Author: Simone Barden

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Wonderland

Even before you enter the WINCHESTER Farmer’s Market, you get an idea of what’s inside. Next to the big green letters spelling out “farmer’s market” are small signs. “Mercado Internacional,” reads one.

“The other signs are in Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean,” says Ben Park, one of the market’s owners. “For everybody else, we’re just the Winchester Farmer’s Market.”

Winchester Farmer’s Market opened three months ago in the site of a former Seessel’s at the corner of Kirby and Winchester. Owners Park and John Kang took the concept from super-sized international markets such as Buford Highway Farmer’s Market in Atlanta and the K&S World Market in Nashville.

“John and I were small-business owners — he in Nashville, I in Atlanta,” Park says. “We thought it was time to start something big together, so we came back to Memphis, where we went to college together 20-something years ago, to open this store.”

The resulting market is big and colorful, a culinary wonderland. There is no rabbit wearing white gloves and fretting so about being late, but there is rabbit meat for sale. And the aisles aren’t labeled 1, 2, 3, 4 for crackers, coffee, cereals, canned fruit. Instead, they’re organized by country, so you might find Mexican soda and refried beans in one aisle, live fish tanks filled with lobster, crab, and tilapia in the next, and then just a few seconds later be in front of cans of Spam in the American aisle.

In the background, it’s mostly Mexican music, though it’s Jimi Hendrix in the meat department. The common language among the customers of myriad nationalities is some sort of English.

“During the weekend, most of our customers are from the Hispanic community,” Park says. “But during the week we usually have a good mix of nationalities and locals who come to buy groceries.”

Currently, the store is stocked with approximately 30,000 products. Not all of them are exotic, but most are different from the merchandise mix at a more typical American store. Beef tongues are lying next to a cow’s head in one of the freezers. Small beef intestines are next to beef tripe, liver, and “Chorizo Mexicano.” In the produce section, beside the apples, potatoes, bananas, cabbage, and okra, you’ll see green Thai eggplant, which looks like a small green tomato, and fuzzy squash, banana leaves, Taiwanese bok choy, gai choy, a choy, yu choy, and baby bok choy, among other hard-to-find foreign produce and herbs.

The store carries more than 20 varieties and 50 brands of rice. “People from different countries prefer slightly different types of rice,” Park says. “Africans, for example, prefer broken rice. We didn’t really know that, but customers told us and now we carry it.”

Park sees the store as a work-in-progress that will evolve with help from its customers. For instance, Park knows that products from countries such as India, Africa, and the Middle East are underrepresented.

There is room to grow too. The market has enough space for independent vendors and retailers. A jewelry store and a custom-order auto-accessories shop have just opened in the front of the store. Yung Kim owns and operates Glory Video, a small Korean video rental that also carries lingerie, Korean cosmetics, and magazines. A coffee and smoothie bar is set up opposite the deli, which offers “Quick Fixin’ Ideas” with what appears to be seaweed and sprouts salads (no English signs here) as well as fried rice to-go. A sushi bar, a Mexican deli, a check-cashing place, and a Latin American clothing store are in the works.

Park says Winchester Farmer’s Market is filling a void.

“A lot of our customers come from out of town,” he says. “Those from Arkansas usually drive all the way to Dallas to find what they need. Now that this market has opened, they might find it here.” n

The store is located at 6616 Winchester. Store hours are 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday-Thursday and 8:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Sunday.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

For Keeps

When I was a kid, my mother spent days in the late summer turning our garden’s fresh fruit into preserves. I remember a pantry that held mismatched glass jars filled with strawberry, blackberry, and raspberry preserves. Mom never bought any canning equipment or containers. Instead, she re-used empty pickle and mayonnaise jars, which she decorated with little square labels listing the content and date.

Modern-day home canners would surely shake their heads over Mom’s methods, which she applies to this day. For them, part of the success of preserving foods lies in the jar, in particular the mason jar. The mason jar is sturdier than most commercial jars and is better suited for preserving safely.

The mason jar was invented out of necessity. There were no refrigerators, no quick-stop corner stores. Food had to keep through long winters. It was preserved by pickling, drying, and smoking. For storage, early families used earthenware jugs sealed with corks, plugs, or parchment and tin containers that had to be soldered for sealing.

It was war that eventually led to the discovery of a new way to preserve food. Napoleon offered 10,000 francs to the person who could deliver nourishing food to his soldiers. Nicholas Appert, a French chef, won Napoleon’s challenge by preserving food hermetically using jars sealed with pitch.

Then a small revolution in home canning took place in the mid-1850s, when John L. Mason, a 26-year-old tinsmith from New York City, filed a patent for a reusable glass jar — the mason jar. What was special about Mason’s jar was its seal. The neck of the glass container was threaded so the top could screw on. The screw-on top plus a zinc lid with a rubber ring provided a tight seal.

Others had tried to improve seal mechanisms before Mason. A wax-sealed tin can eliminated soldering but didn’t do much to improve the food’s quality. (The acids in the foods tended to react with the metal and made the food inedible.) In addition, it did not make preserving foods more affordable because the cans were limited to one-time use. Things changed once glass jars, which were first sealed with a tin lid and wax, became common. Those jars, called the all-glass wax sealer cement jar (wax was commonly referred to as cement) or “standard” fruit jar, remained popular even after Mason’s invention.

Mason sold several of his early patents to Lewis Boyd and his Sheet Metal Screw Company. Boyd, who is most famous for inventing a white “milk glass insert” for zinc screw lids which reduced the risk of food and metal reacting in a non-tasty way, produced the mason jar for many decades, even after Mason’s patent had expired.

Mason’s jar made life during his time much easier. A family’s survival depended on the availability of food. Reusable glass jars made preserving food affordable and the tight-sealing lid was one step to guarantee that food could be eaten even months after it was preserved.

Today, old canning jars are collectors items. (eBay lists close to 1,000 items under the term “mason jar,” which cost from a penny to $700.) Grocery-store aisles are packed with commercially preserved foods, and home canning has become a hobby. Mason jar is now a generic term for any home-canning glass jar, some of which still use the basic sealing mechanism patented by Mason on November 30, 1858.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

That Smarts

What’s left when genius has gone? Insanity? Can genius be inherited? And insanity? David Auburn’s Proof, currently at Playhouse on the Square, leaves the answers to these questions to the audience.

Thank you for giving us something to ponder.

At first, the story seems all too familiar. Robert (Dave Landis) is a famous mathematician whose genius got lost in the maze of madness. Robert is dead. What he left behind are two daughters: While Claire (Anne Dauber) was succeeding in New York, Catherine (Kim Justis) was stuck in Chicago with her sick father, with Hal (Jonathon Lamer), a young mathematician who worshiped Robert, and with 103 notebooks. It sounds very much like the storyline of A Beautiful Mind.

The timing of the two works is tangled. Auburn wrote Proof in the summer of 1998, and it premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club in the spring of 1999 before it moved to Broadway in the fall of 2000. It won the Tony Award for Best Play and the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Sylvia Nasar’s biography of the schizophrenic Noble Prize-winning mathematician John Nash Jr., A Beautiful Mind, on which the movie was loosely based, was published in June 1998. Ron Howard’s movie premiered in December 2001.

The topic — on screen, on paper, on stage — is the sticky question of where genius ends and insanity begins. In Proof, it’s hard to believe that the play could deal with anything more.

The once-genius Robert tried to find the answers to everything — beautiful mathematics, the most elegant and perfect proofs — in the decimal numbers on library books.

“He used to read all day,” says Catherine. “He kept demanding more and more books. I took them out of the library by the carload. We had hundreds upstairs. Then I realized he wasn’t reading: He believed aliens were sending him messages through the Dewey decimal numbers on the library books. He was trying to work out the code.”

Auburn’s first act provides a glimpse into this dysfunctional group, in which everybody is focused on Robert, the brilliant dead man. Hal, who at age 28 feels he is past his mathematical peak, tries feverishly to find a phenomenal proof in the notebooks Robert left behind. Catherine doesn’t have much hope that he’ll find something, because after the library book phase came the “writing phase: scribbling 19, 20 hours a day. I ordered him a case of notebooks, and he used every one.” While Hal’s interest in the notebooks weakens, his interest in Catherine becomes obvious.

So you sit in your seat thinking, Okay, it’s going to be a beautiful love story. The against-all-odds kind of thing. You can live with that, especially since Lamer does a great job portraying a clumsy, geeky mathematician in love. You get comfortable, assuming that the second act is going to meander along in the same fashion. Claire, the evil, successful sister who didn’t give a damn about her sick father, will probably try to destroy the sweet happiness, but in the end, everything will turn out fine.

But Auburn doesn’t let you off that easily. The story spins in the opposite direction right before intermission, making you wish that the break could be skipped.

When you leave, you may wonder what this was all about. Catherine, 25, is a young woman who has spent the past five years of her life caring for a sick father: “I lived with him. I spent my life with him. I fed him. Talked to him. Tried to listen when he talked. Talked to people who weren’t there. … Watched him shuffling around like a ghost. He was filthy. I had to make sure he bathed.” Catherine, who dropped out of school to take care of this man, didn’t have friends, didn’t seem to have a life beyond this insane genius. It’s her father, after all. Her successful sister has been far away during all those years. Far enough to not have to deal with this man.

So who’s the genius and who’s insane? It’s the ultimate question for Catherine. Can she have one without the other? Does she want either one? And then, aren’t men supposed to be the great geniuses? As Hal says to her:

“Really original work — it’s all young guys.”

“Young guys?”

“Young people.”

“But it is men, mostly.”

“There are some women.”

“Who?”

Through October 27.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

The Play’s the Thing

I had noticed the posters around town advertising, in screaming pink letters, the run of Anton In Show Business at Circuit Playhouse. But I couldn’t make sense of it, even after reading what the play was supposed to be: hilarious and smart, a madcap comedy that takes you backstage for a hysterical look into the world of theater. I thought, Do I want to go to the theater to see a play about theater, to be lectured?

Anton In Show Business is a play about the struggles and successes of modern American theater. It centers around three actresses, Holly (Angela Groeschen), Casey (Mary Buchignani), and Lisabette (Mary Hollis Inboden), who find themselves in San Antonio, Texas, and cast for Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. The actresses represent some of the folks you might meet in the theater world: a naive small-town actress (Lisabette) who believes that theater is the greatest thing in the world and everybody is sooooooooooo nice, a burned-out New York actress (Holly) who lost one breast because of cancer and is grateful for finally getting a paying acting job, and a slutty TV starlet (Casey) who wants to use theater as catapult into fame and fortune.

Right at the beginning, you’ll find out that “American theater’s in a shitload of trouble” — not economically viable and not really theater if it’s not New York theater performed “sort of between 42nd and 52nd Street.” Actresses and actors are frequently out of work anyway, and playwrights, directors, and producers are always bowing to what theater critics demand of them.

Jane Martin’s script for Anton calls for females only. All costume changes are supposed to be done by females, most of the actresses play numerous roles, and there are no men acting in the play, though there are male characters.

“Eighty percent of the roles in American theater are played by men, and 90 percent of the directors are men. The point of having a male director played by a woman is to redress the former and satirize the latter. How’s that?” asks Kate (Lindsey Scott) who, in Anton, is the producer for Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Stressing the obvious without trying to hide the obvious and with the obvious as the subject is a high-wire act. If not done properly, it can easily become very annoying.

But Anton In Show Business balances pretty well, if it weren’t for Joby. Joby (Rebecca DeVries) is the ever-questioning conscience, the overly critical audience, and the extremely inquisitive theater critic placed among the audience, frequently interrupting the play. “Is the director supposed to be a man played by a woman? What’s the point? Is theater culturally important enough to be the subject of a play? Wasn’t that stereotyped behavior?” she asks, and so on.

The exceptionally strong cast, feeding off one another, easily carries the message to the audience, especially in the first act. I understand that Joby is supposed to be the “offstage” part of American theater, but the audience is very capable of “getting the message” without Joby hammering it in throughout the play.

It’s not poor acting on DeVries’ part. It’s what the script calls for. But even though the audience may not be a bunch of intellectuals who read Kant before breakfast, they’ll be able to follow. The playwright needed to put a little trust in her audience, challenging but not belittling them.

Overall, the theme — theater makes fun of the theater — works well in the first half, loses momentum after the intermission, and becomes almost predictable at the end.

Is it worth going to the theater to see a play about theater? In this case, it is — but not so much for the play as for the great acting.

Through October 6th.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

The Light Is On

Most everybody’s asleep in Grover’s Corners. There are a few lights on Shorty Hawkins has just watched the Albany train go by and at the livery stable somebody’s setting up late and talking.”

On a recent Monday night at the Memphis Pizza Cafe, sitting up late and talking Nate Eppler, actor, playwright, and rising star of Memphis’ theater scene. The lights are on — on Eppler, on the Breezeway Theatre Company, his newly formed independent, and on Shorty Hawkins, the peripheral character “down at the depot” in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and the main character in Eppler’s latest creation, The Shorty Hawkins Play, which showed at TheatreWorks last weekend.

Things have been falling into place rapidly for Eppler since his success with Keeping Up With the Joneses, which was produced at the University of Memphis last season. The play, about a family of geniuses, is now being considered for production by several theater companies around the country. The light is on, the pressure too, and expectations are high, but nothing really seems to have changed for Eppler. “I just hope people like what I do,” he says.

Keeping up with Eppler is a task. If he puts dialogue onto paper as fast as words come out of his mouth, it surely takes him no time to write a new play.

“I am a perfectionist, and I always feel that a play still needs something else, but it doesn’t take me long to write one. It’s in me. It’s so natural to me,” Eppler says.

It may take him no time to write, but it still takes about a year for an Eppler play to come together. In Eppler’s terms, it’s research, research, research until he gets a real grasp of the topic. Then, he thinks it over until he can’t think it over anymore, and then, he writes — two weeks, three weeks, two days, often without a break. He writes. And he writes good stuff, new stuff, unique stuff. Stuff people want to see in theater.

The idea for The Shorty Hawkins Play sprang out of Eppler’s obsession with Shorty Hawkins. In Our Town, Hawkins isn’t even a real character. The stage manager introduces him at the beginning of the play as the only person awake and at the end of the play as the only person not asleep. Eppler couldn’t help wondering, What in the world was happening to Shorty Hawkins in between? The play he wrote is intense. It leaves the audience uneasy, almost embarrassed at the end.

“Up until I went to college, I thought I’d be an actor,” Eppler says. An actor who grew up in Flint, Michigan, moved to Nashville with his family in 1990, went to high school in Franklin, Tennessee, and then, in the summer of 1994, explored his artistic talent at the Tennessee Governor’s School for the Arts, which offers a summer program for “the gifted and talented — for the best students in Tennessee.”

Eppler, 25, inconspicuous, skinny, pale, with a gray hair here and there, slurping his Coke. Eppler, talking about theater, his element, flailing, pointing his fingers like Clint Eastwood points guns, leaving barely room for questions. “You know what I mean?” he asks reassuringly between thoughts or when he needs to breathe.

How did he end up in Memphis? “The university had late application deadlines, and it was cheap,” Eppler says. He started at the University of Memphis in 1995, registered for Stephen Malin’s playwriting class, found his calling, wrote Vote Jesus in his freshman year, and moved to New York City in 1997 to produce the play for New York University’s Peregrine theater group. Peregrine bought Eppler a round-trip ticket: Memphis to New York and back.

Back? New York City and back? Why did he come back when he very easily could have transferred to Columbia University, which now wants to recruit him for its graduate program?

“That was the plan. I didn’t really want to drop out of school in the first place, but New York was such a great opportunity, and I didn’t want to transfer,” Eppler says. And then, life in New York is expensive, the group he worked with on Vote Jesus didn’t have any other projects lined up, and it was time to finish school.

Starting back in Memphis in 1999, Eppler took a playwriting class — again and again and again. “I’ve probably taken this class four times or something like that. I definitely exceeded the allowed limit,” Eppler says. He kept coming back to the same class every semester and working on Keeping Up With the Joneses, which went on to win four 2001-02 Ostranders in the college and university category and earned Eppler the Larry Riley Rising Star Award.

Playwriting is it for Eppler, no doubt. He loves dialogue. He loves to put words into other people’s mouths. He loves to challenge himself.

“With playwriting, I found a way to express myself. It’s different from acting. I found that nothing felt it fit to me as much as playwriting did,” Eppler says.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Market Values

Beyond South Main Street, you know you’ll find loft apartments and the river, but now, there is something new — a not-quite farmers’ market, the Butler Street Bazaar, which will hold its grand opening 3 p.m. this Friday.

A week before the opening of the bazaar (11 West Butler Street), there is neither bazaar nor market. There is only a big gravel parking lot in front of the Imperial Warehouse, home to a furniture company owned by the Magdovitz family for more than three decades. The lot and the loading docks are where the farmers and vendors of the Butler Street Bazaar will set up for the first month.

Brett Magdovitz, 26, market manager for the BSB, shares his visions for it while walking through the warehouse’s furniture-filled halls: “The building needs renovation, but I hope to get all that on-track within the first month. The restrooms need to be redone . Look at this space. It was just a mess, loaded with stuff, and now, it’s cleaned out. There is a fallout shelter in the basement, very cool. The roof needs work, but it can all be done, and then, we’ll be able to move the vendors inside.”

Magdovitz has been working on this plan since he moved back from Colorado earlier this year. Born in Memphis, Magdovitz left when he was 16, lived in Israel for a while, went to college in Iowa, joined a traveling Shakespeare company from Virginia, went back to college (this time in Indiana), moved back to Memphis, and then left to become a massage therapist in Colorado, moved to Washington, and returned to Memphis in March. When Magdovitz came back, he moved downtown and got the idea for the farmers’ market. “Of all the places I’ve been, I’ve never been to a city without a farmers’ market that is a thriving part of the community, and I felt that was missing in Memphis,” he says.

To open a farmers’ market, Magdovitz soon learned, he would need a permit from the health department, and to get this permit, he would have to meet all kinds of requirements. In health department code, a farmers’ market “shall mean a place designated by a sponsoring organization where only fruits, vegetables, melons, berries, nuts, or honey, produced by the sellers thereof, are kept and offered for retail sale.”

BSB will offer more than fruits, vegetables, nuts, and berries, and it won’t have a sponsoring organization — no church, school, or nonprofit. It’s just Magdovitz. And to keep the bazaar running year-round, specifically during winter, he’ll have to offer space to retailers who buy and sell but don’t grow produce, which makes a farmers’-market license almost no option. The other requirements the bazaar hasn’t met yet: public restrooms and a paved surface for the market stands.

Magdovitz wants the bazaar to be more than a market anyway. That’s one of the reasons for its name. “There are markets everywhere, but how many bazaars do you know of?” he asks. So far, the BSB is a dusty parking lot, an old building with a cool fallout shelter, and a vision. “I wanted to get this going as fast as possible, and it would take me at least another three months if I were to go the official way,” he says.

The way around the code, Magdovitz found, was a $64 special-event permit that allows him to operate from a gravel lot with portable toilets for a month — maybe two, if the permit gets extended. This will give him some time for the necessary renovations and the business plan he needs for a loan. Permit or no permit, Magdovitz says he would have opened anyway and that he’ll probably apply for a retail/produce license instead of a farmers’-market license. “First, I considered a co-op, but it takes a lot of work to establish a co-op. For now, the bazaar will be a for-profit business. Once it is up and running, we’ll see what it may become along the way,” Magdovitz says.

Live music from Becc Lester & Hank Sable, Billy Gibson, and Gusto, a lemonade stand, children’s activities, a pea sheller, Greek food, and organic produce will be part of the bazaar’s opening days. Soap-, candle-, quilt-, and jewelry-makers will set up their booths for free the first two weekends and then will be charged “a reasonable fee.” For now, the bazaar will be open Saturdays and Sundays, though Magdovitz would like for it to become an all-week event. “The farmers may only come three days a week, but it would be great if some of the vendors would have a permanent spot down here,” says Magdovitz. “This is how it works in other cities, and I think this is how it could work in Memphis too.”

Butler Street Bazaar, 3-7 p.m. Friday, 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, and 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday, August 30th-September 1st. For more info, call 527-9700.

Categories
Opinion

Block Heads

hat do Wonder Bread, Sun Studio, and ArtFarm Gallery

have in common? They are on the edge, the edge of downtown.

But they’re also in the Edge, a new name

for an old neighborhood, reaching from Linden to Jefferson Avenues and

from Danny Thomas Boulevard to I-240, and the name of a newly formed

community association. It’s downtown but not

really. Midtown too but not really.

“This neighborhood has been somewhat of a no-man’s-land between

Midtown and downtown, and we want to bridge that gap between the

Medical Center and the river,” says Michael

Todd. Todd serves as president of the Edge Community Association and owns

property in the area.

On Saturday, the association will hold its first Edgefest, featuring

live music, art exhibits, an Elvis play by Sleeping Cat Studio, and a

walking tour through the neighborhood.

“This neighborhood is unique because it’s a mixed-use area, and we

have a lot of grassroots-type businesses

here,” says Will McGown, vice president of

the Edge and a furniture maker with a studio on Monroe.

Mixed-use means the Edge is not only art galleries, restaurants, and retail

stores but also an industrial zone with businesses such as Wonder Bread, the

auto-body shop A.S. Martin & Sons (in operation for more than 100 years),

and Murdock Printing Company. Those businesses were skeptical when the

artist group connected to ArtFarm Gallery wanted to establish a neighborhood

association about four years ago.

“The commercial businesses were afraid that this area would

become solely an artist community. But we don’t want them to leave. We want

to embrace the community as it is,” Todd says.

Chris Martin of A.S. Martin & Sons, an inactive member of the

association, says that there were concerns at

first. “This area is not absolutely

artist-dominated. I could name four other body shops that are located in the Edge

area,” Martin says.

Plans for a neighborhood association took hold about two years ago,

an outgrowth of ArtFarm and Neighborhood Watch meetings. “I guess

people realized that this neighborhood was up for the next big push in

development. Downtown is running out of space, and we didn’t want to see the

historic houses torn down for just another Home Depot or a shopping mall.

We wanted to control our own destiny,” Todd says.

Controlling their own destiny and having a say about what’s happening

in the community are often how neighborhood associations get started.

Today, Memphis has 350 associations registered with the Center For Neighborhoods,

an agency that provides training, technical assistance, and information to

community associations and help to communities that want to establish an

association. According to Vernua Hanrahan, the center’s coordinator, people usually

get together in a block club first, and several clubs will form a neighborhood

association later.

Every community can start a neighborhood association, and

every neighborhood association will be recognized as such even if it’s not

registered as a nonprofit. It’s about citizen participation, not IRS

designation.

Right now, commercial businesses in the “Edge district” are still hesitant

to take an active role. Kudzu’s Deli & Bar, ArtFarm, Sleeping Cat Studio,

Marshall Arts, and McGown Studio are playing the lead.

“We would like to see everybody involved,” McGown says. But getting

everybody involved is often a sluggish process. The Edge doesn’t charge

any membership fees, which encourages more people to be part of the

community association. If money is needed for projects such as Edgefest, the

association will try to raise the money or get members to donate services. Todd,

who sees himself as mediator between the artist and the business

communities, estimates that, at this point, the

Edge has 50 members, 15 of whom are very active.

But this is not a one- or two-man show. Important decisions that will

affect the whole neighborhood are discussed and voted on. Because

a newsletter hasn’t been established yet, neighbors, no matter if they

are part of the association or not, are informed through e-mail or

by word of mouth.

The Edge’s first success came when the Memphis Medical District

master plan was introduced. Initially, the plan called for major development

in the Edge community, until the association voiced its concerns and

the plans were changed to be more in accordance with the community’s

vision.

“The hardest part for us right now is to build our own

identity. It takes a lot of volunteer work and community commitment

to get this thing going,” Todd says. Edgefest is the first big step

toward this goal.

But building an identity in this neighborhood could be a very

delicate issue. Artists are drawn to the Edge because studio space is

extremely cheap. Improving the community, renovating buildings,

and attracting more businesses will naturally increase the rent.

What then?

“We are not trying to become another Cooper-Young, and we

are not trying to get rich. We are trying to build a neighborhood,”

Todd says.

Edgefest, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, August 17th.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Show Me the Way

It’s hot outside — 90-something degrees on this muggy afternoon. I’m ready for something cool. It’s nicely air-conditioned inside Theatre Memphis, but I’m talking cool not cold. Cool like the ’50s, when men were men because they knew how to drink martinis, light cigarettes, and look comfortable in a tuxedo, and women were women for adoring these men. Cool like Frank Sinatra, “the only man who could wear tuxedos like John Wayne chaps.”

My Way: A Musical Tribute To Frank Sinatra tries to bring back this coolness and the essence of Sinatra through best-of tunes and storytelling. It’s safe to say that most of the people in the audience were around during Sinatra’s best years. They may have never seen him in concert, but growing up with Ol’ Blue Eyes made for all kinds of memories and seemed to create Sinatra experts. Two of them were in the seats next to me: “Sinatra had such a beautiful voice and he was such a perfectionist. All he had to do was to open his mouth and sing. It was effortless. He didn’t have to do anything. He had quite a reputation, though.”

He just had to open his mouth and sing, and that’s pretty much what Bill Burtch, Joseph Lackie, Debbie Litch, and Lura Elliott Turner did. But just opening their mouths didn’t have the same effect. “Whatever you do, do not let anyone do an imitation of Sinatra!!! That is a sure-fire ticket to disaster,” advises the online director’s manual from Summerwind Productions, which licenses the musical. Shaw and Gary Beard (musical director), who are responsible for Theatre Memphis’ version, didn’t get caught in that trap, but if the essence of Sinatra is his voice, for the price of a ticket ($25), I could buy a best-of CD (and rent two of his movies as well). Why would I spend that much money to see a tribute?

Hope, maybe? Hope that this tribute would be something so outstanding it could bring Sinatra back to life for those who still have vivid memories of him and for those who only know him through their parent’s rapture? Well intermission. Let the experts speak again: “It just doesn’t have the Sinatra-spirit thing — I don’t think you should call it Frank Sinatra. Call it something else. The group is really good, but the spirit is missing. Yeah, there is no one like Frank.”

Yes, we know, Summerwind Production knows, and Theatre Memphis probably knows as well that there is no one like Frank. And while this musical tribute doesn’t transcend, it does entertain, and what was Sinatra if not an entertainer? Everything is set to that goal of entertainment. His signature glowed on the black curtain. Before it, the three-man band — Gary Beard on baby grand, Jake Brumbaugh on bass, and Stan Head on drums — were dressed in tuxedos, of course. Onstage: a bar with three stools, a cabaret table with chairs, and, center stage, a retro microphone adorned with Sinatra’s trademark fedora.

Sinatra’s music is easy-listening. Not hokey elevator easy-listening but effortless listening. The tunes in this production, all-time favorites such as “That’s Life,” “New York, New York,” “Love and Marriage,” and “My Way,” are grouped in 11 themed medleys, totaling more than 50 songs: Broadway Medley, Love and Marriage Medley, Losers Medley, Moon Medley, etc. It’s a foray into Sinatra’s music that leaves a vague impression of what coolness was in the ’50s.

But Sinatra can’t be replicated, despite the cast’s best efforts. The fedora only fits Sinatra’s head, not the microphone.

Through August 4th.

Memphis’ annual TheatER Awards, the Ostranders, sponsored by Memphis magazine and the Memphis Arts Council, are scheduled for Sunday, August 25th, at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens. The sponsors have been steadily working to revamp the ceremony for the last few years, and this year’s awards promise to be the most exciting yet. For starters, there will be musical numbers from the season’s best shows. This year’s hosts will be local faves Kim Justis and Jenny Odle, stars of the wildly popular Theatre Memphis production of The Kathy and Mo Show, as well as their own successful cabaret performances at Playhouse on the Square.

Categories
News The Fly-By

What’s In Store

Have you noticed all the out-of-state license plates? Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin. And just try finding an available hotel room.

Memphis has been invaded.

But not just by the celebrities and boxing fans who’ve crowded in for the Tyson-Lewis fight. More than 700 Schnuck Markets, Inc., employees — who are occupying at least 300 of those hotel rooms — have come to transform Seessel’s into Schnucks in less than 72 hours.

“We’re already changing the economy here,” said Randy D. Wedel, Schnucks’ senior vice president of marketing and merchandise, with a wink.

Schnucks opened its doors in the former Seessel’s locations on Wednesday, June 5th, at 9 a.m. Seessel’s closed its doors on June 2nd at noon. The Seessel’s grocery store tradition ends after almost one-and-a-half centuries.

In the end, you could get a pound of Angus tenderloin for $3.99 instead of $16.99 and half a gallon of “not from concentrate” juice for $1, marked down from $3.69 — everything was reduced for “quick sale.” But if you expected tears to roll and Seessel’s customers to beg for the doors to stay open, it didn’t happen. The last hours of Seessel’s being Seessel’s were surprisingly unspectacular:

11 a.m. Only a dozen or so cars are in the parking lot of the Midtown store on Union Avenue. It is calm and quiet inside, with more burgundy-shirted Seessel’s employees running around than shoppers pushing blue carts.

11:30 a.m. At the Truse Parkway store — across Poplar from Clark Tower — is the same emptiness. Outside and inside. The produce is gone, no fresh bread, no more “quick fixin’ ideas” for dinner, no weekend grocery-shopping madness. Customers search the store for reduced items and stroll from aisle to aisle. “Groovin’ on a Sunday afternoon,” sing the Young Rascals from the store’s speakers.

11:50 a.m. In the Truse store, the only check-out counter that remains open is the express line: 15 items or less.

“Attention, Seessel’s shoppers. We’ll close in approximately five minutes. Come back and see us when we reopen on Wednesday at 9 a.m. as Schnucks. Thank you for shopping at Seessel’s.” One more frozen pizza goes through the scanner.

Noon. The cashier looks around and asks, “Is that it?” She answers her own question, “I don’t know,” and shrugs. Someone might be hiding in the bathroom. No, all clear. That’s it. The doors are closed. Goodbye.

12:05 p.m. It isn’t Schnucks yet. First, Seessel’s employees have to count whatever is left in the store, and Seessel’s doesn’t officially become Schnucks until midnight. But the transformation begins when a few people begin to show up at the closed doors. A woman in despair: “Where can I now get fresh produce around here?” A man in need of medicine: “Is the Perkins [Road] store still open?” No, sir. Seessel’s has closed its doors. Come back and see us when we reopen on Wednesday, June 5th, at 9 a.m. as Schnucks.

The large rectangular Seessel’s sign ruling over the parking lot gets divested first.

Midnight. Why are all these people waiting in front of the store? The parking lot at the Truse store is packed. Same thing at the Perkins and the Union stores. It’s the “Schnuck Markets Mid-South Retagging Project.” There are at least five people in every aisle, trying to figure out where to put the Schnucks price tags. Seessel’s tags were lemon yellow and midnight blue; Schnucks tags are baby-girl pink. Sometimes they don’t fit where they’re supposed to. The ends are sticking out, but they remain in place.

It’s the first shift for Schnucks’ midnight workers from Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. But, really, for the next 60 hours or so, there won’t be a regular shift. “They’re here until the job is done,” said Larry Meggio, Schnucks’ director of marketing. Restocking, redecorating, rearranging — Seessel’s has to be transformed, and it has to be transformed fast.

12:30 a.m. At the Union store. What was Seessel’s not even 12 hours ago is already Schnucks. That’s what the large sign above the entrance says. The letters are red and streamlined, not burgundy and curvy like Seessel’s.

Where is the old Seessel’s sign? For now, it rests at the local sign company that removed it. But owner Craig Schnuck said he’d like to preserve it in one of the local museums. It’s a big sign, and space seems to be a problem, at least for the Pink Palace Museum, the only place that’s been contacted so far.

It’s past midnight on Sunday, June 2nd. Seessel’s is Schnucks. It’s official. Besides the new name and the new logo, what will actually be different on Wednesday, June 5th, at 9 a.m. when the Schnucks stores open?

Memphian Marie Sheldon has shopped at Schnucks stores in St. Louis several times, and she has the answer.

“Cinnamon ice cream.”

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

A Modern Tragedy

Director Terry Twyman chose Macbeth, Shakespeare’s last tragedy, as his first production in what he hopes to be a series of Shakespeare plays.

For setting, Twyman opted for Sleeping Cat Studio. The atmosphere in this little black-box theater is arty and relaxed, and the smell was damp like a mortuary. But the morgue creepiness and the very dim sliver of neon light that welcomes you at the entrance only served to whet the senses for the tragedy about to take place. (As for the smell, just relax. You’ll get some relief during intermission.)

Shakespeare wrote Macbeth — about a man, who, urged by his wife and foretold by prophecy, commits regicide in order to gain power — around 1606. And now, in 2002, what can you expect from Twyman’s version?

Well, with an audience of about a dozen and a half on a recent Saturday night, seats above and beside you yawning empty, it felt a bit lonely — like being in a dollar movie theater because you missed out on the lastest blockbuster. But as soon as the witches make their entrance, you’re in the thick of the situation: For all those with longtime memories of ugly, wart-faced witches with big honkers and brooms, Twyman’s witches (Grace Hensley, Twana Coleman, and Leah Roberts) are a delight. Dressed only in thongs and sheer black ponchos, their eyes covered with black masks, they dance around a “devil’s pole,” an ossified staff crowned by a skull and bull’s horns. These are very authentic modern seducers, and Roberts, as “chief witch,” displays a lot of passion, using her long red curly hair to conjure up power.

According to Twyman, all the contemporary touches in this production are to create “a more hybrid version of the play.” When Duncan (Michael Mefford), king of Scotland, and his son Malcolm (Carey Vaughn) take the stage, for example, they are dressed in black suits and their faces are often motionless. The pair appear interchangeable, mere placeholders for the suits. And while it’s understandable that a modern, low-budget production of Shakespeare would work with costumes as simple as possible, hearing Shakespeare while seeing Men in Black requires some adjustment on the part of the audience. But the main purpose of the costumes in this production is to make the distinction between civilians, who are dressed casually in street clothes, royalty, who are dressed in suits, and soldiers, who are dressed in camouflage.

Some of Twyman’s props may cause a slight surprise as well. Swords, daggers, and guns seem to be interchangeable, and it’s not uncommon for Macbeth (Michael B. Conway) and Lady Macbeth (Amy Van Doren) to use that most with-it weapon — the phone.

But props and costumes are not everything. The stage design for Twyman’s Macbeth is very low-key, almost spartan. The stage is framed by scrims, which allow for beautiful light play, and Twyman, who designed the lighting, uses them for dramatic effect. In some scenes, the stage is immersed in mellow, warm, and earthy light that doesn’t draw attention away from the actors. When Macbeth sets out to kill yet another vassal, the light is more dramatic, dark, and threatening.

As for the acting, we can use what Twyman described as his acid test: “People walk in here, pay 10 bucks for Shakespeare, and, by golly, they will get 10 bucks’ worth of Shakespeare.” Make that 10 bucks’ worth of Conway. Conway lives Macbeth’s transformations, his despair. (“I would never turn down a chance to play Macbeth anywhere, and I’d rather do Shakespeare than anything else,” said Conway. “It’s actually the only thing I do for free.”) You can see why and feel it when Conway is onstage, and when you walk out of Sleeping Cat, you have a sense that you’ve seen him — the true Macbeth in the flesh.

Macbeth at Sleeping Cat Studio (655 Marshall) May 31st and June 1st at 8 p.m. and June 2nd at 2 p.m.