Arts District: Scene's Arts Blog

This week the Cleveland Institute of Music Opera Theatre performs acts from three beloved operas—Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischutz, and Verdi’s beloved La Traviata.

Performances are at 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, at CIM’s Kulas Hall.

Tickets are normally $15 each, but I’ve got some free ones to give away each day, and they can be yours for the performance of your choice if you tell me what former Cleveland Opera director David Bamberger is doing these days. E-mail your answers to arts@clevescene.com!

Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the cigarette tax-funded grant maker, announced Tuesday the appointment of Karen Gahl-Mills to lead the organization, starting in February. Among her major challenges will be to build the organization’s public profile — or more specifically, the profile of the work they fund — so that in 2016, when the time comes to re-authorize the tax, voters will approve.

She further steps into the uncertainty of county government restructuring as result of the passage of Issue 6. CAC’s board was appointed by the county commissioners. It’s not completely clear how the county-executive system will impact that, though Community Partnership for Arts and Culture president/CEO Tom Schorgl cautioned that it will be important for voters to know how county executive and county council candidates view the arts and culture, and how they view public funding — especially as Gahl-Mills leads the agency toward re-authorization during her initial four-year term.

A vocalist with an MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, Gahl-Mills previously headed the Syracuse Symphony, a $7 million organization for which community engagement is a hallmark. She will now take charge of an organization with an annual budget of about $17 million, which makes it one of the nation’s top five local public funders of the arts, and by far the largest in Ohio. — Michael Gill

As far as I can tell, these are the top ten reasons to go see the jukebox musical Mama Mia, by ABBA co-founders Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, next week at Playhouse Square:

10. The song, “Mama Mia.”
9. “Knowing Me, Knowing You”
8. You’ve got someone you want to Take a Chance with, and that person —who is probably a girl—wants to go.
7. The song, “Take A Chance”
6 “S.O.S.”
5. “I do, I do, I do, I do, I do”
4. See that girl. Watch that scene. Dig it.
3. You missed it the last time it came through Cleveland
2. You’ll understand your sister a little bit better
1. Because Cleveland Scene hooked you up with free tickets

Be the first to send me your reason for going, and I’ll send you a free pair for the opening performance at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Palace Theatre.

You can pick them up that day at the Will Call ticket window. You’ll need a picture I.D.

e-mail: arts@clevescene.com

When Vincenzo Bellini told the story of Romeo and Juliette, his libretto by Felice Romani was based not directly on Shakespeare’s version of events, but that of an earlier Italian librettist, Luigi Scevola. That led to few differences between their version and the more familiar one by Shakespeare. No balcony scene, for example.

As Bellini and Romani tell it, the emphasis is on the feuding families more than on the lovers, and especially the atmosphere of hatred they create.

Opera Circle executive director Dorota Sobieska says that difference is especially evident in one brief scene at the end, when blame for the lovers deaths is placed on Capellio, head of the Capulet family, father of Juliette, for setting the tone that fuelled their feud that led to their desperate plotting, and ultimately their death.

Sobieska plays Juliette in Opera Circle’s production, opening Friday at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislas in Slavic Village—a visually spectacular space she says will serve the production well.

“The set is built in,” Sobieska says. “It is natural” for many of the opera’s scenes—like waiting for a wedding, or a funeral. The funeral scene will be presented as a funeral in the church, with singers from Cleveland Central Catholic serving as the congregation in the funeral procession.

Italian Andrea Raffanini, a specialist in Bellini operas, came from Milan to conduct the production. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 5:30 p.m. Sunday at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislas (3649 East 65th St., operacircle.org, 216 441 2822). Tickets: $10 to $55.

Psychotherapist Joseph Sestito, of Northfield, might be on to something with his new book, Write for Your Lives (Watkins Publishing, 2009, 172pp., paperback, $19.95). In it he applies principles of Buddhist though and cognitive behavioral therapy to one of humanity’s most primal urges—to write a book.

“I’m a psychotherapist, treating people who were depressed,” Sestito told me in a recent conversation. “When I treated creative types, I found that they were not only getting over their depression, but being enriched in their creative lives. So I began to apply the same principles to creative writing.”

Anyone who has been through cognitive therapy will recognize the ways in which we try to talk ourselves into and out of harmful behavior. Sestito’s book is partly an application of those strategies to your writer’s block, procrastination, and the myriad stresses and insecurities writers put upon themselves, which have the effect of psyching themselves out of the job at hand.

After some introductory matter, Sestito gets down to business with a chapter called “Cognitive Distortions and Root Delusions,” which are the terms which psychotherapists and Buddhists, respectively, use to describe the mind tricks we play on ourselves. Later, in a chapter called “Liberating your Writing and Living through unconditional Serenity,” he takes up the need to free oneself from “the eight worldly addictions” because of the destructive cycle of unhappiness they can cause—a cycle Buddhists call “samsara.”

Later parts of the book include worksheets and checklists to guide a person through the writing, manuscript preparation, and submission process.

Writers who are Buddhists, or who are at least open to Buddhist principles, are likely to find the book helpful. Those who are not might be put off by religious overtones. Sestito urges against writing “trashy fiction” or a “fuck book,” for example, because even though it might only be fiction, our brains have “mirror neurons” which through the reading of such things could cause the accumulation of “a small amount of negative karma that will negatively affect them in this or their future lives.” His reading list, first among the “Sources of Transcendent Wisdom for Living and Writing” (Chapter 8), begins, “Not just any reading, but the reading of the work of supremely accomplished practitioners such as the work of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Lama Thubten Yeshe, Llama Tongkapa, Trungpa Rinpoche, Sogyal Rinpoche, Pabongka Rinpoche, and others . . .”

To a Buddhist, such a reading list might make perfect sense. To someone who does not practice Buddhism, such advice makes the book seem more about buddhism than writing.

Decide for yourself at Sestito’s book signing from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 10, at Coventry Village Branch of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library (1925 Coventry Rd., Cleveland Heights, heightslibraryt.org, 216.321.3400). Free.

I’ve got a pair of free tickets to give away to Opera Cleveland’s production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. But before I do that, I can’t help but note that when it comes to sexual apetite, the world of rap has nothing on Don Giovanni.

It’s just a matter of musical style that separates Mozart’s most licentious baritone from the persona of so many over-the-top rappers as they brag about their sexual exploits. Thanks to the supertitles played on a screen above the stage, it’s easy to see that but for Mozart’s lyrical music, and the Italian language, Don Giovanni is one prodigious Mack Daddy.

As his servant Leporello notes, “He has country girls and city girls, rich girls and poor girls... / Servants and princesses, women of every class, every age, and every shape. / In Italy: 640. In Germany: 231. In France: 100. In Turkey: 91. In Spain: 1003. / Women of every class, age, and shape! / With the blonde he tends to praise... her gentleness. / The brunette: her fidelity! / The fair one? Her sweetness. / He likes fat ones in winter, skinny ones in summer. / The big ones—majestic! / The little ones... are always charming. / Old ladies he chases because he likes adding them to the list. / But his favorite, by far, is the young beginner. / He doesn’t care if she’s rich or poor, ugly or beautiful... / So long as she wears a skirt..../ You know what he does.

It’s not much later that Don Giovanni speaks of his own apetite: “I can’t stop thinking about all those girls. / I want to entertain them until night falls. / We'll have a wild party! Pour out a river of wine. / If you see any girls in the street, invite them in. / Chaos must reign on the dance floor! / Every kind of dance, all at the same time. / And to a different tune I’ll be making love to all the girls! / I want a dozen new names on my list by tomorrow morning.”

Opera Cleveland's Don Giovanni closes with the performance at 8 p.m. Saturday night. I've got two free tickets for that performance for the first person who e-mails arts@clevescene.com with the number of women Don Giovanni banged in Spain.