Word: tubas
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...auditorium is tiny, cluttered and creaky with age. Spectators in the front row run the danger of being skewered by the conductor's baton, and a singer who wants to be heard has to shout down the throat of the tuba. But despite such drawbacks, the audience at Manhattan's Xavier Theater last week saw and heard as fine a revival of Gian-Carlo Menotti's stark Greenwich Village drama. The Saint of Bleecker Street, as the opera is likely to receive. What made the production even more surprising was that not one of the professional performers...
...bandstand may support a ricky-tick piano, a musical saw, or a tuba-but it is the multiple banjos that reign. The crowds, like the proprietors, are mainly collegiate, and they sing along enthusiastically while the banjos plunk out the immemorially cubic rhythms of Hold That Tiger! or Sweet Georgia Brown. The whole wholesome atmosphere is enough to make the massed inhabitants of the beatnik colony at Sausalito slouch toward the sea like lemmings...
Cage's self-styled "anarchistic situation" lasted for 30 minutes and was titled Theatre Piece. The composer himself stood in a corner with his back to the flimsy curtain. On the badminton-court-sized stage were eight performers confronting a weird assortment of props: a grand piano, a tuba, a trombone, a cluster of plastic bags hanging by a thin wire and dripping colored water into a washtub, a swing, a string of balloons, a pair of bridge tables littered with the debris of some nightmarish New Year's Eve-champagne bottle in bucket, movie projector, alarm clock...
...bridge tables popped the champagne bottle, set off the alarm clock, threw streamers and lighted sparklers. "Fifteen!" cried Cage, and Sneakers (Dancer Merce Cunningham) rushed forth petulantly snipping at his hair with scissors while the pianist (David Tudor) polished the piano strings with a buffer and the tuba player (Don Butterfield) stripped to the waist, slipped on a jacket and had a drink...
...prison riot, his pretense being a "good new boy," who has been caught with a potato peeler hidden in a place of maximum security, and been put in solitary. Kinney spreads the word and soon "the less orderly element in this institution" have burned the chapel, organized a tuba and trumpet band around improvised barbecue pits, and taken three guards as hostages...