81. ModCons: Paul Taylor season, the N.Y. Philharmonic, “Mr. B”, “Arthur Miller” and Broadway’s “Some Like It Hot”, reviewed by Pippa Hammet
Change is almost always all. Our boss, Louise Ebersdorf, has decided that – just as the British monarchy must modernize – so must we Yanks renovate. Across the Atlantic, it has been decreed that the Queen Consort Camilla will henceforth have “Companions” rather than “Ladies-in-Waiting”. (It may now be difficult to find a “lady” in England.) Therefore, dear Louise wants her own employees – including yours truly -- to have a new title. She is toying with the designation “Cohort” (as in “Pippa Hammet, Cohort”) because it would suggest the strenuous military campaign that setting up her company, The Ballet, will require of her staff. Also, the term would connote a plural singularity. Each Ebersdorf Cohort would imply numerous militants: Pippa-the-Multitudinous. Goodness knows, I and each of my co-workers will have to have the strength of ten – or 480, to be exact -- to get all of our coming labors accomplished. The other implication is that Louise will be closer to being addressed as “Your Majesty” or, at least, “Major General”.
So, in addition to your present reporter, Mme Sesostris, Belle, Master Raro, and perhaps even Albertine and Paco will henceforth be known as Cohorts, living modern conveniences for Our Boss. Cohort Albertine approached Louise yesterday to report that she has been invited to fly to Paris to parlay with Mme Liane Beach of the kingdom of Le Swing, the French all-female ballet ensemble. Imagine, Albertine representing the interests of our august Louise! Paco would stay behind and tend the prize felines. I wonder if my dear pet Murr is now also a Cohort?
I, of course, would be quite happy to remain Louise’s Assistant, or Secretary-Assistant, but that decision is not mine. Louise has mentioned to me privately that she fears various criminal elements may have her name on their Rich Lists. She may be thinking of increasing her security here at the Tower, beyond the immediate staff. Allowing one Cohort to travel to Paris would decrease the Honor Guard by one. I also suspect that Mme Beach may have plans of her own for our A&P. We will see if H.R.H. grants leave.
In the meantime, Master Raro and I attended the recent season at the Koch Theater of the Paul Taylor Dance Company with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Master and I discovered several new dancers of interest in the sixteen-strong ensemble. I was particularly impressed by John Harnage, who was featured in several lead roles. The two new company works were disappointments. Somewhere in the Middle, choreographed by Amy Hall Garner, contains dance materials all too reminiscent of the contemporary dance styles which Taylor parodied mercilessly throughout his canon, as can be seen in many repertory revivals. Is Garner unfamiliar with the Taylor critique of such idioms? The new work by “Resident Choreographer” Lauren Lovette – Solitaire – was a self-conscious attempt to join her balletic vocabulary to a dynamic contemporary aesthetic. Lovette’s efforts in that direction were dutiful rather than inspired. How convenient that a switch between one type of dance theater and another, quite different stage form (what used to be called “modern dance”) can be so casually attempted by the current Taylor management. Taylor was not a friend to the ballet. Is this news to management?
At their best in the inherited Taylor idiom, the company’s current performers can look like the healthiest dance company on earth.
The important event of the season was the return of live orchestral accompaniment for Taylor’s Scudorama, whose score by Clarence Jackson has been represented with a taped recording for several seasons. (I am informed that the orchestral parts for this work were lost for a time and only recently rediscovered.) The effect on this echt-Taylor dance vision was revelatory. The work’s parodies of the Graham idiom and of Broadway dance clichés were underlined by musical equivalents in the Jackson score. There was a happy spontaneity in the dancing that only live music can foster. And Taylor’s stage imageries acquired a weight that has been missing in recent performances. When those enormous blanketed entities assembled themselves at the final tableau, an antediluvian topography crouched on the Koch Theater stage. The score was played by the St. Luke’s Orchestra under the baton of David LaMarche. (We know his sterling work from his seasons in the orchestra pit for American Ballet Theatre). The Scudorama conductor has to be alert to changing rhythmic textures throughout the dance. LaMarche’s vigilance was part of the production’s shock to the system.
Here, in eschatological terms, is Taylor dealing with his creatures’ realization that all the details of their harried lives are passing feints against the indifference of eternity, with all commonplace obsessions, neuroses, and official doctrines leveled in the sandy void. We are but vapors, clouds, the briefest of traceries. If you wish to consider further metaphorical content of his dances, I recommend you take a look at Taylor’s own words in a new book – Remembering Paul Taylor – sold on the Promenade during the recent Koch season. The best individual contribution in its pages was sponsored by Alan Olshan, a company publicist, who has transcribed notes taken from the late choreographer’s mouth. For example, Taylor states about his Last Look: “It must be the most unpleasant dance ever made.” I’m not sure that Scudorama can be classed as “pleasant” or “unpleasant”. As a masterpiece, it just is.
Across the Lincoln Center Plaza, Master and I attended a concert of the New York Philharmonic in its Geffen Hall home, now acoustically revamped and reopened. A renovated concert space deserves a performance that sheds fresh musical light. That is just what we got in the performance of Béla Bartók’s “Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion and Orchestra”. The score contrasts the ability of percussion instruments to generate varieties of attack against strong sonic continuities. The two pianos trade such effects back and forth and against the orchestra’s ensemble battery, including the foregrounded percussion section. It’s a brilliant festival of rhythm. And this means that the pianist Daniil Trifonov got a workout, especially in the composition’s third movement, with its sustained chordal volleys. His duo-piano teammate (and mentor), Sergei Babayan, brought lyric qualities to the mysterious “night music” second movement. The Philharmonic has seldom sounded so tight and focused as here under the baton of visiting conductor Hannu Lintu. Trifonov has an upcoming solo concert at Carnegie Hall, and Master and I plan to be there.
The acoustics in the David Geffen space seem improved. One feels close to the musical forces wherever you sit. Locating a working restroom and an elevator is now much facilitated. On the other hand, the brownish décor throughout the building becomes a mite oppressive across an evening’s auditions. Room for further improvements.
Louise continues to give me new publications on ballet. How convenient for theatrical biographers that George Balanchine lived through so many World Historical Moments, traveled far and wide attempting to find employment, and confused the casting couch with the matrimonial bed for the entertainment of nations. If the dedicated dance researcher wields her bullet points and a hunger for stray gossip with assiduity (and across at least ten years of dedicated fact-gathering), the resultant 700-page tome can be guaranteed front-page coverage by the New York Times Book Review. If only Elizabeth Hardwick were still here to respond to Mr. B.: George Balanchine’s 20th Century (Random House, 2022), another example of promiscuous journalistic reportage toward the semblance of A Life. Inevitably, the reader gleans far too much about the panting author and too little of import about the book’s ostensible subject.
For example, Mr. B is not hesitant in its discussion of the choreographer’s Serenade to identify Marie-Jeanne Pelus (Marie-Jeanne) as the originator of the completed Russian Ballerina role in that ballet, despite the fact that the definitive assignment of passagework took place over decades and that Annabelle Lyon claimed that Balanchine rehearsed her in the role in the 1930s. (Lyon never performed it on stage.) You will also not find in Mr. B a reference to the earliest Balanchine-trained American ballerina Mary Ellen Moylan, who was an admired Dark Angel in Serenade. Balanchine recognized Moylan: “She was the first.” No documentation on the author’s claim for Marie-Jeanne is to be found in the new book’s endnotes. I have always been fascinated to hear that this dancer managed to perform all of the lead roles in the work, Balanchine’s first American ballet.
Negotiating the salvaged minutiae of Mr. B, I was reminded of some slaving tailor’s surreal heap of fabric scraps and renegade buttons. The pedestrian prose of the volume honors something it terms “radical” dance-making, with the ballet tradition – which Balanchine can be said to have employed at many points – relegated to the sidelines rather than recognized as the basis for innovation. The author’s proud announcement in The New Yorker that the works of Marius Petipa are too ornamental and genteel for her taste might have prepared us. Her critical efforts reward the young Balanchine’s moderne dances (a number of which are now lost) and his later advanced work (The Four Temperaments, Agon, Episodes, Stravinsky Violin Concerto) with high marks but find much else to question or scant. (As Balanchine once put it in witty self-deprecation about his great repertory staples: “I make little pies.”) Were Kirstein alive, he would doubtless sponsor a book-burning on the Lincoln Center Plaza.
No friend of the suspected passé, Mr. B parcels out received opinions resembling the anti-ballet rumblings of the retired Mikhail Baryshnikov. (Thus is an art form subverted by a facile idea of progress; thus do tyro choreographers ignore an inheritance from the danse d’école. Where is André Levinson when we need him?) Here is yet another biographer parading limited knowledge of the developed aesthetics and working methods of the stalked artist. The result is everything you didn’t need to know about a unique genius. Like the second half of the author’s ballet history, Apollo’s Angels, the book goes nowhere at great length. Doesn’t Random House have an editor informed enough about the art of dance to function?
The only practical way to read Mr. B and remain awake is to ignore its central text and to start and conclude with the endnotes, which have bits of information that might point the way to some future scholar. In addition, dangling factoids can sometimes be amusing. I caught a tell-tale error (page 719, note 13): the composer of Variations pour une porte et un soupir was not Maurice Ravel but Pierre Henry. The real problem with this project was a general lack of focus. Dance scholarship takes another hit.
A much better recent theatrical biography is John Lahr’s Arthur Miller: American Witness (Yale University Press, 2022). In a mere two hundred pages, Lahr not only situates Miller in twentieth-century stage history but provides sensible judgments of his dramas, screenplays and television scripts, while also showing the interplay between Miller’s personal life and thematic emphases in his writings. Miller is seen as a man of his time and as an individual. I picked up the volume to find out how his marriage with Marilyn Monroe would be treated and was interested to discover how much Miller’s youthful experience of the Great Depression informed his adult thought. (The comedienne is portrayed with pity and terror.) Lahr actually met the subject of this biography before the playwright’s death. The resulting study is persuasive. Lahr, of course, is the son of the Broadway and film comedian, Bert Lahr, so theater is in his bloodstream. He has written biographies of Noel Coward and Joe Orton as well as other stage and screen figures. His volume is a pleasure to read.
Sandy and I went to a preview of the new Broadway musical comedy Some Like It Hot, adapted from the 1959 Billy Wilder film starring Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. (Monroe was not only married to Miller at that time but pregnant with his child.) Since the movie is widely admired, many will want to know how the stage show compares. Said simply: SLIH puts the comedy back into Broadway musical comedy. The cross-dressing scenes are handled well, and it is clear that the adaptation has been written with acquaintance with Herbert Fields' masterly librettos for the musicals of the 1920s and 1930s, especially those with music by Rodgers and Hart and by Cole Porter. I suspect the working talent here is Matthew Lopez, whose two-part drama The Inheritance recently won a Tony for best play. His choices throughout the adaptation evince the happiest DNA of traditional American stage comedy. (Some of the show’s verbal zingers show the influence of his co-adaptor, Amber Ruffin.) SLIH reminds one how central comedians like Jimmy Durante and Bert Lahr were to Broadway hilarity.
The Jack Lemmon role of Daphne (or Jerry, here played by J. Harrison Ghee) has been expanded, as you can imagine. The relation of Sugar (the Monroe role, now played and sung by Adrianna Hicks) to Josephine (Joe, originally Tony Curtis, here Christian Borle) has been modernized: they are now friends and colleagues rather than predator and sex object on a conveniently available hideaway yacht. The cast also includes an excellent Sweet Sue in Natasha Williams and an Osgood (the Joe E. Brown role) from the antic Kevin Del Aguila. The director-choreographer, Casey Nicholaw, has maintained a strong comic beat throughout the production, quite literally with tap dancing from almost everyone in the cast. The dances are one of the weakest elements in the show, largely because the tap is never developed on its own terms; instead, it provides transitional flow and punctuation. The obligatory Astaire-Rogers number (“Dance the World Away”) is lamely conceived.
The production’s most disappointing element is its pastiche score by Marc Shaiman, who has taken the show’s title literally to provide conventionally “hot” numbers for the tapping, along with several plaintive ballads which serve the fine vocal contributions of Hicks and Williams. The redeeming numbers are the comic turns and the “You Coulda Knocked Me Over With a Feather” solo for Ghee. Shaiman shares credit for the songs’ lyrics with Scott Wittman.
The comic interplay of Borle and Ghee is expert. Ghee provides an arc for Daphne across the evening. Borle is a delight even in the hysterical “He Lied When He Said Hello”. Williams holds down every scene she is in. And Del Aguila is artfully stylized in his approach to Osgood; the characterization is like a show within a show. Congratulations to all four.
Our wise Louise has been much put out by the recent announcement of the selection of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as the greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight and Sound international poll of movie critics. However politically correct the choice might be, Louise has decreed that a gross mistake has obviously been made by the British Film Institute and that a necessary recount and correction must be forthcoming. We Americans like nothing better than a review of any suspect tabulation, and the Brits would do well to imitate this Yank tradition. Louise is certain that the motion picture in the true all-time number one position will be revealed to be Paddington 2, a favorite entertainment of the late Queen of England. Our local H.R.H. insists that apologies be made to Ben Whishaw and Hugh Grant, as well as to a now very extended Royal Family. (I suspect that we were lucky that the first filmic place did not go to Joanna Hogg’s two-part The Souvenir.) Louise also suggests that a Parliamentary enquiry will have to be conducted immediately into the original source of the BFI’s error. Britain is currently reducing financial support for its performing arts. For example, the English National Opera is endangered. There is no reason to ignore a mass art’s obligations to its vast public, especially when a cinematic taste for animated Peruvian bears is involved. True art must be protected by, but must not be confused with, politics.
P.H.
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