Archives for August 2007

“Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”
Robert Towne, screenplay for Chinatown (spoken by John Huston)

I just got back from watching Mark Morris’ Mozart Dances at Lincoln Center. I’ll write about it on Monday–right now all I feel like doing is sitting down and vibrating a little longer–but I do want to advise those of you who weren’t able to see tonight’s Live From Lincoln Center telecast that some PBS affiliates will be showing Mozart Dances again later in the week. In New York City, for instance, it will be rebroadcast this coming Sunday at noon on Channel 13.
For more information, go here.

• The Mostly Mozart Festival has gotten interesting after an alarmingly long stretch of being otherwise. (See Alex Ross’ latest New Yorker essay for a trenchant explanation of what happened and why.) If you want to see for yourself–and you should–Mark Morris’ Mozart Dances will be telecast live from Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater tonight on PBS. It’s a full-evening Morris ballet set to a pair of piano concertos and the Two-Piano Sonata. The performers include the Mark Morris Dance Group, the pianist Emanuel Ax, and the Mostly Mozart Orchestra.
The curtain goes up at eight p.m. EDT. Go here for more details. I’ll be there–look for me in the crowd shots!
If you want to experience Mozart Dances in person, it will also be performed on Friday and Saturday nights. For more information, go here.
• Also on this week’s Mostly Mozart bill are two performances of Osvaldo Golijov‘s Pasión según San Marcos, which I heard for the first time in 2002 and wrote about in a Washington Post “Second City” column:

Golijov’s St. Mark Passion is a rich musico-dramatic stew in which seemingly incompatible styles are jammed together like the sounds you might hear through the open window of a fast-moving car on a hot summer night. Classical strings, chattering brass, Afro-Cuban percussion, flamenco guitar, a Venezuelan chorus that struts and hollers like a gospel choir–you name it, Golijov has stirred it in, not merely for effect but with the shrewd self-assurance of a composer who knows exactly what he’s about…It’s as if the whole thing comes at you in a single communicative flash and makes itself manifest instantaneously–which is, lest we forget, the mark of a masterpiece.

I haven’t listened to the Pasión since its New York premiere and am hugely curious to see how it’s aged, so I’m going back to hear it again. Two performances, on Saturday at eight p.m. and Sunday at five p.m., both at the Rose Theater. (I’ll be there on Sunday.) The performers include Luciana Souza, who should need no introduction to the readers of this blog.
For more information, go here.
• Stephen Lang’s Beyond Glory closes on Sunday, alas. Here’s my Wall Street Journal review in its entirety:

It took long enough, but Beyond Glory, Stephen Lang’s fire-eating portrayal of eight recipients of the Medal of Honor, has finally opened Off Broadway two years after I saw it at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. “Mr. Lang’s one-man play is no simpleminded piece of flag-waving,” I wrote in this space in 2005. “It is an unsparingly direct portrait of men at war, pushed into narrow corners and faced with hard choices. It is also one of the richest, most complex pieces of acting I’ve seen in my theatergoing life.” I went back to see it again last week, and I stand by every word of my original review. The Roundabout Theatre Company has done a great thing by bringing Beyond Glory to New York for a two-month run. This is acting of the highest imaginable quality, a performance that will sear its way into your mind and linger there forever after.

Go here for more information.

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)

• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, 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)

CLOSING SUNDAY:
• Beyond Glory (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Frost/Nixon * (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here)

• Old Acquaintance (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

“I am a pessimist by nature, which is why I have spent my life as a journalist instead of trying to be a leader, which requires optimism.”
Robert Novak, The Prince of Darkness: Fifty Years Reporting in Washington

New York City looked joltingly unfamiliar to me as I rode home from Penn Station after a month in rural New England. The fierce morning sunshine made everything seem unreal. Too many hard-faced pedestrians jammed the sidewalks, and too many cars raced up and down the crowded streets. The first thing I noticed upon reaching my Upper West Side neighborhood was that the diner where I’d lunched the day before leaving town had closed its doors permanently in my absence. I spent the whole afternoon sifting through the piles of mail with which my kitchen table was covered. At one point I snuck a furtive peek at my calendar, saw that I was booked solid through next Monday, and sighed deeply. Life in Manhattan can be hard to take, especially when you’ve just spent a month in the country.

Aldous Huxley speaks somewhere of “the blessedness at the heart of things.” It’s all too easy to lose sight of that blessedness on a hot summer day in New York, and I admit to having briefly questioned its existence yesterday afternoon. But I have more reasons than most to count my blessings, and the events that followed recalled them to me forcibly.

At day’s end I walked to Central Park West, met a waiting friend, and strolled with her to the outdoor stage where Fiona Apple and Nickel Creek were performing. The sky was falling the last time I went to an outdoor concert in Central Park, but by the time we reached our seats, the early-evening air was benignly balmy, and no sooner did my friend and I settle ourselves than the members of Nickel Creek charged out from the wings, loaded for bear and ready to play.

I go back a long way with Nickel Creek–I even wrote the liner notes for their greatest-hits album–but two years had gone by since I last saw them in concert, and a year ago they announced that they’d be going on hiatus at the end of 2007. This will likely be their last New York performance, and I expected it to sound a valedictory note. Boy, did I get that wrong. They came on like gangbusters, and within seconds I knew it was going to be a night to remember.

Fiona Apple showed up on stage midway through the first half of the concert. I’d assumed that Nickel Creek was opening for her, but it quickly became clear that they were going to perform together, and as the band tuned up, I thought, I bet they do “Extraordinary Machine.” Sure enough, they did, and I hugged myself with glee. Fiona Apple had been nothing more than a name to me until I received an e-mail last fall from my favorite blogger containing an audio file and instructions to listen to it at once. It was the title track from Extraordinary Machine, and by the time it was halfway over, I was a fan. Talk about good omens!

Mere words can’t begin to convey how strange and wonderful it was to hear Apple singing with a progressive bluegrass-pop band whose members are equally fond of Bill Monroe and Radiohead. Among many other things, they did Gilllian Welch’s “I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll” and Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight,” and the effect was…well, would it sound too fancy-schmancy to call it exquisite? Rarely do I wish for a concert to last longer–enough is enough–but this one went on for two and a half hours, and I ate up each and every song.

The biggest surprise was “I Walk a Little Faster,” a standard ballad by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh whose lyrics have long had special meaning for me. Hearing them sung by Fiona Apple on a balmy summer evening came close to overwhelming me: I set my chin a little higher,/Hope a little longer,/Build a little stronger/Castle in the air,/And thinking you’ll be there,/I walk a little faster.

Yes, New York City is a difficult and (on occasion) frightening place in which to live. The low-flying helicopters and airplanes that cleaved the night sky over Central Park were sufficient reminder of that. But it is also full of daily miracles of serendipity, and the life I lead there is rich in experience and delight beyond anything I envisioned for myself when young. May I never take that blessed fact for granted.

• Eaten a snail

• Had sex on an airplane (I did engage in some medium-voltage hanky-panky in a radio studio once upon a time, but the mike wasn’t open)

• Shot an animal

• Fainted

• Seen the complete Ring of the Nibelung on stage (not in this lifetime, baby!)

• Watched a person die

• Read Bleak House all the way through (I’m still trying, though)

• Broken a bone

• Done a cartwheel (these two items may be related)

• Waltzed

From last Friday’s Wall Street Journal:

“Dud Avocado,” a 1958 comic novel about Hollywood by Elaine Dundy, is being developed into a film by producer Sara Risher, who is working with longtime rights holder Twentieth Century Fox. “The re-release made me realize it was timeless,” Ms. Risher says.

If you haven’t bought it already…well, what’s keeping you?