Category Archives: Reviews

Venus in Fur

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Now playing at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway.

I have always suspected that for some star-making roles, the magic is all in the part itself and any competent actor lucky enough to land the role could ride it to acclaim. But if that’s true in some cases, it absolutely isn’t true of Venus in Fur. Nina Arianda is unforgettable as Vanda, the dominant presence in the play (in every sense), but that’s in large part because it’s such a high-wire role. It’s all too easy to imagine how unconvincing the character could be in other hands. Capturing Vanda’s subtle wit and quicksilver tonal shifts cannot possibly be easy, and few actresses have the burning charisma and imposing physicality required to convey the woman’s utter mastery of the action on stage. Playwright David Ives needed nothing short of a goddess to make Venus in Fur work; it is to everyone’s good fortune that the play’s producers landed upon Arianda.

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Fringe

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Fridays at 9 p.m. on Fox. Twelve episodes into the fourth season.

The best thing about science fiction (or any fantastic genre) is how escaping the confines of a strictly realistic setting allows the storyteller to address real issues from a fresh angle. Aliens, for example, aren’t necessarily all that compelling in and of themselves (I faithfully watched seven years of The X-Files, where the little green men or gray men or black oil slicks or whatever were nearly always the least interesting things on screen, so I know this for a fact), but aliens as a vehicle for addressing how people deal with the unknown, or how majority groups deal with minorities, or how we conceptualize humanity—that’s compelling. Idle fancies can be fun, but the best speculative fiction ultimately returns to earth.

Initially, Fringe was a textbook example of idle, empty science fiction: a facile yet muddled X-Files rip-off in which a top-secret division of the FBI investigates strange paranormal events while powerful shadowy figures manipulate them and their results—diverting enough but hardly promising and extremely derivative. But then, improbably, the writers settled on a brilliant explanation for the paranormal “fringe events”: the slow collision of two parallel worlds. With that essential conflict at its core, Fringe has developed a gorgeously baroque mythology and, even better, used it as the foundation for thoughtful, poignant explorations of identity and personal history and guilt and love. In short, when it was just about creepy things going bump in the night, Fringe was dull; now that it’s given those sci-fi elements real resonance, it’s perhaps the most underrated drama on TV.

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The Night Circus

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By Erin Morgenstern. Published in 2011.

Emily Dickinson described books in general as frigates, “to take us Lands away,” but in my experience, only the special ones actually accomplish that. Those are my favorites, transporting you to another place, sometimes foreign or alien or fantastic, sometimes a near mirror of home, but definitely elsewhere. The details conjure smells and sights and sounds with enough resonance to give your imagination material to fill in the rest, and the characters seem to continue living outside the pages. The depth and breadth of the setting invites you to linger longer than the plot does, and past and future extend beyond the story’s boundaries.

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel, is one of those rare frigates, so immersive that reading it is like jumping into a cool, clear pond and discovering you can breathe underwater. An elegant grown-up fairy tale, suffused with magical and ahistorical period color, it spins its love story with delicacy and ever-increasing warmth, but the real accomplishment is the setting, the circus for which the novel is named. So evocative, so beautifully and ardently rendered, the spellbinding circus is a wonder to visit.

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Les Carillons, Polyphonia, and DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse

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The New York City Ballet on Sunday, February 5.

I learned after the fact that New York City Ballet’s all-Wheeldon program was a special honor for the relatively young choreographer, something usually done only with the works of George Balanchine or Jerome Robbins, but when I bought my ticket, it never occurred to me that the programming was anything out of the ordinary. Wheeldon’s work has been a constant in City Ballet repertory for the half a dozen (!) years I’ve been attending, and I’m sure I’ve seen more of his pieces than Robbins’s.

The program this weekend demonstrated why that’s the case, why the company created the role of resident choreographer for Wheeldon in 2001 and why it continues to champion his work even after his departure in 2008. Even in his weaker pieces, Wheeldon’s aesthetic fits New York City Ballet. Often playful but always elegant, acutely conscious of music, making gorgeous use of the corps, his work truly does feel descended from (though not derivative of) Balanchine’s. He can justify a full program easily.

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Haywire

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In theaters.

No one slums with so much style as director Steven Soderbergh. The Ocean’s movies, for example, are far more aesthetically polished than any star-studded trifle really needs to be, but that, of course, is part of what makes them so charming. In fact, I secretly prefer frivolous Soderbergh to serious Soderbergh. His sleek manner can come across as cold when he’s dealing with some substance, but it’s just cool everywhere else.

Haywire, his latest, isn’t comedic like Ocean’s or sexy like Out of Sight (my personal favorite)—and it’s not on their level—but it’s fun all the same and just as impeccably put together as the man’s films always are. Plus, the conceit is great: Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs set out to make a vehicle for mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano by catering to her strengths (looking tough, kicking the snot out of people) and underplaying her weaknesses (emoting, delivering extensive dialogue, maybe acting in general). Transcendent it’s not, but as tight, hard-boiled B-movies go, it’s terrific.

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Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major, Mahler’s Ruckert-Lieder, Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, and American opera arias

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The MET Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Sunday, January 15.

The clarinet is often described as the instrument closest, in timbre and range, to the human voice. I never gave the idea much thought before this concert, but the juxtaposition put forth by the Metropolitan Opera’s exquisite orchestra turned out to be lovely. Alternating between supporting a clarinet soloist and accompanying soprano Renée Fleming highlighted the voice-like qualities of the wind instrument, the agility and virtuosity of Fleming’s voice, and the fine musicianship of both. The program itself was a bit quirky, starting with Mozart and ending with several hyper-romantic arias from twentieth-century American operas, but it pulled together beautifully behind its talented soloists.

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McCoy Tyner Quartet featuring Gary Bartz

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At the Blue Note on Wednesday, January 11.

Jazz is never going to be my thing. I have tried (and tried and tried and tried), but I always feel at sea to some extent. Sometimes I get something out of it, and sometimes I simply don’t, but the music never truly speaks to me the way other genres do. I feel bad about that (I feel bad about lots of things), but there it is.

That said, the surest way to pull me out a little bit is to feature a good pianist, and McCoy Tyner happens to be a great one. His résumé—pianist for the John Coltrane Quartet as well as sideman on numerous albums for Blue Note Records and eventual bandleader—is obviously pretty striking (it’s generally a good sign if even I recognize the names), but it wasn’t just Tyner’s credentials that impressed me. He’s an incredible pianist, in a way that transcends genre altogether.

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A Separation

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In theaters.

The most intractable disagreements are those in which each party believes himself to be the true victim, the one most deserving of an apology. A Separation dramatizes that essential truth as well as any film I’ve ever seen, and it does so by playing fair. The four adults at odds in Asghar Farhadi’s moving domestic drama all have legitimate grievances, even as they also have all contributed to the destructive mire in which they find themselves.

It’s a lose-lose mess, but although A Separation is poignant and sad, it’s not depressing. Farhadi’s careful unspooling of his tale keeps the movie from wallowing. In fact, the movie is outright suspenseful, perfectly paced, both tense and thoughtful, and the actors are so talented and quietly expressive that watching them is a joy, even in an unhappy context.

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Misfits

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New episodes Mondays on Hulu (airs on E4 in the UK). Three episodes into the third season.

The whole “this British TV show could never air in the United States” thing is often kind of overblown, but in the case of Misfits, imported here by Hulu, that’s probably a fair assessment. The show’s nonchalant treatment of its characters’ sex lives is its most obviously un-American trait, but the foreignness goes deeper than that. American TV almost invariably celebrates characters who are wealthy or ambitious or somehow outstanding, the best at whatever they do, and Misfits features characters who, even after they acquire supernatural powers, are doggedly ordinary—underemployed, living in council housing (or a complex so grim and run-down it might as well be), in and out of trouble with the law not because they’re outright criminals but because they’re aimless and rash and unlucky. And yet the show is as nonchalant about their hapless, mundane existence as it is about the obvious fact that people are sexual creatures.

That breezy freshness spills over into every aspect of the show: the charmingly flippant approach to its supernatural elements, the peculiar plots twists, the engagingly laid-back acting. It’s a quirky show that doesn’t make a show of its quirkiness. Sometimes the quirks skew wrong (a few plot lines in the first season left a bad taste in my mouth), but they’re always compelling: entertaining first and then, once you’re finished laughing—whether with humor or in disbelief—oddly thought-provoking. Introducing this brazen oddity to the American audiences is one of the best things Hulu has ever done.

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Hugo

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In theaters.

For decades, director Martin Scorsese has been a dedicated film preservationist and an enthusiastic cheerleader for early cinema, but Hugo may be the first time he has aimed his pro–silent movie message squarely at children. It’s an odd moral for kids (as opposed to film students or cinephiles), and it makes for an odd film: broad in its style and messaging and self-indulgent in its pacing, yet also magnificently cinematic in Scorsese’s inimitable way and charmingly earnest about its subject matter. The idiosyncratic result sometimes plods, but more often it takes flight, particularly after it begins its exploration of the extraordinary films of Georges Méliès. I’m not sure whether I would have enjoyed Hugo as a child, but as an adult, I eventually fell under its spell.

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