Posted
by Dan Callahan
on Tue, May 15, 2012 at 1:55 PM
Let’s hand it to Tennessee Williams: he picked some of the best titles for his plays. A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, Small Craft Warnings, Clothes for a Summer Hotel. The very last of his plays, In Masks Outrageous and Austere—it had never been produced prior to this recent Culture Project production, which just closed early due to mixed-to-negative reviews—is no exception; the title comes from a line in an Elinor Wylie poem, and it has both the rhythm Williams generally wanted and the sense, the peacock feathers and the steel. Williams worked on it for fives years, from 1978 to his death in 1983, when it passed into the hands of his friend Gavin Lambert, where it languished until Lambert’s death. Several people, notably Gore Vidal and Peter Bogdanovich, worked to get the play ready for production, and this vital premiere of it at the Culture Project was imaginatively directed by David Schweizer and acted to within an inch of its life by its star, Shirley Knight, for whom Williams wrote A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur.
Posted
by Mark Martin
on Wed, May 9, 2012 at 8:58 AM
You can tell a lot about the state of modern drama from the seats in BAM’s Harvey Theater, sourced, it would appear, from the chapel in a monastery of penitents. Movie houses boast padded recliners; playgoers sit on wooden postage stamps. Obviously, there’s more money in the silver screen, but that’s not the only thing at work. Backsides can be punished here because the stage is meant to transcend mere entertainment. The hard, tiny seats hint at a piousness that does the theater no good at all, and which, dare I say, was always part of Harold Pinter’s sensibility.
Pinter wrote The Caretaker (in revival through June 17) in 1960, when kitchen sink drama was king of the English stage. In keeping with the period, it is set in a grimy bedroom in a rundown townhouse. The first of the stage lights illuminate Mick (Alex Hassell), with his back to the audience, striking a truculent James Dean pose. But the angry young man, the prototypical protagonist of the era, ducks out the room before Aston and Davies enter, a fool and a tramp respectively, characters emerging from Beckett’s coat pocket.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Tue, May 8, 2012 at 8:58 AM
The novelist E.M. Forster's English libretto for Billy Budd, adapted with Eric Crozier from Herman Melville's posthumous morality tale, is all prose, so wordy that the Met titles often condensed a few lines during the season premiere Friday night of John Dexter's 1978 production. But Benjamin Britten's score, a mixture of classical grandeur and contemporary anxiety, often compensates with poetry. Sometimes it's as simple as the up and down of the strings in the overture of this seafaring opera set entirely on a ship, which suggest the soft undulations of calm waters. Or it's the choppy rhythms of the dialogue, which evoke angrier seas. Or it's the several long, wordless dramatic interludes in which Britten lets the music express enormities that words cannot, like the captain of the HMS Indomitable telling the title character that Budd has been sentenced to death—"the most celebrated passage of the score," Thomas May writes in his production notes.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Tue, May 1, 2012 at 11:28 AM
"To the Beacon Theater! Maybe George Tsypin will let me come up on stage with him!"
The Tony-award nominations are out, and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark received merely two pity nods: best scenic design of a musical and best costume design of a musical. (No disrespect to George Tsypin and Eiko Ishioka, respectively.) The bajillion dollar spectacle didn't open until June last year, after the deadline for the 2011 nominations, and so wasn't eligible until this year; either voters have already forgotten its tourist-pleasing pageantry, or they (like so much of the New York press) weren't buying it.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 12:24 PM
Looking good for 337 years old
Leoš Janáček's 1926 opera The Makropulos Case, now at the Metropolitan Opera in a revival of Elijah Moshinsky's stylish, noirish, German expressionist production, is gabby: instead of posing for arias and ensembles, it's like endless recitative; the characters chatter unceasingly—about love, about law, and mostly about the mystery at the center of the story: when a rich old man died 100 years ago, whom did he intend to inherit his estate? And how does some gorgeous young singer seem to know century-old secrets?
Janáček was adept with the melody of natural speech; according to Benjamin Folkman's program notes, the composer would wander the streets, making musical notations to describe the cadences he overheard, Henry Higgins-like. Focused on uneasy, upset characters, the score then adds anxiety to the story, doubled by Anthony Ward's sets, which usually feature a canted wall of windows, oppressive in their tilt and their facilitation of angular lighting.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 8:58 AM
Chekhov's darkly comic play examines Russia's well-educated, pre-revolution, fin-de-siècle idle class as they search for ever-elusive happiness—in philosophy, in drink, in love and infidelity, but mostly in the hopes of ditching the small town in which the title characters are stuck for the big city. "There's nothing better in the world than Moscow!" one sister cries near the play's end—not that she'll ever get to confirm it. Three Sisters is like It's a Wonderful Life without the happy ending; imagine a bunch of Georgette Baileys who never escape the sticks, who search in vain for the significance of their provincial sufferings, wallowing in existential morbidity.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 1:14 PM
Peter and the Starcatcher, the delightful Peter Pan prequel just transferred to Broadway (at the Brooks Atkinson), adopts the spirit of its intended audience: like children, the cast and crew make much of little by using their imaginations—and rely on the audience to do the same. The ensemble restores the aspect of play to plays: the show is proudly low-rent, like a living-room production by your most precocious nephew, with plungers for swords and nothing but a rippling rope and some green lighting to create a scene underwater. "Pity the child who lives in a fact-based world," growls the proto-Hook villain Black Stache (a roaring, indefatigable Christian Borle).
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 12:01 PM
"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players," Simon Callow quotes at the start of Being Shakespeare (at BAM through April 14). "They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts." In this one-man show by Jonathan Bate, directed by Tom Cairns, Callow narrates the Bard's biography, aided by a few props and some subtle ambient sound and mood lighting, interspersing throughout selections from the oeuvre, as though revealing autobiography secreted in the folio—how the events from the stage of life may have made their way onto the boards of the Globe.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 3:17 PM
BAM announced on its blog yesterday that it would soon open a satellite location in Manhattan; it would, of course, be called MAM, "tentatively located on the Highline 'UltraNorth'—west of Madison Square Garden overlooking the scenic train yards between West 30th and 33rd Streets."
Finally, after 150 years... BAM has decided to export its elusive cultural cachet to the island to its west. Manhattan dwellers can more easily access the cutting edge culture they've flocked across the East River to see.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 10:43 AM
The last two Arin Arbus Shakespeare productions I saw were sparse and true to the letter, great classical interpretations of great classical works. But her Taming of the Shrew (also by Theater for a New Audience, through April 21) is looser and livelier. Set against a kind of Wild West backdrop—to emphasize the play's gender-battling lawlessness, perhaps?—this Shrew has long coats, wide-brimmed hats, wood-board sets and a Stephen Foster-ish score (by MichaelFriedman). But nothing about it feels particularly fusty. Instead, it crackles with contemporary verve; it's a genuine knee-slapper without some strange conceptual framework. It's faithful and traditional, but also popping and alive, much like Karin Coonrod's triumphantLove's Labor's Lost at the Public last season.
Target Margin Theater's annual laboratory continues through April 7 at the Bushwick Starr. Alexis Clements checked in this weekend and sends this report.
It’s surprisingly rare to see a group of artists enjoying themselves while doing their work in public. In private, anything is possible, but when they’re presenting their work for the public, artists can often be very serious, or, more precisely, very stressed out and nervous. They could be stressed out for any number of reasons: worries about whether or not everything they’ve been working on for so long and at some personal expense is going to pull together; anxiety over what the audience will think; questions about whether or not anyone is actually going to show up; concerns that if someone really important does come that they may not see the work in the right way or think of the artist as serious or important or worth their time; along with all manner of other nagging thoughts about money or relationships or family problems that they may have avoided while working on their art.
So, it’s unique to find artists playing freely these days. It’s also rare to find settings where artists are willing and able to exercise a real sense of collegiality—experimenting openly, trying out new artistic relationships with collaborators, and accepting that some things they try out may not work but that they’ll learn something anyhow.
This little pre-amble may make it sound as if I’m painting the annual Target Margin Theater (TMT) lab as something of a utopia. It’s not that, by any means—and it’s certainly not the only open playground for artists in the city. But still, it was kind of really great to walk into the Bushwick Starr, grab a PBR for $3, sit down and watch some artists plying their trade and enjoying it.
Jesus isn't very likable in Jesus Christ Superstar. He never smiles. He tells the lepers to heal themselves. Mopey, angsty, irascible, arrogant, needy, exhausted, and cryptic, he comes across as a crazy death-cultist, consumed with mystical worries, unwilling to engage in the political upheaval that surrounds him. Des McAnuff's celebrated revival, imported to Broadway from Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival, draws subtle connections between first-century Rome and our Occupiable times: sporting messenger bags, Apostles spend the overture running from storm-trooping soldiers like they're Wall Street protesters; they camp out like a bunch of Zuccotti kids; with a growl, Judas draws special attention to the line "we are occupied!" in "Heaven on Their Minds." (At the performance I attended, understudy Jeremy Kushnier played Judas; he was very good, the crowd adored him, and he deserves a break.) It's hard not to sympathize with Simon when he exhorts Jesus to add a touch of hate at Rome in his sermons, or not to side with Judas when he berates Jesus and Mary Magdalene for wasting salable ointment on the prophet. "People who are hungry, people who are starving/Matter more than your feet and hair," he sings in "Everything's Alright." Right on!
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 9:46 AM
There's really no better time for a revival of the musical Carrie, a show that not only demonstrates the harrowing effects of bullying, but also features rich people treating lower classes cruelly (which is so Occupy-appropriate). But for more than 20 years, such a revival has seemed totally out of the question. The adaptation of Stephen King's novel and Brian DePalma's film was perhaps the most notorious flop in Broadway history, an $8 million production—an exorbitant sum for 1988—that closed after only 16 previews and 5 performances. Its creators, alumni of Fame and Footloose, blamed the original director Terry Hands, in a recent interview with the Times, for letting the production get out of control. They never recorded a cast album, and they've refused to allow anyone to mount a professional production—until now, that is. Director Stafford Arima, who helmed Altar Boyz, convinced the creators of his sincere appreciation for the show, and spearheaded this extensively reworked version for the MCC Theater. Many songs have been cut, and new ones have been added; scenes have been restaged. This is much closer to what the creators always envisioned, they said. And that's too bad, because it's way too safe.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 8:56 AM
In the revival of Porgy and Bess at the Richard Rodgers Theater (through September at least), the singers play loose with George Gershwin's music, tearing open the vocal melodies and spilling out the raw emotion inside. This is Broadway, after all, not the opera house, so the reverence for Text is weaker—which is just how this controversial production courted trouble! After a Timesarticle outlined how director Diane Paulus, with book adapter Suzan-Lori Parks and music adapter Diedre L. Murray, might fiddle with the original, purists cried foul; Stephen Sondheim penned an open letter decrying any alterations, arguing that the work needs none. But a few black people might disagree.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 1:20 PM
You can tell Rufus Wainwright had a lot of ideas for an opera. Unfortunately, they all made it into his debut, Prima Donna (presented by City Opera at BAM), an ambitious but messy work about an aging soprano, Regine Saint Laurent (sung terrifically by City Opera rising star Melody Moore), a kind of Norma Desmond-lite readying for a return to the stage. It's a show about spectacle, about shows; you could read it, through its main character, as a grand metaphor for the death of classical opera, an extinguishing history passed down to a generation that may or may not deserve it. The action is set within Regine's ornate but tumbledown home as she and her pair of servants prepare for the arrival of a reporter, Andre (Taylor Stayton). The display they prepare for him—twice, once in each act, as the reporter leaves and then is invited back—is Prima Donna's first show-within-the-show: the vases of fresh roses, the lighted candles, the crisply uniformed help, the dowdy diva done up like a mid-20th century first lady, all meant to conceal the sad reality of a nervous, unstable woman living essentially alone among her anxieties and memories of bygone greatness.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 8:58 AM
At some point, you may have picked up Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, a deserved classic of Manhattan lit about a low-level fact checker at a New Yorker-like magazine who struggles with a recent break-up, substance abuse, and his middling career. Or you might have seen the film adaptation with Michael J. Fox. But chances are you've never discovered the musical adaptation, which debuted at the New York Theater Workshop on February 24, 1999 (in a production directed by Michael Greif, who also directed Rent, which also opened at the NYTW). Happy 13th anniversary, Bright Lights, Big City: The Musical! A fittingly unlucky anniversary to celebrate, since the show was not received particularly well, especially because of unfavorable comparisons to Rent, and has since fallen off the cultural radar.
But that's too bad—the music, by Paul Scott Goodman (reworked some for the cast recording), on occasion topples into a kind of genius born of unabashed immoderation; three songs are each reprised twice. A blues about Wednesday—cuz doesn't Wednesday just give ya the blues?—includes the rhyme "Drano for the brain-o"; the missing girl on the milk carton has her own song, which she sings twice. (Did I mention it's written in an Irish folk idiom? And was apparently sung on stage by a woman dressed in blood-soaked panties?) At its best, the show is like one of The Simpsons' brilliant musical parodies from the earlier seasons. The fact that Goodman's show is not a parody, and isn't kidding, doesn't make it any less amazing. A young Patrick Wilson starred as Jamie, while Jesse L. Martin (who had been in Rent), played his conspirator Allagash.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 2:25 PM
When Christoph Willibald Gluck's Armide opens, the composer employs sweet major keys for women's talk of love, and ominous minors when their topic changes to war. But the title character is unbound by such convention; when she sings of romance, it's through darkened melodies. For her love will be another kind of war, no less because her true love—the crusader Renaud—is a warrior and her enemy. "How sweet it would be to bind him in chains," she sings. I bet!
Love is slavery in Gluck's cynical and astonishingly good opera, now too briefly in a superb semi-staging, a co-production between Juilliard and the Metropolitan Opera. (The first performance was last night; the second and last is Saturday.) Armide, a sorceress who controls the dark powers of Hell—the 17th century's vision of a typical woman?—is reluctant to marry because it means the loss of her independence. Similarly, Renaud prides himself on his freedom from love, a liberty of which that wicked witch robs him with a spell, after she spares his life, asking, "is it not enough if love punishes him?"
In a society obsessed with self-actualization and finding one's "passion," it's rare to see real glimpses of the wrenching struggles that some people go through while attempting to create a persona and a life that lives up to their ideals. Not to mention the pressures to mesh those ideals with the norms our society imposes in the form of vocation, class, race or ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. Self-actualization often implies that there is a single and stable self to be realized, to be found, and the project then becomes to live fully and only as that idealized self, controlling, ignoring or purging your errant desires and failures to live up to those lofty aspirations.
The Builders Association's new show Sontag: Reborn (in the Under the Radar Festival through January 15), depicts, in a rich polyphonic production, the ways in which the young Susan Sontag attempted to build a regulated self, despite the messy, confounding, nonconformist and indomitable elements within her.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 12:22 PM
Photo by TA Smith
Perhaps Brooklyn's only serious puppet theater company with a permanent home, Puppetworks puts on several shows a year at its storefront space in Park Slope, usually adapting tales from classic children's literature. (They'll also be doing an adaptation of Miracle on 34th Street at Macy's—on 34th Street!—from Thanksgiving to Christmas.) The group was founded in 1980 by puppeteer Nicolas Coppola, who still serves as artistic director. We spoke with Coppola and chief puppeteer Michael Leach about the artistic advantages of puppetry and what it's like doing it in Brooklyn.
How long have you had the theater in Park Slope? We will soon celebrate the 22nd year in our present location, although we have been based in Park Slope a bit longer, and appeared at BAM in concert with the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 1983 and 1984.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:28 AM
The protracted negotiations between musicians and management at City Opera have broken down, sources tell the Post, which could lead to a strike by singers and orchestra. The company is set to bring La Traviata to BAM in eight weeks, followed by the premiere of Rufus Wainwright's Prima Donna the following week. But those plans could be derailed. "This impasse is a deep disappointment to all of us," George Steel, the company's general manager, said in a statement. "But we hope the unions can put aside rancor and political theater and find a way to move forward—we need to do the work New Yorkers expect of us."
Union members are worried the company wants to turn them into freelancers and severely cut their pay. City Opera's budget has been reduced by more than half, thanks to declining revenues (based on bad programming decisions?) and rising debt (thanks to the financial crisis and poor management?). The company was forced to leave its long-time Lincoln Center home at the Koch Theater to become a nomadic company, whose itinerary includes the two stops at BAM this winter.
