Category: Music, Dance & Theater

Now playing at the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway.

I suspect philosopher-playwright Johann Schiller was less sympathetic to England’s first Queen Elizabeth than I am, but the genius of his play Mary Stuart—about the fatal rivalry between Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots—is that one needn’t share Schiller’s sympathies, or lack thereof, to enjoy it. Schiller plays fair, for the most part, rendering both Elizabeth and Mary with dazzling complexity and a deliciously meaty sense of drama. The play climaxes in a confrontation between the two queens—a meeting that, in life, never happened, much as Mary wished for it. But that meeting is the sort of thing that should be true, the sort of thing that begs for art to improve upon life, which makes Schiller’s invention of it all the more precious.

Maude Maggart at the Algonquin Hotel on Saturday, April 19.

Maude Maggart is a talented, highly proficient vocalist, but it’s her ability to convey sincerity, to feign sincerity, that makes her mesmerizing. To truly convey someone else’s song—or perhaps even one’s own—a singer must be able to act, to play the part, and Maggart is a bewitching interpreter, artfully changing her expression, her bearing, the very timbre of her voice to match the mood of each song she sings.

The effect is all the more charming for being acknowledged as a contrivance. After a fervently passionate rendition of Gershwin’s “The Man I Love,” for example, Maggart suddenly shifted her weight, adopted a cheeky grin, and disavowed the lyrics’ someday-my-prince-will-come mentality. That kind of reflection turns up over and over in her between-song patter, which might sound pedantic, but in fact, that thoughtfulness, the sense that she really thinks about the songs and how they relate to each other, invites her listeners to hear them afresh. She makes obscure songs sound familiar and old standards sound new and all of them sound breathtakingly beautiful.

Now playing at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway.

Few theater experiences are so alienating as the feeling that you and the rest of the audience are at odds. If the difference is slight, you can get caught up in the crowd, enjoying the production—or not—more than you otherwise would. But if the difference is more significant—they’re laughing, and you’re cringing; they’re sighing, and you’re sneering—the opposite tends to occur. The chasm grows larger as you become more self-conscious and resentful of the disconnect.

Or maybe that’s just me and my socially maladjusted family. My parents were visiting, and Mom wanted to see the new star-studded revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, which she first encountered back in a high school drama production when she was the understudy to Edith the maid. (Hee!) We all enjoyed the play—Mom, Dad, Sean, and me—to varying degrees, but honestly, Coward’s humor is wry: a classic dry, British wit, yes? It’s the sort of humor that makes you (and by you, I mean Mom, Dad, Sean, and me) grin and snicker, not howl and slap your leg and drown out the next five lines with your guffaws, so why in the world was the rest of the audience acting like we’d all been heavily dosed with nitrous oxide?

Chanticleer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Wednesday, April 15.

I thought I knew exactly what would be on Chanticleer’s program of American choral music: a few shape-note hymns, some folk songs and spirituals, one or two works by big twentieth-century names such as Barber or Copland, and another couple of pieces the choir itself has commissioned over the years. I was right, to a degree—those were all on the program—but I foolishly underestimated the choir’s bent toward venturing past standard repertory.

In addition to the expected selections, Chanticleer sought out traditional seventeenth-century liturgical music written by immigrants to New Spain and also featured a striking work by Brent Michael Davids, an American Indian composer who draws heavily on indigenous musical traditions. Even the “folk songs and spirituals,” my careless catch-all, proved more varied in style than I had so casually anticipated. Taken together, the mix beautifully accomplished what must have been the goal: to celebrate just how wildly diverse America’s musical heritage truly is.

Pomerium at the Cloisters on Saturday, April 11.

Now that I no longer spend my Sundays working as a church organist, I make it a point to go to a seasonally appropriate concert each Easter weekend. Two years ago, it was Bach’s St. John Passion, and last year, it was a program of liturgically timely Renaissance motets, performed by Pomerium. This year, too, Sean and I trekked up to the Cloisters to hear the early music choir sing the works of Gesualdo and Monteverdi and Byrd and others.

Pomerium truly is an amazing ensemble: beautiful tone, beautiful blend, and an impeccable understanding of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century works in which they specialize. Their clear, round voices perfectly articulate the polyphonic lines, and their sonorous unisons enfold you with their warmth.

At the Blue Note on Thursday, April 2.

For a few minutes, a specter hangs over the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. The hall from which it hails was founded in the 1960s specifically to preserve the tradition of New Orleans jazz, hence the name, but now, with the memory of Hurricane Katrina still bitingly fresh, New Orleans itself seems vulnerable, its unique culture that much more so. When the musicians first start to play, you feel a tense sort of melancholy, like when you visit someone on the brink of death, but then the music is so spirited and vivacious, so animated, that the specter vanishes and you realize that, however dark times might have been, however dark they might still be, New Orleans jazz is simply too lively to ever keel over.

Chanticleer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Thursday, December 4.

Attending Chanticleer’s annual Christmas concert quickly has become the one holiday tradition that Sean and I faithfully observe, just the two of us. We love it, but for a fleeting moment this year, I wondered whether we should go. The tickets are a big splurge for us, more than twice what I usually pay for other events, and the program is fairly similar year to year. Is it really rational to keep spending all that money to hear again the Gregorian chant processional and the Willcocks carol arrangements and the Jennings spiritual medley and the Biebl Ave Maria? Perhaps we should do something else instead, something new.

But that was just a fleeting moment of doubt because there is a very good reason that Chanticleer’s annual Christmas concert became our one special holiday tradition in the first place. Aside from time with family, music is what we both love most about the celebration of Christmas. The familiar melodies, hauntingly sung, make me feel like a child again, in the best sense, safe and warm and loved and special.

The New York Philharmonic on Thursday, November 20.

After the small ensemble finished one of Bach’s oft-performed Brandenburg concertos, Sean turned and wryly murmured in my ear, “With a couple more rehearsals, they might have had it.” I stifled a giggle and gave him a mock-reproving frown, but I knew what he meant. The featured violas were dragging, and the tuning was off; the ensemble simply never felt like a cohesive whole. Ironically, the rarely performed Penderecki cello concert that followed was practically perfect: taut and energetic and immaculately synchronized.

One could blame the violists for the disappointing Brandenburg (Violists are the butt of many an orchestral joke. For example, how do you get two violists to play in unison? Answer: Shoot one of them.), but I suspect the main problem is that all the musicians “know” that concerto. They’ve played it countless times and most likely take it for granted that they can play it well again without too much effort. The Penderecki, on the other hand, is unfamiliar and obviously difficult and thus justifies extensive rehearsal time. It’s not an unusual scenario: Too often it’s the relatively easy, familiar pieces that trip you up.

The Metropolitan Opera on Thursday, November 15.

The Manhattan Project—specifically the final days at Los Alamos before the testing of the atomic bomb—makes for an odd subject for opera. The drama is there, but it’s an internal, bookish sort of drama with little in the way of action. In the first act, the characters argue about petitions and bad weather. In the second act, they just wait for the explosion.

Composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars, adapting a number of sources, attempt to get at the enormous ethical quandaries that Robert Oppenheimer and his team faced, but the music is poorly served by the tag-team philosophizing. Ultimately, opera is not an intellectual medium but an emotional one. When Adams tries to challenge that, the music often feels empty and scattered and the expressed ideas feel superficial. But when he embraces the emotion—setting aside the historical details and physics jargon and ethical debates in favor of meditating on raw fears about mortality and culpability—Doctor Atomic finally discovers its real power.

Presented by Theater Breaking Through Barriers, now playing at the Kirk Theatre, Theatre Row, off-off-Broadway.

Dramas in which we plunge into ongoing action intermittently are always rather interesting—not always effective (does life really work like that, vast periods of unimportance punctuated by a few sudden turning points?) but definitely interesting.* I enjoy piecing together context and elapsed time with each new scene, and the plotting is generally rather tight: after all, we only drop into a particular moment because something significant is happening.

Such structure also allows the story to cover a long period of time without needing to become epic. For example, in The Middle Ages, a play by A. R. Gurney, we spend time in just a single room, with only four characters, but span more than thirty years. I’m not quite convinced that the setting—the trophy room of a big-city men’s club—is truly so meaningful to the characters as to justify its being the site of so many critical moments in their lives, but I can set that aside. It’s an interesting conceit.