Habemus Papam! -- Pope Benedict XVI

I knew it was going to happen, and I called it at the end of my entry for April 8. As the winner of the Papal election, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, cut a unique figure during John Paul II's funeral. As he presided at the mass for the late Pontiff, there was a feeling that it was a done deal. A week later he was elected Pope after one of the shortest conclaves in recent history.

Since his election much ink has been spilled about Ratzinger's past. Pictures of young Josef in his Hitlerjunge uniform seemed to be everywhere, and the London Times reminded everyone that "unknown to many members of the church ... Ratzinger’s past included brief membership of the Hitler Youth movement and wartime service with a German army anti- aircraft unit." The article, written a few days before his election, goes on to report that "in 1937 Ratzinger’s father retired and the family moved to Traunstein, a staunchly Catholic town in Bavaria close to the Führer’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden. He joined the Hitler Youth at age 14, shortly after membership was made compulsory in 1941." Also, we learn that "two years later Ratzinger was enrolled in an anti-aircraft unit that protected a BMW factory making aircraft engines. The workforce included slaves from Dachau concentration camp."

Pope Benedict XVI should be a very busy man from now on. He needs to heal a Catholic Church (in particular the American Church) which has been wounded. He needs to overcome his past, which is tied to the history of his country, and he needs to shed the tough outer skin he developed as John Paul II's defender of the faith. He has to go from being the German rottweiler to becoming the German shepherd -- the Shepherd of the flock, that is.

The following article, written by Jane Kramer, appeared in the May 2 issue of The New Yorker magazine. Although it presents a largely negative reaction to last week's events in Vatican City, her ideas are interesting, and her writing style fresh and informative.

"Holy Orders" by Jane Kramer

Cardinals of the Church of Rome do not normally hold press conferences to spin their choices, but that is precisely what many of them did last Wednesday, less than a day after they named Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and arguably the most powerful person in the Vatican, to St. Peter’s chair. They wanted the world to know that Ratzinger has a “great heart,” that he is “compassionate,” “collegial,” even “shy”—that, in fact, it was shyness and humility that had made him seem so strict and pitiless in the job of doctrinal enforcer that he held for the past quarter of a century.

In his homily to his fellow-cardinals, on the first morning of their conclave, Cardinal Ratzinger had warned that modern society was threatened by a “dictatorship of relativism.” But it might have been more accurate to say that it is threatened by a dictatorship of absolutisms, including his own. This is a world in the tightening grip of orthodoxy, of literal “truths” and crusading certainties, and early last week it was the hope of many Catholics that the Church would begin to break that grip and return to them the right to exercise their own consciences on matters that do not concern faith so much as the realities of their intimate lives: sexuality, celibacy, choice, the use of condoms in aids-ridden Africa, the use of birth control in the favelas and shantytowns of Central and South America, the acknowledgment that stem-cell research might conceivably be a gift from God.

The question of God and conscience, or, rather, the relation between God and conscience—the central question of Vatican II, and, as such, the source of immense hope to young Catholics in the nineteen-sixties and seventies—was so “deconstructed” (to risk a relativist term) in the twenty-six years of John Paul II’s papacy that raising it now constitutes a kind of doctrinal heresy. Ratzinger maintained, with his friend and predecessor, that a well-ordered conscience is one that submits to the authority of the magisterium. So it is understandable that today those Catholics are asking who exactly is, and was, Joseph Ratzinger. Was he the Pope’s man, the unbending instrument of John Paul II’s insistent orthodoxy, or was he, at least in part, the motor of that orthodoxy, especially in the Pontiff’s last years?

Most Popes of the last century—even John Paul II, for all his groundwork as a priest in Communist Poland—were elevated to that office from relative anonymity. Ratzinger does not have that advantage. He has been well known to Catholic intellectuals since the nineteen-seventies, when he battled Hans Küng, the liberal Swiss theologian and his mentor at the University of Tübingen, on questions of doctrinal dissension, and, as Archbishop of Munich, was instrumental in having Küng barred from teaching Catholic theology. And, of course, he has been very well known to most Catholics since the early eighties, when the Pope installed him at the Vatican. His agenda, or his orders, were always clear. During his first ten years as Prefect, the Jesuits were censured for challenging papal teachings on contraception, parts of their constitution were suspended, and their Vicar General, Vincent O’Keefe, a passionate advocate for social justice, was removed. The reactionary lay order Opus Dei was transformed into a “personal prelature” accountable directly to the Pope. The dioceses of progressive Latin-American bishops were gerrymandered out of existence, liberation theologians like Leonardo Boff were called to Rome and silenced as “Marxists” (they were, more accurately, Christiancommunitarian evangelists), and the priests they had trained, who were responsible for an ebullient Catholic revival in Latin America, were ordered back into the fold of tradition and obedience. The relative autonomy of the North American bishops’ conference was ended, and its most progressive members—most famously Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, of Chicago—were marginalized.

If the Vatican’s project in the eighties was to purge its clergy, its nineties project was to purge its teachings of ambiguity. The dogma of papal infallibility, which dates only from 1870, has been invoked just once since then, in 1950, when Pius XII proclaimed the “truth” of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. But in the years of John Paul II’s papacy there was a conflation of the notion of infallibility and what the Church calls “definitive teachings.” The result was that John Paul II’s teachings often carried the imperative of infallibility, and Cardinal Ratzinger’s theological imprimatur on those teachings, together with his power to enforce them, effectively ended the discussion.

These issues were more important to the cardinals than the new Pope’s age or whether he was Italian, or European, or from Latin America or Africa. There are a hundred and eighty-three cardinals, but no cardinal over the age of eighty may vote, and, of the hundred and fifteen who did, all but two owed their appointments to John Paul II. It was probably never in doubt whom they would choose. Joseph Ratzinger speaks for them, and whatever he says about “waves” battering at the boat of the true faith—globalism, feminism, individualism, desire, homosexuality (“an objective disorder”), demands for the ordination of women, mysticism, “gravely deficient” sects, Turkish Muslims in Christian Europe—those words put a full stop to the opening up of the Church of Rome that we still call Vatican II. In the past few days, Benedict XVI has promised the world dialogue and reconciliation, but at the same time he has reappointed the Vatican team that, with him, brought us the spectacle of suffering and death that ended with the funeral of John Paul and secured the veneration, if not the speedy sanctification, of that faithful and controlling Pontiff. (“This is a long way from three people at the foot of the Cross,” one ex-Jesuit remarked last week, not long after Benedict XVI appeared for the first time in his papal vestments.) Most of the Cardinals wanted a continuum of that always spectacular reign. And they wanted a continued enforcement of its most conservative dicta—which may be why they are talking now about cutting their losses for the advantages of a smaller, “purer” Church. But, from what we know, the early Church was a place of risk and debate. They should remember that, too.

Tristan und Isolde at the Bastille

Finally, the awaited new Peter Sellars production of Tristan und Isolde premiered at the Bastille. The following is the New York Times review by Alan Riding.

In Pursuit of a Total Art, the Paris Opera Adds Video to 'Tristan und Isolde'

By ALAN RIDING

PARIS, April 13 - Huge, dense, taxing, with almost all the action taking place in the heart, Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" is notoriously difficult to stage. Indeed, the composer himself abandoned his first attempt in Vienna in the early 1860's after no fewer than 77 rehearsals. Now, in a daring experiment, the Paris National Opera has invited the American video artist Bill Viola to accompany the work with his own visual commentary.

On a 30-foot-wide screen above and behind the somberly lighted space peopled by the singers, images that recall some of Mr. Viola's well-known video pieces variously offer literal, metaphorical and even spiritual complements to one of mythology's most famous and tragic love stories. With only the preludes played to a closed curtain, Mr. Viola's multi-toned video poem runs for some 3 hours 40 minutes, a full-length spectacle in its own right.

The production, first performed in a concert version at Disney Hall in Los Angeles in December, is directed by Peter Sellars, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Paris Opera Orchestra.

Its seven performances at the Bastille Opera through May 4 are to be followed by seven more in November, with Valery Gergiev at the podium. It is to return in concert version to Disney Hall in March 2007 and to be staged in New York in April 2007.

Central to this production are the German mezzo Waltraud Meier as Isolde and the Canadian tenor Ben Heppner as Tristan, both given a rousing reception after Tuesday's opening night. In the view of French music critics, the Swiss mezzo Yvonne Naef as Brangäne, the Finnish baritone Jukka Rasilainen as Kurwenal and the German bass Franz-Josef Selig as King Marke also contributed to the high quality of singing.

But the true novelty lay in Mr. Viola's videos, which the artist said in an interview were inspired more by the text than the music. "I listened to it, various versions, for a month and I was stunned, I couldn't see anything," he said. So, no less than Wagner, he started with the myth, the story, the text. "The images tell the inner story in a similar way the music tells the inner story of the emotional and, I would say, spiritual life of these people."

As a result, Mr. Viola shot most of the images before turning back to the music. "I realized the music is not useful to me while I'm shooting," he explained. "The music becomes absolutely necessary in the editing process. So music became for me the last stage. It was then that I tried to fit the images onto this pre-existing landscape that Mr. Wagner has beautifully provided us."

As such, the images echo rather than illustrate the story, with many sequences slowed to harmonize with the protracted development of the plot. For instance, it takes most of Act I, as well as a magic potion, for Tristan and Isolde to recognize they love each other. They enjoy their love in Act II, but it ends with Tristan stabbed by a follower of Isolde's new husband, King Marke. And Act III is devoted to Tristan's extended death and Isolde's decision to join him.

Perhaps the central image used by Mr. Viola for Act I involves a split screen in which two tiny lights gradually take the form of a man and a woman, Tristan and Isolde's surrogates, who slowly strip and then are purified with water. The sequence ends with close-ups of their faces under water, as if they - like Tristan and Isolde who have drunk the love potion - have passed into a new reality. Two other figures then caress each other as they float under water.

With Tristan persuaded that the night is benevolent and the day is evil, Act II opens with an image of sunset and closes with another of dawn, but the most powerful sequences involve fire and water, two of Mr. Viola's preferred opposites. In one, a man slowly approaches a fire from a long distance and finally walks through the burning logs; in the other, a woman - again in slow motion - lights some 150 candles before herself walking through water.

Water too is at the heart of the final near-mystical scene when the now frustated love of Tristan and Isolde becomes, in Mr. Viola's words, "something more profound, something you can't even describe." Here, by reversing the high definition film he has shot, Mr. Viola uses water to lift the dead Tristan from a stone slab and raise him to eternity. "You're looking at death, and in the editing room, it becomes a kind of birth," he noted.

The question already raised by some critics in Los Angeles last December and echoed by some spectators here Tuesday is whether the powerful images distract from the singing. Views seem divided, with the criticism applied mostly to Act I. Mr. Viola recognized the problem. "The images can overwhelm," he said. "It seems like a huge amount to take in, but a lot of them are quite slow and on the screen for quite a time. They function at times as backdrops."

Unusually, Mr. Sellars began working on his production only after seeing Mr. Viola's images. "The staging is built around Bill's images and of course Waltraud Meier and Ben Heppner," he said in an interview, "because the depth they bring to the first rehearsal means you're starting at an advanced level. Waltraud is the reigning Isolde of her generation. Ben is now truly without peer."

With the images in place, Mr. Sellars said, "Bill gives me permission to ground the singers in an emotional depth because I don't have to have them run around the stage and be 'interesting.' " The result is a minimalist staging, with only a square platform as décor and all the intensity reserved for the voices.

Still, with the combination of video, orchestra, singing, acting and text, Mr. Sellars likes to think the team has come up with something resembling a modern Gesamtkunstwerk, the concept of total art that was Wagner's lifelong musical and theatrical objective. "Of course," he added, "Wagner's music alone gives you more than you can possibly take in."

Sin City

The collaborative culmination between director Josef von Sternberg and superstar Marlene Dietrich ocurred in 1935 with the last film that the two made together: The Devil is a Woman. Superb cinematography was always one of the key ingredients of these elaborate, baroque fantasies made at Paramount, and some of the best studio cameramen -- Lee Garmes, Lucien Ballard, James Wong Howe, and Bert Glennon -- worked with the director in defining the sultry and unforgettable look of these B&W films. In The Devil is a Woman, von Sternberg, credited in the film with his American Society of Cinematographers (A.S.C.) title, took the directorial as well as the cinematographic credit, an aspect of his films to which he always payed the utmost attention.

Sin City, Robert Rodriguez's new film, adapted from Frank Miller's graphic novels is, technically, a worthy successor to von Sternberg's early work in Hollywood. Rodriguez takes the cinematographic as well as the editing credit, and also shares directorial credit with Mr. Miller.

When was the last time that a major motion picture was released in black and white? The last that I can remember was Jim Jarmusch's 1995 iconoclastic western Dead Man, and that was an independent film that received limited release.

Sin City is visually a unique film. That alone demands that the work be seen, and it is reason enough for me to not go at length about it; for how can you faithfully describe with words what one needs to experience with your sense of sight? Miller's noirish sleaze is brought to life in a panoramic style that captures the pulp essence of the work, but allows the medium of film to expand on it. The results are truly stunning. Go see it. Post your comments about the film here.

Pope John Paul II is Buried

Thursday, April 7 was a long day's journey into night and beyond for me. I taught the entire day, and during the afternoon showed my Film Club The Producers, a film which they enjoyed very much. Then, I watched the first act of the dress rehearsal of HMS Pinafore at school. Then, I got a call from my friend Brian inviting me to a free showing of the film Donnie Darko at the 34th street Loew's Cineplex. Awesome film, by the way, and I recommend it to everyone who likes science-fiction, horror, time travel, and movies that are carefully crafted puzzles. It ended after ten o'clock (it was the director's cut, after all), then I had dinner at the "Tick-Tock Dinner" (they make great roadside sliders there!), then went back home in a taxi, under a huge downpour -- needless to say, I did not have an umbrella. These days, it's been raining a lot in NYC. When I finally got home, I went to sleep at midnight, and got up at 5 AM to watch the Pope's funeral on TV.

I was surprised that the Pope's Requiem Mass was held outdoors, Spring weather being so unpredictable. Then again, how could they hold this mass indoors and deny the millions of people who had flocked to Vatican City at least a far-away glimpse of the events. Thousands stood shoulder to shoulder on St. Peter's Square and beyond. There were people as far back as the eye could see, and overhead threatening clouds were evident. The robes and vestments of the prelates gathered were blowing in the howling winds of St. Peter's Square. However, miraculously the rain held up, and the ceremony went off without a hitch. It was a memorable service -- moving at times. I don't believe there has ever been so much clapping and cheering at the funeral mass of a pope before -- but it never turned into an irreverent scene at all. The crowd chanted either "Santo" or "Magno" (Saint or Great) or both: a reference to the grassroots movement, that started the very day the pope died, which aims to cannonize the Pontiff and attach the term "The Great" to his name. This has not happened in centuries, and as I was watching the telecast I knew that I was witnessing history in the making.

I also could not help but wonder if I was watching the next pope at the altar. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the current Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dean of the College of Cardinals, and Cardinal from Germany sayed the Mass, and rumors are swirling that he might be the successor to John Paul II. Hopefully, in a few weeks we will know.

In Memoriam -- John Paul II 1920-2005

A Bloody and Noisy Julius Caesar

The production of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, that is about to open at the Belasco, is a bloody and noisy reading of this venerable warhorse. The arriving audience is greeted by muted martial music that sounds like it's coming from a junkyard band consisting of rusty horns and tattered bagpipes. This drone -- which after a while almost becomes contagious, but ends up ultimately being annoying -- is played up to the start of the performance. On stage, we see a curtainless stage cluttered with dilapidated Roman ruins, a couple of headless and armless classical statues near the side balconies, as well as a shopping cart filled with junk. Before the start of the play a homeless man staggers onstage, sits on the floor by his cart, and scratches his scraggly beard. He is, of course, the Soothsayer. Not the seer that Shakespeare intended, I'm sure, but then again, this is not the production that he had in mind either. A giant banner on stage with Julius Caesar's image is adorned with a laurel wreath and a crown. Caesar wears a beret and fatigues, as if he were the ruler of some modern police state.

And that's exactly the point of departure of this production: to make it modern. Set in a contemporary dictatorial country, the largely male cast is dressed in suits and ties during Rome's times of peace, and when civil war erupts after the title character is assassinated everyone switches to military fatigues and camouflage.

But this conceit by director Daniel Sullivan is obviously not new. As a matter of fact, it has almost become a cliché by now to set a classic play in a time period other than what the author originally intended. By the way, everyone should know that back in 1937, the then newly-formed Mercury Theater staged a modern-dressed production of Julius Caesar. That brave experiment revolutionized modern Shakespearean staging. That ground-breaking production was produced and directed by Mercury Theater founder Orson Welles.

I attended the Wednesday matinee on March 30, not so much because I wanted to see this play, but more because I wanted to experience Denzel Washington on the stage once again. Many years ago, when I was a freshman undergraduate at Fordham University in Lincoln Center, my English professor, Robert Stone, urged us to see a performance of a play that had been written by a student at the college. In the cast, playing a wheelchair-bound, cantankerous old man was a senior making his last performance at Fordham. His name was Denzel Washington. As a junior he had starred in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, and Shakespeare's Othello. By the time he was a senior, thanks largely to the tutelage of Robert Stone, Denzel Washington was on his way to becoming a star.

He gives a very powerful and believable performance in the role of Brutus. It is the best role Washington has had since he starred in Spike Lee's film Malcolm X. The declamatory style that he adopts for the role of Brutus reminds me very much of the cadences he adopted when he played the slain civil rights leader. He is the star of this show, the reason for its existence, and the sole reason why you should go to the Belasco to see it.

Otherwise, the production is confused, bloody and very noisy. I don't remember ever having seen a more graphically violent play on Broadway. The stage blood flows freely in this production, not only during the murder of Caesar, but in the second act scenes of war. Also, in an effort to make things really relevant, the director has staged a particularly disturbing torture and decapitation scene that will remind everyone of the realities of the current situation in Iraq. The second act also features unnecessary, earth-shaking special sonic effects that, although very realistic, also go overboard. I am certain that the people outside the Belasco Theater can hear the roars coming from within.

The only roars that matter, in my opinion, are those coming from Mr. Washington's performance, and those from the appreciative sold-out crowds.

Wall to Wall Sondheim Saved for Posterity

Last Saturday, March 19, Symphony Space celebrated composer Stephen Sondheim's 75th birthday with a gigantic marathon of the composer's music called "Wall to Wall Sondheim." I was scheduled to perform in that concert as a member of the Juilliard Choral Union. Unfortunately, personal and professional conflicts did not allow me to participate in the event. The Choral Union sang during the last hours of the show, and closed the evening with "Sunday in the Park with George," arranged and played by composer Jason Robert Brown. Luckily, the entire affair was broadcast by XM Satellite Radio, and the buffs were quick to post it to Usenet. I downloaded and burned all twelve hours into one shiny CD-R -- don't you love the MP3 format?! -- and have plans to spend my Easter week vacation listening to the whole thing.

I hope this will be a great week of listening and discovery. Truthfully, though, I am riddled with fears of interruptions. I remember that funny, clever British comedy by Simon Gray Otherwise Engaged, where London publisher Simon Hench buys a recording of Wagner's Parsifal, and all he wants to do is unwind in his den with the recording and a glass of brandy. His prospects are dashed, time and again, by annoying interruptions.

I must say that the first two hours (I am listening to it as I blog) have already featured "Into the Woods," "Gypsy," "Company," and esoterica from Sondheim's days as an undergraduate in Williams College. It promises to be a very enjoyable marathon. Click here for a complete schedule of the event, with a list of performers and musical numbers.

Der Rosenkavalier at the MET

On Saturday night, I went to the MET to hear my first Der Rosenkavalier. After almost thirty years of attending opera, I had never gone to hear this great work anywhere, although I had seen the MET telecast many years ago, had listened to many Saturday broadcasts of it, and was somewhat familiar with the score. A few years ago, I realized that I had not gotten around to studying the great opera comedies. Over the past few years I have tried to do something to rectify this, and thus far have also attended performances of Verdi's Falstaff and Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

Saturday night was Der Rosenkavalier's turn. It was extraordinary! One of the best performances I have ever attended! Memorable in all accounts, how many times does an opera-goer have a chance to say this? In the pit, Donald Runnicles led the orchestra, and this well-oiled ensemble has not sounded better. I was excited about going to see Runnicles conduct since I own a recording of the Parsifal that he recently led in Vienna in April of 2004. Runnicle's take on Wagner's last work rivals James Levine's reading when it comes to beauty of expression and expansive tempi. I was sitting on the side of the orchestra (M-35), and I must say that the side overhang reflected sound quite nicely without the flatness that tends to be the major complaint of the orchestra seats at the MET.

What a cast! Susan Graham's Octavian was a very likeable interpretation, her voice secure throughout her range. She is such a sensitive artist. The Marschallin was sung by Angela Denoke, who is making her debut at the MET this season. This German soprano is a rare find, and she conveyed both the beauty and the inherent sadness of the character perfectly. Sophie was endearingly portrayed by Russian soprano Lyubov Petrova. The scene in Act II where she rattles off Octavian's baptismal names was superb. Baron Ochs was Peter Rose, and about him all I can say is that I have so much admiration for any non-German (he was born in Canterbury) that can learn this vocally demanding role with its tricky rhythms, low E's, and generally talky and complex nature. He was superb, and a wonderful actor as well. His dismissal of the Italian tenor in Act I was brilliant (he clapped twice after the aria, and boorishly motioned him to go away). By the way, Matthew Polenzani was superb in his cameo as the Italian tenor. His fine instrument soared above the orchestra, having no problem whatsoever with the devilishly high tessitura that culminates in a high C-flat.

The rest of the large cast was also superb. The three noble orphans sang harmoniously, Annina and Valzacchi (Wendy White and Greg Fedderly) were deliciously oily, and Håkan Hagegård's Feninal was hilariously befuddled. It is captivating to see how this artist has mellowed since the days when he starred in Ingmar Bergman's film of Mozart's The Magic Flute.

On the other hand, it is sad to report that Paul Plishka's voice has not weathered the test of time as well. Now in the sunset of his career, he was quite wobbly throughout the small Act III role of the Police Commissary. There is a rumor that he was booed at the opening night performance, and has not taken a curtain call since. Last night, to the best of my recollection, he did not appear for a curtain call.

This revival of Der Rosenkavalier best exhibits the MET's ability to command the best singers in the world, and present performances the likes of which will rival and surpass those of any other opera house in the world. This kind of quasi-perfection happens very seldom, but when it does, it is beautiful and memorable.

A Rowdy PARSIFAL In Berlin

At the Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the new production of Parsifal, which premiered on March 19, was greeted with roars of boos from a shocked and angry crowd. Filmmaker Bernd Eichinger, who is directing opera for the first time, set Wagner's work in an Apocalyptic, post September 11 New York City. Using video projection extensively, the director's vision included Kundry as a homeless bag lady in Central Park, the Knights of the Grail as East Village punks, and the city as a nightmarish urban landscape of exploding skyscrapers.

For those familiar with this summer's Bayreuth production of Parsifal by artist Christoph Schlingensief, the use of video and prominent and frequent lapses in bad taste is nothing new. In that production, which is set in Africa, the conclusion of Act III features video images of a maggot-infested rotting carcass of a rabbit projected on a screen in the background as Parsifal brings a tribal spear to a group of tribesmen.

What next? Can the necrophilia Parsifal be far behind? My production of this work, which I always thought was a little out there, now seems downright tame these days.

The following is the review of the production from the Associated Press.

"Parsifal Draws Boos and Shouts in Berlin"

BERLIN (AP) -- A German film producer's version of Richard Wagner's Parsifal was greeted with boos and shouts from the audience and sharp criticism in newspapers Monday following its debut at Berlin's Staatsoper. Reviewers attacked Bernd Eichinger's production as dull and confused, singling out its use of video clips including the Earth seen from space and pagan temples. The capital's Berliner Morgenpost daily said Saturday's premiere was greeted by "a concert of boos.''

The staging included scenes in modern-day New York in an apparent reference to the Sept. 11 attacks, a marked departure from the traditional medieval Spanish setting. The contrast was very apparent with the depiction of exploding high-rises. Kundry, one of the main characters, is led around on a dog leash by the sorcerer Klingsor. The Berliner Zeitung reported that the applause afterward dwindled in a few minutes to about 30 people still applauding when the performers took their final bows.

Eichinger has been a prominent figure on Germany's film scene for decades, most recently producing "The Downfall,'' a portrait of Adolf Hitler's final days in his Berlin bunker. It was nominated in the best foreign language film category at this year's Oscars.

However, his excursion into opera met with little enthusiasm from domestic critics. "Eichinger showed a video for every state of the soul, degrading Wagner's music to the status of a soundtrack,'' the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung wrote.

It's the first time the Staatsoper has done Parsifal, Wagner's last work, in 13 years. The next performance of Eichinger's Parsifal is set for March 28.

Here is the full cast of the opening night performance:

Conductor: Daniel Barenboim
Production: Bernd Eichinger
Set Design: Jens Kilian

Amfortas: Roman Trekel
Titurel: Christof Fischesser
Gurnemanz: René Pape
Parsifal: Burkhard Fritz
Klingsor: Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Kundry: Michaela Schuster
Flower Maidens: Ekaterina Siurina, Adriane Queiroz, Simone Schröder, Anna Samuil, Carola Höhn, Katharina Kammerloher
First Knight of the Grail: Peter-Jürgen Schmidt Second Knight of the Grail: Yi Yang
Squires: Anna Samuil, Katharina Kammerloher, Peter Menzel, Gustavo Peña
Altsolo: Simone Schröder

The MET -- 2005-2006 Season Preview

The roster of works and performers for the Metropolitan Opera's 2005-2006 season has just been posted on the MET's new website. The season is replete with Wagnerian good news. Not quantity, but lots of promise for quality.

The 1998 Robert Wilson Lohengrin, which I have written about on the pages of Wagner Operas, will be making a return. If you have not seen this production, do not miss it. It is an unforgettable rethinking of the opera. This time around, the cast features Karita Mattila, Luana deVol, Ben Heppner or Klaus Florian Vogt, Richard Paul Fink or Greer Grimsley, and Stephen West or René Pape. James Levine will be conducting. To read further about this production click here.

Parsifal will be back for three performances in mid May, 2006. The cast will include Waltraud Meier, Ben Heppner, in his first Parsifal in the house, and Thomas Hampson singing his first Amfortas at the MET. René Pape will reprise his memorable portrayal of Gurnemanz, which he sang here back in 2003. James Levine is scheduled to conduct.

Other non-Wagnerian highlights of the up-coming season include the return of Verdi's La Forza del Destino and Falstaff. Bryn Terfel will bring us once again his amazing interpretation of Shakespeare's boozy, lovable knight, and James Levine will lead the MET orchestra. The Forza cast includes the interesting casting of Deborah Voigt and Salvatore Licitra, and will be lead by Gianandrea Noseda, the principal conductor of the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester. During late December and early January Alban Berg's Wozzeck will come back to challenge MET audiences. This amazing score will also be led by James Levine, and will feature Katarina Dalayman, Clifton Forbis, Graham Clark, Alan Held, and Walter Fink.

For a complete list of next season's works click here.

T&I at the Bastille

The new production of Tristan und Isolde that is currently in preparation at the Bastille Opéra in Paris is the culmination of "The Tristan Project," a conceptual piece that began at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and is the brainchild of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Music Director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, stage director Peter Sellars, and video artist Bill Viola: the same creative team which is now preparing the Bastille's premiere on April 12. The production will play for eight performances until May 7.

"The Tristan Project" was described by a Los Angeles Philharmonic press release as "a multi-discipline arts experience" presenting one semi-staged act of the opera on one night, along with works influenced by the opera; the kind of works that, in the opinion of maestro Salonen, could not have been composed without Tristan und Isolde having paved the way. The other pieces accompanying Wagner's opera were a suite from Claude Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande," Alban Berg's "Lyric Suite," and the West coast premiere of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's "Cinq reflets de l'Amour de loin." On artnet.com you can read all about the performances that took place in Los Angeles.

It is my understanding that the Paris Opéra production will not be "The Tristan Project" but T&I itself; it will not include the other pieces that played in L.A., and the entire opera will be performed in one night, as is the customary fashion. Performing the role of Tristan, Ben Heppner will sing seven out of the eight performances, and Waltraud Meir will be his Isolde throughout the run. It promises to be "the" opera event in Paris. For a preview of this production go directly to the Opéra National de Paris website.

"The Gates" -- Gone but not Forgotten

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates" an installation that was in the works for two decades, and which captivated New York City for a mere sixteen-day stay is now history. As I write these words, the last of the 7, 500-plus gates still left in Central Park are being dismantled, according to the wishes of the artists, and nothing of the exhibit will remain for posterity. All will disappear except for thousands of swatches of saffron-colored cloth, millions of pictures, miles of film and videotape, and the lingering memory of the structures, forever preserved in the minds of people from around the world who came to New York City to experience this event.

According to the Pricewaterhouse Coopers Hospitality & Leisure practice, "The Gates" contributed to record February hotel occupancy in New York City during the last two weeks of the month. Occupancy averaged 84.2 percent during the weeks that the Christo and Jeanne-Claude project was in place, compared to an average of 71 percent for the preceding six weeks. The project brought an additional $26 million to New York City, and that is good for the city.

I visited "The Gates" four times. Twice on my own, and twice with friends. On three of those occasions I had my Nikon D-70 with me, and during my visits I took over 100 photographs of Central Park and the installation. There was snow on the ground during my second and third visits. That definitely added to the visual terrain of the park. "The Gates" photographed nicely against the snow, I think.

If you click here, you can see sixteen of those photographs, one for every day that "The Gates" were on public view. I hope that you enjoy these pictures.

Bryn Terfel's Walküre

While New York City suffers through an unbearable Wagner dearth, The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden is basking in the glory of its new production of Die Walküre which premiered Saturday, March 5, and which is causing a sensation. This is the second installment in the still unfinished new Ring cycle, which will take some years to be completed. Although the staging is being received favorably and boos are not ringing out as in most current productions of Wagner's works, the talk of London town these days is not about sets, costumes, or direction, but rather of the first Wotan being sung by Bryn Terfel.

He has beguiled us with his Don Giovanni, enchanted us with his Falstaff, and his readings of George Frideric Handel have set the standard for a whole generation of singers. And now Bryn Terfel is exploring the German repertory. At last! He allowed us to enjoy his larger-than-life Jokanaan last year at the MET, taking some of the limelight away from Karita Mattila's striptease Salome. And now, he is trying out the role of Wotan, for the first time, at Covent Garden. The most human of gods is now being interpreted by one of the best loved singers of our generation. The news from London is that he is glorious. Here's what the critics are saying:

Rupert Christiansen writes in the Telegraph that "In his first Wotan, Bryn Terfel fulfils his destiny as an operatic singer. His clarity of projection, firmness of line, richness of tone and nobility of presence all bespeak rare artistry."

Here is the NY Times review by Paul Griffiths:

Bryn Terfel's First Wotan as Horns and Hounds Bay

By PAUL GRIFFITHS

LONDON, March 6 - The new Covent Garden production of Wagner's "Ring" revolved Saturday night into its second quadrant, with a performance of "Die Walküre" every bit as exciting as the "Rheingold" in December. Once again, the excitement was thoroughly and fundamentally musical, its dual sources in the singing and in the pit, where the company's music director, Antonio Pappano, made the score consistently intense and animated.

When Mr. Pappano was in charge of the Brussels opera, in the 1990's, his performances moved with the certainty that nothing is more dramatic than opening orchestral music to its full richness, detail and flow: its full expressive potential. In this "Walküre" the determination is the same, as is the triumph. Right from the opening storm music, where the main attacks seem to be punching out into the auditorium, there is the thrill of music speaking its utmost.

Mr. Pappano has his musicians fully committed. The brass sections, in particular, bring Wagner's musical onomatopoeia to life: the baying of Hunding's hounds, the snorting of Wotan's war steed, the bitter cosmic laughter. The strings beautifully underscore the tentative burgeoning of desire and recognition in the first act, with phrases caressingly dovetailed into silence. In the final scene, as Brünnhilde quietly starts to turn the mind of her father, Wotan, from fury, the woodwind counterpoint is delicately but firmly in support, with all its effects of color, contour and harmonic surprise on view.

But the essence of Mr. Pappano's work is dynamic, not only in the general briskness of his tempos and the thrust of his forward motion but also in his careful staging of the moments of orchestral outburst. The music following Brünnhilde's change of heart in her interview with Siegmund comes with its terror and colossal joy: the joy that she will now help the hero, the terror that she will be unable to do so. Similarly, in the last act, the interlude before Wotan's closing monologue has rapturous power, which certainly comes from its immediate context as a statement of father-daughter love but also from its place within that 70-minute act, as the arrival at the peak.

Arriving there with Mr. Pappano and the orchestra is Bryn Terfel in the role of Wotan, which he is singing for the first time, outstandingly. This is a god becoming a man, and growing. In the early stages of the second act, he finds places where he can let a phrase run loose a little, green and fresh, before he pulls it tight again. Then, as he is cornered by his wife, Fricka - sternly and strongly portrayed by Rosalind Plowright - he exchanges the easy confidence of command for a force born of awareness and experience. You hear this happening in his slow, soft turns within a trap from which he cannot escape. "I can do what I will" is changing into "I will do what I must."

The "will" is the same. Mr. Terfel's Wotan from this point abandons suavity to gain massively and musically in power. He sings, of course, what is written. Yet he seems to be improvising: to be Wotan. Just as, in his physical presence, he makes every gesture and movement come from the character, so his singing - always absorbing, always purposeful - projects the consciousness of the flawed immortal. The more he goes down, the more he rises.

His rage as he enters in the last act is stark, a rage Wotan is directing at himself, for his powerlessness. At the end he reaches up to magnificent pride. Wotan's farewell to Brünnhilde is also a farewell to his own divinity, yet he goes like a god.

His Brünnhilde, Lisa Gasteen, is human all through. Her voice is rich and rounded, and she uses it to create a character of loveliness and eager sympathies. She does not need to learn from Siegmund and Sieglinde what it is to feel: she knows, and responds. The flame in her voice is warm, not hot, and easily blown by emotional circumstances.

Katarina Dalayman's Sieglinde is conversely complex. At first, as a domestic slave, she is wary, with a thoughtfulness that makes it possible for her to advance gradually, increasing in strength and resilience until she is fully steering the love scene with Siegmund. She later conveys distress and resolve with equal strength, her bleakness as engaged and luminous as her passion.

Jorma Silvasti offers a nicely gentle Siegmund, but one who can rise to the certainty of selfhood in the second act. Stephen Milling is the boorish, malevolent Hunding to the life, physically and in the superb rippling muscles of his singing.

Alas, as in "Rheingold," Keith Warner's direction is weak and sometimes vulgar.

Performances continue through March 28.

From Hell: Constantine

Sad, sad news: if you currently Image Google the word Constantine, your first hit will be a still showing Keanu Reeves, as renegade occultist and high-tech exorcist John Constantine, smoking a cigarette and finishing a bottle of cheap booze. Sadly enough, the Roman emperor Constantine, responsible for declaring himself a Christian and thus altering the history of the world, only comes in a distant third in Google-land.

Keanu Reeve's new film Constantine is terrible. The movie, directed by Francis Lawrence, and adapted from a seminal graphic novel, is the latest in Hollywood's new trend to adapt works of this genre into popular films. This time around the results are very poor. But I am not surprised. It is not the first time that Hollywood takes a stab at this form of entertainment and fails to achieve the kind of results that have proven to be so successful on the printed page.

A few years ago, From Hell came pretty close. The Allan Moore, Eddie Campbell graphic novel was ably adapted by the Hughes Brothers into a visually captivating film starring Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Ian Holm, and Robbie Coltrane. Propelled by the mystique surrounding the Jack the Ripper murders, the movie did very well at the box office and received very positive critical praise from many critics. When I attended the film, I did not know that it was an adaptation, and much less of a graphic novel, a genre that I was still calling comic books back then. Once I got around to reading Allan Moore's book , I thought that his work was vastly superior to the Hughes film. The novel was in black-and-white, somehow making the grisly events portrayed even more gruesome, and giving the work a dark Victorian look. My first thought was that the film should have also been made in black-and-white. But green-lighting a B&W movie these days in Hollywood is next to impossible. Besides, nobody in Hollywood nowadays seems to know how to work in B&W, except for maybe Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, or Jim Jarmusch. The graphic novel's elegant pen and ink drawings had given way to a rainbow of Hollywood colors, and somehow, it was all wrong.

Another Allan Moore work (and my particular favorite) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen became a disastrous movie starring Sean Connery. The least said about this film the better. Suffice it to say that, enthralled by this book, I seriously looked forward to the film adaptation. When I finally got around to see it (on HBO, mind you, the reviews kept me away from the theaters and saved me a few bucks) I could not believe my eyes. This movie changed my life. After that, I no longer looked forward to Hollywood adaptations of novels, graphic or otherwise.

I should have stayed miles away from Constantine. One of my friends had a nice "I told you so" after I informed him how much the movie stunk. Wondering about it, I think that the reason why I went to see it was due, no doubt, to its amazing trailer, which promised a compelling visual feast back in December, which lured me back to the theater months later, and ultimately delivered very little of what it originally promised. But a two minute trailer is really all that Constantine has going for it.

By the way, this is Francis Lawrence's first film, having previously only directed music videos for Britney Spears, Will Smith, and Aerosmith. No wonder the movie was awful, and the trailer highly effective and promising. Now that music videos have become the training ground for future hacks, we are certain to expect a lot more Constantines filling digitally-projected screens in every multiplex in America. Now if we can only get a real exorcist to drive these movies back into the infernal abyss from whence they came, then we could all sing hosannas and other triumphant sounds of victory.

Oscars 2005 or Why Chris Rock Sucked

Does Chris Rock's rude and irreverent view of the world qualify him to host film's most prestigious gala event? Should his race-obsessed patter be the language of choice for this kind of event? Apparently Oscar wants to grow up, throw away the knickers (although Oscar always stood proudly in his golden nakedness) and enter modern times. The question is whether that is too much to ask of a show that year after year takes a gamble in looking fresh and new, but which always prefers to look back to the glory and limelight of decades past.

One of the best loved segments from the Oscar ceremony has always been the omnibus of film clips at the beginning of the show. It is here that the reverent tone of the show is set yearly. This time around, was no exception. In the past few years, when Billy Crystal has broken that tradition by including song-and-dance segments, and spoof film clips featuring himself, it has always been with a loving eye to the world of movies. The other segment of the show that's an audience favorite is the "In Memoriam" section. In addition, lifetime achievement awards such as the honorary Oscar awarded to Sidney Lumet this year are inherently nostalgic looks at Hollywood's greatness, thus forcing us to examine careers that have spanded generations, and settling us once again very much in the safe world of sentimentality and nostalgia. Exactly what the Academy Awards should be about. Besides, everybody knows that, when in doubt, the Oscar vote will always go for the safe movie. In today's New York Times, Caryn James expressed it best when she wrote that Oscar "knows it ought to move into the 21st century, but hates the idea."

Chris Rock hosting the Academy Awards was no big deal. It was the latest way that the show wanted to stay fresh and relevant. He just wasn't very good. Nothing worse than threatening to bring an M16 and at the last minute trading it in for a cap pistol. I was expecting that seven second delay to be working overtime, instead it is unlikely that it was ever used; although it should have been working nonstop to edit out the barrage of annoying "OK's" that seemed to follow every joke made by the host. This repetitive nervousness made Chris Rock sound like a lame, under-rehearsed soap-box speaker instead of the million dollar baby comedian that his reputation is built on.

For ease of delivery and genuine humor, all that Chris Rock has to do is go to the videotape and watch Robin Williams' segment as a presenter. His five minutes of screen-time wiped Chris Rock off the map. After that, Chris Rock was fighting for his life, and his appearance was at best -- inconsequential.

When Quincy Jones, P. Diddy, Spike Lee (whose get-up made him look like a Brooklyn version of Secret Squirrel's sidekick Morocco Mole), and Oprah Winfrey praised Chris Rock's performance it was an Afrocentric knee-jerk reaction to one of their own having arrived. It certainly could not have been in praise of the comedian's terrible performance. The worse part of the evening came when they rolled a segment that Rock filmed in a movie theater lobby interviewing black audiences. It seems that everyone there had seen the highly forgettable White Chicks but had managed to miss the best-picture nominee The Aviator. This kind of slap-in-the-face at the movie industry's lack of connectivity with minorities landed like a lead balloon in the industry-filled audience, and Hollywood does not like to have its feeding hand bitten away.

I don't even went to get into the Jude Law insult in the beginning of the show, but I was very happy when Sean Penn came out in defense of his fellow actor. Jude Law is an amazing talent, and maybe Chris Rock has never heard of him because he has been too busy watching bootlegs of White Chicks.

NB: Click here for a complete list of Jude Law's films.

Shalom Chichester!

This weekend will be my final two performances of Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms with the New York City Ballet, at the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. Although the NY City Ballet and the Juilliard Choral Union will be performing the work again in April, I will not be involved with those performances. I do, however, plan on attending one of these Spring performances. It will be a fun and eye-opening experience to attend and really appreciate the work from the other side of the footlights.

Singing the world premiere of this work last summer was exhilarating, and returning to the work this year for four more performances has been very gratifying. Musically, the Choral Union is a more confident, tighter ensemble, and the difficult parts of the work have improved tremendously. The dancers, many of whom are coming back to the work a year later, have matured into their parts. The demanding choreography by Peter Martins has settled quite nicely within the talents of the dancing ensemble, and the collaboration of dancers and singers is finally beginning to feel like a well-oiled machine.

It has been a memorable experience to collaborate with the NYC Ballet. This weekend I will once again be able to experience that unique moment when the stage manager says "stand by," and the curtain rises to reveal conductor Andrea Quinn's smiling face in the pit and a sold-out crowd filling the house. That exhilarating moment, which has been accented by applause even before Andrea strikes the downbeat at all the performances except for one, will always be one of the most cherished memories of this experience.

These Things Always Come in 3's

In a coincidental phenomenon, stemming from the lore of urban legend, and usually associated with show-business, the world lost three of its major literary figures within the space of a little over a week. Arthur Miller, the New York playwright who revolutionized the American theater with such works as Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible; Hunter S. Thompson, the irascible gonzo journalist who injected a definitive biased spin on countless articles for the magazine Rolling Stone, and whose Death and Loathing in Las Vegas was turned into a memorable motion picture starring Johnny Depp; and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the Cuban-born novelist who became a British subject and claimed to be the only British author to write in Spanish.

In his own highly specialized field, each one advanced his particular art, and made a lasting impression in the minds of readers and audiences everywhere. Needless to say, they will be missed, but their literary legacy will live on for many generations.

Muerte de un Escritor

One of the great writers of the 1960's "Boom" generation, Guillermo Cabrera-Infante, died in London this week. The blood of the satirist ran in his veins, and many regarded him as a Cuban Jonathan Swift, although his talents were uniquely his. The names of his characters and the titles of his novels were chosen very skillfully, and very much in tongue-in-cheek fashion. In his seminal novel Tres Tristes Tigres we meet two quintessential Infantian characters: the secretary Vivian Smith Corona, and the singer Olga Guillotina -- their names say it all, and in their names we find the essense of the writer's work.

My favorite Cabrera Infante title is what he chose to call his 1979 autobiographical novel: La Habana para un Infante difunto. Literally, the title means Havana for a dead Infante, but those that know French composer Maurice Ravel's short work "Pavane pour une infante défunte" will understand his clever word play and the inherent sense of nostalgia. Now, after his death, the title rings with a finite sense of reality.

The following is the obituary as it appeared in the London Times.

GUILLERMO CABRERA INFANTE was as Cuban as a Cohiba cigar, but London was his home for the final 39 years of his life, and he took British citizenship. That did not stop him from writing obsessively about his homeland. According to his wife, Miriam, he always carried Cuba — a Cuba that no longer existed — inside him. He left Havana for the last time in 1965, after attending the funeral of his mother, and he remained an outspoken critic of President Fidel Castro’s Government until his death. Cabrera Infante originally supported Castro’s revolution, but the two men fell out over freedom of expression and censorship — Fidel was against the former and in favour of the latter — leaving Cabrera Infante no option but to remain silent or go elsewhere. He opted for exile, and resolved not to return as long as Castro remained in power. He never did go back, and Castro is still there.

Cabrera Infante was one of the outstanding writers in Spanish of his time. His most celebrated work, Tres Tristes Tigres (translated into English as Three Trapped Tigers), was a fictional evocation of the louche nightlife of pre-revolutionary Havana, populated by gangsters, whores and jazz musicians. Written in playful — the title is the first line of a tongue-twister — and sometimes impenetrable, habanero slang, it caused a sensation in the Spanish-speaking literary world, winning the major Biblioteca Breve award in 1964. The author returned to the same themes, and some of the same characters, many years later, in Ella Cantaba Boleros (1996).

Fiction was by no means the only literary form cultivated by Cabrera Infante. His first book was a collection of short stories, Así en la Paz como en la Guerra (1960), and a collection of his cinema reviews was published as Un Oficio del Siglo XX (A 20th- Century Job). The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa commented that Cabrera Infante had managed to turn cinema criticism into a new literary genre. A volume of his political essays, Mea Culpa, was published in 1993, eight years after his history of tobacco, Holy Smoke, had appeared (in English). The semi-autobiographical La Habana para un Infante Difunto (another play on words) appeared in 1979. Cabrera also wrote screenplays, adapting Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano for John Huston, and his own Tres Tristes Tigres for The Lost City, directed by the Cuban-born actor Andy Garcia, and starring Dustin Hoffman as the gangster Meyer Lansky. The film, which was shot in the Dominican Republic, will be released this year. Cabrera Infante received the ultimate accolade for his lifetime’s work, the Miguel de Cervantes literary prize, in 1997.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante was born, to communist parents, in Gibara, a village in eastern Cuba, in 1929. The family moved to Havana in 1941 and Guillermo intended to read medicine at the university. But in 1947, at the age of 18, he gave up his studies and went to work for Bohemia magazine, taking a series of odd jobs to make ends meet and give him time for writing. In 1950 he entered the school of journalism in Havana, and two years later had his first brush with the authorities: he was arrested and fined for using “English profanities” in a short story that had appeared in Bohemia. In 1951, while still at the journalism school, he founded the Cuban national film theatre (Cinemateca), and ran it until 1956. By that time he was working as cinema critic, under the pseudonym G. Caín, for Carteles, a popular magazine of which he was to become editor in 1957.

When Fidel Castro’s bearded guerrillas rolled into Havana on New Year’s Day 1959, and the dictator Fulgencio Batista was put to flight, Cabrera Infante was an enthusiastic supporter of the new order. He was appointed a director of the film institute, ICAIC, and also worked for Revolución, the newspaper of Castro’s 26 July Movement, editing its weekly literary supplement, Lunes de Revolución, until it was closed down by the Government in 1961. By that time, the initial liberalism and open-mindedness that had so appealed to foreign admirers of the revolution was giving way to rigid central control, and there was no room for dissenting voices. Cabrera Infante said he was made to feel like a non-person in Havana, so, when he was offered the job of Cuban cultural attaché in Brussels in 1962, he took it. Three years later, thoroughly disillusioned with the way things were going back home, he resigned his post, and settled in London the following year.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s first marriage, of which there were two daughters, ended in divorce in 1961. He married his second wife, Miriam Gómez, an actress, that year. She was at his bedside when he died, of an infection in hospital after falling and breaking a hip at their home in West London.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, writer, was born on April 22, 1929. He died on February 21, 2005, aged 75.

"The Gates" Swung Open...

Florence has Ghiberti's "The Gates of Paradise," Paris has Rodin's "The Gates of Hell" (we had them for a few months at the Metropolitan Museum of Art back in 1983), and now for a matter of days New York City has Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates."

According to Christo and Jeanne-Claude's press release: "The 7,500 gates, (are) 16 feet (4,87 meters) tall varying in width from 5 feet 6 inches to 18 feet (1,68 to 5,48 meters) according to the 25 different widths of walkways, on 23 miles (37 kilometers) of walkways in Central Park. Free hanging saffron colored fabric panels, suspended from the horizontal top part of the gates, come down to approximately 7 feet (2,13 meters) above the ground. The gates are spaced at 12 foot (3,65 meter) intervals, except where low branches extend above the walkways. The gates and the fabric panels can be seen from far away through the leafless branches of the trees. The work of art will remain for 16 days, then the gates will be removed and the materials will be recycled."

"The gates swung open and a Fig Newton entered." I don't know exactly what that means, but it is one of the funniest lines from the Marx Brothers movie Animal Crackers. These gates don't exactly swing; they just sort of stand there, and the crowds walk under them, looking up at the fabric panels billowing in the wind (if there's any), hoping that the sun breaks through the clouds so that the digital pictures will come out nicer. If "The Gates" were part of a comedy act, then collectively they would be the straight-man -- the biggest collection of straight-men in the world!

I've gone to see "The Gates" twice. On my first visit this past Sunday, the reaction of the people around me grabbed my attention. People go out of their way to say the darndest things around modern art, I'm convinced of it. The comments went from the ridiculous: "They look like shower curtains," to the not so ridiculous: "All the gates are different." While I was in the park, admiring the transformed landscape, I thought that the gates would look especially beautiful if a nice snowstorm blanketed Central Park. On Sunday night, I got my wish. Five inches of snow fell overnight, and on Monday morning I returned to the park. The snow had totally transformed the landscape, and the saffron colored gates stood like sentinels against the freezing cold and the new winter landscape.

For sixteen days, Central Park has been one huge Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation. A few days from now, "The Gates" will be history. They will be dismantled, according to the wishes of the artists, and Central Park will once again be its former self. I will personally miss them. These rigid structures, meaningless and meaningful at the same time, added a colorful dimension to the park, and their memory will linger for years in my mind, and in the minds of all who experienced them.

The Holy Grail on Broadway or Welcome to the Sure-Thing Musical

The Great White Way is not necessarily the first place where you would look if you are on the quest for the Holy Grail, (it's certainly not the place to which I would direct young Parsifal in his mythical quest for the Holy Spear) but Broadway is exactly where you will find the Holy Vessel. No, not inside Barnes & Noble within the pages of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, but right on Shubert Alley, at the wacky new musical Monty Python's Spamalot currently in previews at the Shubert Theater. This is the new hot ticket on Broadway, a reworking of the film Monthy Python and the Holy Grail, now turned into a musical and starring Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce, and Hank Azaria, with direction by Mike Nichols.

Before anything else, let me say that the show was very funny, and definitely worth attending. The preview last night was filled with thirty-and-forty-somethings, weaned on the film since adolescence, loudly itching for the curtain to rise. When the lights dimmed and a wacky amplified voice assured us that it would be OK to leave our cell phones on and let them ring, the audience burst into uncontrollable screams and cheers. Go to see this show if you love the film, and stop reading this post right now. However, if you want to know some of my current thought on the state of musical theater in America, take two Tylenols and read on.

Monty Python's Spamalot is the latest in a disturbing trend in musical theater that is occurring on both sides of the Atlantic. No doubt inspired by the mega-success of The Producers, and helped by current wintry economic conditions that impede taking any kind of risk, Broadway angels are investing millions in musicals based on established film hits and classics. For the first time in the history of the musical theater a rash of these pre-fabricated spectacles are sweeping through the West End and Broadway, and producers are counting on this "theater of the familiar" trend to keep them solvent for years to come; or in the case of Mel Brooks, financially secured for a lifetime.

The many billboards around Times Square are currently advertising Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, two upcoming shows based on films ("Scoundrels" is already in previews, and "Bang Bang" begins previews in March). Other billboards advertising films turned into musicals include Wicked (based on a novel, which in turn is based on The Wizard of Oz), the revival of La Cage aux Folles (perhaps one of the first of these musicals) and Fiddler on the Roof. As far as "Fiddler" goes, one of Broadway's most beloved shows, and one of my personal favorites, I can't help but wonder if its current revival is due to the inherent popularity of the property as a show, or to the fact that producers found out that it was an Academy Award-winning Norman Jewison film back in the 1970's.

At the performance last night I experienced layers of disturbing behavior. Hank Azaria came out on stilts with a long coat and horns on his head and announced that "we are the knights who say..." before he was able to utter the fabled word "NI" already a dozen hushed voices in the crowd had said it. This kind of behavior went on the entire show. It seemed as if the audience was cueing the actor's next line, a sort of pre-echo: a behavior unheard of in a Broadway show before the advent of this type of entertainment. As these upcoming shows begin to fill the Broadway stages, this type of audience participation will become the norm. People are now paying money to be entertained by the sure-thing-musical that will not pose a financial threat. After all, at $100 a pop audiences want to know what they are paying for. No doubt the first audiences filling the theaters these days, as was last night, will be the die-hard fans. Producers are counting that, as word of mouth spreads, they won't be the last.

Possibly the most surprising event at last night's performance came during the re-enactment of the French taunter scene by the walls of the castle which ends a very short Act One. Hank Azaria decided to act. To put his own stamp on the character, as actors have done since time began, and not follow the cadences, mannerisms, and style found in John Cleese's brilliant performance forever preserved on celluloid. At the intermission, my friend Keith, who got the tickets, and I agreed that the French taunter scene was weak. Why? Not because Hank Azaria was weak, but because somehow he had not successfully given the illusion of duplicating Cleese's madcap performance.

After attending Monty Python's Spamalot I came to the conclusion that audiences at a pre-fabricated Broadway musical are the hardest to please, especially since the majority merely want to recapture the rapture found in the film. Everything must be in place, every line must be said correctly, every nuance must be there, and everything must be like the film they love. Why they would pay all the money to attend it live instead of plunking down a few dollars to rent or buy the DVD is the question. The answer lies, I believe, in the magic of live theater and audiences need to experience it. This, together with the curiosity of how their favorite movie will play live, is the lure of the new Broadway season.