Category: Reviews

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Chicago

Now playing at the Ambassador Theatre on Broadway.

The central conceit of the musical Chicago—the vaudeville setup, in which every character is both acting out the story and performing for a literal audience*—is so strong, so sly and sharp, that it's all but impossible to screw up. So it's no surprise that the Broadway revival of Fred Ebb and John Kander's irrepressible classic is indeed unrepressed. The long-running production is like a well-oiled machine; having been around for more than fifteen years, it no longer attracts top-tier stars, but even the more modest parts keep things moving along. I mean, really, if you can't make "All That Jazz," "Cell Block Tango," and "Razzle Dazzle" fun, you have no business on a Broadway stage.

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Cindy Sherman

Special exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art through June 11.

At first glance, artist Cindy Sherman, who first leapt to prominence in the 1970s, seems to have anticipated today's endlessly self-photographing, narcissistic culture because she, too, photographs herself. Just as many people now constantly capture images of themselves and curate entire galleries of them online, the MoMA's retrospective of Sherman's art features Sherman's face in all but a handful of the photographs.

And yet that's misleading, for though Sherman is the model for her photographs, she's never the subject. Before she ever snaps a photo, Sherman the artist has costumed and styled herself to create a character, often to such an extent that Sherman the individual is unrecognizable. Her art is self-obscuring, not self-revealing—which is not to say that it lacks a point of view. Her perspective (like that of any artist) is definitely there. When you look at one of Sherman's photographs, you're not simply looking at her; you're simultaneously looking at her and at not-her and through her eyes, and that strange paradox is part of what makes her work so fascinating.

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Moneyball

On DVD and streaming on Amazon Instant Video.

At the Academy Awards, Moneyball was described more than once as a baseball movie. This drives me crazy. First, and most obviously, virtually all the action in the movie happens behind the scenes, so we see almost no gameplay whatsoever. But beyond that, most baseball movies are deeply romantic about the game; in fact, it's not just a game. Hell, in Bull Durham, it's a religion. Baseball movies are built around the idea that there is something exceptional and magical and unquantifiable about baseball.

Moneyball is a blunt repudiation of that idea. The whole point is that people's love of narratives and image, the whole mythology of baseball as America's pastime, has blinded them to the realities of how the game actually works and how it can be won. Moneyball is about boiling down all the would-be magic into cold, hard statistics. The fact that the team using those statistics is an underdog makes the coldness more palatable, but there's still something oddly unromantic in the fabric of the film, something that makes it an obvious outlier from the arena of baseball movies. And that, of course, is a big reason why I like it.

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Venus in Fur

Now playing at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway.

I have always suspected that for some star-making roles, the magic is all in the part itself and any competent actor lucky enough to land the role could ride it to acclaim. But if that's true in some cases, it absolutely isn't true of Venus in Fur. Nina Arianda is unforgettable as Vanda, the dominant presence in the play (in every sense), but that's in large part because it's such a high-wire role. It's all too easy to imagine how unconvincing the character could be in other hands. Capturing Vanda's subtle wit and quicksilver tonal shifts cannot possibly be easy, and few actresses have the burning charisma and imposing physicality required to convey the woman's utter mastery of the action on stage. Playwright David Ives needed nothing short of a goddess to make Venus in Fur work; it is to everyone's good fortune that the play's producers landed upon Arianda.

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Fringe

Fridays at 9 p.m. on Fox. Twelve episodes into the fourth season.

The best thing about science fiction (or any fantastic genre) is how escaping the confines of a strictly realistic setting allows the storyteller to address real issues from a fresh angle. Aliens, for example, aren't necessarily all that compelling in and of themselves (I faithfully watched seven years of The X-Files, where the little green men or gray men or black oil slicks or whatever were nearly always the least interesting things on screen, so I know this for a fact), but aliens as a vehicle for addressing how people deal with the unknown, or how majority groups deal with minorities, or how we conceptualize humanity—that's compelling. Idle fancies can be fun, but the best speculative fiction ultimately returns to earth.

Initially, Fringe was a textbook example of idle, empty science fiction: a facile yet muddled X-Files rip-off in which a top-secret division of the FBI investigates strange paranormal events while powerful shadowy figures manipulate them and their results—diverting enough but hardly promising and extremely derivative. But then, improbably, the writers settled on a brilliant explanation for the paranormal "fringe events": the slow collision of two parallel worlds. With that essential conflict at its core, Fringe has developed a gorgeously baroque mythology and, even better, used it as the foundation for thoughtful, poignant explorations of identity and personal history and guilt and love. In short, when it was just about creepy things going bump in the night, Fringe was dull; now that it's given those sci-fi elements real resonance, it's perhaps the most underrated drama on TV.

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The Night Circus

By Erin Morgenstern. Published in 2011.

Emily Dickinson described books in general as frigates, "to take us Lands away," but in my experience, only the special ones actually accomplish that. Those are my favorites, transporting you to another place, sometimes foreign or alien or fantastic, sometimes a near mirror of home, but definitely elsewhere. The details conjure smells and sights and sounds with enough resonance to give your imagination material to fill in the rest, and the characters seem to continue living outside the pages. The depth and breadth of the setting invites you to linger longer than the plot does, and past and future extend beyond the story's boundaries.

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern's debut novel, is one of those rare frigates, so immersive that reading it is like jumping into a cool, clear pond and discovering you can breathe underwater. An elegant grown-up fairy tale, suffused with magical and ahistorical period color, it spins its love story with delicacy and ever-increasing warmth, but the real accomplishment is the setting, the circus for which the novel is named. So evocative, so beautifully and ardently rendered, the spellbinding circus is a wonder to visit.

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Les Carillons, Polyphonia, and DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse

The New York City Ballet on Sunday, February 5.

I learned after the fact that New York City Ballet's all-Wheeldon program was a special honor for the relatively young choreographer, something usually done only with the works of George Balanchine or Jerome Robbins, but when I bought my ticket, it never occurred to me that the programming was anything out of the ordinary. Wheeldon's work has been a constant in City Ballet repertory for the half a dozen (!) years I've been attending, and I'm sure I've seen more of his pieces than Robbins's.

The program this weekend demonstrated why that's the case, why the company created the role of resident choreographer for Wheeldon in 2001 and why it continues to champion his work even after his departure in 2008. Even in his weaker pieces, Wheeldon's aesthetic fits New York City Ballet. Often playful but always elegant, acutely conscious of music, making gorgeous use of the corps, his work truly does feel descended from (though not derivative of) Balanchine's. He can justify a full program easily.

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Haywire

In theaters.

No one slums with so much style as director Steven Soderbergh. The Ocean's movies, for example, are far more aesthetically polished than any star-studded trifle really needs to be, but that, of course, is part of what makes them so charming. In fact, I secretly prefer frivolous Soderbergh to serious Soderbergh. His sleek manner can come across as cold when he's dealing with some substance, but it's just cool everywhere else.

Haywire, his latest, isn't comedic like Ocean's or sexy like Out of Sight (my personal favorite)—and it's not on their level—but it's fun all the same and just as impeccably put together as the man's films always are. Plus, the conceit is great: Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs set out to make a vehicle for mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano by catering to her strengths (looking tough, kicking the snot out of people) and underplaying her weaknesses (emoting, delivering extensive dialogue, maybe acting in general). Transcendent it's not, but as tight, hard-boiled B-movies go, it's terrific.

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Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major, Mahler’s Ruckert-Lieder, Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, and American opera arias

The MET Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Sunday, January 15.

The clarinet is often described as the instrument closest, in timbre and range, to the human voice. I never gave the idea much thought before this concert, but the juxtaposition put forth by the Metropolitan Opera's exquisite orchestra turned out to be lovely. Alternating between supporting a clarinet soloist and accompanying soprano Renée Fleming highlighted the voice-like qualities of the wind instrument, the agility and virtuosity of Fleming's voice, and the fine musicianship of both. The program itself was a bit quirky, starting with Mozart and ending with several hyper-romantic arias from twentieth-century American operas, but it pulled together beautifully behind its talented soloists.

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McCoy Tyner Quartet featuring Gary Bartz

At the Blue Note on Wednesday, January 11.

Jazz is never going to be my thing. I have tried (and tried and tried and tried), but I always feel at sea to some extent. Sometimes I get something out of it, and sometimes I simply don't, but the music never truly speaks to me the way other genres do. I feel bad about that (I feel bad about lots of things), but there it is.

That said, the surest way to pull me out a little bit is to feature a good pianist, and McCoy Tyner happens to be a great one. His résumé—pianist for the John Coltrane Quartet as well as sideman on numerous albums for Blue Note Records and eventual bandleader—is obviously pretty striking (it's generally a good sign if even I recognize the names), but it wasn't just Tyner's credentials that impressed me. He's an incredible pianist, in a way that transcends genre altogether.