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.

Years before the Church’s sexual abuse scandal broke in America, I was privy to it, but either too stupid or too preoccupied to follow up. I was a working journalist at the time, and it could have been my ticket to a Pulitzer.

My sister was a county detective in New Jersey, working juvenile, and locking up priests left and right for molesting young boys, and the Church was sending these pedophile priests to Canada for six weeks of “rehab,” and then reassigning them– within the same bloody county! Mother Church as Father Enabler.

My sister told me of wiring one youngster and then playing the tape of his sexual encounter with a priest for his parents in an effort to get them to press charges. But they were so terrified of the Church’s power that they declined, even when confronted with he sordid, undeniable reality of their own son’s molestation.

The diocese was exerting tremendous pressure to keep the lid on what would become the now-familiar scandal, and my sister’s best efforts to see at least a smattering of justice were stymied at every turn, both by the Church and by the politics of the day. The two were fearsomely intertwined, then as now.

Fellatio with Father Ray

Years before that, there was Father Ray. I was living with two roommates in Society Hill. These guys— ex-dope shooters and general street hustlers— had been around the block, and whenever they were broke, they made a call to Father Ray at his parish in the Northeast.

As quickly as his new Oldsmobile could get him downtown, Father Ray would be ringing the bell. I’d leave and sometimes pass him on the stairs, a small, wizened, bespectacled man with the mottled face of a heavy drinker. He wore a tan windbreaker and black trousers and never looked at me.

When I returned, my roomies were usually off spending the $50 that Father Ray had given each of them for letting him perform fellatio on them. They calculated that Father Ray must have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of the Church’s money on male sex over the years.

The role of alcohol

Nothing new here, really. But what I’ve never read in all the stories of priestly perversion is the part played by alcohol.  If anyone has written studies or stories about the connection between alcohol and the ongoing epidemic of priestly sexual crimes, they’ve escaped me.

My own take– based on nothing more than too many years as a practicing drunk– is that, for many priests, alcohol is a major factor in their fall from grace, as well as the subsequent scarring of untold young lives. To me, the causal chain goes like this:

Many priests are heavy drinkers. Alcohol lowers celibate inhibitions. Boys and young men– altar boys and students– are readily available and sometimes swayed by the perceived power of a reversed collar and a friendly manner.

Boys, but not women?

I know that girls and women have been priestly victims as well. But the offending priests, I would submit, tend to think of celibacy as a heterosexual issue. To many priests, sex with males doesn’t constitute a breaking of celibate vows (or at least not as much of a breaking).

I would be curious to know if civil and/or canonical authorities have investigated the correlation between alcohol abuse and sex crimes as applied to Roman Catholic clergy. If history is any indicator, though, I suspect my curiosity will go unanswered for some time to come.

All of this background probably doesn’t mean much to Osmo Vänska, the aureole-haired, Finnish-born music director of the Minnesota Orchestra. Maestro Vänska, who studied conducting at—what else?— the Sibelius Academy in Finland, takes an approach to his great compatriot that is all his own.

At one time the seven Sibelius symphonies— having leapfrogged over those of Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler— were considered the natural successors of Beethoven’s nine. So keenly anticipated were they that for two decades a Sibelius Eighth was the most eagerly awaited work in the classical music world. Its failure to materialize, like the unwritten sequel to J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, only deepened the mystery and gravitas that surrounded the composer’s silence.

No longer so difficult

Sibelius (1865-1957) wasn’t considered a Friday afternoon pop tart then. His music seemed difficult and strange to many, a chthonic force that overturned conventional harmony and symphonic form and obeyed rules of its own. 

Nowadays, it’s easy to hear the Wagnerian influences in his work. The harmony is familiar, the structure assimilated. The casual listener can peg Sibelius as another late Romantic and be done with it.

That isn’t Vänska’s way. He wants us to hear the strangeness again, the abrupt surges and silences, the twists and turns of the Sibelian narrative. He wants us to appreciate the fact that that narrative is as much a modernist as a Romantic trait, with many a detour and no easy resolution.

This is true even in the Sibelius Second Symphony, which ends on what is conventionally taken to be an extended triumphalist climax. But insofar as the music wins through, it does so after long travail and no small contradictory impulse. It also exhibits, for the first time, the pattern that will become more and more characteristic of the Sibelius symphonies, in which themes are not stated directly but grow out of cell-like motivic elements.

In Vänska’s hands, the Second was craggy and gruff, with tempos pulled a bit roughly, too. If this wasn’t a Sibelius for everyone, it was a refreshing take on a score whose over-familiarity has dulled many ears to its abiding novelty. The orchestra responded finely to Vänska’s approach.

Perpetual motion machine

Vänska opened the program with the work of another fellow-countryman, Kalevi Aho. Mr. Aho, who is 61, has penned 14 symphonies to the Sibelius seven, but although Vänska has championed them he brought instead Minea, a single-movement work that scarcely breathes from its first bar to the last of its 18 minutes, a perpetual motion machine whipped by nonstop syncopated percussion.

Minea begins arrestingly with a motif, proclaimed by four trumpets in unison, that alternates between C and D. It soon spills over, however, into an Oriental-sounding riff that could well serve for a film track; and though it had better moments of invention, it was more busy than involving, at least on a first hearing.

Not such odd company

Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto might have seemed odd company here, but there is a connection between this score and the Sibelius: Liszt too explores the idea of themes developing out of motivic cells.  He worked on the concerto between 1839 and 1861 before finally performing it. 

It begins with quiet play in the woodwinds, which the piano interrupts and the violins bear away:  a splendidly offbeat start in a work that’s full of surprises. The young French pianist Jean-Frédéric Neuburger was engagingly awkward onstage, but all business at the keyboard as he brought off his bravura part with zest and aplomb.

Vänska drew fresh-sounding performances from the Orchestra for all three works. Don’t start thinking about the local music director sweepstakes, though; he’s signed with Minnesota through 2015.

Bad’s life has been stripped down to one remaining relationship, with his agent, with whom he regularly talks on the phone. He no longer has his own band, instead playing with locals at each gig. Most of these musicians are happy to play with him; some are eager to learn from him, as had Tommy Sweet— now, apparently, a big star, though one whom Bad is reluctant to discuss.

Jean, played by the wide-eyed, subtly freckled Maggie Gyllenhaal, is an aspiring small-town reporter. Her uncle, a keyboard player in one of Bad’s one-night bands, arranges for her to interview him, and the two hit it off. Bad is as charmed by Jean’s four-year-old son Buddy as he is by Jean herself, and Jean and Buddy end up creating several kinds of change in Bad’s life.

Confronting failure

Anyone who’s seen both Crazy Heart and Darren Aronofsky’s harrowing 2008 film The Wrestler, with Mickey Rourke in the title role, will inevitably compare them. Each is about a man emphatically past his prime who is still coasting on a reputation built years before.

Each man continues to perform out of some combination of love for his art and lack of alternatives. Each protagonist is forced to confront his numerous failures, both personal (as lover, father, friend) and professional (as performer, creator, mentor). Each man must decide how— and whether— to live his life going forward.

But the differences between the two films are also significant, and not just because Crazy Heart has a much better soundtrack. (I’m no country fan, but I bought the CD and have been happily listening to T-Bone Burnett’s wonderful songs.) Crazy Heart is a kinder, gentler Wrestler, with an ending that’s both more hopeful and less ambiguous.

Overlooked by Oscar

As significant as story and mood are in comparing the two films, though, is the relationship between the lead actor and his role. Bridges has deservedly received much praise for his Crazy Heart performance, including an Oscar and a Golden Globe. (Mickey Rourke was nominated for, but did not win, the Oscar for The Wrestler; he did take the prize at the Golden Globes and the Independent Spirit Awards.)

Bridges deserves the accolades. He can communicate as much with a squint or a shrug as other actors can with pages of dialogue. He’s completely believable as an emotionally disconnected man going through the motions as he drinks himself to death.

Scandal-free in real life

I was, however, unable to completely forget that Jeff Bridges, unlike Bad Blake, has lived a stable, scandal-free life, married to the same woman for more than 30 years. This contrasts sharply with Mickey Rourke, once a handsome leading man (Body Heat, 1981; Diner, 1982) whose sporadic appearances in the tabloids over the years have kept us apprised of accusations of spousal abuse, a DUI, and a stint as a boxer. His battered face and body reflect numerous bad decisions before the camera begins to roll.

What is the more significant accomplishment for a film actor— to draw deeply on the life he has lived, or to communicate truths fundamentally at odds with his personal experience? It’s certainly arguable that the less eventful real life of Jeff Bridges makes his performance a more impressive technical/artistic achievement.

For me, however, the facts of Rourke’s life give his portrayal of Randy “The Ram” Robinson a resonance that’s lacking in the Bridges portrayal of Bad Blake. A gut-level truthfulness seeps into every frame of The Wrestler, and that’s missing from Crazy Heart.

     Robert Zaller is absolutely right re the implicit imperial politics in The Hurt Locker, a well-crafted entertainment.
     On the level of personal ethics, consider also the psyche and the motives of Sergeant James, the American hero encapsulated in a bomb suit on a bombsite. He is the reckless big guy who gets high on excitement.
     Another kind of hero? The guy who, unlike Sergeant James, sacrifices the chance at personal highs in order to care for his responsibilities to family.
     I think of a relative and his wife who have been guardian angels to several dying family members, sacrificing their privacy, their time and their money for their care. Boring, probably. Costly, certainly. Stressful, very. Heroic, yes.
Mary E. Hazard
Center City/ Philadelphia
March 10, 2010

     Hail to Professor Zaller, too, for rationally deflating the balloon of Hollywood’s version of the world.
     The American populace seems content to let our “leaders” fight endless wars in far-away places with strange-sounding names, as long as they don’t interrupt “American Idol.”
     The only long-term hope for an end to this casual madness will occur when the military runs out of volunteers and there is talk of a draft. Then there will again be marching in the streets, singin’ songs and carryin’ signs.
     But not until then— and maybe not even then.
Bob Ingram
Cape May Court House, N.J.
March 10, 2010

     As we spill like lemmings into the digital world, and wean our children on unprecedented and incalculable amount of televised violence, who cares any more what it means to be a hero? Besotted by testosterone, if talented women like Kathryn Bigelow don’t know, who ever will?
Margaret Chew Barringer
Narberth, Pa.
March 11, 2010

     The shallow nature of our film and media has been evident for many years now. I certainly had and have no desire to see that movie and appreciate this article for exposing the truth. Thanks
Jim Bronke
Cassopolis, Mich.
March 13, 2010

     A person who thinks all mistakes by his political opponents are lies is a trifle dense.
Thomas Patrick Burke
North Philadelphia
March 10, 2010

     Robert Zaller replies: I don’t assume that those I oppose politically always lie. But George W. Bush’s stated rationale for invading Iraq was as credible as Adolf Hitler’s claim that Germany had been attacked by Poland in 1939. Hitler knew the truth of his claim. So did Bush.

Barnes Day in the Inquirer

     Re “Barnes day in the Inquirer”—
     Once again, Robert Zaller discloses the disgusting sleight-of-law that the movers of the Barnes have used. When the city and the state are not luxuriating in dollars, why must this move from Merion of the Foundation’s art be pursued? A bus from the Philadelphia Museum of Art would be enough to transport visitors to the Barnes— where indeed they would get the aesthetic experience Dr. Barnes intended, not an approximation.
Michelle Osborn
Haverford, Pa.
March 10, 2010

     When are you guys going to suck it up and accept the fact that the Barnes is moving? Lower Merion never cared about the Barnes Foundation until the move was pretty much settled, never undertook to assure the integrity of the building or safety of the collection, made it difficult for people to visit, and made it nearly impossible for anyone to visit who couldn’t get there by private car.
     (Ever try to get there by bus? Doesn’t go there. Ever wonder about parking along the street nearby? Don’t even think about it.)
     Seems like the only thing Lower Merion considered worse than having the Barnes was letting anyone else have it. It’s a done deal! Give it up! It’s a treasure that belongs in the heart of the city.
Carl Anderson
Yeadon, Pa.
March 11, 2010

     As a Bala Cynwyd artist, neighbor and “Friend of the Barnes,” I appreciated your recent articles about the controversy over the Barnes Foundation move.
     The illustration you used with Robert Zaller’s latest article was one of many I painted of witnesses, lawyers, art experts and museum directors… and of course, Judge Ott, during the many weeks of hearings.
     The series of limited-edition prints I’ve created are available to anyone wishing to have a visual record of one of the many complex pieces of the Barnes- Fiasco puzzle.
Bill Ternay
Bala Cynwyd, Pa.

March 10, 2010

Martello’s Happily Ever After

     Re Dan Rottenberg’s review of Mary Martello’s Happily Ever After—
     Did we see the same play? First, that was not Snow White in the nursing home. It was her stepmother, the evil Queen.
     But Happily Ever After comes in many ways, and it’s what you make it. Martello’s Cinderella hardly seemed “reduced”; she was happy, she was using her talent, she likes her husband.
Beauty was happy in menopause, too.
     Your opinion is your opinion and I’ll spare you mine. But I was so glad I caught Happily Ever After while I was in town. And if her voice is “adequate,” may we all strive for such adequacy.
Joy White
Ann Arbor, Mich.
March 11, 2010

Barone the underappreciated

     Peter Burwasser’s review of Marcantonio Barone’s piano recital was brilliant. Barone is not to be taken for granted. It is a real shame that in our day so many quality performers deserving international admiration are hidden in the shadow of stars.
Alla Sherman
Newtown, Pa.
March 12, 2010

Jane Austen’s prose

     Re Alaina Mabaso’s “In defense of Jane Austen’s prose,” which responded to my piece, “Jane Austen is ready for her close-up“—
     Actually, it’s not Austen’s dialogue that makes me squirm. I love her dialogue. Keep it all. It’s all that stuff in-between— when Austen seems to delight in trying to convince the reader of what a clever phrase-maker she is, and of how twistedly complex she can craft a sentence.
     Proust got away with it because he had say so many interesting things to say. Even in the most prominent English translation (Montcrieff/Kilmartin), Proust’s style is irresistible, captivating, charming. By comparison, marching with Austen’s wooden platoon of convoluted strained hyperformal sentences feels like a chore.
     Think also that within 30 years we would have Dickens, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau. Their work next to Austen’s makes her writing seem a century or more behind its time.
     Austen’s intellectual canvas may have been smaller due to circumstance rather than any imaginable lack of intellectual firepower on her part. We owe Austen great credit for being a trailblazer for countless women writers for the last 200 years, not to mention working as a wonderful storyteller with an unsurpassed gift for character profile.
Robert Murphy
Drexel Hill, Pa.
March 10, 2010

     Editor’s note: To read earlier letters on this subject, click here.

Dancers in search of critics

     In response to Merilyn Jackson’s response to my letter about dance critics (February)—
     I too believe reviewers must write the absolute truth of their thoughts/feelings on performances. And I agree— artists need to suck it up and take the criticism. Bad press is sometimes better than no press. Let’s get that criticism out there and highlight what this dance community is doing— the phenomenal, the good, the bad, and the ugly. The artists will learn from experienced perspectives.
     But how can dancers entice a reviewer with an original performance when the reviewer isn’t present? What defines a dance performance as being “review worthy”? What causes a reviewer to take an artist “seriously”? What can the dance community do to attract reviewers (besides provide greater originality and/or spectacle)?
     Most dancers in Philadelphia are lucky if their dancing provides them a supplemental income— that is, if they make anything at all doing it. And what budding choreographer can afford to pay professional dancers’ salaries?
     If Philadelphia dancers waited to get a job that paid them well enough to rehearse and perform, you’d see much less dance. When you see a show, you don’t want to hear, “Well, I couldn’t afford dancers who had good technique. I couldn’t afford to rehearse them well. I couldn’t afford a real venue.”
     If dancers can still fight their way through these economic obstacles to put on shows with rising production costs, then someone out there can show up to review them.
     Shall we ask our audiences to blog reviews or submit them independently?
     Should we dancers ask our professional colleagues to submit reviews of our shows, supporting the community from the inside out?
     Write for the reader always, but if you’re particular about only seeing certain performances, are you really writing for the reader, or are you just writing what you want to write about? I think dancers and writers can work together to further each other’s best interests without losing the integrity of either art form.
Amy Bowles
Philadelphia
March 3, 2010

     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.
     Now, you obviously don’t want to give arts groups free advertising. But it might make sense for Broad Street Review to create kind of a clearinghouse for arts groups seeking reviewers. Groups could send in information about their coming shows and events. You could then cut and paste this info into a weekly e-mailing, sent to your regular (or semi-regular) reviewers, who could then contact the group directly if they were interested.
     Yes, I know how much you appreciate someone trying to add things to your already not insubstantial to-do list. But it might make sense in terms service to the local arts community.
Judy Weightman
East Falls/ Philadelphia
February 25, 2010

     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.
     Our Congress should grow up and walk the walk, not foolish talk false talk.
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
March 8, 2010

Barnes architects make their case

     Re “The Barnes architects make their case”—
     Robert Zaller, I have to hand it to you: You know how to take an issue and make it all about you.
     The 800-pound gorilla in your article is the fact that your conjecture of a so-called “unsustainable” Barnes Museum on the Parkway completely ignores (and contradicts) the fact that the Merion Barnes was unsustainable— which is why it had to be moved in the first place. It ran out of money. Hello?
     Nobody I know who has ever visited the Merion Barnes likes it. Nobody appreciates the fact that one can hardly see anything in those rooms.
     All the half-baked hysteria about how the Parkway Barnes is an example of the elite screwing the rest of us ignores the fact the Parkway Barnes is replacing a children’s prison that once stood like a canker sore at the apex of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, an avenue originally intended to be a center of art and culture for the region’s citizens. That’s a good thing for the city and its residents.
     Robert, please enjoy your 15 seconds of fame when the little indie film about it is seen by all 15 of your fellow anarchists, but please also come by the Parkway Barnes after it has opened, and appreciate the fact that one can finally see these paintings and sculptures that have been hidden in Merion all these decades.
Eric Vincent
Fairmount/ Philadelphia
February 24, 2010

     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.”
John Blatteau
Fairmount/ Philadelphia
February 24, 2010

     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.
     Will the new Barnes become the next Kimmel Center (i.e., a cold boondoggle designed by a starchitect)? Just ask the Pews, the Lenfests, the recently relocated Annenbergs and the other powers that be who are hijacking our cultural heritage for their own ego trips. I say to the Pews: If you’re so powerful, go make your own museum.
Liddy Lindsay
University City/ Philadelphia
February 25, 2010

     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.
     The Barnes’s recent hire of an additional curator in charge of special exhibitions further makes a hash out justifying the move to the Parkway on economic grounds. Won’t those marvelous Barnes paintings bring the tourist hordes on their own, just like they did in 1993 in Paris? After this not-so-special building is up and running, will the Barnes, at even greater expense, have to juice up its offerings with “special exhibitions”?
Victoria Skelly
Wayne, Pa.
February 24, 2010

     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.
     One thing that never seems to be mentioned is that the stones the building was built (or faced) with were quarried in the Cézanne country depicted in many of his paintings. Is this true, or have I been mistaken all these years?
     I have not seen The Art of the Steal, but hope it will move opinion. Thanks for your good work,
Caroline Wingfield Roth
New York
February 24, 2010

     Eric Vincent (above) writes, “Nobody I know who has ever visited the Merion Barnes likes it”. I have two responses.
     First, my father visited the Merion Barnes some time in the early 1960s, coming from Abington Township. He found it one of the most moving experiences he’d had. I have visited the Merion Barnes on a number of occasions. I have always been astonished and delighted. The same is true for the several people who ‘visited the Merion Barnes’ with me on those occasions.
     More important, what possible bearing does the like or dislike for “the Merion Barnes” of those who have “visited” it have on the adjudication of a petition to Orphans Court for an order permitting the breach of the trust terms established by the person whose property was placed in trust for display at “the Merion Barnes”?
Dan Larkin
Merion Station, Pa.
March 3, 2010

     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.
     On the way upstairs, try to spend time looking at the Matisse in the stairwell without blocking traffic. Look a long time at the lunettes until you really see them. Visit in silence the great Matisse paintings. Also upstairs, find the painting once hung in Mr. Barnes’s bedroom. Make up a story about it.
     Go downstairs to the east and start looking at the rooms. There are diamonds in the dreck. Seek out the former. For the latter, try to find the world’s most hideous Van Gogh.
     Also, count the number of Renoir nudes. Of those nudes, decide which are successful. If you do this with a friend, you must both agree. Let snarky comments fly. It will refine your taste at Renoir’s expense. Establish a ratio between good and ghastly Renoir pictures.
     Visit all the rooms you have missed. From time to time, try to see the method behind the wall arrangements. Attend to the Horace Pippin pictures.
     Discuss “Any excuse for Soutine?” Decide, after looking, if you want to know more about Pennsylvania German culture. Do not leave without looking at the major Southwest Native American pots.
     If you do this, you will leave exhausted but happy. When you exit, look at the façade. Understand its relationship to the institution and resolve to return in about 18 months.
Arthur Waddington
Wynnewood, Pa.
March 3, 2010

     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.
     To Eric Vincent, who writes that no one he knows has ever liked the Merion Barnes: I wish you a wider circle of acquaintance.
     To Liddy Lindsay: I think I have a good idea for what the new “Barnes” should contain. What about bringing the Annenberg collection back from the Met in New York, to grace Walter Annenberg’s native city? Of course, the collection is protected by an ironclad stipulation that it remain at the Met forever in its own wing, and that its works never be sold, loaned, etc. But the same provisions didn’t stop Philadelphia’s city fathers from figuring out how to break the Barnes indenture. Might as well scarf up Monticello while we’re at it. Didn’t Tom Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence here?

‘A Governor’s Romance’

     Re Dan Rottenberg’s lyrics to “A Governor’s Romance” (Editor’s Notebook)—
     Dan, talk about hidden talents! You have earned my first “Grampy” award for being old enough and still able to remember that Ricky Nelson tune.
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
March 9, 2010

Orchestra’s marketing

     Re “The Orchestra’s inane marketing”—
     Dan Coren makes many good points. Every time the Philadelphia Orchestra calls me, trying to sell me a subscription, I tell them that they don’t play the music that interests me.
     If you’re looking for “the new,” groups like Network for New Music, Orchestra 2001 and Relâche and, for heavens sake, even the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society are where you’ll find more interesting repertoire.
     And those lame advertising slogans, and “thematic” programs— as if those things really got people into the concerts.
     I do go to the Philadelphia Orchestra once in a while (about four or five times a season). But it’s invariably because there’s a work I really want to hear. Recently they cancelled Martinu’s Symphony, so I surrendered my ticket.
Andrew Rudin
Allentown, N.J.
February 26, 2010

     There’s an obvious answer to Dan Coren’s comments on the Orchestra’s “Try Something New” marketing campaign: The campaign isn’t aimed at him. It’s aimed at all the people— including people with college degrees— who have never listened to the Philadelphia Orchestra’s standard repertoire.
     There was a time when you could assume an American with a liberal arts degree from a major university had some familiarity with the major symphonies. That isn’t true today and it hasn’t been true for several decades.  By the time most Americans reach college age, they have been immersed in popular music since they were children and everything else has been blocked out.
     The popular music industry markets its wares as modern and adventurous, when it is in fact primarily appealing to our natural desire to move with the herd. Classical music is portrayed as conventional and stodgy.  But most contemporary adults would actually be stepping off the beaten path and venturing into a foreign world if they attended a Philadelphia Orchestra performance of the Eroica or one of the standard piano concertos.
     The Orchestra’s marketing campaign confronts them with that basic truth and challenges their sense of adventure. It may not work any better than most marketing ploys, but it makes sense if you look at it from the viewpoint of the audience it’s trying to reach.
Tom Purdom
Center City/ Philadelphia
February 25, 2010

     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.
     The quality of college orchestras has likewise improved many times over in recent years. The Penn Orchestra is a large group that now competently performs challenging standard repertory— Brahms, Beethoven, Mary Higdon, John Adams, etc.— as a matter of course, and I hear anecdotally that orchestras at other Ivy League schools are even better.
     If memory serves, only a very small percentage of my high school or college classmates had any interest in classical music back in the ’50s and ’60s.
     Second, if the Orchestra is aiming at people who are not familiar with the standard concert repertory, then they’re wasting a lot of postage and advertising money on the wrong people. Both my wife and I received separately addressed copies of the brochure that got my dander up; a close friend who is in fact a current Orchestra subscriber received one too. So I assume that just about everybody who has ever been on the Orchestra’s mailing list got one as well. I’ve heard plugs for the Orchestra recently on Temple’s WRTI during the day, when it is broadcasting classical music only. I’ve heard nothing on, say, talk radio or KYW.
     Finally, my observation has been that people who have reached the age of 30 or so without developing an interest in classical music are not likely to have a conversion experience. Some do, maybe, but not enough to support the Orchestra’s wishful thinking, if indeed they are thinking along the lines that Tom claims.

     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—
     This exhibition does have one marvelous Amedeo Modigliani sculpture of a head, obviously influenced by African art (as were many artists in Paris at that time).  I recall that the sculpture is positioned on the floor, visually “beneath” Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Perhaps Mr. Carreño missed the sculpture, because he was attempting to find a good vantage point through all those people to view the Duchamp! It is positioned rather high up on a brick red wall along with many other large paintings that compete visually for attention.
     Fortunately, the local museumgoer can examine this iconic Duchamp picture more closely when it returns to its normal home in the Art Museum’s galleries. To enjoy the marvelous Modigliani, however, one would have to make a point of seeing it by going back to this show a second time.
Victoria Skelly
Wayne, Pa.
February 24, 2010

     Editor’s note: To read an earlier letter, click here.

Vanishing art postcards

     Re “The vanishing art postcard,” by Andrew Mangravite—
I used to own a postcard store in Berkeley, California, called Déja Vu. It was arranged somewhat like a library with sections, not only for visual art of different periods, but such categories as kings and queens, flowers, food and so on. Problem was that people would browse for an hour and buy two 50-cent cards.
     We closed after a few years, but it was fun while it lasted and gave many a lot of pleasure and perhaps a little education.
Diana Kehlmann
Berkeley, Calif.
February 28, 2010

     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—
     I took in Any Given Monday a few weeks ago and thought it an entertaining, mildly cynical comedy-drama. It followed a somewhat predictable dramatic arc, but it wasn’t always obvious it was going to, and I’ve spent so much of my life working out plots that I probably see the possibilities a little more than most people.
     I didn’t find it odd that Lenny and Mickey were friends. Lenny is a high school teacher, not a college professor. In the American economic and social pyramid, a high school teacher and a subway worker occupy comparable positions. They could easily live in the same neighborhood, have similar childhoods and share common interests like football.
     The fact that one is nominally Jewish and the other is nominally Catholic isn’t that unlikely. In the circles I travel in, I have friends who come from families associated with all the major faiths. Words like “non-practicing” and “agnostic” are far too precise for our hazy, undefined relationships with the religious traditions that colored our childhoods.
     When I discussed your review with two of my friends, one of them pointed out that we were, in fact, a Catholic, a Jew, and a Protestant.
Tom Purdom
Center City/ Philadelphia
February 25, 2010

     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.”
     I’ve listened to so many Catholics and Jews refer to their childhoods that I probably find nun jokes and Jewish mother jokes just as funny as they do. And they seem to be amused by my stories about Southern backwoods ministers.

     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—
     I agree with Jim: This opera was magnificent. Unfortunately, Philadelphians tend to discount anything that is not 100 years old!
Cheryl Familant
Center City/ Philadelphia
February 25, 2010

     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.
     I love the sound of water splashing and the beauty of colorful set design as much as the next guy. But to compare this opera to Turandot, or any other opera by the masters, is to make light of what has made opera a great art form.
     There is much beauty in this show and talent in the cast, and creativity by the composer. But do not chastise me and my fellow lovers of our art form for expecting glorious music in an opera.
Warren Pasternack
Feasterville, Pa.
February 25, 2010

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.
Dolly Schulman
Wayne, Pa.
February 24, 2010

When poets get drunk

     Re Lynn Hoffman’s “Poets drunk”—
A poet need not read on time
Nor stroke his words with sips of wine
But for his scheme to be sublime
Must get his fancy on a line.

To catch my breath I slug away
With tumblers full of Chardonnay;
Merlot, Rosé and Cabernet
Will lead me through another day

Gamays will blossom as I long
To romp in fields of Sauvignon
For who can feel or want to care
When fueled with vin extraordinaire?
Jackie Atkins
Northern Liberties/ Philadelphia
March 2, 2010

     Editor’s note: To read Lynn Hoffman’s latest poetic effort, click here.

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.♦


To read a response, click here.

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?

Transparent, or concealed?

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.

Impossible to administer?

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.♦


To read responses, click here. 

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.♦


To read responses, click here.

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.

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.

Bryars, the musical bridge

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.

Incomprehensible, but…

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.

I really don’t know if this conception was driven by the necessity of overcoming Zellerbach’s acoustic shortcomings, or if it was a purely artistic choice– or both– and I really don’t care. I loved every second of it.

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.

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.

Good old Dark Ages

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.

Playful pagans

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.

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.

Erotic electronics

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?

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.”

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.♦


To read a response, click here.

“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.)

Beloved comic strip

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.