Archives for 2005

“Fran

As a rule, New York drama critics are admitted only to those Broadway shows to which they’re formally invited, which usually means a press preview just prior to opening night. (Sometimes we’re asked back later in the run to cover a major cast change.) Because I go to the theater so often, and because tickets cost so much, it’s very unusual for me to see a play more than once, whereas I normally see a film at least twice if I really like it. Until last Saturday, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee was the only show I’d paid to see again since I started covering theater for The Wall Street Journal two and a half years ago. Well, not only did I do the same thing for Sweeney Todd, but I ordered my tickets immediately after coming home from the press preview. That’s how good I thought it was–and I felt the same way on Saturday. So did Ms. In the Wings, who was all but jumping up and down with excitement when the curtain fell at evening’s end. “I could see it again right now!” she said as we filed out of the theater.

I knew just what she meant. John Doyle’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece is so powerfully individual that you feel as if you’re seeing the show anew, no matter how well you think you know it–and I know Sweeney Todd very well indeed, having written about it in detail in A Terry Teachout Reader. I know some people, and even a few critics, have found the production disappointingly modest in scale, but I’m damned if I can see why that should stop them from appreciating the sheer audacity of Doyle’s concept, or the overwhelming punch with which his perfect cast brings it to life.

– I finally started revving the engine down on Sunday, having hit all four of my accumulated deadlines and taken all but one of my scheduled out-of-town business trips through the end of 2005. (I’m going to Baltimore on Saturday afternoon to see Centerstage’s production of No

I didn’t plan it this way, but all the links I’ve hoarded lately seem to fit that description. They’re also all from last week because I am living in the past.

Ross at The American Scene makes the case for an HBO White House drama:

It struck me that there’s an opening for a show that gives our nation’s capital the real HBO treatment–not the “Steven Soderbergh filming flacks with a handheld camera” approach, I mean, but the Sopranos/Deadwood/Rome approach. Start with the West Wing formula–idealistic, articulate people working in high-pressure jobs while keeping the nation’s best interests close to their hearts–and shove it through the looking glass. Send an anti-hero to Washington, and follow him (or her) up the ladder, all the way to the Presidency (if he’s a politician) or the Karl Rove role (if he’s an operative). Make the characters twisted, depraved, power-hungry, sexually voracious, occasionally violent–and make them appealing, too. Give us Deadwood at the Palm, the Sopranos with their hands on the nuclear football, Rome in the capital of the modern Roman Empire.

Outer Life stars in his own tale of–well, just go read it. I can’t possibly do it justice and might well wreck it. Be prepared to laugh at the misfortunes of another, is all I’ll say.

At Cathy’s World, Cathy Seipp’s pal Sandra Tsing Loh chips in a magnificent rant. The object of her righteous ire? PEN USA:

So. . . I was excited about the PEN Awards and marked my calendar. Then at my writer’s group meeting yesterday, I asked my friend Samantha Dunn if she was going. She had indeed been honored with a gracious invite to join the table of David Ulin, but snorted a remark along the lines of: “$250? I ain’t got it!”

This gave me pause. Then I went to the PEN website, and realized, in good conscience, what was I thinking?  I really cannot go!

In fact, if I had the babysitting I would be standing in front of the Biltmore in a placard literally PROTESTING this event.

Loh is as funny on paper as on the air, plus the sailor in her gets a furlough.

“Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.”

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

– On Saturday I flew down to Winston-Salem, where Carolina Ballet was giving three performances of Robert Weiss’ Swan Lake (it was premiered last season in Raleigh, but I was too busy covering Broadway openings to come see it).

The standard four-act version of Swan Lake, choreographed in 1895 by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, is too large in scale to be performed by medium-smallish companies. Weiss had long taken for granted that it was beyond the reach of Carolina Ballet, which employs only thirty-two dancers, until he ran across a children’s-book version of Swan Lake by the Viennese author-illustrator Lisbeth Zwerger in which the story of the ballet is turned into a fairy tale. Reading the book showed him how Swan Lake could be reconceived on an intimate, organically smaller scale. Zwerger gave him permission to use her Schwanensee as the basis for his production, and now Carolina Ballet has its very own two-act Swan Lake, one with just eight swan maidens instead of the usual twenty-four.

Weiss’ Swan Lake is forty-five minutes shorter than the Petipa-Ivanov version and has been altered in a variety of other ways, some small and some significant (among other things, it has a happy ending, Tchaikovsky’s original intention). Above all, it’s been completely rechoreographed in the fast-moving manner of Weiss’ other full-evening story ballets. As I explained a couple of years ago in a Washington Post review of his dance version of Carmen:

If you hadn’t seen any full-length ballets other than, say, “Giselle,” you probably wouldn’t notice anything unusual about it, except that there aren’t any boring parts–and that’s the point.

Having squirmed through far too many three-act kitschfests such as Ben Stevenson’s “Dracula” (which the Houston Ballet inflicted on innocent Washingtonians earlier this month), I’ve lost patience with choreographers who cram the stage with high-priced scenery and costumes, then forget to add steps and serve hot. The emphasis in their faux-romantic pseudo-ballets is placed squarely on pantomime and pageantry, while the dancing, such as it is, must fend for itself. The results invariably end up looking static, the opposite of what a good ballet should be.

Weiss has chosen a different model for “Carmen,” as well as the similarly conceived, equally successful “Romeo and Juliet” that Carolina Ballet premiered last year. Both ballets are choreographed in the manner of Balanchine’s 1962 adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in which the plot is propelled, and the characters defined, through movement rather than mime. “I don’t like seeing a lot of people standing around on stage doing nothing,” Weiss says. Instead, he builds each scene around a carefully organized dance sequence, just as Balanchine did in his great Shakespeare ballet….He uses the standard steps and combinations of neoclassical ballet, but always to make specific narrative points.

As a result, Weiss’ Swan Lake, though related to the standard Petipa-Ivanov version, doesn’t feel anything like a slimmed-down alternative. It’s different not only in scale but also in shape and tone, and to my mind is wholly successful on its own terms. I saw it twice and couldn’t have been more impressed. Aside from the obvious artistic merits of Weiss’ version, it strikes me that he’s found a solution to the Swan Lake problem that other regional companies with similarly limited resources would do well to embrace.

– I took Ms. Pratie Place to the Sunday matinee, about which she blogged at length last week, complete with illustrations. It was a heart-stoppingly beautiful day, so we had brunch at an outdoor caf

From DVD Journal:

New from our friends at The Criterion Collection are four titles, all due in February. Jean Renoir’s 1938 La B

– William Holden’s fee in 1957 (plus ten percent of the profits) for playing in The Bridge on the River Kwai: $300,000

Time is a very strange thing.

So long as one takes it for granted, it is nothing at all.

But then, all of a sudden, one is aware of nothing else.

It is all about us, it is within us also,

In our faces it is there, trickling,

In the mirror it is there, trickling,

In my sleep it is there, flowing,

And between me and you,

There, too, it flows, soundless, like an hour-glass.

Oh, Quinquin, sometimes I hear it flowing

Irresistibly on.

Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night

And stop all the clocks, all, all of them.

Nevertheless, we are not to shrink from it,

For it, too, is a creature of the Father who created us all.