The return - and last bow - of a classic

Whitney Jensen sails through the Waltz of the Flowers.  Photos: Gene Schiavone.

I'm not sure I have anything left to say about The Nutcracker. I'm not sure anybody does. But as I settled into my seat to catch the first night of Boston Ballet's annual edition, I looked forward to its familiar pleasures just as I always do.   Does the Ballet do this holiday classic up right?  Yes, most definitely, and I'm not alone in that opinion - judging from online polls, it's the most popular Nutcracker in the country.  Which really should come as no surprise, given artistic director Mikko Nissinen has taken great care to pack as much entertainment value as he can into his company's big moneymaker - indeed, at times it feels almost overstuffed, a kind of holiday behemoth with something for everyone.

You could argue, I suppose, that some versions are cleaner and more coherent - often because they've recruited an adult Clara, which allows for more narrative dancing in the second half.  And indeed, the Boston Ballet edition is not so much an artistic statement as an extravaganza; it lurches occasionally in its narrative, and swings from fantasy to romance to comedy at the drop of a snowflake.  But who cares?  The kids always laugh at the mechanical mouse, and Dad always wakes up when the sylph of the "Arabian" dance begins her barely-PG contortions, while Mom just finds everything adorable; and I'm not going to argue with any of them.

Alas, a few of this elaborate production's tricks didn't quite come off on opening night; a magic handkerchief went rogue, for instance, briefly entangling Sabi Varga's spooky, sexy Drosselmeier.  So maybe it's a good thing the sets and costumes are being "retired," bright and bold as they are - in case you haven't heard, this year is your last chance to see them.  And you should, of course, because they're charming in a deliciously high, fantastical key - but something tells me next year's edition will be charming, too (never fear, my inside sources assure me the production will remain traditional - you can see an initial sketch of the possibilities at www.bostonballet.org/nutcracker2012).  So you should probably see the show this year and next, just like I do.

Indeed, watching the production play out over time has turned out to be the best way for me to assess the growth of the Ballet's general technical ability. By now, however, the bench of talent has grown so deep and so wide that it may have outgrown this particular yardstick.  To be honest, the second act is now one long stretch of technical prowess - every one of Tchaikovsky's divertissements seems to have its own expert interpreter.  Indeed, as the dancers parade into the Kingdom of Sweets at the top of the act, you could be forgiven for feeling slightly stunned.   We've already met mainstays James Whiteside, Lia Cirio, and Misa Kuranaga - but then Rie Ichikawa, Kathleen Breen Combes, Lasha Khozashvili, Adiarys Almeida, Joseph Gatti, Jeffrey Cirio, and Whitney Jensen file through, along with many others - the great dancers just keep coming and coming, until they fill the stage.

Lia Cirio (the Sugar Plum Fairy) guides Rachel Harrison (Clara) through the Kingdom of Sweets.

There were incremental steps forward evident for some younger members of the company, too.  The up-and-coming Paolo Arrais, for instance, who dazzled us as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, unexpectedly had to step in for John Lam as the Snow King - and dazzled us all over again.  And somehow Isaac Akiba's leaps during his "Russian" dance had a lyricism this time around they've lacked before; Akiba has always been a great athlete, but now I could feel real emotion moving beneath his sunny ability; he's becoming a great dancer, too.  Lawrence Rines likewise made a solid impression as a loose-limbed Harlequin, against Dalay Parrondo's reliably precise Columbine.  And the very youngest members of the cast - the children - all performed with dedication and charm, while Rachel Harrison (above, with Lia Cirio) made a sweetly poised Clara.

Down in the pit, conductor Jonathan McPhee gave what may be the longest stretch of memorable melody in existence his usual vigorous shape, although as in Romeo and Juliet, I'm afraid there was roughness in the horns here and there.  Still, principal trumpet Bruce Hall came through with a gleamingly confident solo in the "Spanish" dance that seemed to almost sum up the virtues of this much-loved version - dazzling show-biz brio, a solid sense of fun, and dancing chops to die for.

Janet Echelman's world-wide webs at Northeastern

In these networked days, it's no surprise that literal nets have become an artform unto themselves - and the artist who has made them resonate best as public art is probably Janet Echelman, whose wonderful 160-foot wide project, She Changes (above) brilliantly transformed a traffic circle along the coast of Portugal into a meditation on the sea and wind. Ms. Echelman first drew her inspiration from fishermen's nets, but now she's gone all high-tech, and her installations are in demand all over the world.  And I'd certainly say there are barren public spaces in our own "Windy City" that could be enlivened by her brand of floating magic (as long as it can withstand a strong nor'eatster, that is).  At any rate, you can get to know the artist a little better this Thursday night at Northeastern University, where she will be speaking in the Raytheon Amphitheater at 5:00 PM, as part of the Presidential Speaker Series, Profiles in Innovation. The event will be also be streamed live on facebook.com/northeastern and via the university's homepage, northeastern.edu.

Ok, everybody's a critic - only Michael Kaiser is a really bad one! (And you can be a better one.)

Sorry, I know it's wrong to make fun of people with mental challenges, but I can't resist the temptation to pile onto Michael Kaiser (who is, I can barely believe, a graduate of my own alma mater, MIT!), after he has been all but buried under a heap of ridicule for this truly block-headed cri de coeur on the Huffington Post. In that by-now-infamous whine, Kaiser lamented the demise of the professional critic, and found the rise of reviewing on the Internet "a scary trend."  (Included in that trend were not only bloggers like moi, but also frequenters of chat rooms, people who write for "professional" websites like Broadway World, and even folks who praise or diss shows they've seen on the producing theatres' own websites.)  In essence, Kaiser worried that without paid critics offering the public guidance, "art that appeals to the lowest common denominator will always be deemed the best."

And you know, at first glance, that sounds like an argument, I suppose.  But only at first glance.  The fact that it has been posted on a website that does not pay its authors should, I think, be the first amusing signal that all's not right with Kaiser's analysis.  (For in effect, he's arguing against his own forum, isn't he?)  And then one has to wonder - exactly what Golden Age of Professional Criticism is he referring to?  There has never been a moment (in my lifetime, at least) in which print critics in Boston were leading any kind of intellectual charge for any kind of theatre - much less proffering complex arguments of any real artistic discernment.  In New York - yes, a bit; but honestly only from a handful of people, who were wrong almost as often as they were right.  I suppose there were a few glimmers of critical ability in Chicago and on the West Coast over the years; and I know some folks cling to Theatre of Revolt as an example of engaged criticism - although to me, Robert Brustein's own checkered theatrical career kind of undermines that argument; but hey, I'll throw his fans a bone - one book, fifty years ago.   And Frank Rich was a smart guy with a sharp, upper-middle-brow eye.  But all in all, I'm inclined to say:


Big fucking deal.

And I can't help but note the underside of Kaiser's wistfulness.  He's the president of the Kennedy Center, of course - a major producer of the arts - and one thing he's not honest enough to admit is that professional print critics are in many ways much more easily controlled by producers than Internet critics are.  [As I've been both a print critic and an Internet critic, I'm in a good position to critique Kaiser's argument - and I'll say up front, writing for the Internet is far more intellectually satisfying than writing for print.] I know for a fact, for instance, that during my stint at the Globe, a major theatre in these parts went to my editor and demanded that I never be allowed to review their productions (based on my rather acerbic style, I suppose).  Just in case you're wondering, the editor reportedly acquiesced to the demand.  And let's just say that would never happen on the Internet - after a blog has established its audience, I should say; until then, some bloggers do find themselves cutting ethical corners for the sake of free tickets.

Which may be what gives some producers the idea they can run the rest of the Web with the same iron hand they apply to print outlets.  I've just faced down a years-long attempt, for instance, by the A.R.T. to silence me  - which I'm not pretending wasn't a pitched battle; I had to rely on my own earned reputation for content, as well as the respect and support of other Internet critics, to hold my own. But the point is that said battle never would have even happened at the Globe.  Things would have never gotten to the bare-knuckles stage; it would have been handled behind the scenes.  With advertising dollars, as well as various business, political, and personal relationships in the balance, no critic who savaged the A.R.T. as relentlessly as I have would ever have lasted at the Globe.

Let's look at a related claim by Kaiser; he coos that professional critics are "vetted by their employers."  To which I can only say - oh, really?  Don Aucoin, the Globe's chief critic, was simply rotated in from the city desk, I believe.  And wasn't Ed Siegel, his predecessor, a television critic?  And who the hell was Terry Byrne, anyway, before the Herald hired her?  And isn't Jenna Scherer (admittedly the brightest of this crew) only about 16?  I hate to tell ya, Mike, but it's hard to parse an intellectual standard from this motley field.  Even looking to New York, I don't find the "vetting" too edifying - Charles Isherwood used to gush about porn stars when he wasn't reviewing for Variety, and didn't Ben Brantley write for Women's Wear Daily?  Whew - almost too lofty, huh.

But of course in a way these critics are vetted; they are judged by how closely their taste matches that of their paper's audience, and perhaps more importantly, how accurately they can assess the power structure within which a theatrical production has been mounted.  Questions of artistic judgment are incidental to these concerns.  In Boston, for example, we're faced by an obvious contradiction between theatrical achievement and social prominence: Harvard, the leading institution in the area on practically every level, regularly produces burlesque and titty shows on its stages - that is when the world's greatest university isn't aggressively dumbing down the classics into rock extravaganzas and the like.  To be blunt, Harvard is the top of the social heap, but the bottom of the artistic heap: in fact it proudly produces art that appeals to (in Kaiser's words) the lowest common denominator.  No real theatre critic could ever square that particular circle.  Hence - Don Aucoin and Terry Byrne.

So it's obvious where Kaiser's model of criticism can lead.  But is his nostalgic dream the only model for substantive criticism?  Do we have to look backward for a vision of great criticism?  The evidence argues otherwise. Kaiser actually doesn't seem particularly conversant with the state of discourse on the Internet, or the passionate debates that have often been waged on various sites over various works of art.  He doesn't note that analyses are often published on the Web that are far longer than those ever allowed into newsprint - even in the heyday of the Times.  (I myself have published three-part articles on some theatrical events, and a 3,000-word review is not unusual on this site.)   In short, he doesn't grapple with the sheer abundance of commentary on the Web, and he doesn't attempt to divide the digital wheat from the chaff.  Indeed, he even admits that it's difficult "to distinguish the professional critic from the amateur as one reads on-line reviews and critiques"!

Only - whoa, Mike - doesn't that actually undo your entire argument?

Okay, like I said, it's not fair to make fun! But it's completely fair to argue that the real problem with Internet reviewing is that it's still too much like print reviewing.  Indeed, bloggers often ape the emasculated tea-room tone of the print crowd in some pathetic attempt to be "taken seriously," and people often foolishly declare that I don't follow the "standards" of print criticism - to which I can only say, honey, that's the whole idea!  I can write as much as I want to about what I want to; I can draw connections between art forms that no print outlet would allow; I can indulge in extended conversations with other critics and artists; and of course, I can hammer away at various miscreants as long as I have the strength.  In short, I can tailor my criticism to what I believe are the needs of the moment; I'm not shackled by my paycheck, or any inability to reach the public.  These advantages may shock Michael Kaiser, of course, because they amount to a sustained assault on what he imagines are his own prerogatives - and the prerogatives of his class - over criticism.  But there's the rub, Mike - you're no longer in charge.

I know, I know, standards aren't what they used to be, and sometimes it all looks like a race to the bottom (with newspapers leading the way!) and blah blah fucking blah.  Only the standards were never real, buddy, and you were always being flattered beyond your actual critical ability, and only now do we perhaps  have a chance to re-make theatre criticism into what it always should have been all along. In fact, if you look closely, you'll find criticism on the Web that is as good or better than anything you'll find in print.  Yes, it's too bad we aren't paid for it - and probably never will be.  But if the pay became a reality, without the meddling editors, would you still feel the same way? And frankly, if money is the reason you're in the game, maybe you need to find another game . . .

Tonight, tonight

By now the annual Boston Early Music Festival chamber opera production qualifies as an "event." And that event is tonight (above is the promo video, which gives you some sense of the intelligent stagings and high musical standards at BEMF). This year the selection(s) are a double bill of Charpentier's La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers and La Couronne de Fleurs (from a text by Molière). Tonight and tomorrow only.  (It's probably sold out, but who knows, you may have a shot.)  And I'm hearing more music tomorrow, btw, in a different key - the wonderful Fats Waller musical Ain't Misbehavin' at the Lyric Stage.  You'll hear all about both over the coming week, along with (I hope) my thoughts on Dance/Draw at the ICA, George Clooney's new flick The Descendants, and, you know, other stuff.

Captors at the Huntington

I didn't think it was possible to write a boring play about Adolf Eichmann.

Nevertheless, fledgling playwright Evan M. Wiener has managed to do it, and the Huntington has staged it with all the trimmings, under the guidance of artistic director Peter DuBois.  If you doubt me as to its tedium, go ahead and sit through Captors (through Dec. 11) - but seriously, you're better off staying home and reading Hannah Arendt, on whose work Weiner's derivative ramblings are merely a thin theatrical gloss.

Does that sound harsh?  I think I'm actually going easy on Wiener; he practically obscures Arendt, I'd argue.  But then the real source of Captors is not the great Eichmann in Jerusalem but rather the lesser Eichmann in My Hands, a first-hand account of the fugitive war criminal's 1960 capture in Argentina by Peter Z. Malkin ("as told to" Harry Stein).  Malkin was on the Israeli team that nabbed the Nazi, and his book essentially covers the ten days during which the kidnappers hunkered down in their safe house, to devise both an exit strategy and a disguise for their captive - all while simultaneously attempting to cajole (or threaten) him into signing a paper agreeing to his extradition and trial.

The eventual bestowal of that signature is one of the script's two small-scaled, but genuine, dramatic coups (the other occurs when Eichmann answers his guilt in the killing of children with the horrifying line - straight from Malkin's book - "But they were Jewish, weren't they?").  To some, these small shudders - created almost entirely by Michael Cristofer, in a striking performance as Eichmann (below) - may be enough to justify the evening, but all I can say is they're a long time coming; both occur about two hours into the play, and neither counts as a revelation.  And I think it's worth noting that Malkin's (and Stein's, and Wiener's) account of how that key signature was obtained is widely contested.  In Captors, Eichmann's pride seduces him into signing his own death warrant; but while one reading of his character lends some support to this idea, more worldly-wise historians think Eichmann only signed on the dotted line once a gun (or its equivalent) had been held to his head.  (For tellingly, despite that signature, Eichmann had to be sedated to the edge of consciousness before he could be hustled out of the country.)

So Captors is probably suspect as history; it's certainly suspect as art.  Wiener is an inexperienced dramatist - he has spent most of his relatively short career developing screenplays.  But even most Hollywood hacks, I think, would have avoided the obvious mistakes he makes here.  The playwright gives us not only extraneous scenes between Malkin and co-author Stein, for instance, but also gives Stein (a non-character if ever there was one) solo voice-overs, delivered straight to the audience.  Even this might have worked if Wiener's writing was sharp, or tightly bound to personality and situation; but instead his characters hold forth on hypothetical questions of guilt and disguise and memory - re-iterating cliches from other, better plays - and their occasional "conflicts" feel forced.  To make matters worse, the script hops back and forth between time frames, and Wiener never builds any sense of the claustrophobia or desperation that must have weighed on his characters (and which is generally the kind of thing at which first-hand accounts excel).  Indeed, the entire first hour of the play lacks all shape or focus, and despite the looming historical and moral context, literally nothing seems to be at stake; the phrase that Arendt famously attached to Eichmann, "the banality of evil," hangs in the air - but surprisingly, so does another kind of banality.

Michael Cristofer as Eichmann.

Eventually, in the second act, Wiener does attempt to limn the familiar, but fascinating, question of Eichmann's guilt - or (as there was never any doubt as to his actions) perhaps the better phrase would be his moral standing against the enormity of the crimes he committed.  Or should we say "participated in"?  For Eichmann's supposed lack of autonomy was essentially his defense - he was "only following orders" in leading the huge transportation efforts that brought some six million Jews to their doom.  It was the orders themselves that were guilty, while Eichmann argued he was merely a normal man doing his best to get ahead in a society gone mad.

And it seemed he was "normal" by every account.  Psychiatrists found no evidence in Eichmann of mental derangement, and, strange as it may sound, most observers agreed he was not even anti-Semitic.  Indeed, early in his career Eichmann worked with Zionists to deport the Jewish population from Germany (even traveling to Haifa, in an effort to relocate them to Palestine - a bizarre irony right there); the so-called "Final Solution" was certainly not his idea. Yet he carried it out assiduously - even as the Reich was falling apart in 1945, and the Holocaust was "called off" by Himmler, Eichmann kept the trains rolling.

But why?

Hannah Arendt's answer, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, was to re-interpret not Eichmann but evil itself, which she came to see as ordinary, commonplace - the true meaning of her resonant phrase, "the banality of evil."  Not that Arendt felt Eichmann shouldn't swing (he was indeed hanged in 1962 in Israel), nor did she buy his vain defense, with its discombobulated refs to Kant; Eichmann always knew what he was doing, Arendt argued.  Her deep insight was that we're all a bit like Eichmann; we all accommodate the evil forces running through society, and even advance ourselves with their help.  When PBS or Lincoln Center accepts money from David Koch, for instance, they're acting a bit like Eichmann.  When Americans torture out of their fear of terrorism, they're acting a bit like Eichmann (indeed, John Yoo's and Dick Cheney's "theory of the unitary executive" was basically a gloss on Hitler's Führerprinzip). Even when you or I turn a blind eye to Apple's factories in China, we're acting a bit like Eichmann.  The Nazis' best bureaucrat took such participation to an extreme, it's true; still, there's no clear dividing line between us and him; in the end, he was less an amoral demon (instead, Arendt likened him at times to a clown), than the most horrifyingly ruthless of Human Resource Directors.

Was he a war criminal too?

This doesn't mean that a dramatist owes Eichmann any sympathy - but it does mean that the questions surrounding his capture and execution demand fresh and genuine exploration.  To be fair, playwright Wiener seems aware of this responsibility - at one point, in fact, he has a character declare:  "This is not your father's Jewish revenge tale!"  But alas, I'm afraid it is, beneath all its pseudo-intellectual trappings, and that troubles me a bit. For on the one hand, by the time Quentin Tarantino gets around to an artistic trope, you know it's artistically and politically exhausted, and should be kept to the multiplex.

And on the other hand, the tale of Eichmann's capture should still resonate uncomfortably with its political, if not moral, quandaries; for all the questions of how, when and why to avenge wrongdoing in a corrupt world are still very much with us.  No one could begrudge the great Jewish tradition its revenge on the evil men who tried to destroy it; nor should we ever forget the terrible facts of the Holocaust.  Still, at this late date, with Jewish culture firmly ensconced at the heart of theatrical life, perhaps we can afford to consider the questions of Israeli exceptionalism that Captors celebrates.  For it's a tale of undercover operatives invading a sovereign nation and plucking one of its citizens from the streets - which made we wonder, would we feel the same way about Eichmann if he had been kidnapped from the streets of America?  For just btw, wasn't Wernher von Braun (at right) a member of the SS (and weren't his rockets assembled in concentration camps)?  And isn't the Catholic Church, which spirited Eichmann (along with many other Nazis) to Argentina, still a global force - indeed, wasn't its current leader a member of the Hitler Youth?  Pope Benedict has argued that his membership was a matter of financial necessity - but, ummm - is that so very far from Eichmann's argument?

The play in the glass booth. Production photos - T. Charles Erickson.

So questions of guilt and innocence are rarely pure and never simple, even when it comes to Nazi war criminals.  Indeed, watching Captors, I couldn't help but remember Robert Shaw's play The Man in the Glass Booth, a rather woozy existential identity-puzzler from the 60's, in which Israeli abductors nabbed the wrong man - or did they??? (Part of the reason I couldn't forget it was the large glass booth DuBois and designer Beowulf Boritt had erected around the set at the Huntington, in a nod to Eichmann's famous containment during his trial.) Now I'm in no rush to see the pretentious Glass Booth again, but I have to admit it actually had ambitions that Captors can't match - and that's too bad. For I'm not sure the Huntington's audience is truly served by this kind of production.  It has clearly been pulled together as a nod to the 50th anniversary of Eichmann's trial - which makes it, weird as it may sound, a kind of nostalgia piece.

But don't we already get enough nostalgia from the Huntington?  And while we should never forget the Holocaust, must we always remember it the same way?  (Isn't a living memory all about its context?)  The Huntington's Jewish audience is facing what could be a sea-change in its identity; the Middle East is morphing around Israel, there is increased awareness that America's best interest may not align with that of the "Jewish lobby," and sympathy with the plight of the Palestinians is on the rise.  Cries of anti-Semitism won't easily stop this ferment - so couldn't the Huntington's "Jewish play" be about that?  I know people often smile at this theatre's "diversity" programming - which sometimes seems to dole out productions like presents to the various segments of its audience.  I actually don't find anything wrong with that policy - as long as the productions engage with how we live now.  But you couldn't make that claim about Captors - just as you couldn't make it about the Huntington's last effort, Before I Leave You.  Both were in different ways essentially sentimental, and neither, to be blunt, was ready for a professional production; you could argue they were chosen for their marketing merits rather than their artistic ones.  Which is why I worry that there's something broken over at the Huntington right now, and I'm hoping that one way or another, it's soon fixed.

Five years and counting . . .

A scene from last year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

It's that time of year again - so here's a sincere wish for a Happy Thanksgiving from me to you.

I also thought it was worth noting (in passing) that this is the fifth Thanksgiving for the Hub Review. Yes, on November 15, 2006, under the banner "Welcome to the Hub Review," I posted the following:

You've found it - the only site devoted to Boston (high) culture that tries to cover everything that matters (at least to me). Yes, I'm elitist. Yes, I'm gay. If you don't like either of those things, there are plenty of middlebrow-religious-hetero sites around to tickle your fancy. So get outta here and go crazy. Just don't whine that my standards are too high or that I'm a pervert threatening the arts or what have you. 'Cause I don't put up with that you-know-what.

As you can see, the tone was there right from the start.  I think that post had about twenty readers - basically, my close friends and the folks at the office who knew I'd begun blogging.  Now I reach about forty or fifty times that many - still a small audience, but a pivotal one, I believe.

Or at least a lot of people seem to think so.  For this has been a rough year, frankly, for the Hub Review - I've always gotten personal threats, but for the past two years or so there was a concerted effort afoot to silence me from various powers-that-be on the local scene - an effort which came to a head last spring.  Things looked pretty dark for a while; but it turned out I had plenty of supporters, too.  (I think the most common thing I heard from readers this year was, "I don't always agree with you, but you're the only real critic Boston has.")  So I hung in there, and rest assured, things seem to have turned a corner - I'm still here, and hope to be so for the foreseeable future, with, perhaps, more influence than ever.  And at least I think that's something to be thankful for.

Another sublime afternoon with Uncle Itzhak

Perlman in action in New York.

I came to Itzhak Perlman's Celebrity Series appearance at Symphony Hall last weekend after a series of disappointing experiences at the theatre, and so the concert felt like a long, wonderful wash of aesthetic balm. I think by now Mr. Perlman needs no introduction; the virtuosity of his musicianship is pretty much an accepted fact.  (And perhaps it's some consolation, I think, in these days of decay and dissolution, to remember that there are still a few things on which we can all agree.)

Indeed, every time I've heard Perlman play, the same awed, grateful sensation seemed to ripple through the crowd as soon as his bow touched his instrument's strings. The only thing I can compare the moment to is the lighting of a candle in a darkened room; at once the entire hall is always stilled, as the separate attentions of thousands of people become focused on a single, sublime sensation emanating from the graying, bespectacled man and his violin.  Sometimes I think that as long as we're awed by superb technique, we can still call ourselves human.  (So how we'll hang onto our humanity after we've lost Itzhak Perlman I've no idea.)

Of course Perlman has his critics (the Globe's Jeremy Eichler among them) who are perhaps disturbed by the fact that he has long since become the star of his concerts; indeed, the music he plays is almost incidental; he could play "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and still fill Symphony Hall.  The virtuoso himself is obviously aware of this - although it must be added, he wears his stardom lightly.  He's hardly a diva - instead, Perlman has the dry warmth of that witty uncle who knows better than to take himself (or his music) too seriously - or rather too self-seriously.  Or at least that's the kind of affectionate avuncularity he manages to project as he runs through his encores - many of them simple showpieces by the likes of Kreisler - whom Perlman himself mocks lightly from the stage.

To be fair to Eichler's ilk, of course, I have to admit there are all kinds of odd formal questions bouncing around a Perlman star turn.  His sound is basically a sweetly lyrical distillation of late romantic, German style - and he doesn't change it much, whatever he's playing.  I don't mean he doesn't take the pieces he plays seriously; quite the contrary; his performances on Sunday were marvels of thoughtful nuance.  Yet he ran through a program of duets for violin and piano by Schubert, Brahms, and Saint-Saëns with hardly any variation in his core tone. Intriguingly, however, his accompanist, Rohan De Silva, proved something of a stylistic chameleon.  De Silva may lack his own interpretive profile; but his touch slid into the interpretive consensus behind Brahms, and then Saint-Saëns, with ease (only his Schubert didn't convince). If the program was at all differentiated in style, this was almost entirely due to him.

As I said, however, the opening Rondo (in B minor) from Schubert didn't quite cohere - although this may be because it represents Schubert trying not to sound too much like himself - his own masterpieces were rarely popular! - and so not sounding like anything too clearly at all.  The Brahms Sonata No. 2 was far better, although this was the one time I wished for more interpretive distinction from De Silva, as until the final movement the piano (which Brahms played himself, of course) does most of the musical heavy lifting.  Still, the last Allegretto grazioso, which features one of the master's most subtly ravishing melodies for violin, came off beautifully, with Perlman in his most transporting form.

Next came more Brahms - three of the Hungarian Dances (I think there are 21 in all, although we weren't told which of these Perlman was playing!), all of them indeed dancing with just the right mix of romantic feeling and fire.  But probably the triumph of the concert was the closing Sonata No. 1 in D minor from Saint-Saëns.  This is a curious piece, more in symphonic than sonata form, that somehow exudes the mysterious core of its sphinx-like composer's musical gift; pure, poised, and exploratory, with a sense of floating mood and sparkling intelligence (perhaps sans clear object), it's the kind of work that can drift from haunting melancholy to lively joy and back without ever quite settling on a single statement or stance.  And somehow Perlman (and De Silva) made its oppositions utterly compelling - for once, Perlman's technical and interpretive virtuosity were entirely in alignment.

And then came six encores - probably Isaac Albeniz’s Tango and Ries’s Perpetuum Mobile (described by Perlman as "one of Ries's pieces") came off best - with probably as many, or more, standing ovations. But I could have given him six more; indeed, when Perlman finally left the stage, I admit I found myself immediately hoping that Uncle Itzhak would be back to see us soon.

Short Cuts: Jumping off The Balcony with The Divine Sister

A tech rehearsal for The Balcony.

In his program notes to The Balcony (which closed last weekend at Boston Conservatory), director John Kuntz tells us that he attempted to approach Jean Genet's masterpiece as if it were "a brand new play." But I got the feeling as I watched the production that what he really meant to say was "a brand new play - by me."

For Kuntz tarts up Genet with many of his own tricks - there's a lot of processed sexual sugar and (of course) plush stuffed animals on this Balcony, along with all manner of cutesy "perversity."  In one long sequence, a deadpan dominatrix smashes eggs over every inch of a hot young dude in a snug, yolk-yellow speedo.  Later we get a dance by a "furry" in what looks like "beaver" drag. (Uh-huh.)  These extended fantasies have scant foundation in the finished text (although Kuntz points to early sketches of the play as justification for his directorial antics - of course Genet rewrote those early versions, but never mind).  But a few bits are at first diverting, and at any rate the production boasts a dazzling level of design and technical bravura (the production team included Cristina Todesco, set; Jeff Adelberg, lights; Gail Astrid Buckley, costumes; Jeff Maynard, video; and David Reiffel, sound, all of them working at the top of their respective forms).  Kuntz is playing here with many more toys than he's ever been able to deploy in one of his own plays - and is clearly having the time of his life.

All this would be fine, of course, if we were, too. But we're not; gradually The Balcony proved a bore, despite all the fresh, nubile flesh on display.  And it wasn't hard to tell why.  Kuntz is a talented playwright in his own right, but basically he's a paranoid hedonist - while Genet is a kind of existential sadist.  If Kuntz is about moral escape, then Genet is about moral contradiction - but contradiction as vise, as trap.  As the seeming co-authors of this production, they basically talk past each other.

And the distance between them plays out right through the production concept. Kuntz re-imagines Genet's notorious bordello, where customers play at power figures like judges and bishops, as some sort of new-media sound-stage/panopticon (at top) - which has been brilliantly realized by the designers.   So brilliantly, in fact, that at times the technical cues alone hold our attention.  And the TV studio, and pop in general, is Kuntz's home territory; the mix of glee and dread with which he regards them is effectively his artistic signature.

But even he has to admit that the blandishments of television undermine the basic tenets of Genet; indeed, the director himself openly wonders in his notes whether the revolution that frames The Balcony can even happen in the environment he has conjured.  And he's right - it probably can't.  The real problem, however, is that the multiverse of escape that new media offers is antithetical to The Balcony in even a deeper way; to be blunt, play-acting and falseness offer no way out in Genet, that's the whole idea.  It would count as a stroke of pure genius if Kuntz had found a way to square this particular circle, but he hasn't, and so few of his transgressive flourishes ever connect with what the actors are actually saying.  There's only one sequence that comes alive - when the "fake" bishops and judges have to take the place of the "real ones" once the revolution has descended into chaos.  Anxiety is something Kuntz understands, and suddenly the actors, Grant Wallace in particular, seemed to truly inhabit their roles.  But the moment proved fleeting - although all the student actors here seemed talented, and gamely played along with their directorial puppetmaster; and a few, such as Grace Tarves and poor Ryan Halsaver (the egg-boy) even struck a spark or two.  Oh, well; there's always next term, guys!

Jeffrey Roberson as the Mother Superior in The Divine Sister.

Meanwhile, across town, there was more too-gay theatre to be had in the closing weekend of SpeakEasy's The Divine Sister, which starred Jeffrey Roberson (above, of Varla Jean Merman fame) in Charles Busch's send-up of just about every nun movie ever made. Like all of SpeakEasy's recent output, the production was smart and savvy, with a crack comic cast (Roberson was a very precise hoot, while Paula Plum, Christopher Michael Brophy, and Kathy St. George weren't far behind him) that, under Larry Coen's sharp direction, nailed every laugh in the script (along with a few that weren't).    Still, things never got actually hilarious, and as I often do at SpeakEasy these days, I couldn't help but feel that the goings-on were a bit over-familiar.  I mean, gay men in yet another form of drag, in a convoluted "plot," with out-takes from yet another Hollywood genre - sometimes one wonders how long the Charles Ludlam/Charles Busch tradition (a friend calls it "Buschlam") can totter on.  (As long as there are square middle-aged straight people to laugh at it, I suppose.)

I will admit The Divine Sister struck a few poignant notes for me, perhaps unintentionally.  I found myself picking up references, clearly planted by Busch, that seemed to be flying over his own audience's head, and that indeed only members of my own aging, vanishing tribe would ever notice; I mean, who but me (and a half-dozen other fading movie queens) would have spotted the "Sister Ruth" scene from Black Narcissus?  Sigh.  Gay men today aren't even sure who Judy Garland was, for chrissakes.

And I do have to mention that in the end (whatever the print press may think), Charles Busch ain't exactly Ryan Landry, and Coen's broad, Gold-Dust-Orphans M.O., which treated the entire play as a long-form sketch, kind of flattened the few sequences (such as the Mother Superior's encounters with a woman of the world whose home she needs) that hinted at - well, almost a theme.  In his own weirdly alienated way, Busch is concerned with moral poise (as a variant of feminine poise) - and the idea of his movie convent literally being forced into the secular world I think should have struck us as slightly more resonant than it did - even if it was draped with gags from The Trouble with Angels, Song of Bernadette and even The DaVinci Code.  But then again, probably only the queers like me who remember Black Narcissus could even tell that anything was missing.

Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth

Aimee Rose Ranger in Dogg's Hamlet

I'm late with my thoughts on Whistler in the Dark's double bill of Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet and Cahoot's Macbeth, which has been "occupying" the BCA Black Box (in repertory with Imaginary Beast's Macbett) the last few weeks. In fact I think there's only one show left, today - so you still have a few minutes to catch it - which you should.

Perhaps I've been dragging my feet because the Whistlers are always telling me they're looking forward to what I'm going to say about their current show, good or bad.  And I kind of half-believe them.  I've always thought they were smart; now (oddly enough) they think I'm smart, too!  And there's so much to unpack in Dogg's and Cahoot's!  It's so tiring.  Luckily, I hear they've been getting good houses, so they didn't really need the Hub Review for publicity; after five years of reviews from fans like me (at one of their shows I was literally the only person in the audience), they have finally been "discovered" by the print and radio critics as a "brand new company!"  Uh-huh; whatever; it's still a good thing.

And duty calls, so here goes nothing (I can't disappoint the Whistlers, can I?). Dogg and Cahoot's are basically an intertwined meditation on Wittgenstein and rebellion.  The great Austrian philosopher, of course, is one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth century - despite a very slim published output; and one of his obsessions was the relationship between mental representation, the world itself (if you will), and the mechanics of language.  Dogg's Hamlet was conceived when Stoppard came upon one of the master's discussions in which he posited that separate gangs of workmen who spoke different languages could quite easily cooperate as long as words like "plank" and "slab" had a consistent (and serendipitous) linguistic correlation for both groups.  For instance, if in one language, "plank" meant, well, "plank," but in the correlated language it meant "Next!," the men could easily get on with their work, yelling their monosyllabic instructions to each other, unaware that the mental representations in their respective heads were actually completely different.
Now to some, this may sound only like a gay Austrian egghead's extrapolation of the common concept of the pun; but trust me, it was big news to philosophers (sorry, if I went into why, I'd be here all day).  At any rate, Stoppard took Wittgenstein's philosophic-linguistic insight and ran with it into the intersecting worlds of class, culture and politics, where he invented Dogg, a "language" (a bit like Nadsat, the slang devised by Anthony Burgess for A Clockwork Orange) spoken by the students of a strange British public school attempting to stage Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Ludwig von, in a photo by lover Ben Richards.

Not much of an excuse is given for Dogg's existence; indeed, when a Wittgensteinian workman (named "Easy," believe it or not) shows up with some props for these kids' play, he assumes they're touched.  Oddly, Dogg is composed entirely of common English words (unlike Nadsat), and follows the same syntactic rules.  But the words are usually short, blunt, and vaguely Anglo-Saxon, with the occasional bit of schoolboy techno ("Bicycles!") thrown in.  And tellingly, insult and compliment are often reversed; in Dogg, for instance, "Git" ("jerk" or even "asshole," roughly) is high praise - so Stoppard has a lot of fun with all his young Doggians calling their headmasters "gits," to warm approval.

But Stoppard, like Wittgenstein, is also attempting to limn his schoolboys' inner state of mind; and we begin to perceive that Dogg is a manifestation of their oppression and incomprehension.  When they rehearse Hamlet, for instance, they speak Shakespeare's English straight (which they probably cannot understand at all); but when they're alone, they switch immediately back to Dogg.  And that mystified deliveryman suddenly gets the hang of Dogg when he, too, is mistreated by the fatuous schoolmasters; when he sputters that they're "Fascists!," suddenly he's through the linguistic looking-glass, and talking Dogg like a native.

What comes next is an amusing send-up of student Shakespeare that is, of course, utterly incomprehensible to said students (and thus hilarious to us; Wittgenstein's paradox reversed, in effect).  But things get a bit more complex in Cahoot's Macbeth, in which we find ourselves transported to an underground production of another Shakespearean tragedy, somewhere on the other side of what used to be called the Iron Curtain.  Here a group of persecuted actors are in "cahoots" with each other (another pun!) to perform an even more pointed critique of power gone mad - they're actually doing it in a living room, though (lit by floor lamps), as they've been locked out of their city's theatres by the oppressive state.

The secret police (or the critics?) catch up with them even here, however, and the rebels face a fresh round of interrogation - until Easy, the deliveryman from the earlier play, comes stumbling in, still speaking Dogg, and delivering not merely props but also a kind of linguistic virus: a language not of direct rebellion, but of subversion.

Nate Gundy menaces Scott Sweatt in Cahoot's Macbeth

Now I'm afraid this is where I feel Mr. Stoppard goes a little "Pepsi Generation" on me. Indeed, as Cahoot's ends with an image straight outta Pink Floyd's The Wall (the play and the album were both completed in 1979), I couldn't help but remember the unfortunately simplistic argument of the playwright's later Rock'n'Roll - which seemed to claim that Syd Barrett caused the Velvet Revolution, or something like that.  Sigh.  I'm not too sympathetic toward grand intellectual visions of pop pleasures, and I'm a little dismayed to see a fantastic critic of over-reaching dialectics like Stoppard fall so easily himself into what amounts to a dialectic (albeit a funny one).  Still, I'll admit the subversive elements of pop culture certainly infiltrated the Eastern bloc countries, and probably had more to do with the collapse of those regimes than Shakespeare ever did.  (So I'll go as far as Cahoot's, but not as far as Rock'n'Roll.)

At any rate, that's the critical exegesis of the text.  What about the production?  Well, it is (or was) a solid, knockabout one; a bit broad in places, but brilliant in other spots, and always clever and alive to the intellectual arguments of the plays.  We won't see a better one locally.  I felt Whistler stalwart Jen O'Connor, though strong, took a back seat this time around - the star  turns came from Aimee Rose Ranger (as the obnoxious over-achiever who got every school prize, as well as the lead in Hamlet), Nate Gundy (perhaps miscast as the chilling police inspector of Cahoot's, but making the most of it anyway), and Mac Young as the happy-go-lucky everyman who gladly threw himself through a literal barrier of language over and over.  There wasn't really a weak link in the cast, however, with particularly sharp cameos coming from Becca Lewis and Michael Underhill.  (My one quibble was with Scott Sweatt's take on Lady Macbeth, in drag - his work was subtle, but it seemed to be coming from some other play.)  And as usual, the Whistlers made the evocative most of a basically bare space (a particular strength of director Meg Taintor).  Oh btw, I forgot to mention in the Hubbies (I've corrected that post) the atmospheric lighting design PJ Strachman devised for Cahoot's, which actually made Stoppard's stripped-down Macbeth the spookiest I've ever seen.  As always, I await with pleasure the next outing from this adventurous, up-and-coming (can I still say that after five years?) company.

Not-so-simple gifts

Whitney V. Hunter in Angel Reapers.

Angel Reapers, the new meditation on the Shakers by choreographer Martha Clarke, playwright Alfred Uhry, and music director Arthur Solari (through this weekend at ArtsEmerson), opens with a transcendent theatrical coup: a religious community gathers onstage (men and women separate but facing each other), and then gently begins to giggle.  The giggles turn to laughter, then guffaws, as something like pure, pointless, child-like joy briefly tingles in the air; and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the community, now a congregation, launches seamlessly into a hymn.  Joy; music; God.  The equation is as simple as a Shaker chair.

This proves to be only the first of many such magical moments conjured by Clarke's choreography (which only occasionally aligns with the Shakers' distinctive dances), all of which are supported by exquisite singing (impeccably arranged and conducted by Solari).

But it's probably the last time we connect with the sense of pure joy many of us associate with the Shakers; again and again, Angel Reapers proffers not only their simple gifts, but complex metaphors regarding the underside of their celibate existence - all conveyed via a nearly perfect meld of movement and music.

The string on which these jewels are strung, however, is only just adequate to hold them together; playwright Uhry's contribution proves so slight and episodic that we feel a deeper potential moving in the material than has so far been unlocked (and we often need the program to figure out who's who).  We can make out a rough story line in the performance - a couple falls in love, and are forced to leave the sect; meanwhile Shaker founder Mother Ann Lee (the luminous Birgitt Huppuch) emerges as the central figure in other vignettes, many of them fraught with conflict. For while spiritual ecstasy is encouraged by this pale, pure matriarch, natural desires are denied; tensions in the community thus inevitably rise, the sect comes to depend on the destitute and the orphaned (along with hired hands), and critics and apostates attack on every side - even as a strange sense of deep perversity (the men begin to dance naked in the woods!) gradually pervades the community's shared sense of innocence.

All this cries out for a firmer narrative line, but, like the siren call of sex itself,  the demands of plot are firmly denied in Angel Reapers.  No doubt the collaborators' conceit was to mimic the spareness of the Shakers themselves; but this is one time that famous community would have been better served by something more richly embroidered.  Aiming for a poem, Clarke and company have given us a haiku that's transporting and frustrating by turns.

And have they really given the Shakers a fair shake?  Ms. Clarke has made an illustrious career out of deconstructing the sexual codes of various eras, in famous productions like The Garden of Earthly Delights and Vienna: Lusthaus.  But we feel in Angel Reapers that sometimes she's a bit of a naïf herself when it comes to the pleasures of the flesh.  After all, there is, shall we say, a case to be made against sex; and anyway, the Shakers didn't actually try to repress sex, they instead tried to channel it into ecstatic dance, into direct, personal contact with the spirit.  This is an old, old impulse - and I'm not sure it's a dishonorable one, even though, yes, sex has inevitably raised its horny, hoary old head in every monastery from Vatican City to Tibet.  And could the demands of celibacy actually have been central to the Shakers' outpouring of industry and culture? Could it have been the battery that powered their luminous achievement? Could they have had sex and still been the Shakers?  Clarke never seems to face this issue, and by the end of the evening, we desperately want her to.

Yet I can't deny that despite these flaws, Angel Reapers often glows with a rare spiritual power, and almost always casts its own haunting sense of theatrical presence. And the company - mostly dancers, btw - sing like angels, in arrangements of the familiar hymns which are subtle without seeming studied (quite a trick right there). They also deliver what text they have with a mix of transparent emotion and natural, graceful dignity that's rare even in the best professional actors. If the piece itself still calls out for further development (like many in the ArtsEmerson line-up this season, more on that in a future post), its simple gifts are nevertheless most welcome.

Birgit Huppuch, center, in the company of Angel Reapers.

Macbeth remixed

Nate Gundy as "Banco" in Macbett.  Photo: Nancy lasBarrone.

We may not have seen an actual production of Macbeth in, well, years, but two of the play's derivatives have been on the boards this season - first the Verdi version, from Boston Lyric Opera, and now Ionesco's absurdist Macbett, from Imaginary Beasts at the BCA (through this weekend).

Although to be honest, Ionesco doesn't so much derive from his Shakespearean source as attack it; at the bottom of the Bard's arguably-darkest tragedy, Ionesco still perceives an essentially naive, romantic illusion regarding personal moral dimension - which he ruthlessly dismantles.  In Macbett, the hero's royal victim, Duncan, is himself a slime bag, and half-mad to boot (and the incoming heir to the throne seems just just as bad).  Indeed, everyone in the play is corrupt, or will soon be corrupted.  Power is the only morality, while ideas like "destiny" are just a cheap trap for the gullible (Ionesco's "witches" are merely tricksters- indeed, maybe they're only Missus Macbett in disguise!).  Thus "tragedy," at least as Shakespeare defined it, does not, and cannot, exist.

Now I'm not going to argue any of these ideas in the abstract - for in the end, Ionesco is only re-iterating a point that the ravages of the twentieth century seem to have already  made for him.  But I will argue, however, that the playwright doesn't seem able to sustain this point through two acts of a satire which feels quite a bit longer than its source.  Indeed, Macbeth towers over Macbett, which rambles, and gets a bit repetitive and convoluted, and yet doesn't achieve anything like the depth that Beckett conjured through the (seemingly similar) repetitions of Waiting for Godot.  Instead, despite a few inspired episodes, you can slowly feel the theatrical equivalent of the Law of Diminishing Returns kicking in for Ionesco, even as he gropes for a dramaturgical exit. So maybe there's something to be said for naive, romantic illusion -  at least in this example of the Theatre of the Absurd, the joke in the end seems to be on the audience.

Which isn't to say that the current, clever production from Imaginary Beasts doesn't have its compensations.  There are two particularly strong performances here, from fringe stalwarts Joey Pelletier (as Duncan) and Scott Sweatt (as Macbett), that are probably the best things either actor has done in some time (even if both get a little shouty - in the BCA Black Box we're only five feet away, guys).  Pelletier brings a sharp, sallow wit to Duncan's sleazy shenanigans, while Sweatt becomes a compellingly perverse Macbett once he has tasted power; indeed, his gleeful kissing of the corrupting crown is one of the most disturbing things I've seen onstage in some time.

The rest of the cast is strong, but not quite as distinctive - although intriguing turns come from Nate Gundy (above) and Kiki Samko.  In an Imaginary Beasts show, however, actor intention and achievement are always a complicated thing to parse, because the troupe's signature style of movement and imagery, devised by director Matthew Woods, often takes center stage.  Here, this is sometimes a blessing, but also occasionally a curse - for while it's true Ionesco is sometimes imagistic, in Macbett, well, not so much; here the dramatic mode is more often blunt, even brutal, simplicity.  And so Woods' signature style of evocative (yet inevitably artificial) movement can feel a little forced.

Still, the director does score several visual coups - the first appearance of the cast in body bags, and the transformation of the Macbetts into a life-size Punch and Judy, were both particularly apt, and the physical production, which seems balanced between a British pantomime and a Kurosawa movie, is filled with striking touches (like Macbett's samurai-by-way-of-Princess-Padme make-up) that stick with you well after the final curtain.  Students of Ionesco - or simply students of intelligent, exploratory theatre - will find much to admire in this stimulating production of a flawed, but intriguing, play.

It's once again time for high art to meet sports porn in . . .

What do you want from me, it's football season!

People sometimes ask me, "Why do you always have to post dirty pictures of hot guys (that's Vince Ramos above, btw) with the Hubbie Awards?  I'm like totally embarrassed to tell my mother about my award!" To which I can only answer, "If you have to ask about the dirty pictures of the hot guys on the Hub Review, then you haven't been paying attention."  And honey, there's nothing on this blog that your mother doesn't already know.

Now it has been a while since the last edition of the Hubbies, and my attention has been somewhat divided of late between the music, art and dance scenes, so I'm afraid there have been achievements in the theatre this fall that will go un-recorded here.  But that's no reason not to celebrate what has been achieved and can be recorded, is it?  True, the season has been up and down so far, but we've been lucky to have experienced two world-class visiting productions, Candide at the Huntington, and The Speaker's Progress at ArtsEmerson - although I'm afraid we've also been subjected to a pretty high level of pseudo-intellectual dross (from the usual suspects - attended by the usual cheers from ditto).  But let's not think about that now!  Let's remember instead that the New Rep seems to have survived Kate Warner's disappointing tenure, and that the fringe is bubbling along with more energy than ever - they're getting more organized, and every now and then, the print critics actually deign to write about them!

Which are good enough reasons, I think, to tell ourselves that the glass is half full, not half empty. And what better way to do that than to look back at the best acting, singing, direction and design from the past few months?

So without further ado - and in no particular order -

Geoff Packard and members of the ensemble in Candide.

Best Ensembles

Candide - Geoff Packard, Lauren Molina, Larry Yando, Cheryl Stern, Erik Lochtefeld, Jesse Perez, Timothy John Smith, McCaela Donovan, Tom Aulino, Spencer Curnutt, Alexander Elisa, Rebecca Finnegan, Evan Harrington, Abby Mueller, Jeff Parker, Emma Rosenthal, Joey Stone, Tempe Thomas, Travis Turner, Tom Hamlett and Shonna McEachern, directed by Mary Zimmerman, Huntington Theatre.

Clybourne Park - Timothy Crowe, Tommy Dickie, Mia Ellis, Mauro Hantman, Anne Scurria, Rachael Warren, Joe Wilson, Jr., directed by Brian Mertes, Trinity Rep.

The Speaker's Progress - Sulayman Al-Bassam, Amal Omran, Carole Abboud, Fayez Kazak, Nassar al Nassar, Faisal Al Ameeri, Nicolas Daniel, Nowar Yousef, directed by Sulayman Al-Bassam, ArtsEmerson.

Trout Stanley - Becky Webber, Kathryn Lynch, Sean George, directed by Louise Richards, Exquisite Corps.

Fayez Kazak in Speaker's Progress

Best Performances in a Drama

Alycia Sacco - Arcadia, Bad Habit Productions.

Gabriel Kuttner - Love Song, Orfeo Group.

Mal Malme - The T Plays, Mill 6 Collaborative.

Beth Wittig, Christina Pumariega - The Persian Quarter, Merrimack Rep.

Joey Pelletier, Scott Sweatt - Macbett, Imaginary Beasts.

Nate Gundy, Aimee Rose Ranger - Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, Whistler in the Dark.

Fred Sullivan, Angela Brazil - His Girl Friday, Trinity Rep.

Liz Hayes - Collected Stories, New Rep.

Amelia Broome, Robert Walsh - Next Fall, SpeakEasy Stage.

Gordon Clapp - This Verse Business, Merrimack Rep.


Best Performances in a Musical

Lisa O'Hare, Hayden Tee, Sarah deLima - My Fair Lady, North Shore Music Theatre.

Aimee Doherty, Leigh Barrett - And the World Goes 'Round, New Repertory Theatre.

Kate Fisher - The King and I, North Shore Music Theatre.

Philip Boykin, Bryonha Marie Parham, Natasha Yvette Williams - Porgy and Bess, A.R.T.

Till next time!

Best Design

Dan Ostling (set), Mara Blumenfeld (costumes), Timothy J. Gerckens (lighting) - Candide, Huntington Theatre.

Sam Collins (production) - The Speaker's Progress, ArtsEmerson.

Campbell Baird (set) - The Persian Quarter, Merrimack Rep.

PJ Strachman (lighting) - Cahoot's Macbeth, Whistler in the Dark.

Cristina Todesco (set) - Love Song, Orfeo Group.


Best Direction

Mary Zimmerman - Candide, Huntington Theatre.

Sulayman Al-Bassam - The Speaker's Progress, ArtsEmerson.

Doin' the time warp in outer space

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Long-time Hub Review readers know we are all about the time lapse. And this one is a beauty, stitched together by Michael König from 18 different separate time-lapse sequences photographed from the International Space Station. The soundtrack is by Jan Jelinek. Enjoy!

A fair (and foul) Macbeth

Carter Scott parties down as Lady Macbeth.

When I ponder the Boston Lyric Opera's new production of Verdi's Macbeth (through this Sunday at the Schubert), I'm inevitably reminded of a line from the play itself: a production so foul and so fair I have not seen.

For on the one hand, in purely musical terms, this may be BLO's strongest work yet. The cast is remarkable in vocal terms (as usual), with the leads boasting satisfyingly big Verdi voices, and the chorus (as always) in superb shape. What's new this time around is that the sounds from the pit are just as striking as those from the stage: new Music Director David Angus has settled into his role and begun to work his magic, and the orchestra has responded with a bold, grandly modeled sound that's new at the BLO.

But on the other hand (and alas, there is one), stage director David Schweizer, who delivered a brilliant Emperor of Atlantis just last spring, has styled the opera as a black, Brechtian comedy, and I'm afraid Macbeth just doesn't work that way.   I can understand, however, how he imagined it might have: the combination of bel canto arias and the Macbeths' deadly intrigue lends Verdi's early hit a certain cognitive dissonance to modern ears, and what's more, the composer (and his librettists, Francesco Maria Piave and Andrea Maffei) have transformed the Bard's grotesque trio of witches into a proletarian mob (who, in a nod to their Shakespearean source, often sing in three-part harmony).

The resulting amalgam of nineteenth-century populism and Shakespeare's brutal existentialism is an uneasy one, I admit.  And even though Schweizer has restyled Verdi's vox populi as a kind of Brecht-by-way-of-Les-Miz mob, his concept might have worked, I think, if he had not also recast Lady Macbeth as a villainess nearly comic in her calculations, and her husband as more nebbish than warrior (at least until the final scenes).  These two aren't just puppets in the hands of historical (rather than mystical) fate; they're also too often cartoonish tin-pot dictators; a Mr. and Mrs. Arturo Ui lost on the Scottish moors.  Unfortunately, however, the drama of Macbeth depends entirely on the moral stakes for this pair - after all, it's guilt that drives Lady Macbeth mad (why she loses it in this production remains a mystery).  To be blunt, we have to have some sympathy for the play's murderous heroes (which Shakespeare works overtime to ensure, against all odds); otherwise, the rise and fall of their regime can't grip us.

Still, there are those voices - and that music.  This isn't, however, Verdi at his maturity; in Macbeth, he is expanding on bel canto, but doesn't quite transform it as he would just a few years later in works like Il trovatore and La traviata.  Still, there's considerable interest in the arias, particularly Lady M's, which dominate the first act and which leap unexpectedly to the top of the soprano range (perhaps in a bid to intimate the singer's inner instability).  Carter Scott - at left with Daniel Sutin - generally pulled these off well, I thought, despite a few scrapes here and there (they shouldn't, actually, sound technically secure anyway, that's the point), and elsewhere Scott boasted a big, plush instrument redolent with a vibrato that might have been a bit much elsewhere but worked for Verdi.  As I explained, dramatically I didn't agree with her performance - but I don't really blame her for that, as you can find on the Web evidence that she can do far better (there's a Youtube of her mad scene from another production that's quite riveting).

Meanwhile, as her murderous husband, Daniel Sutin deployed a complex and richly resonant baritone, but his doomed diffidence didn't work until close to the end of the opera (he should actually be a warrior whose reckless barbarity Lady M. is trying to unleash).  Elsewhere in the cast, Darren K. Stokes acquitted himself well vocally as a somewhat stolid Banquo (below), while tenor Richard Crawley briefly stopped the show with Macduff's big aria.

As I stated earlier, the chorus was likewise in fine shape vocally - and a few of Schweizer's (or perhaps designer John Conklin's) gambits, such as the hoisting of yet another royal body bag over the action, were chillingly effective.  But the crowds onstage were sometimes a distraction from the stripped-down action of the drama, and the mob's hollow-eyed puppetmaster act slowly wore thin.  I can understand how BLO thought, after the brilliant success of Atlantis, that Schweizer's sardonic sensibility might have pulled together the disparate elements of Macbeth. But the gallantly gonzo fatalism of Atlantis - which never tries to seriously style its Hitler factotum as a tragic hero - is actually a world away from Shakespeare's aesthetic stance.  And thus, while Verdi fans may be happy to drink in David Angus's accomplished take on the score, I can't really hail this Macbeth.

Banquo and Duncan return from the dead in Macbeth.

Telling Melville's tale (of a whale)

Conor Lovett in Moby Dick.

One of my favorite stories about my stint writing for the Globe revolves around the time I tried to work a ref to Moby Dick into my review of a stage version of The Old Man and the Sea. I remember my editor was quite put out by the whole idea. "Why do you always have to show off about the big books you've read that nobody else has?" she wanted to know, an edge of irritation rising in her voice.  When I countered that hey, I thought quite a few people had actually read Moby Dick - I read it in high school, after all - I could sense her rolling her eyes (even over the phone). "People only say they've read it," she snapped. "They haven't really!"

Now that may be true of most Globe readers, I suppose.  But looking back on that exchange, I smile when I think of Globe reviewer Don Aucoin's peculiar predicament when faced with the new one-man adaptation of Moby Dick by the Gare St. Lazare Players playing at ArtsEmerson through the weekend.  He must, I think, perforce, mention the book - how could he not?  But oddly enough, it strikes me his appreciation of the show will be enhanced if, like my own Globe editor years ago, he hasn't actually gotten through the novel.  Indeed, you'll certainly enjoy this production much more if you haven't encountered Herman Melville's literary leviathan than if you have.

Which isn't to say this performance isn't remarkable in some ways.  Actor Conor Lovett (who has already starred in a one-man show based on Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, believe it or not!) manages an intriguingly low-key and diffident rendering of the text that does hold (if not quite grip) your sympathies in its direct simplicity.  (His stance intrigues, perhaps, because his Ishmael seems to be asking us what his strange experiences can possibly mean.)

And Lovett and his wife (and director) Judy Hegarty Lovett have arguably succeeded in distilling the narrative of Melville's novel down to its inevitable essentials; indeed, I was sometimes surprised by how swiftly Melville dispatched events that loomed far larger in my memory (such as the death, or rather the final disappearance, of Ahab).  I even went back to check a few passages after the show, thinking "It had to have been longer than that!"  But every time I discovered that Melville's text - which the Lovetts  seem to have edited but rarely amended - was indeed just as terse as what had been delivered in performance.

So in short, the Lovetts have boiled the gigantic Moby Dick down to the skeleton of its story - which is rendered, sometimes in the softest tones, on basically a bare stage.  For sheer theatrical daring, they deserve our respect and praise.

Only Moby Dick isn't just a story.  It's an allegory.  And more than that - it's a kind of overstuffed encyclopedia of seafaring (and human) oddity, with its curious chapter-long asides on such topics as "The Whale as a Dish" and "Ambergris."  And to be honest, the novel's willful, wandering weirdness, its very difficulty, even its stretches of boredom, begin to work on you as you read it, just as the same strategies work a similar magic in lengthy classics like Ulysses and Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote.  Yes, all these books are too long.  Yet via their very discursiveness they open up a huge, meaningful space in your mind as few other art forms can.  (In theatre, only Shakespeare - and maybe Chekhov - can really compete.)

Rockwell Kent's famous vision of Moby Dick.

Indeed, I wound up with so much affection for Moby Dick that I took the famous Random House edition that I read (with terrific illustrations by Rockwell Kent, like the one at left) from my father's library upon his death. In fact I'm leafing through it again right now, musing on how some passing frustration may actually be necessary to apprehending a truly titanic vision.

And I'm also noticing all the things that Mr. and Mrs. Lovett cut out that perhaps they shouldn't have.  It's almost funny, I admit, how much blubber you can carve from this literary leviathan before you hit narrative bone.  But at the same time, surely something basic to the story is lost when you leave out Queequeg's embrace of Ishmael in bed - or when you drop entirely Father Mapple's famous sermon on the fate of Jonah.  Even the unforgettable last glimpse of the sinking Pequod - which mysteriously drags a passing sea-hawk down into the deep - has gone missing.  To be blunt, the Lovetts have shorn Moby Dick of both its homo-erotic undercurrents and its full spiritual dimensions.

And then there's the unfortunate fact that of Melville's wide cast of characters, Lovett only truly fleshes out Ahab (which he does quite hauntingly at times, aided enormously by the eerie playing of violinist Caoimhin O'Raghallaigh).  Beyond Ahab, however, few characters make much of an impression; Ishmael himself is a bit blurry, and Queequeg and especially Starbuck are sketches - Stubb and Flask aren't even that - and minor, but key, figures like Fedallah are never really drawn at all.

To be fair, Lovett sometimes captures the queer, stoic comedy of the novel, and he conveys Ahab's tortured intensity and craziness, too (no small feat).  And he demonstrates that he and his wife were quite right to realize Melville's sternly gothic prose could hold the stage all by itself, and even raise a few goose bumps.  But in the end, theirs is a Moby Dick in miniature (it could be Samuel Beckett's Moby Dick).  Only Melville's vision was not a miniature; it was an enormity.  So it was hard for me not to feel as I left the theatre that folks who had only seen this production, but not read the novel - well, they still don't know Dick.

Busking with Aszure Barton

Pretty but a little vacant: Andrew Murdock in Busk.

Becoming a true artist requires talent - obviously.

But it also requires a topic, too.  A theme.

And while choreographer Aszure Barton clearly has the first of these requirements in spades, after her debut concert at Celebrity Series last weekend, I'm not sure she has the second.  (In fact I kind of doubt it.)

Which isn't to say that there aren't pleasures to be had from her work, or from her company, Aszure and Artists, which is almost overstuffed with talent and ability; that much was clear from their dazzling, fearless performance.  They even have a style - a jazzy virtuosity built around casual, everyday moves that suddenly speed up into exaggerated motifs from break dance or modern, or even ballet.  It's a fluid mix that affords these talented and impeccably trained dancers the chance to say anything they might want to say.

But . . . do they have anything to say?  I was left in the dark about that.  In fact, I have no idea at all what the first of the two dances on Barton's program, Blue Soup, was about.  It purported to be a mash-up of several of her earlier pieces - so I hoped for some sense of development to be evident in the work, along with perhaps a statement of pre-occupying themes, or even (this would have been nice) a sense of a dawning self-consciousness.  In short, this was Barton's chance at an artistic introduction, and even a bit of biography.

Instead, I got zip.  Well, I got soup.  I mean it's a charming dance, a jauntily off-hand mix of pin-point solos and unison dances.  The performers are clothed in loose, but fashionable, blue suits; they saunter about confidently, with a happy what-the-hell air (sometimes their hands are in their pockets) in between bursts of sudden "choreography."  They know they're hot, and so, to be fair, are many of their moves.

Especially in the solos, you can feel a fleet, light-footed grace in Barton's pastiche of styles.  But literally nothing develops, despite the dancers' confidence.  There's no structure, and not even any links between the various episodes - which never achieve anything like a rhythm.  And occasionally strange things happen for no reason, like the moment when everyone suddenly yells "AMERICA!"  When the dance is over you clap in appreciation, but only think to yourself,  "Well, that was nice."  And then you can't think of anything else to think.

The second half of the program, Busk, is a little bit better - it's still episodic, but the "scenes" all share a common theme. Barton has said her title is drawn from the Spanish "buscar" - "to search" - rather than the familiar rite of street busking; nevertheless, she opens the dance with a solo from an obvious busker (Barton herself), in a black hoodie and white gloves, who ends up trying to work the audience from the edge of the stage.  After this seeming "overture," the piece stretches out into a fluid set of variations on that commercially seductive situation, all set to a rollicking, gypsy-tinged score.  We meet a mime, and an acrobat, and a lady contortionist (Emily Oldak); somebody even rides through on a unicycle.  The dancers take turns as performer and audience, and there's also a dark-clad chorus that sweeps through the "street" occasionally, perhaps a gaggle of monks or priests (I suppose they're buskers too, aren't they!).  Dancers shimmy and swivel, pop and leap and even do back flips; a modern twist will morph into a balletic turn, which then collapses into a somersault down a set of stairs. Sometimes the performers are on their toes, then are suddenly back down on their heels.  The only constant is that every scene and solo is a montage of references; Barton samples and samples, and then samples some more.  And it's all gorgeous and sexy - with Andrew Murdock (above) and Ben Wardell probably the stand-outs in what's a rivetingly beautiful company.

But at the end of the piece, Barton enters again - and strips herself "naked" (well, down to a bra and panties), then slowly "crawls" off-stage.  To some viewers, this amounted to a statement; and actually, I thought it was a statement, too - only one whose content troubled me.  For Busk could easily be read as a kind of confession from someone who knew only too well how to seduce a crowd - but also knew that said seduction would lead nowhere; the busk itself was its own be-all and end-all.

Indeed, thanks to her minute-by-minute choreographic command, Ms. Barton has indeed busked much of the dance establishment (she's a protégée of none other than Mikhail Baryshnikov himself).  But I'm afraid I'm going to be a hold-out on this particular street corner.  I mean should a dance, however virtuosic, be no more than a busk?  I have no doubt at all that once Ms. Barton finds her true themes, she will immediately be a dance-maker to reckon with.  But I think I'll hold off on the "serious artist" accolades until that happens.