Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

American Ballet Theatre -- The Balanchine-Tchaikovsky Spectacular

                            ... George Balanchine and Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky ...

This was a magnificent evening of joyous music and consummate ballet, seen Friday, May 22.  The four ballets moved like four symphonic movements.

The uncluttered, glowing color behind the dancers is all the setting one wants or needs to enjoy the dazzling use of the human body -- and the ABT's glamorous, sensuous costumes that bring out its beauty.  Think jewels splashed against exotic tie-dyed silk. 

   Here they are:

  Allegro Brillante is like a classical pas de deux but with Balanchine's purity -- beyond narrative -- although eroticism is its own story.  From his first moment on stage, Ethan Stiefel was thrilling and charming, he just has it in him since Gillian Murphy, perfect in technique, seemed emotionally disengaged.  The choreography is interesting in the way it follows the music.  For example, if the music flutters, alternate lines of dancers alternately go up and down, fluttering with it.

  Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux:  Well -- there are those who dwell on a more rarefied plane but -- this above all is what most people come to the ballet for!  A classical pas de deux in the style of Petipa, it's loaded with the narrative of desire, and astonishingly danced by the big, strong Marcelo Gomes -- those leaps! -- and the delicate and poignant Paloma Herrera.  The music was originally written for Act III of Swan Lake, according to the program note, but wasn't used for reasons of history, was lost, and later discovered -- a good reason for Balanchine's choice of classical choreography.

  Mozartina is the andante -- the costumes are black, lacey and 18th Century.  Suspended chandeliers speak ancien regime and the sequence of dance styles, a prayer, a gig, a minuet, a pas de deux, and a finale are like a courtly entertainment.  Ballet students, little girls not yet on pointes, dance in the ensemble.  Principal Dancer Veronika Part was strong and precise but, as in Allegro Brillante, the male Principal Maxim Beloserkovsky had more fire, and his footwork in the air is breathtaking.

  Theme and Variations is a big piece with lots of dancers, just right for a finale.  It was beautifully danced and costumed but the choreography is distracting.  David Hallberg was superb in his solos but overworked in partnering Michele Wiles.  As in Allegro Brillante the choreography  often followed the music only here, the musical "ups" required Hallberg to lift Wiles again and again, to the point where the repetition seemed unimaginative and lacked balletic ease -- at her final leap into his arms he looked shocked, I had a close view from the second row and hoped he could hold on.  He did.  Whew!

An evening of ballets by a single composer and choreographer is a wonderful idea -- a free flowing unity in diversity.  This is a great season for The American Ballet Theatre.  Shortly they will be dancing their All-Prokofiev Celebration, including a world premier, On the Dnieper.  The American Ballet Theatre is performing at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC.

                                                                                                            Yvonne Korshak

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Is "The Torment of St. Anthony" by Michelangelo? Here's another reason to think so.

                                                    ... look to the landscape ...

Did Michelangelo make the painting of "The Torment of St. Anthony" which has recently been in the news?  Writers contemporary with Michelangelo indicate he made a painting of the subject when he was around 12 or 13, and an apprentice in Ghirlandaio's workshop, but it's never been agreed that this painting is the one Michelangelo made.

A good place to see color photos, including excellent details, is the website of The New York Times.

Recently purchased in London for 2 million, the painting was cleaned at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sold again, for $6 million or more, to the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas.  The arguments about its authorship are circling around connoisseurship issues.  Keith Christiansen, Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum is particularly impressed by some strong cross-hatching.  Evidently Christiansen didn't persuade others -- if the Metropolitan Museum thought this was Michelangelo's first painting, they they never would have let it go!    (recession or not)

Judging from the photos:  This painting doesn't  "say" Michelangelo.

On the other hand, there's one aspect I detect so far that may point to Michelangelo -- the relatively simplified, even barren landscape.   Michelangelo is interested in the human body, never mind leafy trees!  His landscapes are less lush, less sensuous, more hard-edge than those of his Italian and Florentine contemporaries -- think Sistine Chapel Temptation and Expulsion.  In his earliest known painting, he pretty well lets his monumental figures squeeze out the landscape behind the Holy Family with the Infant St. John the Baptist at a time when contemporary painters were glorifying the landscapes behind holy figures.

There's barely a nod to the famous, Renaissance "atmospheric perspective" in "The Torment."   Instead, the contours of the shore and distant hills are slick -- they look air-brushed.  The waves seem pasted on.  Condivi, who knew the artist, said Michelangelo told him he'd gone to the fish market to learn how to depict fish scales (they do indeed appear in this "Torment" and not the Schongauer engraving upon which this painting is based) -- no sign that the painter attended to what's out there in the landscape with that kind of focus.

Christiansen also sees in the vibrant, almost iridescent colors in "The Torment" a possible "prelude" to the colors in the Sistine Chapel vault.  Could well be.

Is this by Michelangelo?  The treatment of the landscape, the colors, and other aspects make it a genuine possibility.  I look forward to seeing the painting directly when it goes on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in June, before moving on to Texas. 

                                                                                           Yvonne Korshak

Vieux Carre by Tennessee Williams, directed by Austin Pendleton, at the Pearl Theatre

                                                 ... streetcar named memory ...

The setting is a run-down boarding house in New Orleans' French Quarter in the 1930's and you know you're in good hands from the first moment.  The house is empty now, The Writer comments at the start, remembering when he lived there, but clearly it isn't -- Mrs. Wire, the landlady is on stage even before the play begins.  With that brilliant contradiction, Williams conveys the paradox of memory.

The Writer, turning his memories into a play, brings us with him to the time this house was crowded with the intensely individualized characters and their desires, jam packed with the ongoing torments of their situations and the occasional raptures open to them through their partnership in the human spirit. 

It's interesting that The Writer is both the central character in the play and also the most passive.  Though young and beautiful, he doesn't seduce but is seduced, by an elderly and not appealing painter -- the man has serious lung disease -- who in a sparkling moment of truth defines himself as "rapacious."  Appetite never dies -- the painter reminded me of Goya's black painting of "Old Man and Old Woman Eating Soup," skeletons scraping their bowls to the end.  All the other tenants in Mrs. Wire's rooming house are ravenous, in one way or another.  The handsome Tye is sexually passionate, stimulating Jane's unquenchable desire.  Two once higher class old ladies are famished to the point of scrounging in garbage cans, while Mrs. Wire cooks gumbo.

Even toward the end when The Writer has the chance to move to a new freedom, a cross-country car trip to the West, he's invited along but it's the other guy's plan.  The Writer's action is mainly to observe and understand things better.  This gives the play a soft center.

Vieux Carre was written in 1978 near the end of Williams' career but written about writing and about coming to terms with sexuality, it has the feel of a coming of age play.  He often draws upon memories of his life and family in his plays but this is the most directly autobiographical -- Mrs. Wire's has the same address as his French Quarter boarding house -- 722 Toulouse.  It even has a structural laxity one might expect of a youthful playwright with more to learn.  Perhaps, after having produced a great body of work, Williams felt he'd earned the right to just give himself over to autobiography -- at last.  Never mind:  the production is flawless, the acting superb, the language goes directly to the heart and the characters are real, vivid, and remain in the imagination.  

Vieux Carre is at the Pearl Theater in the East Village, St Mark's Place, through June 14th.

                                                                                            Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome -- please scroll down and click.  Thank you!     

P.S. Two of the best plays I've seen this year are Vieux Carre, and Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, reviewed here (click on link).  And more to come -- I'm looking forward to Glass Menagerie at Guild House in East Hampton, L.I., this summer (reviewed -- click here). Also reviewed here, Williams' The Day on Which a Man Dies (click on link) in East Hampton, August 2009.

Coraline, music and lyrics by Stephin Merritt, book by David Greenspan, based on Neil Gaiman's novel, directed by Leigh Silverman

The novel is an international best seller, the movie has grossed over $80 million, there's a movie tie-in edition, a movie collector's edition, a graphic novel, a visual companion, and a video game, and now a brilliant group of New York theater people have produced a musical play.

This makes sense.  This production, however, in its intense and imaginative focus on the weird visual effects and surrealistic juxtapositions, loses somewhat the thread of the human story.

Coraline -- like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, the Darling children in Peter Pan, Clara in The Nutcracker -- escapes the world of busy grown-ups and their rules for fantasyland.  For Coraline, adventure lies in an apartment on the other side of a magic door -- like Dorothy's mirror -- from her own.

Past that door everything -- furniture, Mother, Father, stray occupants -- are the same but not quite the same as what she's left behind.  At first, the differences spell "freedom."  The Other Mother will give her everything she wants!  Wow!  But the dark side emerges, the Other Mother is a soul-stealer, ghostly children with button eyes appear, her previous conquests.  She kidnaps Coraline's true parents.  The Good Witch of the North is really the Wicked Witch of the East.

How will Coraline escape and free her parents?  Through a clever game, with the help of a black cat and a special stone.  I think.  At least that's what I heard mentioned.  But I never really saw how it happened.

How Coraline succeeds in tricking the wicked Other Mother is lost amidst the extravagant visuals, and some arbitrary magic.  Solutions are handed over too easily to special effects.  Coraline, the story, already deemed a classic, is about working out problems for oneself, and coming to appreciate sometimes humdrum loving parents, and love as we have it in our bothersome real world.  It's a story of growing up, and we need to see that.  But the production skimps on the psychological development and that, even amidst the clever moments, limits ones engagement.  Coraline is smart at the start and smart at the end, and that's about it. 

Still, there are extraordinary images and witty word play, as well as sophisticated disjunctions that provoke big laughs.  Jayne Houdyshell as a mature actress and a convincing pre-teen Coraline at one and the same time is an ongoing fascination, and for this surreal production, a brilliant choice.  David Greenspan plays unforgettably the defeated Other Mother falling down a deep well for a very very long time -- I wouldn't mind seeing the play over just to see him do that again.  Julian Fleischer as the mature, thoughtful, upright talking cat makes the slinky ones in "Cats" seem really tacky.  The songs are wonderfully rhymed;  they're hilarious, a highlight.

Coraline, a production of MCC Theater, plays at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in NYC's West Village through July 5th.  

                                                                                   Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome ... please scroll down and click.  Thanks!

Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward, the 1947 film with Rex Harrison, Kay Hammond ...

                                                                ... always ...

Since Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit is currently on Broadway, it seems like a good time to look at the 1947 film, directed by David Lean.

With an evanescent greenish cast and semi-transparent, a beautiful ghost returns to stir things up with her novelist husband in the midst of his new life with a new wife.

People talking to the ghost in one direction when she's really on the other side of the room ... flowers carried from the table to the mantelpiece with no one carrying them ... a seductive ghost ... a suave and youthful Rex Harrison .. a terrific "great performance" medium played as an English eccentric by Margaret Rutherford ... a common sense Constance Cummings as the second wife puzzling through inexplicably opening and closing doors ... that's a lot.

A broad percentage of the film's appeal comes from the sheer allure of Kay Hammond as the ghostly first wife, with her throaty voice, ironic gaze, and the cast given by greenish overtones to her red lips.  Lounging gracefully over the back of the sofa, she's completely at home -- so amusing. 

The title comes from Shelley's poem "To a Skylark" ... "HAIL to thee, blithe spirit!  Bird thou never wert -- "  The film has a musical theme, "I'll be loving you, always, with a love that's true, always ... "  Right, "always."  The plot is thin -- but the fantasy is powerful!

                                                                                               Yvonne Korshak

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Heightening contrasts -- Gustave Caillebotte, Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea, at the Brooklyn Museum

                                        ... the front of a boy, the back of a man ...

Not always following the Impressionist "rules," Caillebotte fulfills the French Impressionist purpose -- to capture the moment, deliciously.  This exhibition covers his main subjects, scenes of the city and urban labor, and with a special focus on his paintings in which water plays a major role.  Here are two of my favorites ...

In Oarsman in a Top Hat, we (unseen), are in a rowboat, knee to knee with a rower who's taken time off from the office for a refreshing row on the river.  Beside him on the rower's bench is his folded jacket -- what a detail to conjure up th just before and the just after, framing the great Impressionist subject:  the now.  His cheeks are rosy, his face flushed with physical activity -- he's just pulled forward on th oars -- but he looks aside, caught in thought.  Physical activity and thought, the Impressionist broken brushstrokes of the water and the clear, curved contours of his hat, the color-filled shadows of his face and the black of his vest, the dappled patterns of the watter and the stripes of his shirt sleeves, he's near as he could be, others are distant -- this painting is a study of contrasts, a visual drama of available human joys.

The Floor Scrapers is a study of browns and sepias.  What -- no juxtaposition of complementary colors?  no broken brush strokes?  hard work as a subject? -- for reasons like these Caillebotte has often been overlooked, because the "true" Impressionists -- Monet and Renoir, bathed in such prestige.  What a narrow attitude that assumes that hard work isn't fun!  that arbitrarily decides that the color brown, poor brown, lacks light.  For this artist, neither is true.

As in Oarsman in a Top Hat, Caillebotte paints mind and body.  Concentration on the job, one of our greatest pleasures -- well, isn't it?  -- is as much the subject of The Floor Scrapers as scraping floors.  The older worker, on his knees, uses experience, training and focus to do a fine job -- it's all in his posture.  The young worker concentrates on sharpening his blade, head bent to the task.   

Natural light pouring through the window falls across the poignantly naked chest of the young man and the shirted back of the older one -- the front of a boy, the back of a man, coming and going, flesh and no flesh, youth and age ... and yet, both face the same direction.  This is one canny painter.  The unpausing light illuminates the parallel rows they've been cutting through the old floor varnish, the curly shavings a heightening contrast, and reflects with a refreshing dazzle from the wetted floor.

These are life-affirming paintings.

Gustave Caillebotte, Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea, is at the Brooklyn Museum through July 5, 2009.

                                                                             Yvonne Korshak         

Comments very welcome ... please scroll down and click.  Thank you!                                         

Walt Whitman and the Arts in Brooklyn, at the Brooklyn Museum, The Walt Whitman Project

                                                        ... still a young nation ...

It was nothing less than a privilege to meet up with America's greatest poet in his home town, Brooklyn!

What a city!  So much happening, how to keep track?  If I hadn't happened to know an organizer, I might not have known about the Walt Whitman and the Arts in Brooklyn, held in the Library of The Brooklyn Museum on May 2*.   

Most startling was mezzo-soprano Nicole Mitchell who, simply arising from her place, filled the room with her deep, gospel singer's voice, without accompaniment and with startling power, singing Stephen Foster's "Oh! Susannah" (most popular song of the 19th Century, Whitman had written about it). 

Cascading readings from Whitman ... "Old Brooklyn Days" ... "Paumanok" from Leaves of Grass, "Old Time Amusement" ... "A Fourth of July Patriotism" ... piled up a renewed sense of the promise of America -- small scale but it felt like Obama's Inauguration.  Toward the end Mitchell sang a Whitman poem to martyrs of the American Revolution set to the music of the Star Spangled Banner -- it was almost overwhelming.

Whitman's father had seen with his own eyes some of our founding fathers, whom he idolized.  Whitman was Abraham Lincoln's contemporary, "O Captain! My Captain!", his most famous poem, written to express grief at Lincoln's death, and the poet's words continue to speak from the 19th Century to us directly in the 21st Century.  Many of his Brooklyn haunts evoked in his writings are still there.  It's good reason to feel glad we've been a nation for a short enough time to hold to a complete vision.

Glad, and grateful to those who, sometimes catching us by surprise, bring us into intimate touch with the best of human aspiration and achievement.  Thanks to Principal Museum Librarian Deirdre Lawrence and readers Greg Trupiano, Lon Black and Hakim Williams for creating Walt Whitman and the Arts in Brooklyn, held Saturday, May 2 and there's more*:  The Walt Whitman Project is holding its Sixth Annual Whitman Birthday Bash in Manhattan May 27  -- it's even FREE. 

                                                                                 Yvonne Korshak  

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