Category: Music, Dance & Theater

The New York City Ballet on Tuesday, June 24.

The lyrics to “At the Ballet” from A Chorus Line (“Everything was beautiful at the ballet / Graceful men life lovely girls in white …”) make me think of works like Balanchine’s “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet.” Sure, the costume colors tend more toward peaches than cream, but “Quartet” presents exactly the kind of unabashed, innocent sweetness that the song so wistfully celebrates. Charmingly pretty and traditional, it is all pirouettes and arabesques and pink tulle tutus.

It was fun to see that juxtaposed against “Prodigal Son,” a completely different Balanchine ballet in which the dancers tend to creep about with their feet wide apart and the prima ballerina, Siren, spends a great deal of time wrapping a long velvet train between her legs in a suggestive but distinctly unladylike manner. The contrast is striking—in the steps, in the dancers’ physical bearing, in the costume style—but both works are a joy to watch.

The New York City Ballet on Thursday, June 13.

One of my all-time favorite albums—of any genre—is Five Tango Sensations, composed by Ástor Piazzolla and performed by the bandoneón master himself with the Kronos Quartet. It’s a dazzlingly rich, textured composition (one often hears the analogy that Piazzolla did for the tango what Chopin did for the polonaise), and it showcases just how expressive and evocative the bandoneón, a relative of the accordion, can be. To me, that was a wonderful surprise.

Bruno Moretti’s accordion-centric score for “Oltremare,” one of the works included in the City Ballet’s Here and Now program, doesn’t have quite the same passion as Piazzolla’s work, but it, too, makes vivid use of its distinctive solo instrument. Mauro Bigonzetti’s choreography isn’t particularly remarkable, but Moretti’s music makes “Oltremare” memorable nonetheless, and it made me think about how important music is to the success of dance.

The New York City Ballet on Friday, May 9.

The choreography in the Russian Roots program ranges from the primly beautiful to the slightly jazzy to the quasi-tribal, which is why it’s such a trip that they’re all choreographed by the same man: Jerome Robbins, whose Russian heritage the title references. The pieces are quite different in mood and texture, but as my dad pointed out afterword, knowing they come from the same person gives one license to the similarities among them, the way modern touches turn up in the classic “Andantino” and traditional steps create a foundation for the brutal “Les Noces.”

Now playing at Studio 54 on Broadway.

I’ve seen theater that uses video projection before, but even when it was done well, it always seemed superfluous, just trendy window-dressing. And none of it compared to the stunning, seamless, marvelously engaging animation in this production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. Those other plays could have been stripped down without losing much, but the wizardry of this Sunday production so perfectly complements and expands upon the musical cues and dramatic themes that I can’t imagine the musical without it.

Chanticleer and the Shanghai Quartet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Thursday, April 10.

The members of Chanticleer blend their voices more beautifully than any other choir I’ve ever heard, and in the powerfully reverberant hall housing the Temple of Dendur at the Met—where their most recent New York performance took place—the effect is extraordinary. The choir’s collective voice envelopes you. It’s above you, behind you, inside you,* and it’s glorious.

To be honest, I didn’t even much care what they were performing—I was just happy to hear them—but in fact, the big work of the concert was the premiere of Chen Yi’s From the Path of Beauty, a song cycle for choir and string quartet. It is the sort of composition that probably would take multiple listens to fully appreciate but that Chanticleer and the Shanghai Quartet performed well enough to make even the first listen dazzling.

Pomerium at the Cloisters on Saturday, March 22.

When I began studying the organ, I fell in love with the fugue. In a fugue, one voice introduces a short melody, the subject, and then the other voices take it up in turn, weaving together, stretching and compressing and inverting and transposing the subject, each voice equal to the others, until they finally cadence together in a glorious climax. The underlying harmonic structure of the fugue is often quite simple, but the rich polyphonic texture is markedly different from the typical melody with harmonic accompaniment of pop songs and hymns and even much classical music. To me, the big Baroque fugues were a revelation.

I still get a charge out of the incomparable polyphony of the Baroque and Renaissance periods, which is why I was eager to hear Pomerium, a choral ensemble devoted to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century repertory. The concert was a seasonal one, featuring motets written for Passiontide and Easter, and as I expected, the intricate polyphony was exquisite. But the concert reminded me, too, that as magical as polyphony can be, the moment in which it ends, the moment when the voices converge into unison, is often just as special.

Chichester Festival Theatre at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through March 22.

I know some people don’t enjoy or approve of anachronistic productions of Shakespeare’s plays, and it’s true they can be gimmicky. But I can’t imagine that Shakespeare himself would have minded those directorial choices; after all, he included numerous clear anachronisms in his plays—note the chiming clocks, billiard games, and pistols of antiquity, for example—but more to the point, he unapologetically imposed the manners and behaviors of Elizabethan England onto a variety of other times and places. A Midsummer Night’s Dream isn’t really set in ancient Greece. The Winter’s Tale isn’t really set in Bohemia. And Macbeth isn’t really set in eleventh-century Scotland. So why cling to those settings? New settings can reinvigorate the plays, forcing us to reexamine them with new eyes.

This Chichester production of Macbeth is a good example of anachronism used well. Director Rupert Goold uses a relatively contemporary setting packed with Stalinist imagery, and that helps emphasize the idea that Macbeth isn’t just treacherous in rising to power but also in exercising that power. I admit I’d never really thought about that before, so wrapped up was I in all the intrigues and stratagems, but Goold makes it impossible to look at the story from such an amoral perspective. Macbeth is a tyrant, in every sense, and the creatively anachronistic production helps make that clear.

Now playing at the Booth Theatre on Broadway.

The most memorable passage of The Seafarer is a monologue about Hell—Hell as a place, not a mere concept, but not the traditional inferno either. To the contrary, The Seafarer describes Hell as a place of cold—cold, isolation, and self-loathing. The more I think about it, the more I like that description. Flames might be more frightening from a physical standpoint, but from an emotional standpoint, cold is worse. A cold person is capable of much more terrible cruelty than a fiery person. What’s more, cold is not a thing itself; it is absence, the absence of heat. Cold is abandonment, loneliness, rejection or, worse, indifference. Fire might be physical agony, but cold goes deeper. To experience a cold Hell is to experience profound loss, the loss of everything warm and good and beautiful.

I listened, rapt, as Ciarán Hinds delivered the Hell monologue in The Seafarer, just as I listened, rapt, to the monologues in The Weir, an earlier work by the same playwright, Conor McPherson, when it saw it in London nearly ten years ago. But unlike The Weir, The Seafarer didn’t really capture my imagination beyond that monologue. Unlike in The Weir, the monologue was really the only thing that felt fresh.

The New York City Ballet on Thursday, February 7.

It never fails: When I choose to see a ballet repertory program mainly for one or two works on the bill, those works are never my favorites, and often, the work in which I had no particular interest is the one I most enjoy. Sometimes I wonder whether I should just start picking programs at random.

In the case of the City Ballet’s Inspirations program, I was curious about “The Chairman Dances,” set by Peter Martins to music cut from John Adams’ minimalist opera Nixon in China, and I was eager to see “Rococo Variations,” Christopher Wheeldon’s final work for the company as its resident choreographer. I rolled my eyes at the inclusion of “Stars and Stripes,” George Balanchine’s John Philip Sousa extravaganza, but inevitably, that latter work delighted me in spite of myself, and the former two disappointed. Someday this will stop surprising me.

Now playing at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on Broadway.

Before this, I’d never seen one of Tom Stoppard’s plays performed, only read them on my own, and to be honest, reading them is easier. Stoppard’s text is so dense, packed with philosophical ideas, debates on determinism and free will, romanticism and classicism, materialism and consciousness, and—always—Truth with a capital T, and it isn’t so overwhelming if you can keep the words in front of you, to reread and parse and ponder at your leisure.

That said, watching the text brought to life is exciting. Seeing the actors helps keep you from bogging yourself down in the concepts and theories and abstracts, for though Stoppard’s plays are intellectually demanding, they can be tender and funny and human, too. His famous debut play, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, wouldn’t be so affecting if it were merely an existential treatise, and his latest, Rock ‘n’ Roll, also expands on its challenging philosophical foundation to tell a vivid, moving story.