Don't ask Alice

In Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark," the hunt itself turns out to be utterly pointless, because "the Snark was a Boojum, you see." The hunters were searching for something that, paradoxically, was actually something else (and which, via its dangerous non-existence, made its hunters non-existent too!).

And while I hate to be snarky about this (har de har), I'm afraid much the same thing could be said of Alice's Adventures Underground (above left), the new adaptation of the "Alice" books (plus bits of "Snark"), at the Central Square Theatre through Dec. 28; the whole show feels somehow misdirected, as if its seeming object didn't exist.

Perhaps this is because adaptress/actress Debra Wise has morphed "Alice" into a stressed-out mother who has lost her connection with her free-spirited daughter, "Carol" (what, no son named Lewis?), and tries to put "Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" through roughly the same paces Steven Spielberg put "Peter Pan" through lo those many years ago. But this time the conceit just doesn't take (if it did then, either), for reasons that are hard to pin down in particular, but easy to sense generally.

The first is that the Alice books (the first manuscript of which was titled, yes, "Alice Underground") are about the the little conundrums that invade the bored young mind - they're hardly about wish fulfillment for the middle-aged. And then there's the problem that they're also obsessed with frustration (as their author was - an avid photographer of naked little girls, his photograph of his muse, Alice Liddell, is at right). Alice never gets what she wants, and she wanders through a world in which pleasure is always just ever so slightly out of reach. Language and what she thinks of as logic fail her, and she's not so much freed as repeatedly trapped; indeed, the things she most gets "in touch with" are chaos and violence. I don't mean to make the books sound grim - they're anything but; but they're hardly about finding peace with your inner child; indeed, their message is that even children can't get in touch with their inner child, that it's impossible.

So after she falls "through" her looking glass as if it were a rabbit hole (a nice little mash-up), there's really nowhere for Wise to go with her basic premise without doing real violence to the material, and so she's left simply following the familiar tropes of the beloved books, with their point always somehow beside the point. Occasionally "Alice" recognizes daughter "Carol" amid the denizens of Wonderland - but this seemingly subconscious search never really comes to much, and anyhow the spirit of Lewis Carroll is basically the antithesis of such a blatant cliché. Still, even if the show seems basically out of touch with its own themes, the Underground Railway Theater has brought a dazzling level of imagination to its production anyway - it's a cornucopia of gorgeous drops and magical puppets and masks, by talented designers David Fichter and Will Cabell. The little critic in my head told me that the designs, brilliant as they were, were rather more brightly generic than Alice-specific, but the rest of me didn't really care. From a giant Humpty-Dumpty (at left) to Alices of every shape and size, the designs delight throughout, and the various gambits by which the heroine is transformed or travels through time and space are ceaselessly inventive - and the actors tirelessly leap through one transformational hoop after another (sometimes literally). Of the adults in the piece, probably Steven Barkhimer came closest to the subversive spirit of Carroll, while Robert Najarian, although always amusing, was never quite incisive enough (and in his velveteen getup he looked more like Willy Wonka than Lewis Carroll, anyway). The young members of the cast - Katie Green, Kyla Frieden and Alenah Garcia on the matinee I attended - all brought off their parts with charming aplomb.

As for Wise - she never flagged in energy, but sometimes you caught a flash of desperation in her eyes - she knew this wasn't working. To be fair, it's easy to see what tempted her to do the piece: Carroll's themes of the suspension of time and his floating sense of erotic loss seem to map ever so tantalizingly to the underside of middle-age. And Wise has devised some amusing parallels to Wonderland in the older Alice's frazzled landscape: her husband, for instance, runs about in a tux rather like the White Rabbit, and even, tellingly, calls her "Boojums." But Wise has yet to discover how to actually enter Carroll's garden of whimsical paradox, much less find her way through it.

Eww, kissing boys, yucky!

Today was supposed to be "A Day Without Gay" - some activists pushed for gay people to stay home from work, and not buy anything for 24 hours. Alas, I'm not on board with that initiative - it seems ill-timed, and well, just a little odd as a response to Prop 8; I'd be much more up for "Paint a Swastika on a Mormon Temple" or "Break a Stained Glass Window at the Pedophile Club" day. But I will post a little snippet from the David Letterman Show that bugged me when I saw it. I don't think of Letterman as particularly homophobic, but really, what is with this long harangue about how icky it is to kiss a guy? James Franco (plugging his latest, Milk, which I'll write about soon) handles his host's stupidity well, and the exchange ends on a cute note, but the whole sequence reminded me yet again of what a friend of mine calls "post-homophobic homophobia," i.e., the restatement of bigotry in an ironic disguise. Why does this go on? Why is it just about every other skit on Saturday Night Live, for instance, features some weird gay character in leather, or guys kissing guys? Why must every TV show still bow before the anxieties of Midwest male twenty-somethings? (Somehow, for instance, I doubt Letterman was as horrified by Britney kissing Madonna.) Sigh. I'm just saying.

Broccoli We Have Heard on High

What can I say? An ocarina made of broccoli! Can a vegan Messiah be far behind?

Messiah complex

H&H Concertmaster Daniel Stepner.

There's at least one Christmas tradition that isn't really a tradition any more - in the last few years, Messiah has morphed from the equivalent of checking off a box on the Christmas list to something like an ongoing aesthetic argument. First came the early music revisionists (led by Boston's own Martin Pearlman), who pulled the work back from the nineteenth to the eighteenth century (where it basically belongs). Then last year Harry Christophers, Handel and Haydn's new artistic director, offered a striking amalgam of the lighter "new" Messiah manner and its "older" Victorian proclamative power. And now this year's model from H&H, driven by yet another innovative British conductor, Paul Daniel, unveiled another vision altogether: Messiah as personal musical statement.

The results were by turns fascinating and moving, but also somewhat eccentric, and sometimes even slightly irritating. Daniel's reading was nothing if not fresh, and his players and singers responded to every surprising decision with excitement and passion - and this kind of intellectual commitment to musical exploration is, I admit, what impresses me most about this group; they'll follow their conductor anywhere, even when he decides to open the "Hallelujah Chorus" at something close to a whisper.

But I confess I wasn't ready to follow Mr. Daniel (at left) quite that far, and sometimes it struck me that he was looking at Messiah as a kind of academic experiment, or even personal musical toy. Perhaps this is due to the fact that I'm just a cultural stick-in-the-mud - but it might also be due to the fact that I know when a piece has been almost over-considered. In a word, this was a Messiah that rarely let rip, and as a result some of its glories - in particular its joy and power - had gone missing. The conductor also willfully subsumed the dramatic text into the musical one - he was only too happy to push diction into a blur if he wanted to step on the musical gas, and even the final, gorgeous "Amen" was de-constructed into a set of disconnected notes; it was a lovely, intriguing musical phrase that recalled the moment's medieval sources, but it was not the word "Amen." I also noticed a certain repetition in Daniel's originality - he liked tender beginnings that rushed into slightly-melodramatic climaxes; certainly a time-honored technique, but by the third or fourth time around, one that had begun to sound a little corny. In the end, this conductor's Messiah was as much a tour of his own musical world as a thoughtful re-imagining of a tradition.

But hell, it's Christmas - and Daniel certainly bore many lovely musical gifts. The highlights of his Messiah were the gentle and melancholy moments that many other versions overlook: from the opening "Comfort ye" to "Behold the Lamb of God" to "I know that my Redeemer liveth," this was a Messiah of hope and solace rather than confident affirmation. Sometimes the piece was even heartbreaking - the "We shall be chang'd" segment was particularly piercing, via a beautifully dramatic reading by bass Brett Polegato. Handel and Haydn hasn't seen Mr. Polegato since 1999 - too long a break, if you ask me.

As for the rest of the soloists, however, I'd have to say "meh." No one else had Polegato's power (this was perhaps by design); at least mezzo Paula Murrihy projected a sense of profound personal feeling in "He was despised." But alas, soprano Kendra Colton and tenor Brian Stucki only managed the usual generic "heart." The chorus was nimble and attentive to Daniel's every whim - you could almost see them calculating exactly how loud he wanted them to be. But they sounded a little thin as both the jubilant congregation of "For unto us a Child is born" and the snarling mob of "Let Him deliver Him, if he delight in Him." The orchestra was the conductor's real musical focus, and I have to give Daniel props for the most cleanly delineated musical layering I've heard yet from H&H - in this department, he rivals James Levine. Daniel drew particularly fine work from the timpani, and of course the reliable Jesse Levine, H&H's secret weapon on natural horn.

And in the end, I have to admit it takes guts to simply ignore the presumptions of a tradition and follow your own road, which is precisely what Mr. Daniel has done. Oddly enough, despite the many caveats of this review, I'd be eager to hear him again, although maybe not in the saddle of this particular warhorse. I guess I just like my hallelujahs to sound like "Hallelujah!"

Against "cool"; or, the trouble with Tara

It's hard to argue with pleasure in the arts, particularly when so much contemporary art gives, well, so little of it. That's what makes the strange case of artist Tara Donovan so difficult to crack: it's almost impossible to persuade people that she's empty and superficial when she's just so much fun. People have been bringing their kids in droves to her retrospective at the ICA - which, after the Anish Kapoor show, has clearly found its niche as an adjunct of the Children's Museum - and you can hear little voices piping up with "Wow!" over and over again as tiny art-lovers encounter Donovan's clouds of styrofoam cups (above) and stalagmites of buttons and fog-banks of zillions of straws. And you can't blame them; Donovan's pieces are indeed "cool," and "cool," as they say, is king, as well as kid-friendly. I love cool stuff, you love cool stuff, we all love cool stuff. But can we stop pretending it's art?

Before you say it, I know the answer is "no." This would be asking a lot from the typical baby boomer (and actually even more from Gens X & Y). Just try explaining to one that the music and art they thought was cool when they were eleven or twelve was probably not, actually, all that deep or interesting (it was probably powerful, yes, but that's hardly the same thing). Most simply refuse to listen, even though their position is pretty ridiculous (imagine if literature were governed by the same model - we'd all still be talking about The Outsiders). Hey, if it rocks you, then it's deep - because otherwise, of course, you're not particularly deep, but are instead stuck in a very extended adolescence, and that obviously cannot be! It sometimes seems the idea that one should deepen as an adult - indeed, that it's your responsibility to deepen as an adult - has become about as attractive a position to my generation as racism. And why? Because if you've deepened as an adult, then you've become old. Hence the importance of having your taste ratified by your ten-year-old.

It's equally pointless to mention that most great art, in fact, is not particularly "cool." Indeed, great art is often impacted, thorny, strange, or opaque at first blush. It is usually difficult - only not merely difficult for its own sake, like so much second-rate modernism, but rather difficult because difficulty is often necessary to convey complex meaning. Which is practically the opposite of coolness. Cool things are sleek, controlled, and both self-sufficient and efficient; they offer instant gratification, instant elegance, and unexpected solutions; they must be immediately graspable, both in terms of their goals and their success. What's more, they are all about utility; they lift you up, give you wings, in general defy the gravity of the physical and emotional world. They don't leave you pondering your mortality, or perceiving your own limits; they don't make you humble or wise; instead, they "empower" you, which, of course leaves the "you" at the center of that new power basically unchanged.


Those are plastic cups! Can you believe it? It's like a digital network!

So I know it's pointless, really, shaking my graying locks over Tara Donovan; she's here to stay, and I'll be hearing about her at cocktail parties for a long time. Can you believe how many straws were stuck on that wall? How long did it take her to stack all those cups? And isn't it interesting that almost everything she's done is called "Untitled"? I really should just try to lie back and enjoy it, or think of England, or something.

Then again, I can almost already hear people asking me (or thinking to themselves), why can't you just sit back and enjoy all the pretty, mindless coolness, Mr. Snarky Artsy-Fartsy? And Tara Donovan's art is about something - it's like, about digital networks, and it's biological. Biomorphic, whatever. It is conceptual, that's the point - it's like there's this concept, or this process, or this concept process, or this process concept, of doing this small thing over and over - just like cells do, okay? - and then like stepping back and going "Wow. That is amazing." And Tara Donovan didn't have to have any particular ability, just tons of patience and, yes, hard work and determination, because anybody should be able to be a great artist, whether they have talent or not; that's what "contemporary art" means.

So let me tell you, gentle readers, I can enjoy mindless coolness as well as the next man. I, too, enjoy the strange ying-yang between size and scale that Donovan plays with; I totally dig models of Manhattan that fit on a tabletop, as well as twenty-foot pencils. I, too, went "Wow!" and ran around the perimeter of the cups/straws/tape and said "How did she do that?" I, too, understand that what she does is not at all like building an Eiffel Tower out of toothpicks because the Eiffel Tower is not cool. I, too, walked up and down before the gazillion straws of "Haze," letting the piece play hackey-sack with my depth perception. I, too, gazed through the one that's like a window stuffed with curls of polyester film, and thought about how beautiful it was, and how it reminded me of stained glass. And the way the sounds from the hall came through it, that was totally cool, too.

The trouble comes later, when I'm sitting here, before the keyboard, trying to think of something to say about Tara Donovan but not being able to come up with a single thing. Except that I suppose she's given Minimalism some fresh life. But did anyone really want to give Minimalism fresh life? Well, maybe a few curators did! Oh wait - speaking of curators - you know what? I can say something nice about Ms. Donovan after all: she was a lot more fun than those nominees for the Foster Prize! Because they weren't even cool. And man, if you don't have anything to say, then it's not cool to not be cool.

The "two cultures" meet again!

In the spirit of encouraging the "two cultures" of art and science to better understand one another, I thought I'd post the above video, "The Role of Vitamin D in Beta-Cell Function," the top prize-winner of the "Dance Your Ph.D." 2008 AAAS/Science Dance Contest. Below is an even more intriguing number called "Hydrodynamic Trail Detection in Marine Organisms." The idea was to challenge recent Ph.D.'s to communicate their dissertations via interpretive dance. You can read more about the contest and see more videos here. Or learn how you can submit an entry to next year's contest here.

A crackling Nutcracker

A bevy of snowflakes do their thing in The Nutcracker.

If you've been waiting for a special reason to see - or return to - Boston Ballet's The Nutcracker, then this may be your year to take the plunge. For this old chestnut is crackling this year as it never has before. Indeed, the annual extravaganza had begun to seem a bit gimmicky and bloated of late; every season marked the introduction of some new special effect or cute bit of business, to the point at which the ballet seemed to be bulging at the seams, and you could almost count on some technical snafu or other (I remember on last year's opening night, the Christmas tree only "grew" to half its full height).

But in this year's model, the spectacle that had accumulated over recent years finally cohered - all the special effects came off, the constant stage traffic never got snarled, and the acting reached the same high level the dancing had long since attained. In short, The Nutcracker actually flowed as a story ballet, as it should.

Much of the credit for this happy development should, of course, go to Artistic Director Mikko Nissinen, who has been tooling and retooling the piece under pressure, as it's wandered from the Wang to the Colonial and then to the Opera House. But I think at least a few laurels should be thrown at the feet of dancer Boyko Dossev, who made the best Drosselmeier I've ever seen. The role includes little challenging dancing - in the first act, that went to the virtuosic John Lam and Misa Kuranaga, as the mechanical, yet utterly flexible, Harlequin and Columbine - but it's still the essentially the acting fulcrum of the piece, and Dossev effortlessly pulled together the opening Christmas party (which with its simple dances for kids can get a little wearying for grown-ups) with a smart, slightly fey, but also faintly menacing sense of masculine whimsy. In short, Dossev made Drosselmeier spooky and fun - and as a result, so was the whole show.



Actually, the production did wobble slightly during the battle between the Nutcracker/Cavalier and the Mouse King (above) - which of its many set-pieces probably includes the most gags per minute, all of them good, but perhaps taken together almost too much of a good thing. Once Clara (a charming, light-on-her-feet Elizabeth Wisdom) and her Cavalier were making nice with the Snow King and Queen (Roman Rykine and Larissa Ponomarenko), however, the stage business settled down, and the Ballet's leading dancers - a very strong field these days - took over, and all was once again well.

As usual, Ponomarenko and Rykine were pretty much peerless - this team brings the art of partnering to the highest level of any couple in the Ballet, and their pas de deux was, as it should be, a dazzling display of noble romantic glamour. The various divertissements in the Land of Sweets remained at close to the same ravishing level; Sabi Varga and (especially) Lia Cirio brought a dark hauteur to the Arabian pas de deux ("Coffee"), while Misa Kuranaga (again) and Altankhuya Dugaraa charmed in the Chinese ("Tea"), and Jared Redick wowed the crowd with his stratospheric leaps in the rousing Russian dance. Likewise Melissa Hough impressed with her sunny confidence as the Dewdrop Fairy, and Lorna Feijóo brought her usual disciplined sex appeal to her exquisite turn as the Sugar Plum Fairy. Alas, her Cavalier for the evening, the talented Yury Yanowsky (replacing Nelson Madrigal, and not listed in the role for that weekend) seemed to be having an off night; he looked tired, and seemed unsteady on one or two of his solo landings - still, he partnered Feijóo well (if somewhat intently - you could almost see him counting pirouettes). And his handful of missteps did little to dull what proved to be a truly dazzling evening.