauded by such luminaries as Harold Pinter, and regarded as a celebrity in Germany and France, Kane couldn't handle her ever-present depressions. In 1999, she finished her last play, 4.48 Psychosis (the time of morning when most people kill themselves) and swallowed 150 anti-depressants and 50 sleeping pills. Two days later, she was found hanging by her shoelaces in the hospital bathroom. She was 28. Phaedra's Love is a retelling of the Greek myth in graphic terms of sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse. I wouldn't go see this on a full stomach. Kane herself said this about Love, "Sometimes we have to descend into hell imaginatively in order to avoid going there in reality." Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

MAIN STREET THEATER

2540 Times Blvd

713/524-6706

www.mainstreettheater.com

The Little Foxes

March 20-April 19, 2003

Don't get in Regina Hubbard's way. She is the Southern Gothic Lady Macbeth in Lillian Hellman's 1939 nest-of-vipers portrait of greed that gave renewed life to Broadway originator Tallulah Bankhead and movie portrayer Bette Davis. She lies, blackmails, schemes, and kills to have the finer things in life. If she keeps this up, she may lose her daughter.

The Women

June 26-July 27, 2003

In Clare Boothe Luce's all-female universe, the characters scheme, bitch, stab each other with words, bitch some more, and steal each other's husbands to have the finer things in life. The 1939 film, helmed by gay director George Cukor and starring a henhouse of indelible she-wolfs (including Shearer, Crawford, and Russell, Goddard, Fontaine, and Boland), remains the gayest film of all time. Live it should be wicked fun.

MASQUERADE THEATRE

1537 North Shepherd

713/861-7045

www.masqueradetheatre.com

Floyd Collins

September 26-October 19

In 1925, a Kentucky caver, already known in the mining community as the best spelunker anyone had ever met, got trapped in Sand Cave while looking for his fortune and a way out of his hardscrabble existence. His aborted rescue created a media circus unlike anything previous in American history and unseen again until the Lindberg kidnapping. This 1996 show, with music and lyrics by Adam Guettel and book and additional lyrics by Tina Landau, won the Lucille Lortel Award for best off-Broadway musical of the year

THE MENIL COLLECTION

1515 Sul Ross

713/525-9400

www.menil.org

Anna Gaskell

September 27-January 12, 2003

Suppressed eroticism and budding sexuality tinge the work of this former Bennington grad and professional photographer. Who knew a girl from Iowa could be so weird?

Donald Judd: The Early Years

January 31-April 27, 2003

Minimalist with a vengeance, artist Judd secluded himself in the wilds of Marathon, Texas, and built his own gallery and foundation, the Chinati. Judd's monk-like furniture, all hard angles, is supremely uncomfortable, but his shimmering aluminum boxes, polished to blinding gloss, take the flat, burned-up landscape of west Texas desert into their own reflection and are actually quite serene in a hot/cold modern way. Hey, this is art, not IKEA.

THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON

1001 Bissonnet

713/639-7300

www.mfah.org

Art Beyond Isms: French Impressionism, Masterworks from the Pushkin, and Paris in the Age of Impressionism

Through June 29, 2003

The pastel, painterly late 19th-century world of the Impressionists receives a grand comprehensive treatment through four separate but equal exhibits of collections from Washington's Phillips, Copenhagen's Ordrupgaard, Moscow's Pushkin, and Paris' Musee d’Orsay. The masterworks on display are among the finest works of man: Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, Monet's White Water Lilies, Edgar Degas' green-tinged Absinthe, Picasso's Saltimbanques, and Cezanne's Apples and Oranges.

OPERA IN THE HEIGHTS

1703 Heights Blvd

713/861-5303

www.operaintheheights.org

Madama Butterfly

November 14-23

Once you have seen the expressive Stanton Welsh dance version at Houston Ballet in September, go and hear the Puccini version in November. Mix and match, compare and contrast. Korean singing husband and wife duo, Kyoung-Wha Cho and Won Cho are poor Butterfly and her nemesis, The Bonzo. In the intimate Lambert Hall, you can smell the greasepaint, and you are so close to the action, you'll end up wearing some. Just don't sing.

RADIO MUSIC THEATRE

2623 Colquitt

713/522-7722

www.radiomusictheatre.com

A hidden treasure, RMT has been making audiences laugh for 25 years. Those goofy Fertles of Dumpster, Texas, appear in the mother-of-all Fertles sagas, the cult favorite A Fertle Holiday (November 22-January 11, 2003).

SOCIETY FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS

www.spahouston.org

For the balletomanes, SPA offers the Georgian State Dance Company (September 20, Cullen Theater), bad boy Mark Morris Dance Group (October 11-12, Cullen Theater), the phenomenal Ballet Preijocaj in what I pray will be their fantastic Le Parc, but anything they do is worth seeing (November 8, Cullen Theater), bad girl Twyla Tharp Dance (January 24, 2003, Jones Hall, 615 Louisiana), Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (March 28-29, 2003, Jones Hall), and veteran modern dance master Merce Cunningham Dance Company (May 9, 2003, Cullen Theater). If you wish to give yourself a headache, the Kodo Drummers of Japan thump their way into your brainpan on February 28, 2003, in Jones Hall. Remove the pain with the soothing spun-irony of monologist Spalding Grey (March 21, 2003, Cullen Theater).

STAGES REPERTORY THEATRE

3201 Allen Parkway

713/527-0123

www.stagestheatre.com

Blood Wedding

September 18-October 13

This is a Spanish-style Romeo and Juliet from the pen of Federico García Lorca, gay man and Spain's greatest poet and writer since Cervantes. An accomplished painter and musician as well, his resplendent life in the arts was brutally cut short by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Langston Hughes, another gay literary icon, translated the radiant verse.

Dirty Blonde

March 19-April 13, 2003

Claudia Shear's play-a sensation on Broadway-is an inventive, witty look at Mae West and the power of dreams to transform lives. Two people, film archivist Charlie and aspiring actress Jo, meet cute at West's gravesite and are transported through Charlie's reminiscences to that great big screen of life called Hollywood.

THEATRE NEW WEST

1415 California

713/522-2204

Devoted to all things GLBT, artistic director Joe Watts seems to find intriguing world premieres or offbeat plays before anyone else.

The Coming Out Party

September 20-October 26

In swinging '70s West Hollywood, two older queens pick up loser Hal and transform him into the proto-stereotypical clone. Will Hal's love for the hunky pool boy wreck his chance for social advancement? Pygmalion goes gay in this stage version of John Michael Caffey's novel. On September 19, TNW hosts a benefit performance for H.A.T.C.H.

Fruit Cocktail

November 8-December 18

This world premiere musical revue is created by Eric Lane Barnes, whose Fairy Tales was a highlight of TNW's inaugural season.

THEATRE UNDER THE STARS

Hobby Center, 800 Bagby

www.tuts.org

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

October 10-27

Holy mackerel, if this isn't the gay theatrical event of the year, I'll eat a rat. It's taken eight years to get this project onto the stage, after workshops in London, and the official top liners are now Henry Farrell (author of the original novel), Lee Pockriss (tunesmith for Broadway's Tovarich and pop classics "Catch a Falling Star" and "Johnny Angel"), and Hal Hackady (lyricist for Minnie's Boys and Goodtime Charlie). Through showbiz veterans all, whether they can weather the storm of cult fans screaming for a Davis vs. Crawford smackdown is anybody's guess. Baby Jane's world premiere could be a chillingly terrific sleeper or a bomb more lethal than the wildest dreams of Bin Laden.

The Wizard of Oz

December 5-22

Who in their right mind thinks that anyone could possibly refill those ruby slippers, or replicate that A. Arnold Gillespie tornado, or cackle like Hamilton, or dance like Bolger, or bark like Toto? Apparently, TUTS does, for here it comes just in time for the holiday season to butt heads with Scrooge across the plaza and those dancing sugarplums at the Wortham. This moneymaker better not weigh a ton of bricks like the last Wizard with Mickey Rooney doing his Tony Curtis-Some Like It Hot imitation of a Broadway star. And why do they need a book version by John Kane, when the screenplay is written in stone? They all better keep looking up, because if they mess this one up, a house is gonna drop on them.

UNHINGED PRODUCTIONS

Atomic Café, 1320 Nance

713-524-8707, 713/547-0440

Lips

September 20-October 27

Constance Conglin's prickly satires have included her coruscating sci-fi cautionary Tales of the Lost Formicans. Here, though, she skewers a much more savvy political planet. The first woman president, faced with opposition to her defiant GLBT stand, helps circulate the rumor that she's gay. The repercussions are hilariously sad, or are they sadly hilarious?

The Stand In

January 31-March 9, 2003

Ah, our favorite subject, gay Hollywood, gets a special screen test with Keith Curran's Panavision camera loaded with poison darts instead of celluloid. Ex-soap star Lester Perry is gay, but don't tell anyone, not even Lester. In what he thinks is a bold career move, he signs his latest movie role-a gay umpire. Of course, for his kissing scenes, he demands a stand in. Needless to say, everything tumbles out of his carefully constructed closet in this tidy satire of lavender screenland.