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Mary Martello’s ‘Happily Ever After’
BY: Dan Rottenberg
03.11.2010
The charming Mary Martello’s cute idea— what happens to fairy-tale heroines after they find their charming princes?— is undermined by a weak script that’s too often repetitive and obvious. Happily Ever After. Written and performed by Mary Martello; Jennifer Childs directed. Produced by 1812 Productions through March 28, 2010 at Adrienne Theatre, 2030 Sansom St. (215) 592-9560 or www.1812productions.org. |
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Sleeping Beauty snores! DAN ROTTENBERGMary Martello is a versatile Philadelphia-based actress blessed with a charming stage presence, a good sense of comic timing and a competent singing voice. To her one-woman show, Happily Ever After, she also contributes a cute idea: What do you suppose happened to all those fairy-tale heroines after they found their charming princes? Thus in the course of 90 minutes and a half-dozen costume changes Martello introduces us to a menopausal Beauty (abandoned by her Beast for a younger woman and left to raise a teenager by herself), a Cinderella reduced to running a castle-cleaning service because her dense Prince Charming blew the royal exchequer on a Ponzi scheme, a narcoleptic Sleeping Beauty, a seriously obese Gretel (victim of too many gingerbread cookies), and a wheelchair-bound Snow White living out her days in a nursing home. Unfortunately, this intriguing concept is undermined by a weak script that’s too often repetitive and obvious (e.g., “I always knew my Prince would come,” “Sleeping Beauties eventually snore”). I laughed out loud just once: at Martello’s raunchy Peter Pan, a bisexual lounge lizard (reinvented as “Peter Panties”) who remains addicted to chasing lost boys and fairy dust even in his Medicare years. Martello punctuates each skit with a couple of songs (“Que Sera, Sera,” Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” the Mr. Clean jingle) that go on much too long and seem to have been inserted for no reason other than to break up her monologue. These tunes might have served Martello’s purpose if she’d updated the lyrics to match her revisionist characterizations, but Martello sings most of them straight, so that I found myself thinking, “Why am I listening to this?”
Happily Ever After appears to be Martello’s first attempt at writing for the stage. She deserves credit for trying something new instead of clinging to her past successes. God knows that’s more than Cinderella or Snow White ever did.
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Barnes Day in the ‘Inquirer’
BY: Robert Zaller
03.09.2010
With no less than four articles and columns last Sunday, the Inquirer finally got around to acknowledging the fracas over the Barnes Foundation’s proposed move. But Barnes chairman Bernard Watson’s op-ed defense of the move is replete with evasions and distortions.
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A few tidbits For years, Philadelphia’s newspaper of record has stood demurely aside from the fracas over moving the Barnes Foundation from Merion. It was thus with some surprise that I recently found myself approached by the Inquirer’s Kevin Ferris to offer my thoughts about the Barnes. I was told there would be a rejoinder from the other side, but not from whom. In fact, when I opened my Sunday paper on March 7, I found not two articles about the Barnes but four— two apiece in the Arts and Entertainment section and two, including my own, in Currents. There I discovered that my interlocutor was Dr. Bernard C. Watson, chair of the Barnes Foundation’s Board of Trustees— the man who spent the Barnes’s endowment down to zero defending his predecessor Richard Glanton’s attempt to prosecute the Barnes Foundation’s Latch’s Lane neighbors and Lower Merion Township under a statute designed to combat the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan. Before Dr. Watson’s involvement with the Barnes, he had had a distinguished public career in Philadelphia. But his article is replete with evasions and distortions. Spending into insolvency Item: Dr. Watson’s contends that the Barnes board petitioned for the move “only after exhausting all other viable alternatives to keep the collection in Merion.” On the contrary, Dr. Watson’s own decision to spend the Barnes into insolvency contesting the scathing dismissal of Glanton’s suit made it so. Dr. Watson glosses over the $100 million state appropriation to move the Barnes in a passage in which he notes only that it was designated for a “building” in Philadelphia and “not to help the foundation’s chronic operating deficits in Merion.” He manages, in an extraordinary feat of verbal legerdemain, never to mention that the building in question was the new Barnes. He also fails to mention the Barnes board meeting of September 30, 2002, attended by Ed Rendell, in which the deal to move the Barnes to Philadelphia was clinched, and which was duly followed three weeks later by passage of what has come to be known as the “immaculate appropriation.” Dr. Watson states that “all other viable alternatives” had been exhausted prior to petitioning for the move. What were they? Did he approach the Pew, the Annenberg Foundation and the Lenfest Foundation— the principal supporters of the move— for money to keep the Barnes in Merion instead of moving it? Any other potential benefactor? Did he ask the state for money to keep the Barnes in Merion instead of moving it? Did he discuss the matter with Montgomery County and its legislative representatives? Did he consider selling assets not covered by the Barnes Foundation’s indenture of trust?
Dr. Watson, exactly what did you do to save the Barnes in Merion as you were spending its last millions in litigation?
Item: Dr. Watson states that the move “was the result of a prolonged and transparent court proceeding, lasting over two years.” He fails to note that one reason for its prolongation was that Judge Stanley R. Ott, in disgust at the poor preparation of the Barnes petition, recessed the proceeding from January to September 2004. He also omits the fact that the $100 million state appropriation, which the petitioners were statutorily obliged to disclose, was never mentioned in court. Judge Ott found out about it only in September 2006, when he was advised of it by a member of the Friends of the Barnes, who asked him whether he regarded the information as material and whether it might have affected his decision. Judge Ott responded affirmatively on both counts, in writing. So much for transparency.
In fact, opponents of the move were denied full standing in court by Judge Ott, so that they were unable to challenge assertions made by the petitioners or compel discovery of the record. The interests of the Barnes trust were supposedly represented by Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Mike Fisher, who as we now know was actively brokering the move behind the court’s back even as the matter was in the dock.
Item: Dr. Watson quotes an article from the Barnes indenture stating that should its collection “ever . . . become impossible to administer,” the Foundation’s assets might be “applied to an object as nearly within” its purposes as possible “in connection with an existing organization” in Philadelphia or its suburbs. Yet this article speaks only of the orderly disposition of the Foundation’s assets to other parties in case it were to fail. It says nothing about the Foundation itself using its own gross and willful mismanagement as an excuse to transplant its operations to Philadelphia, an option specifically denied it elsewhere in the Indenture. And, certainly, the Barnes is not “impossible to administer” in Merion. My own Inquirer article opposite Watson’s outlines several ways in which it could be put on a perfectly sound financial footing in Merion even now. ♦Respond to this Article Art • Posted on 03/09 • Permalink • More by this author |
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‘The Hurt Locker’ and the endless war
BY: Robert Zaller
03.09.2010
For its realistic portrait of a bomb squad in Iraq, The Hurt Locker won six Academy Awards, including “Best Picture.” Yet the small truths within this film implicitly condone the larger lies that took us into that war in the first place. The Hurt Locker. A film directed by Kathryn Bigelow. At the Ritz at the Bourse, Fourth and Ludlow Sts. (215) 925-7900 or www.landmarktheatres.com. |
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The limits of unflinching realism: One Hollywood began its Oscar bash this year by noting that the number of nominees per award category had doubled from five to ten, for the first time since 1943. The winner for best picture that year was Casablanca, and certainly there was nothing nearly as good on offer this time around— indeed, nothing as good as half a dozen pictures on that long-ago list. The choice this year boiled down to two front-runners: James Cameron’s Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. I haven’t seen Avatar; but then, I left 3-D movies behind in childhood and have no particular interest in the Photoshop update. I did see The Hurt Locker, a film I thought effective in a bludgeoning way, and truthful enough on its narrow terrain. I was naggingly disturbed by it, too— an aftertaste I couldn’t shake for a while. The disturbance was clarified for me by the groundswell of popularity and acclaim that built under the film and culminated in its sweep of six Oscars. We are approaching the seventh anniversary of the Iraq war, a war that seems to have no end, although we are periodically promised one. A number of films have been made about the war, but none before The Hurt Locker engaged the general public or attracted much Oscar attention. To the contrary, films about the war, whether well made or not, seemed guaranteed to fail at the box office. War without a cause This wasn’t surprising, considering that the subject is a war of lies built on lies. All the usual flag-waving and warmongering could not conceal the fact that Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction, and that the evidence for them had been manufactured. Abu Ghraib didn’t make the picture any prettier. America seemed to have lost its way in Iraq, a polite way of saying it had committed aggression against a nonbelligerent state and unleashed the hounds of hell on a fractured nation. No wonder nobody wanted to see the movie. As a film, The Hurt Locker isn’t much different from Jarhead, an earlier look at the impact of the war on those fighting it. Nevertheless, The Hurt Locker became everyone’s darling. Kathryn Bigelow and her screenwriter, Mark Boal, had found a way to look very closely at the war without seeing anything at all. Like a surgeon, with a difference The film depicts an explosives demolition unit; the central character, First Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), is the point man who defuses roadside bombs. The road must be cleared of all civilians and personnel before defusing can proceed. The operation is as delicate as surgery, the difference being that the patient must die for the doctor to live. Sergeant James must step into a bomb suit, much like a surgeon donning his scrubs. The surgeon, however, frees his limbs, while the demolition man encases himself from head to toe, and breathes filtered oxygen. He looks like a spaceman, and the terrain around him, cleared of all life, is an alien planet. All of this is exactly according to code; it is also a perfect metaphor for the American footprint in Iraq, and the hubris of George W. Bush’s attempt to impose the neocon fantasy of a “democracy”—read “docile client state”— on the world’s oldest continuous culture. A director could have fun with this idea. But Bigelow’s focus remains almost entirely limited to the paranoia-flecked experience of the bomb squad. Iraqis themselves are virtually out of sight; the one exception is a young boy whom Sergeant James christens “Beckham” and adopts as a mascot. Beckham mimics his masters, becomes a hustler, and may or may not perish in what is or is not a terrorist setup. The moral of that story is that nothing can be gained by any human contact with the native population: The only safe place is one’s bomb suit. Matador’s challenge On the other hand, Sergeant James is a cowboy, reckless not only with his own life but with that of his unit. He has become a war lover, both numbed and intoxicated by his daily encounter with death. Like a matador, he plays with it, manages it and dispatches it. For Sergeant James, there is no war, no enemy— just a daily challenge that’s always the same and each time lethally different. Sergeant James’s colleagues don’t share his death wish, but we’re drawn inexorably into his experience until it becomes normative for us— in film parlance, the point of view. At the same time, because our own experience is vicarious, we can stand outside it and see it in a dimension inaccessible to Sergeant James himself. In short, we can see him as he cannot possibly see himself: as a hero. His very recklessness is the vertiginous price Sergeant James pays for standing on the ramparts of freedom. He’s keeping the bombs out of the way for us, on a road stretching all the way back to Lower Broadway. ‘You need me’ Bigelow isn’t so crass as to suggest this directly. In the film’s most affecting scene, we see Sergeant James back home, cradling his infant son and explaining to him that the instinctive faith and trust he shows in the world will gradually curdle as it reveals the death and disillusionment at its core. Having tasted that reality at its most extreme, he is drawn to live in its truth, the sole reality it has for him. We understand that Sergeant James is addicted and in a certain sense damned; but we’re also left to feel that it is he and his kind who most defend us. It’s exactly the message that Jack Nicholson’s self-intoxicated Colonel Nathan R. Jessep leaves us with in A Few Good Men: “You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.” In A Few Good Men, Colonel Jessep crosses the line and is responsible for the death of a hapless soldier under his command. In The Hurt Locker, Sergeant James exposes his unit members to danger, but himself most of all. He doesn’t in fact cause harm, and he “kills” no one but the bomb in front of him. We sense that in the end he will sacrifice only himself. We think: I don’t much like this man and I certainly don’t wish to emulate him. But I’m glad he’s defending me. War in five countries This is the larger lie wrapped around the small truths of The Hurt Locker. Sergeant James and his like are not defending us. They’re doggedly attempting the conquest of a country that we attacked without cause. That war has now bled in popular consciousness into the war in Afghanistan as well as our wider military actions in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. We are now effectively at war with or within five separate countries, and covertly present in scores more. Our shadowy enemy is nowhere and everywhere. Sergeant James is the soldier who fights for us, who finds the next bomb wherever it is buried. He fights a war both very private and very public, but one that he hopes will never end. Our leaders plan to oblige him. This is the imperial ethos that Hollywood has validated in embracing The Hurt Locker. Kathryn Bigelow herself, in accepting her awards, expressed her gratitude toward our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for all the servicemen and women on duty anywhere in the world.
The sentiment was applauded. Hail, Caesar. Hollywood liberals, too, salute you.
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‘Romeo and Juliet’ at the Arden
BY: Jim Rutter
03.09.2010
Matt Pfeiffer’s direction of the Arden’s Romeo and Juliet bathes us in emotional intensity. He also strips the young lovers’ tragedy of any romance in order to cast a disapproving glare on Shakespeare’s text itself.
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Romeo and Juliet: Unless you married your first love, you probably remember the whole romance like a dream. Shakespeare litters his Romeo and Juliet with almost two-dozen references to dreams, and in the Arden’s current production, Matt Pfeiffer’s ambitious direction captures this sensibility completely. Scenes in sequence occur simultaneously or overlap; consequences of actions precede their causes; and the plot appears as a series of images that, yes, form a narrative, but one submerged in the hazy miasma of memory. Pfeiffer’s direction bathes in the emotional intensity of each scene and hands us Shakespeare’s drama like a jeweler displaying a string of pearls. For a moment, we hold each in our grasp, feel its texture and shape, and then pass quickly along a thin thread to the next. Networking That said, the production doesn’t always succeed. Lighting designer Thom Weaver’s harsh transitions jarred me from the play’s reverie, and sound designer James Sugg’s compositions, while often enhancing the action and staging, sometimes aren’t used enough and don’t always fit the mood. But Pfeiffer’s carefully chosen ensemble— an example of professional networking amongst friends if I’ve ever seen one— helps realize his vision. Although the Montague family has been largely edited out of this version, Scott Greer’s terrifying Lord Capulet provides enough rancor for both families, one amply balanced by the tender benevolence of Anthony Lawton’s Friar Laurence. Humor dominates the first half, and persists throughout in the performances of Shawn Fagan’s Mercutio, James Ijames as Benvolio and Suzanne O’Donnell’s nurse. Costume designer Rosemarie McKelvey identifies each faction with the crested blazers of rival prep schools, and Dale Anthony Girard’s fight choreography shows us schoolboys who’ve been raised to wield weapons. Soaring above this acrimony like a dove among crows is the childlike gentleness of Mahira Kakkar’s Juliet. Believable teenagers Thanks to these performances, to Sean Lally’s stage-commanding Tybalt, and to the young casting of the parents, for the first time in more than a half-dozen productions, I truly believed I was watching teenagers. The sexual comedy stayed within the boundaries of youthful ignorance; the jokes felt like genuine horseplay and ribbing, and all of these mid-20-somethings played like boys on a schoolyard. It also helped that Arden set this play in the 1980s, lit the dance scene with a high school prom’s Japanese lantern-effect, and gave the warring teens ninja weapons (the preferred tool of every junior high school boy) to fight with. Only Evan Jonigkeit’s Romeo took time to warm up. He starts argumentative and only becomes endearing at the magically rendered balcony scene. His repetitive deep sighs were so annoying that his suicide almost came as a relief. Rebuking the Bard’s intentions To some extent Jonigkeit’s bitchy performance serves Pfeiffer’s larger point about the play. Ultimately Pfeiffer strips the young lovers’ tragedy of any romance in order to cast a disapproving glare on the text itself. And rightly so. Whoever decided that Western culture should hold— let alone export— the notion of these two dreaming children as archetypal lovers?
Pfeiffer’s production stands as a riposte to the flower of truce that grows from the scorched earth of these young lives, reminding us that in reality, the violent passions of youth strike with the force of a nightmare, not a dream.
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Jasmine Choi flute recital
BY: Tom Purdom
03.09.2010
The impressive young flutist Jasmine Choi explores the border between East and West and invades the empire of the Great Romantics. Jasmine Choi in Recital: Bach, Sonata in E Minor; Franck/Choi, Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Minor; Yun, Garak; Schoenfield, Four Souvenirs; Taffanel, Fantasie on Themes from Der Freischutz. Jasmine Choi, flute; William Hong-Chun Youn, piano. Presented by Astral Artists on March 7, 2010 at Trinity Center, 22nd and Spruce. (215) 735-6999 or www.astralartists.org. |
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Between East and West TOM PURDOMI’ve often wondered why modern composers don’t create suites of modern dances in the same way Baroque composers fashioned suites out of the dances of their own era. Jasmine Choi’s Astral Artists recital included a contemporary piece that proved at least one composer has received the same brilliant inspiration.
Schoenfield’s closing “Square Dance” races along faster than any real dancers could actually move, but we have a vision of the square dance in our head that we can relate to in a way that we can’t relate to a gavotte or a minuet. His opening Samba received the same kind of acceleration; the Tango belonged to the dreamier segment of its genre; and the section marked “Tin Pan Alley” was so gently sentimental that it evoked a flutter of spontaneous applause. Expanding her repertoire Jasmine Choi is a 27-year-old flutist who is combining a career as associate principal flute of the Cincinnati Orchestra with solo appearances with orchestras in Europe, the U.S. and her native Korea. She is dedicated to expanding the flute repertoire, and the highlight of her recital was a particularly spectacular example of her efforts: a transcription for flute and piano of Cesar Franck’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Minor. The transcription worked so well that I never had any sense that the flute part had been written for another, very different instrument. At a few places in the first movement the piano came on too strong when it played solo, but Choi’s flute sounded right in its element when it weathered the storm the piano creates in Franck’s second movement. In the rest of the piece you could hear the long floating lines, flutter-tongued chatter, and rolling melodies that I associate with flute music. I even heard one genuine climactic shriek. This Sonata’s great attraction is the fact that the Franck original is a highly Romantic piece in the best traditions of the Romantic period. The Romantics seem to have neglected the flute. Most of the flute solos we hear stem from the Baroque and Classical periods that preceded the Romantic era and from the movements (like the French impressionists) that followed it. Choi’s transcription gives the flute the opportunity to indulge in the surging passions and grand gestures the Romantics added to our musical dialogue. It must be a real workout for an instrumentalist who works with her lungs and lip muscles but it was worth all the effort she put into it. Korean, or German? The intermission gave Choi a chance to recover before she tackled a major piece that displayed another aspect of her interests: the interaction between Asian and Western music. Isang Yun is a Korean composer who spent much of his life in Germany because of the political situation in Korea after the Korean War. He’s one of the Asian composers who pioneered the fusion of Western and Asian musical traditions. His Garak for flute and piano is probably his best known and most performed work. According to Daniel Webster’s program notes, Choi has said that the audiences’ judgment that Garak sounds “more Korean” or “more German” seems to depend on who’s playing it. To my ear, it sounds like a series of calls or musical gestures in an idiom that resembles the flute music you sometimes hear in the sound tracks of Asian movies. It traces an arc that rises to an intense peak and recedes to a surprisingly moving ending in the flute’s low range. Memorable event Choi opened with a Bach sonata and closed with a Fantasie on Themes from Der Freischutz by the late 19th Century French flutist, Paul Taffanel. The first two movements of the Bach sounded dry, but Choi’s work with the long andante made up for that.
The Taffanel reduces a major opera to a piece for flute and piano and still manages to deliver a dramatic introduction, solemn arias and a satisfactory round of dances and serenades. Choi would be worth listening to if she confined herself to the stodgiest quarters of the flute repertoire. But her efforts to expand her domain produced one of Astral’s most memorable events.
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Reich, Glass and Bryars at Annenberg
BY: Dan Coren
03.09.2010
The Zellerbach’s dry acoustics and a battery of mirambas and xylophones almost swamped the Philadelphia Singers’ delivery of Steve Reich’s You Are. And I loved every minute of it. Philadelphia Singers, Relâche and Orchestra 2001: Steve Reich, You Are; Philip Glass, Persephone; Gavin Bryars, Laude 22 & 23. David Hayes, conductor. March 6, 2010 at Zellerbach Theater, Annenberg Center, 3680 Walnut St. (215) 898-3900. or www.pennpresents.org. |
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Steve Reich, forever young DAN CORENIn April of 2007, as I reported in these pages, I was persuaded to re-acquaint myself with the so-called Minimalist composers John Adams, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. At that time, I had hardly any knowledge of Reich’s music, despite the fact that the Alex Ross, writing in the New Yorker, had called him the greatest living composer. But at the very end of that year, Reich provided my wife and me with what really could be called a life-changing experience. We were returning from a Christmas visit to Massachusetts via I-95; just as we embarked on the dreary schlep between the Massachusetts border and New Haven, I said to my wife, “See what you think of this,” as I slipped my recently-acquired disk of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians into the CD player. This hypnotically pulsating musical organism immediately enveloped us and devoured the next 80 miles as if they were nothing. I don’t know which gave me more pleasure: the music itself or seeing my wife in the sort of trancelike state she enters while photographing sandhill cranes along the Platte River in Nebraska. When, 70 minutes later, the music stopped without any warning (as Reich’s music often does), she plaintively asked, without the slightest hint of sarcasm, “Is that all? It’s over?” My wife has several times since cited “that piece we heard on I-95” as the paradigm of what music would be like in her version of heaven. Pathetic program notes Last Saturday we had the opportunity to revisit that musical universe at the Annenberg’s Zellerbach Theater, where the forces of the Philadelphia Singers, Relâche, and Orchestra 2001 combined to perform music by Reich, Glass and the British composer, Gavin Bryars, all under the baton of the Philadelphia Singers’ director, David Hayes. The concert opened with a performance of Glass’s Persephone for chamber orchestra and chorus. Even though Persephone was originally commissioned by Relâche in 1994, it’s really best described as the incidental music for Robert Wilson’s theatrical production of the same name (see this New York Times story).
Taken out of context as it was at Annenberg, and without any real help from the anonymous and pathetically inadequate program notes (“…throughout the score are voices, which exist perhaps in an illusion [sic] to a Greek chorus…”), the work, with its wordless choral parts and strangely named sections, was, for me at least, more puzzling than anything else and not particularly compelling musically.
Before this concert, I knew nothing about Gavin Bryars, whose settings of Italian sacred texts, Laude Cortonese— two short works for unaccompanied women’s voices, composed in 2002— preceded the intermission. The program annotator didn’t see fit to supply his birthdate (1963) but enigmatically stated that the Laude “form a fascinating bridge between the musical and vocal styles of Glass and Reich.” What that could possibly mean? It turned out to be complete nonsense. Bryars seemed to me to be writing an homage to the delicately dissonant choral music of Francis Poulenc from the 1940s, music I happen to be in the midst of rehearsing these days. Whether or not that was his intent (based on my minimal research, Bryars seems to be one of those musical chameleons who can write in any style he chooses), the works are gems in their own right: choral writing whose beauty was justly served by the Philadelphia Singers’ impeccably prepared female voices. Holocaust survivors But the evening really belonged to Reich’s You Are (Variations), composed in 2004. You Are is divided into four sections; in each one, the vocalists sing a different aphoristic philosophical fragment as in this sample, “Explanations come to an end somewhere.” Several audio clips like this are available on the web; if they indicate Reich’s true intentions, then You Are is a close cousin of his Emmy-winning Different Trains (1988), a chamber work incorporating the recorded conversational fragments of Holocaust survivors. (Different Trains is widely available in many different forms. Here is a representative sample.)
But the version at Zellerbach was anything but a chamber work. The forces of Relâche and Orchestra 2001 combined to form a more or less standard orchestra flanked by a quartet of keyboards on the left and another quartet of mallet percussion– xylophones, marimbas and vibraphone– on the right.
I know from personal experience that the Zellerbach’s dry acoustics, which are fine for stage productions, make for about as unforgiving a venue for choral singing as you can imagine. Matched against this instrumental army’s relentless barrages of ostinato rhythms, the only solution was to heavily mike the chorus and have them belt out the text for all they were worth. You could see that the singers, as is the case with all well-prepared choruses, were working their tails off to deliver Reich’s words clearly, but all the audience heard was a wall of incomprehensible sound behind the teeming activity of the orchestra. The result was music much closer in spirit to Music for 18 Musicians, with strong suggestions of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.
Reich composed Music for 18 Musicians an astonishing 35 years ago. Back then, the idea of staying on a chord for minutes at a time was a radically new idea. Today, Music for 18 Musicians and its ancestor, Terry Riley’s In C, have become classics of the late-20th-Century repertory. And here at this concert was Steve Reich, the oldest composer present (by a hair) with the newest work, still treating chords like individual musical biospheres, each with its own pulsating life-forms, and making them sound as fresh and visceral as they did in the 1970s.
My only complaint about You Are was, again, “What? Over so soon?” But, come to think of it, that’s my reaction to all music I love.
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Pennsylvania Ballet’s ‘Program II’
BY: Jim Rutter
03.09.2010
Pennsylvania Ballet’s version of Balanchine’s Four Temperaments demonstrates that artists know more about life than philosophers. Matthew Neenan’s take on Carmina Burana, on the other hand, tells us more about the artist than about life. Pennsylvania Ballet: “Program II.” George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments, music by Paul Hindemith; Matthew Neenan’s Carmina Burana, music by Carl Orff. Through March 13, 2009 at the Academy of Music, Broad and Locust Sts. (215) 551-7000 or www.paballet.org. |
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Mathew Neenan takes (too many) liberties JIM RUTTERDuring the recent Winter Olympics, a friend asked if I’d rather watch the figure skating in Vancouver or the Pennsylvania Ballet’s forthcoming “Program II.” Both display exquisite, inspiring choreography, paired with tremendous athleticism and artistry. But figure skating can only tell me something about the skaters (Joannie Rochette’s fortitude, Evgeni Plushenko’s arrogance). Ballet, by contrast, can teach me something about life. After its three opening themes, Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments progresses into an exploration of each pole in the Ancient Greek system of dividing personalities. From the start, the black-and-white costumes express the severity and isolating lack of middle ground between each extreme of humor, reflected more so in Hindemith’s varying piano melodies. Here, the movement in “Melancholic” more embodies the current sense of the word. One moment, Alexander Iziliaev casts his head upward in ascension, in the next it swings like a pendulum on his neck. He drops each arm like a sigh that inflates the music and the Academy’s hall like a pair of lungs, with his body contorting from side to side as he releases the air from one and then the other. It was like watching a poem by the Symbolist Paul Verlaine come to life. In “Sanguine,” Arantxa Ochoa and Sergio Torrado exude confidence in their erect-postured poses. With their backs tight and flat throughout, even when twisted at the waist, both look imperious and impervious in their exacting precision. “Sanguine” suits both of their dancing temperaments, but the droopy movements and poses of “Phlegmatic” provide a well-met challenge to Jermel Johnson’s customary explosiveness. What Descartes got wrong Amy Aldridge’s “Choleric” burst in, all spurts of explosive activity cut hastily short into pauses that freeze her in place before she tears across the stage again. Balanchine makes most recognizable the idea that every human emotion and thought accompanies a corresponding movement or posture. When proud, we stand erect; in despair, we double over and clutch the ground. And while we can stand perfectly still when something excites, the heart betrays us by racing.
His ballet suggests that Descartes got it wrong when he argued that we could strip away all the physical components of existence and reduce human essence to reason and inner mental life. As these four humors attest, experiencing the emotions that color our lives requires a body that moves us when we are moved.
Matthew Neenan’s Carmina Burana poses a simple question: How much importance should a choreographer place on the music’s text? When I first saw Neenan’s take on Orff’s music in 2007, I hated it precisely because he abandoned many of my favorite elements in Orff’s song cycle. Orff’s Carmina conveyed a ritualistic, desperate tale of medieval peasants struggling to create moments of joy while living under punishing conditions. Neenan’s inventive, inspired interpretation inverts this meaning, transforming their struggle into an ebullient, bold evocation of life’s rich joyfulness.
Neenan’s creatures— who are downright otherworldly in Oana Botez-Ban’s shimmering, scale and feather-covered costumes— know only bliss and joy. Their only pain comes when they’re expelled from this Garden of Eden, an opening and closing that constitutes a ritualistic passage into suffering.
Throughout, these playful dancers capture the ebullience of Matisse’s later work as they execute a series of lines flowing into circles in front of and around Mimi Lien’s triangular structure— which at once represents a ship, a temple, or a cave. Here, Neenan’s playful pagan people invert religious terror into joy-filled rituals, and fuse the solemnity and the proud exuberance of possessing one’s own body into a reverence for existence. Neenan’s Carmina consists entirely of evocation, a series of discrete emotions expressed boldly and brilliantly to achieve an electrifying effect. Everything soars in this celebratory fairy tale existence, and under John Hoey’s lighting, everything glows. Lost in interpretation And yet its luminosity fails to fully illuminate. We can still recognize ourselves in Orff’s terrified, struggling peasants. But where he casts our eyes backward on our fearful past, Neenan’s gorgeous stage painting opens them to a brilliant, though barely comprehensible future, and the one touchstone— a single kiss— can’t open a portal wide enough for contemporary consciousness. Jean-Jacques Rousseau— who wrote, “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil”— would have enjoyed Neenan’s choreography. As for me— I’ve grown to appreciate what Neenan’s aesthetic creates, but I still believe that an artist should subordinate his voice a bit to avoid losing too much in his interpretation. By failing to choreograph anything to Carmina’s opening “O, Fortuna” measure, Neenan loses the fullness and the resonating roundness of the music and text. For Orff, life begins where it ends, whether in a single day, a calendar that repeats each year, or— as Beckett so elegantly put it— “astride of a grave and a difficult birth.”
In Neenan’s Carmina, we see no awakening, no birth, only finality. As with figure skating in the Olympics, we learn more about the performer than about life.
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March Letters: Dancers vs. critics…
BY: Our readers
03.09.2010
Readers discuss dancers and critics, left and right in Chile, the Barnes Foundation’s architects, ‘A Governor’s Romance,’ the Philadelphia Orchestra’s marketing, ‘Picasso and the Paris Avant-Garde,’ vanishing art postcards, Bruce Graham’s Any Given Monday, Tan Dun’s opera Tea, and Lynn Hoffman’s poems, Jig For My Father and Poets Drunk. |
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Dancers in search of critics
In response to Merilyn Jackson’s response to my letter about dance critics (February)—
Editor’s note: The writer is a dancer.
I saw the February letter from Amy Bowles asking, “Why all the Streb reviews, with zero for my group?”, which got me thinking. One reason certain performances get reviewed and others don’t is just that no one heard about some of the smaller groups (that lack advertising budgets). I’m on the mailing list for the Annenberg and the Keswick, for example, and have pals in the local tap-dance community. But I’m really not at all hooked in to most of what’s going on in Philly dance.
Editor’s comment: This is an intriguing idea, albeit one that would cut into my regular full-time job as a busboy at the International House of Pancakes. Would some foundation out there care to fund a part-time assistant for this purpose? Left and right in Chile
Steve Cohen’s explanation of Chile’s mixed political system is exemplary. I envy my German wife’s and son’s health coverage. Too much of our public health “debate” is mindless wrangling, belying our foolish boasts about being the greatest nation on earth. Bismarck’s insistence on universal values such as social security and health insurance was pioneering of universal significance— to be emulated by all thoughtful regimes ever since.
Barnes architects make their case
Re “The Barnes architects make their case”—
Well-written and, as usual in Philadelphia, we are a day late and $400 million short. And in case it has never been mentioned, those trees on the Parkway were a “War Memorial.”
Hopefully, us peasants armed with pitchforks and the other barbarians at the gates that dare to question this steal, will have the needed reinforcements to fight this move after the sold out screenings of The Art of the Steal.
I have understood that some of that extra 83,000 square feet of space of the new Barnes building was to be designated for “special exhibition” galleries.
I attended the Barnes in 1950. Dr. Barnes was still alive at that time and even taught one of our classes himself. Of course, Violette DeMazia (with her little silver thumb rings) taught the others. To me every square 1/16th of an inch is meant to be what it is, and I hate the idea of the move.
Eric Vincent (above) writes, “Nobody I know who has ever visited the Merion Barnes likes it”. I have two responses.
Here’s how to enjoy the original Barnes building. Spend as much time as you can in the central hall. Get a docent to explain the hanging of pictures.
Robert Zaller replies: Thanks John Blatteau for pointing out that the London plane trees cut down to accommodate the Parkway Barnes were part of a war memorial. That’s a novel way to dishonor the dead. Laurie Olin, the Barnes landscape architect, rhapsodized about the remaining trees in his Penn presentation. He didn’t mention there were 28 fewer of them.
‘A Governor’s Romance’
Re Dan Rottenberg’s lyrics to “A Governor’s Romance” (Editor’s Notebook)—
Orchestra’s marketing
Re “The Orchestra’s inane marketing”—
Dan Coren replies: I know that it ‘s common wisdom today that young people are unfamiliar with and/or don’t care about classical music. However, my personal experience is very much at odds with this view. I have sung in choruses at Penn for more than 30 years. In that time— and especially in the past ten years or so— the level of musical interest, knowledge and technical prowess among college students, or at least among the ones I get to observe first-hand, has increased dramatically. More than a hundred students joined the Penn Choral Society this past fall to sing the Mozart Requiem.
Editor’s note: To read an earlier letter, click here. ‘Picasso and the Paris Avant-Garde’
Re Richard Carreño’s review of “Picasso and the Paris Avant-Garde,” at the Art Museum—
Editor’s note: To read an earlier letter, click here. Vanishing art postcards
Re “The vanishing art postcard,” by Andrew Mangravite—
Andrew Mangravite replies: Well, yes, sadly, I didn’t say that there was money to be made selling art postcards. This is undoubtedly why so many institutions have stopped selling them. But then, if we make money the measure of any thing’s intrinsic worth— what is a college degree in, say, English literature worth? Probably not as much as a truck driver’s license from an accredited trade school. The point of the cards was that they gave folks an affordable taste of art. Any Given Monday
Re Dan Rottenberg’s review of Bruce Graham’s Any Given Monday—
Dan Rottenberg replies: I wasn’t suggesting that friendship between a Jew and a Catholic is unlikely— just that such labels seem irrelevant to the plot of Any Given Monday.
Tom Purdom replies: Then I misread you. But I don’t think the childhood associations are irrelevant. People do talk about them. And they do leave a stamp. A Protestant atheist and a Catholic atheist will have different attitudes toward many things— including their atheism. I’ve about decided, for example, that I don’t feel the kind of emotion Catholics and Jews are referring to when they talk about “guilt.”
Editor’s Note: To read an earlier letter, click here. Tan Dun’s Tea
Re Jim Rutter’s review of Tan Dun’s Tea, by the Opera Company of Philadelphia—
My tastes are truly bloated by my consumption of magnificent arias and melodies to die for. The patrons of this art form are the final authority as to whether an opera is worthy or not. They spoke in droves by leaving as soon as possible.
Jig for my father
Lynn Hoffman’s Jig For My Father touched my heart. I cried more than I laughed. Sounds like a great guy, just like his son.
When poets get drunk
Re Lynn Hoffman’s “Poets drunk”—
To catch my breath I slug away
Gamays will blossom as I long
Editor’s note: To read Lynn Hoffman’s latest poetic effort, click here.
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Pink Hair Affair’s ‘Take It Off’
BY: Jim Rutter
03.09.2010
Pink Hair Affair’s Take It Off! purports to blend burlesque and modern dance, although its pieces rarely achieve a mix of either. Take It Off: A Burlesque-Inspired Show. Directed by Laura Jenkins; choreography by Jenkins, Ashley Wood, Lauren Mathis, Rachel Slater, Annie Wilson and Kaleigh Jones. Pink Hair Affair production March 5-6, 2010 at Mascher Space, 155 Cecil B. Moore Ave. www.pinkhairaffair.com. |
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This was burlesque— or was it? JIM RUTTERPink Hair Affair’s Take It Off! purports to blend burlesque and modern dance, although its pieces rarely achieve a mix of either. Instead, with few exceptions, director Laura Jenkins fashioned what might best be described as a burlesque show as imagined by someone who’d never been to one. The most egregious example occurs in Kaleigh Jones’s “Sensual,” where she and Danielle McGilligan donned pink corsets and leotards to dance around, astride or atop a white cube. Sometimes in sync, they gyrated their hips or outstretched an arm before strutting quickly toward the audience and elaborating on these prior movements. No bawdy stripping, no mocking humor, and nothing I haven’t seen better executed in any Beyoncé music video.
Nevertheless, the evening offered a promising beginning in “Satisfaction,” in which the ensemble’s seven dancers sported their signature pink wigs and entered in a line like pneumatic robots. Their vapid expressions betrayed the sultriness of the mood, one both enhanced and broken by their stone-faced lip-synching of Ben Benassi’s electronic lyrics.
Satisfaction dovetailed nicely into Ashley Wood’s “Oh Cum On,” where three dancers, dressed in layers of frilly granny panties, ill-fitting bras and stockings, played on the floor with Play Station controllers and electric toothbrushes. They awkwardly stripped out of these layers— as if to poke fun at our expectations— and drank PBR beer while rubbing these devices on themselves and one another like vibrators, a laughingly erotic fetishization of consumer electronics. A short interlude later, Jenkins and Lauren Mathis reappeared in “Unchained Shadows,” their negligees and thigh-high nylons enrobed inside trench coats. Behind backlit floor-to-ceiling paper banners, we watched their silhouettes disrobe one arm-length glove or stocking at a time, while in between each discarded covering, they would reappear briefly to level the audience with a glance. Despite Mathis’s stolid expression, the piece crackled and snapped like an erotic live wire, and at least peered into the evening’s potential spirit. Writhing in mud But just when I started getting into the evening’s mood, Jenkins destroyed it by inserting a crudely enacted dance-video piece featuring Rachel Slater (a Pink Hair member who now lives on the West Coast) and set to the grunge band Nirvana. This series of uninventive close-ups and cutaways forced us to watch Slater cry, dance and writhe in the rain-soaked mud. This unfortunate visual intrusion blindsided Annie Wilson’s “Lovertits,” the evening’s only piece to skillfully blend the sensibilities of both modern dance and burlesque. Here three dancers wriggled out on their backs, pinned to the ground by overstuffed chests. Moving in a staggered line, they poked fun at Jane Fonda exercise videos before stripping off their tops to reveal sacks filled with mashed potatoes, gravy and creamed vegetables. Christina Gesualdi provided virtually all of the evening’s laughs as she struggled to stand up (slipping on the gravy?), while Christine Steigerwald and Ashley Wood emptied the contents of their chests to accompany a steaming steak brought out by an aproned Wilson— a raucously mocking lampoon of what happens when a woman serves herself up as a dish. Swimming on bicycles The evening never achieved a similar sensibility. Jenkins’s “Slow Ride,” a sort of synchronized swimming on bicycles, merely felt cute and underdeveloped. In “My Box,” Jenkins popped out of the aforementioned cube to dance around in a pink bra and panties. She was surely watchable, but how this piece embodied burlesque or modern dance any more than a woman bursting out of a cake at a bachelor party is beyond me. Between each work, Wilson told jokes or recited limericks and sex facts, but her poorly rehearsed emceeing only mirrored the sometimes-shoddy execution of the dances themselves.
In assembling this program, did the Pink Hair women hope to present their friends and families with a somewhat enjoyable, albeit disjointed evening of catcalls, booze, and mild laughs? In that case, mission accomplished. But what did the night mean for them artistically?
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Bill Cain’s ‘Equivocation,’ Off-Broadway
BY: Toby Zinman
03.09.2010
No equivocating about Equivocation: This superb Off-Broadway production of Bill Cain’s smart, complex play, directed by the brilliant Garry Hynes, satisfies on every level— emotional, intellectual, theatrical. It’s funny, too. Equivocation. By Bill Cain; directed by Garry Hynes. At Manhattan Theatre Club, New York City Center, 131 West 55th St., New York. (212) 581-1212 or www.nycitycenter.org. |
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Playwright’s predicament TOBY ZINMANStrife is the order of the day: a new government, ambitious advisors, religious hatreds, political prisoners, torture, backroom political machinations, public dissatisfaction, revolutionary unrest, terrorist attacks, sexual shenanigans at the highest levels, moral equivocation everywhere. It’s 1604. The Scottish king, James I, has just acceded to the throne of England. Enter: relevance. Enter: Robert Cecil (David Pittu), with a commission from the king requiring Shakespeare (John Pankow)— here called “Shag”— to write a play about the recent Gunpowder Plot, when a group, disgusted with the king’s reneging on his promise of religious tolerance, planned to blow up Parliament and the Royals. The plot was undone by an anonymous letter betraying them to the authorities. (The infamous Guy Fawkes gave the event his name, celebrated in England as Guy Fawkes Day, when he is burned in effigy). Shag sees this commission, accurately, as a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t deal. How to write it, how to survive the setup is the problem of the play. Strife persists as well within Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men— the most celebrated actors in England— filled, unsurprisingly, with egos, self-interest and divided loyalties. The actors of this production (Michael Countryman, Remy Auberjonois, David Furr and Pittu) play the actors of the King’s Men— who in turn play various scenes from Shakespeare plays— Lear, Macbeth— and then they double or triple their roles as historical figures. Sometimes these changes occur before our eyes, sometimes with lightning-quick costume changes. Fathers and lost daughters Strife infects the family, too: Shakespeare’s daughter, Judith (Charlotte Parry)— a constant, almost silent presence, twin of Shakespeare’s dead son Hamnet— tells us, in a soliloquy, how she hates soliloquies and, in fact, hates theater. But does she ever know theater, since she knows how personal her father’s plays are; all those daughters in all those late plays (The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, for examples) lost and restored to their fathers. Their complicated, tense relationship, with her awful mother in the psychological background, is a play in itself. But Bill Cain has ideas to burn, and never stretches one too thin or clobbers us to make meaning obvious. Under Garry Hynes’s imaginative direction, the scenes dazzle the audience with sometimes-sudden shifts, sometimes slides; on a minimal set of clanging metal walls (designed by Francis O’Connor), David Weiner’s lighting changes the mood from workaday at the Globe to grim in prison. O’Connor’s clever costumes feature jeans and Renaissance doublets. This visual connection is rendered startlingly actual when Robert Cecil, the ruthless, hollow man who does the monarch’s dirty work, reminds us that there have been 400 years of Robert Cecils, up until the 21st-Century conservative leader of the House of Lords. Beyond cheap realism With a cast this uniformly skilled and a play this rich, we have to provide the audience it requires. As Judith tells us, “The last plays are completely unbelievable…. Audiences loved them…They cried…They believed them. Of course, audiences— they’ll believe anything.” “Believing,” of course, means more than responding to the cheap and easy domestic realism of most contemporary theater; it means holding a mirror up so that we feel, not just see, the truth in a play. As Bill Cain learned from Shakespeare, “Laughter makes the tragedy bearable.” ♦ Respond to this Article Theater • Posted on 03/09 • Permalink • More by this author |
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Marcantonio Barone piano recital
BY: Peter Burwasser
03.09.2010
Barone’s exceptionally vivid and smart playing pulled a diverse program together, with music that sprang to life as if the composers were all vivacious and engaging guests at a really good party (even if one or two of them might have had too much to drink). Marcantonio Barone, Piano: Haydn, Piano Sonata in E, Hob. XVI/22; Maneval, Lines from a Poem– Ten Bagatelles for Piano, Op. 39; Finko, Piano Sonata No. 2; Mussorgsky, Pictures At An Exhibition. March 3, 2010 at Benjamin Franklin Hall, 427 Chestnut St. (215) 569-8080 or pcmsconcerts.org. |
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Barone’s cast of keyboard characters PETER BURWASSEROn paper, Marcantonio Barone’s recital last week seemed an odd, unbalanced mix; a first half with a Haydn Sonata plus two new works, including a world premiere, and a second half filled with a great, lumbering warhorse, Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition. The perils of poor programming were discussed insightfully in Robert Zaller’s recent BSR review of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s February 25-28 concerts. But in practice, surprisingly, Barone’s diverse assemblage was an unqualified success, with music that sprang to life as if the composers were all vivacious and engaging guests at a really good party, even if one or two of them might have had too much to drink. His exceptionally vivid and smart playing pulled everything together. Haydn’s music tends to be respected by the general public, but not revered. Pianists, however, love his solo keyboard output because it’s so dramatically concise and slyly humorous. Alfred Brendel has said that he measures the success of his playing of Haydn by whether or not he can get the audience to laugh out loud. Marc-Andre Hamelin, in recital at the Perelman Theater earlier this year, did actually elicit audible chuckles for a Haydn encore. The Sonata in E that Barone played contains humor as well, but it was the sort that caused the listener to smile rather than laugh out loud. This Haydn came across with conversational intimacy, and Barone’s precise, chiseled phrasing made it easy and deeply rewarding to engage a remarkably eloquent artistic mind. Quiet guest at the party Philip Maneval was the guest composer at the party who quietly nursed his Cabernet Sauvignon, carefully observing the crowd and chatting only with those who actually had something interesting to say. Lines From a Poem, his new work written for Barone, is reflective, even poetic, constructed with Maneval’s characteristic elegance and precision. It served as a contemplative respite from a generally raucous evening of music making. David Finko, born in 1936, is a product of the great Soviet music-making machine, a graduate of the vaunted St. Petersburg Conservatory. Russian pedagogy was, and is, quite traditional, including an intense reverence for the giants of the Classical era. Thus we get the neo-Classicism of Prokofiev, and in the case of the Finko Sonata No. 2 (also written for Barone), a Haydn sonata cloaked in extreme modernism. Extreme is the operative word, and it applies to many aspects of the work, which seems to use all 88 keys of the piano and every possible dynamic variation. Harmonically, Finko sounds like a liquored-up Liszt on acid, with echoes of the Hungarian composer’s only sonata occasionally bleeding through the corpulent pile of notes. Wildly entertaining stuff, if not a little scary. Old work, neat trick Certain pieces of music, Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition among them, are so stamped by famous performances that it is hard for new performances to carry any kind of freshness. The dueling recordings of Horowitz and Richter, now both over a half-century old, continue to inform the way we hear this music and, consequently, how it’s performed. Barone, without in any way violating the intent of the composer, managed to find a distinctive way with the score, via dazzling virtuosity. That’s a neat trick; Marcantonio Barone is a superb pianist whom many Philadelphians may take for granted, as he has been on the scene here since his child prodigy days in the 1970s. We shouldn’t. Barone is a world-class artist, and we’re fortunate to have him as a vital member of our local musical community. ♦Respond to this Article Music • Posted on 03/09 • Permalink • More by this author |
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‘Annie’ without the Depression
BY: Dan Rottenberg
03.08.2010
Annie wasn’t much of a show to begin with. Now its original target audience is dying out. Does that mean its setting— the Great Depression of the ’30s— should be scrapped? |
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Updating Annie: Just one slight problem… DAN ROTTENBERGHaving been enthralled as a child by the original 1977 Broadway production of Annie, our critic Jennifer Baldino Bonett recently took her own young sons to the same show’s latest uncut revival and found today’s audience less than enthusiastic. “Eighty years after the Great Depression,” Jennifer concluded, “Hoovervilles, and even Franklin D. Roosevelt himself, seem like ancient history, especially to Annie’s target audience: kids not yet old enough to vote.”
Her solution: Annie’s producers should borrow a leaf from the show’s film and TV adaptations and eliminate most if not all references to the Great Depression. (Read Bonett’s review here.)
That’s one way to look at Annie. Here’s another. By the time the original Annie arrived on Broadway, three generations of Americans had grown up with Little Orphan Annie, the zero-eyed waif who first appeared in the Sunday comics in 1924 (five years before the great stock market crash of 1929), and whose sole earthly possession was her dog Sandy. Every day for more than 50 years, millions of people had spent time with Annie, her right-wing benefactor Daddy Warbucks, and his mysterious servant and bodyguard, Punjab and the Asp. As with the long-running British series, “Upstairs, Downstairs,” people were exposed to Annie’s crowd so steadily that we felt as if we knew them personally. The stage musical based on this comic strip also exploited a perverse human phenomenon that might best be described as “nostalgia for the bad old days.” A show like Fiddler On the Roof, for example, wistfully recalls that wonderful period in Tsarist Russia when Jews cowered in their homes, waiting for the Cossacks to crash through the door. In much the same way, Annie recreated those happy times when millions of Americans sold apples, stood in soup lines and lived in makeshift shanties constructed from tin cans. Superman’s fatal flaw But unlike Tevye and his family in Fiddler, or the Bellamys and their servants in “Upstairs, Downstairs,” comic book characters lack depth. They may enchant us for five minutes, but on close examination— in two-hour stage or screen adaptations like, say, Superman, Dick Tracy, L’il Abner or Popeye— they fall over like the cardboard figures they are. Try a two-hour serving of the brilliant “Doonesbury” and you’ll see what I mean. Not surprisingly, then, the Broadway musical Annie resembled a meal consisting entirely of hors d’oeuvres: full of juicy little morsels but bereft of anything you could sink your teeth into. It charmed audiences for much the same reason that old baseball cards charm guys my age: They remind us of a time when we were younger, even if we weren’t necessarily happier. So Bonett is right in one respect: Annie’s Depression context offers nothing to her kids. On the other hand, that context is a vital element of what little story line Annie has to offer. Annie without the Depression is like South Pacific without World War II. Shantytown bitterness Because work was so difficult to find in 1933, single matrons like Miss Hannigan were forced to hang on to thankless jobs running orphanages and to take out their frustrations on their helpless charges. Swindlers like Miss Hannigan’s sleazy brother Rooster and his tootsie, Lily, flourished because there was no easy way to make a buck. In the show’s bitter early number, “We’d Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover,” a shantytown chorus of erstwhile solid citizens, ruined by the stock market crash, recount what the former president has done for them and conclude, “You made us what we are today.” When I first heard that song, it struck me as unduly harsh: After all, Hoover didn’t cause the Great Depression. But in 1933 it was widely perceived that he had, and this song accurately reflects that attitude. More important, it sets the stage for the desperate period in which the runaway orphan Annie must survive: not necessarily a cruel world, but a world in which nice people have grown desperate. Irrational exuberance Amid this economic crisis, Annie’s indefatigable cheerfulness comes as such a relief that she’s invited to the White House, where her singing of “Tomorrow” inspires FDR to save the country by launching the New Deal. Without such a crisis, who needs her? In boom times, sunny optimism— what the Yale economist Robert Shiller called “irrational exuberance”— is not only unnecessary, it’s downright dangerous, as we’ve learned in our own recent economic meltdown.
I say: Annie wasn’t much of a show to begin with. Its original target audience is indeed dying out. But if this show is to retain any relevance, the answer is not to scrap the Depression references, but to preserve them— as a reminder of how Americans felt at a traumatic period in our history. A trauma, incidentally, that we did survive.
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Chile: Left wing and right, together
BY: Steve Cohen
03.06.2010
Chile is in the news this week due to that disastrous earthquake, and North Americans are realizing how little we know about that country. That’s a shame, because Chile today offers us a useful lesson in peaceful coexistence between laissez-faire capitalism and nanny-state socialism. |
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Can capitalists and socialists get along? Chile is in the news this week due to that disastrous earthquake, and North Americans are realizing how little we know about that country. That’s a shame, because Chile today offers us a useful lesson in peaceful coexistence between laissez--faire capitalism and nanny-state socialism. This congruence has been helpful to its earthquake recovery. It also has given Chile a health care system that works much better than ours, at a time when Americans seem unable to get our health care act together. Chile’s death toll was low compared to the magnitude of its recent quake, thanks to strict government building laws that have been imposed by Chile’s right-wing dictators and by its Socialist leaders alike. It’s not that the two political extremes worked together. Rather, each wing, for its own reasons, implemented strong governmental control. Socialists imposed rules because they believe they know what’s best for the people, while Pinochet people imposed rules because, well, that’s what dictators do. Not long ago I visited Chile when a friend was spending a year there, teaching English at a Chilean school. The visit certainly was informative. Thirty-seven years after the violent overthrow of Chile’s Socialist president, Salvadore Allende, repercussions of that event continue, but a great deal has changed, too. Nixon and the copper mines As most Americans seem to have forgotten, Allende, a Socialist, was elected president in 1970 with only 36% of the vote in a three-man race. His administration apparently made a mess of Chile’s economy— but that, of course, was no excuse for armed rebellion. Among other actions, Allende nationalized Chile’s copper mines, most of which were owned by U.S. companies. Therefore he encountered opposition from commercial interests in his country and the U.S. The 1973 military coup that deposed him was supported by President Nixon and the American CIA. Allende was reported as having shot himself, but it’s widely believed that he was executed. General Augusto Pinochet then began a dictatorship that lasted from 1973 to 1990. Chile has been governed for the last ten years by democratically elected Socialists who are friendly to the U.S. The current president, Michelle Bachelet— Chile’s first female president— is a physician who extended medical and dental coverage in Chile’s public health system. Chile’s social welfare programs co-exist within a generally privatized economy. The government runs one large bank and one large copper company. They are Chile’s version of a “public option.” When President Bachelet’s second term expires on March 11, her successor will be Sebastián Piñera, a billionaire economist and investor. He’s no Socialist, but he has no plan to dismantle Chile’s present system, either. Airport shakedown Yet some of the old anti-American resentments remain. When my family landed at the capital city of Santiago, officers demanded that we pay $131 cash for each of us. They called it a “reciprocity” fee and told us, frankly, that it’s levied because the U.S. requires Chileans buy a visa to travel here. That American tax was imposed by the Nixon administration during the Allende years. Chileans, I discovered during my visit, have a predilection towards conservative values and obedience to authority. For three centuries, much of Chile’s governing class came from Spain, home of autocratic kings and clerics and, later, Generalissimo Franco.
What most people in North America don’t realize is that Germans also comprise a substantial Chile’s population. Between 1850 and 1900 Chile invited families from Germany to immigrate, offering free land, so the country was infused with immigrants who had been indoctrinated in the values of Otto Bismarck, organizer of the German Empire. Thus German cultural clubs and restaurants, not to mention Viennese waltzes, are almost as ubiquitous as Latin music. On the slopes of the Andes Mountains I saw chalets that resemble what we associate with the German and Austrian Alps. Citizens are conservative and pride themselves on their self-reliance.
On a flight from Santiago to the southern city of Osorno, I sat next to a middle-aged woman named Regina, whose family has lived in Chile since the 1870s. She described herself as German, not as “German-Chilean.” Regina lamented that her daughter has turned away from the family’s heritage and doesn’t read or speak German. Mind you, this is 140 years since the family arrived. Four generations, and only now is it abandoning the mother tongue! Compare that to the experience of Italian Americans and Jewish Americans who arrived later. How many of them still speak Italian or Yiddish? Chile’s motto is “Liberty Within Order,” and in Osorno I saw banners proclaiming that city’s credo: “Constancy and Discipline.” The Spanish and German heritage helps explain Chile’s emphasis on law and order, and also its acceptance of dictatorial administrations like Pinochet’s. A positive result of Chileans’ obedience to authority is the cleanliness of city streets and sidewalks. Bismarck the paternalist If you are puzzled why a conservative populace would embrace socialized medicine, think back to Germany’s Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. For all his right-wing credentials, Bismarck made Germany the world’s first nation with national health insurance, social security, disability insurance and (later) unemployment compensation. Bismarck, if he were here today, would no doubt offer Obama some good advice about health care reform. “Go ahead and call it Socialism if you like,” Bismarck told his critics in the 1880s. “I don’t care.” My family experienced Chile’s health care system directly. Our son got a prompt and free office visit from a doctor, and his drug prescription was filled at minimal cost.
(I had an even more dramatic and personal experience in Peru, where the heath care system is similar. Dizzy and feverish from altitude sickness, I asked the clerk at my hotel about the availability of medical help. Ten minutes later, two doctors from the local hospital came to my room. They diagnosed me, gave me an injection and I fell asleep. Four hours later, both doctors returned to check on my condition. My fever had subsided and I felt refreshed. They handed me a bottle of liquid medicine and then, apologetically, said they were sorry but they had to charge me the equivalent of $15 for their services and the drugs.)
Respond to this Article Cross-Cultural • Posted on 03/06 • Permalink • More by this author |
A selective guide to arts commentaries in print and websites elsewhere.
Introduction to Broad Street Review, plus biographies and contact points for our editors and contributors.
How to submit articles.
How to submit letters.
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‘A Behanding in Spokane’ on Broadway
BY: Toby Zinman
03.06.2010
A Behanding in Spokane is less provocative and less political than Martin McDonagh’s previous brand of Irish lunacy. But with the wildly unsettling presence of Christopher Walken, it’s a great show. A Behanding in Spokane. By Martin McDonagh; directed by John Crowley. Through June 6, 2010 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 West 45th St, New York. (212) 239-6200 or (800) 432-7250 or www.behandinginspokane.com. |
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Watered-down lunacy, The Yikes! factor cubed. Martin McDonagh’s vicious hilarity (known to theatergoers via The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Cripple of Inishmaan, and to moviegoers via In Bruges) plus the wildly unsettling presence of Christopher Walken— here hollow-voiced, hollow-eyed, hollow cheeked, missing a hand and snarling— well, yikes! A Behanding in Spokane is about a man named Carmichael (Walken with a long gray hairdo, a long overcoat, sporting a little pot belly and walking with that signature bizarre combo of stealthy grace and mincing step). Early on, in a cheesy hotel room, he tells his story: Forty-seven years ago, a group of hillbillies held his hand down over a railroad track until the train arrived to cut it off. They left “the lad” there, and “waved him goodbye with his own hand.” Since then, Carmichael has been searching— not for the hillbillies (revenge would be far too straightforward a motive for McDonagh)— but for the hand. Two young weed-selling scammers, Toby (Anthony Mackie) and Marilyn (Zoe Kazan— wait until you see her climb a radiator pipe halfway to the ceiling), have brought him a hand, but the wrong hand. Mayhem and misunderstandings ensue, exacerbated by the slimy hotel receptionist (Sam Rockwell). Stupidity—the usual component that fuels a McDonagh plot— combines here with American racism. (Is there non-stupid racism? Well, are there non-white hillbillies?) This is the first McDonagh play to be set in America, with American characters, and his Irish lunatics/scary guys are funnier (maybe because the language/accents are more exotic to my ear; maybe the Irish don’t find them so funny). But McDonagh’s “Leenane” plays and his “Inishmore” and “Inishmaan” plays are fiercer and more extravagant and more substantial, with more to say about dangerously obsessed and delusional people. In those works we feel a creepy, thrilling gamut of emotions from appalled to heartwrenched for their characters. The Pillowman, set not in Ireland but in some mysterious totalitarian country, is stuffed with ideas about families and governments and the power of stories. Here, by contrast, McDonagh’s story-telling monologues are neither as riveting nor as revealing of character. The syntax and vocabulary is sometimes off-kilter for American voices. And the characters are less developed and seem, therefore, to be merely cartoons and plot devices. Less political, less philosophical, less provocative, less shocking and therefore less interesting, A Behanding in Spokane isn’t really much of a play. But, with Walken in it, it’s a great show. Whether the script would work as anything other than a regional faux-bold little-theater diversion without this actor (whose fan base is out in force in the audience) is anybody’s guess. ♦ Respond to this Article Theater • Posted on 03/06 • Permalink • More by this author |
A selective guide to arts commentaries in print and websites elsewhere.
Introduction to Broad Street Review, plus biographies and contact points for our editors and contributors.
How to submit articles.
How to submit letters.
How to advertise.
Editor’s Digest
BY: Jim Rutter
03.06.2010
Pig Iron contemplates the future. Plus other links to recent articles and websites that have interested us. |
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Recent articles of interest
“A Wild, Wild West of Their Own.” Philadelphia actress (and Temple MFA graduate) Krista Apple chronicles the aesthetic trends that catapulted Philadelphia’s experimental Pig Iron theater troupe to national recognition and highlights the group’s likely future directions, including its plans to open a Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training in Philadelphia in 2011. (Krista Apple, American Theatre Magazine, February, 2010.) Playwright’s Nurturing is the Focus of a Study: If Eugene O’Neill wrote it today, would Long Day’s Journey Into Night ever see a production? Or would uncaring corporate-minded producers and artistic directors whittle away its significance in workshops? According to the authors of Outrageous Fortune—the Theatre Development Fund’s recently released six-year study about how plays get written and produced in America— O’Neill would today face hostility from theaters, producers and audiences, and would likely have given up long before he put his pen to the page. (Patrick Healy, New York Times, Feb. 13, 2010.) “New gay theater has more love than politics.” A new breed of plays and musicals this season is presenting gay characters in love stories, replacing the topical; and political messages of 1980s and ‘90s shows like The Normal Heart and Angels in America with more personal appeals for social progress, reports Patrick Healy in The New York Times (Feb. 23, 2010). That begs a point raised by Dan Rottenberg in BSR in 2006: “The essence of drama is conflict— and there’s ample conflict in the endless dance between the sexes but relatively little conflict in the seduction of one gay man by another.” (See “The trouble with gay theater.”). (Dan Rottenberg.) The music of Olympic figure skating isn’t what it could be. Figure skating music must include a number of varying tempos that match the athlete’s choreography— graceful passages for artistic ice dancing, exhilarating crescendos to highlight a leap, and slower portions where a skater can catch her breath. But for audiophiles, it often sounds like a grating, disjointed mix. The Washington Post’s Anne Midgette examines the current trends Olympian’s and their coaches employ to balance the demands of skating artistry and musical purity. (Feb. 14, 2010). ♦Respond to this Article Editor's Notebook • Posted on 03/06 • Permalink • More by this author |