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November 27, 2006
TT: Off-road vehicle
After what seemed like an endless string of trips to everywhere imaginable, I find myself in New York City once more, a homecoming that reminds me of G.K. Chesterton's remark that "going right round the world is the shortest way to where you are already." I don't expect to see the inside of another airplane until I go home for the holidays, and that suits me fine.When Harry Truman returned home to Missouri after a seven-year stint in the White House, a reporter asked him what he planned to do first. "Take the grips [i.e., suitcases] up to the attic," he replied. Like Truman, I tossed my trusty rolling tote in the closet on Saturday afternoon, but then I headed straight back out the door. As I mentioned last week, I knew I'd have to fling myself into a marathon of plays and performances the moment I hit the city limits, and the only thing that made it possible for me to face that prospect with reasonable equanimity was the probable quality of the shows I'd be seeing.
On Saturday, for example, Maccers and I caught a preview of Voyage, the first installment of the American premiere of The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard's trilogy of plays about the nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals who catapulted their country out of one tyranny and into another. The coming of The Coast of Utopia to the Vivian Beaumont Theater is by definition a major event, not only because we see so little of Stoppard's work on Broadway (it's been five-and-a-half years since a new Stoppard play was last performed there) but because this production is crawling with familiar faces (Billy Crudup, Jennifer Ehle, Ethan Hawke, Amy Irving, Brían F. O'Byrne, Martha Plimpton).
Alas, The Coast of Utopia, as Mr. Playgoer points out, is a fearfully expensive pleasure:
I've just found my actual tickets stubs from the original Royal National Theatre premiere of Utopia, almost exactly 4 years ago. I flew to London that November for basically a weekend to see all three plays in one day....
Sure, I spent some money flying over there, but note the prices of my three tickets to the trilogy: Voyage (11am matinee) £13; Shipwreck (3:15 matinee) £19; Salvage (7:30pm) £14. Total: £46. The exchange rate then was basically 2-to-1, so let's call that $90. A pretty awesome deal for what were pretty decent seats. (Shipwreck was the splurge.) And that was not a student rate or any special discount.
At Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont, $90 will just about cover a $65 seat in the balcony. To one of the plays. And only the last two rows of the balcony. The overwhelming majority of seats are $100. So to see all three--which really is essential to appreciating any one of them--will run you anywhere between (not including fees) $235 for sucky seats and $300. Per person....
By the way, my cheap-deal airfare to London 4 years ago? About $250. So in other words, for just a little more than the price of three downtstairs seats at the Beaumont, I got the same show and a trip abroad.
I know well how lucky I am to get free tickets to the shows I see (though it hasn't felt like much of a boon in recent weeks!). Still, I rarely have occasion to think in specific terms about how much civilians pay to go to the theater in New York, and Mr. Playgoer's bluntly informative posting, which has provoked some interesting reactions in the blogosphere, filled me with dismay. Tom Stoppard, after all, is widely regarded as one of the half-dozen most important playwrights in the world, and for that reason alone any New Yorker who cares about art will want to see all three installments of The Coast of Utopia--but how many of them can afford to do so?
Similarly bleak thoughts ran through my head on Sunday afternoon as I settled into my $101.25 aisle seat to watch the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's Company, staged by John Doyle in the style of his small-scale production of Sweeney Todd, about which I said extravagant things last year in The Wall Street Journal. That time I took Ms. in the wings, who was in New York on a visit, and this time I took Ms. Litwit, a Sondheim buff of near-fanatical intensity who just moved from Chicago to New York and will doubtless be posting her own reactions to Company in due course. (To find out what I thought of it, come back on Friday.) I also gave her a tour of the Teachout Museum before we headed down to the theater district, and I gather she liked what she saw.
Sunday was a two-show day for me, but the second show wasn't on Broadway or anywhere near it: I went to hear the Maria Schneider Orchestra at the Jazz Standard, my favorite New York nightclub. Maria and her band performed some of the music from Sky Blue, the album they'll be recording in January. If you know their work, you won't be surprised to hear that the results were utterly beautiful.
I wasn't the least bit surprised, since I've known Maria for years and have written about her music on many occasions, most accessibly in my liner notes for her second album, Coming About:
Coming About is no ordinary big-band record. You won't hear any blues in D flat, or standard-issue flagwavers with a shout chorus tacked on at the end. The centerpiece, "Scenes from Childhood," is a suite in three movements that begins with the angry howl of air-raid sirens (simulated on a theremin by baritone saxophonist Scott Robinson) and ends, half an hour later, with iridescent clouds of sound that shimmer into silence. It is one of the most ambitious jazz compositions heard on record in years, and it makes perfect sense when you look at Maria's resumé: she studied composition with Bob Brookmeyer, and spent three years as Gil Evans' musical assistant. From Brookmeyer, she learned how to create large-scale musical structures that add up to more than just a string of solos; from Evans, she learned how to blend instrumental colors with a Ravel-like precision and clarity.
Working with these two masters of big-band writing inspired Maria to develop a completely original sound of her own. "I think my music has a strong element of fantasy in it," she says, explaining that the inspirations for her compositions are as likely as not to be visual: dreams, paintings, memories. "If I don't have a dramatic plane to put myself on," she adds, "I'm at a complete loss for coming up with notes. Actually, I think of my pieces as little personalities. They're like my kids. After I finish a piece, it takes a while for me to forget the struggle of composing it. Then, all of a sudden, it becomes something separate from me, and the band takes control of it, and shapes and develops it, and it has its own life."
One of the new pieces I heard on Sunday was in a similar vein: "The Pretty Road," a musical reminiscence of Maria's small-town childhood in which a Coplandesque opening section gives way to an astonishing episode of Messiaen-like onomatopoeia in which she evokes the mysterious sound of bird calls on a starry Minnesota night. I can't think of another jazz composer capable of writing a piece remotely like "The Pretty Road," though I'm increasingly disinclined to use the word "jazz" to describe Maria's unabashedly polystylistic music. As I said in Time magazine a few years ago, "To call Schneider the most important woman in jazz is missing the point in two ways. She is a major composer--period."
Now I'm back home again, girding my loins for the coming week's work: I'll be writing two pieces and seeing five more shows and a classical concert between now and next Sunday night. The good news is that I'm looking forward to all these events, especially the concert, a Sunday matinee at which Richard Stoltzman and the Amelia Piano Trio will be playing Paul Moravec's Pulitzer Prize-winning Tempest Fantasy. (If you're interested, go here for more details.)
I plan to blog in between shows and deadlines--I haven't spent nearly enough time with "About Last Night" in recent weeks--so watch this space to find out how things are going.
See you tomorrow.
P.S. Even when I'm at my busiest, I try to roll over the Top Five and "Out of the Past" picks fairly frequently. You'll find some new ones in the right-hand column.
UPDATE: To read Ms. Litwit's thoughts on Company, go here.
Posted November 27, 2006 12:00 PM
