Supersize meals

It's not that I mind ginormous sets at the theater or opera, but they can really backfire. Too often, the director feels that merely plopping the cast in the middle of a Cecil B. DeMille or D.W. Griffith extravaganza is enough: That's it, my job is done! No need to think any further! But it's part of a director's job to offer some kind of take on what he or she is staging. You may not agree with Peter Sellars saying that Marke was Tristan's lover in the Tristan Project's synopsis, but at least it's a point of view.

Case of a big set that works because it makes a point integral to a director's reading of the work: Thomas Ostermeier's rotating apartment for Nora (A Doll's House), seen at BAM in 2004.

Case of a big set with no clear purpose other than épater le bourgeois: Il Trittico at the Met, seen on Monday. For the first act of Puccini's trilogy, "Il Tabarro," there's an almost-lifesize barge on stage, and even that is dwarfed by the very high bridge it sits under. Other than it being shorthand for Paris (it's very Hôtel du Nord), I'm just not sure what purpose it serves. The monastery in "Suor Angelica" looks frighteningly authentic—or at least like an American dream of a Tuscan monastery—and includes a gurgling fountain; the 1950s apartment in "Gianni Schicci" is perfect down to the overstuffed furniture and the boar's head mounted on the wall.

The people sitting behind us loved it all, ooh'ing and aah'ing every time the curtain went up and revealed yet another set designer's wet dream. As for me, when it comes to Met productions I much preferred the boulders in Jenufa a few months back. And they were big, too!

Speaking of bigness, I cannot recommend Coram Boy enough. It's getting a rough deal from the critics (except for ours: Yay, David Cote!) but it's one of the best things on Broadway, and certainly among the few shows there to be worth the ticket price—or more, since I hear discount tickets are easy to find. This London import is pure theater magic (emphasis on theater) since its effects belong to the stage and nowhere else. I may have been positively biased because I'm a big fan of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, but the show doesn't just pile on the plot twists, it also delivers genuine pathos along with breathtaking staging ideas courtesy of director Melly Still.

No wonder that adaptation of a YA novel came from London's National Theatre, which also presented the stage version of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. The Brits know how to put on children's shows that not only don't underestimate children's intelligence, but also dare to show them that the world is not necessarily a nice place, testing their moral compass in the process. In the US, on the other hand, children's entertainment is sanitized beyond belief. Sure, parents have to prepare their little ones before going to Coram Boy, but that's part of the job, and the experience should benefit both generations.

Five years

I got a little emotional dropping my ballot in the urn at the French Consulate Saturday afternoon. "A voté!" was called out. I selected the ballot bearing Ségolène Royal's name, though I voted more for the Socialist Party than for her, and knowing full well that Sarkozy was going to win. How not to get a little verklempt when doing one's citizen duty, especially for an election that may well be considered historic a few years (months?) hence? Perversely, I welcome Sarkozy's win. It's going to make things very interesting for France, a country that's often welcome an authoritarian figure at the helm in the past. We fear it and want it at the same time, seemingly unable to figure out how to deal with modernity without a manly man telling us what to do.

After leaving the Consulate, I crossed Central Park westward to attend The Tristan Project. I can't say I was as bowled over as most audience members. While often beautiful, Bill Viola's images also were a little obvious: fire and water to symbolize purification? What next, white means good and black is evil? I was also frustrated by the relative disconnect between the impassive behavior of the singers onstage (except for Anne Sofie von Otter, who looked and sounded stupendous) and the video unfurling above them. Yes yes yes, I understand what the point was, but to me it felt like empty illustration instead of two art forms enriching and illuminating each other. Even worse, the visuals looked a bit…passé at times, especially during the shakycam, Blair Witch moments. Technically, the use of video and screens felt more sophisticated—and better integrated in the overall concept—at the Justin Timberlake show. It's nice to see opera enter the 20th century; it'd be even nicer for it to enter the 21st.

This topic is obviously tricky because I really don't want to come across like one of those stereotypical NYC operagoers who screech that it's all about the music and no directors with ideas should apply. So yes, I love it that Lincoln Center put up some big $$$ bringing over The Tristan Project, and I much prefer this kind of failure to the Led Zeppirelli extravaganzas—you know, the huge ones that laboriously lift off the ground before going down in flames. And I'm eagerly awaiting Gérard Mortier's arrival, ’cause you can already tell he has Peter Gelb's number. But no, Tristan is not beyond criticism. But then, debate is good. Doesn't arguing over the artistic merits of a production beat arguing over, say, boring NYC obsessions like real estate or the latest foodie emporium? Right, thought so.

Blonde ambition

So, Legally Blonde…

First of all, it plays at the Palace, where I saw Liza Minnelli do her creepy but enthralling tribute to her father, Minnelli on Minnelli, in 1999. My pal Moe had gotten us balcony seats but we were able to sneak down to a better section as the show was pathetically undersold. This was in the pre–David Gest days, when Liza was physically and psychologically struggling, and she even did a number in a wheelchair—as a bit of a lark, but not really.

For my return to the Palace, girls (and their moms) had replaced middle-aged men (and their moms) in the audience. And many of them had or were about to raid the merch tables: stuffed dogs (there’s two live ones in the show), pink T-shirts, sweat pants (sorry, yoga pants) with OMIGOD printed on the butt, hoodies, etc. Drinks and snacks were also allowed at the seats, so quite a bit munching was going on inside, albeit not close enough to where I was to really bug me (I turn into a complete fascist when it comes to eating at the theater and even movies). In other words: It was the Broadway equivalent to a trip to the multiplex—at ten times the price, of course.

Overall, the show achieves exactly what it aims for, and a little more. There's quite a few positive elements in it: lots of fun, energetic dance scenes courtesy of choreographer/director Jerry Mitchell; a good cast (with Dilettante fave Leslie Kritzer predictably strong as sorority girl Serena), a strong second act (a rarity in musicals, as we know) and a score that’s not great but definitely above average (it's way better than Wicked, and opening number “Omigod You Guys” is lodged in my head). Laura Bell Bundy delivers as Elle Woods, though I will for once agree with Ben Brantley in that she lacks that elusive spark that makes a musical-theater star. In other words, she's no Kristin Chenoweth or even Sutton Foster.

I've seen and heard comments about the overwhelmingly female appeal of the show. And why not? Most pro sports have an overwhelmingly male appeal but that doesn't seem to be a problem to anybody. Why is a woman in a Legally Blonde hoodie cast as a victim of merchandizing run amok but a guy in a Red Sox one isn't? All I can say is, I hope The Tristan Project has decent merch. Like maybe an Isolde baby T, or branded power drinks.

Last-ditch effort

I just noticed that director Ariane Mnouchkine has been writing a campaign blog hosted by the daily newspaper Libération (which has thrown all pretense of journalistic neutrality to the wind and openly supports Ségolène Royal's candidacy). Her latest post, dated from yesterday, is a plea for people to vote Ségolène Royal. It is impassioned and poetic, and those lucky enough to have seen Mnouchkine's stage work will recognize the tone. It ends with these words: "Will you stand it on Sunday night to learn that we missed by a vote? A single one. Yours. I implore you." The comments are a doozy, and seem to nicely encapsulate the apprehension and mixed feelings shared by French voters.

I myself will vote tomorrow—French citizens living abroad vote a day earlier—at the consulate then cross over to the west side for five hours of the Tristan Project at Avery Fisher Hall. It will be my first live Wagner opera; in other words, tomorrow I'm finally losing my Wagner cherry. Esa-Pekka, Bill and Peter: please, be gentle!

As a side note, that production, which has been received with near-universal raves, was seen at Gérard Mortier's Opéra de Paris a couple of years ago, which makes Peter Gelb's recent catty comment sound even more myopic and stupid: "You won't be attending any performances like this [the Met's 40th-anniversary gala] at the City Opera of the future, or the Paris Opera of the present." He then proceeded to describe Met darlings Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón as "the future glory and hope for opera." In a flash, Gelb undermined all the good will he amassed over the course of a pretty positive first season at the Met. Dumb dumb dumb.

Pre-postap hoopla

It's raining postapocalyptic novels! Cormac McCarthy's The Road has pulled off a neat little trifecta—Pulitzer, Oprah and film deal. Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown and Jim Crace's The Pesthouse are getting reviewed everywhere Crace got Francine Prose in the Times and Joyce Carol Oates in The New Yorker—double whammy! Personally I found the latter book a flimsy little read, with too many plotholes (I'm willing to buy that America has reverted to feudal times while Europe seems to do relatively better, but why hasn't anybody ever returned from across the pond to report, if it's so great over there?)

Readers of this blog know that I love postap fiction, so I'm pretty psyched—if not exactly reassured, in the grand scheme of things—by this onslaught. And let's add to the list. Of course I'm going to be fascinated by someone who describes American cities as being surrounded by rings of "necrotic suburbs,"somone who paints a future in which "aviation will become an increasingly expensive, elite activity as the oil age dribbles to a close, and then it will not exist at all," while "the circumstances we face with energy and climate change will require us to live much more locally, probably profoundly and intensely so. We have to grow more of our food locally, on a smaller scale than we do now, with fewer artificial 'inputs,' and probably with more human and animal labor."

Except these visions aren't from any of the aforementioned novels but courtesy of James Howard Kunstler via his 2005 book-length essay The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century and his blog Clusterfuck Nation. Yes, Kunstler is among my favorite pre-postap (are you following?) doomsayers. That I essentially agree with many aspects of his pessimistic predictions (while being frustrated by his occasional embarrassing social conservatism) makes him even more compelling.

Kunstler's theory is simple: The American way of life is built on the abuse of unsustainable energy sources and is bound to crash, leading to changes that will be beyond radical. He exposed this basic idea in the book and has been expanding on it ever since, most recently in an article for Orion, which I quoted above. And no, switching to ethanol or french-fry oil or whatever the hell is pushed as an alternative energy source this week won't change a thing: "The truth is that no combination of alternative fuels or systems for using them will allow us to continue running America, or even a substantial fraction of it, the way we have been."

Among the many consequences is that our age of global economy would disintegrate as communities would need to become more self-reliant, as they did before the industrial revolution facilitated the transportation of goods and people. Say goodbye to that cheap T-shirt from China, American teenager! Most U.S. cities would be in real trouble (enter the necrotic suburbs, a memorable expression worthy of the best postap fiction), relying as they do on the ferrying in of food and of pretty much every consumers' product they need. This change will also have repercussions on large and/or national bureaucracies such as the education system and government itself, which will be as unable to function as the cities.

If this isn't postap in its rawest state, I don't know what is.

What to do about it? Everybody from politicians to Times columnist/flatearther Thomas Friedman (one of Kunstler's favorite whipping boys) is accused of delusional myopia that leads them to a single-minded emphasis on finding new sources of energy while we should instead focus on, among other things, "walkable communities and public transit." Europe, with its well-developed public-transportation network, smaller cars and inferior energy waste (there's a lot less air-co in summer over there for instance—I grew up in the Mediterranean but never encountered large-scale systematic air-conditioning until I moved to the US in 1987) is way ahead of the US on this count, though by no means perfect.

Ditch the Hitch?

My short review of Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is out in the new TONY. How I wish I had liked this book more. I agree with almost everything in it, and yet found it to be a tiresome slog; by the end, I felt as if I was stuck on the subway next to a self-righteous stranger screaming in my ear. Of course it's kinda moot to say that a reasonable tone would be more successful in luring believers—if believers were susceptible to reason, they wouldn't believe to begin with. But there has to be a middleground between giving a free pass to superstition and obscurantism and Hitchens' brand of condescending aggro.

Cheap little mistakes don't help his case either. The French right's saying in the 1930s wasn't "Meilleur Hitler que Blum" but "Mieux vaut Hitler que Blum," for instance, and the Vichy slogan wasn't "Famille, Travail, Patrie" but "Travail, Famille, Patrie." But God is in the details after all, so it makes sense Hitchens would be cavalier about them.

Tongue twister

For a regular fix of home, we French expats in New York tune to France 2's evening news, shown here at 7pm. They're even subtitled for monolingual American viewers who want to experience TV news utterly devoid of neckless sportscasters. Judging from this screen grab, Nicolas Sarkozy had a refreshingly candid moment. But alas, it turns out there was a mistake in that subtitle—and no, it wasn't the repetition of "that we can." Sarko was inviting the French to rally around him, but the translator took some liberties. While many would think he or she simply verbalized Sarko's implied thought, he/she is now out of a job.

As someone who's often translated and interpreted, I can testify to the everpresent temptation to fix something. I remember an instance, in particular, when I was interpreting for an American writer interviewing the director Leos Carax. It took an enormous amount of discipline to remain neutral and not tell that idiot he was squandering a golden opportunity: Carax obviously was ready to open up but the journo blithely went down his list of questions, never following up on the various leads Carax tantalizingly kept waving in front of him. How can you not follow up when a filmmaker says "Many things went terribly wrong on that shoot…"?!?

Ponder this as you play a few rounds of this Battle Royal (tip 'o the hat to my brother in Paris for sending the link).

A sad little medium struggling to be heard

That sad little medium (to quote from the brilliant Canadian series Slings & Arrows, which I've belatedly discovered) is theater, of course. It's true that its voice can get lost in our current maelstrom of media offerings, but its potential wonders remain unmatched. Emphasis on potential here, because we all know you have to kiss a lot of frogs to chance upon a prince.

The latest batrachian I encountered was Aldo Perez's The Curse of the Mystic Renaldo The, which I caught Friday night at the brand-spanking-new 3 Legged Dog Theater. (I also saw Legally Blonde and LoveMusik over the weekend, but more on mastodons those later.) On the plus side, the production makes a genuine effort to develop a specific aesthetic drawing from silent movies, Dada and Richard Foreman—as a friend put it, it reeked of NYU's Experimental Theatre Wing. And it was gratifying to discover a genuine stage presence in Jenny Lee Mitchell, who moves with the precision of a screwball comedienne, possesses an impressive vocal range and even plays the clarinet. But Perez seems blissfully unaware that it's doubly hard to capture your audience's interest without a narrative: You have to compensate with ideas and visuals and soundscapes, not tired vaudevillian shtick, mugging and feeble dick jokes. But hey, those got laughs, and common wisdom has it that the customer's always right, so who am I to begrudge?

À propos of Slings & Arrows, it's obvious that the fictional New Burbage Festival theater where the series is set is inspired by Stratford, but I found it hard not to thing of BAM, especially in the third episode of the first season, when Mark McKinney's general manager escapes to a weekend in Toronto and discovers the delights of Mamma Mia! after a steady diet of mediocre Shakespeare at his own institution. There is such a thing as too much Bard, and BAM is running right into that wall.

Men with long, silky hair rule

I was bummed to miss Dimmu Borgir's show at Nokia—and I'm even more bummed now that I've read Steve Smith's account. Steve is dead right about the fact that hipsters tend to laugh at bombastic black metal and prefer BM when it's recorded on hissy 4-track by misanthropic loners with mommy issues. But while I do enjoy the latter subgenre, particularly when oozing out of Burzum, Draugar, Leviathan or Xasthur's nether regions, there's no denying that over-the-top BM is giddily enjoyable, as theatrically satisfying as classic disco and an evening at the Met. I particularly love reading liner notes that include references to recording with the Riga Symphony or whatever former communist orchestra is paying the bills by backing—through gritted teeth—metallers with Wagnerian ambitions.

At least a fair number of great metal bands is due to visit us: Celtic Frost opens for Type O Negative at Irving Plaza next week; a scary-looking bill including Watain and USBMers Nachtmystium hits BB King's on May 14; Immortal is at BB's July 13, followed there ten days later by Mayhem (not crazy about Attila Csihar being back at the mike but that's not reason enough for spurning an opportunity to see Mayhem) and by Taiwan's Chthonic on August 21. You could also add Emperor (June 1) to the list, though I saw them last year and don't feel a pressing need to repeat the experience, good as it was.

And while I'm on the metal tip, the label/distributor Ledo Takas, from Vilnius, now takes PayPal, considerably easing up the purchase of extreme music from the Baltic and Eastern European countries. I have a soft spot for Estonia's Loits and Obtest, a Lithunian outfit that delivers emphatic "war metal" (with, alas, the dubious politics that tend to accompany that genre).

Tech-free at last

I saw in my very own magazine (well, the one I work for, not my property—which would be, I gather, this humble blog) that some people take their BlackBerry to the beach. Let me reassure you, dear readers, that I myself am getting ready to go to the beach, but you sure as hell won't hear from me for the next six days. Nope, I'm going off the grid, as the young, the eco-warriors and the survivalists say. (I have no idea where this came from, considering I don't belong to any of these three groups.) Okay, fine, so I may try to reach out and find a computer or television on Sunday to see the results of the French election, but that's it!

At least there will be tons to talk about when I return, not so much about the trip but about the avalanche of plays opening at the end of the month and early May. Hang tight, it's sure to be a very bumpy ride.

Charlotte 4 Ever

Three pieces in the new Time Out New York: a review of Charlotte Gainsbourg's album, 5:55; a review of Elizabeth Hand's latest novel, Generation Loss; and a blow-by-blow account of my shopping trip to the Mitsuwa mall in Edgewater, NJ.

In tribute to Gainsbourg père et fille, here's a cover of their infamous duet "Lemon Incest" (which liberally borrows from a Chopin piece) by the excellent Belgian duo Vive la Fête, aka Danny Mommens and Els Pynoo.

[fixed link] MP3 Vive la Fête "Lemon Incest" from République Populaire (2001)

And before I forget: Tune in to WNYC 93.9 FM tomorrow (Thursday 19) at 2pm. I'll be on Soundcheck to talk about one of my favorite subjects—the Eurovision Song Contest. The 2007 edition is only a few weeks away after all, and it's high time we figure out who'll be singing what in Helsinki.

Whimpering across the finish line

Braving a raging rainstorm, we caught Salvage, the third and final chapter of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia yesterday afternoon. Hours and hours of Russian philosophizing, and what do we, the hardy audience members, get? A wet blanket of a play. A timid whimper. A soap opera that dares not speak its name.

Unlike the first two installments, which offered a variety of points of view within a motley group of (mostly) Russian characters, Salvage is dominated by one person; unfortunately, it happens to be played by Brían F. O'Byrne, in one of the most single-note performances I've ever seen. It's actually rather amazing to see an actor so steadfastly avoid any range over the course of so many hours. This was already germinating in Voyage and Shipwreck, but it's a lot worse in Salvage since there's nobody else to pick up the slack: The other men are reduced to bellowing gasbags (particularly Ethan Hawke's Bakunin) and the women pretty much disappear—the etch-a-sketch treatment awarded to Malwida von Meysenbug, played with very dry humor by Jennifer Ehle, is particularly irritating.

While Jack O'Brien did a decent job of staging this whale of a show (making me very curious to see his take on Puccini's Il Trittico at the Met next month), I never, over the course of nearly nine hours, felt the thrill of watching ideas in action—and yes, it can be thrilling to watch ideas ferment on stage. Come to think of it, I never felt the thrill of watching action, period. I can only shake my head in astonishment as to how little punch The Coast of Utopia packs.

The war at home only

Just got some advance promo for Ken Burns' new marathon doc, The War, coming to PBS in September ’07. The war in question is WWII, which is described on the package as "the greatest cataclysm in history." I won't argue with that. What really gets up my nose is that The War will portray said cataclysm "through the stories of ordinary people in four American towns."

Hey, Ken, it's not called World War II for nothing!

So does this mean the doc will only cover 1941–45, when America participated, or will it generously go for 1939–45, the dates taught in European schools? Or will it be 1937–45, when Japan attacked China? Hmmm, let's take a closer look at the press materials. The first episode is titled "A Necessary War: December 1941–December 1942." So it wasn't necessary before? It's not like the U.S. wasn't aware of what was going on in Europe and Asia, including things like the ongoing Shoah.

There's more: The series "explores the history and horror of the Second World War from an American perspective." But this doesn't mean America was not concerned by what was going on in 1937–39; the rest of the world was going up in flames and you think the US was oblivious? If Burns was insistent on focusing only on the US, it would have been great if an episode had been dedicated to the war's impact here before Pearl Harbor.

Okay, enough with the apoplectic episode. We'll return to our regular programming in the next installment.

The year of wishful thinking

Wishful thinking—the prosaic way to describe Joan Didion's magical thinking, and one I feel apply better to the play based on Didion's book of the same title. And that show is nothing if not prosaic. Actually, it's barely a show at all, which is quite something to say considering that it consists of a titan of the theater, Vanessa Redgrave, alone on stage for 100 minutes.

But Didion—who adapted her memoir—should have realized the endeavor is nothing but a live book on tape. David Hare's direction didn't help either; a lot of dramatic events are recounted at the Booth stage, but none happen on stage: There's nothing theatrical about what happens in The Year of Magical Thinking. Why not have Redgrave record the text so you can play it back at home? The difference in experience would be minimal, and at least you'd avoid the Booth's horrendous seats, which are even worse than flying coach on Cattlecar Air. The theater's owners have even done something egregiously abusive: In order to add a few seats to the orchestra, no aisle breaks up the first four rows or so; if you sit in the middle, it's a very long way to go over other people's legs if you want to exit.

Glass Theft Auto

The trailer for Grand Theft Auto 4 is out and…wow, could it be Philip Glass on the soundtrack?!? Not only do the visuals emulate Koyaanisqatsi, but so does the music. At first I wasn't sure if it was the doc's actual soundtrack—I haven't listened to it in years and at this point, a lot of Glass' music melds into one big blob in my mind. Thankfully, smarter people have found the similar footage in the game and the movie and posted it. I certainly hope GTA4 will use more Glass, because he's perfect for video games; I'm surprised he isn't used more, in fact.

As for GTA4 itself, it's set in New York and looks absolutely amazing. The trailer smartly doesn't show any proper gaming; if you've played GTA, which is only nominally about driving, you'll know it's an engulfing experience and accomplishing whatever mission you're given is almost secondary. My only regret is that I quickly get carsick—go ahead, laugh!—and I can't play for more than an hour or so. Which is probably a blessing in disguise, come to think of it.

Ségolène et Nicolas

Forty percent of French voters are still undecided and the presidential election's first round is less than two weeks away. At least Caen reggaeman (I never thought I'd ever type the words Caen and reggaeman in the same sentence) Khalifa is hitting both leading candidates equally in his song "Ségolène et Nicolas." That would be Royal and Sarkozy, respectively, in case you haven't been following this soap opera. They have pretty amazing rhythm sections in Normandy, uh? No wonder: It's Sly and Robbie.

Meet my PEN pals

PEN's World Voices festival, on April 24–29, is a rare chance to see/meet/hear non-English and non-American writers in New York. (You'd think this shouldn't be such a rare occurrence in this cosmopolitan city of ours, but the state of translation in the US is pretty pathetic.) Anyway, some of the groupings are intriguing. What to expect, from instance, from a reading including Miranda July, Eric Bogosian and Algerian noir auteur Yasmina Khadra on April 28? Will I suddenly sprout the gift of ubiquity so I can go to the panel on literary thrillers with Vladimir Sorokin and Jean Echenoz that same day? And some of these writers are pretty damn busy: Alain Mabanckou is listed as participating in four events, as is Khadra (including a great-sounding panel on Mediterranean thrillers with Massimo Carlotto and Carlo Lucarelli).

Still, I can't help but whip out my red editor's pen. PEN dedicates a section to translation, something close to my heart for obvious reasons. Among other things, it includes the titles of non-English novels that deserve to be translated or are out of print in English. Amélie Nothomb's last name is misspelled twice by the very person who recommends her. Pretty scary, considering the books are nominated by PEN members.

All right, enough with the petty hating: Despite its establishment timidity, I love PEN, really I do! So let's end this post with a special shout-out to all my PEN peeps and their new prez, the stone-cold fox (librarian division) known as Francine Prose! Go Licky!

MP3 Larry Tee featuring Princess Superstar "Licky (Hervé Goes Low Mix)"

Thanks to my colleague Bruce Tantum for alerting me—and all Time Out New York readers, for that matter—to this awesome track.

Fergie time is all the time

My love for Stacey Ferguson is no mystery. I know many rejoiced when she went under—way under—in Poseidon, but I was sorry when she met her aquatic demise. The only way I could have been sorrier is if Gwen Stefani had played that part (but no, she was slumming in some movie called Aviator by that washed-out Oscar winner, Martin Scorsese). Anyway, Fergie keeps getting better and better.

First, there was the cover of "9 to 5" with Charlotte Church (who masochistically books guests who often upstage her on her TV show—just remember the instaclassic version of "Beat It" with a totally trashed Amy Winehouse).

Now, Kevipod's Music has posted a two-minute excerpt from "Impacto," an upcoming track by reggaetón king Daddy Yankee on which Fergie does a featuring. It's only April and the rip's sound quality is pretty bad, but I smell a summer hit.

Hellz Bellz

If you went to college in Paris in the ’80s, as I did, a rite of passage was to go see Hellzapoppin'. That nuttoid 1941 movie played constantly, usually at the Action Rive Gauche theater, and it was obligatory viewing for budding cinephiles. I haven't seen it in more than 20 years because the flick's fairly unknown in the U.S., a situation not helped by its unavailability on DVD (something to do with rights, I gather). Lucky for us New Yorkers, Anthology Film Archives has scheduled a rare screening of Hellzapoppin' for Saturday 7 at 7:3opm. I'd like to think the place will be packed with throngs of Hellzafans, but maybe I'm deluded.

Someone helpfully posted the film's first nine minutes on Youtube, which should give you an idea of the meta-mayhem that is Hellzapoppin'. Based on a Broadway revue, the movie recycles the show's stars and writers, Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, and basically consists of rapid-fire Borscht Belt chaos that makes the Marx Brothers look sedate. Add at least one totally fanfriggingtastic dance number by Whitey's Lindy Hoppers (aka the Harlem Congaroos), the vaudeville charms of Martha Raye, adored second banana Mischa Auer, and you have one of the most bizarre comedies ever to come out of America—even if purists gripe, of course, that the stage version was crazier, seeing as it did not even bother with a plot (that reactionary invention foisted on cinema by Hollywood hacks, as we all know).

Support the Beeb!

Nah, not the BBC but the upcoming stage adaptation of Ann Bannon's pulp novel Beebo Brinker. I mentioned this cool project a little while ago, and now a fundraising event has been announced. Go there to sign up.

And while we're on a girly bent: I went to the Brooklyn Museum to check out its new exhibit, Global Feminisms, along with Judy Chicago's Dinner Party (pictured above). As far as the contemporary works go, I was underwhelmed by a certain lack of emphasis on craft (my own personal hangup there); I might have been more impressed if a larger share of the artists had payed less attention to their high-minded statements of intent and more to the art itself. In addition, is it politically and artistically a good idea for the museum to have a new Center for Feminist Art? Personally I'd prefer it if female artists were referred to as just artists, without being circumscribed to their own little section; it reeks too much of sitting at the back of the bus for my taste.

Overall I'm glad The Dinner Party exists and I'm glad I saw it, but I can't say I have much patience for the piece's wide-eyed womonly worship or for its palette (pinks and purples, oh my). The increasing outlandishness of the vulvae that decorate the dinner plates is amusing—I especially liked the one that looks like the egg right before the face-hugger jumps out of it in Alien—but overall the emphasis on women's nature as nurturers bugs the hell out of me. (Less vulvae, more Saabs, I say. Ba-dum-bump! Thank you, I'll be here all week!) By the end, our merry little band found itself looking for more guests to invite to the party—Angie Dickinson, Kathleen Hanna and Shane came up, but also Imelda Marcos, Ethel Merman and Eva Peron.

We are vampires

What better way to unwind after an exhausting Saturday afternoon shopping at Century 21 (in Bay Ridge, of course, where untouched racks of Ted Baker and Ben Sherman shirts await) than listening to French public radio on podcast? Even better: One of my favorites shows—Kathleen Evin's usually sedate L'humeur vagabonde—ran into a highly entertaining glitch called Jeanne Balibar.

Balibar is a French actress with an immediately identifiable voice (not unlike that of Delphine Seyrig) and immediately identifiable intellectual aspirations (inherited perhaps from her philosophy professor of a father, Etienne Balibar, a disciple of Louis Althusser). She currently stars in Jacques Rivette's latest, Ne touchez pas la hache, a Balzac adaptation.

Evin, who liked the film, invited Rivette to discuss it; he took three weeks to decide that he didn't want to plug his flick on the radio, and so Balibar was dispatched on the promo front. Her segment would be prerecorded by one of Evin's producers then played on the air.

Balibar proceeded to show up late at the hotel room where the interview took place, wore dark glasses the entire time, and responded to questions not only grudgingly, but in a voice dripping with resentment and condescension. When the taped segment ended, Evin explained that it was all the journalist's fault: Balibar was cross because she had been prevented from smoking. But of course!

Here's a translation of some choice moments:

Asked if she had to be particularly precise when dealing with Balzac's text: "You must always be precise when you claim to give the public something artistic."

But how did she approach that particular text? "As usual, with the precision that is always mine, whether there are words or not. Burlesque and silence require as much precision as when there is language. I detest the beautiful, I only love the corrosive. What is beautiful is what Rivette and Balzac do: steel against steel."

How did she work with costar Guillaume Depardieu? "Guillaume and I are animals, wolves, vampires. Each of us howls to death when there's a full moon. That's why we made this movie together. I built the scenes around Guillaume, so you could see that magnificent soul. I literally did that: I built the language around him, the body around him, the movements around him. That's what I suggested to Rivette."

Evin, back in the studio: "We'll wish her a good vacation—I think she needs some rest."

And because I just can't get enough Balibarisms, here are a couple of excerpts from her first album (yes, la Balibar sings, too).
MP3 Jeanne Balibar "Johnny Guitar" from Paramour (2003)
MP3 Jeanne Balibar and Maggie Cheung "Hélas" from Paramour (2003)

Uncommon cold

My review of the compilation Bippp: French Synth-Wave 1978/85 is in the current issue of Time Out New York. Let's use this opportunity to pay tribute to the cold wave that did not sweep a nation back in the late ’70s and early ’80s with songs from Bippp and Transmission, a comp covering the 1980s French dark wave.

Quite a few French alt-bands discovered synthesizers and punk at about the same time, as the Métal Urbain reissues from a few years ago showed. Add to that a predetermination to embrace doomed romanticism—France loves a perdant magnifique, or beautiful loser—and you have all the ingredients for a particularly thriving "back to black" musical movement. Do visit the amazing French New Wave site, which is to its topic what BNR is to metal.

MP3 A trois dans les WC "Contagion" From Bippp: French Synth-Wave 1978/85 (2006)
I only knew of that band, which hailed from the northern town of Saint-Quentin, under the name WC3—which it adopted after signing to CBS. Its first single, "Contagion," was independently released under the group's original moniker. Seventeen, the label responsible for the Métal Urbain CDs, recently reissued A trois dans les WC's early material.

MP3 Visible "Le jour se lève" from Bippp: French Synth-Wave 1978/85 (2006)
Hailing from Troyes, Visible was completely unknown to me until now. Love the elastic beat on "Le jour se lève."

Released a couple of years ago by the excellent label Infrastition, Transmission covers the years 1981–89, focusing on the French equivalents of Joy Division and the Cure. It's an indispensable purchase if you want to discover Gallic goth. That scene pretty much passed me by at the time, but I'm now diving into it with great enthusiasm—I even prefer it to the British strain I liked so much 20 years ago.

MP3 Clair Obscur "The Pilgrim's Progress" from Transmission (2005)
Founded in Creil in 1981 (this track is from 1983), Clair Obscur was one of the most theatrical and physical acts in the doom ’n’ gloom scene; remarkably, it's still active.

MP3 Opéra de Nuit "Ami-Amant" from Transmission (2005)
Fantastic 1986 track from this super-confidential band from Provence. It's as if the band is catchy despite itself.

The Hayes code

Today a colleague playfully—I think—called me evil. But how can I be evil when I go weak in the knees thinking about Darren Hayes? Really, it's just a metaphysical impossibility.

What possessed me to go see Hayes—oh hell, let's just call him Darren—at Joe's Pub last night? Savage Garden, of which he was half, used to send me to sleep. In addition, I'd heard only a couple of his solo songs, including the admittedly excellent "Popular." Actually what pushed me into going was the fact that Darren's two gigs sold out in something like ten minutes. Who wouldn't want to see for herself what could prompt such fandom?

Result? As much as I enjoyed seeing Justin Timberlake a few weeks ago, Darren came very near to obliterating his scrawny little Mouseketeer ass.

The quickest way to describe Darren and his solo music is as a male version of Kylie Minogue. Like Kylie, Darren is an Aussie now living in London. Like Kylie, he's perfected a specific kind of dance-pop that's very Euro. As the Sheila remarked, "It's Eurovision night at Joe's Pub!" Little else need be said. Oh okay, if you insist…

Darren's releasing a 25-track (!) album titled This Delicate Thing We've Made (!!) in August, so I'm sure I'll come back to the songs themselves. The thing that really struck me is how damn good a performer he is. None of that "I'm going to show you my intimate, emotional side ’cause I'm in a small venue" crap: He sold it as if he was playing to 15,000 people, not 150. That falsetto! Those dance moves! Combine the two, as in a turbocharged cover of Prince's "Baby I'm a Star" (which slyly incorporated bits of the aforementioned "Popular") and…oooh, there goes the knees again. About midway through the evening, the Sheila and I realized we had huge, uncontrollable grins plastered to our faces and eyes the size of saucers. Not a pretty sight, I can assure you.

As for the Darren freaks dedicated enough to grab those tix, much to my surprise they were 90% female—I'd expected more gay men, if only because Darren's so pop these days. But I think the women in the audience had really gotten into him back in his Savage Garden days and have remained faithful to the cause through the years. So faithful that an astonishingly large number went to both gigs. Remember that metal show I saw at Roseland last week? Both crowds were polar opposites in their composition yet similar in their die-hard fandom. Now that'll warm the evilest soul.

Climbing the fourth wall

Coincidentally, I've just seen back-to-back two shows that look at what being a performer entails. Never mind that one is a decidedly mainstream Broadway musical and the other is staged by a British experimental company at PS 122—both, in their own ways, look at what it means when the world is a stage, and the stage is your world.

Kander & Ebb's latest (and last), Curtains, is getting a bit of a rough deal from the press. Are my expectations simply lower when it comes to Broadway musicals, so that I'd find that tuner so satisfying? Granted it's creaky around the edges: The jokes are draped in showbiz cobwebs and you have a much higher chance of having a good time if B fare such as the Destry Rides Again musical holds a special place in your heart. I wouldn't be surprised if the same people who enjoy Curtains also had a pretty nifty time at Martin Short's Fame Becomes Me. (As an aside, it probably says something depressing about the audience's knowledge of world theater that the lyric "Don't bother me with Molière/Those Russians never pay," sung by a bottom-line-oriented producer, didn't get a laugh.)

But aside from the endless plot resolution at the end, I thought Curtains moved at a good clip and featured enough instances of old-school all singing/all dancing excitment to qualify as a minor (very minor) success. Two numbers, in particular, come to mind. Debra Monk is superb throughout and explodes with big-broad energy in her second-act showpiece, "It's a Business." But the most interesting number is "A Tough Act to Follow," in which David Hyde Pierce's police inspector obsessed with musicals crosses the invisible line between the drab world of the audience and the glittering one of the theatah. Pierce doesn't dance very well and he's only an adequate singer, but that's okay because his character is an amateur in the purest sense of the term. The number really captures an everyman's overwhelmed excitment at being annointed as one of the show people, and also works as a literal illustration of the transference process that happens when a stage production hits a right note.

Doublethink, a piece by the English company Rotozaza at PS 122, comes at the issue of performing from a decidedly more aggro perspective, casting a keen eye on issues of power and control. In Doublethink, two local volunteers agree to follow all the directions given them by Rotozaza's Silvia Mercuriali and Neil Bennun, who first sit at a table, then get onstage, manhandling—and getting manhandled by—the two guinea pigs. The first clever trick is that the stage is divided in two halves by a white curtain so each guest performer cannot see what the other is doing. The second one is that while the audience hears the directions at first, so we can see how well the guests execute them, we stop being privy to that information as the piece goes on—the directions get whispered in someone's ear, or they are silently read on pieces of paper that then get discarded. Despite a dip in tension at the two-thirds mark, the show—which starts in a mood of surreal humor—ends with a startling release of pent-up aggression. Our guests, who included Neal Medlyn, looked shaken and stirred.

You only have until Sunday to catch Doublethink—and Ann Liv Young is scheduled to participate! After that, Rotozaza will stage Five in the Morning, which presents a similar concept in a water park. Score another one for PS's artistic director, Vallejo Gantner.

Unswitched-on Classics

BAM seems to have turned into an annex of the British Consulate. Right now, it's hosting not one, not two, but three imported productions at the same time—and in longer runs than is usual at BAM.

Let's start with the dispensable offering. At the Opera House we have Matthew Bourne's adaptation of Edward Scissorhands. The production is eye candy but its pleasures pretty much stop there: It never graduates from pleasing to thrilling. Even the big ensemble dances—something to which I usually respond in a Pavlovian manner—failed to raise my pulse. It's hard to pinpoint where exactly Bourne failed: It's all aesthetically pleasing, the individual performances are just fine. But Terry Davies' new score is a lite-jazz wash (Danny Elfman at least can do big-band stomp very well, a legacy from his Oingo Boingo days) and Bourne rushes through the story with such precipitation that nothing sticks. Like my colleague David Cote, I agree that his finest work in recent years has been Mary Poppins, and wish he'd work with better material—and on a real musical, not another of those those flaccid "dancicals."

On the other hand, I cannot recommend enough The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, in rep at the Harvey. Edward Hall's all-male Propeller company plays both, with the same cast and the same basic décor. I particularly loved Shrew, in which the comic elements are very, very funny, while the turn to harsher emotions in the second half is heartbreaking. The only two Shrews I'd seen before contorted themselves to sugarcoat the ending, trying to make it look as if Kate was a liberated woman on equal standing with her husband. But Hall plays the text literally and shows a woman broken by a lout.

Still, beyond my immediate liking of these two productions, it's hard not to be a little bit disappointed by BAM's overall trend of betting on dead white men (particularly Shakespeare) to bring in the punters. It's also showing Cymbeline this spring, and Ian McKellen's King Lear in the fall—and it's safe to predict those productions aren't going to fuck with the Bard, unlike Jan Lauwers' memorable King Lear, during which people fled the Harvey Theater in droves during the show.

I find this reflex emphasis on safety classics disheartening and the vision of world theater it presents ossified. The presence of contemporary non-American playwrights is dwindling, as are the appearances of major non-English directors (repeat visits by Thomas Ostermeier's being a major exception). The days when we could see Company B Belvoir's adaptation of Cloudstreet or Bernard-Marie Koltès' In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields at BAM seem sadly over.

Out to Loach

News has surfaced that lefty filmmaker Ken Loach—whose latest, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, is currently playing in NYC—is supporting the candidacy of Olivier Besancenot for the French presidential elections. Give me a friggin' break! Besancenot means well, but he's also stuck in an illusory past and preaching for a no-less-illusory future.

Besancenot is the candidate of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), a Trotskyist party long associated with Alain Krivine, who himself ran for president in 1969, 1974 and 1981. To his credit, Besancenot, a postman by trade, isn't as reactionary and sectarian as fellow far-left candidate Arlette Laguiller, from Lutte Ouvrière, a party that's been called a cult but its opponents and still positions the working class as a revolutionary vanguard despite the fact that a) its definition of said working class is stuck in the 19th century and b) said working class is equally prone to vote for the extreme-right National Front these days.

In a way it's easy to see why Besancenot's anti-capitalist campaign is alluring to Loach: It's exciting to see a candidate who's an actual working man and questions the entire system the world is built on, including, as Loach points out, privatizations like the ones that were so disastrous in England.

But why isn't Loach reaching out to the Parti Socialiste? Too middle-class reformist for his taste? On the one hand that's understandable, and I'll be the first one to deplore the wimpy way the PS has drifted toward the center in the past 20 years. On the other, we need to be realistic: Besancenot has zero chance of making it to the second round; his candidacy is divisive because he's taking essential votes from the PS candidate and could prevent her from reaching the second round.

I know there's no chance this would happen since he probably thinks she's way too centrist, but how great would it be if Loach directed some campaign videos for Ségolène Royal? She needs someone to light a match under her bourgie ass, and he's just the right guy to do it.

Now wait a minute!

See these guys on the left? They played Roseland Thursday night, except for some reason they were never mentioned in the New York Times' review of the show. The very first sentence announced "a very strong triple bill"—Machine Head, Trivium and headliner Lamb of God. Poor, poor Gojira, who went on first and completed what actually was a very strong quadruple bill.

Reviewer Kelefa Sanneh also described "the most discordant moment of the night" as when the crowd responded to Lamb of God singer Randy Blythe's injunction to "Give it up for Trivium!" with a mix of applause and boos. But an equally discordant moment had happened earlier, when the French Quartet That Wasn't There was greeted with boos, raised middle fingers and shouts of "Fuck you, Frenchmen!"—I know, 'cause some of the eloquent meatheads were standing right next to me.

Gojira proceeded to shut those morons up with a blistering set played at top volume. (And the sound was crystal-clear, in contrast to Machine Head, which played equally loudly but with a muddled balance that made me feel as if the double kick drum was positioned right behind my eyeballs.) There's a reason Gojira was on the cover of Terrorizer a few months ago: Its latest album, From Mars to Sirius, is a massive slab of prog-death metal (with environmentally aware lyrics, natch), and live the band was pulverizingly heavy, like Mastodon without the dumb facial hair. Randy Blythe seemed to think so too: He joined Gojira onstage for half a song.

MP3 Gojira "Backbone" from From Mars to Sirius (2005)

TV on demand

The indispensable INA (Institut National de l'Audiovisuel) is the repository of French public television and radio archives, and there's gold in them vaults. INA has been putting a lot of its holdings online lately; most of the footage is for rent or purchase (prices usually range between 1.5 and 6 euros), so you can download and watch at your leisure, and there are plenty of free clips and teasers.

Recently, INA uploaded a whole slew of Apostrophes, a wildly popular literary talk show that aired between 1975 and 1990, and remains a classic of French television. Just search for Solzhenitsyn (or rather Soljénitsyne, in French), for instance, and you'll get a special, shot in 1983, where host Bernard Pivot visited the Russian writer (seen playing tennis at one point) at his Vermont house. Other classics I still remember from my childhood include a very drunk Bukowski, a cigarette in one hand, a glass of something boozy in the other, staggering out of the set after driving the usually unflappable Pivot crazy, in 1978.

You can also listen to the news broadcast from the day you were born, and of course, the INA site is loaded with great music, from Sheila singing "Les Rois Mages" in hot pants to entire operas from the Aix en Provence festival, like a Così fan Tutte recorded live in 1955.

Have I mentioned the plays? French public TV used to show a lot of theater, and my generation grew up devouring everything from boulevard stars (all hail Jacqueline Maillan!) to Marivaux in prime time.

Thank you, INA, for giving us the biggest time-suck outside of YouTube.

Young the restless

It was pretty fitting that a blizzard hit New York Friday night; walking down 10th Avenue in whiteout conditions added a layer of deep-freeze fun to Ann Liv Young's retelling of Snow White at the Kitchen.

From what I gather, many—including, it would appear, some of her own (now ex) collaborators—think Ann Liv Young is a fraud who's getting press and European grants solely because her shows are in-your-face raunchy. She usually gets reviewed in dance sections but there's relatively little dancing (or what is traditionally thought of as dancing) in the two pieces by her that I've now seen, and it can be very crude, owing more to 1980s music videos and cheerleading routines to Judson or Martha or Twyla or whoever the hell it is NY choreographers look up to these days. The overall aesthetic is rough and amateurish, but you can't tell if this is a deliberate choice executed with canny precision or the result of a certain haplessness on Young's part. Likely, it's a mix of both, which is one of the reasons I like her shows so much.

While Michael, performed at Dance Theater Workshop in 2005, was mondo trailer trash, Snow White is a gonzo-karaoke Twilight of the Fairy Tales. The cast of three—Young, Liz Santoro and Michael Guerrero—already was onstage, wearing eye-shredding white leotards and black ankle-high Reeboks, as we took our seats. Santoro in particular looked as if she was dreading what was about to happen; rarely have I seen so much anxious boredom ooze out of a performer doing strictly nothing.

They started things off by singing along to Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal"; the effect was oddly powerful, with Young in particular looking magnetically feral. In another highlight, Snow White (Young) got fucked by the Prince (Santoro, sprouting a dildo attached to her hips with pink duct tape) to the strains of the original version of "Someday My Prince Will Come." At one point, the Prince berated Snow White in French ("You sucked off all the dwarfs, etc."); at another, Young explained her creative process, which seems to mainly involve harshing on her team, "like when I tell Liz she's a dyke with no singing ability. The next day, she's impeccable." The ensemble of three dressed and undressed constantly, going from one hideous getup to another, while Young, clearly in charge, requested water in the middle of a dance, petulantly barked directions and bossed the other two around.

The entire time, Young's expressions ranged from bratty to angry to frustrated to bored to resentful, as if she was pissed off with her own show and couldn't wait for it to end. It didn't matter if she was play-acting or not and it's this ambiguity that's her strength, this confusion that makes her so bewilderingly interesting. Does it matter if we know what's planned or not? Young is very clever at making it all look like a gigantic car crash in progress but she let us in on her self-awareness with a brilliant idea toward the end, when the three performers sang along to a recording session of the vocals to the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda" complete with studio fuck-ups and interruptions.

Young's choices challenge ours as supposedly hip audience members: Okay, so we've taken an endorsement of junk aesthetics as far as it will go—now what? Cannily, her perpetually angry, perpetually frustrated mix of self-flagellation and self-satisfaction mirrors that of arty, lefty America.

Snow White plays again at the Kitchen on March 21–24. You'll be hard-pressed to find a better way to spend $12 this year.

News from the front

The French front, that is. As the U.S. sinks into further insanity with every passing minute, the first round of the presidential elections is a month away in France, and things are both heating up and…not.

Heating up, because the center-right candidate, François Bayrou, has come from way behind to pull up to pretty much the same level as the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal (candidate MILF!), and now both of them are a few points behind the frontrunner, rightist Nicolas Sarkozy. A few months ago it was assumed by most that Sarko and Ségo would duke it out in the second round, on May 6. Now things are up in the air.

But not heating up either, because the campaign, at least seen from New York, feels rather dull. Sarko has a proven record as a power-mad authoritarian, the great muckracking weekly Le Canard enchaîné has unearthed juicy stuff about his real-estate holdings, and yet he's ahead. But Ségo's campaign is disastrous. She's not any more or less knowledgeable than her male competitors but when she is caught not knowing something, it sticks like glue. Meanwhile, members or former members of her own party are coming up with books attacking her.

On Tuesday, Alan Riding had an article in The New York Times about how contrary to years past, culture doesn't figure out much in these elections. What caught my eye is that how he remarked that unlike in England, in France there's still a "gulf between subsidized high culture and commercial popular culture." First of all, this a rather big overstatement. Unlike in France "directors and actors move freely between serious theater and movies" in England, says Riding; I'm sure this will be news to the likes of Michel Piccoli, Philippe Torreton, Jeanne Balibar, Isabelle Huppert, Catherine Frot—actors who move freely between theater (both serious and not) and movies (ditto). I mean come on: even Alain Delon is starring in a stage adaptation of Bridges of Madison County right now!

Also, since bridging the "gulf" between high and low is to be praised, Riding may want to look into it. A new opera in Copenhagen? Check. Something cooking at the Tate? Right-o. Just don't expect any coverage of what sociological tidbits can be gleaned from Nouvelle Star, the French take on American Idol, for instance, or even of the commercial theater scene anywhere but England (see Alain Delon reference above).

On the newsstands

The new Time Out New York is out, with two short pieces by yours truly: a review of Natsuo Kirino's latest novel, Grotesque, and a preview of the Justin Timberlake shows.

In other publishing news, I'm perversely thrilled to have been called a Nazi by a Salon reader reacting (anonymously, of course) to my article there.

I could have listened to her all night

I blogged about Marat/Sade first, but it actually was the last entry in the weekend's trifecta of shows—on Saturday, I'd seen the revival of Prelude to a Kiss followed by the Philharmonic's concert staging of My Fair Lady at Avery Fisher Hall.

I've never been bowled over by Craig Lucas's plays; they are competent but fail to touch me either emotionally or intellectually. Prelude to a Kiss didn't do anything to change that opinion, especially in the Roundabout's competent but lackluster production. The only thing I have to say is that I don't understand why the character of Rita is so often described as "neurotic." Even in Annie Parisse's high-strung interpretation, Rita strikes me as having not so much neuroses as a variety of issues. When did "neurotic" become shorthand for "strong personality" in America? What's up with the medicalization, especially considering that it's usually employed in reference to women?

Moving uptown for My Fair Lady, which ranged from charming to absolutely thrilling—the latter every time Kelli O'Hara, who played Eliza Doolittle, sang. I'd missed the 1993 revival that starred Richard Chamberlain and Melissa Errico (has it really been ten years since she was scheduled to be the Next Big Thing of musical theater? What happened to that?) so this was my first time seeing My Fair Lady since moving to New York in 1990. It's going to be hard to top the production, even taking into account the fact that no B'way orchestra could ever dream of matching the Philharmonic's insane lushness. Kelsey Grammer may have been typecast as Henry Higgins, but he did a fine job, and it turned out that Brian Dennehy can sing. Who knew?

As a tribute to Lerner & Loewe, here's Mathilde Santing's gender-bended take on "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face," recorded in 1982 with a dinky Casio and drum machine.

MP3 Mathilde Santing "I've Grown Accustomed to her Face" from Mathilde Santing

According to her website, Santing is playing Glinda—in alternance with Glennis Grace, who represented the Netherlands at the Eurovision Song Contest in 2005—in a Dutch production of The Wiz. She's also a brunette now.

The filth and the fury

Sensitive souls were well-advised to take a pass on the Classical Theatre of Harlem's staging of Marat/Sade, which I was lucky to see yesterday, on the last day of its run: It featured the most realistic shit I've ever seen on a New York stage—as opposed to the shitty realism one sometimes encounters at the Roundabout or MTC.

It boggles the mind to think that not only was Peter Weiss's play (full title: The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade) once on Broadway, but it won four Tonys in 1966! Glenda Jackson, who played Marat's assassin, Charlotte Corday, was nominated for Best Featured Actress but didn't win. Director Peter Brook also handled the movie adaptation, from which the photo above is taken.

Except for one silent role, there weren't any women in Christopher McElroen's staging for CTH. And this is the least of his conceptual touches. McElroen's biggest stroke of inspiration was to reconceive the physical space so that the action would take place in a central ring enclosed by chain-link fences; the audience sat in two rows on three of the sides, with two lateral galleries allowing the actors to roam behind the spectators. Since Marat/Sade happens in the titular asylum, this entirely made sense, creating the suffocating impression to be prisoner in a pressure cooker. And McElroen ratcheted up the tension already present in the text, keeping the proceedings at a fever pitch the entire time.

The high dramatic point comes during Sade's big speech—which T. Ryder Smith, as the divin Marquis, must give while getting flogged, his white shirt sprouting crimson flowers. Once that's over, he grabs handfuls of excrement from a bucket and smears it all over his face. A woman sitting in front of me laughed loudly, and was told "This is not funny!" (I couldn't identify who said that—a fellow audience member or someone from the cast.) Sitting a few feet away and watching in horror as turds were flying about, I felt as if a huge weight was pressing down on my chest.

My main caveat with the whole endeavor is that too often Weiss's text—which essentially contrasts two ideas of revolution, Marat's radical dream of a revolution by the people and for the people and Sade's highly individualistic philosophy—got lost in the general mayhem (we're talking hoses to calm down the inmates here). Weiss was a leftist German who in the 1960s realized socialism as practiced by the USSR—one of two large-scale models of communism in action at the time—could not work without crushing the individual. (See also Vasily Grossman's extraordinary Life and Fate for the daily practice of Stalinism.) "On the one hand the urge with axes and knives/To change the whole world and improve people's lives/On the other hand the individual lost in thought/Caught in the throes of the calamity he's wrought," summarizes Sade. But it's hard to focus on ideas when someone is banging on a pipe right behind your head or pulling on your chair.

As we embark on presidential campaigns in France and here, those of us passionate about the arts should keep in mind something else Weiss wrote (not in Marat/Sade): “Art is never a weapon in the sense of concrete political action. It only conveys activity, it communicates qualities which we have to detect in ourselves. We are the ones who, upon closing in on a work of art, liberate the powers confined within. Without our ability to ingest, our own ability to think, the work remains powerless. However, with our attentiveness we transpose the latent vision into real, perceptible deeds.”

Partly this is saying that going to a political show—writing a political show—just isn't enough when it comes to "concrete action." Let's keep this in mind when do-gooders start going on and on about the importance of political art: As much as I'd like to think otherwise, art will never replace the less-glamorous practice of politics when it comes to actually changing the world. You can go listen to Springsteen and feel good about yourself, but that won't prevent Rome from burning—ie, the Republican machine from savagely gutting your country's institutions, moral fabric and individual lives.

All the art money can buy

Last week, Lincoln Center announced the lineup for this year's summer festival. My colleague Gia Kourlas has already expressed what she thinks about the dance component, but fortunately the theater offerings look more inviting.

At each of the last three Robert Wilson shows I've seen, I've told myself "never again!" only to get suckered into going just one last time. The familiar thought last popped up after seeing Quartett in the fall, but once again I'll go back to the trough since Lincoln Center is bringing over the staging of La Fontaine's fables that Wilson did for the Comédie-Française, complete with Français actors. I'm also totally psyched by the return of the Kabuki troupe Heisei Nakamura-za, whose last appearance at the festival in 2004 remains a great theater memory, and very intrigued by the prospect of a Taiwanese King Lear (the third major Lear of the year, with the Kline Lear currently at the Public and the McKellen Lear coming to BAM in September).

Also appealing-looking are the four Spanish-language plays, including Gemelos, an adaptation of Agota Kristof's amazing novel The Notebook (which is part of a trilogy but holds up on its own), and Proyecto Chejov, a deconstruction of The Three Sisters by Argentine director Daniel Veronese, whose Hamletmachine I'd quite enjoyed at BAM in 2000.

All in all, we have many reasons to looking forward to July.

Lusophone love

The new issue of the good-looking cultural webzine Obscena is out and it's packed to the gills, with pieces on the Judson Church group, Caden Manson and Richard Foreman, and my own overview of current New York theater on pages 20–22. You can download the pdf here.

Er…it's all in Portuguese. Not a problem, right?

She's a maniac

Catching up with the ongoing fourth season of The L Word, I must grudgingly give kudos to creator and frequent writer Ilene Chaiken. I'm not sure I'd like to share an espresso with her, and I can't tell whether her choices stem from cluelessness or rebelliousness—there's such a thin line between visionary and nincompoop—but her blithe disregard for narrative conventions and psychological logic makes for addictive television. Ever since the series started, characters have made stupefyingly dumb choices (Bette's flirtation with the carpenter and the student, Max going out with his boss's daughter), undergone personality transplants (Helena's turn from arrogant rich bitch to poor patsy, and hard to remember now that she's a saint, but Bette started as an obnoxious alpha female) and somehow tolerated asshole behavior of the highest order (psychopathic Jenny and cheating, scheming Tina still have friends).

And yet…oh, Chaiken, how you torture us with your gallery of self-involved L.A. lezzies in tight tank tops and horrifying haircuts. The show is like a trip to Payard: shiny colors and sweet, sweet indulgences, including my personal favorite—the hilarious name-dropping in conjunction with Jenny's literary career.

I might also mention that Jennifer Beals has been inducted in my highly selective roster of stage/screen crushes, which includes the likes of Vivica Genaux, Valérie Lemercier, Karin Viard, Elizabeth Marvel and Catherine Keener (Diana Damrau, I have my eye on you too). There are many things to praise about Ms. Beals in The L Word, but a personal favorite may well be the fact that unlike less high-profile cast members, who have no choice but to bare all, Beals seems to have a no-nipple clause in her contract. She's been in quite a few sex scenes over the past four years, and every time it's a pleasure to watch the director of photography go through exquisite contortions in order to avoid showing the Bealsaboob.

Another pleasure has derived from seeing the extremely gifted cartoonist Ariel Schrag benefit from gainful employment as a story editor and occasional episode writer (she displayed a sure comic touch in the recent episode in which the girls comfort Cybill Shepherd's husband). She's come a long way since I wrote about her autobiographical comics in the Village Voice back in 1999.

You missed me, you really missed me!

Fine, I know nobody actually noticed I was on vacation so let's go straight to this year's vastly entertaining movie awards—no, silly, not the Oscars but the Césars, the ones that are given out in France. For the second consecutive year the ceremony was hosted by Valérie Lemercier, whom I worship with the goo-goo eyes of a home-schooled 13-year-old. And after what she pulled off a couple of weeks ago, I'll start a cargo cult.

First of all, her entrance to the tune of Zouk Machine's 80s hit "Maldone" has already become an insta-classic. Check out, in particular, Almodovar's baffled look. Lemercier again pulled all the stops in another musical display later on, when she performed the cult dance scene from The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (1974) as part of a tribute to that movie's director, Gérard Oury, who died in 2006.

Another memorable moment came about when the French distributor of Little Miss Sunshine, which won for Best Foreign Film, accepted the award on behalf on the directors and unconsciously began lasciviously fondling the statuette. Classic live-TV moment.

And because nobody gets rudely interrupted by a swelling orchestra at the Césars, writer-director Pascale Ferran (whose Lady Chatterley eventually won for Best Film) was able to squat the stage with a very long prepared speech about the state of French cinema and the benefit situation of those who work in the industry. She went on and on and on in a deafening silence but the earnest awkwardness of the moment was delish.

Marina Hands (daughter of stage legend Ludmila Mikaël) won Best Actress for the title role in Lady Chatterley. Marion Cotillard might as well start preparing her 2008 acceptance speech now: She's selflessly amazing as Edith Piaf in La Môme. The movie's surprisingly good and I'm sure there'll be plenty of opportunities to come back to it when it's released here in June under the title La vie en rose (never mind there's already a charming Belgian movie called Ma vie en rose).

Other than that, it was really fun to be in France a few weeks before a presidential election. The big talk was about the candidates' real-estate holdings and just how many nuclear submarines the country owns, a question that stumped both major candidates, Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy. I also witnessed Sarko host Canal+'s evening show Le Grand Journal. Sarko's problem right now is that he has zero emotional capital, ie the French think he's efficient but also a cold-hearted jerk. When asked to pick a favorite movie scene, then, Sarko showed a clip from the 2001 tearjerker I Am Sam, in which Sean Penn goes all Method on us playing a retarded man. Unbelievably, the show's hosts didn't blink at such a naked display of political calculation.

Sarko's literary pick was Yasmina Reza's thin novel Nulle Part, from which he even read an excerpt. Though Reza's latest piece for the stage, A Spanish Play, has been panned in NYC, the choice seemed interesting until I later learned that Reza's following the candidate around in order to write a book about him.

Back in black

Ah vacation…a week away, several days to recover. While I concoct a little something about what I saw and heard when I was over in Europe, here's a link to my Salon piece about the debate surrounding Jonathan Littell's novel Les Bienveillantes in France. I can't wait to hear Abraham Foxman and GLAAD's shrieks of righteous indignation when the book comes out here next year.

I also saw and enjoyed the new Jackie Hoffman show, Jackie with a Z, a couple of weeks ago. My review in TONY can be found here.