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Bisbee,
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From the editor
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Thus begins Feathers, the ambitious new Operetta that will hold its world premier at the Rep on Labor Day. We talked to to its author and producer Dik (pronounced like 'Deke') Kizer at the Oliver House one evening last week. The Oliver House itself has something like magic about it. It seems to float up there on O'Neil Hill, out of view, unexpected, just out of reach. People have sworn that the path to it begins at different places according to the phases of the moon. People have sworn that it's haunted.
Today the path begins at the lot in front of St John's Church. The path is bordered by carefully tended gardens. We go under a couple of cedars, across a WPA foot bridge. A drainage ditch slants crazily downward beneath the bridge. In the monsoons the water must roar and plummet down there. Involuntarily, we hold on to the rail. Beyond the bridge we get to a rusty Victorian iron gate. The two-story brick hotel looms behind. Could be scary here ... but no, there's chairs in the shade on a friendly-looking porch stretching the length of the building. People are here, the chairs say. We find Dik in the dining room sitting at a round oak table strewn with papers. He's relaxed and at home, but he still looks his part: if there were a lineup and you were asked to pick out the author-producer type you'd probably finger him. His shaved head and black clothes emphasize the serious and intelligent look, but he's cordial, too, with his quick smile. He's explaining that he wrote the first song for Feathers back in the eighties. "I was writing songs and submitting them to publishers, and I got a response back from a publisher who was looking for a song for a certain Janis Joplin-type singer." So Kizer rooted around and found an old Joplin LP - which just happened to be the one with her on the cover in all the feathers. Feathers seems to have gotten hold of him right there and then. He wrote The American Indian Renaissance Tuba Band, which was to be the first of many songs for a new show.
Many, many songs. We've heard part of the soundtrack on a CD. The thing is a stunning production in itself. Dik Kaiser, it turns out, is something of a heavy. Born in Alva, Oklahoma, he went to school there and at Baylor in Texas, kicked around for a while, worked for a radio station before founding his own corporation, Dennis King Kizer, Inc in Oklahoma City. There he created TV, radio and outdoor ad campaigns for clients in the region like Hormel, Furrs's and midwest banks. He got bigger than Oklahoma, we guess, and started DKK, Inc. in L.A. in the early eighties. DKK was a long-lived boutique agency putting together campaigns for, among others, Souplantation, Yoshinoya and Southern California Dodge Dealers. Dik's always had a good ear and a natural musical talent. He'd interview the clients, get impressions, and develop jingles in his head - sometimes in the car on the way back to his studio. He's still able to rap them off today:
or this one for a bar called Cowboys:
Dik would dash in to the studio with this stuff in his head, sit down at an upright piano and run it by musical director Maitland Ward, who would score it for anything up to a thirty-piece orchestra and produce it. Just like something out of The Hoagy Carmichael Story. |
