Leonard Link

"Storefront Church" - A New Play

Last week I attended a performance at Atlantic Theater Company of "Storefront Church," a new play by John Patrick Shanley, who directed the performance. 

The premise is that a woman living in the Bronx has fallen behind on her mortgage payments and faces eviction from the house she owns.  She has been allowing an itinerant minister, a refugee from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to use her ground-level storefront as a church, but after months in residence there he has yet to hold a public service, so emotionally devastated was he....  The woman, an African-American, is married to an outspoken secular Jew, who goes on her behalf to the bank to try to work a deal with the loan officer, and things take off from there as the woman then goes to the Bronx Borough president to seek an intervention on her behalf.  Of the plot I'll say no more, other than to comment that I found it interesting and provocative, with a good leavening of comedy to relieve the serious themes.

The small cast did an excellent job.  Bob Dishy made a total meal of the part of the secular Jewish husband, Ethan Goldberg.  Tonya Pinkins played the wife, Jessie Cortez. Zach Grenier (familiar from his continuing role on TV's "The Good Wife"), played Reed Van Druyten, the bank loan officer, whose peculiar past requires him to screw up his face in funny ways.  Ron Cephas Jones played Chester Kimmich, the minister.  Giancarlo Esp;osito played Donaldo Calderon, Borough President of the Bronx. And Tom Raidenberg has the thankless task of playing Jordan Lage, the president of the bank who moves the plot into ghastly places - as ultimately this is a tale of political corruption.   

The production is a good one.  Atlantic Theater Company is in the midst of renovations of the old church on W. 20th Street in which they perform, and has made some excellent changes in the interior, especially concerning lounge space and restroom facilities.  This is a worthwhile production that will make you think about what is important in life....

A Week of Dramatized Biography

This past week I attended three productions that were dramatizations of the lives of real people.  On Tuesday, I saw "The Columnist," a play by David Auburn about Joe Alsop, the syndicated columnist who wielded outsize influence in the 1950s and 1960s.  On Thursday, I saw "End of the Rainbow," a play by Peter Quilter, about Judy Garland's December 1968 visit to London to perform a series of concerts in an attempted comeback from drug and alcohol addiction.  And on Friday morning, I attended a mid-day screening of "Mahler on the Couch," a German film directed by Percy Adlon, with script by Percy and Felix Adlon, about Gustav Mahler's consultation with Sigmund Freud during a crisis in Mahler's marriage.

Each of these productions had strengths and weaknesses, but all three impressed me as interesting attempts to capture the personalities of people who made a difference in the world but suffered terribly from various kinds of emotional instability, insecurity, and the brave projection of superiority.  And each provided a vehicle for some incredible acting.  John Lithgow as Joe Alsop created a memorably despicable character, a closeted gay man who marries a widowed mother of a teenage girl as a "cover" and insurance against blackmail generated by his indiscretion with a Russian agent while on assignment in Moscow.  Tracie Bennett does an incredible, over-the-top job impersonating Garland shortly before her drug overdose death, as she struggled with her demons to keep her concert commitment in London.  And Johannes Silberschneider creates a memorable Mahler - at least for me, if not for The Times' critic. 

Each of these leading characters is surrounding by a strong supporting cast in a very well-done production.

In "The Columnist," we get a convincing Washington, D.C., study as our setting for most of the drama, and excellent support from Margaret Colin as Alsop's wife, Boyd Gaines as his brother Stewart, Stephen Kunken as his journalistic antagonist on the issue of the Vietnam War, David Halberstam, and Brian J. Smith as the Russian "tour guide" who entraps him in the indiscretion that will haunt him throughout his career.  In "End of the Rainbow," most of the action takes place in the grand room of a London hotel suite; Tom Pelphrey is stunning as Garland's last boyfriend who struggles to keep her off pills and alcohol until it become obvious that she won't function with them, and Michael Cumpsty is winning as the gay pianist/music director for her show who goes far beyond the call of duty to get her through the ordeal.  In "Mahler on the Couch," apparently shot in the actual locations where much of the plot unfolded, Karl Markovics is a playful Freud, Barbara Romaner an enticing Alma Schindler, but to me the most enticing of the supporting players is Friedrich Mucke as the glamorous young architect, Walter Gropius, whose affair with Alma ignites the crisis that leads Mahler to Freud.

Despite all this talent on display (and excellent cinematography in the Mahler film), there are weaknesses in the scripts that undermine the effectiveness of the productions.  "The Columnist" is very talky at times and drags in the first act.  "End of the Rainbow" is full of histrionics, and at times I felt that Ms. Bennett's Garland becomes cartoonishly exaggerated - but her singing saves the day!  Finally, the Mahler film seems overly simplistic in "diagnosing" the composer's mental and family problems.  Despite these flaws, however, I found the sequence of biographical productions to be generally stimulating, entertaining, and worth the time I spent.

I would especially recommend that anybody interested in the Mahler film HURRY to see it (at Lincoln Center Film Society) since films of this sort tend to have short runs - although I've no doubt it will become available on DVD before too long. 

"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" at City Center Encores!

I attended the Saturday matinee performance of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes", the 1949 Broadway musical (Music by Jule Styne, Lyrics by Leo Robin, Book by Anita Loos and Joseph Fields, adapted from Ms. Loos's novel of the same name), semi-staged by New York City Center Encores! as the last show of their 2011-12 season.  It was a brilliant closing for the season, because this is an absolutely lovely show and all the elements came together for a truly memorable theatrical experience.

Megan Hilty assumed the role of Lorelei Lee, made famous in the film version of this show by Marilyn Monroe but originally created on stage by Carol Channing.  I can't praise Hilty highly enough to do justice to what she achieved in this role.  The singing, dancing and acting were all stunningly good.  Her co-star, Rachel York, was also superb as the girlfriend, Dorothy, who accompanies Ms. Lee on her nautical excursion from New York to France.  Indeed, I couldn't identify any weak link in this cast.  Even the generally non-singing part of the U.S. Olympic team members, headed by Luke Hawkins and Eric Bourne, made a great impression through their dancing, calisthenics, and dashing Olympian builds.

Dancing was at the heart of everything in this show, and choreographer Randy Skinner did a great job of keeping the stage alive.  But then, all the technical aspects of this production were superb - sets (John Lee Beatty), costumes (David C. Woolard), lighting (Peter Kaczorowski), sound (Scott Leher), dialogue scripting for the semi-staged production (David Ives), stage directing (John Rando), musical direction (Rob Berman), and the entire crew keeping things moving in a fast-paced production.

Indeed, this was such a splendid production, so well cast and performed, that I could hope somebody who attended would want to transfer it to a Broadway run.  The main barrier, I suspect, would be putting together and supporting the very large cast necessary.  There were fourteen actors whose parts were substantial enough to be featured, and another twenty or more in supporting roles.  For a Broadway production one would need to go to fuller sets, and - unfortunately, given the economics of today's Broadway theater - would probably have to cut down the size of the orchestra.  It probably wouldn't be commercial.  But seeing a production like this reinforces what's missing on Broadway today. 

One might compare the current production "Nice Job If You Can Get It," where a faux-Gershwin musical has been constructed by cherry-picking numbers for a variety of shows and writing a modestly entertaining book to tie them together, with a cast featuring a big-name but rather obvious weak link, the big name's inclusion undoubtedly being a key to getting the financing to put it on.  This Encores! production of Gentlemen featured many solid Broadway troopers who have performed in plenty of big shows, but none of whom is yet in that "big name" category that would spur investors for a Broadway run.  More's the pity, because they were all superb.

And, with the season over, one can do a quick post-mortem on the renovation of City Center.  From my perspective, it is a big success.  The seating is much more comfortable, the facilities are now modern, clean and functional, and the great acoustics have been preserved.  Everything is easier on the eye, clean and freshened up with excellent colors and fabrics.  Compliments are certainly in order.

Theater/Concert Overload

I've just come through such a busy time of theater and concerts over the past two weeks that I've fallen far behind in writing about things, so herewith just a few capsule comments on each:

Leap of Faith.  I saw a preview of this new musical by Alan Menken (music), Janus Cercone and Warren Leight (book) and Glenn Slater (lyrics), which was conceived as a vehicle for Raul Esparza.  My theater-going companion and I are big Esparza fans so we had to see this. In the event, I thought the female lead, Jessica Phillips, was more impressive than Esparza, but we were seeing a preview performance so I probably should refrain from specifics.  The show focuses on a fake minister who takes his "revival" show on the road, intent on bilking the inhabitants of small midwestern towns, but runs into a female sheriff who is tougher than he anticipated.  It seems like a genre show of the kind that's been done many times over, with an overamplified orchestra and chorus.  The best thing, I thought, was the dancing - congratulations to choreographer Sergio Trujillo.  According to the program, this was based on a movie of the same name with which I'm unfamiliar.

Nice Work If You Can Get It.  Music and lyrics by the Gershwins, book by Joe DiPietro inspired by several Gershwin shows.  So, put together a "make your own" Gershwin musical, raiding the existing works for their best songs and dance music, mixing in bits and pieces from the orchestral music (Second Rhapsody was used quite a bit).  Kelli O'Hara is a real musical theater star, and worth seeing, based on my reactions to this preview performance.  Matthew Broderick is not really a musical theater star, and he seemed quite cautious in both the singing and the dancing at the performance I attended.  The supporting cast is stellar, the production colorful and imaginative, the orchestrations not idiomatic for the 1920s-1930s but serviceable.  Fluffy.

The Best Man.  Gore Vidal's play seems quite creaky after about fifty years, more of a nostalgic look back at old time political conventions, although it was well-staged here.  I wasn't overwhelmed by the performances in the leading parts of the contending candidates, but thought James Earl Jones as the crusty old ex-President (loosely based on Truman?) was superb, and it was wonderful to see Angela Lansbury again in anything.  I would say that this is mostly interesting for political junkies.  The audience seemed to like it last Saturday night.

Alexandre Tharaud at Le Poisson Rouge.  Le Poisson Rouge is an odd sort of place for a classical piano recital.  Between the ventilation system and the scurrying about of the waitpersons, it is difficult to give undivided attention to the music.  On the other hand, the night-club space creates an intimacy that can work wonders when all the elements come together correctly, as they did for much of Alexandre Tharaud's recital on Monday.  I thought his Debussy Preludes were the highlight.  The Scarlatti Sonatas were a bit plain-sounding to me (I miss the harpsichord in this music).  More popular fare by Jean Wiener, Maurice Ravel (Five O'clock Foxtrot from L'enfant et les sortileges), Gershwin (The Man I Love, taken from the George Gershwin Songbook arrangements), and Clement Doucet's marvelous Chopinata whetted the appetite for Tharaud's forthcoming Virgin Records release, "Le Boeuf sur le Toit."  He is making his Carnegie Hall debut next season - I believe in Zankel.

In Masks Outrageous and Austere, by Tennessee Williams.  At his death Williams left behind this unfinished project in a series of drafts.  It is realized in a very interesting production at Culture Project (45 Bleecker Street).  It strikes me as very unlike the Williams plays I've seen.  For one thing, late in life he seems to have been willing to surface the homoerotic elements of his stories and make them explicit, a welcome exit from the closet.  On the other hand, since this production is based on drafts, not a finished and polished script, who knows how much to impute to Williams and how much to those who conceived this production.  Shirley Knight, a veteran performer of Williams' work, was excellent at the performance I saw, but the real stars of the show are the three "Gideons" - Ward Horton, Scot Charles Anderson, Kaolin Bass - in their dark shades, dark suits, and sultry manners....

The Orchestra of St. Luke's performed Thursday night at Carnegie Hall, led by guest conductor Ivan Fischer in an all-Mozart program - Symphony 34 in C, K. 338, and the Requiem (Sussmayer completion).  I thought the symphony a bit on the pokey side, especially the first movement, which seemed a bit too slow and grand for a tempo marking of "Allegro vivace."  But things improved.  The finale really ripped along nicely.  The Requiem was performed in an odd staging, with female members of the Musica Sacra chorus dispersed among the string sections, while the tenors and basses were placed on platforms rear left and right.  The soloists were also seated among the string players.  This blending worked well, however, and Fischer led a vigorous performance, more dramatic than spiritual.

The following night, I attended a performance of Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem Mass at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, performed by The Choral Society and Orchestra of Grace Church, led by their musical director, John Maclay.  A friend had invited me to join with him and a few others. This was not a concert I would have sought out on my own, although I dearly love the Verdi Requiem.  We arrived too late to claim seats in the central section of the church, and were thus relegated to the sidelines behind pillars from which none of the performers could be seen.  The effect, sonically, was akin to overhearing a performance of a work in a very resonant space from an adjoining room.  Everything distanced, distorted...  Seeing nothing, I focused on the text and had a reasonably gratifying experience, but I couldn't say how good the performance was, and the sound from where I sat was too distorted for me to have any idea whether the soloists were actually so far off pitch as they frequently seemed.  But Verdi's work is undefeatable....

Clybourne Park.  I attended the matinee today of Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park, now in previews and set to open later this week.  This is a marvelous play about race.... Or is it about race?  It is certainly about, among other things, the social awkwardness around race and housing, reflected in two episodes in the same house, 1959 and 2009, as a "white neighborhood" may be in revolt against the first sale on the block to an African-American family, and then fifty years later, after the neighborhood had become largely African-American, the alarm at the purchase and planned rebuilding on the lot by a young Caucasian couple. The same actors play both acts, but in different personae.  At times droll, at times outrageous, at times out-loud funny, at times gasp-inducing....  This is definitely one to see.

Pipe Dream, American Mavericks, and NOT a Midsummer Night's Dream

It's been a very busy few days and I'm just getting around to noting several cultural events attended recently.

On Wednesday night, I was in Carnegie Hall for the second of a series of concerts by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra with the collective title of "American Mavericks."  Luckily, the one I ended up attending was the one with the piece I most wanted to hear: Henry Brant's orchestral version of Charles Ives's Piano Sonata No. 2, the "Concord Sonata."  Any purists who might object to the idea of an orchestrated version of a piano sonata would have to take account of the peculiar nature of this work.  Although Ives self-published a version of the sonata in 1920, and a revised version in 1947, he actually never really finished the piece, making little changes, cuts, additions, as it continued to evolve in his mind.  Indeed, the second movement, "Hawthorne," sounds at times like a study for the eventual second movement of his 4th Symphony - a piece that was left in manuscript and only revised into a performable version after his death for the world premiere in Carnegie Hall by Leopold Stokowski (with two assistant conductors) and the American Symphony Orchestra in the 1960s.

Brant heard an orchestral piece struggling to break out of the Concord Sonata, and it is easy to hear that, since the piano's resources are incredibly stretched and strained to contain Ives's imaginative sonic landscape.  Brant's orchestration is only one possible one.  It does most of the time have an Ivesian sound, to judge by the 4th Symphony to which it is close kin.  I recently acquired the recording that MTT and the SFSO made based on a live performance in their home hall, but I wanted to hear this live, as a recording can't really begin to contain the sonic universe of Charles Ives.  It was a great performance Wednesday night, full of color, humor and passion, and I'm glad I was there.

The first half of the concert consisted of being shouted at (Carl Ruggles' "Sun-treader") and being whispered at (Morton Feldman's "Piano and Orchestra" with Emmanuel Ax at the piano in front of the orchestra).  There are interesting sounds in both pieces, but neither cohere for me as overwhelmingly rewarding musical experiences.  Certainly MTT and the orchestra put forth a fantastic effort to project these pieces, but I remain unconvinced by either of them.

On Saturday afternoon, I attended NY City Center Encores! production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Pipe Dream," possibly the least successful Broadway musical produced by this team(from 1955).  Even thought it was not a monster hit like Carousel or Oklahoma, it did run 246 performances, a respectable amount, but didn't earn back it's investment and has not been revived on Broadway.  This semi-staged performance was superb - a great cast, the terrific Encores! orchestra expanded to a respectable string section -- indeed, chamber orchestra proportions to make the most of Bennett's orchestrations -- and great work on the podium.  The thin and ridiculous plotting helps to explain why this one has pretty much disappeared apart from the original cast album.  Listening to it is like constantly thinking that one is listening to something else, because as music and lyrics it fits comfortably within the overall trajectory of shows by this team.  Every song sounds like Richard Rodgers, every lyric sounds like Oscar Hammerstein, with all the strengths and limitations going with that.  The good news is that this brief revival will not be totally lost to history, as the R&H production office decided based on hearing rehearsals that this was worth preserving, and there will be a recording based on the performances.  Anybody who loves R&H should support the project by getting the recording when it is issued.

Last night, I was at the New York Philharmonic for a concert led by guest conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi.  He began with Alfred Schnittke's (K)ein Sommernachstraum, a piece commissioned by the Salzburg Festival that turned into a brief sort-of-tribute to Mozart.  A Mozartian minuet is subjected to variation and distortion over the course of about 9 minutes.  It's fun to hear, albeit quite repetitious to the extent of being tiresome towards the end.  The NYP played with their accustomed finesse.

Then Frank Peter Zimmermann, the fine German violinist, came on stage for a fiery performance of Antonin Dvorak's Violin Concerto.  I love this piece, especially in the recordings by Nathan Milstein and Josef Suk, but I can't recall having actually heard a live performance in more than three decades of NY concert-going.  (I know it's been played before - after all, the NYP played it in 1894, and the program book says they last played it in July 2011 at the Vail Music Festival, but I can't recall hearing it.)  It's sort of on the fringes of the repertory for several reasons: the themes in the first two movements aren't quite as memorable as Dvorak's best, the second movement goes on too long rehashing the same material, and the orchestration - despite Joseph Joachim's determined efforts to get Dvorak to lighten it up - is still too heavy at times in competition with the soloist.  But the finale is rip-roaring fun, and Zimmermann certainly did it justice.

Finally, after intermission we had Peter Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6, the "Pathetique," another piece that doesn't get played as much as it used to.  I've heard a few performances, but not as many as one would expect of what is really a central repertory piece.   (It was last played by the NYP on tour in China in 2008, four years ago - a bit surprising when you consider that the Brahms symphonies get played much more frequently by this orchestra.)  I thought Dohnanyi and the orchestra did a superb job with this.  The third movement march, in particular, seemed more symphonic and dramatic than usual, and with a commanding gesture, Dohnanyi managed to restrain the audience from interrupting the transition to the final adagio with applause.  (I guess he didn't try on Thursday night, since the Times review noted applause at that point.)  It is absolutely draining to listen to a strong performance of this piece, and I felt drained afterwards and thankful for having been there. 

Another Weekend Culturefest: "Carrie"; Juilliard String Quartet; American Symphony Orchestra

Somehow the various series and subscriptions I have tend to intersect on weekends, and again I ended up attending three varied events over the last weekend in February. 

On Saturday afternoon, it was the musical show "Carrie," a revival of a failed 1980s musical based on a novel by Stephen King, with music by Michael Gore, lyrics by Dean Pitchford, and book by Lawrence D. Cohen.  The MCC Theater production was in its final days of previews at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, with an opening scheduled shortly.  Stafford Arima directed a young, talented cast, with choreography by Matt Williams and musical direction and arrangements by Mary-Mitchell Campbell. 

I'm not sure whether this attempted revival will be a success, but if not, it would definitely not be the fault of the cast, whose talent and energy are on continuous display through two acts of sometimes frenetic movement, special effects, and lots and lots and lots of teen angst.  What was originally mainly a horror-show, according to news reports (I didn't see the original production), has been turned into a somewhat simplistic study of high school bullying. 

Carrie, raised by a fundamentalist Christian single mother with an outsized fear of her daughter's sexual blooming, is the target of fun at school because she doesn't fit in, with her dowdy dresses and goody-two-shoes ways.  Marin Mazzie plays the mother as a character always on the edge of explosion in the thrall of a charismatic preacher.  Molly Ransom plays Carrie as a very vulnerable, picked-upon teen, whose acquisition of demonic powers seems so contrary to her character as to be a very puzzling plot development.  Among the other high school students, Derek Klena as Tommy Ross hits the right note of teen innocence as the boy who is worried about the taunting of Carrie, and proves willing to take her to the prom instead of his regular girlfriend.  Sue, the main tormenter played by Jeanna de Waal, is evil bitch personified, and Christy Altomare gets very well into her part as a teen with a conscience.  The teachers trying to deal with the raging hormone issues of their charges are sympathetically portrayed by Carmen Cusack and Wayne Alan Wilcox.  Ben Thompson is suitable aggressive as a suitably aggressive teen boy who cheers on the harassment and is complicit in the final blow-out.  Other supporting roles are well played by Corey Boardman, Blair Goldberg, F. Michael Haynie, Andy Minetus, Elly Noble and Jen Sese.

I found the dialogue, lyrics and music to be simplistic in the 1980s rock-Broadway-musical genre, but sufficiently spirited to support the story. The staging makes the most of the minimal possibilities provided by the Lortel, a small house on Christopher Street with a constricting stage for a production of this sort, with musicians out of sight somewhere, mainly blasting over the sound system. In short, it's an entertainment with some underlying lessons about the cruelty of teens and the well-meant blinders of parents, but I don't think it's a significant piece of theater.  I would not normally have gone to something like this, but my theater-going companion was interested... so we went.

Saturday evening, the Peoples' Symphony Concerts series presented the Juilliard String Quartet at Washington Irving High School. The big novelty, of course, is the new first violinist of the group, Joseph Lin.  The replacement of a member in a long-lived string quartet can significantly change the sound and style of the group, and perhaps that is going on with the Juilliard.  When I was first discovering music in the 1960s, the Juilliard was the gold standard of American string quartets, with a particular talent for challenging stuff like the Bartok or Ives quartets, which I learned from their LP recordings.  They had a somewhat brash, bright, aggressive style, very incisive, more dramatic than beautiful.  The current version of the quartet, with Ronald Copes in the second violin chair, Samuel Rhodes playing Viola, and Joel Krosnick the cellist, produces a smooth, blended sound and seems more concerned at times with beauty than drama.

They opened with the Stravinsky Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914), which somehow seemed less coherent to me than I remembered from recordings (I don't recall hearing a live performance), and I could have wished for a bit more dramatic tension in the very slow third movement.  They continued with Leos Janacek's "Kreutzer Sonata" Quartet (1923), which again I felt as very beautiful but perhaps less dramatic than some other renditions.  They concluded with Mozart's Quartet in A, K. 464 (1785), which I found to be absolutely gorgeous.  Mr. Lin explained from the stage at the start of the concert that they had decided to reverse what would be the normal order of such a program (Mozart first, then Stravinsky and finally Janacek - a classical piece to "ease" the audience into the program, saving the challenging 20th century masterpiece for last) in order to wake up our ears and challenge us first as a set-up for the sublime Mozart in the second half.  The program certainly accomplished that.

I would be interested to know whether other listeners have noticed a difference in the corporate sound of the Juilliard with Mr. Lin in the first chair.  The aggressive Juilliard that I knew from the old Columbia Lp recordings now has a smoother, richer sound in its current incarnation, but I found myself longing for more of the gutsy playing I remembered.

Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I attended the Classics Declassified treatment of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913) by Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra, at Symphony Space. 

Botstein provided an interesting lecture that emphasized the technical ways in which Stravinsky's work built on the past while departing from it through the juxtaposition of different melodies, harmonies and rhythms on top of each other, using the orchestra to illustrate his points.  I thought this process could have been made more effective had he added just one bit to the routine: instead of playing the passage in question, then breaking it down in its constituent parts, then proceeding to his next example, I think it would help to drive the point home to repeat the passage all put together again.  Several times I found myself wanting to hear the whole thing reassembled directly after hearing the constituent parts.  At the same time, I understand that this procedure would probably have added substantially to the length of the presentation, which might have been logistically unfeasible.

After the lecture came the performance, as to which I had mixed views.  On the one hand, for Botstein and the orchestra to get through this very challenging piece in reasonably good shape with plenty of honors to go around among the soloists (especially percussion), probably on less rehearsal than a major orchestra would undertake before presenting this work as part of a concert series in a major hall, is quite creditable.  On the other hand, one could tell that some of the orchestra has not had much experience with the piece and a few of the rhythmically tricky bits lost some precision and momentum, especially in the final sections of each half where the series of complex chains of uneven bars really depends upon a high degree of familiarity from a group that has played the piece together repeatedly over time in order to make its greatest effect.  That said, a competent reading of this piece led by a conductor who knows the work well will always makes a big effect, and there were many moments of high accomplishment to balance the occasional feelings of caution.  This piece makes quite an impact when played in a relatively small hall like Symphony Space, where there is not the effect of a vast concert hall to dissipate the impact of the sound, so it is especially interesting to hear it played there.

The orchestra management distributed to subscribers the information about the ASO's 2012-13 season, and it promises to be quite extraordinary.  To celebrate the ASO's 50th anniversary, they will begin their Carnegie Hall series with two major works associated with founder Leopold Stokowski: Mahler's 8th (for which Stokowski led the US and Carnegie Hall premieres with the Philadelphia Orchestra) and Ives's 4th (for which Stokowski and the ASO performed the world premiere and made a landmark recording for Columbia that has never really been better in capturing the spirit of the piece).  Even bigger news: they seem to have secured special underwriting for this concert, since they will be selling tickets at 1962 prices to celebrate the anniversary.  (I was crushed to discover, on consulting my calendar, that I will actually be out-of-town on October 26 and unable to attend this event!!!) :((   But I will gladly attend the rest of the season's offerings, and note especially that next year's Classics Declassified Series will focus on three great German romantics - Richard Strauss (Alpine Symphony), Anton Bruckner (Symphony No. 8), and Richard Wagner (opera preludes).  It will be awesome to hear these works at Symphony Space.

A Culture Weekend in NYC - "Merrily We Roll Along" at City Center Encores, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, New York Polyphony at American Academy of Arts & Letters

Herewith a brief report on my very busy cultural weekend in New York City on February 11 & 12, 2012.

On Saturday afternoon, I attended New York City Center Encores' production of "Merrily We Roll Along," with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and original book by George Furth.  As with every revival of this musical, which was unsuccessfully first produced in New York in 1981, tinkering has gone on.  Since then Sondheim has written new music and cut old music.  James Lapine, a frequent Sondheim collaborator who has played a role in revising the show for some of the revivals, directed this one, and Joanthan Tunick, who has been orchestrating Sondheim shows for a long time, revised the orchestration so that the new musical material and the old material would have a coherent sound with the Encores orchestra, conducted by Rob Berman.

They brought together a first-rate cast, with Colin Donnell playing the leading role of Franklin Shepard, the successful Hollywood film producer, Celia Keenan-Bolger as Mary Flynn and Lin-Manuel Miranda as Charley Kringas, his two "old friends."  The story, based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, starts out by showing us the situation of these people in 1981, then moves back through the years to show us, in the last scene of Act II, how they first met. 

I thought the performance was stunningly good, but I had my doubts about the show at intermission.  (I hadn't seen the original production, but did see a community theater revival by the St. Bart's Players several years ago.)  Those doubts were resolved after intermission.  What seemed tedious and obscure in Act I came clearer as one went further and further back in time and gradually understood who these people were and how their lives grew in different directions.  The next morning, I listened to the cast recording of a 1994 revival by the York Theatre Company, and I came to the conclusion that one enjoys Act I much more if one has recently seen Act II.  Telling the story in reverse order doesn't work so well the first time through. 

In the program book and the post-show "speak-out" that follows Saturday matinees at Encores, there was some talk about the changes made in the show to try to make this work better.  The original show did not include a scene about how the three lead characters met, and started out with a high school reunion instead of a producer's party celebrating the successful release of a new film.  Some music was dropped from the original to make it tighter and help the audience understand the plot better.  I'm still wondering whether this could be a commercially viable show, but in the Encores format it worked pretty well, and the cast is so good that one hopes there will be a cast recording.  Unusually for Encores, they are doing more than just the normal 5 performances, so there are still chances to see it in the week ahead. 

After a break for dinner at a theater district favorite, Eatery on 9th Avenue, I hustled back to Carnegie Hall for a concert by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.  In the first half, we had Michael Tippett's Divertimento for chamber orchestra on "Sellinger's Round," followed by Dmitri Shostakovich's First Piano Concerto, Op. 35, with piano soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and trumpet soloist Louis Hanzlik.  After intermission, Arthur Honegger's Pastorale d'ete provided a gentle prelude for Peter Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings.  Orpheus plays without a conductor, providing a true chamber music approach in which the performers work out their interpretation through a consensus formed by key players who rotate from piece to piece.  This approach generally works quite well, and gives the music a different flavor than it would have in conducted performances.  Orpheus is known for sharp ensemble, and most of the time that distinction prevailed on Saturday.

The true test of this arrangement comes in works with a soloist, and the Shostakovich concerto was the one piece on the program where I felt things went a bit wrong.  The outer movements were rather faster-paced than usual, and the finale actually seemed to me to come close to careening out of control, especially in the final section, where Mr. Thibaudet's playing struck me as a bit slapdash due to the excessively fast tempo.  I wonder if there was some disagreement between Thibaudet and the orchestra members about tempi.  The performance did not feel ideally cohesive to me, almost more like a contest between the piano and the orchestra, which was disappointing because the Shostakovich concerto is a piece that I thought would have benefited from the chamber music approach that Orpheus embraces.

Here is an odd coincidence of scheduling.  Last Saturday I heard the Tchaikovsky Serenade played by the East Coast Chamber Orchestra (ECCO) at Washington Irving High School on the Peoples' Symphony series.  Orpheus and ECCO have much in common.  Both play without a conductor, and the string ensembles were roughly the same size for the two performances.  Where they part company is that ECCO is entirely a string orchestra, while Orpheus also plays the chamber orchestra repertory involving winds (as in the Tippett and Honegger pieces on this program).  They also parted company in one other way I found interesting:  ECCO used 4 each of first violins, second violins, violas and cellos, with two double basses, and were playing in a much smaller hall.  Orpheus used 5 first violins, 4 seconds and violas, and 3 cellos, with only one double-bass.  The difference in forces made a big difference in the sound of the music.  I definitely felt a deeper, richer sound out of ECCO -- which may be due as much to the venue as to the heftier bottom provided by 4 cellos and 2 basses.  Heard on its own, the Orpheus performance at Carnegie was terrific, albeit with a lighter feeling (as heard from the first row of the dress circle, center).  ECCO is a much younger group, formed just a decade ago, while Orpheus has been around for forty years and recorded this Serenade long ago.  ECCO's performance struck me as more impassioned, more precise, more excited -- which will hopefully be reflected in their recording, due for issue next month.  Orpheus's performance was more expansive, more settled.  One of their musicians commented in an interview with a WQXR announcer prior to the performance that playing the Tchaikovsky was like "coming home" because they've played it so often.  Familiarity undoubtedly contributed to the more settled feeling.  I enjoyed both performances, and am eagerly awaiting the ECCO recording.  Meanwhile, I found that Arkivmusic.com has reissued the Orpheus recording, so I've ordered it as while, and look forward to the comparison.

Finally, rounding out my NYC culture weekend was New York Polyphony's program, "A Renaissance Valentine," presented at the American Academy of Arts and Letters by the Miller Theatre at Columbia University Early Music Series.  NY Polyphony is a fantastic vocal quartet of Geoffreyy Williams (countertenor), Steven Caldicott Wilson (tenor), Christopher Dylan Herbert (baritone), and Craig Phillips (bass).  They specialized in Renaissance polyphony.  I've heard them perform several times, and highly esteem their recording of English renaissance polyphony: Tudor City.  For this concert, planned to reflect the Valentine's Day theme of the week, they devoted their first half to settings of the Latin version of the Song of Songs by Guerrero, Brumel, Clemens "Non Papa", Pyamour, Forest, Dunstable, and Plummer.  Not a lot of familiar music there, but excellent music rendered with great finesse.  They introduced this sequence with an isorhymic motet by Philippe de Vitry, a medieval composer.

After intermission, they turned their attention to madrigals with a strong love theme from Italy, France and England.  Departing from the printed program, they rearranged and supplemented the final set of English madrigals.  This half was also rendered with finesse, but also in a more "popular" style appropriate to the music and sometimes naughty lyrics. 

Go out of your way to hear them.  They are an extraordinary group, bringing excellent voices and a high level of musicality to everything they sing.  This program showed off their incredible versatility in singing both more serious and lighter repertory.  I hope they will get to record more of this music.

 

CQ/CX by Gabe McKinley at Atlantic Theater Company

Remember the Jason Blair scandal at the New York Times?  About ten years ago, a young Times reporter was found to have been phoning in stories from his Brooklyn apartment which he devised by watching and reading the news and cribbing from articles in other newspapers.  The scandal reverberated through the newspaper, leading to heads rolling at the top editorial levels and major restructuring of the editorial process.  Now it's a play, by Gabe McKinley.

McKinley sets his action at the New York Times at around the time the actual events took place, but changes the names of the characters.  (Except for the publisher, portrayed by David Pittu, who is referred to as Junior, a totally unsubtle reference to actual Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.)  The young reporter, now named Jay Bennett, is played by NY newcomer Kobi Libii, and the editors to whom he reports at various times are played by Arliss Howard, Peter Jay Fernandez and Tim Hopper.  His reporter friends on the paper are played by Steve Rosen and Sheila Tapia.  An elderly editor with some of the best lines is played by Larry Bryggman.  I would say that Bryggman's performance is the most accomplished of the lot, real character actor territory that he totally nails.

The play itself has some problems, most notably a first act that seems to lurch a bit from scene to scene, but I found that the piece works pretty well.  It is difficult to figure out the motivation of Jason Blair (Jay Bennett) for doing what he is doing, especially since he is presented from the outset as being so incredibly eager to make a success at the Times.  Why would anybody undertake something so risky?  The Times is, despite the decline of the print media, still seen as a "paper of record" to which people pay close attention, which means that anybody making up stories will eventually get caught.  (The scandal in the Blair case was that he got away with it far longer than one would have expected, which led to a tightening up of the editorial process and the introduction of a Public Editor to field comments and complaints from the public.) 

I think this is a limited run at The Peter Norton Space on 42nd Street near 11th Avenue.  The small theater helps to magnify the drama, and the production, which relies heavily on rear wall projections rather than a set, is imaginatively done.  David Leveaux directs and the cast is obviously working very hard to activate what is - by its nature - a very talky drama.  I think anybody fascinated by the newspaper business, as I am, will find much to enjoy, and anybody who doesn't know the back-story will find many surprises along the way.  I hope the young star, Kobi Libii, has many more opportunities to grow as an actor. The signs are there...

"A Hole in His Heart" at Atlantic Stages

Last night I attended a performance of a new play by Jon Kakaley, "A Hole in His Heart," at Atlantic Stages on West 16th Street, a production of "Ten Years Productions" directed by Jake Turner.  My theater-going companion and I subscribe to Atlantic Stages, which affords a variety of independent theater productions over the course of the season.  The description of this show sounded interesting, so we decided to take the plunge, even though we had never heard of the author, so we showed up without any specific expectations.

Mr. Kakaley is a young actor who has been working on this, his first full-length play, since January 2009.  He's spent the last several years struggling to build a career as an actor in New York, and has appeared in some short films, TV series pilots, and off-Broadway revivals of some well-known stage plays, but it sounds like he hasn't yet had his real break-through as an actor.  According to an author's note in the program, he's realized that the hard work and sacrifice has caused him to neglect forming relationships with people, and although he's derived "great joy" from being an actor, "I have always felt a hole in my heart.  I've thought long and hard about what that hole was from, and I believe it's from the relationships I've missed out on to get here."  His play is devoted to exploring this issue.

He has created (both as a writer and actor) the central character of James Logan, a young film actor whose career has developed nicely over the span of ten years and is about to take-off into "star" territory, but who is bothered by the lack of personal relationships in his life.  All the calls he receives are business calls.  Ten years previously he had separated from a girlfriend in order to make a career as an actor, but the regret at ending that relationship lingers.  As the play begins, his ex-girlfriend, now a divorced woman in poor health who has lost custody of her child due to her drug abuse and neglectful ways, is lounging in her seedy one-room apartment when Logan bursts unannounced through her door, having had no contact with her in a decade, and seeks to restart their relationship.  The play explores the rocky road that ensues towards rebuilding the trust destroyed by his prior desertion, and the ultimate test that Logan faces in trying to decide what is more important to him - pursuing this relationship or seizing upon the next big opportunity for his career.

The entire effort is marked by great sincerity, but in truth the play is very much a first effort.  Mr. Kakaley performs the lead role with enthusiasm, and his supporting cast is also clearly very committed to the effort, but I thought the script and production still needed plenty of work to become convincing. 

At intermission, my theater-going companion asked "Had enough?" and suggested leaving.  But I insisted that we stick it out.  I thought that these actors and the technical staff supporting them had put a real effort into making something of this story, and although the end result was not entirely convincing, we should at least stay and see how things turned out.  I concluded that the second act was actually more effective than the first.  Exposition establishing the characters and their relationships can be difficult, but once the plot is really set in motion, things tend to move more smoothly.  Knowing how to end can be difficult, and I don't know that Mr. Kakaley solved the problem of ending this play all that convincingly - a blackout at a moment of high drama can be a good ending, but I found this one a bit unsatisfying.

According to his bio in the program, Mr. Kakaley is working on two more plays and I would be interesting in seeing how his experience with this first effort pays off in future works.  I would also be interested in seeing him acting in other peoples' productions, as he does exhibit significant skill as an actor.  His chief supporting player, Ydaiber Orozco, a Venezuelan-born actress who plays the girlfriend, really threw herself into the role as well, and I enjoyed her performance.  Briefer supporting roles were well taken by Brian Podnos, Arthur Gerunda, Daniel Genalo, and Mark Hennessy.  The entire play was performed on a single set meant to represent "a low-income house in the middle of nowhere," which it adequately did.  Director JakeTurner had to handle the light and sound due to the last minute unavailability of a staff member, which may explain some of the lengthy delays between scenes, and definitely explains the delayed start of the show, which runs a bit over 2 hours. 

This is a limited run, so anybody interested should not hesitate.

"Hugo" and "Blood and Gifts"

Contrasting cultural outings here....

One evening last week I went to see Martin Scorsese's new 3-D film, "Hugo," a sort of fairy-tale about an orphan boy who occupies himself keeping all the clocks running in the Paris Railway Station in the 1920s.  The boy gets involved in various adventures with a toy store owner, the owner's niece, a security official at the train station...  You get the drift.  It is very entertaining most of the time, although I found that the scenes focusing on the security official, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, tended to drag a bit.  When the kids are on-screen, the action picks up.  Ben Kingsley as the toy store owner comes across as rather stiff ands scowling through most of the film - undoubtedly just what the director asked for - but unbends in the end when his true identity is revealed.  Perhaps the most suspenseful acting is provided by the automaton that is central to the plot (as to which, see this morning's NY Times Science Section). I thought the 3-D effect almost detracted from the look of the film, seeming a bit gimmicky and not always so well in focus as I would have liked.  (I thought the 3-D in "Avator," the first feature film I saw in this technology, seemed much more sharply defined and pleasant to view.  During the previews, there was a glimpse of "Titanic" done up in 3-D, which will be released for a brief run in 2012.  More artificiality here, taken a film that was shot in two dimensions and simulating the 3-D effect through some computer program.)

On Saturday afternoon, I saw a performance of a new play by J.T. Rogers, "Blood and Gifts," which tells a story about the U.S. involvement with attempts to rid Afghanistan of its Soviet occupiers during the 1980s.  The story is told from the perspective of various secret security services - the U.S. Islamabad CIA station chief, his Soviet Russian counterpart, and the head of the Pakistan secret service.  The first act is set mainly in Islamabad and the hill country near the Afghan border; the second act centers at first on Washington, D.C., where one of the "warlords" who is leading the effort against the Soviets in Afghanistan comes to seek funding and weapons, but then reverts to Afghanistan after the expulsion of the Russians.  The entire thing is quite gripping, as staged at Lincoln Center Theater  by Bartlett Sher with a truly stellar cast, among whom the male lead, Jeremy Davidson as the CIA operative, stands out.  But the entire cast is really stunning, and stunningly well directed to keep the audience's attention throughout a very serious play.  I can highly recommend this one.