The littlest Corsaire

Four-year-old Alexei Orohovsky watched Ali's variation from Le Corsaire on Youtube, and then came up with his own version at his summer dance intensive. Enjoy! (And watch out for this kid in a few years!)

Thoughts and wild speculations on Opera Boston's demise

A lot of people have been emailing to ask, "Why the hell are you diddling around with the sh*t that Parabasis says, when you're not covering the collapse of Opera Boston?"

And I don't really have a good answer to that.  Although I have been trying to find out the truth about why the fat lady sang for that intrepid opera company, really I have.  I wasn't always kind to their productions, I admit, but I always appreciated what they were trying to do - that is, forge a niche in Boston for productions of both rarely-produced and avant operas.  And more than once they succeeded brilliantly - last fall's mounting of Béatrice et Bénédict was often enchanting, and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein was one of the best (and funniest) opera productions the Hub has seen in a decade at least.  Previous seasons had boasted strong productions of Nixon in China and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.  Boston had much to thank Opera Boston for, and its closing was a tragic loss - as well as something close to an insult to the incredibly hard-working guiding light of the company, musical director Gil Rose.

So like many of you, I was really shocked that the Board could act so precipitously - and on so seemingly thin a pretext (a debt of $500,000, hardly small change, but also hardly a death knell in the world of opera), leaving not only many employees and visiting artists, but also a whole host of subscribers, in the lurch.

And to be honest - the suddenness of the action made me a little suspicious.  We have a history of boards behaving badly around here, and from what you could piece together from press accounts, the Opera Boston Board's last-minute actions sounded a bit fishy.  The pieces of the puzzle included: a suddenly looming debt; newer Board members who were eager to put together a plan to save the organization; and a sudden agreement to shut up shop anyway by the elder members, in a meeting from which many younger members were missing.  Essentially, a contingent of the Board closed down the company summarily and unilaterally - even the Artistic Director didn't find out till after the fact.

The question of the hour is - why?

Now you don't really have to be Sherlock Holmes to begin piecing together a rather unflattering picture from those disparate data points.  I mean, to put it bluntly - why would you suddenly slam the door on a basically-viable organization - unless you wanted to slam the door on its books, too?  Was there something that one part of the Board knew that it didn't want the other part of the Board to find out?  Hmmm.  No wonder the rumor mill has been buzzing! But nobody I know will go on the record about what they know - at least not to me.

But I do know that Geoff Edgers is writing up a story about the whole affair for the Globe (which to its credit, called for an investigation into the Board's actions on its editorial page). And that's never a good sign, is it? No, it is not.  Word is it the Edgers story will drop this week.  So for once I'll be buying the Globe!  Can't wait.

The Great War and the Iraq War

As has oft been noted, pop charts the national mood much the same way an analysand's chatter inevitably betrays his or her buried fears and desires.

So I wonder - what should we make of our new love affair with World War I?

Right now on TV the big news is Downton Abbey, the best soap opera on the tube in years (I admit I'm a fan), and meanwhile, in the multiplexes, Steven Spielberg's War Horse is cantering across the big screen - even as its far-superior stage incarnation is still packing them in on Broadway.

Just a coincidence?  I'm not so sure, because I'm one of those who believe in the pop subconscious.  For the past few years, for instance, pop has been all but screaming at the top of its lungs, "WE'RE TORTURERS! AND WE LOVE IT!" even as in our political debates we either denied or elided this fact (or slowly, but defiantly, admitted it).   Indeed, perhaps partly due to all those official denials, pop torture spiraled into a whole labyrinth of fetishes and sub-specialties.  There was the psycho who literally tore people apart for their own good (Saw).  There was the serial killer who only tortured other serial killers (Dexter).   There was the torturer who re-wrote history!  (Inglorious Basterds.)  The torturers who did it for sport (Hostel).  And the torturer who saved the world in 24 hours!  Etc., etc., etc.

There was just never the American who tortured the innocent man.

(And so deserved to be tortured himself?)

But be that as it may, you can almost feel the cultural ground shifting beneath our feet a bit at the present moment.  Corpse and torture porn, and the vengefulness they fed, feel tired; you can almost hear the zeitgeist rattling its chains - and of course we've just left Iraq, which immediately began to totter.  So perhaps it's no surprise that the great waste of the Great War is suddenly on the Broadway stage, as well as screens both large and small.

But are we really admitting to ourselves, in a back-handed way, that our Middle East adventures have been just as tragic a mistake as World War I?  Well - it's possible, I suppose.  Certainly that's what Downton Abbey is hinting at right now - the start of its second season revolved around the ironies and injustices of the draft in Britain in 1916.  Indeed, sometimes screenwriter Julian Fellowes seemed to be pushing parallels to the present day a little too explicitly - just as wealthy Americans balanced the Iraq War on the backs of the lower classes, who had few other options than to enlist, so in the Great War the aristocrats ensconced in the safety of country houses schemed and pressured the local officials for military exemptions for their servants and favorites.  Actual war always throws class war into high relief, if you have your eyes open.  And as for the rest of it (overextended empires, corrupt diplomacy, collapsing economies) - doesn't it all sound too familiar?

This kind of piquant comment is refreshing to see, of course - even if it's far too little, and far too late.  And of course it's British comment, not American. Which reminded me of something else that's sad about American pop - we never allow ourselves any serious contemplation of class differences on TV (and thus perhaps we crave them in representations of the past!). A series like Downton Abbey would be unthinkable in America, even on cable - and even though a very close parallel would be possible in, say, a Manhattan co-op.  There's a doorman there, after all, and of course a janitor, and many maids and nannies and au pairs tending the privileged few who reside within its walls.  You could do an American Upstairs, Downstairs in the Hamptons, or on Beacon Hill, or in Kennebunkport or any number of other American enclaves.

And yet it never occurs to us to produce such a show.  We don't even really allow ourselves to ponder it.  Part of the reason, of course, is that in America, the class structure is complicated by race.  Another part of that reason is our insistent self-delusion that we're not a class-bound society at all (when recent social studies have shown that actually, we're more class-bound than the rest of the developed world).  It also goes without saying, of course, that anyone who is a conscious social climber in America is violating our most sacred pop trope - that one about "authenticity" - and so cannot serve as a hero or heroine. And then there's our weird modern neurosis about money in general.  In most of the great Victorian novels, money is the motor of the plot; read a little Trollope, in fact, and you get a great sense of the practical economics of his age.  But in America - and really in modern culture in general, high and low -  money is generally either demonized or ignored.  And you could certainly never figure out how an American household runs economically from reading a modern novel!  Can you think of a successful popular novel or movie in the last generation that has been driven by economic concerns, as half of Dickens and all of Trollope and much of Eliot is?  If you can, email me!

But in the meantime, I'll be watching Downton Abbey.  Yes, I know it's sentimentalized, and it's certainly a soap opera - and yet in other ways, compared to the rest of what's on TV, it's so oddly realistic.

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.