Archives for February 2020

A new episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

Here’s American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings: 

This week the critics begin with a discussion about how their personal lives affect their experiences in the theatre, and the ways that different people identify (or don’t) when certain topics appear shown onstage. They then answer some listener questions about stage violence, respond to reader comments on reviews, and recount how they found their way to criticism. The round-the-horn discussion this week touches on Mac Beth at Hunter Theater Project, Gun and Powder at Signature Theatre, and Medea at BAM.

To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

Jascha Heifetz plays the “Chaconne” from Bach’s D Minor Partita for Unaccompanied Violin on TV in 1970:

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

“Some say never meet your heroes, but I say if you’re really blessed, you get them as your parents.”

Laura Dern, Oscar acceptance speech, 2020

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the new Broadway revival of West Side Story. Here’s an excerpt.

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Pop quiz, boomers: What’s your favorite musical? If I had to guess, I’d go for “West Side Story.” Not only did the original 1957 production light up the Hit Parade four times in a row, with “Maria,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “Somewhere” and “Tonight,” but the 1961 film version was a box-office smash that won 10 Oscars and remains to this day a small-screen staple, while regional theater companies all over America continue to stage the show with remunerative regularity….

Unfortunately, a suburban mom who goes to Ivo van Hove’s new Broadway revival without knowing anything about Mr. van Hove’s work in general or this production in particular is in for a very big shock. This is not the “West Side Story” you know and love, and there are some—quite a few, actually—who’ll likely tell you that it’s not “West Side Story” at all. Jerome Robbins’ finger-popping choreography has been scrapped, and the rest of the show is heavily cut (it now runs for an intermission-free hour and 45 minutes, an hour shorter than the 2009 Broadway revival). “I Feel Pretty” and the “Somewhere” ballet are nowhere to be seen in Mr. van Hove’s production, which takes place not on New York’s Upper West Side in the ’50s but—surprise, surprise—here and now. Oh, yes, there’s no balcony or fire escapes, just a huge empty stage….

All this, Mr. van Hove has said, is to the end of giving us “a ‘West Side Story’ for the 21^st century.” On paper, that’s an obvious but not-unreasonable idea. I’m for changing the classics when it’s done with taste and imagination—I just reviewed an 85-minute high-concept all-female “Macbeth” that was thrilling from start to finish—and “West Side Story” is similarly overdue for a thoroughgoing spring cleaning. This is especially true of Robbins’ dances. While I love his vibrant, vaulting sketches of teenage passion, I’ve seen them too many times to feel the urgent need to see them again any time soon. Of the five previous “West Side Story” revivals that I’ve reviewed in this space, all either reproduced Robbins’ steps more or less literally or were strongly influenced by his style. The trouble with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography is not that it’s new but that it’s dull…

As for Mr. van Hove’s staging, it is, like everything else he’s done in New York, a medley of self-regarding minimalist clichés slathered with political sauce….

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Read the whole thing here.

A British Pathé newsreel story about the 1953 Covent Garden premiere of Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana, commissioned as part of the celebration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The premiere was a now-legendary disaster, largely because the opening-night audience consisted mainly of upper-class luminaries hostile to modern music, and the opera (which is only mentioned in passing in the clip) failed to establish itself in the repertory until more than a decade later:

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

“But I think he thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the New York premiere of Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky. Here’s an excerpt.

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It’s February—or, as it’s known in the theater business, August Wilson Month. That’s a sly reference to the fact that February also happens to be Black History Month, the time of year when theater companies with white artistic directors are notorious for going out of their way to revive shows by black playwrights, after which they usually consider their duty done until next season. 

More often than not, this means either one of Mr. Wilson’s plays or Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” but a growing number of ambitious companies are starting to dig deeper and come up with lesser-known works deserving of much wider attention. The latest of these is Keen Company, one of my favorite off-Broadway troupes, whose new offering, Pearl Cleage’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” received its premiere in Atlanta in 1995 and has since been staged throughout the U.S. but is only just receiving its first major New York production. About time, too: Ms. Cleage’s tale of a pair of misfits from Georgia who come to Depression-era Harlem in the hope of leading more abundant lives is quietly poignant and beautifully wrought, and Keen Company’s staging, cast to absolute perfection and directed with supreme delicacy by LA Williams, is pleasing in every imaginable way.

At the center of the action are Angel (Alfie Fuller), a would-be nightclub singer, and her roommate Guy (John-Andrew Morrison), an openly gay costume designer. They share a tiny New York apartment but want to move to Paris to pursue their careers in a country where they can live more freely. Angel, however, is more hard-boiled than Guy, and would be content—or so she supposes—to marry for money. “I’m tired of Negro dreams,” she says bitterly. “All they ever do is break your heart.” Enter Leland (Khiry Walker), an unsophisticated, fresh-off-the-bus widower from Tuskegee who falls in love with Angel at first sight….

“Blues for an Alabama Sky” isn’t without flaw—Ms. Cleage gets a bit preachy once or twice—but for the most part she steers well clear of the obvious. I was struck by the impressive assurance with which she sketches the lives of Angel, Guy and their friends, who also include Delia (Jasminn Johnson), a idealistic young neighbor who is setting up Harlem’s first family-planning clinic, and Sam (Sheldon Woodley), a middle-aged doctor who unexpectedly falls for Delia. I was struck, too, by the unselfconscious sweetness and warmth with which Ms. Cleage portrays her five characters…

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Read the whole thing here.

An excerpt from the Court Theatre’s 2017 Chicago revival of Blues for an Alabama Sky, directed by Ron OJ Parson:

In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about one of music’s most mysterious powers. Here’s an excerpt.

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Music is the most mysterious of all the arts. Incorporeal and seemingly without intelligible meaning, it nonetheless has a powerful effect on most of those who hear it—though not all….

Not the least of music’s mysteries is that so many of us turn to it in times of trial. That’s what Philip Kennicott did a few years ago. A once-promising pianist who is now the senior art and architecture critic of the Washington Post, Mr. Kennicott decided to try to learn Bach’s Goldberg Variations after the death of his mother…

Anyone who has resorted to music under like circumstances, whether as a player or merely a listener, will find much to ponder in Mr. Kennicott’s reflections. One of them, though, struck me particularly hard, not because it recalled my own experience but because it didn’t: “I bristle at the idea that music is consoling or has healing power. It is a cliché of lazy music talk, the sort of thing said by people who give money to the symphony and have their names chiseled on the wall of the opera house….”

I scarcely know where to start disagreeing. To be sure, most of the over-familiar words spoken by those who sympathize by rote with the plight of a mourner or caregiver are ineffectual at best, irksome at worst, leaving you with no choice but to paste a fixed half-smile on your face and say something equally meaningless in response. But music is different, in part because it speaks another, deeper language. When Beethoven, who understood suffering well, gave a copy of his Missa Solemnis to Austria’s Archduke Rudolf, he inscribed it as follows: “From the heart—may it return to the heart!” Moreover, countless listeners have similarly testified to the power of music to miraculously bypass the greeting-card banalities of reassurance and help heal a shattered heart….

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Read the whole thing here.

The Busch String Quartet plays the “Cavatina” from Beethoven’s Quartet in B Flat, Op. 130:

Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic perform a transcription for string orchestra of the same movement: