Tony Toni Toné

Reviewing the Tonys for The Los Angeles Times, Robert Lloyd writes "Though the awards honor only a fraction of what makes up even New York theater, they nevertheless seem to stand for the art as a whole in a way that the Oscars, Grammys or Emmys don't — they represent a community rather than an industry."

As much as I can enjoy a Broadway show, it certainly doesn't "stand for the art." Many seem to forget that Broadway is not theater in New York, and theater in New York is not just Broadway. It would be a very depressing state of affairs if this was the case. Once in a while, Broadway delivers a unique jolt of electricity. But too often, it means art by committee, shrewd calculation, and obscene, naked greed—don't get me started on the subject of premium seats or the extra charges tacked on to ticket prices. And no, I don't pretend to know how to fix those problems. With the kind of large sums involved, producers play it safe—it's not surprising that the two big winners on Sunday evening were nurtured Off Broadway (Spring Awakening) and in England (The Coast of Utopia). Projects that initiate directly on Broadway tend to recoil from audacity like vampires facing the threat of garlic. If this stood for the art, American theater would be well and truly screwed.

Bad company

It's highly satisfying to see the Gossip meet a certain amount of success—at least in the UK, where "Standing in the Way of Control" was a bit of a club hit and frontwoman Beth Ditto was voted Coolest Person of the Year, or somesuch nonsense, by the NME. Only five years ago, around the time I interviewed them, Ditto reacted to the writers of that weekly mag calling Missy Elliott fat by stripping down to a thong during a show; of course she'd do that kind of stuff anyway, and I recall a show at the Knitting Factory where she mooned the audience.

The first time I saw the Gossip, they were opening for Sleater-Kinney at Irving Plaza. An important detail here is that the two bands were releasing or had released records on Kill Rock Stars. For many years, the Gossip's labelmates included the likes of Stereo Total, Erase Errata, Bikini Kill, Elliott Smith, Free Kitten, Comet Gain. KRS proved you could have radical politics and aesthetics, and succeed.

The Gossip left that glorious heritage to sign with Sony's new gay and lesbian imprint, Music with a Twist. This strikes me as a completely stupid step backward for two reasons. Artistically speaking, the trio shares space with a gaggle of mediocre acts that make me want to poke my eyes out on the label's introductory comp, Revolutions. According to the press release, "Revolutions gives adventurous music fans a chance to join the vanguard of some of the most exciting and expansive directions in pop culture today." To paraphrase Mary McCarthy, every word in this sentence is a lie, including "and" and "the." But of course if jejune beats and self-esteem-building banality are your idea of exciting and expansive directions, go right ahead.

The growing success of out acts as diverse as the Gossip, Darren Hayes and Tegan and Sara, and even the Tony nomination of Kiki and Herb, shows that more and more you don't need identity niches to succeed. Even Morrissey is crawling out of the closet, and that doesn't stop him from playing Madison Square Garden—but you wouldn't see him touch Music with a Twist with a ten-foot pole. The very creation of the imprint strikes me as an absurd step back for artists and listeners alike, fostering a sense of self-congratulatory fake audacity.

Two great tastes

At last, I've secured a ticket for the event of the summer: Patti LuPone's Gypsy. And the show falls the day after another much-awaited gig, that of Norwegian black-metal legend Immortal. A better one-two punch I could not have dreamed of. (I don't think I need directionals for the photos, though I did choose one of the young Patti.)

For years, fans of both Gypsy and LuPone—and the singer herself, for that matter—have known she was born to play Mama Rose. Let's not get into details of interest mostly to show-tune freaks, and simply say that a long-running feud among some of the personalities involved led us to think the project would never happen. We got an inkling that things may be about to change when LuPone did a concert version at Ravinia last year, but there's still no way to describe the tremors that sent Chelsea seismographs into a seizure when it was announced that not only would LuPone perform Mama Rose at City Center for three weeks in July, but that the production would be directed by the book's author, the notoriously persnickety Arthur Laurents. So that's I'm-so-there show number one.

Show number two is the reunion of Immortal, which embodies classic, corpepainted Norwegian black metal. Never mind that it managed three entries (including a solo shot by guitarist-vocalist Abbath) in the Top Ten Most Ridiculous Black Metal Pics of All Time: The trio has released one of my favorite BM albums, the surprisingly catchy Sons of Northern Darkness. The band last played New York (at Wetlands!) back in 2002, when that album came out, then split. Fortunately it is now understood by everybody that splits are not permanent, so Immortal is back and playing NYC on July 13 at, of course, BB King's.

Now, my love for show tunes and black metal may seem strange at first, but think about it: Both genres celebrate alternate universes in which heightened emotions rule, and where theatricality is so integrated into the discourse as to become absolutely normal. It's indie rock, that paramount of individual expression (ha!) that turns into a stylistic straitjacket when compared to these two genres, ruled as it is by stultifying normalizing parameters that enforce prevailing social codes instead of undermining them, as common wisdom would have it (rock is supposed to be rebellious, right?).

There's something extra about Mary

I realize it's really not cool to say so when Spring is Awakening, but my favorite new musical of the past season was the decidedly old-fashioned Mary Poppins. This sentiment was confirmed when I saw it again Wednesday evening: In concept and execution, it is flawless. But while this word may suggest a certain soullessness, the show is far from the mechanical concoction many associate with Disney-spawned products. (Granted, this reputation is often deserved: just look at the horrid Tarzan a few blocks away—or rather, don't.) Flesh and blood are what make this show, and actual human emotions ensure that there's something to sustain the bright surface.

Disney was very clever is calling upon the likes of Matthew Bourne and Richard Eyre to handle the choreography and the staging, respectively. Bourne thrives within such a seemingly rigid narrative structure, and Eyre, whose Notes on a Scandal was deliciously nasty, makes sure things never get saccharine. As for Ashley Brown, her Mary, chin decisively jutting forward, always has a naughty glint in her eyes; she's warm but also sternly efficient, and never seems to beg for the children's (or the audience's) affection. Brown's performance should really have gotten more notice. Well, she did get nominated for a Tony but even in a year without Christine Ebersole's Madwoman of the Hamptons, I don't think voters would ever give her a chance.

Once again, trust the Brits to make smart, elegant family entertainment that looks down neither on adults nor on children, with the much-missed Coram Boy another recent example. Alas, I'm not holding my breath to ever see the National's acclaimed production of His Dark Materials in the U.S.—the antireligion philosophy which is the very foundation of the plot might be too hard to swallow for American audiences. (I hear it's been toned down in the upcoming film version, directed by that well-known master of complex emotions and magus of dark souls, Chris "About a Boy" Weitz.)

The heat of the limelight

Two interviews in this week's Time Out New York, and coincidentally both are related to the way some performers come alive on stage.

First off is Marion Cotillard, who is stupendous as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose (I much prefer the French title, La Môme). I usually have no patience for biopics—and have to admit that Piaf had never clicked for me—but I was completely moved by this one. Olivier Dahan cleverly plays around with chronology, introducing the dying Piaf very early on for instance. But his strength really lays with his mise en scène, which is most in evidence in the live scenes, like Piaf's big concert debut (shown sans sound) and the sequence in which she transcends her howling pain at Marcel Cerdan's death by going on stage, a transference process beautifully suggested by a long tracking shot.

Second is my current pop fave Darren Hayes, whom I'd already gushed about in these virtual pages. Hayes also illustrates the transformative power of a live show on audience and singer—I found it difficult to reconcile the emo-for-the-masses guy who once sang with Savage Garden with the sexy dervish doing Prince justice at Joe's Pub a few months ago.

Field research

In an article in New York magazine, Peter Carey talks about teaching creative writing in New York. Toward the end, he mentions what some of his students are up to:

"So that student over there, the one who arrived from San Francisco, is now working as a research assistant with Jonathan Franzen. (…) And there is A. working for Toni Morrison, and V. working with Salman Rushdie. And C. who went to work with Richard Price and found him a psychic and a haunted house on the Lower East Side. E. researched for Siri Hustvedt. G. worked with Patrick McGrath and collected information on spinal injuries for the book he is now just finishing. The list of mentors goes on and on."

What I wonder is: Why aren't these acclaimed writers doing their own research? What do they have to do other than research and write, write and research? They don't have day jobs to worry about. It's not like they have to pull lobster shifts proofreading at law firms. They may teach creative writing, but honestly, how much of their time can it possibly consume? Reaserching actually is part of the writing process, and getting Cliffs Notes from MFA students can't be the same as immersing yourself into a topic. As for the MFA students themselves, they should use the $60,000 in tuition to travel, live, read—above all, read—instead of learning how to craft innocuous prose in windowless college rooms.

Sunburnt noir

I had a lovely chat with noir author Peter Temple a couple of weeks ago, and parts of our conversation have surfaced in this week's Time Out New York. It's really hard to make procedurals feel fresh, but Temple does just that in his latest, The Broken Shore. I did not have the space to elaborate on that point in my piece, but one of the things I like best about Temple is his ability to write good dialogue—something that too often takes a backseat to plot convolutions in genre fiction. Whether it's blokes discussing footie in a pub or the sexually charged banter that precedes a kiss, Temple's lines crackle and pop like they're out of a Ben Hecht screenplay.

Stephen Booth's The Dead Place, on the other hand, is a striking example of how not to do it. I find it impossible not to finish a crime novel once I've started it so I had to get to the end of that book, getting increasingly annoyed by my own stubborness. A few pages in, I realized I had actually read another Booth novel, One Last Breath, and managed to completely purge it from my memory. No wonder: His leads, Detective Constable Ben Cooper and Detective Sergeant Diane Fry, are wafer-thin creations with no distinguishable characteristics whatsoever, save for the fact that Cooper is detail-oriented and Fry is both closed-minded and aggressive about it. This does not take us very far.

The Dead Place revolves around the type of killer who leaves pretentiously cryptic messages about the horrors he's up to. If we haven't seen his sad kind a thousand times… Watching Cooper and Fry (a name better suited to a comedian team from the ’50s) bumble their way around, deal with potential suspects, a profiler and other assorted archetypes of contemporary procedurals, you just want to scream at the suffocating mediocrity of it all.

Storytelling and scheduling

My review of Rebecca Barry's "novel in stories," Later, at the Bar, is now in The Los Angeles Times.

Completely unrelated: In today's New York Times, Sharon Waxman writes about how Disney cannily scheduled the international release of the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. "Disney took care to open the film on Wednesday in France, when children are out of school, and on Thursday in Germany, when films traditionally open in that country."

Fine, except that films traditionally open on Wednesdays in France, so Disney taking care to open its new barrel o' bilge on that day wasn't exactly out of the ordinary. In both countries, the movie came out on regular opening days. So what's the point, exactly?

Civilization and its discotheques

All signs point to this summer being a disco one. Of course every summer is a disco one for me—and every fall, winter and spring. But it's not often there's a new album by my current favorite disco chanteuse, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, plus a double-barrel compilation attack: Disco Deutchsland Disco and Dimitri from Paris' Cocktail Disco. Where Dimitri found the tunes on his double CD, I cannot fathom, but they are absolutely extraordinary samples of the super-orchestrated subgenre of disco that was produced in the mid- to late 1970s. Best of all, the tracks are not mixed together or edited down; many are 12" versions, which of course are always preferable when it comes to disco. I've been listening to these songs obsessively since getting them, but two really stick out right now.

The first is Jonelle Allen's 1978 "Baby, I Just Wanna Love You," which actually concludes Cocktail Disco—it's the comp's post-coital cigarette. It starts off with chimes, which usually are a sure sign that a song will remain a simmering, panting stew of anticipation. This impression is confirmed by funky but subdued organ riffage at 0:11. At 0:21, a piano comes in to deliver the hook that'll form the song's melodic spine, immediately followed by backup singers cooing "Aaaaa, I wanna love you." They repeat. And again. More sighing. Yep, this is fireside/white tiger rug disco. Not my favorite but I can live with that piano.

But whoah! At 1:08, the anonymous backup singers take it up a notch in intensity, while the string section (a trademark of arranger Charles Veal) makes its entrance. Things are beginning to cook, and Jonelle's vocals gradually gain overtones of bunny-in-the-oven instability while the strings add a dramatic counterpoint. By 2:46, she's whipped herself into a full-fledged frenzy, roaring, squealing; it sounds like she's losing both the plot and the pitch, but who cares? At 3:37, the guitar comes back in to calm things down as abruptly as they heated up. Ah, a guitar-bass-drums break: we're in disco territory all right. And then Jonelle starts peaking all over again. But forget about her: I'm spent!

MP3 Jonelle Allen "Baby, I Just Wanna Love You" from Dimitri from Paris' Cocktail Disco

Next we have Marti Lynn's "Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me)," which has also been performed by the likes of Tony Bennett and Dusty Springfield (I can't resist posting her version for comparison purposes). The 1979 track starts off very show-tuney, and for a reason: It's from Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley's 1965 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd. Yet it goes on to overcome a sax solo and ends up working for three reasons: 1. well-written, complementary charts for strings (dreamy) and horns (aggressive); 2. Marti Lynn's belting, very Love Boat vocals; 3. a pair of diabolically funky breaks, for which we can probably thank producer Wardell Quezergue (who I believe hailed from New Orleans).

The first of these breaks completely interrupts the by-then-familiar flow at 2:40—it's as if we were listening to the clumsiest mashup of all time, with two completely different songs grafted not together but one after the other. The track almost stops dead, then the instrumental voices are reintroduced one by one: drums, then guitar, then bass, then strings, then horns. It's straight out of the Chic playbook, and more transporting than the purest hallucinogenic drugs. The first time I heard it, I was at the gym and almost fell off the treadmill.

More stuff happens—Marti comes back, there's a second break, Marti starts hiccupping lyrics ("Tell me who/Tell me who who who?")—as the song spirals up and out into the 11th hour number in the glitterball disco musical that never was. Bliss doesn't come any purer than this.

MP3 Marti Lynn "Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me)" from Dimitri from Paris' Cocktail Disco
MP3 Dusty Springfield "Who Can I Turn To" from Ev'rything's Coming up Dusty (1965)

Pink is the new black

The upcoming New York Times Book Review includes Marilyn Stasio's regular roundup of crime and noir fiction. I don't always agree with Ms. Stasio's taste but whatever, that's par for the course. But what really stopped me in my tracks is a sentence in her review of Kjell Eriksson's The Cruel Stars of the Night (which, incidentally, is sitting in my "to read" pile). The novel seems to be rather grim: Stasio talks about "the autumnal melancholy that pervades the story," while a detective acknowledges "a nauseating feeling of indifference." No surprise here: We're talking not only about a crime novel, but about a Swedish crime novel.

But then Stasio muses, "Why genre readers are tickled by such morbid views of suffering humanity is anyone's guess."

Come again? Stasio wasn't describing, say, gratuitous scenes of torture by that Thomas Harris hack but a cop who doesn't just have a blues day, but an entire blues month. Ms. Stasio, the title of your column, which you have been writing for years, is "Crime." We indeed may be talking about genre here, but it's not romance or science fiction—it's not called noir for nothing. Suffering humanity is the name of the game, and acting all prim about it strikes me as either hypocritical or deluded. Should crime books have more happy endings? Should they be either about cats or cowritten by them? Would the inclusion of recipes help? What about even more cutesy bios for the lead characters, like a nun-turned-investigative mechanic, a snooping golf pro or a sleuthing chiropractor? And should these characters be put on a solid diet of antidepressants, lest they give the readers a bummer of a ride?

And what about that use of "tickled," as if readers of noir fiction found its often-pitch-black worldview sexy? Of course readers get tickled, but Stasio gets the source of that tickling wrong. Or should we assume that someone who's been reviewing genre lit for the Times for years isn't, on some level, tickled—not by violence but by clever plotting and well-drawn characters? I, for one, certainly hope she is.

Check your dial

Tune in to WNYC on Friday, May 18, and hear your humble Dilettante discuss the new cabaret scene with the lovely Amy Eddings on "All Things Considered"; not sure about the exact time but the show airs from 4 to 6:30pm.

Completely unrelated: leaving the manipulative Frost/Nixon (turns out the disgraced prez was an endearing old coot!) yesterday evening, we saw Tom Wolfe, or at least an amazing Tom Wolfe lookalike. The white suit was exactly as I imagined it'd be, but my favorite sartorial touch is that he was wearing spats. Upon hearing this, a colleague joked that Wolfe would probably be buried in jeans and a T-shirt.

Same wavelength

I belatedly noticed that Slate's Jody Rosen commented on Avril Lavigne's Heather turn last week. A dead-on analysis from this habitually clever and informed critic.

Uneasy on the ear

I realized that I've been talking about a lot of expansive and expensive spectacles lately, but one of the most rewarding shows of the past few months is playing in a small downtown venue, the East 13th Street Theater, and you can get tickets for $25 (and Mondays is pay-what-you-will at the door.)

David Cote really nailed the language in Jenny Schwartz's new God's Ear when he described it as "a cross between Gertrude Stein and Hallmark cards." The play doesn't make it easy for the audience and is bound to leave people very divided: I was mesmerized by it while the Sheila loathed it—she kept digging her nails into my arm in frustration during the show. But I think that if you have an interested in language and if you are willing to give in to the words' rhythm, God's Ear (presented by the New Georges company) is a keen choice. Anne Kauffman's staging is taut and inventive, making the most of a clever set that physically suggests the subterranean currents and eddies roiling the characters' lives beneath the surface banality of their verbiage. It helps that Schwartz and Kauffman get the likes of Christina Kirk (whose virtuosic delivery of a real aria of a monolog does not get in the way of its heartwrenching impact) and Annie McNamara (who displays real comic chops in a supporting role) to deliver those words, of course.

Heather Lavigne

You can't really go wrong with a rip-off of Toni Basil's "Mickey" produced by Dr. Luke and bolstered by Bow Wow Wow–style drumming, so it's not a surprise that I quite like Avril Lavigne's current single, "Girlfriend." Its video, on the other hand, is messed-up.

As we all know, Avril started her career as a mall punkette, a wholesome rebel girl you could introduce to mom and dad. She sang about crushes on skaters and seemed to side with the underdog and the put-upon.

In the video for "Girlfriend", Avril plays the two main parts: the snotty über-insider in a pink sweater and the put-upon geek in black. At least that's what it looks like on the surface, because this time around, it's the former (ie, the Heather) who gets mocked throughout, until the final humiliation, while it's the latter (the Veronica) who does the taunting. The bespectacled, pretty-in-pink dork is on a date, only to get constantly harrassed by a Hot Topic harridan.

When did the punk character turn into the bullying enforcer of social codes?!? Did I miss an episode?

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.