FROM THE CHEAP SEATS

Two very different kinds of reviews, and we love them both: Martin Bernheimer's quick dissection of "Die Walküre" at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and Clive James's probing analysis of "Cyrano de Bergerac" at the National's Olivier Theatre in London.

Bernheimer's lede:

The Ring fanatics are here and night after night they're filling the house. These aren't modern Wagnerites, it should be noted, who think the old mythological tales can benefit from psychological insight, social comment or political interpretation. These aren't adventurers who savour symbolism or find updating a potentially stimulating exercise. No, the Met, capacity 4,000, has turned itself into a mecca for conservatives who enjoy fairy-tale pretence, who want to see trees with leaves, sopranos with breastplates and villains with horned helmets. Forget Bayreuth.

James's lede:

His nose preceding him by a quarter of an hour, the hero of Cyrano de Bergerac is a reminder that there were once things plastic surgery couldn't do. Today it can turn Michael Jackson into his own sister. But the original Cyrano, furiously active as poet, swordsman and celestial fantasist in seventeenth-century France, was stuck with his deformity. ... Appearance was destiny. If a man's appearance ruled him out in the eyes of the woman he loved, there was nothing he could do about it. Except, perhaps, one thing. What if he could rule himself back in through her ears?

Read both reviews and savour them. We could all take a lesson.

By contrast, I read a hatchet job the other day on the Roundabout Theater's revival of the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical, "Assassins," at Studio 54 in New York, and was flabbergasted. The headline could have been: "Kill All the Liberals." After a lede bashing New York City theater for its liberal culture and politics and the liberal circles Sondheim is said to travel in, the reviewer added insult to injury by beginning his second paragraph with one of those back-pedaling don't-get-me-wrong apologies: "I speak, mind you, as a passionate admirer of Mr. Sondheim ..."

The negative judgment of "Assassins" (basically, love the production / hate the show) may be correct for all I know, not yet having seen Sondheim's dirty deed. What astonished me about the piece was the unctuous tone and the impression it left of a Wall Street Journal reviewer carrying water for the Journal's liberal-bashing editorial page, which, in a peculiar arrangement, has authority over the paper's arts and culture section.

He writes of Sondheim: "You can all but hear the purr of self-satisfaction in his voice, the sound of a rich man snuggled in the well-upholstered lap of comfortable certitude. I wonder when he last questioned anything his fellow liberals thought about... well, anything." Rest assured, this is not a reviewer huddled under a bridge somewhere in the unupholstered lap of a cardboard box, but rather a well-fed aesthete dining out comfortably on the certitude of his opinions.