Hoyle, Hoyle — the gang's all here
In his dazzling new solo show, the Bay Area’s intrepid theatrical journalist brings an array of Americans onstage
The thing about the journalist and theater artist Dan Hoyle is that I’ve seen nearly all of his solo shows over the years and I’m still not entirely sure I know what he looks like. Could I pick him out of a police lineup? If it came to that, sure. But Hoyle is so deeply, virtuosically chameleon-like that every character he portrays onstage looks more like themself than like him. He turns his back to the audience for a moment, turns around again, and suddenly there’s a new person among us — not the previous person, whose presence was so indelibly vivid just a moment ago, and not Dan Hoyle either. It’s like watching the same magic trick over and over again, and being newly dazzled every time.
Hoyle’s terrific new 70-minute show at The Marsh, his longtime artistic home, is the latest opportunity to watch this sorcery in action. Takes All Kinds isn’t very different in format from his earlier work, including Border People, The Real Americans, or the incendiary Tings Dey Happen. Hoyle’s method is at both conceptually simple and enormously complex. He travels hither and yon, interviewing people and getting them to tell him their stories, whether that’s a sweeping autobiographical arc or a seemingly mundane interaction at work. Then, with breathtaking empathy and verisimilitude, he recreates one side of the interview onstage. (The one-sidedness of it is a perennial joy. To watch Hoyle, as one of his subjects, look straight in front of him and say something like, “What’s that you say, Dan?” creates a little fun-house ripple.)
The people Hoyle meets in Takes All Kinds, and whom we meet through him, are as diverse as ever. They include a Black woman in Las Vegas dealing with casual racism from the bubbas who pull up alongside her at a stoplight, and a struggling North Carolina salesman whose life has been given meaning by Jordan Peterson. We hear, briefly and heartbreakingly, from a survivor of the 2015 church shooting in Charleston, S.C. We visit with a St. Louis activist whose years in a maximum-security prison have led him to a career trying to keep other damaged young men from a similar fate. Periodically, Hoyle brings us back to the Oakland party with which the show begins, where his friends, like some sort of judgmental Greek chorus, weigh in on how the evening is going so far. (He and his fellow 40-somethings do still have parties, Hoyle admits. “They’re not much fun, but we do it anyway.”)
As usual, Takes All Kinds has an ostensible focus — in this case, the plight of a polarized nation and the possibilities of some kind of personal and political reconciliation among America’s far-flung tribes. And as usual, this is a slender reed that often provides only a tenuous framework for what’s happening onstage. Thematic consistency is not a key concern for Hoyle.
The reason for that becomes clear as some of the vignettes unfold, and the audience begins to comprehend a basic tenet of the undertaking: You never know where the story is to be found. In Hoyle’s previous shows, each vignette typically focused exclusively on one or two characters. But Takes All Kinds celebrates journalistic serendipity. Several of the most affecting scenes begin with someone who turns out to be less important than one who shows up later, with a better story. A high-school student makes a quick appearance before scurrying off as Hoyle infiltrates a Florida school board meeting; the salesman’s bluster is overshadowed by the darkly tortured wisdom of the nearby bartender, whose life turns out to be far more gnarled and painful than anyone in the bar had suspected. Through Hoyle’s artistry — at once transparent and richly textured — we get to know all of these folks up close.
Takes All Kinds: The Marsh, through Oct. 26. www.themarsh.org.
Elsewhere:
Lily Janiak, San Francisco Chronicle: “the specificity of his choices ignites your imagination. You somehow already know this lady, and you almost start to see her materialize next to Hoyle on the Marsh’s main stage.”
Corey Finnegan & Barry David Horwitz, Theatrius: “Takes All Kinds is a masterpiece of empathy, reporting, and channeling of citizens we would never meet ourselves.”
Rhapsody in blah
The last time the San Francisco Symphony featured Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 on a concert program was in 2018, when the Japanese-born violinist Karen Gomyo gave the piece a rousing and forceful interpretation. In particular, Gomyo — who doesn’t seem to have made any appearances in the Bay Area since then — gave the concerto’s two slow movements a vivid sense of purpose. As those long, meandering melodic lines unspooled, each note led to the next with palpable logic and a feeling of urgency. The music was slow but tensile; it never felt becalmed.
To my way of thinking, that kind of taut power is the only way to make a lot of Shostakovich’s music tolerable, and it was the very quality missing from the Symphony’s tepid performance of the piece last weekend in Davies Symphony Hall. The soloist was the Japanese violinist Sayaka Shoji, who has recorded prolifically but was making her Symphony debut under Esa-Pekka Salonen’s baton. “Becalmed” was the very word for Shoji’s take on the concerto’s opening movement. It lacked any kind of rhythmic or interpretive propulsiveness. The solo part ambled along like a gloomy stroller through a grim, dark landscape. The line turned this way and that way, and eventually it ran out of steam and something else happened. None of it seemed to matter.
This is so frequently the difficulty with Shostakovich. Especially in slow movements, he’s devoted to endless, exploratory melodies, skeins of notes that are constantly in danger of expiring from sheer ennui unless the performer breathes life into them. The supporting harmonies don’t help, because they’re always in service of the melodic line; orchestral color doesn’t help, because there often isn’t any. It’s up to the performer to make the music compelling by stitching together note after note with such intensity that the listener has no choice but to say, “Yes? Yes? And then what?” Instead, Shoji left it all — both the introductory Nocturne and the vast Passacaglia with its massive solo cadenza — in a flaccid pile of disconnected phrases.
Is there any connection between Shostakovich’s concerto and Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, which Salonen programmed for the second half of the concert? I don’t see it, and if you try to tell me that both pieces include a passacaglia I’m going to arch a skeptical eyebrow at you. (I mean, it’s true, but so what.) For that matter, I wasn’t entirely sure what Salonen had in mind with the performance, which was suffused with the same late-Romantic plushness and tobacco fumes that any run-of-the-mill conductor would bring to the piece. If Salonen’s going to conduct Brahms, I personally would hope for a little of his patented stainless-steel precision and gleam. There was nothing to fault about the execution, but nothing especially distinctive either.
Elsewhere:
Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV: “Shoji… took the full measure of the work, with Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen and the ensemble meeting her in every respect.”
Michael Strickland, Civic Center: “this is difficult, expressive music, and [Shoji] seemed to play every note perfectly while missing the meaning throughout.”
Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio: “this was a seriously demanding concerto, but [Shoji] was consistently responsive to all the challenges the composer had set for the soloist.”
Cryptic clue of the week
From Out of Left Field #236 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers on Thursday:
Mark Cuban’s first error is uncommon (6)
Last week’s clue:
Arcane love remedy: eating baloney (7)
Solution: OBSCURE
arcane: definition
love: O (as in tennis)
remedy: CURE
eating: going around
baloney: BS
Coming Up
• Jordi Savall, La Capella Reial de Catalunya, and Hespèrion XXI: The Catalan conductor and viol virtuoso Jordi Savall has been a frequent visitor to the Bay Area over several decades, and he always brings a canny program drawing on an enormous variety of early music. His latest creation, which features the instrumental ensemble Hespèrion XXI and the chorus La Capella Reial de Catalunya, traces the influence of Monteverdi from Italy up through the rest of Europe, including the German-speaking lands and as far as England. Oct. 12, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley. www.calperformances.org.
• Karim Sulayman and Sean Shibe: I confess I’m not familiar with either member of this duo, but I’m fascinated by the eclecticism and taste of their recital program, presented by San Francisco Performances. Sulayman, a tenor, and Shibe, a guitarist, will perform a lineup of both early music (Purcell, Dowland, Monteverdi) and more recent work (Harvey, Takemitsu, Britten). Oct. 12, Presidio Theatre. www.sfperformances.org.
• Lester Lynch: If you remember the San Francisco Opera’s 2009 production of Porgy and Bess — or you caught up with it five years later during the PBS telecast — you’ll welcome the return of baritone Lester Lynch. His portrayal of the thuggish, menacing Crown was a virtuosic bit of villainy, delivered with a winning level of vocal power. Together with pianist Kevin Korth, Lynch offers a recital of songs by Beach, Schubert, Mussorgsky and more. Oct. 13, Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley. www.calperformances.org.