Archives for November 14, 2003

I reviewed Taboo, the new Rosie O’Donnell-produced musical about Boy George, and The Caretaker, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Harold Pinter’s 1960 play, in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

Taboo was terrible:

Rumors about the mind-boggling awfulness of “Taboo,” which opened last night, have been circulating for weeks. I wish I could say I ignored them, but such whispers often turn out to be all too true, and once again, the whisperers were right on the money. Not since “Urban Cowboy” has Broadway been littered with so much smoldering wreckage. If Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom had produced “Taboo” instead of “Springtime for Hitler,” they’d have stayed out of jail….

The Caretaker was really good:

Don’t be put off by Mr. Pinter’s reputation for inaccessibility (or the whiny anti-Americanism of his post-9/11 public statements). His school-of-Beckett style may have hardened into mannerism long ago, but “The Caretaker” is still fresh and fine, and this production, well acted by all three players and directed with deceptive clarity by David Jones, is a superior piece of work….

No link (gnashing of teeth), so to read the whole thing, including shorter reviews of two new off-Broadway shows, Fame on 42nd Street and Bright Ideas, do the usual. Extract dollar (A) from wallet (B), proceed to the nearest newsstand, buy today’s Journal, turn to the “Weekend Journal” section (on whose front page you’ll find me), and revel in the rest of our excellent arts coverage. Got that? Good.

I’ll have much more to say about “Sargent’s Women” after I see it again, but in the meantime I urge you to go straight to this eye-popping exhibition of portaits by John Singer Sargent, which just went up at Adelson Galleries (Mark Hotel, 25 E. 77th St., through Dec. 23).

Aside from being gorgeous to behold, “Sargent’s Women” sheds light on the inner life of an artist who is widely thought not to have had one. Next to nothing is known of Sargent’s romantic entanglements (if any), and as a result contemporary opinion seems to be divided between those who think him to have been asexual and those certain that he was homosexual. Be all that as it may, you can’t spend ten minutes walking through “Sargent’s Women” without feeling the fascination that women exerted on him–not just the darkly exotic ladies of Capri, but his own sisters as well.

For reasons all too obvious, at least to me, Sargent continues to be dismissed by many critics as a lightweight virtuoso who specialized in portraits of the haut monde at the expense of serious work. He was, in fact, an extraordinarily gifted painter who did far more than merely capture the pretty-pretty surfaces of his well-heeled subjects, and even if he hadn’t devoted at least as much time and energy to the watercolor landscapes that may well prove in the end to have been his supreme achievement, Sargent’s portraits would still require no apologies. Take a look at “Rosina” and “Head of a Venetian Women” (both of which can be seen on the gallery’s Web site). The artist who painted those canvases may not have been a ladies’ man, but he definitely knew a thing or two about women, and I doubt he learned it just by looking at them.

I want to say a quick word about Adelson Galleries, whose two floors are an eminently civilized place to look at turn-of-the-century American art, about which Warren Adelson knows as much as anybody in the world. He has a knack for putting together museum-quality shows, and “Sargent’s Women,” like “Maurice Prendergast: Painter of America” before it, definitely qualifies. Between this show and “Joseph Cornell: The 100th Birthday,” currently on display at Richard L. Feigen, I’d say it’s time you took a trip to the Upper East Side. Why not make it tomorrow afternoon? Or today, for that matter?

Our old friend Bruce Bawer e-mailed us from Europe this morning, weighing in on the great e-book-vs.-printed-book debate, about which you can read more by going here
and here:

Not to get too lofty about this, but this argument about physical books vs e-books is sort of a variation on the conflict between Hebrew and Greek notions of body and soul. Is the body an essential aspect of human identity or just a container for a soul? For most purposes, reading things on a screen is fine with me. But then I think of my very favorite novel. I used to read it every nine months. Each time I opened it up again, I expected that it wouldn’t have as powerful an effect on me as last time. I was always wrong. I was transported. And when I got to the end, I was always in tears. I would close the paperback and just look at it, in awe that this object in my hand contained these people who were so real to me and whose lives moved me so deeply. It seemed a religious object. Reading that novel on an e-book, I know, would be a very different experience.

That’s beautiful, and I hesitate to disagree, however tentatively…but even so, I do wonder whether a person who grew up with e-books might not be capable of broadly similar, comparably intense feelings. Of course they would assume a different aspect, if only by virtue of the fact that (as Bruce so acutely points out) an e-book has no “body.” But would they be less powerful as a result?

I don’t know, of course. But the thought occurs to me–and I don’t know why it took so long–that some of my own feelings about the body/soul problem may well arise from the fact that music was the first art form in which I became deeply involved as an executant. Sheet music, no matter how handsome the paper and typography, is not an art object in and of itself. Rather, it’s a set of instructions by which humans of flesh and blood may call into evanescent existence the non-corporeal “art object” that is a “piece” of music. Could it be that my early experience as a musician now conditions the way I think about all art? I’m sure, for example, that it made me more open to abstract art and plotless ballet (for what art is so abstract as music?). Perhaps it has also made it easier for me to accept the idea of the “bodiless” book.

On the other hand, here’s a thought experiment: try to imagine a ballet like George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments “performed” on a computer screen by a “company” of articulated stick figures. All the movements, which are the essence of the dance, would be visible–but the viewer would experience them as a three-dimensional geometrical theorem, not an interaction between…well, souls. So long as we are on this earth, there can be no souls without bodies. That’s one of the reasons why I love ballet (it’s the “word” made as flesh), and why synthesizers will never replace live orchestras.

And will any of this stop the e-book from replacing the printed book? Don’t count on it.