Chanticleer's polyphonic Christmas presents

The men of Chanticleer

An entire week has gone by since Chanticleer visited Celebrity Series, but I've been too distracted by shows with short runs to get around to throwing a few critical bouquets their way.

Of course critiquing Chanticleer is a bit oxymoronic - there's not much to critique; since the group's founding in San Francisco some thirty-five (!) years ago, it has slowly taken the world by storm, and now all but rules the male-chorus roost.  And for once, the mainstream take on the group has been accurate: it is an "orchestra of voices" - for Chanticleer's greatest achievement is its consistently gorgeous (and startlingly accurate) vocal polyphony.

What's polyphony?  It's a style of choral writing in which independent melodic lines weave against one another to form a ravishingly rich musical texture (polyphony reached its greatest pitch in the sacred music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which together form the core of Chanticleer's repertoire).  A polyphonic work should open as slowly and hypnotically as a flower  - and needless to say, a truly radiant bloom requires every petal be perfectly placed (a highly daunting vocal task).  And this is where Chanticleer is pretty much peerless.  The timbres of its members's voices are not only exquisitely matched to this material, but also to each other, and their intonation is stunningly secure, particularly given that in some of the works sung Friday night, just about every single member was carrying his own vocal line a cappella.  (Although it's when they swoop from soprano to bass lines and back that your jaw really drops.)

Actually, maybe there was a wobble or two in the opening plainsong (done beneath atmospheric lighting that briefly transformed Jordan Hall into the nave of a cathedral).  But once Chanticleer reached the familiar Veni, veni, Emmanuel, their singing had coalesced into a transporting, multi-foliate vocal rose. I confess I often felt leaps of emotion throughout the first half of the program, thanks to the intensity of its musical and spiritual rapture.  Certainly highlights were gorgeous renderings of Gabrieli's polychoral (that's when two mini-choruses face off) Angelus pastores ait, and Cristóbal de Morales' Pastores dicite, for which the group was arranged in a kind of Christmas star (Chanticleer's blocking is always intriguing, and sometimes - particularly when they move contrapuntally, while singing - produces startling sonic effects).

The group also excels at musical scholarship - this concert amounted to a fascinating tour of the length and  breadth of sacred vocal music, extending from perhaps 800 A.D. to the twentieth century, and covering more than one Christian church (there are a couple of them, you know).  We heard a thrilling version of Poulenc's ecstatic O magnum mysterium, for instance - and in an intriguing thematic gambit, the singers segued from Arvo Pärt's "O Adonai" from Sieben Magnificat Antiphonen to the 14th-century O Virgo splendens, effectively shifting from a masculine conception of the divine to a feminine one.

Should I bring up the group's apparent sexual orientation now?  I think I should. Of course I doubt everyone in this chorus is gay, but clearly that's their core identity.  Are you shocked?  You shouldn't be - honey, gay men have always run sacred music; the only question is whether they're in the closet or not. Being 'out,' of course, isn't perhaps an entirely unalloyed advantage - Chanticleer does sometimes beam with an amusing gay vanity that isn't quite what Christ had in mind, whatever Andrew Sullivan may think (but of course only because vanity itself isn't what Christ had in mind).

In other ways, however, questions of sexual identity do lead to intriguing juxtapositions in the group's repertoire, like the one cited above.  In brief, when Chanticleer shifts on a dime from "O Adonai" ("O, Father") to "O Virgo splendens" (basically, "O, Mother"), they are making a rather poignant statement that resonates, I think, from the Vatican to the Castro.  Not that they don't cover much of the rest of the globe (and many of its languages) in their selections.  I'd never heard any of Alexander Gretchaninoff's work from the Russian Orthodox tradition, but the throaty Svéte tihiy made me hungry for more.  There was also a lovely sampling from the English hymnal in the sweetly lilting Allelulya: A nyewe work.  And of course the Germans held their own, with gorgeous renderings of Prateorius and others; a suite of versions of In dulci jubilo (you may know it as "Good Christian Men, Rejoice") proved a swift, entertaining history lesson which concluded with a complex setting from Bach himself.

As you can tell, there were almost too many riches to catalogue in the concert's stunning first half.  Alas, after intermission the group turned to more popular carols, many of which date from after the nineteenth century, when Christmas music basically fell off a cliff (sorry, there's really nothing you can do with the likes of "Silent Night," not that Chanticleer didn't try).  Still, even here there were a few gems: "A Christmas Carol" from Charles Ives proved touchingly direct (and very un-Ives-like), and the traditional French carol, Il est né le divin enfant, made a lovely impression.  And you know, after so much transcendent musicianship, I was happy to sit through "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" and a "Star of Wonder" medley.  After all - it's Christmas.

The magic of Mummenschanz at 40

Your inner child is closer than you think - in fact, no further than the nearest Mummenschanz show, which actually is playing through this Sunday at the Schubert Theatre (thanks to Celebrity Series).

The venerable Swiss troupe is celebrating its 40th anniversary - hence the title of their current tour, "40 Years," which draws on the best of four decades' worth of imagination, observation, and inspiration.  (The show features founder Floriana Frassetto, who I believe has appeared in every Mummenschanz performance ever, and is still going strong, as well as newer hands Philipp Egli, Pitero Montandon and Raffaella Mattioli.) As always, the show is silent - even though it's not exactly mime - and as always, it's composed of a handful of mummers, concealed in a good deal of fabric and foam, or a bit of wire and paper, and a large helping of whimsical resourcefulness.  Mummenschanz was always about transplanting mummery into the bright colors and forms of post-modern pop, so it's no surprise that beneath their mod veneer, there's something timeless kicking around in their routines; the human body always haunts even their biggest, boldest costumes and conceits - and thus so does humanity itself (in both the ideal, universal sense, and the flawed, fleshy sense, too).

So Mummenschanz is cute, but never "cute" - while always playful (literally - they're fond of volleyball with the audience) they're rarely sentimental.  Bouncing, joyful, gentle, humane - yes; but also wry, sometimes sardonic - and occasionally even sweetly bawdy.  When one character whose head is a plug meets another whose face is a socket, you're pretty sure what's going to happen next (and the kids think it's a riot; in fact throughout the show, some little kid somewhere was always chuckling in a delighted, tickled-pink sort of way).  There are a few life lessons to be found in all the fun, though. Another sketch opens up into a droll little essay on vanity; and even after a passionate kiss, couples sometimes drift apart; and the sparkly little fish under the sea get eaten by bigger fish (bye-bye Nemo!).  Life's like that.

But frankly I think what's most striking about Mummenschanz at forty is their combination of faith and humility.  Even though they're often encased in orange slinkys or giant, rolling sponges, they never lose sight of what it means to be human - how that's an awkward, vulnerable, vexed, and bemusing position.  And thus how important it is to stay silly.  What's more, they still believe that economy can be as transporting on the stage as excess; all Mummenschanz needs is a strip of wire (and maybe a spotlight) to conjure a character. And you know what? They're right about that.  There are wonders here, built from nothing - schools of shining fish, and a giant, thrashing squid, and a ballerina looking for her head, and floating scraps of paper that fold into human faces, and much, much more.  Indeed, by the end of this evening, the small, quiet scale of the Mummenschanz magic begins to feel like something very large indeed - and something definitely to be treasured.

Beauty and the Beast go to the Haunted Mansion

Two Disney franchises collide at ArtsEmerson.

Rarely has a single YouTube served quite so well as a theatrical review as the one above does, of La Belle et la Bête, by Lemieux Pilon 4D Art, which plays at ArtsEmerson through Dec. 9.

I'm serious.  Just look at the effects captured above; they are why you should see this show. Are those fantastic images as convincing on the stage, you may ask?  Believe it or not, for the most part, they are.  Multimedia wizards Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon, the driving forces behind the Montreal-based Lemieux Pilon 4D Art, work wonder after wonder in La Belle et la Bête through the latest tweaks of an old technology called "Pepper's Ghost", which you may remember from Disney's "Haunted Mansion" ride (no, these aren't holograms, but rather projections on a giant, barely-discernible scrim that is stretched at an angle in front of the action).

Whether the technology is new or old doesn't matter, of course; the fact that it conjures amazing stage pictures (that actually seem to surround and interact with the actors) is all that counts.  And there are dozens of stunning moments in this show (perhaps my favorites were the ghost that creeps stealthily from a mirror, the thorns that slowly twist around la Bête's gloomy castle, the sudden rainstorm that envelops Belle, and the glorious white stallion that runs through every now and then for some reason).  To be honest, the imagery is usually bluntly literal - even the "symbols" feel literal; when the two leads lock lips, for instance, flames actually rise around them. (Get it?) So don't think you're headed to a show by Robert Lepage here; we're a long way from the layered, ambiguous metaphors of The Andersen Project.

But alas, the text, by Pierre Yves Lemieux, does have pretensions to "art" - which mostly go bump in the digital night.  In this version, there's a narrator/enchantress/author with some sort of murky, obsessive connection to la Bête, and both leads have mysterious alter egos, and - oh, never mind.  (That YouTube may be in French, but it's not much better in English.)  My advice is to simply ignore the dialogue altogether - that is if you can also tune out the over-amplified bass (I swear, it never fails, the dimmer the production, the chunkier the bass!).  The good news is that the actors (who are often playing against thin air) make a good impression despite what they have to say, particularly the lovely Bénédicte Décary as Belle, and the great Diane D'Aquila (whom old Boston theatre hands may remember from her days at the A.R.T.), who almost puts over that narrator.  (And I might have liked Vincent Leclerc's Beast a bit more if he'd mumbled less.)

In the end, however, the production mostly only whets our appetites for what Lemieux Pilon 4D Art might be able to do with other, better (or even great) plays.  Could this technology serve a production of Shakespeare's Tempest - or his Hamlet?  Could the RSC or Canada's Stratford Festival (which is closer to home, and to Montreal) season a show with a few shots of Pepper's Ghost?  Let's hope someday they do - and in the meantime, just sit back and watch (but don't listen to) La Belle et la Bête.

The great Justin Vivian Bond explains "the fiscal clip"

She calls this segment "The Drunk News." I hope it's on nightly!

Mixed Blessing

The talented Georgia Lyman finds her way through Lee Blessing's shaggy dog story.

Years ago, at the height of the cultural war that inspired Lee Blessing's Chesapeake (at the New Rep through Dec. 16), I was bemoaning said battle over lunch with a friend of mine - a nice, smart, educated lady who happened to be Jewish.

She was (as many were at the time) railing against the Christian Right, who had pulled the plug on the "NEA Four" (i.e., performance artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck and Holly Hughes), and who were attempting to pull the plug on the agency as a whole, too.

She was most outraged, however, by the controversy surrounding Andres Serrano's photograph Piss Christ (below right), which had been partly funded by the NEA, and which depicted a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist's urine.

To her, the outcry against Serrano amounted to censorship (although an ex post facto kind of "censorship," surely). Still, I wondered if she might appreciate the special political problems presented by federal funding of art that was all but designed to offend the religious sensibilities of many (if not most) voters.

Andres Serrano's Piss Christ

"So how would you feel, " I innocently ventured, in the spirit of playing devil's advocate, "about an Andres Serrano photograph of a Star of David submerged in a jar of urine?"

I remember she actually dropped her fork.  A deadly silence descended; she stared at me in horror, as if I'd grown a second head.

"I can't believe you said that," she whispered.  "A Star of David - in a jar of urine??"  She let the terrible gravity of such an act sink in for another moment.  "No real artist would ever do that!" she declared.  "Because that would be offensive!"

You see the problem.  The folks who generally bang the drum the loudest for artists like Serrano and Finley are often the blindest regarding their own biases.  Clearly it would have been extremely easy for the NEA to fund "art" that would have offended my enlightened friend; indeed, if Serrano had simply pissed on a Jewish symbol instead of a Christian one, she'd have been on the barricades, screaming for NEA blood.

And it didn't take long before outside observers (at the late, lamented Spy magazine and elsewhere) were taking note of political groupthink at the NEA, and had begun decrying a log-rolling conspiracy among the organization's judges that promoted politically controversial art with obvious conceptual and formal weaknesses - as long, that is, as it mapped to the accepted ideologies of the academy, the art world, and the audience that David Brooks (in one of his few moments of insight) had memorably dubbed "the bohemian bourgeoisie."

Karen Finley on the Hershey highway in the 80's.

A similar blindness runs through Chesapeake - even though, to be fair, playwright Blessing makes bemused, affectionate fun of the naive "offenses" of the NEA Four (while skirting their edgier, sometimes anal, antics). Blessing clearly has lesbian performer Holly Hughes, and the notorious provocateur Karen Finley (at left) most in mind in his tale of "Kerr" (Georgia Lyman), a performance artist who babbles that art is a form of "domination," and whose greatest claim to fame is a little number in which she recites the "Song of Solomon" as she is disrobed by members of her audience.

No, Kerr, doesn't shove "yams up her ass," as Finley famously did, so she seems sexually anodyne  - still, she's deep into the kind of lefty sloganeering that powered the nude harangues of the 80's, but which has slowly dwindled into the mild-mannered "background" of ironic burlesques like The Slutcracker and The Donkey Show.  (Designer Adrienne Carlile has clothed Lyman in several removable layers, so we wonder whether we might be in for a reprise of Kerr's seven-veils schtick; alas, to the disappointment of the heterosexual male reviewers on hand, this proved just a tease.)

But if we don't get any skin in Chesapeake, we're also stuck with a play that's skin-deep.  Indeed, what Blessing misses entirely is the psychological damage evident in many of "NEA Four" and their ilk.  Karen Finley and Holly Hughes may not have made real art, but they channeled real pain, and during the 80's, a benighted age of sexual plague and official denial, their self-degradations substituted (perhaps in an autistic rather than artistic way) for the political dialogue the commercial theatre was dodging.  Their work may not have been art, but at least it was authentic, and it's hard to think of any performers today who take the kind of personal risks that they did.

Indeed, playwright Blessing is hardly interested in risk at all; Chesapeake substitutes knowing giggles for gasps (intriguingly, although it is styled as a wry tribute to the NEA Four, it probably represents the final triumph of self-awareness over their brand of "edge").  Needless to say, Kerr runs afoul of a tub-thumping Bible Belter, Senator "Therm Pooley" (who sounds like Strom Thurmond crossed with a heat exchanger), and once her funding has been cut, she decides to enact her revenge as a performance: she'll kidnap the senator's beloved Chesapeake Bay retriever - who operates as a living symbol of his white-bread wholesomeness - and record the whole process, thereby wresting back from him the political dialogue.

Frankly, this gambit feels at best oblique, and the first half of Chesapeake is only mildly amusing  - everything's a little too canned and familiar to be gripping, even if the talented Lyman's smokily casual delivery makes a good impression from the start.   Still, Lyman, like the playwright, and even director Doug Lockwood, seems to have forgotten the intensity of the NEA Four (well, Lyman is too young to remember it).  Hence at intermission, my partner could only smile bemusedly and remark, "Well, I had a nice nap . . ."

Luckily, the play gets friskier in its second half, after the dog-napping goes wrong, and in a Freaky-Friday style twist, "Kerr" finds herself transformed into a literal "cur" - she's re-incarnated as Senator Pooley's next canine companion. This means that if anything, the play gets even cuter (and it joins that strange little theatrical club featuring grown women imitating dogs). But her new identity gives Lyman something to throw herself into, and her drily witty canine impressions (and obsessions) are consistently hilarious; you wind up liking the show a little more. Of course by the finish, Kerr has learned something, and Blessing has doggedly (sorry) gotten even more sentimental.  And we have been reminded that "failed art is better than no art at all."  Hmmmm.  Given that Blessing has himself received funding from the NEA, if you called that a moment of unconscious self-critique, I don't think I'd argue.

Off-topic, but one for your cool list

Landings at San Diego Int Airport Nov 23, 2012 from Cy Kuckenbaker on Vimeo.
All landings at San Diego Int Airport on Black Friday Nov 23, 2012 between 1030am and 300pm.

And if you're interested in how it was done: http://www.petapixel.com/2012/12/01/five-hours-of-airplane-landings-captured-in-thirty-seconds/#more-91275.

The Nutcracker re-booted, and re-born

Jeffrey Cirio gives his cadets their marching orders before the Ballet's spectacular new Christmas tree.

The Boston Ballet production of The Nutcracker has been oft been voted America's favorite - so you could argue that tinkering with it is a risk - and a wholesale re-boot, perhaps pure folly.

Yet the re-invention that premiered last weekend at the Opera House proved the nay-sayers wrong. Robert Perdziola’s dazzling sets and (literally) sparkling costumes bring a welcome sophistication to this beloved warhorse, and artistic director Mikko Nissinen has made sure the dancing is at as high a level as ever.  On opening night, the new stage configurations meant that some bits of blocking (particularly the opening moments) were vague - and a few funny tricks have gone missing (there's no tiny stretcher for wounded mice, alas - although something tells me this much-loved bit of business will come back). But there are moments of awe and wonder here that more than compensate for these occasional gaps.  It has been a long time since I've heard gasps from the adults at a Christmas show, but at Perdziola's best and grandest gambits, that's exactly what you heard from even grizzled ballet veterans.  Which may be why this Nutcracker felt like a big new Christmas gift to the city.

Designer Perdziola's basic impulse has been to pull this storybook ballet a little bit closer to the storybook; the spirit of children's illustration hovers over his intricately painted sets, which are heavy on panels that open like the leaves of an album.  His costumes, meanwhile, lean away from the heavily structured Victorian frou-frou of the last version toward the sleeker, draped look of the Empire period - which is closer to the timing of E.T.A. Hoffmann's original story; in essence, we feel we're looking at what might have been illustrations for it the year it was published (1816).  And for good measure Perdziola has thrillingly re-imagined a few "tent-pole" special effects: this production's Christmas tree, for instance, opened into an awesome, twinkling bower that covered the entire stage, and the Snow King and his Queen no longer caper through evergreens, but instead pirouette through a pristine grove of Russian birches.

And if the venerable version that held the Ballet's stage for over two decades sometimes felt like a grab-bag of shifting stances, tricks, and even gimmicks, this one attempts a little more internal incoherence.  There's more real dancing for Clara, and what's more, it's dancing with a psychological dimension - she's not a little girl this time around, but clearly on the edge of adolescence (though not over it - her Christmas gift is a pair of pointe shoes, so she's about 12). Drosselmeier - and that romantic factotum, the Nutcracker Prince (at left) - play a subtler role in her fantasy life than usual, but the production reminds us that it is a fantasy life; in the poignant coda to this version, Clara awakens from the Kingdom of Sweets back in Kansas - or at least her parlor at home.

On opening night, our Clara was the charming young Chelsea Perry, who proved as gifted an actress as she is a dancer, and who was clearly completely "over" her tantrum-prone brother, Fritz (the feisty young Santiago Paniagua).  Many of the other characters in the familiar yarn were played by familiar faces - we were again lucky enough to see Isaac Akiba's amazing leaps in the Russian dance, and Joseph Gatti and Adiarys Almeida once more charmed in the Chinese dance.  In other cases, however, familiar roles weren't quite so familiar anymore; the dashing Sabi Varga, now the Ballet's most reliable romantic lead, was always compelling, but seemed to still be working through the new, slightly-spookier conception of Drosselmeier. Meanwhile the brilliant Kathleen Breen Combes had finally left the Arabian Dance behind; this year she dazzled as the Snow Queen (next to the electric Paulo Arrais as her King) in what was probably the most ravishingly synchronous duet of the night.

Elsewhere new faces took over, with solid if not stunning results - Brittany Summer impressed in the Arabian (although she was perhaps more aquiline than actually sinuous), and rising star Irlan Silva made a delicately alienated Harlequin (although he didn't quite nail his double tours).  The highlights of the Kingdom of Sweets divertissements were definitely the dazzling Lia Cirio and her waltzing flowers (unfortunately there was a slip in the Spanish dance, which seemed to have been tweaked a bit oddly, perhaps the one misstep in Nissinen's choreography).  And Misa Kuranaga was, of course, everything she should be as the Sugar Plum Fairy - in an inspired pairing with the ever-dreamy Jeffrey Cirio, who is the first Nutcracker Prince I think I've seen who brought truly romantic feeling to their gorgeous pas de deux.  For Cirio's Prince, this all seemed to be a delightful first date - and so it was for us, too.

Indeed, no higher compliment can be paid to this production, I think, than this: for the first time in I don't know how many years (and how many performances) I felt the stirrings of surprise and wonder again as I watched The Nutcracker. Particularly when the giant Christmas tree spread its mantle of glittering, mysterious promise over the stage, I felt that delicious seasonal thrill I perhaps haven't experienced since I was a child. Suddenly The Nutcracker was new again - and so was the magic of Christmas Eve.

The magic of Christmas in The Nutcracker.  Photos: Gene Schiavone.