I’m the furthest thing from a music critic, but I saw something I loved, so here you go. Last weekend Chicago’s Lyric Opera premiered a new production of Oklahoma! directed by Gary Griffin. It’s a special show. The music and singing are as full-blooded and full-throated as you would expect of the Lyric. As Chris Jones wrote in his Chicago Tribune review, “listening to a full-sized orchestra playing the original orchestrations” is an “increasingly rare treat.” Saturday night it did feel rare and rich.
The production had visual magic too. The first thing you get to look at, during the overture, is an achingly lovely painted backdrop–a criss-cross of crops in pinks and purples against a butter-yellow sky. It’s a recognizably American, fruited-plain landscape rendered in a wistful palette that reminded me of Pierre Bonnard. The sets themselves–house, barn, shed–are classic, solid Americana against the impressionism of the backdrops, echoing the show’s two registers.
The heart of Oklahoma! is its songs, of course, and they were well served here. I got a series of shivers during the iconic title song, hard and bright, with its beeline for the nerve endings. I wished it would go on and on. But the show’s soul, for me, lies in the darker dream interlude at the end of Act I, which works more mysteriously on those nerves as the show shifts from one dramatic language to another.
This sequence, in the Lyric’s production, is unforgettable. A gorgeous piece of dancing, it’s also authentic–the 91-year-old Gemze de Lappe, who danced in Oklahoma! in 1943, recreated Agnes de Mille’s original choreography for the Lyric, to wondrous effect. I was entranced–almost literally. (Incidentally, it also put me in mind of Chicago Shakespeare’s 2011 production of Follies, also directed by Griffin–a connection I didn’t make when I was watching.) The whole show is strong, the musicians wonderful. But if you need an extra reason to get there, look no further than the jewel-like choreography and dancing, reaching heights in Laurey’s dream (the corps de ballet’s brightly colored dresses invoke jewels, but so does the crystallized, luminous quality of the whole).
Oklahoma! is the first of five Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals the Lyric will stage the next five springs. It runs through May 19. Go go go.
UPDATE: I’ve fixed a deplorable–yet unsurprising if you know me–error above, replacing Tribune hockey writer Chris Kuc’s name with that of the paper’s wonderful theater critic and true author of the review quoted, Chris Jones. I’m embarrassed to have made this mistake, the more so since I’ve met Jones and greatly admire his work. Lessons learned: (1) Mix writing with sudden-death overtime playoff hockey with caution. (2) Proofread.
If you need me, I’ll be in the penalty box.

Aphorisms are almost the opposite of the kind of writing that typically draws me in, writing that’s absorbed in the particular. But Aaron Haspel’s hard, bright aphorisms, which he recently brought together and called Everything, are abstract and generalizing, yet so precise as to share something of the quality of the gemlike details I swoon over in poems and fiction. They give a startle first that then gives way to recognition. Twitter, where I first read many of them, might have seemed their natural context in a way, but they gain force from being collected together and grouped by theme.
Here are several of my favorites:
No style guide can address the chief defect in writing, which is having nothing to say.
Good critics do not have good taste. They have articulate, consistent taste for which the reader can correct.
Read a lot: think some: write a little.
Influence is plagiarism spread thin.
The less a discipline resembles mathematics, the less likely a clever theory is to be true.
Few experiences are more salutary than losing an argument, but only if you notice.
The parable of the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp, where the light is better, explains vast swaths of intellectual history.
Efficient search is serendipity’s implacable enemy.
The more you regard your life as a story the more you edit it.
The superstitions of a culture are easily discerned: they are the matters on which everyone agrees.
Low-down, thoroughgoing rottenness often has nice manners.
Your terrible secret is that you have no terrible secret.
Blaming an actor for being a narcissist is like blaming a tiger for being a carnivore.
To manage people effectively you must not only accept but praise work that you could have done better yourself.
A relentlessly cheerful, upbeat, can-do attitude is a highly effective form of bullying.
More successful enterprises have been created for spite than for money.
Humanity for the first time is burdened with a vast proletariat of literate, ambitious, and demanding people who can’t really do anything.
The joy of money lies less in what one does than in what one might do.
The people are flattered more obsequiously than the monarch ever was.
We reserve our warmest admiration, not for what is utterly beyond us, but for what we secretly believe we might have done ourselves on our very best day.
The future will marvel that we regarded “be yourself” as sound moral advice.
Better deceived than distrustful.
Nothing tastes quite like the hand that feeds you.
People will like you if you like them, which is too high a price.
To hate something properly you must have liked it once.
To make an epigram, invert a cliché.

Hello, OGIC here. I’ve been away from the blog for two years, so to get my feet wet again, here’s just a frivolous post about my current reading.
Two-thirds of the way through J. F. Powers’s novel Morte D’Urban, I’m wondering where this book has been all my life. Father Urban, the ambitious Clementine priest at its center, surprised me from the beginning. He treats his vocation, Terry wrote in the New Criterion years ago, “precisely as he would any other job: with one eye firmly fixed on the main chance.” He doesn’t suffer his less worldly, less canny colleagues gladly, and Powers does a wonderful job of satirizing both his main character and those around him as they appear through Father Urban’s ever appraising eyes.
I’ve been laughing helplessly through the book, but have also read far enough in Terry’s essay to know that this comedy is headed somewhere serious. Not having reached that point yet, I want to pull out for your amusement something very small and inconsequential in the book, and very charming: dogs.
In what seems to me a purely playful impulse–though for such a meticulous writer, I wonder whether something more is going on–Powers outright anthropomorphizes the three dogs I’ve encountered so far in Morte D’Urban. In a few quick strokes, he makes them seem to observe the human folly playing out in front of them with bemusement, as you might imagine some of the dogs drawn by James Thurber or George Booth doing. Here, they even (sort of) speak. In some passages you get the sense they are secretly running the show. I find them among the most memorable people in the book.
The first dog to appear remains unnamed. It resides in the station at Duesterhaus, the Minnesota outpost to which Father Urban has been banished from the place he deems his proper setting, Chicago. On arrival, Father Urban instantly gets a taste of his new isolation:

The station agent, writing at his desk, seemed unaware of [Father Urban]. An old dog lying behind the counter woke up and gave him a look that said, Can’t you see he’s working on his report?

“I’d like to call a taxi, if I may,” said Father Urban, giving the town the benefit of a doubt, and then he waited.

Presently the agent got up and came to the counter. He pushed the telephone at Father Urban and tossed him a thin directory. “Cost you a dime to call,” he said.

The dog opened its eyes, as if it wanted to see how Father Urban would take the bad news.

Father Urban put a dime on the counter.

The dog closed its eyes.

The next dog, Rex, belongs to a local man who sells the land for a golf course to the Clementine order, a deal put together by Father Urban with the backing of Billy Cosgrove, a patron from Chicago. On his first visit, “Father Urban found Mr. Hanson and the dog at home,” Powers writes. “The dog seemed to recognize him, but Mr. Hanson didn’t, and so Father Urban introduced himself.”
The black dog largely takes over the situation when Father Urban arrives with several associates on his next visit.

Mr. Hanson and the truck were elsewhere, but Rex showed the party around the farm. Most of the time they walked in silence, Mr. Robertson occasionally raising small binoculars to his eyes. When they were back where they’d started from a half hour before, Billy said:

“Well?”

Mr. Robertson gave the frozen ground, which he’d been eying from all angles, from close up and afar, one last kick, and said:

“I don’t see why not.”

“Let’s make it a standout course,” said Billy.

As they were getting into the cars, Monsignor Renton now alone in his, Rex spoke to them, and a moment later Mr. Hanson and the truck appeared.

Billy, who had been told about Father Urban’s accident, said to Mr. Hanson: “Paid that bill yet–that collision bill?”

“Yar, I got to pay it,” said Mr. Hanson.

“Yar,” said Rex to Monsignor Renton.

It’s worth noting that the buyers eventually negotiate for Hanson to throw in the dog with the land, in a conversation Rex follows closely. Later an “aged Airedale” named Frank turns up, the color of “dark chocolate that had melted and hardened and lightened,” but I’ll let you discover him yourself if you happen to pick up the book–which you really, really should. In the meantime, I’ll try to find out whether Powers was a dog owner, and what his dogs thought about it all.

“We sink too easily into stupid and overfed sensuality, our bodies thickening even more quickly than our minds.”
M.F.K. Fisher, Serve It Forth

Sean Connery and Zoe Caldwell in a scene from Macbeth, telecast by the CBC in 1961:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”
Jane Austen, letter to her sister Cassandra (Dec. 24, 1798)

Here’s where I took my mother this afternoon: