Category: Music, Dance & Theater

Dresden Staatskapelle at the White Light Festival on Sunday, October 31.

Lincoln Center’s new White Light Festival celebrates music conceived with spiritual meaning, music that consciously seeks some transcendent quality. It is, in short, a festival after my own heart. In virtually every other arena, I find the phrase “spiritual, not religious” irritating—I dismiss it reflexively—but in the concert hall, the words actually mean something to me. Maybe it’s the collaborative nature of the medium, maybe it’s something about the way sound reverberates in a room, maybe it’s just years of conditioning, but music affects me like nothing else.

As for the festival, if you’re going to pick a spiritually meaningful work in the canon of Western music, you’d be hard-pressed to find something better or more appropriate than Brahms’s glorious Ein deutsches Requiem. It’s both a compositional masterpiece and an acutely personal work: Instead of setting the traditional Latin texts (the “Kyrie,” the “Dies Irae,” and all that), Brahms personally selected passages from Luther’s translation of the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha, deliberately avoiding Christian dogma (Jesus is quoted but never directly mentioned) and highlighting more broadly humanistic passages of comfort and hope. The result is a requiem like no other: a passionate attempt to confront and accept the specter of mortality, not so much for the dead as for the living.

The Gotham Chamber Opera at the New Victory Theater on Saturday, October 9.

Not everyone liked the little puppet boy in Anthony Minghella’s 2006 production of Madama Butterfly. The artifice was unapologetically overt: the puppeteers might have been dressed in black, but they were there on stage, right next to Cio-Cio San, manipulating the boy’s head and limbs by hand. You either accepted it or you didn’t.

I did. To my eyes, the puppet fit beautifully into the production’s vividly stylized aesthetic, apiece with the paper-lantern stars and, for that matter, the thirty-something Butterfly. But I can understand (grudgingly) how for other people, puppetry was jarring in a relatively realistic opera and better suited for something like, oh, El Gato Con Botas, in which the lead is not a victimized teenage girl but a wily talking cat.

Those people clearly are no fun at all. The stunningly expressive creations of Blind Summit Theatre (the company responsible for the puppets in Butterfly and El Gato) should not be limited to children’s fairy tales—though they are, I admit, perfect for fairy tales. Xavier Montsalvatge’s slight little opera isn’t much on its own, but with the cat and rabbits and ogre (not to mention a few of the humans) brought to life through Blind Summit Theatre’s artistry, El Gato Con Botas makes for a dazzling hour or so of entertainment.

The New York City Ballet on Sunday, October 3.

For more than a decade, the New York City Ballet hasn’t performed fall repertory (aside from an opening gala in November before Nutcracker season), which has always been unfortunate for me personally since my mom, who introduced me to ballet, tends to visit in the fall. She and Dad also like to visit in mid-spring, in between the City Ballet’s winter season (January and February) and spring season (May and June). It’s almost as though Dad has been scheming to avoid being subjected to tutus. (Ha! I kid. We would never subject Dad to tutus.)

In any case, I don’t know why City Ballet changed up their schedule, adding a new fall repertory season, but Mom and I were delighted at the opportunity to go to a performance together, and we got lucky: it was a great program, varied but not incoherent, with great music and lovely dancing—and in October! What more could we ask?

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Saturday, October 2.

The program, led by guest conductor Gustavo Dudamel, was gleefully, ridiculously, unabashedly populist—endearingly so, but also a bit over the top. There’s something kind of goofy about selecting a Rossini overture AND Ravel’s Boléro AND a collection of Bernstein dances (not the West Side Story suite, to be fair, but so like it that it might as well have been). Part of me wanted something a bit richer and more challenging—something like the Prokofiev symphony Dudamel conducted in his New York Philharmonic debut three years ago. But even in my snobbier moments, I couldn’t help but enjoy it. If one must do a crowd-pleaser-packed program, one might as well do it exquisitely well. It would be easy enough to coast through this stuff—it’s going to get an enthusiastic reaction regardless—but Dudamel and company never rested on the music’s laurels.

The New York City Ballet on Sunday, September 19.

Ballets rarely use much plot. Ideally, if there’s a narrative at all, you want just enough to immerse the dance in emotion. Works that try to pack in convoluted twists and subplots dry out in a desert of pantomime.

Alexei Ratmansky’s “Namouna, a Grand Divertissement” is not one of those over-plotted ballets. To the contrary, it’s gleefully under-plotted, hinting at familiar ballet story elements (a lovestruck young man, virtuosic pirates, a sultry seductress, a demure mystery girl, a corps made up of identical, interchangeable women) but never bothering to knit them into a coherent story. “Namouna” is deliberately elusive, all intimation and no resonance, and as such, it’s charming but emotionally empty. Calling the work a “grand divertissement” is actually quite apt: for all its grandeur, it’s a trifle. That could be criticism, I suppose, but when the trifle is so delicious, why complain?

The Mark Morris Dance Group at the Mostly Mozart Festival on Thursday, August 5.

I knew there was a reason I kept attending performances of Mark Morris’s choreography. Even when a particular work didn’t click for me, I always saw something intriguing there—the musicality, the pared-down aesthetic—and now I’ve finally stumbled across a Morris work I love passionately and wholeheartedly. In L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed it Moderato, all the characteristics of his style that I dislike fade into the background, and the traits I admire move to the forefront. And despite the fact that it’s a long nonnarrative, two-act work, it’s never dull. L’Allegro is a gorgeous mosaic—with funny, playful passages and sad, delicate passages; subtle, thoughtful passages and joyful, exuberant passages—and all the disparate little tiles somehow fit together with perfect coherence, becoming more beautiful and revealing new truths in one another’s company.

Shakespeare in the Park, presented by the Public Theater, on Wednesday, July 7.

Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale is a strange play—a sometimes ungainly mash-up of Othello and Romeo and Juliet with a dash of The Tempest for good measure—and I, for one, consider the Tempest elements the most alluring. Storms and shipwrecks, curses and prophesies and seemingly impossible restorations, give The Winter’s Tale a fantastical, fairy tale quality.

Aesthetically, Michael Greif’s production captures that quality well, leaping off the play’s whimsical mishmash of cultural and historical references (the Emperor of Russia and the Oracle of Delphi together at last!) with gorgeous costumes, sets, and props of no particular time, blending the West and Middle East with glorious abandon. The Oracle is accompanied by both thuribles of incense and a pair of Whirling Dervishes. Breathtaking puppets bring to life flocks of birds and predatory bears. The production looks like a fairy tale made flesh, but doesn’t feel like one, not really. Despite the compelling performances, the Tale stays earthbound precisely when it should take flight.

Now playing at New World Stages off-Broadway.

Avenue Q made its Broadway debut in 2003, but when the economic downturn hit, it downsized back to an off-Broadway theater, for which it is well suited. I never saw it in one of the grander theaters, but its scrappy striving seems to belong in a more cozy, modest space.

Not that the musical is modest in any sense. It’s hilariously crude, for starters, and it doesn’t lack for ambition. It could have been just one dumb joke—just the giddy shock value of a warped, gleefully perverse Sesame Street—and maybe sometimes it is just that. But taken as a whole, Avenue Q features more than enough wit and insight to elevate it above the baseness of its base. Like the best episodes of South Park, Avenue Q manages to be both jubilantly childish and darkly mature, shamelessly ribald and quietly profound.

Now playing at the Daryl Roth Theatre off-Broadway.

Does Fuerza Bruta mean anything? The title, to be sure, translates from the Spanish as “brute force,” but does the show itself have any particular meaning? It has its share of striking images—a man running to nowhere on a treadmill, a ceiling torn down in a flurry of confetti, a quartet of women immersed in the water of a shallow pool—but these don’t seem to add up to more than, perhaps, a meandering dream of escaping the malaise of everyday life.