Pope's Visit Forces Change for the NYFF

I received the following from the Film Society of Lincoln Center:

New York, NY (July 29, 2015) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today that the World Premiere of Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk will take place on Saturday, September 26 instead of Friday, September 25 due to Pope Francis’s upcoming visit to New York. The date change was made for logistical and security reasons. The film, which remains the Opening Night selection of the 53rd New York Film Festival (September 25 – October 11), will screen at Alice Tully Hall. Festival dates stay the same, with free NYFF programming to take place on Friday, September 25, prior to the Opening Night screening on Saturday, September 26.

NY Times Review of the new Bayreuth "Tristan"

The following review appeared today in the New York Times.

BAYREUTH, Germany — It’s the season of re-evaluating well-loved characters we thought we knew. First Atticus Finch, a saintly warrior for racial justice in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” was revealed as a patronizing bigot in Ms. Lee’s newly published companion novel, “Go Set a Watchman.”

Now there visionists have come for King Marke. In a new production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” that opened the Bayreuth Festival on Saturday evening, the thoughtful, melancholy king of the opera’s libretto, shocked and saddened by Tristan’s betrayal, is depicted as a brutal, unfeeling tyrant. At the end, rather than blessing the dead bodies of Tristan and Isolde, as Wagner indicated, Marke drags Isolde — here very much alive — away, still insisting on claiming the bride Tristan stole from him.

That is not the only intervention by the production’s director, Katharina Wagner, who has led the festival since 2008 with another of the composer’s great-granddaughters, her half sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier. This “Tristan” abjures magic: The title characters, in an agonized mixture of lust and guilt from the start, ecstatically pour out the famous love potion rather than drinking it, taking radical responsibility for their actions.

The second act is not the lovers’ secluded summer idyll but a fleeting union in a dystopian prison yard where Marke’s thugs have thrown them to be watched over by guards and pursued by harsh floodlights. This is a post-Stasi, post-Snowden “Tristan,” or perhaps it shows that the composer anticipated what we have tended to consider a recent phenomenon: the death of privacy — even, in this production, in death.

Ms. Wagner has made the opera a veritable taxonomy of gray, gloomy nightmares. The first act, set aboard Tristan’s ship, is here a labyrinth of shadowy staircases to nowhere, a combination of M. C. Escher and Piranesi. The looming walls and retracting cylindrical cages of the second act lead to a third act permeated by fog and dotted with a hall-of-mirrors profusion of Isoldes — some living, some collapsing mannequins — conjured by Tristan in his madness.

At this point, it is news when a production at Bayreuth, known for its cadre of fierce traditionalists, does not get booed, and on Saturday, Ms. Wagner and her design team seemed to receive only cheers at their curtain call. That speaks to the sobriety of the staging, and perhaps to some relief that this director has not offered a repeat of her idea-filled but messy, much-reviled “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” first performed here in 2007.

With anonymously contemporary décor (by Frank Philipp Schlössmann and Matthias Lippert) and timeless costumes (by Thomas Kaiser) that are simultaneously medieval and futuristic, this “Tristan” is cleaner than “Die Meistersinger,” its divergences from the original text carefully considered. No, there is not the “tent-like cabin” that the libretto gives Isolde aboard Tristan’s ship, but that tent does find its way into Ms. Wagner’s second act, when the lovers cobble together a makeshift shelter out of some fabric to hide from the glare of the prison-yard lights.

Any restive fundamentalists in the audience might also have been calmed by seeming homages to the festival’s past, in a summer when Wagner’s home here, the Villa Wahnfried, is having its long-awaited reopening as an expanded museum. The third act of “Tristan,” its playing spaces defined by soft fields of light (designed by Reinhard Traub) and punctuated by floating pyramids that keep appearing and vanishing, evokes the abstract “New Bayreuth” aesthetic of the 1950s and ’60s.

Despite its stage-filling sets and its willingness to tinker with details of plot and character, the production’s overall impact on Saturday was modest. It makes few ideological claims, but also, more problematic, few emotional ones. Despite the terrors implied by its settings, its mood is never persuasively disconcerting or, indeed, persuasively much of anything. It is fluent and sensible, but that may not be enough when approaching one of the most disorienting works in operatic history.

In that sense, one of the production’s greatest strengths may also be a weakness: Christian Thielemann’s conducting was perhaps too subtly colored, too easily flowing, too effortlessly responsive for its own good, bolstering the impression that tension was all but missing from the performance.

Mr. Thielemann’s approach to Wagner has unique naturalness. In the first act, which frequently takes the form of a kind of call-and-response between singers and orchestra, his answers always arrived with alert immediacy. But like his oddly unanxious “Parsifal” at the Salzburg Easter Festival two years ago, his “Tristan” smooths over the work’s strangeness, its emotional extremes, its revolutionary harmonies.

Recently given the essentially new title of music director at the festival, Mr. Thielemann, rather than Ms. Wagner, was the one to bear some scattered boos at his bow. Perhaps that was a response to his musical choices, or perhaps to his controversially conservative politics or his seemingly ever-growing power here at Bayreuth.

It was clearer why the soprano Evelyn Herlitzius, announced last month as a replacement for Anja Kampe as Isolde, got her own catcalls: Her voice is angular rather than luxuriant, though her sound has clarity, and she acts with febrile focus. She was the odd woman out in a cast with considerable vocal glamour. The bass-baritone Iain Paterson was a hearty Kurwenal, and the mezzo-soprano Christa Mayer floated Brangäne’s offstage warnings to the lovers in Act 2 with haunting poise.

Stephen Gould actually sang Tristan — no mean feat — with a tone mellower and more lyrical than the pressured bellowing of many other tenors in this impossible role. Best of all was Georg Zeppenfeld as King Marke, his bass rich and pitch black, his malignancy potently underplayed. He made the production’s most surprising revision entirely convincing.

More Green Hill Shenanigans

The following article appeared on The Guardian:

It’s that time of year again: the balmy nights of late spring are the augurs of the annual ritual of blood-letting in northern Bavaria, when the remaining Wagners do their best to tear each other apart in public on the eve of the Bayreuth Festival. 

This week’s fun on the Green Hill concerns the following: it was announced over a year ago that Eva Wagner-Pasquier would be leaving her co-managerial duties with her half-sister Katharina at the end of this season. But that’s not enough, it seems. Malevolent forces somewhere within the poisonous, Nibelheimisch politics of Wagner’s Bayreuth mean, apparently, that Eva isn’t even allowed to be seen anywhere in the environs of the festival theatre, otherwise their star conductor Christian Thielemann will apparently humph off in a massive schtropp and not conduct Tristan und Isolde in the production that Katharina is directing to open the festival on 25 July. 

Allegedly, that is: Thielemann denies it, as do key partners in the festival organization, but Wagner-Pasquier’s lawyer seems to confirm the rumours. And, in a personal statement, Daniel Barenboim has called the treatment she is being subjected to as “inhumane.”  “I thought you couldn’t take away people’s freedom of movement – unless they were criminals,” he added.

And all of this comes on top of Kirill Petrenko, the Ring’s conductor and the sole unsullied hero of Bayreuth’s current production of the tetralogy, voicing his disapproval at the late, late replacement of his Siegfried, Lance Ryan, with Stefan Vinke describing the treatment of Ryan – and Wagner-Pasquier – as “unprofessional and wholly undignified”, and saying that only his responsibility to and respect for his colleagues have stopped him from cancelling altogether. 

So, are Bayreuth and the Wagner clan in crisis? Far from it: Bayreuth just wouldn’t be Bayreuth without its annual curtain-raiser of gossip and scandal. Let’s instead be grateful to everyone at the Green Hill for the drama that makes it an on- and offstage saga that just keep on giving, year after year.

Shenanigans on the Green Hill

Lots of news to report.  First, a poster advertising Opening Night of the Bayreuth Festival (on the left) is now available. The festival will begin this Saturday with a performance of Tristan und Isolde, a new production by Katharina Wagner. The composer's great-granddaughter shocked audiences with her strange, irreverent production of Die Meistersinger. This new production of Tristan will be shown on German theaters on August 7.

There are also reports that the rehearsal period for this festival has not gone smoothly. Already two sopranos have bowed out of this new production, and now the latest news is that there is growing animosity between Kirill Petrenko and Christian Thielemann. The root of this animosity might stem from the fact that Mr. Petrenko has just been named chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, a position that Mr. Thielemann coveted as a result of being a disciple of Herbert von Karajan who was appointed music director for life of this orchestra in 1955.

Currently Evelyn Herlitzius is singing the role of Isolde.  She replaced Anja Kampe a few weeks ago. However, the singer has not stormed out of Bayreuth and will honor her contract to sing the role of Sieglinde in this year's revival of Frank Castorf's dreadful Ring production. It is interesting to note that Ms. Kampe is Mr. Petrenko's companion, and Mr. Thielemann is conducting the new production of Tristan.  You do the math!

Further news about Katharina's Tristan reveals some early pictures of this new production.

 

This beautiful stage image bears more than a passing resemblance to the "New Bayreuth" style of Wieland Wagner, Katharina's uncle, who revolutionized the festival when he took over the reins in 1951. In an effort to get rid of all vestiges of Nazism that the festival had acquired, thanks to the many times that Adolf Hitler attended during the 1930s, Wieland Wagner employed light and darkness to re-invent the Wagnerian world. It became a style much imitated around the world.

An interesting image from what can only be Act II of the opera.  Though the centerpiece of this work is the glorious love duet between the title characters, it seems that Katharina is underlining the impossibility and the danger of this elicit love affair by placing the two characters on opposite sides of a turnstile, while Tristan seems to be choking his beloved.

 

Georg Zeppenfeld as King Marke looks more like a pimp from a 1970s blaxploitation film.

As always, opening night of the Bayreuth Festival is an event, and this production will, I'm sure, divide audiences and further the debate over the kind of productions that are being presented at the Green Hill these days.

The Great Jon Vickers is Dead

Jon Vickers, the great Canadian tenor who excelled in such operatic roles as Otello, Tristan and Peter Grimes died at the age of 88 of Alzheimer's disease. I was lucky to have thrilled to his colossal singing in my early days of opera-going, at the end of the 1970s at the MET. He was a shining star in roles which ranged from Handel to Britten, and his performances of Otello, Pagliacci, The Bartered Bride, and most memorably, Parsifal, were unforgettable. Likewise, he shared the stage with some of the great sopranos of the post World War II era, from Maria Callas to Birgit Nilsson, with whom he sang many memorable performances of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde all over the world.  Unfortunately, I never saw him sing a performance of Samson et Dalilah, one of his signature titanic roles, which he brought to life with his huge voice. Nor was I lucky enough to thrill to his great Florestan in Beethoven's Fidelio.  Luckily, many of these performances were recorded, and quite a lot exists in video as well.

Below is video of Jon Vickers performing Otello, from 1978, from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. This was one of the first "Live from the Met" telecasts. Here we have the duet "Dio ti giocondi" from the beginning of Act III.  Renata Scotto sings the role of Desdemona, and the memorable production was designed by Franco Zeffirelli.  The young James Levine conducted.

Jurassic World: More of the Same

Mankind's twisted dream to play God is at the heart of the best horror movies in cinema history. It is the driving force behind not just Frankenstein but every other movie that features a mad scientist throwing a monkey wrench in the machinery of the natural universe, only to be punished for his folly, usually by his own creation. It is also the primal essence of Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park and the Steven Spielberg franchise adapted from that bestseller that features the original film, two sequels, and now a reboot: Jurassic World, also produced by Amblin Entertainment, Spielberg's company, and directed by Colin Trevorrow, a helmer who is not afraid to liberally pay homages to the earlier films and its famous creator.

If you remember Jeff Goldblum's line in The Lost World, the uneven sequel to the first film, then you're already pretty familiar with the main plot of this new film. Back in 1997, reprising the role of Dr. Ian Malcolm, the character quipped as he once again stared at the ferocious biological dinosaurs that DNA cloning had brought back to life, and the initial sense of wonder that it produced on people: "Oh, yeah, Oooh, Aaah, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and um, screaming." In Jurassic World there is plenty to Oooh and Aaah. We are back in Isla Nublar, a remote island near Costa Rica, where the original Jurassic Park was built. Now an amazing resort, a la Disney World, has emerged from the ruins of that failed enterprise where the tourists can indulge in the fantasy of having a close encounter with a host of extinct creatures. There's even a petting zoo where the kiddies can ride the mild baby herbivores. But to satisfy the spectators blood lust there is also a show where the carcass of a dead shark is eaten whole by a gigantic Mosasaurus, an aquatic carnivore, who jumps out of his pool, like a killer whale, splashing those in the stands. The scene is one of the early highlights of the film, and it is a magnificent example of cgi at its best.

The plot is pretty basic. Two brothers are sent on a dream vacation to Jurassic World where their aunt (Bryce Dallas Howard) is the operations manager of the place. Even though she is supposed to personally give the kids the VIP tour of the park, she is too busy recruiting corporate sponsors for a new attraction called Indominus Rex, a genetically modified Frankenstein of a dinosaur made from the DNA of several dangerous predatory creatures. Meanwhile, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), a Velociraptor trainer, and Great White Hunter type, warns the powers-that-be that Indominus Rex poses a real threat because it  has lived in isolation all its life. Further, Vic Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio) believes that the raptors can be trained for military use. This is the "Oooh and Aaah" section of the film.

But what would the Jurassic Park franchise be without the running and the screaming?!

And there's plenty of that as Indominus Rex, tired of his isolated existence, escapes from his walled enclosure in search of freedom and a viable second act to this film. Its escape is followed by four Velociraptors busting out, and most thrilling of all the spectacular flight of escapee winged Pterosaurs, who descend on the park's visitors, like a squadron of fighting planes, and attack them like the Avialae descendants of dinosaurs in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. There's running for ya! Also, there's the sight of Ms. Howard racing through the island's thicket in her business suit and 4 inch heels. Soon to become a camp classic! And speaking of classics, the film manages to channel the spirit of King Kong as well as the original Jurassic films.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition trying to be a creator is bad enough, and it has to be punished, but the producers of Jurassic World also know that we live in a secular society. Therefore, the bad guys in this film are not the scientists who originally cloned these creatures, but the shady men who represent the corporate greed that leads to the destruction of the enterprise. It's the one interesting take on the Frankenstein myth that the Jurassic franchise has added, and it is a formula that adds some interest to an otherwise predictable journey to a man-made segment of the Mesozoic Era.

Booing at the Royal Opera House

The opening night performance of the opera William Tell, by Giacomo Rossini was booed at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden because of the on-stage dramatization of a rape scene with nudity. The following excerpts are from an article on the BBC website:

The Opera House issued a statement after the performance... apologizing for any distress caused. Director of opera Kasper Holten said: "The production intends to make it an uncomfortable scene, just as there are several upsetting and violent scenes in Rossini's score. We are sorry if some people have found this distressing."

Holten said the scene "puts the spotlight on the brutal reality of women being abused during war time, and sexual violence being a tragic fact of war." Rossini's opera of the Swiss patriot, William Tell, who shoots an arrow that splits an apple atop his son's head, has been directed by Damiano Michieletto and stars Canadian baritone Gerald Finley as Tell and American tenor John Osborn.

Osborn told Reuters after the performance that the scene "maybe ... went a little longer than it should have. But it happened and I think it's an element you can use to show just how horrible these people were that were occupying this town," he said. "If you don't feel the brutality, the suffering these people have had to face, if you want to hide it, it becomes soft, it becomes for children."

The Stage gave the production one star. George Hall called it a "dire evening" in which the "gratuitous gang-rape" scene provoked "the noisiest and most sustained booing I can ever recall during any performance at this address. Intellectually poverty-stricken, emotionally crass and with indifferent stagecraft, the result is nowhere near the standard an international company should be aiming at", he said.

Mark Valencia writing for What's on Stage pointed out that first night booing is "a fast-growing problem at Covent Garden that doesn't happen at other opera houses. It's become standard practice for the director of practically every new production to be jeered by practiced factions in the audience who object to ideas that go beyond the literal reading of an opera," he said.

But at last night's first night "the perpetrators did something unheard of: they booed during the music. And they did so loudly and long." They also booed at the end of the performance when the production team came on stage for the curtain call.
The opera is Italian director Damiano Michieletto's debut at the Royal Opera House.

Dmitri Hvorostovsky Diagnosed with Brain Tumor

The following appeared in the New York Times a few days ago:

 

The celebrated Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky has a brain tumor and has canceled all engagements through the end of August, according to an announcement posted Wednesday on his website.

“He has recently been suffering from serious health issues, and a brain tumor has just been diagnosed,” the statement said. “Although his voice and vocal condition are normal, his sense of balance has been severely affected.”

The site said that he would begin treatment this week and that he remains “very optimistic for the future.”

Mr. Hvorostovsky, one of the best-loved baritones in the world, is still scheduled to appear in September at the Metropolitan Opera in a star-filled production of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” featuring Anna Netrebko as Leonora.

Mad Max: Fury Road

A.O. Scott, in his insightful review in the New York Times of the film Mad Max: Fury Road, wrote that this film isn’t "about heroism... it’s about revolution." Perhaps that is the reason why this franchise reboot by its original director feels as fresh as the original film did back in 1980 when it was just an Australian low budget, sleeper exploitation movie starring a then unknown Mel Gibson. George Miller has gone back to his original creation and he has brought with him an arsenal of talent to bring it up to date. Junkie XL's musical score, with its deep string chords and clever riffs on Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem, is a memorable asset to the film. Likewise, master cinematographer John Seale agreed to come out of retirement for this film, and his work is spectacular. All shot digitally, using an arsenal of new cameras including the Arri Alexa Plus. It is one of the most beautifully shot films in recent memory.

Once again we are in a post-Apocalyptic world (devoid of any visible zombies, although I'm sure they are out there in the vast empty wasteland that Earth has become) where gasoline and water are scarce commodities, and where the dignity of what's left of mankind has been trampled by ruthless chieftains like Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) who keeps a harem of women, and whose army of War Boys capture Max (Tom Hardy). Our eponymous hero is a loner who can easily be an American hero right out of the pages of James Fenimore Cooper. He is taken prisoner by Immortan Joe's men and turned into a "blood bag" for a sick War Boy named Nux (Nicholas Hoult). When Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) drives off-course in her mission to find gasoline, Immortan Joe realizes that she has betrayed him by stealing some of his women, one of whom is pregnant. And the chase is on!  This is when the movie gets loud, down and dirty: but you wouldn't have it otherwise. It is, after all, a Mad Max movie!

But this film goes beyond the twisted metal and explosions that are the bread and butter of the summer cinematic season. At the heart of Fury Road is a tale of vengeance and redemption, all major themes of the American western, a genre that this film often pays tribute to, especially in its photographic wide open vistas and in the depiction of its laconic hero. Or heroine, for that matter. This film is very much about Ms. Theron's character: a damaged, but strong-willed, valiant woman with a prosthetic arm. She belongs to the same breed as Julie Christie in Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Claudia Cardinale in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. By far, it is the feminist film of the year.

The film is also impressive when it comes to the amount of images that linger in one's mind. George Miller knows how to set up a scene and how much to hold a shot so that it becomes indelible. The opening sequence of Max chomping down on a live two-headed gecko, and a truly surreal nighttime shot of people on stilts walking through a poisonous bog are two memorable moments from this film.

Finally a winner in a summer season of many forgettable films. 

Julie Kent Bids Farewell to ABT

Julie Kent, who for many ballet fans represent the epitome of the all-American ballerina, bid farewell to her artistic home, American Ballet Theater, after an amazing 29 year career with the company. She chose Sergei Prokofiev's demanding Romeo and Juliet for her swan song, and with her partner for the evening, principal dancer Roberto Bolle, she gave her all in a passionate performance that at times seemed the work of a much younger artist, while at the same time it was obvious that her Juliet came with a lifetime of technique, experience, and elegance.

It was a sold-out audience that was there to celebrate Ms. Kent's career, and her entrance in the second scene of Act I caused such a deafening roar that it must have been difficult for the performers to hear the music. As the evening went on, her flawless performance turned into a love fest for the audience. It was truly a perfect evening for her, and for the rest of the company, and one of the highlights of this year's ABT season.


The ovation at the end of the evening went on for close to twenty minutes.  The great curtain of the Metropolitan Opera parted and the assembled cast, each with a flower in hand, tossed them in her direction, while petals rained down from the rafters.  Meanwhile in the audience not a single soul left the place, and everyone remained on their feet. Then, there was the parade of colleagues onstage, all bearing flowers, positioning them in the middle of the stage, creating a mountain of flora. These included Xiomara Reyes and Paloma Herrera, who earlier in the season had their very own memorable ABT farewells. One of the last to pay her tribute was ABT's Associate Artistic Director Victor Barbee, a former dancer with ABT, and Ms. Kent's husband. There were some tender ovation moments as her children William and Josephine shared the stage with their mom.

It was an evening that few will forget, but as ABT finishes the last two weeks of the season, I'm sure that on everybody's mind is the question of who will fill the spots of these three artists who were so much an integral part of the company.  It promises to be a very interesting 2016 season.

The Walk will open the 53rd NY Film Festival

 

I received the following announcement from the Film Society of Lincoln Center:

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today that Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk will make its World Premiere as the Opening Night selection of the upcoming 53rd New York Film Festival (September 25 – October 11), which will kick off at Alice Tully Hall. A true story, the film is based on Philippe Petit’s memoir To Reach the Clouds and stars Golden Globe nominee Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit, the French high-wire artist who achieved the feat of walking between the Twin Towers in 1974. The Walk will be the second 3D feature selected for the Opening Night Gala since Ang Lee’s Life of Pi in 2012 and also marks Zemeckis’s return to the Festival after Flight, the 2012 Closing Night Gala selection. The film will be released in 3D and IMAX 3D on October 2, 2015.

New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said: “The Walk is surprising in so many ways. First of all, it plays like a classic heist movie in the tradition of The Asphalt Jungle or Bob le flambeur—the planning, the rehearsing, the execution, the last-minute problems—but here it’s not money that’s stolen but access to the world’s tallest buildings. It’s also an astonishing re-creation of Lower Manhattan in the ’70s. And then, it becomes something quite rare, rich, mysterious… and throughout it all, you’re on the edge of your seat.”

Robert Zemeckis added: “I am extremely honored and grateful that our film has been selected to open the 53rd New York Film Festival. The Walk is a New York story, so I am delighted to be presenting the film to New York audiences first. My hope is that Festival audiences will be immersed in the spectacle, but also to be enraptured by the celebration of a passionate artist who helped give the wonderful towers a soul.”

Margaret Juntwait is dead at 58

Margaret Juntwait, Former WNYC Host, and the Voice of the Metropolitan Opera, died today at the age of 58. In the history of the Metropolitan Opera Radio Broadcasts she was only the third host, and the first woman to hold this position. She will be missed.

Tomorrowland is Pure and Preachy Disney

The basic premise of Tomorrowland, the new Disney film from director Brad Bird, is that half the world tries to build up Mother Earth in the morning, while the other half tears it down overnight.  Mankind has an incredible inventive gift that has led humanity to wonderful achievements, however we are a race that is also inherently bent on destruction, and this dark aspect seems to be taking over our current civilization.

The story begins in 1965 with the young Frank Walker (who will grow up to be George Clooney) who attends the New York World's Fair and brings with him a half-baked jetpack gizmo that he has invented. While being rejected by Hugh Laurie (who turns out to be the villain in the piece, a fact that you know right from his first appearance) he meets the mysterious child Athena (Raffey Cassidy) who introduces him, via a magical pin, to the world of tomorrow: a remarkable skyscraper city, half Fritz Lang's Metropolis, half modern-day Dubai, which ultimately is reminiscent of a 1950's conception of the future.  In other words, it reminds one of the sleek "Tomorrowland," one of the theme lands of Disneyland/Disney World.

The future, according to the gospel of Disney, is a clean-cut place with the kind of architecture that brings to mind the futuristic designs of the theme parks as well as the memorable structures of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. His amazing City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain, for instance, seems to be the blueprint for Scott Chambliss's production designs.

But the land of tomorrow is rotten from within: it is crumbling and heading into dystopic destruction. To set things right, Athena summons Casey Newton (Britt Robinson), a teenager who has been sabotaging the dismantling of a NASA launch pad near Cape Canaveral where she lives. Obviously this is a teen who cares about space travel, and in the logic of this film one of the good guys. Her meeting with Athena, who gives her one of the magical pins, is the call to adventure that sets her on a journey where she meets the older Frank Walker, now a grizzled, discontented George Clooney living in the sticks, in a run-down house filled with interesting futuristic gadgets. The meeting of Casey and Frank, the catalyst that will bring the narrative to a climax, unfortunately takes way too long to happen. At 130 minutes the entire movie feels too overproduced and definitely too long.

Watching Tomorrowland is very much like attending the future section of EPCOT.  The sense of optimism overwhelms you. Nothing wrong with that. Frank Capra built a career based on it, and so did Walt Disney! What I find a bit troubling are the constant self-references. The entire film is a Disney infomercial. The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise was based on a park ride, but the films, especially the first of the series, was so successful artistically that you forgot the shameless plug and you concentrated on the new myth the film was developing. No such luck with Tomorrowland, which looks to the future, but deep down is just interested in first week earnings.

Mad Men ends by Big Sur

In his own words, Mad Men creator Matt Wiener could not believe that 150 people kept the ending to the show a secret. Well, make that 151. It was hard, but somehow I did it. It amazes me that this ending was in place in Matt's head right from the start of the series, and it managed to remain intact all the way to the end. It shows total knowledge of the character and the situations surrounding him in the drama. And by the way, keeping such a big secret, knowing me, takes amazing determination and will power! Never mind that I had to keep it for about five years.

But seriously, it was the best ending, the only ending possible to the series. It dashed away any gory hopes that Don Draper would end up a suicide, falling out of a building, his body descending in slow-motion, like the Vertigo inspired logo to the show.  Don has been falling now for many seasons, there was no need to belabor the point. The series ended with us inside Don's mind, as he dreams up what is arguably the greatest ad campaign for a product ever to come out of Madison Avenue. Bravo!

Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II in The Interview

All Hail Helen Mirren!  She is not only the Toast of Broadway, she is its reigning current queen as long as she plays Queen Elizabeth II in Peter Morgan's fantasy play The Interview.

The author (who also wrote Frost/Nixon and the screenplay for The Queen, an Oscar winning performance for Dame Helen) imagines what occurs during the weekly private meetings that the monarch has had with a queue of Prime Ministers, starting with a crotchety, self-serving Sir Winston Churchill, through the controversial Sir Anthony Eden, the down-to-earth Labour PM Harold Wilson, with whom Queen Elizabeth had a very close rapport, and the mighty Margaret Thatcher, whom the Queen saw as a fellow traveler as well as a very real rival for power. The play also includes a couple of scenes with John Major, whom we learn was not wholly prepared to lead a nation when it was his turn at the dispatch box, the very angry, and very Scottish Gordon Brown, and David Cameron, the UK's current Prime Minister. There is also a very small cameo by Tony Blair, but surprisingly the author does not imagine a one-to-one interview with the well-known leader of "New Labour."

When Dame Helen is on stage she rules. Our eyes are glued to her. This is part stagecraft, part stage presence. When Churchill appears center stage for his interview, puffing on a cigar, as portrayed by the physically imposing Dakin Matthews, he is a great dinosaur of a politician. The scene has been staged by director Stephen Daldry so perfectly that our eyes cannot help but shift momentarily to him. This gives Dame Helen (and her dressers) enough time to perform one of her many lightning fast costume changes right on stage. Suddenly she is transformed into the young, uncrowned queen welcoming her first Prime Minister who carries an agenda as big as his girth. It is early magic in a production that is filled with such delightful moments.

Among the visitors to Buckingham Palace two Prime Ministers stand out: John Major (Dylan Baker), and Harold Wilson (Richard McCabe). Each of these scenes plays beautifully in contrast to the other. Mr. Baker portrays a weak, but very human John Major, a politician unable to escape from the shadow of his "Iron Lady" predecessor. Likewise, Mr. McCabe plays the droll Mr. Wilson who knows that politically he has to push his socialist agenda to a woman who was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Despite their social class differences, the play portrays their relationship in the warmest of ways. It is the most satisfying interview of the evening, and Mr. Morgan even dramatizes a trip by Mr. Wilson to Balmoral Castle for a rainy weekend in Scotland with the Royal Family.

This is an evening of sheer artistry on Broadway.  A unique play where even the interval (or intermission, as we say in the States) has a very British atmosphere.  It is a not to be missed production, and  one of the big contenders for this year's Tony Awards.

Balanchine and Stravinsky at the NYC Ballet

 Last Saturday afternoon I attended the New York City Ballet. They performed four of the great Igor Stravinsky, George Balanchine collaborations: Apollo, Agon, Duo Concertant, and Symphony in Three Movements. These classic works, that collectively have come to be known as the "black and white" ballets, due to the fact that the dancers are costumed in primarily these two colors, are staples of this company, and are brought back year after year to the delight of seasoned ballet aficionados and young audiences coming to these works for the first time.

Apollo is the oldest of these ballets.  Stravinsky composed the music in 1927, and the twenty-four-year-old Balanchine choreographed it a year later.  A host of great dancers have passed through this iconic role throughout the decades. It is the only Balanchine creation that puts the male dancer on the forefront. The short video below features Chase Finlay, a NYC Ballet principal dancer, explaining his approach to dancing this role.


Duo Concertant is a unique creation that features two dancers as well as a pianist and a violinist, all on stage. The short work examines the equal relationship that exist (or ought to exist) between music and dance. The piece takes the musicians out of the pit and places them side by side with the dancers. Saturday's results also included an interesting juxtaposition between the seasoned age of the musicians versus the youthful quality of the dancers. I'm not sure if this was an original intention of Mr. Balanchine.

The performance concluded with the amazing Symphony in Three Movements, a hyper-kinetic Stravinsky composition from 1945 that on the one hand looks back to his atonal beginnings back with Sergei Diaghilev and The Ballets Russes and dares to look forward toward the future of music. Listen closely with your eyes closed, and you will hear the nervous minimalism of a John Adams.  However most ballet goers will not close their eyes especially when a dancer of the caliber of Amar Ramasar is dancing in it. Mr. Ramasar has been a soloist since 2006, and he was a principal dancer in Chichester Psalms, the Leonard Bernstein, Peter Martins ballet that I performed with the NYC Ballet when I was a member of the Juilliard Choral Union.

If you missed the black and white Stravinsky, Balanchine ballets this season, I would not worry.  I am certain that they will be performed again next year to the delight of young and old.

Calixto Bieito comes to the MET

The New York Times reported today that Calixto Bieito, the iconoclastic, Catalan opera director will be making his Metropolitan Opera debut during the 2017-2018 season.  He will be staging Giuseppe Verdi's great work La Forza del Destino, in a co-production with the English National Opera. The production will be seen in London (sung in English) the year before it comes to New York where it will be sung in the original Italian.

His productions have been called offensive by some, and brilliant by others. His Parsifal, which has been featured on this website, takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, where the old knight Gurnemanz is a defrocked priest turned drug pusher, and, at the conclusion of the production, the character of Parsifal undresses and is carted away to be cannibalized by the rest of the opera's survivors. Another of his productions, Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, staged for the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, featured a scene in a public bathroom.

 

Peter Gelb said that he expected that the new production of Forza "would stimulate audiences, not shock them."  He also added that the production would be set during the period of the Spanish Civil War.

Verdi's Don Carlo at the MET

Arguably Giuseppe Verdi's greatest work, Don Carlo is a massive five act affair that started its life at the Paris Opéra in 1867 as Don Carlos, with a French libretto that was later translated into the Italian version that is often performed these days. An intense, brooding, dark work set in stern, despotic Spain during the reign of Philip II, the opera examines the conflicts between the personal and the political, and the often clashing relationship between religion and the monarchy during the time when the Inquisition tried to maintain Spain loyal to the Vatican and Holy Mother Church.

The current Nicholas Hytner production (a co-production of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden) is pretty tame when it comes to the direction and costumes by Bob Crowley.  However, the sets, also by Mr. Crowley, tend towards the minimalist in a geometric sort of way in some scenes, while in others, shafts of light, coming through windows, lend an air of expressionism. It is a production that does not offend the sensibilities of the conservative New York opera crowd, but neither does it propel the drama into an epic level.

This opera lives or dies by its principal singers, and the MET has assembled a cast of impressive soloists headed by the amazing Ferruccio Furlanetto, who these days owns the role of Philip II. His deep bass has matured into the kind of instrument that is able to express the anguish of a character who has married a woman who has never loved him, and raised a son who threatens his power. His failure as a husband is now compounded with the thought that in order to save his kingdom he might have to sacrifice his son. Mr. Furlanetto beautifully conveys the character's agony as he realizes the church might not be able to absolve him of the murder of his first born. His is one of the great opera characterizations of our times.

Rounding out the cast is a splendid Yonghoon Lee in the title role. The young Korean tenor was in amazing voice on Monday night, and delivered a memorable performance. Dmitri Hvorostovsky was also in good voice as the faithful Rodrigo, although I have always found his intake of air before launching into a phrase to be, at times, as loud as his singing. On Monday night it was louder than I can remember in a while. Ekaterina Gubanova was a sonorous, memorable Eboli, while Barbara Frittoli took longer than I wanted for her to settle into the role of Elisabeth. Finally, it's great to see James Morris still singing these days. In the autumn of his years the bass-baritone has settled into the comprimario world effortlessly. But I don't think that the Grand Inquisitor is the role for him. His voice always had a light timbre and this character requires a threatening cavernous voice. When the Philip is darker than the Inquisitor then there's something wrong.

But that might be a little too much to protest about. The orchestra, under the direction of the great Yannick Nézet-Séguin, played beautifully, offering a sonorous cushion for the cast. It is great to have him as the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, which means that he is only two hours away from New York City. In the unlikely event that he were to become the new music director of the New York Philharmonic in 2017, after Alan Gilbert leaves, he would only be steps away.  But that just might be way too much to ask.

Gigi is back on Broadway

The MGM motion picture Gigi is perhaps the studio's last great musical before the genre became a dinosaur. This original musical for the screen, directed by Vincente Minelli and produced by Arthur Freed, proved to be a box office bonanza, and, as in the team's previous hit an American in Paris, Gigi won the Oscar for Best Film of 1958, as well as eight others.  As a matter of fact, it won an Academy Award for every category in which it was nominated, a record at that time. With its irresistible French cast headed by Maurice Chevalier, and co-starring Louis Jourdan and Leslie Caron, the movie was pure champagne, and the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe score was a delightful recreation of fin de siècle Paris.  For the composer and the lyricist/screenwriter it was a fitting followup to their Broadway smash hit My Fair Lady two years earlier.

In 1973, Gigi opened on Broadway with additional songs written by Lerner & Loewe. It boasted an all-star cast headed by legends Alfred Drake and Agnes Moorehead, and featuring Maria Karnilova and Daniel Massey. A newcomer, Karin Wolfe, played the title role. It was the second Broadway show I ever saw as a kid, and I loved it, but it proved to be a disappointing flop. The frequent absences of many of its stars and the fact that Ms. Moorehead was diagnosed with cancer during its run did not help matters. It played for only 103 performances at the Uris Theatre (now called the Gershwin.) Thankfully, RCA Victor recorded an Original Broadway cast album which is still available on CDs.

A new production of this property is set to open at the Neil Simon Theatre, and I caught one of its previews last week. The original concept, adapted by Heidi Thomas, consists of taking scissors and shuffling songs around. The original musical opener, for instance,  "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," originally sung by Honoré Lachaille, has now been transformed as a duet for Mamita and Aunt Alicia, and moved to the middle of the first act. It works, but it settles the show into a somewhat safe zone, as if Ms. Thomas thought that a middle aged man singing about little girls could only spell pedophilia for today's audiences. Howard McGillin, who plays Honoré, gets very little to do as a result.  He is still the narrator of the story, but in name only. Since he is not given the chance to profess to the audience his credo, his character quickly develops a hollow center. His second big number "I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore" is also turned into a duet, this time with the great Victoria Clark who plays Mamita. One begins to ask oneself if Honoré's presence is even required. Mr. McGillin tries to bring him to life, but when you remove the character's guts there's very little that any actor can do to animate him once again. Mr. McGillin may not have the genuine Gallic charm of Chevalier, it is true, but at least give the guy a chance to do something important with his role. Interestingly, when the songs are left to the original characters, the thing works. "I Remember it Well," sung by Honoré and Mamita, this time sung in a street of Paris, and not by the beach of Trouville, maintains the raison d'être of the original film and its gentle charms stops the show. Likewise, Corey Cott as Gaston sings a winning version of the title song.

The show's director, Eric Schaeffer, and his choreographer Joshua Bergasse believe that bigger is better. They have taken the film's grand moment, for instance, when Gigi, Mamita and Gaston celebrate in their house with a bit of the bubbly, and they have turned it into a giant production number. "The Night they Invented Champagne" is now a wild, drunken romp through nighttime Paris, free of absinthe drinkers, of course: after all, it is a family show. The same technique is applied to "She is Not Thinking of Me" and "The Contract," a jewel of a number that was written for the 1973 show.  In each case Mr. Bergasse's choreography seems forced and overblown to giant proportions. It gives one the feeling that the cast is really trying hard, but it ends up being too much artifice for my taste.

With the name above the title, Vanessa Hudgens, a pop star graduate of the Disney High School Musical franchise, plays the title role with believable results. Her best moments are when she's being sassy, trying to cheat Gaston at cards. Her voice is adequate for the role, more pop than Broadway, but she gets away with it. In any event, her youthful zeal carries her performance, and I'm sure that she will settle into the part nicely, provided that the show runs for a while.  I'm afraid that the New York critics will be merciless towards it, however, and as in 1973 you're going to have to act fast if you want to catch it.

Holy Week Starts in Seville, Spain

 It's that time of the year once again, when masked men and women, wearing the garb of medieval penitents, carrying candles, walk alongside ancient statues transported in baroque platforms around the old, windy streets of Seville. It's Holy Week. And if you happen to be in this fabled city, you experience it in a very special way. For seven days the faithful remember with solemn resignation the passion and death of Jesus Christ with elaborate processions, some even having a curious, almost out-of-place, festive atmosphere, while others are gloomy and silent as the grave. This should all lead to a kind of rejoicing since Christ rises from the dead on the seventh day.

 It might seem odd to most of the world to see thousands of masked figures walking alongside their treasured images of Christ and Mary, his mother. To outsiders, these life-sized representations of the Virgin all look the same, and for Americans, in particular, the sight of hooded men in white robes can only bring to mind bigoted times south of the Mason-Dixon line. You're going to have to forget all of that if you want to get to the bone marrow of what goes on in the streets of Seville, and "live" Holy Week, as the locals say. These are age-old customs that can trace their lineage back to the times of the Inquisition when Spain was fighting to remain staunchly Catholic while the rest of Europe was trying on for size the Protestant experiment.

During the time of the Franco dictatorship, these processions seemed a natural outcropping of the conservative, reactionary times of the dictatorship. However, forty years after the demise of Fascist Spain, Seville and its Holy Week processions are more popular than ever, and the role of women is stronger these days than it was ever thought possible in the long history of this event.

Those knowledgeable of Scripture understand that the mystical trajectory of the week from darkness to light is a very special time for believers.  For the majority of people crowding the streets of Seville, it is a week of cultural tradition rather than religious fervor, and it is marked by seven days of little sleep. At its conclusion most "Sevillanos" just get sad that the greatest week in their calendar has come to an end.  Luckily, their sadness does not last for long. The beginning of the April Fair, another fabled cultural event, tends to dispel the gloom rather quickly.

If you would like to experience Holy Week in Seville, it is being broadcast live.  Just follow this link: http://elcorreoweb.es/elcorreotv/