Another Nutcracker

The Nutcracker, in New York City (NYC), has been the province of many companies but not the American Ballet Theater (ABT) in recent years.  They have just done a brilliant new production which they are hoping will become the backbone of every season, for the Nutcracker pulls many a company out of financial disaster each year.  It is without doubt the most popular ballet in America.

ABT is a stellar company and Alexei Ratmansky, the Russian-trained choreagrapher, and his team have done a marvelous interpretation from the opening scene with the party preparations in the kitchen taken over by the rats to the wonderful set pieces.  This ballet is remarkable for its use of child dancers, for its Biedermeier inspired sets and costumes, for its humor, for its very clever staging of the dances.  The evening flies by.  I am a twitchy audience member and usually checking my watch, but this eveining, when the intermission came, I thought, "Already?"

At some level, Nutcracker seems to be a metaphor for puberty as the child dancers become adults, as the children's friendship becomes "love'--in this version the male dancer gives his partner a ring, as the dream of childhood becomes the morning after of awakening with the toy nutcracker.

This is a fresh and different production which also holds closely to tradition.

God Bless Us, Every One at the Da Capo Opera, NYC

Have you ever wondered what happened to Tim Cratchit and the gang after the end of A Christmas Carol?  Well, neither have I actually, but other people have, and so we have God Bless Us, Every One by Thomas Pasateri (composer) and Bill Van Horn and Michael Capasso (librettists).  It tells the further story of some of the Cratchits. It has love, adventure, war, degradation and redemption not to mention a whole lot of forgiveness.  After twenty years, Scrooge dies at his desk, greatly beloved and successful.  He leaves all of his money to the poor which leaves his business partner in a bind.  Tim Cratchit, the partner and formerly Tiny Tim, sails to America to make his fortune.  There he lands in the Civil War.  Many scenes later he is re-united with his true love.  Meanwhile his ward falls in love with a southerner.

The piece to my way of thinking was too much like a pageant (it is only one act) with people popping in and out of the story to make the various plot points .  The music was better than serviceable but songs about "Christmas day, hurray hurray" don't quite do it.  The staging was unusually good for Da Capo, a small opera company in a large expensive city.  The fact that this was a co-production with the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre undoubtedly helped.  Audience applause was polite.

But the New York Times really liked it. (NYT, Dec. 19, 2010, page C1, "'A Christmas Carol', the (Operatic) Sequel."  And I suspect it has a future especially for community productions which want something seasonal and for which a large caste and conventional sentiments are a draw.
Sort of recommended.

American Grace

Some time ago, I was managing the programing for a convention and someone suggested Robert Putnam for a speaker because of his seminal book on social connections, Bowling Alone.  At the time his office assured me he was probably already booked and charged $10,000 for a one hour speech based on his research (that is, his book).  Well, our group did book reviews all the time for free, and I found a member willing to do a break-out session.

However, when I heard that he was appearing in NYC with no ticket charge, I was ready to go.  He has a new book which was published in October, and it should be as important as Bowling Alone, and since it deals with religion, it could even be much more prominent.  American Grace discusses the most comprehensive survey ever done of Americans and their religious lives.  He and his co-author, David Campbell, make a number of startling discoveries.

American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us involved a survey of three thousand Americans in 2006 and a repeat survey of the same people in 2007 plus stays of one to two months with about a dozen congregations of all kinds spread around the US.  He found (as have others) that we are an exceptionally religious people.  We are also exceptionally diverse.  In most countries those conditions lead to civil war.  But it seems, we are also exceptionally tolerant especially in our personal lives.  Although religious piety is predictive of political division to an unprecedented degree, in our personal lives we are deeply connected.  Eighty per cent of us see some good in all religions.  More than half of us marry outside of our religious group, and a large number change affiliation over their lifetime.  And on the whole religious people are just nicer than the non-religious.  There is, of course, much more.

One can agree or disagree, but he has almost 700 pages of data, charts, argument and citations to back up his points.  If you can't get Putnam to explain it all to you, I suggest the book, for I believe we will be talking about this for a long time.  There is a lot of text, but Putnam is a fairly easy read in that you can get a lot from the graphs and headings.  It is solid but clear.

Highly recommended.

Summer and Smoke

A generation ago Lee Hoiby wrote an opera which was criticized as old-fashioned.  He was a student of Menotti, and if you are familiar with Anahl and the Night Visitors, you have the idea.  Fortunately fashions change and Hoiby's Summer and Smoke recently performed at the Manhattan School of Music now receives more favorable reviews.


Summer is based on the play of the same name by Tennessee Williams and tells the story of dashing doctor Johnny and repressed Alma, next door neighbors fated to be almost lovers.  Williams was not big on conventional happy endings.  The story is affecting, the performances excellent, the sets marvelous with two especially nice Spanish-moss draped trees and lovely lighting.  The music is rich.   I would recommend it, but we saw the last performance.

Holiday Brass

Each year the New York Philharmonic brass players do a Christmas concert.  The last couple of years they have joined with the West Point Band playing seasonal music.  Listening to Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring with brass continuo is a cultural treat that ranks with hearing Va Pensiero in strong waltz mode or Under the Double Eagle with a mandolin orchestra.  Actually the Bach, played by the NYP brass was very pleasurable, but once you get used to the concepts, the others have their peculiar charms too.

Back to the concert--it was loud, it was brassy, it was jazzy, it was corny, and the audience liked it..  For my taste, however, it was too loud and lacked nuance--brass can be played with nuance even though that is not what first comes to mind.

Scipione Africano

The Yale Baroque Opera Project shows what can be done with talented faculty, very bright students and $3 million in a Mellon Foundation grant.  It was very much a college production--Freshmen and Sophomore student singers (and others).  Free tickets.  It made me appreciate what those master classes we have observed at the Metropolitan Opera are about, but it is unfair to hold these students to such standards--the Met scholars are probably ten years of hard study older and most have some professional experience.  Opera performance is a lifelong study.

Most of these students will not sing professionally--several had lovely voices but lacked the power to fill even a small auditorium  They performed well.  The wonder is that such young students are already studying Baroque opera performance.  That is a Yale education, and I envy them.

About the opera--Francesco Cavalli was big name in his day (approximately 1650).  He gave the audience what it wanted: stage spectacle, lots of plot, royalty, noble virtues, comic servants, sword fights with one contestant dragged off stage after expiring and lots of pleasant music.  Great opera?  Not really, but grand and a very pleasant evening if you ignore the traffic between New York and New Haven.

Ghostwritten

One of the better books I have read recently is Ghostwritten by David Mitchell; however, I have doubts about my ability to get one of my book groups to pick it up.  It is a series of linked short stories (apparently a current fad) united by their connection to an explosion in the Tokyo subway system.  Each chapter has a different narrator and locale but each turns out to be linked in some way to the original event.  Some of magical aspects.  It is puzzling, thought-provoking, worthy of argument--or discussion as we call it.  Mitchell notes at one point that each act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.  And there is an actual ghost-writer who may or may not have a happy ending.


And why wouldn't my book groups be eager to take this on?  Well, it's not easy.  It's puzzling at times, definitely not The Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.  Multiple times the reader has to get into the story.  Some of the narrators are likable, some are quite repellent, some sympathetic, some not so much.


While it is challenging, it is also rewarding and to my taste well worth the effort.

Paris, the Luminous Years

We went to a preview showing of the first hour of Paris: the Luminous Years the Alliance Francaise last night with a talk by the director beforehand.  She spoke of it as five year project with four years devoted to fundraising, and one to making the two hour program which will be shown at 9:00 p.m. on December 15, 2010.

Even though the time of the post-impressionists is so well known, there is much to learn and enjoy; the film is lovely and there are many little discoveries.  Why did they hang out in cafes?  Their apartments had no heat, and there was a law against meetings without a permit.  Permits were awarded slowly and capriciously.  Bars had booze, heat and toilets, and no one bothered a group sitting around a bar.  Some of the filmed interviews are with people who were there and some with distinguished and well-spoken scholars.  Highly recommneded.

John Kelly and Eqon Schiele

Pass the Blutwurs, Bitte at the Ellen Stewart Theatre at La Mama portrays  the life of Egon Schiele, the Austrian expressionist artist.  La Mama is the New York City experimental theater which has been doing avant garde performances for nearly fifty years without ever managing to become old garde.  Egon Schiele was a painter who specialized in the erotic, was jailed for pornography and yet highly successful, married for advangage, and died at twenty-eight in the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.  All of this is in the performance.  John Kelly is a poly-artist who does a little of everything. In this performance he wrote, choreographed, directed, performed and is having a simultaneous art show a few blocks away.

The show is certainly interesting with sets so minimal as to be virtually non-existent, period costumes and period music.  Think silent movie with all of the dialogue cards at the beginning of the movie--there is no English dialogue and no surtitles.  We aren't supposed to understand any spoken words.  At the opening two men come out carrying signs explaining the action of the six scenes--dramatic discovery is not a factor here.  Everything else is pantomime.  There is movmement, much of it dancelike, and a marvelous bit where Kelly/Schiele "paints" by washing whitewash off a painting and a lovely beer-drinking scene where they actually drink what certainly appears to be beer.  The audience clearly understands what is happening at each moment.

It is easier to say what this is not than what it is, but what it most significantly is not, is moving.  I was never bored, but when it was over, I was ready and most of the applause was warm without being wildly enthusiastic.

book- A Jury of Her Peers

A Jury of Her Peers, named after a famous short story by Susan Glaspell, is a history of the writing of American women from the beginning of the country to very recently.  It is well worth reading as a survey, but since it casts its net so wide, there is only superficial analysis of the many works covered.  An arc of history appears as women writers move from apologizing for their audacity to attempting to write like men to finding a voice that considers women's concerns to be as valid as men's concerns. Covering three hundred fifty years, author Elaine Showalter gives biographical information of each writer, summarizes the prominent works, gives an idea of the contemporary critical reception and some idea of their overall importance, and she covers a lot of women  She doesn't tell you everything you want to know, but she definitely introduces some writers you will want to know better.

pay equity and its lack

The Paycheck Fairness Act was sunk in the senate under a procedural vote eliminating it from consideration and also eliminating the obligation of senators to consider its merits.  I wonder if inept promotion was part of its defeat.  A key provision would have prevented companies from punishing workers for revealing salaries and inquiring about them.  Without this provision not even egregious salary discrimination can be prosecuted.  If you don't know you're being cheated, what can you do about it?  No law is enforceable without access to information.  You would think everyone could approve of that kind of freedom of information.

Now--I went to a meeting last night with an interesting speaker representing Women on the Job, a project of the Long Island Fund for Women and Girls.  I won't attempt to recapitulate the speech--just a couple of nuggets.  The gender differential in pay is about 23% in private market jobs and only 11% in public jobs which normally have published, or at least publicly available, pay scales.  Gender differences in pay have a racial dimension..  Black women  earn 68% and Hispanic women only 60% of what men make while Asian American women earn 92%.  Gender pay equity would eliminate 50% of the nation's poverty problem.  Finally it has been known that in professions that have had a significant influx of women, salaries and pay decreased for all, but it seems that in fields that have had in increase in men workers such as nursing, salaries risen for all.  I will never look at a male nurse the same way again.

John Baldessari at the MMA

The Metropolitan Museum had an event for William Society members recent--a very nice way to see an exhibibt.  The museum is closed, members are given wine and nuts, a curator talks and after everyone descends to the level of the exhibit and views it, able to ask the curator any questions that come to mind. 

Baldessari is a California conceptual artist who has worked and taught for fifty years and is well known to those who study and appreciate such things. He has won numerous awards including a Golden Lion for lifetime achievment at the Venice Biennialle.  Sometimes what appears to be a comment is the title of a picture, and sometimes it is the picture. Or the artist's input  is the  idea of the picture. In one series amateur and weekend artists were asked to select from a group of pictures by Baldessari and then paint them.  In another series his wife threw a series of colored panels from an upper window in his house, and he photographed them.  Such pieces make one consider not only what is art but what is the role of the artist.

I can't resist also wondering, if I lived with this and walked by it every day for month, would I see any more in it the thirtieth time than the first? We all have our personal definitions of "great" art.  One of mine is that it holds my interest beyond the first viewing.  I do not have to like it, but I do want it pull at me. 

Theater-Metamorhosis

Metamorphosis, currently having its premiere, November 20-December 4, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the Harvey Theater is naturally based on the story by Franz Kafka about a man who wakes up one morning to find he has become a cockroach and whose only worry (at that point) is how he can get to work  The story progresses then to what happens to the family and to Gregor.  It's a metaphor and one can spend years discussing what it means.  It is also fascinating even though the story is so well known.

  The company is composed of Icelandic and British actors and other members and something called the Knee High Theater.  The set is of two levels, a conventional first floor for a conventional family and a second floor hallway with a bedroom turned on its side so that we are looking into the room through the ceiling.  Gisli Orn Gardason is Gregor Samsa in a marvelously physical performance as he moves around the room in his cockroach state.   

This is a wonderful evening of theater.  Highly recommended.

The Scarlet Letter, Opera

The Scarlet Letter is an opera based on Hawthorne's novel with both music and libretto by Margaret Garwood with its world premiere November 19-21, 2010 in Philadelphia at the Academy of Vocal Arts.  It opens with Hester on her deathbed and reverts to the time of her affair with the Reverend Dimmesdale, a clergyman, her trial, the well-named Chillingworth, villainous and supposedly dead husband who reappears and becomes the engine of revenge.  There is her obnoxious child, Pearl, who manages to make things worse until the end when Dimmesdale dies in Hester's arms at last confessing his paternity of Pearl.

According to the composer's note Hawthorne himself thought it could be an opera.  Certainly the themes are big enough.  Works with themes concerning the victimization of women are apparently a continuing interest for the composer and certainly there is victimization in abundance.  The horror of sexual transgression would make it so; if the woman was in anyway guilty, she would not, at that time, been a character one could sympathize with.

The production was effective; the music while a product of this time was rich and interesting.  One can hope it will be done again.