Orfeo ed Euridice at Boston Baroque is a must-see

I don't have time this morning to pound out a full review, but early music fans will not want to miss Boston Baroque's current production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice (in its original Italian version). In the lead role, Owen Willetts proves a phenomenon, the only countertenor I've yet heard with the kind of clarion force that legend has accorded the castrati.  I've never been one of those who obsessed over the supposedly trumpet-like power of that lost (and horrifying) vocal tradition, but if you are, then believe me, Willetts is about as close to the real thing as you're likely to hear in the modern age. And what's more, the entire production is memorable, with direction by David Gately and choreography by Gianni Di Marco that are among the best I've seen at Boston Baroque.  Tonight only at Jordan Hall.

Hails and farewells from the Emerson String Quartet

The Emerson String Quartet

Last Friday Celebrity Series welcomed the Emerson String Quartet (above) in what felt a bit like a farewell concert - although it was really only a farewell to cellist David Finckel, who will be leaving the ensemble next year (he will be replaced by Paul Watkins).  So it was no surprise the program brimmed with other farewells - it featured Haydn's farewell to the string quartet (Op. 77, No. 2), as well as what unexpectedly turned out to be Beethoven's farewell to everything, the String Quartet in F Major, Op. 135, No. 16.  The concert was balanced by one big "hello" - the rolling premiere of Thomas Adès' The Four Quarters, which was commissioned for the Emersons by the Carnegie Hall Corporation.

Needless to say, the performance gave poignant, persistent evidence of why people are already feeling nostalgic toward this quartet's current line-up (which has endured for more than three decades).  The maturity, the insight, the passionate detail, the confident, unspoken sense of ensemble - it was all there, again, just as it always is with the Emersons.  The opening Haydn was particularly delightful - it played as a rich, perhaps slightly rueful emotional statement with a buoyant chuckle rippling just beneath its surface.  Propelled by Eugene Drucker on first violin, the opening Allegro moderato was exquisitely Mozartean (scholars claim it quotes the "catalogue aria" from Don Giovanni), while the following Menuetto proved deliciously playful - and the indispensable Finckel's cello all but bounced through the final Vivace assai.  To be honest, I felt this was the quartet's finest playing of the night (but then this is one of my favorite quartets, too).

Next came the Adès, which perhaps inevitably sounded a bit thin when sandwiched between late Haydn and Beethoven.  I'm generally a big fan of this challenging composer, but I have to admit - I think this may be one of his minor works; it  comes with an overt metaphoric program, but not much of a developing intellectual one.  Still, time will tell, and the audience certainly seemed to warm up to it (but then it gets better as it goes along, too).

As usual for Adès, Four Quarters is built on extremes of tone and dynamic, and depends on a certain alienated formal precision.  It's also a clear meditation, like La Mer and other works, on specific times of day; the first movement, Nightfalls, sets strange booms of sound against a kind of low, dreaming bass; something (perhaps human consciousness) is collapsing here into a sleepy drone.  In contrast, the following Morning Dew (excerpt below) is a spiky wake-up call of pizzicato effects, with plucked strings conjuring dozens of droplets precipitating out of the atmosphere.  This isn't too far from Brian-Eno-level electronica, however, where the concept does most of the heavy lifting; and the churning Days likewise plays like a self-conscious, but rather obvious, chunk of pop.  Adès only really gets down to work in the finale, The Twenty-Fifth Hour, which both hints at some mystical limit beyond the scope of our daily lives, and actually gets somewhere musically, too, thanks to a gracefully building contrapuntal development.



After Adès it was on to Beethoven, and what the master didn't realize at the time would be his last completed piece, Op. 135, No. 16. The work is famous for the inscription on its final movement, “Muss es sein? Es muss sein” (“Must it be? It must be”), which is perhaps not so much a reflection of the great composer's awareness of his impending mortality (he had a number of projects cooking at the time of his death, including a 10th symphony) as some eerily prescient, half-comical accidental portent.  The Emersons seemed to take the piece as mostly another of the composer's meditations on the pleasures and limits of classicism; with Philip Setzer on lead violin,  the Allegretto and Vivace were elegant, but not deep - depth came later, in the third movement, which touched here and there on the spiritual transcendence that illuminates the other late quartets; but this was shaken off again in a vigorous final Allegro.

After tumultous applause, the Emersons returned for a single encore, the first movement of Ives' First Quartet, generally known as the "Salvation Army" quartet.  This proved everything it should be: affectionately parodic but eventually affirming, and tossed off with the Emersons' usual low-key mastery.  It was hard to bid them (and especially cellist Finckel) farewell after that, I admit - but perhaps we're only on the verge of an exciting "hello," and another dazzling career phase, for this stellar ensemble.

A grand, if not impossible, dream

Everybody dance now - the Ideal Woman on the hoof in Don Quixote.  Photos by Gene Schiavone.

Okay, let's get the truth-in-advertising part out of the way: Rudolf Nureyev's Don Quixote, with which the Boston Ballet has had a long relationship - and which, in a spectacular new production, runs through the weekend at the Opera House - has almost nothing to do with that novel you may have heard of by that Spanish dude named Cervantes.  In fact, much like the dreaded Man of La Mancha, it's practically an unintentional travesty of its source.  The immortal Quixote gets his share of hard knocks here, it's true, but somehow Cervantes' satire of chivalric delusion never gains any traction, and the daft Don remains a noble dreamer to the end.

Instead, Nureyev focuses on a young couple in love (whom I don't remember from the book at all) who, in pursuit of their nuptials, sometimes intersect with the delusional Quixote - but more often with hordes of townspeople, gypsies, and toreadors - who of course all want to cut a rug.  The whole piece, like much of imperial Russian ballet, is at its heart a pageant, with all manner of divertissements broken up by the occasional pas de deux ( as well as some rather lame "rollicking" comedy and a few utterly random episodes from the actual novel).


So there's not much to think about in this production (and the music, by Minkus, is pretty much free of ideas, too) - but frankly a whole lot to gawk and marvel at.  For the Ballet is now packed with superb dancers, and in the lead roles of "Kitri" and "Basilio" on opening night we got two of the company's best, Jeffrey Cirio and Misa Kuranaga (at top), who feel a bit like a matched set in their light, twinkling precision.  Cirio in particular had his adorability set on "stun," but you couldn't deny he aced Nureyev's tricky footwork with a seemingly unstoppable flow of sheer nimbleness.  His lifts were less dazzling than his leaps, however - he still needs a bit more upper-body power; but is he even fully grown yet? ( I'm not sure.)  Kuranaga was just as charming, if slightly more restrained, and she, too, was close to technical perfection, even as the ballet turned into a punishing obstacle course for her in its last act, with fouettés on top of fouettés, and a series of unsupported freezes en pointe.

Meanwhile Carlos Molina (at left) brought a convincing commitment to the Don's dazed, stricken stare, and even some poignance to his ravishment by various visions of feminine grace (Dusty Button, as the "Queen of the Dryads," above, was perhaps the most convincing of these).  But alas, as Sancho Panza Robert Kretz was all pratfalls and little loyal steadfastness (and for some reason he was a monk rather than a peasant), and we just didn't get enough of Paulo Arrais, who still made a skillfully funny sketch of Gamache, Basilio's competition for Kitri's hand.  There were other brilliant turns, many from the women - Kathleen Breen Combes tossed off her "street dancer" with brio, and Adiarys Almeida, Rachel Cossar, and Olga Malinovskaya all had striking moments.

There are a few intriguing eccentricities to Nureyev's choreography - he uses a male corps more often than you'd expect, and tends to arrange his background dancers in flat, moving friezes.  But basically he goes for the money solo every time (although there is a subtler pas de deux at the top of the second act in which Kuranaga and Cirio conveyed a sense of private, rather than public, romance).  Indeed, watching Don Quixote, you feel as if you're getting a glimpse into a grand, if somewhat empty, lost tradition - which I suppose has its own meta-resonance with Cervantes!  And is grandeur for its own sake really such a bad thing, anyhow?  (We may miss it when it's gone.) I should also note that the splendid sets were by Nicholas Georgiadis, and the atmospheric (somehow antique) lighting, drawn from a palette of burnt siena and umber, was by John Cuff.  Through Sunday.

There is nothing quite like stupid destruction in slow motion

I know.

It gets soooo tiring being as civilized as we are here at the Hub Review.

Well, perhaps these "highlights" from the Danish answer to Jackass, Dumt & Farligt (that's "dumb and dangerous," btw) will take the edge off.

It's a little odd how every single one seems to be a kind of ejaculation.

Or is that so odd?  Anyhow, enjoy.

The Ghost-Writer at Merrimack Rep

Dan Kremer and Rebecca Harris in The Ghost-Writer.

We've all heard of the "ghost in the machine," that famous tag for one of philosophy's central conundrums, the mind-body problem.

But now, in The Ghost-Writer (at the Merrimack Rep through May 13), playwright Michael Hollinger offers us the ghost in the type-writing machine: in this elegant three-hander, Hollinger conjures a late author who (perhaps) can still dictate from the great beyond, to the devoted secretary who has survived him, but has yet to complete his final novel - although she's working on it.  Even if the jealous widow of her beloved is utterly determined that their illicit - spiritual collaboration, shall we say? - will never see the light of day.

This is, of course, the kind of basically-silly, but irresistibly-romantic conceit that can open out onstage into something deliciously evocative - in the right hands.  And it's in almost the right hands at Merrimack.  Director Charles Towers is clearly hoping to spark something like the spooky fire that made last season's thriller Tryst such a hit - and with the help of brilliant lighting designer Dan Kotlowitz, he does conjure a dozen different dramatic moods, each worthy of holding a séance by.  Indeed, it's hard not to believe in ghosts - the hair all but stands up on the nape of your neck - when you're confronted by any of the louring dusks with which Kotlowitz has washed the nearly-bare Merrimack stage.  (In fact I'd say next year's IRNE lighting design award already has a front-runner.)

Photos: Meghan Moore

And odd as it may sound, the script is almost as good as the lighting; Hollinger has crafted a compellingly cool draught of a play that should go down in one delicious pour.  But I'm afraid it has a hidden flaw - or perhaps booby trap might be the better word.  The playwright has sculpted a series of meticulous exchanges over grammar and punctuation which essentially serve as the mating song of his two utterly repressed lovebirds.  (Thus even that hyphen in the author's title is, I think, important.)

The trouble is that, at least for a time, director Charles Towers, and actors Dan Kremer and Rebecca Harris, have taken Hollinger's precisely clipped words a little too much at their word, attending obsessively to the elocution of the text, while only nodding in the general direction of the emotions rising beneath it. Indeed, we only realize in retrospect that love has bloomed, and that Harris is now essentially Kremer's muse - or that at least she imagines she is.

Still, once love is indeed in the spectral air, there are several delicious shivers to be had in the play's final scenes - thanks largely to the perfectly pitched performance of Maureen Garrett as that not-so-grieving widow, who was always pleased to imagine that she was her famous husband's muse.  And Hollinger does manage to tease a few amusingly ambiguous vibrations from the plight of his lonely amanuensis, her pale fingers poised over her dark keyboard as if it were a Ouija board, while one ear remains cocked to the spiritual plane.  Is she indeed (as she believes) taking dictation from the dead?  Or is she only indulging a delusion designed to stave off the painful reality of her passion's passing?  Or - or - has her long collaboration with her virtual lover endowed her own imagination with something like his voice?

Even if these mild mind games fail to intrigue you - and even if you find Hollinger's meditations on artistic collaboration (he also wrote Opus, the popular tale of a struggling string quartet) fall flat - it's still hard not to be moved by the spooky stylishness of this production.  Leaving it, you may discover a certain chill has filled your heart as you gaze at the setting sun . . . and is that just the wind in the chimney, or the echo of a howl from the great beyond?  Is that only the scratch of a tree-branch at your windowpane?  Or is it a dead voice whispering its lonely secrets in your ear . . ?

Dancing with the Sirens of Titan

Outer Space from Sander van den Berg on Vimeo.

Above is "Outer Space," Sander van den Berg's almost-abstract tone poem to the rings and moons of Saturn (with an occasional glimpse of Jupiter), stitched together from image sequences taken by NASA's Voyager and Cassini missions. Accompaniment: The Cinematic Orchestra - "That Home."  Enjoy.

Meeting Mrs. Donovan at the Huntington

Shalita Grant and Francesca Choy-Kee in The Luck of the Irish. Photos: T. Charles Erickson.

Over a year ago, I wished in a widely noted post that Boston theatres, rather than relying on Athol Fugard or some other proxy when attempting to engage with race, would instead produce plays that treated our own city's vexed racial history.

Well, playwright Kirsten Greenidge was already working on a play along those very lines, and thus we now have the Huntington premiere of The Luck of the Irish (at the BCA through May 6).  And I have to say - Kirsten and I had a great idea (although I think she thought of it first)!  For The Luck of the Irish turns out to be not only a rich and satisfying drama on its own terms, but also, perhaps, a small inch forward in the limited racial dialogue we will allow ourselves on the sadly polarized millennial stage.

Perhaps this is because The Luck of the Irish plays like an eloquent riposte to the cynical Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris's bitter, whiter-than-white prequel/sequel to A Raisin in the Sun, in which the races were portrayed as locked in an endless cycle of mutual contempt.  In contrast, Greenidge's script, though it too echoes Raisin and its concerns, is something quite different: a testament drawn from lived experience rather than from some playwriting echo chamber, The Luck of the Irish treats racism almost matter-of-factly - and perhaps more strikingly, it is calm and clear-eyed about the way class intersects with race.  Indeed, by her dénouement, Greenidge has even offered something like an olive branch of sympathy across the color bar.

Pay particular attention to that "lived experience" part, btw - a rarity, it seems, in millennial playwriting. Greenidge drew her inspiration from her own family's history: back in the 50's, her grandparents - here "the Taylors" - slipped into the all-white environs of Arlington (here "Bellington") by way of a "ghost buyer," who (for a fee) would purchase a property for an "undesirable" buyer before transferring the deed to the true purchaser's name in secret.  In Greenidge's script, however, the actual transfer of that deed remains an open question till the final scene, as her fictive ghost buyers, the Donovans (particularly the missus) - return to haunt the Taylors' heirs (granddaughters Nessa and Hannah) nearly fifty years after the purchase of their home, claiming that the property in question "really" belongs to them.

Now we've all known Mrs. Donovan.  She's a classic Boston type - the hard-bitten, hatchet-faced Irish dowager, the (often literally) battered madonna of a tribe that almost cherishes the memory of its own oppression, while clinging to the bottom rung of the middle class (or the top rung of the lower class), obsessed with the defense of hard-won turf while blighted by a toxic mix of ignorance, corruption, and Catholicism.

And needless to say, the Mrs. Donovans of the world were one of the last bastions of open racism in Boston.  Not the cloaked, genteel racism of Arlington and Newton, but the bare-knuckled race-hate of Southie and Charlestown - that at the very least (they were proud to growl, if you dared to ask) was unapologetic and authentic.

Yes, Mrs. Donovan has loomed behind Boston culture for so long that it's slightly strange she has never received any serious dramatic treatment.  Then again, perhaps it's not so strange; the actual politics of Boston remain largely terra incognita on our city's stages.  Even The Luck of the Irish offers us only a carefully controlled glimpse in the (rear-view) mirror, for this is a city locked in a peculiar mode of self-denial regarding its own culture and mores.

Richard McElvain and Nancy E. Carroll.

Indeed, I remember how that culture shocked me when I first arrived, now a little over thirty years ago; I never expected how baldly Boston's liberal veneer would be contradicted by its obvious policy of apartheid.  I was coming from the South, so I was used to a system of open, but declining, racism - which my family had always opposed, btw.  We were hardly heroes, much less martyrs, but we nevertheless received a fair amount of intimidation for our various stands on civil rights - slashed tires, rocks thrown at our house, anonymous small threats and aggressions meant to rattle you and get you to back down, that kind of thing.  I knew plenty of people who went through more; in fact my brother-in-law's father once spent a night, Atticus-Finch-like, on the porch of a threatened black family with a loaded shotgun in his lap - just in case there were any unfriendly visitors.

Yet oddly, when integration came to Houston, my home town, it came with less strife than anyone expected - partly because the races had always actually mixed, I suppose. And I went to an inner-city high school and had plenty of friends "of color," as we say now, and at eighteen naively imagined that a process had begun that would eventually lead to some more equitable social order.

Boston, of course, put an end to those illusions.  The city was obviously a war zone under an uneasy cease fire, with various avenues operating as virtual Maginot Lines, and liberal hypocrisy hovering over the landscape like so much acrid smoke.  The city wasn't really a city, anyhow; it was a pile of of ghettos masquerading as a metropolis, with Roxbury at the bottom of the heap, far beneath the city's Anglican and academic overlords, who were elegantly detached from the scruff and scuffle of the street.  The Irish in particular were huddled in neighborhoods they regarded as Masada-like redoubts, where they nursed memories of their persecution as well as resentments of the Episcopal ruling class, which after the World War had begun to disavow its long-standing gentleman's agreements regarding African-Americans and Jews - thus denying the working class their few irrefutable claims to respect: Christianity, and whiteness.

It would be a lot to expect a single play to encompass all this blight and hypocrisy, I know.  But The Luck of the Irish is at least a start - indeed, it's so quietly good that you keep hoping Kirsten Greenidge can squeeze more of the story in than would be humanly possible.  She does, I think, get a certain kind of Mrs. Donovan just right - the kind that was not actually virulently racist, but was nevertheless trapped in a racist, underachieving milieu, and knew that she was falling ever further behind even as better-educated black folks got ahead under the new dispensation.  And who, needless to say, forever clung to the vengeful dream of clawing her own back, one way or another.  Greenidge knows this type through and through, and gazes at her with an understanding that verges on sympathy.  And she captures her best character in a dozen small but telling details, as when Mrs. Donovan jealously imagines that the black Mrs. Taylor has a set of genuine Waterford crystal, an emblem of Irish status (it's actually fake).

Other aspects of Irish are if anything even more intriguing, though perhaps less fully realized.  We do wonder, for instance - why has Mrs. Taylor invested in that set of fake Waterford?  And what does it mean for an African-American family to tear itself up from its own neighborhood and transplant itself to the hostile turf of a different race (particularly given that "black flight" is seen by some as a persistent socio-economic problem?).

Playwright Greenidge is clearly aware of these quandaries, but only seems able to circle them, eloquently, without ever quite bringing them to a dramatic climax.  Her second generation of "Bellington" Taylors are haunted by a sense of dislocation, and a persistent anxiety that despite the passage of time, they're still being "profiled" by their neighbors.  Granddaughter Hannah in particular is worried that her rambunctious son is not only being stereotyped but also being goaded into a stereotype - he's both perceived as violent by his teachers, and yet is also egged on by his white chums to be the athlete, or the comedian - stereotypical "black" roles - rather than just the good student.  She longs for him to forge his own identity - but what is that identity? We sometimes feel the Taylors are relying on their house to provide that which they themselves are unsure of.

Reaching across the color bar - Nikkole Salter and McCaleb Burnett in The Luck of the Irish.

Although perhaps Melia Bensussen's solid, but slightly uneven, production is somewhat at fault here.  I consistently felt that Greenidge was willing to explore more complex psychological territory than Bensussen was.  The playwright's portrait of her grandmother, for instance, includes a persistent shop-lifting habit (which ends up providing her grand-daughters a kind of ironic legacy).  This idea - that Ms. Taylor perhaps knew somewhere that she had "gotten away" with something, that she even half-understood Mrs. Donovan's point of view - is quite intriguing, but right now there's little of this complexity in the lovely Nikkole Salter's portrayal, who gives us much the same mix of brains, beauty, and poise she offered last season in Stick Fly, but without the subtly unstable sense of alienation that I think Greenidge is hinting at.  You can feel something like the same diffidence in the reliable Marianna Bassham's turn as Mrs. Donovan; she seems nervous about nailing a character whose political significance is so intensely fraught.

But elsewhere there is very strong work indeed from Francesca Choy-Kee, Curtis McClarin, McCaleb Burnett, Richard McElvain and especially Shalita Grant - and Greenidge's calmly insightful voice seems to somehow sustain her action despite a slow start and a few static dramatic eddies (or conceptual gambits, such as people of different eras inhabiting the playing space at the same time, that don't quite come off).  In my analysis of Clybourne Park, I wondered whether the "race play" wasn't played out - and I still feel that when it comes to polemic, the "race play" is played out.   But Kirsten Greenidge proves that plays from life itself are never played out - and that perhaps in that context, our ongoing drama of race relations has only just begun to be written.