Okay, we used to think J. Holtham was evil, but now we feel bad because we realize he's just dumb

J. Holtham, just to prove he's not really dedicated to smearing people's reputations and stifling discussion the way everyone thinks he is, has now gone and made himself look stupid as well as mean-spirited.  (That wag!!) In a  post today over at the Parabasis, he posits that  . . . well, he seems to be saying that debating whether various cultures are more or less attracted to traditional theatre is like denying marriage rights to gay people.

I'm not kidding, he actually says that.  I'm not sure that comparison even counts as "apples and oranges," frankly.  It's more like apples and . . . what?  Root vegetables?  Flying sheep?

Okay, so when attempting a parallel, Holtham wound up with a non sequitur.  But the funny thing is . . . a lot of gay people are NOT, in fact, attracted to traditional marriage!  So . . . not only is his "devil's-advocate" comparison utterly flawed - it also would seem to lead to the contradiction of the conclusion he imagines he's supporting in the case of theatre.

Ta-dah!

Yeah, right. Who knew the mean girls were so dumb?  The man is a dunce, pure and simple.

Oh I'm sorry - was that rude?  But I mean, it's not like I called him a racist . . .

How do the Boston boys stay so civil? And why are the Parabasis boys so evil?

The recent, nasty brouhaha over at Tom Loughlin's "A Poor Player" reminded me again of one of the ironies of the blogosphere - that it's often riven by immature battle-royales between horrid little high-school-style cliques.  The usual reprobates were behind this particular imbroglio, I think - none other than Isaac Butler and J. Holtham of the blog "Parabasis," the "mean girls" of the theatrical blogosphere, who have banded together against me in the past, and who seem to think that somehow they run the Internet cafeteria; they're always denouncing people and insisting that so-and-so can't sit at their table, etc. (As if anyone wanted to sit at their table - I know they're both over-privileged types with connections, so a lot of people make nice, but seriously, there's a limit.)

Holtham, it seems, has finally accepted the fact that he is not a talented playwright; Butler keeps resisting the same verdict on his directing ability; meanwhile, both have slowly become cartoons of the kind of politically-correct mandarin so widely scorned by stand-ups and late-night TV.  Which, you know, would be okay if they weren't so bureaucratically-minded, mean-spirited, and basically censorious.  Their campaign against poor Tom Loughlin - whom I've read off and on for years, and who believe me, is no racist - to my mind only makes them look desperate.  And perhaps they should be desperate; I mean, what have they got left but race and racism?

Meanwhile, of course, the Boston bloggers - me, Art, and Ian - seem somehow to always get along, even though I'm sure we disagree quite strongly on various political issues.  Indeed, we make jokes at each other's expense and in general enjoy each other's company.  I don't know if this is because we actually bump into each other, and so know each other as human beings, or not (I certainly doubt that compromises our camaraderie).  I imagine the fact that we all are clever enough to read in each other's writing our varied, but mutual, intelligence and good nature, also helps us maintain our relative harmony.

Which leads me to the deeper problem with Parabasis - I simply can tell that those two writers are not generous of nature or spirit; their mutual flattery is so unctuous and all-encompassing as to be unconscious, and their political (and class) conformity is so explicit it's suffocating.  The latest evidence of this is their treatment of Loughlin - it is impossible to have been reading this writer for the past few years and imagine that he is a racist.  Do you hear me? IMPOSSIBLE.  So to pretend that he is, frankly, is obviously the coldest kind of self-aggrandizing, ideological calculation - which is, of course, typical of Parabasis.

I'll go a little further - I can't think of the last time I met a racist who was devoted to the theatre.  Seriously.  Do I know any racists in the theatre?  Okay, maybe there are some covert ones, maybe - but why would they stick around?  I mean, would Hitler take a job in a kibbutz?  Get real, guys.  When the Parabasis Boys start circling in their vulture-like way, and begin insinuating such things about somebody who has devoted his or her life to this declining, but delightful, and eternally progressive, art form - think twice.  And then think three times.  Because trust me, you are most likely being played by two of the most obnoxious, and obvious, operators on the Internet.

Boston Baroque rings in the New Year

Photo by Kayan Szymczak for the Boston Globe.

I'm terribly late with this review, and I feel especially guilty because the concert in question was delightful, as Boston Baroque's annual double-gala on New Year's (both Day and Eve) always is. But then the intense crush in the lobby at Sanders Theatre last Monday was proof positive these folks don't need good reviews to get out the word about this tradition anymore, everyone knows it's the place to be for classical music fans on January 1.

Don't imagine, however, that just because a crowd is largely blue-haired that things can't get rough; honestly, I can remember crowds at the Rat back in the day that were more polite than the one that elbowed its way into Sanders Theatre that afternoon. Then again, folks knew the concert was being broadcast live on WCRB, so it had to begin on a dime (if you were listening, however, don't think that what you heard had the tenor of a tea party - well, maybe it did if you're thinking of the NEW tea party!).

At any rate, the WCRB recording didn't get much in the way of things musically, even if it did slightly muddle the usual intimate atmosphere that Boston Baroque conjures with its audience (at its New Year concerts in particular).  Emcee Cathy Fuller made a gently fulsome, if slightly blank, hostess, and Pearlman came off as slightly diffident in his radio patter, perhaps - but then he is a bit diffident, isn't he; indeed, as I listened to him I suddenly felt a strange sense of correspondence between his vocal presentation and the way he thinks musically.  Not a direct correspondence, actually - rather an inverted one; I wondered if Pearlman's swift, graceful tempi were actually the final goal of a careful consideration that can manifest itself in his speech as hesitancy.  But be that as it may, the broadcast in general felt like a sweet moment of triumph for this local light, who certainly deserves accolades for his dedication to Boston Baroque (and before that Banchetto Musicale, yes I'm that old) over the past decades.

After the introductions, the concert got off to a clean, rousing start with a gleaming rendition of a Corelli Concerto Grosso (Op. 6, No. 10), which might have almost stood as typification of Boston Baroque style: dancing, even sparkling, with some depth but not too much.  The ensemble here, and throughout the concert, was focused and responsive, even luminous; the players knew they were on the spot before perhaps their largest audience ever, and they gave it their best.

These New Year's Day concerts are always distinguished by little eccentricities, musical "features," and in-jokes, and this time around the crowd got a taste of two now-obscure instruments, the triple harp and sopranino recorder.  A triple harp deploys three sets of strings to cover the notes that in modern harps are handled by pedal-work - thus performing on it is a special technical challenge; but beyond that, like many period works, it has its own hauntingly delicate timbre: it seems to be literally speaking to us from several centuries ago.  Pearlman chose to showcase it with a great piece, Handel's Harp Concerto in B-flat (which more people know from its translation to the pipe organ).  Harpist Barbara Poeschl-Edrich played with clarity (no small feat!), and an exquisite sense of musical architecture, though perhaps a bit dryly, I thought (but then a truly singing line is the trick with this instrument).

Next came an even greater musical monument - Bach's famous Double Violin Concerto.  Here, perhaps, was where one could most argue with the brisk Boston Baroque manner - not because of its speed, I suppose (were violinists Christina Day Martinson and Julie Leven really that much faster than other performers I've heard?  I'm not sure) but rather for the fact that a certain expressiveness or lyricism seemed to be lost in the players' attack.  Again, you can argue about the level of lyricism appropriate to Bach - I just left wanting more, especially from the gorgeous Largo, and I know these ladies can supply it.

The program wrapped with two less rich, but still dazzling, offerings from Vivaldi.  The first, his Concerto in A minor for Sopranino Recorder, proved bewitching, and featured a diving, dazzling turn from virtuoso Aldo Abrau (who I swear must have an extra lung) on what Pearlman aptly called "the hummingbird of recorders."  Next came crowd favorite Mary Wilson, who wrapped her glowing soprano (if not her best diction) around Vivaldi's curious motet "Nulla in mundo pax sincera" ("In the world there is no genuine peace,") which disconcertingly delivers a melancholy lyric in an uplifting musical setting, and crowns it with truly sublime "Alleluia!"

There's always a little extra surprise at the end of these concerts, and this time it turned out to be a period-instrument rendering of "Glitter and Be Gay," from Bernstein's Candide, with Wilson beaming center stage as Cunegonde.  Maybe I'm just drunk on Candide these days, but I thought the instrumentation sounded fabulous (and Pearlman conducted with spirit), which made me think that an entirely-period-instrument version of the whole show could be quite intriguing (how about it, Mary Zimmerman?).  And Wilson had a fine time with the schizophrenic laughter-and-tears, sympathy-now-satire mode of the lyrics, and of course her voice has a richness you rarely hear on the musical-theatre stage.  It was a final triumphant touch to what was a truly gay and glittering soirée.

Mike Daisey, "When the Clock Strikes"

"A piece of shit, wonderfully executed."

You can't help but admire Mike Daisey when you're watching him - even when, as was the case this New Year's Eve in Boston, he has nothing coherent to say, and has tied up his performance in a narrative knot (and knows it).

Or should I say that's especially when you can't help but admire him?  For it's precisely at such times (i.e., when he's spinning his wheels) that Daisey's technique is at its most obvious, and also its most impeccable: when his voice is soaring into a carefully punctuated bellow, then swooping into a whisper for no apparent reason - that's when you ooh and aah internally over his physical control. When the arms are at one moment swinging like mallets, then the next, slipping through the air as sinuously as an odalisque's - it's only then that you realize this sumo-sized guy, whose eyes glitter with madness, and who is forever beading out in sweat because he's so aquiver with indignation, is actually enacting a kind of self-conscious ballet for your benefit; with utter focus and relentless discipline, he is sculpting an evanescent (indeed invisible) dramatic sculpture - a virtual persona - for your contemplation and edification.

And the fact that whatever he's doing, it counts as a still life, is intrinsic to the weird pull of his theatrical presence.  Daisey's affect is all outrage unleashed, and yet he's absolutely and completely tethered, rooted to the spot behind the bland table that serves as pedestal for his notes.  And around him there is no set, no context, nothing - indeed, at the Huntington here in Boston, the fact that the beginnings of the set for God of Carnage were in place behind him led to a ten-minute diatribe about that particular play ("A piece of SHIT, but wonderfully executed!").  Daisey was clearly unsettled by the presence of a theatrical frame - perhaps because he's aware that his caged rage operates best in a vacuum; it can't, and shouldn't, get any dramatic traction; the "fourth wall" must be sealed around him like shrink wrap, so that he floats before us like a bitter genie pickled in his own rhetorical bottle.

This is what makes so many folks giggle at his expectorations; Daisey's harangues, though precisely targeted, and delivered with Old-Testament-level authority, are nevertheless so clearly helpless that their intensity tickles us, the same way that the doomed monomania of a cartoon character does.  Only beneath this superficial response, I think there lurks a somewhat deeper resonance: the impotence of Daisey's anger maps to a new sense of social incapacitation in the zeitgeist.  For there's no shared culture anymore to channel the fury of a funny scold like him; Daisey's wicked riffs can't land, can't have any effect on their targets.  Like the guy left hanging by tech support, and the smartphone user who can't access an app, Daisey is dangling, cut off by the grid from personal efficacy.  And politically, things may be even worse;  he can scream shame on any number of social and cultural miscreants all he wants, but shame no longer exists.  Hence the essential stasis of his show.  And the sense that within our lubricated social shells, we're much like him.

I admit that all this came to mind, however, because the text of his Boston show, "When the Clock Strikes" - a loose meditation on the general lousiness of New Year's Eve - was intermittently amusing, but so meandering as to have been almost maddening (if I'd been paying close attention to it, that is).  It was, I suppose, a tour of sorts of his psyche, as Daisey tilted at his usual windmills - capitalism is sucking/has sucked your soul, but you are a hopeless hypocrite anyway (just like me!),  and then this other WEIRD thing happened, did I tell you about my wife and the Nazi - oh maybe not, but you're a puritan anyway (or are you a marauding drunk?), which is funny because right now I am basically jerking off into your mouth.  Har-de-har. I think he repeated that last bon mot twice - which really made me think the show should have been titled "A Taste of Mike Daisey."

There were certainly some punchy moments in this psychological mystery tour, but a mood of showbizzy hypocrisy pervaded it, too - Daisey's such a knowing observer of snobbery that the precision of his satire betrays an unspoken allegiance to its targets; after punching down Yasmina Reza, for instance, he sighed that "all pop culture and literature" is now about a handful of neighborhoods in Brooklyn.  Somehow I missed that - but then I'm an alcoholic puritan, right?  (At least I don't live in Connecticut, though!)

Oh, well, as I said, it was the performance that made the show - Daisey admitted as much himself, quipping that, like Yasmina Reza, he might well be presenting "a piece of shit, but wonderfully executed."  (Just as he likewise shouted that he was a hypocrite - you often sense in Daisey the nervous desire to pre-empt any and all critique.)  At any rate, if you'd like to check the performance out for yourself, you can - Daisey has posted the audio on his website.  I think even from an MP3 you can appreciate the hypnotic, almost-musical cadence of his delivery - and perceive that with better material, he could put on quite a show.  I've been hoping for some time that a local presenter (like ArtsEmerson, hint hint) might bring his monologue on Steve Jobs to Boston - if any town needs to see that, it's this one; and "When the Clock Strikes," if it did nothing else, made me hunger for that opportunity all the more.

Now I'm not going to say I told you so . . . but it seems Sarah Ruhl has come home to roost . . .

I admit I'm mightily amused by the revulsion so many critics have suddenly evinced at the House that Ruhl Built (of string, no less). Whimsy? Quirk? A structureless narrative free-for-all? Suddenly everyone's realizing that this amounts to one big artistic dead end. The poster boy for the new sentiment seems to be the Village Voice's Michael Feingold, who in a recent, much-discussed pan of Molly Smith Metzler's Close Up Space lamented thusly:

I'm sad, but not from Seasonal Affective Disorder. The fall season ended with Manhattan Theatre Club's opening Molly Smith Metzler's Close Up Space, a work neatly encapsulating everything new plays do that has been making me sad for months. I bear Metzler no ill will. As with too many other recent plays, hers has some distinct virtues, but its faults outnumber them so heavily as to make theatergoing burdensome: Instead of engaging creatively with the event onstage, you expend all your energy looking for little things within it to like in compensation for its generally dismaying nature.

I can't blame Metzler for repeating the pattern. Like all playwrights, she wants to get produced. Naturally, she has turned out the sort of play our would-be serious theaters increasingly tend to produce. They, too, strive to imitate previous successes; everybody's following the Ruhls. The result, in Close Up Space, is a viscous mixture of sitcom and after-school special. It opens with patent absurdity, in an ostensibly naturalistic context, and ends in a glop of would-be tragic ironies. Reality, heightened or everyday, is the one thing it virtually never touches.

You know, I'm glad (of course) that people like Feingold are finally seeing the light about millennial playwriting, but . . . honestly, where have they all been the past five years? Couldn't they have seen this coming? I certainly did.  From way up here in the provinces!  [Correction!  I have been informed that Feingold, like me, has been critical of Ruhl from the start.  I have to start reading him more.  But for the rest of you New York peeps, however, this post still goes!  And you should start listening to Michael Feingold!]

Words to live by

If you're looking for New Year's resolutions, here are a few suggestions.  Woody Guthrie's, from 1942 (below) are all classics - particularly "Stay glad," "Dance better," and "Love everybody," not to mention "Beat fascism" and "Wash teeth, if any."

In retrospect

I'm still in cheerleader mode - only this time for myself.

It's going to be a slow week, so I thought to myself - what about filling up some space in the blogosphere with a self-retrospective, a "Best of the Hub Review," to go with my other annual "best of" lists?

 And you know, I'm just conceited enough that I thought this was a really great idea.

Especially since 2011 was a busy one for the Hub Review in terms of sheer polemic, which almost none of the other cultural blogs engage in.  So I've mostly narrowed my "Best Of" focus to those essays which had a particularly political edge during the past year.  I've kept it to roughly ten - well, to almost ten rubrics, as you'll see; some of my longer pieces, particularly my extensive consideration of His Girl Friday and Porgy and Bess (in the context of the racial politics of vintage theatre), were linked into something like one continuous article.  So without further ado -

The Best of 2011

I'm well-known as just about the only long-form cultural blogger in existence, and 2011 saw me at my most long-winded in a linked, four-part (and almost 8,000-word) consideration of what constitutes a valid approach to racism in classic theatrical texts - via a comparison of the ART's exploitive Porgy and Bess to Trinity Rep's honorable update of His Girl Friday.  I also pondered why, exactly, the print press is so hypocritically eager to condemn racism in some works, while ignoring it in others.  (Indeed, if you only read the print reviews, you might never have realized this cultural debate was playing itself out on-stage in New England - I think I'm the only person in the region who bothered to compare the two productions.)  The series culminated in the critique of Clybourne Park that the Guardian deemed "brilliant" (thank you, Guardian - I now have a whole cohort of steady readers from the UK):

Two contrasting tales of racism and renovation

Hot off The Front Page

Paulus, Parks, and Porgy

What we talk about when we talk about what we talk about when we talk about race

I also penned a double essay around the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and the questions it raised about America and what I christened "9/11 pop" (although in retrospect, "9/11 porn" might have been the better handle):

Which one is the real America?

Seen from a distance . . . Notes on 9/11 pop

I likewise devoted a fair amount of space on the blog to the crack-down on Occupy Boston - which I often visited this fall - which led to these widely-read pieces:

Thoughts on the phony progressive politics of the theatre

Scenes from an Occupation

So, Mumbles has lost my vote

Elsewhere, I mused on the slow death of cultural discussion on the web  -

Welcome to the blogosphere

And wrote about the practice of theatre criticism itself quite a bit, as I weathered a sustained attack from several theatres (and then launched my own against Charles Isherwood of the New York Times.) Salvos from that period include:

The case for creative destruction, etc.

More thoughts from Larry

Larry's open letter to the A.R.T.

And, of course, I can't honestly review this tumultuous year without including my own attack on those who sought my expulsion from the IRNE Awards:

The Shawn & Kati Show

Meanwhile, on the lighter side, there were my frustrated polemics against another theatre critic, Charles Isherwood:

You know, maybe Chuck does kind of suck

and

Should the gays be reviewing the blacks? or, Is there too much swish to the Ish?

Don't worry, we're near the end! Looking way back, very early in the year I penned the following plea for a "Martin Luther King" prize devoted to plays about race right here in Boston.  (Within a few weeks, intriguingly enough, the Huntington announced it would be producing just such a play, Kirsten Greenidge's The Luck of the Irish):

The Martin Luther King Prize - how about it?

And finally (fast forwarding to just a few weeks ago) one article that led to a number of positive emails and comments was my re-consideration of the Frank Capra classic, It's a Wonderful Life:

It's a wonderful life, but a lousy market economy

Whew; I think that's enough self-congratulation for now - not that there isn't even more great writing on the Hub Review. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up something like the same standard in 2012, so by all means - keep reading!