A surreal UA invasion of the performing arts

Salvador Dali might be hard-pressed to create the surreal scene erupting at the University of Akron as   the handiwork of an overzealous regime  that has set out to fix what in many instances wasn't broken. My talks with knowledgeable campus denizens who were in the UA ranks long before the Scarborough goodwrenches  arrived from Toledo  tell of the day to day horrors of trying to salvage some clarity from the woozy game plan to eliminate the school's debts.

Nothing demonstrates UA's  rocky path more than the published report that after many weeks of hazing the programs and staff at E.J.Thomas Hall the university has signed on with Playhouse Square in Cleveland to manage its Broadway road shows at the hall.  This bubbly relationship replaces  the director and staff  whose contracts expire in January.  That includes E.J.'s executive director, Dan Dahl.

The move has puzzled some of the  affected staffers.  And one person quite familiar with the operation asked a reasonable question:  If the series already had a Broadway producer, why did they replace it with another one?

As usual,  reasonable responses to reasonable questions have not been the forte of the Scarborough team. It prefers self-promoting slide shows to community groups.  

The turmoil has damaged the health of one of the area's prized possessions,  Tuesday  Musical's series at the hall.  TM has had a strong national reputation  for showcasing some of the leading classical music artists, a respected organization that apparently didn't impress the new UA regime enough to recognize its value. It messed up the preseason ticket sales, closed EJ's box office and  created a hunt-and-peck  system that discouraged many would-be ticket buyers from renewals, which are said to be down by at least 160 from last year.   

Here's what I encountered Thursday:

A call to Tuesday Musical's office  was unanswered. A call to the Akron Civic Theater box office for direction  was cautiously answered by someone who told me he was prohibited from talking.  I was told to call the Akron Symphony's office, which appeared to surprise the person at the other end of the line who also was on lockdown about the situation.  

 More frustrating calls around town to  folks to find out more about this  absurdity.   It came from the top, one source said:   Scarborough & Company.

I've had years of experience that often led me to the arts community. Even managed a couple of Elderhostels anchored by the Broadway series at  EJ.  But that was long before it was subjected to the current heavy hand that altered the course.

Oh, Thursday also was  the day when several scholarship foundation donor reps  met with  Lawrence Burns UA's import from Toledo  and now titled the vice president of advancement.    One complained to me that Burns, into a selfie, recounted his own career and seemed out of touch with some of the UA's donors, including an important foundation.

And the official reaction to the critics of the new regime's soiling of UA's reputation with its monstrous rebranding scheme?

"They don't give a shit!"  exclaimed one who sat painfully through the Burns meeting. 

Unapologetically graphic in a polite society of classical music lovers?

Perhaps.  But really, I sort of look at it that way myself.

With Joe, the race card is cashworthy

AT THE END of pianist Philip Thomson's stormy performance of the first movement of the Grieg piano concerto with the Akron Symphony Orchestra Sunday night, a woman seated somewhere behind me effused, "He got a helluva lot of music out of that piano!" That appears to be also true of Joe Wilson's slam at President Obama as a liar. The South Carolina Republican congressman reportedly is getting a helluva lot of cash register music out of his contributors following his historic misconduct during the president's health-care reform speech.

As awful as it might seem, Wilson may have set a precedent for other congressional Obama haters. The next logical step would be for one of the southern Claghorns to interrupt a State of the Union speech to challenge Obama to a dual. Politics doesn't limit its questionable excesses when it comes to raising money.

The Republican Party has never been the same since it was hijacked by noisy groups of religious fanatics, racists and cable lunatics. The election of Barack Obama only increased their fervor to do and say outrageous things. And after decades of racial progress, a party without a single African American in Congress is now hosting a retreat to political precincts where racism is a guarantee to a long happy life on Capitol Hill.

The haters are embittered that their war-hero candidate and pink-cheeked hockey mom were soundly defeated by a Democrat with dark skin. This was not supposed to happen, not in an America where The Others were supposed to know their place. After all, wasn't it Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss who cautioned Obama to be "humble" in his speech to the congress? In Louisiana, which is two-thirds white, Republican Sen David Vitter is basing his rise-from-the-ashes campaign by reminding everyone that he has no use for Obama. Even some ministers down there, well aware that Vitter is an out-of-pocket adulterer, figure he can be excused because of his antipathy toward the President.

What is it about Louisiana? Vitter succeeded Rep. Bob Livingston in the House, who in turn was to succeed Newt Gingrich, a Georgian, as the House speaker, after Newt was caught up in his own scandal. And why did Livingston need a successor? Well, he resigned from Congress because of public notice of his own extramarital affair and is living happily ever after as a...yep, lobbyist. I've only gone back on the devious line of succession to Gingrich. For all that I know, it might have begun with the Marquis de Sade.

OK, I might as well haul in California GOP Assemblyman Mike Duvall, who just resigned after unwittingly boasting on a live mike to a friend of his sexual escapades with a much younger female energy company lobbyist. This was the same pol who once received an ehtics award from Chapman University in Orange, Ca., for his deep commitment to meritorious behavior as a family and community man.

Remember: This is the party that boasts of its moral clarity and family values only to have some of its leading lights - Sen. John Ensign, Gov. Mark Sanford and Vitter - seeking sex right off the assembly line.

And this is the party that is adrift in a world where racism and hyprocrisy could become a plank in th next party convention platform.

In his introduction to Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Columbia University Prof. Bruce Robbins observes that the book's protagonist merely reflected his times. Of Julien Sorel he writes:

"If he wants to improve his lowly condition, hist0ry decrees he must be a hypcocrite. In love, as in religion and politics, he must ignore the empty banalities he is fed and take a hungrily scientific interest in how the gears and levers of social power really work."

Since it is also a no-no with the Joe Wilsons et al, science may not enter their premeditated conduct. But the rest of Robbins' words seems about right.