Posts Tagged ‘amanda palmer’

Culture Vulture: Nicky Paraiso, Amanda Palmer, WHITE NOISE, Basquiat, and more

April 29, 2019

April has been a cultural smorgasbord!

April 6 – Lucas Hnath’s Hillary and Clinton (at the Golden Theatre) feels weirdly similar to his previous play, A Doll’s House Part 2: an extremely unlikely Broadway show starring the great Laurie Metcalf as a powerful woman in a showdown with the husband she has very mixed feelings about, with two ancillary characters to add dramatic tension and comic relief. Set on the eve of the New Hampshire primary in 2008, loosely based on real-life happenings, the play pivots on an invented encounter with Barack Obama, who shows up to offer Hillary the vice presidential slot if she’ll drop out of the race, but really exists as an extended meditation on the power of the imagination to invent multiple parallel universes. On Broadway it serves the purpose of giving New Yorkers devastated by the results of the 2016 election some liminal space to gain strength and hope from the idea of possibility and change. I enjoyed the framing device, in which we watch Laurie Metcalf come out as herself and with no more than the power of suggestion transform into Hillary Clinton; I admired the performances and the simple staging by Joe Mantello. But, like Doll’s House Part 2, it struck me as an exercise and left no lasting impression.

April 7 – In 1986 I wrote a piece for the Village Voice that began: “What becomes a legend last? Surely it’s the Off-Off-Broadway star, the performer who devotes the best part of a career to toiling for no money in the back alleys of lower Manhattan. The machinery exists to turn film and television performers into international celebrities quicker than you can say Live at Five, but some of the most original and creative actors in America continue to work year after year in basements and lofts, in semi-obscurity and near-poverty, resisting embitterment while clinging to whatever environment will allow them to become more and more themselves. Though you won’t find them in Broadway’s Theater Hall of Fame, actors such as Ruth Maleczech, Kate Manheim, Ron Vawter, Jeff Weiss, and Crystal Field are nonetheless national treasures, and any ranking of them must include the Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s leading lady Black-Eyed Susan.”

photo by Albie Mitchell for the New York Times

Nicky Paraiso belongs in that pantheon as well. Even among the colorful creatures of the downtown theater world, there is no one else like Nicky – multitalented, vivacious, ubiquitous, universally beloved by and unstintingly generous to his fellow artists. Since I moved to NYC at the tail end of 1979, Nicky has always been a fixture on the scene. He was a key collaborator for decades with Meredith Monk, Yoshiko Chuma, and especially Jeff Weiss – none of whom provide the financial security that collaborators named Shonda Rhimes or Ryan Murphy would. In middle age Nicky was barely scraping by waiting tables at McBell’s when Ellen Stewart, with her super-power for genius-spotting, zeroed in on his networking skills and made him resident curator, booking music, theater, performance art, spoken word, and miscellaneous events for The Club at La Mama and eventually becoming coordinator of the annual La Mama Moves! dance festival. All this and much more childhood and family history got folded into now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories at the La Mama Annex. Because Nicky is Nicky, he got John Jesurun to direct and design the show, and he corralled four respected downtown choreographers (Irene Hultman, Jon Kinzel, Vicky Shick, and Paz Tanjuaquio) to improvise onstage alongside his autobiographical monologue, in addition to a fun video appearance by two other high-powered Filipino-American downtown legends, Jessica Hagedorn and Ching Valdes-Aran. The show amounted to a kind of life review (not unlike John Kelly’s Time No Line, which played in the same space last year), an impressionistic chronology from growing up in Queens to the present moment. Touching, funny, and honest, the show among other things showcased Nicky’s wizardry as a musician. Every so often he’d wander over the piano and bang out some brief brilliant burst of music (pop, classical, cabaret, show tune) before leaping up and moving on to something else. Weirdly, he never so much as mentioned the Laura Nyro song from which he borrowed the title of his show. But I enjoyed imagining Nicky encountering Nyro’s wildly passionate original musicianship as a queer kid and using that inspiration to launch his own artistic spirit.

April 10 – I’m a big fan of Taylor Mac, but his play Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (another highly unlikely Broadway mounting) left me cold. The performances by Nathan Lane, Kristine Nielsen, and a vocally overtaxed Julie White amount to an exhausting mugfest. And George C. Wolfe’s busy busy busy staging reminded me of his production of Shuffle Along: all footnotes, no show.

April 19 – I was psyched to see Camille Vidal-Naquet’s Sauvage at Film Forum because it promised to be a sexy, gritty portrait of French gay male sex workers. In some ways it provides a fascinating glimpse of Eastern European gay-for-pay street hustlers gathering in packs for survival and scrambling to make it work under crummy circumstances. The depiction of older schlumpy customers (one in a wheelchair, one recently widowed) is honest and compassionate. But the story revolves around a wildly unbelievable main character who is a manifestation of a curiously French attachment to the notion of the noble savage, lurching from touching moments to scenes that are ugly and sensational.

April 20 – Amanda Palmer started out as a street performer in Boston and played with Brian Viglione as the punk cabaret duo Dresden Dolls for years before launching her solo career. She recorded and toured behind her 2012 album Theatre Is Evil thanks to an overwhelmingly successful Kickstarter campaign; a memoir and a TED talk detailed her road to success via her knack for The Art of Asking, and along the way she acquired a famous husband, the fantasy author Neil Gaiman. The social media savvy that made her a DIY cult figure Rockstar also generated a lot of nasty blowback that got so ferocious that Palmer had to take a break. Now, after four years, she’s back with a new album, There Will Be No Intermission, and an 18-month international solo tour, just her and her piano and her ukulele. Andy’s a diehard fan and got tickets for her show at the Beacon Theater as soon as they went on sale. The day of the concert, an email arrived announcing that the show would start promptly at 7:30 and be over at…11:30. We’d seen her in concert three times before, and I liked her fine, but I wasn’t sure I had the stamina for four hours of Amanda Palmer solo. We gave ourselves permission to bail when we’d had enough, but we stayed for the whole thing. Palmer referenced both Springsteen on Broadway and Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette (both Netflix specials), and they clearly influenced her decision to undertake the brave notion of a solo concert that combines music and storytelling (a LOT of talking) with a very specific political agenda. She’s had three abortions in her life, she’s been raped twice, and she’s had a miscarriage, and as she says in the show after those upsetting experiences she looked around for some art work (movies, books, plays, songs, albums) that reflected the range and depth of emotions she was feeling and didn’t find any. So in this moment when access to abortion is again politically under assault, she resolved to fill in the gap and Talk About It herself. It makes for a bold, challenging show that alternates between songs from her new album, selections from her back catalogue, and fun covers. For all the ways she teeters on the verge of insufferable self-indulgence – let’s just say she needs a lot of attention – she does have an extraordinary ability to read the room and disarm an audience. Early on she warned the Beacon crowd what was coming and established a rule: at any time, anyone in the audience could call out “Amanda, I’m feeling so sad!” and she would immediately respond with the jaunty opening of her song “Coin-Operated Boy.” And that did happen several times during the concert. And it made a 2000-seat theater feel like a pretty cozy living room.

April 21 – “I can’t sleep” is the first line of Suzan-Lori Parks’s White Noise (at the Public Theater), which addresses the mixed blessing of being #woke – it’s both empowering and exhausting. Leo (Daveed Diggs) is a black artist; his white girlfriend Dawn (Zoe Winters) is a lawyer. Their best friends (and former significant others) are Ralph (Thomas Sadoski), a white English professor, and Misha (Sheria Irving), a performer who hosts an edgy podcast called “Ask a Black.” The set-up feels rom-commy, but as usual Suzan-Lori Parks can’t help coloring outside the genre-lines – as staged by Oskar Eustis, the play unpredictably veers into pockets of farce, tragedy, melodrama, soliloquy, and performance-art weirdness. After Leo is roughed up on the street by cops, he conceives of a provocative art project for his own healing: he talks Ralph (who comes from a rich family) into buying him for 40 days of slavery. Being owned settles Leo down emotionally and energetically; he’s finally able to sleep. Meanwhile, Ralph surprises even himself by how much he gets into ownership, and the two women resume their on-again off-again love affair, which has its own kinky aspects. For all the elements that land as contrived and preposterous, the mood of the play matches the feeling of the American zeitgeist over the last two years, with the shredding of the social contract, white supremacist bullying fully emboldened, and (as Dawn asserts in her monologue – each character gets one) doing good is seen as suspect activity by clueless libtards.

What is Parks saying, that blacks should give up and that White Makes Right is manifest destiny? Even as my friend Jay and I stood in the lobby of the Public having a juicy conversation about the play and our quibbles with certain plot points (yeah, right, an unpublished author can write a story and get it published in the New Yorker in less than six weeks), I received the play in the Brechtian sense I believe it is intended. Brecht was no fan of dramatic naturalism and emotional plausibility. His fantasy was that critical thinking — that is, imagining how things could be different than they are now — acquired through theatergoing could spur critical thinking on political and social issues. Critical thinking means being alive and alert at the theater rather than dozing through a pleasant entertainment.

At a typical play, according to Brecht, most people say to themselves: “Yes, I have felt like that too — Just like me — It’s only natural — It’ll never change — The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable — That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world — I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.” He wanted spectators at his theater to say: “I’d never have thought it — That’s not the way — That’s extraordinary, hardly believable — It’s got to stop — The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary — That’s great art: nothing obvious in it — I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.”

April 26 – What can I say about the Jean-Michel Basquiat show at the newly renovated Brant Foundation Art Study Center in the East Village? Being in the presence of almost 70 Basquiat paintings over the four floors of the gallery made me absolutely crazy with joy. I don’t know how to explain it, because normally I live with a distinct aversion to chaos. But when I look at Basquiat’s work, especially the gigantic paintings busy with lists and icons and as many overlapping narratives as a medieval tapestry, I don’t see chaos but feel privileged to be viewing the inner workings of…not just a mind but a heart and a sensibility super-alive to child-like playfulness and sophisticated art-music-life references.

The Brant Foundation show is running for another couple of weeks, through May 15. Tickets are required, it is ostensibly sold out, but the waitlist shifts all the time; be patient with the confusing and arduous process and you might well end up in the door after all. The show includes some famous Basquiat works (Hollywood Africans, on loan from the Whitney, and the untitled skull painting that sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million) but also lots of stuff I’d never seen before, some stuff that hasn’t been exhibited in New York before. (The show was put together by Dieter Buchhart for the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.) My friend Clint described me as looking like St. Teresa de Avila in a state of rapture. There is, of course, the gift shop on your way out the door that sells among other things a Basquiat yoga mat. I didn’t get one, but you know, I have a birthday coming up….

Speaking of my birthday, if anyone wanted to gift me with a pair of tickets to see Lizzo at Brooklyn Steel on Sunday May 12, I wouldn’t say no. Her single “Juice” has already established itself as candidate for The Song You’re Going To Be Hearing All Summer Long. Her video featuring stars from RuPaul’s Drag Race is hilarious:

April 27 – Curse of the Starving Class was the first in a sequence of five semi-autobigraphical family dramas that represent the single strongest period of Sam Shepard’s long, anything but homogenous playwriting career. Set in the semi-rural Southern California of Shepard’s adolescence, it portrays an almost cartoony family of Mom, Dad, Brother, and Sister just on the verge of combustion from a flammable combination of dreams, despair, hormones, addiction, financial distress, and genetic predisposition for self-destruction. Julian Crouch’s set for Terry Kinney’s revival at Signature Theatre captures the fragility of the environment spectacularly well, and the zeitgeist ensures that Shepard’s fable of family life as metaphor for American life and/or Western capitalism stays pertinent. Having studied and written about Shepard for 35 years (the first edition of my biography was completed in 1984, the revised edition in 1997), I view productions of his work from so many different angles. I had mixed feelings about this one, mostly because of quibbles with the casting. Gilles Geary gives a one-note dead-eyed performance as Wesley, the poetic-souled son, and both Maggie Siff as his mother and Lizzy DeClement as his sister were too perky and clean-cut for my taste. Meanwhile, David Warshofsky as the dissolute, mercurial dad was just about perfect. I somehow hadn’t realized how consistent this string of family plays returns to the concept of role reversal – it shows up most clearly in act two of True West but it starts with Curse, continues in Buried Child, and returns in A Lie of the Mind (and beyond, in The Late Henry Moss). The pleasures of a Sam Shepard play almost always include boldly visceral real-time theatricality: a nude body, a live animal, the smell of breakfast cooking.

April 28 – Thaddeus Phillips (above) is a travelling man, and his solo performance 17 Border Crossings at New York Theater Workshop does what it says on the tin. With the simplest of means, and in close collaboration with lighting designer David Todaro and sound designer Robert Kaplowitz, Phillips recollects a globe-sprawling array of encounters (most but not all his own) with customs and immigration officials, some of them uneventful if humorous, others hair-raising. It’s a sweet short (90-minute) exercise in theatrical storytelling that starts with a burst of Shakespeare, segues into a succinct history of passports, and carries on unpredictably from there. My plus-one was Laurie Anderson, who introduced me to Arto Lindsay (they’d just had a meeting with some cutting-edge sound designers). I in turn introduced Laurie to Jackie Rudin (see below), who had just seen Laurie at the Kitchen in Anohni’s performance She Who Saw Beautiful Things. After the show, Laurie and I had a delicious dinner at Piccolo Strada, the minuscule trattoria a few doors down from the theater.

 

Posted in Culture Vulture | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Performance Diary: Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer at Town Hall and GRASSES OF A THOUSAND COLOURS

November 27, 2013

gaiman palmer
11.23.13 – Andy is a huge fan of writer Neil Gaiman and singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer, so he bought tickets for their double-bill at Town Hall as soon as they went on sale. The two met when Palmer, formerly half of the Dresden Dolls, asked him to write material for her solo album Who Killed Amanda Palmer? Before long, they were a pair and are now married. In this charming, chatty, intimate concert, we heard a little about their courtship. Early on, in a conversation about the dearth of contemporary torch songs, Gaiman announced that he’d written one called “I Google You.” He sang it for her, twice, and a few days later she sent him a link to a YouTube video of her singing it in concert in San Francisco. For the Town Hall gig, they opened the evening singing a duet on “Making Whoopee,” paving the way for considerably more singing from Gaiman than I expected (and less reading of his work than I would have liked). He’s a Brit and characteristically modest; she’s an American, more brash and with, let’s say, a bigger personality. Weirdly, she often reminds me of my friend, the San Francisco-based performance artist Keith Hennessy (weirder still, I think it’s the powerful legs). Saturday night also happened to coincide with the premiere of the 50th anniversary broadcast of Doctor Who, the long-running British TV show for which Gaiman has contributed a few episodes, so there was a fair amount of fanboy-geekery running between the stage and the audience. The inevitable special guests included Aussie burlesque chanteuse Meow Meow backed by Lance Horne (on loan from La Soiree downtown) and Arthur Darvill, who plays a minor character on Doctor Who and ran over after finishing his show as the lead in Once.

11.25.13 – I can’t pretend I understand what Wally Shawn’s play Grasses of a Thousand Colours is about. When I flew to London to see the world premiere at the Royal Court, I managed a pretty succinct summary of the play in my Performance Diary:

grasses-of-a-thousand-colors-86857
It’s a big, long, crazy, intense three-act fantasia about a famous scientist overwhelmingly fixated on his penis and his relationships with three different women (his wife, his mistress, and his girlfriend, named for three shades of red: Cerise, Robin, and Rose) and a mysterious shape-shifting cat named Blanche who may be the shamanic double of Cerise and/or possibly God. It’s set in some apocalyptic near-future when some initially successful experiments with increasing the world’s food supply have gone dreadfully wrong. And the stories that Ben and his playmates tell – addressing the audience directly, as is usually the case in Shawn’s plays – teem with images of animals. Eating and fucking. Dick and Pussy. Humans and animals. Andre Gregory’s staging unfolds on a simple stationary set – a long white sofa and two standing lamps – and it interpolates strange little bursts of film that surrealistically mangle the sense of time and place. Wally himself plays the main character, known as Ben or the memoirist, who says things like, “When I was a boy, parents never masturbated in front of their children. In fact, children never masturbated in front of their parents! And God knows children would never make out with their parents or fuck them, ever, because that would have been seen as utterly shocking…So, you see,  for me, the way things are now still seems astonishing – I mean, the fact that people talk about their penises and vaginas in public, at dinner parties, in magazines, and newspapers. I can’t get over it. Ha ha ha!”…

whitecat1
In an endnote to the published text, Shawn mentions that certain elements from the play derive from a 17th century story by Madame D’Aulnoy called “The White Cat.” I don’t know that story, but I will look it up as I continue thinking about this strange strange play, which is a bizarre combination of fairy tale, fever dream, and The Story of O. It’s quite unlike any other play I’ve seen before, except that it bears a distinct family resemblance to other wild, linguistically pungent, sexually transgressive, disturbing and disorienting Wally Shawn plays (Our Late Night, Marie and Bruce, The Music Teacher, The Designated Mourner).

Besides Wally in the central role, the London cast included Miranda Richardson as Cerise, Jennifer Tilly as Robin, and Emily Cass McDonnell as Rose. Seeing it again at the Public Theater, with Julie Hagerty in the Miranda Richardson role, I found that I had no particular advantage the second time around, nor did I find it especially enjoyable to sit through again. (I was somewhat affected by sitting next to Andy, who is a game theatergoer in general but found the play an ordeal.) I admired Andre Gregory’s production less than I did the first time around – for one thing, Jennifer Tilly’s performance has coarsened over time to a one-note bray.  I had mixed feelings about Julie Hagerty, who was definitely wispier than Miranda Richardson. I enjoyed most the freaky dream-like film sequences in which she appeared as “Blanche,” although my strongest takeaway is her deliver of the line, “Last night, as I was urinating on him…”

Clearly there are layers and layers of mischief going on throughout the production, signaled by tiny gestures of sound and movement – every time Ben (the main character) takes a sip of the green potion on his lecturer’s podium, his energy immediately shifts, never predictably. As I explained to Andy and my friends Melissa and Maribel, as we walked to dinner at Noho Star afterwards, my best guess about  the play is that it represents a particular literary phenomenon – Shawn, an excellent brainy and theatrically savvy playwright, has given himself the challenge to follow his imagination, his psyche, his dreams in creating a work that relentlessly and categorically defies the viewer’s attempt to interpret it as any kind of coherent narrative reducible to meaning. Like the craziest, scariest fables and fairy tales ever written, it is a story that exists in relation only to itself.

Oh, one major difference in the production at the Public Theater was that instead of a second intermission, after two and a half hours, we got a five-minute pause, during which an insane array of snacks was handed out in the foyer adjacent to the Shiva Theater – a paper cup containing 5 almonds, a hard-boiled egg, a Lindt chocolate ball, and a silver cup containing a swallow of cranberry juice – served by a chubby whiskered lad wearing a cat mask.

Posted in performance diary | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , ,

Culture Vulture: LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST, BLUE JASMINE, Amanda Palmer and Rosin Coven

August 11, 2013

THEATER

The musical adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost in Central Park reassembles the major dudes responsible for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson – writer/director Alex Timbers (who adapted Shakespeare’s early comedy), songwriter Michael Friedman, choreographer Danny Mefford, and some key players (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe and the hilarious Jeff Hiller). The show is even more fantastic than I could have dreamed it would be – a fast, funny, smart update of one of Shakespeare’s un-sacred texts. The four aristocrats renouncing pleasure are frat boys (they open the show ceremonially locking in a trunk a six-pack, a bong, and a string of condoms) who are as cute as a boy band. The four party girls who tease them out of their vows hit the stage like the cast of Bridesmaids crashing the set of Girls.

Love's Labour's Lost Public Theater/Delacorte Theater
The nutty secondary comic plot actually sizzles because of Caesar Samayoa’s brave and funny turn as Don Armado, with a lot of help from his Jacquenetta (Rebecca Naomi Jones, late of Murder Ballad) and the band (musical director Justin Levine jumps in and out of the action playing Moth). The cast is full of newly minted downtown stars – Daniel Breaker (Passing Strange), Colin Donnell (Anything Goes, the Encores! version of Merrily We Roll Along), Patti Murin (Lysistrata Jones), and, hello, Rachel Drach for good measure. I especially enjoyed Audrey Lynn Weston’s stoner-chick Katherine. Friedman’s songs are fiendishly witty (I think I heard the word “apothegms” fly by in one of the lyrics), and Timbers happily ladles in references to Hair, Passing Strange, and (for some reason) Einstein on the Beach. I would gladly see this show several more times. I can’t believe it’s not going to extend or move after its scheduled run in the park finishes next Sunday. It’s every bit as good as anything I’ve seen in Central Park.

MOVIES

I think I’d gotten a vague inkling that Woody Allen’s new movie Blue Jasmine somehow referenced A Streetcar Named Desire, but watching the movie I couldn’t believe how note-for-note the plot follows Tennessee Williams – one more instance of Woody Allen defying predictability. He’s been on a roll with his string of feel-good travelogue movies (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris, To Rome with Love), but Blue Jasmine breaks that cycle. Yes, it’s set in San Francisco (and the Hamptons) but it’s not a love letter to any location, and the story swerves dark. What makes the movie a must-see is Cate Blanchett, who has played Blanche DuBois onstage to rave reviews (wish I’d seen it) but here perfectly embodies Woody’s interpretation of Blanche (mixed in with Ruth Madoff) as a woman whose beauty allows her to deceive her way into powerful men’s hearts because her looks makes her vulnerability and desperation come across as strength. But the cast is full of yummy performances by terrific actors: Sally Hawkins in the Stella role, Bobby Cannavale and Andrew Dice Clay (!) as two versions of Stanley Kowalski, Louis C.K. as Karl Malden, plus Peter Saarsgard, Alec Baldwin, and Michael Stuhlbarg.

MUSIC

Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra headlined Friday night’s show at Lincoln Center Out of Doors in a light drizzle. AFP (as her legion of hardcore fans, including Andy, refer to Amanda Fucking Palmer) did a modified version of the concert she gave last fall at Webster Hall on the launch tour for her album Theater Is Evil – a couple of the major numbers from that release (including the hit-single-that-shoulda-been, “Do It With a Rock Star”); guest appearance by her former cohort from the Dresden Dolls, Brian Viglione; plenty of time spent off the stage moshing around with the folks standing in front of the stage; a couple of plaintive, emotional, inspiring solo numbers on ukulele; the odd cover (“Smells Like Teen Spirit”); encore of “Leeds United.” I confess that I dug the Webster Hall show a bit more, partly because the stomping crowd during the encore made the floorboards bounce, an effect not quite possible in Damrosch Park. For me the gift of the night was getting to hear the opening act, a quirky outfit known as Rosin Coven: a flame-tressed singer fronting a string trio, a vibes player, two horns, and a drummer. Andy called it “mystic Goth jazz,” not a bad summary – smart, ambitious, nutty and intriguing arrangements putting me in mind of Boston’s genius band of the mid-70s Orchestra Luna, with traces of Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention.

Posted in Culture Vulture | 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Performance diary: Amanda Palmer, INTO THE WOODS, and EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH

September 18, 2012

September 11 – Amanda Palmer first made her name as half of the Boston-based theatrical punk-cabaret duo Dresden Dolls. Most recently she achieved internet notoriety by raising over a million dollars with a Kickstarter campaign intended to raise $100K to finance the current tour supporting her newly released album Theatre Is Evil. In between she carved a major niche for herself as a DIY breast-baring grass-roots ukulele-toting championship social-networker, acquiring not only an ardent fan base but also a geek-idol husband, the charming, prolific and equally media-savvy science fiction-fantasy writer Neil Gaiman. I’ve been watching from the sidelines as Andy, a huge Gaiman fan, got intrigued and then swept up by the Kickstarter campaign. And I was perfectly happy to go along with reconfiguring September 11 as Amanda Fucking Palmer Day this year, even if it meant enduring the rigors of standing up for four hours straight at Webster Hall. (I swear I’m not going to say it, I refuse to say it, you’ll never hear me utter the words, but of course I’m thinking: I’m getting too old for this.)


It was a whiz-bang show, with three opening acts. We missed the first one. The second was a really young power-pop trio called the Pleasant Surprise led by AFP’s guitar player Jherek Bischoff. The third was Ronald Reagan, “Boston’s premiere ‘80s-rock saxophone duo” – a classic one-joke-two-song opening act who wailed out “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “Total Eclipse of the Heart” while half the audience sang out all the words (including my sweetie). Palmer had been traipsing out in her dressing gown to introduce each act and to whip up interest for the inevitable live-streaming webcast. Introduced by Meow Meow, an Australian female-impersonator-impersonating female, Palmer entered borne aloft through the crowd (above) and led her three-piece Grand Theft Orchestra through most of the new album, whose destined-to-be-some-kind-of-hit is the Bowie-esque instant earworm “Do It With a Rock Star.” There was stage-diving and crowd-surfing, there were costume changes, and there was the obligatory hilarious cheesy Top-40 cover encore (“Call Me Maybe”). Palmer made the pre-emptive strike of addressing an issue that would be all over the internet and the New York Times the next day – that she’s enhancing her touring band with crowd-sourced string and horn players (“crowd-sourced” meaning volunteer, meaning unpaid, meaning uh-oh, here comes the musicians’ union out for blood…). I think she’s handling the evolving music-world economy pretty well (giving her new album away online, trusting that fans will pay for it, for instance), but if she gets as big and successful as she seems to want to be, there will have to be some rethinking of all this.

September 15 – Andy has never seen Into the Woods, the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine show, and he was dying to get tickets to see the production in Central Park this summer. We never managed to (which may have been a blessing), so we hunkered down instead with the DVD of the 1987 original Broadway production. The songs continue to dazzle, the performances hold up (especially Joanna Gleason as the Baker’s Wife, Danielle Ferland as Little Red Riding Hood, and Bernadette Peters as the Witch), James Lapine’s book….not so much. With the distance of time and home video, the holes in the second act gape like chasms. Without her magic powers, how does the Witch disappear in a puff of smoke? And the subtext related to AIDS, supplied by the zeitgeist when the show first appeared, is now completely imperceptible.

September 16 – Revisiting masterpieces is always worthwhile because they’re never the same twice. The original U.S. performances of the Robert Wilson-Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach (only two of them, at the Metropolitan Opera in 1976), epitomized the saying, “The legend is created by the people who weren’t there.” I heard about it as a college student in Boston, devoured the original cast recording, was thrilled to hear a concert version performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble at a church in Harvard Square, and couldn’t wait to actually see the first revival at BAM in 1984, in the early days of the Next Wave Festival. It lived up to all my expectations. This revival seemed, well, not exactly tamed but certainly different. My memory of the earlier production was that the music was extremely loud – body-bracing loud, rock-concert loud. This production is definitely not deafening (maybe because Glass isn’t playing in the band, for the first time ever?), and it’s funny to find that a little disappointing. Also in my memory of the first BAM revival, the performers maintained neutral facial expressions, which perfectly matched the Steinian prose of the spoken texts (by Christopher Knowles and Lucinda Childs, anyway) and the wordless vocals (all numbers and solfege syllables) as well as Glass’s monumentally release-avoidant score. In recent years, Wilson has been working a lot with German theater companies and incorporating much more expressionistic acting – white-painted faces, garish makeup, and exaggerated expressions at times virtually indistinguishable from clownish mugging. I didn’t like seeing that stuff in Einstein on the Beach. I wished the performances were as cool and sleek as the sets and the imagery and the lighting. But what the hell, to paraphrase what Paul McCartney said about critics who grumble about The White Album – “It’s fooking Einstein on the Beach. Shut up.” I was surprised that the music that grabbed me most was the choral music during the Knee Plays (maybe it helped that we could see the singers in the pit very clearly from where we were sitting). Four and a half hours without a break didn’t seem arduous at all. And I felt an unexpectedly strong wave of emotion when Wilson, Glass, and Childs came out and took bows at the end – three brave artists now old and gray who created a massive piece of work decades ago that still looks exceedingly strange and fiercely original.

Posted in performance diary | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , ,

%d bloggers like this: