Category: Music, Dance & Theater

Lar Lubovitch Dance Company at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday, April 18.

When I went away to college, I took great pleasure in going to the movies on a whim. It would be 9 o’clock on a Tuesday night, and I wouldn’t feel like studying or socializing, so I’d hop in my car, speed to the nearest metroplex, pick something off the marquee, and settle happily into a chair in the back of the theater. I felt like a triumphant fugitive, free and unbound.

I still love doing that, actually, and one of my favorite things about New York is that my options for spur-of-the-moment escapism have expanded exponentially. On Wednesday, for example, I took the subway downtown instead of up- after work and bought a ticket to see the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company that night. I’d read about the performance earlier in the week, but I didn’t decide to go until that afternoon. After several excruciatingly bad news days (working in front of a computer from 9 to 5 has turned me into a full-blown news junkie), I felt I needed the diversion.

And I do love Lubovitch’s work, which turns up fairly frequently in American Ballet Theatre repertory programs. His choreography for pairs is particularly breathtaking. The couple seems to move as a single organism, always touching, moving seamlessly though intricate steps and lifts. The dancers never pause to shift the man’s hands to the woman’s waist or adjust their stance or plant their feet. Their movements are completely fluid and strikingly intimate, a joy to watch.

Now playing at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on Broadway

As I watched Spring Awakening with growing impatience, I wondered: Would I have enjoyed this more, say, ten years ago when I was seventeen, angst-ridden, melodramatic, and overwhelmed by the enormity of the world around me? My inclination is to say no, I was just as unforgiving of flat, clichéd characters and self-important, overwrought plotting then as I am now, but perhaps I am wrong. Maybe I am so old as to start grumbling about kids these days. Damn.

But really, honest to god, there is a lot to grumble about in Spring Awakening. The music, particularly the orchestration, is beautiful, and the young performers are clearly quite talented, but the writing—wildly overripe and ludicrously underdeveloped—just made me cringe.

Collegium Vocale Gent Choir and Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall on Sunday, April 8.

Attending a performance of J.S. Bach’s St. John Passion was the perfect way for me to celebrate Easter. It’s a gorgeous, moving work—heartstoppingly grand and yet, during the arias and chorales, heartbreakingly intimate. A masterpiece of one of my favorite composers, it’s the sort of devoutly felt music that makes me feel the presence of God.

But the Passion is also “problematic,” to use that wonderfully weaselly word. A setting of John’s account of Jesus’ betrayal, trial, and crucifixion inevitably includes that Gospel’s identification of the “the Jews” as the villains: Pilate insists the prisoner is blameless, but John’s Jews howl for blood.

In other words, the St. John Passion encapsulates what I treasure about religion and what troubles me deeply. It is a testament to the Good that divinely inspired people can accomplish, maybe even a glimpse of the profound Beauty of the divine itself, and yet it is also an example of the damage religion can do. Although the work is, arguably, not itself anti-Semitic, it reflects a tradition of hate and cruelty and ignorance that is as much a product of organized religion as the Goodness and Beauty to which I cling.

At the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Saturday, March 30.

At its core, Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands is elemental: the simple tale of a gentle innocent martyred by a cruel, uncomprehending world. That simplicity, that mythic quality, is well-suited for interpretation through dance. Spared the elaborate expository pantomimes, freed from the fussiness of a complicated plot, the dancers can focus on the story’s grand emotion, which is what they’re best at portraying anyway, especially when accompanied by music as evocative as Danny Elfman’s.

So why, when it’s so unnecessary, does choreographer Matthew Bourne insist of mucking up his Edward Scissorhands ballet with cutesy silent-movie-style acting, overembellished storytelling, and flashy, distracting sets? I’m sure it’s supposed to be “accessible,” but it ends up being shallow, not just artistically but—worse—emotionally. The climax has no punch because the movements have no passion.

The New York Philharmonic on Thursday, March 22.

What I love most about classical music (and by this I mean music of the classical period, roughly 1750 to 1820) is its irrepressible buoyancy. Composers then didn’t think of music as self-expression (that began in the romantic period that followed), so angst and pain rarely weigh down their compositions. Mozart, for example, wrote some of his loveliest, airiest pieces during some of the darkest times in his life.

I love tense, impassioned music as much as the next person, but there’s something very special about those bright classical works. To me, they express an unearthly sense of innocence. It’s as if the music is coming from a different plane, a world without suffering or trouble.

I went to Thursday’s concert feeling moody and glum. Work had been frustrating, the skies were grey, and Sean had to work late and couldn’t join me. Then the concert began—Haydn’s lilting “La Reine” symphony followed by one of Mozart’s piano concertos, with the glorious Mitsuko Uchida as soloist—and the music was so radiant and clean, so unaffected and blithe, that all those petty concerns evaporated. That’s the power of classical music.

Now playing at Circle in the Square on Broadway.

The cast of characters in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is a field guide to early adolescent geekdom. The relentless academic overachiever, the hyperactive boy clinging to childhood, the shy introvert with an oddball sense of humor, the hormone-addled boy who crumbles into inarticulate giggles around pretty girls, the too-precocious kid who spouts her parents’ beliefs without truly understanding them—they’re all here, awkward and vulnerable and eager to please.

Spelling Bee sometimes leads a bit too hard on cliché (the overachiever is, of course, an Asian-American girl), but for the most part, it gets the kids right. They’re at the age when the pressure to grow up and fit in hasn’t yet softened or sanded off or veiled the idiosyncratic lumps of their personalities, and Spelling Bee embraces that, affectionately reveling in the young spellers’ foibles and quirks.

The New York City Opera on Saturday, March 10.

The Pirates of Penzance is as frothy as any Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, but years ago, it taught my brother and me the meaning of the word paradox, the seemingly impossible contradiction in which, for example, a young man might have lived twenty-one years but, having been born on leap year, celebrated only five true birthdays. In a weird way, that one little personal fact encapsulates Pirates for me. The story is completely ludicrous (the leap-year twist figures into a bit of intrigue surrounding a contract of apprenticeship to pirates), but underneath that goofiness is a real satiric edge, a kernel of substance that sticks with me, like that memorable vocabulary word, even as I giggle at the matrimony-obsessed buccaneers and primly bloodthirsty maidens.

The Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday, February 20.

There’s a good deal to love about Eugene Onegin—the joyous, robust choral numbers in the first act; the presence of a heroine with a modicum of independence and fire; Lenski’s gorgeous preduel aria and the way fragments of it weave themselves into the final act like ghosts—but what tickles me most is the opera’s scant affection for Onegin himself.

As I understand it, Aleksandr Pushkin’s novel romanticizes the jaded, discontented aristocrat, but Tchaikovsky’s adaptation clearly sides with the innocent but resilient Tatiana and the idealistic poet Lenski. As far as the composer is concerned (he also put together the libretto), Onegin rightfully reaps the misery he sows. The result of that outlook is a beautiful but oddly plotted opera without a hero—romantic music with a weirdly unromantic plot. I like it!

The New York City Ballet on Sunday, February 11.

Carousel is the quintessential example of great music paired with an asinine story, so whoever had the idea to create a short, essentially plotless ballet using the musical’s swooning, long-lined waltz and elegant song orchestrations was a genius. You get the pleasure of “If I Loved You” (one of my all-time favorite songs) and some lovely romantic dancing without having to sit through the apologia for domestic violence or the silly celestial intervention or the outrageously heavy-handed graduation scene.

The New York City Ballet on Saturday, February 10.

Dybbuk premiered in 1974 and failed to earn a prominent place in the City Ballet’s repertory. Looking at its pedigree—music by Leonard Bernstein and choreography by Jerome Robbins—I didn’t understand how that had happened, but having seen the 2007 revival, I do. Dybbuk is slack and distant and unabsorbing. It’s just not that good.