A Night At The Theater

It was lucky for our evening out that my wife had bought our tickets ahead of Friday night's performance at the Red Barn Theater. We enjoy live plays but sometimes there is an enormous mental block that makes the effort not worth the candle and a night in, with the dog and Netflix seems infinitely preferable to a thirty minute drive to arrive and then be crushed by a throng of eager theater goers.

That said The Last Night of Ballyhoo was entirely worthwhile. It was written by the author of the better known Driving Miss Daisy and also deals with being Jewish in the South, this time in Atlanta in 1939. I thoroughly enjoyed the performance, funny and poignant by turns, especially as the play opened a window on a time and a place and a culture not well known to us. The cast was splendid and I found myself absorbed by the story. A great night out.

After the play we strolled Duval looking for a drink for my wife ( I was driving) before heading back to the car a few blocks away on Eaton Street. Our friends were hungry and took off on Caroline Street after hasty adieus so we had time to wander. After we nearly tripped over a party of drunken revelers and were momentarily blocked by a man the worse for wear who mistook a tree for his wife and refused to let "her" go, we decided that Friday night on Duval Street really wasn't our scene and we turned and took the short route back to our car.

That took us past the old abandoned theater on Eaton, said to be haunted. Haunted no more, for now it is to become home to Key West's fourth theater company, if you include the peripatetic fringe group of no fixed abode which performs in found spaces. These fine people with powerful bios listed, are working to organize the space and with two weeks to go they will have their work cut out. I look forward to seeing what they can do with "original Key West" plays.

I will enjoy this long dormant space coming back to life, like Rumpelstiltskin after a very long sleep.

It was a pleasant night for a shirt sleeved walk, a cool north breeze prompting my wife to complain she was almost cold which goes a long way to explaining why we live here...

...that and the 19th century architecture rendered mysterious by the night.

We paused by Hilltop Laundry to remember our adventures bringing our clothes ashore from the boat, hauling sail bags filled with salt encrusted rags accompanied by our two dogs when we lived anchored in the harbor. The good old days tinged with the unhappy reality that living like that may be no longer possible nor desirable at our advanced ages.

Bollocks. If I wanted to I would go back to anchoring out. But driving home to be greeted by a happy dog and a glass of wine and a comfortable couch in a home battered by winds, yet planted entirely stationary was an entirely worthwhile place to be. Besides it's much easier to drive to the theater on the highway than get in a dinghy, cross a dark wet windy harbor covered in spray and outboard smoke and be forced to do it all in reverse hours later, just to get into a rocking pitching bed. Good old days indeed!

Posted with Blogsy

Red Barn And The Poetry Of Hearts

It is winter time in Key West, season of cold breezes and bright white sunshine, a time when the dog can often be left in the car with just the windows open, in the shade of course, and when Culture comes to Key West. Frequently brought here by talented artists from Up, North who seek winter refuge down here and bring their considerable talents with them.

The Red Barn Theater has kicked off the winter season of live theater with a new play by playwright Bob Bowersox a man who apparently made quite a career in television selling dust catchers as well as acting in more conventional roles on stage and in television and in movies. He's turned his talented hand to writing plays and luckily for Key West he likes to stage them in his home town. I wasn't sure what to expect when I saw the poster advertising the play but I knew I wanted to see it.

The Red Barn is a totally cool space to go see a play. Its hidden somewhat off Duval Street's 300 block behind the Women's Club, and the theater itself fronts onto a relatively large brick courtyard, handy for two wheeler parking but also useful as a space to drop off patrons who arrive by car but aren't able to walk very far. There is a small bar with outdoor seating under the tree canopy and if you aren't alone as I was for this performance, it's a good spot to come early and meet friends. They have 35 seasons under their belt so they have the process of putting on plays pretty well figured out.

The play itself, a family drama set in Arizona was an absorbing study of end of life issues, the successful poet facing one more challenge and one more honor in a long career and being forced to choose between ambition and the reality of a career run dry. He is surrounded by an ambitious wife backed by an equally eager agent on one side balanced by a sympathetic daughter and brother on the other. In the middle for light relief a lively and indifferent nurse who enjoys life  and watches the family unravel with professional detachment and a wry sense of humor. I enjoyed the writing and the performances especially as the author managed to avoid the cliches of manufactured drama- no sudden discoveries of dark hidden family secrets or sudden inexplicable plot twists. I thought the story held together well overall and the drama came from within the characters. It was a good night out (right before I had to show up to work one more overtime shift! Argh!). 

I know that Up North winter is hitting much of the center of the continent quite hard, an thus winter has arrived. The effects of that sudden deeply cold snap are visible on our roads every day with a sudden influx of out of state tags. In Key West where the cold snaps have produced lows in the mid 60s and are cold enough thanks, the start of winter is marked by the shift in focus from the great watery outdoors to literary pursuits and as always I promise myself not to miss a play at the Red Barn or the Waterfront but unhappily I shall, I always do and regret it. Key West offers  a lot each winter for such a  modest cockpit.

Duval At Dusk

I've been busy enough that I only recently realized I haven't been on Duval Street lately, and when I found myself strolling the main drag I discovered once again a place of color and life. It looked good, which surprised me as I tend to subscribe to the conventional wisdom that Duval Street, named for Florida's first territorial governor, is pretty much useless. Unless you suddenly need a t-shirt describing your penis to all passersby, or if it occurs to you that a palm reading has'nt taken place lately in your life. Yet for all it lacks useful commerce Duval looks good at dusk.

I wasn't even drinking as we strolled Lower Duval, the north end of the street, and did some all too brief people watching, but it struck me differently. I like the colors at dusk, the people strolling and window shopping...

...it was festive, oddly enough, on a regular weekday evening. I don't usually take the time to slow down on Duval as I am going somewhere or to something, as indeed I was last Friday. Yet I wanted to linger on the street for a while.

Usually winter is too crowded for me down here but this past high tourist season I have been downtown a lot for some reason, but not dawdling. I'm not fond of fruit drinks but I wondered for a moment if we should stop and have a daiquiri drink instead of going to a performance...the others were already far ahead making a beeline for the Red Barn box office.

I envied these two strangers, at the quietest bar in town, no jostling for attention, no noise. I once again wished I weren't going to work later.

We watched seven distinct short attention span comedies RANDOM ACTS OF COMEDY AT RED BARN THEATRE and to their credit they remain clear, distinct and thought provoking in my memory bank. An evening of funny and poignant theater, so I did not feel deprived, in the end, by not being allowed to dawdle on Duval.

 

Posted with Blogsy

The Made In Key West Band



 

Walk past the hard Rock Cafe  and you'll see there is  a narrow alleyway  that disappears apparently behind the mansion that is the Key West Women's Club, an edifice as fossilized as the club itself, yet in the darkness there is a little cobbled square and behind the square is a little wooden building and that is a  hive of wondrous activity every winter.

 

 

Sometimes it can feel onerous to lift oneself out of the comfort of one's own home and plod off down to the three hundred block of Duval Street, only to disappear up the little alleyway consulting the time in the manner of the White Rabbit of  Alice in Wonderland fame, tut-tutting about the time.

In order to avoid such a feeling of aggravation one buys  season's worth of tickets in advance. We in fact check the schedule and decide which plays we like the look of, and there being enough to justify it we do a season's worth. Then we cozy up to the bar, have a drink and sit on the porch to wait for the opening of the doors.

In years past the Red Barn had put on a lot of musicals and frothy silliness which are not my cup of tea, but the crop of dramas and thought provoking productions has increased each year and this year I am aggravated I managed to miss the opening production which was The 39 Steps, a story I have enjoyed in print and on screen but never live in a theater. Oh well.

 Our latest outing came last month when we saw the final night of Conchs, Cowboys and Tales of Old Key West, put on by the five members of the Made in Key West Band. Between them they claim 153 years of residence in the Southernmost City and because of that no doubt some cross dressing, even of the mildest sort was soon on display.



The band did a nice job, and they were having a rollicking good time on stage, a bunch of friends who for the most part go way back and are extremely comfortable together doing what is not at all their day jobs, except perhaps Paul Cotton who's musical career goes a long way back, enough that he is on a Wikipedia page  devoted to the band Poco...luckily for me as I had no idea who he was.

Above we have George Halloran a  local figure in the field of law. he has taken on a few sacred cows in the name of the people and he also knows how to sing. I thought he rather resembled Clint Eastwood in his shades. Below we have teacher Tom Murtha:

 Paul Cotton sang with a richness and presence that betrayed his professional career. It was also noted he was the only member of the band who did not know Mel Fisher personally. Murtha was proud to wave around a silver real hanging from his neck given to him directly by the august treasure hunter.

Gary MacDonald played the drums with fervor in the back of the stage. He and Mimi MacDonald have been leading lights in the theater operations in Key West for decades.

John Wells took on the role of de facto band leader,  grinning with delight at his own jokes, his plastic features expressing delight and surprise, desire and astonishment vividly enough to pull the audience into his performance. Some few visitors not completely familiar with Key West lore fell in love with him and his performance cheering him on, rowdy and happy, entertaining the staid theater audience with their seat dancing in the front row. They went home with happy memories of Key West those three women of a certain age in the front row.

 Then Island Alex cam on stage and danced sang and blew his brass, the consummate performer  having a ball on stage.

 Finally the sole woman in the performance Camille Russo Toler stepped up the microphone to sign variations on Oh Susanna. And in effect it was less a night about old Key West and more a night of cowboy and folk songs, familiar  repertoire with just a few references to Bum Farto ( the tourists loved that one) That Fucking  Conch Train in the spirit of cowboys singing of the Iron Horse, Mel Fisher and of course abundant if unsurprising references to coconuts, palms, warm weather and driving to the end of the road. Familiar stuff but not really engaging if you already live here.

It was a fun night out but with the winter snowbird season over I would have enjoyed a little more topical references, inside jokes perhaps and just a little mockery of the foibles of daily life on the island.