Category: Music, Dance & Theater

The Metropolitan Opera on Thursday, October 5.

The articles I read made a big deal about the puppet. Director Anthony Minghella chose to use a life-sized, Bunraku-style puppet to represent Butterfly’s young son, and apparently some people found the expressive little figure distracting.

I didn’t. The puppet, manipulated onstage by the two members of Blind Summit Theatre, delivers a much stronger performance than a toddler could have done, and besides, it fits the production’s spare, East-meets-West aesthetic. Both the puppetry performance and Minghella’s Madama Butterfly as a whole are gorgeous, passionate, and memorable—everything one could want from a night at the opera.

Shen Wei Dance Arts at the Joyce Theater on Sunday, October 1.

Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography for the 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring nearly started a riot. The savage, inelegant steps shocked the audience, but how else could Nijinsky have interpreted Stravinsky’s gloriously primitive work? With its driving yet uneven rhythms and crushingly dissonant harmonies, Rite of Spring doesn’t lend itself to dainty arabesques and pirouettes.

Sadly, Nijinsky’s notorious choreography has been lost to history, but contemporary choreographer Shen Wei captures Stravinsky’s brutal work beautifully. For the dancing is beautiful—not graceful, certainly, but energetic and athletic and invigorating.

The New York Philharmonic on Thursday, September 28.

Like many orchestras, the New York Philharmonic performed a concert in honor of the 100th anniversary of composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s birth. The program notes focused on the debate about Shostakovich’s relationship to the Soviet government, and that, too, was probably fairly universal from orchestra to orchestra. The story of Shostakovich’s rocky musical career is too dramatic for any writer to resist.

Twice denounced by Stalin—the first time at the onset of the Great Terror—Shostakovich nonetheless survived to write numerous symphonies, string quartets, concertos, operas, and other works that entered the canon not only in his homeland but in America and Western Europe, too. The Soviet regime used much of his music as propaganda—and Shostakovich accepted and even encouraged that—but later musicians and historians have argued that some of his compositions were actually subversive, satirizing rather than celebrating Soviet aesthetic ideals and burying coded anti-government messages into his music.

The debate is fascinating, but I think it distracts from Shostakovich’s music. That’s unfortunate because, as the Philharmonic demonstrated Thursday night, Shostakovich’s music is thrilling—essentially romantic but enlivened by a vivid use of repetitive motives and a delicious crunch of chromatics. The Philharmonic’s selections—the cello concerto and the fifth symphony—are a joy to experience whether they contain subversive messages or not.

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center on Thursday, September 21.

Wu Han, one of the Chamber Music Society’s artistic directors, described the program’s opening night concert as a “tasting menu,” a tantalizing preview of some of what the 2006-07 season has to offer. The metaphor is apt. Few of the selections were particularly filling in themselves, but the variety of musical offerings—from the Baroque to the twentieth century—was positively scrumptious.

The Metropolitan Opera at Central Park on Tuesday, August 22.

Sean wasn’t feeling well, so I went to the park alone. By myself, I only needed space to spread a single towel, so I shamelessly snaked my way to a small patch of unoccupied grass relatively close to the stage on the north end of the Great Lawn. Even from there, I could barely see the performers, but it didn’t matter. I spent most of La Traviata with my eyes closed, blissfully soaking in the music together with the cool night air.

The Metropolitan Opera’s parks concerts are unstaged, so they give one the opportunity to focus solely on the music. Verdi holds up to the scrutiny effortlessly. The vocal lines are interesting, not always moving in the direction I expect, and the orchestration is beautiful. The opening Preludio — with quiet yet ardent whispers from the violins — captured my attention immediately by not demanding it.

Closed August 13 after a limited run at the Booth Theater on Broadway.

The image of a barren landscape marked by a single blasted tree — the first thing we see in this production of Brian Friel’s play Faith Healer — lets us know immediately that whatever the play is about, it’s not faith, at least not a living faith. I confess I’m not entirely sure what it is about, though. Friel’s writing touches on the contradictions of hope, how its presence can sometimes be more painful than its absence, and the indignities of chance, the sense that we have little control over the courses of our lives. But I had some difficulty knitting it all together in my mind.

Faith Healer is riveting, certainly, and thoughtful and lyrical, but I wondered what to make of it in the end. As an acting showcase, it’s mesmerizing. Friel’s conversational yet writerly monologues gave Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid bountiful material to create rich, memorable characters, and the play surely would lend itself to repeat viewings or, even better, careful reading. Yet I suspect that even after all of that, it would reveal itself to be a brilliant quartet of monologues, nothing less but little more.

The San Francisco Ballet at the New York State Theater on Friday, July 28.

The word nymph typically invokes wispy, nature-loving little sprites, the sort of girls whom a stiff breeze might topple. We forget that in classical mythology, the nymphs of Artemis (Diana to the Romans) were mighty huntresses, defiantly independent and fiercely draconian (peeping Toms were subject to the death penalty) — nothing wispy about them.

Choreographer Mark Morris gets that right. It’s one of the few elements of his Sylvia that I will unreservedly praise, but setting that aside for now, his nymphs in Sylvia aren’t remotely pixie-ish, and that works. The titular Sylvia is particularly commanding. As played by Vanessa Zahorian, Sylvia is beautiful and womanly but not the delicate waif we see in so many ballets. Her movements, her physical presence, sometimes seem more traditionally masculine than feminine, not in the steps but in her stance and bearing. Morris’ choreography makes it clear that Sylvia is no one’s distressed damsel.

Now playing at the Cadillac Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway.

Escapism comes easily to some people, but I’m not one of them. I don’t have anything against escapism (though I wouldn’t want to live in world where every movie, book and play was mere frivolity), and I enjoy it when it clicks with me, but more often than not, I sit frowning in my seat, picking holes in the plot, overanalyzing the themes, and generally driving everyone around me crazy by subjecting a goofy romantic comedy to the same critical rigor I would, say, a Shakespeare play.

Not wanting to alienate my loving family members, I went to Mamma Mia, a weightless Broadway confection featuring the music of ABBA, with a mantra — It’s only a silly musical — that I silently intoned to myself through the production. The mantra was supposed to prevent me from being a dispassionate killjoy. I’m not sure whether it worked, but it certainly got plenty of use.

Now playing at the August Wilson Theatre on Broadway.

I am not the target audience for this musical. At 26, I am less than half the age of the average nostalgic Jersey Boys theatergoer. I grew up in the sunny sprawl of Orlando, Florida, not the hardscrabble streets of New Jersey. Furthermore, Frankie Valli's overbearing, nasal falsetto in "Walk Like a Man," the only Four Seasons song I could confidently name before seeing this show, makes me want to stab an ice pick through my skull — or his.

Yet Jersey Boys entertained me in spite of all that, in spite of myself. Not all of the music is to my taste — I still consider "Walk Like a Man" one of the more egregiously awful pop concoctions ever inflicted upon the American public — but some of songwriter Bob Gaudio's later compositions intrigued me, and if nothing else, the story of the foursome is fascinating.