bum phillips opera

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Type: video

0 Wade Phillips on “Bum Phillips: The Opera”

  • May 16, 2014
  • by monkparrots
  • · Uncategorized

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0 60 sec promo courtesy of NFL Films

  • May 16, 2014
  • by monkparrots
  • · Uncategorized

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0 “adrenaline-fueled…perfect harmony” – Theatre Mania

  • May 3, 2014
  • by monkparrots
  • · Hero Slides

0 “unique, audacious” – USA Today Sports

  • May 3, 2014
  • by monkparrots
  • · Hero Slides

0 ABC Announcers

  • May 3, 2014
  • by monkparrots
  • · Hero Slides

0 “quirky and earnest” – Texas Monthly

  • May 3, 2014
  • by monkparrots
  • · Hero Slides

0 “a fine evening’s entertainment” – NYTimes

  • May 3, 2014
  • by monkparrots
  • · Hero Slides

0 Video Excerpt, Bum Phillips Opera: Act I, “Luv Ya Blue” (What does a family look like?), March 16, 2014

  • May 3, 2014
  • by monkparrots
  • · Blog · Videos

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0 Bum Phillips Inspires an Opera — Texas Monthly

  • April 15, 2014
  • by monkparrots
  • · Uncategorized
TEXAS FOOTBALL AND OPERA MIGHT SEEM LIKE AN UNLIKELY UNION, BUT THE WORLD OF OPERA HAS NEVER BEEN SHORT ON BRASH MEN OF DESTINY.

ADAM CHANDLER

Cast of the “Bum Phillips All-American Opera,” which premiered this month in New York.
COREY TORPIE


When the legendary coach of the Houston Oilers, Oail Andrew Phillips — everybody knows him as “Bum” — was approached in 2012 with a pitch to make an opera about his life, he responded in trademark fashion, “I can’t sing a lick.”

But Mr. Phillips gave his blessing, and two years later the “Bum Phillips All-American Opera” premiered on March 15 at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in Manhattan’s East Village. Texas football and opera might seem like an unlikely union, but the world of opera has never been short on brash men of destiny. The outsize, Stetson-wearing Mr. Phillips, who in the late 1970s twice came achingly close to taking Houston to its first Super Bowl, was no less a star-crossed general than Otello. But he was also a jester. His famous wit — homespun homilies affectionately known as “Bum-isms”— made such good copy that even Rigoletto would have had to doff his cap.

The director Luke Leonard, a Houston native, conceived the opera after reading the coach’s 2010 autobiography, Bum Phillips: Cowboy, Coach, Christian. Mr. Leonard said the coach was easy to find; his phone number and address were listed on the website for his Texas-based charities. In 2012, Mr. Leonard traveled with Peter Stopschinski, a fellow Houstonian who composed the opera’s music, to the Phillips ranch in Goliad, Tex., where Mr. Phillips treated them to Subway sandwiches, a pot of his wife’s baked beans and, of course, pie.

“I felt a lot of responsibility after we left,” Mr. Leonard said. “Like a weight. It felt more relevant and more real.”

A recent performance, which doubled as a benefit for Mr. Phillips’s charity, drew a scattering of the coach’s friends, family members and former Oiler players to New York. Lawrence Harris, whom Mr. Phillips drafted as a lineman and later became an opera singer, sang the opening national anthem.

The quirky and earnest production by the Monk Parrots, a New York arts company, focuses on crucial points in Mr. Phillips’s life, from his Depression-era upbringing in Orange, Tex., and his time in combat as a Marine in World War II to his divorce, second marriage and late-in-life turn to Christianity. In the end, Phillips is delivered more character than caricature—fearful, enthusiastic, and at times haunted. In addition to the show’s director and composer, several other Texans populate the cast and production team, including Kirk Lynn, a native of San Antonio who wrote the opera’s libretto.

But it is Mr. Phillips’s year as Houston Oilers head coach during the 1979 season that takes the central focus. Mr. Phillips, played by Gary Ramsey, presided over the “Luv Ya Blue” years, named after the team’s blue jerseys, from 1978 to 1980, an era of delirious pride — even by Texas standards — that swept Houston as the city was reveling in an economic boom.

Watching a staged depiction of the “Luv Ya Blue” era is like biting into a deep-fried madeline. The opera, largely set in 1979, celebrates the Oiler mania of the era with a choreographed parade of Columbia blue jerseys and foam fingers, Texas flags and Derrick Doll cheerleaders, and an operatic rendition of the Houston Oilers fight song. Earl Campbell, the Hall of Fame running back, who is played by Anlami Shaw, appears young and full of menace, and he even sings. The Houston Astrodome is restored to its bygone status as the Eighth Wonder of the World.

Dan Pastorini, the Oilers quarterback for most of Phillips’ time with the team, flew in for the show. He still encounters fans of those Oilers teams of the late 1970s who remain nostalgic for the euphoria that Phillips cast over Houston.

“They always come and they shake my hand and they thank me for the ‘Luv Ya Blue’ years and all of us who played it,” Mr. Pastorini said. “And you see this faraway look in their eyes. It was like Shangri-La. It was like Camelot.”

Mr. Phillips’s reign at the helm of this Texas-size ecstasy aligns the stars for disappointment. The upstart Oilers fall one game shy of the Super Bowl two years in a row, in 1978 and 1979. Both times Mr. Phillips’s designs were foiled by their division rival, the Pittsburgh Steelers, a team that was rounding out a six-year span in which it won four Super Bowls.

In its tragicomic climax, the opera zeros in on a pivotal play in the second showdown between the Steelers and Oilers when an apparent touchdown pass from Mr. Pastorini to receiver Mike Renfro is ruled incomplete by a referee unable to see the catch from the conclusive angle visible to the millions watching on television. The characters reverse and repeat their steps like in an instant replay clip, but the ruling cannot be reversed. The call remains the subject of what-if fantasy scenarios 35 years later.

After the loss, an estimated 60,000 greeted the team at the Astrodome. Mr. Phillips, wiping away tears, delivered a speech that would have made Patton blush.

“Last year, we knocked on the door,” Mr. Phillips told the crowd. “This year, we banged on it. Next year, we’re going to kick the sum’bitch in.”

This, the ne plus ultra of Bum-isms, naturally appears near the end of the opera. In reality, the door was never kicked in. Mr. Pastorini was traded, and in 1980 the Oilers lost in the playoffs to the Oakland Raiders, who eventually won the Super Bowl. The team’s owner, Bud Adams, then fired Mr. Phillips. Houston never forgave Mr. Adams, who moved the team to Tennessee in 1997.

Mr. Phillips was revered in Texas until his death in October and remained close to a number of his former players.

“I was moved to tears in the end,” Mr. Pastorini said. “I lived with the man and I knew the man and they depicted him to a T.”

“It’s a great tribute for us and our family,” said Mr. Phillips’s son, Wade, who has also had a career as an NFL coach. “There’s not many people that get an opera, Don Giovanni and the Barber of Seville.”

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0 “It Ain’t Over Till the Fat Man Spits: Recalling a Colorful Coach” — New York Times

  • March 25, 2014
  • by monkparrots
  • · Uncategorized

It Ain’t Over Till the Fat Man Spits: Recalling a Colorful Coach

Opera Celebrates Bum Phillips, Who Led the Houston Oilers

By JAMES R. OESTREICHMARCH 21, 2014

Photo

Bum Phillips All-American Opera Gary Ramsey, center, as the colorful Texas football coach Bum Phillips in this production at Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa. Credit Richard Termine for The New York Times

“Luv Ya Blue,” an electronic sign reads as you enter the Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa for its current show, referring to the defunct Houston Oilers of the National Football League through the color of their home jerseys. The word “Blue” flashes at times, seeming to short out, then morphs into “Bum.”

“Luv Ya Bum”: Now that would at least have been a grabber of a title, however inexplicable to the uninitiated, and you wouldn’t have had to quibble about whether the show it referred to, which opened last Saturday evening, was a musical, an opera or an opry. Instead, its makers gave it the awkward and tendentious title “Bum Phillips All-American Opera,” so let the quibbling begin.

For those of you who do not automatically shift your gaze from, say, the Metropolitan Opera on a fall Saturday to the N.F.L. on Sunday, a little background may be needed. In fact, a lot is needed, and that’s part of the problem.

Oail (pronounced AWL) Andrew Phillips, nicknamed for his sister’s inability to pronounce “brother” — “bumble” was shortened to “bum” — was from 1975 to 1980 the coach and general manager of the Houston Oilers (the forerunner of the current Tennessee Titans, and not to be confused with the present-day Houston Texans). Though he turned a mediocre team into a Super Bowl contender in his final two seasons, its hopes were quashed both times by the Pittsburgh Steelers in conference championship games, a step short of even playing in the Super Bowl, and Phillips was fired in a New Year’s Eve Massacre in 1980.

Photo

Mr. Ramsey, top, in a scene from “Bum Phillips All-American Opera.” Credit Richard Termine for The New York Times

But by then he had become a cult figure in Houston, a hero to the Luv Ya Blue throng of avid Oilers fans. Hefty and jut-jawed, he presented himself as the quintessential Texan, with his cowboy hat and boots and his down-home manner and platitudes. He chewed tobacco and spat a lot, as was copiously documented in an NFL Films segment that presented him as the No. 8 Character of All Time.

In the film clip, he points out a homemade sign in the stands: “It ain’t over ’til the fat man spits.” So is it opera we’re talking about, after all?

No. For all of Phillips’s late immersion in the Christianity of his upbringing and his newly adopted mission of visiting prisoners, there is no heroic action here of operatic scope.

The issue is not quality. Conceived and directed by Luke Leonard, the work functions reasonably well on Broadway musical terms, and there is no reason to believe it would have been better for being more operatic.

The work “was born from nostalgia,” Mr. Leonard writes. And Phillips was indeed a colorful figure, but the color was local.

Even for many of us who followed football avidly at the time, he was never more than a peripheral figure. Of what I wrote above, about all I remembered before I started digging was coach of the Houston Oilers, cowboy hat and boots, and jutting jaw.

So exposition is needed: lots of it, and it’s still not enough. In Kirk Lynn’s libretto, the television announcers tell about Bum; family members tell about Bum; Bum tells about Bum.

In operatic terms, almost everything functions as recitative, little as aria. Even when the melody soars a bit, it seldom conveys overwhelming emotion of the kind that motivates operatic arias; it is still too busy just dispensing the facts.

All of that said, Peter Stopschinski’s music has appealing moments, perhaps more of them in a countrified mode than in the higher-flown tunes or the slightly more adventurous harmonies, and a talented and energetic cast added to the appeal.

The hard-working, strong-voiced, charismatic and, yes, jut-jawed baritone Gary Ramsey offered a tour de force as Bum Phillips. In the other glamour role — as Phillips’s second wife, Debbie — Alison Bolshoi unfurled a plush and lovely dramatic-soprano tone but spent a little too much time slightly under pitch.

For those who know more, and care more, about Bum Phillips, this will undoubtedly make for a fine evening’s entertainment. But merely loving music and loving football isn’t enough to make it so.

“Bum Phillips All-American Opera” runs through March 30 at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater, 66 East Fourth Street, East Village; 212-475-7710, lamama.org.

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