One intelligent homosexual's New York weekend

The Hub Review headed south this past weekend, to that provincial little town (above) you may have heard tell of.  I only managed to catch two plays - Jacobi's Lear (which we'd caught previously via simulcast), and Tony Kushner's The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Marxism with a Key to the Scriptures. Both were powerful, and I'll write about both. I was surprised to discover that I may have actually enjoyed the Jacobi Lear more in HD than I did in person (for reasons I'll explain). But what has most been occupying my mind since my return is The Intelligent Homosexual, etc. Reviews in New York have been mixed, and the play is (very) far from flawless. Still, I have one of my hunches that it's a truly great play, and perhaps the greatest of the post-millennium era. Certainly in its ambition and scope it completely eclipses anything we've seen in years, and this cast - studded with long-time Kushner collaborators - is unlikely to ever be bettered (and due to the complexity and, yes, political obscurity of much of the material, the production is unlikely to tour). And while I hate to say it, I'm having trouble imagining a Boston cast that would be up to the demands of this particular play. Which I think means that if you care about Kushner, or even the (fading) dream of a rigorously challenging intellectual theatre, then you have to get yourself to the Public before June 12.



Christophers, soloists, orchestra and chorus take a well-deserved bow.

Hub Review readers are no doubt getting a little bored with my continual praise of the Handel and Haydn Society. But if you were hoping that at last Harry Christophers and Co. had slipped up last weekend in their performances of Mozart's Requiem and Handel's Dixit Dominus, and that the critical monotony around here might finally be broken by a snarky little pan, I'm afraid I have to disappoint you: Harry & Co. were just as terrific as ever. Sorry!

Indeed, H&H (and the chorus in particular) has gotten so consistent of late that the only thing I wonder going into their concerts is: will the soloists measure up this time? Not quite all of them do, I'm afraid, although most of the line-up last weekend was splendid. Met power-bass Eric Owens, who recently triumphed as Alberich in the Met's new Das Rheingold, was on hand, as was rising lyric soprano Elizabeth Watts, who usually busies herself at Covent Garden or the Welsh National Opera, and who also boasted plenty of power, as well as a ravishing blush of radiant color. She was flanked by another rising British star, tenor Andrew Kennedy, who sang with passionate attack; the only slight gap in this luminous line-up was mezzo Phyllis Pancella, who had sumptuous tone but a lot of vibrato, and not quite enough volume to keep up with her cohorts.

But frankly, the chorus was the real star anyhow, particularly in Handel's Dixit Dominus, which I think many in the hall left feeling was the highlight of the program - and perhaps even a greater piece than the famous Requiem (sacrilege, I know, but I feel the Requiem is only truly brilliant in those passages we have complete from Mozart's own hand - the work was completed after his death by his student Franz Sussmäyr).  Dixit Dominus, by way of contrast, is thrilling throughout - indeed, its stern authority is pregnant with a sense of trembling foreboding only hinted at in the pronouncements of its text. And technically, it's almost stunningly complex - yet the H&H Chorus was always on point, both technically and emotionally (all the more remarkable given the urgent tempi favored by Christophers). Indeed, the solos from within the chorus - particularly those by Margot Rood, Teresa Wakim, and Woodrow Bynum - seemed as strong as anything we heard from the headliners. 

Judgment seems to have been on Mozart's mind, too, in the composing the Requiem, which in Christophers's hands rang more with warning than mourning, and which he also often took at a sometimes-blistering pace (for some sense of the committed connection this conductor brings to the stage, check out the photo at left). He slowed down, however, for some truly threatening moments in the Dies irae, while Owens triumphed in the forceful Tuba mirum and the string section broke the judgmental mood with a piercing rendition of the famous Lacrimosa.

These two titanic, back-to-back statements dominated the concert, but it would be wrong to ignore the beautiful pieces that filled out the program: Mozart's  Ave verum corpus, a short motet which I'd never heard before, but which was surpassingly lovely (with more exquisite work from the chorus), and the charming Por questa bella mano, which bass-baritone Eric Owens essayed with resonant feeling. As is sometimes the case in a period music concert, we also got to hear some unusual instrumentation - "basset horns" sang out during the Recordare of the Requiem, and  Por questa set Mr. Owens against an even deeper sound, that of the double bass obbligato - one of those early instruments you really think must have been designed by Dr. Seuss. Just watching bassist Rob Nairn attack this giant with his bow brought a sense of comedy to the performance that Owens seemed to eschew - which may have been just as well; somehow the contrast between the singer's sincerity and the player's struggles seemed wonderfully Mozartean all on its own.

Titania in her bower in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Right now Hub audiences have the unusual chance to take in the second of two genius-on-genius Midsummer Night's Dream mash-ups: after Boston Ballet's splendid mounting of Balanchine's version last month, we can now savor Benjamin Britten's gorgeous response to the same masterpiece at Boston Lyric Opera (through this weekend at the Schubert).

It's pretty much agreed that both these derivative works are masterpieces in their own rights - and what's more, they serve as conceptual bookends for their expansive source. Balanchine stresses the romance and structure of Shakespeare's mother of all romantic comedies (and all but ignores its goofy "mechanicals"); Britten, meanwhile, emphasizes the work's infinite variety rather than its unity - musically, he conjures a different sound-garden, in fact, for each "cast" of characters.  And surprisingly he punches up the comedy, particularly the baggy-pants stuff; indeed the mechanicals are all but center-stage much of the time, and their travesty of the "tragedy" of Pyramus and Thisbe becomes the opera's hilarious climax.

It's here that the BLO soars to the same brilliant level it achieved in recent productions of Agrippina and The Emperor of Atlantis (it occurs to me that comedy may be their strong suit). But at first it seems director Tazewell Thompson and set designer John Conklin are a little lost in the woods themselves, and it takes the production a long time - indeed, the entire first act - to come together. The singing, however, is first-rate throughout, and Britten's instrumental writing is so lustrous that classical fans may not mind the conceptual confusion unfolding on stage.

No doubt Thompson and Conklin thought they were simply taking a note from Britten's own approach: just as the composer devised individual sound-scapes for Midsummer's different characters, so Conklin and Thompson seem to have concocted a separate look for each as well.  (Perhaps they also think that the "contradictions, confusions, and disguises" that afflict the play's characters should afflict the audience, too.)  Thus the lovers are roughly Edwardian, while Oberon and Titania seem more historic and fanciful; meanwhile the fairies look to be modeled on the Boy Scouts.  Odder still are the many design gambits Conklin offers and then discards: the general mood is mod and coolly geometric, but sometimes the furniture grows or shrinks like decor from Alice in Wonderland, and when the mechanicals wander through the forest, the trees are labeled "TREES" (apparently because Bottom and his crew are so literal-minded).  The moon remains an organizing motif, at least - but when things grow more surreal after Bottom's transformation, even it gets tricked out with a Man Ray photograph - again, just in case we don't "get it." 

A few of the contradictions and confusions in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Photo(s) by Erik Jacobs.

These ideas aren't "wrong," exactly, it's just that they keep calling attention to themselves, and begin to seem too clever by half - and that makes the opera feel disjointed and slightly incoherent, when actually Shakespeare's complex text and Britten's delicately ambiguous music are both highly unified beneath their surface effects.  (For the record, the opera's underlying style is something like Purcell gone modern - and it's worth noting that this is a rare case in which a Shakespearean opera is based on Shakespeare's own text, a stunning achievement in and of itself.)  There are some lovely vocals to savor, from the sweet countertenor of John Gaston's Oberon to Nadine Sierra's languidly plush turn as Titania, to Andrew Shore's robustly rendered bully of a Bottom.  And the children of the PALS Children's Chorus charmed whenever they sang.  Still, the performances somehow couldn't make much headway against a persistent sense of conceptual drift; and it didn't help that stage director Thompson and new music director David Angus both favored a very measured pace - which only gave us plenty of time to wonder what, exactly, they were getting at.

A heartbroken Thisbe (Matthew DiBattista) mourns the fallen Pyramus (Andrew Shore).

Luckily, things turned a corner at intermission; Britten's music gathers more dramatic momentum, and Conklin settled on a design motif, and the lovers got a wonderfully punchy scene to strut their stuff (that's Chad A. Johnson, Heather Johnson, Susanna Phillips, and the clarion-voiced Matthew Worth, above).  Best of all, the mechanicals did a boffo job with "Pyramus and Thisbe."  It's a little surprising to realize that Shakespeare actually invented "camp" some four hundred years ago with this little skit (it even includes what may be the stage's first drag queen), but Britten understood its true nature all too well, and offers up a hilarious parody of classic bel canto opera, complete with a mad scene out of Lucia di Lammermoor (above left), in which Lucia is a brawny lad with a mop on his head (played originally by Britten's lover/librettist, Peter Pears).   Here the whole sequence was pure perfection - balancing beautifully Shakespeare's point about perspective being everything in romance with his deeper affection for the faith that makes all romantic (and artistic) feeling possible.  And thus somehow Britten and Boston Lyric Opera brought off the depth of this great work as few theatrical productions do, making this Midsummer something of a dream in the end.

Yes, MIT can bust a move

In fact we beat the pants off the totally rhythm-free Boston College senior class.



Altan Dugaraa, Sarah Wroth and Yury Yanowsky in Bella Figura.





Two years ago, in its own words, Boston Ballet’s production of Jiří Kylián’s Black and White took the city by storm (it proved so popular the company reprised it last season); the production was one of those rare, thrilling moments in which a startling intellectual statement was also a roaring popular success. Now the Ballet is back with another Kylián premiere from the same fertile period (through this weekend at the Opera House), which poses an inevitable question: can the company catch lightning in a bottle twice?

And the answer is: yah, pretty much. Bella Figura (above) doesn’t  pack quite the shocking wallop of Black and White, even though it covers much of the same territory (gender, violence, and identity, for those of you keeping score). But if that earlier blockbuster was a choreographic call to arms, in which men danced with rapiers while women prowled the stage like lionesses, Figura is more of a rumination, sometimes tragic, sometimes bemused, on the smaller-scaled (perhaps even internal) struggles that Black and White treated as overt combat. Thus it has less of a sense of attack, but perhaps even more ambiguous depth. And it goes without saying that it’s danced peerlessly at the Ballet, where the women carry off with admirable sang froid the partial nudity (at top) the piece demands.

What’s more, Bella Figura shares its program with two other worthy postmodern works: William Forsythe’s The Second Detail, one of his seminal experiments from the 80's and 90's, and the brand-new Pärt I, II & III, from Forsythe disciple Helen Pickett, who is perhaps the Ballet’s second choreographer in residence (after Jorma Elo). Taken together, these pieces provide a solid sense of the breadth and depth of the ongoing, post-Balanchine intersection of ballet and modern dance.  And one of the most richly satisfying evenings of thoughtful high culture the city has to offer right now.



You could argue that with the great Balanchine's death in 1983, ballet had lost its Shakespeare, and maybe even its compass.  Certainly a sense of unspoken void is palpable in the works of William Forsythe, an American whose rise began almost precisely with Mr. B's demise (in an eerie coincidence, Forsythe's first landmark work, which won him the directorship of the influential Ballett Frankfurt, appeared the year of Balanchine's death).  The Second Detail - seen in snippets above - was set on the National Ballet of Canada some years later (1991), but it operates almost as a purification of the atmosphere of the time: it takes place in an abstract, white-on-white rehearsal hall, in which any leader or choreographer is strangely absent.  Elvis has clearly left the building, but the dancers are carrying on by themselves, trying this or that combination in various directions, searching for a new style to move them forward.  The score, by perennial Forsythe collaborator Thom Willems, is amplified electronic percussion, mournful and even a little morbid, and lacking a real melody - it's inching forward, too - but nevertheless weirdly energized.

The vibe may recall Balanchine in its techno-purity,  but it doesn't feel particularly committed; the dancers engage each other with a strict grace (with clean, incisive turns from Kathleen Breen Combes, James Whiteside, John Lam and Whitney Jensen, who I think was born for Forsythe), but they often just drop things in mid-step, to retire to a seat along the back, or saunter off stage, or even drop in exhaustion to the floor.  The work is thus a strange mix of the classic and the casual; everything only works until one of the dancers loses interest; meanwhile the question of exactly what they're all doing - or looking for - remains an open one.  In a quirky nod to that formal issue, there's even a title card with the word "THE" printed on it center stage, as in "The - what?" In a word, there's no name for this kind of dance (and there still isn't).

The Second Detail certainly haunts, but beautiful and striking as it is, you couldn't argue that it coheres - at least until its unexpected finale, when a very different figure - perhaps representative of that eponymous "second detail" - invades, and tries to shatter, the work's cool self-possession.  On opening night this impassioned figure took the form of prima ballerina Lorna Feijóo, who threw herself with abandon into (and through) the icy permutations going on around her.  Clad in what looked like a cross between a shower curtain and a wedding gown (she was, I think, a kind of bride), Feijóo may have been a madwoman, or perhaps some pagan spirit of the dance - but she couldn't in the end turn the tide toward her idea of passion; instead she collapsed, and then the title card did, too.  I'm not sure if that meant the work had ended on a hopeful note or not, but clearly the question was closed; the statement had been made, even if it was too ambiguous to name.

Next came Pickett's Pärt I, II and III, a triptych set to the mystically minimalist music of Arvo Pärt. Each dance had its own exotic name: "Layli o Majnun," (Persian for "Layla and the Madman") "Tsukiyo," (Japanese for "Moonlit Night") and "Tabula Rasa" (Latin for - you should know that one). The actual dancing, however, was in none of these traditions; Pickett is a Forsythe protégée, and you could feel his influence in her steps, but only subtly - perhaps because she was more interested in narrative and relationships than Forsythe usually is.

As you might guess from the variety of titles, the pieces didn't quite hold together as a matched set, although there were brilliant moments in each.  The strongest was probably "Layli o Majnun," which featured fierce turns from the great Larissa Ponomarenko and Yury Yanowsky as a troubled couple, shadowed by a mysterious Lorin Mathis (identified bluntly in the program as "Madness").  This is the kind of conceit that sounds corny, but that dance can bring off thrillingly, and Pickett conjured a gripping development that led to a spooky climax in which "Madness" mirrored Yanowsky's tormented moves as Ponomarenko clung to him desperately.  But Pickett didn't seem to know how to resolve her story (which she had changed from its source, anyhow: in the original fable, "madness" results from the frustration of the couple's being unable to marry; here it seemed intrinsic to them).  For while  Mathis was apparently driven off at the end, we didn't really understand why or how; it was just the power of Ponomarenko's luuhv, apparently. 

"Tsukiyo" likewise could have used a few more specifics and a bit more plot; it's a lovely pas de deux, in a highly traditional vein - a lonely swain woos the goddess of the moon, or something like that - but dramatically, it's curiously inert.  Set to Pärt's haunting, and by-now-ubiquitous, "Spiegel im Spiegel" ("Mirror in Mirror"), the piece is sweet, but at least as danced by Sabi Varga and Lia Cirio (above left) - that is exquisitely but with a shade too much self-conscious grace - its mirrored passion seems to be more about its own loveliness than about love itself. 

Pickett did more forceful work in the buoyant "Tabula Rasa" - set to a Pärt piece of the same name - which, as that moniker implies, was a kind of Forsythian blank slate: whatever "plot" it had seemed scrambled, and mostly it was just pure dance, and much in the master's manner, but without the formal questions and probing sense of cool that Mr. F brought to The Second Detail.  Still, Pickett's main prop - a giant mothership/chandelier borrowed from Close Encounters - was gorgeous, and she scribbled all over her "Tabula" with spirit, if not coherence; indeed, at times - as in the leaping romp for the company's young men  - she even tapped into a sense of competitive joy that I've never seen her mentor match.

At last came Bella Figura - itself both a striking formal statement and a complex construction freighted with metaphor - although the one thing everybody knows about it is that halfway through, the girls take their tops off. Before you point any fingers, though, ponder that the resulting imagery is curiously asexual - indeed, Kylián soon pulls together a crowd of topless men and women in flowing, blood-red skirts (see above), and we're forced to consider their lack of differentiation, the similarities of their "genders."

Sabi Varga, Rie Ichikawa and Tiffany Hedman. 

But from the top (sorry), Kylián has hinted that gender is a prison - the piece opens with two nude manikins, one male and one female, suspended in glass coffins over the action, before switching to a half-nude woman struggled to free herself from the stage curtain, while her male twin twists, upside down, within a box much like the ones that housed those earlier "bella figuras."

Immediately we sense a loose set of themes has been declared. "Bella figura" is both an Italian catch-phrase and an attitude; roughly translated, it conveys the need to meet life's challenges with a forceful sense of beauty and style. But Kylián's choice of music - yearning melodies from the likes of Pergolesi, Vivaldi and the contemporary Lukas Foss - tells you he's interested in the cost of beauty rather than its benefits. Thus in the iconic costumes of Bella Figura - which eventually everyone dons - the dancers are both flamboyantly beautiful (in flowing red bloomers) and yet simultaneously stripped; there's a vulnerability beneath their operatic beauty, and indeed it's the need to be beautiful itself that makes them so vulnerable.

Kylián rings many changes on this fundamental insight. We see duos and trios, romantic couples and, well, triangles, in which beauty is always present, but sometimes a problem, or even just superfluous - it can't always change an ugly power dynamic; the most attractive people, in fact, sometimes walk each other off stage like dogs (beauty as a form of degradation). Elsewhere coupling is even more awkward; dancers suddenly become knock-kneed puppets (above left), or fall into fetal positions, or to the ground.  Sometimes a partner will decide to twirl his intended mischievously, like a top.  The ludicrous is never far from the lovely in Kylián's sometimes-sardonic vision.

And always the stage itself shape-shifts with the dance, because the idea of self-presentation is always in play. Dancers drag the curtains after them, or push them aside, to change the shape and size of their playing space; at one point they're even holding up the curtain themselves. In the piece's most iconic moment, black drapes swoop down, like a camera lens focusing on a key detail, to frame Rie Ichikawa and Kathleen Breen Combes as they kneel before each other like two tentative wraiths, gingerly reaching out, but never quite touching. Finally they shed their gowns, too, abandoning one form of beauty for another; they come completely clean, not so much as naked bodies as naked souls.

This is a strangely tender moment - a transcendent one, actually, and Ichikawa and Combes play it perfectly; but Bella Figura isn't quite over yet, and it closes with an odd sort of fire dance that I admit left me scratching my head. But then part of what makes a Kylián dance fascinating is that he leaves some questions open, and other statements ambiguous; like Black and White, Bella Figura is made for repeat viewings (and luckily I'll get a chance to ponder it again - the Ballet will bring it back next year). At any rate, against a background of flames, most of the dancers return, in a final set of variations that are dotted with curious details. One man puts his hand over a woman's mouth to silence her (it wouldn't be pretty to complain about things, now would it). But another simply reaches out to his partner and gently eases her tense shoulder down in a moment that's as resonant as anything in the piece. There's nothing to be done about the beauty part, Bella Figura whispers in the end; so you might as well relax.

The bells are ringing . . .

. . . once again, thanks to the MIT Kendall Band Preservation Society.

So our Muslim, terrorist, Kenyan president has done what George W. Bush could never do

It's a great day for our nation, of course, and I know one should never pause for snark in a time of celebration. BUT . . . I do have to wonder - what will the birthers do now? Wouldn't you just love to be a fly on the wall in the Palin homestead, or the Trump boardroom, or the man-sized safe Dick Cheney hangs out in, right about now?