Not coincidentally, these and other characters coping so ludicrously with issues of sexual desire in Robert O’Hara’s stinging and original satire, Bootycandy, all happen to be black or gay (or black and gay)— that is, they’re authority figures who, having been relegated to the margins of mainstream society for centuries, have never exercised real authority.

O’Hara brilliantly perceives the common linguistic idioms that link gays and blacks— two groups with little in common other than their shared history of exclusion and persecution— just as, say, Gershwin and Gottschalk sensed the common emotional threads running through the music of blacks and Jews. But O’Hara’s response to this state of affairs is not to lament it but to have a howling good time with it.

In 11 very funny vignettes that jump back and forth in time from the 1970s to the present, we see conflicts between parents and children, blacks and whites, gays and straights— everything, come to think of it, except the dramatic staple of mainstream theater: the endless mysterious dance between men and women. (In lieu of heterosexual seduction, we observe a negotiation between two gay men concerning who will do what to whom, and when and where.)

Truth or dare

Nor do we encounter any strong, silent, confident adults here— only adults playing childish games (“truth or dare” or a “non-commitment ceremony” between two lesbians who’ve broken up) because they’ve been infantilized by society for generations; or overbearing black mothers overcompensating for the absence of black fathers; or men and women running off at the mouth because words are their only defense (a white man alone on the street at 3 a.m. avoids a mugging not by pleading or resisting but by delivering a nonstop monologue that convinces the would-be mugger that he really is inferior and in any case there’s no long-term profit in mugging).

In some sense, Bootycandy is a modern-day Alice in Wonderland, except here the Alice who encounters a menagerie of exotic creatures is not, as you would expect, the sole white actor in O’Hara’s five-person cast (Ross Beschler); it’s Sutter (Philip James Brannon), whom we first meet as an eight-year-old, then as a teenager, and ultimately as a gay adult. Sutter is the sanest character here but also the least interesting; the others may be wacky or desperate but they never admit to being plagued by doubt.

Within this narrow universe, O’Hara lampoons everything in sight, including the Wilma Theater itself: A clueless white dramaturge moderates a panel discussion among four black playwrights whose names and works he can’t quite remember, beyond the fact that they’re black. In another scene, the house lights go up and the five actors purport to shed their stage roles and just be themselves, only to discover that they have no selves— only the definitions imposed on them by the mainstream society.

Passage of time

Each of O’Hara’s 11 scenes succeeds on its own merits, but stringing them together so that some characters reappear provides an added bonus: a sense of how the passage of time both heals and wounds not only victims but victimizers as well. That lonely white (and maybe straight) man who propositions a black teenage boy or sneaks into a gay bar is no mere caricature but a human too. The final scene— in which Sutter visits his grandmother (played by the cross-dressing Lance Coadie Williams) in her nursing home and finds in her dementia a key to his own issues— is both hilarious and touching.

To be sure, O’Hara glosses over the significant difference between race (which is defined by one’s skin color) and gender preference (which is defined by one’s sexual behavior). But Bootycandy isn’t a sociology tract; it’s a perceptive and very funny satire that sticks to the ribs, as it should. The Wilma’s revolving set by Clint Ramos, confident direction by O’Hara and highly capable performances by five actors in multiple roles assure us that we are in the hands of people who know what they are doing, even if their characters don’t.

“A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong,” explained Jeffries, whose stores pointedly refuse to carry plus-size clothes for women. “Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”

According to Denizet-Lewis, Jeffries restricts his retail hires to “good-looking people,” because “good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people.”

Those comments somehow lay relatively dormant for seven years, only to inflame the blogosphere earlier this month. (Hey, it’s the Internet, not the American Philosophical Society.) Since then, angry women have been organizing Abercrombie boycotts and I have been covering all the mirrors in my apartment.

Jeffries’s dread that a girl of my size might some day pollute an Abercrombie store naturally shook me to my blubbery core. On the other hand, his comments did ease some confusion in my mind about exactly what he’s selling. From what I’ve glimpsed in Abercrombie’s store on my way to Sears, I had the impression that the store mostly sold muscular, naked Caucasian male torsos.

Confessing to my hubby

But in my Old Navy jeans, off-brand T-shirt and New Balance sneakers, who am I to argue with the chief executive of a major retailer? Once Jeffries’s message got through to me, I called my husband to confess.

“Honey,” I sobbed, “do you remember that petite, pretty girl I told you about who used to roll her eyes at me in senior year English? Well… what would you say if I told you only one of us was wearing Abercrombie and Fitch?” The conversation was short, and the divorce lawyer called soon after.

About the same time, I received a cryptic e-mail from my publisher. She said that while I certainly had had many unique ideas to contribute to her magazine, Mike Jeffries had finally emboldened her to tell me that I lack the physique that would attract the kind of stories she wanted to tell. But she wished me the best.

Heading to the mall

I logged onto Facebook to update my relationship status from married to single, only to find that the only people who hadn’t unfriended me were my mom and my former co-worker’s dog, who somehow maintains his own page.

To gauge my plight, I went to the Willow Grove Mall and lingered outside Abercrombie’s doors in my purple-rimmed spectacles and worn Timberland boots. A pair of size-two girls with long platinum ponytails walked out, talking about the party at Stephanie’s after the big game. But they didn’t invite me, so I wiped my tears and slunk into Macy’s.

Denizet-Lewis reports that in 2004 Abercrombie paid $40 million to settle a class-action lawsuit from minority applicants who claimed they were denied employment or forced to work in back rooms. Do you suppose there might be a place in their back rooms for people like me?

Chicken and egg

To be honest, the biggest philosophical question raised by Jeffries isn’t whether or not I should throw my well-endowed form off a cliff (or whether he should throw himself off, for forcing me to feel that way). It’s a classic chicken-or-egg conundrum.

“In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” Jeffries told Denizet-Lewis. “Candidly, we go after the cool kids,” which Jeffries defines as the “attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends.”

But here’s the question implicitly raised by Jeffries: Does shopping at Abercrombie’s make you cool? Or does the presence of cool kids in the store make Abercrombie’s cool? Who needs whom?

In other words, could I have charted a different life ten years ago if I’d worn Abercrombie’s cool duds on campus? Or would the fat-girl alarms have begun to wail as soon as I crossed the threshold?

Republicans with toddlers

I’d like to ask my cool classmates whether wearing Abercrombie’s tees back in college made a difference in their lives. But today they’re nurses, lawyers, baristas, administrative assistants, ministers, musicians, government bureaucrats or all-American wives with stellar Republican credentials and toddlers— in short, too busy to talk to the likes of me.

But at least they have time for a man in his late 60s with dyed-blond hair who wears distressed jeans and whose face looks as if it was just blown up with a bicycle pump. Mike Jeffries: Coolness personified!

Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony provided the most satisfaction, rather than the shock music that occupied the first three-quarters of the program.

Simon Rattle led a performance of the Pastorale that stressed what was radical about this symphony. Uniquely, Beethoven here wrote about a specific place: his beloved fields and woods along the Danube River near Vienna. The piece, he wrote, is “more the expression of feeling than painting.” Accordingly, he labeled specific sections such as “Scene at the brook,” “Happy gathering of country folk” and “Shepherd’s song.”

Rattle’s interpretation stressed Beethoven’s explicit program: You could hear the cuckoo, the meandering stream and the rustling of wind in the trees. The composer’s solid classical structure wasn’t neglected, yet it served as an underpinning rather than front and center.

Stokowski objected

Whereas other performances of the Pastoral take about 40 minutes, this variation lasted 45. Rattle observed all of the indicated repeats, bringing lovely, differentiating details to each reappearance. The woodwind and horn solos by the first chairs were ecstatic. Much of the tutti playing was of gossamer softness.

Rattle seemed to offer a rebuttal to the Orchestra’s famous 1940 performance of this same work under Leopold Stokowski in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Disney’s animators shifted the scene from Beethoven’s Austrian countryside to mythological Greece, where they pictured centaurs, cupids and fauns and Zeus throwing lightning bolts.

Originally, that spot in Fantasia was intended for a suite from Cydalise et le Chèvre-pied, a ballet about fauns by Gabriel Pierné. Stokowski and Disney abandoned that music, but Walt had too much time and money invested in Cydalise’s fauns, so he transferred those images to Beethoven’s Pastorale. To his credit, Stokowski objected to the switch.

“I’m only a musician,” Stokowski argued at a story meeting in January 1939, “but I think what you have there, the idea of mythology, is not quite my idea of what this symphony is about. This is a nature symphony. It’s called Pastorale. If you’re going to leave out the trees and nature, you’re going to leave out what it is.”

Facebook dreamers

Ollie Johnston, one of the revered “nine old men” of animation, told me, “Some people were so upset by what we did that they said they’d never be able to listen to Beethoven again. But we knew we could reach a whole generation who would never have heard this music in the first place.”

And today on Facebook and YouTube you can read comments like “This is by far my favorite segment of the movie. It just makes me feel like dreams can come true.” At the talks I gave before each performance this past weekend, many people in the audience said they’ll always associate this music with the Fantasia imagery.

Earlier in last weekend’s program we heard moving renditions of avant-garde works introduced to America by Stokowski and the Philadelphians. (Each of the disparate works on the program had some link to Stokowski.)

Hissed in ’27

Webern’s Passacaglia, which was hissed at its first U.S. performance in 1927, sounded beautiful this time around. Three fragments from Berg’s Wozzeck, now acknowledged as a classic, were powerfully projected by the Orchestra. Barbara Hannigan sang sensitively as Wozzeck’s mistress Marie as well as, at the end, the lines of the child left behind after Wozzeck murders Marie and drowns himself in a pool while trying to wash Marie’s blood from his knife.

Contrary to Robert Zaller’s remark that Hannigan “seemed insufficiently miked at times,” she had no amplification whatsoever. A microphone was on stage, but only for recording purposes.

A scene for soprano and orchestra excerpted from Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre is a specialty of Hannigan and Rattle. Their outlandish act, with Hannigan dressed as a dominatrix, brought a standing ovation. If you listened beyond the shtick you heard spectacularly accurate projection of staccato high notes that spoofed the excesses of coloratura opera.♦


To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Peter Burwasser, click here.

You could hear her distinctive voice in the harp-like piano notes that opened the program’ first piece: Mimi Stillman’s flute and piano arrangement of Debussy’s song Nuit d’Etoiles (“Starry Night”).  When a piece calls for it, Zhu can create streams that flow like the seamless notes of a flute or violin, rather than the detached hammer strokes of a piano. In the fast movement of Debussy’s Arabesques for solo piano, she even proved she can bang with one hand while she maintains that liquid flow with the other.

This was the final concert in Dolce Suono’s season-long focus on Debussy, and it ended the series with a flourish. All of the Debussy songs and instrumental works on the program were miniatures, but there was nothing small-scale about their impact. The only thing miniature about them was their length and the number of musicians required.

Curtis reunion

Stillman made an important statement about Debussy when she played six of her flute and piano arrangements of his songs. Many composers produce settings that express the emotions of a song but aren’t very interesting musically. The vocal lines of Debussy’s songs make good flute pieces because they’re so melodious and musically interesting that they can stand by themselves, without the help of a text.

The concert had some of the air of a reunion. Twenty years ago, Stillman and Zhu were young classmates at Curtis— Stillman having entered at 12, Zhu at the advanced age of 15.

Their partner on the Field Hall stage, soprano Sarah Shafer, is still studying at Curtis, but she’s another example of Stillman’s ability to surround herself with first-class associates. Shafer can hit the big notes, like all the students in the Curtis opera department, but she’s also developed the nuanced, less assertive style that art song requires.

Unpredictable composers

Shafer’s main event was a group of six Debussy songs based on texts by Paul Verlaine. It had moments when it required a room-filling surge but Shafer kept everything in proportion. She moved gracefully between the big notes and the passages that called for a crooning, caressing style.

Dolce Suono’s previous Debussy programs this year included entries that reflected Debussy’s continuing influence on other composers. For this concert, Debussy’s works were interleaved with the premieres of seven pieces by the winners of Dolce Suono’s first Young Composers Competition.

These pieces added an unpredictable element to the program and created a lively variety show, offering something different every five minutes.

Exit laughing

The contest winners all adapted highly personal approaches, but their entries reflected Debussy’s interest in imagery, tone color, Asian art and poetry that creates elusive images. Kai-Young Chan, for example, translated a Song Dynasty poem into textless instrumental music for piano and alto flute and evoked the mood of a desolate night.  Michael McMillan’s Images IV begins with a perfectly blended shivering for flute and piano and ends with the soprano singing alone as it creates a musical background for a subtly romantic five-line poem about things that tremble in their stillness.

The dazzler among the premieres was 23-year-old Viet Cuong’s Lacquer and Grit, an exercise in “overblown harmonics”— the sounds that flutists produce when they overblow their instruments. The sounds can be brilliantly attractive (the lacquer on the surface) but they require exceptional control (the grit behind the shine).  The result was an exciting virtuoso flute display for Mimi Stillman, combined with lively music that would have been enjoyable even if you didn’t know the composer had placed the flutist on a high wire without a net.

The afternoon’s grand finale was a piece by Hong-Da Chin, in which pianist, flutist, and soprano imitate birds. The flute is often used to imitate bird cries, but I wondered how a serious soprano like Sara Shafer felt about singing coo coo over and over.

Then the piece ended and all three performers immediately started laughing.

It was a fitting end to an afternoon in which the spirit of a great composer hovered over a stage inhabited by two young stars, a promising newcomer and seven of the composer’s youngest successors.

Not that the Brooklyn Museum isn’t trying to help, with a wall full of technical specs and a demonstration video by an accomplished watercolor artist. But the parsing of technique— pigment choice, size of brush, degree of wetness, direction of stroke– only emphasizes the distance between educated practice and inspired creation.

Sargent is an artist claimed by America, but he was American only by nationality. He was born in Italy to ex-pat parents (his father had been an eye surgeon at Willis Eye Hospital in Philadelphia) but developed his skills and his career in Europe and spent virtually his entire life there.

His name is nearly synonymous with the glamorous fashion portrait of the late 19th Century; a likeness by Sargent was a valued prize for the wealthy of Paris and London as well as among sophisticated circles in America. But for all his commercial success, his most famous works— including the “shocking” Madame X and the intriguing Daughters of Edward Darley Boit— attest that he was no obedient artist-for-hire.

Fresh intimacy

His watercolors, in some ways a world apart from his oils (as artists’ drawings and works on paper often are), are unmistakably the product of the same confident, bravura hand that painted the famous portraits. To his signature virtuosity, the watercolors add a fresh intimacy that puts the viewer into the personal space where Sargent painted them. His brilliant flurries of strokes and dabs and marks exude an ephemeral magic that breathes a freer air. Many of these works are so alive that they seem barely dry.

Most of the exhibit’s 93 paintings are from Sargent’s travels, primarily around Europe but also notably into desert areas of North Africa. The Bedouin he found there gave him some of his most arresting images: stark contrasts of light and shade, voluminous robes in deep cobalt blue, flowing layered tents, black-rimmed eyes staring back across a broad cultural divide. These paintings convey a nonchalant glamour but also the closely observed truth of a lifestyle exotic to an outsider but routine to those living it.

One of the most striking works shows a mother holding a small child. She stands in the heat of the desert sun under their tent, her face lost to shadow, her hands and the child’s delicate feet thrust forth into the harsh light. Vigorous darks— browns, blues, blacks— swirl around the focal point of bright exposed skin, speaking of protection and vulnerability, fragility and strength.

Boats and beaches

Mundane subjects often inspired Sargent to astonishing results. La Blancheria, a simple scene of wash drying in the sun, is a tour de force of light and shade defined with brisk, decisive color and technique. Boats Drawn Up is another, with a bold composition that slants a white sail clear across the page and fills the space beneath with a complex shaded tangle of boats, beach and napping sailors.

Here, as in many of his works, Sargent’s favored cobalt blues and ochres provide the rich basis for infinite variations of tone and shade. This palette is brilliantly effective in his paintings from the marble quarries at Carrara, an astonishing series that comes close to complete abstraction at times.

Portraits from this supreme master of portraiture are here, too. Some of them feature Sargent’s friends and family, posed and unposed, usually outdoors at sunny picnics and gatherings. In the best, faces are barely recognizable as such, acting as points of reference to hold the joyous swirling mounds of foliage and frothy dresses in place.

Rembrandt’s depth

Sargent also painted his artist companions, but the most extraordinary portrait in the show is titled A Tramp. This noble face with piercing eyes staring out from a ragtag swirl of greys and browns possesses the tossed-off nonchalance of Sargent’s best work, but it rivets the viewer with the nuanced psychological depth of a Rembrandt.

The works on exhibit in Brooklyn date from the late 19th Century to just before the start of World War I. Not only are Sargent’s paintings rich and beautiful, but they also serve poignantly to document a world that would soon disappear or be forever changed. So these works stand as an important record as well as an aesthetic delight.

The Brooklyn Museum owns many of the works in this show, but they’re not often on display. This exhibit, jointly organized with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, offers a rare opportunity to see these treasures in lavish quantity.

Gatsby, more or less a commercial flop on its initial publication in 1925 (it would have done far worse if Zelda Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins hadn’t talked Scott out of his preferred title, Trimalchio in West Egg), became a perennial bestseller after being force-fed to troops in World War II, though the literacy level has obviously fallen far since then. It has received five film adaptations (not to mention one for the stage), the most notable being Jack Clayton’s 1974 version with Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, Sam Waterston and Bruce Dern. 

Farrow and Dern, at least, were ideally cast as Daisy and Tom Buchanan— Farrow for her waifish, evasive vulnerability, and Dern for his crackling nastiness. No such successes can be found in Luhrmann’s film, but then it’s hard to imagine any acting performance surviving this director’s cinematic mugging.

Mating call

Fitzgerald’s plot is far-fetched enough. Jay Gatsby, né Gatz, is a poor boy who falls in love with a rich debutante, Daisy. They are separated by his induction into the army during World War I, and Daisy marries Tom, a man of her own class. Gatsby, meanwhile, gets fabulously if mysteriously rich, builds a huge mansion across the bay from the Buchanan estate from which he pines for Daisy, and throws big parties which become fashionable among the nouveaux riche. 

These efforts constitute an elaborate mating call for the personally reclusive Gatsby, who finally gets to meet Daisy only through the offices of her poor cousin, Nick Carraway. Gatsby and Daisy rekindle their romance; but in a showdown with Tom, Daisy opts to remain with her husband (it’s the only effective scene in Luhrmann’s film, even if characteristically histrionic). Daisy is responsible for the accidental death of Tom’s shantytown mistress, Myrtle, on her way back from this confrontation, and Tom directs the wrath of Myrtle’s husband George onto Gatsby, whom George kills.

This melodramatic scenario, narrated by Nick, is textured in the novel by Fitzgerald’s wry observations on the mores of the newly rich, but no such subtleties detain Luhrmann. As in Wright’s Anna Karenina, Luhrmann is preoccupied by spectacle— orgiastic revelry in Gatsby, as opposed to the imperial balls of Tolstoy— and in camp theatricalization as a means of taking down what little of dramatic integrity remains to his characters.

Dime novel plot?

In Gatsby, Luhrmann’s device of choice is an updated version of 3-D that blows curtains and snowflakes in one’s face. When the characters are foregrounded against the illusionist depth of the camera, they look like cardboard cutouts.

No purpose is served by this gimmick except to call attention to Luhrmann as puppet master. He doesn’t want you to believe in the characters— only the cleverness with which he deconstructs the vision of his elders and betters. Luhrmann even makes the superficial resemblances of Anna Karenina and Gatsby— mismatched lovers, a jealous husband, a climactic death caused by a motor conveyance— look like variations on the same dime novel plot.

When we meet Luhrmann’s Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), he turns a knowing and seductive smile on Nick, who observes that it’s one of the rarely charming looks one encounters in life. What I thought instead was how much DiCaprio’s studied expression seemed an attempt to channel the kind of corrupting smile Orson Welles always brought off, and how splendidly the young Welles could have played Gatsby.

Beneath Di Caprio’s skin

Of course, Welles did just that in Citizen Kane, a film that perhaps owes as much to The Great Gatsby as to the real-life magnate William Randolph Hearst. Welles would have captured the essence of what Gatsby represented for Fitzgerald: the immense ambition and raw energy of the driven social climber whose success masks the most annihilating inner emptiness— the tragedy, in short, of the Horatio Alger prototype in the real world. 

DiCaprio, a very careful and sometimes technically impressive actor who rarely delves far beneath the skin, never gets past first base with Gatsby, not that Luhrmann would have allowed him to. Tobey Maguire is likewise out of his depth with Nick, a character whose peculiar attachment and ultimate loyalty to Gatsby cries out for exploration. Carey Milligan’s Daisy is a kewpie doll whose interest to either Gatsby or Tom is inexplicable. 

Only Joel Edgerton’s Tom provides some interest. His character is crass, bigoted and morally detestable, but he’s a man who stands up in the end and gets what he wants, and his victory feels like the film’s only real moment. It’s also over the top— Fitzgerald wants us to feel less that Tom has won Daisy anew than that the two deserve each other— but at least there’s a spark of life in it.

How I’d do it

How should one do The Great Gatsby in our modern Gilded Age?  I’d take it out of the 1920s and give it a contemporary setting. Gatsby would be a hedge fund manager instead of a hooch runner. He’d have a slew of lobbyists and accountants at the ready rather than, as in this Gatsby, a single funereal butler bringing him the phone and whispering “Philadelphia” or “Chicago.” Daisy would be an Ivy League graduate on her own way up the ladder. Tom would be the CEO of a bank too big to fail.

As for Baz Luhrmann, he’d be banned from the set, and never allowed anywhere near a good book again.

At first glance, the assemblage would appear to be closely related, either by marriage or friendship. But by the end of this two-and-a-half hour production, each of the characters seems to inhabit separate interior worlds.

Under the brisk direction of Lynne Meadow, The Assembled Parties takes the form of a traditional family play where the audience expects the characters to reveal secrets about themselves and their relatives and that things will fall apart by the end of the gathering.

All the characters get lost— either symbolically or literally— in a rambling 14-room pre-War apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which revolves like a merry-go-round from kitchen to foyer to living room to dining room to bedroom. The handsome set, designed by Woody Allen’s frequent collaborator Santo Loquasto, might be described as a character in itself.

Cracks in the marriage

“You would love the apartment, Mom,” the awestruck young visitor, Jeff, tells his mother during a hurried phone call. “It’s like the sets of those plays you love. With the ‘breezy dialogue.’ They sort of talk that way and everybody’s unbelievably nice and, like, gracious and happy. It’s like you go to New York, but it isn’t there? But it’s here.” Or is it?

Act I takes place on Christmas Day of 1980. If you didn’t happen to read the Playbill, the clothes and the phones with their long cords would tell you immediately. Christmas decorations and a large tree take center stage, even though Julie and Ben Bascov, the occupants, are Jewish.

Julie, a former movie star (played by the ravishing Jessica Hecht), is the prized acquisition of her husband, Ben (Jonathan Walker), who seemingly adores her. But a rapid, hostile scene between them hints at cracks in their seemingly perfect marriage.

Faye and Mort, Ben’s sister and her husband, are obviously and pointedly less elegant and well off. The other characters are the Bascovs’ sons, Scotty and Tim, and their weird, socially inept cousin, Shelley (a very funny Lauren Blumenfeld). Jeff, Scotty’s college friend and invited guest, functions as the de facto narrator, involved yet removed, much the way Nick Carraway tells Jay Gatsby’s story.

Twenty years later

When the curtain rises on Act II, it’s 20 years later— Christmas Day 2000. The promising golden boy Scotty (Jake Silbermann) has died of AIDS. His younger brother, Tim (also played by Silbermann), is now the center of family concern as a wayward kid who refuses to follow everyone’s great expectations. His father Ben is also deceased, and also disgraced because of conduct unbecoming (and unspecified) during those past two decades.

The same fate seems to have befallen Julie’s brother-in-law, Mort (Mark Blum), an unsavory blackmailer. His wife, Faye (the wonderful actress and comedian Judith Light) now takes charge of the family, along with that faithful friend Jeff (Jeremy Shamos), now a rather staid lawyer, still enamored of Julie.

Loose ends

As the audience filed out of the theater, animated discussion of the play spilled out onto the sidewalk: How did Scotty contract AIDS? Where did Faye’s immigrant mother acquire a valuable ruby necklace? Exactly what sins had Ben committed?

But within a few days I had lost interest in the answers. Greenberg’s clever and glittering repartee faded from memory in the face of the plot’s increasingly obvious contrivances. For most families, things do change or turn out differently than expected— and that being the case, why should the audience be shocked or surprised?

Only the two women remained vivid: Jessica Hecht and Judith Light— superb actors whose performances embodied the enduring qualities of strength and fortitude in the face of life’s challenges. They are reason enough not to miss The Assembled Parties.

I think I speak for all music-loving Philadelphians when I say: Thank you for your tireless efforts to save our beloved orchestra. The work is far from done, but perhaps the tide has turned, and all of you deserve our praise and gratitude.

I would, however, like to offer three words of advice, based on the experience I had at a recent concert: Play more Ligeti.

Some historical background is in order. The Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) began his artistic life under the heavy boot of Stalinist cultural dictates, having barely survived the Nazis. In 1956, after the heartbreaking suppression of the Hungarian revolution by Soviet tanks, Ligeti and his wife walked across the Hungarian-Austrian border to begin a new life.

Almost immediately he encountered the young lions of the Western new music scene, including Boulez and Stockhausen. For the still youthful Ligeti, the experience was akin to a little boy let loose in a candy shop.

Composing on the margins

Perhaps because of his association with such forbidding music makers (this was the public perception; whether or not it’s defensible is another story), Ligeti remained on the margins of the music world, with the exception of his seminal vocal work, Lux Aeterna, which was included in the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

That music, like much of what Ligeti was writing, was actually vitally different from what the strict serialists were creating. Ligeti, while never pandering, was producing art of tremendous emotional and dramatic impact. In effect he was predicting the future of music.

By the time he died in 2006, Ligeti’s style had, in his words, undergone a 180-degree turn toward an even more accessible manner. This final period produced his concertos for violin and piano, as well as the opera Le Grand Macabre, from which the concert piece Mysteries of the Macabre is excerpted.

Hannigan’s sizzle

This delightful work, which both parodies and celebrates musical theater, was brilliantly performed by the sizzling (both vocally and visually) soprano Barbara Hannigan as well as the good sports in the Orchestra, under the buoyant leadership of Simon Rattle. When was the last time you heard a Philadelphia Orchestra concert that included the crumpling of newspaper as a part of the score? Not to mention the audience laughing out loud throughout the performance?

The balance of the Orchestra’s program seemed like an odd mix but ultimately resulted in a richly satisfying evening. The concert opened with a luminous rendition of Anton Webern’s early masterpiece, Passacaglia, which the Orchestra rendered as a great, flowing curtain of beautifully woven and colorful threads of sound.

Webern’s Second Viennese School partner, Alban Berg, pushes the harmonic envelope even further in his opera Wozzeck. The Three Fragments offer a concise sense of the dramatic range and power of this 1922 work. Hannigan and Rattle displayed the same focus and expressiveness that they achieved in the Ligeti, absent the levity.

Beethoven’s connection

And where does Beethoven fit into this mix? The lush and gentle rhythms of the Pastorale Symphony would seem to make this work the odd man out in this lineup, yet all four composers on the program shared a critical esthetic, albeit an almost simplistically obvious one: to craft music of beauty and emotional impact for the enjoyment of others.

That goal applies to new music just as it does to Beethoven. The audience’s happily boisterous reaction to all of the music vindicated this axiom.

Orchestra planners would do well to remember it. Their very future could depend on it.♦


To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.

The problem is that his name was unknown to all but the most dedicated of basketball fans; and the kind of athlete who lands a job of that sort, like Terry Bradshaw or Charles Barkley, has usually been a star performer. But Collins did have one advantage he figured out how to exploit: He is gay.

It’s statistically inevitable that gays should play in the NBA as well as other professional sports. The sexual orientation of Bill Tilden and Martina Navratilova wasn’t exactly a secret. Those two tennis champions enjoyed a certain celebrity, and so, as with movie stars, their private lives attracted some interest. Tilden, given the mores of his heyday (the 1920s and ‘30s) had to be discreet about his sexual orientation. Navratilova, playing in the ’70s and ’80s, shrugged about her own rumors, properly taking the position that her private life was nobody else’s business.

Obama’s ‘evolution’

Nowadays, being gay has been promoted into some kind of public virtue, and consequently Jayson Collins attracted national attention when he decided to come out. National figures praised his courage. President Obama gave him a congratulatory phone call, of the sort usually reserved for World Series winners or Medal of Honor recipients.

President Obama, who “evolved” with glacial slowness toward accepting gay marriage until his pollsters discovered the benefits, certainly appreciates political savvy. One cynic met another in mutual brotherhood, and I can fully understand that. Happens all the time.

I draw the line, though, in comparing Jayson Collins to Jackie Robinson.

What Jackie Robinson did in integrating Major League baseball was, socially if not legally, the most consequential act in American race relations since the passage of the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery in 1865. To stand alone on a field of white athletes before crowds of hostile and threatening white fans in ballpark after ballpark, and to perform with grace and excellence at the highest level of a demanding sport, represented a level of heroism that’s difficult to imagine and impossible to replicate today.

Jackie’s aggressive style

Nor did Robinson merely try to fit in quietly. He played with flair. To watch Jackie on the bases, rattling a pitcher, distracting an opposition defense, was to see an entirely new and aggressive style of baseball. He forced attention on himself, as if not only demanding his rightful place on the diamond but everywhere else as well. 

Every black man and woman in America knew what Jackie Robinson was doing, and for whom. And only they could fully reckon the cost.

But what has it cost Jayson Collins to disclose something about himself that’s of no relevance to the sport he played and little risk to himself? He may get that nice, cushy commentator’s job he was angling for. Good for him: Americans always admire a guy who knows how to work an angle.

Unfinished business

I’m fully aware that gays still face discrimination of many kinds, that fear and hatred of gays is still out there, and that tremendous institutional resistance to gay equality still exists in some quarters. We have a long way to go before gay sexuality is properly accepted as a matter of moral neutrality, subject only to the same kinds of restraint we impose on heterosexual activity: prohibition of rape, abuse of minors, and so forth. 

But the goal is acceptance, not glorification. There is nothing inherently praiseworthy or blameworthy about homosexuality.

I couldn’t care less whether you describe homosexuality as a biologically coded preference or a lifestyle choice. It is, or should be, nobody’s business but your own. You shouldn’t need to hide it and you shouldn’t need to flaunt it (although if the latter is your thing, that’s fine with me).

Barney Frank’s courage

There was a time when publicly coming out was indeed an act of courage, and when it took on social as well as personal significance. It meant something when Ellen De Generes or Congressman Barney Frank declared themselves gay.

But we have passed that turn, and the response to Jayson Collins indicates that a certain glamour now attaches to coming out, as if being gay were meritorious in itself and deserving of congratulation. That simply means that it has become, for the moment, an emblem of political correctness. 

Perhaps this, too, is a stage we must pass through on the way to full acceptance.  I’m OK with that, too. Just don’t compare Jayson Collins to Jackie Robinson.

“Alive and Ticking”: The invention of battery-powered quartz time-keeping in 1969 heralded the death of machine- and hand-crafted wind-up watches. A resurgence in mechanically driven precision movement, led by Swiss design houses, represents more than a technological and aesthetic revolution.
(Jonathon Keats, Wired, May 17, 2013.)

“American orchestras: A time of crisis or rebirth?”: As Classical music fades farther from the center of American cultural life, bankruptcies, lockouts and closures threaten the future of the nation’s orchestras. Survival will depend on a blend of cost cutting, community building and experimental programming.
(Anne Midgette, Washington Post, May 10, 2013.)

“The E-Book Piracy Debate, Revisited”: In an attempt to determine the impact of cost on e-book piracy, a major publisher of science fiction books recently removed copyright protections from its offerings. The results have proven little, for publishers or for piracy advocates.
(David Pogue, New York Times, May 9, 2013.)

Other recent articles of interest

“The Problem with David Mamet”: Since his 1991 anti-political correctness play Oleanna, David Mamet has used the stage as a bully pulpit for his evolving anti-liberal, pro-capitalist ideas. Only in two works since then (The Cryptogram and The Old Neighborhood) has Mamet dramatic poet side bested his polemicist inclinations.
(Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2013.)

“Saltz on the Death of the Gallery Show”: The gallery show used to connect artist and buyer while providing a physical venue for other artists to connect with and criticize the fashions and issues shaping their field. The Internet, direct-to-auction and the commercialization of art sales has expanded the idea of the “art world” even as it slowly erases that notion.
(Jerry Saltz, Vulture, March 30, 2013.)

“Deconstructing PIFA”: The second biannual Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts will operate on a budget of 5.3 million. What does that say about a city in which only one-third of its district’s schools employed both an art teacher and a music teacher?
(Emily Guendelsberger, Philadelphia City Paper, March 28, 2013.)

“Solving the Symphony Crisis”: Nearly three-quarters of America’s 131 professional symphony orchestras operate in the red, and the cause is clear: Their members earn more than six times the average salary of other musicians. If orchestras want to retain a place in the culture, they must stop overpaying their employees.
(Music Think Tank, March 27, 2013.)

“Why eBooks are a Different Genre from Print”: While eBooks contain the same text as a printed version, electronic books alter the fundamental nature of reading from something private and egalitarian into a corporatized, editor-selected experience. In this regard, eReaders fail also to accommodate the permanence and potential for shared interpretation of physical, bound works.
(Stuart Kelly, The Guardian, March 26, 2013.)

“Ballet 101: Dispelling myths for newcomers and skeptics”: Skeptics may dismiss ballet as incomprehensible movement amidst layers of tulle. However, ballet demands as much athleticism and dedication as the National Basketball Association, while also requiring dancers to tell a story through movement and gesture that surpasses the skill of seasoned actors.
(Stephanie Merry, Washington Post, March 14, 2013.)

“Reports of the Death of Opera Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”: Two recent books have argued that the composition of new opera amounts to little more than a “zombie-like pursuit.” More than a dozen new works commissioned in just New York and London prove otherwise.
(Marion Rosenberg, New Music Box, March 13, 2013.)

“Do Bigots Deserve an Audience too?”: Theater, like all the arts, leans left, especially on issues like abortion, equality and gay marriage. The genre’s failure to air right-wing perspectives not only inhibits open debate but also hinders theater practitioners’ ability to achieve their progressive goals.
(Daniel Marshall, The Guardian, March 11, 2013.)

“How and why taste changes”: Van Gogh’s genius rose to prominence only after his death. But even artists who enjoy fortune while living seldom fall out of the rankings centuries later. Critical appraisal rarely changes over time, and past masters remain just that.
(David Ekserdjian, Art Newspaper, March 2013.)

“What Shall We Tell Our Young Playwrights Who are Black?”: August Wilson and Ntozake Shange presented the fullness of the black experience on stage, warts and all. Today’s black playwrights shouldn’t let our country’s move to a post-racial society mute a similar portrait of contemporary African-American life.
(Carla Stillwell, HowlRound, March 13, 2013.)

“Weapons Against Vandals”: For the past decade, jihadists and rebels across the Middle East and Africa have looted or destroyed ancient sites and cultural resources. U.S. museums and historical institutions could do far more to protect these antiquities.
(Melik Kaylan, Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2013.)

“Why Hollywood kowtows to China”: In recent films such as Red Dawn and Looper, Hollywood studios have whitewashed depictions of the Chinese and their government. Distorting the activities of a repressive government pays off.
(David Cox, Guardian, March 11, 2013.)

“The End of the Creative Classes in Sight”: Technology has already reduced the need for specialists who read MRIs, analyze securities and write software. Applications that compose music and write screenplays will similarly disenfranchise the creative classes.
(Tom Campbell, Guardian, March 4, 2013.)

“Why Are Romantic Comedies So Bad?”: For decades, Hollywood’s biggest stars built their careers on romantic comedies. Today, the genre’s decline rests not so much on a dearth of talent as society’s relentless elimination of amorous obstacles.
(Christopher Orr, Atlantic, March, 2013.)

“The Gaze”: The works of Édouard Manet transcended his era’s trends in portraiture by distorting perspective and employing heavy brushstrokes. His depiction of his painting’s subjects turned their gaze outward, heralding the gaze of modernity that would occur a century later.
(James Polchin, Smart Set, March 2013.)

“Maestro Wolfgang Sawallisch, 1923-2013”: The conductor who led the resurgence of the “Philadelphia Sound” passed away at his home outside Munich on February 22. The Inquirer’s music critics recall his career as one of the preeminent maestros of the 20th Century.
(Peter Dobrin and David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer, February 25, 2013.)

“Oscars 2013: What the nominations say about America”: Four of the 2013 nominees for Best Picture celebrated patriotism, righteousness and strong-armed justice by any means. The modern Western may be dead, but Hollywood, it seems, has returned to the virtues of the Wild West.
(David Cox, Guardian, February 21, 2013.)

“Split decisions: When critics change their minds”: Art critics from Clement Greenberg to Terry Teachout have famously reversed judgment on artists as notable as Monet and Gustav Klimt. Changing social and cultural contexts can change a mind, but sometimes a deadened response is to blame.
(Ann Landi, ARTnews, February 19, 2013.)

“The queen’s new gambit: Chess as a great American spectator sport”: Collegiate chess programs operate with the same recruiting strategies, player and coach-poaching and drama of a Division I sport, only without the same fanfare. Through a bold series of publicity stunts, America’s only female Grandmaster hopes to make chess as popular as soccer.
(Jason Fagone, Wired, February 12, 2013.)

“Violence in theater: Revelation, not nihilism”: Kings blinded, babies stoned to death, corpses dismembered: Theater has produced images that rival movies for violent barbarity. Yet on stage, far more often than in film, the violence serves moral and psychological ends.
(Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, February 15, 2013.)

“Of businessmen and ballerinas”: The recent acid attack on the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet revealed the nasty drama involved in making art. The drama and inner workings of an arts company also shed some light on other less conspicuous but equally malicious industries.
(Shumpeter, The Economist, February 9, 2013.)

“Why it’s time for galleries to dump the jargon”: Art gallery catalogues and descriptions abound with academic and faux-technical terms when familiar language could suffice (i.e., “interrogate” for “ask”). This language intentionally obscures and often confuses, begging the question of what the galleries are trying to hide.
(Christina Patterson, The Independent, February 5, 2013.)

“Ice Age Art at the British Museum”: More than 40,000 years ago, humans possessed the conceptual and cognitive capacity to produce art. Anthropologists can argue over the meaning of those works, but one thing remains clear: Not even Leonardo could surpass the evocative or technical skill of these ancient masters.
(Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, February 5, 2013.)

“Classical: What If It’s (Gasp) Entertainment?”: Orchestras and opera companies struggling to fill seats should abandon one limiting distinction in their missions: the division between high art and entertainment. This false dichotomy not only fails to capture much of the Western canon, but also refuses to recognize the ways that many listeners approach culture.
(Michael Zwiebach, San Francisco Classical Voice, February 5, 2013.)

“Jerry Saltz on ’93 in Art”: The 1993 Whitney Biennial displaced painting as the dominant modern art form and ushered in an era dominated by installation and design works. By insisting on personal and political meaning over beauty, these artists have shaped the curation process ever since.
(Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine, February 3, 2013.)

“From Beyoncé to horse meat”: At President Obama’s recent inauguration, pop singer Beyoncé lip-synched her way through what everyone thought was a live performance of the National Anthem. If we care at all about reckless contempt—from celebrities and politicians—for the public that supports them, her faux performance should outrage us.
(Gary Younge, The Guardian, January 27, 2012.)

“Hotel Artists”: In 1918, Matisse alleviated a bout of depression through a long stay in hotels along the south of France. His ascetic renderings of these interiors not only restored his mental health but also permanently altered his approach to painting.
(Barry Schwabsky, The Nation, January 23, 2012.)

“The case for naming a U.S. Secretary of Culture”: Since its inception, politicians of all stripes have treated the National Endowment for the Arts like a political football. Creating a cabinet-level post for culture may not ensure funding stability for the arts, but it would reassert culture’s vital role in informing and shaping policy.
(Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, January 19, 2012.)

“David Gockley and the Golden Age of American Opera”: American opera reached its lowest point in the mid- 20th Century, with few composers writing anything but academic-sounding music designed to please their peers. But since the 1970s, one company director has overseen the commission and production of 40 new works, almost singlehandedly revitalizing the genre.
(Michael Zwiebach, San Francisco Classical Voice, January 15, 2012.)

“Where Have All the African-American Audiences Gone for Concert Dance?”: Dance companies across the country use aggressive ad campaigns to increase the number of African-Americans in their audiences. Maybe the marketing isn’t to blame.
(Roger Lee, Dance USA, January 15, 2012.)

“The Mozart Delusion”: The Nazis and Allies both claimed his music as a form of celestial culture. Psychologists claim his works raise fetal IQ or ease adults into a state of contemplative meditation. Despite these dubious claims, few of Mozart’s works showed anything other than the efforts of a conservative, even conformist composer.
(Norman LeBrecht, Standpoint, January/February 2012.)

“Why are we still waiting for Godot?”: Beckett’s existential masterwork turns 60 this year, begging the question why a post-World War II tragicomedy still sells out houses. The script’s indeterminate language, lack of easy answers and rich visual imagery provide some of the answer.
(Sean Coughlan, BBC News, January 4, 2012.)

“The culture of the copy”: The Internet has revolutionized the production and dissemination of information much the way Gutenberg’s movable type displaced the manuscript. But libraries, museums and other cultural institutions should tread lightly before embracing the digital revolution for their archives.
(James Panero, New Criterion, January 2013.)

“Making a case for high art”: The crowded market for contemporary culture emphasizes elevation of emotion and instant connection over works that reflect on the human condition. To ensure that culture does more than just entertain, we must insist on the superiority of higher forms of art.
(Tiffany Jenkins, Scotsman, December 28, 2012.)

“How Gangnam Style and Fifty Shades gave culture a spanking”: No works dominated culture in 2012 more than Psy’s pop music video and E.L. James’s novel about bondage. The former gave a peek into a rarefied class; the latter showed what an entire gender lacked in a feminist world.
(Boris Johnson, Telegraph, December 23, 2012.)

“Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?”: Half a century ago, writers as diverse as Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor and J.R.R. Tolkein presented Christian themes as central to the lives of their characters. The changing demographics and attitudes of contemporary America have turned current literature into a religious wasteland.
(Paul Elie, New York Times, December 19, 2012.)

“Naked appeal: Is it OK to find actors attractive?”: When a man or woman appears nude on stage, should only the prudent avert their eyes? Or would all audiences demean performers by taking delight in the naked body in art?
(Mark Lawson, The Guardian, December 12, 2012.)

“The Pleasures of Imperfection”: Critics refer to some of Shakespeare’s best known works as “problem plays”; Duke Ellington couldn’t finish one of his best known pieces; and Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo needs 15 more minutes of editing. But we should cherish these great artists because of their shortcomings.
(Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2012.)

“Too old for Beatrice and Benedick– or much ado about nothing?”: At age 78 and 81, respectively, Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones will play the feisty paramours in a new staging of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Their celebrity will attract ticket buyers, but artistically speaking, are they too old for the roles?
(Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, December 5, 2012.)

“Why we like cruel reviews”: Writers in the New York Times recently trashed a mass-market restaurant on Times Square and a little-known novelist. Critics of critics allege that a nasty review is just the writer showing off. But why shouldn’t reviewers also entertain?
(Russell Smith, Toronto Globe and Mail, December 5, 2012.)

“Who should be the next NEA chair?”: Rocco Landesman just stepped down as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts after a three-year tenure that kept the once-troubled organization out of the public eye. The new chair must reverse this trend and return art and discussions about culture to the forefront of public life and American identity.
(Ray Mark Rinaldi, Denver Post, December 2, 2012.)

“Interesting Times”: People who sit at desks or computers all day find little opportunity to experience the beautiful or the sublime. But that doesn’t mean they lack daily aesthetic experience, even if reduced to the cute, zany, or merely interesting.
(Hua Hsu, Slate, November 30, 2012.)

“Not Quite a Horse Race”: Each year since 1985, the University of Louisville has awarded its Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. Although its $100,000 prize dwarfs the Pulitzer’s $10,000 award, the general public and music journalists give the Grawemeyer little respect, most likely due to its process for selecting recipients.
(Frank J. Otieri, New Music Box, Nov. 26, 2012.)

“Kid Stuff at the Clark Art Institute”: Museum directors in Baltimore and Williamstown, Mass., invited members of the general public to design and select artworks for recent exhibitions. Enough of this politically corrects madness; the public should come to art institutions to learn.
(Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 22, 2012.)

“Will the decline of rep kill British acting?”: Sir Ian McKellen recently decried the death of repertory theater as the end of high-caliber British actors (like Dame Judi Dench and himself). Not so. The rep model produced a type of versatility in performance that no longer suits the needs of today’s performers, who must constantly switch from stage to TV to film.
(Lyn Gardner, Guardian, Nov. 20, 2012.)

“How Art History is Failing the Internet”: Art curators and historians have eagerly used the Web to publish works, highlight exhibits and engage audiences, but they’ve done so by continuing to work in isolation as solitary scholars. This approach misses the Internet’s potential for collaborative research and fails to employ new open-source technology for analyzing images and tracking data.
(James Cuno, Daily Dot, Nov. 19, 2012.)

“Worthwhile Canadian Coolness”: Over the past decade, America’s most successful recording artists, performance groups and actors have all hailed from the Great White North. Does this trend reflect a crisis of American confidence, or just the appeal of Canadian wholesomeness?
(Thomas Rogers, New Republic, Nov. 9, 2012.)

“It’s a brand-news day in Hollywood”: The Walt Disney studio used to sell products in order to fund its films. The company’s recent acquisition of Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm indicates that the business end of making movies now takes precedence over the production of art.
(Neal Gabler, Los Angeles Times, November 10, 2012.)

“Sienna Miller nude”: British actress Sienna Miller posed naked for artist Jonathan Yeo during her recent pregnancy. While these paintings intend to shock, contemporary artists who paint pregnant nudes enjoy a safety net: our culture’s veneration of motherhood protects them from controversy.
(Jonathan Jones, Guardian, November 7, 2012.)

“A guide to drinking with Hemingway”: Papa Ernest peppered his prose with references to more than 50 drinks, many of which his writing helped popularize. The type of alcohol not only defined his characters, but also helped elucidate his plots and themes.
(Jason Wilson, Washington Post, November 6, 2012.)

“It’s Polaroid’s World— We Just Live in It”: When Polaroid founder Edwin Land introduced the first instant camera in 1948, he intended his invention to fundamentally alter the way humans interact with each other and to daily events. More than 60 years later, it has.
(Christopher Bonanos, Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2012.)

“Horror: A genre doomed to literary hell?”: In the late 19th and early 20th Century, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and HP Lovecraft elevated horror stories to literary status. More than ever, our age of multimedia and capitalist crisis demands writers who can transcend realistic, scientific depictions of contemporary life.
(Stuart Kelly, Guardian, November 7, 2012.)

“How Contemporary Art Lost its Glamour”: For nearly two decades, the super-rich have inflated the cost of artworks, and artists such as Damien Hirst and Maurizio Cattelan have catered to their pretensions. Over the past six months, leading critics, dealers and gallery owners have rebelled against this consumerist approach. But will this revolt signal a return to appreciating art as a form of virtue, or a re-elevation of modernist values?
(Jacob Willer, Standpoint, November 2, 2012.)

“I’ve Got a Bad Feeling about This”: That George Lucas just sold the rights to Star Wars probably doesn’t matter to anyone but hardcore fans. But it should upset anyone interested in film as art. For 35 years, these films remained a singular example of artistic integrity and personal vision in a medium built on franchises and merchandising.
(Tom Carlson, American Prospect, November 2, 2012.)

“Pina Bausch’s True Gifts”: The late choreographer Pina Bausch blended intense theatrical techniques with sometimes obvious intrusions of text and symbolism. As the town government of Wuppertal, Germany, struggles to decide her company’s future, an appraisal of Bausch’s greatest gifts and technical weaknesses shed light on how she created her own genre: dance-theater.
(Joan Acocella, New Yorker, October 29, 2012.)

“A Matter of Taste?”: The weekend chef has now replaced the Sunday painter, as amateur gourmands everywhere uphold foodism as the pinnacle (or at least, substitute) of culture. But this enthusiasm neglects that food, however intoxicating to the senses, isn’t an art form that can enlighten our souls.
(William Deresiewicz, New York Times, October 26, 2012.)

“Does Willy Need Protecting?”: The owners of Arthur Miller’s plays stepped in when an Australian director wanted to stage his own rewritten ending to Death of a Salesman. If Shakespeare can withstand multiple rewrites and interpretations, modern classics have nothing to fear from a fresh perspective either.
(Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2012.)

“Hollywood’s perception of value versus real value”: The entertainment industry’s elevation of status over worth has seeped into academia, the financial sector and the art world. But a reliance on popularity as a metric leaves us struggling to determine what’s good from what’s merely successful.
(Neal Gabler, Los Angeles Times, October 21, 2012.)

“Glengarry Glen Ross revival shows us how low we’ve sunk”: David Mamet wrote his verbally aggressive critique of capitalism in the wake of Watergate and Reagan’s “Morning in America.” The current Broadway revival arrives on shores of cynicism; like the Occupy protests, the play’s message no longer makes a dent in the national consciousness.
(Mark Guarino, Salon, October 21, 2012.)

“How Fattening Up Will Save Ballet”: Ballerinas suffer from anorexia, brittle bones and torn muscles as a result of ballet’s ruthless regimen and Spartan diet. Encouraging female dancers to embrace their curves and admit their limitations can turn their art form from victimizer to empowering pursuit of strength.
(Deidre Kelly, Huffington Post, October 18, 2012.)

“The Dangerous Business of Being an Opera Singer”: The push to broadcast and film live opera in high-definition has led directors to incorporate realistic fight scenes, daredevil stunts and unsafe blocking into live performances. In this podcast, three opera critics assess whether these requirements place dangerous demands on performers trained only in voice, not stunt work or fight choreography.
(WQXR, October 12, 2012.)

“You Are Not a Switch”: “Talent borrows, but genius steals” has become a mantra in arts driven by technology, such as digital images, film, pop music and DJ culture. But applying that understanding of creativity to literature and painting misses the essential act of creation in fashioning the old into a new vision.
(Simon Reynolds, Slate, October 5, 2012.)

“How Capitalism Can Save Art”: Before the 1960s, great art emanated from a grounding in commercial trades and a healthy exploration of sexuality and religious ideas. Now, argues Camille Paglia, only entrepreneurship can save contemporary art from the wasteland of white-collar attitudes and insular academic ideology.
(Camille Paglia, Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2012.)

“Are professional book reviewers better than amateurs?”: The chairman of England’s Man Booker Prize recently stirred controversy when he remarked, “Not everyone’s opinion is worth the same.” The proliferation of blogging may have democratized criticism, but it hasn’t changed the fact that paid professionals, subject to a higher standard of content, produce superior opinions on books, or anything.
(Robert McCrum, Guardian, October 1, 2012.)

“The Case for Wagner in Israel”: An informal (though mostly enforced) ban has forbidden live performances of Wagner in Israel since the end of World War II. This prohibition of Hitler’s favorite composer confuses much about Wagner’s politics and Hitler’s history and leaves an important question unasked: Why should Jews continue to hear Wagner’s music through Hitler’s ears?
(Alex Ross, New Yorker, September 25, 2012.)

“Hold your applause until an actor deserves it”: The rash of celebrities on Broadway and the West End has audiences applauding the moment a Hollywood star walks on stage. Even starlets should face the same critical standards as understudies.
(Kate Taylor, Globe and Mail, October 1, 2012.)

“Philadelphia Orchestra’s residency in China: What’s the goal?”: The Philadelphia Orchestra first played in China in 1973— a huge diplomatic achievement that came on the heels of Nixon’s visit 19 months earlier. Its coming ten-day tour blends soft diplomacy with the organization’s more modern goals of establishing an annual schedule and finding new talent.
(David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 28, 2012.)

“There You Go Again”: What do filmmaker Wes Anderson, playwright Samuel Beckett and composer Philip Glass share in common? All of their works repeatedly return to the same set of themes depicted by a narrow set of stylistic devices. But this is due less to a lack of originality than to a fecundity of artistic obsession.
(Mark O’Connell, Slate, May 23, 2012.)

“Olympics, 388 B.C.: Mud, Sex, Hymns…Sports Too”: This summer’s Olympics in London will generate billions of dollars in revenue by pitting contestants in 35 sports in a struggle for national supremacy. The original Olympiad more resembled a hybrid of Woodstock and religious festival, with sports a diversion for the aristocratic athletes.
(Neil Faulkner, Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2012.)

“So Whose Swan Lake Is It?”: Nineteenth-century romantic ballets—from Swan Lake to Giselle to The Nutcracker— dominate spring schedules by claiming their origin in the choreography of the great Marius Petipa. But most versions seen on contemporary stages display the hackneyed steps of meddling, lesser minds.
(Alastair Macaulay, New York Times, May 10, 2012.)

“Barnes move to Parkway is progress, but a quirky something has been lost”: Moving the Barnes Collection to downtown Philadelphia may boost tourism and increase access to the world-famous collection. But the Barnes move is one more step in the commercial ascendance but spiritual decline of a city that used to take its character seriously.
(Peter Dobrin, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 20, 2012.)

“How to Enjoy Going to the Movies Again”: Cell phones have driven the last nail into the coffin of movie-theater etiquette for serious cinephiles. The boisterous crowd at midnight movies offers a different spectacle: hard-core fans who connect— albeit loudly— just as much as their silent, screen-worshipping brethren.
(Alexander Huls, New York Times, May 18, 2012.)

     Re “To follow your dreams, or play it safe?” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor’s Notebook)—
     Nicely done, Dan— a useful and realistic follow-up to Maria Corley’s wonderful piece (“The fallacy of ‘The Voice’”). I really like your point about starting out with what you really want to do, since it will lead you somewhere along that path— maybe not where you expect it to.
     I was a religious studies major in college, and when people asked me what I planned to do with such an impractical major, I replied, “Whatever I want.” Learning to make sense of and write about abstract explorations of the human condition turned out to be a great training ground for a writer and editor.
Janet Benton
Wyncote, Pa.
May 15, 2013

     ...and the British Medical Journal lists some 40 physicians who gave up the scalpel for the pen. They— and we— are probably better off for their decision. Among them are Somerset Maugham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Michael Crichton, Anton Chekhov and A.J. Cronin.
David Woods
Society Hill/ Philadelphia
May 15, 2013

Doctors vs. lawyers

     Re “Doctors vs. lawyers,” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor’s Notebook)—
     It must be wonderful to be able to view life through a microscope with a narrow focal plane. Literally thousands of lawsuits are resolved by settlement and millions of transactions are successfully negotiated every year without rancor.
     I teach a course at Temple Law School, which, among other things, contains elements of the skills of successful negotiation. The principal art asserts that the key to negotiation is good behavior and the adoption of a win/win attitude.
     While the adversarial system has it faults, it is far better to argue through surrogates who know how to behave rather than to “do it yourself” with the attendant consequences of personal bad feelings and other more serious behavorial misconduct.
     The few failures do not prove the point. The fact is that the failures are few, which is similar to the failures in the medical system. Your analysis is flawed.
Richard R. Goldberg
Northern Liberties/ Philadelphia
May 8, 2013

     Way to go, Dan. Broadcast this beyond Broad Street. We,too, were fired up by the Ken Burns documentary on the Central Park Five.
Helen Buttel
Queen Village/ Philadelphia
May 8, 2013

     As a lawyer, I serve clients— and, truth to tell, when something cannot be settled, I have confidence in juries of 12.
     Be careful when commenting on the “Central Park Five” case. The ‘confession’ of Reyes was only done after he could no longer be charged; that his DNA was found on the victim does not mean that the five were innocent— just that she was raped by six, not five. We also have to believe that Reyes acted alone.
     The “faulty evidence” (your term) included videotaped confessions, with the boys’ parents present, tested thoroughly under legal standards (Miranda) and then before two juries.
     Many of those arrested refused to confess and were released. Further, the five corroborated details of the event, location, etc., which they could not have done if they did not participate.
W. Bourne Ruthrauff, Esq.
Center City/ Philadelphia
May 9, 2013

     Thank you, Dan, for your article on “Doctors and lawyers.” Adversarial confrontation is no way to build healthy community. Societies that devolve into “us” and “them” are certainly not going to achieve any sense of community and will most likely rely on some false sense of “law” to keep order, leading inevitably not to a community of compassion but a state of totalitarianism.
     I would have liked you to have written more on doctors. Just as the legal system needs to be more concerned with community, so does the medical system. It seems that, while lawyers still have a voice in how their profession is to progress, the voices of doctors, on the other hand, are more and more being drowned out by the drone of administrative bureaucrats who make policies that pervert genuine medical practice. The only ones being served in society are those seeking to make some profit rather than those seeking to be healed.
Craig R. Tavani
Phoenixville, Pa.
May 8, 2013

     For what it’s worth, only 17 of the 39 men who drafted the Constitution were lawyers.
     They were probably the ones who drafted the Second Amendment, which would explain why it is so confusing.
Andrew Kevorkian
West Philadelphia
May 8, 2013

     I couldn’t agree with you more on your doctors vs. lawyers take. It’s one of the reasons I got out of law. There are many creative solutions to legal problems, but the adversary process gets in the way.
Joseph Glantz
Levittown, Pa.
May 11, 2013

     Comparing the lack of progress in the law to that of medicine seems to me to be confusing art with science. Law is a slowly evolving body of rules concerning the varieties of human behavior. It is aided (and occasionally misled) by science, but its foundational discipline is ethics. Modern medicine is based on the work of biologists and chemists, and developed by medical researchers rather than actual practitioners. As Dan points out, the law has had its own remarkable growth. But you can’t hope to cure human misconduct the way you can cancer, and justice is often a matter of balancing interests rather than producing clear-cut and unambiguous results.
     Dan is not alone in complaining about the law’s delay and expense, as Shakespeare reminds us.  But that is partly a function of its necessary workings.  Truth in a courtroom is not as easily had as diagnosis in a doctor’s office may be. 
     Dan concentrates on the excesses of our adversarial legal system, which indeed has many flaws (as does the judge-based European system). But Dan doesn’t distinguish between prosecutors who try to keep the prisons full and defense attorneys whose job it is to keep it is to keep their clients out of jail.
     A final point: Dan suggests that we need more counseling and treatment of offenders rather than incarceration, and I heartily agree. But medicalizing criminal behavior has its own potential for abuse, as Thomas Szasz and others have pointed out.  One has only to look at the sorry record of psychiatric imprisonment in the Soviet Union to see where that can lead.
Robert Zaller
Bala Cynwyd, Pa.
May 8, 2013

     The claim that “the medical profession today stands on the threshold of eliminating most human diseases and possibly even death itself” has been made many times over the past century and more. The end of all infectious disease, the end of cancer, the end of heart disease— the annals of medical science are as notable for the bold announcements as for the signal failures.
     You could create a nice little gallery with Time cover stories heralding the end of cancer from the magazine’s early years to the present. Yet the U.S. government’s “war against cancer,” spearheaded by the National Institutes of Health with billions of taxpayer dollars, has not in any way diminished the mortality and morbidity associated with cancer, except through the gaming of “five year survivor” data, in which the medical profession credits itself with “prolonging” the lives of people from the moment it diagnoses their cancers, even though these people do not in fact live any longer because of their expensive, quality-of-life-destroying treatment.
     The legal profession deserves all the scorn you heap on it, and more. But medicine does not deserve your absurd praise. Take a look at the increase in antibiotic resistant infections. Consider why routine mammograms and PSA tests are no longer recommended for most people. Ponder the fact that the increases in life spans have mainly to do with public health issues, such as sanitation and sewage, better diets and safer lifestyles, than with any significant increase in medicine’s ability to combat serious illness once it has taken hold. The decrease in lung cancer from tobacco use is all owing to a decrease in tobacco use, which certainly can be credited to medical science, but not in the way your “threshold of eliminating disease” suggests.
     This is not to say that medical science has not achieved wonderful, positive advances. It has, and here’s hoping those advances continue. But medical science’s knowledge is small in comparison with its ignorance of the causes, mechanisms, and possible cures of disease.
     Finally, to step aside from the particulars of current medical science, ask yourself what a world without death would really be like. Would it be heavenly, or a living hell? On any humane and sensible calculus, it would surely be the latter.
Hilary Hinzmann
New York
May 8, 2013

     Editor’s comment: I reacted precisely the same way in 1993 when, in an interview, the biotechnology venture capitalist Wallace Steinberg suggested to me that the benefits of extended longevity would outweigh the disadvantages. “The reason why the planet is in such bad shape,” he contended, “is that all of its people are biologically immature”— that is, people die “just as they are reaching the height of their experience.” A more mature world population, he argued, would approach many problems (including overpopulation) more intelligently than we do now. Meet me in a hundred years and we’ll see if he was right. (Steinberg, incidentally, died in his sleep at the age of 58.)

Kermit Gosnell’s abortion case

     Re “The Gosnell trial and the abortion debate,” by Robert Zaller—
     The curtailing of five abortion clinics in Pennsylvania had nothing to do with state inspections. These clinics’ services were affected by the passage in December 2011 of SB 732, which required medical offices that perform abortions to be held to the same standard as ambulatory surgical facilities. This imposed requirements on the physical plant of clinics and medical offices that are not needed to safely perform an abortion— like wider hallways and elevators that can accommodate a stretcher.
     I will also note that many “abortion clinics” perform all kinds of women’s health services, and that this law and the subsequent closures also prevented these medical providers from performing breast exams, pap smears and other kinds of standard gynecology.
     That law and any inspections that resumed did nothing to improve health outcomes for women, or make abortion— a procedure that already has a complication rate of under 1 percent— safer. It was intended to limit the number of already safe places a woman can get an abortion.
     By the way, an appendectomy, something we generally consider safe, has complication rates three times as high as abortion, at 3 percent. The law did, however, prevent thousands of women from getting medical care while doctors scrambled to pay for expensive and needless construction, or just opted to stop providing those poor women abortions.
     Robert Zaller glibly writes, “Many poor women also allow their pregnancies to extend beyond the 24-week limit for abortions prescribed by Pennsylvania law, and thus require the services of someone willing to break it.” What does Mr. Zaller know about being a poor woman trying to obtain an abortion in Pennsylvania? The cost of an abortion at 18 weeks is around $1,000. For someone who earns minimum wage, that means more than a month’s pay.
     That $1,000 is just for a woman who even lives near a clinic (97 percent of U.S. counties do not have an abortion provider) and doesn’t have to arrange for transportation and for an overnight stay in a hotel because— surprise surprise— Pennsylvania requires a 24-hour waiting period for an abortion. So yes, it is conceivable that a poor woman might have to wait (saving over a quarter of her minimum wage income each month for four months) before she could afford an abortion. They don’t “allow their pregnancies to extend.”
     (Even given these obstacles, 88 percent of abortions are obtained within 13 weeks of a woman’s last period, and fewer than 2 percent of abortions are performed after 20 weeks.)
Finally, water-muddying nonsense about “when life begins” implies legal abortion itself is murder. Gosnell did not perform late-term abortions; Gosnell effectively delivered babies and murdered them.
Mary Duffy
Queen Village/ Philadelphia
May 6, 2013

     Robert Zaller writes, “Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer I generally respect, once likened terminating an unwanted pregnancy to removing a tumor. Whatever a fetus is, though, it isn’t a tumor. I can state this from personal experience, having been one myself.”
     Ehrenreich likened it— that is, created a metaphor— not equated it. So, no, she isn’t saying it’s a tumor.
     Plus— “personal experience”? Are you serious? I don’t think there’s any meaningful way you can call something your “experience” when no consciousness is involved.
Judy Weightman
East Falls, Philadelphia
May 8, 2013

     I knew Dr. Kermit Gosnell and worked closely with him at Germantown Hospital during his internship and my second year of pre-med at LaSalle College. I was an IV tech; Dr. Gosnell was my direct supervisor on multiple patient cases.
     Dr. Gosnell was reprimanded on numerous occasions for blatant and wanton disregard of patient care. He was ridiculed and demeaned by his peers and others on the staff.
Jason Brando
Mount Hamilton, Calif.
May 8, 2013

     Robert Zaller replies: I state a fact and not a judgment when I say that I am personally unacquainted with poor women, the point being precisely that I am in no way qualified to pass judgment on them. It is also a fact that women who seek late-term abortions tend to be poor, for the very reasons Ms. Duffy indicates. If abortions are to be provided, it is only fair that they be provided for everyone by qualified persons under proper conditions.
     Ms. Duffy suggests that I am trying to imply that abortion is murder. Rather, I’m interested in how she and others who support abortion would describe it. If an unwanted fetus is not a tumor or a wart— that is, a useless or dangerous bodily excrescence of no legal or moral significance and value— then just what is it, and what is it we are doing when we extract and discard it?

     Methinks Mr. Zaller doth protest too much (reply, above). He isn’t just implying that abortion is murder; the very phrasing of his question makes clear that, in his worldview, abortion is murder— the rights, safety and health of the living woman carrying the fetus be damned.
     So here, for what it’s worth, is my answer: abortion is self-defense, no more and no less. We can argue all we want about “when life begins,” but it is too easy to forget that the pregnant woman is indubitably alive. If those in the anti-abortion camp want to confer full human rights on a four-cell zygote, as recent ballot initiatives in several states have tried to do, then a woman is thereby reduced to the status of unwilling breeder, forced to bear a pregnancy against her will, even at the cost of her health, and quite possibly her life. There’s a word for that: slavery.
Ann C. Davidson
Spring Garden/ Philadelphia
May 15, 2013

     Robert Zaller replies: We are dealing with an extraordinarily, perhaps uniquely difficult issue of balancing rights, which the most extreme views on both sides of the question refuse to recognize.
     Ms. Davidson describes abortion as “self-defense.” Against whom or what? Pro-life absolutists tend to insist that the life of the fetus is the only issue in question because pro-choice absolutists insist that the fetus has no status as a living entity apart from the prospective mother’s will.

     If abortion were considered, as it ought to be, a private issue involving the woman who is pregnant and no one else, it wouldn’t be so fraught. Quite frankly, it is an issue that I don’t think a man is capable of comprehending.
     I am married to a man who has said, several times when I’ve been pregnant and unable to continue the pregnancy, “It is your body and your decision, and I can’t pretend to understand what you are experiencing.”
     If only there were more such men in the world!
Diana Douglass
Queen Village/ Philadelphia
May 19, 2013

PIFA’s publicity machine

     Thanks for Alaina Mabaso’s enlightening ”Woe to Journalists at an arts festival.” She confirms my long-held suspicion that here in Philadelphia the “energy” in creation of marketing and public relations materials is valued far more than devotion to integrity of the “product,” which in this case is the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts.
     My husband, who has always worked in science-based industries, had a modicum of interest in attending the wrap-up of this festival about one week before it took place. After hearing of it again and again on the radio during his morning commute, he decided that this festival seemed to promise little of substance— a “science” carnival at best. Thanks to the clueless overkill of marketing and public relations, we were saved the expense of traveling into the city to experience disappointment.
     I wonder what the marketing costs were of this event? Marketing and public relations are essential tools in modern society, but marketers need to have something developed, focused and viable to market. Eventually the public will tune out the noise.
     The University of Pennsylvania’s change maverick, Russell Ackoff, used to say that it’s far better to do the right thing wrong than to do the wrong thing righter and righter. Philadelphia, as this situation readily demonstrates, seems to be stuck in the latter mode.
Victoria Skelly
Wayne, Pa.
April 29, 2013

     Alaina Mabaso replies: Not everything about the festival was a disappointment; I saw a lot of worthwhile work at PIFA. But I felt that the festival’s marketers failed to produce a viable uniting theme.

     The City Paper’s article, “Deconstructing PIFA,” explained how a “team of human beings could have cranked out so many press releases.” The first iteration of PIFA in 2011 spent 40% of its $10 million budget on marketing. If we assume that to be true for the 2013 iteration, then about $2 million of the $5 million budget was spent on marketing. That buys an awful lot of marketing. And as usual with PIFA, most of the local artists got diddlysquat.
Amy Smith
South Philadelphia
May 1, 2013

     Editor’s note: The writer is a founder and co-director of Headlong Dance Theater. Dafni Camerota of the Kimmel Center says the non-profit arts sector has never paid “millions of dollars” for PR alone; “not even close.”

     I love the jaunty mood of this commentary. And I’m impressed that anyone can keep the wolf from the door writing arts reviews. Good job!
Reed Stevens
Campbell Calif.
April 30, 2013

     I read with pleasure and interest Tom Purdom’s review of Orchestra 200l’s recent presentation of Crumb and Gorecki. His point about the PIFA festival ostensibly bringing recognition and publicity to small organizations like Orchestra 2001, Network For New Music, Dolce Suono, 1807 & Friends, etc. is alas not borne out by their actions.
     As Tom Purdom undoubtedly noted from the sparse attendance at the Center City presentation by Orchestra 200l, PIFA benefitted the group in no way whatever. PIFA sent out one e-mail blast, several weeks prior to the event, and that was it.
     Anyone in today’s world understands that it is typical in this sort of publicizing to send out one announcement about three or four weeks before, another about ten days to two weeks before, and another two or three days prior, which is the time a great many people make up their minds to attend something. 
     In addition, this year, PIFA dispensed none of its funds to the groups like ours that participated. Orchestra 2001 received not a single dollar. Instead, PIFA spent literally millions of dollars on the tiresome construction of a “time tunnel” that now impedes access to the performance spaces in the Kimmel Center, to dubious “artistic” purpose.
     Add to that the absurdly narrowing focus of the “Time Travel/Dates in History” theme chosen for the festival, with the insistence that each presentation be linked to a specific date in the past. Orchestra 200l could have much more meaningfully presented its recent collaboration with Piffaro as a time-travel to the past, but the organizers of the festival would not agree to any such.
     I frankly hope that the concept of this supposedly international festival will collapse under the weight of its own administrative ineptitude and we’ll not be burdened in the arts community with trying to find a way to participate, without apparent benefit in a concept that seems designed, as is so often the case, to pay big salaries and fees to organizers and administrators, with not even the smallest “trickle down” to the actual artists.
     This year’s PIFA was considerably scaled back and worse in concept and implementation than that of 2011. One wonders what new monstrosity will be commissioned to obstruct the lobby space of the Kimmel for the next PIFA.
Andrew Rudin
Elkins Park, Pa.
April 18, 2013

     Editor’s note: The writer is a composer as well as a board member of Orchestra 2001.

     Tom Purdom replies: I think we’re all disappointed in the second PIFA. A Philadelphia arts festival should draw attention to the breadth and depth of the artistic wealth available in the city. The first festival did that. This one didn’t.
I think there’s some value in a citywide brochure and schedule that includes the smaller organizations. That was the main advantage of the first festival.

     Alaina Mabaso’s commentary says that the Kimmel Center charged journalists for food and drinks during the PIFA 2013 press preview event, which is incorrect.
     All journalists were handed food vouchers at the media check-in table to experience the Garces Pop Up Food Court, and we’re really sorry that she hadn’t found me or Nina Zucker to let us know, because we totally would have taken care of her.
     Also, the press release announcing the time machine was written in February, when the Kimmel Center first began to assemble the time machine in preparation of the festival. It offered the artistic director’s inspirations, and left the time machine open to journalists’ interpretations when it was actually completed and open to the public on March 27.
Dafni D. Comerota
Public Relations
Kimmel Center
Center City/ Philadelphia
May 10, 2013

Mozart and the Masons

     Re “Mozart, the Masons and the wages of secrecy,” by Dan Rottenberg (Editor’s Notebook)—
     That the Masons, as the first trade union, were obliged to keep their organization secret, perhaps provides a model for modern unions. Like the original Masons, wherever organized labor shows its head today it is sure to court destruction. Like the medieval Masons, too, modern labor toils against a backdrop of serfdom.
     The real secret societies today are unaccountable organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Unlike the Masons, they actually do decide the fate of millions. Of course, the two biggest secret societies are the European Union and the Catholic Church. The bureaucrats of Brussels make decisions behind closed doors that overturn the economies of entire nations. The Catholic Church, the most successful authoritarian institution in history, dictates the conduct and belief of more than a billion people. If it didn’t actually exist, such an organization would be hard to imagine.
     No doubt, as Dan Rottenberg suggests, some activities require privacy and confidentiality. Ultimately, though, any activity that touches the common weal needs to be brought into the light of day, and all business that can be transacted in public ought to be.
     I’ve always been amazed that the Masons admitted Mozart.  There was never a man who brought more sunlight into the world.
Robert Zaller
Bala Cynwyd, Pa.
May 1, 2013

     Dan’s gift at clarifying neglected episodes in American history (remember his recent take on the Vail of Tears of dispossessed American Indians forced to flee west?) is a unique blessing in these United States of Amnesia.
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
May 3, 2013

     There are so many places you could go with that theme: secret men’s groups; our forefathers as Tribesman by any other name. The “work” origins of the Masons, as opposed to the philosophical beliefs of the Masons, point to a Marxist view of securing workers’ rights first above all else.
     Who would have thought that the story of the Masons would remain so contemporary?  Thank you for blowing some dust off them.
Karl Middleman
Merion, Pa.
May 3, 2013

George W. Bush’s library

     Re “A pyramid rises in Texas,” by Robert Zaller—
     Sandra O’Connor, that allegedly shyest justice, alas, cast the vote that gored the White House for eight awe-filled years. That Court will do US in, ultimately, if they express their fear of Americans eventually voting out The Usurpers as Citizens UnLimited.
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
April 30, 2013

     Robert Zaller replies: Sandra Day O’Connor may regret the vote that gave us George W. Bush— hers— but she was overheard to say after the election that it would be a disaster if Al Gore became president. When this comment became public, she was urged to recuse herself from Bush v. Gore, but she refused.

Rufus Wainwrght

     Re Steve Cohen’s review of Rufus Wainwright—
     Just a note to let you know that Rufus didn’t sing the entire 1961 Judy Garland concert at Verizon Hall, just excerpts.
Carole Verona
Chestnut Hill/ Philadelphia
May 1, 2013

     Steve Cohen replies: Ms. Verona is correct. Rufus did perform Garland’s program of 26 numbers from April 23, 1961, in other concerts and on records. At Verizon Hall he sang 15 of them. I should note that he added several excellent encores of non-Garland songs, joined by singers Melody Moore, Katheryn Guthrie and by tuba player Scott Devereaux on “Oh, What a World,” which was written by Wainwright.

South Pacific, transposed?

     Re Steve Cohen’s review of South Pacific in Wilmington—
     I played Emile DeBecque in this production. I’m not sure where Steve Cohen got his information, but his statement that “Some Enchanted Evening” was transposed up a step is incorrect. I sang all of my music in the key it was written, as I believe did the entire cast.
Michael Sharon
New York
May 6, 2013

     Steve Cohen replies: I didn’t have my pitch pipe with me, but the song certainly sounded higher and brighter. That’s meant as a compliment to Sharon. The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization has told me that the only licensed version of “Some Enchanted Evening” is in C major, with the top, pay-off note being an E, but they are aware that many performers have transposed it upwards. Conversely, some singers make both of the last two notes, on the words “her go,” a C instead of the written C going up to E.

Terry Williams case

     Robert Zaller’s three-part series on the Terry Williams case (Sept.-Oct. 2012) is interesting to me, and he does a nice job of pointing out subtle facts in Williams’s life history. Zaller also pointed out somewhat accurately why Williams’s accomplice, Marc Draper, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder as a first-time offender with no prior criminal history. There will be another day in the not so distant future where more of the truth will be told about this unfortunate crime, and I hope Mr. Zaller will shine the light on the injustice done to me in addition to Terry Williams.
Marc Draper
Frackville, Pa.
May 7, 2013

     Editor’s comment: Marc Draper has a website at timeservedformarcdraper.com.

‘The Master’

     Re the reviews of The Master by Susan Beth Lehman and Robert Zaller (October 2012)—
     After watching The Master, I did something I never do: I watched it again on the big screen, and then bought the DVD. Then I did another thing I never have done: I read review after review of this fascinating film. It is fascinating that every reviewer sees something different, from discussion of id and ego to the basic need to cling to some kind of belief.
     Unlike almost every reviewer, I did see some redeeming qualities in Freddie. He does not blame his parents (or possibly an aunt who abused him at a young age). He treats Doris with respect, making the ultimate sacrifice of leaving her because he is too old for her and most likely not good enough for her.
     He serves his country at a cost of irreparable damage. He exhibits friendship and loyalty to Dodd. In the end he is brave enough to leave Dodd. He is able to quell some of his rage and find a measure of peace with a grown up version of Doris: Winn Manchester.
Laura Smith
Vancouver, Wash.
May 12, 2013

Classical music: Dead or alive?

     Re “Classical music: Dead or alive?” by Maria Corley (September 2012)—
     I enjoyed your Maria Corley’s article, being of the same generation as her erstwhile manager and having written about the same issue myself at embarrassing length on March 5. (Click here.)
     I share your optimism, perhaps in part because I too am a fan of Gustavo Dudamel and hear his orchestras often. I argue that the solution to the problem boils down to what kids do during the first six (or so) years of their life and cite some scientific support, beyond the remarkable success of Dudamel’s El Sistema.
Carl Ellenberger
Mount Gretna, Pa.
May 12, 2013

Verdi kept a complete set of Shakespeare’s plays (in Italian translation) in his bedroom, and he used the Bard’s scripts as inspiration for three of his best operas (Macbeth, Otello, Falstaff) as well as one more that he never completed, King Lear. In each he hewed faithfully to Shakespeare’s words and figures of speech.

But an equally important element in Macbeth is the parallel between Malcolm’s and MacDuff’s struggle for liberation from Macbeth and the similar struggles of Verdi’s countrymen against the Habsburgs at the time Macbeth opened in 1846. Verdi was active in the freedom movement led by Giuseppe Garibaldi; the composer’s name was used as a rallying cry by Italians who wanted their own nation under Victor Emmanuel as king. (Verdi’s name made a convenient acronym for “Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia.”)

Verdi’s operas immediately preceding Macbeth were best known for their hymns about freedom: the chorus of Hebrew slaves in Nabucco, and the chorus of Crusaders intent on liberating the Holy Land in I Lombardi. These found echoes in Macbeth with Verdi’s lament for Scottish refugees, Patria oppressa (“Oppressed homeland”).

Improving on Shakespeare

Verdi also wrote gorgeous choruses bemoaning the murder of King Duncan in Act I and celebrating freedom at the end. And in 1865, four years after the Kingdom of Italy was established, he added a final chorus proclaiming victory over a tyrant, ”Salva, o re!” (“Hail, oh King”). Verdi wasn’t merely adapting a great work of literature; he was nudging history in real time.

It can be argued that Verdi’s added choruses actually improved upon Shakespeare— not only in Macbeth, but also in Act I of Otello, where the triumphant Othello is cheered by adoring crowds, and in Act III of Falstaff, where a large throng mocks the fat knight and then sings that “everything in the world is a jest.”

Opera Delaware’s recent handsome production offered impressive sets built locally, and sensible direction by Cindy Du Pont Tobias. Unlike the Met’s new production of Macbeth, which conflates time and place and transforms the Scottish women into modern-day bag ladies, here the locale clearly was old Scotland.

Exciting new face

The baritone Grant Youngblood— who has sung at the Met, but not in roles as starry as this— made a world-class Macbeth, with a fine, well-projected voice and an appealing ability to convey the conflict between his ambitions and his conscience. It’s still hard to believe the speed with which Macbeth decides to assassinate King Duncan, not to mention the wholesale murders he orders as the story progresses— but that’s Verdi’s fault, not Youngblood’s.

As Lady Macbeth, Courtney Ames emerged as a force to be reckoned with— not only in the plot but as an exciting new personality in the world of opera. Her youth and attractiveness masked her malevolence, yet she sang with a fierceness that accentuated her evilness, only to exhibit pathetic vulnerability in her last-act sleepwalking “mad aria.”

Lady Macbeth is an extremely difficult role; it even intimidated Maria Callas, and it played a role in her firing by the Met’s boss, Rudolf Bing, in 1958. Yet Ames sailed into the part fearlessly, almost recklessly— just like Lady Macbeth, come to think of it. Her top notes soared above all the rest of the ensemble, just as Verdi intended.

Classic opera house

Ben Wager, a 2009 graduate of the Academy of Vocal Arts, made an appealing Banquo; his farewell aria to his son was one of the production’s highlights.

Giovanni Reggioli conducted with an appropriately restless surge that built up the tension of the story and the music.

This company performs in The Grand, a beautiful small house (capacity about 800), modeled after Europe’s classic theaters. Its intimate size might not suit a later Verdi opera like Aida, which sometimes calls for large animals onstage, but its ambience is perfect for 18th- and 19th-century operas like this one.

The time is 1900, 1928 and several years before, after and in between. The scene is The Fail Clockworks, established by an immigrant couple in 1900 near the docks in Chicago. The quirky action jumps back and forth in time like a clock gone haywire, or like life itself, lived in the present and past simultaneously (since memory colors experience).

Search for love

This is a lighthearted production, notwithstanding the premature demise of the Fail sisters Nelly (Mary Beth Shrader), Jenny June (Tabitha Allen) and Gertrude (Isa St. Clair). Only the two men in their lives survive into old age: John N. Fail (Brendan Dalton), who is washed up on shore as a baby and adopted by the Fail household; and Mortimer Mortimer (Kevin Meehan), the earnest gentleman caller who loves each of the sisters in turn.

A marvelous cast of young actors briskly directed by Azuka Theatre’s resident director, Allison Heishman, double as narrators, enacting the scenes and stories of their past lives in keeping with what Heishman calls “the hidden love story of our play, the love of telling stories.” Here the stories include Mortimer Mortimer’s bittersweet fruitless search for love, the affecting loneliness of his “almost brother-in-law,” John N. Fail, Nelly’s silly but fetching girlishness, and Jenny June’s boldly optimistic goal of swimming across the rough and freezing waters.

River of time

Other important if inanimate characters occupy this household as well: a few birds, a snake named Moses and a dog called Pal, each ingeniously made from fabrics. A scarf and a jacket take on many guises. A long and wide sheath of blue cloth assumes the principal role of the river of time that sweeps away lives and years. (It’s actually Lake Michigan in its earliest form.)

Music too, emanates from an old Victrola, and some vintage songs, like “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” add nostalgia for past eras.

Since the passage of time is the recurrent theme, clocks and timepieces abound in Lindsay Meyer’s minimal but effective set. If Philip Dawkins’s script contains a few too many time-related puns, they are easily forgiven. The lighting by Robin Stamey, the costumes by Amanda Sharp and the sound by Toby Pettit all contribute to a memorable evening whose theme— storytelling as a key to surviving human tragedy— resonates long after the play ends.

This year has marked the beginning of Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s tenure as music director, a generally successful one artistically. Some of Nézet-Séguin’s preferences have started to become clear. He seems fond of requiems, one hopes without undue symbolic implications.

Otherwise, however, his programming choices have fallen decidedly on the safe side. There is financial calculation in that, too.  There is also a cost.

The point was driven home for this reviewer by Sir Simon Rattle’s second concert with the Orchestra, the penultimate one of the season.  Rattle put together a varied and idiosyncratic program. He tends to do that, but then it’s easier for a visiting conductor to choose the road less traveled than for the helmsman of the Orchestra, for whom the risk of empty seats is not to be taken lightly.

Wagner’s shadow

Rattle opened the concert with two ill-fated composers from the Second Viennese School, Anton Webern and Alban Berg. Webern, stepping outside for a smoke in occupied Vienna at the end of World War II, was killed by an American soldier for violating a curfew. Berg died of a bee sting. Fate has an odd sense of humor.

Webern began as a post-Romantic composer before adopting Schoenberg’s 12-tone system of composition and becoming a musical pointillist whose mature works, employing the sparest of textures, all run under ten minutes in length. Webern did write a symphony, which he believed would be a full-length work requiring a good half hour to perform. It actually clocks in at less than a third that time.

When Webern is performed, it is most often his early, pre-serialist Im Sommerwind, a warm and ingratiating work that makes no heavy demand on the listener. Rattle chose the less frequently played Passacaglia, Op. 1, a ten-minute score that, beginning with the softest of pizzicati, deploys a large orchestra with great virtuosity and assurance.  Wagner lurks heavily in the background, and there are accents of Scriabin and Reger. It’s the kind of densely weighted and perhaps overwrought work in which tonality appears to be torn apart like taffy.

One can well imagine a young Stravinsky resolving to write music as completely unlike it as possible. The later Webern did as well, although he never quite left Romanticism behind— rather, he miniaturized it. 

Still, the Passacaglia is worth the occasional hearing: Stokowski premiered it with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1927, but it wasn’t heard again until Mark Wigglesworth (another visiting conductor) performed it in 1999.

Everyman of the Great War

The Passacaglia was followed by the Three Fragments from Berg’s opera Wozzeck, one of the essential dramatic works of the 20th Century. The Fragments were not arranged from the opera subsequent to stage performance, but were extracted and performed prior to the premiere in 1925. They focus not on Wozzeck himself, the hero whom Berg conceived as the Everyman of World War I, but on his suffering mistress Marie and her child. 

In a way, the Fragments represent a re-imagination of the work as a whole, in which the music is employed to highlight the female protagonist. When heard at a distance of nearly nine decades, it fuses musical Expressionism with the lushness of a post-Romantic orchestra.

If Stravinsky set out to be the anti-Wagner, Berg turns Wagner on his head in another way, using the Wagnerian orchestra not to depict the heroes and gods who represent bourgeois society in distress but that society’s proletarian victims.

Hannigan transformed

The coloratura soprano Barbara Hannigan, in blond tresses and a sweeping gown, sang Marie sensitively, though she seemed insufficiently miked at times. The great orchestral crescendo in which the music rises above the action of the drama to a tragic apotheosis was shiveringly good.

After intermission, a transformed Hannigan came out in a jet-black wig and Weimar cabaret costume to match— a black leatherette overcoat, tight black sheath and spiked heels— to perform another operatic excerpt, this time from György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, which depicts an apocalyptic dystopia. 

Such a genre had a long pedigree; Wozzeck might be considered an example from a certain angle, and certainly Kurt Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and Vikto Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis, a work composed in the Theresienstadt concentration camp by a composer who perished in Auschwitz. Ligeti, who is probably best known for having (involuntarily) supplied music for three Stanley Kubrick films (most notably 2001), was himself a Holocaust survivor as well as a denizen of Stalinist Hungary, which would have offered him copious material.

Podium fight

The Mysteries of the Macabre is a nine-minute romp in which Hannigan offers a bizarre Sprechstimme of nonsense phrases, squawks, pips and vocal leaps that make her absurdist character— a chief of police— sound like Mozart’s Queen of the Night on LSD. While singing the notes on perfect pitch, Hannigan discards her coat, pushes Rattle off the podium to mock-conduct a parody of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, and gets booted off in turn by the maestro. The music supporting these goings-on, rendered by a chamber-sized complement heavy on percussion, was witty and surprisingly delicate. 

A concert performance of the entire opera in its 1997 revision was offered three years ago by the New York Philharmonic. It would be nice to hear the Philadelphians take a crack at it— or, better yet, to have a full operatic staging— but I keep forgetting that Philadelphia isn’t New York; it’s Paris.

There was method in Rattle’s seeming madness, not only in continuity of theme between Wozzeck and Mysteries of the Macabre, as this excerpt was titled, but in the careers of the three modern composers, for Ligeti had started out as a 12-tone disciple before moving through the experimentalism of the Stockhausen school and finally settling on the atmospheric soundscapes that attracted Kubrick, and on which Ligeti’s reputation for the moment chiefly rests.

Idiosyncratic Beethoven

The program concluded with Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, a work from another sonic world entirely. The period instrument revival has meant a leaner, more classical approach to Beethoven in general, but Rattle took the reverse tack, reading the score backwards through the prism of Wagner and Richard Strauss.

The result, with blended tones and a marshaling of Romantic effects, was more like a four-movement tone poem than a work composed while Haydn was still alive. It wasn’t everyone’s Beethoven, to be sure, but the Kimmel Center audience loved it.

The Pastoral is a score unlike any other Beethoven symphony, with its lyric warmth and proto-Romantic scene painting. Rattle wanted to make us see it as a model for the Forest Murmurs from Siegfried or the Strauss Alpine Symphony, and he made his case, even at some expense to an ideally balanced presentation.

Good news

What, though, is an “ideal” Beethoven? If we can look back to see Beethoven as a bearer and re-shaper of the classical tradition— the period instrument approach— why can’t we see him as an influence in turn on even late Romantic composers?

The one thing we’ll never be able to do is to hear Beethoven as his first audience did in 1808 at that titanic concert that featured the premieres of both the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, as well as the Choral Fantasy. We must hear with our ears, not theirs, and that means with everything that has come since Beethoven as well as all that went before.

A weak horn entrance in the third movement of the Beethoven aside, the Orchestra gave Rattle everything he wanted by way of a burnished, responsive tone. The good news is that, in its first year since bankruptcy, the Orchestra is still a glorious instrument, the best efforts of its administration to destroy its cohesiveness and morale notwithstanding. 

Nézet-Séguin must be given some credit for this recovery, but the chief reason is the pride and professionalism of the musicians themselves. Performing under duress, with reduced wages and benefits, they have still maintained the Orchestra as one of the world’s premier cultural institutions. Would that the city itself were worthy of its treasure.♦


To read another review by Peter Burwasser, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.

Only too late will you realize that, in doing so, you’ve become an accomplice to one of the 20th Century’s most infamous political regimes. For Here Lies Love concerns the dramatic rise and fall of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, who reigned over the Philippines from 1969 to 1986.

For the first half of this production’s wild 90-minute ride, Timbers makes you fall in love with a First Lady best remembered today for acquiring more than 1,000 pairs of shoes— not to mention at least 15 mink coats, 500 ball gowns and 1,000 handbags— while most of her country starved.

Talking about shoes: Wear sneakers and check your bags at the door, because this theater has no seats and you’ll never, ever, sit down or stop moving. For this production, one of the venues of the Public Theater has been converted into a disco club– a long rectangular room featuring stages on either end, with moveable raised runways lining the sides and stretching down the center.

Cinderella meets Evita

As you enter, the disco ball shimmers, the music pounds, the colored strobe lights throb, and images of Imelda flash across giant screens mounted on all four walls. People are milling everywhere, and you go with the flow of it, moving with the crowd and gazing at the images above and around you.

Then the DJ perched high on the balcony calls out: “Welcome to Club Millennium— we’re going to the Philippines!” As the music blasts and platforms turn, 13 performers strut out onto the runways and the show begins.

Mrs. Marcos’s streamlined story— a simplistic blend of Cinderella, Eliza Doolittle, and Evita— is told in continuous music and song. It begins with a fantasy scene in the Filipino provinces, featuring an innocent little “country” flower named Imelda. A flock of damsels dance dreamily, dressed in chiffon and twirling white parasols.

Whirlwind courtship

The scene segues into a beauty pageant, where Imelda is crowned “the Rose of Tacloban” (and later “Miss Philippines”). “Here lies love,” Imelda sings sweetly—a sentimental motif that turns desperate as the show goes on.

Platforms turn again, as we follow the upwardly mobile Imelda to Manila, where she works as a shop girl and singer, continuing her meteoric rise. She’s swept off her feet by a political candidate named Ferdinand Marcos, who marries her after an 11-day whirlwind courtship. We dance at their wedding, of course, as if we don’t know what’s coming. (Sad to say, most of the audience doesn’t.)

Dancers twirl, platforms whirl, and we dance through the ’60s as the Marcoses campaign for Ferdinand’s presidency, win it, serve two terms, and indulge in lavish excesses, like a fleet of yachts and a disco in the presidential palace. Dressed like Jackie Kennedy, Imelda wins hearts at home and abroad, her face featured on magazine covers all over the world.

Dancing with Arafat

Insatiable, Imelda dances on— now in a white Chanel coat, now in a white mink, a Martini in one hand and a vial of tranquilizers in another. She descends from the raised platform to walk among “her people”— the audience on the dance floor.  After all, it’s not only extravagance to which she’s addicted– it’s also the public’s adulation.

While she dances abroad with Yassir Arafat and Ronald Reagan, at home students protest against the regime’s greed, only to be met with police brutality. Ferdinand abolishes the free press and imprisons his opposition. Aquino, Marcos’s most outspoken critic, is assassinated.

Suddenly, the disco music stops. It’s 1986, the People Power Revolution erupts, and the Marcoses flee the Philippines to the deafening sounds of whirling helicopters. Stunned to silence, the audience is frozen in place. Two singers clad in rags emerge, to sing a bittersweet ballad of the country’s newfound freedom and uncertain future.

One missing piece

The party is over.  We file out of the theater, sobered after the orgy, guilty for our compliance in the Philippines’ troubled past.

And yet, for all its clever exposition of the roots of tyranny, Here Lies Love omits one crucial element of the story: the present. And that element might very well change our view of this otherwise sensational show.

After a six-year exile, during which she was acquitted by an American court for various charges (including fraud and racketeering), Imelda Marcos returned to the country she and her late husband plunged into poverty, turmoil and revolution. Within a year, she made a bid for the presidency. She was subsequently elected to Congress from Leyte, her home province, in 1995. This month, at the age of 83, she was reelected to Congress for a second term.

Her own constituents, it appears, have forgotten Imelda Marcos’s story. So what does that mean, Mr. Director? Does sensation trump substance? Should we just keep dancing?