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September 13, 2004
TT: To be (a)live
Last Friday I saw Kristin Chenoweth make her Carnegie Hall recital debut. I was there as a fan, not professionally, but I've written about Chenoweth quite a bit in my Wall Street Journal theater column, most recently in my review of the New York Philharmonic's semi-staged concert performance of Leonard Bernstein's Candide:Cunegonde, Candide's shopworn sweetheart, is far beyond the reach of ordinary musical-comedy singers, for "Glitter and Be Gay," her big number, is an all-stops-out coloratura aria requiring a rock-solid high E flat. I knew the diminutive Ms. Chenoweth had operatic training, but it never occurred to me that her high notes would have survived years of Broadway belting, much less that she could still nail them with the brilliance and panache of a full-time opera star. Add to that her impish charm and switchblade-sharp timing and...well, let's just say I'm no longer capable of being surprised by the amazing Ms. Chenoweth. After "Glitter and Be Gay," I wouldn't have boggled if she'd picked up the baton and conducted the second act.
Though Chenoweth didn't conduct the band on Friday night, nothing else happened that was inconsistent with what I wrote about her performance as Cunegonde. Yet what impressed me most forcibly about her concert was the fact that it was a concert--an experience whose impact relied in substantial part on her physical presence. Tiny though she is, Chenoweth has the kind of outsized charisma that is impossible to capture on record. I hadn't seen her on stage when I first heard her solo album, Let Yourself Go, and so I didn't quite get what she was all about. It wasn't until I covered the opening of Wicked last year that I got the point, which was hammered home by Candide and her Carnegie Hall recital. As the saying goes, you have to be there, the way earlier generations claimed that you had to see Al Jolson or Ethel Merman on stage to understand why they were so great. I hope Chenoweth someday finds a record producer (or TV director) who can figure out how to translate her astonishing energy into a medium that puts so high a premium on one-to-one intimacy. In the meantime, all I can say is that if you've never seen her in the theater, do so as soon as you can.
Last Friday was also, of course, the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, an occasion Chenoweth marked by singing a touching version of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times (Come Again No More)." On the day itself I was awakened by the sound of jets flying overhead, presumably on their way to the ceremonies at Ground Zero, and by the time I got outside to partake of the glorious weather, I was startled by how thinly populated the streets were. Perhaps everybody was downtown--or out of town.
Me, I had a press preview to cover, and I'd given quite a bit of advance thought to what I wanted to be seeing that day. In the end, I settled on the Dodger Stages revival of Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique, which opens on Thursday. Since I'm reviewing it for the Journal, I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I've written about Symphonie Fantastique before, most recently in my Washington Post column when it was performed at Lincoln Center a couple of years ago as part of a Berlioz festival. Here's what I said back then:
I'd been looking forward to Lincoln Center's revival of Basil Twist's "Symphonie Fantastique" ever since it was announced last year, but when my friends asked me exactly what it was, I hemmed and hawed and finally said, "Well, uh...it's an abstract puppet show in a thousand-gallon water tank, set to a recording of Berlioz's ‘Symphonie fantastique.'"
Sounds crazy, no? And to tell the truth, "Symphonie Fantastique" is a little crazy--a loony masterpiece that defies any sort of easy characterization, save to say that it is one of the half-dozen most entrancing theatrical experiences I've encountered since I started writing this column. Sure, all you see are strange objects swishing and swirling behind a colorfully lit wall of glass, but the images conjured up by Twist and his crack team of puppeteers are so inscrutably gorgeous (think of a cross between George Balanchine, Paul Klee and Chuck Jones) that they will stick in your mind like a wild but happy daydream.
What I didn't mention back then, and what struck me with special force on 9/11, is that Symphonie Fantastique, like Kristin Chenoweth's singing, is a theatrical experience whose effect is deeply rooted in the fact that it's presented live. True, you don't see or hear the puppeteers until they emerge at show's end for their curtain call, and it would be quite feasible to film it for TV, but it wouldn't be the same, precisely because it's slightly different every time. It is, in short, not merely live but alive.
Of all the essays reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader, the one that stirred up the most controversy on its original publication was "Tolstoy's Contraption," a piece I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 1999 in which I suggested that "film has largely replaced the novel as the dominant mode of artistic expression, just as the compact disc has become the ‘successor technology' to the phonograph record." I went on to explain:
We are not accustomed to thinking of art forms as technologies, but that is what they are--which means they can be rendered moribund by new technological developments, in the way that silent films gave way to talkies and radio to TV. Well into the eighteenth century, for example, most of the West's great storytellers wrote plays, not novels. But the development of modern printing techniques made it feasible for books to be sold at lower prices, allowing storytellers to reach large numbers of readers individually; they then turned to writing novels, and by the twentieth century the theatrical play had come to be widely regarded as a cultural backwater. To be sure, important plays continue to be written and produced, but few watch them (unless they are made into movies).
As I pointed out after the fact to any number of irritated readers, I wasn't talking about quality: all I had in mind was the immeasurably greater power of film to shape the cultural conversation, both in America and throughout the world. Since then, though, I've spent the last year and a half going to a play or two each week (if not more), and while that experience hasn't made me change my mind about the cultural significance of live theater, it's reminded me that the real value of theater lies in the fact that it isn't a mass medium. In a way, it's more like painting. No matter how much money you pour into a theatrical production, there's still an absolute upper limit on the number of people who can see it at any one time. (The theater where Symphonie Fantastique is playing, for example, contains only 199 seats.) The importance of this upper limit is that it similarly limits the amount of money that can usefully be spent on any individual production. Hence big-budget shows like Bombay Dreams and Dracula: The Musical are an aberration. Real theater is about making magic out of next to nothing. As the director John Dexter wrote in his autobiography, "To hell with economy, spend imagination."
That's one of the reasons why I went out of my way to see Symphonie Fantastique on the afternoon of 9/11. Later that day I went with a friend to Michael Mann's Collateral, a film on which a very large amount of money was spent in very obvious ways. I liked it, too--I wouldn't dream of pretending otherwise. What's more, Collateral will be seen by infinitely more people in a single weekend than will see Symphonie Fantastique in the whole of its run. Nor is its technology-enabled ubiquity in any way a bad thing. As I wrote several years ago in Fi,
I never heard Bill Evans play in person: he died before I moved to Manhattan. Thus, my whole knowledge of his playing derives from his recordings. In fact, I suspect most of the really important musical experiences of my life (not counting the ones in which I was a participant) have come to me not in the flesh but through the medium of recorded sound....
It may well be that the most important thing about the phonograph is its unique capacity to reproduce and disseminate those aspects of musical performance which cannot be notated. (If you doubt this, take a moment to reflect on the difference between reading about The Who and listening to Live at Leeds.) This capacity is not without its disadvantages. For one thing, it has caused us to grossly overemphasize the role of execution in musical experience: veteran record collectors habitually spend far too much time talking about whose recording of the Bartók Violin Concerto is best, and not nearly enough talking about the Bartók Violin Concerto itself. But it has also made it possible for us to re-experience great performances of the past--including, among many other things, the world premiere of the Bartók Violin Concerto. I've been listening to old records for well over half my lifetime, and yet it never quite ceases to amaze me that simply by pushing a button, I can hear Joseph Joachim playing Bach, or Louis Armstrong rapping out that golden introduction to "West End Blues."
And yet, and yet...there is no possible substitute for being in the same room with Kristin Chenoweth (even if it's a really big room), or standing five feet away from a painting made by the hands of Vermeer or Manet or Fairfield Porter, or sitting ten feet away from Luciana Souza at Joe's Pub, listening to a performance that will never again be repeated in exactly the same way. What's more, it does nothing to diminish the significance of Citizen Kane or The Rules of the Game to acknowledge that fact. Film and recorded sound are wonderful, immensely powerful things--but the one thing they cannot do is remind us of how good it is to be alive, here and now, in the evanescent moment. That's why I chose to spend the afternoon of the anniversary of 9/11 in the company of a group of puppeteers, immersed in the immediate experience of art.
Posted September 13, 2004 12:55 PM
