Two very different kinds of reviews, and we love them both: Martin Bernheimer’s quick
dissection of “Die Walküre” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York,
and Clive James’s probing analysis of “Cyrano de Bergerac” at the
National’s Olivier Theatre in London.
Bernheimer’s lede:
The Ring fanatics are here and night after night they’re filling the
house. These aren’t modern Wagnerites, it should be noted, who think the old mythological tales
can benefit from psychological insight, social comment or political interpretation. These aren’t
adventurers who savour symbolism or find updating a potentially stimulating exercise. No, the
Met, capacity 4,000, has turned itself into a mecca for conservatives who enjoy fairy-tale
pretence, who want to see trees with leaves, sopranos with breastplates and villains with horned
helmets. Forget Bayreuth.
James’s lede:
His nose preceding him by a quarter of an hour, the hero of Cyrano de
Bergerac is a reminder that there were once things plastic
surgery couldn’t do. Today it can turn Michael Jackson into his own sister. But the original
Cyrano, furiously active as poet, swordsman and celestial fantasist in seventeenth-century France,
was stuck with his deformity. … Appearance was destiny. If a man’s appearance ruled him out in
the eyes of the woman he loved, there was nothing he could do about it. Except, perhaps, one
thing. What if he could rule himself back in through her ears?
Read both reviews and savour them. We could all take a lesson.
By contrast, I read a hatchet job the other day on the Roundabout Theater’s revival of
the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical, “Assassins,” at Studio 54 in New
York, and was flabbergasted. The headline could have been: “Kill All the Liberals.” After a lede
bashing New York City theater for its liberal culture and politics and the liberal circles Sondheim
is said to travel in, the reviewer added insult to injury by beginning his second paragraph with one
of those back-pedaling don’t-get-me-wrong apologies: “I speak, mind you, as a passionate admirer
of Mr. Sondheim …”
The negative judgment of “Assassins” (basically, love the production / hate the show)
may be correct for all I know, not yet having seen Sondheim’s dirty deed. What astonished
me about the piece was the unctuous tone and the impression it left of a Wall Street Journal
reviewer carrying water for the Journal’s liberal-bashing editorial page, which, in a peculiar
arrangement, has authority over the paper’s arts and culture section.
He writes of Sondheim: “You can all but hear the purr of self-satisfaction in his voice,
the sound of a rich man snuggled in the well-upholstered lap of comfortable certitude. I wonder
when he last questioned anything his fellow liberals thought about… well, anything.” Rest assured,
this is not a reviewer huddled under a bridge somewhere in the unupholstered lap
of a cardboard box, but rather a well-fed aesthete dining
out comfortably on the certitude of his opinions.
