Mitt Romney vs. Giant Gay Flesh-Eating Rats

I know, you're still waiting for reviews - but really, this is a classic. It's all about the "family-valuest" candidate, Mitt Romney, and his fight against the giant gay flesh-eating rats of Massachusetts . . .

Everybody's a critic . . .

. . . but at least some people are funny ones. Perhaps the ultimate product review is the one for "Tuscan Whole Milk" (at left), on amazon.com. 97 pages of comments, many of them brilliantly witty. My favorite of these many missives is probably the opening riff, by "Debunker":

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately dairy-house decree:
Where Alf, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
the sacred cows wandered and fed,
And there were gardens bright with soft young grass,
Where blossomed many a pound of fresh-churned butter;
And casein scents filled the air,
Engorging the nostrils of naughty milk-maids.

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian milk-maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Cottage Cheese.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dairy in air,
That sunny dome! those cows of wonder!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Moo! Moooo!
Her flashing eyes, her swinging udder!
Weave a circle round her thrice,
And squeeze the teats with care,
For she on sweet grass hath fed,
And produced the Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon,
128 fl oz, of Paradise.

The Huntington finds its next A.D.

The Huntington has announced a decision that will probably have more impact on the local theatre scene than any other event this year. Peter DuBois (at left), currently an Associate Director at the Public Theater in New York, will take over the Artistic Directorship from Nicholas Martin (who's headed to Williamstown) this coming July. Prior to his stint at the Public, where he was known for his involvement with transfers from the Royal Court, Steppenwolf, and the Abbey Theatre, DuBois served as Artistic Director of the Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska. According to the Globe, Dubois has said that he hoped "to inventively reimagine the classics, to break ground in musical theater, and to nurture a generation of emerging artists, while at the same time focus on the needs of Boston's institutions and local community." At 37, he will be the youngest Artistic Director in the Huntington's history.

The Eight: Reindeer Monologues

The alternative Christmas show - it's not just about The Santaland Diaries anymore! Above is the "trailer" for Jeff Goode's The Eight: Reindeer Monologues, a "hilariously disturbing monologue play (that) shares the real dirt on Santa's perversions, Vixen's allegations, Rudolph's mental health and why Dancer no longer dances." No endorsement here, I haven't seen it - but hey, the trailer's a kick (wait for the Nutcracker spoof), a lot of the actors have done strong work around town, and it's all for a good cause - proceeds benefit the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. So I'd say it's worth checking out. For more info, go to www.reindeerinboston.com.

We've started blowing whistles

Chris, Joey and Brian get in the mood in this shot by Joel Benjamin.

For those wondering why the blog has been "dark" for the past few days - it's because rehearsals have begun for Blowing Whistles, a new play by Matthew Todd, which I'm directing for Zeitgeist Stage. That's my cast above - Christopher Michael Brophy, Joey C. Pelletier, and Brian Quint (from left to right). As you can see, they're all too sexy for their shirts (but hey, that's marketing).

As a result, I've been out and about much less than usual. I have, however, caught the H&H Messiah and Boston Ballet's Nutcracker, both of which I'm overdue on discussing, as well as the Takács Quartet at Celebrity Series on Sunday. All of them, of course, were worthwhile, but I will try to tease out more specifics in a longer format some time this week (I may try to catch Boston Baroque's Messiah as well, for one of my patented compare-n-contrast efforts).

In the meantime, though, I'm immersed in the text of Matthew Todd's edgy, troubling play, which pretty much rips away, in an almost embarrassing fashion, our various politically-correct pretenses around the "gay lifestyle" and monogamy. Actually, that's not quite right - Blowing Whistles actually rips away any pretenses around the "gay lifestyle" and trust, period. Sometimes I've joked that only gay people should be allowed to see it, as so much dirty gay laundry is on parade in it. Don't get me wrong - Blowing Whistles is hilarious, but its comedy, like so much observant humor, is often sourced in pain. But how could it be otherwise? The play unflinchingly depicts the destruction of a loving relationship by promiscuity, and probes an unspoken issue in gay life right now: how will gay culture accommodate its new civic status, and claims to marriage equality, with its essential foundation: the right to sexual freedom? In other words, how do freedom and commitment co-exist? I hope we can do justice in our production to the playwright's insights, and I'll be popping in and out of the blog with updates on our progress.

Rescue the Constitution!

This is the ad FoxNews would not run. And no wonder - they don't want to rescue the Constitution!

But you should. In fact, you can send President Bush a copy of the Constitution for Christmas by signing up here.

Taylor-made

Lisa Viola and Robert Kleinendorst camp it up in Troilus and Cressida.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company has been with us for over fifty years, and Taylor himself has choreographed over 100 dances - a stunning achievement; in terms of its breadth, his only peer may be Balanchine himself. Taylor's oeuvre hasn't been credited with the same depth as the immortal Mr. B's, however - a sad fact seemingly belied by the quality of last Friday's Celebrity Series concert at the Schubert. It was, simply put, the strongest Taylor program the Hub has seen in years, featuring two of his classics, Aureole (1962) and Esplanade (1975), along with a worthy new work, Lines of Loss (2007), and an extended (perhaps too extended) goof, Troilus and Cressida (reduced) (2006). Together, this quartet dazzled in its range and imagination, as Taylor always does, but this time two of the pieces, Aureole and Lines of Loss (intriguingly, the oldest and most recent), delivered the kind of profundity that has sometimes eluded the company in the past.

So we'll start with the lightest (and slightest) of these, Troilus and Cressida, which found Taylor in the high, brassy spirits he's often brought to Boston. Before a gigantic, mock-Paris-Opera backdrop from Santo Loquasto, the company cavorted through a travesty of Shakespeare's tragedy set to Ponchielli's gloriously insipid Dance of the Hours (you know how it goes: "Hello muddah, hello faddah . . .") Lisa Viola and Robert Kleinendorst proved inspired clowns in the leads (Viola seemed hilariously able to make even the most graceful pirouette go splat, while Kleinendorst proved hilariously unable to keep his baggy pants up), and the respective trios of ditzy cherubs and dastardly Greeks likewise knew just how to chew Loquasto's scenery; still, the whole thing didn't amount to much more than what Disney did to Ponchielli years ago in Fantasia.

There was far more meat on the bones of the rest of the program. Esplanade (at left), a thrilling evocation of running, jumping, skipping, and every which way people move on down the road, looked as fresh on Friday as it did at its premiere thirty years ago. The piece is so carelessly reckless, in fact, that the audience kept wincing in fear for the dancers' safety: Taylors sends them literally skidding across the stage in baseball-style slides, or nose-diving over each other's shoulders, or flying into one other's arms. At the same time, the seeming chaos is succinctly organized into subtle patterns (to a Bach concerto), and somehow the dancers, despite their evident physical danger, seemed to almost shine with joy (particularly Viola, who again executed a dazzling bit of backward horseplay).

The same exhuberance marked Aureole, which prefigured the baroque investigations of Mark Morris by some twenty-five years. Working against a score by Handel, Taylor has here designed an exciting, eccentric analogue to classic dance; where ballet technique tends inevitably toward elevation, however, Taylor keeps everything on the down low: swinging their arms wide, the dancers all but skim the floor in a delightful series of vignettes that somehow convey a serene sense of almost abstract happiness.


The finale of Lines of Loss.

And if there was any question that Paul Taylor has lost his mojo, said doubts were laid to rest by Lines of Loss, a harrowing work set to a pastiche of composers (as different as Alfred Schnittke and Arvo Pärt) which nevertheless cohered into a kind of ritual of grief. Santo Loquasto's backdrop may have been a bit literal - darkly smudged "lines," or perhaps threads, woven over a pale sky - but, as they say, "it worked," and Taylor's choreography has rarely been more powerfully spare. From the opening moment, in which Lisa Viola coolly flicked a tear from her eye, every "scene," as it were, calmly bade farewell to one of life's joys - youth, friendship and love among them. The piece would be simply depressing if you didn't feel that at age 77 Taylor has earned his Beckett chops, and if the dance itself weren't so unsentimentally virtuosic, and performed with such intensity. Annmaria Mazzini (who had all but glowed in Aureole) here seemed almost possessed with an equally bitter passion as she repeatedly slammed her torso into the floor, while Viola, in a tortured pairing with Michael Trusnovec, likewise limned the inevitable pain in every shared embrace. The suite ends with a kind of blood passage; the dancers, robed in crimson, enter in formation, then fall to bended knee, except Viola, who keeps walking, into - well, whatever comes next. And as she vanished from the stage, I found myself hoping that Paul Taylor will be with us for many years to come.