Category: Music, Dance & Theater

A Punchdrunk theatrical presentation by Emursive running through July 9 (extended).

Atmosphere only gets you so far, and with few exceptions, atmosphere was all I got from Sleep No More, a site-specific theatrical presentation in an extravagantly modded-out warehouse on 27th Street. Performers slink down the dark corridors in between elaborately choreographed scenes in the elaborately decorated rooms—followed all the while by a free-roaming audience wearing creepy white plague masks—and it’s all very moody and portentous. Honestly, though, once I got over the novelty of the thing, that moody portentousness started to feel hollow.

I hesitate to be too catty on this point, however, because I suspect part of the problem was a simple lack of compatibility between me and the show. Yes, audience members are free to wander wherever they like, but to get much out of the story, they really ought to follow the performers to catch the scenes. This leads to mobs of people tailing the characters through the building, rushing en masse up staircases, and squeezing tightly into too-small rooms, and my inclination, when faced with these scenarios, was always to flinch and head off in the opposite direction. Occasionally, I’d sigh and find a place in the back of the room, near a doorway, but this didn’t always afford me a great view, and I burned out on the whole claustrophobic ordeal after about an hour, so I’ll readily admit that I didn’t get the complete Sleep No More experience. That being said, what I did experience struck me as rather shallow.

Now playing at the Eugene O’Neill Theater on Broadway.

Religion has always been one of the more interesting satiric targets of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park. Take “Red Sleigh Down,” a shockingly violent 2002 episode in which Santa Claus and his reindeer are shot down over Iraq. The South Park boys convince Jesus (an occasional recurring character) to save Santa, who is enduring subplots straight out of Three Kings, and together they manage to extract the prisoner. As they make their escape, however, Jesus is killed, and back in the United States, a distraught Santa Claus tearfully tells the people of South Park—as he decks the town out in holiday finery and distributes toys—that from that day forward Christmas should be a day to remember Jesus and his sacrifice, for that’s what made all this Christmas joy possible. It’s an essentially conservative message (not at all unusual for the show, incidentally) delivered in this most audaciously warped way possible, somehow managing to be both sacrilegious and reverent.

That kind of sweetly profane, irreligious religiosity is also what you get from The Book of Mormon, Parker and Stone’s new musical with Robert Lopez, one of the creators of Avenue Q (which was more than a little reminiscent of South Park itself), and as a musical, it’s an unqualified success. Parker, Stone, and Lopez clearly know the genre (South Park has been evoking it and riffing on it for years), and although they have fun alluding to classics like The Sound of Music and The King and I, they don’t get bogged down in meta cleverness. The Book of Mormon isn’t staged in air quotes; it’s a full-throttle, unabashed musical, with tuneful songs and energetic choreography invariably presented with skill and verve.

As for the satire, it isn’t always so sure-footed. The two central characters, a pair of young Mormon missionaries sent to spread the word in Africa, are sharply realized, but Africa itself is treated with murky, problematic inconsistency, and the conclusion lapses into sentimentality, unwilling to face head-on the ramifications of its critique of religion. I understand why, but it still leaves me dissatisfied. As much as I applaud the heartfelt performances and the witty, nimble lyrics, I can’t quite shake the feeling that the creators of South Park have gone soft.

Now playing at the Barrymore Theatre on Broadway.

I’m sure many playwrights could write a play ostensibly about music or dance or poetry that’s ultimately about love and lust. The arts lend themselves to such things. Using some sort of inherently dramatic field like politics or war or religion as a conduit wouldn’t be too difficult either. But it takes someone like Tom Stoppard to bring out the passion in mathematics and theoretical physics. Arcadia is impressive simply for that achievement.

And honestly, were it not for that unlikely alchemy, Arcadia is the kind of hyperliterate play that easily could have been impressive but not particularly loveable. The subject matter sounds so dry, the structure so highly composed, that one could be forgiven for expecting something a bit cold and airless, but Stoppard finds a way to make it just the opposite. Arcadia somehow lives up to its blissful, verdant name.

eighth blackbird; Argento Chamber Ensemble; red fish blue fish; Steven Schick; and others at the Tune-In Music Festival at Park Avenue Armory on Friday, February 18.

The program was outside my comfort zone, which was exactly why I wanted to go. It’s so easy to fall into picking only the familiar works you know you love—or maybe less familiar works by composers you know you love—that every now and then you have to shake yourself and dive into something unknown. The dizzying program at the inaugural Tune-In Music Festival, committed to “enhancing opportunities for contemporary musicians and composers,” certainly qualified: two works by twentieth-century/contemporary composers I’d never heard of, one by a twentieth-century/contemporary composer I’ve never warmed to, and a rather free arrangement of a work by Bach, the composer who brings out my most rigid, purist inclinations about interpretation—definitely not in my comfort zone.

But the conceit of the program intrigued me. Its title, “powerLESS,” alludes to a notorious line from Igor Stravinsky’s autobiography: “Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.” (Another program in the festival is titled “powerFUL,” essentially taking the contrary position.) Stravinsky is being provocative, of course, but if you can get past the absolutism, it’s an interesting idea, demanding that we justify music for its own sake. Each work on this program seems to demand that kind of attitude. The music offers no narrative entry points, no extramusical suggestions to hold onto, no language at all. It’s music—sound—left to its own devices, and in that, it’s a fascinating assortment.

The Metropolitan Opera on Saturday, February 12.

The word operatic connotes grandeur and spectacle, usually to the point of extravagance, and under that narrow understanding of opera, eighteenth-century composer Christoph Gluck’s musical dramas scarcely qualify. They were, in fact, a reaction against Gluck’s perception of the genre as, well, operatic: a hollow celebration of virtuosic but meaningless fireworks with no connection to story or character.

Gluck’s own operas, by contrast, are defiantly stripped down to their core elements—no coloratura flamboyance, no shaggy humor, just simple, sincere storytelling and a constant flow of elegantly emotional music. The relative austerity of it can be strange. At Iphigénie en Tauride, Sean pointed out that Gluck’s operas might, in some ways, be better suited for the concert hall than the stage because there’s so little action of any kind to depict. I see his point—and I’m not too fond of this particular production—but I’m loath to give up the quiet but poignant drama of long-exiled Iphigénie finding her similarly exiled little brother. There might not be any histrionic vocal embellishments to mark the occasion, but when it reaches its high points, it’s stirring all the same.

The Metropolitan Opera on Wednesday, January 12.

The thing that mystifies me about opera—or, more precisely, opera audiences—is how conservative it is. Theater companies routinely tweak Shakespeare plays—Romeo and Juliet in modern times, The Merchant of Venice in pre-war Germany, Hamlet in a bare black box, part doubling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, gender reversals in The Tempest, an all-male cast for The Comedy of Errors, and on and on and on—and although those interpretations aren’t always popular, they’re not shocking either. Broad interpretation is an accepted component of theater.

By contrast, any opera production that isn’t a traditional, realist sort of affair seems to be branded “controversial” out of hand. Having heard the “controversial” label applied to Willy Decker’s production of La Traviata (which premiered in Salzburg in 2005 and made its Metropolitan debut this season), I expected something truly avant garde and alienating. Instead, the only shock was how elegantly constructed the production is and how beautifully it dramatizes its sad tale of repression and mortality. I simply can’t understand how such a sensitive, thoughtful, passionate Traviata could ever be controversial.

The American Ballet Theatre at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday, December 30.

The Nutcracker has never been one of my favorite ballets. The Act I party scenes are dull, the Act II ethnic character dances are discomfiting, and the girl-and-her-nutcracker plot is so bizarre that I’ve never been able to make much emotional sense of it.

Yet despite my mixed feelings about The Nutcracker, I’ve seen it more than any other ballet. (In fact, I’ve already written about it two times here on this blog, which might help account for my pitiful sluggishness in finishing this post.) It’s a holiday standard, of course, but that doesn’t mean much to me. (Case in point: I have never seen one of those ubiquitous Rankin/Bass holiday specials—not even Rudolph.) Perversely enough, those mixed feelings are probably the reason for my repeated attendance at The Nutcracker. It’s such an insanely weird ballet that I’m always fascinated to see what the choreographers do with it. I’m usually disappointed or mildly repulsed, at least to some degree, but for some reason, that doesn’t stop me.

Alexei Ratmansky’s new production for the American Ballet Theatre works better than most. Most notably, the choreographer doubles the child Clara and child Nutcracker with an adult couple, their imagined grown-up selves—a conceit that works beautifully. It allows him to provide the main characters with virtuosic choreography, obviously, but it also gives the ballet a stronger dramatic arc, making this Nutcracker sweeter and more intimate than most. I only wish Ratmansky had extended that same thoughtfulness to some of the ballet’s other icky elements, but I suppose it wouldn’t be The Nutcracker if something wasn’t make me mildly queasy. And now I have something to bitch about. Tradition!

The Mark Morris Dance Group at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday, December 15.

The tone of The Hard Nut, Mark Morris’s idiosyncratic take on The Nutcracker, is hard to pin down. It’s definitely satiric—tweaking E.T.A. Hoffman’s story, the 1960s setting into which he’s transposed it, and the conventions of ballet itself—but it’s never caustic, and at times, it’s genuinely affecting, albeit in an offbeat sort of way. When the snowflakes, for example, made their appearance—with men and women alike dressed in silly caps, crop tops, and super-short, heavily ruffed tutus, flinging white confetti in sync with the music—I could only giggle along with everyone else in the audience. But as “Waltz of the Snowflakes” continued, giggles melted into happy sighs. The ballet is still irreverent and cheeky, but it becomes wondrous and beautiful too.

Tallis Scholars at the White Light Festival on Sunday, November 7.

The fascinating thing about composer Arvo Pärt is that his music, particularly his choral music, simultaneously sounds both old and new. The textures—long pedal tones, simple chant-like rhythms—hearken back to plainchant and early Renaissance polyphony, but the stark harmonies, with their pressed semitone dissonances, could never be placed in the fifteenth-century. That strange duality gives his work an eerily timeless quality; neither here nor there, it exists on its own plane.

That duality also makes the Tallis Scholars unusually well suited to perform his music. Named for sixteenth-century English composer Thomas Tallis, the ten-voice choir specializes in sacred Renaissance music, so Pärt’s similarly textured sacred works fall into the ensemble’s repertory with apparent ease. Sunday evening’s program moved seamlessly from Pärt to Palestrina, Tallis, Allegri, Praetorious, and Byrd. The choir’s flawless intonation and expressive phrasing polished each piece like a pearl on a string, threading them together into a miraculously cohesive whole.