Broadway's Future: A Call For Hope

Broadway's Future

Today I attended a seminar at Lincoln Centre named "Broadway's Future; A Call for Hope", which showcased 15 new musicals written by lyrics/composer duos, each under 30. All had been writing musicals since they were children and the quality was as astounding as the subject matter. One toe tapping show focused on mortality in its various forms and was called "One Death at a Time." An ode to narcissisim was called “I Love You, Me.” “Under A Different Sun” imagined the complexities of a black family who looked white. “Be The Dust” was the story of Adam and Eve's early divorce and “The State of Hockey, The Musical” was a three act treatment of the crisis caused by the Minnesota hockey team being sold to New Mexico. This is just a sample. There were ten more, just as good.

Stephin Merritt

Stephin Merritt, www.stereogum.com

Stephin Merritt and the Naked American Songbook

This evening I finally got to be in a radio audience. The Naked American Songbook is a radio show produced by The Jonathan Channel, WNYC and WQXR and it is broadcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There were cards saying "applaud" and "laugh" and "silence" and a man in a red hat warmed us up before the guest came on. He was Stephin Merritt and he created some interest because he did not say very much, which made a radio show a little complicated. But he did say that for many years he spent Christmas with Rosemary Clooney. She used to spend Christmas with Ethel Merman in a mid town hotel suite with its own Christmas Tree. When Ethel Merman died Rosemary Clooney took over the suite, and the Christmas Tree, and spent every Christmas there, with Stephin Merrit, until she died in 2002. So that was unexpected.

Jane Glover

An Afternoon with Jane Glover

Jane Glover is the world’s most accomplished conductor of Mozart and has done everything, everywhere. Spending an afternoon with her and 12 students at the Manhattan School of Music is just another of those things people seem to expect in New York. She was very funny, telling the brilliant Shaina Martinez that relearning her breathing would “take three weeks - or eighteen years, one or the other,” warning Christian Thurston to lose his New Zealand accent if he was going to sing Mozart correctly, pointing out to Hayan Kim that her inability to pronounce “crudele” made it “your personal C word,” and transforming the finale trio of Le Nozze di Figaro after convincing each singer, one by one, that it was all about domestic violence. After four hours, Jane Glover went off to rehearse the MSM Chamber Sinfonia and I went to Vine Sushi [alas, since closed] across the street and had the red curry.
  
Jane Glover talks about conducting Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro:

I Puritani

Ken Howard, Metropolitan Opera

I Puritani at the Metropolitan Opera

The rotten New York Times review of I Puritani at the Metropolitan opera meant the house was pretty empty last night but the audience could still interrupt the performance with enthusiasm as tradition demands. Reviewers always say that this opera is a marsh of muddy music rescued by its principals. What rot. It is like “Don Carlo” poured through a hair sieve and left to set, so enchanting are its four hours of choruses interspersed with terrific arias that only the world’s best singers can approach. Last night’s singers were not only musically enchanting but also gorgeous to look at while the masses of Puritani, in their poke bonnets and aprons, sang perfectly and gave good, Puritan stare. Being there was like spending Eternity in the Rijksmuseum surrounded by Vermeer portraits, with divine music. That’s my idea of heaven but it seems to be the NYT’s idea of hell.

Juilliard Faculty Recital

Henry Grossman

Juilliard School Faculty Recital at Paul Hall

 

Catherine Cho (violin), Hsin-Yun Huang (viola), Natasha Brofsky (cello) and Robert McDonald (piano) hardly ever appear together, not because they are too busy on the concert circuit, but because they are too busy teaching or in the recording studio and rarely perform in public at all. So their virtuosic perfectionism last night at the Juilliard School with incredibly difficult pieces by Haydn, Stucky and Brahms seemed to amaze the audience as much as it quite evidently delighted their students. I went home wondering if maybe the best performers in the world are not those we always see on the stage but those lurking in the college halls and studio rehearsal rooms.

Pedro Almodova

Julietta, a film by Almodovar, at Lincoln Cinema Plaza

 

© Gtresonline, www.revistavanityfair.es

This film’s a joke, right? It’s The Iliad done as an Iberian melodrama like those on TV at 3 am in  Mexico City. A mother gives her daughter freedom, so she ignores her. She forgets to tell her that her father has died while she was at summer camp. The daughter moves to a huge apartment in Madrid (aged 11). Then she goes into a three month mountain retreat (aged 15). After twenty years the mother notices the daughter is missing and throws a fit. “She was lost to anti-depressants for 20 years,” murmurs a woman in a crowd. “I drank too much for a decade,” writes the mother in her diary. Rossy de Palma appears (as the Charybdis). The mother drives backwards into an unknown past which probably explains everything. Credits roll. Almodovar slaps me across the face with a wet dish rag. But he didn’t. It’s a joke. Isn’t it? 

Watch the trailer: