A Hub Review Reprise for Hallowe'en

Holiday greetings from the Hub Review!

Back by popular demand (sorry it's at the last minute) - are the Hub Review's recommendations for Highbrow Hallowe'en film viewing:

Yes, it's that time of year again - the time when "Scariest Movies of All Time" lists proliferate in all manner of media (the Globe just posted a particularly lame one - scariest thing about it was the idea that Globe readers have actually sat through schlock like Pet Sematary).

So far, however, I've never seen a "Scariest Élitist Movies of All Time" list, so a year or two ago I decided to leap into the gap, with a list of movies that not only make you jump but make you think, too. Because the thing is, horror movies have often been about intellectual challenge and fearless experimentation. So don't worry, you won't find any multiplex cheese on this list - no Amityville Horror or The Blob - and of course you won't find any bad American remakes of foreign classics. (When in doubt with horror, always see the foreign original!)

So without further ado, here's that original list, with a few added attractions at the end:

Cat People (1942) - recently released on DVD, this thriller (produced by Val Lewton and directed by Jacques Tourneur) is devoted entirely to indirection and poetic mood. Simone Simone is some sort of lesbian/were-woman who's transformed into a panther when aroused - and hubby is an all-American innocent who can't understand why she's afraid to do the nasty. I know, I know - killer pussy; it sounds ridiculous (and it is), but the panther attacks - particularly the one in which the beast slinks through the shimmering shadows around a swimming pool - are masterpieces of menace. The first of a short run of Lewton classics, including I Walked with a Zombie and Bedlam. (Warning: be sure to avoid the laughable 80's remake.)



Dead of Night (1945) - the scares found here feel prim today (and there's one weak attempt at "comic relief"), but the format - a kind of omnibus of tales of terror - was very influential, and its circular dream structure was both the first, and perhaps the best, of its kind. Two Twilight Zone episodes - as well as the Final Destination movies - were drawn from its (superior) vignettes, but it's the final episode, about a dummy that slowly drives its ventriloquist mad (Michael Redgrave, in YouTube above), that remains hauntingly effective.



The Night of the Hunter (1955) - Charles Laughton's only directorial effort, this very strange thriller-melodrama isn't so much scary as ominously hypnotic. Robert Mitchum makes a convincingly murderous "preacher" who's after some buried treasure - and his night-time pursuit of the children (above) who know its secret is probably the longest, and most dreamily beautiful, piece of surrealism in American cinema.

Les Diaboliques (1955) - Leave it to the French to work out the logic of the thriller to the nth degree; Henri-Georges Clouzot's gritty shocker introduced the "double twist" ending that would eventually become cinema's standard dénouement. But even before that final scene, the movie is compelling in its sordid way, with little digressions into melodrama and even (seemingly) the supernatural. Other notable films by Clouzot: the grimly cynical Le Corbeau and Le Salaire de la Peur.



Eyes Without a Face (1960) - did we mention surrealism? This macabre classic by Georges Franju (above) all but defines it. The repellent story is about a mad doctor (Pierre Brasseur) who surgically removes the faces of captured girls to replace the ravaged one of his daughter (Edith Scob); the visuals, however, are all about haunting juxtapositions and dream logic. The image of Scob's glittering eyes moving behind their inexpressive mask is unforgettable (as are the calmly-gruesome surgical sequences, it's only fair to warn you).



Psycho (1960) - yes, I know you've seen it, but it's the source of an incredible number of pop tropes; the psychotic slasher, the out-of-the-blue murder (above), the twistedly "innocent" (and probably gay) villain, the cheap-o production design and even such touches as Bernard Herrmann's "slashing" strings have all become embedded in the culture. But the movie also, believe it or not, has bizarrely tragic undercurrents, and formally, it fascinates for the way in which Hitchcock sets up one of his standard templates, then rips away its surface to reveal the frightening impulses raging beneath. Related: Vertigo, The Birds, the weirdly comic Frenzy, and Michael Powell's florid companion piece, Peeping Tom.



The Innocents (1961) - Jack Clayton's take on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is not just the most literate horror movie ever made, but perhaps the most literate movie ever made, period. Deborah Kerr is perfection as the repressed governess who may (or may not) be seeing ghosts, with weirdly mature charges who may (or may not) be possessed. The movie lacks suspense, but makes up for it with sheer beauty, the subtle craft of its dialogue, and the fact that every appearance of the ghosts (above) is an imaginative tour de force.

Don't Look Now (1973) - Nicolas Roeg's fragmented film can feel very self-indulgent - especially during some of its fractured improvisations. But stick with it: the final sequence makes up for everything with both a satisfying scare and a strangely persuasive suggestion regarding the interpolation of past and present. Plus the movie features Julie Christie naked (alas, it features Donald Sutherland naked, too).

The Shining (1980) - The Divine Stanley's one foray into pure horror sags in the middle, and never really manages to beef up Stephen King's blandly superficial novel with any real depth. But its banal, brightly-lit look, its atmosphere of floating dread, and especially its many chase sequences remain indelible. True, Jack Nicholson's over-the-top performance can seem either genuinely, or artistically, horrifying, depending on the day I see it. But once Kubrick drops his pretensions and gets down to business in the last act, he shows he's still got his mass-market chops.

The Vanishing (1988) - George Sluizer's deeply disturbing "thriller" follows both a young man obsessed with solving his girlfriend's disappearance and a local magistrate who has become similarly obsessed with his freedom to do evil. Sluizer's real theme, however, is the inevitability of death, and our poignant denial of same - a theme which his climax drives relentlessly home. WARNING - do not see the American remake (even though it was helmed by Sluizer!).



Cube (1997) - Far from perfect, this chilling Canadian cheapie (above) nevertheless operates as both a visually elegant shocker and a genuine brainteaser. Seven strangers awaken to find themselves trapped in a maze of cubes, each filled with deadly booby-traps, and slowly realize they're human guinea pigs in some enormous survival experiment. Which means there must be a means of escape. One of those satisfying movies in which plot secrets are revealed just as you, too, figure them out.



Funny Games (1997 and 2007) - Michael Haneke's doubly-filmed provocation (this time the "American remake" is a shot-by-shot reproduction; trailer for the original above) may be the most gruelingly horrific movie ever made, even though none of its violence ever appears on the screen. It's essentially the standard psychos-torture-victims-in-a-lonely-place set-up, only reversed to turn all the punishment on the audience itself. All thrills, indeed every form of catharsis is deliberately frustrated in one brilliant gambit after another - and weirdly, even when the movie goes all meta on us, it doesn't lose its overwhelming sense of dread. Horror movies are sometimes the most intellectual films around, and this is among the most brilliant of the last two decades; it basically launched Haneke's international career.

Cure (1997) - much has been made of "Japanese horror" in recent years (Ring, The Grudge, and especially the skin-crawling Audition), but Cure, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's hauntingly oblique meditation on a kind of viral psychosis, remains the subtle avatar of the form. The final scene alone is a masterpiece of offhand horrific suggestion. Related films: Pulse, Bright Future.

Irréversible (2002) - Gaspar Noe's X-rated reversed-time narrative feels like Memento gone to hell; at times it's as unwatchable as Saw, but it's never merely torture porn. Instead, it's got quite the stern intellectual spine. Not for the sexually faint-of-heart, however; this film pushes horror's conventional obsession with sexual disgust to its limit - it even opens with a brutal murder in the depths of a sex club called "Rectum." At least there won't be an American remake.

Other notables, in case you've seen all these:

Ring - Japanese original only! A case in which the crude, cheap-o production design does wonders for the content.

The Exorcist - preferably not the Director's Cut, but if you must, you must; still memorable for its general intensity and freezing climax.

Scream - a horror movie that morphs into a teen comedy; still, it's witty and smartly acted, and the opening sequence kicks serious horror ass.



Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Philip Kaufman's 70's remake is definitely worth seeing, but the 1956 original (above) is the real classic.

Rosemary's Baby - more a study in isolation - or maybe a black comedy! - than a genuine horror film, this Roman Polanski classic defines insinuated menace. Related: the more violent, hallucinatory Repulsion.



The Fearless Vampire Killers - another Polanski oddity, this weird piece of whimsy has its longeurs, but is also lavishly produced, features the suavest bloodsucker ever (Ferdy Mayne, above), and concludes with a dazzling "dance of the vampires." Somehow Sharon Tate's presence gives it all an added resonance.



The Abominable Dr. Phibes (above) - this minor classic from the early 70's has proved incredibly influential, from its tongue-in-cheek tone to its gorgeous production design. With its concept of serial killing as a sad performance art, Phibes would influence everything from Silence of the Lambs to Saw. Weirdly enough, the movie may also count as a musical. Related: the equally witty, if conceptually less-interesting, Bad-Shakespeare version, Theatre of Blood.

Alien - Ridley Scott's breakthrough, this subtly-acted creature feature is made compelling (like Phibes, and the forgotten Black Sunday) via its unforgettable production design. Related: John Carpenter's best picture (and #1 on the Globe list), the grotesque and memorably paranoid The Thing.

and finally:

The James Whale-directed trio of The Old Dark House, Frankenstein, and Bride of Frankenstein - Now that The Old Dark House is available on DVD, there's no better time to re-assess Whale's brilliantly witty, deeply dark achievement.

Todd triumphant

This is just a quick note regarding Boston Conservatory's current production of Sweeney Todd, which completes its one-weekend run this Sunday in the Conservatory's brand-new, as-yet-unnamed theatre.

Okay - first, the bad news: the new theatre is a wonderful improvement over the tatty, claustrophobic space in which Conservatory students long performed; the seats are comfy, the sight lines good, everything is gleaming and brand-new.  But alas, the space is still somewhat disappointing acoustically.  It seems the rough dimensions of the old theatre remain in place, although now there's a genuine orchestra pit (hurrah!) and the hall has been swathed in dark, high-tech surfaces that we suppose were meant to work some kind of acoustical magic on it.

But wonderful sound has yet to pop out of the acoustician's hat.  The trouble is that even with the new pit, the theatre is afflicted with balance problems - the orchestra's too loud (and the singers are still amplified over it, though not as much as they used to be).  What's more troubling is that loud as it is, the sound feels slightly flat; the place booms, but doesn't resonate.  So I'm not sure simply installing more sound absorption or whatever in the pit is the answer.  It is a puzzlement.  Boston Conservatory reportedly engaged acoustical engineer Larry Kirkegaard, who did the Shalin Liu Hall up in Rockport, to work on the space; somehow I don't think his job is over.  In the meantime, my advice to the orchestra is: play softer.

But the good news is that this production of Sweeney Todd is quite memorable, and I would advise Sondheim fans to run out and grab tickets, only there aren't any - the show sold out weeks ago.  There were a few odd artistic decisions here and there in the acting (neither the Judge nor his Beadle seemed at all formidable), but leads Robert Lance Mooney and Julie Thomas (above left) sang and acted superbly in notoriously challenging roles - although intriguingly, they traced different arcs over the course of the show.  As Mrs. Lovett, Thomas was all comic bustle, to hilariously detailed effect - but she didn't seem in touch with the darker aspects of the role (particularly during "Not While I'm Around," sung quite affectingly by Dan Rosales, when she should be contemplating murder).  Meanwhile Mooney, who seemed a bit withdrawn at first, blossomed in the second half to truly operatic heights of intensity.  There were other strong turns from Mike Heslin as Anthony, Marissa Miller as Johanna, and Daniel George as Pirelli.  And it was wonderful, after years of stripped-down chamber versions, to hear the great Jonathan Tunick's original orchestrations (even if at too high a volume).

The artistic idea that seemed to be in director Neil Donohoe's sights was the ongoing question of whether Sweeney Todd counts as musical or grand opera.  It is, of course, about 75% sung-through, I think - but on the other hand, its musical style isn't always operatic; Sondheim switches from opera to operetta to music hall and back again at a moment's notice.  And the work is probably best sung by singers with Broadway training - which essentially covers technical resources with a casual, I'm-just-tossing-this-off-like-a-regular-guy kind of articulation.  Still, what Donohoe and this cast demonstrated is that in its climaxes, Sweeney Todd reaches the musical and emotional intensity we expect of grand opera - in fact, it eclipses quite a few works in the repertory.  And much of the show was a dark hoot, to boot.  It was the kind of Conservatory production one wishes could find a longer life in some other space around town.  The only thing it really needed - like grand opera - was super-titles.  Sondheim's lyrics are just too delicious to miss, and some of them always are, even in halls with clearer acoustics than this one.  Can we all decide on that in the future?  Sweeney (and maybe all Sondheim) needs super-titles to be super.

They say history is written by the victors, so of course pop culture is, too. And our pop culture has been telling us some strange things of late; since the Iraq War, we've not only seen a hit TV show about a torture-lovin', terrorist-bustin' secret agent (24), but another hit "comedy" about a serial killer, Dexter (who of course only kills other serial killers), as well as a mammoth movie franchise, Saw, in which a brilliant mastermind viciously torments people - at one remove - for their own good.

Sense a pattern? Well, if you don't, I do; pop has shown us precisely what we've been up to the last few years - and even why, precisely, we tell ourselves we're doing it.  Only it processes this self-awareness into a perverse, congratulatory triumphalism that always lets us off the moral hook.  After all, we're the victors - right?

But Aftermath (above), at ArtsEmerson through this weekend only, is not a piece of pop culture.  So this time, there's just the news about ourselves, plain and simple, with no ironic, winking spin from Fox.  Instead there are only the words (drawn from direct interviews in Jordan) of a handful of Iraqis - from among millions - "displaced" by the war.  They speak to us, as they did to their interviewers, Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank, as hosts - albeit hosts who are heart-breakingly eager to tell their stories, to have someone, anyone, pay some attention to their plight.  And thus they  don't really accuse us; indeed, they rarely raise their voices - they even manage some sad jokes about their situation.  But then, they don't have to raise their voices: what they have to say would be devastating even at a whisper.

Among them are cooks, and pharmacists, and artists, along with an imam, and even a hot-shot dermatologist.  All of them share one thing, however: they hated Saddam.  But they had learned to live their lives around his cruelty; they "knew where the red lines were," one explains.  "We had some space."

That is, until the sky people (that would be us) decided they cared above all about bringing democracy to tyrannies - but not Wal*Mart suppliers like communist China, rather desolate dictatorships (without air forces), sitting atop large oil fields, that we could crush without instituting a draft.  And as a result, these people's lives fell apart.  The litany of Aftermath is a grim one - the shrapnel still lodged in an eye, the nephew gunned down before his mother, the imprisonment in Abu Ghraib, the son left for dead in the garbage dump - but it only occasionally lapses into political pronouncement.  Instead, there's a dazed sense of question in the air, a palpable sense of the unbelievability of the whole disaster; "Why did you kill my nephew?" one man asks us.  "Who was responsible - and for what reason??"

If you find yourself squirming at such a question - because, of course, the answer is "We're responsible - we killed your nephew because we were looking for vengeance for 9/11!" - then maybe there's some hope for you, and perhaps for the whole situation.  Maybe.  But I have to point out a key flaw in Aftermath: although it raises a terribly pointed political question, it offers not even a glimpse of how it might be answered.  Many of us sky people always opposed the Iraq War, but as we survey the ensuing human wreckage, we simply don't see a way forward.  And nobody in Aftermath, does either.  It may be that there's no solution possible, and that all we can do is bear witness to the suffering we've caused.  Certainly that alone is a legitimate cultural endeavor - although given that gap, skeptics may wonder whether this piece of "verbatim theatre" counts as a legitimate form of "art."  The performances here are all grippingly subtle, but have Jensen and Blank shaped the material as convincingly as they could?  Frankly, I'm not sure.  But if Aftermath isn't a work of art, at least it feels like a small step toward a work of art; and maybe that's all we have.

And we need that art, because it's unlikely we've seen the full aftermath of "Shock and Awe."  There's one moment in the performance in which the veil of hospitality drops, or is torn open, when the imam who was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib at last raises his voice (in the evening's most powerful performance, by Ted Sod), and predicts that we will pay for all this - or rather that our children will.  His jeremiad is immediately withdrawn, his anger extinguished, and apologies made, of course; our translator (the gently sly Fajer al-Kaisi) papers things over.  But history has a way of proving such predictions true; if 9/11 was our thank-you for decades of interfering with Saudi politics, then one can only imagine what kind of fall-out lies ahead for us.

Spiro's Dickens of a show

You can't fault Spiro Veloudos (at left, embedded in Dickens) for lacking ambition. In previous seasons, he has squeezed Sondheim's Follies into his intimate theatre, the Lyric Stage - with mixed results.  Now he has attempted an even bigger project - David Edgar's six-hour adaptation (slimmed down from eight and a half!) of Dickens' mammoth novel Nicholas Nickleby.  The "long" version, of course, took America by storm in the mid-eighties, in a triumphant RSC production helmed by Trevor Nunn.  Since then, though, the show has been rarely seen, due to its cost and logistics (even in the slimmer version, there are something like 150 roles!).

So I'll just cut to the chase - does Spiro bag his big game this time around, or is Nicholas Nickleby the second of his follies?  Happily, judging from Part I, the answer is "Yes (mostly)!" - even though Veloudos has a problem right at the center of his production.  His lead, the up-and-coming Jack Cutmore-Scott, proves a confidently bland (if handsome) hero, while as his smarter sister, Elizabeth A. Rimar tries her best to look tormented but if anything is slightly less interesting.  Meanwhile the great comedienne Maureen Keiller does better as their mother, but for some reason misses the wry comic edge to her character (she's sweet, but a bit silly).  The point is that the Nicklebys are nervous, delicate people, unsure of their way in the world but basically good, who aren't quick to demonstrate courage or pluck (although they have plenty of both). Their adventures represent, as Dickens's heroes' often do, the clash between our inner, nobler sensibilities and the machinations of the cold, cruel world.   Right now that's not happening, because none of the leads are suggesting much affectionate inner life, and so in a way, the play's arc isn't happening either.   But luckily, around this unhappy family Veloudos has cast most of Boston's best character actors, and they pretty much play the dickens out of a cascade of unforgettable personalities, and so carry the show.

Did I say cascade?  I meant torrent.  A torrent that's also a tonic, by the way.  For now seems like just the right time to get re-acquainted with a promethean talent like Dickens, when we're getting awfully used to carefully crafted little plays about a handful of characters in which we slowly, and indirectly, get around to pondering questions like "Did Mother ever love me?" or "What do I really think about my breasts?"

Next to this kind of thing, Dickens looks like a font of invention.  Perhaps because he was a font of invention - indeed, in Nicholas Nickleby, the characters (and sometimes the caricatures) keep coming, and coming, and coming, each more sharply drawn than the last.  The names alone tell you as much: Wackford Squeers, Madame Mantolini, Miss Snevellicci, Mulberry Hawk - who could forget these sardonic sobriquets, much less the wickedly sketched personages attached to them?  Even the hero's name is a rippling, rhythmic mnemonic.  And the plot - it keeps coming and coming, too.  Innocence betrayed!  Death cheated! Dickens is always a page-turner, in a highly theatrical way, and that drumbeat of narrative suspense makes Nicholas Nickleby inherently gripping.

Indeed, let me repeat myself.  Absorbed by the misadventures of the innocent Nicholas, I was struck again and again by just how thin our dramatic concerns, and even aspirations, have become.  Dickens wrote for maximum emotional impact - so he's never afraid of melodrama, although in his hands it achieves a nearly tragic pitch.  And while he may tiptoe around sex (he makes up for it with plenty of lusty comedy), he's quite blunt about much that make us blush today - things like money, and class, and who's got how much of either, and why this should be so.  Writers like Wharton and Fitzgerald used to be able to write about these things in America, but now, frankly, money has become to us what the down-and-dirty was to the Victorians; we just can't talk about it!  What's even more striking is that Dickens is so unafraid of villainy - in fact he revels in it; he's quite comfortable with characters who are utterly irredeemable (just like in real life), and so Nicholas Nickleby teems with rogues and charlatans and cowards and sadists who wander the wide world without explanation or apology (just like in real life!).  And the hypocrisy - was there ever a greater poet of Christian hypocrisy than Dickens?  Indeed, his brilliant skewering of pious self-interest may be what makes him most relevant today.

Although frankly, it's the political dimension of Nickleby that right now Veloudos may be artfully dodging.  But before I go any further - it's time for full disclosure.  I actually saw the original version of Nickleby, and not in America, either, but in London - back when Ben Kingsley, Graham Crowden, and Timothy Spall were still working with the great Roger Rees, David Threlfall, and the rest of the brilliant cast that later toured the States.  I have to admit, I have rarely been as electrified by any performance as I was by that show, and as I watched the Lyric version whole scenes from the original seemed to leap up again before my eyes, fresh with the same fire that flickered within them thirty years ago.  Even the set (below, with Will Lyman, Maureen Keiller, Jack Cutmore-Scott, and Elizabeth A. Rimar) inevitably recalled the original to life.

Photo: Mark S. Howard

So I'm in the odd position of judging the Lyric against a production that even now seems to me close to the most perfect theatrical experience I've ever had. And is that really fair? After all, Trevor Nunn, et. al., are generally considered a pretty exceptional crowd. But even compared against their legend, I have to say the Lyric has done well.  There are one or two missteps (the Mantolinis work hard, but are miscast, and is doubling Wackford Squeers and Mulberry Hawk a bit confusing?), but generally Spiro serves up a tasty smorgasboard of Dickensiana.  Will Lyman etched a chillingly low-key Ralph Nickleby (Nicholas's cruelly calculating uncle), and Nigel Gore almost made me forget about Ben Kingsley as the brutal Wackford Squeers, in no small part because he got great back-up from Kerry Dowling as his formidable wife and Sasha Castroverde (who I'm glad to see break into the "professional" sphere after lighting up the fringe for a few years) as his delusional daughter.  Under their cruel usage, Jason Powers put a more comic spin on Smike than David Threlfall did in the original, but was still very moving.  Meanwhile, at the edges of the show, Leigh Barrett painted a beautiful miniature of the miniature portraitist Miss La Creevy, while the versatile Michael Steven Costello and Daniel Berger-Jones made the most of a dozen different roles apiece.  Likewise Larry Coen sliced the ham deliciously thick as Vincent Crummles (he of the famous Theatrical Troupe), and as his untalented daughter, the aging "Infant Phenomenon," Alycia Sacco was actually funnier than I remember the role being in Trevor Nunn's version.  Perhaps best of all was the reliable Peter A. Carey as the poignant Newman Noggs, who again I thought was as good as the original (the redoubtable Edward Petherbridge, who won a Tony for it).  When I first saw Part I back in London, I was skeptical going in (Four hours?? I thought), but then went straight to the box office at intermission to get a ticket to Part II.  I'm betting most of the Lyric's patrons will do the same thing.

More fun with Orion

Thanks for the emails about the other nebulae in Orion; I'm aware of them, and here's a cool photo of a few! The bright stars to the left form Orion's belt - at the top corner is Zeta Orionis, or "Alnitak" (its original Arabic name, meaning "girdle"), which happens to be a triple star, followed by  Epsilon Orionis, or "Alnilam," ("string of pearls") and Delta Orionis, or "Mintaka," (or "belt") a double star.  Just to the right of Mintaka you can see the tiny, rearing head of the "Horsehead Nebula." To the upper right is "the Great Nebula in Orion," which is visible to the naked eye, and at roughly 1,344 light years away, is the closest region of star formation to the Earth.  Yes, as you can see, heaven is a busy place.  Tomorrow: the Lyric's Nicholas Nickleby.

Life with Mother

Three for the road: Carole Monferdini, John Wojda and Kate Udall in Four Places.  Photos by Meghan Moore.

Joel Drake Johnson's Four Places (at the Merrimack Rep through November 7) has one of those deceptively simple titles that seem all too easily explained. At one level, the play's moniker bluntly refers to the fact that it occurs across four settings (a car interior, then a restaurant's waiting area, dining room, and ladies' room). But when one considers the script also features just four characters, one senses in its sobriquet a deeper, colder statement: the dysfunctional players of this desolate drama are always apart - always in four separate places - even when they're together.

And it's this sense of mutual isolation that Charles Towers' fine production honors, in its delicately grim way - under his direction, the characters, though seemingly all too familiar with each other's every flaw and failing, nevertheless float in a moral twilight zone in which nothing about any of them can ever be precisely pinned down.  The story spine of the script is so simple that it can be encapsulated in a sentence: the unhappy children of an unhappy marriage stage an intervention to prevent their mother from hurting - or possibly even killing - their father.  But the precise circumstances that brought them to this pass remain always slightly vague; the witness to Mom's actions may be unreliable (tellingly, she's called "schizophrenic"), said actions, even as described (half-smothering with a pillow), were aborted anyway, and perhaps the victim has been begging to die.  What Mom did, and what she knew, and when she did it and when she knew it, are all hard to parse precisely.  Not that Brother and Sis are any different - both of them have curiously unstable back stories, and it seems even the waitress who attends them may actually be a half-sibling, although then again, maybe she's not; we never know for sure.

I do want to say at this point, however, that most of the reviewers of Four Places have seemed quite confident about exactly what transpires in this streamlined, yet mysterious, little drama; indeed, Four Places may be the most widely - and blithely - misinterpreted local production I've come across in some time.  Jenna Scherer in the Herald, for instance, declared that its conflicts were "instantly recognizable in that all-American family way." Really? I'm not even exactly sure what said conflicts are.  But in the Globe, Sandy MacDonald likewise confidently intoned that Johnson's Mom "is a monster, of the garden-variety sort." Indeed, even at its Chicago premiere, Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones announced that Johnson had forged a world that was "thoroughly credible and recognizable and raw." Yeah, and that's thoroughly wrong.  (For the record, the print critics hardly had a corner on misperception in this case. The "Wicked Local" blog, for instance, insisted that "one chilling truth after another reveals itself in brittle pronouncements." Uh-huh.)

Sigh. Sometimes people ask why I write this blog.  Well, this is one reason why: I have the rare ability to accurately interpret plays! Although at least all these critics liked the show, even if they didn't understand it. (What that means, I think I'll leave intentionally vague, in the spirit of this particular script.)

But back to Four Places, the despairing theme of which, I think, is the impossibility of real connection - given our limited knowledge of each other - and yet the endless need for it, particularly within the (four) emotional walls of the family. It's more than possible that something serious did indeed go down between Mom and Dad; and so something serious must be done. And yet that action - or intervention - implies issues of judgment that not only play hacky-sack with parent-child dynamics, but require a kind of moral authority that no one in the play can legitimately claim.

All in the (extended) family - Kate Udall, Laura Latreille, Carole Monferdini, and John Wojda.

And at the same time, what seems clear from the text is that no, Mom is not a monster, of any variety; if anyone's a monster here, in fact, it's probably Dad; her description of his behavior, and his begging for his own death, are heart-rending, and we also believe her when she says she could never go through with assisted suicide (although she adds, with a hiss, "If this is any of your business!").  Indeed, in what counts as probably the play's core thematic statement, Mother goes further with her children: "Your dad and I actually have a life outside yours. We have a relationship that is not part, any part of who you are. We have our own little universe into which NO one else is invited - a secret life . . ." Yet tellingly, a moment later she's begging her daughter to reveal her own "secret life" and excoriating her son for his "little white lies;" Four Places is not so much a glimpse into American Gothic as Chicago's take on No Exit.

Although in the end, Johnson's play may be more poignant than despairing; for despite the many recriminations exchanged between this mother and her children, something like love still binds them, and something like reconciliation still seems possible between them. "I don't love you anymore!" Mom tells her judges as she retreats into her lonely home, but as she gazes back through the window, her offspring know different. "Jesus, those faces!" her daughter marvels. "Look - she still loves us."

It's a credit to Towers's uniformly excellent cast - John Wojda, Kate Udall, Carole Monferdini, and Laura Latreille - that such internally-contradictory moments are so precisely limned. This is another superb ensemble in a season crowded with them. And Johnson's play is certainly a worthy one - although at times it does seem to be marking time in its action as it works out its carefully balanced themes; it felt to me like a kind of stepping-stone play for a writer who may be testing wider, deeper waters. Or perhaps it's that director Towers has staged the script in almost too considered a manner; I felt that a few of the bombs dropped in the show should have detonated more loudly - or at least loudly enough to make it immediately clear why Mom must retreat to the ladies' room. And Towers seems unsure of precisely how to deploy Barb, the too-attentive waitress who may be Dad's illegitimate daughter; somehow the siren call of her sweetness, its "false" familial aspect, never came clear thematically. Still, this production counts as another feather in Merrimack's cap - a subtly-shaded gray feather, perhaps, but a beauty nonetheless.

Big news at the Ballet

"The Kingdom of Shades" sequence from "Night of Stars." Boston Ballet photos by Gene Schiavone.

This weekend brought Boston Ballet's annual "Night of Stars" gala, which is always a pleasure - this time around, though, there were some real surprises in store; the company has grown its ranks (including Boston Ballet II) by 19 dancers, and "Night" marked our first peek at a few of them.

The good news (and actually the big news of the evening) is that the Ballet seems to have chosen well - and all but closed the last gap (among its men) in its "world class" status.  New danseurs Lasha Khozashvili and Joseph Gatti both made stunning debuts, Khozashvili in a brilliant new work by Helen Pickett, and Gatti in a virtuosic spin through the leaps of Le Corsaire that all but drove the crowd wild.  These talented guys will clearly refresh (and perhaps bring a competitive edge to) a bench that has sometimes been a bit uneven.  Of the new women, only Adiarys Almeida was featured prominently (below left with Gatti, in a jump that gives you some idea of the spring in his step), and while she didn't throw off many sparks of personality, she nevertheless sparkled technically.

Alas, the bad news was that the corps de ballet, which has improved markedly over the past few seasons, wobbled noticeably in its big number, "The Kingdom of Shades" from the upcoming La Bayadère. The dance - much of which takes place on a long, sloping ramp (at top) - is a killer series of slow (very slow) arabesques and rotations; it's one of the most difficult, and utterly exposed, sequences for the corps in the repertory - hardcore corps, if you will. And the girls just weren't ready - they didn't like that ramp, not one bit, but even once they were on solid ground things never quite cohered. Not that this is easy! But "The Kingdom of Shades" may have been one gamble the Ballet shouldn't have made.

Yet as if to compensate, the Ballet's established stars shone brightly.  Larissa Ponomarenko returned to the stage after a hiatus last year, opposite Khozashvili in the intense "Layli O Majnun" (at right) from Pickett, and demonstrated yet again that she's not only one of the Ballet's greatest dancers but its greatest actress, too.  The shock was that Khozashvili demonstrated a similar psychological depth; these two Russians are naturals together, and the Pickett should be stunning when it "officially" premieres next spring.

Elsewhere, the oft-imperious Kathleen Breen Combes seemed to open up a whole new wing of her stage presence as a glowing Terpsichore in an excerpt from Balanchine's Apollo (against Pavel Gurevich), and Whitney Jensen was eloquently light and free in Mr. B's "Tarantella."  The great Balanchine kept on coming, too - James Whiteside and Misa Kuranaga were exquisite in his "Theme and Variations" from Jewels, and the company danced elegantly in its dazzling finale (as they had earlier in Jorma Elo's "Plan to B," a crazy quilt of swiveling moves that basically sets Attention Deficit Disorder to dancing).   There was even a striking premiere, choreographed by dancer Yury Yanowsky, to a new piece of music by Berklee grad Lucas Vidal.  The up-and-coming Mr. Vidal came up with an appealing score that sounded a bit like Philip Glass with romantic film music threaded through it; it was derivative, but hinted at the development of its own original musical niche.  Mr. Yanowsky doesn't quite have his own choreographic voice, yet, either, but his dance had an aggressive, off-hand athleticism that was exciting and highly watchable, and drew committed, fearless performances from Rie Ichikawa, John Lam, and Jaime Diaz.

The evening's guest stars were Wendy Whelan, a long-time light at NYCB, and Damian Smith, of San Francisco Ballet, performing Whelan's signature piece, Christopher Wheeldon's heartbreaking ode to dysfunctional romance, "After the Rain."  I've seen Whelan do this before, and as always, she was peerless, and Smith provided perfect support.  Small-scaled rather than grand in its melancholy, it offered a haunting note of contrast to what was generally a night of high-stepping triumph.

Baker's Plays

I think it occurred to me the second time I found myself listening to the air conditioner run (above) in Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation (produced by the Huntington at the Caldwell Pavilion through November 14):

At what point does mumblecore become inaudible?

Now by that I don't mean to suggest this up-and-coming young playwright has nothing to say; far from it, in fact. She's a very intelligent and thoughtful - although perhaps not all that original - dramatist. My friend Art Hennessey has already admonished me, "Now don't go all Sarah Ruhl on Annie Baker's ass, Tom, she's a real playwright!" And she is a real playwright - whether she warrants a three-play retrospective here in Beantown I'm not yet sure, but I'll keep an open mind.

Certainly she has been given a superb production by the Huntington. Director Melia Bensussen is almost too attuned to Baker's don't-say-anything-aloud-that-would-like-not-be-cool aesthetic, and has capably drawn from Circle's circle of actors a suite of performances that are just about perfect in their nuanced indirection. I'm actually in awe of how much was suggested, vs. how little was stated, in this show; only a mime troupe could have said less. And, as with mime, we're suddenly impressed when we perceive - or rather piece together - the shape of dramatic incident moving behind the play's utterly nondescript surface.

This, of course, is an old trick. It's basically the same ploy as Chekhov's gambit of having someone's life smashed up casually, over breakfast; although to be honest, Baker more often reminded me (wait for it) of William Inge - indeed, Circle Mirror Transformation is essentially Bus Stop redux, set in a rehearsal room instead of a snowbound diner: a group of ordinary characters are thrust together (here, in a community drama class) and over time we learn everything about their emotional and sexual lives. Baker's gimmick is that we discover almost all of this "inadvertently," through theatre games the class repetitively plays.

Again, this is hardly a new idea. But Baker has a very precise ear, so we often enjoy hearing old tropes updated into the precise hesitations of millennial newspeak. When one of Baker's characters says a line like "Oh, yeah - no. Yeah. No," the context has been so carefully set up (and the performances here are so specific) that we know exactly what she means. And when the characters "play" each other, or trade "secrets" in class, we get to read two sets of tea leaves (at least) - both what the characters understand at this point about each other, and what they don't: in short, whether they're ahead of or behind us as their own audience.

Of course it helps in appreciating all this (as it did with The Method Gun) if you're a theatre geek; otherwise you may wonder sometimes what's going on - when the class launched into the "counting" exercise for the umpteenth time, for instance, my partner whispered to me, "What the HELL are these people doing???" Even he, however, began to get into the mumblecore groove, as Baker's poignant hidden drama made itself steadily clearer. Lives are, indeed, smashed up casually in Circle Mirror Transformation, and this is inevitably moving.

Still, it's worth pointing out, I think, that in the end this is elevated melodrama - indeed, Baker's script is at least as melodramatic as Bus Stop, it's just at infinite pains to disguise that fact. Not that there's anything wrong with that.  And if I like Inge, I should therefore like Baker too, right?

Well, maybe.  I was certainly touched by Circle Mirror Transformation, but doubts still gnawed at me about its author. She's certainly better than Sarah Ruhl, but she's also being "launched" in much the same way, and by some of the same people.  And Baker's smart, but she's hardly Chekhov, and sometimes I felt the reverent subtlety of this production was designed to fool me into thinking she is. And I found myself working hard to feel any sense of real discovery about the fictional New-Age Grover's Corners (dubbed "Shirley, VT," although it's no secret it's actually "Amherst, MA") in which her shy young slips of plays occur. I felt shocks of emotion whenever one of the sad arcs Baker's characters trace came clear; but then I quickly realized, "Oh, yeah - I already like, um, knew that, Annie. Yeah; no.  Yeah."

And there's a certain lack of self-awareness in the play's seeming confidence that the drama-school techniques it depends on "make you a better actor;" certainly as the theatre games grow more and more personal, it strikes us that Baker's crunchy class leader should know better than to play with the kind of emotional fire that's only appropriate to committed actors (don't try these tricks at home!).  In a way, the problem with the play is summed up unwittingly by the authorial factotum Baker places within it - the smart but withdrawn "Lauren" constantly, if self-consciously, questions the madness of the class's method ("Are we going to like do any real acting?" she finally asks).   It slowly dawns on us, though, that Lauren kind of serves as an inadvertent metaphor for the play she's in; like it, she draws attention to herself by struggling to disappear into the woodwork.  Yet  she comes around in the end; in a sweet, flash-forward coda (expertly limned by Marie Polizzano, in a performance that steals scene after scene from this polished ensemble) Lauren admits she now sees the light about the awesomeness of the class and how, like, everything changed but in the end everything turned out for the best, you know?  Hmmm. I'm not sure a great playwright would be so sure; in the end, Circle Mirror Transformation seems to validate rather than challenge its audience's quirky world view.  But I'll soon get two more chances to adjust that opinion.

Songs of a summer night

Metro Stage's production of Sweeney Todd last year is by now a local legend (its leads stole IRNEs from far-more established groups), so the question surrounding their current production of A Little Night Music (which closes Saturday) was: could Sondheim lightning strike twice for this up-and-coming little theatre troupe?

And the answer is: yes - and no. Vocally, this production is actually stronger than Todd - in fact it's as strong, or stronger, than any musical production I've heard this year. Director Maryann Zschau - who starred in the last local outing of Night Music, at the Lyric - clearly understood from that experience the challenge of this score: poised on the cusp of operetta (or even opera) it relies heavily on ensembles, perhaps more than any other Sondheim musical, and so she has scoured the local landscape for singing talent to fill out its many demanding roles. Luckily for us, the cast she assembled is a vocal knockout, with dazzling turns from Robert Case, Jim Fitzpatrick, Tracy Nygard, Shana Dirik, Joelle Cross and particularly John Coons, who sounds like a baritone yet has an astoundingly high and powerful tenor top.

But alas, Zschau has generally directed these wonderful singers in a rather broad community-theatre style, and her blocking is sometimes apt, but sometimes flat. She has also made a few choices I didn't really understand (was Madame Armfeldt out of her wheelchair because the stage was so small?). And her leading man, Jim Fitzpatrick, though a likable presence, simply isn't invested in his character's conflicts, either broadly or subtly. Meanwhile production values are about what you'd expect from a young theatre company - although the instrumental ensemble, tucked away up in the balcony, was generally pretty polished.

There is some appealing acting around the edges of the production - Lenni Kmiec had hilarious attitude as the sexy Petra, for instance. And like Todd, Night Music is blessed with two great - perhaps even towering - central performances. Shana Dirik, who I felt was as good as Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett last year, proves that performance was no fluke in a really stunning turn as Charlotte, the bitter wife of Sondheim's romantic roundelay (which is derived, and slightly coarsened, from Bergman's wonderful Smiles of a Summer Night). Ms. Dirik is hardly a conventional leading lady, but she has that mysterious something extra that all great performers have, and her solo in "Every Day a Little Death" I have to say was mesmerizing; she's simply one of the best singing actresses in the city. The surprise this time around was her co-star, Tracy Nygard, who did wonderfully delicate work as the world-weary Desiree Armfeldt. Ms. Nygard's moving rendition of "Send in the Clowns" was a kind of small miracle - beautifully sung, yet emotionally precise - great singing, great acting, great Sondheim.

Canadian History X

Hate is perhaps the most dramatic emotion.  Which may be why Cherry Docs, David Gow's meditation on the redemption of a Canadian skinhead (now at the New Rep), lights up when its villain lets rip with one of his scary Aryan Nation tirades.  What's most unsettling about these outbursts, however, is that this Nazi bad boy - who could be facing multiple life sentences for the vicious (if accidental) killing of a man he calls a "Paki" - is anguished over letting his cause down.  "I want to keep the Movement OUT of this!" he even wails in torment to his lawyer.

It's at moments like this - when we realize that hatred is, in its way, a form of twisted idealism - that Cherry Docs seems to stir with a disturbing sense of intellectual freedom.  Elsewhere, however, it's somewhat thin liberal soup, although I feel very bad about saying so.  I hammered the New Rep for their last production, but they're a class act, and invited me back to see this one - and so I very much wanted to like this well-intentioned drama, which has been produced and acted with earnest, committed intensity.

But alas, it often seemed to me like a kind of lesson plan - although it's certainly a worthy lesson.  Indeed, what's most appealing about Cherry Docs is the educational value of its grounding of the message of redemption in the Jewish faith.  Yes, before you roll your eyes, Gows has dusted off one of the oldest tricks in the the melodramatic playbook, and made his two-hander a clash of polar opposites, rather like one of those anti-racist movies where Sidney Poitier is chained to Richard Widmark or some other psycho cracker.  In Cherry Docs, it's up to a Jewish lawyer (Benjamin Evett) to save the skin of this Nazi punk (Tim Eliot, both above left), but Gow is smart enough to tease out the irony of the situation ("In a perfect world, I'd have you eliminated!" the defendant snarls to his lone ally).  And it's a welcome surprise to see a play which simply tosses the old Judeo-Christian dichotomy of Old-Testament-judgment vs. New-Testament-forgiveness in the cultural dumpster where it belongs (I admit, The Merchant of Venice has something to do with this long-lived misconception).  Jesus himself, of course, was a Jew, and the Christian message of atonement and redemption is so intrinsic to Judaism that it's actually embedded in the religious calendar (which Gow references repeatedly).  Everybody who loves Judaism (as I do) knows this, but I'm often struck by how many Christians imagine that the duty to forgive  counts as their own special spiritual merit badge (however little they may deserve it).

But if all this makes Gow's play socially worthwhile, it makes it artistically a bit schematic - we can feel the playwright dashing about "tagging" this or that moral concept; and the same diagrammatic sensibility extends to the characters, too.  We can predict just about every emotional transition in Cherry Docs just before it happens, and yet neither protagonist seems to add up to a living, breathing human being. Gow's Jewish lawyer tells us bluntly, for instance, that he sees some hope of redemption in his creepy client - but we don't really see how; the author hasn't really written that in; but we appreciate that this is a necessary plot point.  And sure enough, the kid is indeed redeemed, right on cue.

It doesn't help that this capable cast has been directed by David R. Gammons, whose vogue among local critics continues to mystify me.  Gammons can be counted on to give his productions a harshly striking look; this time around we get his signature whiter-than-white lighting and a remarkable set that's been pulled back to a sharp vanishing point by designer Jenna McFarland Lord. (This is serious, dangerous stuff, a Gammons design always seems to say.) But like the playwright, this director often leaves his actors adrift - fortunately for him, he's usually working with very good ones, who can cover for him. Here Ben Evett and newcomer Tim Eliot throw just about everything they've got into their respective roles, and make them work, minute-to-minute, by being aggressive and vulnerable by turns, and relying on the occasional bout of histrionics (they break chairs, they throw things, etc.). These two convince us this is a high-stakes smackdown; but any sense of organic personality is somehow missing from their performances - and that, I'm afraid, is the job of the director and the writer. And without it, Cherry Docs can't really get beyond its worthy message.

Beethoven goes baroque

Ludwig van with a manuscript sketch of the Seventh Symphony.

Boston is a funny little town in which the music press is absolutely determined to not tell the public the news. For years, the city has been bustling with early music activity, and by now it boasts three or four of the best period music organizations in America (H&H, the Boston Early Music Festival, Emmanuel Music and Boston Baroque). These days, it's widely recognized as probably the center of period performance in the country.

Yet most Bostonians are utterly innocent of this fact. They don't know anything about what probably counts as their hometown's major musical achievement of the last few decades. Because they're never told about it. Oh, the local press dutifully notes, and even reviews, the zillions of period music concerts that now dot the city's calendar. But they cover the scene the way they covered the build-up to the Iraq War - they dutifully record the detail, but resolutely refuse to connect the dots. By now, there should have been cover stories in the Globe, and of course a special on WGBH - which I know is a laughable proposition right there; WGBH doesn't give a damn about its home city's arts scene, we all know that. Its idea of "arts programming" is Jared trying to talk Emily into spending her beer money on the ballet!

Swaddled thus in blissful ignorance, Bostonians are happy to imagine their music scene is precisely what the local deep pockets tell them it is. In this la-la land, the BSO is the big, and indeed only, artistic game in town, and there an end. Now don't get me wrong; James Levine is a fantastic craftsman, and when he's around, the BSO sounds fabulous. It's very pretty - and oh my god the passion, etc.! We all know the drill - which doesn't change the fact that the BSO is a sideshow of the Met and essentially a showcase for the very best suburban music that educated money can buy.

Meanwhile the smart money goes elsewhere - and one place it goes is Boston Baroque, which last weekend essayed a program with the Big Kahuna of period music squarely in its sights - the program ended with Ludwig van's famous Seventh Symphony. Beethoven, to those unfamiliar, is both boundary and watershed for the early music movement. He stands at the cusp of the explosion in musical technology which essentially created the "modern" orchestra, just as he stood on the hinge between the classical and romantic periods. So does he belong in the modern or period musical camp?  Mainstream symphonies are loathe to give him up, as they've had to cede Handel, and Haydn, and even much of Mozart, to early music specialists. And yet I find over and over that the most exciting and revelatory Beethoven I hear is done on period rather than modern instruments.

So I was hoping for big things from Boston Baroque - and they mostly didn't disappoint, although conductor Martin Pearlman did get carried away with the whole "apotheosis of dance" thang that everybody likes to cite about the Seventh these days, and let the last two movements get repetitively loud and bangy. (This is probably in the notation, I know - but remember Beethoven was practically deaf by the time he wrote this symphony!) There was more exciting work early on - particularly in the first movement, in which Pearlman pulled off the strange trick of showing us how Beethoven slowly assembles his trademark sound from the different sections of the orchestra (in contrast, modern instruments, with their smooth, glossy surfaces, always blend too much into one another). And for once the rough edge of the natural horns sounded absolutely wonderful - indeed the lusty, raucous volleys from the brass resounded in Jordan Hall like the calls of post horns across the 19th-century countryside.

Beethoven wasn't the only big name on the program, though, which opened with Mozart's Symphony No. 33, a charming early work that the orchestra played with clean, elegant brio. The symphony all but brims with melodic ideas, and is lit by Mozart's youthful confidence, but its development isn't particularly challenging or even interesting - you get the feeling the young genius just didn't have time for that (and who can blame him?).

Pearlman returned to Beethoven for the evening's second highlight, the solo scene "Ah! perfido" sung by local gal-made-good Barbara Quintiliani (at left).  Ms. Quintiliani is blessed with a big, gorgeous voice that can be lusciously ripe one moment then thrillingly stern the next - which is perfect for "Ah! perfido," in which the soprano turns on a dime between condemning her faithless lover and pathetically begging for pity - or even his return.  Her later excerpts from Cherubini's “Medée," played less to that dichotomy, and were a little meandering too, and so were less gripping.  Even here, though, Quintiliani made a powerful impression - and left me longing to hear her in Verdi, where it seems her mix of emotional honey and intellectual authority might reach its greatest pitch.  We don't hear Verdi much in town these days, more's the pity - maybe some local opera company will catch Quintiliani and decide to change that.  At any rate, she deserves to be a bigger star, and something tells me someday she will be.

Bowles doesn't bowl you over

If you haven't guessed by now, this is the week the Hub Review beats up on the competition.  This post features my old bête noire, Bill Marx, who let it be known that those of us who were taken with Nicky Martin's Bus Stop had it all wrong - the far better revival in town was In the Summer House, the single play by Jane Bowles (wife of the more-famous Paul), which the BU Fringe Festival is mounting with a student cast through October 23.  To Bill, In the Summer House was "a marvelous script" that is "far greater than anything Inge wrote for the theatre" because it "purposely uses estrangement to examine the ambiguities of social and psychological constriction as well as the smothering attachments of parent and child." He also raved over its "attempt to dramatize a ferocious will-to-control born of spiritual emptiness" which proved "magically unsettling."

Yowza! I'm always up for ferocious, you know, whatever he said; I had to check it out.

So is In the Summer House really better than anything William Inge ever wrote?  Of course not. It's an intriguing piece of juvenilia, but not much more, by a woman (at left) who might have developed into an interesting playwright if ill health hadn't cut her career tragically short.  It's hardly at the level of Inge, and it's pretentious babble to pretend it is. Mind you, it's perfectly suitable for revival by an academic festival, because it's of some academic interest - it clumsily prefigures certain surreal effects of the Theatre of the Absurd.  And of course those with an interest in Bowles are urged to go.

Certainly the script exhibits unusual formal quirks - there's an indeterminacy to its style and action that's original.  But this doesn't really add up to an intellectual armature or anything; we're not talking Beckett here.  Someday, of course, Bowles's drifting, unstable mise-en-scène might have amounted to more; artists often don't truly understand their own material when they begin writing, and watching Summer House, I felt a bit like I was watching something like one of Tennessee Williams's early drafts of Orpheus Descending.  There's a streak of listless unhappiness to Bowles, too, that feels somehow individual.  But there's much here that's awkward and superficial - as well as self-indulgently weird - and at any rate, the conflicts between mother and daughter that Bowles investigates are hardly news.

Still, the production, like the play, had its moments; the cast of BU students was confident and polished, and there was a buzz of talented energy in the air.  But you could tell the kids thought the show was kind of weird, too; there was a suppressed giggle behind everything that didn't allow the alienated twistedness you felt Bowles might be getting at to really take hold.   And director Ellie Heyman's work was inventive but uneven; she likes to "deploy" her "space," which meant actors were often clambering over obstacles or writhing on the floor - but she made up for everything with a truly marvelous final image, in which Bowles's beleaguered heroine leapt into a beautifully abstract sea.  For some, this alone might tip the balance in favor of the show - but if not, don't say I didn't warn you.

Isaac I vs. Henry V

Good morning, class! 

So Isaac Butler has made another idiotic pronouncement. What else is new?  We already know the blog host and trust-funded bon vivant (having a bad hair day, above) feels that Shakespeare's overrated - so what's the big deal if he has decided that Henry V is proof positive of the Bard's mediocrity?

Well, it's not that big a deal, actually - and yes, yes, I promised to never read his silly blog!  But the post was staring me in the face on Art's blogroll, and besides, as Isaac himself might say (as he gamely suggests in a backpedaling later post), his position is interesting to study.  It's "a fruitful thing to discuss."

And why?  Because Butler's not just an Internet busybody these days - he's also actually teaching Shakespeare, to college students, at the University of Minnesota.

I know, I know - this is a bit like Lamarck explaining evolution, or Pope Urban offering a seminar on Galileo! (I could go on and on.)

But is Butler's current post (and position) just a bizarrely ironic quirk of fate - or a kind of cultural harbinger?  I'm hoping for the former, of course, but I fear the latter.  Because Isaac's such an exquisitely-detailed millennial type; it's like he was designed by computers and sent back from the future to warn us or something.

Hold on, though - back to his points against Henry V; they're so cliched they're somehow delicious. According to Isaac, Henry V sucks because:

1) There's no suspense - we know how it's going to turn out.  It's actually history!

2) The characterizations are bad.  So what if we're still talking about them 400 years after the fact?  They're still  uninteresting, you know what I mean? Like in that way David Byrne talked about.

3)  It's not that funny, and sometimes the jokes are mean.

4) What's with the plot?  Yeah, even though it's history, it should still have a plot, just like it should still have suspense!  Duh.  That's obvious.

5)  The Battle of Agincourt is not sufficiently awesome.  There's really nothing more to say.

6) The French aren't badass villains, either.  Seriously, they're not.  Just try hissing them, you'll feel silly.

And yes, that's the professor's lecture on Henry V!  I hope the sophomores are feeling edified by now, because I'm not.

Even though I have to admit - everything Professor Butler says is true. I mean, as I read his post, I could only think to myself, "Oh, my GOD!  I do feel silly hissing the Dauphin!"

Ha ha, just kidding.  Professor Butler has only proven that Henry V is a very bad comic book. Indeed, Shakespeare totally ignores the rules of genre!  What was he thinking???

Gosh, who knows?  But what's funny about all this is that the Professor's comments are basically what you'd expect the smart-alecky student in the back row to point out: this play was weird; Henry's a mystery; am I supposed to cheer the hero or not?; and am I supposed to hiss the villains - or not?; I don't get it.  It's not like Star Wars at all!

And then the professor starts talking.  And begins to explain, perhaps, that Henry V is an extended meditation on the meaning of our celebration of "history;" that Henry's "character" seems to be missing because it vanished into his public role slowly, over the course of two previous plays, and that therefore his persona is intentionally mysterious; that the actual Battle of Agincourt for Shakespeare is all but immaterial; and that there is almost no other play extant that can be interpreted in such contradictory, utterly opposed ways - which makes it a "mirror" rather than a "window" (much less a "screen").  It is, in short, a cultural artifact utterly unlike anything in pop culture; indeed, it contains pop culture - what's more, it's a covert critique of exactly what you think it should be.

Only the professor is Isaac Butler!  So none of that is said.  Instead, the student is encouraged to validate his own naive impressions as intellectual insight through "fruitful discussion."  And the academic community takes another small step in its long journey toward intellectual senescence.

To die for

Everybody loves Stile Antico (at left) the new early music vocal ensemble from Britain; rave has followed rave for their album releases (I think the Globe described their last one as "perfect"), and everyone seems to adore them even more since they were tapped by Sting for The Journey and the Labyrinth, his exploration of the music of John Dowland. If early music ever makes the pop charts, the thinking goes, Stile Antico might just be the group to do it.

The ensemble made its American debut last year at the Boston Early Music Festival, to great applause, and returned for a nearly sold-out performance this past weekend at St. Paul's Church in Harvard Square, one of those reactionary Catholic fantasias in which almost every kind of sacred architecture is piled togetherr, willy-nilly; St. Paul's design is roughly Italo-Gothic-Romanesque, with medieval friezes rubbing shoulders with baroque and even Tudor flourishes. It may not make aesthetic sense, but damn it puts the fear of God into you.

Still, if St. Paul's is an architectural hoot, it's also big and resonant, and an effective, if slightly crude, setting for the sepulchral sacred music that Stile Antico favors.  For their program on Saturday, the group had chosen music that was literally to die for - and a lot of it, too.  We got songs from the funeral of Philip II of Spain, as well as the entombment of Saxon nobleman Heinrich Reuss Posthumus (fitting name, no?), and the commemorative mass for René d'Anjou, King of Sicily (the Pope shaved off a thousand years in Purgatory for those who recited this text, which may give you some idea of how much fun it is).  We even got a song from Dufay that was composed to be sung around the composer's own deathbed, at the moment he expired.  I don't think I've ever heard quite so much Catholic lachrymosity in a single sitting; needless to say, when my partner and I got home, we watched Singin' in the Rain three times in a row.

Still, all the necrophilic dolor was heartfelt and lovely - it was just too relentless. And while Stile Antico sang beautifully, would you think me a bad person if I whispered that they're not quite as good as Sting thinks they are? The women, particularly the sopranos, are absolutely fabulous, it's true, with an effortless pure tone and a breathtaking sense of balance. Meanwhile the men are very good - but not quite as good as, say, Chanticleer or the Tallis Scholars; the tenors don't always have as much power as you'd like, and there's an odd buzz in the basses. The ensemble formed as a college group, and to be frank, sometimes it still sounds like one, albeit a very good one; plus it dispenses with a conductor - because you know, conductors are so yesterday (unlike early music) - but it's my impression that the men could use one. For interpretive questions always seem to be left open by the lack of a conductor; like A Far Cry, a local conductor-free string ensemble, Stile Antico seems to have an earnest stance but not much of a profile - because when a collective is making the artistic decisions, said decisions tend to regress to the mean; thus, just about every composer in this program sounded much like every other composer.

Of course sometimes the mean is pretty darn good - and to be honest, even Stile Antico's death-wish sometimes sounded like a tonic; for how often is death, and the question of the soul's rest, pondered by contemporary music? Almost never. True, to the academic, agnostic, gay-Jewish milieu of the early music scene, this concert's spiritual content was pretty alien (it might as well have come from a Tibetan monastery) - but it was still refreshing, if a little depressing, to hear so much calm contemplation of mortality. And Stile Antico brought true intensity to several pieces, particularly John Sheppard's epic Media vita, which dominated the first half of the program. Likewise there were heartbreakingly beautiful moments in the Dufay, as well as in William Byrd's "Retire my soul." A piece from the German requiem of Heinrich Schütz (one of the few Protestants - sort of - in the program) brought a livelier attack to the proceedings without any diminution in emotion. Still, when Schütz is as lively as your program gets, frankly it may be time for a variety check.

The HD paradox - or should I say parallax?

Can you really hear Wagner at the mall?

I've been meaning to write something about the HD experience again for some time, and my recent exposure to Das Rheingold, which has coincided with local discussion of the-Met-at-the-mall phenomenon,  has given me more food for thought about this increasingly-dominant mode of viewing the performing arts.

Think I'm kidding when I say "increasingly dominant"?  Think again.  The first theatre I looked to for Das Rheingold tickets was already completely sold out - two weeks in advance.  I wound up seeing the opera in Revere, of all places - in a venue of maybe 1,000 seats, which was also almost completely sold out.  In fact, every HD performance I've attended in the past year has been either a sell-out or a near sell-out - which matches the Met's own publicity, which trumpets that its HD broadcasts play to 91% capacity (translating to over 920,000 viewers over the course of a season).  And the Met is hardly alone; there are other opera HD series available locally, as well as a dramatic series from Britain's National Theatre.

So HD has become a very popular way to view high culture.  But what precisely is it?  To many, of course, it feels just like "live" performance (because there's no delay in its transmission to the cinema) - only heightened somehow.  That's the way I felt too, after my first exposure (to Racine's Phaedra, with the great Helen Mirren); HD seemed much like a live performance, only with larger-than-life actors. Since then, though, I've begun to have some doubts about whether I can really consider an HD transmission "live" or not.

And I'm not alone - although it seems some critics have enthusiastically embraced the difference between HD and "live."  Over at the ArtsFuse, for instance (which yes, I've begun reading again out of irritation with its editor), the erstwhile Helen Epstein has been singing the praises of HD - only now she's gone even further, after a recent visit to the actual Met, and has announced that she prefers seeing her opera at the mall. She likes the close-ups; she likes the louder sound; she likes having the subtitles right up there on screen; she even likes having the director decide what and whom she's going to look at!  Indeed, Epstein all but revels in a consumerist passivity before the pleasures of processed performance; she doesn't want to engage with the Met - she wants to "experience" a kind of meta-Met instead.

But troubling little differences between that meta-Met and the Met itself have begun to crop up.  I was surprised to learn, for instance, that Richard Croft, who sang the role of Loge in Das Rheingold, had been booed at some performances; it seems that his tenor (which is a little light for Wagner) hadn't always been able to penetrate to the stalls of the cavernous Met.  But the HD microphones, of course, were hanging just out of sight, along the proscenium - and as any recording engineer will tell you, microphones even out the sizes of different voices.  No wonder Croft sounded great at the mall!

I noticed another strange discrepancy between HD viewers and critics who saw the actual "live" performances.  Many of these reviewers were struck by the acting of bass Eric Owens in the role of Alberich.  Alex Ross in the New Yorker was particularly ravished; he declared that Owens was the "chief glory" of the production, and that his performance "is so richly layered that it may become part of the history of the work."

Only I was watching Owens in close-up, and I'd have to say: nuh-uh.  The voice was terrific - and to be fair to Ross, he seemed to be conjuring all sorts of theatrical magic purely from Owens's musical prowess.  Which is something opera fans have often (and perhaps always) been prone to do.  But the HD audience had no such luxury; the acting ability, or lack thereof, of the singers loomed before us larger than life.  I wouldn't say Owens was bad, but he was a bit blank - and in HD, that complicated his vocal performance.

There have been other odd gaps between stage and screen.  Amusingly, some things seen clear as day on the Met's actual stage have never made it to the multiplex.  Standards of stage nudity slammed into doubts about Middle America's tolerance for naked naughty bits when the Met instructed its cameramen to discreetly avoid the bare boobies in the background of Bartlett Sher's Les Contes d'Hoffmann, at left. One could only wonder - what would they have done with the striking climax of David McVicar's controversial Salome for the Royal Opera, below (the video for which was even pulled from YouTube)?

So as you may now appreciate, there's a kind of paradox latent in HD performances - or perhaps the better word is "parallax," that funny word for the gap between what you think you're seeing through your camera lens and what it's actually picking up.  Croft benefited from the HD parallax; Owens didn't.  (And we all lost out on the girls from Hoffmann.)

Already some critics have begun to express concerns about these discrepancies between "live" and HD.  In the Washington Post, reviewer Anne Midgette wondered aloud in irritation whether Das Rheingold had been "cast for the simulcast" - that is, with photogenic singers who sounded fine over speakers, but couldn't cut it in the theatre.

Midgette may have a larger point than she realizes.  The bottom line about HD is that it simply cannot convey a true theatrical experience; the atmosphere of the house, the response of the crowd, even the  actual acoustics - all that is missing.  Meanwhile, the language of the cinema (close-up, establishing shot) subtly intervenes between viewer and performer.

What's becoming clear, I think, is that HD is really a hybrid form - it has the immediacy of "live" theatre, yes, but in the end it's inevitably mediated visually and aurally.  And if something works onscreen but not onstage - who's in the right?  After all, the opera's largest audience is on its mediated end, out at the mall, seeing the whole show in close-up, through state-of-the-art speakers.  (Thus singers trained to project an oversized voice, with a persona to match, may now find themselves having to be method actors instead, while technicians mix down their voices.)  So will the Met and the National begin playing more directly to the mall rather than the hall?  Will the performance style of HD productions subtly shift to the perceptions of this huge new audience?  I guess we'll all have to stay tuned to find out.