Billevesées

Songs Announced from the Stage, and Other Notes from Susan Graham

2012-02-02T09:44:00.006-05:00

Susan Graham returned to Carnegie last night for a new recital program, once again accompanied by the indispensable Malcolm Martineau, and once again cheered on by me. Almost all the material was new to Susan’s repertory, including the first song she’s ever performed in Russian, but the mix of moods and characters was just what you’d expect from her, by turns poignant and hilarious.

Indeed, the stated purpose of the program was to present a series of portraits of women, and that Susan actually has a choice in the matter — that is, having played so many trouser parts, she could just as easily present a gallery of men — she reminded us with “Sexy Lady,” a comic number written by Ben Moore for that first Carnegie recital, in 2003.

Sexy indeed.

In all seriousness, Susan is a very sexy lady in her own right, and she brings to her music a whole set of decidedly physical pleasures, both for her listener and (I presume) for herself. That’s what makes her unbeatable in French rep: the warmth and sensuality of her voice find their most congenial resting place in that music.

Thus it was no surprise that Susan and Malcolm performed Poulenc’s Fiançailles pour rire, an ideal selection, in the second half of the evening. Yet as I have witnessed the collaborations between these two artists over the years, I’ve come to appreciate that their goal is never merely to make Susan look good. With their previous program, Un frisson français, they offered a survey course in French art songs — so thoroughly that any music-appreciation instructor could use the album as a starting point for a syllabus.

This time, offering their portrait gallery of women, Susan and Malcolm effectively split the program into two parts — nice girls and nasty girls — with a change of gowns at intermission, from demure white to vavoom one-shouldered dark-and-sparkly, to heighten the contrast that ranged from the Blessed Virgin in Part I to Lady M*cbeth in Part II. But in between these two extremes the distinctions weren’t so clear-cut, and the Poulenc, for example, depicts a number of ladies whose stories are very different, one from another, and from all the other stories Susan and Malcolm told during the evening.

The Lady M piece, by Joseph Horovitz, takes three of the titular character’s speeches and sets them to mostly conversational music that — if nothing else — gives the singer plenty of opportunity to act one of the greatest roles in theater. Seated off to the side, and thus not lost in Susan’s gaze (as I usually am), I had the chance to admire her use of gesture, economical and true, as Lady M descended from majesty to madness.

Kennst du Midland?

The set of five Mignon songs inspired me to read Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship at long last, and I confess I’ve gotten only about 10 percent of the way, according to the handy measure on my Kindle. Without having finished my reading, or even gotten to Mignon’s first appearance in the book, I’m left knowing what I knew already: that Mignon appealed to 19th-century composers because of a certain variety of innocent victimhood. What I get from Susan’s interpretations of the songs is a direct connection to the physical: when she sings of lemon trees and orange blossoms, you can smell the fragrance. Malcolm is very much complicit in evoking the sensuality of this music, it should be said, and at times I caught him “watching” a phrase as it floated away from his piano.

Susan’s wit is part of her charm as a performer, and in the final sections of the evening, “Other songs announced from the stage” and a couple of encores, she made the promised announcements with flashes of humor, as well as putting over the comic numbers (also including Messager’s “J’ai deux amants” and Porter’s “The Physician”) with verve.

We were beside ourselves with happiness, to the point that at least one fellow in the audience was shouting out requests. He wanted to hear “A Chloris,” and Susan meant to give it to us — but according to her own schedule. She is still finding fresh insights, though she’s sung this piece a thousand times, surely, and it’s grown ever more mystical, sacred even, in the purity of its feeling. Yet she turned this mood on its head a moment later, delivering Sondheim’s “The Boy from…” and cracking us up, before calling it a night.

This was the sort of musical evening when I went backstage just because it's the equivalent of pinching myself: yeah, I really do know this person who uplifts me and who decks me in beauty. And she kissed me, too, just in case I didn’t already feel like the luckiest guy on earth. Afterward I walked alone in the warm moonlit air, with her voice still ringing in my heart. It doesn’t get much better than that.

The recording of Susan’s Carnegie recital debut:
if you listen closely, you can hear me cheering.

Jennifer Van Dyck in ‘The Picture Box’

2012-01-29T15:26:00.012-05:00

A girl I used to know: With Arthur French,
in Charles Weldon’s production for the Negro Ensemble Company.

The last time I went to the stage door of the Beckett Theatre to congratulate an actress, she was Billie Whitelaw and her dressing-room had just been burgled. Greeting Jennifer Van Dyck at the stage door last week turned out to be a happier affair, I think.

Jennifer had just finished a performance of Cate Ryan’s The Picture Box, with the Negro Ensemble Company. (The show closed today.) Seeing her in the small and simple confines of a Theatre Row house — not so unlike Brown’s Production Workshop at Faunce House in its proportions — seeing her in a T-shirt and jeans — pretty much what she wore in college — seeing her in a play — it was as if nothing had changed, and she’d tricked time, somehow.

She is aging awfully well. Actually, I’m not sure it’s accurate to call it “aging” at all: she’s really just existing progressively. And she’s also doing some lovely acting, centered and honest and graceful, alongside fine co-stars in an earnest if imperfect little play.

The Picture Box gives us Mackie (Arthur French) and Josephine (Elain Graham), an older couple who worked for the mother, now deceased, of Carrie (Jennifer), first on Long Island and then in some sort of Floridian paradise. Carrie’s got to sell her mother’s house — to a white couple who are far more boorish than dramatic purposes really require them to be. So one last time, Carrie, Mackie, and Jo sit and reminisce.

It quickly becomes apparent that the bonds here are far deeper than those among employer and employees, and the characters describe each other as “my oldest friend” and “like family.” Having just lost Bessie, I understand the truth of those feelings, even as they’ve made me uncomfortable sometimes: Bessie was my family, yes, but was I ever part of hers? Do I truly know her family, or her opinions? Did I know before reading her obituary that her kin called her “Beth”?

Ryan’s play was a somewhat slender vehicle for such musings, it must be said. Sensitively directed by Charles Weldon, artistic director of the NEC, the script nevertheless bore signs of its author’s inexperience. The picture box of the title, for example, turns out to be a gimmick so that the characters could look at old photos and tell each other stories they already knew, for the sole purpose of informing the audience things we didn’t know. And the plot drives toward a moment — signing some papers — that left many of us confused about the procedures of selling a house. (We talked about it, generally, as we left the theater.)

Still, the playful interaction between Mackie and Jo elicited a warm response from the audience at the performance I attended, and the principal trio of actors was marvelous. Together they created something delicate and true, in quietly assured strokes. Even the frankly impossible roles of the intrusive bigots got a boost from Marisa Redanty and Malachy Cleary’s skilled performances. (Redanty was especially good at suggesting the possibility of humane good intentions behind her offensiveness.)

To be honest, I have every reason to believe I’d enjoy watching Jennifer act in almost anything; since she was a girl, she’s been one of the most reliably entertaining talents I’ve encountered. It’s unnerving, really. And yet, as I say, it does my heart good to see her still working at something she seems so surely meant to do. That’s a great gift indeed.

Interview: Janice Hall Would Rather Be Doing This

2012-01-27T10:00:00.007-05:00

Kicking up her heels in Grand Illusions

Just when soprano Janice Hall’s brilliance was starting to seem almost routine (“Oh, of course she’s going to be sublime in that new opera, portraying 37 different characters and singing the Grand Inquisitor’s aria backwards”), she found a new way to dazzle us all, turning to cabaret. Most sopranos would fall flat in such a setting, let’s be honest, but few of Janice’s colleagues can rival her expressive musicianship — to say nothing of her impeccable diction, without which any cabaret number is just a plate of cold mashed potatoes.

Grand Illusions, her first complete cabaret show, proved a revelation, not only of this new dimension to Janice’s art but also of the personal need for reinvention. Dietrich evolved constantly, and so, too, is Janice evolving.

Her newest act, of which we got a preview of sorts at Urban Stages in December, finds Janice ever more assured, offering up a fascinating mix of numbers from Cole Porter to Stephen Sondheim. Directed once again by Peter Napolitano, with music director Matthew Martin Ward, I’d Rather Be Doing This opens at New York’s Metropolitan Room on Sunday, February 12, for the first of three performances over the coming months. Reached by phone in Savannah, Janice was kind enough to talk with me about the show.

WVM: The subject of your first show was an icon, Marlene Dietrich. The subject of your new show is also a legendary diva — yourself. It’s not as if you were hiding behind Dietrich before, but this change in focus really bespeaks a growth in confidence in what is still a new art form for you. How did you arrive at the point where you felt so comfortable in cabaret performance?

JANICE HALL: It’s odd – that kind of happened by itself. I decided after Marlene, I had lots and lots of concept ideas, but that was such an exhausting, intense process, immersing myself in the world of Marlene, that I decided to give myself a little bit of a breather and give myself a program of songs that I liked.

In the process, I discovered that it was kind of about me, though that wasn’t my intention. People who saw the first performance commented on that a lot, and even then I wasn’t aware of it until I watched the DVD and said to myself, “Yes this is very different.”

WVM: Do you feel comfortable now?

JH: I do, and when I go back now and look at the Marlene footage, I see — I think I tend to be overcritical of me — but I find it to be much more formal, let’s put it that way. And I was more removed from it. So I guess just by doing, I’m becoming more comfortable and more confident, as you say, about what it is that I’m doing.

WVM: It’s not that you were uneasy before, but there’s a different kind of ease now.

JH: Marlene was a little bit more studied. I wanted it to be perfect, so I was going for that, so it was scripted in a more formal way. I think it had to be, because if you’re trying to give the story of another person, there are certain facts you have to include. This one I was just on my own, and at first it was strange because I had such a form with Marlene, you’re kind of restricted in terms of what you say and how you say it. This was free-form, and at first I thought it would be simpler, and in a way it was not. Eventually a pattern began to emerge.

WVM: Was the process this time more like programming a recital?

JH: You know, I rarely ever did recitals. The answer to that is probably yes, but I can’t necessarily tell you that from my own experience. One of the reasons I never really wanted to do recitals as a Classical singer is that it really scared me to be out there and be me, without a character to hide behind. For some reason, with cabaret music, I became very comfortable with just that very thing. If I were to go back and program a Classical recital, with what I know about putting together a cabaret evening, I would find it easier. And in fact I’m thinking of doing that.

I also want to add about the structure of the show, that was one of the ways that my director, Peter Napolitano, was very helpful in looking at the overall picture and saying, “Yes, this works,” or “No, this has to go.” If anybody ever wonders why you need a director for a cabaret show, that’s one reason why.

“Lana Turner Has Collapsed,” from Madame X.
(Also known as the act I haven’t seen yet.)
Pygmalion Theatre Company, Salt Lake City, UT, May, 2011

WVM: I’m always struck by a kind of seamlessness in your vocal production when you sing cabaret, and that’s also an asset in opera, of course. Where does your Classical training help you in cabaret, and what’s been the biggest technical adjustment you’ve needed to make?

JH: I do get that comment, and it makes me very happy, because it doesn’t necessarily feel seamless to me. It’s becoming more and more so, but the biggest challenge I’ve had in transferring over has been not trying to go into what I call opera voice. You do have to go into your head voice at some point: I’m not a belter, I’m never going to be a belter.

I’m learning how to mix my voice in new ways, but I’m also sort of relaxing and letting my soprano voice come through, but I don’t want to do it in an operatic way. So that’s been the biggest challenge, moving smoothly from my chest voice to my head voice.

Now, in terms of how it helps me, my background, I think the discipline aspect of being a Classical singer is a natural advantage to me, in terms of doing this music. It isn’t something I think about: it’s just the way I’ve been trained, it influences the way I learn music.

Frankly, I don’t know how people who don’t have that training learn music, and I’m constantly amazed at people who don’t read music at all and yet they learn just fine. I don’t understand how that happens, because my process is very different. But for me, the discipline of having to be a Classical singer is very valuable for me in this.

WVM: The title of the act turns out to be a very funny song [by Napolitano and Ward], but it also suggests or advertises that you’re performing songs that are personal favorites. People are often surprised to discover that Classical musicians like pop songs, so can you tell us how you first discovered one or two of these numbers, and how you came to understand they might be right not just to listen to, but also to sing yourself?

JH: When I was a teenager, I was listening to all kinds of different music. I’m sure that a lot of people think that my incorporation of Piaf songs or Kurt Weill songs came from my years of being in Europe, but in fact, they came from my teenage years, when I discovered Lotte Lenya and Edith Piaf and all these strange European singers. They achieved a certain iconic stature later, but at that particular point they were pretty obscure. I just found this music and listened to it. I listened to the pop music of my generation, and I’ve always been a very eclectic music listener.

So some of these songs have been things I’ve had in my ears for years. In a couple of cases, they were songs I didn’t feel ready to tackle until now. One of them is “Pirate Jenny,” of course. It’s such a difficult song because people have certain expectations. And yet those expectations have become almost stereotypical, so to find something that’s original with the song or unique to your interpretation yet remaining true to the integrity of the song is a real challenge.

Fort Worth Favorite: Janice, with David Adam Moore,
in Eötvös’ Angels in America, 2009.

WVM: Darren Keith Woods will kill us both if we don’t mention that you’re still an opera singer — performing in Jake Heggie’s Three Decembers at the Fort Worth Opera Festival in the spring. What can you tell us about how you’re getting ready for that show?

JH: Actually, that process is going to start in full, as soon as I get back from Savannah. I’m going to throw myself into that. So far, I’ve read the libretto, I’ve listened to the recording, I’ve had my costume fittings now — we did a whole wonderful afternoon of costume fittings on Sunday. That is also going to inform me a lot, in how I go about this.

But the biggest challenge for me now is simply cabaret voice and opera voice. If I’m working a lot in cabaret voice, it’s like if you’re an Olympic athlete and you’re not quite working at that level for a while, you have to get back up to that level. Just singing in my daily voice, I’ve got to get back up to that point. Because you lose stamina if you’re not at that level.

So that’s the challenge, but it’s a fabulous character to be playing, and I’m very excited about that aspect of it — as well as the musical aspect!

Janice Hall in I’d Rather Be Doing This
Metropolitan Room, 34 West 22nd St.
Sunday, February 12, 4:00PM
Monday, March 5, 7:00PM
Wednesday, April 18, 9:30PM

Heggie’s Three Decembers
Fort Worth Opera Festival
May 13, 18, 20, 26, 31; June 2, 2012

Orsino’s Dream

2012-01-26T10:00:00.007-05:00

The author as Orsino, with Tom Diggs as Feste.
Production Workshop, Brown University, 1982
Staging by Robin Saex Garbose.

You have been cast as Count Orsino, Duke of Illyria, twice-titled ruler of William Shakespeare’s boffo rom-com, Twelfth Night. You have rehearsed for weeks, until the Bard’s language is your own, and you speak each speech trippingly on the tongue. You do not saw the air too much with your hand, but use all gently. Discretion has been your tutor, and you suit the action to the word, the word to the action.

You take your part seriously. For you are conscious that to act Shakespeare is a gift, offered to few — and seldom if ever again offered to you. This is your big chance. Yours is the privilege to start Twelfth Night in action, and to do so with the play’s most famous line:

“If music be the food of love, play on!”

And so on opening night, you stand in the wings while a musician (a lutenist, ideally, but possibly a guitarist instead) serenades you with the only cue you will get. Bedecked in your ducal finery, you stride toward your mark, and hit it, radiant in the spotlight. You can sense the perfumed Illyrian breeze; you are “in the moment”: majestic, rare and fine.

And then you speak.

“If food — ”

You wake screaming.

Christina Haag as Viola, WVM as Orsino

Orsino is a deceptively difficult role, because in only a few scenes, the actor playing him has to establish a character who’s worthy of Viola’s love. Otherwise, the audience will lose sympathy for her.

Granted, he does almost nothing to warrant sympathy for himself: he’s in love with an idea of love, and he spends all his time mooning over a woman who a) doesn’t like him, and b) isn’t Viola. The principal difference between Orsino and a stalker is that he sends Viola out to stalk Lady Olivia. Clearly, there were no restraining orders in 17th-century Illyria.

What’s more, virtually all your interaction is with Viola, a character whom you’re not treating all that nicely, and who you don’t even notice is actually a girl. Nevertheless, once your audience starts thinking, “What on earth does Viola see in him? Malvolio is much more fun,” then there is no point in pursuing the play any further. She’s the heroine, after all.

Thus Orsino a part that should be offered only to skilled — or extremely handsome — actors. For some reason, Robin Saex cast me anyway.

Since that experience, I have surveyed (informally) dozens of other actors who have played Orsino. Without a single exception, all of us suffered the same nightmare, which is to start off the play with that most famous line — backwards. Exactly as I have described it to you.

Plenty of actors have nightmares that they haven’t learned their lines, or put on the wrong costume, or showed up in the wrong scene, or met John Simon at a party. But Orsino’s dream is specific, a nightmare unto itself.

When you’re Orsino, you have no build-up, no real cue, and no way out. Say the line wrong — the one line everyone knows — and you’ll be screwed. Hopelessly. Because there’s no way to recover, short of starting the play over.

No matter how often you tell yourself, “Don’t f*** this up,” the possibility is always there, swimming beside you, ready to attack.

And so, the next time you see Twelfth Night, I ask you to show a little mercy to the actor who plays the Duke: he’s had a rough time already, even before he got started.

NOTE: There’s a line in the play about Orsino’s beard, which Robin took quite literally (with Christina egging her on). Trouble is, even now, I can’t grow more than sparse whiskers; my cheeks in my youth were barely peaches. What you see in the pictures is the result of two weeks’ praying and straining and swearing — and a copious amount of eyebrow pencil.

Also, please note that Robin and the costume designer, Jamie Scott, found codpieces “distracting,” so I wasn’t given one to wear. I was, however, given a dance belt.

Years later, I think we can all agree that it is

not at all distracting

that my Orsino looks like a Ken doll here.

Farhadi’s ‘A Separation’

2012-01-23T10:00:00.001-05:00

Leila Hatami (Simin) and Peyman Moaadi (Nader)

After seeing Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, I joked to a friend that the movie is so good, I can’t believe it’s not French. While it’s true that the picture represents something the French often try — it’s an intimate psychological portrait of a family, with just a few, very good actors — A Separation succeeds on its own terms, too. I’m not the only one who enjoyed it: it’s received excellent reviews and appears poised to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. There’s not a lot I can add, except to say that you really owe it to yourself to see it.

One reason is the film’s portrayal of daily life in contemporary Tehran. Many of us (and I do include myself in that number) have limited exposure to anything Iranian other than news reports about nuclear programs Ahmadinejad’s provocations, followed by emotional/political diatribes about military responses. Our notions are limited, therefore, of what it’s like for rank-and-file Iranian citizens to live in the mullahs’ thrall.

Based on the evidence in A Separation, for Iranians like the central couple in this film, creature comforts are plentiful (microwave ovens! shiny cars!), and even for such secular, educated, even Westernized Iranians, it’s sometimes possible to go about one’s business without running afoul of the system. But there are hidden costs in such arrangements, and when Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi) embark on their eponymous separation, every one of the major characters — rich and poor, young and old, devout and secular — is sucked into a maelstrom of moral compromise.

Sareh Bayat (Razieh)

A teacher, Simin is chafing already under the regime, dyeing her hair and wearing her headscarf almost casually, more like a fashion accessory than a legal requirement. Her reason for wanting divorce isn’t that Nader is a bad man, she explains, but that he’s preventing her from leaving the country with their daughter. She feels that young Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the director’s daughter) can’t live up to her potential in Iran, but she punts when the off-camera judge asks her why, and she never says where she wants to move. (My guess is France, since Termeh is seen practicing her French.)

Likewise, Farhadi stops short of directly criticizing the regime, but his film contains many scenes that depict the Iranian legal system unflatteringly. Even the magistrate (Babak Karimi) seems frustrated by the restrictive structure and the endless wrangling. While much of the difficulty arises from the individual personalities involved, how can there be justice when everyone is somehow corrupted?

Sarina Farhadi (Termeh)

They’re also sympathetic, which in turn makes the film sometimes quite uncomfortable: we’re watching a car wreck in slow motion, and we’re also watching ourselves, or people with whom we can identify easily. The actors are attractive, and the naturalness of their art (as well as the fact that we in America are unlikely to have seen any of them much if ever) keeps drawing you in as if you were witnessing real lives in real conflict.

Ultimately, Farhadi’s reliance on a very jittery hand-held camera becomes a commentary in itself: nothing here is truly stable. The audience never really gets a long view, the visual equivalent of the broader perspective that the characters need and don’t get, either.

I’ve held back on plot details, because very little in A Separation plays out as you expect it to do, and that is one of its strengths. Suffice to say that Farhadi’s film will tell you something about modern Iran, but more than that, it will make you think: about politics, about morality, about people you know, and how they treat one another.

Shahab Hosseini (Hodjat)

The Met’s ‘The Enchanted Island’ at the Multiplex

2012-01-22T12:00:00.005-05:00

Joyce DiDonato, as Sycorax,
looking the way she makes me feel.
She will probably spend the rest of her life trying to get rid of that gold leaf.

The Metropolitan Opera presented its new Baroque pastiche, The Enchanted Island, as a high-definition simulcast yesterday; I saw it at a high-rise multiplex in Times Square, where a disaster movie of some sort was playing downstairs. Periodically our little theater would rumble with distant explosions — including the point when Joyce DiDonato sang about “thunder underground.” So we got the benefit of extra special effects in a show that has plenty already.

Watching the screen, I was able to see bountiful details that escaped me at the final dress rehearsal, in December. For example, Joyce’s Into the Woods–style transformation from old crone to golden queen is more extensive than I’d realized: when we first see her, she’s got bushy eyebrows that appear to have been inherited from the late Andy Rooney. In the next scene, as her power grows, she loses the eyebrows. And by the time Sycorax emerges in full splendor at the end of the opera, Joyce really is golden, with bits of gold leaf pasted to her face and neck. Glamorous, indeed.

Luca Pisaroni (center) in Caliban’s dream sequence:
One of the finest acting performances I’ve seen at the Met.
Really, Pisaroni could play Caliban in Shakespeare’s “version” of this story, too.

Two acting performances that impressed me very favorably already proved even more exciting in closeup: Luca Pisaroni’s Caliban is one of the sweetest, funniest, and angriest imaginable, and his comedic teamwork with Layla Claire, as Helena, is simply beautiful to watch. Elizabeth DeShong has been the talk of New York since Enchanted Island opened, yet somehow I didn’t see her greatness until yesterday. This is a major voice, rich and creamy and powerful, and her account of Hermia’s “Where are you now?” (based on “Where shall I fly?” from Handel’s Hercules) is stunning. I sat there dreaming up a list of other roles I’d like to hear her sing.

Plácido Domingo’s first scene is pretty much a manifestation of the way opera lovers feel about him. Of course he’s a god, and of course he should make an entrance like this one, attended by flying mermaids! Seen in close-up, however, he looks like the fellow who got called at the last minute to play Santa Claus at a kids’ Christmas party. He doesn't really know what he's doing as an actor, but hey, people like it when he sings, so okay, why not?

Somehow, this slight awkwardness makes the scene even more fun, and his fans must have loved it when they heard him speak (during his intermission interview with hostess Deborah Voigt) with perfect confidence of his intentions to sing Neptune again when Enchanted Island is revived in a couple of seasons. Yesterday was his birthday: he’s 71 years old. Yet there’s no reason to believe he’ll ever sound anything less than brilliant.

A marvel of color and agility, Joyce got the first round of applause from us, and probably the most, too. (Though Domingo gave her a run for the money.) I refuse to be blasé about this: my friend is up there on a movie screen, in an opera tailor-made for her by the Metropolitan, and a roomful of jaded New Yorkers is cheering her even though she can't hear us because she's at Lincoln Center.

Darling, it’s hotter under the water!
Domingo as Neptune

That’s why I mean to go back to the Met to hear Enchanted Island one more time — even though Jeremy Sams’ libretto continues to drive me crazy, and of course watching the simulcast from the front row of the movie theater, I had no choice but to read the damnable words all afternoon.

In huge letters. In my native tongue. Right in front of my face.

The horror, the horror!

But all in all, I’m enjoying my Island cruise tremendously, and I was pleased yesterday to see so many young people, not only sitting with me in the movie theater but also on the screen in the Met audience. Enchanted Island is long, and even I get squirmy. (I have identified two ideal places where Act I ought to break, and yet the thing keeps charging right past them.) Yet the show is fun, with all kinds of staging tricks and magic. Joyce’s scary witch isn’t too scary, and Pisaroni’s monster is rather dear, as I say; Danielle de Niese’s charming Ariel likewise suggests that this might be a really good opera for kids, maybe even a first opera.

You’ve got a few more chances to see The Enchanted Island at the Met this season, and a DVD of yesterday’s simulcast will surely be released in coming months.

Not just HD, but 4-D (DiDonato, Domingo, and Daniels)

Note: I’m looking forward to another bout of Mezzo-Madness, beginning with Joyce’s next appearance in Enchanted Island and followed by performances at Carnegie Hall by Susan Graham (February 1, with Malcolm Martineau on piano) and Vivica Genaux (February 2, with Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante).

Liz Dribben’s Jahrzeit

2012-01-20T10:00:00.004-05:00

It’s so tough to say tootle-loo.

When Liz Dribben passed away last year, I resorted to photographs of Michelle Pfeiffer to illustrate my reminiscences. That would have pleased Liz tremendously, as I said at the time, because she’d always hoped that “Miss Pfeiffer” would play her in the movie adaptation of her life story. Even so, I promised to update my essay with photographs of the real Liz Dribben, who was very much the star of her own life, and a glamorous blonde at that.

I had one gorgeous picture of Liz already at hand — or so I thought. Yes, she’d given it to me while I was helping her to sort through her myriad collections, files, cases, and hordes of hoards, just before she left for the nursing home. Meanwhile, however, the photograph, a bona fide 8 x 10 print, slipped off to the warehouse with all my other belongings. By the time I’d unpacked it again and managed to scan it, Liz’s Jahrzeit, the first anniversary of her death, was upon me.

So here is the picture, and here is the anniversary. Miss Pfeiffer will remain in place, and Liz’s own portrait will get its own special frame. Together now we can look at the pioneering Buffalo TV journalist, along with her co-anchor. I don’t know whether this is the fellow who was getting paid more than Liz for doing the same work, but I do know that, when she asked for equal pay, she was fired. That’s how she wound up in New York, where I met her two decades later.

I’ve had a year to get used to Liz’s absence, to the phone that doesn’t ring and the e-mail that doesn’t ping. But how can I get used to hours not spent talking with her every week when I’m in New York! Not receiving her chatty notes and the news articles she forwarded so avidly! And not being on the receiving end of her endless advice!

Now that I reflect on it, her advice was seldom entirely practical, and there was always a catch to it: yes, it would be terrific if I did on-the-scene reporting from a bathysphere off the eastern coast of Madagascar, especially if Mr. Sondheim came with me, and especially if I got one of those broadcast-quality digital telephones she’d heard about (and craved), and I’d have to admit she was right, even as I tallied up the reasons her scheme would never work.

Say what you will, she was always looking out for me, thinking about me, wishing me well. A resilient optimist, too, she forever insisted, “You never know” what good might come of my efforts, if only I’d dare.

I miss that.

I miss Liz.

The concept of “Jahrzeit” means that we grieve for a year, and then we move on. It’s going to take me a while longer.

We Bought a Zooey

2012-01-19T10:10:00.018-05:00

Who wouldn’t want to see a quirky, heartwarming
independent comedy about the white slave trade?

It’s awards season, and that means I’m busily trying to come up with movie projects of my own, so I won’t be left out next year. Because I look pretty good in formal wear, if I do say so.

Here are some of my latest concepts. They’re completely unoriginal and therefore totally safe, which is how I know you’ll want to greenlight them into development now. Or however you say that. Look, just have your people call my people.

The Ironic Lady
Meryl Streep is Alanis Morissette, dontcha think? Yeah, I really do think.

(Suggestion: Hire Phyllida Lloyd to “direct.”)

The Fartist
Hollywood smells an Oscar when Jean Dujardin returns to his low-comedy roots, starring as Joseph Pujol, “le Pétomane,” a popular real-life French music-hall performer. Isn’t it time to relive the glory days of moviemaking — the golden age of Odorama?

Carnyage
Jodie Foster goes on a promotional tour for her new movie, but a persistent entertainment reporter (Kristen Wiig) keeps asking her about a movie she made when she was a teenager. “What was it like to work with Gary Busey? No, really, what was it really like?”

*

In My Week with Marilyn Horne, a young Englishman learns the hidden truths of a glamorous American superstar.

*

We Need to See We Need to Talk about Kevin, Kevin
A young couple argues about which movie to see on a Saturday night. Harrowing.

Dondi
Re-booting the franchise based on a comic strip that hasn’t been done lately. (Not since 1961, in fact.)

Mission Impossible: Ghost Proctologist
The aging Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) undergoes an unusually suspenseful, top-secret prostate exam. You’ll be on the edge of your seat! And so will Tom!

*

Sure, those biceps look good now, but wait ’til you see the powerful psychological drama, Shape. Michael Fassbender stars as a gym instructor who suffers from exercise addiction.

*

Midnight in Paris, Arkansas
Woody Allen has definitely left New York City behind!

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spike
A black filmmaker becomes involved in a major espionage caper.

Bridesmaids Revisited
A middle-class Englishwoman’s life is upended when she agrees to be maid of honor for her noble-born best friend from Oxford. British Catholicism has never been funnier! Look out for the already notorious bangers-and-mash scene.

*

Dondi. Seriously.

‘Costa Concordia’ Captain Says He Had No Choice but to Abandon Ship

2012-01-18T14:21:00.005-05:00

ROME -- A profound sense of duty compelled Francesco Schettino to abandon his sinking cruise liner, the Costa Concordia, the ship’s captain told Italian authorities this morning, and his actions saved countless tiny, almost completely invisible lives.

Schettino has been criticized for allegedly fleeing the accident, last Friday, long before many passengers and other crew members. It is also alleged that he refused to return to the ship after being ordered to do so by the Italian coast guard; according to some sources, he either did not participate at all in the rescue effort or else hampered efforts by others.

“It was my duty as captain to oversee the evacuation and rescue of the most vulnerable passengers on board the Costa Concordia,” Schettino is said to have told investigators. “The Puffi are a tiny people who would have been crushed by others in the rush for the lifeboats. What is more, only I have the ability to see them. Had I abandoned them, they surely would have died, and casualties from this regrettable accident would have been much, much higher.”

Schettino “refuses to be the Gargamella in this case.”

Aboard the ship, the Puffi, tiny blue people who wear white stockings and caps, were mostly elderly (Grande Puffo), women (Puffetta), children (Puffo Bambino), or so incredibly brainy or handy that Schettino dared not leave them behind (Puffo Quattrocchi, Puffo Inventore). “Survivors of the wreck would need the Puffi skills these Puffi could provide,” Schettino reportedly said.

“You cannot imagine how difficult it was,” Schettino told Italian authorities, describing what he called a “Puffi’s Choice” as to “who would escape and who would stay to fight for their Puffi lives. But it was my duty as captain to act as I did.”

Among the disaster’s unreported casualties, Schettino said, were Puffo Goloso, Puffo Maldestro, and Puffo Brontolone, all of whom are missing and believed smurfed.

“I can understand that, since nobody else could see the lives I was saving, it may have appeared that I was a foolish coward, thinking only of myself. This is simply not the case.”

Hamilton’s ‘Anthony Burns’

2012-01-18T10:25:00.005-05:00

The book’s cover features an illustration by Leo and Diane Dillon, whose work enhanced Hamilton’s The People Could Fly
so eloquently.

Continuing my exploration of the work of the late author Virginia Hamilton, and doing so in the most haphazard way, I have stumbled across a lovely book, from 1988, that is a compendium of many of the best qualities that made her such a compelling writer. Not the least of these is, it’s a helluva good story, excitingly told.

Aimed I think at high-school kids and those junior-high students who are strong readers, Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave reads like historical fiction: with its Boston setting, roiling political background, and its hero with a crippled hand, it may even recall that landmark of the genre, Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain. But it’s all true, as Hamilton makes clear with a thoughtful afterword and an extensive bibliography.

Hamilton shows us Burns, a young man who finds himself the center of a riot in 1854. As is sometimes the case with such figures, Burns is de facto a passive figure during the most dramatic event of his life, since he’s being held prisoner (in shackles and under heavy guard) at the very moment he’s a cause célèbre. But creating passive heroes is not what Hamilton is about.

And so she shows us Burns’ inner thoughts, active even as he’s confined and facing the prospect of forcible return to his master in Virginia: Anthony retreats within himself, reliving his past in vivid flashback sequences, making of the narrative a counterpane of past and present. This technique makes absolute sense, chiming as it does with what we know about survivors of prison camps and other such ordeals. (Hamilton doesn’t say whether any of the real-life Burns’ writings or statements corroborated her narrative approach, but I wouldn’t be surprised.)

The book is full of smart psychology, and Hamilton shows us, for example, what a mixed blessing is Anthony’s as a very young boy, because he’s the special favorite of John Suttle, the man who owns him (and who cannot stop himself from repeating that Anthony is his property). Yes, Anthony gets somewhat better treatment than the other slaves, but this in turn exposes him to rumors and resentment from whites and blacks alike on the plantation. Anthony is still a slave, and even John Suttle’s affection can’t be relied on: he takes Anthony on pony rides, yes, but then knocks him off the saddle to the ground. The boy cannot — must not — complain.

Hamilton doesn’t need to spell out her message: there was no such thing as comfortable or “nice” slavery, nor any way to make the condition tolerable, and we understand why young Anthony feels the need to escape. Sure, some of his jobs are cushier than others; he never works in the fields, though he does plenty of manual labor, including in a sawmill, where a white man’s negligence leads to the accident that cripples 13-year-old Anthony’s hand. Other slaves have it worse, but that doesn’t make his situation better.

And so, as a man, Anthony retreats to his memories not out of sentimentality but out of pride: his memories are his own, and no one can take them from him: that is what makes them a source of comfort.

You see what an astute observer of psychology — of the human spirit — Virginia Hamilton could be. The rest of the book is full of comparable insights and intriguing characterizations. And if Anthony isn’t the most active participant in the courtroom drama, he remains the heart of the story.

Drawing on memoirs and testimony, Hamilton makes those trial scenes very suspenseful (what a great movie this story would make!), and it’s another mark of her method that she doesn’t condescend: legal terms are used, with the apparent presumption that her readers are smart enough to look ’em up if they don’t know ’em already.

Along similar lines, you don’t have to read the appended historical texts (including not only the works in that bibliography but also excerpts from the Fugitive Slave Act, nightmarish), but you can: as with The People Could Fly, Hamilton isn’t merely telling (or spoon-feeding) stories, she’s giving her readers the tools they need to learn and to make the stories their own. Fascinating.

She does keep you guessing, though. Two of the scenes that you expect to play on a grand scale are kept brief, remarkably non-violent, and really rather understated: the sawmill accident and the riot itself. It’s clever strategy, because you wind up paying closer attention to other, subtler or more obscure points in the plot: in a way, Hamilton knows that your imagination has filled in the big scenes, so she doesn’t have to.

And so it’s not only for the stories — which she has uncovered with such thoughtful care — that I’m returning to Virginia Hamilton’s books. It’s for the way she goes about her business, and for the sense she gives me that I know her now, though I never met her. With each book, she’s shared a bit of her soul with me.

Virginia Hamilton’s page at Amazon.com can be found here.

Virginia Hamilton’s page at Scholastic Books can be found here.

Streep’s ‘The Iron Lady’

2012-01-17T10:00:00.014-05:00

Another Oscar would go so nicely
next to the Golden Globes on the mantel.

Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady, an unconventional biopic about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (played by Meryl Streep), is about the qualities of leadership, and is aimed at those audiences who buy books on “Leadership” and who quote Winston Churchill at parties… no, start over.

The Iron Lady is an unconventional love story that proves that behind every great woman, there is a great man (Harry Lloyd as the younger Denis Thatcher, Jim Broadbent as the older)… no, start over.

The Iron Lady is a Joan Crawford movie in modern dress, about the personal costs of a woman’s career, as Thatcher neglects her children and her husband recedes into the background, leaving her alone….

Maybe The Iron Lady is about the importance of upholding principle… no, not really.

No matter how this picture looks when it is cropped, these gentlemen are not giving Margaret Thatcher a Nazi salute.

The Iron Lady is a disease-of-the-week movie about senile dementia, which brings low even the mightiest…. The Iron Lady is a dreamplay about memory, which holds even the departed close to heart….

Well, to tell the truth, I had no idea what The Iron Lady was about, after sitting through a 104-minute movie that seems much longer than it is. Director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan stubbornly, almost courageously refuse to take a point of view about anything in the picture.

At least The Iron Lady is absolutely and categorically not about politics. And this is why it may have been perfectly all right for me to see it on Martin Luther King Day, though the subjects of movie and holiday almost surely would have clashed in life. (Can you imagine the protest marches Dr. King might’ve led against Thatcher’s treatment of the coal miners?)

Be patient, keep a stiff upper lip, and the real subject of the picture will come to me, I assure you.
But perhaps you’d better pour yourself a cup of tea while you wait.

Ultimately, The Iron Lady is about Meryl Streep, who portrays Margaret Thatcher in middle and old age and who is the whole excuse for the exercise. She gives a remarkable performance, a celebration of a powerful woman who is either Margaret Thatcher or Meryl Streep herself, and it really doesn’t matter which.

Watching her, Americans will regret that we cannot confer knighthoods upon our actors, as the English do. Perhaps there are others who could be made to look and sound more like Margaret Thatcher (in Britain she’s usually mimicked by men), and surely there are plenty of actresses who are more British. But when the question of authority comes up at one point in the film, you think, “Aha! That’s it — that’s why Dame Meryl is the only actress today who could give this performance — she has authority.”

Because then The Iron Lady is a movie about Dame Meryl Streep, the filmmakers are keenly interested in humanizing Margaret Thatcher, because, no matter how evil you think Thatcher is (and some people do hold strong opinions), Dame Meryl does not play inhuman characters: even Miranda Priestley turned out to have an inner life.

Behind every great woman: Jim Broadbent plays Denis Thatcher as an older man, and also as a deceased man.

Here, humanizing Margaret Thatcher is done primarily through scenes depicting her with husband Denis, both before and after his death, and he turns out to be an entirely adorable fellow indeed, a gentle clown, as patient with Margaret as he is proud of her.

Just in case this wasn’t enough humanity for you, Phyllida Lloyd has cast Jim Broadbent as Denis. Not only is Broadbent very good at such roles, having played a lot of them, but he has also been amassing quite a reserve of audience affection for himself personally, so that we’re inclined to think he’s sweet no matter what he’s doing. Harry Lloyd, as the young Denis, is even more charming and probably too good-looking ever to turn into Jim Broadbent, but we don’t mind.

A great deal of work is crammed into very few scenes for Alexandra Roach, who plays young Margaret. It’s up to her to convey Thatcher’s pain at being snubbed by male chauvinists and upper-class twits; it’s also up to her to convey Thatcher’s worship of her father and terror that she’ll turn out like her own Mum.

The sweetest scene in the picture: Young Denis (Harry Lloyd) proposes to Young Margaret (Alexandra Roach).

And yet, in a curious reflection of the scenes in which Thatcher is carefully trained and groomed for higher office, it’s hard to take this movie’s Thatcher seriously until she turns into Meryl Streep. Roach isn’t supposed to have authority, of course, but because she doesn’t, we’re just biding our time until Dame Meryl returns.

In the realm of politics, everyone else gets short shrift with the possible exception of Geoffrey Howe (played by Anthony Head), who has a lot of screen time if not many lines. Richard E. Grant is instantly recognizable as Richard E. Grant, not so much as the politician he plays, but it doesn’t matter because he vanishes almost immediately. As for the actor who plays John Major — well, you assume he’s John Major, because the resemblance is uncanny, but in truth he never opens his mouth, and really you’re just guessing.

For a long time, Dame Meryl was the prime contender for the film of Evita. Watching this picture, I saw definite clues as to how she would have played Señora Perón.
I also wished Iron Lady were a musical.

Did Thatcher save Britain? Was her idea of Britain worth the suffering she inflicted? The movie does in fact raise these questions, but never gets around to answering them.

Does Dame Meryl save the picture? Yes. Does Phyllida Lloyd inflict too much suffering, with her meandering moviemaking? Yes. (And dear Heaven, Lloyd already made Mamma Mia! You don’t get many more free passes after a crime like that.)

You will not really learn much about Margaret Thatcher’s life, and still less about your own, from watching The Iron Lady. But you will see a very fine actress in a very challenging role, one that is almost certain to win her another Oscar.

If that’s your idea of a good time, don’t let me stop you.
Frankly, next time I might prefer to see her play Batman.

Please Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington

2012-01-15T10:00:00.008-05:00

Christina Haag as Viola, with Adrian Hernandez as the Sea Captain.
Twelfth Night, Production Workshop, Brown University, 1982.
Directed by Robin Saex Garbose.

Actors aren’t like other people; they’re always acting. So goes the conventional wisdom, anyway, and to some it’s quite handy.

So you broke up with your girlfriend? Blame it on her acting talent! “Oh, you know, she’s an actress,” you can say; “She was always changing, never herself, so artificial, constantly pretending. I never knew where I stood with her, and I couldn’t tell what she was really thinking.”

Nobody will call you on this — nobody will dare to suggest that maybe you didn’t understand her because you’re not terribly perceptive, or that you’re certainly not as well connected to your emotions as any decent actress really must be to hers (even to the point of excess). And rest assured that nobody will tell you that you didn’t deserve a girl like her in the first place. So long as you speak in truisms universally accepted, you can delude yourself forever.

Ann Harada as Christmas Eve

Returning to New York and reuniting with friends who just happen to be actresses, I have found reassurance in the very unchangeable nature of their changing art. This isn’t to say that they aren’t better actresses now than when I knew them in college, but that — contrary to what people say — they are less changed in spirit, and perhaps more authentic, than many other women of my acquaintance.

Where is the girl I used to know? She’s right here, doing what she has always done. And that makes everything seem somehow right.

Jennifer Van Dyck, with Charles Busch in The Divine Sister

Christina Haag has been getting so much attention as a writer — not least for Come to the Edge, her tender account of her love affair with John F. Kennedy, Jr., which has just been released in paperback. Indeed, the fact that she writes so beautifully came as something of a revelation to me, and if she ever turns to fiction, I intend to become jealous and quite unpleasant about it.

But I knew Christina first as an actress, and so it was a providential gift to find her onstage again, a few months ago in New York, in Sharyn Rothstein’s drama, The Invested. She portrayed a driven financier with such natural grace that she had me believing that she might have succeeded on Wall Street, too, in real life. (Christina quickly but gently disabused me of that notion after the show.)

Christina Haag in Sharyn Rothstein’s The Invested
New York, 2011

Before The Invested, I hadn’t seen Christina in something like 20 years. She’s a grownup now, and yet she’s still the poised, almost ethereally beautiful girl I used to know. When our friend Robin Saex Garbose directed Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at Brown, I was Christina’s Orsino, and playing opposite her really raised my game. Looking into her eyes, I wanted to be the Orsino she imagined.

She’s the last girl I ever kissed onstage: I guess it’s just as well that I quit while I was ahead.

Christina as Viola, with WVM as Orsino.

There’s a lot to be said for the fulfillment of a promise, and in seeing a woman do what she was meant to do, your own destiny may seem more secure. Just last night, I missed hearing Ann Harada performing the songs of William Finn in Lincoln Center’s “American Songbook” series, darn it, but I’ve had the joyful experience of seeing Ann a few times elsewhere recently, including her annual tour-de-force, Christmas Eve with Christmas Eve.

For the moment, let me emphasize that Ann throws her Christmas Eve revues together in only a few weeks, with minimal rehearsal. Her instincts, her training and experience, her talent and her prowess as a performer are such that she can pull off such feats of skill and daring, where any mortal woman might fail. What’s more, her heart (the shows benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS) makes the effort necessary to her. But even as a girl, in musical comedies at Faunce House, Ann was signaling already that some day she’d be capable of exactly this magic.

Art isn’t easy: Ann Harada with WVM,
following December’s annual Christmas Eve extravaganza.
She pours herself into these performances, as you can see.
Photo by Anne Balcer©

I barely suspected that I’d see Jennifer Van Dyck when I went to Charles Busch’s farce, The Divine Sister, in 2010 — but there she was. Even though she was playing (alternately) a little boy and an older woman, she, too, was entirely the girl I remembered: lovely and funny and smart. In conversation, I always had the feeling that she was three or four lines ahead of me in the dialogue, as if she had privileged access to the full script, whereas I was just reading sides. Her mind works that quickly — and her wit shines through when she’s onstage, just as it always did.

Now Jennifer is appearing in a new play, Cate Ryan’s The Picture Box, with the Negro Ensemble Company, at the Beckett Theatre on Theatre Row through January 29. Promising the story of a black couple’s relationship with the daughter of the white family they work for, the play is evoking memories of my own relationship with Bessie Pullam, even before I see the show. I’m looking forward to it. (For more information, click here.)

Jennifer Van Dyck

I’m conscious of context here. It’s possible, for example, that actresses without the brains and accomplishment to get into Brown aren’t as estimable as these three women. It’s possible — indeed, probable — that Christina, Ann, and Jennifer would be just as extraordinary if they’d studied molecular biology or worked in real estate. And yet the combination of circumstances here strikes me as resistant to debate — and worthy of celebration.

In a too-changing world, these women are not merely stage stars but pole stars, and we’d be fools not to be guided by them. The next time you meet an actress, consider yourself lucky.

Christina as Viola, with Andrew Weems as Malvolio.

Kennst du das Buch?

2012-01-14T10:00:00.003-05:00

An illustration from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister:
She’s been singing while the old guy plays the harp and the young guy listens, and that’s about as much as I can tell you about the story, for now.

To say that I’m excited about Susan Graham’s recital tour (now underway and arriving at New York’s Carnegie Hall on February 1, with the heroic Malcolm Martineau at the piano) would be an understatement of a sort to which I am not prone when Susan is the subject. By far the bulk of the program is given over to material Susan hadn’t sung before opening night (in Québec), including the first number in Russian she has ever performed in public — because if there’s one thing Susan is bad at, it’s coasting.

Perhaps most intriguing is a set of five songs, by five composers, inspired by the character Mignon, from Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjare (usually translated as “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship”). An appealing character, apparently, Mignon herself sings in the novel, and she inspired several 19th-century composers, notably with “Kennst du das Land?” (“Do you know the country?”), which everybody from Franz Schubert to our dear contemporary, Mark Adamo, has set. Ambroise Thomas wrote an entire opera on Wilhelm Meister, and named it after Mignon.

Suddenly it occurred to me that I’ve never read Wilhelm Meister. I daresay that Susan could sing the tax code in Chinese and still manage to connect with me on a spiritual level — but why not read the book? I had no answer to that question, and so I’ve loaded it onto my Kindle.

Susan Graham in recital, Québec, January 6, 2012

I’ll update you on my progress, and I’m looking forward to reacquainting myself with Goethe, of whose work I know only two other monuments: Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther. (Those books inspired two of Susan’s most distinguished stage roles, Marguerite in Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust and Charlotte in Massenet’s Werther.)

With a view primarily to impressing the admissions officers of Harvard College, I read Faust in a dual-language edition; the stunt didn’t work, and while I remember the framework, I don’t remember the brushstrokes, as it were: neither German nor English text stuck in my head.

Werther I read in English, but at a time when an ex-girlfriend was about to marry. I was homeless at the time, sleeping on a friend’s sofa, and I dreamt — surely as Werther himself must have done, when Lotte married Albert — that I could hear the happy couple making love in the night. Let’s just say that I understand why Goethe’s novel provoked a rash of sympathetic suicides when it was first published.

Susan as Massenet’s Charlotte, with Rolando Villazón as Werther.
I was lucky enough to see them in this production
in Paris a few years ago.

Will Wilhelm Meister enhance my appreciation of Susan’s performance? There’s only one way to find out. But as I move forward, I’m reminded of something Beverly Sills said during my first-ever interview, backstage in her dressing-room in Dallas. “You have to do your homework,” she said about opera-going.

In those days, she was especially right. We had no projected titles in those days, children, and so we had to read the libretto before we went to the theater, or else risk getting hopelessly lost in the flow of foreign languages. At the very least, we had to read a plot synopsis, so that we understood that Alfredo was Violetta’s boyfriend, and not her dad or some guy she picked up on the street.

Nowadays it’s easier, and even I sometimes go to a show without having studied up on it. But in “winging it,” I’ve lost something, I know. By doing my “homework” for the opera, I wound up learning a lot — and not least that there existed a great wide world beyond the horizons I could see from where I stood.

Susan herself has spoken eloquently about listening to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts on Saturday afternoons and dreaming of that wider world. Now it’s she who points out new horizons to the people who are lucky enough to hear her. I am one among them, and I am glad of it.

Okay. Back to my homework.

Susan Graham and Malcolm Martineau

January 14, 2012: Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall at Univesity of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

January 18, 2012: CSU Northridge, Valley Performing
Arts Center, Northridge, CA

January 22, 2012: Spivey Hall, Morrow, GA

January 28, 2012: Koerner Hall at Telus Centre, Toronto, ON

February 1, 2012: Carnegie Hall, New York, NY

February 4, 2012: Kennedy Center Concert Hall, Washington, DC

In Praise of the Avid Dilettante

2012-01-13T10:25:00.008-05:00

Geraldine McEwan as Lucia, in one of the greatest performances
I have ever seen on television.

In reflecting further on Susanne Mentzer’s Huffington Post column and my essay from yesterday, I returned to an observation I’ve been mulling over for some time: namely, there is a diametrical opposite to the sort of people who never go to galleries or concerts. And I have come up with a gang of unlikely role models.

Emmeline “Lucia” Lucas and Elizabeth Mapp are the central characters in a series of comic novels by E.F. Benson. Ordinarily I wouldn’t suggest them as role models to anybody, because they’re truly awful people — deliciously so, I hasten to add — backstabbing busybodies who plot against one another in order to achieve and maintain social dominance in the tiny seaside village where they live.*

Prunella Scales (at left, fondly remembered as Sibyl Fawlty)
played Elizabeth Mapp in the TV adaptation.
She’s seen here with Geraldine McEwan as Lucia.

Naturally, then, these characters don’t seek out art for the right reasons. If they sketch or paint watercolors, it is primarily to win prizes and to defeat rivals. If they play piano, it is primarily to monopolize the attention of dinner guests. If they attend an opera, it is primarily to enjoy the company of a famous singer, after the show, and if they speak Italian, it is entirely to show off.

Art for Mapp and Lucia is a weapon to be used in their constant social warfare. They’re both intelligent, upper-class women with no more productive use of their time, and who knows whether, if they had jobs of some sort, they’d be quite so avid in their pursuit of culture. They’re cheats, too. For example, when Lucia reads Ancient Greek, she resorts to dual-language editions, and her Italian is mostly sham (leading to one of the novels’ most famous episodes).

Nigel Hawthorne as Georgie Pillson, Lucia’s closest
(and most effeminate) friend.

And yet these characters do have cultivation. Whether they practice the arts well or poorly is — for the purposes of this discussion — almost irrelevant. They do sketch. They do play piano. They put on theatricals and recite poetry. They do speak at least a bit of a few foreign languages. And they do expose themselves to other people’s art, as well, even if they don’t quite understand (or even like) modern music and painting.

Which is to say that Mapp, Lucia, and their friends are doing exactly what the rest of us ought to be doing. Yes, they’re doing these things for the wrong reasons, but how many of the rest of us, lo these decades later, could do as much? Maybe they’re not great artists, but they keep the engines humming for themselves and for everyone else.

Benson’s characters become quite admirable, when viewed in this context. You wouldn’t have to force Mapp or Lucia to go to a museum or attend a concert; you wouldn’t have to explain why art is important or cajole them into supporting arts programs. I’d probably hate to know them, and yet I’m sorry I’m not more like them.

*NOTE: The fictional village of Tilling, where Mapp and Lucia live, is based on the town of Rye. Henry James spent his last years there — and Benson was the subsequent occupant of James’ house. In the Mapp and Lucia novels, Benson describes the house in detail, particularly a window ideally situated for spying on the main street; at various points in the story first Mapp and then Lucia live there. The house was destroyed in World War II, so this is as close as we’ll get to it — and thanks to Benson, we have a pretty terrific image now of Henry James sitting in that very window and snooping on his neighbors as he almost certainly must have done.

On Art, Light Bulbs, and Orgasm

2012-01-12T12:20:00.005-05:00

Susanne Mentzer

The mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer has been writing essays lately for The Huffington Post. It’s not enough that she’s a dazzling artist in her own field (the first singer I saw as Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier and as the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos), she’s also smart about other people’s art, and she expresses herself in lucid prose that is darned near impossible to argue with.

Her latest essay describes some “light-bulb” moments she had while visiting the Prado Museum in Madrid. The magnificent collection there inspired several realizations about the importance of art in general and the need to experience it, to share it, and to support it.

I agree wholeheartedly with what Susanne Mentzer wrote, including the praise for the Prado, which I revisited a few years ago (after touring it as a teenager) and found beautifully proportioned, thoughtfully curated, and thoroughly inspiring. Full of ”light bulbs,” in other words.

One thing that struck me while reading is that her light bulbs went off while she was experiencing the art. Visiting a museum, attending a concert or play, these experiences are triggers that lead us to think more, beyond the present moment.

The Prado Museum, Madrid

If some people are dismissive of the importance of art, and hostile to it, it must be at least in part because they haven’t been exposed to art: they haven’t been allowed or allowed themselves the light-bulb experience. They don’t know what they’re missing. But in consequence, these same people are effectively working to deny the rest of us — anybody else, really — a light-bulb experience.

Those of us who believe in the importance of art are often frustrated by those who don’t. We keep looking for persuasive arguments, but we don’t find them, and they keep on, stubbornly cutting funding and lobbying against what is (if only they knew!) the essence of civilization.

When faced with someone like Sue Sylvester (in her anti-arts campaign for Congress, earlier this season on Glee), we tend to reasonable arguments: “Art is good for the economy! It enhances education! It’s even good for your health!”

These are not, of course, the reasons we like art, and very few of the anti-arts crusaders are reasonable people to begin with: our debates are doomed to failure. We can argue until we’re blue in the face. The trouble is, we’re basically recommending orgasms to people who never had sex.

Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, at the Prado.

“You’ll like it,” we say. “It will bring you closer to other people. It requires a little effort sometimes, and you may feel a little self-conscious, but it’s totally worth it. Once you’ve had the experience, you’ll just want to keep doing it. Really, you’ll want it as often as you can get it.” And so on.

Our opponents need light-bulb moments (or orgasms) of their own, but they’re unlikely to get any so long as they never set foot in a museum, a concert hall, or a theater. And meanwhile, they’re making it more difficult for anyone else to have a light-bulb moment.

The first time I heard an opera, I was on a school field trip. This required extra funding for elementary education, as well as funding and donations for the opera company itself. Take a look around and see how well those issues are faring in today’s political and economic climate.

That doesn’t mean that we should stop advocating, and so I’m taking the opportunity today to say, “Brava,” to Susanne Mentzer, essayist.

In her essay, she says she’s not an art-museum person, and yet (for my money) her reactions to the art you saw were exactly right, original to her and yet in keeping with what the artists wanted. Her experience brought her into a community of men and women alive today, and long since passed away. (She was also able to express those reactions beautifully, and to share them with more people still.)

What happened to Susanne Mentzer in the Prado and afterward pretty much sums up why we need to support the arts. I’m grateful to her for sharing her feelings and ideas, and for making me think about my own.

The San Ildefonso Group, sometimes referred to as Orestes and Pylades, a gem of the Prado collections. Seeing it a few years ago, I was overwhelmed. But try explaining that to anybody else.

‘Lysistrata Jones’ on Broadway: A Glimpse before Closing

2012-01-08T17:00:00.012-05:00

Unless I write this very, very fast, and you read even faster, the new musical comedy Lysistrata Jones will have ended its Broadway run by the time you read this. Twenty-five years after the demise of Rags and one year after I attended the final performance of the dispiriting Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, I feel terrible whenever a show closes. In this case, I spent a great deal of time wondering where the show will go next on a fascinating path that took it from the Dallas Theater Center to a real gymnasium off-Broadway to the bright lights of the Walter Kerr Theater.

I wondered, too, what will become of Lysistrata Jones’ winning cast in a Broadway environment that seems increasingly incapable of supporting bright young talent in anything but the generic chorus of a tourist-trap thrill-ride. I didn’t spend much time wondering what went wrong with this show, however, or why it’s closing: that much seems clear.

Hetaira (Liz Mikel) holds court.

Much to my relief, Douglas Carter Beane’s book is not a transplantation of Aristophanes’ antiwar comedy to a college cheerleading squad. After all, basketball is an uneasy equivalent for war.* Lysistrata Jones isn’t Carmen Jones, not an updating or retelling in different context but merely a starting point: this is another story entirely, in which Aristophanes’ play (or the Spark Notes thereto) inspires a plucky blonde cheerleader. And so the present-day Lysistrata (named by parents who were theater majors) tries to force the hapless but horny Athens University basketball team to win a game.

Beane’s script is awfully clever — starting with the fact that a basketball team is just five guys, and thus cheap to produce. Occasionally Beane is too clever, as when Lysistrata makes a (very good, probably irresistible) joke with the name of Amelia Earhart as its punchline — though the character we’ve seen is unlikely ever to have heard of the lost aviatrix. Still, there’s room here for a smart, sassy cast to have plenty of fun, and to keep the script topical (like Lysistrata’s equally unlikely, equally funny reference to Kim Jong-il) and fresh.

A little learning: Lysistrata shares a plot from Aristophanes.
Left to right: Sharnell, Nejat, Murin, Boren, Chambers.

There’s a message about personal courage, and giving up the things that hold you back, but nothing heavy: the real purpose of this show is to provide a good time, with peppy songs and, above all, lively choreography by the director, Dan Knechtges. So much of Broadway dancing reminds me of cheerleading moves, so I wasn’t surprised to see the link forged here: what did surprise me was Knechtges’ inventive use of basketball moves, and the unstoppable kinetic energy of the cast. LaQuet Sharnell (as Myrrhine) boasts the precision and grace of a prima ballerina — that she can sing, too, and damned well, seems almost too much to ask.

Lewis Flinn’s score breaks down to a mere 13 numbers in the playbill, yet the show is almost through-composed, which really keeps things zipping along. (I was amazed to realize how long Act I really is.) Even when Flinn kicks out one of the harder-rocking numbers, the songs remain feather-light; while listening, I thought one or two might prove memorable, and the fact that, today, I can’t remember a single melody doesn’t make them any less effective in context or exemplary in craftsmanship. I’d willingly buy the cast album, if there is one, and I daresay I’d play it from time to time. The catch is that this show simply doesn’t boast the one or two surefire hit songs that might have drawn a bigger crowd.

Play ball! Knechtges’ choreography keeps the whole show aloft.

The producers mitigated some of the pleasure of Lysistrata Jones by overmiking Flinn’s score. There are several powerful voices onstage here, including those of Sharnell, Patti Murin (as Lysistrata), and Liz Mikel (as the muse/madam Hetaira). But where’s the excitement of being in a room with a woman with a great voice when the amps are cranked up to the point you can barely understand her lyrics? Mikel’s voice is not only strong but big, yet the sound designer, Tony Meola, threw in a reverb for many of her numbers: we might as well have been listening with an ear trumpet to a computer in a well. That’s not the effect an intimate show like this should have been aiming for.

Murin is another multiple-threat performer who sings and dances and looks delicious, and she managed the tricky feat of making Lysistrata dumb yet appealing, funny yet sympathetic, too. As her boyfriend, Josh Segarra was up to something similar, with just a suggestion of John Travolta’s Vinnie Barbarino to help convey the sweetness beneath the swaggering. His big ballad, crooned in his upper register, was undermined by overmiking, another victim of the sound design.

Battle of the sexes: Segarra and Murin face off.

Part of the fun of the show is watching several couples — all of whom seem like matched sets — wind up with unexpected partners. You fully expect that Robin (Lindsay Nicole Chambers) and Xander (Jason Tam), the brainiest kids on campus, will pair off; the next-brainiest characters, Sharnell’s Myrrhine and Ato Blankson-Wood’s elegant Tyllis, seem almost the same person, black kids baffled by the street-talkin’ non-blacks around them. Myrrhine and Tyllis seem destined for each other, but Beane’s script holds a few surprises in store.

For example, Xander, who’s underused in Act I, really blossoms in Act II, especially given Tam’s performance, which in an earlier Broadway era would be star-making. He’s like a cross between Johnny Galecki and John Leguizamo and yet wholly original. (His dance numbers are at once clumsy-looking and gorgeous, and very funny.) Along similar lines, Harold (Teddy Toye) all but disappears in the background until his big moment, near the end of the show.

Stars of tomorrow? In Broadway's heyday, Murin and Tam
might be household names already.

Beane’s script opts for many, many easy laughs through the use of stereotypes, and here his lack of ambition — of wit — is especially disappointing. He deserves kudos for setting up a multi-culti cast, but ultimately he doesn’t do much with the characters most of them play.

Hetaira is nothing but a bundle of tired ideas about big black ladies and heart-of-gold hookers — though you hardly mind while the charismatic Mikel is onstage. The Latin couple (Kat Nejat and Alexander Aguilar) continually remind us that they’re Latin, but there’s no real payoff, and precious little wordplay, even, in the Spanglish that Nejat almost unintelligibly deploys. Fly-for-a-white-boy Cinesias (Alex Wyse) makes a furtive attempt to transcend the stereotypes, yet by the time the show’s over, Beane lets him (and us) down. Beane forgot to write anything at all for Lampito (Katie Boren), the Tina Chang of this show.

Hetaira shares her wisdom, because what else
would a sassy black woman do in a Broadway musical?

Make no mistake, however: while some characters are written better than others, all the actors are tremendously appealing, and Lysistrata is a terrific showcase for them. Cute, sexy, and high-spirited, they sing and dance their hearts out, and I look forward to seeing every one of them again, soon and often. I had a good time, and overall Lysistrata Jones is a sturdy vehicle.

That said, it’s easy enough to see what went wrong here. With a cast of 12 non-famous actors and an “orchestra” of seven, larded with smartass references to Classical and pop cultures, the show belongs where it began, in regional theater companies and offbeat venues. Before any of those future players and producers can hear about your show, however, you’ve got to run on Broadway. The gamble was necessary, but it was a gamble.

Show me the money: This is as glitzy as Moyer’s set design gets.
(That’s not saying it isn’t effective.)
Lysistrata and the girls prepare to teach the boys a lesson.
Costumes by David C. Woolard & Thomas Charles LeGalley.

After all, ticket prices at the Walter Kerr break down to roughly $10 per actor and musician, and the set (by Allen Moyer) and staging — fun as they are — look as if they’re still in a gymnasium. There’s simply no way, even given the legendary (or urban-legendary) demands of theater unions, that this show cost very much to produce. And yet audiences were expected to pay as much (or nearly) for the unknown Lysistrata Jones as they’d pay for the more eye-popping, densely populated, and comfortably familiar Mary Poppins or Phantom of the Opera.

Lysistrata Jones nearly pulled off the trick, which is why I’m absolutely certain that the show will live on. Word of mouth was mostly excellent, and the review in the New York Times might have been written in electric ink, so glowing it was. Plucky producers with energetic actors are going to produce this show — and when it comes your way, I daresay you’ll have a good time.

Some of the illustrations come from the off-Broadway production,
at the Gym at Judson. I can hardly tell which are which.

*NOTE: The correct equivalent for war is rugby — as everyone knows.

Backlash Ensues over Santorum ‘Blah People’ Remark

2012-01-07T17:00:00.002-05:00

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum denied recently making comments about “black people’s lives” after receiving criticism for the remarks. Santorum took heat after saying, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”

During an appearance on FOX News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor, he denied ever making the comments, saying the remark was the result of “a little bit of a blurred word.” “I looked at that, and I didn’t say that,” Santorum told O’Reilly. “If you look at it, what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — ‘blah’— came out. And people said I said ‘black.’ I didn’t.”

-- from The Huffington Post

LITTLE BORES HEAD, NH -- Dull, uninteresting, run-of-the-mill, and downright mediocre people are up in arms following what they construe as “an unwarranted, frankly bigoted attack” from Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, a spokesman for the League of Boring Voters, Herbert Velveeta, said today.

Since attempting to excuse what many interpreted as a racial slur, Santorum has been on the receiving end of a frothing wave of anger from protesters who dog his campaign appearances but who otherwise wouldn’t have the gumption to say “Blah” to a goose.

“We thought he was one of us,” Velveeta said. “He even wears sweater vests! But until we get an apology, we’re going to bang the humdrum loudly, I promise you.”

Blah voters are estimated to represent approximately 30 percent of the American electorate, said statistician Ludlow Ogden Schnorr of the Nebraska Institute for Statistics. “Blah Americans can be found in every community, every faith, and many lines of work,” Schnorr said, “including chartered accountancy, bookkeeping, cheesemaking, computer repair, and — this will surprise a lot of people, given how exciting the field is perceived to be — even statistics.”

Despite his near-victory in the Iowa caucuses last week, the chances of the former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania may be affected negatively by the backlash in the aftermath of his “blah” remark, but many New Hampshire voters said they had yet to see Santorum’s appeal.

“I’ve never believed that Rick Santorum shared the values of rank-and-file Blah Americans,” said Jane Smith, of Happy Valley, NH. “He’s always talking about sex. It’s like the man is obsessed. Have you seen his Google site? Disgusting!”

Patsy & Edina Ride Again

2012-01-07T11:59:00.005-05:00

Seems like old times: Bubble reenacts the Royal Wedding.
Left to right: Jennifer Saunders (Edina), Jane Horrocks (Bubble), Julia Sawalha (Saffy), Joanna Lumley (Patsy), Christopher Malcolm (Justin).

On the strength of the first of three new episodes of Absolutely Fabulous, Jennifer Saunders is back in form. That episode was broadcast in Britain over the Christmas holiday; immediately, it leaked to the Internet, where I watched it. The official U.S. premiere is Sunday evening, on Logo, a cable channel.

It’s great fun to be reunited with Edina Monsoon (Saunders) and Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley), but especially so since many other AbFab specials have been such lackluster affairs. For a while, it even seemed possible that Saunders had forgotten how to write her show. Again and again, she’d resorted to a cavalcade of celebrity guest stars, whose turns were seldom as much fun as the misbehavior and interactions of the family/coven of Patsy, Eddy, Saffy, Mother, and Bubble. Moreover, the rich and famous stole time and focus away from those core characters. In short, we were cheated: promised AbFab but given something far less satisfying.

At least for the first new episode, Saunders has learned her lesson. We even get — bliss! — a long kitchen-table scene in which the women discuss the latest trends and gossip. Merely reading a magazine can lead reliably to a scene of great dialogue in this series, and here we get commentary on hot topics such as the Kardashians and Prince William’s wedding, brilliantly reenacted by Bubble. It seems like old times — and good times, at that.

Shopping, sweetie.

What makes such scenes funny is anger — of a sort that can’t quite be expressed when the real-life celebrity is standing next to you. Oftentimes, AbFab has struck me as an extended shriek of protest against the images of womanhood purveyed in popular culture. The central characters react accordingly: Patsy and Eddy try to keep up with every latest anything, Saffy lectures and abstains. When she allows herself the freedom, Saunders makes it all funny.

When the series first appeared in the United States, another analysis of AbFab held me captive: it seemed to be a show about two drag queens, bedecked in flamboyant costumes, prone to outrageous behavior and provocative conversation. (Small wonder that, from the first day forward, men started dressing up as Patsy and Eddy.) The catch was that women played the leads, making the show more palatable, if only a little less subversive, for a mainstream audience. Just as drag often comments on society’s notions of sex, so too does AbFab, and nowadays I hold to my original interpretation, if not quite so emphatically.

But that’s from the highbrow. From the heart, what you need to know about the AbFab reunion is that the familiar characters are delightfully true to themselves — despite some surprising new situations. (For instance, the person you’d least expect has just spent two years in prison.) That’s always been the strength of AbFab: taking two perfectly awful women and listening to what they say. We don’t really care what Elton John or Whoopi Goldberg says here; we care about Patsy and Eddy and their continuous collisions with the universe.

Eurydice Colette Clytemnestra Dido Bathsheba Rabelais Patricia Cocteau Stone

Plot is nearly superfluous in this show: what matters is never that Edina rents a house in France or drives her own car to the supermarket, but what she says (and what she drinks) when she gets there. As a writer, Saunders has sometimes misjudged her work, as when she decided that AbFab was really about a mother–daughter relationship, as if that were what set the show apart from anything that had ever been on television before. We’d seen plenty of mothers and daughters, but we’d never seen Patsy Stone.

One advantage, however, to Saunders’ long and sometimes erratic writing process is the development of character relationships that redeem the otherwise irredeemable Patsy and Eddy: this means that they’re still fun to hang out with. The ladies may take their sweet time getting around to it, but in the end, their devotion to one another (and even to Saffy) conquers all. At the same time, no matter how extravagant their excesses, we can see that Patsy and Eddy are admirable, in their way. There’s something courageous, even heroic, about their struggles to have a good time, to stay young forever, to get to the top and stay there.

The enduring alliance: Edina and Patsy

The first new episode includes some terrific scenes in which Eddy helps Patsy make sense of her finances (confronting a bureaucrat who, in earlier “specials,” would have been played by somebody famous), and in which Saffy is left a very long time wondering whether her mother will ever stick up for her in what is surely the direst conflict she’s had to face (with an ex-convict who, likewise, might have been played by a celebrity but is instead played by a highly competent actress).

All of the leading ladies look terrific, too. Jane Horrocks (Bubble) and June Whitfield (Mother) have aged most notably, but they’re still charmers — and mercifully, the Katie Grin character seems to have vanished. (Saunders devised Katie to give the chronically underused Horrocks more to do, as well as a more mature role than that of the adolescent Bubble — but I’ve always found Katie relentlessly unfunny, uninteresting, and unsatisfying.) Julia Sawalha looks exactly the same as ever, but they’ve given up any pretense to Saffy’s still being a schoolgirl. Now she’s creeping up on middle age — which of course is what she was born for.

Clearly, I’m not the only one pleased with the results of this reunion. In the press, Jennifer Saunders has begun talking again about an AbFab movie, to be set in the South of France. Much of the English-speaking world probably knows nothing of the terrible French movie that was already made, years ago. Having endured the French version, on an airplane from which, remarkably, I did not jump, I might not be enthusiastic about the prospects of a new movie — even an authentic one.

But on the strength of this reunion, I say, “Bring it on.” I can use a good dose of extravagance and audacity right about now.

What’s wrong with this picture? Everything!
Josiane Balasko as Eddie Mousson (French for “monsoon”) with Johnny Hallyday’s real-life ex, the great Nathalie Baye, as Patricia. Boy, she must really have needed the money. Absolument Fabuleux (2001) set back the cause of French cinema by approximately four centuries: now they’re going to have to invent movies all over again.

William Duell

2012-01-06T11:05:00.008-05:00

Like the great character actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Duell pops up in dozens of roles. Here he is in his recurring role as an informant in the short-lived TV series Police Squad!
I imagine he looked much like this when playing Filch.

The New York Times reports that the character actor William Duell has died, at the age of 88, and in his obituary the Paper of Record very nearly does justice to the length and varied breadth of his career. Long after the heyday of quirky character actors in Hollywood, Duell lent spice and interest to dozens of movies and plays. He was never a star, as we understand these things, but he was a lovely man, whom I had the pleasure of meeting once. The Times does give you some sense of that.

What the Times neglects to mention is that Duell set and held a record for the longest-running performance in an off-Broadway play. Starting in 1954, and ending in 1961, Duell played in the ensemble of the legendary revival of Weill’s Threepenny Opera, in Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation at the Theater de Lys in New York.

As Filch, one of Macheath’s gang, as well as the Mounted Messenger, Duell became a crucial part of one of the most important cultural events in postwar America.

Yes, you do know that face:
Duell in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Outside the tiny theater, the Cold War and the Witch Hunt raged — but inside, dissenting voices rose in song. Blacklisted actors, including my beloved Madeline Gilford, found work in the show, and a steady stream of lefty intellectuals at the box office guaranteed the show its long run.

But it wasn’t only the congregation of those who were already persuaded to whom the Threepenny choir sang. Surely most of the people who have heard Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darrin’s recordings of “Mack the Knife” (which use Blitzstein’s lyrics and incorporate Lotte Lenya’s name among the list of Mack’s conquests) have had no idea where the song came from. I certainly didn’t, when I first heard it.

What’s more, the Theater de Lys Threepenny inspired a younger generation of smart, progressive kids; its score provided their anthems, and, among those who were artists, the show itself helped to focus their ambitions. When I found out that Madeline Kahn was a Weill fan in her youth, everything about her mind and her sense of theater became clear to me.

Poster from the Theater de Lys production.
Today the theater, on Christopher Street, bears the name
of its most celebrated producer, Lucille Lortel.

Bright young New Yorkers went out and learned about Bertolt Brecht, and tried to adapt his ideas for their own shows — very often in tiny little theaters “off-Broadway,” a locale that hadn’t even existed before Threepenny.

We’re still feeling the effects of those performances and calculating the show’s influence. As a training ground for actors, too, the show was unparalleled: among the cast members over the seven years were Beatrice Arthur, Ed Asner, Estelle Parsons, John Astin, Jerry Orbach, Jane Connell, Jerry Stiller, and hundreds more. Going through the old playbills in the Weill archive, I marveled — and without going through them again, I can’t give you anything like a complete list of the distinguished names. Suffice to say that, for decades, you couldn’t turn on the TV or watch a movie or go to a play without seeing an alumnus of Threepenny.

Some 700 actors cycled through the cast of that show, creating a landmark in American culture — but only one actor stuck it out to the end. His name was William Duell, and I thought you ought to know.

Meeting Duell in a rehearsal studio many years ago, I talked to him about Threepenny. (At the time, I nurtured a little fantasy of writing a book of interviews with the cast of the revival.) He was immensely proud not only of his record-setting run but also of the show itself.

NOTE: William Duell’s obituary in Playbill makes prominent mention of Threepenny, and reminds me that Duell took part in Richard Foreman’s Lincoln Center revival of Threepenny in the 1970s. Although I now recall that Duell himself made a point of mentioning it when we spoke, I’d forgotten completely when I wrote this essay this morning. So I really ought not be so quick to criticize the Times obituary-writer.

Survey: Iowa Voters Ruining It for Everybody, Reporters Say

2012-01-03T10:00:00.002-05:00

CLIMAX, IOWA* -- A new survey released just minutes ago finds that an overwhelming majority of news reporters believe Iowa voters are on the brink of spoiling the process for everybody.

“For months, we’ve been happily going about our work, predicting winners and losers, guessing at who’s ahead and who’s behind and what that means, without anybody casting a single vote,” Tess Harding of the AP told pollsters. “All that’s about to change. Thanks for nothing, Iowa.”

This morning’s survey figures showed reporters in agreement, with 29 percent in a comfortable lead over 17 percent. Among pollsters, a critical demographic segment here in Iowa, there was no clear winner, however, with 14 percent speculating, 12 percent predicting, 11 percent horse racing, 9 percent self-pitying, and 8 percent contemptuous.

“Clearly, this is one of the most exciting horse races we’ve seen so far in this election cycle,” Ann Mitchell of Politico said. “I’ve never seen so many horses! Also cows.”

“The volatility is astonishing, and the ‘anyone-but-Iowa’ segment just seems to careen from one rival to another,” the Des Moines Register’s Henry Connell said of the latest survey. “I don’t think you can discount the importance of the Tea Party-slash-Occupy Wall Street-style discontent among reporters here, which translates into an almost palpable restlessness and desire to throw the bums out. It’s neck-and-neck, hold-your-breath excitement here!”

Diz Moore of interrupted Connell, saying, “The really significant trend, however, is — oh, who am I kidding? Once Iowans start to vote, there’ll be nothing left to live for.”

According to today’s survey, 85 percent of political reporters overall demanded another survey, for old time’s sake, while a statistically negligible 4 percent preferred sticking their fingers in their ears and singing “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

This represents a marked shift from two weeks ago, when Iowa reporters favored “Jingle Bells.” Analysts say the trend away from Christmas carols reflects nationwide preferences among other analysts of analysis.

“Before today, basically, we could make it all up — and very often we did,” Sam Craig of The Washington Times said. “After all, who could prove we were wrong? The only hard data was the stuff we generated ourselves! Now actual voters will get involved, muddying the water by creating verifiable statistics of their own. Rank amateurs!”

With striking unanimity, political reporters and analysts told pollsters they believe that actual voting could “shake up the field” of candidates, with serious consequences.

“So Iowa votes, and the next thing you know, some of these clowns are going to drop out,” Chuck Tatum of CNN said. “Instead of a half-dozen colorful candidates, you’ll have just one or two. Do you have any idea how hard it’s going to be to come up with stuff to say about them, day after day, hour after hour, until November?”

Some analysts recommended caution, but Hildy Johnson-Burns of Gallup spoke for many colleagues when she urged Iowa voters to postpone the caucus until a later date.

“Actual voting results will provide us with material for, what, a couple of hours? And then what?” Johnson-Burns said. “I’m warning you, Iowa, for your own sake. If you screw this up, we’ll have to pack it up and take our business elsewhere. New Hampshire is starting to look mighty appealing.”

*NOTE: I did not make up that name. The reporters’ names are all from classic Hollywood films.

‘Glee’-nalysis: Lessons Learned from Sharing the Story of My (Possibly) Gay Cat

2012-01-02T15:40:00.012-05:00

Brittany (Morris) with Tubbington

Not long ago, I wrote about my cat, Mr. Whiskas, and his tom-crush on Lord Tubbington, a character on the television show Glee. Whenever Brittany (Heather Morris) picks up Lord Tubbington, Mr. Whiskas jumps on my lap and mews for me to hold him the same way. He has only to hear the name “Tubbington,” and he comes scampering into the den, sits down in front of the television, and waits expectantly for his beloved. And you should hear the caterwauling throughout any Glee episode in which Lord Tubbington doesn’t appear! (Which is most of them, I’m sorry to say.)

It seemed like such a cute story. But then the e-mails, phone calls, and certified letters started to pour in. I wasn’t prepared for the reactions.

“Animal abuse!” some cried. “You’re exploiting your cat’s private emotions for your own benefit!”

“How humiliating!” other people said. “The other kitties are laughing at him already, I hope you realize. And that story is going to be on the Internet for thousands of years, haunting poor Mr. Whiskas!”

“Mr. Whiskas has the right to his own sexuality, without having it broadcast and advertised all over the planet,” said others still. “Coming out should be a personal choice, not dictated by others.”

Funny, they never said a word when I shared the stories of my 6-year-old possibly gay son, my 14-year-old possibly gay daughter, my 19-year-old possibly gay niece, my 37-year-old possibly gay neighbor, or that fortysomething possibly gay guy I keep seeing at the grocery store. (He’s always squeezing the endive. Endive!)

Not to mention the story of my uncle Claude. No “possibly” about that one, right?

“There’s no such thing as a gay cat,” others said. “And if there is, I don’t want to hear about it.”

Bigots! Right here in America! Can you believe it?

Some of the comments I got were even threatening.

“You’d just better hope I never catch you alone in some dark, deserted alley,” one writer said. “I’d grab you roughly by the shoulders, throw you to the ground, and force you to watch this season’s totally terrible Christmas episode over and over until you begged for mercy.”

Well, if that’s the price I have to pay for showing my possibly gay cat that I accept him unconditionally, that nothing can change my love for him, and that really it’s no big deal if he prefers tom to pussy — so be it.

But I’m surprised and saddened to learn how narrow-minded some people can be. Especially when I also hear from literally hundreds of Americans who think their cats may be gay, too. It only strengthens my resolve to be the best cat-mommy ever.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to take Mr. Whiskas to his Zumba class.

Because one Tubbington is enough.

Romney Compares Obama to Character from a Kirsten Dunst Movie

2012-01-02T08:46:00.013-05:00

Romney looks forward to challenging Obama at the polls in November. “Bring it on,” the candidate said.

DAVENPORT, IOWA -- President Obama is like a character played in movies by actress Kirsten Dunst, long-time Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said in a stump speech today.

“Americans only think they like Obama,” Romney said. “People talk about him, they think about him all the time, probably, but without listening to what he’s really saying. They obsess over him like they did that pretty girl Kirsten Dunst played in Virgin Suicides, without ever really paying attention to the real problems underneath,” Romney said.

Also like Dunst, Obama’s name doesn’t sound American, Romney said.

The former Governor of Massachusetts added that if the parents in the film had been Mormon instead of Roman Catholic, and if they’d had five sons instead of daughters, there wouldn’t have been any problem. “But then I guess you wouldn’t have had a movie, either, so it’s kind of a wash.

“But then have you noticed how Obama is constantly cheerleading for his socialist agenda, just the way Kirsten Dunst was cheerleading in Bring It On?” Romney said. “And isn’t Obama sucking the life out of the American economy, just the way Kirsten Dunst sucked blood in Interview with the Vampire?”

Romney conceded that Obama still manages to be adorable,
even when pursuing deadly policies.

When voters size up the prospective candidates for the White House in 2012, Romney said, they should remember another Dunst film, Little Women (1994).

“You sure don’t want to vote for a Beth, do you?” Romney said. “She’s only going to die in office. And Jo is too erratic, sort of a Gingrich type. You never know what she’s going to do next.”

Winona Ryder (Jo), Claire Danes (Beth), Trini Alvarado (Meg),
Dunst (Amy), and Susan Sarandon (Marmee)

“I’m much more of a Meg than an Amy,” Romney said. “And I’m not ashamed to admit that. Meg [played by Trini Alvarado] was the responsible one. Sure, Amy [played by Dunst] may be more entertaining, and she ends up with Christian Bale, but in the final analysis, what America needs is a Meg. Am I right?”

Ronney also compared Obama to the character played by Dunst in the film Marie Antoinette.

“The President wears clothes well, I have to hand him that,” Romney said. “He’s got a nice build. I bet he’d look good in pastels, satin, maybe a little lace. And he’s a good dancer, too.”

In conclusion, Romney said, “Really, in many ways, President Obama is a lot like Kirsten Dunst, when you think about it.”

“Also, Obamacare is like Harry Osborn [James Franco],” Romney suggested. “He may look attractive, but he’s the next Green Goblin.”

Following Romney’s speech, Iowa Republican Earl Earlson, 47, a welder and father of three, told reporters covering the campaign that he remained unimpressed and would probably vote for Ron Paul instead.

“Governor Romney and I just don’t share the same values at heart,” Earlson said. “I guess I’m more of a Reese Witherspoon kind of guy.”

Romney’s critics dismissed the speech as a brazen attempt to court the Kirsten Right, voters who have long suspected the candidate’s commitment to their cause, and whose presence has been noted increasingly at campaign events for Romney’s rivals. “Legalize Mary Jane” banners seen at Ron Paul’s events, for example, are a clear reference to the character played by Dunst in the Spider-Man movies.

Romney declined to take questions from reporters, but through his office released a statement: “This will be a campaign about issues, not personalities,” Romney said, “just like that fine film by Alexander Payne about the high-school election, from 1999, starring Matthew Broderick.”

‘Enchanted’ for New Year’s

2011-12-31T16:03:00.004-05:00

Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Hawt!
Joyce DiDonato as Sycorax

This afternoon I’m listening to an archival broadcast of Die Fledermaus from 1951, at the Metropolitan Opera. Among the many Golden Era opera singers in the cast, we’ll hear Jack Gilford in his legendary turn as Frosch the Jailer. It’s a New Year’s Eve party, and great, giddy fun of the sort that only opera houses can achieve.

This year’s New Year’s party at the Met is a new work, Jeremy Sams’ The Enchanted Island, a pastiche of two Shakespeare plays and several Baroque composers, starring some of the brightest of the singers of our own Golden Era. I saw the final dress rehearsal, after which I complained so bitterly about Sams’ lyrics that I may have slighted the reasons that, in fact, I had a great time at the show.

So, as a preview of what Met audiences will experience this evening — as an invitation of sorts to the New Year’s party — here’s a rundown of what I really liked about The Enchanted Island.

Jack Gilford and Patrice Munsel in Fledermaus.

The Look of the Show

Director Phelim McDermott, set designer Julian Crouch, costume designer Kevin Pollard, and graphic designers 59 Productions are seeking 21st-century solutions to the challenges of 18th-century stagecraft. To put it mildly, this is something that more producers of Baroque works ought to do — whereas in most productions, almost nobody even tries.

Baroque opera was meant to be as dazzling visually as it was vocally, packing in elaborate costumes, fancy sets that did stuff, gods and monsters, machines and explosions! (And, of course, big hats with feathers.) Everything was meant to be attention-grabbing and otherworldly, the sort of entertainment that an 18th-century audience would go out of its way to enjoy.

Trouble is, that stuff is expensive, and nowadays, Baroque opera isn’t a guaranteed success at the box-office. Thus we keep getting stripped-down productions with little to no set, modern-day costumes, and as little heroism and divinity as possible. We put up with it, because we’re lucky enough to live in an era when truly great singers of this music walk among us. But I’ve very seldom encountered a physical production that even attempted to rival the musical razzle-dazzle, and really only the Met’s old Rinaldo (shared with Houston Grand Opera and a Canadian company I’ll have to look up) came anywhere near the 18th-century aesthetic.

Topic: Kansans do Handel really well. Discuss among yourselves.
Ramey as Argante.

When Samuel Ramey, as Argante, made his entrance on a chariot pulled by a smoke-puffing dragon, he looked about ten feet tall even without the elaborate turban — and then he opened his mouth and sang like Samuel Ramey. I knew I was in good hands.

The Met’s Enchanted Island uses computer graphics and ingenuity, mixed with a bit of old-fashioned stagecraft (like throwing glittering confetti on people when they’re put under a spell) and imagery (the proscenium, Prospero’s cell, and Sycorax’s cave are meant to look like antique woodcuts), to create a show that feels true to its own nature. (Compare it with the new Faust.)

Do I wish some of the designs were prettier? Yes. Am I relieved that this isn’t just another Gelb-era flat box of bold solid colors and computerized gizmos? Also yes. It’s a step in the right direction.

A scene design from Enchanted Island

And because The Enchanted Island is based primarily on Shakespeare’s Tempest, the aesthetics matter. Shakespeare wrote his play hoping to capitalize on the new taste for courtly masques. The masque is the true spiritual progenitor of Baroque opera. Visually, McDermott’s production ties these aesthetics together quite smartly.

The Shakespeare of the Show

Sams has constructed a neat fusion of two plays into a whole that mostly makes sense. When he encounters dramaturgical potholes, it’s because he’s tried to add something: Prospero’s interest in forgiveness arrives much too early in Enchanted Island and makes it seem as if he’s been watching too much Dr. Phil; and likewise Neptune’s strange sort of midlife crisis (refusing to use his own divine power until Ariel believes in him) and his interest in environmentalism. (When he starts singing about pollution, you’ll be baffled: his undersea palace is sparkling clean.)

But I especially admired the way Sams introduces Miranda and Caliban into the Midsummer shenanigans. The characters interact appropriately and satisfyingly — Caliban even becomes a sort of surrogate Bottom. We’re instantly taken back to the Shakespeare productions of Handel’s day and age, when textual fidelity didn’t matter so long as the show was good. And this is in keeping, too, with the Met’s intentions behind the piece: to celebrate New Year’s. Nobody dies in Tempest or Midsummer, and everyone reconciles. Auld acquaintance ain’t forgot, but we move on to something that promises to be much nicer.

Ariel (Danielle de Niese) plays like Puck, mixing up the lovers.

It’s worth noting, too, that the strongest lyrics in the show are found in Caliban’s aria “If the air should hum with noises,” which paraphrases the Shakespearean Caliban’s haunting speech “Be not afear’d! The isle is full of noises.”

The Sound of the Music

There are many kinds of Baroque fans. Some are purists, and they’re the ones who will tell you it’s jarring and blasphemous to mix the works of Handel and Rameau, of Leclair and Vivaldi. But honestly, there’s no pleasing them, so why bother trying?

I am merely the sort of Baroque enthusiast who owns multiple recordings of Ariodante — and who loves theater. I’m old enough to remember so-called early-music specialists such as Christopher Hogwood, who treated the music as if with tweezers, dissecting rather than conducting, and the result was dry, bloodless performances.

William Christie, by contrast, may conduct period-instrument ensembles, but he’s pure electricity. He didn’t take up the cause of French Baroque music because it was a good career opportunity — nobody else was doing it — he did it because he feels passionately about this art form, and you hear that in his conducting.

Moreover, you hear it in the performances of the people who work with him. The first time I heard Joyce DiDonato in Handel, he was at the helm (Hercules at the Palais Garnier, in 2004), and she put on a simply staggering show, rich in psychological nuance and dazzling in vocal effects.

David Daniels as Prospero

With the countertenor David Daniels on board, you know The Enchanted Island is seaworthy. Daniels was the first countertenor I heard who really understood what it means to be the hero of a Baroque opera, and that dramatic fire fills his singing voice.

The Kids in the Show

Well, “kids” may be a relative term, but with the New York City Opera effectively assassinated and buried, the Met will bear a greater responsibility than ever for grooming young talent — American, when possible. I daresay it’s time to reexamine the ancient dream of a “Mini Met.”

The Enchanted Island gives several singers a terrific spotlight, starting with Anthony Roth Costanzo (as Ferdinand), the countertenor whose skyrocket is only just starting to take off. A Princeton-educated polymath, he’s scarily smart, boy-band cute, and a thrilling vocalist.

Costanzo

I do wish Costanzo had more to do in this particular production, but he and the other “young lovers” in the company are mightily impressive: Lisette Oropesa (Miranda), Layla Claire (Helena), Elizabeth DeShong (Hermia), Paul Appleby (Demetrius), and Elliot Madore (Lysander) combined radiant voices and first-rate comedic chops. Also, an appealing quartet, commenting a couple of times on the action, featured Ashley Emerson, Monica Yunus, Philippe Castagner, and Tyler Simpson.

The strength of all of their performances speaks well of training grounds such as the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, and it will speak even better of the Met if the company keeps finding good parts for these singers. Yes, let’s start looking for that Mini Met, please.

The Divo

There’s an undeniable, irresistibly satisfying charge that goes up and down your spine when Plácido Domingo makes his entrance as Neptune. To see him in his undersea palace, surrounded by a chorus of mer-people, some of whom are “swimming” in midair behind him, is its own kind of fantasy. And then he starts singing.

At an age when other tenors have long since hung up their shields and helmets (or make you wish they had), Domingo still wields a flexible, clean sound with its trademark burnished-gold tone. Is Baroque really what we expect to hear from him? Of course not — but he sounds terrific, and he’s such a smart musician that he finds a style that strikes you as absolutely right. How else would a god sound?

Costume designs for Neptune (with Domingo’s face pasted in) and the mermaids.

The Fun of It All

As an actress, Joyce seems liberated (one of her favorite words) by the role of Sycorax. I was reminded of the Let’s Pretend games of childhood, when you’d grab the kitchen broom and run around the back yard, “flying” and playing the witch. Stooped and dressed in haggy rags, she’s having a high old time, especially in the comedic romance scenes, in which Sycorax is constantly meddling, perfectly in harmony with the silly business around her.

Ad yet Joyce is capable, a few scenes later, of eliciting real sympathy in a poignant lament she sings, by way of apology, to Caliban, the son she’s manipulated (for his own good, at least as she sees it). She sounds amazing, of course, sustaining long lines and spinning off filigree, but to me what’s really striking is her ability to weave the many strands of her character into one seamless, credible, (vocally) shimmering fabric.

By the evening’s end, Sycorax has gone glamorous, much like the Witch in Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Joyce wears a golden gown with cleavage to make you gasp — and remember that, yes, Italian men do love her. Plus, it’s she who gets the pièce de résistance, the big feathered hat I’d been waiting for. Also a big feathered cape.

Then Domingo took her hand, and I said, “Yes! That’s opera, baby!”

So, go! It’s a good time, and what’s more, the Met is trying something different, and it’s worthy of our support and encouragement, into the New Year and beyond.

The Enchanted Island
Metropolitan Opera
31 December 2011 – 30 January 2012
For more information, click here.
HD Simulcast 21 January

Not just HD, but 3D? (Namely, DiDonato, Domingo, and Daniels.)

L’Isola Incantata

2011-12-29T09:30:00.012-05:00

Castaways: David Daniels (Professor), Luca Pisaroni (Skipper), Anthony Roth Costanzo (Gilligan), Lisette Oropesa (Mary Ann), Layla Claire (Ginger), Plácido Domingo (Mr. Howell), and Joyce DiDonato (Mrs. Howell).

There’s so much to recommend The Enchanted Island, a new pastiche opera that will have its premiere at the Met on New Year’s Eve. It marks a reunion between Joyce DiDonato, who makes so much of my life not only bearable but special, and William Christie, the conductor who, by dint of his pioneering revival of French Baroque music, is one of my primary cultural heroes. Joyce and Christie collaborated on Handel’s Hercules, which I saw at the Palais Garnier, several years ago, on one of the great nights of my career as an audience.

Add to these two wonderful artists such estimable colleagues as David Daniels, Luca Pisaroni, Lisette Oropesa, and Anthony Roth Costanzo, plus some singers I hadn’t heard before, including the especially impressive Layla Claire and Elliot Madore. Then toss in Plácido Domingo, treated like the divine force he truly is, and it was a sure thing I’d float out of the Met on a fluffy Baroque cloud of Handel and Vivaldi and Rameau and all the other composers whose music is so thrillingly performed in this opera. I attended the final dress rehearsal, and by all means, you should rush to buy tickets.

The tiny ship was tossed…

That’s not to say I don’t have reservations. Jeremy Sams has constructed an ingenious framework for all this fabulousness, fusing elements of Shakespeare’s Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream, sometimes with winning comedy. Unfortunately, Enchanted Island also features English lyrics by somebody else called Jeremy Sams (can’t possibly be the same guy); these sound as if he wrote them like Mad Libs and using a rhyming dictionary. Again and again, a character steps forward to sing, “I feel [blank].” Now, the original arias don’t contain great poetry, perhaps, but at least their authors were acquainted with metaphor and other literary values: for instance, when Julius Caesar rescues Cleopatra, she doesn’t sing, “I feel happy,” she sings about a ship, battered by storms but arriving safely in the harbor.

Many, perhaps most, of Sams’ lyrics are jaw-droppingly, head-slappingly, Pinth-Garnell bad. The low point is Miranda’s entrance aria, in which she tells Prospero, “I have no words for this feeling I am feeling,” which is not only a flat statement that would embarrass a third-rate pop tunesmith, it’s also an admission that Sams ran out of ideas.

You may be tempted to do what I did, which is to set your MetTitles® to German (Italian and French aren’t available) to distract yourself; or you may choose do what Stendhal would have done, which is to forget the words altogether and make up your own story.

Ultimately, it’s not too early for the Met to start planning for the revival, and I urge one and all to do the right thing: sing in Italian. At least the rhyming will be easier. But while they’re at it, the Met could simplify Sams’ plot — five acts’ worth of business crammed into two very, very, very long acts — and make The Enchanted Island even easier for contemporary audiences to follow, with most of the same cast and just a few minor adjustments. My version is entitled L’Isola Incantata, ossia Gilligan.

Sit right back, and you’ll hear a tale….

SYNOPSIS

There’s a crisis on the island! Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell III are fighting! Mr. Howell (Plácido Domingo) continues to live in splendor, while Mrs. Howell (Joyce DiDonato) dresses in rags and schemes to murder her husband, possibly using the poison that a Headhunter (Danielle DeNiese) has left behind.

With his vast understanding of Psychology 101, the Professor (David Daniels) acts as go-between, counseling the couple but secretly hoping to marry Mrs. Howell himself, since they’ve been on this island a long time and he can see that Ginger (Layla Claire) and Mary Ann (Lisette Oropesa) will never sleep with him.

Meanwhile, the Skipper (Luca Pisaroni) and Gilligan (Anthony Roth Costanzo) are making one last-ditch attempt to repair the Minnow and get off the island. Just then, Jungle Boy (Elliot Madore), a TV actor, arrives on the island to do research for his new adventure series. Can he rescue the Castaways?

There’s high jinks and suspense galore, and also some terrific singing. In the Act III finale, the Howells are reconciled, and Joyce gets to wear a pretty dress and a hat with big feathers, which is not only what Mrs. Howell would wear, it’s also the costuming hallmark of any decent Baroque pastiche opera.

Mr. Gelb, you know where to find me!

Here, the cast listens to a Saturday afternoon radio broadcast.

Lautner Magazine Cover Is Fake, ‘People’ Reports

2011-12-28T13:45:00.001-05:00

Widely circulated on the Internet, a People Magazine cover suggesting that Taylor Lautner is interesting is a hoax, a spokeswoman for the magazine said today. A representative for Lautner confirmed that the actor is “100 percent dull.”

“Taylor Lautner: Out & Proud” the fake magazine headline read, with the teaser paragraph, “Tired of hiding behind a vapid exterior, the Twilight star opens up: ‘I have a rich inner life, complex life experience, and nuanced global perspectives. You would probably enjoy a conversation with me.’”

“Not one word is true,” People spokeswoman Julie Farin told reporters. “I don’t know where the crazies come up with this stuff. It’s just a Photoshop stunt that went viral.”

Lautner doing something, somewhere, for some reason.

Lautner fans worldwide expressed surprise and disappointment. “I really wanted him to be interesting,” said one admirer, Bella Meyer, 17, of Kalamazoo. “I mean, I really wanted him to do something or say something or be something that might justify the hours I spend looking at pictures of him without a shirt. But no such luck.”

“At least he’s still the highest-paid teen actor in Hollywood,” another Lautner fan, Dustin Brayden, 16, of Walla Walla. “That’s kind of interesting, right?”

Lautner turns 20 on February 11, 2012.

Kaurismäki’s ‘Le Havre’

2011-12-23T11:45:00.000-05:00

André Vilms and Blondin Miguel

Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre is such a gift-box of delights that I’m almost hesitant to tell you anything about it, but for fear that you’ll miss it altogether. (The movie continues to run at New York’s AFI Center through 3 January.) The Finnish film director, working for the first time in France, treats a subject that is torn from the headlines, politically sensitive, and not unrelated to his own status: illegal immigration, the “sans papiers” and “clandestins” who periodically dominate French discourse, until they’re forgotten yet again.

Torn from the headlines: Blondin Miguel as Idrissa

Kaurismäki focuses on a little boy from Gabon (Blondin Miguel) who’s stranded in the eponymous city, tracked down by a wily detective (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and reliant on the goodwill of a working-class French neighborhood. If you need any confirmation that Kaurismäki, a foreigner himself, is welcome in the notoriously insular community of French cinema, you get it soon enough, when no less a figure than Jean-Pierre Léaud shows up. Léaud was Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel, of course, an icon of the seventh art, but he doesn’t make many movies anymore. His participation, even in an unsympathetic role (arguably the only one in the picture), lends Kaurismäki’s freshman effort the greatest seal of approval you could want.

Your own approval is virtually guaranteed, from the loopy humor to the eccentric characters and a story that, despite its outward reserve, is frankly heartwarming. It’s a mystery how anybody can take illegal immigration and turn it into the feel-good picture of the year, without a second’s worth of cloying or grandstanding — but that’s just what Aki Kaurismäki has done.

“Miracles do happen”: Vilms and Outinen

The great wonder of Le Havre is not that Kaurismäki finds so much visual beauty in run-down neighborhoods, ports, and bars, in France as in Finland, but how well his patented style — so much of which seems to be based on a particularly Finnish repertoire of quirks and deadpan — works in a French context, with mostly French actors. The acting in a Kaurismäki movie is deliberate, about half a beat off the rhythms of those of any French movie, lending each word and gesture a certain artificiality, yes, but guaranteeing that you’ll pay attention. And here, as in The Man without a Past, Kaurismäki shows us a marginalized community that looks after its own: very rarely, and perhaps only in Robert Guédiguian’s Marius et Jeannette (from 1997, it also co-starred Darroussin), have I seen the like in contemporary French cinema, a sort of updated, European, unabashedly Socialist Frank Capra sensibility by which, when given the chance, people turn out better at heart than you first expect them to be.

Volcanic activity: Vilms and Outinen

Kaurismäki has brought along his favorite actress, Kati Outinen, whose long, weak-chinned, dispassionate face and comparably flat line readings uplift his films so cunningly. At first she doesn’t seem to be acting at all, much less feeling anything, but as you watch, you sense a vibrant, passionate, beautiful woman within: it’s underplaying as volcanic activity on a microscopic level. Here she’s given the name Arletty, a tribute to the great actress of the Golden Age of French cinema and another assertion of Kaurismäki’s fitness to work here.*

Protagonist meets antagonist: Vilms and Darroussin. The detective is costumed like a character from a graphic novel, but he’s decidedly three-dimensional.

Arletty’s husband, Marcel, is our protagonist: a failed writer turned itinerant bootblack, he finds and shelters young Idrissa and tries to help him on his way to London, where the boy’s mother is waiting. (Typically for this film’s melting-pot conception of immigration, she works in a Chinese laundry.) He’s played by André Vilms with the face and florid voice of a matinée idol gone to seed, more theatrical than the other actors in the film and yet not discordantly so: it’s a lovely performance, beautifully matched by Miguel’s sangfroid.

Of course, you can’t prevail on your own — or at least, you can’t in a Kaurismäki movie. Marcel enlists the aid of his neighbors, including the soft-hearted boulangère Yvette (Evelyne Didi); the tougher, wiser Claire (Elina Salo), who runs the local bar; a fellow bootblack who, it turns out, is also an illegal immigrant (Quoc Dung Nguyen); and an Arab grocer (François Monnie). Their sense of community solidarity is exemplary, and intended to be, I suspect, in a country where politicians from Marine LePen to Nicolas Sarkozy continually seek to exploit xenophobia for their own purposes. But even though Marcel’s last name is Marx, Kaurismäki never mentions politics at all.

He sent her husband up the river, but what’s a little thing like that between friends? Darroussin and Salo.

Similarly, although Darroussin devotes much, if not quite all, of his career to projects that promote his left-wing political views, very seldom do I feel he’s hitting me over the head with agitprop. One reason is that he so often conveys the quick play of his critical intelligence, and the complexity of any situation. As the black-hatted police detective, he reminds us that an antagonist isn’t necessarily a villain, and he’s having a great time here — as is Léaud, though to tell you much more about him would risk spoiling the picture for you.

And that is the last thing I want to do. If you’re in New York, hurry to the IFC Center; if you’re not, pounce on this movie the minute it comes near. By remaining true to himself, Kaurismäki has made something fresh and exciting and somehow thoroughly French. It’s a movie to savor and to prize.

Miguel, with Laika — who also gets star billing in the picture.
That should tell you something about Kaurismäki’s sensibility.

*Among Arletty’s many great films is Marcel Carné’s Hôtel du Nord (1938), another study of a down-and-out French neighborhood and the colorful characters who live there.

Kindly Angel Helps NYU Professor Repent for Giving James Franco a ‘D’

2011-12-20T11:42:00.016-05:00

Santana (center) at the press conference, with members of his family.

NEW YORK CITY -- A contrite José Angel Santana should never have given actor James Franco a “D” in his graduate course, the former New York University professor told reporters today, saying, “I never realized the mistake I was making, the consequences that my thoughtless behavior might have for millions of moviegoers and the people who read New York Magazine.” Santana has alleged in a lawsuit that he was fired by NYU in retaliation for Franco’s low grade.

According to Santana, he was visited during the night of December 18 by a guardian angel (second class) named Clarence Oddbody, who told him, “You’ve been given a great gift, José: a chance to live on the same planet as James Franco.”

Santana with his guardian angel, Clarence Oddbody (left).

Oddbody went on to show Santana what the world would be like if James Franco didn’t get straight “A”s in all of his many graduate programs, and if he were, instead, an ordinary actor who made ordinary movies like Annapolis and Eat Pray Love instead of Howl and The Broken Tower.

“Even my hometown of Bedford Falls became a nightmare vision of cruelty and self-interest, all because of what I’d done to James Franco,” Santana said. “Still, I didn’t hit rock-bottom until I saw lovely Mary Bailey, who’s a hardworking reporter for New York Magazine. Without James Franco to write about, she would be a lonely, repressed spinster librarian. Actually handling books! She even wore eyeglasses! Oh, the horror. The horror.”

Big man on campuses

Franco attended only two out of 14 classes in Santana’s one-semester course. The star of such films as Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Pineapple Express, Franco recently became eligible to marry any man in New York State.

Santana has brought a lawsuit against NYU in connection with his firing. He alleges that a tacit reward system operates at the school, whereby professors who give Franco good grades receive acting and directing jobs in Franco’s projects. Beyond this, Santana says, graffiti in the faculty men’s room advertises lavish sexual favors from an unnamed Franco fan who is willing to do anything at all to see his idol succeed.

“But seriously, what was I thinking?” Santana said. “He’s James Freakin’ Franco. He doesn’t need to show up to class — he already knows everything! This is a guy who can make Your Highness and Tristan + Isolde — and still have a career. Really, I ought to be taking lessons from him.”

No Gucci Loafer: Franco is enrolled in several graduate programs, while pursuing his career as an actor, writer, director, producer, artist, model, rapper, and certified public accountant.

At the press conference, Santana was joined by dozens of his closest friends and neighbors, who sang “Auld Lang Syne” with him and gave him the money they’ve been saving for a divorce, if every they got a husband.

Santana said he was optimistic, and his daughter Zuzu concurred: “Teacher says, ‘Every time a bell rings, José Angel gets his job back.’ Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

UPDATE: NYU registrar Henry F. Potter has told reporters that, because Santana is no longer a member of the faculty, it is now too late for him to change Franco’s grade to an “A.” “Look at Santana!” Potter said. “He used to be so cocky. He was going to go out and conquer the world. He once called me a warped, frustrated, old man! What is he but a warped, frustrated young man? A miserable little professor crawling in here on his hands and knees and begging for help. Well, happy New Year to him — in community college!”

A New ‘Faust’ at the Met: Le Docteur Atomique

2011-12-20T07:44:00.023-05:00

Pape, I can hear you: Méphistophélès sings of the Golden Calf.

By rights the headline of Saturday night’s performance of Gounod’s Faust at the Metropolitan Opera should have been the house debut of conductor Pierre Vallet, an auspicious occasion in itself and a promising display of bench strength in a company recently shaken by the declining health of the once-indefatigable James Levine. The Met needs good conductors right now, and on the strength of this performance, it’s got a new one to call upon.

But in the event, it was an accident that made the news: during Act III, the stalwart mezzo-soprano Wendy White, as Marthe, dropped some eight feet through a gap between a backstage platform and one of the galleries that flank the set, designed (if that’s the right word for it) by Robert Brill. Bass René Pape signaled to Vallet to stop, then tenor Jonas Kaufmann voiced that command, and Pape said, “Curtain! Curtain!” (A useful reminder that cool-headed professionalism extends beyond showing up on time and performing well.) There followed an impromptu intermission lasting about 45 minutes, before the show resumed, with another reliable favorite, Theodora Hanslowe, stepping in for White, who was taken to the hospital as a precaution. (She’s reported to be doing fine.) The accident is just one more reason to hate Des McAnuff’s Eurotrash-wannabe production, which has generated considerable debate in New York since it opened last month.

Troupers: Mezzos Jane Bunnell and Maria Zifchak (top),
Theodora Hanslowe and Wendy White (below) are among
the best-loved residents of Opera World.
(Just ask their colleagues!)
Photo by Dario Acosta for Opera News.

The fact that European audiences are obliged to watch stagings more arbitrary than McAnuff’s is cold comfort to the Met’s audience, admittedly conservative and accustomed to more luxurious settings than the voice-swallowing warehouse interior that Brill and McAnuff provided. Little touches — such as Faust’s praising Nature (leading into “Salut! Demeure chaste et pure”) while addressing a plumbing fixture (a laboratory sink that doubled as a holy-water font) — probably go over most people’s heads. And it must be said that the vision McAnuff imposed on the work isn’t as outlandish as, say, the stuff Calixto Bieito has thrown onstage, like the Ballo in which Renato sings “Eri tu” while sitting on the crapper. (Speaking of plumbing fixtures.)

McAnuff sets his Faust in the first half of the 20th century: Valentin and Wagner march off to World War I, and Faust (who is a scientist, after all) has something to do with the atomic bomb, which may belong to Méphistophélès, although Faust has already got one of his own when we first see him. The story’s themes of temptation and power are thus linked to our own times, and McAnuff has said that he was inspired by the late Jacob Bronowski (best known in the U.S. for The Ascent of Man), who renounced a distinguished career in physics after seeing the destruction caused by the bomb at Hiroshima. Fine. Faust renounces science, too. But what do you do with all this, and is Gounod’s Faust the right vehicle for your ideas? Is there anything in this opera that will sustain video of a nuclear explosion?

Gounod’s Faust is not Goethe’s (to the point that Gounod wanted to call his opera Marguerite instead); and while some works reward directors who return to the source material, this is not one of that kind. The principal philosophical aim of this opera is to affirm traditional Roman Catholic notions of sin and redemption — period. Gounod isn’t out to make us think, and he doesn’t seek to shock or titillate us (as his contemporary Offenbach would have done), which is why his Walpurgisnacht scene is about as racy as an ice-cream social. His Faust is designed to preach to the choir, if you will, engineered to suit a conservative, bourgeois audience that had ample reason to be comfortable with the status quo in Paris under Napoléon III. Which is to say, an audience not unlike that of the Metropolitan Opera in present-day New York.

High-Church Ritual: Marguerite is redeemed,
while a flock of lab-coated angels looks on.
When Susan Graham sang this role in Robert LePage’s staging of the Berlioz version of the story, she had to climb a ladder the height of the Met stage.

That set-up gives a director plenty of leeway, actually: what is the disruptive force in our present-day society, and what is the established order? What signifies temptation, and what signifies redemption? What are the tensions between them? And so on. The music itself will permit you to go only so far, however: it’s pretty, and intended to be, even when it’s depicting infanticide. If you’re going to try to explore any outside, unpretty ideas — such as nuclear weapons — then you’ve got to try to reconcile your ideas with Gounod’s score. I saw scant evidence that McAnuff recognized the real challenge, much less rose to it. Really, it seemed as if he spent the whole production wishing he’d been asked to direct Doctor Atomic instead of Faust.*

Vallet at least had a firm hand on what he could get away with, and he delivered a polished, flavorful yet absolutely faithful account of the score. Even when I found myself wanting a little more idiosyncrasy — more character in the soldier’s chorus, for example, where we might profit from the sense that testosterone, patriotism, and bloodlust are boiling under the surface — Vallet kept his cool. The melodies came swirling up like pure mountain springs, and for all that the military numbers were rousing, they couldn’t match for force and majesty the High Church chorale that greets Marguerite’s ascent into Heaven.

Pierre Vallet

A onetime physics student himself, Pierre Vallet conducted Faust in Barcelona earlier this fall (a debut at the Gran Teatre del Liceu) and assisted in the musical preparation for the current run at the Met, where he’s been on the conducting staff for 15 years. Vociferous friends greeted his arrival at the podium on Saturday, and he displayed remarkable poise all evening, even when the overenthusiastic crowd began cheering Kaufmann’s star turn in “Salut! Demeure,” well before the orchestra had finished. Vallet turned to the violins, shrugged, and grinned as if to say, “What’re you gonna do?”

Kaufmann’s burly, baritonal tenor voice made this Faust quite intriguing (it doesn’t hurt that he’s good-looking and a fine actor, too), and while I missed a certain visceral thrill in his high notes, he sounded terrific. This is one media darling who deserves the acclaim. Kaufmann attempted a few vocal effects that probably would have worked better in a different acoustic environment: as it was, the vast, empty set swallowed many of his soft-singing effects, especially in Act I.

Pape is one of those singers you can tell right now is going to be remembered as a titan, in generations yet to come. He was having a high old time as Méphistophélès, and between his wit and the cut of his suit, it seemed almost as if Alec Baldwin were playing the role (and I will now look at Jack Donaghy as a more diabolical character). Gounod’s score, which Pape has sung many times before, is catnip to him, and his singing was as confident and stylish as his acting; his French diction is sterling.

Dapper: Kaufmann & Pape

Marthe is a gem of a role, a generous reward for mezzos exactly like White and Hanslowe, seasoned pros with comic flair and vocal character: both ladies know exactly how to score points with every phrase and gesture here. White was about three lines shy of the end of her big Act II scene when she fell, so that Hanslowe didn’t have much opportunity to strut her stuff, but still, the Saturday audience can say with pride that they heard two top-notch Marthes.

Baritone Russell Braun warmed to the role of Valentin, surprisingly self-effacing in Act II but pure fire in the duel and his death scene in Act IV. A singer of remarkable taste and intelligence, he rose here to thrilling heights. Jonathan Beyer towered over the rest of the cast and sang attractively as Wagner, Valentin’s sidekick, here depicted as mere cannon-fodder. Mezzo Michèle Losier looked terrific as the boy Sièbel, and though her stage deportment struck me as too girlish, she sang “Dites-lui” with the right vibrant impetuosity.**

Poplavskaya & Kaufmann

Soprano Marina Poplavskaya sang Marguerite, and it’s impossible to avoid suspicion that she was cast primarily on the basis of her looks: vocally, she was far from her comfort zone, with high notes especially taxing both to her and to her listeners. There was never a moment when she won me over, as she did in Don Carlo last season: I really felt she was in over her head, and just by opening their mouths, Kaufmann and Pape wiped up the floor with her. That in turn threw off the balance of the opera, which is, after all, about Marguerite. What I heard Saturday was an opera about Méphistophélès and Faust.

But there’s no denying, either, that physically Poplavskaya was charming, and any sopranos who inherit this production will be hard-pressed to match either her willowy figure (exquisite in Paul Tazewell’s costumes) or her stamina when climbing umpteen flights of stairs into Heaven.

McAnuff’s production makes use of video projections — becoming something of a signature of Met stagings under the Peter Gelb administration. To this audience, they make the set look remarkably flatter and less interesting, but in close-up pictures like this one (or like a high-definition simulcast screening), they do look pretty cool.

*NOTE: It’s interesting that the same week that saw me recalling Des McAnuff’s Big River so fondly also found me dismayed by his Faust. You win some, you lose some.

**A staple of the master classes and recitals at the Festival International du Chant Lyrique in Canari, Corsica, “Dites-lui” makes an entirely different impact when sung in its original context, and I admired it afresh on Saturday. Sièbel is an excitable boy, and keeps interrupting himself, frequently distracted even while he’s obsessing over Marguerite. It’s an ingenious aria.

POSTSCRIPT: Back in the day, blonde sopranos really knew how to sing Gounod. Here’s Tintin’s friend Bianca Castafiore, the “Milanese nightingale,” whose entire repertoire consisted of nothing but the Jewel Song.

The Barihunks Calendar

2011-12-17T17:24:00.002-05:00

David Adam Moore and Wes Mason kick off the new year.

The phenomenon of the sexy baritone isn’t new, but it got a burst of energy over the past couple of decades, as singers started hitting the gym more and strutting their stuff on the opera stage — until we’ve come to expect the pecs in the spectacle. Nowadays it’s unthinkable that the leads in Britten’s Billy Budd or Bizet’s Pearl Fishers will keep their shirts on, and rare is the Don Giovanni who doesn’t give us a dose of skin. Factor in that a number of these guys are quite good-looking in the face department, too, and you’ve given husbands across America a new reason to complain when their wives want to go to the opera.

Stage director Francesca Zambello is believed to have coined the term “barihunk” to describe the phenomenon of the shirtless singer — a phenomenon she did much to instigate, often with the baritone Nathan Gunn. Now there’s an entire website devoted to barihunks, and the blogger has collected some of his favorite pictures to create a 2012 calendar, proceeds from which enable him to make donations: the first beneficiary was Portland Opera Studio, and the second is the Seagle Music Colony, run by Fort Worth Opera’s own Darren Keith Woods. I approve wholeheartedly — that’s why I’m spreading the news — even as I admit I can’t quite get into the spirit.

Überbarihunk Gunn in Pearl Fishers
with Hunkentenor William Burden (left).
Yep, even tenors are getting into the act.

It’s not a high-minded or aesthetic opposition; there’s no question of my tut-tutting, “What would Wagner say? This has nothing to do with art!” No, dear reader, the trouble is that I know too many of these guys. And that’s creepy.

Pity me! Across Opera World, thousands of men (and at least a few women) are drooling over David Adam Moore. Whereas I have to look him in the eye — up here — when we go for coffee. Daniel Okulitch stripped in The Fly, and his naked photos flew onto hard drives like lightning or locusts — while I was making small talk with his mom and dad.

It’s gotten so bad that I can’t even ogle Darren Criss without feeling guilty, because he is, as we know, the Wes Mason of pop music.

And it doesn’t help that I own socks that are older than Dan Kempson.

Who just married another young barihunk.

Really, I feel guilty just writing his name.

Okulitch in The Fly.
This photo does absolutely nothing for me.
That would be wrong.
And I do not own a copy of the full-frontal shot.
Trust me.
Really.

All of the aforementioned guys are in the Barihunks calendar. And so, lucky devils, you can hang these ’em on your wall, fantasize, write love letters, carve their initials on your flesh, do whatever you please. And I hope that you will. But you must understand that I’ll remain a eunuch when I’m around this harem, a wallflower at this fantasy-orgy, a priest in this choir room.

(Okay, maybe that last metaphor was ill-chosen.)

When he was writing about opera, George Bernard Shaw
did not have this kind of problem. Just saying.

Newspaper & Magazine Publishers Announce Technological Developments

2011-12-17T15:45:00.000-05:00

Seeking to remain competitive and commercially viable in a changing world, the American Newspaper and Magazine Publishers Association today announced a new technology that, in the words of Association president Charles Fosterkain, “will enhance the experience of reading a newspaper or magazine, making it more like the experience of reading online.”

The new technology consists of hiring thousands of children. Whenever a reader attempts to turn the page of a newspaper or magazine, a child will “pop up,” grab the publication, and run around the room while screaming, “Buy me something! Buy me something! Buy me something!”

Before a reader can actually see the article she wanted — and paid for — she will have to wait patiently for the child to give back the newspaper or magazine.

“Personally, I don’t see the appeal,” Fosterkain told reporters. “But so many people are reading online now, you gotta figure they like it this way.”

For readers on the go, a mobile application can be used.
This model is being tested in a supermarket.

The new technology is still being tested but may be ready for general use as soon as April, Fosterkain said.

Written after spending too much time reading The New York Times and New York Magazine online.

Hamilton’s ‘The People Could Fly’

2011-12-16T14:00:00.002-05:00

During the 1992 election campaign, I was taking calls in the newsroom when a viewer called to protest not something any CBS personnel had said (whew) but an inappropriate remark by one of the candidates. Ross Perot’s reference to a difficult situation as a “tar baby” was, she said, bigoted.

The conversation struck me. Sure, the core problem was that she didn’t want Perot — an old white guy with no particular track record on civil rights — using black folklore to his own purpose. And yet it struck me as sad, on purely literary-aesthetic grounds, that such a vivid metaphor might be off-limits.

Virginia Hamilton

Already in 1992, the author Virginia Hamilton had devoted much of her prolific career to reclaiming black folklore, beginning with some of her earliest books in the mid-1960s. She stripped the stories of their Joel Chandler Harris–Walt Disney-accented minstrelsy, restored them to parity with the traditional tales of other cultures (much as the Grimms had done for Germany), and most importantly, placed them securely in the hands of a new generation, who might draw upon their wisdom and build a sounder future.

Her best-known collection, The People Could Fly, beautifully illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon, won a slew of awards in the mid-1980s, and fully deserves the status of a classic. I returned to the book recently, and found joy there.

One of the illustrations by Leo and Diane Dillon

Here is the Tar Baby, and right off the bat we see what Virginia Hamilton is up to. Harris’ exaggeration of black speech — so thickly rendered that as a boy I couldn’t make sense of it — is gone. Instead, she gives us lucid prose that reflects but doesn’t overdo the oral tradition: “Brer” Rabbit is now “Bruh,” for example, and while he’s still the wily Trickster, outwitting his foes but sometimes undone by his own foibles, he’s presented now as a character, not a cartoon.

The stories are still fun, but they’re treated with respect — and so, in turn, is the reader. In like fashion, Virginia Hamilton follows each tale with a few paragraphs of background, to satisfy the curiosity of older readers, tracing the roots of the tradition throughout North America and Africa.

Several other tales depict scary-comic devils and the resourceful heroes who oppose them: one of the book’s greatest achievements is the constant evocation of the importance of intelligence in surmounting even the worst predicaments. Some of these heroes are boys, some are girls; some are princes, others are slaves.

Indeed, slavery, diaspora, and poverty enrich the stories: you get a clear sense of people sticking together and enduring hardship through the use of imagination and language. And the real whammy is saved for the last, the title story, one of the most poignant I know of.

The very phrase “the people could fly” is a poem, a complete story in its way, a signal of aspiration and redemption. For a time, it entered my everyday speech, and Dan Rather’s, too: for example, when Michael Jordan retired (for about ten minutes), Dan shook his head and said, “He could fly.”

On a school visit

I was inspired to return to the book at a party in Paris last year, when the friend of a friend mentioned that her mother was a writer. When she told me just who her mother was, I nearly fell over: I could hardly have been more surprised if she’d told me that her mother herself could, in fact, fly. Returning to New York and unpacking my books, I discovered that my copy of The People Could Fly had disappeared, probably given to one of my godkids. (“Of course I didn’t forget your birthday! See, I have a present for you right here.”)

So I went out and got a new copy, and look forward to reacquainting myself even further with Virginia Hamilton’s work. She was the first African American to win the Newbery Medal, for M.C. Higgins the Great, and her mystery novel The House of Dies Drear was a favorite among the girls I knew. There’s a lot to rediscover, and a lot I have yet to explore.

Leigh Hamilton

I won’t have the honor of getting acquainted with Virginia Hamilton herself; she passed away in 2002. But that daughter of hers? Leigh Hamilton is a knockout (literally — she boxes) who is also a very dramatic soprano.

She can fly, baby. I’m immensely pleased to know her — and looking forward to hearing her in person, instead of relying on YouTube clips!

NOTE: Among the pleasures of Virginia Hamilton’s website is a whimsical collection of facts, pictures, stories, and jokes about frogs. Even as you’re admiring her career and her œuvre, do take a minute to check out the fun.

‘Christmas Eve with Christmas Eve 2011’: Revelry, Remembrance, & Other Unpronounceable Words

2011-12-14T22:09:00.007-05:00

Miracle on 46th Street
Ann Harada and WVM, after the show.
Backstage photos by Anne Balcer©

“If you don’t have anything else to believe in, you can always believe in Broadway musicals!” a pint-size dynamo named Christmas Eve insisted during her extended “Broadway fantasy” on Monday night, Christmas Eve with Christmas Eve. She knows what she’s talking about, after all: the actress Ann Harada created the role of Christmas Eve, a sometimes inscrutable psychiatrist in the hit musical Avenue Q, and Ann trots her out each year in a benefit performance for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. But I was inclined to believe Ann, and to believe in Broadway musicals, with all my heart already, because something extraordinary happened during Monday’s performance.

To explain, I have to take you back to my first years in New York City, when I observed the fretful faces of the folks back home. When I told my family where I planned to live, my cousin Mary Elizabeth took me aside. “Don’t let them make you mean,” she implored; “don’t let them make you into a Yankee.”

It can’t be easy to send any young relation off to the wilds of the big bad city, but least easy of all for a loving grandmother to watch her grandson embark for that perilous destination. Once I got here, I calculated that theater — specifically, the Broadway musical — might prove more eloquent than any argument I could make in favor of my remaining here. A really good show could provoke my loved ones to set aside for a happy hour or two whatever terrors they suffered for me.

Witness, for example, the delight my mother still gets from a number called “The Grass Is Always Greener,” which Miss Lauren Bacall and Miss Marilyn Cooper performed one night for Mom exclusively (she’s certain of this) in a Kander & Ebb show called Woman of the Year. If New York could harbor such wonders, then surely it wasn’t such a bad place, after all.

Ann Harada, in performance as Christmas Eve.

But my grandmother might prove a tougher case, I thought. She and my aunt Tisha came to town in 1985, and it was my unfortunate duty to conduct her into the New York City subway system in her first moments here. Tisha thrilled as if on a carnival ride and made friends with everyone in the car, but my grandmother sat silent and petrified the whole way. She would have been content to lock herself in her hotel room; she required all her inner fortitude in order to follow me anywhere beyond.

For her, then, something extra-special would be required, and in Big River, I had it, a show that combined an irresistible score with imaginative stagecraft, and the spirit of Mark Twain, whom my grandfather, another son of the Mississippi, revered.

And I was right. Helen loved the show, and it’s entirely possible that, for the rest of her life, whenever she thought of me in New York City, she also thought of Huckleberry Finn, braving perdition as he navigated the river on his fragile raft, just as she’d seen him do in Big River. Like Huck, I might turn out all right.

That’s why I believed already when Ann, as Christmas Eve, exhorted us to believe in Broadway musicals. By that point, she had brought to her little stage no less than the original Huck Finn, Daniel Jenkins, and together they had sung a medley of the beloved songs. In doing so, they achieved no less a miracle than bringing back my grandmother, until I felt her beside me, just as she was 26 years ago.

Daniel Jenkins and the late Ron Richardson as Jim,
in the original Broadway production of Big River

This isn’t to say that the experiences were identical. Theater doesn’t work that way. Time doesn’t stand still here. Ann isn’t the girl I knew in school, either, my grandmother passed away in 1989, and the songs they sang decades ago are gone. The lively arts are the most Proustian: they’re a memory even as they happen, and to retrieve such memories requires great effort.

So Daniel Jenkins, though his tangy, twangy singing voice sounds much the same as ever, is a real grownup now, not a stringbean in overalls. And Christmas Eve, though completely committed to the role of Jim, didn’t seem quite authentic as she sang “Liver in the Lain,” one of Big Liver’s most poignant songs. Still, my grandmother would have loved it. In fact, I know that she did.

This is the second Christmas Eve with Christmas Eve I’ve attended, in which Ann explores the character’s “Broadway fantasies,” performing terrific numbers from classic shows with fun guest stars — all men, of course, and many of them shirtless, because it’s a fantasy.

Ann commands the stage for roughly 90 minutes with nary a break: she has thrown the show together in her so-called “spare time” in a matter of days, and yet she remembers every line, executes every step, and never lets her exaggerated accent lapse for a moment in repertory ranging from operetta to Garland-esque belting, from West Side Story to Annie, from Sideshow to Oliver!

To a degree, this revue represents the kind of clowning around that any Broadway-mad kid does in the privacy of the den, playing records and goofing off with a few friends. To another degree, it’s top-notch artistry from bona fide Broadway stars who may never sing Tony and Maria, for example — but can do just that, and do it better than anybody else. At the same time, they’re doing good, for friends and colleagues who need their support.

My Broadway fantasy is that more musicals will be as satisfying as Ann’s shows — and I wish I could say that fantasy often comes true. Yet for one night a year, Ann gets to do whatever she wants, which is what she was born to do; and I am happy to be in her company — on the banks of a big river, on an enchanted island that is known as New York City.

If you’d like to make Ann — and me — happy, please consider making a contribution to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

Here, I am auditioning for next year’s show.
(The benign patience with which Ann appears to listen to me is just one indication of what a phenomenally good actress she is.)

Scientists May Have Observed Elusive Higgs Bosom

2011-12-14T08:40:00.009-05:00

The bosom has long frustrated scientists hoping to understand
the so-called Standard Swimsuit Model.
In this photo, for example, the bosom remains hidden.

GENEVA -- Scientists at the Centre Européen de Recherche Nucléaire, or CERN, held a press conference here today to announce that they may at last have seen a bosom, an elusive part first hypothesized by Peter Higgs, a Scots physicist. The bosom is believed to have been seen on the cover of an American magazine, which the scientists declined to identify until further research has been performed.

“It’s impossible to overstate our excitement,” said Fabio Gianotti, a member of CERN‘s so-called At Last Team.

“We have been waiting literally all our adult lives for this moment,” Gianotti said, adding that he and his colleagues refer to the bosom as the “God Part,” because of their habit of exclaiming “God!” whenever they think about a bosom, which they “would definitely worship,” Gianotti said, if they ever got to see one up close.

The Higgs Bosom is the cornerstone and the last missing part of the so-called Standard Swimsuit Model, sweet, sweet theories that have held sway over physicists and other nerds for the last 35 years and that describe what a lady is.

One scientist’s conception of what the Higgs Bosom might look like, with an entire Higgs attached.

Physicists have been eager to finish the Swimsuit Model, and then use that information to form deeper theories that could explain, for example, what to do if they ever meet a lady; why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter; why ladies do not hang out in the physics lab; or what constitutes the “dark matter and dark energy” of feminine behavior that rules the larger universe and remains an impenetrable mystery to the At Last Team.

The particle is named for the University of Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs, who was one of six physicists who suggested that a sort of cosmic molasses pervading space is what gives lady parts their heft, becoming more and more pendulous and less and less like man parts over time. It was Dr. Higgs who pointed out that the bosom, normally invisible and, of course, untouchable, would probably feel as nice as it looks, and so the branding rights went to him.

Somewhat less elusive, the Whiggins Bosom has been glimpsed in part on numerous occasions, dating back to the 1970s.

World’s Best Recipe for Seasonal Hen’s Milk

2011-12-11T07:23:00.008-05:00

Lait de poule (“hen’s milk”) is a charming traditional recipe dating back to medieval times. It makes an appearance in Madame Bovary, which just proves that it’s French, no matter what the English and the North Americans say. I am prepared to concede nevertheless that it wasn’t the French who made lait de poule a holiday favorite around Christmastime, under the curious and rather unattractive, decidedly Saxon-sounding name of “eggnog.”

When you are, as I am so often, stuck in your charming country kitchen in the middle of France, you will want to enjoy many holiday treats that remind you of your homeland. So why not put on an album of Christmas carols, that red-and-green sweater your mother gave you last year, and join me in preparing a big bowl of hen’s milk to share with all the friends and relations who would surely be clustering around you this time of year, if only you lived a few thousand miles closer?

Sure, hen’s milk is high in calories, but so what?
The holidays are stressful, even in France.
We can all use a little Christmas cheer.

Locate a punch bowl. Since most charming kitchens in the French countryside do not actually keep a traditional punch bowl, be prepared to use a soup tureen instead.

Purchase 12 eggs from your local dairymonger. Ideally, these should be from free-range, college-educated, and left-handed hens.

Separate the eggs, reminding yourself how easy Jacques Pépin makes this look. Pour the yolks, and absolutely no eggshell, into your bowl.

That tureen is quite large, isn’t it? You’d better make sure you have enough alcohol to make hen’s milk correctly. You wouldn’t want to disappoint the French! Check the cupboard for cognac, whiskey, rum, or, if supplies are low, any combination of the three. Do not use Armagnac, however, because that’s just wrong.

I don’t know. It just is.

Mix the yolks with a cup and a half of sugar. Because a “cup” is not a European measure, use a real cup, because it’s Christmas, dammit, and you can’t be bothered to look up the metric equivalents. That coffee mug Karen gave you should do just fine.

Continue to mix the yolks and the sugar until they take on the color and consistency of butter. This may take a while, so pour yourself a shot of alcohol. I’m using rum for this recipe.

Keep mixing.

Did you know that Cuban rum is legal in France and actually quite easy to obtain?

Keep mixing. Does it look right yet?

This would be a lot easier if you had an electric mixer in your charming kitchen in the French countryside. Keep mixing.

Have a little more rum.

Oh, right, don’t forget to mix in some rum, too. About two cups, if you’ve still got that much. And some vanilla extract.

At this point, you can chill the mixture until about half an hour before your guests arrive.

Have some more rum — rum-pa-pum-pum. Get it? I love this song. Tu connais?

This reminds me of the funniest thing that happened, one Christmas when I was a kid, back in Texas, which is the greatest state of all.

Are our guests running late or something?

And you know, when I say le plus grand, I don’t just mean “great” like magnifique. I mean grand like “big.” Texas is bigger than France.

You could fit all of France inside Texas, and still have rum left over.

Have some more rum.

I’m just kidding — I love France! No, really. I love all of you guys.

So mulch.

That said, we did save your asses, you know. Two wars, bébé. Count ’em. Deux.

Okay, look, I think it’s time to put in the milk. And also the cream.

This rum is pretty tasty, when you think about it. Is there more?

Oh! Right. Like six cups of milk or cream. Whatever.

I don’t know. Just don’t say anything. They’re French. They won’t care.

They never cared about me. Nobody ever cared about me, when you think about it.

Will you get off my goddam back already? You think it’s easy, cooking for French people? Tu trouves que c’est facile, hein? Hein?

You know, it’s very difficult to say that in French. Rhum. Rhum.

I’m telling you. You want a piece of me? Je t’écrase.

I mean it. I’ll cut you, man. I mean it. I’m standing right here in my country kitchen in the charming Frenchyside, and I’ve got a knife.

I don’t have a mixer, but I’ve got a comment est-ce que ça se dit? A couteau, man.

Bullets cannot harm me.

No, really, I really love you guys.

So mush.

Well, bon soir. I didn’t hear vous entrez. Why don’t vous step into my living rum and have a nice little, charming little punch glass of … oh, merde, there’s supposed to be nutmeg in this shit.

Pardonnez mon français.

Or else some cinna — cinna — voulez-vous some rum instead?

Rhum.

What do you mean, “There isn’t any more”?

Is it New Year’s yet? I’m a little sleepy. Just gonna curl up here for a little bit of siesta. Buenos noches.

Be a Master Debater! Tips from Republican Candidates

2011-12-07T10:48:00.002-05:00

So You Think You Can Run?

Let’s face it, public speaking is hard. But how else are you going to run a campaign for the Republican nomination for the White House — thus clearing the way for your phenomenally lucrative career as a Fox News “analyst,” which is the only reason most people enter this freakish reality TV show in the first place?

Many public speakers employ coaches, and it’s worth noting that many of those coaches offer the same advice, which I’m pleased to publish here. (For free, because I’m that kind of guy.)

Whenever addressing a crowd, the experts say, it’s wise to picture the audience in their underwear. That way, it’s they, not you, who seem vulnerable.

Indeed, a quick survey of leading Republican candidates shows that this strategy is popular and effective — with a few modifications, of course.

Mitt Romney pictures the audience wearing Magic Underwear.

Herman Cain remembers the audience wearing their underwear.

Michele Bachmann pictures her husband wearing her underwear.

Rick Perry pictures the audience doing three things: 1) wearing underwear; 2) concealing a handgun; and 3) something else … you know what it is … can’t remember … oops.

Ron Paul forgot the question in the time it took everybody else to answer before him.

Rick Santorum pictures the audience fully dressed, paying attention to whatever he says.

Newt Gingrich finds the entire question to be fundamentally flawed.

John Huntsman pictures the audience voting for Obama again. Hey, at least he’s sure to have a job in 2013.

Hey, Mr. Gelb, I’ve Written a Pastiche Opera, Too!

2011-12-05T08:12:00.006-05:00

Isle Full of Noises: David Daniels & Joyce DiDonato
A promotional photo for Enchanted Island at the Met.
Joyce is probably the last person I’d think of as Sycorax, the Caribbean witch who spawned Caliban. But that’s why theater is fun.

On New Year’s Eve, the Metropolitan Opera will unveil The Enchanted Island, a new opera by George Frideric Handel, who died in 1759 and yet would not have been surprised to see this “pastiche” with his name on it. Recycling odd bits of music into a new opera was a common practice in Handel’s day (he undertook a few himself), extending the fun and saving the composer a great deal of bother.

Cobbled together by Jeremy Sams (with additional music by Jean-Philippe Rameau and Antonio Vivaldi, as well), The Enchanted Island is loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and stars Joyce DiDonato as Caliban’s mother, the witch Sycorax. Also in the cast are David Daniels, Anthony Roth Costanzo, and as the god Neptune, which I reckon to be the 655th role in his legendary 137-year career, Plácido Domingo, because nobody could bear the thought of his sitting all lonely by himself on New Year’s.

My point is, why should Jeremy Sams have all the fun? I happen to have an excellent libretto for another new Handel opera right here, incorporating all those crowd-pleasing elements of Baroque tradition, as well as my own, more forward-looking principles: namely, that opera, in order to survive in the 21st century, must be more like television.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Rhoda-Brenda.

Our setting is the enchanted Isle of Manhattan, and the palace of Queen Rhoda Morgenstern (Renée Fleming), betrothed to handsome Prince Joe Gerard (Andreas Scholl). Unfortunately, Rhoda is also loved by Carleton, a mysterious Doorman knight (David Daniels), and to thwart the marriage, Carleton enlists the powerful sorceress Ida (Stephanie Blythe), who also happens to be Rhoda’s mother, supreme ruler of the magical realm of Grand Concourse.

Carleton little suspects that he, in turn, is loved by Rhoda’s confidante, her sister, Princess Brenda (Joyce DiDonato), and further complications arise when the exotic Northern queen, Mary Richards (Susan Graham), arrives from the frozen land of Minneapolis, accompanied by her henchmen, Lou Grant (Ewa Podles´) and Ted Baxter (Plácido Domingo, in the 973rd role of his career). Lou seeks Brenda for himself, even as Prince Joe, undone by Ida’s sorcery, forgets Rhoda and falls in love with the beautiful Mary Richards.

Don’t worry too much about keeping track of who’s in love with whom: that’s what Met Titles® are for.

Anyway, they all stomp around in boots and feathered hats and sing about honor and vengeance for three hours, until at the last minute, Brenda persuades Ida to set everything right, in the bravura aria, “Ma, Knock It Off!”

Mary goes back to Minneapolis, all the couples line up appropriately, and everybody sings a chorus of “Da tempeste,” with the words changed a little bit.

You’ll love it, really. What do you say, Mr. Gelb?

Très Laur’ & Flanigan: From Our Furniture Catalogue

2011-12-04T15:32:00.017-05:00

Dinner is served! Every meal is fit for a queen
with these handsome dining chairs.
(Side chairs shipped separately.)

Here at Très Laur’ & Flanigan, we believe in home furnishings that make a dramatic statement — just like the thrilling characters portrayed by a certain American soprano! Now, from the pages of our catalogue directly to you, we bring you home décor that liberates your full self-expression! That’s what makes us Très Laur’ & Flanigan.

DINING ROOMS WITH A DIFFERENCE

This matching dining table cuts straight to the heart of any meal.
(Remember, you can’t hold a séance until somebody dies!)

WHY JUST A LIVING ROOM,
WHEN YOU COULD HAVE A SALON?

The perfect living room suite!
For intimate evenings with a few hundred friends.

The ideal spot for sitting alone
and plotting the brutal destruction of your enemies!
(Or relatives… or total strangers. It’s up to you.)
From our signature Regina Collection

STORAGE SOLUTIONS

Storage is a problem in most people’s homes — but not in yours, once you get your hands on this tasteful, discreet locker!
Perfect for storing jewels, gowns, armor, dead bodies, and other bric-à-brac that just won’t fit anywhere else.

BEDROOM COLLECTIONS

Good Night Moon — Now Go the F**k to Sleep!
Our stunning children’s bedroom suite virtually guarantees that Junior will be too terrified to get up in the night.

For the guestroom, our handcrafted sleep furniture is a must…

… But for the lady of the household, this stylish bedroom suite
is the perfect choice.
Annunciatory Alarm Clock (lower right corner) sold separately.

DINNERWARE WITH IMPECCABLE TASTE

Your cup will run over … with something … when you raise a toast with these charming goblets from our signature Banquo Collection.

Silverware they won’t forget!
By Lady M. of Cawdor
(Forks and spoons out of stock at this time.)

Come fill the cup … with something …

And of course it’s no good if you can’t see what you’re eating!

BATH & BEYOND

They don’t make ’em like they used to! Our traditional bathroom décor is built to last.

Sink into our exquisite bathtub designs, and you may never want to get out — or be able to!

AN INSPIRATION OF NOTE

It’s a goofy post, I know, but the names are so similar, and it would be kinda fun if the great Lauren Flanigan sold home furnishings, wouldn’t it? And wouldn’t it be even more fun if we could aspire to the dramatic style Flanigan displays onstage? This singing actress’ neutral gear delivers an intensity few other sopranos get anywhere near — and then, of course, she cranks it even higher, making the most of an astonishing repertoire.

And no wonder I’m excited: Lauren Flanigan will be singing Monday night with Glen Roven at Urban Stages, and I hope to see you there, too.

Lauren Flanigan appears in I Hate Music: The Songs of Glen Roven as part of the “Winter Rhythms” series — which also includes the great Janice Hall in a brand-new show, I’d Rather Be Doing This, on Tuesday, 6 December at 7PM. I’ll be at that one, too.

For information on and tickets to both shows, click here.

Urban Stages
259 West 30th Street
New York, NY 10001

‘The Muppets’ Redux

2011-12-02T08:37:00.008-05:00

Once more, with felt: “The Rainbow Connection”

The Muppets is a love story, one of the best I’ve seen in a long time, but perhaps not the way you expect it to be. Sure, we do get an update on the romance between Kermit and Miss Piggy, but the real love story is between Jason Segel, a writer, producer, and star of this movie, and the Muppets themselves. You don’t need to see a single background interview to understand what’s going on here: Segel has been a Muppets fan since boyhood, and he took it upon himself to bring the gang back for another adventure. What’s more, he cared enough to get it right.

Gable and Lombard. Tracy and Hepburn.
Frog and Pig.

The Muppets is also a movie musical, of a kind that Hollywood quit making and barely remembers how to make: here again, you sense an underlying affection that compels the creative team to get it right.

The result is a joyous reunion, a group hug, full of corny jokes and almost-corny songs. It is, in short, just about everything you want a Muppet movie to be, and if you have any kind of nostalgic feeling for these characters, you can expect to wipe away a tear or two before the show is over.

Welcome back.

One of the movie’s cleverest gambits, however, is not to cast Segel himself as a Muppet-mad fan who reconvenes the fuzzy stars. Instead, that role is delegated to Segel’s brother, a new Muppet named Walter, whose quest to find others like himself doesn’t seem nearly as obsessive or creepy as a grownup’s story might. Still, Segel’s Gary is a childlike soul, whose love for his brother is not unlike one’s love for a favorite toy, even as it is solicitous and oriented toward guiding Walter to a well-adjusted, grownup future.

How I Met Your Muppet:
Somewhere in this picture, you may find
Jason Segel and Amy Adams.

Walter isn’t terribly interesting, however, and I can only hope that he helps the very youngest audiences to find their way into the Muppet universe: clearly, they’re meant to identify with him.

Gamely trying (and mostly failing) to find her place in this brotherly bromance is Gary’s neglected girlfriend. Amy Adams is thoroughly charming as Mary, smiling sunnily like Debbie Reynolds or any of the great movie-musical ingénues — and yet she’s cracking just a little teeny bit more with each successive scene.

Walter and Gary (Jason Segel)

Chris Cooper is on hand as the villainous Tex Richman, a tycoon bent on destroying what’s left of the Muppets’ career, and Rashida Jones is the television executive who takes a gamble on a Muppets telethon. Effective as these actors are, they don’t possess nearly the star wattage that Muppet movies of old engaged, and even the cameos are given over primarily to TV stars, where once they would have been A-listers.

While there’s nothing particularly wrong artistically with this parade of lesser stars, and while it was probably cost-effective, too, it does deprive an audience of some of the fun and the surprise we’ve always found in watching better-known (human) performers frolic, both on The Muppet Show and in the Muppet movies, and, for that matter, on Sesame Street.

Diabolical laughter: Cooper as Tex Richman, with his henchmen.

Still, so much is right, as I say, precisely matching the tone of the old shows, that chutzpah-fortified mix of authentic wit and grade-A corn. What’s Miss Piggy up to these days? Why, she’s the plus-size fashion editor of Vogue, of course, living in Paris (where it’s perfectly normal for her to refer to herself as moi) and scarfing down pastries when she thinks no one’s looking. And she just happens to have the same assistant (Emily Blunt) who worked for Miranda Priestley in The Devil Wears Prada. And so on.

The one and only Moi.

The voices are well-matched, too, such that I didn’t realize that it wasn’t the great Frank Oz who portrayed Piggy and Fozzy.* The exception is Steve Whitmire’s valiant attempt to impersonate the late Jim Henson as Kermit. He’s awfully good, but he doesn’t quite capture the melancholy undertone that Henson produced and that would have been most welcome in these circumstances. (In fact, Whitmire’s performance left me admiring — for the first time, really — what a good actor Jim Henson was.)

A lot of the old crowd are unavailable for one reason or another, and Joe Raposo isn’t around to write another “Bein’ Green” (though Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher’s “Rainbow Connection” is dusted off and trotted out, with feeling). Much of the music is now in the hands of Bret Mckenzie, one half of Flight of the Conchords, whose proven skill at adapting other people’s musical styles surely didn’t hurt when it came to making a modern-day old-fashioned movie musical.

The gang’s all here.

The movie seems to anticipate that younger audiences won’t have any idea who the Muppets are. This seems improbable to me, but who knows? For those making their first acquaintance, The Muppets is a thoroughly pleasing introduction — a great set-up for younger audiences to explore the original canon. And for the rest of us, it’s a homecoming with dear friends.

*NOTE: According to the Internet, where everything is true, Frank Oz has in fact criticized the movie, as have other Muppet performers, on grounds of lack of respect for the characters and/or lack of taste in the writing. I’m at a loss to understand this. I can hardly imagine a more affectionate treatment, or one more in keeping with the Muppets’ original spirit.

Not to rub it in, but the Muppets really did hang with a starrier crowd, back in the day.

Rossini’s ‘Moïse et Pharaon’ at Carnegie Hall

2011-12-01T14:27:00.004-05:00

Let my people sing!
Ketelsen (as Pharaoh) and Morris (as Moses), with Maestro Bagwell, the ASO, and the Collegiate Chorale at the ready.

French grand opéra shares with Baroque opera an insistence on a particularly elaborate kind of stagecraft that is entirely beyond the means of most companies in the world today. These operas are like Jerry Bruckheimer movies, and if you remove all the explosions and special effects, there’s not much left. Because of their smaller casts, most Baroque opera stagings can sneak past us using minimalism and updating (very often requiring the singers to strip to their underwear). Grand opéra seldom lends itself to these expediencies: not least because the casts usually are enormous.

Moïse et Pharaon was one of Rossini’s attempts to prove to the French, as he moved to Paris (where he’d spend the rest of his life), that he knew how to write a grand opéra: he remodeled an earlier work, Mosè in Egitto, to suit French tastes. This was important because, as Stendhal’s life of Rossini reminds us (or me, anyway), the French didn’t succumb easily to Rossini’s charms on first hearing, and the composer must have known that winning them over would require extra effort on his part.

Sibling Revelry: Costa-Jackson (Marie) and Morris (Moses)

Thus Moïse features a rain of fire, the parting of the Red Sea, and all sorts of Cecil B. DeMille effects* — plus infectious melodies and dazzling singing, of the sort that Rossini was bound by nature to provide any time he set his pen to paper. Moïse isn’t Rossini’s best work, by far, but performing it in concert, without the flashpots and thunder machines, permits a listener to concentrate on the music — and the score bears up well, perhaps surprisingly so. The subject matter and the significance of the chorus do make Moïse stripped of scenery feel like an oratorio, but it’s rather a good one.

Certainly the concert performance at Carnegie Hall on 30 November gave us about as strong a musical interpretation as Moïse is liable to get in this country today, with a strong cast of reputable soloists, the ever-ready American Symphony Orchestra, and the massive forces of the Collegiate Chorale, proportioned amply enough for any grand opéra.

The gang’s all here.

Even Rossini might have been satisfied to hear an ensemble that matched his ambitions, both in size and in skill, for this piece, and as is so often the case when I hear the Collegiate Chorale, I find myself feeling decidedly lucky to hear them. No matter how lush or lofty the composer’s conception, I listen to the Collegiate Chorale and think, “Yep, that’s just about exactly what he wanted.” The group alternately portrayed Egyptians and Israelites (it wasn’t always clear which was which), assigned some of Rossini’s most inventive writing.

Not least because of those choral passages, just about everybody sees Moïse as Verdi’s road map to Nabucco, but I hear plenty of Donizetti, too, in the “dialogue” passages between arias. What comes from nowhere and takes my breath away is the purely instrumental piece that concludes the opera: how does any bel canto composer, let alone Rossini, end without singing? Not until Wagner would opera hear anything remotely like this, yet it’s pure Rossini, airy and sparkling and full of delight.

Conductor Bagwell, with Marina Rebeka (left corner).

The Chorale’s music director, James Bagwell, conducted, demonstrating a real flair for those many ensemble passages in which everybody onstage is brought together; in scenes and arias for the solo vocalists, Bagwell elicited new admiration for Rossini’s ability to orchestrate in a manner that’s pleasing and expressive but never overpowering to the voices. Bagwell was far less successful in finding the right dynamics and textures for those sequences in which the orchestra accompanied the chorus: then we got instrumental sound that was almost muddy, when the chorus didn’t drown out the players altogether — the equivalent of the Red Sea washing over Pharaoh’s army.

The principals gave me a chance to reacquaint myself with a few familiar voices, as well as a few I heard about. Chief among the latter category is the soprano Angela Meade, who’s been fielding a number of important bel canto assignments in the past couple of seasons, to the point that all of musical New York now seems to have drunk her Kool-Aid. The role of Pharaoh’s wife, Sinaïde,** affords her one relatively big aria but not much room to show me why folks are so crazy for her: it’s a lovely instrument, but I didn’t hear much personality. I’m hoping that other roles will reveal her to better advantage.

The toast of New York, Angela Meade

As Moses, bass-baritone James Morris sounded better than he did before I moved to France, and if he lacked anything in vocal luster, he more than compensated in authority: this was a prophet whom the multitudes would follow without questioning. He also commanded one of the better French accents in the cast, but alas, that’s something that can’t be said for the young mezzo Ginger Costa-Jackson, as his sister Miriam (here called Marie). Last season, I admired Costa-Jackson extravagantly in the title role of Gotham Chamber Opera’s El Gato con Botas, and this evening her wine-dark timbre and stunning physical beauty made me yearn to hear her in a number of flattering roles — but not before she improves her French diction.

Illicit romance: Moses’ niece (Rebeka) and Pharaoh’s son (Cutler).

Soprano Marina Rebeka didn’t impress me much when I heard her as Donna Anna in the Met’s new Don Giovanni earlier this season. Here, as Moses’ niece, Anaï, a more interesting character torn between her duty as an Israelite and her love for Pharaoh’s son, she seemed in better control of her attractive instrument, coupling creaminess with agility most gratifyingly. Tenor Eric Cutler’s portrayal of Pharaoh’s son made clear the direct line through grand opéra history to Halévy’s La Juive and to Prince Léopold, which Cutler sang at the Met several years ago: there’s a kind of revved-up lyricism here, a shot of brandy to spike the sweetness of his tone.***

Anne Baxter meets Yul Brynner: Meade and Ketelsen
as Mr. and Mrs. Pharaoh.

For this listener, the real discovery of the evening was bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen as Pharaoh, providing cavernous yet perfectly pointed sonority. This isn’t Yul Brynner’s Pharaoh: mostly Rossini’s character just dithers, but Ketelsen lent him real dignity and a kind of philosophical heroism. This Egyptian leader is trying to do the right thing; he simply doesn’t know how. Friends tell me that Ketelsen hasn’t been singing much in New York lately, and indeed I may not have heard him since his highly promising New York City Opera debut, as Figaro, in 2004. That’s an unpardonable shame. He’s an attractive artist, his voice is in full bloom, and more people should get to hear him.

Collegiate Chorale has several more New York concerts coming up this season, including a Mikado in April that looks especially exciting — because the great Marilyn Horne is slated to sing Katisha, for mercy’s sake. For more information, click here.

Bravi, tutti!

*NOTE: Rossini also added a ballet sequence to each of his Frenchified operas, because of course without an opera ballet, wealthy Frenchmen would be unable to pick out their next mistresses from the chorus, which functioned much as a shopping catalogue might. Remember, each time you suffer through the ballet of a French grand opéra, that you are witness to an act of prostitution, more than a century after the fact.

**No matter what you think, Sinaïde is not an over-the-counter sinus medication. Several of the names in this opera reminded me of the names of Astérix’s Egyptian friends.

***Not to sound like Opera Chic of Milan here, but I do wish Cutler would do something with his hair. He’s got everything it takes to be a dashing hero — a tenor of legend, really — and yet he looks like a scruffy graduate student who can’t afford shampoo.

Perry Declines to Pardon Thanksgiving Turkey

2011-11-24T13:13:00.004-05:00

AUSTIN — Citing the supremacy of the rule of law in the state of Texas, Gov. Rick Perry today refused to pardon Tom, a two-year-old broad-breasted white turkey cock, as part of a longstanding Thanksgiving holiday tradition.

"Ours is a society of laws," Perry said, "and it is only at our peril that we as a society show unwarranted mercy toward those lawbreakers who break the law and who have been found guilty by a jury of their peers in a court of law."

Tom was sentenced to die after a Texas jury found him guilty of strutting while intoxicated, aides to the Governor told reporters. A last-minute appeal was denied, leading to the eleventh-hour request for the Governor's clemency.

In another break with Thanksgiving tradition, Perry personally executed the turkey in question.

Other Republican governors in recent years have maintained slightly different positions regarding turkey pardons.

‘Youth and Beauty’ at the Brooklyn Museum

2011-11-24T07:07:00.002-05:00

Portrait of the Artist as a Beautiful Youth:
Paul Cadmus, as seen by Luigi Lucioni

Somewhere there exists an alternate United States, where, on the day after Thanksgiving, Americans throng not to shopping malls but to art museums. Well, it’s a nice thought, anyway.

If for some reason you’re inclined to do something besides shopping, a new-ish exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum is worth your attention. Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties, curated by Teresa A. Carbone, finds quite a lot to bring together — and to say about — pieces the Museum owns already, as well as paintings, photographs, and sculpture from other collections. (Through 29 January 2012.)

We get an idea of what it meant to be “clean,” in the context of the times, and why the artists wanted to depict “clean” bodies, for example: it wasn’t only a version of Art Deco streamlining, the whiz of high-speed modernity, that they sought to capture, but also the antithesis of the ugliness and mess they’d seen in Europe during World War I.

We also get some of the first stirrings of an explicitly gay sensibility in American art, and quite a lot of the work in Youth and Beauty anticipates the Museum’s latest exhibition, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, a meditation on sexuality and gender in portraiture that opened last week (and running through 12 February 2012).*

Guy Pène du Bois’ People, one of the creepier images in the Youth and Beauty exhibition. I grew up on du Bois’ illustrations for children’s books, representative of the ways in which some of these artists were tamed, in a sense, later in life.

The portrait of Paul Cadmus by Luigi Lucioni is arrestingly beautiful in itself — and my desire to see it up close, instead of in a subway poster, is in fact what brought me to the Museum. But knowing that it’s not just any pretty boy but Paul Cadmus points you toward the boys in Cadmus’ own paintings, and the burgeoning sexuality in his work. Suddenly, you think that it may have been pretty easy, after all, for Cadmus to find models for even his most outrageous paintings.

The Youth and Beauty exhibition doesn’t have any of Cadmus’ work, but there are plenty of “liberated” bodies, freed of constraining clothing (in the early 1920s, even a woman’s form-fitting knit bathing suit would have made a bold fashion statement, Carbone’s notes remind us) and free in gesture, too, often captured in tumbled-together, almost orgiastic compositions. Such images hearken to Classicism but also to ultra-modern Madison Avenue advertising and cinema — and there’s a portrait of movie star Gloria Swanson to prove it.

We had faces: Swanson, as seen by Nickolas Murray, circa 1925.

A kind of eroticism pervades the landscapes and cityscapes, too. Architectural forms, especially, when “cleaned” of details, become more sensuous, weighted and shaded as if you could reach out and fondle them — and in a booming industrial society (or in the Great Depression that marks the end of this exhibition’s survey), the potency of a smokestack hardly need be explained.

Carbone’s texts link one artist to another, and also draw on the works of writers who were, one way or another, influential at the time: Sinclair Lewis, William Carlos Williams, Fitzgerald, and so on. I yearned to buy the exhibition catalogue, but even the paperback edition is expensive, and it’s in the nature of museum culture nowadays that it’s nearly impossible to replicate or record the experience more cheaply by purchasing postcards (the Brooklyn Museum gift shop has almost none from this exhibition). Our contemporary Depression has its own chilling effects, it would seem.

Aaron Douglas, Congo, circa 1928.
Somewhere in this group is a figure based on Josephine Baker.

I first set foot in the Brooklyn Museum a couple of decades ago, on a Saturday afternoon jaunt with friends, and didn’t return until Joyce Castle performed William Bolcom’s Hawthorn Tree there last autumn.** Each time I go, I vow to spend more time there: there are wonderful collections of all sorts of things, not merely accessible but friendly. Here, for example, is a collection of Egyptian antiquities of such proportions and display that I might at last get a clear sense of the meanings and movements of that art — if only I’d go back and spend an afternoon or two puttering around and studying!

I expect I will go back to see Hide/Seek (and to look again at Youth and Beauty) in the coming days, and since I’m to be Louvre-deprived for the near future, I hope to make the closer acquaintance of the treasures in Brooklyn.

Get used to it: Berenice Abbott’s portrait of writer Janet Flanner in the 1920s suggests the sitter’s sexuality. From Hide/Seek.

*NOTE: Hide/Seek is best known for the brouhaha it stirred last year at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, when an overhasty G. Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian, removed David Wojnarowicz’s short film A Fire in My Belly from the exhibition following complaints from some representative of the American Taliban.

**The Brooklyn Museum would be an absolutely brilliant setting for a performance of Statuesque, the marvelous little song cycle that Jake Heggie wrote for Joyce.

World’s Best Recipes for a Thanksgiving Feast

2011-11-23T08:46:00.006-05:00

As close as most Frenchmen ever get to a turkey dinner.

The American holiday of Thanksgiving presents expatriates in France, as well as curious-minded French people, with a number of peculiar challenges: despite the fact that, with that modesty and lack of pretension that is so common to all French people, the French invented the American custom of Thanksgiving (complete with friendly native tribespeople), nowadays almost every bit of the tradition is completely alien to France.

Despite what some people will try to tell you, the difficulty of Thanksgiving to a Frenchman does not extend to saying “thank you,” since the French are, in general, far more polite than Americans, and they are even known to give thanks from time to time, especially when thinking how lucky they are not to be American. But try explaining Thanksgiving Day to the French — just try! The percentage of French people is minuscule who have heard of the holiday and can pronounce the name correctly: “Sahnx-geeveeng.”

The ingredients of a proper Thanksgiving feast are difficult, as well, to obtain in modern-day France. But by following these easy instructions, you, too, can prepare a typical, traditional meal, just like those that I like to prepare in my charming kitchen in the French countryside.

Roast Turkey

Part 1: Ordering the Turkey

Turkey is one of the puzzles of French agriculture, like corn: something one sees growing everywhere, but one seldom sees in the grocery store. Therefore, you will have to go to the poultry vendor (volailler) at his independent shop, or at his stall at the town market.
On or about November 1, inform the poulterer that you will be wanting to purchase a turkey, in time for the third Thursday of the month.
Listen politely as the poulterer nods understandingly and tells you that turkeys make excellent guards and are guaranteed to make a racket whenever an intruder enters your yard; however, turkeys are less interesting as pets, and one must take extra care that they do not look up when it’s raining, due to the risk of drowning.
Explain to the poulterer that, actually, you were planning to eat the turkey.
Apologize to his wife when she comes running to see why her husband just fainted like that.

Suggested pairing: Cognac.

Part 2: Roasting the Turkey

Find a large roasting pan.
To achieve the correct flavor and consistency of an American turkey, shoot the bird full of hormones. If this is not possible, expect that your French turkey will have a very strong flavor — indeed, it will have flavor.
Also, it may be tougher than you expect, due to its bizarre habit of walking around, which it does because it has space and a normally proportioned breast that doesn’t cause the entire bird to tip over every time it stands up.
Rub the turkey with salt, pepper, herbs, and/or butter.
Basting (arrosage) will be especially important. Among the ingredients that many Americans use to baste their birds are butter, whisky, maple syrup (sirop d’érables), and, of course, ketchup (cette sauce de merde).
Preheat the oven to the 6 or 7 setting. You don’t know how hot this is, actually, but it’s hotter than usual, and after all, a turkey is a very large bird, so you figure a couple of extra degrees are a good idea.
When you have begun to perspire profusely, the oven is hot; open the door and attempt to force the turkey in.
Discover that your oven, like any oven in France, is in fact too small to roast a turkey.
Chop up the turkey in to parts, hoping to get it to a size that would actually fit your oven.
Even a drumstick is too big. Keep chopping.
Remember how much your Gaz de France bill was last month, and at this point the oven has been on 6 or 7 for, what, two hours already?
Make turkey soup instead.

Suggested pairing: The latest, trendiest Beaujolais Nouveau.

Cranberry Sauce

Call or write to a friend in the United States.
Ask your friend to send you a can of cranberry sauce, which is impossible to find in France.
Pay extravagant duty fees when the package arrives at your local post office.
Return home; open the can; serve.
Contemplate the fact that this is probably the most expensive thing you’ll serve this year.

Suggested pairing: Coca-Cola.

Pumpkin Pie

Part 1: The Crust

Pumpkin pie is unusual among American pies, in that it does not feature a top crust. It looks comparatively like a French tarte. For hints, see my World’s Easiest Recipe for Tarte aux Fruits.

Part 2: The “Filling” (untranslatable)

Look up the word for “pumpkin” (citrouille or potiron).
Go to the supermarket. Notice that citrouilles and potirons are not sold whole, but only in slices.
Buy as many slices as you think would make an entire pumpkin.
Remove the rind and seeds; chop the pumpkin meat into chunks and stew them.
Notice that this really doesn’t look right. Also, it doesn’t smell right.
Taste.
Make soup with it instead.

Suggested pairing: Pepsi-Cola or Root Beer.

Yams

Despite the similarity in appearance and texture to chunks of pumpkin meat, yams or sweet potatoes (patates douces) are a traditional American side dish, prepared with enormous quantities of butter and brown sugar, and American children are typically required to finish at least one helping before they are allowed to eat dessert. Yams can be purchased only at African markets in France’s larger cities. Find one, and go to it.
Try not to notice that the yams don’t look quite like the ones you used to get back in the States. Order a couple of kilos.
Listen politely as the vendor tells you that, in many parts of the world, people eat sweet potatoes — and not only as a remedy for venereal disease, did you know that?
Return to your charming kitchen. Peel and chop the yams.
Boil for approximately 20 minutes, or until soft.
Drain.
Taste.
Make soup instead.
Salt, pepper. The herb tarragon is one popular seasoning.
Serve piping hot, with miniature marshmallows.

Suggested pairing: Fanta Orange.

Green-Bean Casserole

Nothing bespeaks America’s harvest bounty like the traditional green-bean casserole made entirely from canned goods!
Open a can of green beans.
Open a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup©, which you can actually find in the Exotic Foods department of many large French supermarkets.
Open a can of fried onions, which will be markedly more difficult to find at the supermarket; if you can’t find fried onions, tried slivered almonds instead, though they will cost approximately 8 times as much as the other ingredients combined.
Mix the green beans and the mushroom soup. Do not add salt, as the canned goods are already full of sodium.
Pour the mixture into a baking dish.
Sprinkle with the fried onions (or slivered almonds).
Bake at thermostat 5, even though you don’t actually know how hot that is.
Serve.
Explain to your guests that many Americans think this is a French recipe.

Suggested pairing: Diet Coca-Cola.

Mashed Potatoes

At last! An easy one! Not only is the recipe easy to follow and the ingredients easy to find, but also it’s a familiar and favorite dish throughout France. In fact, you’ll find that every Frenchman has his own special way of making mashed potatoes (purée de pommes de terre, which is smooth; or pommes de terre écrasées, literally “crushed potatoes,” which are chunkier).
For a typical American Thanksgiving (6–8 servings), take 96 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks.
Place in a pot and cover with cold water.
Cover and bring to a boil.
Boil until soft (usually under half an hour).
Drain.
Add milk, butter, seasonings.
Mash, using one of those handy mashing tools you bought at Ikea last year. (Where did you put that thing, anyway?)
Serve.
Bury your face in the mashed potatoes and scream while the French people around your table blast you with vicious criticism for not making the purée correctly. What kind of barbarian are you, anyway?

Suggested pairing: More cognac.

The Lost Empires of Brian Kellow

2011-11-22T11:56:00.001-05:00

Kiss kiss etc. etc.

My friend Brian Kellow’s biography of the New Yorker’s infamous film critic, Pauline Kael, is now on sale at bookstores near you — relative and archaic though that expression may be, in this day and age, but you can buy it on Amazon, too. Released on the occasion of Kael’s centenary, A Life in the Dark has elicited sensational reviews (including what I think is the first article Frank Rich has written for The New York Times since his inexplicable jump to New York Magazine), and Brian hardly needs me to add to the stack. I’ve read the book greedily — but also wistfully.

For what strikes me about this book and its predecessors, Ethel Merman: A Life, The Bennetts: An Acting Family, and Can’t Help Singing: The Life of Eileen Farrell, is the pains Brian has taken to document worlds that no longer exist. Namely, a Broadway and a Hollywood where a particular kind of art was practiced by truly distinctive talents, and in Farrell’s case, a musical environment where an opera singer could not only appear regularly on television but also have her own radio program, singing whatever she pleased, including pop, without apology to anybody.

Now Brian has done it again, focusing on one of the great chroniclers of the last era when Hollywood made movies for grown-ups (instead of 14-year-old boys) — which is also an era when magazines mattered, and criticism counted. Since Brian and I met at Opera News, another venerable institution of a magazine, where both of us have on occasion written criticism, the example of Pauline Kael is poignant, perhaps as much so to him as she is to me.

Brian, in a photo by Nick Granito

A vast chunk of A Life in the Dark is given over to quoting from Kael’s reviews — with all manner of contextual material that a reader in 1975 (for instance) might have had fresh in her mind, but a reader in 2011 surely does not. And Brian does a terrific job of capturing the excited anticipation that greeted the arrival of each New Yorker in the mailbox: what would Pauline say this week? To kids like us, in the hinterlands, those reviews were like road maps to another world.

You couldn’t believe how long she’d go on, her stamina, her passion. She was bossy, telling you what you thought and felt, even when you hadn’t seen the picture, especially when you didn’t agree with her. She indulged a taste for films that I found (and still find) trashy and unworthy of my time, but she also had a way of digging into a great film and making it even clearer, until you could hardly think about a movie without also thinking of a particular phrase Kael used to describe it. Madeline Kahn had ample reason to be dismayed when Kael called her “a water bed at just the right temperature.”

In an era when it became hip to say “The personal is political,” it was true of Kael that the professional was personal, and you’re not quite surprised to see how little of A Life in the Dark is given over to conventional biographical accounts. Kael wasn’t conventional, and while she wasn’t quite correct when she said that she’d already written her autobiography — in the course of her movie reviews — there’s plenty about her private life that I didn’t know before Brian exposed it — when you’re reading her criticism, you get the feeling that nothing else matters, to her or to you.

A certain kind of journalistic accuracy seldom stood in the way of Kael’s oh-so-subjective passions, and she wielded an uncanny gift for matching intensely physical descriptions to the images she’d seen on a movie screen. In that sense, she’s not far from today’s bloggers and the current climate, wherein actual knowledge of an art form is by no means a requirement, where democracy has taken over and blurred any distinction between audience and critic, because indeed “everybody’s a critic” now.

But Kael was a guide — even when she was wrong, even when her tastes didn’t accord with yours, you needed her to help you find your way — even when that was an entirely opposite direction from Kael’s own. You talked about her reviews — “Did you see what she said?” — and you and your friends argued as if she were in the room with you to debate your opinions.* Granted, there was nobody else like her, even at the time, but there’s surely nobody like her now, and with the decline of magazine journalism, the chances of there ever being another Pauline Kael are practically nil.

Movies are simpler now, and more simple-minded; maybe we don’t need guides anymore. I find this deeply, deeply sad. With magazines, as with Broadway musicals and so much else, I often feel as if I arrived just a little too late to a marvelous party: it was breaking up already by the time I got here — which is just about when Brian got here, too.

Reading Brian's books is not in itself a melancholy experience, not least because, in his own way, Brian is playing at Proust’s game. He doesn’t mourn the past but recaptures it by recording its details, and there’s something joyful at times in the process. It’s only after closing the book that I sigh for empires glimpsed and lost.

*Sometimes you even started to sound like her.

Davies’ ‘Kommilitonen!’ at Juilliard

2011-11-17T07:03:00.017-05:00

Revolutionary Children:
Heather Engebretson (seated) and Wallis Giunta (crouching)
learn a tough lesson.
(At far right, that’s Wei-Yang Andy Lin on the erhu.)
Photo by Nan Melville, courtesy of Juilliard.

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill wrote an opera for schoolchildren, the Lehrstück (Learning-piece) Der Jasager (He Who Says Yes, from 1930), but it doesn’t much resemble Kommilitonen!, the new work for somewhat older students by composer Peter Maxwell Davies and librettist/stage director David Pountney, given its American premiere at the Juilliard School on 16 November. (The title comes from a German word I’ve never before encountered, meaning “students” but suggesting the English word “tone” and the roots for “militancy” and “togetherness.”) Whereas Brecht and Weill steered away from specific political references and set their opera in a generic Storyland (vaguely Japanese, because based on Japanese source material), Davies and Pountney aim directly at three 20th-century tales of student activism in Jim Crow-era Mississippi, Nazi Germany, and Mao’s China.*

Davies and Pountney are pretty up-front about the debt to both Brecht and Weill, from the Verfremdungseffekt of Red Army officers portrayed as puppets who sing like the Andrews Sisters, to the ultra-Weillian scoring for brass and the recurring jazz rhythms. Really, it’s like Kurt Weill on acid. That there are other ways to write music for such stage works was proved conclusively during the German sections, where Weillian homage would ordinarily have seemed most appropriate yet is seldom heard.

The results, heard at the Juilliard premiere, are satisfactory more on musical (and, presumably, educational) grounds than as an exhortation to political action: when you’ve spent the entire evening steadfastly refusing to appeal to the emotions, you can’t expect to get a crowd fired up. This is a fundamental problem in many of Brecht’s plays, too (and, considering whom he was working for, thank goodness).

Try to keep your eye on the puppet. No, seriously, try.
(On the bright side, that’s JeongCheol Cha on your left,
providing the voice of the Father.)
Photo by Nan Melville, courtesy of Juilliard.

Pountney’s eminently singable libretto tells its three stories in interweaving episodes, rather than separating them (which, as Pountney points out, is Puccini’s approach in Trittico, and which he finds less “interesting” than his own) is scrupulously evenhanded in its targets: we get one oppressive society in America (as James Meredith attends Ole Miss), one right-wing (as Hans and Sophie Scholl’s Die Weiße Rose group opposes Hitler), and one left-wing (as regrettably generic characters watch their parents swept up in the Cultural Revolution).

The point, when we get to it (a luscious final chorale) is something about joining forces in order for freedom to prevail, yet Meredith is seen entirely alone for most of the opera, the Scholls don’t survive to see their viewpoint affirmed, and the Chinese children join the very forces that murdered their parents — they prevail by going with the flow, and they never do find freedom. Ultimately, I’m not sure the creative team picked the best examples for the ideas they wanted to depict, and while we in the audience may not get as much to think about as Pountney and Davies surely intended, we do get plenty of business to hold our attention.

Davies’ score pleasingly synthesizes a number of different styles and forms, but most especially the styles of jazz and the form of oratorio. Indeed, the Meredith sections are so much an oratorio, they feel dropped in from another work entirely, one that’s completely lacking dramatic action, reliant on Meredith (here, Will Liverman) to narrate the pertinent events. Paradoxically, just as you’re realizing the Meredith sections are never going to turn into drama, Davies and Pountney perpetrate a switcheroo, when the interrogation of the Scholl siblings is presented in the form of a Bach Passion, with an Evangelist (Noah Baetge) and an Inquisitor (Aubrey Allicock).**

Pountney’s staging erred significantly in one regard: an excess of scene changes. Given the utter simplicity of the scenic elements, and the ease and effectiveness of lighting and rear projections of photographic images (to say nothing of the cues in Davies’ score) to suggest a change of time and place, one has to wonder why anybody with Pountney’s vast experience fouled this up so badly: was it a Brecht-style attempt to take us out of the dramatic moment? Certainly Pountney has studied his Brechtian tricks thoroughly, as we could see in the use of projected titles (announcing, for example, “The March of the Revolutionary Children”), the makeup (unexplained Xs on the cast’s cheeks), and so on.

Verfremdung macht Spaß!
Meredith Lustig, Laura Mixter, and Rachael Wilson
as the Red Army’s answer to the Andrews Sisters.
Photo by Nan Melville, courtesy of Juilliard.

Pountney elicited strong performances from his youthful cast, notably including a kind of authority that few kids can command onstage or anywhere else. This was most evident in Liverman’s performance: it was hard to see how anyone would dare oppose this James Meredith, and when he told us that he slept soundly despite the violent protests outside his dorm room, we believed. But Allicock, Lacey Jo Benter (as the Chinese mother), and JeongCheol Cha (as the Chinese father) had authority in abundance, too.

As ever, I’m reluctant to get too specific about student performers, but I approved enthusiastically of everyone onstage, and the aforementioned, along with Wallis Giunta (in the trouser role of the Chinese son), Heather Engebretson (the Chinese daughter), and Deanna Breiwick (Sophie Scholl), impressed me especially. The last-named are all exceptionally attractive young ladies, too — but then, this is Juilliard, where “even the orchestra is beautiful,” as Joel Grey might say. (At least two of the young men in the stage ensemble looked like — and may be — Abercrombie models.)

Anne Manson led an assured, spirited reading of the score, by turns dissonant and lyrical though it is (and sometimes both at once). Even when she was called on to command an onstage band and chorus, plus soloists planted in the audience, not to mention those musicians still loitering in the pit, nothing seemed to faze her. I couldn’t ask for a fairer first hearing.

Carolyn Choa’s choreography kept the stage lively even at its most oratorio-esque. Far from intrusive, the dancing actually helped to cover some of those darned scene changes. Representing the Chinese parents, puppets from Blind Summit Theatre, on the contrary, were operated by all-too distracting puppeteers; the Chinese-officer puppets were more successful (very much along the lines of Blind Summit’s puppet King in Gotham Chamber Opera’s El Gato con Botas last season).

I admired Robert Innes Hopkins’ costume designs, which enabled ensemble members to transform from Mississippi redneck to Maoist Red Guard with ease; my only quibble was that the German women shouldn’t have worn trousers under their overcoats, a fashion lapse for which they could have been arrested by the Nazis. (Would it have been so difficult to roll up the pants legs?) Hopkins’ stark, evocative scenic elements were terrific, too, but for the fact that there were so many of them — which isn’t entirely his fault.

I daresay Kommilitonen! was a learning experience for just about everybody involved, including this writer. Whether the piece endures is another question — and yet, so long as young people keep marching in protest, I expect that this opera will never be strictly a museum piece, but a living testament.

Kommiltonen! will be presented at Juilliard’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater on Friday, 18 November, at 8 PM, and on Sunday, 20 November at 2 PM.
For further information, call 1 (212) 769-7406
Or visit Juilliard’s website.

*NOTE: The political dimensions of the new opera must have taken on extra relevance during the rehearsal period, as the Occupy Wall Street movement grew in influence (and manifested across the street from Juilliard on opening night), and as the so-called forces of order began to crack down in various, predictably ill-advised ways. (Who knew that “Bloomberg” was the Yiddish word for “Mubarak Lite”?)

** I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea that the Scholls — however admirable, prophetic, and martyred — were somehow Christ figures, but the authors dodge that logical conclusion by denying the student activists the response that Bach surely would have given to Jesus. Alas, this meant less for Alexander Hajek (as Hans Scholl) to do — but on the other hand, he can’t sing Gianni Schicchi every day, can he?

Muhly’s ‘Dark Sisters,’ at Last

2011-11-16T12:04:00.011-05:00

Sisterwives: Jennifer Zetlan (Zina), Margaret Lattimore (Presendia), Caitlin Lynch (Eliza), Jennifer Check (Almera), Eve Gigliotti (Ruth).
This and all photos by Richard Termine.

Nico Muhly’s Dark Sisters was given its world premiere last Friday night by Gotham Chamber Opera, one of three organizations that commissioned the new opera. (The others are Opera Company of Philadelphia and the Music-Theatre Group.) Having heard a preview in September already, I attended the performance Tuesday night.

Very often, when one talks with composers or reads an interview, one finds oneself wondering why these artists have landed upon this particular form as a vehicle for their expression: you don’t always sense an affinity for opera itself. That’s not the case with Nico Muhly, I’m pleased to say, and I cite as an example something he said in his quasi-cabaret act with Gotham musicians last month. At one point in Dark Sisters, he said, he set out to write the world’s slowest mad scene.

What I understood — and what the score of Dark Sisters confirms — is that Nico Muhly wanted to write a mad scene. Something that is instantly associated and inextricably embedded in one specific art form. Namely, opera. Yes, the guy is in the right business.

Gigliotti, in Ruth’s mad scene

And the proof lies in that very mad scene. Muhly and his librettist, Stephen Karam, have created a lovely piece of music, inventively staged by Rebecca Taichman. The scene is also a star turn for Eve Gigliotti, whose portrayal of hapless Ruth glides seamlessly from comic relief in Act I to aching despair in Act II, culminating here in a moment of the most fragile beauty.

In other sections of the score, composer and librettist do betray their inexperience: Act I sorely lacks momentum until a few minutes before the curtain, when a plot point is shoved in hurriedly. It’s as if the guys suddenly looked up, saw what time it was, and realized they’d better get busy. It’s all well and good to devote a chunk of your opera to leisurely exposition and character development, but these things aren’t dramatic — and to be honest, Act I is too often not merely static but quite dull.

I’m not sure how this is possible, given that Dark Sisters (despite the misleading title, which makes you think it’s about witches*) is a ripped-from-the-headlines drama set among a fundamentalist, polygamous Mormon family whose children have been seized (just before the opera begins) in a police raid. Conflicts that have simmered below the surface (rivalries among the five wives for the affections of their shared husband, the Prophet; rebellion against his authority; the struggles of mothers to recover and to protect their children) now bubble up. Or anyway, you expect them to, but Act I only begins to fulfill that promise.

Things perk up substantially in Act II, beginning with a culture clash, as the wives appear on a TV talk show (a more sensational sort of Nightline), moving swiftly to our heroine’s flight, the aforementioned mad scene, and a poignant farewell. Here was the best evidence of Muhly and Karam’s strengths, with suspense, comedy and pathos operating brilliantly in the service of real drama.

Even so, Muhly has written only a few (at most) of the kinds of big, gutsy outbursts that I need in an opera, and it’s telling that Dark Sisters ends not with a flourish, a fanfare, and a transfiguration but with a wistful tinkling and a blackout. I daresay he can cite for me 743 important philosophical reasons he chose not to write bigger moments — but the bottom line is that I heard the score twice and I wasn’t satisfied emotionally.

Brash, brilliant, and scarily articulate, Muhly seems like the last person you could ever accuse of timidity. But listening to some passages of Dark Sisters, I fantasized that Marilyn Horne might step out of the wings, take Muhly by the shoulders, and say to him, as she says to singers, that he needs to be bigger, to step up to the spotlight: “This is the glory of your voice! Now you’ve got to let ’er out. Not everybody has that.”

That said, this remains a gorgeous score, full of interest, lyricism, and character, and it’s substantially more promising than many another composer’s second opera. Compare Muhly’s Dark Sisters with Puccini’s Edgar, and you can be excused for predicting that Muhly will turn out to be the most important — and popular — composer of opera in the 21st century.

And now the latest news.
Kevin Burdette as King, the anchorman.

In the pit, Neal Goren celebrated his company’s tenth anniversary by leading a shimmering, open-hearted account of Muhly’s score, evoking by turns wide-open horizons, starlight on rippling waters, and daggers straight to the heart. Among the pleasures of the performance was the opportunity to salute Gotham Chamber Opera’s progress to a theater with good acoustics: the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College is a far cry from Gotham’s birthplace, the Harry De Jur Playhouse auditorium at the Henry Street Settlement.

What surely and mercifully hasn’t changed about Goren’s work with the company is excellence in casting. As Eliza, the rebellious wife, soprano Caitlin Lynch made it impossible to take your eyes off her, turning in an affecting, thoroughly credible characterization while singing in a limpid soprano voice with all the naturalness and immediacy of speech. She seems to be — she must be — poised for an important career.

As Ruth’s sister, mezzo Margaret Lattimore impressed me even more on second hearing, and I admired especially her subtle means of conveying Presendia’s efforts to assert her authority over the other women — and herself. Her principal rival is the young, hugely pregnant Zina, given a glittering portrayal by Jennifer Zetlan, pretty and bright but also as hard as gemstones.

The always-appealing Jennifer Check registered strongly in an emotional Act I aria, remembering Almera’s mother and grandmother, but I was impressed just as much by the delicacy of her acting, the flicker of distant desires across her face as she merely listened to the others. Kristina Bachrach sang Lucinda, Eliza’s 16-year-old daughter, with a beautifully placed instrument and a physical presence that conveyed the haste with which Lucinda is pressed into grownup life.

Kevin Burdette, a Gotham stalwart most recently heard as the Ogre in El Gato con Botas, gave the score a resonant foundation — its only male voice, and a basso at that — as the rigid, implacable Prophet. Burdette excels in sly character comedy based on careful observation, and he exulted in a second role, that of the TV host, called King, a cross between Ted Koppel and Maury Povich.

Leo Warner and Mark Grimmer’s video design hoisted the interview scene, using not only clips of real-life polygamous families under the news camera’s glare but also focusing on and enlarging the performers onstage: it’s thanks to them that I could appreciate Gilgiotti’s expressions of ecstatic anguish as she listened silently to Eliza’s outburst during that interview. Warner also designed the set, a barren plain of red earth (actually, carpeting) against a stark blue sky; a center section rose to evoke a cliff or a marital bed, then sank to suggest a grave.

Stage director Taichman shone most brightly in the utter clarity of the character relationships and her sureness in dramatizing a series of situations that are alien to most of her audience. Even the most extreme moments seemed recognizable and true; I’d love to see what she does with a standard-rep work.

Quite apart from the details of the performance, Dark Sisters offered, as I say, a terrific way to celebrate Gotham’s anniversary. Plenty of New Yorkers have tried to start opera companies, without surviving ten years; Gotham Chamber Opera is still going strong, partnering with other organizations and exciting artists in every field, exposing me to new ideas and unheard songs, giving me pleasure — and plenty to buzz about.

Did I mention that Stephen Sondheim was in the audience Tuesday night?

A star is born: Caitlin Lynch

Dark Sisters
Gotham Chamber Opera
Remaining Performance: Saturday, 19 November, 8:00 PM
For ticket information, click here.

For information on upcoming performances (June 2012) with Opera Company of Philadelphia, click here.

*NOTE: Compounding the title’s problems was the premiere, just two weeks after Halloween.

Ignatius Revisited, or Toole’s ‘Confederacy of Dunces’

2011-11-13T12:52:00.011-05:00

Canal Street, where our tale begins

John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Confederacy of Dunces enjoys a sterling critical and popular reputation, yet to this reader its success has seemed more corrective than deserved: unable to find a publisher for the novel, Toole committed suicide in 1969, and only when his grieving mother stalked another, more famous (and vastly superior) Louisiana novelist, Walker Percy, did the book see the light of day, in 1980. Suddenly we discovered an overlooked masterpiece — or so I was told.

Percy’s imprimatur was all I needed to seek out Confederacy, but I couldn’t get very far in my reading: the quirks and comedy struck me as painfully labored (the very criticism my own attempts at humor most often elicited), with little else to support them, and I set the book aside, picking it up from time to time, as if to see whether the prose had somehow changed in the intervals.

John Kennedy Toole

What did change was Confederacy’s reputation: the book has gone from succès d’estime to sacred writ, a Bible of lunacy and a manifesto of defiant eccentricity, in the eyes of many readers I admire. Not having read Confederacy meant missing out on a good joke — or so it seemed. And so I returned to its pages yet again.

Having finished the book, three decades after I bought it, I am still more bemused than amused. I can understand why so many people take Confederacy’s protagonist, the gargantuan Ignatius J. Reilly, to heart. But I can understand, too, why nobody wanted to publish the book in the first place.

That Confederacy languished so long in obscurity isn’t the fault of Robert Gottlieb, the noted editor who tried to help Toole whip the manuscript into shape at Random House but surrendered at last, complaining that the book lacked a point. Pace, Mr. Gottlieb, but that assessment isn’t entirely accurate. The picaresque plot ably reflects Ignatius’ favored philosophy: that chance (or, as Ignatius would put it, Fortuna) rules our lives. A single, apparently random incident brings together all the major characters, creating or revealing connections, and it drives the rest of the story. Plenty of novels succeed with less point than that.

The rest is character study and local color, but the book is like Ignatius himself, shapeless and often overbearing. Some characters, notably the pants-magnate’s wife, Mrs. Levy, are so exaggerated that they’re no longer plausible and therefore not terribly funny, much less interesting. While several of the characters, notably Ignatius’ mother and her sidekick, Santa Battaglia, grace the pages with comic dialogue in exquisitely rendered local accents, Ignatius himself is lingered upon well past the point of our “getting” him, and this reader, at least, couldn’t hear Ignatius’ speech in any recognizable way, though I’ve known a fair number of people who resembled him.

Doris Day, Ignatius’ favorite movie star.
She’s never identified by name in the book, but who else could it be?

Ignatius is a fine character, yes, and he’s surely the reason for Confederacy’s enduring appeal. But Toole gorges us on him, with no more restraint than Ignatius shows for hot dogs and Doris Day movies. Ignatius careens from one marginal New Orleans community to another, ever on the lookout for his own apotheosis, but his debacles are disappointingly small-scale, and the reader has to wait a long, long time before getting any sense that this character will develop or even move forward; my patience wore thin, as it has done every time I picked up the book.

On the Internet, where everything is true, one learns that Toole’s friend, a college professor named Bob Byrne, inspired many of Ignatius’ principal attributes, yet at this remove I’m inclined to see a great deal of autobiography in him: an intellectual not quite so clever as he imagines, a mama’s boy, a failed writer, monstrously egocentric, neurotically sheltered both in his mother’s home and in medieval philosophy, hopelessly and yet defiantly out of step with his times. (And when I say “autobiography,” I mean both Toole’s and my own. I feel quite sure that Ignatius is destined to become an opera fan.)*

If no one wanted to publish A Confederacy of Dunces in Toole’s lifetime, it’s because the book is a mess — still to this day, though it’s unpopular to say so. Ultimately, the book required an extra backstory — the mother’s crusade and Percy’s intervention — to take off. To the extent that Toole achieves something epic and admirable in Ignatius’ louche grandeur, the book’s subsequent success is easy enough to understand. Readers turn to Ignatius as a validation or an excuse, if not quite a justification, for their own foibles.

In his introduction to the novel, Percy does Toole no favors in comparing Ignatius to Quixote, for Cervantes (to say nothing of Rabelais) did this sort of thing much better. But who reads them anymore? For modern readers, Ignatius strikes home. He’s the patron saint of excess — and Toole is his most fervent acolyte.

Let us drink to the lees, as Ignatius would have us do.

*NOTE: That said, there’s an aspect less than benign to this story, innocent though it may have seemed when Toole began writing it. After all, at the very moment when Ignatius and his intellectual delusions and political pretensions are prowling the streets of the French Quarter, so was Lee Harvey Oswald.

(This is not to suggest, however, that I identify with Oswald.)