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: 

James Kim and Jinhee Park

Juilliard's 188th Sonatenabend at Paul Hall

 

Last night it was impossible not to attend the Juilliard’s 188th Sonatenabend. After Poulenc’s sonata for clarinet and piano, a vaudeville of cello sonatas commenced, with one immaculate performance following another: Beethoven’s cello variations on Mozart, Prokofiev’s sonata in C major and Schuman’s crazy “Pieces in Folk Style.” The unexpected finale was the Chopin Polonaise Brillante for cello and piano which was played by the prodigiously talented young cellist James Jeonghwan Kim and the equally brilliant pianist Jinhee Park. As usual with those two, their performance was followed by a stunned silence before the audience went wild, screaming, stamping, whistling and howling. The performers themselves seemed quite pleased to have driven the crowd mad, so we all went home happy.

Watch James Jeonghwan Kim play Rostropovich's Humoresque Op. 5, with Ji Won Ahn (piano):

Mark Rothko

www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/12835/dark-palett

Dark Palette, Mark Rothko at Pace Gallery

 

I have often wondered what it would be like to be surrounded by Rothkos. In theory, I could have had the experience at the Four Seasons Restaurant and now it is too late, Pace Gallery's exhibition of Rothko’s Dark Palette works gave me all that and more. What it is like is, like walking into a Lenticular world, in permanent motion, where everything is not as it seems. Any gesture, mental or physical, towards or away from an object produces a shift in reality, so you end up standing still and staring because that is all you can do without falling over. Eventually hypnosis takes control and you succumb to Rothko’s determination to take you into the mind’s eye, and thus to the troubled soul and it is anyone’s guess as to how to emerge from this state.

L'Amour de Loin

Ken Howard, Metropolitan Opera

"L'Amour de Loin", at the Metropolitan Opera, is supposed to be the 12th century tale of Jaufré, Prince of Blaye's heroic pursuit of unattainable love but the setting and the music led to more direct associations with the existential and metaphysical roots of it all. The whole thing was enacted on a vast ocean swell, flowing from the back of the huge Metropolitan Opera stage and down over the orchestra pit, with the principals on little undulating boats. From time to time the chorus poked up their heads, haloed in ripples, through the waves but their ceaseless chants came mostly from underwater. The score was one endlessly enchanting tune, like a gemelan orchestra, and tonight's audience was transfixed, maybe even mesmerized. The people sitting next to me are leaving for Rome tomorrow. They asked me if the Italians celebrate Christmas.

Brandon Jacobs - Jenkins at Juilliard

Richard Termine for The New YorkTimes

Appropriate

Juilliard Drama is doing Branden Jacobs - Jenkin's play, "Appropriate," possibly because he is the playwriting professor there. Its descent from every drama ever written about post mortem family gatherings is quite evident and the ending doesn't really work but the production was perfect. During the first interval the woman in front of me ordered coffee from the local Starbucks and insisted that it was delivered to her seat.

John Kander at Lincoln Center

Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

Last night I joined a group of 50 Mary Martin and Paul Lynde lookalikes to sit at the feet (literally) of
John Kander and chat to him about his dealings with Fred Ebb, Hal Prince, Liza Minelli, Joel Grey and everyone else you've ever heard of. The facilitator, a giggling fan, lost the plot, leaving the incisive audience to skewer Mr. Kander, correcting his facts, reminding him of details and telling him where he had gone wrong. He seemed to enjoy this enormously. He said that Liza Minelli, at the height of her stardom, saved "Chicago" in its first run when Gwen Verdon went off sick. She learned the part in a week, played it for two months, and amazed the audiences who could not believe their ears when the stage manager announced the sub each night, because it was never advertised.

Mark Morris at B.A.M.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

The Hard Nut at Brooklyn Academy of Music

Mark Morris'version of the Nutcracker, The Hard Nut, opened at Brooklyn Academy of Music today so I raced there to see it. It's very calming in the middle of the silly season to see a suburban holiday party go so awry, with the sinister neighbour unleashing his handsome, youthful, alter ego on the innocent little girl before they cavort through a psychic wonderland of obsession and betrayal. Mark Morris himself appeared as the suburban Dad managing the drinks trolley while his garish guests raced each other off and drank to oblivion. The entire production was entirely gender non-confirming, with women lifting, men en pointe and androgenous snow fairies; the suburban maid was a superbly-muscled drag queen. It was amazing to see little children in the audience, but it will probably do them a lot of good in the long run.

Hal Prince and Stephen Sondheim's Last Collaboration

www.rollingstone.com

The Best Worse Thing That Could Ever Have Happened

 

A film by Lonnie Price

 

Film Society of Lincoln Center

It's almost unbelievable, but the original cast of "Merrily We Roll Along", AND Stephen Sondheim AND Hal Prince appear in this documentary about the experience of originating the show in 1981 only to have it be a total flop and close after 16 performances. For some of the cast, it was the end of their acting careers and they never returned to the stage, and Hal Prince and Stephen Sondheim never worked together again. But as was said at the time, just because the public didn't get it then, doesn't mean they wouldn't get it later, and they did. It's been a cult hit for decades. There's a touching moment when the cast members talk about recording the album the morning after the show closed, saying that they sang in defiance, and had never sung so well.

Frans Helmerson at Juilliard

www.piatigorskyfestival.usc.edu/artists/

I went to Frans Helmerson's cello masterclass at Juilliard tonight and sat for three hours, transfixed by him, as he tutored James Jeonghwan Kim, Xinchi Wang and Mariko Wyrick, all brilliant graduate students, in Schumann, Rachmaninoff and Poulenc. The famous Carlos Avila accompanied. All in a day's work for them, and for Juilliard, and they let us in to gape, in fact they welcomed us. It was amazing. So, now I feel very unaccomplished and wish I had practised more.

La Boheme

Cory Weaver/Metropolitan Opera

Cecil B. De Mille at the Met

What a spectacular "La Bohème" at the Met tonight, like Cecil B. De Mille, with intimacy. The
eighty German tourists sitting in the cheap seats, as was I, will remember nothing about it except the rowdy argument they had in German, from the prelude in the garret to the final curtain on Mimi’s rosy corpse. I think that must be what they do at the opera in Germany. Their complete indifference to the performance was probably sophisticated. It reminded me of that bit in "Amadeus" when Mozart is at the vaudeville watching the rowdy parodies of his own music, and he conceives the idea of writing "The Magic Flute." Anyway it didn’t really matter. It was marvelous.