Jon Vickers and Norman Bailey perform the storm scene from Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes at Covent Garden. The conductor is Sir Colin Davis:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
Archives for 2012
TT: Almanac
“Fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things underground, and much more in the skies.”
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
FILM
Canyon Passage. Jacques Tourneur’s 1946 Technicolor Western about life in frontier Oregon is now mainly known (if at all) as the film for which Hoagy Carmichael wrote “Ole Buttermilk Sky.” In fact it is, along with Robert Wise’s Blood on the Moon, one of the two most consistently underrated golden-age Hollywood Westerns, a shrewd character study of loyalty and weakness in which Dana Andrews, Susan Hayward, and the unfailingly interesting Brian Donlevy are all at their best and most characteristic. Gorgeous cinematography by Edward Cronjager. Very highly recommended, even if you think you’re allergic to Westerns (TT).
CD
Louis Armstrong and the All Stars, Satchmo at Symphony Hall 65th Anniversary: The Complete Performances (Verve, two CDs). Recorded in Boston in 1947 and originally released four years later, this album documents Armstrong’s postwar combo mere months after its founding. The lineup is nonpareil (Barney Bigard, Dick Cary, Sid Catlett, Velma Middleton, Arvell Shaw, Jack Teagarden) and the performances are electrifying. Co-produced by Armstrong authority Ricky Riccardi, it contains a half hour’s worth of previously unissued material, plus indispensable liner notes by Riccardi. Put it on your short list of must-have Armstrong albums–and order it now, because this is a 3,000-copy limited edition (TT).
PLAY
The Freedom of the City (Irish Repertory Theatre, on hiatus after Nov. 25, reopening Jan. 2-20). A flawless revival of Brian Friel’s 1973 masterpiece about a Northern Ireland protest march that ended in bloodshed. Not so much a history play as a tragic meditation on politics run amok, The Freedom of the City has been staged by Ciarán O’Reilly with a galvanizing blend of force and subtlety, and the cast is as good as it can possibly be (TT).
BOOK
Ron McCrea, Building Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home of Love and Loss (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, $35). A well-written, profusely illustrated monographic study of the building of Wright’s Wisconsin country estate. Many of the photos are previously unpublished. Essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in Wright, or in domestic architecture (TT).
DOES WILLY NEED PROTECTING?
“I don’t want to see ‘Willy Loman, Killer of Zombies’ on Broadway any time this millennium, but I do believe that great works of art can profit from radical reinterpretations that fling conventional wisdom out the window. A classic, after all, is tough enough to stand up to the hardest possible use. In the long run, the only thing that can do lasting damage to the reputation of a masterpiece is to let contemporary audiences take its excellence for granted…”
TT: The martyr machine
Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to the Irish Repertory Theatre’s off-Broadway revival of Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City. Here’s an excerpt.
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Politics makes most artists stupid–but not Brian Friel. “The Freedom of the City,” written in 1973 and newly revived by the Irish Repertory Theatre, appears on the surface to be a fictionalized portrayal of “Bloody Sunday,” the terrible afternoon in 1972 when British soldiers shot and killed 14 unarmed men at a civil-rights protest in Northern Ireland. But Mr. Friel has never been one to go in for the obvious, and “The Freedom of the City” has no more (or less) to do with Bloody Sunday than “All the King’s Men” has to do with Huey Long. It is not so much a history play as a meditation on how politics can crush innocent people in the pincers of absurdity, and the Irish Rep’s production, directed by Ciarán O’Reilly with a galvanizing blend of force and subtlety, is as wrenching as the play itself.
Mr. Friel signals his deeper purpose at the outset by setting “The Freedom of the City” not in 1972 but two years earlier. As his fictional protest unfolds, three marchers take cover from tear gas inside a nearby government building, where they discover to their astonishment that they’re hiding out in the mayor’s office. None of them is in any way militant, much less inclined to violence. Michael (James Russell) is an earnest, priggish activist for Catholic rights, Lily (Cara Seymour) is a good-natured but ill-educated mother of 11, and Skinner (Joseph Sikora) is a cynical, ne’er-do-well drifter. As the three drink the mayor’s whisky and marvel at the fanciness of his furniture, the soldiers surrounding the building wrongly conclude that it has been occupied by 40 armed protesters…
The Irish Rep’s revival is above all else a masterpiece of tightly unified staging and design. Charlie Corcoran, the set designer, has festooned the company’s tiny 135-seat auditorium with barbed wire and painted its walls with slogans, and Mr. O’Reilly fills the aisles with gun-wielding soldiers who are rarely more than a foot or two from the audience. M. Florian Staab, the sound designer, and Ryan Rumery, who wrote the incidental music, rend the air with the heartless sounds of rising chaos. Only an ensemble of formidably talented actors could hope to rise above the maelstrom and give memorable performances, and Mr. O’Reilly has found just the right people for the job….
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Read the whole thing here.
A trailer for The Freedom of the City: