About Last Night

From 2005:

Eleven years ago I read an amusing book called Going, Going, Gone: Vanishing Americana that catalogued the long march of obsolescence through postwar America. It occurred to me as I opened my medicine cabinet this morning that the time had come for someone to publish a new book on the same subject. To that end, here are a few of the things I no longer use, do, or see….

Read the whole thing here.

“People who spout their emotions like blood exhaust me, and so I can take Russians only in very small doses, like a liqueur.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (quoted in Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday)

For a long time I used to go see the Paul Taylor Dance Company whenever it performed in New York. In those far-off days I was attending ballet and modern dance performances two or three times a week and covering them for The New Dance Review, the New York Daily News, and (later) Time. I interviewed Taylor on several occasions and wrote about his company repeatedly, both as a critic and as a reporter. In 2003 I called him “the world’s greatest living artist, irrespective of medium,” a judgment I stand by to this day.

I don’t know what Taylor thought of my work—I didn’t have nerve enough to ask him—but he evidently liked it well enough to ask me to write the introduction to the 1999 paperback edition of Private Domain, his 1987 biography, and to give me one of his handmade assemblages after the book came out. No professional honor has meant more to me.

This is part of what I wrote:

Taylor’s singular achievement as a choreographer has been to siphon the angst out of modern dance without simultaneously removing the seriousness. Even when his subject matter is shocking, his tone invariably remains light and effortless, which is why the heavy emotional weather of his darker dances never becomes oppressive….He has taken modern dance and stood it on its head, lightening its ponderous textures with wit and using comedy (which is tragedy inverted) to illuminate the blackest recesses of the soul.

You’d think that the work of so significant an artist would have remained a permanent part of my life, but once I became the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, I quickly found that I had precious little time left over from seeing plays to see anything else. So I cut back on live classical concerts and dance performances, and within a few years I wasn’t going to them at all save on embarrassingly rare occasions.

Flash forward to January, when Mrs. T and I went to a chamber-music concert on Sanibel Island on a whim and enjoyed it so much that we decided to attend a few more such events during our stay in Florida. The following week we heard my friend Stephen Hough play Beethoven’s G Major Piano Concerto (beautifully, of course) with the Sarasota Orchestra. We finally caught up with Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner yesterday, and last Friday we were lucky enough to catch the Paul Taylor Dance Company at Palm Beach State College.

The latter program consisted of two of the oldest works in the company’s huge repertory, Aureole and Big Bertha, and two more recent pieces that Taylor made after I stopped going to the dance, Troilus and Cressida (reduced) and Beloved Renegade. All four of them were new to Mrs. T, who had never before seen the Taylor company.

Not surprisingly, she was thrilled. So was I, but I also felt a powerful sense of loss. Dance, after all, had once been of central importance in my life, enough so that I actually went to the trouble of writing a book about it. How, I asked myself as we waited for the show to start, could I possibly have let such a thing slip away from me? Then the curtain went up on five young dancers who started moving with festive grace to the music of Handel, and all at once I began to cry. Not for long—I was soon caught up in the magical traceries of Aureole—but I was well aware that I had been weeping for something not entirely unlike my lost youth.

I was hit especially hard by Beloved Renegade, a 2008 dance inspired by the words of Walt Whitman that is set to Francis Poulenc’s Gloria, one of my favorite pieces of postwar classical music. As is Taylor’s frequent wont, the dance is darker than the music that acccompanies it. It is, in fact, a valedictory statement by a man who turned seventy-eight not long before he made it. Not only does Taylor quote from Aureole and Esplanade in Beloved Renegade, but he also evokes one of the most celebrated tableaux in George Balanchine’s Serenade, another dance masterpiece that is, like Beloved Renegade, touched by the shadow of death.

When it was all over, I talked nonstop about Taylor and Balanchine as I drove Mrs. T back to our hotel. I was boiling over with an excitement that I hadn’t felt since the last time I saw a great dance that was new to me. We’ve got to do this again right away, I told myself, knowing full well that the Paul Taylor Dance Company will be performing at Lincoln Center next month.

Needless to say, I’d like nothing better than to take Mrs. T to see Esplanade and Company B and Piazzolla Caldera and The Rite of Spring…but will I? My calendar, after all, is already jammed with plays that urgently require my professional attention, and it will be, as it always is, fearfully hard for me to summon up sufficient energy to spend any of my rare nights off doing something that I don’t absolutely have to do, no matter how much I want to do it.

Is that a reason? Or an excuse?

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UPDATE: Here’s something I posted after seeing an outdoor performance by the Taylor company in 2003.

Rudolf Nureyev and members of the Royal Danish Ballet dance an excerpt from Paul Taylor’s Aureole in 1978:

In an excerpt from Paul Taylor Dance Company in Paris, originally telecast on PBS in 2013, Taylor and his dancers talk about Brandenburgs and Beloved Renegade:

Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66 perform “Mas que Nada” on TV in 1967. The lead singer is Lani Hall. Eartha Kitt introduces them:

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

“But—well, I suppose one can’t really understand what one doesn’t love, and one can’t make good fun without real understanding.”

Max Beerbohm, “Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton” (from Seven Men)

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I weigh in on a first-class Florida revival of one of David Mamet’s best plays, Maltz Jupiter’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

I also reprint parts of my original Journal reviews of two important shows that have just been remounted in New York: Robert Falls’ Chicago production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, starring Nathan Lane, and the off-Broadway premiere of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Between Riverside and Crazy, starring Stephen McKinley Henderson.

Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

In New York and Chicago, David Mamet’s name is a draw. In much of the rest of the country, it’s an in-your-face challenge. Yes, Mr. Mamet is now generally (and rightly) regarded as one of America’s greatest playwrights, but many playgoers stubbornly persist in remaining ill at ease with his obscenity-encrusted portrayals of American life as a bloody war of all against all. That’s what brought me to Florida’s Maltz Jupiter Theatre, a suburban company best known for its top-flight musical-comedy revivals, to see Mr. Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” a Pulitzer-winning play that takes the darkest possible view of human nature. How, I wondered, would it go over at a theater whose other offerings this season are “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Foreigner,” “Les Misérables” and “The Wiz”?

The management clearly shared my concerns, since the program contains the following full-page warning: THIS PRODUCTION CONTAINS STRONG PROFANITY THROUGHOUT. But that hasn’t stopped Maltz Jupiter from delivering the goods: J. Barry Lewis’ exhilaratingly full-blooded staging is paced to perfection—each and every F-bomb hits its target—and gratifyingly well cast….

Mr. Falls’ “Iceman” would be worth seeing even if it were merely adequate. It is, in fact, extraordinary, a totally successful staging of a formidably difficult play in which Mr. Lane gives a performance that will stay with you for as long as you live….

Mr. Guirgis has a firm grasp of the endless complexity of human motivation, and he always knows when to pull another rabbit out of his hat, just as he knows how to write dialogue that sounds as if he’d heard it in the street….Mr. Henderson, who spends most of the play sitting in a wheelchair, acts with such seeming effortlessness that you’ll have to look twice—maybe even three times—to catch him stealing every scene….

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To read my review of Glengarry Glen Ross, go here.

To read my original 2012 review of The Iceman Cometh, go here.

To read my original 2014 review of Between Riverside and Crazy, go here.

The climactic scene of James Foley’s 1992 film version of Glengarry Glen Ross, featuring Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey:

“One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.”

George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States

In Friday’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I reflect on how postmodernism has left its long-lasting mark on the music of D’Angelo, Morgan James, and other similarly inclined pop musicians. The Journal decided to post it a day early, so I’m doing the same. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Beck or no Beck, the record that everybody’s talking about is still D’Angelo’s “Black Messiah,” which came out in December to an eardrum-popping chorus of acclaim. And rightly so: It’s a thickly layered, conceptually rich synthesis of R&B, hip-hop, pop, jazz and classical music that’s got the critics hustling for relevant reference points. Listeners with very long memories have compared it to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” both of which turn 44 this year. For my part, I found myself thinking of an even older album, the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which fused a similarly dissimilar assortment of musical styles and techniques into a convincing whole. But no matter what “Black Messiah” reminds you of—if anything—it’s the most exciting pop-music album to come along in years.

Morgan James agrees. Even though she recently cut a superb new album of her own, “Hunter,” she rushed back into the studio last month to tape a passionate tribute to D’Angelo and his band, the Vanguard, that she has released not commercially but as a YouTube video. “The more I dig into ‘Black Messiah,’ the more I think D’Angelo and the Vanguard have made the best rock album in addition to the best R&B album,” Ms. James recently tweeted. So she’s paid homage to its protean creator by recording gorgeously sung, arrestingly individual cover versions of the 12 songs on “Black Messiah,” all of them done in a single day and accompanied only by the guitar of Doug Wamble….

For what it’s worth, I see “Black Messiah” as a particularly choice example of postmodern pop. Postmodernism, which first appeared on the American cultural scene in the early ‘60s, was a purposeful response to the fast-growing rigidity of postwar modern art. By that time, modernism had degenerated into an imagination-stifling ideology whose most militant proponents actually went so far as to argue that abstract painting, serial music and plotless dance were not merely the One Best Way to make art but were—yes—historically inevitable.

The resulting sense of constraint was especially pronounced in the world of modern classical music. Thoughout the ‘50s and early ‘60s, conformity was the watchword: Either you composed in the prevailing academic style or you simply didn’t get performed. But the coming of postmodernism, which declared the “rules” of modern art to be infinitely malleable, changed all that. In “Words Without Music,” his soon-to-be-published memoir, Philip Glass speaks of how the “narrow and intolerant” world of late modernism has since given way to a “new music world of diversity and heterodoxy, where the means of expression—acoustic, electronic, various forms of global and indigenous music—can be equally broad and diverse.”

Whatever you think of the radical relativism of postmodern cultural theory—and I detest it—the fact is that the coming of postmodernism has proved to be both liberating and stimulating to musicians of all kinds….

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Read the whole thing here.

D’Angelo and the Vanguard perform “The Charade” (from Black Messiah) on Saturday Night Live:

Morgan James and Doug Wamble perform their versions of the twelve songs on D’Angelo’s Black Messiah: