Book roundup

Sheesh, what a lame post title.

In the past few weeks I've managed to polish off some in-the-news literary-ish novels—Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, Jennifer Egan's The Keep (#17 on the Times' best-seller list as I type) and Bruce Wagner's Memorial—in addition to my usual subway diet of translated noirs.

Wagner's book I'm reviewing for Time Out, so more on it later. The Emperor's Children isn't great, but quite good. Messud captures a certain kind of ego-laden not-quite-young-anymore Manhattanites, as well as a self-absorbed star pundit always ready to shoot off about the heavy topics of the day. More intriguing than the plot, however, is why the book isn't great. Danielle's affair with her best friend's father reads obvious; Bootie comes across as paint-by-number plot device, not actual character. And everything is so goddam tidy! Messud can do drama but not tragedy. Actually, I'm not even sure she can do drama—what she's good at is dramedy. She's excellent at capturing details and specific, self-contained scenes (like the outré one in which Julius is caught cheating by his boyfriend) but the overall picture lacks heft and urgency.

The Keep is what happens when a literary writer does genre. Egan could have written a nicely packaged gothic suspense (and the passing allusion, conscious or not, to The Prisoner, is pretty cool) but she took it one step further by making it a book about writing, confinement real and metaphorical, and imagination, as it quickly appears that the story about Danny coming into a mysterious central European castle actually is a writing-class project by a prison inmate, and whether the tale has real-life roots is left ambiguous until the very end. The Keep looks more lightweight than The Emperor's Children at first, but in its own way it's as much of an achievement. You could also say that both books are written by skillful authors full of self-awareness about what they're doing. Both at times read like MFA honors' program projects in that they feel…deliberate.

As for the subway books (as in, the ones I read on my daily commute), Tonino Benacquista's Tout à l'ego collects short stories from the 1990s, but is far from prime Benacquista—I prefer his novels as his stories rely too much on a last-page black-humored twist (a tactic very reminiscent of Fredric Brown, a cultish author who seems better remembered in France than in the US these days). Benacquista's last couple of books (Quelqu'un d'autre, Malavita) have brought diminishing artistic returns just as his popularity has soared. He may never top early noirs such as La Maldonne des sleepings and La Commédia des ratés, but at least his screenwriting collaborations with director Jacques Audiard (Read My Lips and The Beat That My Heart Skipped) have contributed to the rejuvenation of French film noir

Arnaldur Indridason's Reykjavik-set Silence of the Grave is one of the bleakest, most depressing procedurals I've ever read. The background is domestic violence, and Indridason is so good at mood that you almost forget the holes in the plot.

Finally, Henning Mankell's The Man Who Smiled, which actually was written in 1994 but is just being put out by the Free Press. Inspector Kurt Wallander starts off deep in a depressive funk, matched by totally gloomy weather: Now that's what I call top Scandi noir! Unfortunately, reading this book also reminded me of how mediocre the newer Mankell offerings have been in comparison to his older stuff—in the recent Before the Frost, the Swedish master managed to turn Wallander's daughter Linda into one of the most annoying fictional characters in recent memory. If he has any sense at all, he'll have her killed in the line of fire in the next installment.

"My rock bottom is still your wildest dreams"

Or so brags Martin Short in his Broadway show, Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me.

Ah, funnymen… I've always had a fondness for ’60s-style vaudeville, and Fame Becomes Me delivers a healthy dose of it. The show is good-natured fluff but entertaining, especially in the Jiminy Glick segment, when Short "interviews" a guest picked from the audience. Nathan Lane "happened" to be there when the Times' Ben Brantley came to see the show; my esteemed colleague Adam Feldman got Cynthia Nixon; we were treated to the Crying Comedian himself—Rip Taylor. The next few weeks are going to be rough.

But Taylor's cameo actually resulted in five minutes of show-biz magic because suddenly the evening, which had been ambling along nicely, turned lunatically surreal. First, Taylor readjusted his toupee (with highlights, mind you) as he was ushered on. Then Short/Jiminy Glick proceeded to unleash a barrage of passive-aggressive jokes, playing off, for instance, Taylor's bling ring. When Taylor was led back out, looking completely dazed and barely coherent as he tottered in his Mephistos, I was in comedy heaven.

Other than that, the show delivers a series of brief, reasonably fun songs written by Marc Shaiman (who's also on stage) and Scott Wittman (who directed). Several of them spoof classic musical moments: "Step Brother de Jesus" is a take on Godspell/Hair-type hippie musicals; "The Lights Have Dimmed on Broadway" underscores how Wicked's washed-out pop style is a haven for showoffy singers; the staging of "Three Gorgeous Kids" rips off…sorry, is a tribute to the "Triplets" number from Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon. And Sondheim gets a couple of nods: "Married to Marty" mimics "Getting Married Today" from Company, and the master gets namechecked for not writing black characters in "Stop the Show."

That dig feels rather rich, however, considering the song in question is typical of Shaiman and Wittman's knack for having it both ways, which I think prevents them from graduating from good songwriters to great ones. (That and the fact that Shaiman is a better composer than Wittman is a lyricist.) Powerhouse singer Capathia Jenkins is made to both deride the habit musicals have of inserting a "big black lady" who stops the show with a belt at the eleventh hour and embody that very trend. This is pretty cheeky of Shaiman and Wittman, considering that she's the only one in the supporting cast who doesn't participate in the previous ensemble songs. She's in the opening number, then is off stage for almost an hour before coming back as a nurse looking after the supposedly comatose Short, then as, well, the belting big black lady. Was she gone for an hour because she didn't, you know, fit? Sorry, doesn't fly: Parts of the show are obviously tailored to the supporting cast's various strengths—Nicole Parker gets to do the impersonations of Ellen DeGeneres, Celine Dion and Britney Spears she's perfected on MADtv for instance. And Shaiman and Wittman couldn't give Jenkins more to do? Weird.

Welcome wagon

I feel lucky to live in a town where I can see Meryl Streep on stage. Not only that, but in a version of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children adapted by Tony Kushner and directed by George C. Wolfe, with new music by Jeanine Tesori (the team behind the wonderful Caroline, or Change). The Sheila and I were lucky to have seats in the fourth row, center, so we got to see La Streep in action from real close. Watching her was like watching a virtuoso musician in full control of her instrument.

I used to be completely obsessed with Streep at the beginning of her film career: The Seduction of Joe Tynan, with Alan Alda; Manhattan, of course; another strong-willed woman depicted as selfish and manipulative in Kramer vs. Kramer; and above all The Deer Hunter and The French Lieutenant Woman. My infatuation ended with Sophie's Choice: Streep wasn't acting anymore, she was acting—all tics (check out how she uses the sideway glance to indicate pretty much anything) and affectations. It was downhill from there: Out of Africa, Ironweed and A Cry in the Dark, the latter marking the beginning of the Accent Years.

A trilogy of sorts in which Streep fully unleashed her hitherto disguised comic chops stood out: She-Devil, Postcards from the Edge and Death Becomes Her (the 1980s version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane). Alas, the reinvention they seemed to augur didn't take, and Streep spent the 1990s playing the ideal suffering mom—especially when fighting back (The River Wild)—and hiding behind spot-on accents (The Bridges of Madison County, Dancing at Lughnasa). It was as if part of her wanted to be the ideal Yankee mom, and another part negated her blond all-American-ness. By then, I had given up on her.

It took Charlie Kaufman to return her to greatness: First in Adaptation, then, in 2005, with his live radio play Hope Leaves the Theater, in which Streep gleefully skewered her own image as a grande dame of the stage. A few months later, she brought the house down at the Public Theater's 50th-anniversary celebration when she sang "Sodomy" from Hair.

This production of Mother Courage has a lot going for it, even when Wolfe's staging feels muddled, even when Kushner gets carried away and keeps padding the original text so that the show lasts over three hours. But what really makes it is Streep: She's on stage the entire time and you can't take your eyes away from her. Who else could have done this role at this point? Stockard Channing maybe. Why not Patti LuPone? Any suggestions, dear readers?

Kiki and Herb: Mixed up on Broadway

Weirdly mixed feelings about Kiki and Herb's new Broadway show. Or should I say "new"? Fans of the dynamic duo (played by Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman) will be familiar with a fairly large portion of Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Part of K&H's appeal derives from familiarity with their backstory. Back in the downtown days, it would be randomly revealed over the course of various performances: One night you'd get a story about the tragic death of Kiki's daughter, Coco; another you'd learn about about why Kiki's other daughter, Miss D, had to be placed with social services; on yet another, there may be some long-winded reminiscence about cavorting with celebrities in Swinging London, or about one of the duo's half-forgotten, misguided albums. The K&H shows were about the balance between CC and ginger–fueled trips down memory lane (emphasis on trips) and the disheveled, hysterical performance of pop and rock nuggets, some of them stretched to absurd lengths and interspersed with flotsam and jetsam popping to the surface of Kiki's brain with Tourette's-like randomness. At one point I was so obsessed with Kiki and Herb that I went to see them almost every week.

For their Broadway debut, K&H blend new selections (Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," Scissor Sisters' "Take Your Mama") with some of their tried-and-true hits ("Total Eclipse of the Heart," introduced as part of the Broadway songbook, which is technically true since it was in Jim Steinman's dreadful Dance of the Vampires; Daniel Johnston's "Walking the Cow," as usual paired with the anecdote about Kiki's cow Daisy eating Jesus' afterbirth). The banter similarly incorporates familiar anecdotes (Kiki meeting Herb for the first time) and new material, including a heavy-handed pro-gay-marriage paean in the second act that doesn't feel very Kiki at all.

And my question here is: Why not a brand-new show? If you're going to be on Broadway, why not expand the K&H experience? After all, the kind of washed-up cabaret duo created by Bond and Mellman would have jumped on the opportunity to go overboard, to hire some dancing boys and girls and jump headfirst into Great White Way vulgarity. I guess the rationale is to expose newcomers to the duo's world (it worked for Ben Brantley), but the end result feels frustratingly on the fence. The show is too outré for a run-of-the-mill Broadway audience, but not enough for its natural constituency. And because of the very nature of Kiki and Herb's act—which to me was among the most innovative of the past decade—I'm not sure that problem can be solved.

Gothic noir

Vacationing at my parents' a couple of summers ago, I stumbled upon the last few minutes of a very strange 1940s movie late one night. I couldn't identify the title, but the film seemed to involve a group of urbane devil-worshippers and a mysterious woman in perfectly even black bangs. Reading about producer Val Lewton (of Cat People fame) recently, I realized the odd movie I'd caught was called The Seventh Victim (1943) and Lewton, rather than director Mark Robson, was considered its author. (You can read the screenplays of Lewton's major movies here.) Finally watching the movie in its entirety over the weekend revealed it to be a melancholy, chiaroscuro tone poem—tellingly, it opens with an epigraph from a John Donne sonnet: "I runne to death and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday."

Kim Hunter, in her screen debut, plays Mary, a young woman who leaves her boarding school (and its lesbianish headmistress) to look for her vanished sister, Jacqueline (Jean Brooks, she of the bangs and once married to director Richard Brooks). If she lived now, Jacqueline would be labeled a depressive and put on Zoloft. But we're in 1943 and her fascination with death (she often retires to a room empty except for a chair and a hangman's noose) leads her to join the Palladists, a sect of devil-worshippers so well-heeled, you expect them to hold their coven meetings at the Algonquin. But we only discover this progressively, mostly through clues left by the men who gravitate around the yin-yang sisterly planets: a ratty, doomed private detective; Jacqueline's husband (who explains to Mary that her sister "had a feeling about life—that it wasn't worth living unless one could end it"); a failed, inquiring poet; and a psychiatrist whose unctuous charm is both charming and menacing. The movie weaves a very odd spell, stumbling from one scene to another, its narrative driven not by logic but by a phantasmagorical aesthetic.

This is typical of Lewton, who usually turned his lack of budget into an advantage, replacing A-list stars and grand sets or effects with idiosyncratic performers directed to underact (Kim Hunter looks as if she's sleepwalking throughout, as if she had stepped into a dream in order to find her lost sister) and dramatic lighting and camera angles. In this respect, The Seventh Victim is exemplary, a catalogue of a man's obsessions.

Cirque du Sexy

Burlesque doesn't really rock my boat, and that genre's revival in the 2000s has largely left me cold. But mix it up with vaudeville and plain old circus acts, and suddenly it's a whole different kettle of hoopla. Absinthe, a show currently running at the Spiegeltent parked by Southstreet Seaport, is a real hoot because it's so obviously derived from the late 19th/early 20th century vaudeville shows in which sopranos belting out arias coexisted with men who ran around and hit each other on the head with frying pans—Buster Keaton, among others, learned his trade on that circuit.

The acts are real short in Absinthe, and the audience sits real close, sometimes uncomfortably so. From that spatial and temporal brevity springs an engaging spectacle in which genuine physical feats come in very sexy wrapping. Fans of new circus (or is that New Circus?) will be familiar with the approach, but when well done—and it is very well done in Absinthe—it bears watching again and again. (Though Camille O'Sullivan may want to reconsider covering "Falling in Love Again" in its original German; her pronunciation is iffy.)

Highlight for me was Ursula Martinez's striptease-cum-prestidigitation number, which brought the audience to its feet, hooting. I hear that Martinez is likely to be back next year as part of the Duckie show P.S 122 is bringing from London. But it's her solo pieces—which explore the border between public and private, fiction and autobiography, and which she's done in venues such as the Barbican—that I'd love to see most. Let's hope a keen-eyed NYC producer drops by Absinthe.

I'm an Indian too

Until it officially opens, I will refrain from posting at length about the new A.R. Gurney play, Indian Blood, seen tonight at 59E59. A quick comment, though: Rebecca Luker is in it (and no, it's not a musical), and she looks uncannily like Catherine O'Hara. She even talks like her. Weird.

Another recent viewing, on DVD this time: John Huston's 1948 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Great scene at the beginning, when a Mexican kid (played by Robert Blake!) tries to get Humphrey Bogart to buy a lottery ticket. Bogart keeps waving him away, the kids keeps insisting, so Bogey throws a glass of water at him. Ah, the days when movies showed people casually being mean to kids (as opposed to showing more severe child abuse, which is relatively frequent on screen now and becomes the point of the story, rather than a visual detail meant to delineate a character) and smoking… Of course, the brief scene is meant to foreshadow the revelation that Bogart's character is a little, how shall I put it?—unstable. Still…

The movie also confirms that I much prefer Bogart as a bad guy; another favorite performance by him is as a nasty, violent screenwriter in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, made two years after Sierra Madre. The novel upon which that film is based, by Dorothy Hughes, is quite different but still worth picking up, especially since it was reissued by the Feminist Press three years ago. (I actually did an article about the Feminist Press' pulp reissues, including Hughes' book, at the time.)

Musical à deux

The latest New Group production, Everythings Turning Beautiful, is an interestingly flawed musical—or is it a play with music? In any case, it deserved better than the snottily dismissive, largely padded review Ben Brantley delivered in the Times, if only because it at least attempts to integrate the songs in an organic way. It's true that Seth Zvi Rosenfeld's characters sometimes have to deliver purplish prose, but the musical interludes flow out naturally because Daphne Rubin-Vega and Malik Yoba play songwriters obsessed both with their crafts and their collaboration with each other; it feels completely right that they would perform for each other all the time. In addition, singing allows them to avoid actually talking about what's really on their mind. (Oink-oink moment: The leads both look great in their underwear.)

While Rubin-Vega's voice is rather frayed at this point (a scary prospect since she's slated to play Fantine in the upcoming revival of Les Miz), Yoba's is soulful in a restrained way, and he's a stage natural. Perhaps the Public should look in his direction next time it wants to put on an interesting Shakespeare.

Pop thoughts

After getting irrationally excited that Latoya (Jackson) not only had a new album out but had managed to get it to no. 1, I was slightly disappointed upon learning that it actually was LeToya (Luckett) who had a smash on her hands. Still, it's pretty fun to see someone kicked out of Destiny's Child after two albums make it to the top by out-Beyoncéing Beyoncé. While the sight of yet another CD relying on generous servings of soul classics (Love Unlimited on "U Got What You Need," the Stylistics on "Torn," the Spinners on "She Don't") is maddening, LeToya actually pulls the mix of R&B and hip-hop better than most—indie rockers should listen to the production on "Tear Da Club Up" and weep.

Speaking of production, John Tofu pointed out to me that there's no bass on Fergie's current single, "London Bridge"—ballsy!

And Ciara finally has a song worthy of "1, 2"; it's the exquisitely elastic "Get Up" and it's lurking on the Step Up soundtrack.

Is it me or is the summer of 2006 one of the best in recent memory when it comes to hit songs? Between Rihanna's "SOS," Nelly Furtado's "Promiscuous," Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man," Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie," Fergie's "London Bridge" and half a dozen others I'm forgetting, we're pretty spoiled.

Split personalities

In today's New York Times, Janet Maslin reviews Julie Phillips' James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon. Tiptree was one of the authors I discovered when as a teen I started plowing through my father's numerous issues of Galaxie, a French science-fiction magazine, and his collection of hardcover books published in the early 1970s by Opta/Club du livre d'anticipation. (French sci-fi geeks will nod in nostalgic recognition.) Of course at the time I had no idea that Tiptree was a woman. While the gender-bending aspect of the Sheldon/Tiptree story is obviously crucial, especially since, according to Maslin, Phillips suggests Sheldon was a lesbian, I find the general idea of building a new identity—any new identity—as a writer equally compelling.

Multiplying identities according to various projects isn't new, as anybody who's tried to find their way through electronic-music releases can attest (Richard James = Aphex Twin = Polygon Window = Power Pill = AFX; Sasu Ripatti = Vladislav Delay = Luomo = Sistol = Uusitalo), but somehow it seems to have a deeper connection for a writer than a musician. A few months ago came out Angie David's biography of Dominique Aury, who was a textbook example of dissimulation and secret coding as both personal and creative covers. (No fan of Judith Butler et al., I'm contorting myself not to use the word masquerade.) While the book is titled Dominique Aury, that name wasn't even the subject's real one. Born Anne Desclos, she switched to Aury relatively quickly, then wrote Story of O under a second alias, Pauline Réage. Aury had a thriving career as an editor in the French postwar publishing world, while Réage wrote one of the most famous erotic novels of the 20th century. It doesn't seem like a total coincidence that Tiptree wrote science fiction and Réage a novel about an SM relationship. Both sci-fi and erotic fiction rely on precise codes, and part of the fun of masquerading (damn!) is to obey a different set of rules than the ones you are meant to follow publicly. Perhaps this is why the nicknames and varying identities of electronic-music guys feel like such a pose: They don't seem to hide deep differences between personal/artistic purposes, only relatively slight variations between projects at best (it's not as if Richard James produces 50 Cent under a false name), whims at worst. See Philip Sherburne's thoughts on the subject of names in electronic music.

And lest I miss the opportunity for a oink-oink moment: Angie David certainly knows how to pose for a publicity photo. The head leaning on the arms…the sweep of the hair…the leather boots…

Glassula and Goebbels

After a much-awaited outdoors screening of Dracula, with a live score by Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet, was interrupted by a violent thunderstorm just as Bela Lugosi was about to spread terror in England, the cultural weekend was brought back from the dead by Heiner Goebbels' glorious Eraritjaritjaka—Musée des Phrases at the Rose Theater. A big moist thank you to the Lincoln Center Festival for programming that piece.

Over the years, Goebbels has come to embody a unique combination you could call music-theater—not musicals, but a hybrid combination that's like an equivalent to the dance-theater embodied by Pina Bausch. He integrates music into thought-provoking spectacles that are never less than visually striking. It's a tough combination to achieve, especially since the visuals are more than surface: For Goebbels, they are part of the very fabric of the show, of the intellectual concept even.

In Eraritjaritjaka, André Wilms spoke all the words (pulled from Elias Canetti's writings—hence, perhaps, the subtitle) while the Mondriaan Quartet played pieces ranging from Ravel and Bach to Gavin Bryars and John Oswald. Halfway through, and just as we were getting used to what looked like yet another European import mixing portentous aphorisms, classical music and elegantly minimalist staging, Wilm left the stage. Actually, we know he left the building since he was followed by a cameraman who continuously filmed him (the image was projected onto the white facade of a house onstage) as he got on then off a cab, bought a bottle of water in a supermarket, entered a building then an apartment, cooked an omelette, etc. But where was Wilms? Unlike the Times' Bernard Holland, I won't spoil the surprise. Suffice it to say that the show had suddenly turned into a metaphysical thriller as Goebbels brilliantly scrambled our expectations in a wizardly technical trick that looked as if he was playing with time and space.

File under What Were They Thinking: Sitting behind me was a mother and her two tween girls. While I love the idea of exposing kids to high art, this was really not a play for children. Needless to say, they quickly got bored and restless, and the trio had to make a hasty departure—and since there was no intermission, it was a hassle for everybody around them. What could that woman possible have thought? "A high-concept show in French and based on Elias Canetti? Move over, Lion King!"

Walter Hill's juvenilia

Caught on DVD Walter Hill's The Driver (1978), an interesting action picture that's all mood, minimal dialogue, paradigmatic characters and screeching tires. Isabelle Adjani plays a mysterious moll (she's made to look exactly like a 1940s femme fatale) while in the title role Ryan O'Neal is meant to look impassive throughout, which fits this most expressionless of actors just fine. Ronee Blakley (of Nashville fame) has a notable cameo as "the Connection"—typically, all the characters are nameless and referred to only by their occupation (Adjani is "the Player," Bruce Dern "the Detective").

Hill was on a roll at the beginning of his career: He followed The Driver with The Warriors, The Long Riders and Southern Comfort, all of them superior examples of 1970s action filmmaking but also alluring examples of a gifted director entertainingly playing with specific movie archetypes. But then he seemed to lose interest in style and delivered straight-faced formula: With 48 Hours and Red Heat (I won't bother to link to these two), Hill bears a lot of responsibility for the horrible buddy-movie craze that took off in the 1980s.

[title of post]

Finally saw [title of show] yesterday evening at the Vineyard. It's a musical about writing a musical—specifically, writing the musical the audience is in the process of watching—and it stars the two actual authors, Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen, playing themselves. The meta experience is taken to its logical extremes in often very funny ways: Susan Blackwell orders takeout during a brainstorming session but gives a fake address so the audience won't know where the author lives once the show is performed; lines of dialogue loop into themselves as if in a hall of mirrors. Backed by a lone piano, the songs are reasonably clever, and the game cast (the aforementioned three plus Heidi Blickenstaff) manages to make the constant self-referencing endearing rather than irritating. Special mention to Blackwell, half of the Wondertwins and a marvelous comedienne whose humor is half deadpan, half neurotic.

While its kind of mise en abime isn't new, [title of show] is different from, say, Urinetown, in that it doesn't confuse irony and cynicism: Bell and Bowen wrote a love letter to the musical theater (it's larded with references to actors and shows), whereas Urinetown's Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis behaved like wannabe hipsters trying to look cooler than the field they've chosen to evolve in—it seems particularly shallow to deride musicals while cashing in with one at the same time.

Disco satori

Another kind of dancing this time, as I plug Disco Delivery, a music blog out of Calgary dedicated to classic examples of that most derided of genres. I thought I knew my 1970s disco, but to my delight Disco Delivery makes me feel like a rank amateur. You'll have to read every entry and discover the songs on your own, but so far I've been really blown me away by Beautiful Bend, one of the many projects of Russian-born producer Boris Midney. I won't rehash what Tommy (no last name) wrote, and only will add that "Ah-Do It" has got to be the most intoxicating track I've heard in a while. Its single-minded thrust is broken only by a short melody line played on an electric piano—it's like Motorik disco. Adorning it are hypnotically repetitive vocals, bumping percussion, life-affirming horns, sweeping strings and…is it really a harp here? Is that a wah-wah guitar squeak there? There's a lot going on, but it never feels it's too much.

Actually, "Ah-Do It" is only one of the most intoxicating tracks I've heard in a while: The other is Tom Moulton's mix of Claudja Barry's "Love for the Sake of Love," also posted on Disco Delivery. (Tom Moulton was one of the DJ-producers who shaped New York's nightlife in the 1970s. More info on him in Tim Lawrence's Love Saves the Day—A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979.) The song's dreamy sensuality is carried by strings beamed in from an outer galaxy and a moodily restrained vocal by Barry. Love here is not a matter of the flesh; it's a disembodied emotion that's more about gauzy wistfulness than anything else. At 5:52, things bloom into quiet euphoria. We're light-years away from the current take on disco, whether it's made by synthetic Italo clones or the manly likes of the DFA: The kind of disco on these two tracks is both highly theatrical and floatingly self-reflective as it basks in its own soft-lit glow. (Side note: While these songs sound fantastic on headphones, I'm really curious to hear what they'd be like on a good PA.)

Dance the night around

Some thoughts on Batsheva Dance Company's Telophaza (seen at the New York State Theater Thursday evening), especially in light of Alex Ross' great piece about Mozart, "The Storm of Style," in The New Yorker.

Telophaza was my third Batsheva show, and with 38 dancers it was closer in scale and spirit to Anaphaza (2003, same venue) than the intimate Mamootot, a piece for nine dancers done in the round last year at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn.

The first impression is that seeing such a large troupe on stage is thrilling, especially since Batsheva choreographer Ohad Naharin knows how to move it. You'd think moving a large group of dancers shouldn't be such a big deal, but anybody who's seen Broadway ensembles clunkily roam about a stage can tell it's not. The comparison with Broadway isn't as far-fetched as it may seem because while Naharin's vocabulary and artistic aim are completely different, a lot of his large-scale work is audience-friendly in a fundamental way; but while it's easy to enjoy on a gut level, it also contains sophisticated layers of possible interpretation ready to be peeled off by audience members keen on analysis.

In a different style, of course, Telophaza captures some of what makes Mozart's greatest achievements so great and so enduring. In a letter to his father quoted in Ross's article, Mozart writes of some of his concertos: "There are passages here and there from which the connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why." You could enjoy Telophaza on a purely surface level—it was never less than gorgeous eye candy, again, an achievement not as easy as you'd think—but you could also ponder, for instance, Naharin's use of video closeups (is technology indispensable to draw the viewer in? Does closeness necessarily equate intimacy?).

Another Naharin particularity is his occasional recourse to audience participation. While it's a device I generally dislike (cheap pandering!), somehow I don't mind it in his pieces. In Telophaza, a disembodied voice belonging to "Rachel" gave us instructions, which we were meant to follow from our seats, like:

"Put your hands in front of your face."
"Put a hand on your head and count down to yourself from ten to one."
"Place your hand on your mouth and think of what you ate today."
"Put both hands on your stomach and think about who you miss."
"Put your hands on your thighs and think that you have plenty of time."

People chuckled, but they also did as told. Because nobody was singled out, as tends to be the norm in audience participation, the sense of community was striking.

Censor! Censor!

It's just been announced that the next chief administrator of the Comédie-Française will be a woman—the first since the troupe's creation in 1680. Muriel Mayette will replace Marcel Bozonnet in August. Officially, Bozonnet's contract wasn't renewed because the Ministry of Culture, which oversees the C-F, wanted to both inject new blood and signal a willingness to place more women at the head of public theaters. Unofficially, it's of course hard not to wonder if the Peter Handke flap had anything to do with the decision. Back in the spring, Bozonnet withdrew from the C-F's upcoming season Handke's play Voyage to the Sonorous Land, or the Art of Asking on the grounds that he had given a eulogy that seemed to exculpate Slobodan Milosevic at the Serb leader's funeral. (Interesting roundup of German reactions here.)

I have mixed feelings about this affair. In his quality of administrator, Bozonnet is entitled to add or withdraw productions. Cries of censorship feel overdramatic and almost exploitative—since after all anybody is still free to mount the play—not to mention that they allow Handke to wrap himself in a convenient mantle of self-important martyrdom. At the same time, Handke has never hidden his sympathies, something Bozonnet clearly should have thought about before programming the Austrian writer.

This hits close to what happened to My Name Is Rachel Corrie and New York Theater Workshop a few months ago. I do believe NYTW artistic director Jim Nicola wasn't wrong to withdraw the play from his schedule, just as I believe he could have handled the matter better. In the end, another theater, like for instance the Culture Project at 45 Bleecker, could conceivably put on the play. And would people have been as upset if Nicola had said something along the lines of, "My bad: I finally read the play and it's a didactic piece of crap so we won't produce it after all"? Like his initial move, it would have displayed bad judgment (think before you program something!) and even worse diplomatic skills, but I doubt it would have created the same uproar.

"We called them saloons. Toilets. Dives."

No, it's not Henry Rollins recalling his touring days with Black Flag, but Dorothy Loudon describing New York's old cabaret rooms.

Could there be a more entertaining read than James Gavin's Intimate Nights—The Golden Age of New York Cabaret? The rogues gallery in the first couple of chapters alone is mind-boggling, and often laugh-out-loud funny. My favorites tend to be the now-forgotten ones, like Sheila Barrett, an impressionist wildly popular in the 1930s, and whose routines "included a scene from Hamlet as it would have been enacted by Bert Lahr and Lynn Fontanne; Mae West as Juliet; and Fanny Brice as Scarlett O'Hara opposite W.C. Fields as Rhett Butler." Or Ray "Rae" Bourbon, a female impersonator who peaked in the 1930s and 1940s before spinning into oblivion and meeting a sad, bizarre ending (let's just say it involves a pack of 15 dogs in a trailer and an alleged hit on a pet-shop owner).

Intimate Nights documents a period of New York nightlife that seemed to brass all kinds of people in a rare manner. The photo of "the Reno Sweeney family, 1974," in particular, makes my head spin: Marta Heflin, Baby Jane Dexter, Ellen Greene and Marilyn Sokol are side by side, but wait! There's also Patti Smith and Holly Woodlawn! An equivalent would be the way races and sexual orientations mixed through disco in the mid- to late 1970s.

In addition to a veritable goldmine of hilarious anecdotes and often touching portraits, Gavin also deals with the integration of homosexuality on stage and off, and the way it shaped both identity and show business; the early acceptance of black performers; and the intangible bond between song, performer and audience. The latter are perhaps more inextricably linked in cabaret than in any other pop genre, often to the point of discomfort for both audience and musician.

In this and many other ways, cabaret is as rebellious as rock & roll—and unlike rock, cabaret has no hope of ever commodifying its dissent; it is a minority taste. Some of it took place in Loudon's saloons, toilets and dives, far from the pop/consumerist mainstream. Some of it unfurled in swank venues, but it still mocked, in song and deed, the Good Housekeeping/K-Mart aesthetics, heterosexual missionary position and clean Christian habits endorsed by the majority of America. Then and now, it's hard to think of a American art form populated with a bigger bunch of geeks, freaks and perverts than cabaret—and I say that with utmost affection, of course.

The sound and the fury

Two big spectacles this past weekend, and two ways to approach the evil that men do.

On Friday night, Emperor put on one of the most unrelenting shows I've ever seen; I left B.B. King's in a daze, barely able to walk to the subway on my weakened legs. I wholeheartedly agree with my colleague and friend Steve Smith's description, and only have a few thoughts to add. One of the things I enjoy most about black metal is its buzzy petulance, the way guitars swarm around your ears like maddened bees. Emperor had plenty of that, but intricate, grand song structures as well, which injected a sense of careful planning into a general atmosphere suggesting end-of-the-world chaos. The mix of screeching abandon and Napoleon-like plotting makes black metal incredibly vital live. That and the unbelievable, head-pummelling aggro, of course.

Sunday night was Grendel at the New York State Theater. I feel as if I'm the only person in town who was bored by Julie Taymor's Magic Flute at the Met, and Grendel elicited the same reaction. The problem with Taymor is that she sucks all extremes out of art. In The Magic Flute, everything was lukewarm: The sad scenes weren't sad enough, the joyous scenes weren't joyous enough, and so on. Taymor is the queen of the middle road—and middle brow—as if she were afraid of anything that'd send the emo-meter not even into but toward the red. Elliot Goldenthal's score for Grendel never raised above basically competent (at best), and Taymor's staging didn't help, since it never developed into actual drama, just an ersatz of it. (Special kudos to Denyce Graves for looking—and at times sounding—like Eartha Kitt, though.) Using puppets to depict Grendel's attackers ensured that the violence was so stylized that it didn't hit us in the gut. All we saw was puppeteers clad in black, bunraku-style, swarming around holding what looked like toy soldiers. The effect was entirely devoid of danger, pain, aggression. It was just…pretty. And pretty is what you get at the American Girl daily show, not the opera.

The Wooster Group vs. the Green Goblin

I'm excited to see that Frédéric Martel, author of Le Rose et le noir, an excellent history of the gay movement in France, has recently published Theater: Sur le déclin du théâtre en Amérique (et comment il peut résister en France). The title translates as "Theater: On the decline of theater in America (and how it can hold up in France)." I've ordered it from Amazon France, so more on the book later, I'm sure.

And based on the op-ed Martel (who was cultural attaché in the US for several years) just wrote in the French weekly Les Inrockuptibles, there will be plenty to talk about. Titled "How Mickey Stepped on American Theater" (a very French statement), it looks like a summary of the book's main arguments, including the fact that American theaters had to fight the decline in popularity of their artform by practicing "outreach"—grassroots creations and marketing, including engaging specific communities (gay, Latino, etc.) That's certainly one answer to the problem, though it is incomplete.

A few sweeping statements irritatingly creep in here and there. For instance, Martel writes, "Here's the era of The Lion King in theaters which yesterday hosted Arthur Miller and Peter Brook." While he's not on Broadway, Brook is still staged in NYC; as for Miller, he is very much still represented on the Great White Way.

An indication of a possible (again, typically French) misreading of the relation between art and commerce in the US is an aside stating, as an example of American theater's losing battle against mass culture, that the Wooster Group gave in to "the sirens of the cultural corporations" when Willem Dafoe played the Green Goblin in Spiderman. First of all, the Wooster Group had nothing to do with Spiderman; Dafoe acted (in both senses of the word) on his own behalf. In addition, not only did he appear in the Wooster's revival of Brace Up!, at about the same time (2002), but by then he had spent two decades appearing in both Wooster shows and Hollywood movies.

Dafoe's film career probably helped subsidize the downtown company, which in turn kept him engaged in the experimental world. In a country where there is little public funding for the arts, Hollywood is a de facto benefactor, the actors' fat film paychecks affording them to do theater. The responsibility then falls on the actors themselves to choose good stage material. Some play it safe, choosing staid vehicles; others are more daring: For years Elizabeth Marvel—one of NYC's top stage actors—funded her Off and Off-Off career with a regular gig on the TV drama The District. On the other hand, Allison Jeanney completely disappeared from the stage after becoming a regular on The West Wing.

Of course, this leads to the question of why actors can't make a decent living on stage and need to do film and TV work. Yes, a few people earn quite a decent buck on Broadway, but that's because the Broadway system is powered by $250 premium seats and $100 second-balcony seats, and of course no discounts for students and seniors. There has to be a way for people to make a living working Off and Off-Off full-time. NYC theater insiders may scoff, but the crisis of the American theater will never be resolved if the only way to make a living in theater is by being on Broadway.

But more on this later. I must prepare myself to finally see Emperor tonight. It's the equivalent of a Beatles reunion for black-metal fans.

How to be a "modern" girl group

In a review of a show by the Pipettes, a trio of charming English women partial to matching polka-dot dresses, The Guardian writes:

"The three vocalists - one brunette, two blondes - offer a modern spin on classic girl groups: the Shangri-La's, the Marvelettes and the Chiffons." So far, so good, even though the Pipettes tunes I've heard are as unabashedly retro as a Civil War reenactment.

But then: "Their songs seem to have been blasted from a golden age of the Brill Building, Phil Spector, sugary harmonies and doo-wop - but with a contemporary, slightly feminist slant. Most concern nasty boyfriends, or boring boyfriends dumped for being 'too sweet', and there's a streak of prudity in Judy, about a girl who did 'rude things'."

That old canard again! Anybody with half an ear knows that many Brill Building songs—the biggest influence on the Pipettes—did, in fact, have a "slightly feminist slant" (something observed as early as 1989 by Charlotte Grieg in her clever book on girl groups, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?) And the Pipettes' boyfriends aren't dumped for doing too much meth or getting nasty with Lindsay Lohan, but for being "too sweet." A modern spin, indeed.