Posts From Author: Month: March 2015

Review: Scheherazade.2 (World Premiere)

Scheherazade.2 — Dramatic Symphony for Violin and Orchestra (2014) by John Adams New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall; conducted by Alan Gilbert; soloist Leila Josefowicz World premiere: Thursday, March 26, 2015 Insights at the Atrium — Artist and Muse: John Adams and Leila Josefowicz David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center Monday, March 23, 2015 John Adams isn’t sure if his latest composition can be played by a man. Scheherazade.2, described as a “dramatic symphony for violin and orchestra,” emerged from a collaboration with the violinist Leila Josefowicz, and after seeing her play it, it’s certainly difficult to imagine the same work essayed by a male soloist. In a talk ahead of the world premiere, Carol Oja, the New York Philharmonic’s Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence, suggested to Adams that he had written “a feminist concerto.” And while he confessed that he never had a coherent “libretto” for the piece in his head, he did concede that she’s “like Isolde or Elektra. I can’t think of a concerto that’s that dramatically specific.” (To note, he rejects “concerto,” preferring the Berliozian construction “dramatic symphony”.) In Scheherazade.2,  the line between actor and violinist blurs. To perform it, Josefowicz prepared much as an opera singer would. She memorized the work, internalized it, began thinking of it […]
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Cocaine Nights

There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll by Lisa Robinson Riverhead Books, 2014; 368pp In Cameron Crowe’s 2000 movie Almost Famous, the rock critic Lester Bangs offers some elder-brotherly advice to Crowe’s young avatar, William Miller, who’s about to go on tour with up-and-coming band Stillwater. “You cannot make friends with the rock stars… They’re gonna buy you drinks, you’re gonna meet girls. They’re gonna try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs. I know: it sounds great. These people are not your friends. These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of rock stars. And they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it. Because they are trying to buy respectability for a form that is gloriously, and righteously, dumb.” Bangs is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who dispenses soundbites with the same air of hard-earned wisdom that characterized many of his greatest performances. He’s been there, done that, and Patrick Fugit’s William is going to discover it all for himself in due course. But even as we watch Bangs’ every prophecy animated, we understand also that he’s completely wrong. You have to travel the Yellow Brick Road to discover the Wizard behind the curtain. […]
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Race (Remix)

Soho Rep’s An Octoroon written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Sarah Benson Theatre for a New Audience, Brooklyn, New York City running till Sunday, March 29 The fact that the Oxford English Dictionary‘s first citation for “mashup” is from Dion Boucicault’s play The Octoroon (1859) is highly significant in the context of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins‘ Obie Award-winning remix An Octoroon. There’s hip-hop, mixed media, a jarring blend of idioms, even a mischievous Br’er Rabbit figure wandering about in scene changes. Now enjoying its final week at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, An Octoroon is an assault on polite taste, a thrillingly audacious work of theater, and a very funny, postmodern take on a text that in any case cannot be played straight in the twenty-first century. Boucicault’s play, as reimagined by Jacobs-Jenkins, is a total mashup. It’s also an eloquent dissertation on the difficulties of talking meaningfully about race in the United States. A man enters at the start of the play dressed only in white underwear. “Hi everyone,” he says, “I’m a black playwright.” What follows explodes this apparently simple statement. This is BJJ (Austin Smith), a sort of avatar for the playwright, standing in relation to the real Jacobs-Jenkins like Woody Allen’s characters do to Woody. “I can’t even wipe my ass,” he complains, “without being accused […]
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No Return

The Shroud of Turin. An Ohio ghost story. “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” Basketball with Xenophon and Achilles. Things that should or shouldn’t be done with a Philadelphia Eagles hat. Just five of the things that aliens landing at City Winery last Monday might have taken away from their close encounter with humanity. The House of SpeakEasy welcomed six more amazing writers to discuss the theme No Return: best-selling horrorist R.L. Stine, poet A.E. Stallings, author Ben Yagoda, novelist Ian Caldwell, and comedy writer Meredith Scardino. Special guest host Joan As Policewoman was the quizmaster for this month’s Tip of My Tongue competition. “I did a book signing here in New York a few weeks ago, and a librarian came up to the table, and she said, ‘May I have my picture taken with you? The kids all think you’re dead.’ That’s why I’m especially glad to be here tonight…” R.L. Stine, most famous for his horror books, was the hilarious opening act. (Prior to his prolific, mega-selling horror career, Stine wrote around a hundred joke books for children.) But, as he revealed, “Once you enter the land of the scary, there’s no return…” Stine took us back to his childhood in Ohio to reveal one of the inspirations for his […]
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Thomas Adès Dances With Death

Totentanz for Mezzo-Soprano, Baritone, and Orchestra (2013) by Thomas Adès New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, conducted by Thomas Adès A medieval frieze destroyed during the Second World War is the source material for Thomas Adès‘s new work, Totentanz, which received its U.S. premiere last week. Conducting the New York Philharmonic was the composer himself. Entering briskly, almost athletically at the start of the program — play began while the audience was still shushing itself — he led the orchestra in bright renditions of Beethoven’s first symphony and the overture from Berlioz’s lesser-spotted opera Les Francs-juges. In the second half, though, that athleticism came into its own. With its vastly expanded workforce — the percussion section alone called for bamboo canes, anvils, snake rattles, a referee’s whistle, and, according to the program note, bones — Totentanz asks of its conductor a near-martial level of control and brute strength. As the New York Times remarked, this was “a real musical event.” An event and also a spectacle. The scene is judgment day. Death, newly arrived on Earth, invites humanity, from the Pope on high to a lowly baby, to join him in his danse macabre. In playing this lurching dance, the musicians become almost like actors. The frenzied sawing of the violins, and the hammering and scraping and […]
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ReadEasy, 12 March 2015

ReadEasy is a new feature for 2015… because you’re worth it. I love Daily Savings Time. No matter what the weather, it makes me feel like spring is here!!!— Danielle Steel (@daniellesteel) March 10, 2015 Naomi Klein on climate change… In an edited excerpt from her new book This Changes Everything (Simon & Schuster, 2014) over at the Guardian, Klein debunks a series of clichés about our collective failure to tackle climate change (it’s too hard, politically and technologically; we’re screwed anyway…) and argues forcefully for action. After all, the stakes, as she points out, couldn’t be much higher: “entire nations could be saved from the waves.” So, what’s wrong with us? It’s Klein’s contention that “market fundamentalism,” the reigning ideology for the entire period of time since the scope of the global-warming threat became apparent, has “systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change.” Globalization and its attendant forces have accelerated global warming and left us in an appalling bind: “the things we must do to avoid catastrophic warming are no longer just in conflict with the particular strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s. They are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic […]
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Curtain Call: No Return

If you still don’t have tickets to see our latest Seriously Entertaining show, No Return, you’re reaching the point thereof, as it’s tonight! Join us at City Winery in New York City for an evening taking in music, poetry, comedy, horror, and a little papal politics as we lay on a mega-selling, award-winning, genius-laden line-up for your intellectual pleasure. Ian Caldwell‘s first novel, The Rule of Four (Random House, 2004), spent forty-nine weeks on The New York Times best seller list, and was a huge hit around the world. Now he’s back, with The Fifth Gospel (Simon & Schuster, 2015), “a suspenseful, trust-no-one journey through the Vatican’s libraries, courts, and parking garages all the way to the Pope’s private rooms” (read our review). In this interview, Ian reveals some of the amazing stories he discovered during his decade-long research for The Fifth Gospel. The Vatican, for example, is “even smaller than a golf course… it would fit in just one corner of Central Park;” and yet “it has the highest crime rate in the world…” Meredith Scardino: “I don’t believe comedy has limits. My personal rule when it comes to touchier subject matter is: never attack the victim. As many comedy writers say, punch up not down.” Read […]
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CSI: Vatican

The Fifth Gospel by Ian Caldwell Simon & Schuster, 2015; 448pp “The search for information about the Vatican is maddening,” writes Ian Caldwell, “not because that information is scarce but because it’s oceanic, bottomless, centuries deep — and because, just when you think you’re on the cusp of a discovery, you drop head-first into the abyss.” Caldwell’s new novel, which arrived in bookstores this week a decade after his blockbusting debut, The Rule of Four (Random House, 2004), is set almost entirely within the forty-four hectares of the Vatican. Accurate information, what Caldwell calls “near-photographic realism,” is therefore essential for grounding a thriller whose mechanics rely on precise knowledge of everything from canonical law to the subtle variations in the Synoptic Gospels’ accounts of the Resurrection. Though set in 2004, in the last days of the papacy of John Paul II, this is still a world of spooky priests, Kafkaesque surveillance, and ancient grudges breaking to new mutiny, reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s medieval masterpiece The Name of the Rose (1983). Our narrator-hero is the young Eastern priest Father Alex Andreou, who lives in the Vatican’s Belvedere Palace (“because in Italian you can call anything a palace”) with his young son, Peter. Unhappily separated from his wife, Mona, he […]
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January 29 2015, The Hollywood Times

Uma Thurman, Dan Stevens, Simon Doonan and more at the House of Speakeasy Gala sponsored by Craigellachie and Aberfeldy
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