Lost boy

What do you do when the actors are willing, but the text is weak?  That's the quandary I'm in about Bill Cain's 9 Circles, now at the BCA in a production by the Publick Theatre (through next weekend).

The script (by the founder of the long-lost Boston Shakespeare Company) wants to be a hard-hitting exposé of our collective shrug regarding the young men (and women) left damaged and destroyed by our grand misadventure in Iraq.  It traces the descent of one broken soldier, Daniel Edward Reeves (Jimi Stanton, at left), who falls from the military, through the court system, and down into the clutches of the death chamber, as he is tried and convicted for the rape and murder of a young woman and her family in Iraq.

Reeves, a natural born killer, indeed seems to be guilty of this terrible crime - and yet you can't say he never cried out for help before he snapped; in Cain's fractured telling of this grim tale, the military recruited (and exploited) Reeves for his instincts, but then washed its hands of him once those instincts began to spin out of control; so all our hands, as it were, have some Iraqi blood on them.

This is a complex and worthy tale to tell, but I'm afraid the playwright pretty much scrambles it; his script lurches from one artificially pumped-up set-up to the next, and we can predict every "big reveal" well before it's revealed (and can't help but notice the script's many puzzle pieces don't really fit together all that compellingly). Indeed, by the finale, when even poor Reeves's lethal injection goes horribly wrong, we've begun to feel that for Cain, his lead character is just a kind of punching bag, on which he's working out all his frustration with the complacency of Bush- (and Obama-) era America.

Not that I don't share those frustrations. Still, I know a real play when I see one, and I'm afraid this isn't the genuine article. But nobody told the actors that, and they each turn in improbably memorable performances - particularly young Stanton, a newcomer who seems to have gotten completely beneath his character's skin.  Under Eric Engel's nuanced direction, the versatile Will McGarrahan and Amanda Collins provide memorable back-up; the atmospheric lighting is by John Malinowski.  See it if you want to catch a rising star, and get an idea of just how far talent can disguise its material.

Our most interesting living composer takes on the world's greatest playwright.

To my mind, Thomas Adès is the most interesting composer alive, the young talent I'm most certain will find a place in the standard repertoire.  Yet perversely enough, we've heard little of him in Boston; instead, we've been listening to the latest from Carter and Birtwistle (two accomplished elder statesmen of modernism whom I don't find particularly compelling), or pretending that Schoenberg is still shocking. Yes, Opera Boston performed Powder Her Face a few years back, and I vaguely recall the BSO playing the great Asyla and the intriguing Living Toys sometime around the millennium.

But in the meantime, the "savior of British music" (as Adès was once known) has all but taken the rest of the world by storm - and found an American home not in Boston or New York, but L.A. (where he has enjoyed a special relationship with the L.A. Philharmonic for several years). Major operas and commissions have flowed from him, he's been showered with awards, all while building a distinguished recorded catalog as a pianist (he also conducts). It's wrong at this point to describe the 40-year-old composer as "the next big thing." He IS the big thing.

So his arrival on the podium of Symphony Hall last weekend was long overdue. Still, he played to plenty of empty seats. Remember what I said the other day about Boston still being a hick town? Well, that goes double for the BSO crowd.

But Adès himself didn't seem to mind - he seemed thrilled to have finally arrived in America’s greatest concert hall; and at any rate, he had bent his intellectual energy on a program that teased out deep cultural issues in a way that BSO programs rarely do these days. Part of the concert was devoted to his violin concerto Concentric Paths, a small wonder in its own right. But the majority of the program was focused on Shakespeare's The Tempest - in particular the musical response to the Bard's last masterpiece by Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, and, yes, Adès himself.

Now Shakespeare posits a strange conundrum for composers, I think. He has always attracted them - and yet have any of them, even the greatest, fully understood him, or been able to express what truly sets him apart from other dramatists? It's a puzzling, and troubling question (and one that, amusingly enough, classical music aficionados rarely seem to be aware exists; they naïvely imagine their art is the most profound one around). But even a masterpiece like Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream (wonderful as it is) only conjures the atmosphere of Shakespeare's play, not the depth or contradictions of its text. The irony is that (as the Hub Review has long contended) part of what makes Shakespeare's dramatic thought so complex is that it's structured musically (my guess is that Monteverdi and the madrigal posited the model for Shakespeare's contrapuntal intellectual structures). And yet oddly enough, the classical musical tradition can't seem to match the achievement of the dramatist it probably inspired.

Verdi, for instance, can give us a chillingly grand Iago, but can't really convey the sense (as Shakespeare does) of the conceptual inexplicability of evil. Likewise Mendelssohn expertly conjures the rich fancy of Midsummer, but when it comes to its last-act parody of its own means - or even the opposed musings of the lunatic, the lover, and the poet - Mendelssohn is helpless. But then music is rarely good at deconstructing its own meaning (it's only good at deconstructing other music) - so how could a composer approach the probing self-critique that's central to plays like Hamlet and Henry V?

It was unsurprising, then, that the first two Shakespearean offerings of the evening were essentially variants on scene-painting (which Adès led competently, but not brilliantly). Tchaikovsky concentrated on a soaring love-theme, as if The Tempest were merely a later variant of Romeo and Juliet. Sibelius, meanwhile, was most inspired by the script’s eponymous sea-storm, and created a heaving, crashing soundscape of startling verisimilitude. This was better than the Tchaikovsky, but it was still essentially movie-music – more thematically intriguing was the surprising vigor and rusticity of Sibelius’s music for Ariel and the clowns.

But only Adès seemed to engage with the actual ideas of the play. The Tempest, of course, is not merely a highly rarefied fairy tale; it is a probing, and utterly sober, meditation on the “problem” of power and freedom – neither of which, in Shakespeare’s mind, is an unalloyed good. And you could feel this moral and emotional tension latent in much of the music from Adès’s celebrated 2004 opera (which has yet to play Boston, but which is now widely regarded as the greatest recent achievement in the form).

Indeed, there was a literal tension between high and low in the songs for Ariel, Prospero, Miranda and Ferdinand that the composer had chosen to showcase, as well as a sense of mournful unresolvability, which captured much of the intellectual mood of late Shakespeare. I should mention that Adès did not work directly from Shakespeare’s text – he commissioned a libretto by Meredith Oakes, which simplifies the play, and emphasizes the roles of Ferdinand and Miranda. That may sound dismaying, but I was surprised to discover that Oakes had preserved Shakespeare’s underlying themes even in her own variations on his text – in her Tempest, Prospero confronts in his child’s romance yet another conundrum of power, love, and freedom.

Much has been made of the vocal writing for Ariel in the opera – almost all the sprite’s songs float up around high E – that’s at the very top of the “Queen of the Night” aria, for ready reference. It’s almost impossible for a soprano to actually vocalize consonants up there, so quite a bit of Ariel’s songs came off as a kind of abstracted sonar, which only Prospero could comprehend. But this, too – although it violates the sense of prettiness we expect of Ariel - is much in line with Shakespeare’s text, which stresses always that this spirit isn’t human, sounds like a kind of sweet buzzing to everyone but Prospero, and is always yearning to escape to the freedom of, in Oakes’s text, “higher spheres.” (You can’t get much higher than high E.)

And luckily the BSO had soprano Hila Plitmann on hand to superbly carry off these high-altitude acrobatics (she even did so with something like the sweet lightness we’d expect of Ariel). Meanwhile Christopher Maltman made a grounded, commanding Prospero, and Kate Royal a gorgeously thoughtful Miranda. I only had doubts about Toby Spence’s Ferdinand, who didn’t seem quite ardent enough to hold his own in this amazing company.

The other major work by in Adès on offer was his 2005 violin concerto Concentric Paths, a hypnotic piece in three movements which paralleled, appropriately enough, his writing for Ariel. Once again, a “vocal” violin line orbited at the top of the instrument’s range (essayed dazzlingly by Anthony Marwood, for whom the piece was written), while, in later movements, the rest of the orchestra sighed heavily below. What’s fascinating about Concentric Paths is the sense that its tonality is unstable in a curiously post-postmodern way, spiraling through key signatures yet seemingly drawn toward some sort of gravitational tonal center – what you might call a “strange attractor” if you were speaking in terms of chaos theory (which I think in a way Adès is). The audience appeared mystified by this eerily attractive gambit – despite the clean authority of the performance (the composer's conducting came alive for his own stuff).  They slowly warmed, however, to the vocal marvels of The Tempest (there were many singers in the audience, as the concert was a freebie for Tanglewood Festival Chorus members). Let’s hope that Boston only grows more and more familiar in future with this amazing talent.

Did you hear the one about the last two Jews in Kabul?

Jeremiah Kissel waits for inspiration in Two Jews Walk into a War . . .

Now I bet you thought stand-up comedy about the strife in Afghanistan was impossible.

Well, you're wrong!

Playwright Seth Rozin actually pulls it off in Two Jews Walk into a War. . ., his amusing two-hander up at the Merrimack Rep through this weekend.  Rozin charts the declining fortunes of the last two Jews in Kabul (it's roughly based on a true story, apparently) in this valiant vaudeville, which features an abundance of jokes spiked not with drum rolls but actual gunshots.  I know, I know - I was skeptical, too.  But the show is, indeed, funny and poignant (if in a slightly formulaic way).  And who better to sell it than local stars Jeremiah Kissel and Will LeBow, two of Boston's best actors, who play off against each other with ace precision under the thoughtful direction of Melia Bensussen, who has helmed a string of successes (The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead, Circle Mirror Transformation) that I'd say have won her the title of best female director in Boston.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot (because there isn't too much to give away, anyhow).  Suffice to say that Kissel and LeBow are the aging Zeblyan and Ishaq, the last two Jews in the hostile environs of Kabul.  Their temple was long ago ransacked by the Taliban (its forlorn ruin, evoked in detail by Richard Chambers, fills the Merrimack stage) and its Torah has been stolen; when the play opens, they're still reeling from the recent death of the third Jew in Kabul.  But Zeblyan and Ishaq refuse to say die themselves!  Trouble is, these last two pillars of the community can't stand each other; the street-savvy Zeblyan and the bookish Ishaq are constantly at each other's throats.  Still, they resolve to work together to rebuild their community - the foundation of which, of course, must be a new Torah.

The rest of the play revolves around their attempt to pen their own Pentateuch (from Ishaq's sometimes-addled memory) - with the punchline being that every time they make a mistake, they must start over again from scratch (because there can't be any mistakes in the Torah).  Now before you write in - the play is open about the fact that Zeblya and Ishaq are cutting some serious theological corners here (a true Torah can only be produced under very carefully proscribed conditions).  In fact, that's the source of much of the script's comedy.  (So if the set-up offends you, you've been warned.)  But the determination of these two to make do with what they've got (even if all they've got is butcher paper, for instance) in pursuit of their devotion is Rozin's main theme, and it is, indeed, a touchingly funny one - and one with a poignant historical resonance (for the Jews, of course, have faced down foes far more powerful - and even more evil - than the Taliban).

As I said, the comedy is often formulaic; it's a bit raunchy, but basically sentimental (which is to say it conforms precisely to the new Hollywood "bromance" template).  For instance, Zeblya and Ishaq puzzle over the fact that Jewish men aren't allowed to masturbate - but women, apparently, are; likewise gay men are an "abomination," yet lesbians - well, HaShem seems to be down with a little girl-on-girl action.  The difference between "clean" and "unclean" animals is likewise an enigma - and why didn't Noah save the elephants?

All this makes for several rounds of great punchlines, but Rozin tiptoes around the deeper implications of the Torah's many curious commandments.  It's rather obvious, for instance, that the Pentateuch never bothers proscribing lesbianism because it considers women second-class citizens whose sex lives only rate moral consideration in relation to men.  Needless to say, the sweet Zeblya and Ishaq never ponder things that far - that way Reform Judaism lies!  And Rozin's only really interested in a valentine to the core of his faith, not a critique of it.

But when you've got pros like Kissel (at top) and LeBow (at left) at the wheels of a vehicle like this one, it's hard not to enjoy the ride even when it's calculated and gentle, and even though you know every turn before it comes.  With these two, the jokes all land just where they should, and the "unexpected" ending does still draw a tear.  I left Two Jews Walk into a War . . . bemused if not bewitched, and somehow I think you will, too.

The tenor's tenor

Matthew Polenzani

Gazing around at a half-filled Jordan Hall before Matthew Polenzani's Celebrity Series concert last week, I had the same thought that I had at the similar turnout for Christine Brewer:

In so many ways, this is still such a hick town!

Oh, well, be that as it may; at least the assembled crowd was a passionate one.  They knew that Polenzani was dropping by early in what promises to be a high-flying career, and we were lucky to hear him in such intimate circumstances.  Already he's a staple at the Met, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and LA Opera, and has made his debut at many of the major European houses, too.

It was surprising, then, that his program proved so serious and unassuming - Schubert's great song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin (or "The Lovely Miller's Daughter"). It's unusual to hear the whole of the cycle in a major recital, which is unfortunate, as the songs are transporting, and of immense historical significance (they're the first cycle to become part of the standard repertoire) - even if, inevitably, they're conceived at the scale of chamber, rather than symphonic, music. Polenzani (at left) hewed closely and carefully to that intimate profile, however; there was no showboating or barnstorming in his emotionally transparent performance. If Dmitri Hvorostovky gave us the baritone as rock star just a few weeks ago, then Matthew Polenzani gave us the lyric tenor as - well, as lyric tenor.  Remember them?

And needless to say, Polenzani proved a very fine lyric tenor indeed.  To be honest, his lower notes are fine, but unremarkable - it's at about a third of the way up his register that his voice suddenly opens up  into a warm glory with a kind of floating, flexible glow; and it stays that way - light yet rich, effortlessly saturated and supple - to nearly the top of his range.  Polenzani rarely seemed to push anything in technical terms; you never felt an ounce of strain in the performance (in fact he didn't even have any water with him onstage, as recitalists often do).  He simply has this kind of vocal radiance he can unleash at will.

His pianist, Julius Drake, proved likewise an exquisitely talented find.  It would be wrong to call him an "accompanist," at least in the case of Die schöne Müllerin, for in Schubert's conception the piano really serves as partner an ongoing duet; it's a character, indeed for all intents and purposes another voice. And you could feel between Drake and Polenzani the kind of subtle, supportive attentiveness you only get between two artists for whom familiarity has bred respect rather than contempt.

Still, for all the musical glory that was evident in this double performance, the emotional depths of Die schöne Müllerin were never fully plumbed. Schubert's songs follow a (seemingly) happy-go-lucky wanderer whose best friend is a babbling brook - eloquently voiced in the piano part - which leads him to that eponymous mill, and that lovely miller's daughter. The cycle, of course, then becomes an extended love-song - at first dappled with romantic sun, a mode in which Polenzani excels; eventually, however, it devolves into a song of love won, then lost. And once lost, that love draws the singer into an obsessive, melancholic undertow, which Polenzani was able to express, but not embody; we never felt any sense of real neurosis (much less death-wish) in his performance.  In short, he's a better singer than he is an actor.  Not that Die schöne Müllerin is quite the twin of Schubert's tormented Winterreise (even though the same poet, Wilhelm Müller, is the source of both) - still, it concludes with a tragic transfiguration: the singer ends up at the bottom of that babbling brook, finally at peace, dreaming along to the eternal lullaby he loved so well.  Charmingly modest as he was, Polenzani never gave us the completion of that terrible arc; although it's clear that once he has found the emotional path to that dark place, he has the voice to carry him there.

Not quite a meeting of the minds.

Like a lot of people, I'd always thought of Peter Brook and Samuel Beckett as kindred spirits. Both always seemed committed to a monkish spareness, and a determination to burn away distractions, to burrow down to the essentials of things.   Brook spurned more and more of the trappings of theatre as he aged, and Beckett's plays dwindled into "dramaticules" so concentrated that sometimes he seemed to be poised at the very edge of being, scraping at the basis of consciousness. But surprisingly enough, Fragments, Brook's whimsical treatment of various Beckett "shorts" and "roughs" at ArtsEmerson through April 3, somehow leaves you pondering the differences between these two giants rather than their similarities. For note that adjective "whimsical" - yes, I meant it, and it's not a word that's usually attached to Beckett. Not that the great Irish playwright isn't funny - in fact, he's hilarious. But is he whimsical?

Well, sometimes Brook, and co-director Marie-Hélène Estienne, almost convince you he is; and the lightness the director brings to opaque scraps of script like Neither isn't entirely unwelcome.  There's nothing worse than Beckett when it congeals into doom-ridden pretentiousness, that's for sure.  And Brook's spritzes of zen bemusement keep the production far from the dark, very still waters where so many productions drown.

Still, as you watch Fragments, you keep feeling that Brook doesn't really "get" Beckett, or rather that he keeps trying to tease the great playwright into his own modes of Grotowski-in-Asia stylization.  But Beckett's simply got more grit in his soul than Brook seems to realize; and what's more, Beckett is deeply religious, even though apparently an atheist - as one wag put it, Beckett's universe may be a godless one, but the god it's missing is Christian.  Meanwhile Brook kind of floats in the penumbrae cast by Buddhism and Hinduism (or something like that; did I mention Sufism? Zoroastrianism?).

So the tone is a bit odd, and then there's the problem of the changes Brook makes in Beckett's stage directions, even the very explicit, don't-change-this-under-any-circumstances stage directions.  Now I'm not one to cling to Beckett's prescriptions as holy writ - still, whenever a director asks me about this question, I always reply with the following: "Now remember Beckett was a genius - so ask yourself, am I a genius?"  I say this because time after time, when I see a Beckett production that hews closely to his instructions, I find it superior to one that was "experimental."  Now sure, maybe Brook is a genius, too - maybe - but still, Samuel Beckett had a phenomenally acute understanding of how his work would best be realized onstage.  You tinker with his instructions at your peril.

In Fragments, the greatest damage is done to Rockaby, the haunting late-career solo piece in which a lonely woman retreats completely from a seemingly-empty world into the rocking arms of death itself (in French, the original language of most of Beckett's work, the title of the play is Berceuse).  In their production, Brook and Estienne abandon almost all of Beckett's suggestions about props and costume; the weirdly glamorous funeral gown, the pre-recorded vocals (the actress onstage should only chime in occasionally), the chair that rocks itself - all this is gone, as are even the subtle divisions of the woman's descent from consciousness into, well, "apparent" death, as the playwright puts it.  (Does anyone ever really and truly die in Beckett?)

The results were, inevitably, thinner than they should have been - indeed, whole swaths of theme were just missing, and while actress Hayley Carmichael did her best with the text, she simply couldn't conjure its full, echoing dimensions.  Which is too bad, because as Rockaby is the greatest of the scripts on offer in Fragments, its failure counted for a lot. And there were other odd deviations from Beckett's directions that undermined the other, slighter pieces: in Act Without Words II, for instance, I believe Beckett even spells out that the seemingly divine prod that pokes his Didi- and Gogo-like protagonists must come from the wings (on ever more sets of wheels), rather than down from the flies - yet Brook brings it down from the flies anyway, which partly spoils the piece's central joke (that God is just as rickety, and just as determined, as we are).

Still, there were many moments in which Beckett's voice came through, in "fragments," as it were - and it's a voice that's always worth hearing (I personally place Beckett right after Chekhov in the pantheon). Actors Bruce Myers and Yoshi Oïda brought a withered comedy and calm pathos to Rough for Theatre I, which is a kind of variant on the themes (and characters) of Godot and Endgame (although neither actor had quite the level of desperate decline needed to conjure Didi on his way to Hamm, or Gogo on his way to Clov). Brook's methods seemed best suited to the wry vaudeville Act Without Words II, which played (as it should) as a Beckett's idea of a silent Buster Keaton movie. Best of all was Come and Go, which Brook staged explicitly as a light drag burlesque. I have to say that even here, the more exquisite qualities of Beckett's conception (its geometric perfection and eerie sense of timelessness) went missing; but at least the piece worked as comedy, and as a charming introduction to the playwright, as intended. I just thought that Peter Brook would intend more.

Hal Cazalet as the cute young cyborg in Death and the Powers.

In the future, robots will perform boring operas that they can't understand.

That roughly seems to be the message of Death and the Powers: The Robots' Opera, a brilliantly lit, but slightly tedious, new opera by composer Tod Machover and librettist Robert Pinsky (after a story by Pinsky and Randy Weiner), which closes tonight at the Cutler Majestic.  Machover is a major mucky-muck at the famed Media Lab (basically a kind of lab + marketing agency at my alma mater, MIT); meanwhile Pinsky, ensconced at BU, is a three-time Poet Laureate.  You're not sure, from all this star-power, whether the problem with Death and the Powers is that these stars just weren't alignment - or whether perhaps they shouldn't, actually, be stars.

Tod Machover

But one thing you're sure about is that light show.  Damn!  Designers Alex McDowell (production), Donald Holder (lighting), Peter Torpey (visuals and software) and Matt Checkowski (media) - I list them all because the lighting is integrated into the set - had a collective field day with Death and the Powers, and the show they deliver is worth the price of admission all by itself.  As for Machover and Pinsky - well, not so much; although Pinsky does provide a convincing oratorical gloss on the libretto (so maybe it's the "story," such as it is, that's the problem).  Machover likewise offers a solid semblance of a score - but note that word "semblance;" the music feels somehow like a gloss, too.  Many of the vocal lines are singable, and the composer paces things well, and knows how to build to a climax; but nothing's memorable - and nothing's all that original, either.  The score pretty much sounds like a smart student's simplified remix of his mentors (Machover's were Carter and Boulez), and never really attains anything like an individual signature; it's almost too easy, in fact, to believe the opera was written by robots.

The automatons in question, by the way, get most of the libretto's best lines.  The conceit is that we're watching a mechanical ritual set far in the future; in a scene like something out of A.I., a group of surprisingly low-tech androids (they look like vacuum cleaners with glowing, pizza-wedge heads) gather to re-enact an ancient scripture - which turns out, of course, to be Death and the Powers.  They puzzle over the text as we might ponder Genesis (in a way it is their Genesis) - particularly its central theme: death.  The robots have no idea what "death" might be.  (I guess there are no on/off switches in the future, much less power failures.)

Yet to honor their age-hold tradition (and, wittily enough, to earn "human status credits"), the robots once again re-enact the tale of Simon Powers (James Maddalena), an ailing genius-billionaire who, rather like Steve Jobs, suddenly comes face-to-face with his mortality.  Instead of venturing into that undiscovered country, however, he uploads his consciousness into a computer (just like in Tron!) instead. Or rather a computer network, or at any rate something called "The System," which at first seems to merely control his thermostat and microwave, but eventually seems to be running much of the outside world as well.

And that's about it for the action of the opera.  Powers gets uploaded - and Maddalena vanishes into the orchestra pit, from which his voice is projected - and everybody talks about it quite a bit and wonders what it all means, and whether they should follow him.  Powers' wife and daughter (from a previous marriage, for some reason) are on the fence about his decision, although his cyborg sidekick is all for it - but the various arguments of this trio never get very deep, or seem very passionate.  And of course the actual process by which Powers is "uploaded" remains a mystery (as does the disposal of his physical remains) - because this moment, although often evoked in science fiction, is kind of like the geek version of the Virgin Birth: if you think about its transubstantive aspects at all seriously, it suddenly looks ridiculous.

It's better in HAL's memory bank - James Maddalena tries to lure Sara Heaton into "The System."

Not that the question of a computer becoming conscious isn't fascinating - it is; and unsurprisingly, it's already been "covered," as it were (and to far greater effect) in all manner of books, movies, TV shows and plays - from which Death and the Powers borrows copiously, without adding much. Indeed, the opera simply dodges its most intriguing question - if, indeed, something patterned after consciousness could be made operative in a computer, could we ever know if it was really "alive"? Yes, we would,  Tod Machover and Robert Pinsky inform us. Just because, okay?? End of story!

A similar article of faith undercuts the libretto in a deeper way. Scanning Pinsky and Weiner's script, you might take Death and the Powers as a cautionary tale. After all, Powers clearly doesn't achieve immortality - we know from the prologue that somebody eventually pulled the plug on "the System." And as Simon gets more comfortable in his new virtual abode, he gets more distant, and pissily mystical (think the Great and Powerful Oz crossed with Ming the Merciless) - without, I'm afraid, actually offering us any new visions or insights.

The claw!  The claw! I have been chosen!

Yet the opera feels weirdly triumphalist. We get the impression we're supposed to think - in a clichéd "The future is NOW!" kind of way - that its techno-bionic vision is fabulous and inevitable. But somehow this renders Pinsky's T.S.-Eliot-in-the-Twilight-Zone ironies inoperative; the text is in essence opposed to its marketing (and in a way the whole thing is more a branding strategy than an opera).  And so we can't help but notice the opera is floating in a thematic limbo - at least until the light grid fires up again (as above).

Some passing interest was generated, I admit, by one central question - which was not "Can a computer  be truly conscious?", but instead "Can a computer have an orgasm??" As Death and the Powers was directed by Diane Paulus, the answer of course is a resounding "Yes I said YES!" - the computer does come, in quite a light show, thanks to a shiny chandelier that looks like a giant vagina designed by Santiago Calatrava (above left). Every home should have one.  Another bid at dramatic development was more puzzling - Weiner's story suddenly abandons Kubrick for Ayn Rand about two thirds of the way through, with a John-Galt-esque subplot about the rioting masses, etc.  But a better strategy to hold our interest might have been to further develop the opera's characters - simply giving daughter Miranda her own brush with mortality, for instance, would have given her struggle over entering "The System" a weight and meaning that right now it doesn't have.

I should say that most of the singing in the production was quite strong (with Sara Heaton's Miranda a standout), although the complicated amplification tended to artificialize and distance things (as it almost always does); perhaps that's why the singing gave me little pleasure.  And Diane Paulus's direction was, as usual, competent but uninspired.  The Paulus "phenomenon" has kind of metastasized of late - her shows keep popping up all over town, like tumors - but I've yet to see one that struck me as revelatory of any deep talent.  Instead, Paulus fascinates me as an avatar of our cultural decline.  She's quite smart, of course, and appreciates precisely how to keep a career afloat by "breaking boundaries" without actually generating any new content. Which makes her the perfect "artist" for our age - an era devoted to formal experimentation as a way of disguising its stasis (or nostalgic drift). Add the ART's seeming abandonment of the ethical profile of a traditional non-profit to the mix, and you realize Paulus's rise was almost over-determined. But I do wonder - now that she's got, what, three shows running simultaneously in town, is husband Randy still pocketing the bar tab over at Oberon?  I wonder!

Richard Egarr and you-know-who.

Right now the Handel and Haydn Society is on something of a roll. Just a few weeks ago came the stunning Israel in Egypt, in which the chorus took command; but last weekend, it was the period orchestra's turn to amaze. Under the inspired direction of the brilliant Richard Egarr (above), they tore through a slate of masterpieces: the overture to Don Giovanni, Haydn's Symphony No. 101 ("The Clock") and Keyboard Concerto No. 11, and what may count as the most familiar piece of music in the Western canon: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

First, the Fifth (even though it came last in the program).  You may think there's nothing new to be said about it - and actually, I couldn't claim Egarr delivered a profoundly new interpretation; as always, fate threw down its gauntlet at the opening, and it was taken up in triumph at the symphony's end (through its several ends, in fact). Still, the performance bore an intense personal stamp, and that makes all the difference, doesn't it. Egarr is known for both thoughtfulness and passion - he's fond of lightning shifts in dynamics, as well as calm, pondering reveries; and both were evident in his Beethoven. It was clear he'd thought a lot about the Fifth, and was eager to show us everything he'd learned. Thus though superbly sculpted, his interpretation still felt questioning, almost probing; everything felt deeply considered, and yet everything felt spontaneous.

And as Egarr seems to relate to his musicians as a musician himself (he's a superb keyboardist), he engenders a startling degree of camaraderie with them. (He also, perhaps not incidentally, has a curiously self-deprecating stage charisma.) Perhaps partly as a result of these factors, I don't think I've ever heard the orchestra sound as committed and unified as it did last weekend. New concertmaster Aisslin Nosky seemed to throw everything she had into every entrance, but this was only one facet of the players' palpable collective drive. I personally don't think the Fifth is Beethoven's greatest; it's harmonically simplistic (to be honest) and its great, animating idea - its incredible extrapolation of that fateful opening statement - I'm afraid has grown old for me. Still, when the Fifth builds as it did here, it's impossible not to be taken with it all over again.

Just as it was impossible not to be seduced by the rest of the program (indeed, I preferred the earlier pieces to the finale). Although I’m afraid that Egarr seemed to investigate the Overture to Don Giovanni without coming to any conclusions about it; his somewhat-light reading of it was never dull, certainly - there were eerie or mysterious touches here and there that you don’t often hear. Still, at times his fondness for abrupt swings in dynamic felt more like mannerism than manner.

But then came “The Clock,” perhaps Haydn’s most popular symphony (i.e., his answer to the Fifth), which features a famous second movement of almost hilarious domesticity, marked by a metronomic beat that gives the symphony its sobriquet. Here, unbelievably, Egarr insinuated beneath the tick-tock of that andante a kind of essay on the inexorable nature of time itself; as the movement rose to a climax, it was hard not to feel that a menacing gulf had opened up beneath the superficial gentility of Haydn's themes. But Egarr’s interpretation of the Concerto in D Major was even more startling. It’s the conductor’s belief that the concerto is a response to the meteoric rise of Mozart, and there’s certainly a Mozartean feel to its lyrical flights. But in the second movement, Un poco Adagio, Egarr seemed to push past Mozart to the Romantics (and even beyond). Considering that he was also playing the fortepiano part, the performance was all the more extraordinary – and daring.  For while in the Fifth, Egarr seemed determined to prove that period instruments could be as resoundingly affirmative as modern ones, here he seemed to be meeting head-on a related criticism: that they’re too soft for venues the size of Symphony Hall (I’ve muttered that sometimes myself). In his fortepiano playing, however, Egarr held the audience in the palm of his hand even as his playing slipped toward the gossamer – and then into a whisper, as the faintest mists of accompaniment rose from the strings. For most of the movement, it seemed that everyone in Symphony Hall was holding his or her breath. Rarely has a hush been quite so transporting.

Un-sentimental education

Jane Pfitsch and Andrew Long attempt to educate each other.

Education is Boston's big business.  Or at least one of the biggest businesses we've got left - and our newer industries, like high- and bio-tech, are tightly linked to our powerhouse universities.

Yet education is something we almost never treat on our stages.  Then again - perhaps that's inevitable in these parts.  Somebody famous once said theatre holds the mirror up to nature; but Boston theatre most often holds the mirror up to someone else's nature.  Our stages prefer to produce plays about racism in Alabama or South Africa, for example, rather than in Southie or Charlestown.  And when we do hold the mirror up to ourselves, we only gaze through rose-colored glasses: at the ART, for instance, production after production celebrates youthful rebellion, because that's what Harvard's customers - the professors and the students - want to hear about themselves.

So it's slightly shocking that the Huntington would dare to stage Educating Rita - a kind of Pygmalion update about a crusty professor and his sweet, swinging student - which turns out to be not very sweet at all; indeed, Educating Rita slowly reveals a shockingly bitter dissection of the academy.  Or at least the not-so-distant academy - humanities professors have moved on a bit from the style of pedagogy portrayed in Rita ("critical thinking" and "new perspectives" are now the rage).  But the essential contradiction at the heart of liberal education remains the same: its goal is meant to be intellectual freedom; yet inevitably it results in the codification of a class.  In short, one kind of class breeds another (maybe that's why we use the same word for both).  "Liberal" education leads not to true liberty but to new totems and taboos.  Perhaps that's why, when the professor in Rita surveys his confident new creation, he muses not on Pygmalion but on Frankenstein.  And perhaps that's what makes Educating Rita in some ways the most radical play I've seen on a major stage this season.

How odd, then, that on its surface it's so conventional - indeed, playwright Willy Russell has disguised his critique in a "well-made" two-hander that's really a kind of bourgeois Trojan horse.  Rita is designed to "pass" as a bright pop valentine to - well, half the movies and plays of its time and place (Britain in the late 60s and early 70s).  The playwright's inspiration was the "Open University" initiative of that era - an attempt to crack open the class carapace of British universities by admitting almost anyone to a basic studies program.  In Russell's script, that "anyone" is the eponymous Rita, a saucy hairdresser in Liverpool who shows up for tutoring - in a fabulously "mod" wardrobe - at the door of the rumpled, unshaven, nearly-alcoholic "Frank" (note the name), a battle-scarred poet-professor who has only taken on tutoring for extra cash.

From the opening moments, we sense the seeming derivativeness of the material - perky Rita (at left) desperately wants a better life, and unsurprisingly, Frank desperately needs a spiritual recharge.  Thus we fully expect (as we pat back a yawn) to watch Rita blossom into her own confident woman as Frank finds a renewed faith in himself.  Or something like that.  But even as the familiar tropes of a zillion well-made plays float by, we begin to sense that something very different is afoot in the subtext of Educating Rita.  In fact, from the outset there's a sweet confusion in Rita about her aims - and even her identity.  Her real name isn't actually Rita, for instance (it's Susan) - she has re-christened herself because she yearns to find a true identity, by "learning everything;" yet these idealistic yearnings slide all too easily into naked social ambition.   And needless to say, as the play progresses, that ambition quietly, but inexorably, takes over her life.

Russell makes it immediately clear that Rita's got intellectual chops - she offers a wicked critique of the Titian on Frank's wall, for instance, that precisely sums up the problem of the erotic in art.  And later, when she sees her first production of Macbeth, she's completely bowled over.  But Frank tells Rita that instinct isn't enough; indeed, subjectivity itself is something to be avoided and suppressed in the critique of art. "There are rules," he explains, "and you must observe them."

But as Rita masters the rules of the university game (deftly communicated by costume designer Nancy Brennan through a series of ever-more-sophisticated ensembles) we can feel the spontaneity that Rita brought to Frank's stuffy office slowly leak out of her.  As for Frank, as he watches his tutelage dismantle Rita's originality - a dismantling she's only too happy to accelerate - he hardly finds a renewed faith in himself; instead he sinks all the faster.  The climax to their relationship comes when he offers Rita his latest sheaf of poems - which he knows are a desperate conglomeration of allusions and references - and she responds as if they were truly inspired.  He gazes at her then with a look that tells you he not only knows he has created a monster, but also knows he has killed Rita's skeptical spark - and that he is finished in his profession, and may be staring at his own replacement.  No surprise then that he soon decamps (for Australia!), and that as a farewell gift, Rita offers him a long-needed haircut - after all, she was once a hairdresser; but even this innocent gesture inevitably recalls a similar favor that Delilah once did for Samson.

The trouble with Educating Rita, however, is that while Russell certainly communicates his dramatic intentions, he never quite makes good on them.  Or rather he refuses to let his themes really break through the play's pop surface, and this ends up limiting their impact.  Things never quite fall apart as they should, and Russell moves on from each well-crafted point as quickly as he has made it.  In a way, he's slightly undone by his own subterfuge.

But thoughtful viewers will perceive his argument anyway, I think, partly because director Maria Aitkin limns it with a subtle hand (even as she keeps the comedy bubbling along), and partly because we simply couldn't ask for better actors to put it over.  It would be easy for Rita's happy bounce to read as cliché, for instance, but Jane Pfitsch (above left) keeps it remarkably fresh - although her accent is a shade too thick (and perhaps her final scene isn't quite conflicted enough).  Meanwhile, as Frank, Andrew Long (at right) proves a revelation.  I felt the first stirrings of his internal disgust weren't quite accurately calibrated, but Long proves just about peerless in his second-half collapse; he's clearly one of the best classically-trained actors to play Boston in quite some time, and his performance only made me long for the Huntington to bring him back in Shakespeare or Shaw.

As usual, the set - by Allen Moyer - is a handsomely appointed giant, but I confess I always dig these beautifully-detailed behemoths; I guess I'm just a size queen.  My one quibble with the production was its lighting; designer Joel E. Silver, together with projections designer Seághan McKay, poetically conjures a dozen passing times of day (and season) through the set's office windows; but then all is often sacrificed to the glare of the fluorescent lights of the office itself. While I understood the rationale for this, I slowly began to resent it; less, please.  But as for everything else: just right.

Egarr is electric at H&H

This is just a quick note to say that if you've been on the fence about checking out Richard Egarr's version of Beethoven's Fifth at Handel and Haydn tomorrow - go.  Just trust me - go.  The brilliant Egarr made a brilliant case for Beethoven's Eighth a year or two ago, and so I wasn't surprised that his version of the Fifth was indeed superb; but actually, his renditions of Haydn's "The Clock" and Piano Concerto No. 11 (with himself as soloist) were even more original and arresting.  I'll be writing more about this concert later this week, but the upshot is that this is one of the most electrifying classical performances of the season.

An imaginary frontispiece, with the artist in furs.

I was struck when I read the Globe preview for "The Elegant Enigmas of Edward Gorey" (at the Boston Athenæum through June 4) that somehow the author got all the way through the piece without ever mentioning his subject's sexuality (even though a subtitle of the article at one point was "Figuring Out Why Edward Gorey Liked What He Liked" - you can still see this in the link). Other previews and articles I came upon followed the same M.O. - as if, either consciously or unconsciously, a certain story had been agreed upon, and the press was sticking to it. It seemed Gorey wasn't necessarily gay, even though he was a life-long bachelor who dressed in necklaces and furs; he was just asexual, a kind of lovable eunuch who spent his spare time petting his cats down on the Cape when he wasn't drawing his funny little books.

So I wasn't too surprised when at the exhibit itself, I found little mention of the artist's sexuality either. The biography on hand from the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust doesn't mention it at all, even though its four pages included references to Harvard, Chicago's "legendary St. Francis School" and Art Institute, the Poet's Theatre (where Gorey hung out with Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery . . . hmmmm), the New York City Ballet, and just about everything else prestigious that Gorey ever had a connection to.  So on the one hand - his pedigree, his connections, his place in the establishment firmament - the exhibit offers copious information about Mr. Gorey; but on the other hand, about his personal life it offers absolutely nothing.

Now I never personally knew the talented Mr. Gorey (who passed away in 2000).  So I don't "know" if he was gay or not. But I do know his artwork was obviously coded as queer.  In fact, it's gayer than a lavender three-dollar bill.  Just check out the cover he designed for Melville's Redburn in 1957,  at left; the novel is subtitled "His First Voyage" (!), and Gorey's design is hilariously deadpan; all it lacks is a word balloon with "Yoo hoo, Sailor!" to make its come-hither subtext clear: the buttoned-up Redburn's hands frame his pubes, even as he gazes at the open crotch of a swarthy sailor (while his twin offers up his bum).  At the same time, though, there's a real sense of alienation and melancholy at work in the image - and appropriately enough, as Redburn is the story of a virginal young man thrown into a brutal male milieu.

Many take Redburn as veiled autobiography; and of course these days, Melville is more and more generally believed to have been gay (I'm one of those believers, I admit).  So the Gorey cover is perhaps doubly, or even triply, poignant.  And at least it's in the Athenæum show.  To be fair, there are a few other images where the gay coding is so explicit  you'd only miss it if you were blind; in one from The West Wing, for instance, a Victorian gentleman kept warm by his fur (like Gorey himself) stares furtively at the tush of a male statue just before meeting his doom - and in it, we sense the darkly comic chuckle that Gorey became famous for.  But a similar image from Wing that's not in the show is far more moving, if less marketable; in it (below right), we see Gorey's bearded factotum stripped of his fur (and facing a void) on that cold, lonely parapet.  And tellingly, this time he has his hands covering his own bum.

Alone in the deadly West Wing.

Such an image, it goes without saying, could be troubling to gays and straights alike. To straights, it means pondering the artist's identity not as some emasculated entertainer but as an actual sexual outsider, expertly manipulating their responses; to gays, it means facing the author's estrangement from that identity, and his horror of it.  And isn't being gay supposed to be wonderful now?  Well, when you look over the oeuvre of Edward Gorey, you get the distinct impression that he didn't think so.  Which makes him a tricky subject for gay critics.  For can you have a gay cultural hero who was alienated from gay sex?

Thus, perhaps, the vogue for pushing Gorey into what I call "the glass closet," that strange cultural zone - rather like one of Gorey's own limbos - where cultural figures simultaneously operate as both gay and straight.  In the high cultural end of the closet, Peter Sellars jostles James Levine; in the low end, Michael Jackson elbows Calvin Klein and Danny Kaye.  Indeed, sometimes even when an artist explicitly states that he or she is gay - this used to happen fairly often with pop stars - they're patted back into the glass closet anyway, because it allows opposed aspects of the culture at large to exploit their output at will, without any thought as to its true nature.

Of course Gorey kept perfectly mum about his true nature to the press; he only spoke about it in his art.  And in a way, to be honest, the glass closet was appropriate to his artistic persona, which was itself neither here nor there, but locked in a kind of alienated stasis.  And as his  books and designs became more popular with the mass audience, Gorey probably found the glass closet a commercially convenient place to reside as well.

But should critics honor its crystalline walls?  Somehow I don't think so.  It would be strange, for instance, to never mention that El Greco was Catholic - and thus, to my mind, it's also equally strange to not wonder whether or not he might have been gay.  We'd look down at a Jewish performer who concealed his or her religion, and we'd never tolerate a black performer who worked in whiteface.  Why is the glass closet so different?  I suppose because many people still live with the burden of internalized homophobia.  But Edward Gorey has long passed on, and even if you wanted to honor the wishes of a closeted performer by never discussing his or her true identity, surely that wish becomes a bit absurd once they're dead.

Of course there are also purely commercial considerations in play - which, yes, still operate at non-profits like the Boston Athenæum, which has leaned heavily on Gorey's commercial work (albeit in its original form) for this exhibit.  That work is now largely perceived as a postmodern variant on Victorian "nonsense" (and accurately enough, I think), and you can feel that the press coverage of the "Enigmas" show (was there a single enigma in it?) was designed, again consciously or unconsciously, to make the exhibit "safe" for children.  (Indeed, the Globe later featured an article in which a staff member took her kids to it; meanwhile the paper's critic, Sebastian Smee, recommended that we "laugh and laugh" at Gorey's silly, "asexual" images.)

But this only begs a larger question - why do we keep Victorian nonsense in its own kind of closet?  For it, too, was populated by sexual outsiders.  Lewis Carroll was obsessed with little girls, and J. M. Barrie was obsessed with boys, but that doesn't really change the artistic status of the sublime Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Peter Pan.  Indeed, it's hard not to miss a certain parallel between the Victorians and Gorey's supposed sexlessness: it's pretty clear that Carroll and Barrie never acted on whatever impulses or drives they may have harbored - and neither, it seems, did Gorey.  He's their gay soul-mate, who poignantly enough never acted on his true nature.  Actually, perhaps Gorey's celibacy is more poignant than theirs (if less heroic); for they refrained from actual crimes, while Gorey . . .

Well, this is where things get really interesting.  Like Carroll and Barrie, Gorey is obsessed with children - but hardly as idealized sex objects.  No, Edward Gorey doesn't want to molest children, he wants to kill them - in drawings that fill the "Enigmas" show - although his sketches evince a strange near-sympathy that renders these many murders free of any sense of personal sadism.  No, it's the cruelty of the world that Gorey invokes so repetitively, as an emotional rather than sexual fetish; and as he's obsessed with the demise of both boys and girls, it slowly becomes clear that his true theme is the death of innocence in general (and it's hard not to equate this "death" with a similar childish "death" - the onset of sexual experience).

What perhaps made his name - and fortune - is that Gorey renders the end of childhood with an owlish bemusement that provides a reliable comic distance from the deadly events in question (comedy depends on some sort of distance, and "distance" is essentially what Gorey is all about).  In The Gashlycrumb Tinies (at right, perhaps his signature work), Neville may be lucky enough to die of ennui, but the rest of the "tinies" meet more, well, ghastly fates, in alphabetical order: Kate is struck with an axe, for instance, while Xerxes is devoured by mice.  But Gorey's pristine imagery is always frozen just before or after these horrors, and that po-faced gap renders the unseen atrocity absurd (as it has in the violent comedy of so many popular cartoons and movies).

This is what turns Gorey's illustrations into a form of high camp - that slight step back from the brink also operates as a mode of ironic control.  And that control never falters - all of Gorey's commercial illustration is relentlessly rigid; even when a figure is caught mid-leap, it seems to simply hang in mid-air, unable to move - which synchs up nicely with the palindromic, illogical nature of his clever limericks, and of "nonsense" in general.  That ironic grip is also what allows his art to be re-purposed by heterosexuals into a tonic for the pressures of wholesomeness; like Sebastian Smee, they can "laugh and laugh" at the images of kids headed toward disaster as a form of self-aware, but innocent, venting.

Still, I think for Gorey the death of children meant something quite different, just as I think it's wrong to try to emasculate his gayness, or deny his alienation from it.  Both aspects of his personality enrich his art - which of course makes it less marketable but more moving.   It's harder to "laugh and laugh" at some of his lesser-known but more personal works, for instance, like the drawing below (which is not in the Athenæum show).  There's still a certain black comedy at work here, but the image isn't camp, because there's also a greater sense of personal horror.  Oddly, it's difficult to chuckle knowingly at this helpless creature (with human eyes) gasping for air on its comfortable sofa, just as it's hard not to laugh at the grim ends of Kate and Neville.  The Athenæum is supposed to be a place of scholarship - or so I thought.  Yet it's happy to present only one side of this artist's emotional coin: an Edward Gorey largely reduced to the genesis of his calendars and bestsellers.  This, of course, nicely transforms the atmospheric corridors of the Athenæum into a kind of Addams-Family artistic theme park.  But I think real scholarship would have unearthed a portrait of the artist a bit more like the image below.

Not so funny: an Edward Gorey self-portrait?

And here's to the other side of the coin: the great PR people in our midst

Now seems a good time to say that not everybody in the Boston theatre scene is conspiring to destroy critical integrity. Some people, in fact, do just the opposite. I know it isn't easy to take a bad review and then smile at the critic responsible at the next opening night and say "So good to see you!" But some folks still understand that's part of the job, and they somehow carry it off with style. So even if these people hate me behind my back, I have to say I admire them, and they make my life infinitely easier than it otherwise would be.

The list of great publicists in the Boston theatre world is a long one, but I'd still like to take a moment to recognize a few of them. (All these people should have won IRNEs by now, in my opinion, if a PR category existed!)  At SpeakEasy Stage, Jim Torres is practically a star himself after years of dedicated service, and deservedly so; there simply isn't a nicer or more conscientious guy around.  Meanwhile, at the Huntington, Rebecca Curtiss always makes me feel welcome (even when I'm sure a sane person would want to kick me to the curb).  And at the New Rep, Gia Podobinski is unfailingly professional and unbelievably sweet.  I'm also always impressed with Dan Berube at the Merrimack, and I just get a kick out of Joyce Linehan's friendly, but no-nonsense, attitude at ArtsEmerson.  So here's to you, guys. Press contacts just don't get any better.

The Shawn & Kati Show

Okay, you've probably been able to tell that there has been a certain amount of turmoil going on here at the Hub Review.  And if you're in the theatre community, you're going to hear about all this anyway.  So I might as well tell you.

I have resigned as a member of the IRNE Awards, largely due to the scheming of the ART's Kati Mitchell (the addled old bat who has long defined the local nadir of the public relations profession) and Company One's "artistic" director, Shawn LaCount.  For many readers, I suppose an introduction is in order to both these unsavory characters.  First, batty Kati - she's been after me for years, I think because I could precisely explain why most ART productions were pretentious junk. She didn't like that, not one bit; not because she understood the productions herself (don't be ridiculous; she's crazy but not that crazy); no, it was just that my level of insight threw a serious wrench into the campaign of intimidation and threat by which the ART maintains its reputation against all artistic and moral odds. Kati not only used to send me crazy emails in all caps after a bad review, but, believe it or not, she even penned the IRNE folks an angry letter declaring that the ART's failure to win more awards every year only made the IRNEs look bad.  She's hilariously beyond the pale - easily the worst PR person I've ever encountered in my life.

Next: Kati's latest cohort in crime, Shawn LaCount, whom (yes) I called an "a**hole" in one of my tweets a few weeks ago. Shocking, I know; such language!  (And in my own Twitter feed!)  I tossed off this "personal attack" (in Kati's self-serving lingo) because Mr. LaCount was serving as her replacement for Jeff Poulos, late of StageSource, who was her previous pawn in a plot last year to get me off the IRNEs. (Yes, the poor IRNE critics have gone through all this before - Mitchell essentially wages wars of attrition.)

Now calling LaCount an a**hole may be crass, but is it inaccurate? Before you answer, consider that LaCount has spent the last few weeks relentlessly badgering and harassing various IRNE members (until finally I resigned just so he'd leave them alone). He whined and screamed and stamped his feet. He called the IRNE critics racist (of course); what's more, he actually called good old Beverly Creasey a racist, even though she was one of the founders of the non-traditional casting project, back in the days when local critics like Arthur Friedman (Bill Marx's mentor, of course) would publicly argue for all-white casting for classic plays - and many years before LaCount discovered (as so many of his generation have) the career-enhancing aspects of "fighting" something that nobody actually supports anymore.  To be fair, LaCount was also probably smarting from my labeling him a "race diva" after Company One refused me press tickets to their crude blackface extravaganza The Neighbors - which was dreadful, everyone says in private, so maybe I should be grateful I didn't have to suffer through it.  And to be honest, I was also pretty grateful for their hilarious explanation as to my exclusion - according to the logically-challenged Mason Sand, it was because of Company One's commitment to diversity!  That's right: "We are excluding you because of our commitment to diversity."  (Really, you can't make this stuff up.)

I should add, though, that LaCount went well beyond simply playing the liberal guilt card to get what he wanted.  He claimed he would boycott the IRNE ceremony unless I left the organization,  and would talk other companies into boycotting, too.  He threatened that he would not allow his actors to accept their awards should they win.  Which was pretty ironic, since one of those nominated actors - Becca A. Lewis - was on the ballot largely because I argued for her to be there.  So it's also amusing to ponder that if she wins, and I hadn't resigned, LaCount would have ripped the award right out of her hot little hand. That's how much he loves his "collaborators."

And Lewis well may win; like diversity specialist Mason Sand, she has some talent.  But Shawn LaCount, like his sidekick Summer L. Williams (who also specializes in browbeating critics), just doesn't - funny how that works, isn't it - and that's going to hurt more and more as the years go by and Shawn doesn't get the recognition that (like Kati!) he's sure he deserves. To pile irony on irony, however, I should also tell you that I actually argued for a directing nomination for Shawn only a few weeks ago, because I thought he'd done better than usual with his direction of The Aliens; isn't that just a hoot? I was shouted down, though; other IRNE members felt his sterling cast had made him look good, which is probably true.

Anyway - back to the Shawn & Kati show. Mitchell and LaCount were clearly in cahoots, but they weren't alone, I'm afraid; I don't have the full story from anyone on this, but I imagine the usual suspects (Steve Mahler, of Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, I'd guess, and maybe the neurotic John Kuntz?, or the weird Mitchell crony Henry Lussier of the Lyric Stage?, perhaps the bitter Debra Wise of Underground Railway Theater?) got involved with drafting a Scary Letter of Outrage against me.  I know, I know - a scary letter!  EEEK!  The IRNE people really need more spine, but to be honest, the situation was more that their spines were just being worn down from the ongoing neurotic frenzy.   Still, I wish I'd been able to read this letter!  I can just imagine: Tom Garvey said "a**hole" in a tweet!  Plus he said Shakespeare was white and James Levine is gay!  He is a terrible stain on your entire organization!  (Remember, Kati Mitchell works for Diane Paulus, so I think she knows from stains on reputations.)

Anyway, long story short, together Shawn and Kati slowly wore the IRNE members down.  Kati didn't threaten to deny them all press tickets (she has done that before, it seems), but I'm sure they feared that was the final step, after the Scary Letter, in her ongoing Inquisition.  They wouldn't actually get rid of me, of course, but I kept getting calls and requests to go to meetings that all revolved around their begging me to censor my blog (and then even my tweets) as if I were writing for the Globe.

In a word, that ain't gonna happen.  So I resigned, just to get the whole thing over with. And the bitch won.  (Yes, you can quote me on that.) Although it may be a pyrrhic victory, at least for Shawn LaCount - for as you can see, my resignation actually means Company One has lost an advocate on the IRNEs.  (And I don't think they've gained any others!)  Of course Shawn couldn't have known that, just as I'm sure he couldn't figure out that Mitchell was playing him for a patsy.  What the other dolts who apparently signed on to Mitchell's letter thought they could possibly gain from it I've no idea.  People do seem to think I have a mysterious influence over other IRNE critics, but rest assured, I don't.  Behind closed doors, my opinion of the quality of the productions at both the ART and Company One is widely shared.  I've really never had to argue against the ART, or Company One - or Steve Mahler, or Ryan Landry, or even David Miller (in fact I'm careful just to never discuss David Miller).

Anyway, for a few days I was very blue.  I thought I wanted to close The Hub Review, in fact. It wasn't that Kati Mitchell "won;" it was, as another critic put it, that her example, along with the fact that several other theatre producers would fall in line behind her, made you not want to go to the theatre at all.  Because Kati's - and Shawn's - vision of the theatre is a place of sleazy, crude gamesmanship overlaid by Harvard "class" and political correctness, where artistic quality comes dead last.  It's creepy - a kind of theatrical hell, in fact. 

And I have to say that this whole affair has set a horrible precedent.  It gives the impression that PR people are setting critical policy - at least at one remove.  Which, in a word, should never happen.  Plus there's the dispiriting sense of what the IRNEs have turned into backstage - a vile exhibition of arm-twisting and back-biting.  It wasn't supposed to be that way.  The IRNEs are entirely a volunteer organization, of critics who do indeed love the art form they cover; they "owe" the grasping Kati Mitchell and Shawn LaCount, as well as the theatre companies they represent, precisely nothing.  And yet both feel entitled to attack and bad-mouth these volunteers at will.  They're just disgusting.

Never fear, however - I'm not abandoning the Hub Review. (Then the bitch really would have won.)  Mitchell and LaCount may have tarnished the IRNEs, but who knows - things change, and if there's any justice, Mitchell will be struck by lightning and a piano will fall on LaCount.  And as my partner pointed out, the only practical difference to me is that now I don't have to cover their mediocre theatre companies anymore.  Because that rogue's gallery of "usual suspects" I listed above - the ART, Company One, et. al. - are, indeed, the shallow end of the theatrical talent pool, the ones who have to lean on money, clout, or political correctness to "win" awards.

So I'll keep writing.  I have to.  If I quit, the amount of theatre coverage in Boston is almost cut in half!  And I'm really not concerned that my reputation for skeptical, fair-minded analysis will be at all impacted by this whole imbroglio.  Everyone knows I'm the strongest, most versatile, and most prolific critic in town.  That's why Kati wants me gone.  But yes, it's true that if you poke me enough, I will respond with a word like a**hole - and that's just the way it is.

David Trudgen faces down Julius Caesar as Nero. Photos by Jeffrey Dunn.

You leave Boston Lyric Opera's Agrippina a bit winded, I think: it's so good in so many ways you can't quite believe it.  Or perhaps you're just winded from laughter; for this Agrippina is not only exquisitely sung, and brilliantly acted and designed, it's also screamingly funny, in a go-for-broke pop style that many local productions have attempted but few have brought off (the only competition I can think of was Opera Boston's La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, but that's a far lesser opera).  Perhaps the shortest, punchiest review for Agrippina would be: Big voices, big laughs = grand opera, or something like that.  BLO has always specialized in opera as popular entertainment (just as Handel did); with Agrippina, they've practically perfected it.

Although I can already guess what some will say: "It's too funny."  Right.  Too funny.  I know you won't believe me, but I was doubled over with laughter at some of Agrippina (and I thought my partner might have a seizure).  I guess you're not supposed to do that at Handel.  But I'm not sure why - at least when not only the singing and music are first-rate, but the concept and direction are, too.  And incredibly, somehow Agrippina hangs onto its sense of grandeur despite its many pratfalls - and when the libretto spins on a dime in the second act and turns tragic, believe it or not, the production does as well.  In short, you'll laugh and you'll cry.  You could argue whether the BLO cast finds a synthesis of these opposed styles for the opera's final act; I mean, you could if you wanted to.  I'd had so much fun by then that I really didn't care.

I admit, though, that I wasn't sure the BLO could pull off a satire quite this brazen in the opening scene (when a bored Nero almost set his mother on fire).  But I soon realized just about everyone on stage had not only operatic pipes but crack comic timing, too; and at any rate, it became impossible to ignore the tone of Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani's blackly comic libretto (widely viewed at the time as a parody of Vatican politics).  You probably know the basic plot from I, Claudius or L'incoronazione di Poppea: the ruthless Agrippina schemes, well, ruthlessly to place her son Nero (here Nerone) on the throne in the waning years of the reign of Claudius (here Claudio).  Incredibly, Handel and Grimani transform these Roman power plays into a kind of quasi-romantic roundelay, with only the occasional hint of the disaster that Nerone's impending reign would become.

Venice meets Rome meets modernity: Kathleen Kim's entrance as Poppea.

Director Lillian Groag leans heavily, then, on screwball antics, and lets just about everybody chew the scenery.  The amazing thing is that the cast is so strong - and Groag's clever stage business so artfully  intertwined with the music - that it all works, even when it gets a little hammy.  Soprano Caroline Worra makes a kind of mad stage mother of Agrippina - she seems to be devouring the role as we watch; but she's also in glorious voice, and when the empress is suddenly struck by guilty doubts (see masthead photo), suddenly Worra is dramatically riveting, too.  She's matched, however, by Kathleen Kim's piping pepperpot of a Poppea (above), who not only soars dazzlingly through several demanding arias, but has major bedroom-farce chops, too.  But then I can't forget baritone Christian Van Horn's horny Claudius - another amazing match between a voice to die for and bedroom moves that leave you in stitches.  Perhaps not quite as compelling vocally was countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo's Ottone.  Costanzo seemed to have breath control trouble in his big Act II aria, but dramatically it was heart-breaking anyway, and somehow Costanzo's characterization wound up being very endearing.  The other big counter-tenor role was handled more consistently, by David Trudgen (at top), who brought a nicely spoiled spin to the proceedings, but from whom I hoped for a bit more dark twistedness here and there.  There was also very nice work around the edges of the production by bass David M. Cushing, a local boy who has never sounded better.

Caroline Worra and Christian Van Horn.

Meanwhile, down in the pit, Gary Thor Wedow conducted with both sensitivity and muscular feeling - although he wasn't working with period instruments, but rather something like a hybrid modern orchestra with a continuo section.  This bolder sound matched the bold stage business, however, and that sense of a "hybrid" modern/baroque aesthetic played out elsewhere, too  - the houselights were half-dimmed (in Handel's day, they wouldn't have been dimmed at all), and the orchestra pit was lifted to almost audience-level (again, there would have been no break between audience and players in the 18th century).  Even the stage design hinted at an overlay of eras - the cast was clad in a range of modern duds, from Mussolini to Swinging London, but they plotted and schemed among moving chunks of ancient Rome (bisected occasionally by abstract stairs and thrones - often the color of Agrippina's gown, at left).  The great John Conklin was responsible for this layered, ever-shifting vision - constantly re-configured by Venetian courtiers from Handel's day - and it was lit with startling imagination by Robert Wierzel (who I'm beginning to think, after seeing this and Idomeneo, may be the most talented lighting designer alive).  Alas, opening night featured its own bit of stage drama, when two moving columns crashed into each other.  But something tells me they've taken care of that by now - because frankly I'm beginning to wonder if there's anything BLO can't do.  Agrippina marks their third hit, out of three productions, this year.  With their upcoming Midsummer by Britten, they may just go four-for-four.

Bolcom, BMOP and the graceful ghost of Ligeti

Olivier Cazal plays William Bolcom's "The Poltergeist" rag.

I'm late with my thoughts on the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's "Bolcom with BMOP" evening last Sunday.  Which may have something to do with the fact that I was slightly, but not entirely, disappointed by the program.  I was drawn to the concert because I'm a fan of its eponymous star, the distinguished American composer William Bolcom - or at least I'm a huge fan (like many people) of his piano and vocal music (a favorite selection, "The Poltergeist," above).  So I was curious about the less-often-heard orchestral selections conductor Gil Rose had chosen for the concert - Bolcom's early Commedia (1971) and his Symphony No. 3 (1979).

Both, however, proved perhaps more interesting for what they said about the state of modern music - or perhaps Bolcom's relationship to that music - than what they revealed as individual musical statements. Bolcom has always been a man torn between "serious" and "popular" modes - he has probably made his largest mark on the culture with his brilliant investigations of ragtime (above).  And listening to his work here, it was hard not to consider him a man fundamentally divided. In Commedia, for instance, he juxtaposed the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries - quoting from everything from Papageno to Petrushka, in fact - without ever really seeming to settle anywhere; the upshot of the piece seemed to be that every musical style was in effect a kind of harlequin, and the whole of musical history therefore, yes, merely a commedia.

Meanwhile, in Symphony No. 3, Bolcom seemed to devise a kind of conceptual stand-off between György Ligeti and (believe it or not) Guy Lombardo. The piece is embroidered with a lot of conceptual mumbo-jumbo about the "alpha" and "omega" of existence, and has the high-modern finish to go with that kind of guff; but a hilariously suave fox-trot takes over from the Ligeti-like washes of prettified dissonance in the second movement, and never really lets go. The effect was funny and poignant - but largely because you could feel the composer's own eccentric energies were most at home in the plush, horn-y rhythms of that fox-trot rather than out there in the nebulous space of some gaseous "future."

Of course many BMOP concerts are a bit like listening to the academy hum to itself (the performances are often funded by the composers themselves, most of whom teach in leading music schools).  And at this program, much of the humming did seem to be coming from the office of the late Professor Ligeti.  Many of the movements on offer derived from the hazy sonic clouds of Atmospheres, for instance - only glinting with more blank optimism than exotic paranoia (and cut with intriguing mixes of vaguely Asian percussion).  It's a formula I've heard a lot before at BMOP, and though Rose always brings off its technical challenges impressively, I can't say I want to hear much more of it.  Still,  Sojourner Hodges's "Full Fathom Five" wasn't a bad sample of the form (and featured some lovely singing from soprano Bethany Worrell).  And Michael Gandolfi's by-now-familiar "Garden of the Senses" Suite from The Garden of Cosmic Speculation was enjoyable enough, even if its sweetly intricate complexities remain somehow unchallenging.

I was most intrigued by local composer Kati Agócs, however, and her gorgeous . . like treasure hidden in a field, even if I felt her music sometimes sounded as if it had been designed to please an unseen faculty committee (she teaches at the New England Conservatory).  Much of . . . like treasure was a bit generically "spiritual" and uplifting - but somehow, as the piece progressed, the composer's passion came through anyway. You wondered whether her essential problem was that she's got no genuine native tradition to embed her passion in - all she's got is the new-age, new-music consensus, which always feels slightly pre-fab. That synthetic quality was only re-inforced in my mind by her web page, in which (coiled sexily on a grand piano), she declares her music is "original, daring and from the heart;" I also noted with dismay her dizzying number of new commissions, all with Hallmark Card titles like "Supernatural Love," "Immutable Dreams," and "Perpetual Summer." Of course being sexy, self-promoting and "spiritual" doesn't mean Agócs doesn't have musical talent; indeed, I think I might already rate . . . like treasure hidden in a field as a bit better than The Garden of Cosmic Speculation.  Like Andy Vores, she may be a local composer to watch.

Boys and girls together in Reasons to Be Pretty.

Fans of gender parity should be thrilled about Neil LaBute's Reasons to Be Pretty (at SpeakEasy Stage through April 2). The famously misanthropic playwright has written female monsters before, I suppose, but none that matches up with popular modes of femininity in quite the same way his long gallery of male assholes has mapped the culture's idea of masculinity.  Indeed,  here LaBute pulls off something like the hat trick he managed in Fat Pig - where he dared the audience to honestly disagree with the cruel standards of beauty his handsome hero's world espoused. In Reasons, his female lead - named "Steph" - throws tantrums so severe, and so comically cruel, that when a character describes her with the c-word, my guess is every guy in the audience silently agreed; and yet you could sense the women in the crowd - well, they didn't think she was so bad.  Not even when she hollered like a five-year-old and broke things; not even when she struck the supposed love of her life in the face.  And yet ten to one, the boyfriends who watched it all in horror went home and told their girlfriends that yeah, they could kind of sympathize with her. You have to hand it to him - when it comes to audience-baiting, with Reasons to Be Pretty, LaBute has penned another beaut.

Meanwhile, as a gay friend of mine put it, why not call this play Reasons to Be Gay?  (Or as another quipped, "Or how about a Ryan Landry version called Reasons to Be Pussy?") To those of us with little interest in women as sex objects, the play certainly operates as a kind of SOS from the edge of a gender war we've only observed from the sidelines (if with mounting horror).  Not that there's any way we could help; and not that the emergence of this kind of harridan has gone unremarked in pop culture; late-night comedy, slapstick frat movies, and, yes, the Gold Dust Orphan shows are filled to bursting with similar gorgons.  Yet these characters are almost inevitably caricatures - cartoons undercut with irony, a form of cultural venting with no real weight behind it.  LaBute is different; he serves his female trouble up straight, no chaser.

Gisele Bündchen: the problem

Of course you could argue that "Steph" (who's a hairdresser) has been driven to violence, emotional and otherwise, by our culture's obsession with body image - like so many LaBute characters before her.  Indeed, what sets off her first tirade is a phone call from BFF "Carly," who has overhead Steph's boyfriend Greg describe her face to his buds as "regular" - although in the following context: "Okay, Steph's face may just be regular, but I love her more than anything," or something like that.  In short, Greg's a nice guy who cares for his girl, but who also knows he hasn't bedded Gisele Bündchen (at right).  And he's okay with that.  (After all, Gisele is taken.)

Not for Steph the mature comforts of romantic realism, however. Indeed, no bull ever reacted to a red flag as she does to the word "regular." Soon poor Greg is out in the cold, clutching copies of Nathaniel Hawthorne to his chest (though a college drop-out, he's still a reader) as he shuffles back and forth to his dead-end job, which seems to consist of stacking big crates in even bigger cages.

Prowling those cages with him, however, is more female trouble - "Carly" is Greg's co-worker (she holds court in the lunchroom in a guard's uniform, just so we know which gender has policing authority these days). And with the arrival of lovely Carly and her horndog husband, "Kent" on the scene - both of them quite pretty, btw - Reasons to Be Pretty begins to move beyond the horizons of Fat Pig and The Shape of Things, and get a little deeper and more ambitious than the average LaBute play.

One reason to be pretty. Photos by Craig Bailey.

For this time around, the playwright has in mind the construction of a set of interlocking variations on his usual themes. In the past, LaBute has been content to reveal how our culture of beauty victimizes those who lack it - a woman is spurned, or a man is humiliated; then he rings down the curtain. But Carly and Greg struggle just as Greg and Steph did with the "problem" of beauty - even though both of them are, indeed, beautiful (and know it). But beauty, it turns out, isn't pretty - and what's more, it's a double-edged sword. For Kent has been cheating relentlessly on Carly, with a woman even more attractive - in fact, he has finagled a move to a different work shift to give him more time to pursue his extra-curricular activities.

So even as Steph has thrown aside a worthy man who can see through the blandishments of beauty, so Carly is clinging to a cad precisely because she, too, is in its thrall. The question for Greg is: as his buddy-buddy intimacy with Kent has given him the inside scoop on his affair, should he violate the norms of gender loyalty, and give Carly the same wake-up call she gave Steph - only this time with a dose of truth far more crushing?

It's actually a rather interesting moral quandary - and a common one, too; who among us hasn't struggled with some minor variation of it? And LaBute skillfully teases it out to a satisfying climax (complete with fist-fight, here staged, ironically enough, by Angie Jepson, who plays Steph, and is also a fight choreographer). At the same time, the playwright seems unsure what to do with Steph once she's served her purpose as catalyst; he keeps bringing her back on, in scenes that linger but basically go nowhere, because for some reason he's unwilling to allow the scales to fall from her eyes (even when she hears the truth about Carly).

As Steph, Angie Jepson can't quite triumph over this lack of arc - nor does she suggest the depths of insecurity (and thwarted love for Greg) that might inspire a twinge of sympathy even among the boyfriends in the audience.  But Jepson has always given great spitfire, and she certainly crackles on here.  Meanwhile, as Greg, Andy Macdonald looks and sounds just right, but likewise doesn't really suggest the torch for Steph that he claims to be carrying; once caught up in conflict with Kent, however, Macdonald grows quite compelling.  Danielle Muehlen's Carly likewise grows in stature as the play progresses, even though its slightly schematic natures forces her into some hairpin emotional turns.  Meanwhile, as Kent, Burt Grinstead struts and preens with show-stopping confidence - but even he, I think, could tend a bit more to subtext; the cocky Kent is at heart a rather cowardly weasel, and I think he'd rather die than let anyone know that.

Paul Melone's direction was (as usual) strong and slick - although as noted, there are deeper notes to be sounded here and there than the cast seems to realize.  Meanwhile Eric Levenson's set design cleverly blended together work, home and play (just as they're all blended together for the characters), and Jeff Adelberg's lighting was appropriately industrial; the entire physical production, in fact, held to SpeakEasy's usual high standard.  That and the solid acting on offer are more than enough reasons to see Pretty.