A cultural diary of my life in New York
The Metropolitan Opera on Friday, October 5.
Usually I’m not particularly moved, one way or the other, by acting in opera. In good operas, the music provides all the “acting” necessary, and everything extraneous to that is mere filigree on an already impressive monument. But Natalie Dessay made me lose my indifference. Starring in the Met’s new production of Lucia di Lammermoor (a very good opera), she delivers not only a dazzling vocal performance but also a dramatic performance to match.
By Ann Patchett. Published in 2007.
Ann Patchett has the remarkable ability to simultaneously ground her work in reality and spin it into fairy tale. Her novels are both of this world and otherworldly, rich in hard, telling detail that somehow transubstantiates into something magical and fragile.
That sense of grace grows in large part from her choice to tell her suspenseful stories without using villains. An idealist (though not a blind one), she chooses to see the good in all her characters, even, famously, a band of terrorists (“one man’s terrorist…” notwithstanding). It’s an incredible tightrope act, threatening to pitch into callow schmaltz at any second, but to my mind, at least, Patchett succeeds, persuasively conveying the humanity of all her characters. The worlds of The Magician’s Assistant and The Patron Saint of Liars and especially Bel Canto are, perhaps, more beautiful than our own, but under Patchett’s spell, those worlds don’t seem so very distant.
Patchett’s newest novel, Run, fits neatly within her oeuvre. It, too, is an almost fable-like tale of good people in intriguing, artfully drawn circumstances. It doesn’t have the gorgeously magical air of Bel Canto, but with its lyrical writing and gently humanistic perspective, it still has its enchanting moments.
Royal Shakespeare Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday, September 26.
I need to study King Lear because whenever I see it, I always wonder whether I’m supposed to despise Lear. Is that just a modern or youthful interpretation, to see the play as a warning not to ungrateful children but ungrateful parents? Goneril and (especially) Regan’s treatment of Gloucester is appalling, but their treatment of their father, at least initially, seems reasonable. They’re perfectly within their rights stripping him of his slovenly, rowdy, expensive attendants, and if they do so with unseemly relish, well, given the disrespect with which he’s treated them, I’m not sure I blame them. As unforgiving and vicious as Goneril and Regan can be, that very hard-heartedness marks them as Lear’s true daughters, at least as I usually read the play.
So I’m grateful that Trevor Nunn’s production and Ian McKellen’s masterful performance in the title role managed to complicate and maybe even soften my feelings toward Lear because that makes the play more interesting. Lear becomes more sympathetic if you can see his bullheadness and inability to empathize as—to some extent—symptoms of creeping dementia. Not that Lear was ever a good father to Goneril and Regan or that his treatment of Cordelia was appropriate, but he might have been able to learn and repent—like Gloucester, the other rotten father—if he hadn’t been losing his grip on his sanity.
In theaters.
Eastern Promises is a perfectly good thriller, maybe even a better-than-average thriller, and if I’d gone into it with no expectations of any kind, I might would have enjoyed it more. But with David Cronenberg directing and Viggo Mortensen starring, I was gleefully anticipated A History of Violence 2, with a dash of the mordant humor and social consciousness of screenwriter Steven Knight’s previous effort Dirty Pretty Things, and Eastern Promises simply didn’t live up to those expectations.
Thursdays at 10 p.m. on AMC. Nine episodes into the first season.
Mad Men is like a girl whose beauty distracts people from her intelligence. Or maybe it’s like a girl whose charm and good looks mislead people into thinking she’s smarter than she truly is. I’m not sure, to be honest, but the look of Mad Men is undeniably ravishing, and the analogy amuses me: insidious, condescending sexism is one of the principal threads of the show.
But it’s not the only one. Quietly provocative and sumptuously textured, Mad Men does not lack for ambition. Set in a midlevel New York ad agency during the early 1960s, it delves into sexism, classism, racism, anti-Semitism, and homosexuality without ever feeling like a movie-of-the-week. It’s too luxuriantly filmed for that and occasionally too opaque, presenting a striking tableau without necessarily spelling out what it means.
In theaters.
I’m not a huge fan of Julie Taymor’s Titus, but I’ll never forget the moment when Titus’s brother discovers his niece, Titus’s daughter Lavinia, outside the city. Raped and brutalized, her tongue and hands savagely cut off, Lavinia stands atop a tree trunk with twigs protruding from the stumps of her arms and tears streaking her ash-white face: a silently weeping scarecrow against a pale blue sky. The image, paradoxically, is hauntingly beautiful—which is sort of a problem. Taymor has created a gorgeous tableau, dazzling in its aesthetic artistry, but the emotional context is muted. The sheer beauty overwhelms the horror.
That kind of visual splendor disguising emotional vacuity is a recurrent problem in Taymor’s work, on both stage and screen, and her latest film, Across the Universe, is no different. Admirably ambitious yet ultimately rather shallow, Universe is pretty but empty. I remember the set pieces vividly; the story I’ve already half forgotten.
In theaters.
The image of ash falling from the sky is immediately arresting; the quiet terror it evokes, inherent and inescapable. Writer-director Chris Gorak doesn’t deserve any credit for that. He does, however, deserve credit for trusting that such quiet terror will be enough to give his thriller, Right at Your Door, the tension it needs to hold our nerves taut for ninety-six minutes. Someone else might have thrown in screaming crowds, explosions, and crashing cars, but such standard action material could have been brushed away. The ash—along with distant plumes of black smoke and a few dead birds—lingers in the mind, a signifier of once-unimaginable horror we now conjure up all too easily and vividly.
Right at Your Door plays on those fears, but it’s not cheap. It deserves credit for that, for sidestepping exploitation in favor of something more thoughtful and emotionally true, but I can’t say I enjoyed it, exactly. It feels like a cautionary tale, vaguely pedantic, earnestly warning me about dangers I acknowledge but on which I don’t want to dwell.
Shakespeare in the Park, presented by the Public Theater, on Saturday, August 25.
Like everyone who has studied Shakespeare and who loves his work, I have strong feelings about how his plays should be interpreted. If, for example, a production diverges sharply from my vision of Othello (deeply internalized self-loathing rotting behind a facade of strength), I’m skeptical about its quality from the outset. My opinions about A Midsummer Night’s Dream are no less passionate (though perhaps less vehement), so I was slightly disappointed when I learned that the Public Theater’s new production wasn’t using the same actors for Athenian and fairy royalty, often key in the sort of Freudian, forest-as-the-unconscious interpretation I favor.
But Midsummer has so many elements—the lovers, the mechanicals, the fairies, the city, the woods—that even if one element isn’t to your taste, another surely will be. And the Public Theater production won me over. Funny but not frothy, sometimes creepy but never cruel, it was too charming and sweet not to enjoy.
The Mark Morris Dance Group at the Mostly Mozart Festival on Wednesday, August 15.
I’ve never gotten used to the practice at dance recitals of applauding in the middle of a work—to acknowledge a string of pirouettes, for example, or a soloist’s exit from the stage. As a classically trained musician (I know it’s an insufferable phrase, but it’s applicable here), I was taught never to applaud until the very end of the piece and, even then, preferably not until the conductor has dropped his hands or the soloist released her instrument. In the music world, clapping between movements of a work is pitiably ignorant at best, and clapping mid-movement is unheard of.
Dance etiquette is different—I understand that—so I do my best to tolerate the outbursts of applause over the music of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and Stravinsky, however much they make me wince. I nearly cracked at Mozart Dances, though. I wanted to scream: I don’t care that you enjoyed that particular solo sequence, people. Emanuel Ax is playing a piano concerto! Shut the hell up!
Perhaps that seems extreme, but in some ways the clash of etiquette reflects Mark Morris’ charming but sometimes problematic union of movement and Mozart. Maybe Mozart just doesn’t truly lend himself to dance.
The Swedish Radio Choir at the Mostly Mozart Festival on Wednesday, August 8.
Russian choral music has a wonderfully distinct sound. Anchored by unusually rich, low bass voices, the music feels grounded and earthy yet, at its best, mystical as well, as if the music were spanning the spectrum of sound, all-encompassing, all-embracing. It’s glorious.
The Swedish Radio Choir never quite attained that glory when they performed selections from Rachmaninoff’s Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom Wednesday night. Maybe the not-particularly-live hall dulled the basso profondo sound and muffled the overtones. Maybe a man must have grown up in the Russian Orthodox Church to truly exemplify its musical traditions. Maybe the choir members simply haven’t lived and breathed the work, let it soak into their pores, into their consciousness and unconsciousness, the way you must to bring that music to life inside you. Whatever the reason, the Liturgy never took flight. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t transport me. I felt marooned in my seat.
Much Review About Nothing 
You must be logged in to post a comment.