Category: Music, Dance & Theater

At Lincoln Center on Saturday, October 10.

The American Ballet Theatre doesn’t usually perform at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall—and for good reason. It’s a terrible place for a dance performance. The majority of the balcony seats, in three tiers along the walls of the long rectangular room, have only a partial view of the stage. There’s no orchestra pit, so all the accompanying music must be performed by a mere handful of musicians sitting in a back corner of the stage. And there’s no curtain, so the dancers have to warm up in full view, the ballerinas with sweat pants pulled up underneath their skirts, an amusingly ungraceful effect.

I was trying to make the best of it, but the woman sitting next to me Saturday was not shy about voicing her displeasure with the situation. After she had finished griping about how she couldn’t see the left third of the stage even when she leaned forward in her seat, she started complaining about the lack of a curtain. “I don’t like having the stage just be open,” she told me. “It ruins the mystique!” I mumbled something noncommittal—I was trying to read my program—but she turned back to me a few minutes later. “Never mind what I said earlier,” she said, now smiling. “This is fun. It’s like having a backstage pass!”

So I looked up for a second look, and she was right. It was fun watching the dancers warm up, walking through steps, practicing gestures, greeting one another with theatrical kiss-kisses on both cheeks, all the while dressed in their goofy hodgepodge of slick performance attire and grungy hoodies and legwarmers. And that, the mixed blessing of a bad venue, set the tone for the program. My seat really was lousy, and there were aspects of the music and choreography that I didn’t like, but I had fun despite my misgivings. The beautiful elements of the dancing were truly beautiful, and that made up for a lot.

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center on Wednesday, September 23.

Vienna has been overshadowed. Well, maybe not overshadowed—that’s too strong—but the Beethoven trio, Schubert piano duet, and Strauss waltzes at the Chamber Music Society’s season opening concert, “A Tribute to Vienna,” all met expectations. They were familiar. David Bruce’s piece for soprano and ensemble—and not just any soprano but the glorious Dawn Upshaw—that was new, a world premiere. No one had any idea what to expect, and it turned out to be textured and evocative and haunting. That was the highlight of the concert—except perhaps for the Mahler work that closed the program. It’s very difficult to overshadow Mahler.

Presented by the Public Theater and LAByrinth Theater, at the NYU Skirball Center, through October 4.

Adapting the term problem play to describe Shakespeare’s more ambiguous comedies, as some critics have done, was always a stretch—the term originally referred to nineteenth-century dramas that realistically portray turbulent social issues (think Ibsen)—so, seeing as how problem play is likely the wrong term anyway, I prefer to ignore its roots and use it to refer to any Shakespeare play that feels uncomfortable for modern audiences. After all, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice present just as many problems as All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, and as for Othello—well, if you can get through Othello without cringing at something, there’s probably something wrong with you.

And yet, there’s an allure to Othello—poetic, evocative writing; intriguing, enigmatic characters—that makes it worth wading through, despite the inevitable snags. The challenge of tackling its problems is part of the fun, so I enjoyed Peter Sellars’s new production of the play, even if I found some of his “solutions” rather perplexing. The acclaimed director manages to neutralize some of the truly pernicious racial elements, but in doing so, he makes the Moor all but inexplicable and kills any sense of classic tragedy. Plus, he creates uncomfortable new problems by merging the characters of Bianca and Montano. The production is interesting, at times compelling, but it lacks dramatic cohesion. It’s odd. I cringed a lot.

4x4 Baroque Music Festival at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin on Tuesday, September 1.

The raw emotion of Baroque songs takes you by surprise if you’re expecting “classical” music to be prim and refined. Composers of the era often strove to convey just one intense feeling in an individual work, so a song would be given over to undiluted passion, or sorrow, or bitterness, or agony—especially agony. The poetry the composers set was well suited to this single-minded aesthetic, feverishly so, with translated lines such as “Alas, foolish, blind world! alas, cruel fate,” and “I’ll drink my own fatal tears, and I’ll always be the most heartbroken of all abandoned lovers,” and “I wish the abysses to see my suffering, and the furies to weep at my bitter lamenting, and that even the damned souls will concede my torment is greater.” See? Agony. Apparently Baroque poets were the emo kids of their day.

The two soprano soloists who performed at the Scherzi Musicali program, featuring songs by Claudio Monteverdi, perfectly handled all that Baroque craziness, vividly conveying the passion, and sorrow, and bitterness, and agony—especially agony—with deliciously theatrical fervor without ever sacrificing the beauty of their voices. Such a sacrifice would have been unacceptable, for Jolle Greenleaf and Molly Quinn have exquisite voices. Their ornamentation had that light, seemingly effortless quality that I so envy, and in their duets, their radiant bell tones blended so well that it was hard to belief two separate beings were producing them.

Shakespeare in the Park, presented by the Public Theater, on Sunday, August 16.

People asked me whether I enjoyed The Bacchae, and I could only answer, “Well, it was interesting.” I don’t mean that as criticism or a non-recommendation (well, not exactly). I doubt that you could create a production of Euripides’s play, more than thousand years old, that I would enjoy, per se. Despite the program notes’ insistence otherwise, I don’t find much of contemporary relevance in the ancient Greek work. But it’s interesting, I’ll grant you without hesitation, and the performances are intriguing, and the production is striking and well done, so I couldn’t ask for more. The Bacchae is what it is. It couldn’t be otherwise.

At the Mostly Mozart Festival on Thursday, August 13.

This is the hardest thing to write about: the thing that surprises you, envelops you. You sit rapt with a straight back and clasped hands, and afterward you sigh with mingled happiness and regret, because it is so beautiful and because it is over and because you will never experience it new again.

When I went home after the performance, I babbled happily to Sean (who had to work late and couldn’t join me) about John Adams’s new opera, and when I paused to draw breath, he smiled and said, “You’re using lovely again.” I felt somewhat abashed. Lovely is my gushiest word, and I often overuse it, but it was appropriate in this case. To me, lovely goes beyond beautiful. It has a goodness about it, a special quality that draws me out at my most earnest. If I use lovely, it is only because, well, I love it.

The American Ballet Theatre at Lincoln Center on Wednesday, May 28.

Other than the dancing, Le Corsaire has absolutely nothing to recommend it. The story is ludicrous at best, and worse, the music is hopelessly prosaic, a hodgepodge of paint-by-numbers early Romantic filler. It’s tragic, really, how nineteenth-century ballet companies that established the canon gravitated toward wallpaper music. Were it not for Tchaikovsky (Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker) and Prokofiev (Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet), the repertory music for full-length ballets would consist almost entirely of watery pastiche.

I know that the primary reason to go to the ballet is to see the dancing, but a striking score elevates a work. Without Tchaikovsky’s gorgeous music, for example, Swan Lake wouldn’t be such a paragon, and a lack of such keeps the otherwise exemplary Giselle from achieving real greatness. As for the dopey Le Corsaire, it probably wouldn’t be top-tier even with music by one of the Russian masters, but a score with some substance certainly couldn’t hurt.

Now playing at the Palace Theatre on Broadway.

At a weekday evening performance of West Side Story, Sean and I had the misfortune to be seated directly in front of a group of high school students, a small but significant number of whom simply could not deal with the conceit of dancing gang members. They snickered and whispered and generally lived down to every stereotype of the age. We wanted to smack them. Choreographer Jerome Robbins’s street ballet obviously isn’t realistic, but strict adherence to realism is a poor metric for quality in art, and in a musical, it’s absurd.

The real irony, though, is that Robbins’s landmark choreography, restored in this new revival, is the best thing about the production. The instrumentalists, while quite talented, aren’t completely in sync performing composer Leonard Bernstein’s complex rhythms, and the singers, with a few notable exceptions, are pedestrian and poorly served by bad miking. But the dancing—athletic leaps and long-lined extensions and crisp, coordinated movements playing off Bernstein’s iconic music! That I loved, and no stupid giggly kids could spoil it for me. (Kids these days! Get off my lawn!)

The Mark Morris Dance Group at Lincoln Center on Thursday, May 14.

The oddest thing about Sergei Prokofiev’s otherwise orthodox Romeo and Juliet—the original version, the one with the telling addendum to the title, the one that ran badly afoul of Stalin’s repressive regime—is the exceedingly unorthodox ending: Romeo and Juliet live. I gasped when I first learned that, but the scenario turns out not to be the cloying, saccharine happy ending I imagined. It’s more subtle than that. Rather than say that they live, it’s probably more accurate to say that Romeo and Juliet don’t die. (“Zombies!” Sean exclaimed when I told him.) They ascend, perhaps, existing on some otherworldly plane for one final pas de deux. It’s actually quite lovely.