Archives for March 2017

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

BROADWAY:
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• The Price (drama, G, too long and serious for children, virtually all shows sold out last week, extended through May 14, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes June 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Born Yesterday (comedy, PG-13, closes April 15, reviewed here)

“I hate dubbing. I even believe that in a period of high civilisation, like the twelfth century, if people had done dubbing in films they would have been burned in the public square for pretending that man may have one body and two souls.”

Jean Renoir, interviewed by Rui Noguiera and François Truchaud (Sight and Sound, Spring 1968)

New York drama critics are forced to attend so many Broadway openings in March and April that they don’t have time to do much of anything else. Needless to say, I love theater, but I’m not monomaniacal about it, so I figured I’d better indulge a couple of my other artistic interests while I still could. To that much-needed end, I went to the press view of the Metropolitan Museum’s Marsden Hartley exhibition on Monday morning, and I went with a friend to Lincoln Center last night to see what is now, I gather, called Paul Taylor American Modern Dance.

No, the Paul Taylor Dance Company hasn’t gone out of business, but it’s changed its ways slightly. Here’s the official explanation:

Through a new initiative at Lincoln Center—Paul Taylor American Modern Dance—great modern works of the past and outstanding works by today’s leading choreographers are presented alongside Mr. Taylor’s own vast and growing repertoire. And Taylor Company Commissions enables the next generation of dance makers to work with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, thereby helping to ensure the future of the art form. As an integral part of Mr. Taylor’s vision, these dances are accompanied at Lincoln Center by live music whenever so intended by the choreographer.

I’m for all of this, so long as Taylor’s own supremely great dances don’t get lost, so to speak, in the shuffle. Fortunately, Tuesday’s program was a jackpot for anyone who loves modern dance. Not only did the Taylor company perform his Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal) and Esplanade, but six dancers from the Lyon Opera Ballet performed Summerspace, a Merce Cunningham masterpiece made in 1958. As mixed bills go, that one is pretty hard to top.

Esplanade is, of course, Taylor’s signature piece, a joyous collage of “found” movement—running, jumping, hopping, skipping, sliding—set to the music of Bach. It was first seen in 1975 and hasn’t dated in the slightest since then. Esplanade is one of the dances I love best, but I don’t get to many dance performances these days, and though I went to see it last year for the first time in God only knows how long, I was more than glad to see so festive a piece for two years running, especially on the first day of spring.

As for The Rite of Spring (The Rehearsal), a surreal blend of dance rehearsal and gangster movie that is accompanied by Igor Stravinsky’s piano-duet arrangement of the greatest ballet score of the twentieth century, it doesn’t get done nearly as often as it should, nor can it be viewed on home video. It was premiered in 1980 and I last saw it danced in 2000, the same year that I watched Taylor rehearse his company and wrote about the experience. It’s one of the works by Taylor that I had in mind when I teasingly asked, “How dare a modernist be so much fun?” Yes, Sacre is more than merely fun—the climactic sequence is wrenchingly emotional—but the juxtaposition of frivolity and utter seriousness is an important part of what makes Taylor Taylor, and in no other dance is it so fully on display.

It’s been even longer since I last saw a performance of Summerspace, which is a somewhat tougher nut to crack, set as it is to a wispy, elusively abstract composition by Morton Feldman called Ixion. But Cunningham’s airy choreography and Robert Rauschenberg’s décor, a pointillistic backdrop into which the dancers, who wear similarly colored unitards, all but dissolve, turn out to be unexpectedly easy to like, and if you’ve never seen anything by Cunningham, Summerspace is a good way to get started.

My friend, a singer-songwriter who knew nothing going in about Taylor, Cunningham, or Rauschenberg, was thrilled by everything she saw and heard. Me, too. Dance on Broadway can be and often is wonderful in its own way, but it rarely aspires to the richness and subtlety that are constantly on display whenever you spend an evening looking at the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and it’s been far too long since I challenged my eye and elevated my spirits by doing just that. Better still to be able to share so wonderful an experience with a good friend. I went home feeling both happy and generous—a soul-satisfying combination.

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Kristine Scholz and Mats Persson play the two-piano version of Morton Feldman’s Ixion:

The Paul Taylor Dance Company performs the second movement of Esplanade, set to the slow movement of Bach’s E Major Violin Concerto, on PBS in 1978. The dancers are Carolyn Adams, Ruth Andrien, Elie Chaib, Bettie de Jong, Nicholas Gunn, Robert Kahn, Linda Kent, Monica Morris, and Lila York:

Mark Twain, filmed by Thomas Edison in 1909 at Stormfield, Twain’s Connecticut home. This is the only known film footage of Twain:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“The taxi we took had a postcard of a Picasso stuck in the dashboard: inevitably, in Renoir’s company, it seemed. He instantly leaned forward and started to talk about it. The driver, who chatted with hair-raising responsiveness in the Paris traffic, turned out to be a spare-time painter. ‘Only to amuse myself, you understand,’ he said.

“‘Why not?’ said Renoir. ‘Everything interesting is only to amuse yourself.’”

Penelope Gilliatt, “The Ruler of the Game: A Conversation with Jean Renoir”

From 2007:

In 1908 Percy Grainger persuaded the Gramophone Company to record Joseph Taylor in the studio. It was the first time that the voice of a “Genuine Peasant Folksinger” (as the label described Taylor in its promotional material) had ever been commercially recorded for posterity. Taylor didn’t much care for the process, claiming that singing into an acoustical horn was “lahk singin’ with a muzzle on,” but that didn’t stop him from doing his best. He cut a dozen songs, of which nine were released….

Read the whole thing here.

“I believe that a production should be based on feeling—again, on the idea of communion. I mean a communion among the artist, the actors, the audience, and the wider world. After all, when you listen to great music—let’s say a piece by Mozart—it’s a direct conversation that you’re having with him. Mozart is sitting there in a chair, you’re sitting next to him, and you proceed to have a talk—in a musical language that is pleasant and even moving. And I believe that the less Mozart or any artist talks about himself, the more, finally, he gives of himself in communal terms.”

Jean Renoir, interviewed by Gideon Bachmann (Contact, June 1960)

Marsden Hartley was a major American painter, to my mind a great one. Robert Hughes called him “the most brilliantly gifted of the early generation of American modernists,” a judgment with which I increasingly incline to agree. Yet his work has never come close to receiving its due, and “Marsden Hartley’s Maine,” which went up last week at the Met Breuer, is the first museum survey of his work to be seen in New York in nearly forty years.

It isn’t hard to see why Hartley isn’t better known. He died in 1943, just before the abstract expressionists turned American art upside down. By then he had long since renounced abstraction to concentrate on painting the landscapes of Maine, his home state, working in a strong, at times almost rough-hewn style that is—like certain difficult people—easier to love than to like.

Clement Greenberg, always a shrewd observer of the American art scene, remarked in 1950 that Hartley’s landscapes

have an intensity and are animated by a desire to break through to a fresh and directer reality of pictorial feeling that bring them close somehow to the most recent abstract painting. I myself value them for their clumsiness and the sincerity of their failures almost as much for the rightness of their successes. There are and have been greater painters than Hartley, but few whose sentiment I value more.

I myself would say “awkward” rather than clumsy, but otherwise Greenberg put his finger on it: Hartley was to Cézanne what Milton Avery, another chronically underappreciated American master, was to Matisse, and it is Cézanne’s deliberately, purposefully awkward way of portraying the visible world that shaped his later style more than that of any other painter. Such artists are rarely fashionable, whether in their own time or for long afterward.

To be sure, most American scholars agree that Hartley was an artist of quality, and you’ll find at least one of his paintings hanging in most American museums, in part because his work is more affordable than that of his celebrated successors. (That’s why Mrs. T and I were able to acquire one of his little-known lithographs in 2006.) Many of the finest paintings and drawings in “Marsden Hartley’s Maine,” for instance, are owned by such regional collections as Maine’s Colby College Art Museum, Arkansas’ Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, New Hampshire’s Currier Museum of Art, and the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Nevertheless, opportunities to see and digest Hartley’s work in bulk are vanishingly rare, which is part of what makes this well-curated, sensitively hung show so important. It’s not a conventional retrospective, concentrating as it does on his paintings, early and late, of Maine and its people. To the extent that he’s remembered today, it’s for the work that he did in between, especially during the time that he lived in Germany, where he turned out a series of emotionally charged abstract paintings that have long found favor with critics who have little use for the rest of his output.

But Hartley, in his own opinion and in mine as well, was usually at his best when he painted Maine. “Maine is a strong silent country,” he wrote in 1939, “and so I being born there am able to express it in terms of itself with which I am familiar.” Accordingly, “Marsden Hartley’s Maine” contains dozens of stirring canvases that show the state he loved in a wide variety of aspects. My four favorite pieces in the show, “Winter Chaos, Blizzard” (1909), “Smelt Brook Falls” (1937), “Storm Down Pine Point Way, Old Orchard Beach” (1941-43), and “Mount Katahdin, Snow Storm” (1942), are all reproduced here. None is like its companions save in subject matter, yet all are instantly recognizable as his work. To see them in a single day, along with many other paintings of like quality, was a experience I never thought I’d have.

It’s possible that I wouldn’t have come to love Hartley as passionately as I do had Mrs. T and I not spent so much time up north in recent years. Whenever I see one of his later paintings, I’m put in mind of Maine’s endlessly varied, endlessly fascinating landscapes and seascapes. All the more reason, then, why I should have been so thrilled by “Marsden Hartley’s Maine.” Nobody, not even Winslow Homer or John Marin, has had a richer appreciation of the stony, unyielding beauty of Maine, and I doubt you’ll ever get a better chance to see how much he made of it.

* * *

“Marsden Hartley’s Maine” is on display at the Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, through June 18. For more information, go here.

The show then travels to the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, where it will be on display July 8-November 12. For more information, go here.

A video preview of the show: