New York: Cultural Consumption Report, Part I
Clothes and Shows
Almost fifteen years ago, I went to an American Ballet Theatre performance of the Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet in New York City, while I was working there on a two-month contract (what inconsequential bit of bank software was I working on? Can’t remember). I’d never been a huge ballet person but I had enough of an eye to know that the performance was in a very different class from what I’d been seeing in Canada — I hadn’t known before that ballet could be that good, actually moving instead of only pleasing. I’m going to keep coming back to this city for the rest of my life, I remember thinking, enchanted.
And since then, that’s what I’ve done. I go as often as I can (usually once or twice a year), put on outfits that are too flashy for Seattle, and spend my time looking at art, going to the opera and the theater, browsing shops and bookstores, sitting in cafes and parks reading, eating rich meals, and so on. To friends I call them “clothes and shows” trips. None of this is special or original, in fact it’s a bit embarrassing, but there are few ways I’d rather spend my time and money and I’m very grateful to have the means.
I spent four sunny days last week doing all of the above. Here’s my report.
Looking at art
I don’t entirely trust my own taste in art but I enjoy situations where I don’t have anything else to go on. Anything in a big museum has already been anointed as worthy, but a show of new work at a gallery is more a proposition than an instruction. So I always have fun going in and out of the various white boxes in Chelsea between 10th and 11th avenue, asking myself: do I like it?
I also appreciate the chance to put myself in the hands of someone else’s good taste, as at the exhibit at the Hill Art Foundation curated by David Salle, with one work each by thirty-seven different artists, arranged so as to suggest throughlines and affinities. The kind worker at the gallery made sure I had the checklist of works in my hands, and pointed out the outdoor space and the stairs to the second level to make sure I wouldn’t miss any.
From the catalogue essay:
Creating that sense of inevitability is the art. This is not merely formalism—it’s the poetics of dynamism. Painting events are like notes in a melody, one note following another in specific intervals of sound and time. An atonal sequence of notes, though unlikely to sound melodic to our ears, can still have wrong notes. How can you tell? Even an infant can recognize nonsense words when it hears them. A six-week-old baby (if born to English speakers) will recognize that “pilk” is not a word. There is a similar mechanism in painting, with the mind-bending difference that it is the artist herself who must make the grammatical rules and also demonstrate in the painting how the rules are true. To make things even more complicated, not all “rules” are equally productive, and not all applications of those rules are equally meaningful.
I also visited the special exhibition of van Gogh at the Met (the theme: his paintings of cypress trees). There was a long virtual waitlist, followed by a physical line to get in, and the woman behind me complained bitterly about both. Inside, the small and quiet paintings were overwhelmed by throngs of picture-takers, including me. I can’t complain, that’s how it is sometimes with big museums and famous painters.
There weren't any throngs in front of this still life, which was my favorite of all, perhaps because I could look at it more closely. It shimmered from the wall, lemons and blue gloves, and cut cypress branches instead of a tree.
The explainer text tells a sad story. The chronology of this painting places it after his break with Gaugin and only weeks after the notorious ear-slicing incident, in the brief time afterward when he still occupied the Yellow House in Arles before going to the asylum in Saint-Rémy. “The work is marked by a spirited determination to make piece with the past and remain hopeful about the future as he was processing his mental collapse.”
Don Giovanni
I didn’t have high hopes for the new Ivo van Hove Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera, but I wanted to see at least one opera and wasn’t in the mood for The Magic Flute.
I spent most of the performance trying to puzzle out for myself why I’ve never seen a good production of this opera, which is undoubtedly a masterpiece, and is my official “favorite” opera for when people ask. This was my sixth Don Giovanni, and in my opera-going life I can expect to see six more — will I ever see a production with intelligence and dramatic verve? I am starting to think I should give up. The production I saw in Berlin back in January with the golf balls and clown noses and neon and gas masks might honestly have been the most engaging of them all.
Don Giovanni is the Italian name given to Don Juan, seducer of legend, and most of the plot concerns his efforts to outrun the consequences of his bad behavior while squeezing a few more seductions in. It opens with an attempted rape followed by a murder, ends with the protagonist dragged to hell by demons, but in the intervening hours has the structure of a comedy, including some creaky costume-switching farcical business that directors would usually rather pretend isn’t there. Directors and audiences tend to be reverent of the “dark” scenes and impatient with the comic scenes (which admittedly are not very funny), and refusal to treat it all as a whole makes most of the productions I’ve seen take on a shrugging, half-hearted, apologetic character. One choice I see made over and over again: to siphon the sex out of the story in favor of a class-forward reading with as little erotic content as possible. It sort of works; Don G is an aristocrat who menaces a peasant girl. But most of the “good” characters are aristocrats too, so it’s hard to get much meat off that particular bone (at least without a lot more subtlety). Meanwhile, the complex and troubling sexual politics are right there! No director seems to want to deal with them.
The van Hove production was strikingly and deliberately bloodless. I almost laughed aloud at the end, where after Don G’s descent into hell, the formerly grey and featureless set is newly decorated with flower-boxes, gauzey curtains, and other signs of neighborhood revitalization. Don Giovanni, as a character, doesn’t really work very well as a stand-in for bland corporatism; he’s the one who brings the party, after all.
Anyway, since I’ve been thinking of writing a longer series of essays about the operas of the Standard Repertoire, I’ll save my material for that.
Sweeney Todd
I am a big Sondheim person (previously) and Sweeney Todd is dear to me. It’s got some of Sondheim’s most beautiful music, many of his best lines, and it’s one of the only shows where he was able to wholly silence his theater-sabotaging instincts. He was compulsively ambivalent and mistrustful of things like catharsis and resolution; this resulted in a lot of brilliant shows that don’t quite feel like they reach solid ground, or that undermine their own best scenes. Of course, this is often what people like about them.
Sweeney Todd doesn’t indulge any of that and is just a great piece of theater. It’s inspired by Victorian grand guignol horror melodramas, and the operatic excess of its premise — a revenge-mad barber and his accomplice who makes his victims into meat pies — is mingled with heavy irony, lush music, and comedy in proportions that ensure it doesn’t become kitschy, silly, or self-important. The last twenty minutes or so of Act I in particular are spectactular, but there’s good stuff all the way through. I’m especially partial to the “Joanna Quartet”, where Sweeney sings a soaring, optimistic melody addressed his lost daughter while periodically cutting the throats of men who come to sit in his barber’s chair. This production currently on Brodway, starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, is a bit busier and broader than the others I’ve seen and perhaps suffers from a lack of gravitas. One problem is that I’m not a fan of what seems to be the main mode of musical theater singing these days — a blaggy, vibrato-heavy chest belting that I find ugly to listen to, especially in comparison to the likes of Len Cariou and George Hearn.
Ashford, as Mrs. Lovett, is brilliantly funny and a joy to watch. She’s an absolute pro — she knows exactly how to speak, move, and time her lines to get laughs from the audience. She was almost like something from another time, a pure stage creature, a vaudevillian. Groban sings well but doesn’t have any grandeur, and isn’t scary enough to be a counterweight to the comedy. Sweeney Todd is entertaining even in a bad production, and this is a very good one, but the balance is off; it tilts too far away from horror to be satisfying when the scales right themselves at the end.
It’s getting too late at night for me to write up the rest of the trip. My next newsletter will cover two other shows (Good Night, Oscar and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window), more art, and possibly also some thoughts about John Updike.