Song and dance

Last weekend Boston Baroque brought a unique program to Jordan Hall: a combination of works by Lully and Charpentier along with Rameau's Pigmalion (Gérôme's treatment of the myth, at left) an intriguing one-act opera that's about evenly divided between song and dance. Admirably, Boston Baroque attempted to honor the work's structure by mounting a corresponding postmodern ballet right on the stage of Jordan Hall, with the help of the talented Marjorie Folkman, a former Mark Morris dancer. This was a good thing, although perhaps not quite enough of a good thing: Folkman offered variations on a charming solo, but the dance portions of Pigmalion are extensive, and by the end of the evening we felt the work demanded more than Folkman could deliver on her own. Nevertheless, the performance certainly suggested such productions can, and should, work in the modern dance idiom (indeed, in a way the evening was merely a variation of what Morris's group has been doing for years).

But back, briefly, to the Lully and Charpentier. The concert got off to a slow start with an assemblage of short Lully pieces from various operas and comédie-ballets. Selected by Music Director Martin Pearlman, the resulting 'suite' was cohesive enough, but Boston Baroque's orchestra was ever so slightly blurry in its attack (although its tone was subtle and lovely). I'm not sure if this is the result of Pearlman's mildly eccentric conducting style or if there is a certain soft, muted quality he intentionally seeks for reasons of his own (Pearlman, below right, is a man of larger intellectual scope than your average musician), but I worry the orchestra may have been superceded technically by some of the city's other early music avatars.

The chorus was an entirely different story. The concert snapped into luminous shape with Lully's Regina coeli, a soaring soprano trio here delineated with buoyant skill by Roberta Anderson, Gail Abbey and Sabrina Learman. The following Charpentier Mass proved just as compelling, though in a hauntingly introverted mode: this was an exquisitely melancholy contemplation of the central Christian mystery, and the chorus seemed up to both its precise technical demands and its plaintive coloring.

The shift in feeling to the Rameau was less jarring than one might imagine (perhaps due to Pearlman's sensing something of a similar mood in both). And the biggest news of the evening was that the vocal writing in Pigmalion is ravishing, and was here performed superbly. Tenor Lawrence Wiliford - apparently a last-minute replacement - brought a kind of contemporary intensity to the yearning Pygmalion, and displayed impressive power even in his higher register (although the score did at times scrape the very top of his range). More conventional, but no less impressive, was the sparkling Kristen Watson as both "L'Amour" and the mortal competition for "La Statue," while Meredith Hall brought an achingly pure tone to the awakening heart of the sculptor's creation.

The dance "half" of the opera perhaps wasn't quite as compelling, but then Folkman was working under tight constraints: Rameau's dances seem to have been constructed for a group, but Folkman worked largely solo (although against dancer Rob Besserer's Pygmalion factotum) - and there wasn't room for a group on the Jordan Hall anyhow. I felt Folkman's evocation of the Statue's growing awareness was delightful at first (Folkman is still the lively gamine she was in her Mark Morris days), but grew slightly repetitious, when it should both vary in structure and build in emotion. Such criticism is really only a call for the deployment of more resources, however; it would be wonderful to see Boston Baroque attempt such a project at a larger scale in the future.

Yet another Shakespeare

Yet another Shakespeare "portrait" emerged the other day in London - this one is the "Cobbes" portrait (detail above). It has a very good provenance - to Shakespeare's period, that is; but any actual connection to the Bard himself seems rather tenuous. But to me, this handsome, intelligent, elegant gentleman will do - at least for several of the plays. This is the Shakespeare who wrote the sonnets, Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labour's Lost, and of course the fairyland of Midsummer Night's Dream.

But it's hard for me to imagine the "Cobbes" Shakespeare writing the entire Folio.

That's why it's lucky there are other portraits. At left is the "Chandos" portrait, from the Folger Shakespeare Library. To me, this is the doomed Shakespeare of Hamlet and Othello and Twelfth Night, the poet of shipwreck and love lost or tempest-tost. Meanwhile, at right is the "Sanders" portrait, unearthed in Canada a few years back. This may actually be my favorite Shakespeare portrait. To me, this is the sly, jaunty Shakespeare who wrote Comedy of Errors and Merry Wives of Windsor, and maybe even Henry IV Part I, and who had a hand in many of the other plays. He takes over from the "Cobbes" portrait whenever the country does battle with the court, as in Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, for instance.
As for the poor old Martin Droeshout engraving from the First Folio (at left), I suppose we can leave to him the ironies of Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, and the ingrown intellectualism of Richard II. but it's hard to believe that he - or indeed any of these gentlemen - or anyone, period - could have written the whole canon. And therein lies the mystery that no portrait can ever limn.

Endgame replay

Remo Airaldi, Karen MacDonald, and Will Lebow in Endgame.

Was it really a generation ago that the A.R.T. and JoAnne Akalaitis screwed Samuel Beckett and Endgame? How time flies when civilization is winding down; that disastrous production feels like only yesterday. Alas, the Nobel-prize-winner didn't manage to prevent it - all he got was a disclaimer in the program - but clearly it made him decide for damn sure that nothing like it was ever going to happen again. So when the A.R.T. decided to return to the scene of its crime, Beckett's estate got everything in writing: this time, not a single beat or stage direction in the script was to be changed: a body-blow to the A.R.T.'s whole raison d'être. (Indeed, despite his failure to stop the Akalaitis Endgame, Beckett did manage to score one for intellect over attitude back in 1984: Brustein had made a career out of proscribing how - and even why - theatre should be done, and then arguably the greatest playwright of the twentieth century brutally smacked him down. That musta hurt.)

But how, exactly, was the A.R.T. to deal with a legal writ forcing it to produce a play exactly the same way everybody else does? Well, thinking fast - not for nothing are they at Harvard - the theatre turned this contractual obligation into its marketing concept: they would bravely soldier on in chains, honor the intentions of the author and still pull off his play! Oh my God, what a like totally awesome challenge! Nobody has ever tried that before!

Of course you knew they were only kidding. There's no way the A.R.T. was going to color within the lines.

And indeed, they've doodled a bit on Beckett's masterpiece; they really can't help themselves. No major sacrileges have been done, mind you - just petty gambits that read as tiny, secret tantrums. The idea this time around seems to have been to conjure a vaudeville playing out in an ambiguous time and space, which is fairly close to the right idea, and certainly an improvement over JoAnne's literalist post-Armaggedon setting. In this version, Hamm and Clov's cell floats in a metaphoric darkness, and it's decrepit, but somehow slightly urban, and hardly suggests the end of the world; instead, it's almost ostentatiously neutral, in a we'll-show-you-Mr.-Beckett-we're-not-going-to-do-anything kind of way (although it's actually ecru, not gray). Still, most of the deviations from the author's wishes come courtesy of the designers: neither Hamm nor Clov has "a very red face" as stipulated, the "high, small windows" are now full-size but boarded up, and the ash cans from which Nagg and Nell emerge are sunk into the floor, rendering their leglessness theatrically moot; the picture "with its face to the wall" is revealed to be of Beckett himself (genius!), and at the final moment, the set begins to slowly drift apart, which at least has some thematic resonance (although it was amusing to read Carolyn Clay wrongly identify this as "the production's only liberty;" read the play more carefully, Carolyn).

To be fair, I'm speaking from a specialist's perspective (I've directed Endgame), and almost all these deviations are well within the accepted limits of theatrical production. Still, it's amusing to see demonstrated yet again how unconsciously both the A.R.T. and its enabling critics depend on the ignorance of their "educated" audience (even when they're shouting about how they're following every detail of a script, they know they can actually fudge it). And there are similar small oddities and mannerisms in the performances as well - some of them serious - although to give the actors their due, this is a generally accurate, though superficial, rendition of the play.

And the critics were surprised to discover how funny a "straight" production of Endgame can be (although every production I've seen has been pretty funny). This is largely due to the fact that in the central roles, Will Lebow and Thomas Derrah (at left) drop hint after hint that they're engaged in some kind of meta-theatrical game (the hints are indeed there in the text), and effortlessly pull off the call-and-response timing of a seasoned comic team. The trouble, of course, is that Endgame should do more than just chase the February blues away, as Louise Kennedy would have it. There's a startling lyricism to its language, as well as great symbolic depth (there are Joycean echoes of the Greeks, and Shakespeare, and the Old and New Testaments throughout). And somehow little of this thematic density comes over at the A.R.T.; the actors conjure a sense of meta-theatricality and nail all their laughs, but Marcus Stern has directed them too superficially to suggest the Biblical power struggles and wounded psyches moving beneath the surface of the text. In the end, Endgame is primal, and there's always something terrible at stake - in a word, the end of the last human connection in the world. Yes, this is just a room, and "where" and "when" it exists is a mystery; and yet somehow, Beckett hints that Western civilization is playing itself out within its walls.

But you'd never mistake Will Lebow's arch, plummily-toned Hamm for the last, sterile gasp of the tragic hero, and you'd never imagine that Thomas Derrah's highly mannered Clov was actually a brutalized, broken-hearted slave. You'd likewise be hard pressed to guess from this production that "real" surprises keep breaking up their routine - and lead, step by step, inevitably down into the dust. But that's rather the trick, isn't it - to keep the audience wondering whether something is, indeed, "taking its course" (it is). Even the twists of the final "scenes" - the last dose of Hamm's pain-killer, and the possible appearance of a future Clov on the horizon - registered here as little more than blips in the ongoing schtick (when they're actually turning points). And at the curtain, it seemed obvious we were still stuck in a cycle of re-enactment. But are we? Or is Clov at last really leaving his master for good? Both interpretations should seem eminently possible, but this time only one - the rather more comforting one - seemed credible. Thus the moving walls didn't seem like much of a liberty - they were actually supplying what the actors weren't.

There was, to be fair, more truly Beckettian feeling in the performances of Remo Airaldi and Karen MacDonald, who perhaps looked too hale and hearty for Nagg and Nell, but clearly were in the right grimly gay frame of mind. Both referenced the music hall too - again, appropriately enough - but this time with more genuine feeling in their desperate, dying interactions. Somehow I think the talented Derrah and Lebow have more of this depth in them, too. Let's hope they find it before this Endgame meets its end.

Still more chronicle of a death foretold: the Globe is losing $1 million a week

Or at least so says Time Magazine in a story called "The 10 Major Newspapers That Will Either Fold or Go Digital Next." Our paper of record is No. 5 on the list. Time doesn't actually say the organization will fold, but predicts that within eighteen months "Boston.com, the online site that includes the digital aspects of the Globe, will probably be all that will be left of the operation." Hmmm. Looks like there are going to be a few more web critics knocking around shortly. Somebody tell the Gold Dust Orphans!

[Update: In a fascinating kind of meta-digital narrative, Globe supporters over at Universal Hub are pointing out that Time actually picked this item up from a blog, 24/7 Wall Street, and question at least one of its figures - many feel the Globe is worth at least $200 million, not $20 million. So I guess at the rate of $1 million per week it's got more like four years to go!]

An idea whose time has come

The Huntington has announced it will be offering an electronic press kit for Two Men of Florence, which opens this week. In my opinion, every critic should save a tree and ask for one!

The wrong way of looking at Blackbird?

Bates Wilder and Marianna Bassham spread their broken wings.

In case you haven't noticed, there's been a little critical controversy over the current SpeakEasy production of David Harrower's Blackbird. The aging critical demi-monde has been shocked that this nasty little opus won the Olivier Award (Britain's answer to the Tony) over boomer porn like Frost/Nixon and Rock'n'Roll (whether it should have beaten The Seafarer is, I admit, a different question). The Globe's Louise Kennedy even went so far as to declare of the play, "There. Is. Nothing. There." (Essentially she admitted this bird had flown right over her head.) Meanwhile, Herald punkette Jenna Scherer hailed it as a "gut-punch" of a play that "peered into the emotional abyss," and insisted, "If you haven’t got a free evening, make one. And if you haven’t got a thick skin, grow one. Just make sure you see it."

Now I like peering into the emotional abyss as much as the next guy, but frankly, my problem with Blackbird was . . . that it wasn't nasty enough. Not enough of a gut-punch. Not "dark" enough.

But to explain why, I'm going to have to ignore SpeakEasy's request (which ham-strung some other reviewers) that critics not reveal any of the drama's "twists." I feel no compunction about doing so, because a) it's late in the run, b) it's an open secret that the play is about a past pedophilic encounter between its two leads, and c) it was a bad idea in the first place to market the piece as a whodunit (it's more of a whydunit). And to answer Kennedy's complaint straight away: Yes, Louise. There's. Something. There. But has SpeakEasy actually managed to catch the play's black lightning in a bottle? I hate to say it, because the cast goes for broke, and it's great to see this company stretch so far from its usual diet of gay uplift, but I'm afraid the answer is: not quite. And therefore, to be fair to Kennedy, it can be a little hard at times to see what all the fuss has been about.

Not that everyone doesn't seem to be trying as hard as they can to nail the play's bleak premise regarding love (which Nabokov approached from a very different angle in Lolita). The set - a trash-strewn break room in some nameless corporate hive - is harshly lit and angular; it screams seriousness. The actors - the talented Marianna Bassham and Bates Wilder - are committed and passionately detailed in their performances. And director David R. Gammons seems to understand that the central concern of the play is why, exactly, twenty-something Una has at last tracked down Ray, the man who had sex with her when she was twelve.

Yes, twelve - intriguingly, the same age as Nabokov's "nymphet;" an age when no Roman-Polanski-like excuses can have any purchase (if they ever can). But where Nabokov gave us a supremely self-deluded perpetrator, we sense Harrower has devised instead a self-deluded victim - or at least, we begin to wonder whether Una understands herself why precisely she is confronting Ray (particularly as he's already been convicted of the crime and done time). Indeed, not only her motives but her very identity begins to seem mysterious, like those of the blurry co-workers who wander past the breakroom's frosted-glass window. But the problem is Gammons and his cast don't seem able to bring into focus any possible answer to this question, even though Bassham and Wilder thrash things out with abandon, and we begin to realize the playwright is asking us to entertain the idea that Una could actually still be in love with her abuser.

Now this is something of a cultural hand grenade; it feels like the kind of thing only a male playwright could dream up: the ultimate perp's pipe dream. Still, that's what Harrower wrote, and what the SpeakEasy team has taken on. You get the impression they see the Gordian knot of Una and Ray's "relationship" as some sort of weird variant of the cliché that we're all the walking wounded, seeking out those who damage us, that "love hurts," etc. And maybe it is. But what Harrower intends to occur over the course of his play - that is, Una's slow regression into something like the emotional state of her twelve-year-old self - doesn't occur at SpeakEasy, and in fact isn't even attempted; instead the production seems to want to "keep us guessing" long after this is an artistic option. Because without a specific (if perverse) emotional context, all the Sturm und Drang begins to feel a bit generic. Don't get me wrong, Marianna Bassham (above left) is often wrenching and fearless, and all but strips herself naked emotionally, but it's still an adult nakedness that she gives us, which doesn't really make any sense. Una's behavior is only intelligible as a kind of trapped re-enactment of the pain of her prepubescent experience; Harrower intends to conjure her longing for her initial violation - as well as, of course, Ray's eventual attraction (once again) to her vulnerability; the playwright is after a squirm-inducing return to the scene of the crime. Which explains his very-creepy final twist (no, I won't reveal it here, except to say it's designed to remind us that Ray is indeed a monster, and insinuate that Una is just as bad).

So - can it be a satisfying theatrical experience examining first-hand such emotional cripples? Well, great theatre has been made in the past from equally dark materials. But said theatre has always had to go the distance. And I'm afraid SpeakEasy, as it has sometimes done before, has dodged the full, disturbing impact of the edgy piece it has decided to produce. I say this while still admiring the commitment of actors Wilder and Bassham, and the uncompromising control of the production design. I'm probably only disappointed in director David R. Gammons, who by now has made a small career out of producing horrifying plays (The Lieutenant of Inishmore, The Duchess of Malfi, and now this) which he then drains of much of their horror. And indeed, sans its central sick emotional arc, Blackbird is often slightly boring rather than shocking - while the inclusion of the famous Beatles song as a coda makes you wonder for a moment whether the director ever really understood what this piece was about.

Oh, well. Another fearless glimpse into the abyss that doesn't quite come off. Sigh. Just don't tell Jenna Scherer.

PSB rocks on

Like every other smartypants dancing queen in the 80's, I fell in love with the Pet Shop Boys, and I still kind of carry the torch. The new single, "Love etc." (above) shows their recent renewal in energy (with Fundamental) was no fluke (not to mention the video by Han Hoogerbrugge is fantastic). I mean what can you say about a pop song that includes the lyric, "You need more than a Gerhard Richter hanging up on the wall"? I also laughed out loud at "You don't have to be beautiful . . . but it helps." Tell it like it is, Neil.