Why I'm not a cheerleader for the Mellon playwrights

I've been wondering why I've had so much trouble cheerleading for the new Andrew W. Mellon Foundation initiative placing resident playwrights in theatres across the country.

I mean I feel so guilty.

Shouldn't I want this kind of job security for practicing playwrights??  Shouldn't I be reacting the way the folks did at Emerson's Center for Theater Commons (at left)?

Well, I think I would break out my pom-poms and halter top if I was really confident that the $3.7 million being dropped would result in great (or even good) new plays.

And maybe it will, maybe it will!

But - ack - here's the rub; right now the residencies in question look like odd administrative hybrids. Indeed, our local recipient, Melinda Lopez, is already in print saying she's in discussion with her bosses at the Huntington about "finding a balance" over the course of her tenure.  Uh - a balance between what and what?  Well, here's what, according to the Boston Globe:

Lopez will also be involved in staff operations at the Huntington, where she will have an office, according to artistic director Peter DuBois. She will meet monthly with DuBois, traveling to New York or London if he is directing plays there, watching him lead rehearsals, and meeting with other writers. Lopez is also going to help produce the Huntington’s summer workshop, under which selected playwrights work with directors, dramaturgs, and actors to develop their new plays. By the third year, the expectation is that she will serve as the workshop’s lead producer. 

That sounds like close to a full-time job, frankly.  Staff operations, assisting the artistic director, producing a workshop . . . I mean it's better than waiting tables, yes, of course (and it's awfully nice that this new staff position is being paid for entirely by an outside foundation, isn't it).  Still it doesn't feel transformative for the playwright; it merely institutionalizes a system which is already in place: writers make their work around other commitments in the development infrastructure, and for the development infrastructure.  Not so long ago, Mike Daisey was criticizing foundation boards for funding buildings, not people.  Is this just the latest, slightly adjusted iteration of that meme?

And I keep wondering - why couldn't the Mellon Foundation have just given Ms. Lopez the money to finish her current project (apparently a play called Becoming Cuba)?  Were they more interested in funding the administration of various theaters than they were in supporting new work?  Or actually, not "new work" - I hate that pablum-y nomenclature of the development crowd - but rather specific scripts?

For when I looked over the roster of playwrights who were winning residencies, I was struck by how few names I recognized, and how none of the playwrights I think of today as edgy or interesting made the cut.  If you picked playwrights for this program based on plays that had recently made an impact, the roster would have looked quite different, I'm afraid.

Which led me to wonder . . . what kind of play do we really think we're going get out of someone who has an office down the hall and is attending development meetings?

Is this an argument for the garret, for the starving artist writing by candlelight?  No, not really.  But it is a question about artistic independence.  About a strange dodge around actually funding new work directly, because that's too scary.  I mean, don't we need oppositional new work, plays that question the theatre as well as support it?  

And don't we really need new work from people who are not flying with the artistic director to his next rehearsal?

This is why I find all this a little troubling.  

And I find actually quite funny an associated grant for $760,000 given to the Center for Theatre Commons, half of which will be devoted to tracking the success of these residencies.

Hmmm.  

Does anybody seriously think they'll find them unsuccessful?

I mean, $380,000 can buy you a lot of pom-poms and halter tops.

A variable "33 Variations"

Paula Plum faces the infinite in 33 Variations.

Sigh!  The Vanya on 42nd Street Effect has struck again!

What's that effect, you may ask? Well actually, that's just my shorthand for the perceptual gap that persists between those theatre-goers who simply "want to see a show" and those for whom the theatre has become a kind of lifestyle.

In a word, the kind of people who might be quite familiar with plays like Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, or Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, or Margaret Edson's Wit - of which Moisés Kaufman's 33 Variations (at the Lyric Stage through Feb. 2) often feels like a muddled variation.

If you haven't seen those plays, of course, then Kaufman's concoction will go down easy.  It will seem, well, funny and sad, as they say - if a little vague, but never actually confusing or incompetent.  You may not be able to tell quiiite what Kaufman is getting at, but if you're the trusting type, you'll remain confident that he must be getting at something.

And you'll certainly notice that the production in general is quite fine. The leading lady (at left) is often superb, in fact, as is most of the supporting cast.  And the design is elegant - even sleek; and a sharp set of projections gives everything a clean, high-tech sheen.

But on the other hand, if you ARE familiar with plays like Arcadia or Amadeus or Wit, then 33 Variations may feel like - well - a clumsy stab into a kind of dramatic Bermuda triangle defined by those earlier Broadway hits.

Moisés Kaufman is famous, of course, for brilliant documentary pastiches like The Laramie Project and Gross Indecency, in which he shaped mountains of testimony into gripping theatrical landscapes. So his ambition to write a play based on dialogue rather than documentation is entirely understandable. It just doesn't justify a first attempt that flirts constantly with conceptual plagiarism.

Kaufman's central conceit is to track a mystery - not about Mozart or Lord Byron (they've been done!) - but about Beethoven, in particular the genesis of the great composer's "Diabelli Variations," a late suite of 33 variations (often called the greatest ever written) drawn from a sturdy but unremarkable waltz by one Anton Diabelli, a music publisher and friend of the grand Ludwig van.  At first rejected by the composer, the project eventually came to absorb him; indeed, he spent four years teasing out 33 different pieces from seemingly every aspect of Diabelli's quotidian theme.  Why?

(That's the Amadeus part.)

But Kaufman also wants to focus on the declining health of one Dr. Katherine Brandt (Paula Plum), a driven musicologist who's bent on solving that particular musical mystery, even at the expense of ignoring her gentle, directionless daughter.  And even though her health is in a nosedive as she succumbs to the ravages of ALS (what many still call "Lou Gehrig's Disease").

(That's the Wit part.)

AND there's Katherine's research itself - an intriguing journey through stained scores and lost letters and the dungeons of a music library in Bonn, guarded by an arch Germanic dragon-lady (Maureen Keiller). This musicological Smaug turns out to have a heart as well as a hoard of gold, of course, and as Katherine draws closer and closer to her goal, we can perceive poignant parallels between her lonely struggles and Beethoven's battle against encroaching deafness.

(That's the Arcadia part.)

Okay, you could maybe argue that the play succeeds as a Venn diagram; but alas, as Kaufman shows little actual dramatic ability, I'm afraid that minute-to-minute it remains a puzzlement.  The seeming harmonies between Brandt and Beethoven never coalesce into anything like a theme - perhaps because the historical parallels really aren't that close (and Kaufman paints a cartoonish Beethoven anyway).  Beyond that, the playwright seems ham-strung by his own documentarian nature. The play comes most to life when it visits that music library - but this only reminds us that the Laramie Project and its ilk succeeded because we understood the actual drama buried within their documentation. Here there's a kind of void, however, that the playwright must fill; yet we get very few solid scenes, much less anything like a rising action or climax.

Will McGarrahan, Victor Shopov, Maureen Keiller and Paula Plum - Photo(s): Mark S. Howard.

Of course we do get to hear some Beethoven (from the talented pianist Catherine Stornetta, who tickles the ivories center stage), and Kaufman offers a nice warm bath in sweet, life-lesson clichés like "Lighten up!" and "Stop and smell the roses!"  Which is all well and good.  I get the impression, however, that Kaufman thinks he has actually written a set of "variations" (he has penned 33 scenes, of course), which is a little confusing.  Does he understand what a variation really is?  The "Diabelli Variations," for instance, are great because they almost ruthlessly dig into every aspect of Diabelli's banal little melody; Beethoven plays with the rhythm or the harmonic structure or the dynamic of just about every measure.  It's a brilliant work of sustained musical archaeology; it's no mystery why it held his interest for four years.

But Kaufman pulls almost nothing from beneath the obviously tragic surface of Ms. Brandt's plight.  He seems to think that simply interlacing modern scenes with period ones can count as a form of "variation" - or at least as a form of dance.  This does make for pretty stage images (see masthead) - if only it were also true!

Luckily, at the Lyric, the cast is often so strong that they sustain a sensitive mood without much actual dramatic support. No, Ms. Plum can't really supply the lines to illuminate her relationship with her daughter - but she does give the brittle Ms. Brandt a subtly poignant bravery.  Indeed, her no-nonsense portrayal of the devastating facts of ALS is quite heartbreaking; you just feel she could do it all by herself, sans Kaufman.  And as her closest companion in her last days, that German dragon-lady, Maureen Keiller is perhaps even better; wryly hilarious and subtly moving - and with an accent that's gloriously extended without ever quite tipping into parody - she expertly dodges the clichés that pothole the part.

There's strong work elsewhere in the cast as well - Will McGarrahan makes a devilishly genial Diabelli, and local hottie Kelby T. Akin once again struts his technically-accomplished stuff as, well, the play's goofy hottie. I didn't feel newcomer Dakota Shepard had quite enough oomph as Brandt's long-suffering daughter, but she had the right kind of presence, and the obviously talented Victor Shopov did what he could with the underwritten part of Beethoven's secretary.  The one gap in the cast, I'm afraid, proved to be the great man himself; the playwright hasn't done actor James Andreassi any favors with this blowsy portrait of Beethoven, but unlike his fellow performers, Andreassi seemed unable to find any way to redeem the weak writing.

Oh, well! I'm happy to add that the rest of the production was generally first-class.  Director Spiro Veloudos did some of his subtlest work in recent memory with Plum and Keiller, and clearly knew to keep things moving elsewhere.  Meanwhile Cristina Todesco's nearly-abstract scenic design was among the most sophisticated I've seen at the Lyric - and served as a striking frame for Shawn Boyle's intriguing projections - while Charles Schoonmaker's elegant costumes were always appropriate.  The high level of craft almost made you wonder - how far could this talented team go with a truly great play?

Boston Baroque rings in the new year

Photo of earlier Boston Baroque performance by Kayana Szymczak.

Boston Baroque always breaks out the bubbly for its New Year's Day concert - both the musical bubbly and the literal bubbly (everybody gets a sip of champagne during intermission).

It's the musical effervescence, however, that has made this annual tradition so locally beloved - although does it count as local anymore, now that it's being carried nationally on public radio? Perhaps not; but what's wonderful is that folks across the country can now get a taste of what only Boston Baroque's fans had experienced until recently - one of the most civilized New Year's parties on the planet.

This year most of the sparkle came courtesy of Giovanni Battisti Pergolesi (below right), the under-sung genius whose early death cut short a career of immense influence despite its brevity; he not only left a permanent mark on sacred music (with a devastating Stabat Mater), but also all but defined opera buffa with La serva padrona (The Servant Mistress), which comprised the core of the Boston Baroque concert.

The 1733 Padrona is actually only an intermezzo - but the impact of its melodic simplicity, and the comic vigor of its commedia plot (in which a fussy bachelor is won over by his servant girl) gave it the stature of a full-blown opera in its day (indeed, whole schools of musical thought battled over it in eighteenth-century France).

A portrait of Pergolesi.

All we see now in this minor masterpiece, of course, is its straightforward sweetness and some beguiling vocal lines, both of which were well-served by the Boston Baroque cast.  The central role of Uberto proved all but perfect for local star David Kravitz, who as Hub opera fans have long known is not only blessed with a sublimely resonant baritone but also boasts hilarious comic chops.  And Kravitz was in fine dramatic form here - and may have never sounded better.

He met his delightful match, however, in the lovely Sarah Heaton, who had stepped into the role of the servant Serpina at a moment's notice, to replace the ailing Courtney Huffman; Heaton was therefore on book throughout (but she turned  this into a witty gesture by sliding her score into a copy of Modern Bride). I've heard Heaton before, in Michael Tippett's wackily overworked Midsummer Marriage, so I was quite glad to get re-acquainted with her here, where she wasn't hamstrung by pretentious symbology, and didn't have to shriek at the top of her lungs to be heard.  Her soprano comes to a ripe bloom at the top, although she could use a bit more power in her lower range; still, hers was a charming performance, and she pitched Serpina's romantic wiles at just the right angle.  There's one more role in La serva padrona, btw - the silent valet Vespone, essayed here by former ART stalwart Remo Airaldi with exasperated flair (and some priceless lip-synching).

Although Pergolesi proved the highlight of the concert, there were brilliant moments throughout: conductor Martin Pearlman brought a light, elegant finish (particularly in its Adagio and closing Allegro movements) to the seventh concerto from Corelli's familiar Opus 6.  Even better was the next rarity, Alessandro Marcello's Concerto for Oboe in D Minor (transcribed by Bach) which featured a deft performance by soloist Marc Schachman on baroque oboe.  Again, it was the Adagio that proved most memorable, with its poignant mood bejeweled by brilliant ornaments from Johann Sebastian himself.  The following George Philip Telemann Concerto for Flute and Recorder should, I think, have been even more transporting, and actually showcased a wonderful performance by soloist Christopher Krueger on baroque flute. The recorder half of Telemann's intertwining duets proved less focused, however, which was surprising given the performer was the brilliant Aldo Abreu.  But Abreu visibly (and of course audibly) blew several notes, and only really came into his own in the dashing final Presto.  So the sparkle came late to this part of the program, but once it arrived, it dazzled nonetheless.

Quentin Off-Leash! Part II

Historical fact - or Tarantino fetish?  Or both?

(Part I of this series is available here.)

Whippings, and the welts they left on the backs of slaves, are a constant motif of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (above, one of the first shots of the film).  Django himself has been whipped repeatedly; his wife "Broomhilda" has been similarly abused; and we see scar after scar on back after back throughout the entire movie.  The whipping of slaves has been portrayed in film before, but never with the same level of intensity or repetition.

Horrifying as it is, Tarantino's imagery is hardly exaggerated.  At left is a photograph from 1863, of a slave in Louisiana (who some claim eventually fought for the Union).  Records from the era report that 39 lashes was a common punishment for even minor offenses, and escaped slaves who were recaptured (essentially Django's position in the film) endured far worse; one slave, Moses Roper, withstood 200 lashes upon recapture, and was only spared from death by the pleadings of his master's wife.  There are even newspaper reports from 1844 regarding an eight-year-old slave girl who was whipped to death (her master was tried but acquitted - the murder of slaves by owners was actually not permitted throughout the South, but as slaves could not testify against whites in court, only one or two cases of white-on-black crime ever reached trial).

And violence against black men and women hardly ended with the Civil War.  Below is an image from some seventy years later of Southern whites gathered to see, and be seen with, the bodies of two lynching victims - to them, murder and torture (note the bloodstains on the broken corpses) was a form of entertainment.  Indeed, such images were known to be sold and traded by whites as postcards - and the crowds depicted often included happy children, there with their parents.

Are we that different from the crowd in this photo? Is Quentin?

So one cannot fault Quentin Tarantino for lurid depictions of violence that are actually outdone by the historical record. Yet many observers of his latest film have nevertheless been disturbed by theatre audiences' reactions to the cruelties it depicts.  Critics have noted the knowing chuckles that greet its many scenes of torment from Tarantino's hardcore fans, who seem to view the movie almost as they might . . . a gruesome postcard.

And therein lies the rub regarding Django Unchained.  The film goes where few American movies have dared to tread in terms of the abuse of slaves; but in the end, it goes there for a thrill, and even a laugh.  Perhaps the more things change . . . the more in some horrifying way they remain pretty much the same.  For it's quite easy to imagine that many of the people in those postcards had their excuses; perhaps some were even there "ironically," to garner a grim chuckle at the moral horror of their neighbors - much like the audiences packing the cinemas for Django.

Or perhaps they simply liked violence - although it would be hard to imagine they enjoyed it more than Tarantino himself.  I wonder, has anyone done a tally of just how much mayhem his films have included (and how little they've included of anything else)?  He struck his template at the very beginning, in Reservoir Dogs, and has stuck to it ever since - hip conversational longeurs floated around heists or capers, spacing out torture sequences that were obviously the main event.  Tarantino borrowed this odd opposition from Godard - specifically from Le Petit Soldat; although to be fair, Tarantino has always acknowledged the plagiarism at the bottom of his sense of cool, and even named his production company after Bande à part, another Godard opus from which he borrowed much. (The French auteur was less than impressed by this homage, however - perhaps because his sense of cool was never designed to power a frathouse thriller, much less a grindhouse fantasy.)

Tarantino's great theme in a nutshell.

At any rate, from the bloody Mexican stand-offs of Dogs to the gallons of hemoglobin spattering Django, the beheadings, castrations, burnings, dismemberments, disembowelings, etc., etc. in the Tarantino oeuvre are surely now beyond count.  But I think it's worth remembering that it's not actually the amount of violence in Tarantino's pictures that make them, well, a band apart.  It's the style of that violence.

Consider the photo at left, from Quentin's previous opus, Inglourious Basterds; it's of Diane Kruger's broken foot, after her character has been tortured by Brad Pitt.  The shot struck me as the most interesting thing in the picture, as it seemed to fuse in a single image almost everything that motivates Tarantino at the deepest level.  Of course the image is absurd on its face - a cast in the shape of a nose-bleed heel?!?  But it nevertheless limns a certain kind of fantasy that Tarantino obsessively pursues.

Artist and subject.

For as most movie fans know, Quentin has a foot fetish (it's by now a Hollywood in-joke; one photo that made the rounds, at right).  So it's no surprise that Kruger's tasty lower digits are made up, and their nails polished; what's even more important is that they're encased, held stiff in a painful pose - and we get the odd sense that this restraint is actually, to Tarantino, the most sexually charged aspect of the shot.

For it's hard to miss the parallel between this encasement and the central scene of almost every Tarantino film ever, from the bound cop in Reservoir Dogs to the rubber ball stuffed in Bruce Willis' mouth in Pulp Fiction to Uma Thurman paralyzed (and then buried alive) in Kill Bill, to Zoe Bell tied to the hood of a car in Death Proof.  In fact, Tarantino is never really drawn to "action" (as some have claimed), he's drawn to inaction, to powerlessness - to helplessness, really, to the position of the torture victim, encased like Diane Kruger's foot and held immobile through unbearable pain.

A conceptual parallel to slavery itself is almost too obvious.  For what is slavery but a kind of torture (spiritual as well as physical), in which the victim is held powerless by political forces?  Hence Django Unchained equals Quentin unchained - he doesn't have to dream up any absurdly unlikely situations or characters (gay "hillbillies" in L.A., etc.) to indulge his fetish; the basic setting of the movie offers him limitless opportunities for the kind of scene he likes best.  

Hence the almost-self-parodic parade of atrocities on display in Django - although it's worth noting that Tarantino exercises some restraint in his treatment of these horrors; he knows exactly how much he can show and still hold onto the comic twist in his tone, and only once (in a scene in which hounds tear one victim limb from limb) does he arguably cross the black-comedy line.

A sly portrait of Tarantino himself?

Still, the violence does grind (they were called "grind houses" for a reason, Quentin) and grows numbing; the sadism quickly loses its edge, and becomes a kind of background hum.  So the comedy dominates, goosed on by moves like the showy zoom above, which first presents the sadistic Calvin Candie, owner of the plantation "Candie Land" (where Broomhilda is enslaved) - a gesture so clumsy and faux-naive that it all but begs for a laugh.  It's at such moments that A.O. Scott's claims for the movie's moral purpose ring most hollow; it's hard to understand how moral purpose could survive this kind of crudely comic technique.  (Indeed, the opposition of earnest feeling with klutzy presentation is a staple of sketch comedy today.)

So it's no surprise that audience members giggle at Django; they're constantly being cued to (by both the camera and the spaghetti-rock soundtrack).  But of course that happy laughter prevents and precludes any sense of building outrage regarding the context of the movie.  It also helps Tarantino deflect and dodge the demands of actual art - perhaps because that would put his own taste directly in the cross-hairs of his camera.

Indeed, in a canny performance, Leonardo DiCaprio seems to hint that he knows Calvin Candie is not very far from Tarantino himself (several gestures mimic the director's) and that the cinema we're all watching is likewise rather like the gladiatorial entertainment at Candie Land (we have, after all, come to watch slaves gouge out each others' eyes, haven't we?).

But he seems alone in that perception.  Jamie Foxx plays Django as almost a block - but then as a character (rather than a type), he barely exists - and the lovely Kerry Washington is likewise hamstrung by the limits of Broomhilda.  And while DiCaprio is sick fun, he is never given the chance to explore the psyche of his sadistic character (for obvious reasons).  As for Christoph Waltz, I suppose he's about as hammily enjoyable as he was in Inglourious Basterds, but his dialogue operates at a sitcommish level; this is how fans of That 70's Show might imagine a European.  Which may be why Tarantino patiently has to explain the ironies of such tropes as Broomhilda's Wagner-esque name; without cue cards, his audience would be lost.

Of course, I suppose I could argue in A.O. Scott's defense that Django Unchained does wrap with a vast Caucasian bloodbath, and the literal explosion of Candie Land.  The tables are turned, justice is done, and the oppressed ride off into the night triumphant (how Django and Broomhilda escape Mississippi, though, I've no idea).  

But it's odd how un-cathartic this sequence feels; the slaughter (being filmed, at left) feels labored, like a weary ritual, and also utterly pre-determined; there's no suspense because we know Tarantino wouldn't have the balls to kill off Django at the finish.  For that would inevitably beg questions of lingering injustice; it would hint that racism wasn't entirely in the past.  In short, it would demand that we engage with the accuracy of what we've seen.

And that's anathema to Tarantino.  He wants to enjoy slavery, and that enjoyment per force demands that the violence in question not be taken seriously; if it is, then his fans really are just like the people in those lynching postcards.  Which in turn means that in the end, Django Unchained is a most unusual form of propaganda - a kind of propaganda of disengagement.  It's for people who look at life, and history, from the other side of a screen.  And is art possible on the other side of a screen?

Samuel Jackson in Django Unchained.

There's really no way out of that conundrum, I'm afraid. As it is stands now, Django contradicts itself, and so is utterly un-serious.  Yet what does it mean for movies to not take American slavery seriously?  Few fans of Django seem willing to ponder that question.  Even the Nazis never made ironic black comedies about Auschwitz; so why are we making them about our own crimes?  Given our current political battles, and the fact that our president was often depicted as a lynching victim down South, Tarantino's stance seems even harder to defend.  (And perhaps it's worth remembering that Inglourious Basterds likewise glorified "enhanced interrogation" while that debate raged a few years back.  It's hard to think, in fact, of any time Tarantino's movies have had any kind of progressive political valence.)

Another, even more disturbing, way of looking at Django Unchained does come to mind. Tarantino, of course, is white, not black (and a Southerner, too).  Yet he seems to reserve his deepest contempt not for Calvin Candie and his ilk, but rather for Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), a vicious "Uncle Tom" at Candie Land who - in the film's one cleverly subversive stroke - is a dead ringer for Uncle Ben, a long-time corporate mascot of Mars, Inc. (at right).  Tarantino seems to want to rip off the benign veneer of all such figures, from Aunt Jemima to Mammy in Gone with the Wind.

But the gambit lacks any real sting, because in Django Unchained, we can tell that the rules of this particular game have shifted. Isn't Tarantino himself really in charge of this plantation? And so we're not sure who truly counts as an Uncle Tom any more.

They say they aren't crazy . . .

Wandering across the web today, I found this little gem documenting a recent base jumping event in Kuala Lumpur, sponsored by Turbolenza (an Italian sportswear brand).  Despite the title of the video, I do think they're crazy; but these images at least demonstrate why they're crazy.  I've always had a strange hankering to sky-dive.  Maybe someday I'll work up the nerve to try this.  (Yeah, right.)

Honest bar blogging*: retro heaven in the Kitchen

It's unusual for me to plug a local restaurant on the Hub Review, but Kitchen, at 560 Tremont (right across from the BCA theatres) is a special case in several respects.

Wait, let me back up a bit: what makes Kitchen outstanding is actually its bar, not its restaurant (although the food is fine), and I am a confirmed skeptic of all bar reviews.  I'm not hot enough (and alas, never was) to get past a velvet rope, and let's be honest, that's all that really distinguishes a trendy bar from an untrendy one: the sexiness of the clientele.  Even though I know the baristas in every joint in town do go on about the artisanality of the drinks they're slinging - they're serious about what they do, in that way that only young hotties can really be serious - I almost always find their mixes at best a mixed bag.

But every now and then you stumble on a bar which seems to really be serious about its drinks.  And Kitchen is one such saloon. The bar is small (you can see the edge of it at left), so there's no b.s. about ambience - although the decor is comfy (blocky leather seats and banquettes in earth tones). To be honest, the bottom line is that there's just not enough room here to squeeze in enough sexy bods to make the place a "scene."

So you're left with the drinks.  Even here, however, I admit Kitchen is not particularly original.  Their drink list reads like a lot of drink lists these days, with manly swallows called stuff like "Satan's Short Hairs," to banish forever the fruity spectre of the cosmo, and to match the animal-fatty, heavy-on-the-sugar-and-sauce nouvelle graisse menu.  (Yes, I just coined that.)

But in a way, Kitchen's lack of originality is also what makes it special (or at least better than Stephi's or Aquitaine): all its food and drinks are sourced in historical recipes (there's even a shelf of cookbooks along the wall for back-up).  And perhaps this did make the difference: for once, the structure of these drinks was actually apparent, and the barista (who ensured "artisanality" by measuring everything carefully before our eyes) did seem to know how to cut against bitters, and balance the sweet edge of citrus.  My Old Fashioned (phone photo by Mary Ellen at right) was simply the best I've ever had, and the hot mulled wine was almost as good - steamy and deliciously subtle.  The rest of my party was likewise impressed - as we were by the vault of vinyl you could choose from for the turntable in back.  Coltrane, Davis, and Ella - all on vinyl?  Between this and the drinks, we thought we'd died and gone to retro heaven.

Once we moved on to dinner, much of that special spell still held (no surprise as proprietor Scott Herritt is also responsible for Grotto and the reboot of Marliave).  Although some historical recipes do have their gaps, as I came to realize.  I gambled on the lamb pie, for instance (circa 1747), seduced by the idea of lamb lying down with stilton and arugula - but should have known better than to hope for a flaky crust from eighteenth century London!  Other diners fared better - the 1833 "Tournedos Rossini" (foie gras, black truffles, tenderloin, at left) proved just as operatically over-the-top as it sounds, while Thomas Jefferson's own macaroni and cheese (although it was actually penne and cheese) was nearly as promiscuously rich.  And when it comes to dessert, go for the baba au rhum: a fluffy island of savarin cake drifting in rum syrup.  Just trust me.  (The doughnuts also proved decadent, though.)

Of course what I can't say is that Kitchen is cheap.  But you know - you don't always get what you pay for.  At least at Kitchen you do.

*All drinks and food were bought and paid for. Drinks $12+; entrees $25-40.

Happy New Year from the Hub Review!

It happened. Again.

Happy New Year, everyone, from yours truly!

Whew. 2013.  I'm beginning to think we've let this whole "march of time" thing go on far too long.  But I do have a resolution I want to share.  This is going to be the year I try to switch from saying "two thousand and thirteen" to "twenty thirteen."  Are you with me?  (Or is it still too early?)  Are we going to hang on to "two thousand" until "twenty twenty" (after which there is surely no hope of ever changing)?  Whaddya say?

Other than that, I think my resolutions will remain what they've always been: to contemplate and analyze the Boston cultural scene like no one else!  Indeed, I already have my first event scheduled this afternoon: Boston Baroque's always-charming New Year's Day Concert.  See you there!