The Hub Review

Change of Seasons

2012-01-27T18:30:00.005-05:00

Violinist Aisslinn Nosky

Last weekend's Handel and Haydn concerts may have been devoted to The Four Seasons, but there was only one major change of musical season during the program - the shift from one sensibility (Harry Christophers') to another (violinist Aisslinn Nosky's) that occurred after intermission, when the concert moved from several pieces by Handel, Corelli and John Christian Bach to Vivaldi's famously seasonal quartet of concerti.

The first half was a small miracle; the second half - well, it was interesting, and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. It was interesting; Handel and Haydn seemed determined to deliver something that was definitely not your father's Four Seasons - and so swung for the bleachers in all kinds of ways; whether the resulting performance cohered or not I'd say is an open question; but I was certainly held the whole time.

But first, the luminous half, when the stripped-down orchestra delivered one ravishing reading after another. Christophers had his string section play standing up, the better to conjure the buoyancy of dance, but always kept the resulting rhythmic power under delicate, attentive control. The pieces rocked, most definitely, but were also colored with a mature sophistication. Handel's Overture to "Agrippina," for instance - which we just heard a year ago at Boston Lyric Opera, on modern instruments - here sounded far more evocative than it had then; its majesty seemed almost wounded, and shot through with melancholy; it seemed to be calling to us from some lost, ancient age (which it was).

Likewise the performances of two of Corelli's concerti (both from Op. 6, Nos. 3 and 4) were gorgeously rendered, utterly transparent and always exquisitely detailed. In contrast, J.C. Bach's forceful Symphony in G minor felt like a whirlwind - the tumbling first movement was so powerful, in fact, it drew a round of spontaneous applause at its finish.

The same energy powered The Four Seasons, but this time felt unfettered by any sense of shaping control. Nosky is a marvel, and obviously a showman (her magenta 'do and tuxedo-tails tell you as much), but Christophers here seemed to simply hand over the artistic reins to her much of the time, and I'm afraid she doesn't yet know how to build an interpretation from her instincts. They're great, daredevil instincts, to be sure; this was a Four Seasons which was unafraid to revel in the work's dissonance, and in which Vivaldi's summery suspensions (as well as Nosky's own rather meandering cadenzas) sometimes seemed to hang in the air like a blazing haze. Likewise the more rollicking sections were sped up to a gallop and beyond - indeed, sometimes Nosky made promises of speed she couldn't quite keep, at least not with perfect intonation. And everywhere she and the other players threw themselves into their bowing with full-body abandon; I have expected Nosky to smash her instrument over somebody's head at the climax of "Winter."

So I'll say this much - this was one of the most "extreme" version of The Four Seasons I've ever encountered. But the same artistic questions dogged this performance as sank the shenanigans of Red Priest up on the North Shore this summer: gonzo alone doesn't amount to an interpretation. To be fair, Nosky wasn't just pursuing technical glory - she was pushing individual musical ideas to their limits; this wasn't just Red Priest-style show-boating. And perhaps The Four Seasons only suffered in comparison with the luminous playing that had immediately preceded it. But then Harry Christophers is just a little more seasoned, isn't he (sorry). Give Nosky time, and I think we can expect wonders from her, too.

Memories of underdevelopment

2012-01-26T15:29:00.008-05:00

Photo by Paul Marotta

This season ArtsEmerson has explicitly stated that some of its presentations have been in a state of development. I'm not sure that's the official line on Robbie McCauley's one-woman show Sugar (which plays through this weekend), but it probably should be. The talented Ms. McCauley's meditation on her long involvement with the title topic, through her affliction with diabetes (and its entwinement with race, life, and art) certainly has its moments - largely because McCauley (above), who carved out a distinguished career in theatre and dance before joining the Emerson faculty, has lived a life rich in moments large and small, and she's practically a perfect theatrical raconteur - warm yet wry,with a low-key, skeptical dignity.

But so far her piece has yet to coalesce into the kind of political and personal statement that it could be, and we often feel that gap. Yes, you read that right - the Hub Review has found a script in which race should figure more prominently than it currently does. (Somewhere, pigs are on the wing through the frozen caverns of Hell.)

It's not that the perceptive Ms McCauley doesn't appreciate the breadth and depth of her theme; she does. Sugar, as she puts it, is "complicated." And so are our politics, and inevitably, our commitment to health care for everyone. McCauley explicitly acknowledges that sugar's deadly shadow, diabetes, exacts a disproportionate toll among communities of color largely because a different kind of sweetness - the sick sweetness of racist feeling, and the politics that flow from it - allows it to. She may have lived through a civil rights revolution, but she knows only too well that entrenched modes of privilege have a way of surviving changes in the legal code.

Indeed, the actress herself is a piercing example of the toll this quiet plague can exact on a human being (she lost the lead in the premiere of For Colored Girls . . . due to diabetic exhaustion, and so missed her chance at a Tony; only later was she able to join the second Broadway cast). The trouble is that in the retelling of her struggle against the bad hands and missed chances that American life dealt her, the personal rarely ramifies into the political. As the episodes of her story unfold, we nod along in sympathy, but are somehow rarely moved to outrage or action.

Of course in some ways McCauley is wise to keep her focus tight, on the specifics of her own life; she triumphed over her disease, after all; she played on Broadway, knew everyone and everything in her heyday in New York, and is now enjoying a whole new late-life career when, as she puts it, according to the statistics, "I shouldn't even be here." Still, the disease has taken its toll, and her performance is perhaps at its most memorable when she's most forthright about facing down the shame that in some quarters still hovers over this condition and its impact; she's honest about the disease's debilitating sexual effects, for instance, and even calmly gives herself an insulin shot on stage, because, of course, dignity should always be accorded the body and its natural needs.

But how to interweave that personal empowerment into the larger political picture? This is where Ms. McCauley seems at loose ends. Her personal imagery holds us - ironically enough, particularly her reminiscences of Southern home cooking - and her story is compelling. How and when will it become everyone's story? I'm not sure - but there are already moments in which you can feel the full scope of her theme moving beneath her performance. Near the close of the show, she lifts a huge pack of sugar cane onto her back, and, stooped over from the effort, makes her way determinedly across the stage. And for a moment, race, history, culture, and even economics seem to be woven together into an inspired metaphor. With a few more moments like that one, Sugar could be one long theatrical (and political) high.

The "I" of the beholder

2012-01-25T11:00:00.011-05:00

Photo by Andrew Brilliant.

We're having our Yasmina Reza moment in Boston right now: this week you can catch the Huntington's production of God of Carnage, or the Polanski film version (just Carnage), OR an earlier Reza opus, ART, which has just opened at the New Rep (through February 5).

The surprise is that the New Rep production may be the best of the lot, and it would be too bad if it got lost in the Reza shuffle. Not that it's perfect - its opening section lacks drive - but Antonio Ocampo-Guzman's production slowly builds into an intriguing meditation on Reza's actual theme in ART (which the Huntington mostly misses in God of Carnage): in a nutshell, how much of our identities, and our relationships, are a matter of projection.

But first a note on the playwright. Reza has for some time occupied a strange place in the gender-theatre wars, for her career has contradicted the chorus of complaint from many female playwrights that the Broadway deck was stacked against them. For while Theresa Rebeck and Sarah Ruhl have indeed had trouble launching a genuine hit on the Great White Way, Reza has gotten rich off the two smashes now playing in the Hub (which were actually global, not just Broadway, successes). Now she's completely bankable - one of the few bankable female playwright alive.

The explanation from the Rebeck camp for Reza's career arc was that her work was too funny, too lightweight, and too commercial. And it's certainly funny, that much is true. The rest of the feminist snark against her is looking harder to justify, I think. I'm not sure where I rate Reza quite yet - but she's certainly far more interesting than Rebeck or Ruhl; simply put, she has been successful while they have not because her plays are quite a bit better than theirs.

It helps of course that Reza is unusual among female playwrights in being able to write men so convincingly, and through little if any judgmental political screen; even though the men of ART and God of Carnage are pretty epicene by Amurrican standards, they seem as masculine as Mamet might have written them. But Reza does not seem to share the politics of the new-play-development club in general - and politics has always been what the scuffles over her career have been about. I'm not sure precisely where Reza lands on the political spectrum, but certainly she casts a cold eye on the platitudes of Paula Vogel and her acolytes. That's largely what Carnage is concerned with. ART is about something else - something that's a little hard to formulate, actually, which may be why the play often seems to morph in style and focus before our eyes.

You're probably heard the set-up: Serge (Robert Walsh), a yuppie with inclinations toward the artistic, has purchased a white-on-white painting for an outrageous sum; to be fair to him, he seems genuinely taken with the thing. But when he unveils it to his friends, they're shocked - and best-buddy Marc (Robert Pemberton) is offended, really: the monochrome canvas (there are actually two shades of white on it, for whatever that's worth) seems to sum up for him everything he finds vapid and pretentious about contemporary art and the art market. The trouble is that there's something vapid and pretentious about Marc, too - and as for peacemaker Yvan (Doug Lockwood), his constant desire to take both sides in every debate only barely conceals the fact that in his personal life he's basically an emotional doormat.

By now you may have already guessed that Reza's real theme isn't the outrageousness of the art scene at all; the white canvas at the center of ART is clearly what Hitchcock would have called a MacGuffin. No, it's the problem of interpretation in general that Reza has in her sights, and as this trio of opposed personalities battle out their differences over contemporary painting, we realize she has subtly posited the disturbing notion that they themselves are as blank as the tabula rasa they're debating. They see in each other only what they want to see - just as Serge does with his monochrome - which means that their friendship, their past history, even the meaning of their lives, are all built on the shifting sands of vanity. Which also means even their conflicts must prove evanescent; this trio sometimes comes to blows (in a moment that's currently under-developed, btw), and sometimes seems to be about to betray their most basic commitments to each other; and yet everything eventually blows over. Now you see something in the painting; but now you don't.

At the New Rep, after a slow start, Ocampo-Guzman's cast charts this ebb and flow with admirable skill. I felt Doug Lockwood (an acquaintance of mine, btw) was the stand-out as the sweetly blundering, vaguely contemptible Yvan; his long monologue of helpless, hapless complaint was a nearly-perfect aria of pained, pathetic nebbishness. Meanwhile, as Serge and Marc, Walsh and Pemberton were superficially just as good, with Pemberton's glittering contempt icily mirroring Serge's suavely earnest self-regard. But the note I'd give these two is that the motor of the drama is actually submerged for much of the play in their complicated relationship (Yvan is merely a fellow-traveler) - a bond which, in classic Gallic style, is rooted in vanity as much as it is in affection, and which is at least as competitive as it is needy. If the initial parries and thrusts of these two are to grip us, somehow that dynamic must be moving forcefully beneath the surface of the lines from the very start. Once open hostilities have broken out, however, both actors are in clover, and this ART feels like anything but a white-on-white blank. The tasteful setting, which could have concealed a sharper twist of satire, is by Justin Townsend; the accurate costumes are by Gail Astrid Buckley; and Christopher Hampton's translation is strong enough to blithely survive a slew of contemporary French high-cult references.

Just one general note in closing: after Artistic Director Kate Warner's abrupt departure last spring, I thought this would prove a rocky season at the New Rep; but instead it seems like a new kind of identity may at last be emerging at this mid-size stalwart - and my gut is that it may be due to the coalescing of a new directorial circle around the theatre. Subtler direction, more thoughtful performances, and a sense of keen character observation have reigned in Collected Stories, Three Viewings, and now ART; and as artistic identities go, I wouldn't say that's a bad one.

Call of the mild

2012-01-24T10:53:00.006-05:00

Photo(s): Megan Moore

Period music is all the rage in classical circles; indeed, these days it's often in the engagement with the past that we feel serious music's most thoughtful connections with the present.

In the theatre, however, the "period piece" is still frowned upon (for reasons that I feel are intellectually naïve). Yet there's a small scene devoted to this kind of thing nonetheless, and one of its exemplars is director Carl Forsman, artistic director of New York's Keen Theatre Company, who luckily for us has a relationship with Lowell's Merrimack Rep.

According to Forsman, his artistic focus is on "sincere theatre;" he aims to "make earnestness sophisticated," with an emphasis on "candor, vulnerability, and optimism." You understand then why he must so often perforce turn to the past for material, and why in effect what he does is period performance. Indeed, his plays are almost always drawn from the American stage of more than fifty years ago - he generally favors domestic dramas and comedies of manners. And generally they've proved to be fantastic.

It helps that Forsman is a subtle and superb director - one of the most reliable in America, I'd argue. That he is in principle non-radical, of course, is in itself a radical statement these days; his consistent elucidation of decades-old bourgeois conventions reminds us with embarrassing honesty that today's "edgy" entertainments are themselves only another set of bourgeois conventions - and that we perhaps can feel the form and pressure of our own age in their mirror as well as we can in our own.

And frankly, the comparison is not always flattering. Take John van Druten's The Voice of the Turtle, for instance, which Forsman is reviving right now at Merrimack Rep (through next weekend). On the one hand, it's a slender three-hander, a vehicle for a trio of skilled actors to exploit the unconscious yearnings of a certain period (that is, the war-weary years of the mid-forties). To those who feel this makes the piece permanently dated, I'd only point out that Forsman usually chooses pieces that share an intriguing quality; they are about the degrees of freedom an individual may have within an existing set of mores. It's amusing to realize that today we may be more often beset by "type" on stage than we were half a century ago; the politically-correct in particular are always trumpeting this or that character or situation as emblematic of class, race, or political beliefs; their texts are too often structured as symbolic political drama.

But Forsman's favored craftsmen of the past are rarely so doctrinaire, and indeed, The Voice of the Turtle turns entirely on its characters' engagement with public sexual and social mores while they are engaged with each other in a cocoon of isolation. It takes place in a Manhattan apartment that feels like a nook of mysterious solitude - its slightly enchanted quality is heightened by Bill Clarke's intriguing set, which is done up precisely as it might have been sixty years ago, that is in streamlined, slightly-artificial pastels, with a storybook model city twinkling outside its window (and an elegant period curtain that rises and falls before it like the hand of Time). A quiet sense of self-aware artifice pervades the acting, too - the performers all exude a sophisticated sense of personality balanced somewhere between dueling public and private identities (come to think of it, this kind of behavior was a staple of 40's movies, too).

But if the atmosphere of the piece is rich, the story is admittedly slim; it's essentially a finely-scaled fantasy about a lonely soldier and a pretty girl finding love while he's on leave. And Van Druten has to work a little hard, frankly, to fill out his essentially conflict-free frame with more than two hours' worth of traffic on the stage. But if his complications are sometimes a wee bit forced, they're also delicately rendered, and with a literate craftsmanship that's imbued with a knowing sense of grace. So perhaps it's also no surprise that Voice of the Turtle ran on Broadway for years - although what's most striking about it today is the way it clearly reflects the forgiving set of sexual mores that prevailed during wartime. Here, as in movies like On the Town, nice girls are allowed to make whoopee with soldiers on leave and still be considered "nice." Indeed, they can even admit they like sex - although the all-American Sally (Hanley Smith) wonders to her partying girlfriend Olive (Megan Byrne) whether after two affairs she could be considered "promiscuous" yet (both ponder this at top left).

This question is rendered so innocently it's sweet, but you can feel real anxieties floating behind it. In wartime, sexual mores aren't the only social codes that are suspended, after all, and you can feel beneath all the characters' chatter about great times at the Stage Door Canteen not only the looming tragedy of the war but also a sense of creeping alienation, of life gone adrift at home. Sally herself has been bruised by love already, and so has decided to swear off sex until she's 30, at least.

Enter Bill (William Connell), who I think you will be not be shocked to discover eventually triumphs over this obstacle to their intimacy. But you may be shocked to realize that the inevitable unfolds in a way that never feels manipulative or cheap, and that Bill is portrayed as far more romantic than Sally. And really, what can you say to a handsome soldier who can quote Milton? (Besides "yes," I mean?)

Even if you're immune to the charms of this kind of drama, I think you may appreciate the obvious technique of the trio of actors at Merrimack. All three manage the neat trick of projecting heartfelt performances through what is essentially a self-conscious screen of period convention; Hanley Smith makes the perfect 40's ingénue while still surprising us with her honest freshness, and William Connell hints at believable reserves of worldliness and rue beneath the facade of his smoothly handsome G.I.; meanwhile Megan Byrne nails her laughs in period style, but never pushes Olive too far into caricature. I suppose a cynic might say that The Voice of the Turtle in the end is just a "date play." But to some, of course, that may count as high praise (I think it still operates as a pretty effective "date play," by the way). And even a cynic I think would have to admit, at least while watching this production at Merrimack, that they don't make date plays like they used to.

IRNE deadlines!

2012-01-23T09:59:00.000-05:00

This is just a note to apologize for some tardiness in reviewing - I know, the shows are backed up behind me like Boeings at Logan. But I also have to get out my IRNE nomination form (which is already a little bit late), and that always takes much longer than I think it's going to.

And yes, that was the official declaration that I'm back on the IRNEs. It's a long story, some day I'll tell you all about it, etc. But for now, all I'll say is that it's good to know that the "I" in IRNE still stands for "Independent."

So . . . looking forward to the awards? I am. And I promise this week I will also review Merrimack's Voice of the Turtle, the New Rep's ART, Handel and Haydn's Four Seasons, Whistler in the Dark's Fen, and ArtsEmerson's Sugar.

Oh, I also saw Polanski's Carnage, will try to fit something about that in, too.

Later, Tom

Have you been to Symphony LATEly?

2012-01-21T12:16:00.007-05:00

The show's about to start at Symphony Hall!

Last night at Symphony Hall (I was there for Handel and Haydn's excitingly quirky take on The Four Seasons, you should go on Sunday) the audience once more sat through the usual Symphony drill: after the first movement (here, the first piece, an overture), there was a long pause, during which a large crowd of late-comers trooped to their seats.

The conductor, Harry Christophers, looked decidedly pained during this interlude; but I'm so used to this kind of thing by now at Symphony that I hardly notice it. Still, isn't it odd?

Theatre and dance aren't that way - people show up on time for those (a little late, perhaps, but then Symphony doesn't start at the crack of 8 pm either). Okay, symphonic structure generally guarantees there will be a break about 15 minutes in - but honestly, the classical crowd elsewhere doesn't take nearly as much advantage of this as the Symphony crowd does.

No, this happens much more than it does anywhere else at the corner of Mass Ave. and Huntington.

Is it . . . the building? The location? The fairly small number of restaurants right around it? Those constraints would seem to operate for any number of other venues in the city. Or is Symphony Hall located in some sort of aesthetic Bermuda Triangle, where the normal rules of time and space don't apply?

Perhaps it's some kind of unspoken, Brahmin-philistine tradition? The BSO's audience is widely perceived as monied and well, devoted to "excellence" in the corporate sense, but less devoted to the integrity of musical performance per se; Beethoven can bloody well wait till they get there. And has the BSO's long indulgence of this attitude led to the expectation that people now think, "Well, I can be late, it's at Symphony Hall"?

I don't know. It is a puzzlement. "One of the three greatest halls in the world - and that's why we're showing up late." But then Boston is full of these kinds of contradictions, isn't it. Someday somebody ought to pull them together into one of those funny little books they sell by the cash register.

A rhyme for all reasons

2012-01-19T22:33:00.006-05:00

The Imaginary Beasts bring the British panto to American shores.

Local impresario Matthew Woods has been producing his "pantos" (that's short for "pantomime," although "pantos" are far from silent) up on the North Shore for several years, but Boston is only now getting a taste of his whimsical take on this cherished British theatrical tradition in The Half-Baked and Hard-to-Swallow History of Humpty Dumpty, or One Egg is Enough, which Woods's Imaginary Beasts are presenting at the BCA through February 4.

What is a panto, you may ask? And should you go see one? Well, the answer to the second question is definitely "Yes - particularly if you own or are renting children from ages 4 to 7, or even older if they still believe in Santa." The answer to the first query is a little more complicated. A "panto" is an elaborate, exuberantly foolish piece of nonsense in which much of what you'd find in American vaudeville or even burlesque is benignly applied to glosses on fairy tales and Mother Goose. Think commedia crossed with Lewis Carroll and you've got roughly the idea. But a panto obeys its own unique set of dramatic rules - which you get the impression Mr. Woods is quite devoted to (although he's happy enough to update the dance routines to the likes of Lady Gaga). The dialogue is mostly rhymed couplets à la Ms. Goose, for instance, and gender is always reversed for specific roles: the male heroes are played by women, the dowagers by men. There are also standard call-and-response sequences which tradition demands must appear, and which give pantos much of their structure and shape. These include the hallowed 'Oh no, it isn't/Oh yes it IS" smack-down, lots of booing and hissing for the villains, the occasional sympathetic "A-wwww!" for the hero, and especially the delicious "Look out behind you!!!" whenever big spiders, wizards, dragons, etc., approach on tip-toe from the wings.

Now I have no idea why this odd formula works as well as it does; but you should know that the kids at last Saturday's matinee were transfixed by this silly soufflé for something like two-and-a-half-hours. And I mean riveted. Hypnotized. Quiet as mice, saucer-eyed, waiting patiently for their cues, understanding in some deep way that here at last was a piece of theatre pitched at precisely their level, with no extraneous civics or moral lessons besides the old ones about loyalty, honesty and pluck.

The adults were maybe a little less absorbed, to be honest. A panto is supposed to be a shaggy-dog story, but this one struck me as shaggy indeed; a good twenty minutes could be trimmed. But frankly, that's not what any of the six-year-olds in attendance would have said; I fully believe the kids in that crowd could have watched the show for another hour. And I can't pretend I didn't have a pretty good time. Indeed, I was simply happy to be introduced to a new platoon of lively, game young actors who approached all this square silliness with the utmost seriousness; the entire cast was strong, but I was particularly struck by newcomers Mauro Canepa, Denise Drago, Sam Eckmann, Derek Fraser, Molly Kimmerling, Christopher Nourse, Jesse Wood and Jill Rogati, who made a daringly weird, but eventually endearing, Humpty Dumpty. Woods himself stole scene after scene, preening in a deliriously fey get-up as Old Icicle, who was determined to bring down a permanent winter upon us all. But then everyone actually got a great get-up in this show: Woods' secret weapon is costumer Cotton Talbot-Minkin, who once again produced a fleet of delightfully fanciful ensembles that seemed to channel both Maxfield Parrish and Arthur Rackham. The whole thing was endearing and sweet, and you can't go wrong with bringing the kids, trust me. My guess is that Woods's pantos may quickly become a new Hub tradition; why not be there at the start of it?

Painting, but not priming, the town Red

2012-01-18T14:00:00.014-05:00

See this? Mark Rothko rarely did this.

Local reviewers have called John Logan's Red (at SpeakEasy Stage through Feb. 4) "a great work of art," "a masterpiece," and "a play of ideas" that's "intellectually and emotionally riveting."

What's usually meant by such phrases, of course, is that the show in question is either a vehicle or a lecture. So it's no surprise that Red is a little of both - but at least Logan's two-hander about Mark Rothko is a pretty solid vehicle, and a fairly diverting lecture - the playwright has compiled a (somewhat inaccurate) set of Art History notes for people who didn't take that course in college but like to pretend they did - and then transliterated it into a smoothly convincing facsimile of dialogue between Rothko and an assistant who's basically an amalgam of everybody else in the artist's life.

In other words, Logan has done a great service to cocktail party hostesses everywhere.

Still, the play is hardly a masterpiece or a great work of art. Please, don't be ridiculous. It is, instead, a simulation of same for people who can't tell the difference between craft and art.

But does that difference matter anymore? Probably not. Certainly a lot of people these days think it doesn't; sometimes it seems I'm the only person left alive who does. (But then it's my blog, isn't it.) I am intrigued, however, by the SpeakEasy production in a certain meta-cultural way.

Let me explain. The play itself is clearly a commercial construct with pretensions to discuss Big Ideas; which is fair enough; move over, A Man for All Seasons! Broadway has always trafficked in this kind of thing. Still, a funny conceptual wrinkle arises when you apply tried-and-true Broadway formulae to the central topic in Red, which I take to be the rejection of the commodification of art.

That's right; this is a commodity that attacks other commodities. And that's interesting, isn't it. I mean it's one thing to make a boulevard hit out of the six wives of Henry VIII; it's something else again to make commercial hay out of non-commercialism. For if you were to do that, shouldn't you of necessity find yourself staring into a vortex of mirrors reflecting nothing but themselves, kind of like Charles Isherwood and Ben Brantley in conversation?

For make no mistake: Red is thoroughly a commercial commodity, and a good one; you can feel in its cadences a certain pride in how carefully a machine-tooled product it really is (Logan is a highly-paid Hollywood screenwriter for a reason). It works, it holds you; its beats all land with a crisp little snap. If you're utterly ignorant of Rothko, you may find yourself saying "Wow, I never thought of that!," or something along those lines, and then, yes, remembering to talk about Rothko at your next cocktail party.

But somehow Logan never gets around to pointing out that this kind of thing, and those kinds of goals, are precisely the kind of thing its subject, Mark Rothko, would have despised - and in fact does despise, repeatedly and at length, over the course of Red. In short, this play is its own target. It's one long sneer at itself. The script's climax even revolves around Rothko's rejection of commercialism (when he refuses a commission from creepy old Philip Johnson to supply some fabulous décor for the Four Seasons). And most of the dialogue (it's highbrow banter, really) revolves around splenetic denunciations of the marketable, the sellable, the bankable, the populist and the popular.

And yet Logan tossed all this off between screenplays for Rango and Star Trek: Nemesis.

You see the problem? In what possible cultural frame can something like Red exist?

We're in such a frame, of course (obviously), which makes the question kind of piquant, I suppose.
And I have to admit that a theatre production - even one of Shakespeare or Beckett - has to be marketed somehow. You gotta have a gimmick. You gotta get those butts in seats, which means explaining arty stuff in a way that the critics can understand it.

Yet in the case of Red, the age-old conflict between moral luster and filthy lucre extends right down into the script itself, into questions of form vs. content, and the juxtaposition seems particularly jarring and bald. Perhaps as a result, the original production, from the Donmar Warehouse (which I caught in New York) seemed almost over-concerned with tip-toeing around the internal contradiction at the heart of the text. Most of its theatrical effects were subdued, even muted, in an attempt to conceal the basic hamminess of the set-up - and lead actor Alfred Molina insinuated a kind of magisterial mystery into his impersonation of Rothko. You got the impression the production's conceit was that a deep experience, with its own integrity, could be accessible through the play without being necessarily compromised by the play. Red itself didn't aspire to the depth of Rothko's work - it was simply pointing you toward that work.

Okay. This didn't completely convince me, but it was okay. The SpeakEasy production, however, is solid ham through and through, and ups the commercial ante on the script in every possible way - only in a mode of innocent superficiality, I have to admit; you almost wonder if director David R. Gammons and his team realize that they're doing Red: The Musical!, only without any songs. Star Thomas Derrah turns Rothko into a bitchy diva, and as his assistant "Ken," Karl Baker Olson only seems to exist to lob his many star serves back over the conversational net. Meanwhile director Gammons studs the show with grandiose, "great-man" lighting effects and moments of amusingly solemn stillness (below), even as a doom-y soundtrack cranks up repeatedly with multiplex-style emotional cues. Thus, even as Rothko rants about Nietzche, and the birth of tragedy, and death, we feel we're constantly being massaged by attendants; it's kind of like having a catharsis at a spa.

Hmmm . . . maybe it needs more . . . red . . .

Of course insofar as Red gets a few people to ponder question of recent artistic history, I suppose it ain't all bad. Although playwright Logan certainly plays fast and loose with certain salient facts. As I recall the Nietzche-Birth-of-Tragedy theory was first applied to the phase of Rothko's art before the famous "multiforms" (you know, the less successful, less famous stuff). And a central sequence showing Rothko and his assistant "priming" a canvas (at top) is a little sketchy as biography, for as is rather well known, Rothko often didn't do that, which is why so many of his canvases are in such poor shape today. (And well before Warhol, there were suspicions that Rothko was sometimes using latex paint bought at the hardware store - you know, where Dionysos and Apollo like to shop.) Of course maybe, as my partner joked, Logan was just being "discreet" about all that - for after all, sloppy craftsmen don't make good tragic heroes.

But Logan is "discreet" about other things, too. As I mentioned, the climax of the play revolves around Rothko's famous Four Seasons commission from architect Philip Johnson. But Logan deletes any reference to Johnson's notorious anti-Semitism and fascist sympathies. For make no mistake, the Harvard GSD grad was the genuine article: Johnson used his family money to organize a fascist party in the U.S., thrilled in person to Hitler's Nuremberg rallies, penned a rave for Mein Kampf, and even traipsed after the Nazi army into Poland, writing that watching Warsaw burn was "a stirring spectacle." Always as practical as he had to be, Johnson later sublimated his fascist sympathies into the strict regimentation of German modern architecture - but he remained notorious for anti-Semitic remarks and jokes for much of his life.

Over to Rothko, the Jewish abstract expressionist! But Rothko's relationship to his Jewishness is a little complicated; born in Russia (as Marcus Rothkowitz), his family dodged the pogroms while he was a child - so perhaps it's no surprise that later, alarmed by the rise of fascism in the U.S. (thanks in part to Philip Johnson!) he shortened his name, at his own admission, to elide his Jewish heritage. Logan nods to this episode, but effectively distorts it, which is a little odd. And the very idea of the Jewish Rothko working for a crypto-Nazi like Johnson is ripe with dramatic irony - the relationship must have been seething, and surely Johnson's reputation played a part in Rothko's ultimate rejection of the Four Seasons offer; but Logan daintily pirouettes around the whole topic.

And why? Perhaps because Johnson was gay (like this playwright)? I'm not going to speculate about that, but I think it's worth noting that the rift between Rothko and the artists who "killed off" Abstract Expressionism - which Logan likewise treats at length - also roughly aligned with sexual preference, and once again Logan doesn't mention it; Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg were all gay or bisexual, as were other leading lights in the rising pop and conceptual New York scene. The doomed, phallo-centric nobility of Rothko, the macho Pollock, and their expressionist ilk was losing cultural traction, and Rothko knew it. The attitudes that would eventually lead to organizations like, well, SpeakEasy Stage, were already in the ascendant.

Which makes it all the weirder that the SpeakEasy production is so gay - I mean, not only are most of the guys associated with the show gay, but the whole production (perhaps inevitably?) feels vaguely operatic and slightly camp. Karl Baker Olson's assistant arrives seemingly dressed for a SpeakEasy audition in art-nerd attire, and Derrah's Rothko lounges with a smoking cigarette when he isn't prowling the stage like Margo Channing, hungry for Eve Harrington's blood. There's a deep irony here, I think, that SpeakEasy may not even be aware of; for the company itself is hardly focused on tragedy (please, don't mention Next Fall); The Divine Sister and Xanadu are more its metier. If Rothko's positions became popular again, to put it bluntly, SpeakEasy would be sunk.

So, what can I say except - the irony is really piling up around this show! We have a Hollywood hack writing a valentine to a doomed Abstract Expressionist - only notice he feels the story is more appropriate to the stage than the screen, because . . . well because the stage still has some tattered intellectual prestige, some artsy je ne sais quoi - at least as seen from L.A., I guess. (And what better way to boost your profile with Martin Scorsese - for whom Logan wrote Hugo - than to dabble with the stage?) Yet it lands in the lap of . . . SpeakEasy. Hmmm.

So when Logan lambastes the "younger generation" (I guess that means you, millennials!) for not aspiring to the heights of genuine art, you have to wonder what he thinks of his own career. (Or what his ideas of the theatre are really worth.) Or is Red meant as a kind of melancholy shrug rather than a faux call to arms, an almost-fond farewell not only to heterosexual hegemony, but also to a dead mode of integrity that everybody hopes stays dead? Is that why the critics love it - because it is so obviously not what it claims to be? Oh, I don't know, and I don't care. The whole thing is really just too silly. For God's sake bring on Xanadu.

Okay, you thought Charles Isherwood was a crazy queen? You forgot about Hilton Als!

2012-01-16T22:55:00.005-05:00

I've already deconstructed Charles Isherwood's review of Lydia Diamond's Stickfly - do I really have to do the same thing for the New Yorker's equally-erratic theatre queen, Hilton Als? I suppose I should, but frankly, I'm not sure I can - Als' truly bizarre pan of this smart, funny, complicated play simply defies description. His post on the New Yorker's "Culture Desk" is a critical (and maybe psychological) car crash of epic proportions - I'm not sure I've read a paroxysm quite this incoherently breathless since Kael saw Brando naked in Last Tango in Paris; Al seems to have been undone mentally in some deep way by Diamond's play. He rants that Stickfly "panders to black audiences" by "revering whitey" while simultaneously "putting down whitey"!! Uh-huh. And trust me, that's not the half of it.

It's almost weird what this play is doing to New York, isn't it. Who could have guessed it would prove this radical? The spectacle of a big, well-made drama, written by a black woman, about a black experience of wealth and power that exists largely independent of white experience seems to have driven the town's critics, white and black, completely nuts. What gives? I wish I knew; but let me think about it some more, and I'll get back to you. (In the meantime, see the play; up here in Boston we showered it with awards for a reason.)

Vanya on Winnisimmet Street

2012-01-16T09:53:00.006-05:00

I wish I could say the current Apollinaire Theatre production of Uncle Vanya was truly great, rather than just pretty good; it's the kind of production that you root for, because the play is a challenge for a small company, and this version is unpretentious, straightforward, and at the finish quite moving. Director Danielle Fauteux Jacques has also had the clever idea of staging the production all over her theatre's 1906 home (it was built only a decade after Uncle Vanya was written, on Winnisimmet Street in Chelsea). Fauteux Jacques has done this kind of thing before - she quite effectively staged The Seagull all over a nearby park a few years ago. And it's intriguing how well the technique works for Chekhov; somehow it carries the playwright's vaunted naturalism right through the "fourth wall" and into our laps; after all, the setting is now literally "real," and we're no longer a theatre audience but seemingly flies on the walls of an estate in the Russian provinces a hundred years ago. Indeed, you somehow feel a little frisson when the door to the Apollinaire "set" opens, and you can see other corridors and rooms beyond it (through which gunshots sometimes echo from points unknown, but hardly "offstage"). The drama fittingly plays out in smaller and smaller spaces, too - so that as the characters' lives close in on them, so do the walls.

If only I could praise the acting as much as I can the concept! But I wasn't taken with too many of the performances in this Vanya, I'm afraid. It has gotten a lot of attention from the press because local luminary John Kuntz (above, with Marissa Rae Roberts) has been cast in the title role, but he's basically wrong for it (though with a beard he looks right enough), and despite an earnest effort, only taps into the character's anger rather than his fresh disappointment or romantic, free-thinking nature. Thus Kuntz is pretty much over-shadowed by newcomer Ronald Lacey, whose defeated whimsy isn't quite right for Astrov either, but who consistently intrigues you anyway. (Watch out for this guy, I think we'll hear more from him.) I also liked Ann Carpenter's gruff Nanny and found Anne Marie Shea amusingly pretentious as Vanya's mother. And local casting honcho Kevin Fennessey was fine, but not distinctive, as Telegin. Meanwhile Erin Eva Butcher came through at the last second (with real tears) as Sonya, but till then didn't always seem connected to her character; likewise Marissa Rae Roberts, who made a quite lovely Elena, took the character's self-described boredom far too much to heart - she was just sleepy, rather than a sleeping mermaid. Elsewhere the production felt either a little flat or a little shouty - and perhaps most problematically of all, you never believed anybody in it was truly in love with anybody else.

Still, the despair of the last scene came over - and I think the outlines of Chekhov's vision were discernible here and there (despite an up-and-down translation from Craig Lucas). At least I could tell the audience - perhaps thanks to the Vanya on 42nd Street effect - left talking over the play's issues, with that look on their faces people get when they suddenly realize there's a whole world out there beyond cable, movies, and video games. And maybe that should be good enough for any critic.

Did program notes bring down Opera Boston?

2012-01-15T11:58:00.011-05:00

Well, the Globe story on the Opera Boston mess dropped today, revealing that the company's closing seems to have been not so much a case of malfeasance (as I once speculated), as a case of clashing egos, childish pique, and a culture of financial mismanagement. Which, of course, is all malfeasance in its way.

Long story short: Opera Boston was perennially over-extended, and lived hand-to-mouth, relying on a small clutch of wealthy donors - and particularly one Randolph Fuller, who reliably came through with at least 10% of the annual budget, and who seems to have begun some sort of vendetta against incoming General Director Lesley Koenig after she edited his program notes for Maria Padilla without his consent (or even a call of apology). No, you read that right, according to Edgers - even though it sounds like something out of Guy de Maupassant, that slight seems to have been the start of the feud. But then one gets the impression that Fuller had long held court on the Board, and had also always had the previous general director, Carole Charnow, in his pocket.

Koenig, however, may have played her own part in the company's collapse; cutting your biggest donor's program notes without even an apology is, well, a pretty big lapse in the bow-and-scrape world of arts-board etiquette. I'm surprised she did that. But then Koenig was already a star in arts management (whereas Charnow had little experience outside Opera Boston), and so probably had her own ego, and her own plans. And to be honest, she seems to have been aware of another major mistake the company made: budgeting on the assumption that they would win a major grant from the Fidelity Foundation, which did not in the end come through. This, plus low ticket sales for the season opener, plus Fuller's putsch against Koenig, essentially did the company in, according to Edgers.

Of course, in the final analysis, this is a story about Opera Boston's Board, and not about Koenig, or even the company's finances. In an admittedly bad situation, they made a stunningly bad call. Given the collapse of the year's budget, and even given a looming, expensive production in February, the company still had options - it could have re-grouped, made a public appeal, or abandoned one, but not all, its productions, etc., etc. It's hard not to get the impression that Fuller and his cronies simply took their ball and went home, and destroyed Opera Boston out of spite.

And it's worth noting that Fuller seems to have done this before - he brought down the Boston Academy of Music in 2002, apparently in a single day, over seeming dissatisfaction with its founding director; prior to that, he'd walked out of Boston Lyric Opera (which had the resources to survive his departure). And what that means is: Fuller will probably be back, with checkbook in hand, looking for a new favorite operatic entrepreneur. And I know it's hard for arts producers to resist that kind of temptation - but at the same time, they shouldn't forget what happened to Opera Boston; if you live by Fuller, you should always have a Plan B; because you could die by Fuller, too.

Hello, God? It's me, Carnage

2012-01-14T12:44:00.019-05:00

Christy Pusz gets in touch with God. Photo: T. Clark Erickson.

There's a telling moment in Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage (at the Huntington through Feb. 5) in which Alan, an alpha-male asshole if ever there was one, admits his pet-name for his wife Annette is "Woof-Woof."

That's right. Annette is a pet literally - in fact, she's Alan's dog.

Actually, to get really specific about it - she's his bitch.

I know - cold. But that's the kind of nasty chill that should run through this cynical four-hander, which charts the descent of four seemingly-civilized adults into a childish orgy of destruction. Reza's set-up couldn't be simpler: the parents of two children who have tangled on the playground meet to mediate the resulting claims of injury (one kid - Alan's, of course - has actually knocked out two of the other kid's teeth). We know minutes into the first scene, however, that the veneer of sophisticated parlay these two couples have been trained to deploy with each other will soon be torn away, and that "the god of carnage" (as Alan puts it) will inevitably declare total war across the designer furniture and vases of tulips "just shipped in today" from that peaceable kingdom, the Netherlands.

At the Huntington, however, the cold edge of Reza's schema feels slightly blunted, which is too bad, because honestly, without razor-sharp execution, the glibness of her theme begins to weigh on the repetitive action, and her (admirably) unlikable characters become a tad tiresome even as her tone starts to curdle. It's not that this production falls apart - it's snarkily enjoyable for the most part, and certainly counts as a big step up from the likes of Captors and Before I Leave You. But it's never quite as much mean-spirited fun as you want it to be, and that's because director Daniel Goldstein hasn't really nailed his casting - and that's because he hasn't really understood his play.

And that's because Goldstein seems to imagine (as many reviewers have) that this is merely a superficial satire of haute bourgeois manners. Which, yes, it is; this particular God has only dark secrets, not deep ones. But Reza's targets are far more varied than is at first apparent; like Ben Jonson, she's a kind of monomaniac who stretches a single theme over the entire world. The only real interest in her play, in fact, lies in the way it works its gimmick ("Surprise! The God of Carnage!") through a strikingly wide variety of permutations. First we get the expected couple-on-couple coup d'etat; but Reza then unfurls a whole panoply of battle royales: we get gender-on-gender, conservative-on-liberal, and husband-on-wife; even (metaphorically) gay-on-straight (and top-on-bottom!). Enemies morph into allies, but then switch back again - soon these yuppies are all but dashing back and forth across the battle lines. And Reza goes global, too, balancing cynical exploitation of a pharmaceutical scandal with self-serving concerns over starvation in Darfur (discussed over tasty clafoutis); by the finale, we're surprised the tulips haven't taken sides. Thus the script is rather like that paper-fortune-teller game kids used to play (appropriately enough) on the playground; Reza keeps folding and unfolding her basic quartet into different combinations, but an angry id pops out every time, erupting from the characters like so much projectile vomit (yes, be warned).

Limning all the tiny fissures that will crack open into all those open conflicts, however, requires very precise casting, and a very agile set of farceurs (for in the end this is a farce, based on anger, or maybe disgust, rather than sex). We have to feel in our bones precisely how these husbands and wives are oppressing each other, as well as how they're oppressing the world at large - and how they both deny that; and then we need a team of actors who can physically deliver a mounting sense of chaos with glittering precision.

And there's just enough imprecision in this casting, and just a few too many mis-steps in the acting, for the Huntington version to not quite gleam as it should. We sense immediately, for instance, that Brooks Ashmanskas (Alan) and Christy Pusz (Annette) are gifted physical comedians (well, we already knew that in the case of Ashmankas, but don't worry, he's quite disciplined here) - and, alas, that Johanna Day and Stephen Bogardus, as their antagonists, Veronica and Michael, are not. Strangely, however, it's Day who gives the best, most carefully-thought-through performance; if there were just a slightly-sharper comic twist to her wounded, pseudo-concerned presence, Day would be in clover (as it is, she carries the show anyway). In an intriguing contrast, Pusz and Ashmanskas are physically far wittier, and all but beam with satiric energy, giving everything they do a delicious spin; but their relationship just doesn't have the sexist (dare I say Gallic?) cast that it should have (which is to say I think Annette should be sickened for reasons beyond Veronica's hypocritical clafoutis). The slight class differences between the two couples are likewise not precisely defined (no, they're not exactly on the same level, and they got where they are in very different ways), and Stephen Bogardus's rather weakly acted Michael simply isn't as whipped as he should at first appear (sorry, that's Reza's intent), so his later explosion into Neanderthalism doesn't have the sense of release required to make us laugh. In short, these couples should orbit each other like ironic mirrors - and so far, they don't.

Taken together, such gaps mean the show feels muzzled somehow, and so we get a little bored, and begin to ponder the other gods that govern human nature, in addition to that of carnage (like the god of porcelain, whom the characters occasionally worship). Reza does nod to such deities here and there, it's true; in fact, perhaps the play's most touching moment occurs when loutish, "honest" Alan, abashed at last, silently begins to pick up after himself for the first time. If only Reza had ventured a little further down these thematic by-roads, she might have written a major play, instead of what amounts to a smart little circus act. Which may explain the production's color scheme; Dane Laffrey's yellow atrium seems meant as a wicked ref to Parisian moderne (Reza's original text was in French, and premiered in Paris), but alas, this doesn't map to the "Cobble Hill, Brooklyn" neighborhood-amalgam that Christopher Hampton's apt translation conjures. But then director Goldstein's productions rarely look good; another reason why I left wondering whether the Huntington should be in a hurry to invite him back. With so much of this show almost in place, I think you have to look in his direction to explain why in the end this God isn't quite divine.

The New York Times is wondering whether it should tell the truth or not

2012-01-13T12:01:00.002-05:00

It's not like it's news, but I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I read things like this.

PS - Glenn Greenwald has a very perceptive analysis of when the Times questions "facts," and when it doesn't.

Superior cast, not-so superior Donuts

2012-01-12T23:08:00.013-05:00

Will LeBow and Omar Robinson plot their next move against Starbucks. Photo by Mark S. Howard.

The Lyric Stage definitely has a superior cast to serve up Superior Donuts; they just don't have a superior play (I know, I'm sorry - you've heard, or are going to hear, a variation on that line in just about every review of this show you read). BUT, Tracy Letts's follow-up to his expansively caustic August: Osage County is, I admit, a bit like a donut itself (and I think the author knows it): it's sugar-coated, warm and kinda sticky, and you're happy to gobble it up even though you know it has no nutritional value.

Indeed, the sticky-sweet Donuts sticks out of Letts's oeuvre like - well, like a Dunkin' honey-dipped on a bed of sour grapes; for this author's past work has reliably charted the dark side of American life - from the paranoia of Bug to the internecine generational warfare of Osage County. Donuts, however, taps into the self-forgiving mood of the "social conscience" sitcoms of the 70s - and then crosses it with a big fat kiss laid on the working-class melting pot of Chicago. Which all works pretty well, for the most part, until you begin to sense that Letts himself is uncomfortable with the Good Times vibe he has crafted (in fact he seems more troubled by it than we are). So he interlards his punchlines with sudden appearances by gangsters and goons, and a subplot about bookies that you never quite believe, and a few awkward swipes at big themes (racial tension, the Vietnam War). Thus Superior Donuts slowly morphs into Pulp Fiction Meets Chico and the Man, with a Special Guest Appearance by Langston Hughes; in attempting a play with issues, Letts ends up with a play with issues. But hey, he gives pretty good Tarantino, and definitely could handle an episode of Chico, so scene by scene, the playwright keeps you fairly happy - as long as you don't think about the whole play all at once, you're good.

I realize that wasn't exactly high praise. But then I'm guessing, or hoping, that this has just been an experiment for Letts - or maybe (as I suspect) it's an older, less-polished play that he dusted off once Osage made him so marketable. Either way, the dialogue is generally tight, and there's a poignant undercurrent of feeling to some of the action - and that's all good actors need, really, to keep the theatrical ball rolling. And luckily the Lyric has rounded up a surprisingly strong cast - maybe their best large ensemble since Nicholas Nickleby, in fact (even the bit parts pop nicely).

At the center of Donuts is Will LeBow's Arthur Przybyszewski (this is Chicago, remember), proprietor of, yes, "Superior Donuts," and a gentle, pony-tailed boomer lost in creeping despair and self-blame - so lost he can't even manage to connect with a nice lady cop who has her eye on him (Karen MacDonald). Arthur is given a shove in her direction, however, by Inspiring Young Person Franco Wicks (Omar Robinson), a "self-starter" who thinks he can revive Arthur's fading business and maybe even fight back against Starbucks with natural ingredients and poetry readings. When he's not being inspiring, btw, Franco is busy writing the Great American Novel (which, come to think of it, is also pretty inspiring), but he's also got a gambling debt trailing him, and two nasty thugs along with it.

As I said, there aren't too many surprises in this plot, although there are some head-scratchers - including a sudden fist-fight that seems to emerge from nowhere. Or rather it emerges from Arthur's back-story, which Letts mostly divulges in awkward monologues (with Arthur literally haloed in a spotlight). The brilliant LeBow delivers an exquisitely subtle performance, but he hasn't figured out how to make this dynamic work, and I'm afraid director Spiro Veloudos hasn't been much help. Still, moment to moment, LeBow charms. And luckily he is playing against the radiant Omar Robinson, who caught my eye in Twelfth Night a month or two ago, and here easily steals scenes from some of the sharpest pros in town. Again, I wouldn't say he actually limns the neediness - or maybe instability - that must be moving inside his character (otherwise how has Franco's crushing debt materialized?), but his easy star power makes it easy to forget that.

But then again, almost every performance in this show is a fine turn unto itself; the supporting cast - Steven Barkhimer, De'Lon Grant, Beth Gotha, Christopher James Webb, Zachary Eisenstat and Steven James DeMarco, all bring welcome detail, believable accents, and an admirable level of craft to their roles (which sometimes only amount to a line or two). It seemed to me that only Karen MacDonald, surprisingly enough, didn't quite find her feet; she's appealing but a little forced, as if she didn't trust that we were getting it. Or perhaps she's simply itching to make the part more than it really is. Elsewhere, however, everything was appropriately scaled; the nicely detailed set was by Matthew Whiton, and the accurate costumes by Mallory Frers. With all this talent on the stage, you often wished that Tracy Letts had fried up something more substantial, something that could stick to your ribs; but even if Superior Donuts (like its namesake) is mostly sugar and hot air, I admit it's pretty sweet going down.

The littlest Corsaire

2012-01-11T11:21:00.001-05:00

Four-year-old Alexei Orohovsky watched Ali's variation from Le Corsaire on Youtube, and then came up with his own version at his summer dance intensive. Enjoy! (And watch out for this kid in a few years!)

Thoughts and wild speculations on Opera Boston's demise

2012-01-10T21:24:00.012-05:00

A lot of people have been emailing to ask, "Why the hell are you diddling around with the sh*t that Parabasis says, when you're not covering the collapse of Opera Boston?"

And I don't really have a good answer to that. Although I have been trying to find out the truth about why the fat lady sang for that intrepid opera company, really I have. I wasn't always kind to their productions, I admit, but I always appreciated what they were trying to do - that is, forge a niche in Boston for productions of both rarely-produced and avant operas. And more than once they succeeded brilliantly - last fall's mounting of Béatrice et Bénédict was often enchanting, and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein was one of the best (and funniest) opera productions the Hub has seen in a decade at least. Previous seasons had boasted strong productions of Nixon in China and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Boston had much to thank Opera Boston for, and its closing was a tragic loss - as well as something close to an insult to the incredibly hard-working guiding light of the company, musical director Gil Rose.

So like many of you, I was really shocked that the Board could act so precipitously - and on so seemingly thin a pretext (a debt of $500,000, hardly small change, but also hardly a death knell in the world of opera), leaving not only many employees and visiting artists, but also a whole host of subscribers, in the lurch.

And to be honest - the suddenness of the action made me a little suspicious. We have a history of boards behaving badly around here, and from what you could piece together from press accounts, the Opera Boston Board's last-minute actions sounded a bit fishy. The pieces of the puzzle included: a suddenly looming debt; newer Board members who were eager to put together a plan to save the organization; and a sudden agreement to shut up shop anyway by the elder members, in a meeting from which many younger members were missing. Essentially, a contingent of the Board closed down the company summarily and unilaterally - even the Artistic Director didn't find out till after the fact.

The question of the hour is - why?

Now you don't really have to be Sherlock Holmes to begin piecing together a rather unflattering picture from those disparate data points. I mean, to put it bluntly - why would you suddenly slam the door on a basically-viable organization - unless you wanted to slam the door on its books, too? Was there something that one part of the Board knew that it didn't want the other part of the Board to find out? Hmmm. No wonder the rumor mill has been buzzing! But nobody I know will go on the record about what they know - at least not to me.

But I do know that Geoff Edgers is writing up a story about the whole affair for the Globe (which to its credit, called for an investigation into the Board's actions on its editorial page). And that's never a good sign, is it? No, it is not. Word is it the Edgers story will drop this week. So for once I'll be buying the Globe! Can't wait.

The Great War and the Iraq War

2012-01-10T00:19:00.017-05:00

As has oft been noted, pop charts the national mood much the same way an analysand's chatter inevitably betrays his or her buried fears and desires.

So I wonder - what should we make of our new love affair with World War I?

Right now on TV the big news is Downton Abbey, the best soap opera on the tube in years (I admit I'm a fan), and meanwhile, in the multiplexes, Steven Spielberg's War Horse is cantering across the big screen - even as its far-superior stage incarnation is still packing them in on Broadway.

Just a coincidence? I'm not so sure, because I'm one of those who believe in the pop subconscious. For the past few years, for instance, pop has been all but screaming at the top of its lungs, "WE'RE TORTURERS! AND WE LOVE IT!" even as in our political debates we either denied or elided this fact (or slowly, but defiantly, admitted it). Indeed, perhaps partly due to all those official denials, pop torture spiraled into a whole labyrinth of fetishes and sub-specialties. There was the psycho who literally tore people apart for their own good (Saw). There was the serial killer who only tortured other serial killers (Dexter). There was the torturer who re-wrote history! (Inglorious Basterds.) The torturers who did it for sport (Hostel). And the torturer who saved the world in 24 hours! Etc., etc., etc.

There was just never the American who tortured the innocent man.

(And so deserved to be tortured himself?)

But be that as it may, you can almost feel the cultural ground shifting beneath our feet a bit at the present moment. Corpse and torture porn, and the vengefulness they fed, feel tired; you can almost hear the zeitgeist rattling its chains - and of course we've just left Iraq, which immediately began to totter. So perhaps it's no surprise that the great waste of the Great War is suddenly on the Broadway stage, as well as screens both large and small.

But are we really admitting to ourselves, in a back-handed way, that our Middle East adventures have been just as tragic a mistake as World War I? Well - it's possible, I suppose. Certainly that's what Downton Abbey is hinting at right now - the start of its second season revolved around the ironies and injustices of the draft in Britain in 1916. Indeed, sometimes screenwriter Julian Fellowes seemed to be pushing parallels to the present day a little too explicitly - just as wealthy Americans balanced the Iraq War on the backs of the lower classes, who had few other options than to enlist, so in the Great War the aristocrats ensconced in the safety of country houses schemed and pressured the local officials for military exemptions for their servants and favorites. Actual war always throws class war into high relief, if you have your eyes open. And as for the rest of it (overextended empires, corrupt diplomacy, collapsing economies) - doesn't it all sound too familiar?

This kind of piquant comment is refreshing to see, of course - even if it's far too little, and far too late. And of course it's British comment, not American. Which reminded me of something else that's sad about American pop - we never allow ourselves any serious contemplation of class differences on TV (and thus perhaps we crave them in representations of the past!). A series like Downton Abbey would be unthinkable in America, even on cable - and even though a very close parallel would be possible in, say, a Manhattan co-op. There's a doorman there, after all, and of course a janitor, and many maids and nannies and au pairs tending the privileged few who reside within its walls. You could do an American Upstairs, Downstairs in the Hamptons, or on Beacon Hill, or in Kennebunkport or any number of other American enclaves.

And yet it never occurs to us to produce such a show. We don't even really allow ourselves to ponder it. Part of the reason, of course, is that in America, the class structure is complicated by race. Another part of that reason is our insistent self-delusion that we're not a class-bound society at all (when recent social studies have shown that actually, we're more class-bound than the rest of the developed world). It also goes without saying, of course, that anyone who is a conscious social climber in America is violating our most sacred pop trope - that one about "authenticity" - and so cannot serve as a hero or heroine. And then there's our weird modern neurosis about money in general. In most of the great Victorian novels, money is the motor of the plot; read a little Trollope, in fact, and you get a great sense of the practical economics of his age. But in America - and really in modern culture in general, high and low - money is generally either demonized or ignored. And you could certainly never figure out how an American household runs economically from reading a modern novel! Can you think of a successful popular novel or movie in the last generation that has been driven by economic concerns, as half of Dickens and all of Trollope and much of Eliot is? If you can, email me!

But in the meantime, I'll be watching Downton Abbey. Yes, I know it's sentimentalized, and it's certainly a soap opera - and yet in other ways, compared to the rest of what's on TV, it's so oddly realistic.

Okay, we used to think J. Holtham was evil, but now we feel bad because we realize he's just dumb

2012-01-08T20:13:00.003-05:00

J. Holtham, just to prove he's not really dedicated to smearing people's reputations and stifling discussion the way everyone thinks he is, has now gone and made himself look stupid as well as mean-spirited. (That wag!!) In a post today over at the Parabasis, he posits that . . . well, he seems to be saying that debating whether various cultures are more or less attracted to traditional theatre is like denying marriage rights to gay people.

I'm not kidding, he actually says that. I'm not sure that comparison even counts as "apples and oranges," frankly. It's more like apples and . . . what? Root vegetables? Flying sheep?

Okay, so when attempting a parallel, Holtham wound up with a non sequitur. But the funny thing is . . . a lot of gay people are NOT, in fact, attracted to traditional marriage! So . . . not only is his "devil's-advocate" comparison utterly flawed - it also would seem to lead to the contradiction of the conclusion he imagines he's supporting in the case of theatre.

Ta-dah!

Yeah, right. Who knew the mean girls were so dumb? The man is a dunce, pure and simple.

Oh I'm sorry - was that rude? But I mean, it's not like I called him a racist . . .

How do the Boston boys stay so civil? And why are the Parabasis boys so evil?

2012-01-08T13:39:00.005-05:00

The recent, nasty brouhaha over at Tom Loughlin's "A Poor Player" reminded me again of one of the ironies of the blogosphere - that it's often riven by immature battle-royales between horrid little high-school-style cliques. The usual reprobates were behind this particular imbroglio, I think - none other than Isaac Butler and J. Holtham of the blog "Parabasis," the "mean girls" of the theatrical blogosphere, who have banded together against me in the past, and who seem to think that somehow they run the Internet cafeteria; they're always denouncing people and insisting that so-and-so can't sit at their table, etc. (As if anyone wanted to sit at their table - I know they're both over-privileged types with connections, so a lot of people make nice, but seriously, there's a limit.)

Holtham, it seems, has finally accepted the fact that he is not a talented playwright; Butler keeps resisting the same verdict on his directing ability; meanwhile, both have slowly become cartoons of the kind of politically-correct mandarin so widely scorned by stand-ups and late-night TV. Which, you know, would be okay if they weren't so bureaucratically-minded, mean-spirited, and basically censorious. Their campaign against poor Tom Loughlin - whom I've read off and on for years, and who believe me, is no racist - to my mind only makes them look desperate. And perhaps they should be desperate; I mean, what have they got left but race and racism?

Meanwhile, of course, the Boston bloggers - me, Art, and Ian - seem somehow to always get along, even though I'm sure we disagree quite strongly on various political issues. Indeed, we make jokes at each other's expense and in general enjoy each other's company. I don't know if this is because we actually bump into each other, and so know each other as human beings, or not (I certainly doubt that compromises our camaraderie). I imagine the fact that we all are clever enough to read in each other's writing our varied, but mutual, intelligence and good nature, also helps us maintain our relative harmony.

Which leads me to the deeper problem with Parabasis - I simply can tell that those two writers are not generous of nature or spirit; their mutual flattery is so unctuous and all-encompassing as to be unconscious, and their political (and class) conformity is so explicit it's suffocating. The latest evidence of this is their treatment of Loughlin - it is impossible to have been reading this writer for the past few years and imagine that he is a racist. Do you hear me? IMPOSSIBLE. So to pretend that he is, frankly, is obviously the coldest kind of self-aggrandizing, ideological calculation - which is, of course, typical of Parabasis.

I'll go a little further - I can't think of the last time I met a racist who was devoted to the theatre. Seriously. Do I know any racists in the theatre? Okay, maybe there are some covert ones, maybe - but why would they stick around? I mean, would Hitler take a job in a kibbutz? Get real, guys. When the Parabasis Boys start circling in their vulture-like way, and begin insinuating such things about somebody who has devoted his or her life to this declining, but delightful, and eternally progressive, art form - think twice. And then think three times. Because trust me, you are most likely being played by two of the most obnoxious, and obvious, operators on the Internet.

Boston Baroque rings in the New Year

2012-01-08T12:58:00.000-05:00

Photo by Kayan Szymczak for the Boston Globe.

I'm terribly late with this review, and I feel especially guilty because the concert in question was delightful, as Boston Baroque's annual double-gala on New Year's (both Day and Eve) always is. But then the intense crush in the lobby at Sanders Theatre last Monday was proof positive these folks don't need good reviews to get out the word about this tradition anymore, everyone knows it's the place to be for classical music fans on January 1.

Don't imagine, however, that just because a crowd is largely blue-haired that things can't get rough; honestly, I can remember crowds at the Rat back in the day that were more polite than the one that elbowed its way into Sanders Theatre that afternoon. Then again, folks knew the concert was being broadcast live on WCRB, so it had to begin on a dime (if you were listening, however, don't think that what you heard had the tenor of a tea party - well, maybe it did if you're thinking of the NEW tea party!).

At any rate, the WCRB recording didn't get much in the way of things musically, even if it did slightly muddle the usual intimate atmosphere that Boston Baroque conjures with its audience (at its New Year concerts in particular). Emcee Cathy Fuller made a gently fulsome, if slightly blank, hostess, and Pearlman came off as slightly diffident in his radio patter, perhaps - but then he is a bit diffident, isn't he; indeed, as I listened to him I suddenly felt a strange sense of correspondence between his vocal presentation and the way he thinks musically. Not a direct correspondence, actually - rather an inverted one; I wondered if Pearlman's swift, graceful tempi were actually the final goal of a careful consideration that can manifest itself in his speech as hesitancy. But be that as it may, the broadcast in general felt like a sweet moment of triumph for this local light, who certainly deserves accolades for his dedication to Boston Baroque (and before that Banchetto Musicale, yes I'm that old) over the past decades.

After the introductions, the concert got off to a clean, rousing start with a gleaming rendition of a Corelli Concerto Grosso (Op. 6, No. 10), which might have almost stood as typification of Boston Baroque style: dancing, even sparkling, with some depth but not too much. The ensemble here, and throughout the concert, was focused and responsive, even luminous; the players knew they were on the spot before perhaps their largest audience ever, and they gave it their best.

These New Year's Day concerts are always distinguished by little eccentricities, musical "features," and in-jokes, and this time around the crowd got a taste of two now-obscure instruments, the triple harp and sopranino recorder. A triple harp deploys three sets of strings to cover the notes that in modern harps are handled by pedal-work - thus performing on it is a special technical challenge; but beyond that, like many period works, it has its own hauntingly delicate timbre: it seems to be literally speaking to us from several centuries ago. Pearlman chose to showcase it with a great piece, Handel's Harp Concerto in B-flat (which more people know from its translation to the pipe organ). Harpist Barbara Poeschl-Edrich played with clarity (no small feat!), and an exquisite sense of musical architecture, though perhaps a bit dryly, I thought (but then a truly singing line is the trick with this instrument).

Next came an even greater musical monument - Bach's famous Double Violin Concerto. Here, perhaps, was where one could most argue with the brisk Boston Baroque manner - not because of its speed, I suppose (were violinists Christina Day Martinson and Julie Leven really that much faster than other performers I've heard? I'm not sure) but rather for the fact that a certain expressiveness or lyricism seemed to be lost in the players' attack. Again, you can argue about the level of lyricism appropriate to Bach - I just left wanting more, especially from the gorgeous Largo, and I know these ladies can supply it.

The program wrapped with two less rich, but still dazzling, offerings from Vivaldi. The first, his Concerto in A minor for Sopranino Recorder, proved bewitching, and featured a diving, dazzling turn from virtuoso Aldo Abrau (who I swear must have an extra lung) on what Pearlman aptly called "the hummingbird of recorders." Next came crowd favorite Mary Wilson, who wrapped her glowing soprano (if not her best diction) around Vivaldi's curious motet "Nulla in mundo pax sincera" ("In the world there is no genuine peace,") which disconcertingly delivers a melancholy lyric in an uplifting musical setting, and crowns it with truly sublime "Alleluia!"

There's always a little extra surprise at the end of these concerts, and this time it turned out to be a period-instrument rendering of "Glitter and Be Gay," from Bernstein's Candide, with Wilson beaming center stage as Cunegonde. Maybe I'm just drunk on Candide these days, but I thought the instrumentation sounded fabulous (and Pearlman conducted with spirit), which made me think that an entirely-period-instrument version of the whole show could be quite intriguing (how about it, Mary Zimmerman?). And Wilson had a fine time with the schizophrenic laughter-and-tears, sympathy-now-satire mode of the lyrics, and of course her voice has a richness you rarely hear on the musical-theatre stage. It was a final triumphant touch to what was a truly gay and glittering soirée.

Mike Daisey, "When the Clock Strikes"

2012-01-04T11:15:00.014-05:00

"A piece of shit, wonderfully executed."

You can't help but admire Mike Daisey when you're watching him - even when, as was the case this New Year's Eve in Boston, he has nothing coherent to say, and has tied up his performance in a narrative knot (and knows it).

Or should I say that's especially when you can't help but admire him? For it's precisely at such times (i.e., when he's spinning his wheels) that Daisey's technique is at its most obvious, and also its most impeccable: when his voice is soaring into a carefully punctuated bellow, then swooping into a whisper for no apparent reason - that's when you ooh and aah internally over his physical control. When the arms are at one moment swinging like mallets, then the next, slipping through the air as sinuously as an odalisque's - it's only then that you realize this sumo-sized guy, whose eyes glitter with madness, and who is forever beading out in sweat because he's so aquiver with indignation, is actually enacting a kind of self-conscious ballet for your benefit; with utter focus and relentless discipline, he is sculpting an evanescent (indeed invisible) dramatic sculpture - a virtual persona - for your contemplation and edification.

And the fact that whatever he's doing, it counts as a still life, is intrinsic to the weird pull of his theatrical presence. Daisey's affect is all outrage unleashed, and yet he's absolutely and completely tethered, rooted to the spot behind the bland table that serves as pedestal for his notes. And around him there is no set, no context, nothing - indeed, at the Huntington here in Boston, the fact that the beginnings of the set for God of Carnage were in place behind him led to a ten-minute diatribe about that particular play ("A piece of SHIT, but wonderfully executed!"). Daisey was clearly unsettled by the presence of a theatrical frame - perhaps because he's aware that his caged rage operates best in a vacuum; it can't, and shouldn't, get any dramatic traction; the "fourth wall" must be sealed around him like shrink wrap, so that he floats before us like a bitter genie pickled in his own rhetorical bottle.

This is what makes so many folks giggle at his expectorations; Daisey's harangues, though precisely targeted, and delivered with Old-Testament-level authority, are nevertheless so clearly helpless that their intensity tickles us, the same way that the doomed monomania of a cartoon character does. Only beneath this superficial response, I think there lurks a somewhat deeper resonance: the impotence of Daisey's anger maps to a new sense of social incapacitation in the zeitgeist. For there's no shared culture anymore to channel the fury of a funny scold like him; Daisey's wicked riffs can't land, can't have any effect on their targets. Like the guy left hanging by tech support, and the smartphone user who can't access an app, Daisey is dangling, cut off by the grid from personal efficacy. And politically, things may be even worse; he can scream shame on any number of social and cultural miscreants all he wants, but shame no longer exists. Hence the essential stasis of his show. And the sense that within our lubricated social shells, we're much like him.

I admit that all this came to mind, however, because the text of his Boston show, "When the Clock Strikes" - a loose meditation on the general lousiness of New Year's Eve - was intermittently amusing, but so meandering as to have been almost maddening (if I'd been paying close attention to it, that is). It was, I suppose, a tour of sorts of his psyche, as Daisey tilted at his usual windmills - capitalism is sucking/has sucked your soul, but you are a hopeless hypocrite anyway (just like me!), and then this other WEIRD thing happened, did I tell you about my wife and the Nazi - oh maybe not, but you're a puritan anyway (or are you a marauding drunk?), which is funny because right now I am basically jerking off into your mouth. Har-de-har. I think he repeated that last bon mot twice - which really made me think the show should have been titled "A Taste of Mike Daisey."

There were certainly some punchy moments in this psychological mystery tour, but a mood of showbizzy hypocrisy pervaded it, too - Daisey's such a knowing observer of snobbery that the precision of his satire betrays an unspoken allegiance to its targets; after punching down Yasmina Reza, for instance, he sighed that "all pop culture and literature" is now about a handful of neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Somehow I missed that - but then I'm an alcoholic puritan, right? (At least I don't live in Connecticut, though!)

Oh, well, as I said, it was the performance that made the show - Daisey admitted as much himself, quipping that, like Yasmina Reza, he might well be presenting "a piece of shit, but wonderfully executed." (Just as he likewise shouted that he was a hypocrite - you often sense in Daisey the nervous desire to pre-empt any and all critique.) At any rate, if you'd like to check the performance out for yourself, you can - Daisey has posted the audio on his website. I think even from an MP3 you can appreciate the hypnotic, almost-musical cadence of his delivery - and perceive that with better material, he could put on quite a show. I've been hoping for some time that a local presenter (like ArtsEmerson, hint hint) might bring his monologue on Steve Jobs to Boston - if any town needs to see that, it's this one; and "When the Clock Strikes," if it did nothing else, made me hunger for that opportunity all the more.

Now I'm not going to say I told you so . . . but it seems Sarah Ruhl has come home to roost . . .

2012-01-03T16:36:00.004-05:00

I admit I'm mightily amused by the revulsion so many critics have suddenly evinced at the House that Ruhl Built (of string, no less). Whimsy? Quirk? A structureless narrative free-for-all? Suddenly everyone's realizing that this amounts to one big artistic dead end. The poster boy for the new sentiment seems to be the Village Voice's Michael Feingold, who in a recent, much-discussed pan of Molly Smith Metzler's Close Up Space lamented thusly:

I'm sad, but not from Seasonal Affective Disorder. The fall season ended with Manhattan Theatre Club's opening Molly Smith Metzler's Close Up Space, a work neatly encapsulating everything new plays do that has been making me sad for months. I bear Metzler no ill will. As with too many other recent plays, hers has some distinct virtues, but its faults outnumber them so heavily as to make theatergoing burdensome: Instead of engaging creatively with the event onstage, you expend all your energy looking for little things within it to like in compensation for its generally dismaying nature.

I can't blame Metzler for repeating the pattern. Like all playwrights, she wants to get produced. Naturally, she has turned out the sort of play our would-be serious theaters increasingly tend to produce. They, too, strive to imitate previous successes; everybody's following the Ruhls. The result, in Close Up Space, is a viscous mixture of sitcom and after-school special. It opens with patent absurdity, in an ostensibly naturalistic context, and ends in a glop of would-be tragic ironies. Reality, heightened or everyday, is the one thing it virtually never touches.

You know, I'm glad (of course) that people ~~like Feingold~~ are finally seeing the light about millennial playwriting, but . . . honestly, where have they all been the past five years? Couldn't they have seen this coming? I certainly did. From way up here in the provinces! [Correction! I have been informed that Feingold, like me, has been critical of Ruhl from the start. I have to start reading him more. But for the rest of you New York peeps, however, this post still goes! And you should start listening to Michael Feingold!]

Words to live by

2012-01-02T23:34:00.001-05:00

If you're looking for New Year's resolutions, here are a few suggestions. Woody Guthrie's, from 1942 (below) are all classics - particularly "Stay glad," "Dance better," and "Love everybody," not to mention "Beat fascism" and "Wash teeth, if any."

In retrospect

2012-01-02T13:35:00.021-05:00

I'm still in cheerleader mode - only this time for myself.

It's going to be a slow week, so I thought to myself - what about filling up some space in the blogosphere with a self-retrospective, a "Best of the Hub Review," to go with my other annual "best of" lists?

And you know, I'm just conceited enough that I thought this was a really great idea.

Especially since 2011 was a busy one for the Hub Review in terms of sheer polemic, which almost none of the other cultural blogs engage in. So I've mostly narrowed my "Best Of" focus to those essays which had a particularly political edge during the past year. I've kept it to roughly ten - well, to almost ten rubrics, as you'll see; some of my longer pieces, particularly my extensive consideration of His Girl Friday and Porgy and Bess (in the context of the racial politics of vintage theatre), were linked into something like one continuous article. So without further ado -

The Best of 2011

I'm well-known as just about the only long-form cultural blogger in existence, and 2011 saw me at my most long-winded in a linked, four-part (and almost 8,000-word) consideration of what constitutes a valid approach to racism in classic theatrical texts - via a comparison of the ART's exploitive Porgy and Bess to Trinity Rep's honorable update of His Girl Friday. I also pondered why, exactly, the print press is so hypocritically eager to condemn racism in some works, while ignoring it in others. (Indeed, if you only read the print reviews, you might never have realized this cultural debate was playing itself out on-stage in New England - I think I'm the only person in the region who bothered to compare the two productions.) The series culminated in the critique of Clybourne Park that the Guardian deemed "brilliant" (thank you, Guardian - I now have a whole cohort of steady readers from the UK):

Two contrasting tales of racism and renovation

Hot off The Front Page

Paulus, Parks, and Porgy

What we talk about when we talk about what we talk about when we talk about race

I also penned a double essay around the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and the questions it raised about America and what I christened "9/11 pop" (although in retrospect, "9/11 porn" might have been the better handle):

Which one is the real America?

Seen from a distance . . . Notes on 9/11 pop

I likewise devoted a fair amount of space on the blog to the crack-down on Occupy Boston - which I often visited this fall - which led to these widely-read pieces:

Thoughts on the phony progressive politics of the theatre

Scenes from an Occupation

So, Mumbles has lost my vote

Elsewhere, I mused on the slow death of cultural discussion on the web -

Welcome to the blogosphere

And wrote about the practice of theatre criticism itself quite a bit, as I weathered a sustained attack from several theatres (and then launched my own against Charles Isherwood of the New York Times.) Salvos from that period include:

The case for creative destruction, etc.

More thoughts from Larry

Larry's open letter to the A.R.T.

And, of course, I can't honestly review this tumultuous year without including my own attack on those who sought my expulsion from the IRNE Awards:

The Shawn & Kati Show

Meanwhile, on the lighter side, there were my frustrated polemics against another theatre critic, Charles Isherwood:

You know, maybe Chuck does kind of suck

and

Should the gays be reviewing the blacks? or, Is there too much swish to the Ish?

Don't worry, we're near the end! Looking way back, very early in the year I penned the following plea for a "Martin Luther King" prize devoted to plays about race right here in Boston. (Within a few weeks, intriguingly enough, the Huntington announced it would be producing just such a play, Kirsten Greenidge's The Luck of the Irish):

The Martin Luther King Prize - how about it?

And finally (fast forwarding to just a few weeks ago) one article that led to a number of positive emails and comments was my re-consideration of the Frank Capra classic, It's a Wonderful Life:

It's a wonderful life, but a lousy market economy

Whew; I think that's enough self-congratulation for now - not that there isn't even more great writing on the Hub Review. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up something like the same standard in 2012, so by all means - keep reading!

What to do on First Night

2011-12-31T12:17:00.006-05:00

Yes, the last night of the year has once more rolled around - only in these parts we call it "First Night" rather than "Last Night" (perhaps for obvious reasons). And once more hordes of revelers (even more than usual, I'd guess, as the weather's not too bad) with noisemakers that would have tried the patience of the newly-reformed Grinch will be swarming the streets of Boston till past midnight.

BUT this year I will again be among them, trying not to feel too Grinch-y as I make my way among the crowds. And if you decide to join me (along with several hundred thousand other Bostonians), you may be wondering - what should you see?

Well, here's my short list - Mike Daisey is making a rare appearance in these parts at the Huntington at 9:30 pm. This is one of those controversial shows where for a little extra cash you can nab a premium seat, but there still should be room for everybody (the usual First Night button costs just $18). Not far away, in Symphony Hall, gospel and soul great Mavis Staples will be holding forth in Symphony Hall at 9 pm. Meanwhile Suzanne Vega will be taking the stage at Jordan Hall at precisely the same time. So expect crowds over in the Huntington area.

Elsewhere, a few other events stand out (note - most of these will be either highly popular, or are limiting First Night attendance to the first 100 in line, so plan accordingly): The Central Square Theater is offering free admission for button-wearers to Arabian Nights, which I listed as one of the best shows of 2011. You can't do better than this for kids who are into storytelling (although fair warning, it's a little long for the youngest). Meanwhile downtown the Boston Ballet is once more shaking up The Nutcracker for its final bow at 7:30 pm at the Opera House; this loosey-goosey, what-the-hell version was a hoot last year, so I'm sorry to be missing it. For those with a classical-music bent, over at Emmanuel Church at 8:30 pm, Opera Boston is staging Mozart's very first (one-act) opera, Bastien und Bastienne, which I've seen before and can attest is a charmer (and suitable for children, at least those who are within a few years of Mozart's age when he wrote it - i.e., twelve). And finally, over in a ballroom at the Hynes Convention, you should definitely check out local great Sean Fielder and the Boston Tap Company as they dazzle you with their fleet footwork at 9:30 pm - and even devise a dance challenge!

And don't forget that Boston Baroque is once more offering its own charming New Year's tradition - concerts featuring Bach, Corelli, Vivaldi and Handel at Sanders Theatre both tonight and tomorrow (a "First Day" celebration). These concerts are always packed, and always delightful - one of the highlights of the classical music season. If there are still tickets available, don't miss it.

The Best Boston Productions of 2011

2011-12-30T12:02:00.015-05:00

Candide at the Huntington

2011. To be perfectly honest - it wasn't all that great a year (and I'm not talking about just the weather). In 2010, my "best of" list ran to 20 productions. This year - well, I've got a solid top 10, with maybe 7 more honorable mentions - but after that the pickings get slim. This is partly due to the fact that many of our mid-size houses, like SpeakEasy and New Rep (neither of which saw an easy year in the back office), seemed to be struggling against a pretty-good-but-not-great glass ceiling in terms of artistic quality. And of course the ART remained a vast, revenue-driven wasteland, as I assume it will remain for the remaining years of Diane Paulus's contract (that is if it's not extended!). We just have to get on with the culture without Harvard, I suppose.

On the plus side, however, the best productions of 2011 were the best we've seen in years - we saw one re-thinking of a classic-that-never-quite-came-together that seemed to work out every "problem" this famously troubled musical was ever diagnosed with. And we saw the Arab Spring reflected in an up-to-the-minute production of Shakespeare that seemed to embody everything classical and political theatre should be. These moments were absolutely thrilling - if they were the only highlights of the year, 2011 would still have been a year to remember.

Beyond those twin peaks of achievement (both basically imported, I think it's worth mentioning) there was a wealth of great musical productions this year - some familiar, some obscure, some that amounted to radical re-thinkings, and at least one that was a precise historical reproduction. And for the first time ever, I felt a company engage with questions of race in classic theatre in a productive way - no, not at Company One, but instead down at Trinity Rep, which mounted a renovation of His Girl Friday that had been cleverly cleansed (by John Guare) of its reactionary politics, as well as a brilliantly-acted production of Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park, a script which wasn't quite up to the standard of the production devoted to it. Which, as I think more about it, probably counts as a trend this year; I can't recall a new script I've seen recently that was compromised by the acting of its presentation - instead, I saw a lot of troubled plays elevated and energized by first-rate performances (although sometimes, as with Lynn Nottage's Ruined, even a first-rate cast couldn't quite lift a second-rate play into the Hub Review pantheon).

Elsewhere in the list you'll find productions by both the local and the Polish fringe, a bit of British frat-boy Shakespeare, and at least one new play by a prickly local author who once spent several installments of his blog ridiculing yours truly. But then stranger things have happened. So without further do, on to the best of 2011 -

The Top 10

Candide - Huntington Theatre

Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of Candide (above) may well prove to be the production of the decade - it was up there with the likes of the original Nicholas Nickleby, or the current hit War Horse - that is to say, among the greatest theatre productions I've ever seen. It was practically perfect in every way: great cast, great direction, great design - it was all there. What was most startling was how director/adaptor Zimmerman, by discarding the various books that had been devised for the show over the years, and going back to Voltaire's original book, was able to weave a perfect theatrical frame for this legendary score, which included not only some of Leonard Bernstein's greatest music, but lyrics by the likes of Stephen Sondheim, Lillian Hellman, and Richard Wilbur (some of them devised for a series of revivals). Thus it's not too much to claim the production was the culmination of over fifty years of theatrical effort; and the show's seeming inability to find a berth in New York provided yet another testament to how far quality standards have slipped in the Big Apple.

The Speaker's Progress

The Speaker's Progress - SABAB Theatre at Arts Emerson

It isn't often you realize you're watching the local debut of a global theatrical talent. But that's what happened this fall, when Sulayman al-Bassam took the stage in his own adaptation of Twelfth Night at ArtsEmerson. What ensued was an evening of challenging theatrical and political magic, enacted by a cast imbued with a superbly casual mastery of their craft. Watching The Speaker's Progress, you could feel its political subtext shifting minute-to-minute, just as its creators must have felt as they developed its text during the Arab Spring. I left the show with an undeniable feeling that the brilliant al-Bassam might be a theatrical conjurer on the level of Peter Brook. But alas, from the reviews it was clear that our local elites - which generally under-covered, or misunderstood, the show - are going to have a little trouble with a democratic Arab consciousness emerging on our cultural stage. So stay tuned for more on that front!

The Cripple of Inishmaan - Druid Theatre at Arts Emerson

A number of highly-praised ArtsEmerson offerings proved either slightly disappointing (The Merchant of Venice, Angel Reapers) or downright disastrous (Dollhouse). In between these high-concept misfires, however, you might have caught this brilliant production by the Druid Theatre (where Martin McDonagh got his start) which polished every facet of this cold little gem from that famously misanthropic author to a gleaming finish. And for good measure, nestled in the midst of the pitch-perfect cast was our own Nancy E. Carroll - so who could complain?

Clybourne Park - Trinity Rep

Bruce Norris's acidic Pulitzer Prize-winner turned out to be a recycled mix of Albee and Chappelle's Show (believe it or not) - but the cast at Trinity, under the subtle direction of Brian Mertes, proved so strong that they put the used goods over anyway. Unfortunately you could still tell that there was little new here, save a concept that it seemed the author hoped might, all by itself, conjure something coherent out of received hip attitudes. And its success represents yet another troubling example of the falling standards of the print critics - while the Trinity production, by way of contrast, represented yet another case of actors staving off the collective realization that our playwrights are rarely holding up their end of the dramatic bargain these days.

Oklahoma! - Reagle Music Theatre

Reagle proudly claims that it presents classic Broadway in its original form - and with this production of Oklahoma! it more than made good on that promise. The physical production was drawn from a University of North Carolina research project which all but replicated the original costumes and sets; a long-time associate of choreographer Agnes de Mille was brought in to set her dances on the Reagle company; and top-notch Broadway talent was signed to sing the delightful score. The results were unforgettable.

The Most Happy Fella - Gloucester Stage

The summer stage up in Gloucester isn't known for its musicals - but Eric Engel's remarkable production of The Most Happy Fella might have begun to change people's minds about that. It didn't hurt that the musical itself is a lost treasure - a cornucopia of ravishing melody from one of Broadway's legends, Frank Loesser. But Engel's nuanced chamber production - which featured many of our best local voices - seemed both perfectly scaled to the Gloucester space, and surprisingly true to Loesser's lyrical vision.

The Hotel Nepenthe

The Hotel Nepenthe - Actors' Shakespeare Project

Local luminary John Kuntz's best work in some time, this spooky mood piece toed an ever-shifting line between menace, mystery, and world-weary bemusement. Under the direction of David R. Gammons, Kuntz himself led a sterling cast in a Twilight-Zone-style ramble over multiple pasts, presents and futures; the vignettes were individually tightly plotted, but only loosely connected - which somehow gave Kuntz just enough structure and just enough freedom, it seems, to hang onto his morbid focus without losing his wry sense of humor.

Caesarean Section - Teatr Czar at Charlestown Working Theater

Evocative. Raw. Haunting. In this strangely compelling, often wordless mix of theatre and music, Poland's Teatr Czar seemed to revive before our eyes the exploratory spirit of Grotowski and his kindred spirits - and won another small coup for the scrappy, reliably-challenging Charlestown Working Theater.

Arabian Nights - Nora Theatre and Underground Railway Theater

The two resident companies at the Central Square Theater combined their talents for this new adaptation of the traditional tales by Dominic Cooke, and came up with a mesmerizing winner. Designed by muralist David Fichter in splashy, saturated colors, and directed by Daniel Gidron with an eye to both comedy and suspense, this production was so strong you wished it could last a thousand nights and then some.

Dogg's Hamlet/Cahoot's Macbeth - Whistler in the Dark

After a number of daring but not-quite-fully-realized productions, Whistler was back in form with this double bill from Stoppard (and finally began to get some serious attention from the print critics, too). Smart performances and sharp (if lean) production design together made clear all the clever ramifications of "Dogg," the anarchic language the author invented to embody political (and generational) struggle. As long as Whistler is around, theatre for thinking people will still be found in Boston.

Living Together

And Seven More Honorable Mentions

His Girl Friday - Trinity Rep

This bright, broad re-invention of the classic movie (and its source, The Front Page) didn't have quite the razor-sharp ensemble that cut through Clybourne Park. Yet it still managed to provide an object lesson in how to approach the vexed question of racist attitudes in vintage texts.

Living Together - Gloucester Stage

The second part of Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests, featuring the same superb cast that lit up Table Manners, left everyone praying the same terrific team would be back next summer to pull off the final installment of the trilogy.

Comedy of Errors - Propeller at Huntington Theatre

Propeller's central gimmick - all-male Shakespeare, just as it was first performed - proved much less interesting than anticipated. But their gonzo, frat-boy antics, groundling sexual obsessions, and (literally) bare-assed bravado definitely made for a lot of comedy, even if their conception of the Bard is basically in error.

The Exceptionals - Merrimack Rep

A disturbing social trend. A calm, cool perspective on it. If playwright Bob Clyman didn't quite seal the deal in his sly, sardonic take on what looks increasingly like modern eugenics, then Charles Towers's polished production almost convinced you he had.

The King and I and My Fair Lady - North Shore Music Theatre

Both these charming productions, like Oklahoma! (and in a way Candide), were a balm to those of us who love musical theatre as it was meant to be. But alas, while both showcased divine leading ladies, and talented supporting casts, both were slightly compromised by adequate, but not glittering, turns from their marquee-name male stars. Sigh. They were still intensely pleasurable, believe me. And someday the North Shore will find a male TV star who can sing as well as dance - and then, watch out!

Three Viewings - New Rep

This occasionally smug but always damned clever trio of monologues (all set in a mortuary!) was elevated and electrified (like so much of this season) by its acting - particularly a stellar turn from local light Adrianne Krstansky.

Tweeting the cultural apocalypse now - right now

2011-12-29T11:20:00.007-05:00

I know, I know. As is its wont, the Globe has once again attacked the performing arts in the name of "saving" them. It's hardly news that journalists are closet culture-haters, I suppose - or maybe it's just that they're so mad about having journalism destroyed by digital media that they're hungry to see other noble endeavors meet the same fate. Who knows! All I know is that the Globe's drumbeat of insinuations, dire predictions, and demands for dumbing-down is by now a wearily predictable rhetorical river which I suppose no one can stop. Someday, when the entire world is a scorched, post-cultural virtual environment inhabited by fans of the Patriots and Coldplay, the Globe will finally shut up about how Shakespeare and Beethoven must die. But something tells me not till then.

Ironically, however, this latest salvo has been met by a wall of pure rage from - yes, Facebook and the twitter-verse. So much rage, in fact, that you wonder just how pitched this battle might eventually become, given the teensy-weensy amount of evidence reporter Beth Teitell has amassed to support her supposed thesis. What Beth actually says is that a few productions of "Sesame Street" and "Avenue Q" will allow "tweet seats." (Read: puppet shows with juvenile audiences will allow tweeting.) Marketing directors in Worcester and Central Square are also talking about it. (Only think about it, Central Square - do you really want to be thought of as "the other Worcester"?) Beth also has found four other productions across the country that have allowed "twits" to do their thing.

Oh my God, it's already over!! Theatre's sacred space is about to be raped by a horde of tweets! Ha ha - only kidding. Firstly - just because somebody is sitting in a "tweet seat," that doesn't mean you can't kick them in the balls and knock their fucking teeth out. Remember that. Seriously - would a jury convict you of anything? I think not. [As you may guess, the "tweet seats," should they exist, had better be far away from me.]

As for the rest of Beth's article, it's all about how marketing directors are trying to encourage tweeting at intermission. Wow - what a cool idea!!! Is that actually already happening? Who knew!! Can a rocket car that runs on soda be far off?

In the meantime, as I posted on Art's site, there is this melancholy undertow to these discussions, a tide which whispers that yes, my friends, we are witnessing the fall of Western civilization. Don't kid yourselves - it's over. The post-human is on its way - technology all but mandates it. After all, culture can't exist for people who are more interested in tweeting than they are in their own lives.

But hey, sunsets can be beautiful, right? I'd rather have Shakespeare and Beethoven be forgotten than have them half-listened to by an audience that's more interested in tweeting about them. Sometimes I wonder what it will be like when the last symphony orchestra goes bankrupt, when the last Vermeer is stolen, when the last guy who understands Shakespeare dies, when the whole world is like some lost chapter of Fahrenheit 451. But frankly, I'm hoping I don't live that long.

One last Hubbies hit for 2011 . . .

2011-12-28T10:08:00.000-05:00

I know, I know, it has only been a little more than a month since the last Hubbie Awards. But I have seen some pretty good shows since then! And I felt it was conceptually cleaner to wrap up the 2011 Hubbies for individual performances, etc., before I move on to my "Best of 2011" blow-out later this week - just so I don't miss anybody (although I always do).

And so, with a virtual drum roll . . .

Best Individual Performances

Michael Cristofer - Captors, Huntington Theatre

Grant Wallace - The Balcony, Boston Conservatory

Jeffery Roberson, Paula Plum - The Divine Sister, SpeakEasy Stage

Sirena Abalian - The Nutcracker, Stoneham Theatre

Stacey Fischer, Andrew Cekala - A Christmas Story, New Rep

Michael Forden Walker, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Actors' Shakespeare Project

Best Ensembles

Adrianne Krstansky, Christine Power, Joel Colodner, directed by Jim Petosa - Three Viewings, New Rep

Ramona Lisa Alexander, Paige Clark, Alexander Cook, Evelyn Howe, Elbert Joseph, Ahmad Maksoud, Ibrahim Miari, Vincent E. Siders, Debra Wise, directed by Daniel Gidron - Arabian Nights, Nora Theatre and Underground Railway Theater

Arabian Nights at Central Square Theater

Best Design

Cristina Todesco (set), Jeff Adelberg (lighting), Gail Astrid Buckley (costumes), Jeff Maynard (video) and David Reiffel (sound) - The Balcony, Boston Conservatory

David Fichter (scenic and puppet design), Will Cabell (puppetmaster), Leslie Held (costumes), Karen Perlow (lighting), Kareem Roustom (music and sound) - Arabian Nights, Nora Theatre and Underground Railway Theater

Best Direction

Jim Petosa - Three Viewings, New Rep

Daniel Gidron - Arabian Nights, Nora Theatre and Underground Railway Theatre

Wife swap

2011-12-27T14:42:00.012-05:00

Ruby Rose Fox, Bill Barclay, and Gabriel Kuttner in various disguises. Photo(s): Stratton McCrady

Part of the Actors' Shakespeare Project gestalt is the idea that they're always on the run, searching for a found space to evoke, or match in some idiosyncratic way, the play they're putting on. This is an interesting conceptual challenge - but for once, they have kind of scored with The Merry Wives of Windsor, which they're doing at Jimmy Tingle's in Davis Square (through Jan. 1), with Budweiser pennants festooning the stage, and swinging saloon doors for set pieces. We're slumming, the set design telegraphs, but then so was Shakespeare when he wrote this play.

And fair enough - Shakespeare probably was slumming when he wrote this play; legend has it that Merry Wives was scripted in just a fortnight, at Queen Elizabeth's command that the Bard present "Falstaff in love." And I certainly agree with the consensus that the results are the weakest play in the canon (so it's good to have a legend like that one to explain its existence). Built around a watered-down version of Falstaff (probably because Elizabeth's edict contradicted everything the character stood for) and devised almost purely as an audience pleaser, Merry Wives in a way reveals Shakespeare at his most eager to please, as well as his workmanlike worst/best: he piles on the complications and plots-within-plots, as if to distract us from the lack of theme or development. And thus, I admit, Wives is probably the one Shakespeare play that Diane Paulus is actually equipped to direct - it all but wags its tail at the audience and begs to be loved. Still, this puppy is by the Bard true-bred - and so, inevitably, it has its fascinations.

Perhaps the first of these is the fact that, shocking as it may sound, Merry Wives of Windsor may be the most influential play Shakespeare ever wrote. Why? Because in it you find perhaps the first formulation of dinner-theatre and summer stock, as well as sitcom - the script even plays out as a series of episodes, and its wacky middle-class housewives pretty much bang out the template of frustration, exasperation and mock castration that has dominated domestic bourgeois comedy ever since. And perhaps because it carved out this new niche in what had generally been a more anarchic and satiric comic tradition, Merry Wives is unusual in the canon in several ways: there is a wedding at the end of it, for example, but only one, and it's surrounded by a kind of mockery of the multi-couple nuptials that provide the finales of Shakespeare's courtship comedies (like Much Ado and Twelfth Night).

There's also hardly any nobility stalking the stage - except for Falstaff himself, who is, I suppose, only a knight errant, but who nevertheless represents something like the drunken dregs of the landed gentry in an emergent market-based economy. Thus in the bustling suburb of Windsor, this lesser noble - who imagines his diminished status may still help him to a sexual conquest - is a laughing-stock, and the social structure of much of Shakespeare has been subtly up-ended. Perhaps most surprisingly, despite seeming moments of misrule, and almost too much comic action, nobody in Windsor much changes - and nobody is ever actually cuckolded, or really gets much of a comeuppance, either; thus the social compact doesn't budge an inch, and nothing about the society detailed in the script is truly transformed. Indeed, after his final humiliation, Falstaff doesn't march off, swearing revenge like Malvolio, but merely laughs at his own gulling and joins the party at his own expense.

This diminution of Shakespeare's general aims is reflected in the diminished horizons of one his greatest creations: the Falstaff of Merry Wives is only an anorexic shadow of the overstuffed giant who dominates Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2 (and who haunts Henry V). Shakespeare affords him only the occasional good line, and none of the shrewd, subversive insights that light up his earlier appearances in the canon (for truth be told, the suburbanites of Windsor should really be the victims of his wit, rather than vice versa). This has led many a postmodern critic - most of whom are more enamored of Falstaff than, I think, Shakespeare was - to decry the play.

Richard Snee is tickled by merry wives Esme Allen and Marianna Bassham.

But intriguingly, real Shakespearean fire does occasionally flicker in The Merry Wives of Windsor - not around Falstaff, but rather in the lines of Master Ford, who is driven to a jealous monomania by the (all-in-fun) flirtations of his clever wife. I'm not sure why, but I always feel something like the sketch of a Shakespearean self-portrait in this character. Certainly, there are other jealous obsessives in the canon (Othello, Posthumus, Leontes), but there's a psychological (rather than poetic) edge to Ford's rantings that always reads to me as close to the famously elusive author's own voice. Then again, perhaps it's the rustic, middle-class setting that gives this echo to the character's cadences; after all, the town of Windsor is not that far from Stratford-upon-Avon, as Shakespeare has ripped Falstaff from the Plantagenet era of Henry IV and plunked him down in the world of his own upbringing. Does this mean, however, that in the fraught relationship of the Fords we can catch a glimpse of the marriage between Will and Anne Hathaway? Maybe - but maybe not. All I have is a hunch, but then I tend to trust my hunches.

Anyway - back to the Actors' Shakespeare Project. I've only seen Merry Wives three times before (it's not like I seek it out), but all those productions generally worked about as well as this one did. At ASP, under the direction of Steven Barkhimer, a general, vaguely gonzo, atmosphere of "actor's holiday" pervaded the goings-on - there was a good deal of double (and even triple) casting, which led to many punchy caricatures and ree-dee-culous Franch ak-sants - along with a sing-along chorus borrowed from Love's Labour's Lost - but perhaps not quite as much depth as the play can, indeed, afford. I also wondered whether the double casting - particularly around the romantic sub-plot (the same actress played the ingénue as well as one of her suitors, while her other pursuers were both played by the same guy) scrambled the convoluted plot beyond recognition; my advice is, if you don't know the play, be sure to read the synopsis before going in. Still, even if you can't follow the plot, a lot of the hijinks are cute and clever - the show generally charts the arc of a smart-alecky college production.

But I'm afraid as Falstaff, local stage vet Richard Snee proved a disappointment - Snee's so confident that he sometimes phones things in, and I'm afraid he's too often on speed-dial here (although to be fair, he still wins the occasional laugh). The wives themselves were quite a bit better - newcomer Esme Allen beamed like an Elizabethan-era Amy Poehler, while ASP stalwart Marianna Bassham made a smartly confident Mistress Ford. Alas, she didn't quite limn her complex relationship with her husband as much as I've seen some actresses manage - an obvious missed opportunity, given that the reliable Michael Forden Walker gave Master Ford a surprisingly twisted intensity. Meanwhile, around the edges of the production, there was droll, inventive work from Gabriel Kuttner and Bill Barclay. But I also have to confess that I missed the hints of the green world that the Bard brings to his finale (here, the fairies of Windsor forest danced to disco); still, overall I enjoyed myself, off and on, which may be all you can really do with this particular play - although I hope someday to be proven wrong about that.

Merry Christmas from the Hub Review

2011-12-24T14:25:00.001-05:00

We're up in the snowy woods of Maine, as we usually are at Christmas, with family and friends. So don't expect much blogging over the next day or so, as we'll be too busy eating and drinking. And eating. And drinking. (Although I know I do owe you my thoughts on ASP's Merry Wives of Windsor! If the egg-nog fog lifts today, I'll do my best.) In the meantime, enjoy a Christmas classic re-imagined for glass harmonica (above). Next week I'll be sparring with my buddy Greg Cook on Dance/Draw at the ICA, and writing my series of year-end "Best Of" wrap-ups. Till then - Merry Christmas everybody!

More polyphony for Christmas

2011-12-23T10:21:00.004-05:00

The young singers of Stile Antico.

Last weekend I got a double whammy of medieval and Renaissance polyphony - I caught the chart-topping Stile Antico (above) at the Boston Early Music Festival the night after I heard Boston's own Blue Heron.

And, like a few other people, I found the contrast didn't flatter the better-known band.

This is my second encounter with the Stile Antico kids (sorry, they just seem so young and earnest) - and this was also the second time I left scratching my head after one of their concerts. It's not that they aren't often quite good - they are, not to mention super-serious about sacred music and polyphony, and so awkwardly genteel that sometimes, during one of their tweedy "Ladies-and-gentlemen-might-I-beg-of-you-a-moment-of-your-time" interludes, I felt myself suppressing an affectionate giggle.

And yet, I have to say Stile Antico can be a little dull in long doses, even though one facet of their performances - the soprano line, handled mostly by two women who must be sisters (they share a surname) - is almost too focused and powerful for the profile of the rest of the group. (Which makes me wonder if couple-dom and other relationships figure in the rest of the line-up as much as vocal talent does - there's a faintly in-bred, college-campus air about these guys.)

Those sopranos - Helen and Kate Ashby (along with Rebecca Hickey) - may be the group's only clear artistic signature, but you can't deny they command attention: these ladies boast a combination of perfect pitch, pure tone, and pure power that I don't think I've heard anywhere else; listening to them, you do wonder whether this might be how the angels sound (and no doubt their intensity is what drew the attention of Sting, with whom Stile Antico has toured). Still, these ladies inevitably, and repetitively, tip every piece in their own direction (there are some good voices among the tenors, but elsewhere things are variable) - and that's not really the idea behind polyphony. Sorry, it's just not.

There was one great exception to this general rule in last Saturday's concert - Tallis's Videte miraculum, from his Christmas Mass, Missa Puer natus est, written for the crazily-Catholic Queen Mary, back in the days when England was schizophrenically swinging back and forth between the Anglican and Catholic churches. For a Christmas mass, Puer natus est is a little melancholic (in one of those strange resonances between art and life, it was written when Queen Mary imagined she was pregnant - only she wasn't); but one of the great things about Tallis is the way his vocal works delineate gigantic sonic architectures - rather like the cathedrals in which they were often sung - and for once Stile Antico achieved a rare sense of balanced, detailed expansiveness.

Elsewhere, alas, things often slowed into a blurry trudge (the Anticans make all their artistic decisions collectively, so they rarely hit on a striking individual statement), broken by sudden, siren-like wake-up calls from the sopranos. Sometimes even the transitions and transformations that the singers called attention to in their comments, like the shift from minor to major in Robert White's Magnificat, were a little hard to parse (subtlety is oft doomed in a collective). And few of the pieces by Tallis's contemporary William Byrd made much of an impression, I thought - although Taverner's Audivi vocem de caelo was compellingly sung (by the women only, from the back of the church), and things suddenly picked up at the finish, with a truly ecstatic reading of John Sheppard's Verbum caro factum est (drawn from the opening of the Gospel of St. John). And the encore, a motet by Tomás Luis de Victoria, was nearly as good. It struck me that Stile Antico's true strength isn't actually polyphony at all; they seem to make their best impression with the single, simple power-chord.

A very medieval Christmas

2011-12-21T13:45:00.006-05:00

Blue Heron in flight. Photo by Liz Linder.

The overflow crowd at Blue Heron Choir's Christmas concert last Friday was more evidence (if you needed any) that medieval polyphony - particularly in sacred-music mode - is suddenly "hot." Stile Antico has been touring with Sting, after all, and Alex Ross recently sang Blue Heron's praises in the New Yorker (interestingly, you could compare the two groups last weekend, when they were both warbling within a few hundred yards of each other in Harvard Square).

It's easy to understand, I think, why this ancient, church-bound style has found a new millennial audience. For once polyphony has been stripped of its liturgical function, and transformed into concert music, it feels a bit like sung yoga: its color palette is comfortingly limited, and it's tonally simple (though its suspensions can be dissonant, this is more a function of naïveté than conscious design). What's more, its rhythms are so meditative that its intertwined vocal lines seem to slip the reins of time itself, and expand like a sort of cloud into musical space. To be honest, this is not music for the goal-oriented; the appeal of a great performance of polyphony lies in its precision, purity, and the clarity of its facets - so perhaps it's best not to think of it as sung yoga, I suppose, but rather as a form of vocal crystal.

The downside of this formula, of course, is that the style can feel repetitive, and when it gets fuzzy or loses its pulse, polyphony transmutes in a moment from diamond to rhinestone. Blue Heron has been specializing in this stuff for years, however, so last weekend's concert of English late-medieval music generally steered clear of the cubic zirconia. Some of the full-chorus pieces, alas, did slowly dissolve into an aural fog (I've heard the heavy reverb of the venue, First Congregational Church in Cambridge, work this reverse magic before). But even a few of these - like the short Sanctus, Nowel syng we bothe al and som, and Nova, Nova at the end of the program - were exquisitely clean and vibrant as shaped by the capable, careful hands of director Scott Metcalfe.

Several of the small ensembles were meanwhile quite wonderful. The heavenly melody of Hayl Mary, ful of grace remained palpable throughout its performance, and tenor Jason McStoots - one of the group's strongest voices, and a favorite of mine from other concerts - led a rousing all-male rendition of Leonel Power's Gloria. The trios were often even better. Pamela Dellal, Daniela Tošić, and Michael Barrett made something exquisite of Selden's Ecce, quod natura, while Tošić and Dellal shone again, with Gerrod Pagenkopf, in Nowel: Owt of your slepe aryse (also Selden). Perhaps most bewitching was the gorgeous Ther is no rose of swych vertu, which featured Tošić, Barrett, and Paul Guttry, accompanied by Metcalfe on troubadour harp.

Blue Heron knows its way around a little stagecraft as well, I'm happy to report. The vaults of First Congregational often went dark, to allow singing by candlelight, which added greatly to the haunting atmosphere of such familiar carols as Veni, veni, Emmanuel! And in general Metcalfe deployed his forces across the available space to striking effect. The printed program was also a pleasure, with lyrics in an intriguing mix of Middle English and Latin. As I'll discuss in tomorrow's review, Stile Antico could learn a trick or two from the home team, as they seem to know in their bones how this stuff should be done; indeed, Blue Heron in full flight is a wonder to behold.

Child's play

2011-12-20T11:00:00.011-05:00

Barlow Adamson and Andrew Cekala dream of a Red Ryder bb gun. Photo(s) by Andrew Brilliant.

I'm quite sure A Christmas Story (at the New Rep through December 24) is a nostalgia piece, but I'm not nearly as sure that it's a nostalgia piece about Christmas. No, it seems more like an elegy for what its author, radio raconteur Jean Shepherd, at one point calls "kid-dom" (and what the rest of us would call "childhood") - that strange land, circumscribed by ineffectual, uncomprehending adults, yet essentially its own terra incognita, in which the young once scrambled by themselves, making their own small-scaled society with its treasures and terrors, and, of course, its own fun. To watch this superficially cynical (but actually sweet) little fable about one lad's desperate attempt to talk Santa into bestowing a bb gun upon him on Christmas morning is to gaze through a mist of memory upon a lost world.

Think I'm kidding? Ponder this: in A Christmas Story, the kids aren't wise-beyond-their-years, or technical whizzes; they don't crack jokes like Catskill comedians, nor do they blog, or discuss their "personal brands" - and they certainly don't patronize their parents, much less attempt to "parent" their parents, because they're too spastic to function yet in the adult world. They're kids as we used to imagine them, as we used to be able to admit they actually are: mostly average and often dopey, getting into trouble before they know it and making messes of things and generally almost shooting their eyes out - and always trying to scam the adult world even as they scan it for clues as to how things work. And the adults gaze back at them almost as quizzically; in A Christmas Story, no parent would ever dream of being their kid's "best friend;" both generations think the other one is just plain weird.

In other words, A Christmas Story plays a lot like Jurassic Park; you half-expect a pterodactyl to flap through. And stranger still, the parents actually PUNISH their children! Physically! Yet these episodes lead to no deep psychological trauma - and amazingly, no actual loss of love, either. (Jean Shepherd was definitely not a psychologist, or he'd know that this is impossible.) Perhaps most stunningly of all, while Shepherd's kids long for various toys and other material things, and are only too aware of the crummy reality of their lower-edge-of-the-middle-class condition, they also know how not to mind it, how to have a pretty good time anyway. When little Ralphie, Shepherd's hero, doesn't get his "Red Ryder bb gun with a compass in the stock, and this thing that tells time," he's disappointed, sure, but not apoplectic. When asked by his old man if he got what he wanted for Christmas, he answers "Almost," with a weary sense of philosophy, to which his old man simply answers, "Well, that's life."

And it is life - or life as we used to know it; a life in which we didn't pretend that our horizons were infinite, in which we were realistic about our limits and understood that love can only function within limits. (Which is perhaps why Shepherd's evocation of familial affection is actually quite convincing.) I can well imagine a millennial staring at this show as I might stare at a Martian, but to those of us of a certain age, it's kind of irresistible. It reminds you of the way your parents loved you (and most of us were, indeed, loved), and of the way you loved them back.

Meanwhile, of course, Shepherd's sense of the tacky madness that infects American life is constantly expressed in hilarious detail. Here we find once again the teachers obsessed with nice margins, the corny mail-order contests, the bumptious neighbors, the bunny pajamas and yes, the by-now-iconic lady's-leg lamp (above left). (Shepherd's other great theme - the doomed rebellions of masculine urges against the feminine regime of the suburbs - is also often in evidence, as per Ralphie's humiliation below.)

Ralphie endures the Christmas generosity of the great-aunt who thinks he's a girl.

And the New Rep does well by Shepherd's vision. Designer Dahlia Al-Habiel captures the hardscrabble of midwinter Indiana in a sprawling set, and if costumer Katherine O'Neill follows the familiar movie by updating the story's timeframe to the late 40's or so (Shepherd was born in 1921), well, that's okay because the jokes still work (and would continue to work into the 60's). Translating a movie into a stage play requires fluid staging, and director Diego Arciniegas keeps things moving, while drawing from many of his actors performances that I actually preferred to the movie's (which I've always found a little broad and flat, aside from Darren McGavin). Barlow Adamson's energetic narrator, Stacey Fischer's sweet, sad, Mother, Margaret Ann Brady's frustrated schoolmarm ( and grizzled Christmas tree seller), and Gerard Slattery's caustic Santa Claus were all quite memorable. And in the lead role of Ralphie, young Andrew Cekala handled himself with striking poise and genuine feeling.

Of the main ensemble, I'm afraid I was only slightly disappointed by Owen Doyle's "Old Man," (Ralphie's father). I'm actually an old classmate of Mr. Doyle - so yes, I was reviewing him thirty years ago, back in college; he just can't get rid of me! Owen is a talented guy, so I was surprised to find he hadn't yet relaxed into the role, and made the Old Man's frustrations and flare-ups (and humiliations) his own. But technically the performance is all there. And I would say that the kids are all as cute as can be, only the whole idea is that they aren't - so let's just say they're accurately rendered! And if there are a few rough spots or missed beats in their scenes, that's okay, because you wouldn't want a highly polished production of A Christmas Story anyway, that would be a little creepy. This particular Christmas memory may be all about how the holidays aren't what we pretend they are, but somehow it gets at their sincere essence just the same.

A magic carpet ride in Central Square

2011-12-18T12:29:00.005-05:00

The giant rukh takes flight in Arabian Nights.

Arabian Nights, at the Central Square Theatre through December 31, isn't technically a Christmas show, I suppose (can you have a Muslim Christmas show?) - but it feels like a big fat Christmas present just the same. No, it's not flawless, but Nights is nevertheless just about the best show in town - big and bursting with color and wonder, thanks to brilliant design, evocative puppets, and a tireless troupe of talented actors who once more breathe life into a 1,001 tales that are themselves more than a millennium old.

You probably know the most famous of these, but hardly all 1,001 - and there really are that many (in fact there are actually more), collected over hundreds of years by nameless scribes from lands stretching, it is believed, from Madagascar to India. The record of these tales, and their framing in the haunting story of Sheherazade (or, as here, Shahrzād), counts as one of the great artistic achievements of mankind.

And I mean "great" as in both deep and enormous - we only get a taste of that sprawl here, however, in Dominic Cooke's smart, savvy adaptation of maybe a half-dozen tales, which range from the familiar ("Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves") to the kid-friendly ("How Abu Hassan Broke Wind"). Parents should note, however, that even in this abbreviated form, Arabian Nights runs a little long for the kindergarten set - and there are a few moments of cruelty and/or sexuality that might lead to awkward questions (these are folk tales, after all, from folk who were always honest about the human body).

As an introduction to the sheer pleasure of story-telling, however - a pleasure in short supply for kids these days, I think - the Arabian Nights simply cannot be beat, and adaptor Cooke has done a fine job of distilling the fascinating logic of their unfolding structures into dramatic form. He has also nimbly tied one of the more obscure of them ("The Envious Sisters") back to the frame-story of Scheherazade, which is here gently tweaked into an explicit feminist fable. (It's only a slight tweak, though - the tale of Scheherazade is a feminist fable, and again one of the great ones.)

Director Daniel Gidron always has a flair with tight, logical structures (he's a terrific farceur), but this time he has also conjured a steady flow of striking imagery to produce an often-mesmerizing production. Gidron has been aided immensely, though, by designer David Fichter's iridescently-painted "magic carpet" on the stage floor (Fichter is one of the Central Square's secret weapons), and the many delightful puppets designed by Fichter with Will Cabell (including a full-scale rukh, at top), as well as sensuous costume designs by Leslie Held, evocative props by Talia Lefton, and imaginative lighting from Karen Perlow. In short, the design is pretty much a dream, and the acting is generally just as good. The entire ensemble is strong, and each gets his or her chance to shine, so I'll just name them all, in alphabetical order: Ramona Lisa Alexander, Paige Clark, Alexander Cook, Evelyn Howe, Elbert Joseph, Ahmad Maksoud, Ibrahim Miari, Vincent E. Siders, and Debra Wise. It's also worth noting that there is a hearing-impaired actor in this company, who does just fine, thank you very much; and in a very nice and inclusive touch, near the close of this production it begins to shift into simultaneous sign as well as spoken language (after all, what is sign language but full-body story-telling?), which opens up a whole new topic for discussion with the kids. This version (a co-production of the Nora Theatre and Underground Railway) only plays through New Year's, although if there's any artistic justice, it will be back for future runs; something tells me that Central Square has a classic on its hands.

I know you're all tired of hearing this, but . . .

2011-12-17T13:24:00.005-05:00

. . . I do want to point out that in the Times, Oskar Eustis of the Public Theater is quoted as saying:

" . . .if we’re ever in a situation where we’re holding up a major nonprofit stage for a year or two with a single show, you should complain to me.”

Okay, so . . . why is old Oskar so palsy-walsy with Diane Paulus, who has all but crippled the ART's second stage for the past three years with the imposition of The Donkey Show? I mean, I can't think of any major work that has gone on at "Oberon" since the arrival of that pseudo-Shakespearean quadruped.

So Oskar: I'm officially complaining to you. If you wouldn't do that kind of thing at your own theatre, why do you support people who do it at theirs?

Hard nut to crack

2011-12-15T22:27:00.019-05:00

Mice rock!!! And for their next trick - Sandinista!!

No one could claim that the Stoneham Theatre has played it safe this holiday season; their current Christmas show, in fact, is an edgy new take on The Nutcracker devised by the House Theatre of Chicago (which also came up with a Stoneham hit from a few years back, The Sparrow). So you can forget those familiar visions of sugar plums dancing in your head - this Nutcracker instead tries to touch on grim themes of loss and mourning, even as it simultaneously attempts to tap into the dark springs of fantasy that bubble from its source, E.T.A.Hoffman's "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King."

But if combining those contrasting modes sounds like a tall order to you - well, your theatrical instincts are quite good: this Nutcracker proves an odd, pointless misfire that thanks to its talented cast is sometimes mildly amusing, but doesn't really deliver on any of its artistic promises. It's not particularly touching, or particularly scary, or particularly magical; most often it's just goofy, because it never coheres; and alas, it comes with a melody-free "rockin'" musical score that swings between Saved-by-the-Bell banality and flat-out plagiarism (one "dark" number is transparently the chord progression from "London Calling" - yes, by the Clash - only retrofitted with Christmas lyrics).

What's most perplexing about the House Theatre's script, however, is that it abandons its own most daring emotional gambit: in this contemporary version, Clara's brother Fritz is a young Marine struck down on Christmas Eve. That tragedy dooms one holiday, of course - but must it doom the next? Clara's bid to bring some sort of joy back to the Yuletide is a poignant one; and when her uncle Drosselmeyer presents her with a toy Nutcracker who looks just like her lost brother, we sense that some sort of unlikely Christmas catharsis may possibly be in the offing.

Only it turns out it's not, largely because the fantasy "Cavalier" that the Nutcracker traditionally turns into is a romantic figure, not a brotherly one; and the script never builds any kind of real relationship between Clara and Fritz, anyhow. Thus the talented Sirena Abalian and Danny Bryck just don't have anything to play; their scenes together are blanks, still waiting to be filled in. So you can forget about the "working through mourning" part of the script; even though the local rodents keep hissing all kinds of despairing lines at poor Clara about how Christmas is doooomed, she's simply impervious. And as for the E.T.A. Hoffmann echoes - well, this version does dwell on the long struggle with the Mouse (here the Rat) King that I remember from the original story. Only to be honest, this is material which is usually foreshortened because - well, because it's a little convoluted and repetitive.

Sigh. Somehow I don't think this Nutcracker is going to crack the ranks of the holiday classics (although in a world that thinks Taylor Swift is an "artist," I suppose anything is possible). I'm duty-bound, however, to report that the solid Stoneham cast gives it their best shot, and there's really not a weak performance in the show. Director Caitlin Lowans has drawn uniformly strong work not only from the charmingly natural Miss Abalian and the sweetly mechanical Mr. Bryck, but also from the witty Meagan Hawkes, Mark Linehan, William Gardiner, Grant MacDermott, Alycia Sacco, and Nick Sulfaro (all these folks can sing, too). Indeed, sometimes these troopers at times almost convince you they're working with real emotional material. Meanwhile Christopher Ostrom contributes some appropriately spooky lighting (although alas, his set looks more appropriate to Alice in Wonderland), and Stoneham's live band sounds capable enough, although the composers of this mediocre score sound anything but. And I'm afraid there's nothing like a lame Christmas song to make me let rip with the "bah, humbugs."

Secular Messiah

2011-12-14T23:17:00.006-05:00

Boston Baroque in action.

Once, a generation ago, Martin Pearlman was regarded as an ionoclast, and his vision of Handel's Messiah - performed on period instruments, with light, agile forces, and to tempos derived from dance - seemed revolutionary; indeed, Pearlman was in the vanguard of those who "took back" Handel from a century or more of grandiose Victorian encrustation.

By now, however, his ideas have proven so persuasive, and been so widely adopted, that perhaps they themselves are looking a little dated. Period instruments are everywhere, and a dancing lilt is practically the norm in baroque performance; "early music" is now in its mature phase, and re-considerations, further investigations, and even partial refutations of some of its founding principles have taken over the cutting edge of the scene.

Thus Harry Christophers has constantly experimented with the oratorio over at Handel and Haydn, sometimes achieving dazzling new effects; but meanwhile, at Boston Baroque, Pearlman has merely tinkered here and there - usually in attempts to bring this or that sequence into ever-closer (but always in the end hypothetical) alignment with period practice. He simply seems to have remained largely satisfied with what to many is now the "standard" early music reading of Handel's masterpiece.

And after all, I suppose, if it ain't baroque, why fix it? (Har-de-har.) Still, as I've listened to the "Pearlman version" over the years, more and more questions about its principles and assumptions have gathered in my mind. The conductor has always insisted, for instance, that Messiah is not really "sacred music" at all; he often repeats the point that Handel never played the score in a church - it was designed for theatrical performance, indeed its own librettist described it as "a fine Entertainment." The Pearlman version is essentially an entirely secular Messiah.

And this case sounds awfully convincing, I admit, until you begin to sense that Pearlman is playing a bit of historical sleight-of-hand in his argument. For to be blunt, it's hard to buy Messiah as an eighteenth-century Jesus Christ Superstar for the simple reason that it never pushes back on its central myth (much less attempts any of the sly satire that Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber got away with). Indeed, Messiah never (ever) critiques or questions its title subject; instead it blatantly operates as a straightforward, if amazingly deep and brilliant, evocation of the central tenet of Christianity. It is not merely an exquisite "drama," (as Pearlman would have it) just as the tale of Abraham and Isaac is not merely a punchy short story; it is essentially a religious, or at least metaphysical, idea made musical flesh. The fact that it played in commercial theatres hardly demonstrates that it's inherently secular - on the contrary, it instead implies that Christianity still so pervaded the culture in Handel's day that sacred music could be seen as part of the hit parade.

This hardly invalidates all of Pearlman's premises; but these kinds of thoughts make you wish he could continue to investigate the piece musically, to take a break now and then from his dancing, dotted meters and see where the piece might take him. He has already thoroughly re-thought its style; now, one wishes he would turn the same level of insight to its content, and how that might be better reflected in its form. For Messiah is not merely a dance, or a fine entertainment, any more than King Lear is just a show. There is a grandeur and mystery to it that's not at all related to Victorian pomposity, true - but merely dispensing with that pomposity doesn't necessarily conjure its full dimensions.

Still, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a pleasure to hear the Boston Baroque version every Christmas. And last weekend, as ever, it was graceful, intimate and charming. A bit rushed here and there (sometimes even in Christ's darkest hours). But also often warm and luminous - and Boston Baroque does give Messiah a sense of dramatic arc that many other versions lack. "For unto us a child is born," for instance, remains almost a sprint in Part I, but Pearlman ties its dramatic thrust to the pieces that follow, so that we subconsciously perceive Handel's evocation of the Nativity as a single dramatic unit (ending with the famous encomium from Luke, "Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth, good will towards men"). Pearlman pulls off a similar, but even subtler, trick, at the end of Part II, where he persuasively links the cry of "Hallelujah!" to the rising militarist metaphors of the preceding airs and choruses.

And Pearlman generally chooses his soloists well - or at least they usually form a fairly coherent group in terms of style. Last weekend, the standout of Messiah line-up - really, the concert's secret weapon - was the great Ava Pine, who is a wonderful actress as well as a terrific soprano, and who sang with glorious authority, particularly during her airs in Part I. Tenor Keith Jameson was also in splendid voice, and sang with radiant emotional transparency. Meanwhile baritone Andrew Garland projected a stern, commanding tone that served him well when he was singing about raging, or shaking; but alas, the sense of spiritual transcendence that undergirds "The trumpet shall sound" - one of the great arias for baritone in the repertory - seemed to elude him. And I'm afraid alto Julia Mintzer was even more variable, largely because a good portion of the role lay below her "break" (the point at which a singer generally shifts from "head" to "chest" voice). Thus Ms. Mintzer was often clearly negotiating her performance technically, which pulled focus from the fact that her tone above her break was often complex and compelling.

Meanwhile the Boston Baroque orchestra, as always, played with verve and grace. Alas, this year trumpeter Robinson Pyle didn't quite equal his brilliant playing of "The trumpet shall sound" from last season - condensation within the horn muddied a few notes in the latter half of the aria (as often happens with natural horns). But the audience gave him an ovation anyway - everyone knows the piece is a killer. And if the chorus couldn't quite give us pinpoint diction or a wide palette of color at the speeds Pearlman sometimes favored, still they sang quite cohesively, with both passion and pure tone. Which reminded me that in a way, the thoughtful re-enactment of a musical tradition can be its own kind of Christmas present.

All you want for Christmas - and less!

2011-12-13T10:12:00.000-05:00

The Reduced Shakespeare Company

Okay, folks, it's back to our regularly scheduled programming here at the Hub Review. When I heard that the Reduced Shakespeare Company (you know, the guys who famously "abridged" the Bard) was coming to the Merrimack Rep with their Christmas show, I couldn't help but wonder, "Wow - has someone really figured out a way to abridge Christmas?"

Well, no such luck, I'm afraid. The RSC's (yeah, it kind of reminds you of that other Shakespeare company, doesn't it) Ultimate Christmas Show doesn't really boast any of the whip-smart condensations that made The Complete Works such a hoot (like the British crown working its way down a football field in a mash-up of the history plays). Instead, this time you get a quick shot of just about every tradition in the seasonal sprawl - from the Nativity to Dickens to the Nutcracker to Kwanzaa and Hanukkah - at random, without much in the way of witty insight connecting the dots.

The conceit for all this is that a blizzard has stranded the traveling "St. Everybody's Universalist Multicultural Interfaith Holiday Variety Show and Christmas Pageant." So the RSC is forced, like Judy and Mickey back in the day, to put on the show themselves. And if that set-up sounds a little tired, I also have to report that part of the joke is that the wit isn't actually all that fresh, either - you've heard many of these gags (or something like them) before; the fact that even our Christmas parodies are going meta is built right into the show.

Still, the energy of the RSC - Reed Martin, Austin Tichenor, and Matt Rippy (at right) - keeps the show moving, and gradually it wins you over. These guys are willing to do anything for a laugh (warning: they not only cross-dress at will but also come out in their underwear) - but as they keep throwing comic spaghetti (and ornaments and holly) at the theatrical wall, some of it inevitably sticks. And their sheer gonzo-goofiness is appealing, too - even when they willfully pursue "stoo-pid" ideas (I don't know why dressing the Three Wise Men up as the BeeGees is funny, for example, but slowly it becomes hilarious).

To my mind, the audience participation sequences were the jolliest - particularly the sing-along "Twelve Days of Christmas," in which people got to carol their own wish list (Ferraris and Maseratis were popular items up in Lowell). And a few of the lines, like "I'm a Utilitarian; I believe in God when it's useful!" were up to the usual RSC standard. I'm also happy to admit that the finale - in which the Nutcracker gets it in the pistachios - was well worth the wait. And for all the jabs at political correctness, rest assured, this is a naughty, but also very politically-correct, show. And a sweet one, too. Which is perfectly okay, to my mind; I mean, seriously, what's so funny about peace, love and understanding?

Should the gays be reviewing the blacks?, or: Is there too much swish to the Ish?

2011-12-11T12:37:00.014-05:00

Charles Isherwood of the Times (at left) is back in the news, with a particularly clueless review of Lydia Diamond's Stick Fly, which has reached Broadway after taking several regional theatres by storm (in Boston, the show was so sold out that long lines of people waited patiently outside the Huntington every night in the hope that some ticket-holders would be no-shows). To most observers (including yours truly), Stick Fly looked like the next August: Osage County; if not a commercial slam dunk, then a highly probable success.

Isherwood's pan has thrown a wrench into all those plans, of course (Stick Fly could overcome a negative Times review, but it's unlikely) - so it's no surprise the usual suspects have pointed out that he's white, and that Diamond is black. So how could he understand her play?

The situation is a bit more complex than the blogosphere would like to admit, however, because what's most interesting about Diamond's drama is that it's about class first, and race second; in fact its (almost-) entirely African-American cast is monied and educated, so for the first time in American stage history (perhaps), Broadway audiences find themselves watching a 'well-made' play of upper bourgeois manners in which questions of race have been (to a large degree) transcended, while questions of class and privilege remain entrenched.

And you know, I hate to sound like a school-marm, but this is important; it makes Stick Fly a kind of milestone, whatever its various flaws - and yes, it does have some; it does tilt occasionally toward soap opera, I admit. But seriously, only a fool could imagine it's not a good play - a solid entertainment that could appeal to a large, literate audience and leave them with big, tasty topics to chew on. Sorry, but this is part of what Broadway is for (or should be for).

Still, "the Ish" is blind to the play's significance. I'm not sure if it's because he's (very) white, however (of course I've been the object of that kind of accusation myself, so perhaps I'm too sensitive to it).

No, to me the issue with the Ish may be that he's just too gay.

Now I'm gay too, so let me explain. Look carefully at the style of his takedown (and it's typical of many of his takedowns, btw). He opens with one of his self-consciously "fabulous" wisecracks:

The daytime soaps are being bug-zapped from the networks one by one, disappearing into oblivion after decades of reliably dishing out startling coincidences and staggering secrets.

Studded with gay cultural touchstones ("daytime soap," "dish"), the pan is already, from its opening line, a blend of several modes of post-modern pop - the Ish confidently mixes a certain mode of trashy taste (stereotypically beloved by women) with a dash of patronizing lit-crit savvy, as well as a shot of naughty gay "oh-you-know-you-love-it" knowingness. This is a familiar formula, but the Ish dishes it better than just about anyone.

You may sense immediately, however, that these tropes may not map to the concerns of the African-American haute bourgeoisie. But the Ish seems tone-deaf to this issue; he doesn't realize he's a stranger in a strange land. Indeed, the cultural sophistication of Diamond's dialogue and the fact that she's consciously taking on a "white" mainstream tradition seem to short-circuit whatever larger social perspectives linger in his brain. Thus he totters on through his column inches with one quip after another, like a drag queen on a bender staggering around a stripper pole:

Where to go for a sustaining dose of torrid, troubled romances and the occasional heated catfight? he wonders, and then ( just in case none of the ladies who lunch has answered, I guess) he lets us know: Lydia R. Diamond supplies enough simmering conflict, steamy romance and gasp-worthy revelations to satisfy just about anyone suffering withdrawal symptoms from the merciless soap slaughter that’s taken place over the last couple of years.

Now seriously - "gasp-worthy revelations?" "Steamy romance?" "Soap slaughter?" Oh, snap!! Now I know his reviewing style has always operated in some strange cultural nexus between Babe Paley, Charles Busch, Harold Bloom, and that lady who buys romance paperbacks at the airport, but isn't this a bit much? Okay, Isherwood loves his trash (and his porn - his magnum opus, about porn bottom Joey Stefano, at left), yet he simultaneously seems to imagine that anything less astringent than Beckett is basically fodder for Days of Our Lives. I'm sorry, but something about that just doesn't work.

And you have to wonder - does he never come up for air? Because the soap-addicted gay tropes just keep on coming: "daddy issues" . . . "a Tyler Perry melodrama" . . . "sitcommy and slack" . . . Isherwood does eventually pick up on the issues of class that pervade this "melodrama" (I'd call it a "drama"), but even here he seems to imagine that Diamond is stumbling on these things unintentionally (perhaps because he is - the Ish never seems to realize that his ironic embrace of "trash" is really just another form of class-bound snobbery).

Now the New York production may be far weaker than the well-acted version I saw in Boston last year; it's possible, but I kind of doubt it. I think it's far more likely that the Ish simply latched on to the admittedly sudsy tone of one or two of Diamond's sub-plots, and then worked backwards from them in his usual gay-cookie-cutter-style to a condescending dismissal. The upshot, however, is that he seems to be ridiculing the African-American upper class as well as Diamond; to him, a straightforward drama about its success and complicated mores is little more than a soap opera.

And to be blunt, I don't think a straight white man would make the same mistake (they're too cautious these days!). And it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that gay tunnel vision is what makes Adam Rapp a mystery to the Ish as well; the gays don't much "get" damaged straight boys either. (In fact there are a lot of things the gays don't get; no, that doesn't make me "self-hating," it just means I appreciate the strengths and the limits of my own tribe.)

So whats the solution? No, not a witch hunt against other white, or other gay, reviewers. But it's time for the Times to hire a second second-stringer. Past time, probably. And it's time for Charles Isherwood to turn off the porn, get off the couch, and start to learn a little more about the big, wide, changing world around him, and the Broadway play's place within that world.

So, Mumbles has lost my vote

2011-12-10T12:27:00.011-05:00

Out of the donut shop and into the street: Menino's minions during the raid. Photo by Rachel L. Brody.

If last night was for getting drunk on the possibilities, today is for facing the sober reality. As you probably know by now, the Boston Police moved in this morning at 5 AM with an overwhelming force and cleared Dewey Square of Occupy Boston, being careful to limit and block media access and public awareness of the action in every way possible. You can make donations for legal counsel, etc., here.

So the dream is over, dear friends, but you know, as somebody once said, we just have to carry on. There's a General Assembly tonight at 7 pm on Boston Common. Mayor Menino may not want us to take back our country, but it's still possible, remember that. This dream may be over, but another can take its place. The struggle is not over; it's never over.

Before the police state moved in. Photo by People's Open Graphics.

Scenes from an Occupation

2011-12-09T10:55:00.013-05:00

Photo by Occupy Boston

Last night it was easy to get drunk on the possibilities.

I got to Occupy Boston late - about 11:30 pm, only half an hour before Mayor Menino's "deadline" for the evacuation of Dewey Square (and after having promised the partner unit I was NOT going to get arrested, no matter what, even though I'd been watching all the civil disobedience training on the live feed).

When I arrived, the camp felt slightly schizophrenic - near Summer Street, a brass band was playing, drums were pounding, and people were defiantly dancing; in the camp itself, many tents were down (particularly the expensive ones); and up on Assembly Hill, the mood was serious - though hardly grim. People were debating when the police might arrive, and what the most unbreakable positions were for forming human chains. Those who were less sure of their commitment to spending the night in a holding cell were being exhorted to cross the street, and take positions in the park before the Federal Reserve. And the media was everywhere, not asking any questions or gathering any actual data, of course, but instead clasping their earpieces and intoning their insipid impressions into their cameras and klieg lights. Altogether there were several hundred - maybe a thousand - people on the scene. Every now and then, the human mic announced "Four minutes to midnight!" or "Three minutes to midnight!" Overhead, helicopters circled - two drifting so close to each other they seemed to be kissing in the dark.

Midnight finally arrived - and there was a strange sense of suspended expectancy in the nippy air. One young woman cried out - echoed by the human mic - "Whatever happens - I want you all to know - that I love you!" (For a moment, everyone shouted "I LOVE YOU!") Later the human mic instructed us "Look at the person next to you! That person is a hero! Give them a hug!" (People hugged.) A circle of chaplains stopped praying and began to sing. The brass band - led by Emerson's John Bell (I also saw actor Danny Bryck earlier) - began marching along Atlantic Avenue, playing standards like "When the Saints Come Marchin' In" and just generally raising hell. The vibe was a valiant one; we were going to go down laughing.

But the police continued to not arrive - so the mood began to shift toward relief, and a cautious optimism. The locus of the crowd moved from Assembly Hill to the curbs of Atlantic Ave, holding up signs and waving to passing cars. Along the edge of the encampment, the brass band suddenly launched into "Here Comes the Bride," and I pressed forward to find an actual, impromptu marriage in progress - by one of the chaplains - between a pretty girl and her bearded, beaming groom. They'd brought their vows, which the human mic recited, including a joyful "I DO!" at the end, and then the band gave Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" their best shot as the couple vanished into the crowd amid cheers. The chaplain shrugged. "They had their license with them!" she laughed happily. "So why not?"

Back on Atlantic Avenue, by now folks were over the curb, and a chant had begun: "Out of the camp and into the streets!" The crowd took all the lanes but one - and then suddenly took that one too. As flashes popped, a gaggle of young people lay down in the middle of the street, staring up with their best "I'm not goin' ANYWHERE" faces as people cheered.

I thought this might be the beginning of the expected stand-off - that perhaps Menino had simply guessed that eventually in their triumph the occupiers would go too far. But instead the small police presence wearily retreated, and began waving the stalled traffic back onto Summer Street. In a few moments, the street had been closed, dozens of more kids were on the pavement, and the mood had become uproarious. People scrawled slogans and drew peace signs on the white traffic stripes of Atlantic Ave. The drummers moved in, and the crowd began dancing in the street as many chanted "Together we're unstoppable/another world is possible!"

The media looked stunned; this wasn't the story they were expecting to cover. Panicking, they began to dog the police offers ("Attention media: Please do not rush the police!" one impish protester intoned through a bullhorn.) The police assured them, however, that there were no plans to remove the encampment that night - a message which slowly filtered out to everybody.

That, of course, doesn't mean the struggle is over, or that anyone has "won" anything. Indeed, in a way the struggle hasn't even begun - Occupy Boston still doesn't have a plan for effective political action (no, shaking your fist at the Federal Reserve and peeing on its flowers doesn't count).

But the moment was still sweet. And hopeful, yes, hopeful. When I left the scene (I'm old, after all, I can't stay out all night, my joints will lock) the kids were still dancing, knowing they weren't going to jail after all. Somebody had blown up a huge bouquet of balloons, and suddenly decided to free them from their tether. They drifted up into the darkness, toward the waiting helicopters.

The livestream from Occupy Boston

2011-12-08T21:52:00.004-05:00

Watch live streaming video from occupyboston at livestream.com

Just because tonight it might get interesting.

PS You can contribute to the legal fund here.

Call or email Mayor Menino and tell him to stop threatening Occupy Boston

2011-12-08T12:37:00.006-05:00

The mayor in Mussolini mode.

Mayor Menino has given the occupiers till midnight to clear out of Dewey Square. This is important. The number for the Mayor's office is 617-635-4500. The email is mayor@cityofboston.gov. My message went as follows:

Dear Mayor Menino:

I am a long-time Boston resident and have always been a supporter of yours but I swear I will never vote for you again if you clear Dewey Square of Occupy Boston.

Instead of threatening the "occupiers," you should be engaging with them in an effort to develop an effective political action plan for their cause, so that eventually the physical occupation itself will be irrelevant.

Suppressing what is essentially a valid protest of a society's inequities only and always ensures that said protest will return in a more violent form.

I urge you to reconsider your ultimatum.

Sincerely,

Thomas Garvey

PS - If you care about the future of your country, it would be a good idea to go down to Dewey Square tonight.

Messiah at Handel and Haydn Society

2011-12-07T19:14:00.005-05:00

Jesse Levine plays like an angel. Photo(s): Kyle T. Hemingway.

One of the sillier aspects of our age is the proliferation of pseudo-"rebellions" in the performing arts. As the populace behaves more and more like sheep in the political sphere, ironically enough, they seem to be aping revolutionaries at the theatre. Sometimes I think there ought to be a word for this phenomenon (I nominate "fauxbellion") - or at least for its more irritating forms, like the new-fangled tendency not to stand during the "Hallelujah Chorus"of Handel's Messiah. People who yawned at the invasion of Iraq seem, oddly enough, to take this issue close to heart. Apparently they imagine being couch potatoes throughout the rousing climax to this fantastic oratorio counts as some sort of statement.

But to be blunt, you should stand during the "Hallelujah Chorus." Not for George II, of course (who, legend has it, began the tradition, perhaps without realizing it). And not for the Baby Jesus, either - at least not necessarily.

You should stand for Handel. For artistic greatness. For recognized artistic greatness, which it doesn't hurt to re-recognize once a year.

And you should stand for the Handel and Haydn Society chorus and orchestra, too, at least when they're in as fine a form as they were last weekend. Artistic director Harry Christophers once more worked a kind of miracle with their combined forces, conjuring from many of the choruses huge, exquisitely balanced musical experiences that seemed to expand before your eyes like fields of stars. This year's "For to us a Child is born," for example, was hands-down the greatest performance of this chestnut I've ever heard, ever (even from H&H), and hot on its heels were powerful renderings of the fugue "He trusted in God that He would deliver Him," and, of course, that famous chorus discussed at top.

Meanwhile the orchestra was (mostly) in just as splendid shape - new concert mistress Aisslin Nosky was missing (due to commitments entered into prior to signing with H&H), but the strings sounded just as transparent and robust as they had at their last outing, and on their first appearance (as the trumpets of the angels, up in the balconies of Symphony Hall, at top), the horns sounded wonderful, too - alas, later on, in the most exposed playing of the oratorio ("The trumpet shall sound") things got wobbly - which is always a risk when you're playing a "natural" horn (that is, one with no valves).

As for the soloists - well, as has sometimes happened before, they were a slight puzzlement. Fine singers all, but rather a motley crew; I still don't understand what Christophers is going for in his line-ups for Messiah. This time we got a bel canto soprano, the elegant Sarah Coburn, with a glowing bloom at the top of her range; but she didn't have the crispest diction when set against the pinpoint enunciations of the chorus (from her bio, it's clear she's used to singing in Italian). And Coburn was paired with a countertenor, Lawrence Zazzo - who had an intriguing timbre and sang with mournful fire, but who, like most countertenors, scraped a bit on the low notes of the role. Meanwhile Tom Randle, who is familiar from many previous H&H outings, seemed to take his time warming up - although his initial diffidence did give way to more assured power as the evening wore on. Baritone Tyler Duncan, by way of contrast, was powerful from the start, and also boasted an intriguingly complex timbre - but he, too, dicted a bit slackly, mostly because he tended to drop away at the ends of his lines.

To be fair - all had fine moments, and all are interesting singers; it was just hard to see how they fit together as a set, as a statement. That question only exists, though, because by now the orchestra and chorus have become so cohesive. So someday, I'm sure (perhaps after years of tinkering), Christophers will find a dream quartet to match the accompanying musical forces he has tuned so finely.

It's a Wonderful Life, but a lousy market economy

2011-12-06T11:24:00.019-05:00

The brilliant "bank run" scene from Capra's classic.

I took last Saturday night "off," as it were, and let the performing arts fend for themselves - and instead curled up at home before the TV. And to my happy surprise, I found It's a Wonderful Life had begun its holiday rotation.

It's by now a commonplace, of course, that Shakespeare seems to map to every age; and maybe great films do, too. For certainly Frank Capra's last masterpiece qualifies as a great film, and certainly in today's hard times it seems more resonant than ever.

Of course to some, the movie's sentimental message makes it a tough sell - and I won't make any apologies for the angels and the twinkly stars that overlay much of Life - Capra lays it on pretty thick in spots. But I've often noticed that the movie's skeptics always seem to miss the hard center beneath the sweet surface of what used to be called "Capra-corn."

For there's a calm. worldly awareness at the bottom of Capra's vision that you won't find at the multiplex today - not even in the best from Spielberg or Pixar. Indeed, Capra regularly trades in situations that we just wouldn't tolerate in family entertainment anymore. Consider that It's a Wonderful Life features (right off the top) a little boy who, playing with no adult supervision, almost drowns in a frozen pond - his brother saves him, but as a result loses his hearing in one ear. This is disturbing enough, but then a drunken (and heart-broken) druggist boxes that young boy on his injured ear until it bleeds (as he wails in pain); in Spielberg, retribution would be swift: such a character would quickly be eaten by a dinosaur or a shark. Yet in Capra's movie, it's natural that innocents are often left unprotected, and suffer as a result - and that people who under some circumstances can be terribly cruel are also redeemable, and even perhaps basically gentle and good (that druggist, Mr. Gower, becomes one of the hero's closest friends).

In fact throughout It's a Wonderful Life a highly un-sentimental view of existence prevails, beneath the heart-warming fairy tale of angels getting their wings. People cut ethical corners left and right (like George Bailey's handsome brother Harry, who leaves George stuck with the family business, a building and loan), and are constantly tempted by the blandishments of money and sex (like Gloria Grahame's Violet, who's always on the edge of slipping from "bad girl" status to something worse); or they're simply weak, like George's Uncle Billy (the great Thomas Mitchell), who fumbles through life, making messes of things, then drinks to console himself. The seemingly bucolic Bedford Falls is really no kind of utopia - in fact something serious is always at stake there, and someone or something is always hanging in the moral balance.

Of course the film constantly reminds us, too, that people can surprise you. The callow Harry eventually becomes a war hero - just as Mr. Gower turns out to be a saint - and even Violet thinks better of her ways. The movie's conceit is that there's a kind of moral force field in the town that keeps nudging people back on, or at least near to, the straight and narrow (and which draws its only real power from the sacrifices of people like George). Thus no one in It's a Wonderful Life is precisely, or only, what they seem to be; they're always capable of far better, and far worse.

The dark side of Life - George in crisis.

Even the idealistic hero, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart, at left, in an iconic role), isn't really what he at first appears. The townsfolk always seem delighted with him, but every time I see It's a Wonderful Life, I'm struck by how much anger and frustration are roiling around in Stewart's performance. All George wants to do is escape from Bedford Falls, and he's often furious when over and over again, his moral duties and feelings frustrate that desire.

And yet in that very frustration, he nevertheless finds something - well, "wonderful" (and so do we). Which leads me to something else intrinsic to the movie that you won't find at the multiplex anymore: the admission that moral action demands sacrifice. The sentimental, consumerist bromides of our own age insist that you can become rich by being virtuous - which easily bleeds into the even sleazier insinuation that riches operate as their own moral validation. But Capra (pardon my French) calls bullshit on all that crap. Morality has its rewards, the director tells us - and great ones - but they're not physical or financial. George saves his brother only by losing half his hearing; and he and Mary only preserve the building and loan by giving up their honeymoon. Being good will cost you something.

All this, of course, speaks of a kind of moral scope (and sense of everyday moral danger) that's all but lost to us today. And it's hard not to feel that this underlying moral dimension isn't tied to something else that's more striking than ever about It's a Wonderful Life: the fact that it offers the most sophisticated view of economic life ever committed to American film. Indeed, the famous "bank run" scene (at top) is so economically complex that - even though its developing situation is described quite accurately and explicitly as it unfolds - everyone I've ever spoken to about it essentially mis-remembers it (the Bailey Building Loan isn't actually in any trouble, for instance, even though most people imagine that's the case - the crisis has been precipitated by the run on the bank down the street).

Some viewers have watched this scene and insinuated that the moral points it scores are false, in that the Bailey Building and Loan must have been involved in the kind of high-risk mortgages that contributed to the Great Recession of 2008. But of course nothing could be further from the truth. First, as I stated earlier, the Bailey Building and Loan is presented as quite solvent (Uncle Billy only locks its doors because the local bank, in full melt-down, has demanded its liquid assets on short notice, so there's no cash in the till); and we understand that while the Bailey collection policy has involved flexibility in hard times, its customers aren't deadbeats. Indeed, George Bailey certainly hasn't off-loaded his debt in the derivatives market, because he knows his customers - and in hard times, their character has sometimes operated as their collateral.

All of this is alien to the economy of 2008, but wait - it gets "worse" (if you're a libertarian, that is): George Bailey bails out the Building and Loan (note that pun in his surname) by giving Ayn Rand the swift kick in the ass she deserves and offering up his own assets - he and Mary's nest-egg for their honeymoon - to cover the day's cash demands. He also makes a slew of promises and statements to his customers that are perfectly illegal, and he swings the entire deal without ever consulting his Board. The whole scene is a short course in how when the bottom falls out of a market, no amount of economic tinkering can fix it; only personal commitment can assuage the panic. And thus George holds the building and loan together - but only by ignoring both his "responsibilities" and the demands of the market.

Which is no surprise to anyone who has spent time in Real Life, as opposed to Second Life, and knows that the "invisible hand of the market" must always be guided from self-destruction by another invisible hand - that of the community. But if the people like George Bailey who gave that guidance were to vanish, then there would be no salvation possible - and thus the film's final nightmare vision of the world as it would be without him. The new main street of casinos, honky-tonks and pawn shops that George faces there is in its way amusingly hysterical - but is it so far from the truth? (For isn't that precisely what Massachusetts is turning into even as we speak?) To be blunt, to today's viewers, "Pottersville" is no hypothetical dystopia - indeed, it looks utterly familiar; it's a vision many people promote every day with a straight face. Only look at the faces you find there - this is when It's a Wonderful Life becomes far more frightening than its ultimate source, A Christmas Carol. In the world as run by Ebeneezer Scrooge, Mr. Gower is humiliated and utterly abject - desperate and dazed, he even chuckles along with his own abuse; Ma Bailey runs her flophouse with a face like a hatchet and eyes like a vulture; and we see poor Violet, screaming at the top of her lungs, being thrown out into the street for lewd behavior.

Of course maybe all this seems more poignant now because we're so lost as a nation, so unable to even envision what we must do to prevail over our current crisis. When It's a Wonderful Life was first enshrined on the nation's cable channels, the Reagan Republicans had only just begun to tear at the social fabric - and the movie's liberal platitudes had begun to feel hilariously quaint. Now, of course, free market theory is triumphant, and so It's a Wonderful Life has quickly morphed from a corny Hallmark card to a sad memento of a paradise lost. For there are no George Baileys left to save us from Mr. Potter, and we all live in Pottersville now.

Thoughts on the phony progressive politics of the theatre

2011-12-04T11:16:00.006-05:00

Gandhi's statue at Occupy Boston.

You know, I am not really an activist, but I do try to get out there when it counts, when showing up makes a difference. I support Occupy Boston financially, and visit as often as I can. Back when the Massachusetts Supreme Court made marriage equality a possibility in this state, I went to the marches and spent days at the State House, laughing at the praying nuns and the bleach-blonde moms shipped up by bus by the Baptists. And I was in the crowd facing the riot police when the protests got a little rough at Boston's Democratic Convention - which I admit was frightening, although I still remember with affection the guy who kept yelling, "They're not scary if you picture them naked!" as we were pushed relentlessly back by the advancing line of plexiglass shields and automatic weapons.

And you know, I have to say one thing - I've almost never seen people from the theatre out there when it counted. I don't remember seeing any actors or directors or playwrights at these events (or critics either). Instead I always seem to see the same folks - the earnest, scruffy college kids, and the lesbian ministers, and the guy in the wheelchair, and the crunchy septuagenarians with their stringy hair and their beads and rainbow shirts who, let's face it, have always been in the right about everything.

I don't really feel the presence of the theatre, though. And certainly nobody at the protests thinks about the theatre (aside from maybe the Bread and Puppet folks). They know today's theatre follows, but never leads, the breaking political movements. You can count on the theatre to show up late, watching itself in the mirror.

But God, you would imagine from reading the theatre's own journals and blogs that it was somehow on the barricades. There's a constant ongoing battle, in fact, over who can look more progressive than whom. The world marches on without it, but the theatre still dreams it's leading the charge, and that its internecine squabbles are somehow mystically driving the dialogue. If only!

Which may be why I get pissed off (too pissed off, I know) when I read self-promotional material like this. On the one hand, I suppose, good for its author: she certainly understands how to get ahead in her little fishbowl (the other fish are all applauding). On the other hand - for chrissakes, to somebody who shivered in the cold and shouted down the opposition for the sake of marriage equality (or any equality) this all just looks so spoiled and obnoxious: an elaborate moral toilette that's all but indistinguishable from narcissism. No wonder nobody really takes the theater seriously! It has no fucking skin in the game. (I note the Youngblog's latest gambit is to "Brunchify Wall Street" - oh, how clever!) Seriously, you can't be a saint and a self-promoter at the same time - well, maybe you can in the blogosphere, and on the new play circuit, and even in Paula's playwriting class - but not at the pearly gates, if you know what I mean. And I think the people on the ground can feel the difference. The theatre won't really be politically relevant again until that changes.

Ain't quite Misbehavin'

2011-12-03T14:05:00.003-05:00

Robin Long, Lovely Hoffman, Davron S. Monroe, Lori Tishfield, and Calvin Braxton in Ain't Misbehavin'. Photo: Mark S. Howard.

You've probably already heard the news about the Lyric Stage's Ain't Misbehavin'; this edition of the venerable revue tries a little too hard for its own good, and so never achieves the happy, ribald ease of earlier versions seen at the North Shore and Trinity Rep. The cast is certainly talented, but most of them read as a little young - and while Fats Waller wrote his wicked, knowing hits when he was in his twenties and thirties (he died at 39!), his best numbers go down best when sung by performers who exude a certain experience and maturity - and let's be honest, are of a certain size, too; a Fats Waller revue is one of those rare forums where a plus-size power mama can get as down and dirty as she wants to be, and half this cast is just too skinny, eager and cute! It doesn't help that director/choreographer Josie Bray has removed the revue's traditional piano from the stage (okay, I guess it's still there - in a way - in David Towlun's elegant backdrop), and tried to fill the resulting void with lots of high-energy dance routines. (Indeed, at times you half-expect Ben Vereen to jump in from the wings and make with the "jazz hands" - and that's just wrong!)

Still, what can I say; the cast is talented, and of course the material is great - Waller aficionados won't be satisfied with this version, but I think virgins will find it fun. And the band is tight, the musical direction strong, and the cast is well-trained - they manage an exquisite five-part harmony, for instance, even though they're spread across the stage, in the mournful Black and Blue (at top) - probably this production's highlight. There are other good moments, too - the show seems to warm up (and loosen up) as it goes along. Lovely Hoffman, who's most often at home in the material, brings a genuine broken heart to Mean to Me, for instance, and the versatile Davron S. Monroe slinks sleazily, if somewhat calculatedly, through The Viper's Drag/The Reefer Song. And Robin Long brings a witty edge to Squeeze Me, while Lori Tishfield definitely gives Your Feet's Too Big everything she's got. Meanwhile the effervescent Calvin Braxton does manage to sell every number - just by being a tireless dancer (he's surprisingly light on his feet) and an utterly determined entertainer. Braxton's a bit innocently blank to conjure Fats himself, however - whose arched eyebrows and gleaming eyes always hinted at a brainy, bemused critique of the sated appetites his songs so often celebrated. There's just something too squeaky-clean about Braxton - and about the whole revue, in fact. Which may be why, though often diverting, this show ain't quite Misbehavin.'

Three Viewings at the New Rep

2011-12-02T11:32:00.008-05:00

Joel Colodner, Adrianne Krstansky and Christine Power in Three Viewings. Photo by Andrew Brilliant.

For those who appreciate the fine art of acting, I'd say that Three Viewings (at the New Rep through Dec. 18) may be required viewing. The script itself, by Jeffrey Hatcher, is a set of three highly (almost ostentatiously) crafted solos for individual actors - all, we slowly realize, on the themes of love and death; indeed, all are set in the same funeral home (God, I seem to be seeing a lot of this kind of thing these days, but that's not Hatcher's fault). This up-and-coming playwright [Whoops! Rob Whiner-Kendt, of the "Wicked Stage" blog, wants you to know the play is from 1994, and that Hatcher is not "up and coming," but rather an aging hack who wrote at least one good play that is making the regional rounds; he is better known - as far as he IS known - for forgettable movies like "The Duchess." Thanks Rob! Now back to the review.] strikes me, after a second exposure (his A Picasso played at the Merrimack last year), as quite clever and certainly skilled, if not highly original. Some of his scenarios push the edge of credibility (are there really jewel thieves who nibble the earrings right off corpses? - much as I enjoyed this metaphor, I found it a hard sell), and the tone of his script is familiar from the likes of Six Feet Under and other cable fodder (like a lot of playwrights, Hatcher has had most of his success writing screen- and tele-plays, and something of the conceptual limits of those formats has leaked back into his stage work).

Still, there is that craft, whether it's ostentatious or not (just about every detail Hatcher drops in exposition he returns to as he ties up his narrative bow at the finish). And the playwright juggles various metaphors with ease, while conjuring distinct voices for his characters; all that (plus his Rod-Serling-esque Twilight-Zone sense of irony) leads to a lot of pleasing turns and dips in his narrative line. After a slow start, Three Viewings definitely hooks you, and teases you expertly until its satisfying, campfire-story conclusion.

Of course, it's hard not to get hooked on a narrative line with actors like these as bait. All three of the performers at the New Rep - Joel Colodner, Christine Power, and Adrianne Krstansky - are stalwarts of the local scene, and under Jim Petosa's nuanced direction (and on Cristina Todesco's elegant set), all are either holding to their usual high standards or (in one case) completely transcending them. Colodner probably seems the least secure in his performance right now; but then he's the opening act, so he has to somehow sell the whole concept, and to be honest, his storyline is the simplest, and weakest, of the three - although it's not without interest, and does eventually open up to reveal an affecting depth. (Hatcher is a pretty good critic of his own stuff - he has cannily structured the evening so it builds to his best work.)

The next two "episodes" (sorry) are more satisfyingly complicated, and slide smoothly back and forth between complex moral questions. To Hatcher's tale of a funerary thief with a devastating secret, Christine Power brings a confidently smug corporate finish, along with an intriguingly wounded emotional undertow (and a precise command of detail). But it's really Adrianne Krstansky who walks off with the show in the last and best vignette. As a nice-but-naïve matron who discovers her dead husband was hardly the man she thought he was, Ms. Krstansky is very much in her element, and is working in the kind of intimate space where her familiar emotional transparency is at its best advantage.

Even so, it must be said that she lights up the room (even though she barely moves) with a performance that seems to explore and extend every nook and cranny of her character. Indeed, watching Krstansky, you feel that she's getting at something like the essence of emotional presence, and the variety of her vocal performance may become a legend. The New Rep seems to save its best acting for its small, basement space; after Anne Gottlieb's turn in Frankie and Johnny last December, I recall the critics buzzing in the lobby in precisely the same way. For those who are curious as to what it takes to get an award nomination in this town, I'd advise a trip to Three Viewings for the short course.

Surreal love story

2011-12-01T22:12:00.008-05:00

Once again time has gotten away from me and I haven't written about something I meant to. This time that something is Man Ray/Lee Miller, Partners in Surrealism, which closes at the Peabody Essex Museum this weekend.

And it's one of the best museum shows of the year, so if you haven't caught it yet, this is your last chance to take in perhaps the only exhibit I've ever seen that actually operates as a heart-breaking love story.

For Partners in Surrealism details the decades-long relationship between Lee Miller and the more famous Man Ray (his besotted portrait of her, at left). At first the two knew each other as teacher and student; soon, however, they became lovers, even though Ray had the look of some beetle-browed Kafka character, while Miller, already a famous model, was widely considered one of the most striking women in roaring-twenties Paris. Actually, while gazing at her own calmly rendered nude self-portraits, it's tempting to claim she was one of the beauties of the century. With her delicate yet plush frame, and a boyish bob framing features that would have rivaled Lauren Bacall's, Miller seemed both an androgynous seductress and an alienated innocent, and the combination all but drove Ray mad; her lips alone inspired one of his most famous icons (below).

Miller's lips dominate the landscape in an iconic Ray image.

For a time the two thrived together, working as near-equals in Ray's studio (Miller is often credited for accidentally discovering solarization, which Ray claimed as his own). But Miller was a notorious free spirit - a popular wineglass was actually molded from her breast - and was hardly content to play surrealist muse for Ray; her various liaisons brought their affair to an end within two years. But in some ways, as the Peabody Essex show demonstrates, it never ended. Ray was all but shattered by her departure; and tellingly enough, soon began designing surreal works derived from her image which he could shatter in turn - preferably, as he put it, "with one blow."

He was never successful, however, no matter how many blows he struck - years later, he was still painting his memories of Miller, even though she had long since moved on to a career of her own in photography (she never made the kind of conceptual breakthroughs that Ray did, but many of her portraits and photographs - particularly those from Germany after the war - are clearly the work of a master; at left, an image of a Nazi suicide). Eventually the two reconciled as friends - indeed, the exhibit includes one of the most touching letters I've ever read (clearly a love letter) from Ray to his former muse near the end of both their lives. Some seventeen years her senior, he died only a year before she did; but then I don't think he would have wished to outlive her.

To hell and back with Boston Early Music Festival

2011-12-01T15:44:00.010-05:00

Douglas Williams, Mireille Asselin and ensemble in Hades.

What is period musical performance for?

For its enthusiasts, the answer is simply the beauty of the music itself, which is most authentically conveyed in the language of the instruments for which it was written. And this argument has proven so convincing over the years that organizations like the BSO - which basically plays on nineteenth-century instruments - has slowly had to shed from its schedule much of the early "classical" repertoire (and some argue should really shed Mozart and Haydn, too).

But when it comes to period opera, things get a bit trickier, and the early music movement must face the issues with which theatrical artists have long since grappled, which perhaps could be summed up as, "How do we stay true to classic values while remaining contemporary, too?" Given that the major aim of many in the early music movement is to replicate as closely as possible all the original performance conditions of the works in question (whole concert halls are being designed after period models, in fact, and built of "authentic" materials), the attempt to provide contemporary meaning in what amounts to a costume drama can seem almost paradoxical.

But over recent years the brilliant Gilbert Blin, house director at the Boston Early Music Festival, has reliably devised smart, subtle subversions of this apparent contradiction. Blin isn't really all that interested in period tableaux vivant for its own sake - he's intrigued instead by what it actually tells us about its period, as well as what it tells us about ourselves. Thus, particularly in his chamber operas, he sets his productions in precise historical moments (sometimes a specific weekend) in which actual historical figures like Alexander Pope or Molière may figure in the action, or even take the stage. What Blin attempts to conjure is a kind of meta-historical performance, in which something like the period itself appears before us, draped in its own theatrical trappings.

Admittedly, Blin's aim can sometimes wobble (last year's Dido was a bit of a mixed bag), but his ideas are always suggestive, and at any rate he was firing on all cylinders this year, with a double bill of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers and La Couronne de Fleurs that transfixed audiences at BEMF last weekend. The musical performance was always exemplary, Blin's elegantly simple staging was often haunting, and the historical metaphors he teased from the material were pleasingly resonant. My only regret was that the production had only two performances; like his great Acis and Galatea, this is another Blin masterpiece that deserves to tour.

Aaron Sheehan as Orpheus

Blin's first brainstorm was an inspired gambit to get around the fact that, to put it bluntly, we've lost the last act of Charpentier's Orphée; the extant manuscript simply ends with Orpheus and Eurydice groping their way together out of Hades - before the final tragedy that dashes their romantic dreams a second time. To explain this gap, Blin has nestled the larger opera within a kind of operatic short subject - La Couronne de Fleurs, Charpentier's prologue to Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire, a satire which, believe it or not, opened at the court of Louis XIV with an opera and ballet attached.

La Couronne de Fleurs is a fairly simple set of ditties in which Flora asks her friends (who happen to be nymphs and shepherdesses, of course) to compose odes to Louis XIV's grandeur. The ensuing concert is eventually cut off by the god Pan, however, who explains that it's pointless; try as they might, they can never do justice to the big guy himself. Blin's conceit is that Orphée is part of this brief performance - with Pan's interruption explaining the loss of the third act. Okay, we're never quite sure how Orpheus precisely maps to Louis, but in general the opposition of these two works is hauntingly resonant; Flora recalls Proserpine, the nymph of spring confined to Pluto's court in winter, and of course poor Molière departed for the underworld himself after a performance of Le Malade Imaginaire, never to return. Blin even dresses Pan as one of Louis's courtiers - hinting that what is being silenced is not just Orphée but Charpentier himself (who soon fell from favor before the rising star of Lully).

So Blin's meta-opera is like a wreath of historic and artistic allusions to love and death - it keeps ramifying subtly in our consciousness even as we watch. And luckily the director seems to know his ideas are so strong he can keep his staging to an exquisite, evocative minimum - while what design touches he does choose often perform double thematic duty: Flora's ring of roses around the musical consort, for instance (at top), could serve as either a bouquet for Eurydice's wedding or her funeral; likewise, the ghostly shades in Hell wander about in bridal veils. And I'll never forget Eurydice and Orpheus's slow, sombre march (almost touching) out of the auditorium as Charpentier's gorgeous farewell song unfolded. In this truncated Orphée, of course, they seem to get away - Orpheus never turns, and Eurydice is never lost again to Hades; death is suspended; it is only in "life" itself (as opposed to "art") that their story is interrupted, and their love destroyed.

Of course the ensemble of talented musicians and vocalists BEMF has by now attracted had a lot to do with the success of the production, too. Local star Aaron Sheehan made a clarion, committed Orphée, but he faced stiff vocal competition from Douglas Williams's powerful Pluton (whose bass notes indeed seemed to scrape the roof of the underworld) as well as Olivier Laquerre's bemused, lyrical Apollo. Meanwhile Mireille Asselin made a delightfully ripe Flora, and Carrie Henneman Shaw a startlingly moving Eurydice; indeed, her death scene, which I've seen dozens of times in countless versions of the myth, gripped me here as it never had before. The chorus was likewise in fine form, with subtle solo turns from Jason McStoots, Michael Kelly and Brenna Wells. The instrumentalists were equally dazzling, under the direction of resident early-music geniuses Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs. The entire production cohered admirably; my only regret regarding it was that it only played for two nights (and over the Thanksgiving weekend, no less)! Perhaps, if the gods smile once more on Orpheus, it will get a second chance at theatrical life.

Tea Lobo, Mireille Asselin and the chorus join Orpheus in song.

The return - and last bow - of a classic

2011-11-30T13:11:00.008-05:00

Whitney Jensen sails through the Waltz of the Flowers. Photos: Gene Schiavone.

I'm not sure I have anything left to say about The Nutcracker. I'm not sure anybody does. But as I settled into my seat to catch the first night of Boston Ballet's annual edition, I looked forward to its familiar pleasures just as I always do. Does the Ballet do this holiday classic up right? Yes, most definitely, and I'm not alone in that opinion - judging from online polls, it's the most popular Nutcracker in the country. Which really should come as no surprise, given artistic director Mikko Nissinen has taken great care to pack as much entertainment value as he can into his company's big moneymaker - indeed, at times it feels almost overstuffed, a kind of holiday behemoth with something for everyone.

You could argue, I suppose, that some versions are cleaner and more coherent - often because they've recruited an adult Clara, which allows for more narrative dancing in the second half. And indeed, the Boston Ballet edition is not so much an artistic statement as an extravaganza; it lurches occasionally in its narrative, and swings from fantasy to romance to comedy at the drop of a snowflake. But who cares? The kids always laugh at the mechanical mouse, and Dad always wakes up when the sylph of the "Arabian" dance begins her barely-PG contortions, while Mom just finds everything adorable; and I'm not going to argue with any of them.

Alas, a few of this elaborate production's tricks didn't quite come off on opening night; a magic handkerchief went rogue, for instance, briefly entangling Sabi Varga's spooky, sexy Drosselmeier. So maybe it's a good thing the sets and costumes are being "retired," bright and bold as they are - in case you haven't heard, this year is your last chance to see them. And you should, of course, because they're charming in a deliciously high, fantastical key - but something tells me next year's edition will be charming, too (never fear, my inside sources assure me the production will remain traditional - you can see an initial sketch of the possibilities at www.bostonballet.org/nutcracker2012). So you should probably see the show this year and next, just like I do.

Indeed, watching the production play out over time has turned out to be the best way for me to assess the growth of the Ballet's general technical ability. By now, however, the bench of talent has grown so deep and so wide that it may have outgrown this particular yardstick. To be honest, the second act is now one long stretch of technical prowess - every one of Tchaikovsky's divertissements seems to have its own expert interpreter. Indeed, as the dancers parade into the Kingdom of Sweets at the top of the act, you could be forgiven for feeling slightly stunned. We've already met mainstays James Whiteside, Lia Cirio, and Misa Kuranaga - but then Rie Ichikawa, Kathleen Breen Combes, Lasha Khozashvili, Adiarys Almeida, Joseph Gatti, Jeffrey Cirio, and Whitney Jensen file through, along with many others - the great dancers just keep coming and coming, until they fill the stage.

Lia Cirio (the Sugar Plum Fairy) guides Rachel Harrison (Clara) through the Kingdom of Sweets.

There were incremental steps forward evident for some younger members of the company, too. The up-and-coming Paolo Arrais, for instance, who dazzled us as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, unexpectedly had to step in for John Lam as the Snow King - and dazzled us all over again. And somehow Isaac Akiba's leaps during his "Russian" dance had a lyricism this time around they've lacked before; Akiba has always been a great athlete, but now I could feel real emotion moving beneath his sunny ability; he's becoming a great dancer, too. Lawrence Rines likewise made a solid impression as a loose-limbed Harlequin, against Dalay Parrondo's reliably precise Columbine. And the very youngest members of the cast - the children - all performed with dedication and charm, while Rachel Harrison (above, with Lia Cirio) made a sweetly poised Clara.

Down in the pit, conductor Jonathan McPhee gave what may be the longest stretch of memorable melody in existence his usual vigorous shape, although as in Romeo and Juliet, I'm afraid there was roughness in the horns here and there. Still, principal trumpet Bruce Hall came through with a gleamingly confident solo in the "Spanish" dance that seemed to almost sum up the virtues of this much-loved version - dazzling show-biz brio, a solid sense of fun, and dancing chops to die for.

Janet Echelman's world-wide webs at Northeastern

2011-11-29T13:26:00.002-05:00

In these networked days, it's no surprise that literal nets have become an artform unto themselves - and the artist who has made them resonate best as public art is probably Janet Echelman, whose wonderful 160-foot wide project, She Changes (above) brilliantly transformed a traffic circle along the coast of Portugal into a meditation on the sea and wind. Ms. Echelman first drew her inspiration from fishermen's nets, but now she's gone all high-tech, and her installations are in demand all over the world. And I'd certainly say there are barren public spaces in our own "Windy City" that could be enlivened by her brand of floating magic (as long as it can withstand a strong nor'eatster, that is). At any rate, you can get to know the artist a little better this Thursday night at Northeastern University, where she will be speaking in the Raytheon Amphitheater at 5:00 PM, as part of the Presidential Speaker Series, Profiles in Innovation. The event will be also be streamed live on facebook.com/northeastern and via the university's homepage, northeastern.edu.

Ok, everybody's a critic - only Michael Kaiser is a really bad one! (And you can be a better one.)

2011-11-27T13:44:00.007-05:00

Sorry, I know it's wrong to make fun of people with mental challenges, but I can't resist the temptation to pile onto Michael Kaiser (who is, I can barely believe, a graduate of my own alma mater, MIT!), after he has been all but buried under a heap of ridicule for this truly block-headed cri de coeur on the Huffington Post. In that by-now-infamous whine, Kaiser lamented the demise of the professional critic, and found the rise of reviewing on the Internet "a scary trend." (Included in that trend were not only bloggers like moi, but also frequenters of chat rooms, people who write for "professional" websites like Broadway World, and even folks who praise or diss shows they've seen on the producing theatres' own websites.) In essence, Kaiser worried that without paid critics offering the public guidance, "art that appeals to the lowest common denominator will always be deemed the best."

And you know, at first glance, that sounds like an argument, I suppose. But only at first glance. The fact that it has been posted on a website that does not pay its authors should, I think, be the first amusing signal that all's not right with Kaiser's analysis. (For in effect, he's arguing against his own forum, isn't he?) And then one has to wonder - exactly what Golden Age of Professional Criticism is he referring to? There has never been a moment (in my lifetime, at least) in which print critics in Boston were leading any kind of intellectual charge for any kind of theatre - much less proffering complex arguments of any real artistic discernment. In New York - yes, a bit; but honestly only from a handful of people, who were wrong almost as often as they were right. I suppose there were a few glimmers of critical ability in Chicago and on the West Coast over the years; and I know some folks cling to Theatre of Revolt as an example of engaged criticism - although to me, Robert Brustein's own checkered theatrical career kind of undermines that argument; but hey, I'll throw his fans a bone - one book, fifty years ago. And Frank Rich was a smart guy with a sharp, upper-middle-brow eye. But all in all, I'm inclined to say:

Big fucking deal.

And I can't help but note the underside of Kaiser's wistfulness. He's the president of the Kennedy Center, of course - a major producer of the arts - and one thing he's not honest enough to admit is that professional print critics are in many ways much more easily controlled by producers than Internet critics are. [As I've been both a print critic and an Internet critic, I'm in a good position to critique Kaiser's argument - and I'll say up front, writing for the Internet is far more intellectually satisfying than writing for print.] I know for a fact, for instance, that during my stint at the Globe, a major theatre in these parts went to my editor and demanded that I never be allowed to review their productions (based on my rather acerbic style, I suppose). Just in case you're wondering, the editor reportedly acquiesced to the demand. And let's just say that would never happen on the Internet - after a blog has established its audience, I should say; until then, some bloggers do find themselves cutting ethical corners for the sake of free tickets.

Which may be what gives some producers the idea they can run the rest of the Web with the same iron hand they apply to print outlets. I've just faced down a years-long attempt, for instance, by the A.R.T. to silence me - which I'm not pretending wasn't a pitched battle; I had to rely on my own earned reputation for content, as well as the respect and support of other Internet critics, to hold my own. But the point is that said battle never would have even happened at the Globe. Things would have never gotten to the bare-knuckles stage; it would have been handled behind the scenes. With advertising dollars, as well as various business, political, and personal relationships in the balance, no critic who savaged the A.R.T. as relentlessly as I have would ever have lasted at the Globe.

Let's look at a related claim by Kaiser; he coos that professional critics are "vetted by their employers." To which I can only say - oh, really? Don Aucoin, the Globe's chief critic, was simply rotated in from the city desk, I believe. And wasn't Ed Siegel, his predecessor, a television critic? And who the hell was Terry Byrne, anyway, before the Herald hired her? And isn't Jenna Scherer (admittedly the brightest of this crew) only about 16? I hate to tell ya, Mike, but it's hard to parse an intellectual standard from this motley field. Even looking to New York, I don't find the "vetting" too edifying - Charles Isherwood used to gush about porn stars when he wasn't reviewing for Variety, and didn't Ben Brantley write for Women's Wear Daily? Whew - almost too lofty, huh.

But of course in a way these critics are vetted; they are judged by how closely their taste matches that of their paper's audience, and perhaps more importantly, how accurately they can assess the power structure within which a theatrical production has been mounted. Questions of artistic judgment are incidental to these concerns. In Boston, for example, we're faced by an obvious contradiction between theatrical achievement and social prominence: Harvard, the leading institution in the area on practically every level, regularly produces burlesque and titty shows on its stages - that is when the world's greatest university isn't aggressively dumbing down the classics into rock extravaganzas and the like. To be blunt, Harvard is the top of the social heap, but the bottom of the artistic heap: in fact it proudly produces art that appeals to (in Kaiser's words) the lowest common denominator. No real theatre critic could ever square that particular circle. Hence - Don Aucoin and Terry Byrne.

So it's obvious where Kaiser's model of criticism can lead. But is his nostalgic dream the only model for substantive criticism? Do we have to look backward for a vision of great criticism? The evidence argues otherwise. Kaiser actually doesn't seem particularly conversant with the state of discourse on the Internet, or the passionate debates that have often been waged on various sites over various works of art. He doesn't note that analyses are often published on the Web that are far longer than those ever allowed into newsprint - even in the heyday of the Times. (I myself have published three-part articles on some theatrical events, and a 3,000-word review is not unusual on this site.) In short, he doesn't grapple with the sheer abundance of commentary on the Web, and he doesn't attempt to divide the digital wheat from the chaff. Indeed, he even admits that it's difficult "to distinguish the professional critic from the amateur as one reads on-line reviews and critiques"!

Only - whoa, Mike - doesn't that actually undo your entire argument?

Okay, like I said, it's not fair to make fun! But it's completely fair to argue that the real problem with Internet reviewing is that it's still too much like print reviewing. Indeed, bloggers often ape the emasculated tea-room tone of the print crowd in some pathetic attempt to be "taken seriously," and people often foolishly declare that I don't follow the "standards" of print criticism - to which I can only say, honey, that's the whole idea! I can write as much as I want to about what I want to; I can draw connections between art forms that no print outlet would allow; I can indulge in extended conversations with other critics and artists; and of course, I can hammer away at various miscreants as long as I have the strength. In short, I can tailor my criticism to what I believe are the needs of the moment; I'm not shackled by my paycheck, or any inability to reach the public. These advantages may shock Michael Kaiser, of course, because they amount to a sustained assault on what he imagines are his own prerogatives - and the prerogatives of his class - over criticism. But there's the rub, Mike - you're no longer in charge.

I know, I know, standards aren't what they used to be, and sometimes it all looks like a race to the bottom (with newspapers leading the way!) and blah blah fucking blah. Only the standards were never real, buddy, and you were always being flattered beyond your actual critical ability, and only now do we perhaps have a chance to re-make theatre criticism into what it always should have been all along. In fact, if you look closely, you'll find criticism on the Web that is as good or better than anything you'll find in print. Yes, it's too bad we aren't paid for it - and probably never will be. But if the pay became a reality, without the meddling editors, would you still feel the same way? And frankly, if money is the reason you're in the game, maybe you need to find another game . . .

Tonight, tonight

2011-11-26T13:47:00.001-05:00

By now the annual Boston Early Music Festival chamber opera production qualifies as an "event." And that event is tonight (above is the promo video, which gives you some sense of the intelligent stagings and high musical standards at BEMF). This year the selection(s) are a double bill of Charpentier's La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers and La Couronne de Fleurs (from a text by Molière). Tonight and tomorrow only. (It's probably sold out, but who knows, you may have a shot.) And I'm hearing more music tomorrow, btw, in a different key - the wonderful Fats Waller musical Ain't Misbehavin' at the Lyric Stage. You'll hear all about both over the coming week, along with (I hope) my thoughts on Dance/Draw at the ICA, George Clooney's new flick The Descendants, and, you know, other stuff.

Captors at the Huntington

2011-11-26T11:53:00.021-05:00

I didn't think it was possible to write a boring play about Adolf Eichmann.

Nevertheless, fledgling playwright Evan M. Wiener has managed to do it, and the Huntington has staged it with all the trimmings, under the guidance of artistic director Peter DuBois. If you doubt me as to its tedium, go ahead and sit through Captors (through Dec. 11) - but seriously, you're better off staying home and reading Hannah Arendt, on whose work Weiner's derivative ramblings are merely a thin theatrical gloss.

Does that sound harsh? I think I'm actually going easy on Wiener; he practically obscures Arendt, I'd argue. But then the real source of Captors is not the great Eichmann in Jerusalem but rather the lesser Eichmann in My Hands, a first-hand account of the fugitive war criminal's 1960 capture in Argentina by Peter Z. Malkin ("as told to" Harry Stein). Malkin was on the Israeli team that nabbed the Nazi, and his book essentially covers the ten days during which the kidnappers hunkered down in their safe house, to devise both an exit strategy and a disguise for their captive - all while simultaneously attempting to cajole (or threaten) him into signing a paper agreeing to his extradition and trial.

The eventual bestowal of that signature is one of the script's two small-scaled, but genuine, dramatic coups (the other occurs when Eichmann answers his guilt in the killing of children with the horrifying line - straight from Malkin's book - "But they were Jewish, weren't they?"). To some, these small shudders - created almost entirely by Michael Cristofer, in a striking performance as Eichmann (below) - may be enough to justify the evening, but all I can say is they're a long time coming; both occur about two hours into the play, and neither counts as a revelation. And I think it's worth noting that Malkin's (and Stein's, and Wiener's) account of how that key signature was obtained is widely contested. In Captors, Eichmann's pride seduces him into signing his own death warrant; but while one reading of his character lends some support to this idea, more worldly-wise historians think Eichmann only signed on the dotted line once a gun (or its equivalent) had been held to his head. (For tellingly, despite that signature, Eichmann had to be sedated to the edge of consciousness before he could be hustled out of the country.)

So Captors is probably suspect as history; it's certainly suspect as art. Wiener is an inexperienced dramatist - he has spent most of his relatively short career developing screenplays. But even most Hollywood hacks, I think, would have avoided the obvious mistakes he makes here. The playwright gives us not only extraneous scenes between Malkin and co-author Stein, for instance, but also gives Stein (a non-character if ever there was one) solo voice-overs, delivered straight to the audience. Even this might have worked if Wiener's writing was sharp, or tightly bound to personality and situation; but instead his characters hold forth on hypothetical questions of guilt and disguise and memory - re-iterating cliches from other, better plays - and their occasional "conflicts" feel forced. To make matters worse, the script hops back and forth between time frames, and Wiener never builds any sense of the claustrophobia or desperation that must have weighed on his characters (and which is generally the kind of thing at which first-hand accounts excel). Indeed, the entire first hour of the play lacks all shape or focus, and despite the looming historical and moral context, literally nothing seems to be at stake; the phrase that Arendt famously attached to Eichmann, "the banality of evil," hangs in the air - but surprisingly, so does another kind of banality.

Michael Cristofer as Eichmann.

Eventually, in the second act, Wiener does attempt to limn the familiar, but fascinating, question of Eichmann's guilt - or (as there was never any doubt as to his actions) perhaps the better phrase would be his moral standing against the enormity of the crimes he committed. Or should we say "participated in"? For Eichmann's supposed lack of autonomy was essentially his defense - he was "only following orders" in leading the huge transportation efforts that brought some six million Jews to their doom. It was the orders themselves that were guilty, while Eichmann argued he was merely a normal man doing his best to get ahead in a society gone mad.

And it seemed he was "normal" by every account. Psychiatrists found no evidence in Eichmann of mental derangement, and, strange as it may sound, most observers agreed he was not even anti-Semitic. Indeed, early in his career Eichmann worked with Zionists to deport the Jewish population from Germany (even traveling to Haifa, in an effort to relocate them to Palestine - a bizarre irony right there); the so-called "Final Solution" was certainly not his idea. Yet he carried it out assiduously - even as the Reich was falling apart in 1945, and the Holocaust was "called off" by Himmler, Eichmann kept the trains rolling.

But why?

Hannah Arendt's answer, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, was to re-interpret not Eichmann but evil itself, which she came to see as ordinary, commonplace - the true meaning of her resonant phrase, "the banality of evil." Not that Arendt felt Eichmann shouldn't swing (he was indeed hanged in 1962 in Israel), nor did she buy his vain defense, with its discombobulated refs to Kant; Eichmann always knew what he was doing, Arendt argued. Her deep insight was that we're all a bit like Eichmann; we all accommodate the evil forces running through society, and even advance ourselves with their help. When PBS or Lincoln Center accepts money from David Koch, for instance, they're acting a bit like Eichmann. When Americans torture out of their fear of terrorism, they're acting a bit like Eichmann (indeed, John Yoo's and Dick Cheney's "theory of the unitary executive" was basically a gloss on Hitler's Führerprinzip). Even when you or I turn a blind eye to Apple's factories in China, we're acting a bit like Eichmann. The Nazis' best bureaucrat took such participation to an extreme, it's true; still, there's no clear dividing line between us and him; in the end, he was less an amoral demon (instead, Arendt likened him at times to a clown), than the most horrifyingly ruthless of Human Resource Directors.

Was he a war criminal too?

This doesn't mean that a dramatist owes Eichmann any sympathy - but it does mean that the questions surrounding his capture and execution demand fresh and genuine exploration. To be fair, playwright Wiener seems aware of this responsibility - at one point, in fact, he has a character declare: "This is not your father's Jewish revenge tale!" But alas, I'm afraid it is, beneath all its pseudo-intellectual trappings, and that troubles me a bit. For on the one hand, by the time Quentin Tarantino gets around to an artistic trope, you know it's artistically and politically exhausted, and should be kept to the multiplex.

And on the other hand, the tale of Eichmann's capture should still resonate uncomfortably with its political, if not moral, quandaries; for all the questions of how, when and why to avenge wrongdoing in a corrupt world are still very much with us. No one could begrudge the great Jewish tradition its revenge on the evil men who tried to destroy it; nor should we ever forget the terrible facts of the Holocaust. Still, at this late date, with Jewish culture firmly ensconced at the heart of theatrical life, perhaps we can afford to consider the questions of Israeli exceptionalism that Captors celebrates. For it's a tale of undercover operatives invading a sovereign nation and plucking one of its citizens from the streets - which made we wonder, would we feel the same way about Eichmann if he had been kidnapped from the streets of America? For just btw, wasn't Wernher von Braun (at right) a member of the SS (and weren't his rockets assembled in concentration camps)? And isn't the Catholic Church, which spirited Eichmann (along with many other Nazis) to Argentina, still a global force - indeed, wasn't its current leader a member of the Hitler Youth? Pope Benedict has argued that his membership was a matter of financial necessity - but, ummm - is that so very far from Eichmann's argument?

The play in the glass booth. Production photos - T. Charles Erickson.

So questions of guilt and innocence are rarely pure and never simple, even when it comes to Nazi war criminals. Indeed, watching Captors, I couldn't help but remember Robert Shaw's play The Man in the Glass Booth, a rather woozy existential identity-puzzler from the 60's, in which Israeli abductors nabbed the wrong man - or did they??? (Part of the reason I couldn't forget it was the large glass booth DuBois and designer Beowulf Boritt had erected around the set at the Huntington, in a nod to Eichmann's famous containment during his trial.) Now I'm in no rush to see the pretentious Glass Booth again, but I have to admit it actually had ambitions that Captors can't match - and that's too bad. For I'm not sure the Huntington's audience is truly served by this kind of production. It has clearly been pulled together as a nod to the 50th anniversary of Eichmann's trial - which makes it, weird as it may sound, a kind of nostalgia piece.

But don't we already get enough nostalgia from the Huntington? And while we should never forget the Holocaust, must we always remember it the same way? (Isn't a living memory all about its context?) The Huntington's Jewish audience is facing what could be a sea-change in its identity; the Middle East is morphing around Israel, there is increased awareness that America's best interest may not align with that of the "Jewish lobby," and sympathy with the plight of the Palestinians is on the rise. Cries of anti-Semitism won't easily stop this ferment - so couldn't the Huntington's "Jewish play" be about that? I know people often smile at this theatre's "diversity" programming - which sometimes seems to dole out productions like presents to the various segments of its audience. I actually don't find anything wrong with that policy - as long as the productions engage with how we live now. But you couldn't make that claim about Captors - just as you couldn't make it about the Huntington's last effort, Before I Leave You. Both were in different ways essentially sentimental, and neither, to be blunt, was ready for a professional production; you could argue they were chosen for their marketing merits rather than their artistic ones. Which is why I worry that there's something broken over at the Huntington right now, and I'm hoping that one way or another, it's soon fixed.

Five years and counting . . .

2011-11-24T11:02:00.002-05:00

A scene from last year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

It's that time of year again - so here's a sincere wish for a Happy Thanksgiving from me to you.

I also thought it was worth noting (in passing) that this is the fifth Thanksgiving for the Hub Review. Yes, on November 15, 2006, under the banner "Welcome to the Hub Review," I posted the following:

You've found it - the only site devoted to Boston (high) culture that tries to cover everything that matters (at least to me). Yes, I'm elitist. Yes, I'm gay. If you don't like either of those things, there are plenty of middlebrow-religious-hetero sites around to tickle your fancy. So get outta here and go crazy. Just don't whine that my standards are too high or that I'm a pervert threatening the arts or what have you. 'Cause I don't put up with that you-know-what.

As you can see, the tone was there right from the start. I think that post had about twenty readers - basically, my close friends and the folks at the office who knew I'd begun blogging. Now I reach about forty or fifty times that many - still a small audience, but a pivotal one, I believe.

Or at least a lot of people seem to think so. For this has been a rough year, frankly, for the Hub Review - I've always gotten personal threats, but for the past two years or so there was a concerted effort afoot to silence me from various powers-that-be on the local scene - an effort which came to a head last spring. Things looked pretty dark for a while; but it turned out I had plenty of supporters, too. (I think the most common thing I heard from readers this year was, "I don't always agree with you, but you're the only real critic Boston has.") So I hung in there, and rest assured, things seem to have turned a corner - I'm still here, and hope to be so for the foreseeable future, with, perhaps, more influence than ever. And at least I think that's something to be thankful for.

Another sublime afternoon with Uncle Itzhak

2011-11-22T22:57:00.009-05:00

Perlman in action in New York.

I came to Itzhak Perlman's Celebrity Series appearance at Symphony Hall last weekend after a series of disappointing experiences at the theatre, and so the concert felt like a long, wonderful wash of aesthetic balm. I think by now Mr. Perlman needs no introduction; the virtuosity of his musicianship is pretty much an accepted fact. (And perhaps it's some consolation, I think, in these days of decay and dissolution, to remember that there are still a few things on which we can all agree.)

Indeed, every time I've heard Perlman play, the same awed, grateful sensation seemed to ripple through the crowd as soon as his bow touched his instrument's strings. The only thing I can compare the moment to is the lighting of a candle in a darkened room; at once the entire hall is always stilled, as the separate attentions of thousands of people become focused on a single, sublime sensation emanating from the graying, bespectacled man and his violin. Sometimes I think that as long as we're awed by superb technique, we can still call ourselves human. (So how we'll hang onto our humanity after we've lost Itzhak Perlman I've no idea.)

Of course Perlman has his critics (the Globe's Jeremy Eichler among them) who are perhaps disturbed by the fact that he has long since become the star of his concerts; indeed, the music he plays is almost incidental; he could play "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and still fill Symphony Hall. The virtuoso himself is obviously aware of this - although it must be added, he wears his stardom lightly. He's hardly a diva - instead, Perlman has the dry warmth of that witty uncle who knows better than to take himself (or his music) too seriously - or rather too self-seriously. Or at least that's the kind of affectionate avuncularity he manages to project as he runs through his encores - many of them simple showpieces by the likes of Kreisler - whom Perlman himself mocks lightly from the stage.

To be fair to Eichler's ilk, of course, I have to admit there are all kinds of odd formal questions bouncing around a Perlman star turn. His sound is basically a sweetly lyrical distillation of late romantic, German style - and he doesn't change it much, whatever he's playing. I don't mean he doesn't take the pieces he plays seriously; quite the contrary; his performances on Sunday were marvels of thoughtful nuance. Yet he ran through a program of duets for violin and piano by Schubert, Brahms, and Saint-Saëns with hardly any variation in his core tone. Intriguingly, however, his accompanist, Rohan De Silva, proved something of a stylistic chameleon. De Silva may lack his own interpretive profile; but his touch slid into the interpretive consensus behind Brahms, and then Saint-Saëns, with ease (only his Schubert didn't convince). If the program was at all differentiated in style, this was almost entirely due to him.

As I said, however, the opening Rondo (in B minor) from Schubert didn't quite cohere - although this may be because it represents Schubert trying not to sound too much like himself - his own masterpieces were rarely popular! - and so not sounding like anything too clearly at all. The Brahms Sonata No. 2 was far better, although this was the one time I wished for more interpretive distinction from De Silva, as until the final movement the piano (which Brahms played himself, of course) does most of the musical heavy lifting. Still, the last Allegretto grazioso, which features one of the master's most subtly ravishing melodies for violin, came off beautifully, with Perlman in his most transporting form.

Next came more Brahms - three of the Hungarian Dances (I think there are 21 in all, although we weren't told which of these Perlman was playing!), all of them indeed dancing with just the right mix of romantic feeling and fire. But probably the triumph of the concert was the closing Sonata No. 1 in D minor from Saint-Saëns. This is a curious piece, more in symphonic than sonata form, that somehow exudes the mysterious core of its sphinx-like composer's musical gift; pure, poised, and exploratory, with a sense of floating mood and sparkling intelligence (perhaps sans clear object), it's the kind of work that can drift from haunting melancholy to lively joy and back without ever quite settling on a single statement or stance. And somehow Perlman (and De Silva) made its oppositions utterly compelling - for once, Perlman's technical and interpretive virtuosity were entirely in alignment.

And then came six encores - probably Isaac Albeniz’s Tango and Ries’s Perpetuum Mobile (described by Perlman as "one of Ries's pieces") came off best - with probably as many, or more, standing ovations. But I could have given him six more; indeed, when Perlman finally left the stage, I admit I found myself immediately hoping that Uncle Itzhak would be back to see us soon.

Short Cuts: Jumping off The Balcony with The Divine Sister

2011-11-21T22:56:00.011-05:00

A tech rehearsal for The Balcony.

In his program notes to The Balcony (which closed last weekend at Boston Conservatory), director John Kuntz tells us that he attempted to approach Jean Genet's masterpiece as if it were "a brand new play." But I got the feeling as I watched the production that what he really meant to say was "a brand new play - by me."

For Kuntz tarts up Genet with many of his own tricks - there's a lot of processed sexual sugar and (of course) plush stuffed animals on this Balcony, along with all manner of cutesy "perversity." In one long sequence, a deadpan dominatrix smashes eggs over every inch of a hot young dude in a snug, yolk-yellow speedo. Later we get a dance by a "furry" in what looks like "beaver" drag. (Uh-huh.) These extended fantasies have scant foundation in the finished text (although Kuntz points to early sketches of the play as justification for his directorial antics - of course Genet rewrote those early versions, but never mind). But a few bits are at first diverting, and at any rate the production boasts a dazzling level of design and technical bravura (the production team included Cristina Todesco, set; Jeff Adelberg, lights; Gail Astrid Buckley, costumes; Jeff Maynard, video; and David Reiffel, sound, all of them working at the top of their respective forms). Kuntz is playing here with many more toys than he's ever been able to deploy in one of his own plays - and is clearly having the time of his life.

All this would be fine, of course, if we were, too. But we're not; gradually The Balcony proved a bore, despite all the fresh, nubile flesh on display. And it wasn't hard to tell why. Kuntz is a talented playwright in his own right, but basically he's a paranoid hedonist - while Genet is a kind of existential sadist. If Kuntz is about moral escape, then Genet is about moral contradiction - but contradiction as vise, as trap. As the seeming co-authors of this production, they basically talk past each other.

And the distance between them plays out right through the production concept. Kuntz re-imagines Genet's notorious bordello, where customers play at power figures like judges and bishops, as some sort of new-media sound-stage/panopticon (at top) - which has been brilliantly realized by the designers. So brilliantly, in fact, that at times the technical cues alone hold our attention. And the TV studio, and pop in general, is Kuntz's home territory; the mix of glee and dread with which he regards them is effectively his artistic signature.

But even he has to admit that the blandishments of television undermine the basic tenets of Genet; indeed, the director himself openly wonders in his notes whether the revolution that frames The Balcony can even happen in the environment he has conjured. And he's right - it probably can't. The real problem, however, is that the multiverse of escape that new media offers is antithetical to The Balcony in even a deeper way; to be blunt, play-acting and falseness offer no way out in Genet, that's the whole idea. It would count as a stroke of pure genius if Kuntz had found a way to square this particular circle, but he hasn't, and so few of his transgressive flourishes ever connect with what the actors are actually saying. There's only one sequence that comes alive - when the "fake" bishops and judges have to take the place of the "real ones" once the revolution has descended into chaos. Anxiety is something Kuntz understands, and suddenly the actors, Grant Wallace in particular, seemed to truly inhabit their roles. But the moment proved fleeting - although all the student actors here seemed talented, and gamely played along with their directorial puppetmaster; and a few, such as Grace Tarves and poor Ryan Halsaver (the egg-boy) even struck a spark or two. Oh, well; there's always next term, guys!

Jeffrey Roberson as the Mother Superior in The Divine Sister.

Meanwhile, across town, there was more too-gay theatre to be had in the closing weekend of SpeakEasy's The Divine Sister, which starred Jeffrey Roberson (above, of Varla Jean Merman fame) in Charles Busch's send-up of just about every nun movie ever made. Like all of SpeakEasy's recent output, the production was smart and savvy, with a crack comic cast (Roberson was a very precise hoot, while Paula Plum, Christopher Michael Brophy, and Kathy St. George weren't far behind him) that, under Larry Coen's sharp direction, nailed every laugh in the script (along with a few that weren't). Still, things never got actually hilarious, and as I often do at SpeakEasy these days, I couldn't help but feel that the goings-on were a bit over-familiar. I mean, gay men in yet another form of drag, in a convoluted "plot," with out-takes from yet another Hollywood genre - sometimes one wonders how long the Charles Ludlam/Charles Busch tradition (a friend calls it "Buschlam") can totter on. (As long as there are square middle-aged straight people to laugh at it, I suppose.)

I will admit The Divine Sister struck a few poignant notes for me, perhaps unintentionally. I found myself picking up references, clearly planted by Busch, that seemed to be flying over his own audience's head, and that indeed only members of my own aging, vanishing tribe would ever notice; I mean, who but me (and a half-dozen other fading movie queens) would have spotted the "Sister Ruth" scene from Black Narcissus? Sigh. Gay men today aren't even sure who Judy Garland was, for chrissakes.

And I do have to mention that in the end (whatever the print press may think), Charles Busch ain't exactly Ryan Landry, and Coen's broad, Gold-Dust-Orphans M.O., which treated the entire play as a long-form sketch, kind of flattened the few sequences (such as the Mother Superior's encounters with a woman of the world whose home she needs) that hinted at - well, almost a theme. In his own weirdly alienated way, Busch is concerned with moral poise (as a variant of feminine poise) - and the idea of his movie convent literally being forced into the secular world I think should have struck us as slightly more resonant than it did - even if it was draped with gags from The Trouble with Angels, Song of Bernadette and even The DaVinci Code. But then again, probably only the queers like me who remember Black Narcissus could even tell that anything was missing.

Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth

2011-11-19T14:10:00.013-05:00

Aimee Rose Ranger in Dogg's Hamlet

I'm late with my thoughts on Whistler in the Dark's double bill of Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet and Cahoot's Macbeth, which has been "occupying" the BCA Black Box (in repertory with Imaginary Beast's Macbett) the last few weeks. In fact I think there's only one show left, today - so you still have a few minutes to catch it - which you should.

Perhaps I've been dragging my feet because the Whistlers are always telling me they're looking forward to what I'm going to say about their current show, good or bad. And I kind of half-believe them. I've always thought they were smart; now (oddly enough) they think I'm smart, too! And there's so much to unpack in Dogg's and Cahoot's! It's so tiring. Luckily, I hear they've been getting good houses, so they didn't really need the Hub Review for publicity; after five years of reviews from fans like me (at one of their shows I was literally the only person in the audience), they have finally been "discovered" by the print and radio critics as a "brand new company!" Uh-huh; whatever; it's still a good thing.

And duty calls, so here goes nothing (I can't disappoint the Whistlers, can I?). Dogg and Cahoot's are basically an intertwined meditation on Wittgenstein and rebellion. The great Austrian philosopher, of course, is one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth century - despite a very slim published output; and one of his obsessions was the relationship between mental representation, the world itself (if you will), and the mechanics of language. Dogg's Hamlet was conceived when Stoppard came upon one of the master's discussions in which he posited that separate gangs of workmen who spoke different languages could quite easily cooperate as long as words like "plank" and "slab" had a consistent (and serendipitous) linguistic correlation for both groups. For instance, if in one language, "plank" meant, well, "plank," but in the correlated language it meant "Next!," the men could easily get on with their work, yelling their monosyllabic instructions to each other, unaware that the mental representations in their respective heads were actually completely different.
Now to some, this may sound only like a gay Austrian egghead's extrapolation of the common concept of the pun; but trust me, it was big news to philosophers (sorry, if I went into why, I'd be here all day). At any rate, Stoppard took Wittgenstein's philosophic-linguistic insight and ran with it into the intersecting worlds of class, culture and politics, where he invented Dogg, a "language" (a bit like Nadsat, the slang devised by Anthony Burgess for A Clockwork Orange) spoken by the students of a strange British public school attempting to stage Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Ludwig von, in a photo by lover Ben Richards.

Not much of an excuse is given for Dogg's existence; indeed, when a Wittgensteinian workman (named "Easy," believe it or not) shows up with some props for these kids' play, he assumes they're touched. Oddly, Dogg is composed entirely of common English words (unlike Nadsat), and follows the same syntactic rules. But the words are usually short, blunt, and vaguely Anglo-Saxon, with the occasional bit of schoolboy techno ("Bicycles!") thrown in. And tellingly, insult and compliment are often reversed; in Dogg, for instance, "Git" ("jerk" or even "asshole," roughly) is high praise - so Stoppard has a lot of fun with all his young Doggians calling their headmasters "gits," to warm approval.

But Stoppard, like Wittgenstein, is also attempting to limn his schoolboys' inner state of mind; and we begin to perceive that Dogg is a manifestation of their oppression and incomprehension. When they rehearse Hamlet, for instance, they speak Shakespeare's English straight (which they probably cannot understand at all); but when they're alone, they switch immediately back to Dogg. And that mystified deliveryman suddenly gets the hang of Dogg when he, too, is mistreated by the fatuous schoolmasters; when he sputters that they're "Fascists!," suddenly he's through the linguistic looking-glass, and talking Dogg like a native.

What comes next is an amusing send-up of student Shakespeare that is, of course, utterly incomprehensible to said students (and thus hilarious to us; Wittgenstein's paradox reversed, in effect). But things get a bit more complex in Cahoot's Macbeth, in which we find ourselves transported to an underground production of another Shakespearean tragedy, somewhere on the other side of what used to be called the Iron Curtain. Here a group of persecuted actors are in "cahoots" with each other (another pun!) to perform an even more pointed critique of power gone mad - they're actually doing it in a living room, though (lit by floor lamps), as they've been locked out of their city's theatres by the oppressive state.

The secret police (or the critics?) catch up with them even here, however, and the rebels face a fresh round of interrogation - until Easy, the deliveryman from the earlier play, comes stumbling in, still speaking Dogg, and delivering not merely props but also a kind of linguistic virus: a language not of direct rebellion, but of subversion.

Nate Gundy menaces Scott Sweatt in Cahoot's Macbeth

Now I'm afraid this is where I feel Mr. Stoppard goes a little "Pepsi Generation" on me. Indeed, as Cahoot's ends with an image straight outta Pink Floyd's The Wall (the play and the album were both completed in 1979), I couldn't help but remember the unfortunately simplistic argument of the playwright's later Rock'n'Roll - which seemed to claim that Syd Barrett caused the Velvet Revolution, or something like that. Sigh. I'm not too sympathetic toward grand intellectual visions of pop pleasures, and I'm a little dismayed to see a fantastic critic of over-reaching dialectics like Stoppard fall so easily himself into what amounts to a dialectic (albeit a funny one). Still, I'll admit the subversive elements of pop culture certainly infiltrated the Eastern bloc countries, and probably had more to do with the collapse of those regimes than Shakespeare ever did. (So I'll go as far as Cahoot's, but not as far as Rock'n'Roll.)

At any rate, that's the critical exegesis of the text. What about the production? Well, it is (or was) a solid, knockabout one; a bit broad in places, but brilliant in other spots, and always clever and alive to the intellectual arguments of the plays. We won't see a better one locally. I felt Whistler stalwart Jen O'Connor, though strong, took a back seat this time around - the star turns came from Aimee Rose Ranger (as the obnoxious over-achiever who got every school prize, as well as the lead in Hamlet), Nate Gundy (perhaps miscast as the chilling police inspector of Cahoot's, but making the most of it anyway), and Mac Young as the happy-go-lucky everyman who gladly threw himself through a literal barrier of language over and over. There wasn't really a weak link in the cast, however, with particularly sharp cameos coming from Becca Lewis and Michael Underhill. (My one quibble was with Scott Sweatt's take on Lady Macbeth, in drag - his work was subtle, but it seemed to be coming from some other play.) And as usual, the Whistlers made the evocative most of a basically bare space (a particular strength of director Meg Taintor). Oh btw, I forgot to mention in the Hubbies (I've corrected that post) the atmospheric lighting design PJ Strachman devised for Cahoot's, which actually made Stoppard's stripped-down Macbeth the spookiest I've ever seen. As always, I await with pleasure the next outing from this adventurous, up-and-coming (can I still say that after five years?) company.

Not-so-simple gifts

2011-11-18T10:26:00.010-05:00

Whitney V. Hunter in Angel Reapers.

Angel Reapers, the new meditation on the Shakers by choreographer Martha Clarke, playwright Alfred Uhry, and music director Arthur Solari (through this weekend at ArtsEmerson), opens with a transcendent theatrical coup: a religious community gathers onstage (men and women separate but facing each other), and then gently begins to giggle. The giggles turn to laughter, then guffaws, as something like pure, pointless, child-like joy briefly tingles in the air; and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the community, now a congregation, launches seamlessly into a hymn. Joy; music; God. The equation is as simple as a Shaker chair.

This proves to be only the first of many such magical moments conjured by Clarke's choreography (which only occasionally aligns with the Shakers' distinctive dances), all of which are supported by exquisite singing (impeccably arranged and conducted by Solari).

But it's probably the last time we connect with the sense of pure joy many of us associate with the Shakers; again and again, Angel Reapers proffers not only their simple gifts, but complex metaphors regarding the underside of their celibate existence - all conveyed via a nearly perfect meld of movement and music.

The string on which these jewels are strung, however, is only just adequate to hold them together; playwright Uhry's contribution proves so slight and episodic that we feel a deeper potential moving in the material than has so far been unlocked (and we often need the program to figure out who's who). We can make out a rough story line in the performance - a couple falls in love, and are forced to leave the sect; meanwhile Shaker founder Mother Ann Lee (the luminous Birgitt Huppuch) emerges as the central figure in other vignettes, many of them fraught with conflict. For while spiritual ecstasy is encouraged by this pale, pure matriarch, natural desires are denied; tensions in the community thus inevitably rise, the sect comes to depend on the destitute and the orphaned (along with hired hands), and critics and apostates attack on every side - even as a strange sense of deep perversity (the men begin to dance naked in the woods!) gradually pervades the community's shared sense of innocence.

All this cries out for a firmer narrative line, but, like the siren call of sex itself, the demands of plot are firmly denied in Angel Reapers. No doubt the collaborators' conceit was to mimic the spareness of the Shakers themselves; but this is one time that famous community would have been better served by something more richly embroidered. Aiming for a poem, Clarke and company have given us a haiku that's transporting and frustrating by turns.

And have they really given the Shakers a fair shake? Ms. Clarke has made an illustrious career out of deconstructing the sexual codes of various eras, in famous productions like The Garden of Earthly Delights and Vienna: Lusthaus. But we feel in Angel Reapers that sometimes she's a bit of a naïf herself when it comes to the pleasures of the flesh. After all, there is, shall we say, a case to be made against sex; and anyway, the Shakers didn't actually try to repress sex, they instead tried to channel it into ecstatic dance, into direct, personal contact with the spirit. This is an old, old impulse - and I'm not sure it's a dishonorable one, even though, yes, sex has inevitably raised its horny, hoary old head in every monastery from Vatican City to Tibet. And could the demands of celibacy actually have been central to the Shakers' outpouring of industry and culture? Could it have been the battery that powered their luminous achievement? Could they have had sex and still been the Shakers? Clarke never seems to face this issue, and by the end of the evening, we desperately want her to.

Yet I can't deny that despite these flaws, Angel Reapers often glows with a rare spiritual power, and almost always casts its own haunting sense of theatrical presence. And the company - mostly dancers, btw - sing like angels, in arrangements of the familiar hymns which are subtle without seeming studied (quite a trick right there). They also deliver what text they have with a mix of transparent emotion and natural, graceful dignity that's rare even in the best professional actors. If the piece itself still calls out for further development (like many in the ArtsEmerson line-up this season, more on that in a future post), its simple gifts are nevertheless most welcome.

Birgit Huppuch, center, in the company of Angel Reapers.

Macbeth remixed

2011-11-16T22:37:00.007-05:00

Nate Gundy as "Banco" in Macbett. Photo: Nancy lasBarrone.

We may not have seen an actual production of Macbeth in, well, years, but two of the play's derivatives have been on the boards this season - first the Verdi version, from Boston Lyric Opera, and now Ionesco's absurdist Macbett, from Imaginary Beasts at the BCA (through this weekend).

Although to be honest, Ionesco doesn't so much derive from his Shakespearean source as attack it; at the bottom of the Bard's arguably-darkest tragedy, Ionesco still perceives an essentially naive, romantic illusion regarding personal moral dimension - which he ruthlessly dismantles. In Macbett, the hero's royal victim, Duncan, is himself a slime bag, and half-mad to boot (and the incoming heir to the throne seems just just as bad). Indeed, everyone in the play is corrupt, or will soon be corrupted. Power is the only morality, while ideas like "destiny" are just a cheap trap for the gullible (Ionesco's "witches" are merely tricksters- indeed, maybe they're only Missus Macbett in disguise!). Thus "tragedy," at least as Shakespeare defined it, does not, and cannot, exist.

Now I'm not going to argue any of these ideas in the abstract - for in the end, Ionesco is only re-iterating a point that the ravages of the twentieth century seem to have already made for him. But I will argue, however, that the playwright doesn't seem able to sustain this point through two acts of a satire which feels quite a bit longer than its source. Indeed, Macbeth towers over Macbett, which rambles, and gets a bit repetitive and convoluted, and yet doesn't achieve anything like the depth that Beckett conjured through the (seemingly similar) repetitions of Waiting for Godot. Instead, despite a few inspired episodes, you can slowly feel the theatrical equivalent of the Law of Diminishing Returns kicking in for Ionesco, even as he gropes for a dramaturgical exit. So maybe there's something to be said for naive, romantic illusion - at least in this example of the Theatre of the Absurd, the joke in the end seems to be on the audience.

Which isn't to say that the current, clever production from Imaginary Beasts doesn't have its compensations. There are two particularly strong performances here, from fringe stalwarts Joey Pelletier (as Duncan) and Scott Sweatt (as Macbett), that are probably the best things either actor has done in some time (even if both get a little shouty - in the BCA Black Box we're only five feet away, guys). Pelletier brings a sharp, sallow wit to Duncan's sleazy shenanigans, while Sweatt becomes a compellingly perverse Macbett once he has tasted power; indeed, his gleeful kissing of the corrupting crown is one of the most disturbing things I've seen onstage in some time.

The rest of the cast is strong, but not quite as distinctive - although intriguing turns come from Nate Gundy (above) and Kiki Samko. In an Imaginary Beasts show, however, actor intention and achievement are always a complicated thing to parse, because the troupe's signature style of movement and imagery, devised by director Matthew Woods, often takes center stage. Here, this is sometimes a blessing, but also occasionally a curse - for while it's true Ionesco is sometimes imagistic, in Macbett, well, not so much; here the dramatic mode is more often blunt, even brutal, simplicity. And so Woods' signature style of evocative (yet inevitably artificial) movement can feel a little forced.

Still, the director does score several visual coups - the first appearance of the cast in body bags, and the transformation of the Macbetts into a life-size Punch and Judy, were both particularly apt, and the physical production, which seems balanced between a British pantomime and a Kurosawa movie, is filled with striking touches (like Macbett's samurai-by-way-of-Princess-Padme make-up) that stick with you well after the final curtain. Students of Ionesco - or simply students of intelligent, exploratory theatre - will find much to admire in this stimulating production of a flawed, but intriguing, play.