Here’s the latest from the world of art:
– I scaled back my performance-going in preparation for the coming torrent of work, but I did get to Central Park on Saturday to see the Public Theater’s Shakespeare-in-the-Park production of Much Ado About Nothing, which I’ll be covering for The Wall Street Journal.
– Though I spent much of the rest of the weekend blogging, I did make time to watch three DVR-stockpiled movies, the best of which was Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes. Even though I’m a devoted balletomane, I somehow made it to the age of 48 without having seen this most celebrated of highbrow backstage movies, and Toni Bentley has been pushing me for months to plug that hole in my cultural armor. Now I’ve done so, and loved every minute of it, for The Red Shoes mixes over-the-top and stiff-upper-lip in a way I found irresistible. What nobody ever told me is that it’s also a smart movie, smart in a way to which (say) the preposterous The Turning Point can’t even begin to compare, firmly rooted in sharp-eyed observation and executed on the highest possible level of craftsmanship. I suppose it’s better to have seen it as a teenager, but I wouldn’t have missed my belated first viewing of The Red Shoes for the world.
I also looked at two well-known Hollywood movies of the Forties, Michael Curtiz’s no-nonsense adaptation of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf (strong performances by Edward G. Robinson and Ida Lupino, plus one of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s best scores) and William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (high-minded treacle, compellingly acted and accompanied by another superb score, this time by Hugo Friedhofer).
– Now playing on iTunes: Constant Lambert‘s score for Tiresias, a 1951 ballet by Sir Frederick Ashton. It was the last composition Lambert completed before dying of drink that same year. Between watching The Red Shoes, re-reading Anthony Powell’s Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (in which Lambert figures prominently, thinly disguised as “Hugh Moreland”), and watching the Lincoln Center Festival’s Ashton Celebration (which featured Dante Sonata, set to Lambert’s orchestral arrangement of Liszt’s Apres un lecture de Dante), it was inevitable that I’d want to hear some of Lambert’s own inimitably piquant music. What a tragedy his early death was!