Loos and Liveness

Fred Armisen's recent dump on the one-man show is easy pickin's, no doubt, but it's smile-worthy nonetheless (h/t Playgoer). (For a look at a long sketch toward the above, see Armisen and Brownstein's pre-Portlandia bit here; the choice moment is the "last hat" breakthrough at ≈ 5:19).

Easily the truest-to-life bit in the SNL sketch, among many contenders, is the onstage/backstage bathroom—an amenity which, despite its obvious awkwardness, happens to be a feature at two of the best theaters around: the Atlantic Theater Company here in New York and L.A.'s Theater of NOTE. I happened to be reminded of the latter recently by this photo trove, which catalogues some of the best work I saw in L.A. in grainy black-and-white photos (pre-2006).


Pamela Gordon and Alina Phelan in Eden at NOTE

As great as it is to have these photographic reminders, the work I witnessed in that amazingly intimate space remains still more vivid in my memory, in color and in three dimensions. It's the immanent liveness of theater, of course, that keeps it so alive in our memory—or can make a masturbatory solo show so skin-crawlingly awful.

Missing the Boat

When faced with the choice to save her lover by submitting sexually to his torturer, Tosca sings "Vissi d'arte." When Billy Bigelow is faced with the daunting prospect of being a father, he gets an eight-minute "Soliloquy."

But when Bess is faced, in the first act of Porgy and Bess, with the choice of shacking up with Porgy while her lover Crown evades a murder rap, she doesn't get an aria. The same thing happens, or fails to happen, in the second act, after Sportin' Life dangles a trip to New York, along with some "happy dust," in front of her; there's no song to dramatize our heroine's decision point here, either. At this point in the new Broadway-ized version of the show, arranger Diedre L. Murray gives Audra McDonald, as Bess, a few eerily reharmonized lines of Sportin' Life's pitch, "There's a Boat That's Leavin' Soon for New York," as she equivocates over a drug relapse. A quick sniff later, and she's off to the big city.

I'm not sure why the Gershwins and their librettist, DuBose Heyward, didn't give Bess arias at these obvious story points, but it's hard to escape the suspicion that they just didn't think of their two leads as equals, in the way McDonald and this new revisal's director, Diane Paulus, do. As Paulus told the Times, her "only agenda with the Gershwin opera was 'to make sure that we had a story that lived up to its title.' With emphasis on the conjunction, she continued, 'Porgy and Bess. Porgy and Bess.' "

Alas, it seems, the story doesn't live up to that title, and no amount of tinkering can change that. But if Bess' role is under-dramatized, the picture isn't much fuller for Porgy, who gets essentially one solo burst of joy, "I Got Plenty of Nothin'," and then two back-to-back cries of the heart at the very end, when he resolves to leave in search of Bess ("Where's My Bess" and "I'm on My Way").

While I have little interest in wading into the persistent controversy over the opera's alleged racial insensitivity, I think one reason the piece continues to seem suspect to some folks is this under-dramatization of the titular leads, as if they weren't quite worthy of rich, conflicted interior lives. Indeed, the defining moments in the opera (with two big exceptions, which I'll get to) are community numbers: "My Man's Gone Now," "A Woman Is a Sometime Thing," "Summertime," the Catfish Row seller's sequence, the fishermen's song, "I Can't Sit Down," etc. And as accomplished as these are ("My Man's Gone Now" in particular is masterful, though not so much in the current Broadway production), they make the work feel more like a pageant of black life than a fully characterized drama about specific individuals. That kind of sympathetic but arm's-length view, while arguably a valid approach for writers depicting a community that's not their own, can hover dangerously close to condescension. And in the wrong directorial hands, the result can indeed look like minstrelsy. (But in the right hands, as Joe Nocera reminds us, the community chorales can be the glue that holds the piece together.)

Paulus and Suzan-Lori Parks' approach to this challenge—essentially, to strip back the pageantry and ground the acting in a kind of stark naturalism—is fine as far as it goes, but of course it can't go very far with a piece that was conceived more in medium shot than in close-up. The result is a watchable Porgy and Bess, in large part because of the lead actors, but fundamentally a dull one. For all all the alleged violence its vaunted revisionism does to the original opera, the show actually feels overly reverent.

Ah, but the reason to do P&B is the music, right? Well, that's another problem. Some scores can survive downsizing, but perhaps it's a tribute to the George Gershwin's operatic ambition that his score seems to limp along in this chamber-ized version. The show's crowning achievement, the love duet "Bess, You Is My Woman Now," is a rich, soaring harmonic feast (I would entertain seriously the idea that it's the best thing he ever did), but its extraordinary lift and reach can't be realized, it seems, with anything less than the full orchestration.

The only moment that pierces the production's polite torpor comes with the lesser but still great follow-up duet, "I Loves You, Porgy," in which the production's intensely naturalistic approach pays off in spades; I've never heard this song sound quite so desperate and provisional ("If you can keep me/I wants to stay here"). Lacking a great aria of her own, this is McDonald's most thrilling connection with the material, and Norm Lewis—a mild, genial Porgy for most of the show—matches her fervor note for note.

I should add that the mostly older audience I saw the show with seemed to love it, and I can only hope they've heard the score before and were filling in the missing orchestral colors in their minds (as I was). While I don't quite believe that this new Porgy and Bess does any damage to the original—it hasn't been erased from the culture's hard drive, last time I checked—one sense in which I sadly agree with the show's detractors is that it's a really unfortunate way to be introduced to the manifold glories of Gershwin's score. I doubt that the opera's dramatic deficits can (or really need to be) solved, but in putting its focus there, this new P&B misses the main reason it's worth reviving.

Ken Davenport Bait

I know he's been busy putting together TEDxBroadway, but how did the industrious blogger at Producer's Pespective miss Jonah Lehrer's interesting piece about collaboration, in last week's New Yorker? It's right up Ken's alley, which is to say Shubert Alley.

Though billed as a debunking of the "brainstorming myth," Lehrer's piece is actually more about what kinds of collaborative environments actually do produce the best results. A key example at its heart is a study by Northwestern's Brian Uzzi, who analyzed decades of Broadway musicals in terms of what he calls the "Q factor," or degree of interconnectedness among the creative collaborators. Uzzi found that the most successful musicals, both critically and commercially, were created by teams with an "intermediate" Q factor, or a moderate level of social and professional familiarity—i.e., a mix of folks who'd worked together before and thus had a useful shorthand, plus fresh voices who added something new and/or challenging to the group. Uzzi noted that musicals in the 1920s, for instance, though they produced reams of great songs, were predominantly quickie flops, a deficit he blamed on a too-inbred Broadway scene, or, in his terms, “When the Q was too high, the work also suffered. The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation.” But when the Q was too low—when a show was essentially a collective creative blind date—the show suffered at the box office (though how this explains Spider-man I don't know).

Uzzi's North Star of success is West Side Story, in which the titans Laurents, Bernstein, and Robbins welcomed the newbie Sondheim. My only quibble with that example is that, as has been amply pointed out since, West Side Story was only a modest success on Broadway, and it wasn't until the film version that the work was commercially and critically certified as a knockout (wrongly, in my minority opinion).

In any case, insert pithy lesson about how to make your show better here, and you've got a ready-made post for Ken Davenport's blog (which, in all seriousness, is a model of the form).

Clean "Talk," Dirty Reviews

The post-Tina Brown New Yorker has not been known for its squeamishness (am I the only one who vividly remembers the awkward shock of that hilariously severe Tilda Swinton nude photo spread of nearly 20 years ago?), so I was shocked in reverse to see the way a recent Talk of the Town handled Rick Santorum's infamous "Google problem":

“If Rick Santorum wants to invite himself into the bedrooms of gays and lesbians (and their dogs), I say we ‘include’ him in our sex lives—by naming a gay sex act after him.” [Dan] Savage, who has a long history as a bigot-baiter and civil libertarian (he started the “It Gets Better” project), pounced on the idea. He announced a contest, and readers wrote in with suggestions: “How about calling condoms ‘Ricks’?” In the end, Savage’s readers came up with an unprintable definition. If you have not yet Googled “Santorum,” take a deep breath first.

Readers at risk of hyperventilating over the finer points of sodomy got no such warning when they cast their eyes across Hilton Als' recent review of Thomas Bradshaw's Burning, which featured an extensive, hard-to-miss script excerpt about the distinctive pleasures of anal sex with black women, or when they surveyed John Lahr's exceptionally hostile review of The Book of Mormon, in which he seemed to take special delight in verbatim quotes of the show's most shocking language, including a script excerpt that begins with the immortal line of the Ugandan mission's show-within-the-show, "My name is Joseph Smit’. I’m going to fuck this baby."

I know every double standard cuts both ways; am I saying I'd rather have the New Yorker be more consistently filthy? Not necessarily. But this contrast between the demure smirk at the front of the book and the no-holds-barred frankness of the boys in the back pages is striking. Interesting, too, that this transgressive impulse seems to be the exclusive provenance of the magazine's theater critics; I don't recall Alex Ross or Anthony Lane or Peter Schjeldahl cutting loose like this, even in quotation. To each section its own rules, I guess—and it may be true, to mangle a conservative shibboleth, that when it comes to criticism an editorial policy governs best that governs the least.

Link Sees

A start to a busy week, post-Queens move, means more quick hits out the gate:

• Mike Daisey breaks through the Ira Glass ceiling and apparently gets through to Apple brass.
  
• Terry Teachout's lovely tribute to composer Morten Lauridsen, with whom, true to form, I only became familiar by singing with the NYC Master Chorale.
  
• StageGrade not dead.
  
• Some of the best crowd-source blogging the medium has ever seen, with the intensely compelling follow-up here.
  
• Hunka's farewell to theater blogging?

On the Rebound

My friend and colleague Molly Smith Metzler had a really shitty Christmas: She got a bad case of mono just as her long-anticipated and star-studded New York debut, Close Up Space, got a bad case of bad reviews.

Just a few weeks later, her health on the mend, she was in Costa Mesa, California, to rehearse her other big play, Elemeno Pea, a caustic comedy of class envy which I saw and loved last June at Humana. That production proved she's better, and deserves better, than the Close Up Space reviews would indicate; with any luck, and the right cast under South Coast a.d. Marc Masterson, Elemeno Pea will again show the world what she can do, and the American theater will hold onto her sharp, funny voice.

At least, that's the hope behind my Los Angeles Times feature on the play.

Heading for the Hills

After from a six-month sublet in Cobble Hill, Greenpoint, Brooklyn has been my New York home since early 2006. I moved here with my then-girlfriend when our relationship was shaky, and we were the only non-Polish residents in our six-unit building.

How much has changed: She and I are the married parents of an irrepressibly bright, sweet son, and the 'hood has become overrun with young non-Poles like ourselves (and much younger); the ratio in our building is now just 1/3 Polish. The area has become so gentrified, alas, that we can't afford the extra space for our growing family. So tomorrow we move to Forest Hills, a lovely Queens neighborhood where we'll have a slightly bigger shoebox to call home (and Oliver will at last have his own room).

That happens tomorrow, which means today is our last day in Greenpoint. There's a lot to say goodbye to, from Paulie Gee's to Cafe Royal, McGolrick Park (above) to McCarren Park (this neighborhood used to be Irish), Grumpy to Karczma. Nearby Williamsburg was the site of my first New York Times review assignment (at the Brick) and my first New York solo gig (at Pete's Candy Store). Above all, and honestly the hardest thing about leaving the hood, is our scrappy, warm little Greenpoint Church, which has been an extended family to all of us. That last affiliation provides us with at least the excuse to return once a week to the neighborhood that's been the only home our family has known in this world.

The rest of the week, we'll be busy making ourselves a new home. Regular blogging will resume shortly.