152. “Flower Drum Song,” Virginia Theatre, Jan. 23: Reviving this Rodgers and Hammerstein chestnut meant having to shout to the world that, yes, it’s been updated and is no longer so racially old-fashioned to be offensive. To that end, David Henry Hwang was brought in to update the book. He’s made some interesting changes – particularly in the prologue, in which we learn that Mei-Li’s father was killed by the Communists and that she came to California in search of a better life. But the media buzz about the book’s reworking sort of raised my expectations – I was surprised this revival still seems as dated as it is. (Which makes sense, really; the songs would have had to have been rewritten, too, and then it really wouldn’t be a Rodgers and Hammerstein revival.) Lea Salonga has an absolutely gorgeous voice – if silk could sing, it would sound like her – but she’s too strong and pert in this role, and she comes across as almost condescending. The supporting cast is more successful – Randall Duk Kim as Wang and Jodi Long as Madame Liang in particular – and the production design opulent without being cheesy. Still, the musical has to work hard to overcome its musty scent, particularly the first act, which is overloaded with such cutesy stage-show numbers as “Fan Tan Fannie.” It didn’t really soar for me until the very end, when the cast members recited, one by one, their hometowns: from Stockton and Toronto to Hong Kong. Suddenly, “Flower Drum Song” wasn’t so much an exercise in nostalgia as an affirmation of a nation that welcomed immigrants and became stronger for it.
153. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Jan. 24: A tour of this beautiful library at Lincoln Center, recently renovated and filled with priceless treasures. The curators of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound, the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division and the Music Division spoke to us in turn – and what riches they had to share. Also on the tour: a glimpse of the current exhibition, “Best of Times: The Theatre of Charles Dickens,” which included an intriguing display on the various productions of “Edwin Drood.” (I still remember seeing that Broadway musical with Betty Buckley – twice – during my first New York stint.)
154. “Fifth of July,” Signature Theatre Company at the Peter Norton Space, Jan. 25: Plays about the ‘70s are usually accompanied these days with acres of macramé and a generally wry, bemused attitude toward the whole era, like it was some youthful indiscretion best remembered at 10-year-high-school-reunion intervals. But if you get past “That ‘70s Show” mindset, it seems clear that the decade was the bedrock of much of what our culture has become. What I liked best about this revival of Lanford Wilson’s play is how soberly it treats its era and characters. Sure, we’re treated to flower-child Gwen Landis (Parker Posey, eccentric but not extravagant about it), who wears flowing dresses and tries to give the workers in the factory she inherited a slice of the capitalist pie. But she’s no joke, even when she’s complaining that her musical career is stymied by stage fright or she’s playing cat-and-mouse with her laidback-slash-cutthroat husband, John (David Harbour). And their dear college friend, Kenneth Talley (Robert Sean Leonard) certainly can’t be accused of frivolity. He went to Vietnam when others were fleeing to Europe, and he lost his legs as a result. Now, on Independence Day, 1977, the three are reunited for a couple of days of reunion, dissonance and the revealing of secrets. Even if it didn’t confront Vietnam’s legacy, “Fifth of July” would have been groundbreaking in its day simply for its stark, honest portrayal of gay characters. Ken’s partner, Jed (Michael Gladis in a nice, dirt-under-the-fingers portrayal) is a botanist and all-around garden fanatic, and the image of fertile greenery throughout the play suggests that even the most grievous of psychic wounds can heal.
155. “Little Fish,” Second Stage Theatre, Jan. 26: This new Off-Broadway musical is about as far from warm and fuzzy as you can get. In fact, the show can be downright icy, from the distant melodies of the songs to the coldness of the Big Bad New York City that it depicts. This isn’t a surprise. Michael John LaChiusa isn’t known for his instantly accessible, crowd-friendly compositions or soothing lyrics. But beneath the detached feel of this show – a feel strengthened by its industrial-motif set and throbbing lighting design – is a story that’s almost proud to be sentimental. The defining event in “Little Fish” is a decision by Charlotte (Jennifer Laura Thompson of “Urinetown”), a successful writer doing quite nicely in the Manhattan rat race, to quit smoking. Something about losing the security of cigarettes not only throws her off-kilter in a physical way, but in an emotional way as well. Not that she’s exactly a model of stability. The reason she’s in New York in the first place, in fact, is because she was fleeing an emotionally abusive relationship with a jerk named Robert (Hugh Panaro). Several years later, she’s well established in her career, and she has plenty of friends, including the effusive Cinder (Lea DeLaria) and the inevitable gay pal (Jesse Tyler Ferguson). But there’s something missing, and she (and we, as the audience) instinctively knows that it isn’t just the question of finding the right guy. Ultimately, I think Charlotte’s problem is self-confidence. She can’t see herself as the center of her own universe. She can’t imagine being truly important to someone else – she’s not even sure she could be a big fish in someone’s pond even if she tried. “Little Fish” could be seen by some as almost offensive in how it musicalizes and celebrates pain rather than joy (At one point, Charlotte sings that the most she wants is to get through Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday “with just a modicum of pain.”) Does she sound like a candidate for counseling? Sure. But most of us have felt that way, at one time or another. More important, the show doesn’t rely on a trite love story to solve the world’s woes. What it does instead is sing about how essential it is to belong to a community, to bond with others, to have a circle of friends. People might think I’m absolutely crazy to think of “Little Fish” as optimistic. But when Charlotte sings “the only way to live beyond our lives is to connect,” she’s addressing something so elemental in the human condition that even the chilly, frowning New York in which the play is set seems to soften. I’m not saying it’s my favorite musical by any means, or that it doesn’t have problems – but I found it an intriguing, moving experience.
156. Rehearsed reading, Lark Theatre Company, Jan. 27: My first rehearsed public reading at the Lark, which is a ring above a roundtable reading. (The emphasis is on the words, not the production -- no costumes or blocking.) Adam Kraar’s “The Collectpro” is about a New York law office shaken up by a fast-talking systems operator who offers to install a new computer system. Is he a scammer or the office savior? Sort of like “Tartuffe” meets Microsoft.
157. “Aida,” Metropolitan Opera, Jan. 29: Verdi’s score is beautiful, of course, and although this Met production is so somber it’s almost stiff, it includes one of the most spectacular moments of stagecraft I’ve ever seen. The moment occurs in the second act, when we shift from Amneris’ (Dolora Zajick) apartments in the palace at Thebes to a public square. The back wall of the apartment – a massive, hieroglyphic-encrusted surface -- slowly descends INTO the stage. As it does, we see that a perfectly spaced line of muscular, spear-holding soldiers with their backs to us is standing on top of the wall, and then we see a huge crowd in front of a temple celebrating the victory processional. Wow. Another phenomenal moment comes at the very end of the opera, when Radames (Richard Margison) and Aida (Hasmik Papian) share their last breaths together in their walled-in tomb. The wall above them slowly rises to reveal the priests in the temple doing their thing, with grief-stricken Amneris mourning the death of her great love. And then that whole temple set-up starts moving down, as if it’s squashing the tomb, and we watch as Aida and Radames slowly sink out of sight to their deaths. Double wow. What I wish is that this production had more of a human spark to the proceedings – especially in the crowd scenes. The victory processional is rigid. Every foot is perfectly placed, every gesture choreographed with exquisite precision, but can’t we see a happy crowd on stage? Why must an opera such as this be drained of everyday humanity?
158. Roundtable reading, Lark Theatre Company, Jan. 30: A rehearsal for “Children’s Letters to God,” a musical based on the book by Stuart Hemple, with lyrics by Douglas J. Cohen and music by David Evans. A sweet, warm-hearted musical remarkable in that it stars five children (character ages ranging from 8 to 12) and no adults, who not only voice their questions of God (why do pets die, why does it rain on the weekends) but also interact in a cohesive social unit. (One of the girls, Joanna, has a crush on one of the boys, Brett, for example, but she also has to deal with her little brother, Kicker.) “CLG” will be performed as a benefit for the Lark in a couple of weeks – I greatly look forward to it.
159. “The Guys,” film school, Jan. 31: A film adaptation of Anne Nelson’s play about the experience of teaming up with a New York fire captain to write eulogies for the men he lost in the World Trade Center attack. On just about every level, the film is a failure: It’s static instead of cinematic, it’s glossy instead of emotionally raw, and it squanders the talents of its two stars, Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia, by surrounding them with filmmaking that borders on the amateur. The editing is clunky and distracting (the reaction shots of Weaver, as she’s listening to LaPaglia tell his stories, are almost of the “Saturday Night Live” parody variety) and the bridges between the eulogies cloying. Worse still, this overly earnest effort gives off the faint odor of writerly egotism. When Weaver’s character finishes writing each eulogy, she makes LaPaglia read it out loud to her – a reasonable request, to be sure, but the way it’s filmed it’s as if she’s getting a small charge out of listening to this hunky, street-wise fire god recite her words. (There’s also a strange sense of class consciousness infused throughout.) Later, she shows up at a funeral to listen, and she mouths her words as her mouthpiece recites them. Such an effect was totally unintended, I’m sure, but distracting and borderline offensive nonetheless. The producers would have been much better to simply film the play and show it as a public service for those who couldn’t see it. I didn’t even stick around for the question-and-answer session with Anne Nelson afterward.
160. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Royale Theatre, Feb. 1: If All Whoopi All the Time is what audiences want, they’re certainly going to be disappointed in this uneven revival of August Wilson’s play. For one thing, the real-life character of Ma isn’t a lead role, even if Whoopi’s name is above the marquee – and it should be a part cast for bluesy vocal power more than anything. In that sense, the production is noticeably thin; every time Whoopi attempts a musical interlude, it’s like eating weak soup. Thankfully, Charles S. Dutton (reprising his role in the original production) is around as Levee, the jittery trumpet player whose swagger and combustible belief in himself clashes mightily with Ma’s icy bitchiness (and one-dimensionality). The way Wilson sets it up, it’s inevitable that these two big personalities confront each other. Ma has clawed her way to a certain degree of financial independence in the white-run music world of 1927; even though she can’t hail a cab in certain parts of town, she does have the currency to push around her white manager, Irvin (Jack Davidson). Levee, on the other hand, doesn’t have that power now, but he certainly dreams of it, a tendency scoffed at by the stalwart conscience of the play, the prickly piano player Toledo (the long-fingered, elegant Thomas Jefferson Byrd, who turns in the production’s most seamless, organic performance). As Levee, Dutton owns the stage: cajoling, puffing, sweet-talking, dreaming, scheming, wooing. He’s grand and fun to watch. But the deeper themes of the play seem a bit muddled and distant; there’s a stuffy, historical quality to the proceedings that make it more of a museum piece than anything else.
161. “Uncle Vanya,” Bouwerie Lane Theatre, Feb. 2: Poor Vanya. Not only has he spent his whole life as the manager of a country estate making money for an oblivious absentee owner, he’s also desperately in love with the guy’s wife. Anton Chekhov’s classic is a quiet, but often giddy, account of unrequited love and diminished dreams. This Jean Cocteau Repertory production is crisp and lean, particularly in the first act. The simple, mirrored set, accented by interconnected picture frames hanging akimbo, suggests that we’re going to dive deeply into these characters, to get past the surface formalities of Russian life. In many ways, we do just that, particularly in fine performances by Craig Smith as the stuffy country doctor Mikhail Lvovich Astrov and by Harris Berlinsky as Vanya. But director Eve Adamson’s tone is too arch at times; I couldn’t help but think that the audience laughed too much at certain sensitive moments, such as when the doctor professes his love for Elena (Elise Stone). When does Chekhov sensitivity become soap-opera melodrama?
162. “The Late Show with David Letterman,” Ed Sullivan Theatre, Feb. 3: Think of the Ed Sullivan Theatre as a temple and Letterman – or “Dave,” as he is ubiquitously referred to by his earnest subordinates in a tone reserved for major deities – as the god, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what it’s like going to a free taping of his show. Every step in the process – from the trivia question you’re asked when your name is drawn for the right to “win” a ticket to the concentration-camp-lines you wind through prior to the taping – is designed to instill in the participants a sense of mystery and awe. Indeed, as one curly-haired, red-headed high priest told us, “Dave NEEDS your laughter.” Comedy worship, anyone? When Anya and I showed up shortly after 3 p.m. (two and a half hours before taping), we didn’t realize we’d be chatted up by the perky, up-with-people pages who pepper the sidewalk. (“Where are you from?” the young blond thing asked us, flashing a smile so earnest and friendly I wanted to scratch her ears, like she was a cocker spaniel.) The joke was that we weren’t really ideal audience members: Neither Anya nor I are big Letterman fans, and we certainly aren’t the kind who are good at cheering on command. But somehow, we made an impression on the page (or perhaps the whole thing is random), and we ended up in the “photogenic, enthusiastic” group picked to sit in the first two rows of the audience. The fascinating thing was that the lengthy, confusing pre-show ritual (at one point we were convinced we hadn’t made the cut and were going to be left in the cold) did exactly what it was designed to do: We got pumped up. We wanted to be there. Heck, we even applauded and cheered on cue. Once inside, the taping was mildly entertaining; after a brief warm-up, Dave came out and said hi, and then the show began: monologue, Top 10 list, Bif video, etc. The movie-star guest, Kate Hudson, looked gorgeous and managed to limp her way through the inane conversation with Dave without looking like a total moron (though she didn’t exactly come across as a brainy chick), and the weird animal guy was predictably amusing. (We got to see a capybara, the world’s largest rodent.) What struck me about the whole experience was how little really happens on the show. When you factor in commercials, small talk, band interludes and the “audience shot” – which landed us on national TV, I understand – there isn’t much room for anything more than a brief conversation with the guest. Most memorably, James Brown popped up for a surprise cameo at the end of the show. He waved, put a cape on Paul Shaffer and then waved again. He made a visit to the temple, and he didn’t even have to make a confession.
163. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Feb. 4: I had a nice moment while taking in the “Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman” special exhibition: While standing in front of da Vinci’s “Madonna and Child with Bowl of Fruit,” which shows the Christ child kissing and stroking his mother’s cheek, I realized I was directly behind a young mother holding a fidgety young son. Suddenly he looked at his mother, pressed his face fully against her cheek, smacked her a big kiss, and then stroked her cheek – just like the figures depicted in the drawing. Da Vinci spent his life trying to capture real moments: cats stretching, horses galloping, soldiers parrying, machines grinding. In just a few strokes, sometimes, he was able to capture the line of motion in a way that’s spectacular. A notable example: There’s a study he drew for an “Equestrian Monument” that shows a rearing horse with rider. The artist Pollainolo did a similar study of the same image. And while that study seems perfectly acceptable by itself, you compare it to da Vinci’s fluid, graceful, dynamic lines, and Pollainolo’s offering seems static in comparison. While da Vinci’s incredible varied interests, ranging from anatomy to tides to scientific inventions to religious iconography, make him a true Renaissance man, you get the feeling after this show he probably had attention deficit disorder. It’s too bad the poor guy left so many things unfinished.
Also, a quick view of Thomas Struth’s enormous photos. I was mostly unmoved and couldn’t really connect with Struth’s avowed intention to historicize his subjects – perhaps the very size of the work was annoying – but I was quite taken with his photos of museums such as “Art Institute of Chicago II” and In the latter, a crowd of Japanese tourists gathers before Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” treating it as the sacralized work such an ostentatious setting promotes, yet one man isn’t looking at the painting at all – he’s looking down at the guidebook. Sure, it’s a random moment, but it says something that the man is more interested in reading what someone else says about a famous painting than looking at it himself.
164. Playwrights workshop, Lark Theatre Company, Feb. 5: The first meeting of Playwrights Workshop IV, a gathering of professional and aspiring playwrights that offers up scenes and studies from current work in a non-threatening, critically aware setting. Think a group-therapy session meets Bible study meets Tupperware party. Under the skilled, nuanced direction of playwright Arthur Kopit, this evening was a smorgasbord of delights, from Saviana Stanescu’s deliriously constructed “Waxing West” to Andrew Case's “Bullhead City,” which includes the gripping opening monologue: “Before I discovered trepidation, I wanted to be a psychiatrist.” Four hours later, exhausted and positively smitten with words, I lurched home, fell into bed and had dreams about plays.
165. Tai-Gu Tales, Joyce Theatre, Feb. 6: (The following full-length review was written for my cultural criticism class:)
Grief clings to some people like one of those half-man, half-beast creatures from your seventh-grade mythology class. Think of it wrapping its arms around your neck and digging its talons so deeply into your back that you can’t shake it off, no matter how hard you thrash.
Such is the mood in much of Hsiu-Wei Lin’s violent yet contemplative “The Life of Mandala,” a swirl of Buddhist meditation and modern dance performed by Tai-Gu Tales through Sunday at the Joyce Theatre.
At a pivotal moment in this somber piece, a man and woman stand opposite each other. Their eyes lock; they’re close enough to touch. She holds a lighted candle. The other 10 dancers on stage are frozen behind them, similarly coupled in stances that you’d think would imply intimacy but instead, because of rigid limbs and blank facial expressions, suggest icy distance.
The woman bends her head, staring intently at the man as if she could keep him close through the sheer power of her gaze, and blows out the candle.
The man, his body as rigid as a coat rack, falls straight back onto the hard floor without attempting to cushion his fall. More than a few people in the audience gasp.
It’s a violent moment. Even abusive. But within the context of the piece, it’s transfixing. Eight years ago, a 22-year-old stage designer and close friend of Lin’s fell to his death because of a carelessly constructed set, she explains in her program notes. For years, Lin grappled with the senseless nature of his death, and she went into a deep depression.
Finally she turned to Tibetan Buddhism and found within the tradition of the mandala – a geometric design symbolic of the universe used in meditation – a way to regain what she calls her “love and zest for life.” The resultant dance, with its deliberately paced, meditative choreography slowly transformed by frenzied bursts of motion and gradual brightening of color in lighting and costumes, is a mandala come alive through movement.
As the choreographer, artistic director and principal dancer of the Taiwan-based group, Lin was able, then, to use her meticulously trained dancers as a way to work through her own personal grief. (In Buddhist terms, it might be thought of as an exercise in seeking enlightenment; in Western terms, it’s almost like choreographing your own group therapy session.)
From the start, Lin forces the audience into her own slow, sure, contemplative rhythm. “Sublimation,” the first of the piece’s four movements, is dominated by principal dancer Chun-Kang Peng (Lin’s husband and a Chinese opera singer who specializes in playing acrobatic masked warriors), who starts with Buddhist chants and a series of methodical movements that suggest ritualized yoga.
Peng begins the piece bare-chested and wearing loose, flowing pants. He’s in stark contrast with the others, who look as if they could be bandaged burn victims from “The English Patient,” each wrapped head to toe in swaths of white linen bound tightly with twine. Lin seems to be suggesting that grief initially creates such a gulf between the bereaved and the rest of the “normal” world that it’s almost impossible to connect the two.
Yet Peng and the others do manage to come together, slowly, and with the movements “The World of Desires” and “Awakenings,” the members of the mummy-wrapped ensemble don a series of costumes that progressively expose more skin. Lin herself takes center stage, breaking the languid, meditative style of movement with percussive, twitchy motions that punctuate the lyrical arc of the piece. At one point, the dancers are flat on their backs, and seemingly at random they hoist themselves several inches off the ground and crash back to the stage. It’s like watching popcorn in a pan of hot oil.
“The Life of Mandala” ends with the theme of hope and rebirth, which is no surprise considering its Buddhist underpinnings. Ho Chin Chang’s set – a tremendous, ominous half moon over an indistinct horizon -- slowly begins to characterize hope, thanks to Keh-Hua Lin’s progressively warmer lighting design.
Yet the final movement, “Buddhist Chanting,” doesn’t have the same power as the raw grief of the beginning, which was so tortured and lyrical. Even as we’re supposed to be finding redemption, Lin creates such a stark, bleak, angry mood at the end – tense bodies so tightly wound that you don’t know if they’re going to explode – that the meditative aspect of the piece is overwhelmed. The sense of purification and enlightenment that Lin herself states she wants to evoke is hard to find.
Near the end of the piece, she seems a little more relaxed in her movements, a little less frantic – and then she once again tenses her limbs, drops to the ground and lets us see her pain. Perhaps she’s saying that grief doesn’t ever really go away. We just figure out a way to weave into the fabric of our lives, and find the courage to go on.
166. Group discussion with Steve Stein, journalism school, Feb. 7: The “godfather of sampling” rocked the music world in the early ‘80s with his musical collages created entirely from other sources. Back then, people didn’t even know how to treat “sampling” from a legal standpoint (though today copyright clearance lawyers are well established), and Stein never actually made much money from his work. Most interesting to me are his pieces that incorporate political undertones, such as one that uses the voice of the first President Bush urging the world to war against Iraq. Simply by appropriating the spoken word and manipulating it into a musical format, Stein inserts a point of view. Even the act of repeating a phrase turns it into poetry of sorts. (“Regrettably, we now believe / That only force will make him leave,” Bush seems to rap about Saddam Hussein.) Stein did the same thing with the Kennedy assassination. He sees it as a tribute or meditation on that event, but I can also see how people would think he was taking a somber, historical moment and cheapening it. Side note: I learned what “O.G.” means in rap terminology. Literally it stands for “original gangsta,” but in a broader sense it means someone who’s been around since the beginning of something or had a large role in its origins: You could say Thomas Jefferson was “O.G. Constitution.”
167. “The Pianist,” Lincoln Square theater, Feb. 7: Halfway through Roman Polanski’s Holocaust-era drama about the Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, I feared I was settling into that resigned, grim, emotionally hardened state that audiences have learned to adopt when confronted with such subject matter. We’d seen the obligatory scenes of Nazi cruelty, the squalor of the Jewish ghettos, the dazed grief of the mother who’s just lost her child. When does atrocity in itself become a cinematic cliché, merely numbing the audience instead of moving it? But then comes the scene in which Wladyslaw (Adrien Brody in a passively powerful performance), who’s about to be loaded onto railroad cars along with his family for the trip to the death camp, is given the chance to escape. It comes suddenly, with no dramatic build-up – one moment he’s on his way to the train, the next he’s on a side street. What about his family? But what about the instinct for survival? Suddenly the film became far more compelling, because it ceased to be about action – about confonting the Nazi beasts – and more about reaction. Wladyslaw isn’t a hero; he doesn’t save anybody, and in fact puts other people at risk. What he does do, however, takes a different kind of fortitude: He waits out the war. And he survives. Living in one safe house after another, Wladyslaw watches the German oocupation of Warsaw slowly crumble. Yet we only see it from his point of view, glimpsed out of apartment windows. (The famous Warsaw ghetto uprising is seen as a long shot, with Wladyslaw as little more than dispassionate observer.) When the music finally comes, it’s an emotional release, but it isn’t heroic. What I was left with, more than anything, is that some people die in war, and some people live – and that music is a luxury for the living.
168. “Il Pirata,” Metropolitan Opera, Feb. 8: This was a last-minute excursion: I realized I’d have the chance to see Renee Fleming in the Met’s last performance of this opera for the season – and who could pass up a chance to see one of the great divas at the top of her form? Fleming’s voice is exquisite; when her voice gets soft and high as she trills one of her arias, it’s like a l a cloud against a bright blue sky. This is a sumptuous production by the Met, with lots of reds and golds and spectacular pillared palaces, and John Conklin’s set design is oblique enough – he uses the motif of picture frames within picture frames – to really give the whole outing a visual charge. (The entire stage, in fact, is given a frame of its own, reminding us of the potent theatricality of the whole process.) Fleming’s Imogene was superb and thoroughly dominated the production; I wasn’t much impressed with Marcello Giordani’s Gualtiero (who returns from life as a pirate to learn that his beloved Imogene has married his arch enemy, Duke Ernesto (Dwayne Croft). And the staging itself was a little stodgy: When Ernesto and Gualtiero “fight to the death,” they scurry off-stage with a show of fencing so lame it’s as if they’re third-graders at the local schoolyard.
169. “Children’s Letters to God,” Lucille Lortel Theatre, Feb. 11: A few weeks back I attended a rehearsal for this original musical staged as a benefit for the Lark, and it was fun to see the finished product – or as finished as a staged reading can be – performed for an audience of students. Kids can be a tough audience; several times during the reading, for example, the lyrics were muddy, and several of the students asked aloud: “Who’s Kicker?” Or “What’d he say?” How they connected with the main theme – the idea of children writing letters to God – is a little hard to say. The implicit conceit for the show, with the kids voicing their questions to the almighty, sometimes borders on the heavy-handed and veers toward the polemical; it’s the narrative thread constructed between these one-sided chats that is far more dramatic (and has far more potential). But the girls in the audience, at least, were entranced with the budding love story between Joanna (Samantha Meckes) and Brett (Gerard Canonico) – they emitted a huge “aww” when he gives her his favorite baseball cap – and the audience seemed to warm to the sadness of Brett’s broken family. Most of all, I enjoyed David Evans’ warm, rich music and Douglas J. Cohen’s smart lyrics – some of which were lost on the underage crowd – and walked away humming a tune.
170. Chelsea gallery tour, Feb. 11: Among the highlights: Robert Mangold’s curled figure and column paintings (especially the intense yellow) at the Pace Wildenstein Gallery; Ingo Meller and Otto Zitko’s sprawling, frenzied red scribblings in a dome-like space at Cheim & Read; Daniel Greene’s “Grand C” subway mosaic detail at Gallery Henoch; and Andy Goldsworthy’s Inca-looking, clay-bricked structures squatting at the Galerie Lelong. My favorite: Yayo Kusama’s “Fireflies on the Water” at the Miller Gallery, an entrancing visual experience in which you walk into a small, darkened room and stand on a platform above a shallow pool of water. The ceiling and walls are mirrored, and hanging around you are 150 colored lights. With the mirrors and soft reflection of the water, the effect is a constellation of lights that stretch to infinity; I felt like I was standing on the edge of the universe.
171. Playwrights workshop, Lark Theatre Company, Feb. 12: The second meeting of the session: four hours of intense, word-driven discussion about scenes read by professional actors. Arthur Kopit, the driving force of the group, reminded us this week that the playwrights represented are here because they’re good, not because they’re auditioning, and he encouraged them to go out on a limb: “If you don’t fail once here, you aren’t doing your job,” he said. Among the highlights: a full reading of Saviana Stanescu's “Waxing West.” It’s remarkable that this is the first play in English by this Romanian playwright. The audience got into an interesting debate about the use of Sept. 11 and the World Trade Center disaster as a key plot point; is it a heavy-handed use of deus ex machina?
172. “Jenufa,” Metropolitan Opera, Feb. 13: When the curtain rises on this beautifully staged, hauntingly sung opera by Leos Janacek, we see a country mill set against a sky so blue it almost glows over a field of wheat the same intensity of yellow. It’s like “Oklahoma” on steroids. But any strident cheeriness suggested by the setting soon begins to deepen into more complex, darker colors as we get into the meat of the surprisingly compelling plot: Jenufa (Karita Mattila, who I saw in “Elektra”) loves the dashing drunkard Steva (Adam Klein), who is rich, handsome and the father of her unborn child. Yet his half-brother, the not-so-handsome Laca (Richard Berkeley-Steele), loves Jenufa as well, and when he learns they plan to be married, he cuts her with a knife in a fit of rage, disfiguring her face. And just as you’d expect, the shallow Steva shuns Jenufa and disavows her child, driving her stepmother, Kostelnicka (Rosalind Plowright), an emphatic adherent of the Moravian church, to commit an act so horrific it even surpassed for me the shock of “Medea”: She kills her own grandchild to escape the scorn of the town. In the second act, set inside her house, all we see are bare walls and an enormous rock, which is referred to at one point in the libretto when the delirious Jenufa cries out in a nightmare that she’s being crushed by a huge rock. (Later, in the third act, the wheat is razed with scorched earth in its place, and the rock has been shattered into dozens of pieces.) The rock got a lot of bad press, but I really liked it a lot: After seeing a season of gussied-up palaces and stunningly realistic edifices on stage at the Met, it was nice to see a scenic element so unabashedly psychological on stage. “Jenufa” is about the way that religion not only molds lives but can crush them as well. And yet, despite the string of tragedies we watch unfold, the opera leaves us with gentle hope: The penitent Laca convinces Jenufa to go away with him to start a new life together, and the now murky sky softens for an instant to a glowing orange before fading to black. I’m not one to buy the score for every opera I see, but for the first time this season, I’m putting “Jenufa” on my must-have list.
173. Metropolitan Museum, Feb. 14: While crowds of people (including my fellow fellows) flooded the Da Vinci exhibition, I escaped to the calm and serenity of the American Wing, where I finally found Vanderlyn’s “Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles,” which I’d encountered first in my American art history class last semester and am now studying in my Origins of Modern Visual Culture class. This is one of the few remaining panoramic paintings in existence, and even now, as quaint as it seems, I didn’t find it hard to imagine how impressive such an experience would have been back in a time before movies and the incessant, quick-cut visuality of our lives today. I stood in the upraised center platform – the only one in the room – and lost myself in Vanderlyln’s precise visual depiction of the 1818 restoration court of King Louis XVIII. There’s something to be said for being surrounded by art, 360 degrees, and just let your eye take it all in. The panorama was the IMAX theater of its day.
Also on this visit: a look at “The Legacy of Ghengis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353,” a collection bursting with gorgeous artifacts. My favorites: the stunning brass ablution basins inlaid with elaborate silver designs. It would have almost made not having running water worth it.
174. Neue Gallerie, Feb. 14: After an NAJP lunch at the ultra-swanky Café Sabarsky on the first floor of this cozy, exclusive museum devoted to Austrian art, our small group headed upstairs for a look at Klimt and Schiele. This tiny museum has an aristocratic, decidedly Teutonic flavor to it, from the shushing guards to the haughty interior design. My favorite: Josef Hoffman’s incredible silverware designs, especially his pudgy spoons.
175. “The Winter’s Tale,” Classic Stage Company, Feb. 14: By the time Shakespeare wrote “The Winter’s Tale,” he’d bequeathed to the world so many tragic souls that it seems in old age he softened a bit. Instead of subjecting his jealous Leontes (played in this production by the sad, contemplative David Straithairn) to the typical tragic end, Shakespeare concocted a sweet, magical finale to the proceedings – the idea that time heals all, and that it’s possible sometimes to be granted a reprieve from one’s own worst decisions. It’s a tricky play to pull off. Leontes is no Iago; his jealousy is of the second-rate, shopworn variety, and even as the king of Sicilia wreaks havoc because he suspects his pregnant wife, Hermione (Barbara Garrick) has been sleeping with his best-friend, King Polixenes (Michael Gill), the situtation seems slick and arbitrary. But Straitharn keeps things grounded in this production, which you can’t say in the second part of the play, when the action shifts to fanciful happenings in the kingdom of Bohemia. I was uncomfortable with director Barry Edelstein’s concept for the role of the rogue Autolycus, played by African-American actor Teagle F. Bougere first as a homeless man and then as a Rastafarian fast-talker; not only was it racially offensive, it fell completely flat. So, too, did some of the yee-haw comic scenes in the second act, which seemed completely lost on the audience. It was only in the finale that the promise of the first part of this production was finally fulfilled. When the statue of Hermione is unveiled and then comes to life, it’s one of the truly redemptive moments in theater history.