Archives for August 16, 2007

I just got back from watching Mark Morris’ Mozart Dances at Lincoln Center. I’ll write about it on Monday–right now all I feel like doing is sitting down and vibrating a little longer–but I do want to advise those of you who weren’t able to see tonight’s Live From Lincoln Center telecast that some PBS affiliates will be showing Mozart Dances again later in the week. In New York City, for instance, it will be rebroadcast this coming Sunday at noon on Channel 13.
For more information, go here.

• The Mostly Mozart Festival has gotten interesting after an alarmingly long stretch of being otherwise. (See Alex Ross’ latest New Yorker essay for a trenchant explanation of what happened and why.) If you want to see for yourself–and you should–Mark Morris’ Mozart Dances will be telecast live from Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater tonight on PBS. It’s a full-evening Morris ballet set to a pair of piano concertos and the Two-Piano Sonata. The performers include the Mark Morris Dance Group, the pianist Emanuel Ax, and the Mostly Mozart Orchestra.
The curtain goes up at eight p.m. EDT. Go here for more details. I’ll be there–look for me in the crowd shots!
If you want to experience Mozart Dances in person, it will also be performed on Friday and Saturday nights. For more information, go here.
• Also on this week’s Mostly Mozart bill are two performances of Osvaldo Golijov‘s Pasión según San Marcos, which I heard for the first time in 2002 and wrote about in a Washington Post “Second City” column:

Golijov’s St. Mark Passion is a rich musico-dramatic stew in which seemingly incompatible styles are jammed together like the sounds you might hear through the open window of a fast-moving car on a hot summer night. Classical strings, chattering brass, Afro-Cuban percussion, flamenco guitar, a Venezuelan chorus that struts and hollers like a gospel choir–you name it, Golijov has stirred it in, not merely for effect but with the shrewd self-assurance of a composer who knows exactly what he’s about…It’s as if the whole thing comes at you in a single communicative flash and makes itself manifest instantaneously–which is, lest we forget, the mark of a masterpiece.

I haven’t listened to the Pasión since its New York premiere and am hugely curious to see how it’s aged, so I’m going back to hear it again. Two performances, on Saturday at eight p.m. and Sunday at five p.m., both at the Rose Theater. (I’ll be there on Sunday.) The performers include Luciana Souza, who should need no introduction to the readers of this blog.
For more information, go here.
• Stephen Lang’s Beyond Glory closes on Sunday, alas. Here’s my Wall Street Journal review in its entirety:

It took long enough, but Beyond Glory, Stephen Lang’s fire-eating portrayal of eight recipients of the Medal of Honor, has finally opened Off Broadway two years after I saw it at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. “Mr. Lang’s one-man play is no simpleminded piece of flag-waving,” I wrote in this space in 2005. “It is an unsparingly direct portrait of men at war, pushed into narrow corners and faced with hard choices. It is also one of the richest, most complex pieces of acting I’ve seen in my theatergoing life.” I went back to see it again last week, and I stand by every word of my original review. The Roundabout Theatre Company has done a great thing by bringing Beyond Glory to New York for a two-month run. This is acting of the highest imaginable quality, a performance that will sear its way into your mind and linger there forever after.

Go here for more information.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q * (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)

• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee * (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY:
• Beyond Glory (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Frost/Nixon * (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here)

• Old Acquaintance (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

“I am a pessimist by nature, which is why I have spent my life as a journalist instead of trying to be a leader, which requires optimism.”
Robert Novak, The Prince of Darkness: Fifty Years Reporting in Washington