Archives for May 2007

…why I haven’t been answering my e-mail lately, it’s not just the spring rush. My mother was in a serious car accident a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been a bit distracted as a result.
The good news is that (A) she’s fine and (B) I’m starting to catch up. You should be hearing from me fairly soon. Meanwhile, hang in there!

The pre-Tony rush is on, and so I’ve reviewed three Broadway openings in this morning’s Wall Street Journal drama column, Legally Blonde, LoveMusik, and Coram Boy:

Sure things are rare on Broadway, but absolutely everyone in the business is predicting an endless run for “Legally Blonde: The Musical,” the stage version of Reese Witherspoon’s 2001 screen comedy about a pink-clad, puppy-toting Malibu sorority girl who follows Mr. Wrong to Harvard Law School, where she finds true love and becomes a successful criminal lawyer. Who am I to disagree? I know a megahit when I see one, and “Legally Blonde” has cash written all over it. What’s more, it’s fairly inoffensive as commercial commodities go, so if your tweenage daughter begs you to take her–and she will–give in gracefully. You won’t be bored….
Tune? You want tunes? Go see “LoveMusik,” a jukebox musical about the open marriage of Kurt Weill (Michael Cerveris) and Lotte Lenya (Donna Murphy). Weill was one of the greatest theater composers of the 20th century, and “LoveMusik” contains two dozen of his best songs, some familiar (“Speak Low”) and some not (“I Don’t Love You”). You won’t hear better music on Broadway–or anywhere else, for that matter….
As for Ms. Murphy’s eerily exact impersonation of Lenya, it’s a tour de force comparable in quality to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Truman Capote. Not only does she get all the surface details right, but she inhabits them so completely that you forget she’s pretending to be someone else–and not even Lenya herself sang “Surabaya Johnny” so well….
If you’ve been hungering for a three-hour-long dose of pretentious silliness, I give you “Coram Boy,” a creepily mawkish tale of two 18th-century orphans that plays like a cross between “Oliver Twist” and “Pride and Prejudice” rewritten by Thomas Harris and accompanied by the music of Handel….

No free link this week. I therefore invite you to go buy a Journal (it’s for sale!), or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the drama column, plus lots of additional art-related coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)
P.S. For an alternate view of LoveMusik, go here.

• Read A.D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker and wrote a six-hundred-word notice for my Contentions book column.
• Lunched at Good Enough to Eat, whose waitresses are as nice as pie.
• Came home to find eight parcels from publicists, one of which contained six gorgeous-looking finished copies of New York Review Books’ new edition of Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, featuring an introduction by me. (It’ll be out June 5–order now!)
• Listened to Leos Janacek’s Concertino, a weird and wonderfully prickly 1925 piece for piano, two violins, viola, clarinet, horn, and bassoon.
• Walked across Central Park (first time this year!) to Knoedler & Company, where I saw and reveled in a newly opened show of watercolors by Milton Avery.
• Took a pre-theater nap.
• Went to a Broadway press preview of Terrence McNally’s Deuce.

“There is no more pitiful human illusion than that you can catch up on lost reading in old age. Old age is the busiest of them all. Things you used to do effortlessly take you forever, provided you can do them at all.”
S.N. Behrman, People in a Diary

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Frost/Nixon (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• A Moon for the Misbegotten* (drama, PG-13, adult situations, reviewed here, closes June 10)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
• Biography (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 20)

CLOSING SOON:
• Salvage (The Coast of Utopia, part 3)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 13)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 12)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here, closes May 12)

“‘I can remember,’ John said, ‘when “burger” only meant one thing, and the only word you ever had to stick in front of it was “cheese.”‘
“‘You’re showing your age, John.’
“‘Yeah? That’s good. Usually I show twice my age.'”
Donald E. Westlake, What’s So Funny?

I just got back from the opening night of Mark Morris’ Metropolitan Opera production of Orfeo ed Euridice. (Celebrity sighting: I sat behind Ned Rorem.) I’m still sorting out my complicated thoughts about the staging and don’t expect to be blogging about it until Monday, but I can definitely say that it ranks with The Coast of Utopia as the most important and consequential theatrical spectacle of the current season.
The provisional bottom line: you need to see it, and you only have three more chances, this Saturday afternoon and next Wednesday evening and Saturday afternoon. Go here for more information.
More anon….

Mark Morris’ Metropolitan Opera staging of Orfeo ed Euridice, which opens tonight, is his third crack at Gluck’s best-remembered opera. I reviewed the second one in the New York Daily News in 1996, at a time when I was still in the process of getting on Morris’ wavelength:

Mark Morris’ staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” which opened Thursday at the BAM Opera House, is not your usual operatic production–if only because nearly half the people in the cast are dancers.
Morris’ “Orfeo” puts the Mark Morris Dance Group together on stage with countertenor Michael Chance, sopranos Dana Hanchard and Christine Brandes, and Boston’s Handel & Haydn Chorus for a performance in which song and dance are blended into a single dramatic entity. Opera buffs with open minds will find this “Orfeo” imaginative and challenging; balletomanes who love Morris’ choreography will be in seventh heaven throughout. But does it really add up to a satisfying whole? I’m not so sure….
The members of the chorus, dressed in evening clothes, are placed on risers at opposite sides of the stage; the dancers, dressed in tunics, swirl around the soloists, illustrating and commenting on their plight. In the first act, the results were too busy–the presence of the chorus consistently pulled the eye away from the dancers–but no such problems marred the second act, for which Morris’ choreography was straightforward, fluid and entirely convincing. And his direction of the ascent from Hades was marvelous in its simplicity: he made Hanchard and Chance look as graceful as a ballerina and her cavalier.
But Morris’ treatment of Christine Brandes was jolting: he dressed her in a campy pair of wings and made her act like a bratty little boy. It was as if he’d painted an exquisite canvas, then punched a hole in it with his fist. And the last-act ballet–in which Morris, not for the first time, goes head to head with George Balanchine, who used the same music to unforgettable effect in “Chaconne”–looked raw and unfinished….
In the end, I found this “Orfeo” disappointing, full though it is of good things. It is only the greatly talented who can be greatly disappointing, and Morris is as talented as they come: I admire him more than any other choreographer of his generation. But he has too often proved unwilling to express powerful emotions in a fully committed way–his handling of Amor is a case in point–and for all his astonishing gifts, I once again came away from a Mark Morris premiere shaking my head and muttering to myself, “Get serious!”

Would I have felt the same way about it had I seen it again recently? Maybe, and maybe not. It’s no secret that I’ve changed my mind about some of my early opinions of Morris’ work, just as I think Morris himself has grown more emotionally forthright since then. On the other hand, I don’t like cutesy-pie camp any more now than I did in 1996–though I’ve also come to see that Morris’ use of camp is more expressively complicated than I originally thought.
In any case, tonight’s Orfeo is an altogether different kettle of fish, and I’m very eager indeed to see how Morris cooks it. Even when I don’t like what he does, I still think he’s the greatest choreographer of his generation, and I’d rather see his failures than most people’s successes.