Billevesées

Westward to Pine Valley

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 08:13:00 +0000

Lucci: She’s going to need those sunglasses.

When counting the cultural landmarks of New York City, I doubt that even the most hardcore soap-opera fan would number the studios where such sagas as All My Children have been produced. That’s a mistake, I think. The New York soaps proved an invaluable training ground for some terrific actors (and some very bad ones) over the years, and they injected a note of populist appeal into an artistic symphony that is sometimes too highbrow, even for those who like it that way. (“Shall we see the Heiner Müller play at BAM?” “Oh, yes, let’s shall!”)

So I read with sadness that All My Children has shot its last scene on a New York soundstage; henceforward, the show will be produced in Los Angeles, and One Life to Live will be the last New York soap on daytime television.

The loss of AMC is a blow to me, because it’s the only daytime soap I ever really watched. I began with an ulterior motive — to impress the girl I was dating — but soon enough I was hooked. No matter that the intrigues were overblown, no matter that roughly three-quarters of the cast were more sexy than talented, no matter that the pacing was slow and the dialogue ridiculous. This was engrossing, possibly irresistible. For years, I’d drop in on Pine Valley every now and then, keeping up with the multiple plot lines. I grew to admire Susan Lucci, who portrayed the series’ central character, Erica Kane, a wily, willful, egocentric beauty.

At one point during Lucci’s famously prolonged quest for an Emmy, I even wrote a little radio piece for Dan Rather, in which he suggested that the Academy just name the award after her: The Lucci for Best Actress. Surely it takes a remarkable talent to sustain audience interest over decades, despite a shifting cast of changing tastes, writers, husbands, and careers. We don’t know (as Dan and I observed) whether Sarah Bernhardt was capable of such a feat. But Susan Lucci has done it again and again.*

The late Ruth Warrick played one of the series’ most entertaining characters, Phoebe Tyler Wallingford.

Beyond actors and writers, many of whom presumably will move to Los Angeles, AMC and other New York soaps provided steady work for a once-vast population of technicians, the salt-of-the-earth types you never see on screen. The loss of all that employment is going to have an effect on New York’s economy — as if any further damage were needed.

That said, the technical aspect of the soaps wasn’t high. Upon meeting the late Frances Heflin, who played Erica Kane’s put-upon mother, I was nearly shocked to discover that she was quite beautiful in person. On camera, she certainly wasn’t. It was the same face, but her own make-up and the lighting in Madeline Gilford’s living-room were superior to what she found on the set of a network television series.

Another favorite AMC actress, Jill Larson, achieved the impossible by stepping into the shoes of Dorothy Lyman in the role of Opal Gardner, a kind of trailer-trash Becky Sharp.

So be it. Each episode took the viewer to so many places, and embraced so many characters, for five hours per week, that there was no time, probably, to polish. Just get the work done. That’s wonderful training for an actor, and that’s why so many good ones came out of the New York soaps. When I studied acting, I used to poo-poo the soaps, but I soon stopped. You learn your craft. You hone your reflexes. You get the work done. (You also build a fan base and draw a handsome paycheck.)

Soaps themselves are an endangered species; AMC’s future welfare will not depend on location. It will be the same show, pretty much, and it will fade away when it stops making money, as almost all the other soaps have done. Yet the loss of the soaps will change the cultural landscape of New York. We may not notice all the consequences right away, but we will see this, surely: the arts in the city will be much less a melting pot, and a little less fun.

*NOTE: Though we sent her a copy of the radio script, Susan Lucci didn’t respond, as I’d hoped she might. Maybe she didn’t know we were sincere — both of us. Dan’s mother-in-law was an AMC fan, and he respected the work, though he didn’t quite understand all the fuss that surrounded it.

Record Roundup for 2009: Pop

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:22:00 +0000

MIKA: The Boy Who Knew Too Much
Casablanca Records B002M9FWQE

And now for something completely different: an album to dance around the room in your underwear to. If we were uncertain as to that purpose, Mika gives us full authorization: he spends most of his time in the video “We Are Golden” dancing around the room in his underwear. It’s all about being young and impatient, sassy and unfocused, and by golly, few songwriters have done it better. (Especially the underwear part.)

It’s not exactly a sophomore slump — it’s chockfull of catchy melodies — yet it’s a step down from his debut album, Life in Cartoon Motion, and it represents what I presume to be a conscious scurrying away from Cartoon Motion’s surprising emotional depth and honesty. Indeed, The Boy is by far the cartoon-ier of the two.

What Mika knows too much about, I suspect, is fame. The first album was such a hit, and followed by such intense public scrutiny, that he changed the way he goes about his business. To cite but the most glaring example, with the album’s success came a tremendous public interest in his sex life. Every journalist inquired whether he was gay, and one fellow even threatened to kill Mika if he didn’t come out of the closet.

He wasn’t all that closeted, yet he didn’t want to speak plainly. The glam and pop artists of the 1970s who are his direct ancestors could gender-bend and play as coy as they pleased, and Mika must have believed he could follow their lead. He couldn’t. He has at last come out (about as directly as a boy can who doesn’t want to spoil — or halve — his chances of getting laid on a Saturday night), but to compensate for this violation of his privacy, he’s slammed shut a number of other doors.

It says something, I think, that after repeated listenings, I can’t remember more than a couple of lyrics. These weren’t Mika’s strongest suit, even on Cartoon Motion: he has a weakness for false rhymes, and sometimes one can’t be sure what he means, or what story he’s telling. In “Love Today,” from the first album, I defy anyone to tell me what’s going on in the verses — until you get to the unforgettable, instant-hit chorus: “Anyway you want to / Anyway you’ve got to / Love love me.” He tries a similar approach in “We Are Golden,” already a hit and probably the album’s best song. Yet please note that, when we arrive at the chorus of the new anthem, he’s talking about a lot of people — and not about himself alone.

Having made one of the most stirring arguments in favor of pop music in modern, Mika now retreats to the shallowness of the kind of pop that needed defending in the first place. He’s no longer a personal songwriter. That’s a pity. But he’s young — he’s got time and talent enough to grow — and you know what? There are times when you want to dance around the room in your underwear.

Another Kind of Cartoon Motion:
Mika in the Video for “We Are Golden”

He’s got a lot of energy, doesn’t he?

Record Roundup for 2009: Vocal Recitals

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 06:25:00 +0000

IMPORTANT NOTICE FROM THE EDITOR:
This is not a picture of Vivica Genaux or Joyce DiDonato.
(But he has sung opera.)

Gone are the days when I worked at Opera News and took home dozens of new CDs each year (one of the very, very few perks of that job), and farther still the days when I worked at CBS, and made enough money to walk into Tower Records three or four times a month, and to walk out with a bright-yellow bag stuffed with music. For that matter, gone are the days of Tower Records and a robust recording industry, too, and I’ve been told that I’m an old fogey for continuing to buy discs instead of downloading from the Internet. (In my defense, please note that downloading is grossly unsuited to opera — where are the librettos? — and iTunes and other such sites are managed by nitwits who know nothing of classical music.)

So over the next two days, I offer a roundup of the new albums I’ve enjoyed this year. There are three of them, and they’re very nearly the only new albums I’ve gotten in 2009. I’ll start with the vocal recitals.

VIVICA GENAUX: Pyrotechnics
Vivaldi Opera Arias
Virgin Classics 50999 694573 0 2

Pyrotechnics is the latest album from mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux, who last week brought a selection of these arias to a concert here in Paris. Vivica looked gorgeous, as always, and I noted that, after a weekend when every Frenchman bitched about the cold, she walked onstage Monday in open-toed shoes. “But it wasn’t very cold up there,” she exclaimed. “I was fine!”

”Yes, but you’re from Alaska!” I pointed out helpfully.

Vivica’s album gathers a sampling of arias from operas by Antonio Vivaldi, and the ensemble Europa Galante, conducted by Fabio Biondi, joins the singer. Right off the bat, they announce that this is not going to be another “Pale-White, or Nymphs and Shepherds,” touch-it-with-a-tweezer Early Music performance: Biondi elicits polished fluidity from his players, and Vivica throws herself into each dramatic situation.

The trouble is that the situations aren’t terribly compelling: Vivaldi, an unsurpassed master of choral and orchestral writing, desperately wanted to write for theater, but ultimately was better-suited to the church. These arias aren’t bad, but they lack variety and insight into character. After an album’s worth, you find yourself wishing for Handel.

In compensation, you get the promised pyrotechnics, and plenty of ’em. The notes fly as furiously as snowflakes in a storm (which I have proven scientifically, by playing the album during the wintry weather that descended on Paris as Vivica left town), and her luscious timbre is like a mug of steaming-hot cocoa. The results are exciting, even festive, and you may enjoy the music even more if you forget about the lyrics and Vivaldi’s theatrical ambitions and consider this instead a kind of undiscovered Christmas cantata. (Why not? Doesn’t every one of the Four Seasons sound like sleigh bells?)

JOYCE DiDONATO: Colbran, the Muse
Rossini Opera Arias
Virgin Classics 50999 6945790 6

Richard Wagner (among others) used to complain that Rossini’s music disregarded the libretto: the characters in his operas sang the same way, regardless of circumstance or feeling. Rossini didn’t help his case much by assigning the same aria to different operas, as in the case of “Una voce poco fa,” which Rosina sings to comic effect in The Barber of Seville, but which was originally written as the Queen’s “Quanto è grato all’alma mia” in the melodrama Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra. (Yep, that’s Elizabeth I of England.)

In a really good performance, we’re unlikely to notice the disconnect between compositional style and characterization. Singers such as Marilyn Horne or Shirley Verrett wielded such authority, commanded the stage and score so completely, that every note rang true, and you thought, “Of course she’s singing this music at this moment.”

And then you get Joyce DiDonato, who focuses on Rossini the same laser-beam she brought to bear on Handel last year, performing a kind of musical microsurgery that yields the most penetrating psychological insights imaginable. She’s beyond an advocate for Rossini — she comes up with riches that he himself probably didn’t suspect were there. Pyrotechnics galore here, too, but also languorous caresses and quiet melancholy. To Hell with Wagner: Rossini knew his way around a theater, and so does Joyce.

Beyond that superlative combination of study and instinct, Joyce’s interpretations benefit from the particular quality of her voice. Beneath its shimmering surface runs a powerful current of sadness; this vocal chiaroscuro lends emotional complexity to any music. Joyce’s singing reminds us that even great joy is hard-won at great cost — or, more usually in Rossini dramas, doomed to brevity — and it must be seized and savored.

She is abetted by the tenor Lawrence Brownlee, whose performance in Rossini’s Semiramide at Caramoor last summer I missed, but whose Nemorino in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore at the same venue was one of the most exciting events I witnessed all year. (Unbelievably, it was the first time he’d sung the role; he nailed that sucker.) He and Joyce have sung together onstage many times, and I’m looking forward to a long continuation of this fruitful collaboration.

Edoardo Müller conducts the Orchestra e Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia of Rome.* Some (Wagner-influenced?) conductors balk at bel canto, saying there’s nothing for them to do here, yet Müller makes one feel that he isn’t standing back but creating a space in which the singers can assert their creative forces. I admire that.

And speaking of Joyce and conductors, I draw your attention to the link to the new website of conductor Leonardo Vordoni, who, in addition to his manifold talents and accomplishments, is also Joyce’s husband.

TOMORROW: My Record Roundup for 2009 turns to Pop Music.

*NOTE: And by the way, wouldn’t you love to hear how Rossini would set a phrase such as “Orchestra e Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia di Roma”? A lot of triplets, I’m guessing.

Suis-Je Français?

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 07:22:00 +0000

Often I’ve been known to say, “I’m French,” but usually as an excuse for my reflexive impulse to kiss both cheeks when I’m greeting a friend, or for my failure to recognize some megacelebrity of U.S. pop culture. (You can’t imagine my bafflement when I arrived in the States last spring to find “Jon & Kate” on the cover of every magazine.) On a more serious level, I do love this country passionately, and I can envision circumstances in which, yes, I would die for France and proudly. I may some day apply for citizenship. But do I consider myself truly French? No. Do my neighbors consider me French? Non.

In the context of the current debate on l’identité française, however, many people are asking what it is to be French. Having considered the question at length (two decades), I now propose a handy list of the most important traits that identify a true Frenchman.

To be French is to be born knowing all things — most especially that, if anything goes wrong, anywhere in the world, it is the fault of an American.

Hallyday: Le Plus Grand Français de Tous les Temps
Celui qui a dit “Yé yé yé!”

To be French is to be more interested in the health of Johnny Hallyday than in the Copenhagen conference, wars in the Middle East, world hunger, national politics, the weather, or, for that matter, the current debate on l’identité française. That Hallyday is partly Belgian (and until recently lived most of the year in Switzerland) makes no difference.

To be French is to go on strike at the least provocation, in a way designed to inconvenience the greatest number of people. At any rate, that seems to be the thinking of the transit workers, who voted to continue snarling up the suburban commuter rails through Monday at least — making it impossible for many people to do their holiday shopping.

Désolé, Madame, you will have to take the next train …
some time in January, peut-être.

Similarly, to be French is to profess tremendous faith in the collective wisdom of the state, but to take to the streets in protest any time the government actually attempts to wield power.

To be French is to expect that everyone else in France will uphold a rigid code of personal conduct, a combination of le respect and la politesse, without being told precisely what that code entails. The code differs from Frenchman to Frenchman, and by the way, it’s unlikely that he will uphold it with regard to you. (Especially on motorways.) But you, vous les autres, you’d better mind your manners.

To be French is to defend tradition from threats abroad: French bakeries and French cinema enjoy the “exception” that permits them to compete more advantageously both at home and on international markets. Meanwhile, it’s increasingly difficult to find an edible baguette, and the French line up to see every Hollywood blockbuster that comes down the pike.

Objet Volant Non-Identifié

Just so, to be French is to uphold the importance of la cuisine du terroir and the charm of the béret basque — while dining at McDonald’s and wearing a Yankees cap.

To be French is to enjoy Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey movies in the confident belief that their behavior is typical of all Americans; and to enjoy Woody Allen and Roman Polanski movies more in the years since we discovered what sexual deviance they’re capable of.

Un Américain Typique

To be French is to mistrust one’s neighbors while spending as much time as possible with one’s family. They are the only people with whom one will ever discuss religion, politics, or money. The reason being that, in generations past, one’s neighbors have been prone to denounce and to inform on each other over questions of … politics, religion, and money. (Since there is no record of anyone’s ever being cast into the Bastille for supporting a football team, the French do discuss sports quite openly.)

However, with all that reverence for family, to be French is nevertheless to be perfectly willing to trade one’s grandmother for a really good truffle.

En avant, mes enfants! There’s a special on offal at the butcher’s!

To be French is to believe so fervidly in the Rights of Man that one believes with equal fervor that those rights extend to dogs, as well.

And on the subject of rights, to be French is to ignore any distinction whatever between entitlements and rights, or between rights and privileges, so long as we are talking about one’s own entitlements and privileges, and not somebody else’s. (See “Motorways,” above.) Indeed, this is the second-most important qualification for French identity.

The most important qualification is this: to be French is not to be American.

So French

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:09:00 +0000

The French are currently engaged in a great debate — over whether to engage in a great debate. So far, the “Shut Up and Move On” contingent has the force of numbers behind it, according to a poll this week in the Nouvel Observateur magazine, but the “Let’s Keep Debating (Until Legislative Elections in March)” contingent has behind it the force of the President, Nicolas Sarkozy, and so onward we debate, whether the conversation does us any good or serves merely to drive us farther apart.

The subject is “l’identité nationale,” or what it really means to be French. On strictly legal grounds, the answer is simple: you’re either a native or a naturalized citizen, or else you’re not French. But that leaves out a lot of people (such as this writer), and it begs such questions as whether one can be taught to be French, and what the French state can reasonably expect from those who live here. At the moment, the government is scrutinizing displays of non-Christian faith, in particularly the Muslim veil in all its forms, and it’s a telling discussion.

For one thing, the separation of church and state has been the law of this land since 1905. (There were parties to celebrate the centennial.) Is it really within the government’s purview to ban, to permit, or even to question traditions of faith? And we had hardly begun to discuss the veil before we felt the shock, shock of remembering that many French Jews wear head coverings, too. If a Muslim woman can’t wear a veil, can a Jewish man continue to wear a yarmulke? And don’t Catholic nuns wear veils? Ooops. This is more complex than we thought, isn’t it?

Sarkozy: A soupçon of debate never hurt anybody, n’est-ce pas?

The debate wasn’t intended to round up the Jews (been there, done that), or even to touch them; neither was it intended to revive the anti-clerical measures of the Reign of Terror. Supposedly, it’s a security issue: how can the police identify you if you’re wearing a burqa? Yet at its heart, the present debate really asks “what to do” with the 5 million Muslims who live here. It’s a nasty question — neither Sarkozy nor any member of his government has phrased it this way — but a significant number of French people hear it clearly.

For among the French, in certain quarters, there’s a widespread mistrust of, and in some cases hostility toward, Muslims. We know who feels this way: in the Nouvel Obs poll, the oldest and the least educated registered the strongest support for the debate, which in turn legitimizes the expression of sentiments that, in a civil society, might better be kept quiet. A wave of terrorism in the 1990s, followed by 9/11 and the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran exacerbated the mistrust. These factors ostensibly elevate the debate now to a question of national security.

In turn, fears are growing (with cause) that some of these expressions of hostility will take the ugliest possible forms, from insults to desecration of mosques to ad hominem violence. And none of this — absolutely none of it — does anything to facilitate the integration of a vast population who are indeed French citizens, yet do not enjoy the rights, privileges and esteem that every other Frenchman takes for granted.

Villepin: Stop!

Among those calling for an immediate end to the debate are Dominique de Villepin, the former prime minister and Sarkozy’s onetime rival on the center-right; the entire Socialist Party, the principal opposition party; an assortment of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian leaders; and an impressive majority of those surveyed in the Nouvel Obs poll.

Fat chance that Sarkozy will listen — to Villepin, who may have engineered an attempt to frame him in a criminal scam a few years ago; to the Socialists, who needless to say do not have his best interests at heart; or to anyone else. He’s hoping to attract voters on the far right, especially those who might otherwise vote for the Front National. He’s been down this path before, and to appeal to the FN voters he covets, he has several times adopted stances that — more implicitly than explicitly — indicate that he’s as nationalistic, as anti-immigration, and as racist as they tend to be.

Security risk? Sarkozy with an Immigrant

It’s anybody’s guess why Sarkozy, a man whose own heritage is Hungarian (and in part Jewish), and whose wife is herself an immigrant (from Italy), seeks to broaden his base with this segment of the electorate. Does he really think he can reform them from within, or channel their fear and rage toward constructive ends? Or is it really about getting the biggest parliamentary majority possible? As I say, it’s no coincidence that Sarkozy’s immigration minister, Eric Besson, is expected to deliver his report on the debate just ahead of the legislative elections.

In a purely philosophical context — of a kind which does not exist in politics and government — there is much to be said for asking, “Who are we? What makes us who we are?” Some of my favorite works by Henry James and Mark Twain address what it means to be an American, and I daresay I’m a better person for having considered the question under their tutelage. France, predicated on geographical grounds, and only later devising political and philosophical reasons to exist as a nation, might profitably indulge in some self-examination — that is, if it were more honest than the debate Sarkozy has launched.

Waxing Philosophical: Sarkozy, with a friend,
engages in his favorite kind of debate.

TOMORROW: Are you French? A handy checklist will let you know.

Julie Andrews

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:29:00 +0000

Alive

It’s snowing in Beynes, in flakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes, while the coming of Christmas brings a remembered soundtrack of Julie Andrews’ recordings of carols. In Paris, the current stage production of The Sound of Music (a.k.a. La mélodie du bonheur) at the Théâtre du Châtelet mean that Andrews’ face and voice are popping up all over television these days. And so the first diva I ever worshipped has been much on my mind lately.

I met Julie Andrews backstage after a performance of Putting It Together, a Sondheim pastiche that represented her return to Broadway after a three-decade absence. You’d never have guessed she’d been away, however: she commanded the stage with total mastery. I couldn’t identify the secret source of her presence, but I could see the results, and while the piece wasn’t very good, she was phenomenal.

Scott Frankel, the show’s music director, introduced me to Andrews in her dressing room. I was terrified that I’d start gushing, so I kept my comments to a minimum and mostly listened while they discussed that evening’s performance, what had worked and what they agreed needed more work. Andrews was thoroughly professional about all this, but something more: she made clear that she admired my friend, and she took care to praise him in my presence. “Isn’t he a genius?” she asked me.

I was struck by her generosity. Yes, Scott is a genius, as it happens, but nobody was forcing Andrews to say so, least of all in front of his friend. This was the antithesis of stereotypical diva behavior, and I remember thinking as I left the theater, “I need to be this way, if ever I’m in anything like her exalted position in the world.” Not that there’s much chance, but I’ll try to remember the lesson.

By this point in his career, Scott had worked already with several legendary ladies of musical theater: Bernadette Peters, Teresa Stratas, Shirley MacLaine, Barbra Streisand. He wasn’t in awe of Julie Andrews, therefore, and as he told me, his boyhood idol was Streisand.* Was it something in our family backgrounds, we wondered, that made us gravitate toward the diva who most reflected our heritage? For just as Streisand is Jewish, so Andrews couldn’t be more a WASP.

I quite literally cut my teeth on Julie Andrews records, and when I was a baby, my mother used to sweep me in her arms and waltz around the room while listening to the My Fair Lady cast album. Evidently there were occasions when I did dance all night. And so deep was my infatuation with Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins that I used to dress up like her, grab an umbrella, and fly around the neighborhood.

Practically Perfect in Every Way

Her performances paved the way for my later explorations of opera, and some elements of her work continue to influence my taste: the clarity of her projection and the intimately conversational quality in her singing, and the precision of her diction are qualities I seek in other singers now. Sometimes, it turns out that these singers were influenced by Andrews’ technique: in the course of an interview, the wonderful Barbara Bonney told me excitedly of her early admiration of Julie Andrews, and indeed Bonney’s own bell-like soprano has often been heard in Salzburg.

Sitting around and wondering what simple folk would do.

As I grew older, my enthusiasm for Andrews diminished a bit, tempered not only by the mediocrity of so many of her vehicles but also by her limitations as an actress. She portrays only five emotions, as discrete as the gears on a car’s transmission, with comparably pronounced shifts between them. (Shifting into anger is especially difficult for her.) I found greater openness and truth in her singing — and in her writing, particularly her first book, a novel for children entitled Mandy.

Garn.

Nowadays she’s pursuing her writing quite seriously, and reportedly drawing great satisfaction from it — though the profusion of children’s stories arrives a bit late to do me much good. A pity she didn’t take up the pen earlier and more often: how many of her movies, in a bundle, would I trade for just one more Whangdoodle!

Yet when she was good, she was sublime, and if you have never found yourself on a green hillside, outstretched your arms and twirled around, then burst into song — you have never truly lived.

*NOTE: Streisand’s style was inculcated in Scott to such a degree that, when he worked with her on the Back to Broadway album, she sometimes turned to him to sing a particular phrase — that is, to show her how to do it her way.

Michael Powell

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:58:00 +0000

Sole Man: Léonide Massine as the Shoemaker

A new production of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann at the Metropolitan Opera and a screening at Film Forum of The Red Shoes evoke memories of Michael Powell, the British filmmaker (1905–90). When I met him, in 1980, his film adaptation of Hoffmann provoked me to inquire how on earth he could adapt this work without including its keystone: the revelation that Nicklausse is not merely the poet’s sidekick but also his Muse, and complicit in the sorrows heaped upon Hoffmann because she wants him (and the treasure of his art) for herself. Wannabe writers, like me, love this opera precisely because of that revelation: sure, we may be losers, but it’s worth it. Lose that theme, and all you have left is a grab bag of pointless fantastical anecdotes — and I said so to Powell.

He surprised me by instantly agreeing with me: of his collaborator, Emeric Pressburger, Powell said, “Emeric never understood that part, and he had the tendency to cut anything he didn’t understand. I probably should have stood up to him. At least I was able to keep Nicklausse’s little aria about the rooster.”

In the years since, I’ve wondered whether Powell meant what he said. It’s possible, however, that his apparent candor was merely a feint to deflect a whippersnapper who knew nothing about moviemaking and only a little about opera. At this point in Powell’s career, no longer forgotten but no longer making films, either, he toured college campuses to offer lectures and screenings, which is in fact what he was doing at the Brown Film Society when we met. Surely I wasn’t the first punk he’d run into. He must have developed keen survival skills — in this as in many other areas of his remarkable career.

Powell (foreground, far right) at work

I’d seen very few of Powell’s films, and prior to his visit to Providence, only The Red Shoes. That weekend in 1980, I saw Hoffmann and A Matter of Life and Death, as well. These films — wonderful as they are — couldn’t provide an adequate foundation for me to discuss Powell’s work intelligently, or to take much profit advantage at all of the opportunity to meet an artist whose work I’ve grown to admire tremendously. It’s true that, even now, having seen many of his films, I’m not sure I have many questions — but I no longer have the opportunity to ask them of him.

To have seen only a few of his Technicolor extravaganzas is to risk misunderstanding him. If all you know is The Red Shoes and Hoffmann, you will (forgivably) think Powell a flamboyant showman. Digging deeper, however, we see an artist who matched an exacting pictorial imagination to (usually) the simplest storytelling means. What he leaves out of a story can be as compelling as what he lavishes on the screen: in Black Narcissus, for example, the serene face of Deborah Kerr (his muse and sometime mistress) conceals a roiling emotional subtext. A Canterbury Tale, in black-and-white, is really a shaggy dog story that derives a great deal of its suspense from a wartime backdrop: you constantly think something will happen much worse than what actually does.

The Dance of the Red Shoes: Robert Helpmann & Moira Shearer

While The 49th Parallel, in black-and-white, is a blatantly propagandistic appeal to Canadians to support the British effort in World War II (by hammering home the idea that, yes, this is Canada’s war, too), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, in glorious Technicolor, brings poignant melancholy to the fore. This war isn’t like its predecessors, Blimp realizes, and the kinds of border-blind friendship he once enjoyed with a German officer are no longer possible. (I discussed Blimp at length, here.)

Both The Red Shoes and Hoffmann, for all their riotous excess, are serious considerations of the life of the artist, and the very big, very simple question of what is sacrificed in love and happiness in the here-and-now, in exchange for immortality. But Powell pushes the questions of art and sacrifice even further in Peeping Tom, a thriller in which a photographer captures the facial expressions of his attractive female models at the exact moment of death. The film generated so much scandal that it effectively ended Powell’s career; at the time, critics compared it unfavorably to Psycho, by Powell’s friend Alfred Hitchcock, but seen recently, I saw Hitchcock attempting — and failing — to answer Powell’s challenge in Frenzy, a few years later.

The great Anton Walbrook, who appeared in many Powell–Pressburger films, as Lermontov

Powell was rescued from penury and obscurity by the interest of devoted fans, notably Martin Scorsese. Maybe that’s why Powell showed so much patience with me, another, younger fan, who dared to question an oeuvre I but hardly glimpsed and did not understand at all.

Bernie Birnbaum

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:14:00 +0000

Bernard Birnbaum died on Thanksgiving Day, at the age of 89. One of CBS News’ longest-serving and most valuable producers, he helped Charles Kuralt to create the popular “On the Road” reports, and he worked closely with Dan Rather on several important assignments, including coverage of the civil rights movement in the South, the aftermath of the assassination of John Kennedy, and the Vietnam War.

When I knew him, Bernie was an anomaly, an absent-minded professor in a corporate culture that favored appearance over intellect, action over thought, and speed over diligence. That alone was reason to like him, and I looked forward to his visits to our office — though I avoided visiting him in his, a cluttered nest of books and papers, from which it was said no one but he had ever emerged. He was so widely known as “Bernie” that to hear him called by his full name was surprising: “Bernard Birnbaum? Who’s that?”

There was nothing he didn’t know about the stories he’d covered, and few details eluded him in the retelling, even decades after the fact. You didn’t mention the Kennedy assassination in his presence if you didn’t have a few hours free, because once Bernie started, he really couldn’t be stopped.

He devoted much of his career to investigating that crime, and he was prone to point out, whenever public-opinion surveys reported (as they so often do) that a majority of Americans disbelieve the Warren Commission Report, that a majority of Americans haven’t read the thing and don’t really know what it says. Bernie had read it, of course, as well as every other document in and about the case. He also interviewed many of the principal figures and hundreds of witnesses and experts; to conduct his own ballistics tests, he even rigged a life-size model of the motorcade route, with a six-story tower to stand in for the School Book Depository. No detective assigned to the case knew more about it than Bernie.

His conclusion chimed with that of the Commission: to believe any of the other theories about the assassination, he said, would require one to set aside some part of the hard evidence. And having examined every bit of that evidence, Bernie would not set aside a particle of it. Dutifully, he reviewed it again and again, as the News Division periodically prepared commemorative documentaries. Yes, he was willing to entertain new theories, even those that concluded that Oswald did not act alone, but to my knowledge, no other explanation ever passed his muster.

Short and stout and almost Muppet-like, he stumped through the halls of the Broadcast Center, his rumpled jacket stuffed with notes and papers. By the 1990s he’d renounced two trademarks from the 1960s: his cigars (and none too fondly recollected by his colleagues) and his “practical” footwear, the “moon boots” that Dan Rather was still teasing him about, decades later.

It’s telling, I think, that Bernie worked so closely with the two men in the building who most wanted to be writers: Rather and Kuralt. Words mattered to them all, in a way that they don’t matter to other people in television. Bernie was a throwback to a different kind of journalism, not just the print variety but the harum-scarum of TV news, when much of the technology and most of the forms hadn’t been invented, when everything but the truth was improvised. The News Division hardly knew what to make of him, by the time I got there, and though the network suits kept him on (after his lawyers helpfully reminded them of a little thing called age discrimination), they didn’t hire anyone else like him.

Probably there was no one, for he was singular. The news was better when he reported it — tougher, smarter, more caring and more honest. You’re going to miss him.

The Blonde Side

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 16:51:00 +0000

Bullock: She’s concealing a handgun in that bag.
Up to you to decide whether that’s a good thing —
but if you don’t buy the Proposal DVD, she just might use it on you.

The current release The Blind Side is one of the more remarkable pieces of rightwing Christian propaganda you are likely to see in a major Hollywood motion picture. It tells the uplifting story of Michael Oher, a young black man who is rescued from poverty and set on the path to stardom in professional football, all thanks to the tough love of a pistol-packing bourgeoise, played by Sandra Bullock. Though The Blind Side is based on a true story, it begs the question why that story is being told — and why it’s being told now.

For in the course of the film, we are made to understand that Oher can be saved only by divorcing himself entirely from any people who look like him (or indeed anyone who isn’t blond). The other black men in the movie are, without exception, thugs; his mother is a crack addict. The one and only time Oher embraces his own culture — singing a rap song — he wrecks the car he’s driving and nearly kills his white stepbrother, played by a Quinn Cummings clone.

By the time we get to the end of the picture, we have met only one black character who is intelligent, educated, and gainfully employed, but she’s so unsympathetic that I’m not sure what we’re supposed to make of her.

This isn’t to say that the picture isn’t entertaining, and even I found myself rooting for Bullock, who remains a charismatic presence onscreen, despite the plastic surgery. (She’s six years younger than I: does this mean I need a facelift, too?) And if The Blind Side encourages other Southern, white, Christian, Republican bourgeoises to take real action to help their less privileged neighbors, I’m unlikely to complain much.

Yet, as I say, the timing made me uncomfortable; the film has been released just one year after a man who identifies himself as black achieved an unprecedented position of power in the United States. Granted, President Obama doesn’t behave like a drug-dealing gangsta, and surely that accounts at least in part for his success. But are we as a society really saying (or worse, believing) that African Americans can’t succeed on their own, without the Tarzan-like intervention of white people? Haven’t we come further than that?

Hollywood loves a remake, and I’m eager to see this movie remade — with Angela Bassett in the Bullock role.

Characters in Search of a Reader, or ‘Le Rouge et le Noir’

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:02:00 +0000

In the 1954 film adaptation of Le Rouge et le Noir,
Gérard Philipe and Antonella Lualdi as Julien and Mathilde

Seldom have I encountered a novel so entertaining as Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir. Seizing upon Denise Boutrit’s paperback copy, I galloped through the chapters, and each time I set down the book, I did so reluctantly, so eager was I to see what would happen next. The question is why it took me so long to finish, for the intervals between my multi-chapter gulps were long indeed.

When we’re kids, most of us have the Toy Story fantasy, that when we leave the playroom, our toys get up and play without us, in adventures of their own devising. With Le Rouge et le Noir, I imagined something different, particularly during the long pause I took, just when Stendhal’s hero, Julien Sorel, had stolen into the bedroom of his employer’s daughter, Mathilde de La Mole, for the first time. I pictured them waiting for me.

JULIEN: He said he’d be right back.

MATHILDE (stifling a yawn): I know.

JULIEN: Do you want to play cards, or something?

MATHILDE: We could always make out.

JULIEN: No, that might advance the plot.

MATHILDE (sighing): I guess we’d better wait, then.

At long last, I returned to them, and they enjoyed their first tryst. Oh, yes, they did.

Ciel! Mon mari!
Danielle Darrieux as Mme de Rênal, with Philipe.
Though older than Julien’s 19 years at the time of filming, Philipe was so much the right physical type for the rôle that it’s hard to believe Stendhal never saw him.

Indeed, as with so many great French novels, Le Rouge et le Noir is very, very sexy, especially by the British and American standards of the time — 1830. Julien is low-born and scrawny, but he dreams of Napoleonic glory for himself. This puts him in conflict with both his wealthy employers — first, the provincial Monsieur de Rênal and, later, the Parisian Marquis de La Mole — as well as with the priests at the seminary where he studies for a time. Julien judges that, without a noble title, he has no options but the military (the Red) or the church (the Black). Yet most of the time, his conquests are limited to the bedroom.

Stendhal picks apart his characters’ social and sexual politics with undisguised glee. The shifting emotions of Madame de Rênal, especially, touch on high satirical comedy, and as the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Stendhal has spent most of his life observing the peccadilloes of men and women, while enjoying himself thoroughly.

Of course, literature professors are unlikely to tell you that one of the great monuments of French fiction is a laugh-aloud sexcapade that frequently borders on farce; they will not tell you this about Zola’s Nana and Pot-Bouille, either, or about the huge chunk of Proust’s account of Charlus’ misadventures that is in fact quite funny.

This is why we must read these books for ourselves: because the experts are keeping all the good bits a secret.

Being French, and being based on a real-life character besides, Julien Sorel must give over to philosophy at the end of the book; I suppose it’s for that reason that Le Rouge et le Noir is required reading in French high schools. Honestly, I don’t think it would be possible to fail to comprehend Julien’s gist as it plays out in the narrative, but his final monologues are very beautiful. I do know that the version we were given to read in Texas high schools was so heavily expurgated that it bore no relation whatever to the full-length novel, apart from a couple of characters’ names.*

Now of course I intend to check out La Chartreuse de Parme and — holy of holies — Stendhal’s life of Rossini, preferably while listening to Joyce DiDonato’s new recording of arias for Isabella Colbran.

*NOTE: There’s some satisfaction in the realization that I finished reading Stendhal’s novel on a day when I met for lunch with my high-school French teacher, Carlene Klein Ginsburg. At long last, I have fulfilled the assignment from 1978.

What I Didn’t Say at Bob’s Memorial

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:54:00 +0000

In every memorial service, I think, comes a moment when the talk ceases to serve its consoling purpose. No matter what the speakers say, they can’t fill up the absence, that empty seat in the theater. Yesterday’s memorial service for Bob Straus was especially poignant because, for most of my adult life, he’s been the guy who helped me get through other people’s memorial services: I knew that, at the end, he’d take me out for a bite to eat, and I’d feel better. Yesterday, he was present only in our loving recollections — and of course that wasn’t quite enough.

So often, it has been Bob’s presence that saved the day for me — not so much the specific things he said or did, as his just being there. During the tortuous production of the Broadway musical Rags, in 1986, it often seemed that Bob was the only grownup in the theater, and though he was powerless to correct most of our worst problems (an underdeveloped script, clashing egos, dwindling finances), it helped me — it helped most of us — just to know he was there, seeing through the most elaborate façades and cutting through the densest bullshit, keeping us connected to reality. It was fascinating to hear other people, who worked on other shows, confirming this experience of Bob.

For example, it turns out I am not the only person whom Bob counseled to shut up and take a needed paycheck with the words, “We’re all whores.”

Beyond theater and work, though, Bob could — simply by being who he was — remind you of what was good and possible in life. All of us who loved him have examples of this, whether we’re talking about his love of good food or of travel, or of any of the things that Bob valued. For me, Bob and his wife, Marguerite, served as irrefutable proof of the possibility of true love, at a time when I most needed to believe.

I had my first love affair with another man while I was working on Rags. He was involved in the show, too, but among that close-knit troupe of colleagues, friends and surrogate family, we told no one. And so when he and I broke up, I felt I had no one to turn to. And I kept it to myself.

Swift and heavy, the guillotine blade of our breakup dropped on me in the middle of 51st Street, outside the Mark Hellinger Theater. I was so overwhelmed by emotion that I staggered back, slammed against the brick wall, and slid to sit on the ground. Judy Kuhn and Lonny Price, who played young lovers in the show, walked up. “What’s the matter?” they wanted to know. And the only word I could find to answer was: “Nothing.”

They left me to my stupefaction. They had work to do. So did I, for that matter, but I was so consumed by loneliness, by the certainty that, if Scott didn’t love me, then no one ever would, that I wasn’t much good for anything but staring into the middle distance, where visions of my empty future danced before me. I couldn’t even cry; I could barely breathe. Only when show time approached did I manage to pick myself up and take my place in the stage manager’s office.

Was Marguerite backstage that night, or was Bob merely talking with her on the telephone? I can’t remember. What I do remember — most vividly — was the sound of their voices, and what it told me, more than what they told each other. For at that moment I understood that, if Bob and Marguerite could find true love, then so could other people. Sure, it hadn’t worked for me this time, but it was out there, something to look for and aspire to. It took me nearly two years to try again, but I’m still hoping.

Theirs has been a rare sort of love, that doesn’t shut out others; when Bob and Marguerite were together, you felt the embrace, as if we were all in a big group hug. You felt warmer and better protected. You liked the human race, and the whole planet Earth a little better. And you hoped that some day, somebody would feel the same way about you.

Bob’s passing hasn’t taken that hope out of the world, but he was one of its best models, and in this as in so many other things, I’m going to miss him. A grown man — a straight man — who called me “Sweetie.” Where will I ever meet his like again?

Interview: Daniel Okulitch on Don Giovanni

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:40:00 +0000

Daniel Okulitch recently made his New York City Opera debut in the title role of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in a new production directed by Christopher Alden. It’s a big moment for the company, which has returned to its home base at Lincoln Center. But it’s also a big moment for the young bass-baritone from Calgary.

We got to know each other in 2008, when Okulitch sang the lead in the world premiere of Howard Shore’s The Fly, at Paris’ Théâtre du Châtelet; I heard him again as Joseph DeRocher, the condemned man in Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, at Fort Worth Opera last spring. His willingness to take on such dramatically demanding roles is remarkable, and impresarios must be increasingly aware that, if they need a very tall guy who can sing while ripping a man’s arm off, or while doing push-ups, or while hanging from the ceiling or stooping under 50 pounds of Latex costuming, Dan is their man.

Moreover, he’s able to project dense texts cleanly and tellingly, over thunderous orchestrations, and to create fully dimensional characters. As Seth Brundle, he adroitly negotiated the transitions from nerd to lover to monster, from man obsessed to something not human; as DeRocher, he located the lonely vulnerability of a murderous brute.

Hearing him now in standard repertory, I was able to appreciate the warmth and amplitude of his tone, the excellence of his Italian, and the mastery of his dynamic shadings. Okulitch is quite simply a wonderful singer. Yet Alden’s staging is, in its way, no less demanding than those of The Fly or Dead Man, and I’m conscious of how much more accomplished — at everything — a young artist must be, in order to succeed these days.

Daniel Okulitch took time out from a punishing performance schedule to answer a few questions by e-mail.

Polymorphous: Okulitch, center, with his NYCO cast mates.
Clockwise from lower left: Joélle Harvey (Zerlina); Kelly Markgraf (Masetto); Gregory Turay (Don Ottavio); Keri Alkema (Donna Elvira); Stefania Dovhan (Donna Anna); Jason Hardy (Leporello)

Teresa Stratas likes to say that “Mozart is honey for the voice.” Safe to say she had more down-time between performances?

Ha. Yes, I suppose so. This first week has been a tiring one, with only one day off in between shows. While some may say, “It’s only Mozart,” it is still a big, long sing, a very physical show, emotionally demanding, and the level of vocal and dramatic commitment is taxing. That being said, singing Mozart properly is very, very healthy for the voice. In my career I have tried to balance the contemporary opera I do with Mozart, to keep me honest, to keep me healthy. All your problems are revealed in Mozart — the music is so exposed, so it’s a good way to test yourself.

We spoke briefly about the different colors your voice takes on in this music, as compared with the contemporary works I’ve heard you in. How much of the difference can be attributed to the musical language? To the English language? To the characters you portray? How do you find your sound in a score?

This is an interesting question. Singing contemporary operas in English is always a challenge vocally, since they are often angular, and even if not, the act of singing in English, in the style they often require, can seem like a different animal altogether than singing Mozart. In my growth as a singer, this is something I am working to unify more. I’m glad that in Giovanni you are hearing a wider range of colors, since I am trying to sing with a healthier, more full sound which allows the natural colors of my voice to come through. I am rarely thinking of particular vocal colors (with the exception of the Serenade, where I consciously do some straight tone and a much more intimate dynamic), but rather, the dramatic intention, and allowing that to “color” the voice. The trick, as always, is to not let the intensity of the drama rob one of your voice, which I find more difficult to do in contemporary operas, perhaps because of the immediate, visceral connection to the language.

As Joseph DeRocher, in Heggie’s Dead Man Walking
Fort Worth Opera, 2009

One reason writers (and stage directors) are drawn to Don Giovanni is that so much is open to interpretation. For example, in the libretto, the Don and other characters talk about his successes with women, yet in most productions, we see no evidence; likewise, we have only Donna Anna’s word that he forced himself on her. How do you see the character? If you were directing this piece, what would you emphasize about him?

Too often Giovanni is played in a rather one-dimensional way ... either as a complete brute and sociopath or a somewhat shallow Cavalier who is simply trying to have a good time in his own way, and is continually showing the audience how great it is to be the Don. Both are boring to me. In this production we allow moments where Giovanni is alone, or observing other characters, and there is a sense of inner conflict or regret, or fighting a growing sense of unease, which he then must chase away in the only way he knows how: pursuing sex and women and extreme sensation. There is humanity in Giovanni, even in his most despicable moments, that has to come out. Even the most amoral seducers have moments of insight or analysis or perhaps times of loneliness. As archetypal as he is, he is still a person with complex feelings, and I would try to direct (and play) him as such. The interesting part of Giovanni is not the façade, but what is underneath it. How much self-awareness he has is up for debate and varies from production to production, but no matter what, I am not interested in the typical “Good Ol’ Giovanni,” where everything on the page is taken literally.

Physique du rôle: With Jason Hardy as Leporello

The Alden production is yet another that relies on your physicality, whether you’re stripping to your shorts or dragging Jason Hardy around the stage. Does being in good shape give you an edge over other singers? What’s the downside — if any?

I ate a lot of gelato over the summer* so had to hit the gym again for this show. [Smile] Chris [Alden] warned me, so I had a little lead time. I can’t speak to whether being in shape gives me an edge. I don’t think it hurts to be in shape, no matter what, and it does allow for a certain directorial freedom by then knowing that I will be comfortable with taking my shirt off if it is called for. The downside can be that there are those who will say that I might be cast more on appearance than vocal ability, but I work hard, so that once I open my mouth to sing, it is hopefully clear that I am there on my vocal merits, as well.

A New York City Opera debut is a career milestone, and you’re appearing in a role that has an especially distinguished history with the company: Norman Treigle and Samuel Ramey are just two of NYCO’s revered Dons. At what point do you block out this kind of background noise?

One has to block out this noise, because it doesn’t serve me, my nerves or my performance to think on it. Ramey and Treigle are two of my idols, so I don’t dream of being considered in the same category as them. With a role such as Giovanni, it is inevitable that comparisons will be drawn to the great interpreters of the past. One can’t avoid it. My Giovanni is not the definitive one — no Giovanni is, since no one will ever come to a consensus on who was the “best.” I do my Giovanni my way, to the best of my ability at this time in my life, in this production. Some will love it, some will hate it. What more can I do?

Okulitch as Olin Blitch, in Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah
Boheme Opera, 2006

How do the acoustics in the renovated theater seem to you? Is it a comfortable space in which to sing?

I really enjoy singing on this stage — we get a lot back from the house and I don’t feel we have to push. Our set is particularly kind, since the walls and floor reflect the sound out into the audience. So far, I think the renovations have been an improvement, and I believe there are more yet to come.

Where do you go from here?

Next I perform in Little Women** with Calgary Opera, then the title role in Le Nozze di Figaro in Vancouver, and finish out the season in St Louis as Willy Wonka in the world premiere of The Golden Ticket. I’ll open the 2010 season in LA with Figaro again, which I’ll repeat in Arizona, and have a few other things cooking which I won’t speak of just yet. [He concludes with another smile.]

Daniel Okulitch appears in Don Giovanni again on Friday, 20 November, and Sunday, 22 November (matinée).

*NOTES: Okulitch was singing the role of Theseus in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at La Scala. And avoiding gelato in Milan is like avoiding sausage in Germany: it cannot be done.

** In Mark Adamo’s opera, Okulitch sings the role of Professor Bhaer, whose Act II recitation of Goethe’s “Kennst du das Land” is a highlight of any performance, and a brilliant showcase for the singer.

Tame

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:36:00 +0000

Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is everything the book is not: overlong, talky, ugly, and dull. While I’m astonished that the movie received so many admiring reviews in the press, I’m not surprised that moviegoers have not (as yet) expressed disappointment by staging a riot or tearing down the theater, for this movie simply isn’t good enough to excite any kind of passions.

In general, the picture seems to have been created by that rare species, the American adult male who has spent too much time in psychotherapy, and Jonze and his collaborators indulge at length in the fantastical notion that the dysfunctions of the Wild Things — depicted here as a kind of family — will be of absorbing interest to others. Instead, the dialogue is painfully tedious.

This is a shame, because on most other levels, the Wild Things are beautifully realized: as cuddly as they are strange and menacing. If they had anything worth expressing, the Wild Things would certainly have the means, for they’ve got delicately nuanced CGI animation to bring emotion to their shaggy faces, and their voices are those of excellent actors: James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Chris Cooper, Forest Whitaker, Paul Dano, and Lauren Ambrose. Gandolfini is given the lion’s share of the dialogue, but only O’Hara manages to create a character as dimensional as the costume from which it emanates.

Sendak’s book has limited plot, the better to let young readers project their own stories into the pictures; whereas movie audiences pretty much demand clearly constructed narrative. Jonze therefore couldn’t make the film that would have served the book best — an impressionistic collection of images. So be it, but I don’t understand why he surrendered so many of the best images in the book (especially the wonderful moment when Max’s bedroom is transformed into a forest). I do understand why he washed out the color in the scenes in the Land of the Wild Things: he wanted to make the images seem stranger. But without color, the images are also dull, in several senses. Jonze sabotaged what should have been his signal achievement.

Among the human actors, young Max Records is borderline pretty, which is all wrong for our hero, Max. And though at times he locates and exposes some profound emotional characterization, he’s frequently too self-conscious. During his rampages at the beginning of the film, for example, he keeps sneaking peeks at the camera. As his mother, Catherine Keener fills in whole chapters of back-story with a glance and a gesture, and her depiction of maternal love would be the best thing in the movie, if this were supposed to be a movie about mothers.

But it isn’t, of course. I now suspect that the several child-friends who have seen the picture were trying to protect adults like their parents and me when they described themselves as merely disappointed with Where the Wild Things Are. They wanted to let us down easy. We all grew up with the book. But for them the dream of Max’s long night is fresh and real, almost untouched by nostalgia — and nothing at all like this movie.

Una Voce Poco Fa

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:05:00 +0000

Co-stars at the Met: Proof that I’m not the biggest ass Joyce knows.

Though I’ve seen Rossini’s comedy The Barber of Seville many times, it’s never made me cry — until last night. I wasn’t bawling, mind you, but I got misty, and there’s no point trying to deny it. The question is why I reacted this way. Did the happy ending move me? (Maybe. On the other hand, it wasn’t exactly a surprise.) Am I simply in a weird mood, or excessively vulnerable these days? Or was I caught up in the excitement of seeing Joyce DiDonato at the freaking Metropolitan Opera at last?

“All of the above” is the correct answer, I expect.

Joyce looks on as Barry Banks, the World’s Most Dangerous Tenor,
performs impossible feats of daring.

After the show, Joyce remarked that people seemed grateful for the opportunity to laugh, and it did feel good, in a weekend saturated with bad news of all kinds, to kick back and watch the good guys outwit the bad guys. Joyce was in excellent company, including the tenor Barry Banks as Almaviva. Banks approaches his work with such intensity that in dramatic roles, he seems fully capable of throttling the soprano or setting fire to the theater; here, he could concentrate on being funny, and on luscious singing. I particularly liked his lesson scene and his “Ecco, ridente in cielo,” probably the sweetest I’ve ever heard.

Meanwhile, Joyce frolicked. Fully recovered from the leg she broke singing this very role at Covent Garden last summer, she bounded about the stage, scooting up and down a ladder while wearing a flowing gown, and she created a Rosina who’s young and ultra-feisty. It’s not often I have the feeling that a Rosina would bust out of Dr. Bartolo’s house even if Almaviva and Figaro didn’t come along, but Joyce’s character is a proactive protagonist, and great fun to spend time with. Musically, what struck me most was her shaping of rhythm, lending wit and excitement to even the most familiar passages. Really, she’s mastered this score so completely that now she can squeeze and stretch tempo as if it were a toy — Silly Putty, to be specific.

What’s more, Joyce looks so picture-book pretty in the costumes by Catherine Zuber and that tumbling mane of red curls that, somewhere, her Irish ancestors’ eyes are smiling, I’ll bet.

Joyce made her Met debut a few seasons ago, but this was my first opportunity to see her there. It’s a hell of a thing: you go to that famous house, this woman makes the chandeliers dance, and the crowds fall all over themselves to cheer her. And then you go backstage, and she’s still Joyce. Traipsing along after her is one of my life’s great pleasures, and I can hardly wait to see what she’ll do next.

New York City Opera’s American Voices

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:16:00 +0000

¡Por favor! ¡Toreador!
Joyce Castle and a few friends celebrate NYCO

New York City Opera is so much the “people’s opera” that it’s a bit strange to attend a really glitzy fund-raising event there. This thought occurred especially during the auction that concluded last night’s season-opening gala, “American Voices”: do City Opera fans really have enough cash to plunk down for a hunting vacation in Germany (hosted by members of the Bismarck family, no less)? Well, apparently some do, because the prize did not go begging, though most of us seemed to be sitting on our hands, for fear of being mistaken for bidders.

I don’t know how much money was raised, but the evening was a great morale-booster for the company, which has suffered from financial crises, homelessness, a blacked-out 2008–09 season, and a leadership vacuum in recent years. “American Voices” are indeed a traditional specialty at this populist institution, and — with ticket prices starting at $12 — we were treated to a parade of American singers, in American song.

Ramey (center): A tongue of flame

I was particularly moved by Samuel Ramey’s account of the revival scene, from Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, an opera with a distinguished history here. (The great Norman Treigle, whose shoes Ramey was hired to fill in the 1970s, created the role of Olin Blitch for City Opera, at the work’s New York premiere.) Though his career is nearer now to its twilight than to its dawn, Ramey grew in confidence as the scene progressed. You could actually feel his growing awareness, as if he were waking to his own power. His voice, wobbling at the outset, swiftly found its secure placement, and his acting seethed with intensity. He was having a good night, and he ran with it — exhilarating for him as an artist and for us, his audience. In the pit to egg him on was Julius Rudel, 88 years old, the company’s former director and in many ways responsible for its enduring artistic vision.

City Opera’s reigning prima donna, soprano Lauren Flanigan, offered an aria from Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, a great success for her here a couple of years ago. Alas, I didn’t get to see any of those performances, and the selection this evening (“Do not utter a word, Anatol”), divorced from its context, proved less than compelling. To a degree, this wasn’t a problem: Flanigan gave one of her trademark dramatic readings, and we ate it up, because this is her house and we’d love her if she sang nothing but “Mairzy Doats.” Hell, we even put up with Deborah Drattell’s work, just to hear this woman sing. But I can’t help wishing she’d chosen a stand-alone piece, something with a more festive mood, or a bigger dramatic gesture, or a more melodic sweep — or all of the above — which is to say, something more appropriate to the occasion.

Flanigan: We loved this dress, too.

Another beloved City Opera soprano, Amy Burton, did her best to inject interest into a blurry, repetitive, pretentious aria (in French) aria by pop star Rufus Wainwright, from his new opera, Prima Donna. Wainwright himself performed “That’s Entertainment!” — a fun contribution, but too fast and with insufficient point. Surely a man who writes lyrics ought to appreciate the importance of putting across lines like “Where a ghost and a prince meet / And ev’ryone winds up mincemeat,” but Wainwright failed us, and I was hard-pressed to explain to friends why I admire him.

A better tribute to City Opera’s crossover traditions came from the orchestra, under music director George Manahan, with a spirited arrangement of “New York, New York,” from Bernstein’s On the Town; and from Broadway’s Marc Kudisch, who acted up a storm in Carousel’s “Soliloquy.”

The Gang’s All Here: Manahan & NYCO Orchestra

Manahan and the orchestra were in wonderful form all night, as it happens. Over the years, the level of playing has risen so far, it’s almost a miracle, and so long as the musicians have received adequate rehearsal (as was abundantly the case this evening), you’re assured of a first-rate performance. The orchestra opened the concert with Stravinsky’s “Fanfare for a New Theatre,” followed closely by a companion piece, the world premiere of Peter Lieberson’s “Fanfare for New York City Opera.”

Several numbers at this performance were given over to young singers: the delectable Anna Christy sang “Blue-green beautiful chlorine” from William Bolcom’s A Wedding; sumptuous (and barefoot) Measha Brueggergosman gave us Gershwin’s “My Man’s Gone Now”; and Talise Trevigne and Kelley O’Connor scorched the gold leaf off the walls with a duet from Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainamadar.

Not until the end of the evening, however, did the occasion become a real gala. First, mezzo-soprano Joyce Castle cavorted gleefully through “I Am Easily Assimilated,” from Bernstein’s Candide, a hallmark of her repertoire with this company and elsewhere. This was authentic star power, quickening every pulse in the room. Joyce clattered away on her castañets and hopped and shimmied through her tango, with most of the City Opera chorus to partner her. (You really need to see a close-up of her facial expression, so I’ve provided this inset. Has assimilation ever looked like more fun?)

Koch Classic: Our benefactor starts the show.
George Steel looks on, at left.

A tough act to follow, and it fell to that other Kansan mezzo named Joyce — DiDonato — to alter the mood and to send us out with another kind of uplift already. City Opera’s new general manager and artistic director, George Steel, selected her material: Bernstein again, “Take care of this house” from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The song speaks of the White House, but in this context, it spoke of the “new” home of New York City Opera: the David H. Koch Theater, inaugurated with this very performance, that is both the same old New York State Theater we’ve always loved, and a completely new space, with an uncertain but possibly brilliant future before it. With caressing tenderness and unflinching conviction, Joyce offered the house a blessing, and we, her congregation, joined in.

According to Kara Lack, I am clearly visible in this photograph.
Can you spot me?

I’ve said it before: this company informed so many of my ideas about what opera could be, it presented so many memorable performances by so many great artists, it means so much to me. I don’t want to see New York City Opera fail, or even falter in its mission. (And it has one.) For these few hours, I felt good about the company, and I remain hopeful. That in itself is cause for celebration.

Much easier to spot me in this photo with Joyce DiDonato.
Really, the gala should have been called “American Joyces.”
Photo by Darren Keith Woods. Used with Permission

A Visit to the Set of TV’s ‘Heroes’

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:54:00 +0000

Be it known: I don’t deserve some of the opportunities that come my way. I am so far behind in my viewing of the television series Heroes, it’s embarrassing, particularly because my friend Nate Goodman is director of photography and — as of tonight’s episode — a director, period, of the show. There are mitigating circumstances to defend my tardiness, but the bottom line is that there are hundreds of people who really ought to visit the set during a shoot. Nevertheless, I’m the one who got to do it.

What follows are a few notes on my experience. But first, a spoiler alert: I was able to make out almost nothing of the plot, and not even the title, of the episode that was being shot. However, fans of the show are a very knowledgeable, serious bunch, who have already published a web biography of Nate; and since they surely can extrapolate all kinds of juicy details from my account, they may not wish to read further. I promise not to take that personally.

Hayden Panettiere: Boy, does the camera love her!

At the studio where Heroes is shot, it is a truth universally assumed that any visitor knows already where he is going. I was told to look for Nate in a building, where I wandered lonely as a cloud, until I forced a woman to tell me that the set was in another building entirely, and that Nate was most likely there, not here. “Look for a carnival,” she said, but I saw only an old-time diner and a few storefronts, in the middle of what Gansevoort Street looked like, back before Manhattan’s Meat-packing District got cleaned up.

So I made my way to an alley in Tokyo, where crewmembers were eating a late lunch. Plenty of signs here, but of course I don’t read Japanese.

Believe it or not, I found parking near here.

At last a young woman pretty much shoved me down another alley, just beyond Gansevoort Street, where I found what must be the narrowest carnival ground on record. I had seen last week’s episode, which featured scenes at the carnival, and so I marveled at the way Nate, the camera crew and director, and all the set and lighting crew had made this tiny space seem so large. Well, it turns out that there’s a full set for the carnival, at a remote location. The alleyway carnival is used primarily for more intimate scenes, like the lunch (or was it dinner?) among carnival employees (and visitors?), which Nate and episode director Ron Underwood were shooting as I arrived.

“Shooting” actually entails a series of lengthy discussions between Nate and Ron Underwood (a go-to guy for this sort of television production, his other credits include the film City Slickers), with input from camera operators and other members of the crew. “What if we put the camera here?” “What if we shot over her shoulder?” “What if we moved this here?” “Can we get between these two tables?”

Really, this debate/negotiation/brainstorming moves efficiently and with relative swiftness: these guys know what they’re doing, and they do it every day. But for those of us who aren’t involved in the conversation, the novelty wears off fast. Between one take and the next, I nodded off.

Oliveri: “Thaïs! Du Barry! Garbo! All rolled into one.”

Watching a monitor during the shooting, I was struck by the camera’s glamourizing effect. Hayden Panettiere, who plays Claire, is a perfectly nice-looking young woman, and yet I walked right past her and focused instead on Dawn Oliveri, the knockout who plays Lydia the Tattooed Lady.* When Panettiere is photographed, however, she becomes arrestingly beautiful, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her image on the monitor.

I worked in television for a very (excessively?) long time, yet one seldom gets to witness such transformations in television news. This may have something to do with the business: ostensibly, television newspeople present reality, not artistry. And so Connie Chung really is exquisitely beautiful on-camera and off. Yet I’ve seen often enough the interview subjects, and even reporters, who aren’t telegenic at all, whose features go flat and whose expressions are warped or wiped out on camera, no matter how well-informed or flatteringly lit they may be. Some people are just lucky.

David H. Lawrence XVII

Claire and Lydia talked about something, but I couldn’t quite hear the dialogue (and it’s to be doubted I’d have understood it anyway). Eric Doyle, as played by David H. Lawrence XVII, took in every word the women said, and punctuated the scene with a bite of cake that chilled the blood of pretty much everyone who saw him. Doyle has the “puppet master” ability, and he’s a fan favorite.

Once these two scenes were finished, the actors were released, and we turned our attentions to some visual effects being supervised by Eric Grenaudier. These scenes kept most of the crew busy, while Underwood and two actors rehearsed another scene. None of this was terribly interesting to me, and so I went off to explore the rest of the studio: random bits and pieces of places I couldn’t identify, as well as a big Japanese office, a cut-away carnival trailer, and the uncanny Burnt Toast Café. All the furnishings had been pushed about, as if this were moving day, yet every bottle of ketchup was full and every slice of pie as fresh as this morning’s baking.

Knepper as Samuel Sullivan

At last the actors were ready to walk through the next scene for the benefit of the crew, who watched and decided on camera angles and such. Since the scene took place in the New York apartment of Emma Coolidge (played by Deanne Bray), I felt at first as if I were arriving at a party — about 30 of us crammed into the space. Almost immediately, I felt as if I were eavesdropping on a private conversation, between Emma and Samuel Sullivan (played by Robert Knepper). As the actors went through the scene, a crewmember followed after with bits of masking tape, so that they’d be able to hit the same marks each time they ran through the scene. Bray is deaf, and so an interpreter accompanied the rehearsal; she signed Samuel’s lines (and Underwood’s direction) and spoke Emma’s dialogue. Presumably, her work will be replaced with subtitles in the filmed and edited scene as it appears on television.

Deanna Bray as Emma

Here, as on the diner set, I was impressed with the attention to detail in the set decoration. Emma Coolidge’s diplomas are framed on the wall of her apartment, for Pete’s sake, though I can hardly believe the camera will ever linger over them.

I couldn’t linger, as it happened, so I never got to see how Nate shot the scene in Emma’s apartment.

While I stayed on the set, the tension between unreality (shifting walls) and reality (minute details) grew to seem less and less like Alice’s Wonderland, and more like a workplace. One must get used to the oddities, until they become almost normal, and then one simply goes about one’s job. Indeed, the cast and crew struck me as impeccably professional. That may disappoint some readers, who hoped for scandal. Sorry, folks — I saw only an easy camaraderie among everyone on the Heroes set, matched by an unswerving determination to make each scene as strong as possible.

So that’s what Nate does when he goes to work in the morning — or the afternoon — or the pre-dawn darkness. Show business isn’t very glamorous at all, and yet the set is a nice place to visit. Would I want to live there?

Depends on my ability.

At the Burnt Toast: Panettiere with Thomas Dekker (Zach)

*NOTE: That name — “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” — isn’t an accident. Heroes finds points of reference in every kind of culture.

Marathon Man

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 08:43:00 +0000

In a 26-Mile Slog, a Shortcut Can Be Tempting
Last year, 71 runners in the New York City Marathon were disqualified for various violations of race rules — at least 46 of them for reducing the marathon to something less than 26.2 miles. An untold number of runners escape detection, marathon officials said. Surely some cheats will prosper among the 42,000 entered in Sunday’s race.

From the Times

Whew! Hang on — let me just — catch my breath! Whew! I mean — shoot, man! I just ran the New York City Marathon! Woo-hoo!

Hey, can I get one of those shiny blankets? The kind that only New York City Marathon runners are entitled to receive?

What do you mean, why aren’t I sweating?

And what do you mean, “How can you run the New York City Marathon when you’re 3,000 miles away?”

I don’t like your tone. I happen to be a very fast runner, I’ll have you know. I can run faster than my own sweat.

Yeah, baby!

Over here! Can I get some water? ’Cause I just ran the New York City Marathon! Yeah! That’s what I’m talkin’ about!

What do you mean, where’s my number? Listen, just get away from me, all right?

I pity you, man. I really do. You’ll never know what it’s like to test your self — to push your endurance to the limit — to race not the clock but your own soul — for an entire 26 blocks in the heart of the greatest city on earth!

I told you. Get away from me.

Hey, Mister! I need to get me one of those pasta vouchers. Over here! Got to load on some carbs now, please! ’Cause I just ran the Marathon!

And maybe a shiny blanket?

Dang, I think my knee is about to give out.

Miles Kreuger & the Institute of the American Musical

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:15:00 +0000

All Singing! All Dancing!
Ethel Merman and a few friends.
Miles Kreuger knows what show this is from.

Though I have yet to make a complete inspection, I have been assured that the collections of the Institute of the American Musical fill 17 rooms. Even a quick glance at Miles Kreuger’s headquarters suggests that another five rooms may be in order: the place is carpeted and furnished with memorabilia. Books are shelved in double decks, file cabinets creak under the weight of scripts, correspondence, and other archival documents, photographs practically paper the walls, and a massive cabinet contains nothing but original-cast albums — every original-cast album, ever. Many feature liner notes by Kreuger himself.

In conversation, Kreuger has but little need for his archives: he happily cites from memory names, dates, addresses, and every kind of statistic, even phone numbers long since disconnected. He remembers with extraordinarily vivid clarity the precise details of the first show he ever saw on Broadway — when he was four years old.

Kreuger, right, with the sublime Nanette Fabray

As young Miles prated on, asking his grandmother about the purpose of the stage curtain and why the musicians were punished by being thrown into the pit, a woman remarked, “Imagine! Bringing a child of that age to the theater! He’ll do nothing but talk and talk!”

“Look who’s talking,” replied little Miles.

The play in question, he informs me, was Knights of Song, about Gilbert & Sullivan, whose work Miles was already learning by heart. Nigel Bruce starred as W.S. Gilbert, and the play ran (very briefly) at the Fifty-first Street Theatre, one of the most ornate venues in New York.

Years later, on that same stage — by then renamed the Mark Hellinger Theatre — Miles missed out on what should have been his big break as a performer. While he was working as an assistant on a new musical adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, director Moss Hart and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner asked him to audition in the producer's office. They liked what they heard, and the part was his. But once arrived at the Hellinger, Miles was overwhelmed by the vastness of the auditorium, so much bigger than his college theater, and he chickened out.

That’s how he didn’t create the role of Freddy Eynsford-Hill in My Fair Lady. Julie Andrews still teases him about the incident, he says. (“If you hadn’t been so shy, we could have worked together for two years!”)

The Hellinger

So much for the street where we lived. The Hellinger didn’t bring me much luck, either: that’s where Rags played its four performances, in 1986. Today, the theater is owned and occupied by the Times Square Church.

Many of the great theaters of Broadway are gone, and their only remnants are in Miles Kreuger’s home: just inside the front door are two seats from the old Empire Theatre. (Not the multiplex cinema on 42nd Street, but the legit theater on Broadway and 40th.) “These seats saw Maude Adams in Peter Pan,” Kreuger observes. He can recite whole catalogues of lost treasures, and the changing cityscape, he says, is why he moved away: “By 1978, there wasn’t a trace of New York City left,” he says. “Times Square was gone. Penn Station was gone.” He decided to move to Los Angeles.

Kreuger is such a New York type (who can drive, but doesn’t), and his subject so Broadway-centric, that Los Angeles seems an unlikely destination for him. However, he’s quick to remind a visitor that Hollywood made important contributions to the American musical, too. Lest we forget, Judy Garland never appeared in a Broadway play.

I first met Kreuger when I worked at the Kurt Weill Foundation — he remembers Railroads on Parade, Weill’s contribution to the 1939 World’s Fair — and he was a guiding force behind John McGlinn’s recording of Show Boat, on which Teresa Stratas sings “Bill” (to me, need I point out). We were long overdue to get reacquainted, and my research into the career of Madeline Kahn provided the perfect opportunity. (Indeed, Miles welcomes any qualified researcher to the Institute, and provides advice and other assistance in addition to access to the collections.)

When our conversation touched on Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, an homage to Cole Porter in which Madeline co-starred, I learned that Kreuger knew Porter and had introduced Bogdanovich to some of his songs. Kreuger wrote the liner notes for the soundtrack album, too. But the movie was a failure, Madeline and Bogdanovich never worked together again, and the recording is a collector’s item of which she herself owned no copy, and on which I’ve never set eyes.

Maude Adams did it differently:
Jerome Robbins and Mary Martin rehearse Peter Pan

Mostly, we talked about New York, and the remarkable personalities Kreuger knew there. To cite but one example: freshly graduated from Bard College at age 20, he worked with Helen Hayes, Lena Horne, Ezio Pinza, and Ruth Draper. (Not a bad start.) And one more example: Goddard Lieberson’s secretary sounded so much like an Elaine May character that at first Kreuger thought Mike Nichols (who’d told him to call the legendary record producer) was playing a trick on him.

Kreuger is nostalgic for New York, certainly, yet what strikes me is how much of it he brought West with him. Not only the artifacts that surround him but the spirit he exudes. He serves as a useful role model as I try to decide where I should live — as I mourn my own “lost New York” (which I never saw until after Kreuger had left) — and as I frolic in the eerily seductive California sunshine.

And he reminds me of a scene in Diva. Jules the mailman is talking about music, and Cynthia Hawkins interrupts him. “If you didn’t exist, you would have to be invented,” she says. So it is with Miles Kreuger. Such fans are the keepers of the flame that warms the rest of us.

Kreuger’s latest project is a collection of Johnny Mercer’s lyrics.

The Institute of the American Musical has been described as “a national treasure” by Dr. James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, and its vast collections are open to researchers and students by appointment. As a 501 (c)(3) not-private, not-for-profit corporation, the Institute gladly accepts donations — which are tax-deductible. For more information or to make a contribution, please write to

The Institute of the American Musical
121 North Detroit Street
Los Angeles, CA 90036-2915

Lou Jacobi

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 07:42:00 +0000

Look up the beach. Look down the beach.
Do you see one Chinese?

I never met the Canadian actor Lou Jacobi, though I once spotted him at a bus stop in Manhattan. At six-two or so, he was much taller than I’d expected, and perhaps shy: for when he saw me looking at him, he tried to recede into the shelter, to make himself invisible. But there was little chance I’d fail to notice the man who made me want to be Jewish, and whose performances set in motion the long and ongoing process of my judeophilic cultivation.

Jacobi’s resonant voice made some consonants linger whole minutes after he’d finished pronouncing them. This made his delivery memorable, and it elevated even flat or silly dialogue to the status of genius. He wore fatigue and disappointment like body parts that could not be shrugged off. Though he could moderate his accent, it remained unmistakably Northeastern and Jewish, and it elicited nostalgic affection from more assimilated audiences. They might not get along with their real-life uncle Lou, but this stage-and-screen one they could embrace.

He’s probably best known for his delicate, honest, and howlingly funny performance as the transvestite in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex — the rare role that doesn’t rely on his speaking voice to make its impact. On Broadway, Jacobi also appeared in The Diary of Anne Frank opposite my beloved Jack Gilford, and he replaced Jack in the series of comedy albums that introduced me to his work. When You’re in Love, the Whole World Is Jewish taught me the meaning of the word shtick. Among other things.

As a baby, my first word was “Oy” (though among my Texan relatives, only my father recognized it as a word). Over time, many other artists and many more friends would build on that foundation, sharing with me their culture, and at last adopting me. But Jacobi was the first.

Julie & Julia & Zombies

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:56:00 +0000

Bone appétit: Eisenberg, Stone, Breslin, and Harrelson
versus the Zombies

It’s a measure of how badly Nora Ephron failed, in her big-screen adaptation the lives of nitwit blogger Julie Powell and foodie icon Julia Child, that I preferred Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland to her Julie & Julia. Ordinarily, you can’t get me to go near a zombie picture, much less to enjoy one, yet in this case, I’d rather go near a zombie — a real one — than spend another minute in the company of Ephron’s characters.

Watch Me Acting! Over Here! Look! It’s Me — Meryl Streep!
I Know It’s Hard to Believe, but It’s True! Really!
See My Impressive Choices?
Judy Graubart’s Julia Grownup did it better.

Perhaps Julie & Julia struck too close to home: Powell turns to her blog for many of the reasons that compelled me to begin “publishing” my “work” in this space. However, I felt no special sympathy for her, and the movie’s Julie (Amy Adams) never quite confronts what any viewer must: though her husband (Chris Messina) insists that Julie’s a writer, and presumably the movie has been an account of her personal growth and self-realization (explicitly compared with Julia Child’s), she is by far the least interesting character in the movie, and whatever charms her writing may possess are kept far offscreen.

By trying to link two very different stories, everything about the movie is thrown off-balance. For example, the scenes that deal directly with Child feature fun cameos by New York theater actors (Linda Emond! Deborah Rush! Stephen Bogardus! Richard Bekins! Marceline Hugot!), as well as superlative work from Stanley Tucci and Jane Lynch as Child’s husband and sister; the portions of the movie that deal with Powell feature ... a lot of whining from poor old Amy Adams.

Message to Julie Powell: Nut up or shut up

We never get much sense of what’s at stake — we seldom get much sense of what Powell is cooking, what ingredient or technique is involved, or why she finds it difficult. It’s God’s truth that 76 percent of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking aren’t difficult at all. The rest require a little more time or technique than most American cooks possess, but they’re not impossible. (I’ve had no training whatever, yet I manage just fine.)

The real-life Child wasn’t far wrong when she observed that Powell “wasn’t serious.” Ephron gives us even less sense of Child in the kitchen, though we do get a couple of lovely scenes in which Meryl Streep (as Julia) savors a dish that someone else has prepared.

In short, Ephron has created a movie about aesthetic and sensual pleasures that is almost completely lacking in them — at least, in a form that a viewer can share. Only in depicting the conjugal bliss of Julia and Paul Child does Ephron observe the all-important Rule #32: “Enjoy the little things.”

Does Jane Lynch’s performance here mean that Meryl Streep will make a guest appearance on Glee this season?
Please? Pretty please?

That rule is central to Zombieland, a movie that does very little but enjoy the little things: character quirks, relationship-revealing dialogue riffs, offbeat monomania, and one of the funniest “mystery guest” cameo performances I’ve ever seen. Gore is secondary here, and so, for that matter, are zombies: it’s all about what gives you pleasure when everything else has let you down.

Even the movie’s rampant product-placement turns out to be telling (and who thought we’d still care about brand names, in the post-zombie apocalypse?), as Woody Harrelson’s obsession with Twinkies and his anguished cries of “I want my Caddy back” accrue to create a character portrait — something like those Arcimboldo paintings where all the fruits and vegetables combine to depict a human face.

In short, though I risk comparison to Billy Sol Hurok and The Farm Film Report, I admit that I’d have enjoyed Julie & Julia more if it had been more like Zombieland.

Blowed up good!

The Hollywood Walk of Fame

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:19:00 +0000

A brunch date yesterday on Hollywood Boulevard afforded me the opportunity to examine — for the first time in many, many years — the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It’s quite a brilliant idea: so many mythical cities pave the streets with gold, but Hollywood is paved with stars! Yet almost nothing about the Walk of Fame makes logical sense.

We do exalt certain artists, we elevate them to the status of stars — something over our heads, both in the sense that we look up to them as superior to us, and in the sense that we can’t quite understand them. And yet on the Walk of Fame, we take those stars and we abase them, we place them on the ground, where we step on them: and just so, there are a good number of “stars” whose names we don’t know.

Naturally, I’ve forgotten the names of those I didn’t recognize, but I can give you an obscure example: Michael Ansara. He was married to Barbara Eden for a while, and he appeared in an episode of the original Star Trek. These things I know off the top of my head, without consulting the Internet Movie Database. Does the average twentysomething today know who he is? What will we remember about him, 20 years from now?

‘Day of the Dove’: Ansara as Kang

It’s fascinating to stroll along the Walk, and to watch others doing the same. We hunt and gather, searching for, then pouncing on names we recognize. We collect: in just two blocks, I found Nichelle Nichols, Leonard Nimoy, George Takei, and Gene Roddenberry, a matching set of Star Trek luminaries!

Collecting stars is impulsive behavior, it’s true, yet not completely divorced from reason. Not so the reverence we feel toward the pavement. I felt it myself — that graveside awe, much as if the celebrity in question were buried under that star. Yet the pavement in this spot has only scant connection to the person: it’s possible that Ginger Rogers came for the unveiling of her star, but apart from that, why should this bit of pavement be any more significant to her, or to her fans, than any other? I daresay there are plenty of sidewalks she frequented more than this one, and she left her handprints in the sidewalk in front of Grauman’s Chinese. On the Walk of Fame, we have only her name, not even her signature.

When you’re on the Walk of Fame, you don’t think this way. You get caught up in — what, exactly? Is it excitement? Yes. (But why?) Is it glamour? Sort of. (But we’re stepping on it.) Is it nostalgia, the magnetic attraction of our personal memories, summoned by the glimpse of a name?

I watched others taking pictures of Jimi Hendrix’s star, which lies just outside the restaurant where I ate. It’s a most unlikely shrine, and I’m betting Hendrix never set foot anywhere near it. You could take a piece of chalk and write his name on the sidewalk in front of your own home, and it would be equally relevant. Why do we feel that this sidewalk, in this place, is more worthy of our tributes?

And yet we come, and linger and gape, and remember. We pay homage to people we didn’t know, on a spot they never (or seldom) visited; we thank them for communicating directly with us and millions of others just like us. And then, at last, we walk on.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Kaufman

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:05:00 +0000

Mr. & Mrs. Kaufman and the Collection

A fellow named Donald Kaufman has passed away in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. This is in itself a sad occasion, I’m sure, and yet how joyous is the headline of his obituary in The New York Times: “Donald Kaufman, Collector of Toy Cars, Dies at 79.”

Collector of Toy Cars! What a lovely way to be remembered! It got me thinking about the headlines that all our obituaries might get, if we had our priorities straight.

One of Kaufman’s Toy Cars

Exceptionally Good Listener, Murray Greshner, Dies at 79

Marie Slaughter Is Dead: “Made the Best Brownies EVER”

Teresa Rinteria, 87, a Lively Dancer

Louise Tate, 69, Never Missed an Opportunity to Vote

Hector Lozon, 91, Possessed “Rare Gift” for Choosing Inexpensive Table Wines, Say Friends

Bess Lindstrom Smelled Like Cookies

For my part, I’m torn. Do I want to be remembered for my compulsive collection of plastic figurines of cartoon characters, for my opera recordings, or for my Playbill collection that covers every theater and opera performance I've seen since high school? For a while there, I really wanted to be remembered for my abdominal muscles, but these days it’s looking less likely that they’ll last long enough to figure prominently in my obituary. Maybe choosing the right headline is best left to those who survive me.

Gilding the Roses ... or Not

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:28:00 +0000

Tedium: Act I of Tosca

New York’s Metropolitan Opera offered me a study in contrasts this week, as I bounced from Nathaniel Merrill’s 40-year-old production of Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier to Luc Bondy’s spanking-new take on Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca. Physically but also spiritually, the former is a bourgeois fantasy of Viennese nobility in the 18th century, all satin and scrollwork, while the latter is stripped-down, as stark as the blade that strikes at the villain’s poisonous heart.

Since the new Tosca replaces the Zeffirelli production — even more elaborate than Merrill’s Rosenkavalier — it was bound to find detractors. You can’t tell from looking at Richard Peduzzi’s new sets that this is Rome, for example, and only Milena Canonero’s costume designs (and the program notes) give any hint that the year is 1800. I have no objection, in principle: the power of Puccini’s music is hardly subtle but entirely direct, needing little help to make its points, and Zeffirelli’s sets and costumes always struck me as too damned much. The trouble is that, apart from a few bits of blocking seemingly devised with no other intention than to provoke the Met audience, Bondy had nothing particular to say. This was the dullest Tosca I’d ever seen — and hitherto, I’d always considered the words “dull” and “Tosca” entirely incompatible.

Venal? Scarpia (Gagnidze) menaces Tosca (Mattila)

It’s possible that some of the detail of Bondy’s direction was lost on me, since I was seated in the Family Circle (but is high-definition television, close-up and in stereo, the only way one can appreciate an opera anymore?), and since I heard Russian soprano Maria Gavrilova in the title role, covering Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, who was indisposed, and for whom this production was intended. Unlike Mattila, Gavrilova didn’t have the benefit of extensive, one-on-one rehearsal with Bondy — and moreover, it’s unlikely she could rival the close collaborative relationship between Mattila and Bondy. Obviously Bondy’s work speaks to Mattila in a way that it may not — to the same degree — speak to other singers. But eventually, other singers will be performing in this production: are we to assume that they'll be equally lost, forced to rely on generalized gesture and thrashing around?

Still — I’m inclined to make allowances for some of the lapses in Bondy’s Tosca. But how to account for the end of Act I, when Baron Scarpia starts humping a statue of the Madonna? What about his perversity had we not already learned from the music? After all, he’s roaring on about his lust for Floria Tosca in the middle of a church service. Did we really need the underlining and the humping? And why did Bondy think it made more sense for Scarpia to frolic with prostitutes at the beginning of Act II, rather than awaiting Tosca in solitude, as the libretto prescribes? Isn’t it more interesting if he’s alone, entirely focused on his conquest, coiled and ready to pounce? Apparently, Bondy thinks not.

Extreme interrogation aftermath: Mattila and Alvarez

And never mind that the stage business for Tosca, following Scarpia’s murder, isn’t the Catholic ritual called for in the libretto: it simply makes no sense at all. Why does Tosca start to jump out of a window? (That isn’t what the score tells us what she’s doing — after all, we have very clear musical directions as to what impels Tosca to jump, in Act III, and the music at the close of Act II sounds nothing like it.) Why does she then lie back on a sofa and fan herself? Why would anybody do that? Tosca isn’t a work of great psychological complexity, yet I couldn’t make sense of Bondy’s blocking here.

The musical performance profited from Paul Plishka’s well-practiced traversal of the Sacristan and from Marcelo Alvarez’s intelligent, idiomatic, yet emotionally restrained interpretation of the revolutionary painter Mario Cavaradossi. As Scarpia, baritone George Gagnidze offered plenty of stentorian force but very little aristocratic elegance. In the pit, Joseph Colaneri elicited some of the most beautiful string playing I’ve heard in this opera, but elsewhere he missed opportunities. The music following Cavaradossi’s execution, for example, neither blazed with heroic fervor nor scalded with irony — either of which would be a legitimate artistic statement. Colaneri is filling in for James Levine, who presumably got the bulk of rehearsal time with the orchestra; I tend to think that this is a work in progress.

Dude looks like a lady:
Fleming & Graham as the Marschallin and Octavian

Though Levine’s absence was felt in Rosenkavalier, too, this was in other ways a reunion, as Susan Graham and Renée Fleming returned to familiar roles and a winning partnership, under the baton of conductor Edo de Waart, with whom both have often worked. The result was a kind of comfort zone, in which extra attention could be paid to detail, because all the bigger pieces of the puzzle had been worked out long ago. Traditional, yes, but wholly satisfying, and paradoxical though it may seem, this is the simpler, more direct staging.

I’m nuts about this score, which after all permits me to hear the scent of rose perfume. Strauss’ greatest achievement here, however, is that he makes time stand still — twice — when Octavian presents Sophie with the silver rose, and again at the end of the opera, when the Marschallin gently releases Octavian into Sophie’s arms. Dramatically, these are tiny moments, a matter of seconds, but Strauss spins them out musically, making blissful eternities of sound.

Pretty Woman: Fleming

Though I’d heard Susan Graham and Renée Fleming sing this music on recordings, I’d never attended a performance. Three dimensions make all the difference! Fleming’s Marschallin was the most fully rounded dramatic portrayal I’ve ever seen her give, and her voice — actually too pretty in some roles — seems perfectly suited to a woman who despite her outward grace and gentility must navigate insurmountable heartbreak.

Octavian gives Susan a chance to explore knockabout physical comedy, youthful passions, and innate nobility. She made me laugh out loud, and she made me cry — with happiness. I have been trying so hard in this space to explain the effect her voice has on me; for now, let it suffice to say that she did it again. A lot. I can’t believe that I nearly went without seeing her in this signature role.

Susan in the Presentation Scene,
from San Francisco Opera a few years ago

Luckily for you, you can see it, too, even if you’re far from New York. Der Rosenkavalier has been selected as one of the Met’s upcoming high-definition simulcasts, in movie theaters, on 9 January, with encores on 27 January (in the U.S.) and 6 March (in Canada).

Tempus Dilectionis, Tempus Belli

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:41:00 +0000

Mackie (left) and Renner in The Hurt Locker

Apart from excellent critical reception, English-language dialogues, and the fact that both were directed by women, The Hurt Locker and Bright Star could hardly be more different — so I herewith renounce any attempt to link them. I saw both pictures this weekend.

Few movies have ever made me so uncomfortable as Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker: while I admired the film and was caught up in it, I couldn’t wait for it to end. The plus-que-vérité style — with busy, hand-held camerawork and transparent, hyper-realistic performances — makes viewing even more excruciating, because it becomes harder to say to yourself, “Oh, it’s only a movie.” (Perhaps the wiliest device Bigelow uses to unsettle a viewer is to upend expectations: without giving anything away, let me say merely that star actors are not safer or more likely to survive than the unknowns who take other roles.*) A portrait of an Army bomb squad in Iraq, shot in Jordan, The Hurt Locker manages to avoid the pious preachiness of most other recent films about the war, yet a viewer does wind up asking the Big Questions of Iraq: how the hell did we get here, and what do we do about it now? Just as the central characters must wonder, each time they set out to defuse a bomb.

Bigelow’s moviemaking is wonderfully assured, and she elicits completely convincing performances from her trio of leading men: Brian Geraghty as Eldridge, more vulnerable than he appears; Jeremy Renner as the hotshot, thrill-addicted William James**; and most impressive, Anthony Mackie as the sane, sensible Sanborn. Sanborn has only a few more days remaining in this tour of duty — but if you expect a Lethal Weapon dynamic of crazy white guy partnered with reasonable (and doomed) black guy, Bigelow has a few more surprises for you. I’ll be on the lookout for all three actors in future.

Jane Campion’s Bright Star is an even more conventional film, and afterward I struggled to identify what theme or purpose the picture might serve, beyond simple biography. I confess that I came up short, and doubtless great numbers of Masterpiece Theatre-loving, dreamy-eyed audiences will enjoy the movie tremendously just because it’s a romance about a tony poet whose work they can read at home to their own lovers (or to their cats, depending). Which is fine by me.

But Campion is a smart filmmaker, and her work typically offers a pronounced feminist perspective. The Piano and The Portrait of a Lady, for example, were complex moral dramas with exceptionally strong female protagonists. I have a hard time believing that she meant for any part of Bright Star to be taken at face value, no matter how lovely the face. (It’s a strikingly beautiful film.)

Campion does present us with a bit of role-reversal here, toying with our expectations of a big-screen love story, though she doesn’t carry it very far. Yes, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) is smart, talented, and outspoken, and it’s she who pursues the frail, timid man. Indeed, Cornish’s Brawne is brawny, so much more hale and hearty than Ben Whishaw (who plays the tubercular John Keats), that she looks as if she could knock him down with the bat of an eyelash. Her fashion sense is another sign of her power: in any given scene, Cornish’s costumes are by far the most vivid colors onscreen, while Whishaw wears only one tatty suit, as subdued in color as his surroundings. Thus the one who’s raring to burst out isn’t the superstar Keats, it’s Brawne — yet somehow these elements don’t add up to much. They’re only dressing.

Hot, hot, hot: Whishaw and Cornish

But they’re not un-dressing. In an era when even Pride and Prejudice becomes a vehicle for bodice-ripping, Bright Star differs most from other period romances in its utter chastity***. As the characters remind each other, Keats has no money and cannot honorably propose himself to Brawne. Yet their passion cannot be denied, and it expresses itself not physically (they kiss perhaps five times) but poetically. In the movie’s most telling scene, Keats and Brawne recite poetry to each other, alternating verses, ratcheting up the rhythms, in an ecstasy of shared language — and it’s like really good sex.

The wild card in these proceedings is Paul Schneider’s performance as Charles Armitage Brown, a fellow writer who lodges Keats and who, in his desire to protect his friend, effectively becomes Fanny’s rival. The trouble is that Schneider’s characterization and much of his dialogue are so loud, bold, and over-the-top, that he seems to have arrived from some other movie. The contrast he provides is more extreme than Campion can have intended, and it’s a relief whenever he goes away. Far more effective are Kerry Fox, as the cliché-busting Mrs. Brawne, who probably deserves some kind of posthumous medal for not opposing her daughter’s unsuitable attachment; and Thomas Sangster and Edie Martin as Fanny’s kid brother and baby sister.

Perhaps Hurt Locker and Bright Star do have this in common: Bigelow and Campion take two conventional genres and tweak them: building suspense and surprise; making us think, without ever telling us what to think.

Incredibly safe sex:
Edward and Bella could learn from these two.

NOTES:
*Hurt Locker is like a Star Trek picture in which the red shirts are in less danger than Kirk and Spock are.

**I failed to detect any correlation to the American philosopher and brother of Henry James. But I know Henry’s work better than William’s, so if any of you see a resemblance, please speak up!

***Also in its intelligence. How I wished Becoming Jane had been as thoughtful as Bright Star! Physically, the movies are similar — but I’m still insulted on Jane Austen’s behalf, you know, and smarting from the wounds inflicted on her.

Also-Rans

noreply@blogger.com (William V. Madison) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:38:00 +0000

The Nobel committee today awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to U.S. President Barack Obama, stunning even his biggest supporters.

As a service to my readers, I’m releasing the names of several other candidates for the Peace Prize this year. Though they may not have won (yet!), they deserve our attention and respect.

Pat Feuillete, Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX
This NASA Engineer persuaded his colleagues to blow up only part of the surface of the moon on 9 October 2009.

Joe Jonas, Hollywood, CA
Although he hasn’t done as much to promote world peace or to end human suffering as some rock stars, such as U2’s Bono, Joe is younger and cuter.

Sasha and Malia Obama, Washington, DC
Did not raise their voices, strike each other, or lose their tempers on 17 June 2009, even though those were so Sasha’s favorite sandals.

The Cast of TV’s Glee, Lima, OH
After only a few episodes, this show can be sort of fun. What do you say we give ’em some kind of a prize?

Susan Boyle, Blackburn, West Lothian
Need we really explain?

Anyone Else Who Is Not George W. Bush
We saw a number of talented candidates from this pool, many of whom were not George W. Bush in any way whatever, and all of whom promoted the cause of world peace and international diplomacy through the nonviolent means of not being George W. Bush. The Nobel Committee wants to endorse this attitude, wherever it may arise.

Barack Obama recently renewed his pledge
not to be George W. Bush.