Cut down those trees already

Just before intermission at The Cherry Orchard this weekend, I could see the Sheila's eyes glazing over in the semi-darkness. Yet it's not like the evening had been eventless so far: A man sitting in the middle of a row suddenly got up and left during a very quiet scene, creating quite a stir—but then he did not actually leave the theater, he just sat in an empty seat across the aisle from me. And stayed there after intermission. Then there was the gentleman holding a paper bag on his lap and rustling it absent-mindedly—and quite loudly—at regular intervals. Then there were the four people who arrived an hour late and were seated anyway, despite the fact that two of them were in the first row (which is very very close to the actors at BAM's Harvey Theater). Then there was the person who erupted in braying, quasi-hysterical laughter out of the blue.

As you can see, it was action-packed. And it wasn't too bad onstage either, so I told the Sheila she should stick with it because we were seeing a pretty good Chekhov.

I'm not the biggest Chekhov fan so it's a bit unfortunate that old Anton is hot on the New York stage right now. The Seagull flew off less than a month ago, Uncle Vanya is in previews at CSC, and Sam Mendes is having his way with Ranevskaya et al. I'm sure there's more on the horizon but honestly it depresses me a bit just to think about it.

As far as this Cherry Orchard goes, however, Mendes does a fairly decent job of balancing the drama and comedy that so bewilders directors. Aesthetically speaking it's a little too close to the Lincoln Center production of Coast of Utopia, especially when Mendes brings up a line of silently threatening representatives of the lower classes. (If only angry waiters and bank tellers could pop off at Barneys and Bouley to scare off hedge-fund managers and guilt-trip fashionistas.) But overall it's not too bad, and there's a couple of visually striking scenes, which is a couple more than in most mainstream NY productions, which seem directed by blind people.

But it's the acting that rocks. While I usually cannot stand Simon Russell Beale's hamming, he keeps it in check and delivers an affecting Lopakhin. My favorites were Sinead Cusack as Ranevskaya and Rebecca Hall as Varya. For the first time I didn't get terminally irritated and frustrated by Ranevskaya's refusal to sell her orchard: Yes, she's blithely clinging to a dying world, but Cusack made you understand why, and understanding helps keep the disdain at bay. As for Hall, her ramrod-straight posture barely disguised cracks of pain. And what a voice! Low, sexy—almost Elizabeth Marvel–ian at times. I cannot wait to see this gang in The Winter's Tale, which they will do in rep at BAM starting in February.

Gay, buff and tattooed

I'm a big fan of Radio France, the public-radio network that's like a dream version of NPR—we're talking hour-long interviews with dancers and novelists here, along with excellent investigative journalism and audio docs. I subscribe to several podcasts from France Inter and France Culture, two of the several stations under the Radio France umbrella.

Anyway, imagine my delighted surprise when I learned that Jean-Paul Cluzel, the 60-year-old, openly gay president of Radio France, had recently posed in the 2009 calendar of Parisian tattoo artist Abraxas. Cluzel is barechested and wears a Mexican wrestler's mask. (The guy on the right is Cluzel's boyfriend.) I mean, can you imagine the president of NPR posing like this?

The wit and wisdom of Alphabeat

I've listened to Alphabeat's This Is Alphabeat a lot in the past few months. In fact, it's one of the few albums I've listened to repeatedly all the way through. While the Danes' wicked way with hooks obviously is the primary appeal, I've also come to really appreciate their lyrics.

One song really encapsulates the Alphabeat style: "10,000 Nights." Disregarding the conventional verse-chorus-verse structure, the melody is plain addictive (and look at the adorably dorky dance moves in the video), but it's the lyrics that bring it all home: Such a poetic inanity—or is that inane poetry?—is rare, even in the kind of pop I love. See for yourself in this analysis of the entire song (I'll skip repeated lines):

I was not looking for arty-farty love
Hmm, arty-farty feels like a remote possibility if you're in a band like Alphabeat but okay, if you insist on stating the obvious, I'm with you. But why not artsy-fartsy instead of the awkward arty-farty? Would it have thrown off the meter? Is the gassy echo a reference to Serge Gainsbourg's cult novel Evguénie Sokolov?

I wanted someone to love completely
Someone more than weekly
We're starting to get somewhere: No pseudo-intellectual hipsters need apply, and no behaving like a Simenon character with a weekly prostitute habit.

I was looking for a decent boy
Despite visual evidence suggesting the opposite would make more sense, Stine sings this line, not Anders.

For a tender glance
For a safety dance
First meta reference to another song, ie Men Without Hats' "The Safety Dance." Alphabeat slyly suggests it learned English by listening to the radio.

The wuthering heights
And the stormy nights
This is the one-two punch that slays me every single time. It could be a Bronte reference in the first line but I don't think so, meaning we've got another pop allusion, this time to Kate Bush (which makes you revisit the first line: perhaps someone in Alphabeat would like arty-farty after all). And then we have the stormy nights. No verb, just minimalist description. Amazing.

You give me 10,000 nights of thunder
But I will give them all back to you
But why will you give them back? Don't you like the other person anymore? Also do you realize that 10,000 nights is 27 years??? These two lines are bewildering and insanely wonderful.

Cause you're so ooh, you're so aah, you're so cool
This doesn't help at all. Anders is giving back the nights—and not just any nights: nights of thunder—because the object of his affection is…cool? The way Anders grasps for words before settling down for "cool" is rather endearing.

You came like a thief in the night and stole my heart
Like a solitude erasure
Like an elevator
My three favorite lines of the year, no contest. Listening to the song, I thought Stine and Anders sang "Like a solitude eraser"—referring to the thief—but all the lyrics sites I consulted have "erasure." I'm not sure which one I prefer, though "erasure" somehow has a more definitive side to it. The lines are happy but a certain darkness creeps in. That elevator thing, however, is completely cryptic—like something out of a song those bearded indie-rock kids enjoy so much. Is this an example of catachresis? Discuss.

And I know we'd do anything for love
And it is you and me
For all eternity
Whoa, Stine's going all Tristan and Isolde on us! What happened to the arty-farty safety dance?

It feels like 10,000 nights of thunder
When I've spent one with you
A-ha! They didn't literally mean 27 years. Alphabeat is in absolute mastery of all the rhetorical tools at the disposal of a pop lyricist. (Remember the use of analogy in the "solitude erasure/elevator" combo?)

'Cause you're so ooh, you're so aah, you're so cool
You're so super-supremely ba-ba-di-oh
And one of these tools seems to be nonsense, which Stine uses to express the fact that her infatuation is so strong, it prevents her from articulating her thoughts, just like Anders and his bumbling "You're so ooh, so aah." I like the use of the mirror image, plus for some reason it all reminds me of "Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo" from Cinderella.

And baby baby you're irresistible and I'm insatiable
Yeah love is an ocean of sweet emotion
While Alphabeat is a PG band, the first line suggests Anders has needs, like all young men his age. But he immediately drops that sensitive subject and reassures us that he understands the real force to be reckoned with is love. All's well that ends well.

Magnificent obsession on DVD

My review of the Criterion edition of Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession is in this week's Time Out New York. The two-disc set also includes John M. Stahl's original version of the movie, which starred Irene Dunne. I'm a huge fan of Stahl's, who I think has gotten unfairly neglected because his dramas aren't as sarcasm-friendly to our sad contemporary audiences as Sirk's.

But perhaps his rehabilitation is under way. Later this month, Anthology Film Archives is going to screen both his and Sirk versions of When Tomorrow Comes, Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life. In addition to testifying to Stahl's talent in the women's movie realm, fans of Irene Dunne—which means all readers of this blog, right? right?—should mark their calendars as she also stars in Tomorrow, which doesn't seem to be on DVD.

Also on the horizon, in March Film Forum is going to show Stahl's Leave Her to Heaven, from 1945, which makes great use of Gene Tierney's perverse beauty. The scene in which she rides a horse against a grandiose Western vista, dispersing her father's ashes to the wind while Alfred Newman's score swells, is one of my favorite cinematic moments ever. Like Anthony Mann's The Furies, which mixed Western and melodrama (and which I reviewed for TONY last year), Leave Her to Heaven is a genre hybrid that borrows tropes from noir and melodrama; the two movies also share the honor of being fine examples of incest sublimation, Hollywood-style.

Another incentive to see Leave Her to Heaven is that it's a particularly flamboyant example of Technicolor. I was such a film geek as a kid that when I was around 13 or 14, my enabling parents got me a hardcover coffee-table book about Natalie Kalmus, the official Technicolor consultant in the 1930s and ’40s.

The most depressing list in the world

Okay, maybe not the most depressing one, but still… Stereogum has printed a clean, reader-friendlier version of Hype Machine's "blogger-sanctioned meta-list beast," which is as good an indicator as any of what indie kids listened to in 2008.

And what a sad, sad sight it is.

The top five albums are by Fleet Foxes, TV on the Radio, Vampire Weekend, Bon Iver and MGMT, in descending order. Just looking at these names makes me want to poke a stick in my eyes. And one in my ears too, for good measure.

There's plenty to say about the list, but I'll focus on one aspect of it: Where are the women? Out of 50 entries, seven bands (Portishead, She & Him, Crystal Castles, Beach House, Ra Ra Riot, Mates of States, the Kills) include women in prominent roles, and then there's a grand total of three female solo artists (Santogold, Lykke Li, Jenny Lewis). Just pathetic.

Seriously, what is wrong with hipsters that they can't relate to women making music? Nowadays, the indie charts are dominated by dudes with beards, whereas the Billboard Hot 100 is a lot more hospitable to women making smart, chart-friendly pop music. I guess that's okay in a way: Taylor Swift, Lady GaGa, Miley Cyrus and Rihanna are the ones laughing all the way to the bank. Still, it'd be nice if they could get the critical respect they deserve, too.

Playbill bio of the week

While it's nowhere near as brilliant as Tatiana Chernova's, the bio of director and choreographer Liu Tongbiao reads thus in its entirety in the Soul of Shaolin playbill: "The state's first-grade director, he is a director of the Shanghai People's Art Center. Under the guidance of drama master Huang Zuolin, he has dabbled in drama, film, plays, opera, tourism, art and large evening parties."

He's dabbled in tourism and large evening parties? Would William Powell play him in the American version?

Post-ap book group

You now have less than ten days to read John Wyndham's The Chrysalids before it's discussed at the next meeting of the Brooklyn post-apocalyptic book group. This will be on January 22 at Freebird Books & Goods in Red Hook. Typically for Red Hook, the convoluted directions from the subway stop include the likes of walking "until you can't go any further" to a venue located "across from the packing containers." This, of course, is perfectly appropriate to the subject at hand.

My fondness for post-apocalyptic fiction has long been in evidence on this blog, and I share it with my esteemed colleague Joshua Rothkopf. (We can often be seen huddled by a desk, discussing reissues of obscure novels and relevant new movies.) And so we were both psyched to hear about the book group. Clearly we are not the only ones who dream of the day after.

Also, to clarify: I am not particularly interested in End of Days scenarios—the religious element pretty much leaves me cold, as it does in real life. I'm also not that into the catastrophe itself, so I tend to pass on descriptions of meteors hitting Earth or plagues unleashing out of a lab.

That said, I'd definitely read a book about the last three days before nuclear armageddon, and I'd watch any movie involving Christina Hendricks in a lab coat saying, "We only have two minutes before the virus wipes out humanity." It hasn't been made? Well, what are you waiting for, Hollywood?

Becky Shaw rulz

Let me join the chorus praising Gina Gionfriddo's new play, Becky Shaw, at Second Stage. I can't even remember the last time I laughed so much at the theater, and not once did I feel my intelligence had been insulted. The show is also rather well constructed, though the plot's twists and turns, as satisfying as they are, are almost secondary compared to the fact that all the characters have more than one side, revealing a wealth of new complexities as the play progresses.

Plus let it be said again: Gionfriddo brings on the funny.

I don't know if she got her day job as a writer/producer on Law & Order because her lines are tight and snappy or if it's the L&O gig that's trained her to be tight and snappy, and theatergoers are benefiting. It's a chicken-and-egg situation, though a decision either way may be of interest to those who enroll in playwriting programs. If you're an aspiring author, is it worth getting into debt to get an MFA at Brown or should you send your résumé to Dick Wolfe?

Now the thing with Gionfriddo is that she did go to Brown before landing at L&O. I'd be curious to know how she rates what she learned at both places, and how they affected her playwriting.

Completely unrelated: I realize this blog hasn't gone metal in a while, but I'm listening to the entire Bathory oeuvre for an assignment so get ready for some blackened thoughts very soon.

This Hamlet I want to see

Apparently David Tennant is the greatest Hamlet of his generation, or so says The Guardian. Okay. Needless to say, these photos are not from the production that's taken London by storm. Rather, it is, as you might have guessed, a German staging—more specifically, one by Dilettante favorite Thomas Ostermeier.

I don't even know why I specify it's German because if you've been following international theater of the past 25 years, it's pretty obvious that it is. (The equivalent works in opera, too, as those who read La Cieca and her hilarious Regie quizzes know full well.)

I know, I know: It's so easy to make fun of those productions. And yet I often find them entrancing because they are so demented. I ran into a composer friend at a Park Slope coffee shop a couple of weeks ago, and we had the beginning (because I was running late and had to go) of an interesting conversation about this. I tend to fall in the pro-Regie camp, which holds that you can completely reenvision a play or opera, and his basic question was, If you're going to mangle something beyond recognition, why don't you come up with a new play or a new opera to begin with?

A valid concern, of course, to which I say: If we've seen Hamlet 100 times, why not make take liberties with the 101st? Granted, this does assume that the audience has seen enough Hamlets to be interested in a radical reimagining of it; I'm not sure one can make this leap about our local audiences.

Chances are we're not going to see Ostermeier's Hamlet here, unless maybe BAM does well enough with Sam Mendes's The Cherry Orchard and The Winter's Tale in the coming month, and uses part of the profits to import Hamlet for a five-day run. That to me is one of the reasons to mount this type of staging—so it can finance more commercially hazardous ones. We'll see.

Starry sky over New York

Over at Channel Thirteen's Sunday Arts blog, I wax poetic about the abundance of high-wattage stars about to descend on NYC stage this winter and spring. The real question is, Is it worth seeing Mary-Louise Parker as Hedda Gabler if the staging is the kind of blah we are used to getting from the Roundabout? And what the hell is up with the current obsession with all things Chekhovian? That gun will get used if I have to watch one more Cherry Orchard.

More Pop Club

I have to admit that my single favorite work assignment is doing the Pop Club with the fabulous Jimmy Draper and Kurt B. Reighley every other week or so. We chat about three new singles via Google Talk—I'm in New York, Jimmy in Ann Arbor and Kurt in Seattle—as we listen to the songs simultaneously; I then put up the conversation on the Time Out New York site along with the streaming tunes, so readers can see whether or not they agree with us.

The third installment of the Pop Club just came up today. Under the microscope: tunes by the Veronicas, Miranda Cosgrove and Leona Lewis.

Turning the tables on David Denby

My trashing of David Denby's Snark is in this week's Time Out New York.

Don't let the following prevent you from jumping to the full review, of course, but in brief: The New Yorker's film critic arrives five years late to the snark party, bearing flat, store-brand soda and stale potato chips. Fun!

The French boards, part 2

And now, the present…

Le Monde just ran an interesting interview with director Luc Bondy. One of the things he talks about is the difference between public and private institutions in France. Here in New York, the scene is very roughly divided in three: Broadway, Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway houses. In Paris, you have institutions that get public subsidies and those that rely more on box-office revenues; the former is meant to present fare that's more demanding (with lower ticket prices), while the latter is meant to be more commercial (and is more expensive).

The difference can get muddy, though, as a public institution like Chaillot has often presented accessible, popular shows by directors Jérôme Deschamps and Macha Makeïeff, for instance, while private theaters can show fare that's much edgier than we get on the Off scene here.

The Swiss-born Bondy, who's worked a lot in German-speaking countries (he ran the Schaubühne in Berlin, and has been artistic director of the Vienna Festival for 20 years), says of French subsidized theater: "There's people with great potential, but the output is mediocre. First, because the French are very germanophile, they think everything that comes from Germany is great and they get very derivative. They need their own pride. It's true that it's more difficult to do theater in France than in Germany because the French are more extroverted than the German. In introverted countries, theater is the place where you're free. In extroverted countries such as France or Italy, it requires more effort to find a language." [I think he means a theatrical language here, obviously.]

Bondy on actors: "In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, actors work are hired in companies. They may be less afraid to act than French actors, because they have that safety net. But that sense of safety also sometimes makes them sure of themselves and less curious than French actors, who can get deeply involved in a project. The greatest issue in France is the ostracism between public and private theater. There are great actors working in the private sector that you'd dream of seeing in the public one. And vice versa. But the two areas are like two dogs barking at each other. It's true that when you see the price of tickets in private theaters, and those who can afford them, you don't necessarily want to work there. But without sounding populist, I find unbearable the idea that people can't go to a good boulevard play because it's too expensive. You can learn a lot from boulevard. There's a technique and actors that are marvelous. In England, they can take a tragedy by Eschylus and turn it into a play. They don't have that separation between pure and impure, which is false: a play is good or it isn't. One of the greatest conductors in the world for me was Bernstein, who led Beethoven's symphonies like no one else and wrote West Side Story. That culture is missing today."

Bondy is perceived as high-brow in France, but he's also doing quite well at the box office. Last time I was in Paris, for instance, I couldn't see his staging of Marivaux's La Seconde Surprise de l'Amour at the supposedly elite Bouffes du Nord (Peter Brook's former home, and the inspiration for BAM's Harvey Theater): it was such a big fat hit that there were no tickets to be found. When Marivaux sells out without the help of marquee-name stars, you know the director is doing something right.

And the hits keep on coming

Back in December, I raved about Our Hit Parade, a demented revue I saw at the Zipper. The brain trust behind the event—Bridget Everett, Kenny Mellman and Neal Medlyn—has now started a companion blog of the same name, which combines two of my favorite things: super-commercial pop songs and a twisted downtown sensibility.

The next edition of Our Hit Parade is at the Zipper on January 31. See you there.

The French boards, part 1

Part one of a post about French theater, ie something we rarely see in New York.

First, the past…

Reading about the recent publication of the correspondence of Gérard Philipe and his friend, actor/writer Georges Perros, I learned that even when he was a huge star in the 1940s and 1950s (think James Dean if he had been French, known equally for this theater work as for his films, and a Marx reader), Philipe's name would be listed in the middle of the casts in Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire, which were organized alphabetically. The entire troupe, including him, also made the same salary. Granted, he also had an income from his screen hits, but still, I like that he was paid the same as his less famous colleagues.

I was also stunned to learn that since the troupe put on classics in repertory, Philipe could play up to four different parts in a single week—and we're talking big leads here, like the title characters in Corneille's Le Cid or Kleist's The Prince of Homburg.

Fly the friendly skies

In the current issue of Time Out New York, I interview Clove Galilee and Jenny Rogers, the brains behind Wickets, a clever adaptation of Maria Irene Fornes's play Fefu and Her Friends. Fornes has been in the news in an indirect way recently, thanks to the publication of the early diaries of Susan Sontag, with whom the playwright had an affair. A couple of excerpts, published in the Times two years ago:

November 20, 1959
"I have never been as demanding of anyone as I am of [the Cuban-American playwright Maria] I[rene Fornes]. I am jealous of everyone she sees, I hurt every minute she goes away from me. But not when I leave her, and know that she is here. My love wants to incorporate her totally, to eat her. My love is selfish. … Tonight she went from work to meet Inez at the San Remo. Ann Morrissett [journalist and playwright] was there. After, the Cedar Bar. She came home at 12:00; I was asleep. She came to bed, told me about the conversations of the evening, at 2:00 asked that the light be put out, went to sleep. I was paralyzed, mute, swollen with tears. I smoked, she slept.

December 28, 1959
Till now I have felt that the only persons I could know in depth, or really love, were duplicates or versions of my own wretched self. (My intellectual and sexual feelings have always been incestuous.) Now I know + love someone who is not like me — e.g. not a Jew, not a New York-type intellectual — without any failure of intimacy. I am always conscious of I’s foreignness, of the absence of a shared background — and I experience this as a great release.

I'm available to be U.S. Senator

Dear Governor Paterson,

I would like to express my interest in replacing Hillary Rodham Clinton in the United States Senate. I currently hold a full-time job, which I realize puts me at a disadvantage with Caroline Kennedy, but my employer is willing to grant me a sabbatical while I commute to Washington. Like Ms. Kennedy, however, I am a woman, I have never held or sought public office, I have no governing experience, and I am unwilling to disclose the state of my finances. (I shall not release my medical records so you have to trust me on this, but I am in good health.)

I am ready and able to serve my adopted state, which I've visited extensively. Just two months ago I spent four delicious days exploring the Finger Lakes region. I have also been to the Adirondacks, the Catskills and the eastern tip of Long Island. I am familiar, of course, with all five boroughs of New York City, including Staten Island; in fact, I know someone who actually works on Staten Island. I have also attended several upstate county fairs, consuming deep-fried Oreos and oohing-and-aahing at oversize farm animals.

As a resident of the cultural mecca known as Brooklyn and as Time Out New York's arts & entertainment editor, I've acquired a Rolodex bulging with artsy types; I hear candidates with built-in networks get serious consideration.

A French-American citizen, I have close ties to the immigrant community that is an essential component of the glorious mosaic known as New York State. While I refuse to reveal much of anything about my personal life, I can let on that picking me should soothe the frayed nerves of the gay community; in other words, President Obama will personally thank you for a choice that will ensure everlasting support from those squawky homosexuals, thus favoring your own re-election campaign.

As New York Senator, I realize my job would not be to govern, but rather to divert much-needed federal funds to worthy constituencies, which in our current time of crisis would include not only hedge-fund managers, but also real-estate developers and victims of investment Ponzi schemes. I would also propose that America’s Big Three automakers move their corporate headquarters to Schenectady as part of any industry restructuring; there’s got to be some bailout dollars there.

Your naming me U.S. Senator would send a clear message that as Governor, you are not afraid of putting "regular folks" first, and that in New York, anybody can live the American Dream to the fullest.

Finally, let me assure you that this is not a prank: If you call on me, I will be honored to serve.

Sincerely,

Elisabeth Vincentelli
Candidate to the U.S. Senate

Give Katy Perry a break

Lots of gay women have been really riled up by Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl." The main beef: Perry kissed a girl and liked it, but then she went on to say "I hope my boyfriend don't mind it."

Hold the presses: Katy Perry's not a real lesbian—she sings about hetero titillation!

And she stole the title of a song by Jill Sobule, who's a real bisexual!

And the dudes at Out magazine made her their Musician of the Year! Even though she isn't out ’cause she isn't gay!

And…and…and…those greedy sell-outs at the Dinah Shore made Perry their headliner over Indigo Girls for the ’09 edition of their annual orgy!!!

Can I possibly be the only lesbionic gal who'd rather see Katy Perry than Indigo Girls? The only one who'd trade the entire k.d. lang catalogue for "I Kissed a Girl"? (Okay, maybe "I Kissed a Girl" + "Hot ’n’ Cold," its even better follow-up.) Is it so wrong to want to trade earnestly strummed guitars for the magic of pop music, which is about style, fun, flirtation and yes, manipulation? Sometimes I really despair of my sisters' ability not so much to take a joke as to understand how power works. Frankly if Katy Perry wants to kiss a girl even though she has a boyfriend, we ladies should take advantage. So Katy won't show up the next day with a U-Haul—and that's a bad thing how?

(Also: girls' lips taste better with cherry chapstick than Karma Apple 95% Organic Lip Balm.)

In the meantime—and what really prompted this belated post—here is my new fave Perry-related moment: "I Kissed a Girl" + Britney Spears's "If U Seek Amy" = "If You Kissed Amy." Enjoy.

About Jon Raymond

My review of Jon Raymond's new collection, Livability, is in Time Out New York.

Raymond is best-known for adapting two of his own stories with director Kelly Reichardt for the movies Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. I didn't have the space to expand on this thought in the review, but Raymond frequently reminded me of Adrian Tomine at his worst—when he tries to spin meaning out of nothingness.

Parlez vous crime?

I love Scandi noir as much as anybody out there but that doesn't mean I have to lower my standards. I'm surprised, for instance, by the good will that's greeted Johan Theorin's Echoes from the Dead, considering it's completely by-the-numbers. "Another in a seemingly bottomless pool of sophisticated and effective Scandinavian crime writers"? Hardly.

The best part about the novel is its atmospheric description of an island community off the coast of Sweden, but this isn't enough to make up for the fact that the plot hinges on a contrivance: It works only because the main characters wilfully avoid sharing crucial information (which they all know the others have) as they try to solve the mystery surrounding the 20-year-old disappearance of a child. Of course if they did the normal thing and talked to each other, the book would be only about a hundred pages long.

Much better is Jo Nesbø's Nemesis. I had quite liked Nesbø's The Redbreast, which I had reviewed for Time Out New York when it came out here last year. Nemesis picks up exactly where its predecessor left off, and once again Nesbø somehow manages to make an alcoholic inspector with unorthodox crime-solving methods feel like a fresh character.

And speaking of classic Scandi cops: Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander has gotten another TV series, after the Swedish one in which he was played by Krister Henriksson. Oddly it's from the BBC and Wallander is played by Kenneth Branagh—which at least means we have a better chance of seeing it here than the other version.

Too bad American channels are as protectionist as American publishers when it comes to international crime, and open up only to English series. I've been catching up with a really fun French drama called Engrenages (on DVDs sent from the homeland) and while it doesn't hold up to The Wire—but then, nothing does—it's good watchin'. Following the British model, there's only ten episodes in a season, so one can watch the 20 Engrenages eps has so far in a relatively short amount of time.

When used to the American system, it's intriguing to see one where judges are very involved in inquiries—they drop by crime scenes for example—thus altering the triangular dynamic of cops, DAs and defense lawyers that drives most procedurals here. Another difference: The French cops are a lot more hands-on (as in, rough) with suspects than they are in American shows that aren't The Shield. But the biggest selling point of Engrenages as far as I'm concerned is the presence of two particularly compelling female characters: inspector Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust) and crooked lawyer Joséphine Carlsson (Audrey Fleurot).

The first season of Engrenages was shown on BBC4 under the title Spiral and it's now on British DVD; the second season is scheduled to air over there this winter. Check both out.

Just the facts, m'am

Siouxsie is an influence whose time has come, so it's not really a surprise that London's Ipso Facto sounds like Ms. Sioux on downers. Black & white aesthetics, stern haircuts, a "Louise Brooks goes to architecture school" look—hmmm, I think I'm in love. Signed to newish Mute imprint Mute Irregulars (of course), the quartet only has some singles out for now. Hopefully they also have a Google alert on themselves and will see this post pleading for a gig in New York sometime soon. Meanwhile, we'll have to do with this video for "Six and Three Quarters."

Women beware ballerinas

Now that's my kind of holiday fare: cheating, lying, conniving, and a final orgy of violence in which half the characters annihilate each other. The Red Bull Theater's production of Women Beware Women is an absolute delight, down to the death by crucifix at the end, though I think this is one of director Jesse Berger's liberties; regardless, it feels very much in the spirit of Thomas Middleton's play.

The cast is topnotch, and as the duplicitous Livia, Kathryn Meisle shows she could have been a much better Marquise de Merteuil than the woefully miscast Laura Linney in the Roundabout's revival of Dangerous Liaisons earlier this year.

Happily, it also looks as if Berger blew two thirds of his budget on the costumes, a parade of Technicolor beauties that seem pulled from the pages of a Jacobean edition of Vogue dreamed up by Edith Head. It's the kind of extravagance one does not see enough Off Broadway.

(Another positive claim for the evening: The subway trek from Brooklyn to Hell's Kitchen, where the show is appropriately staged, gave me enough time to read Carlo Lucarelli's The Damned Season in its entirety. Lucarelli's De Luca trilogy takes place in the chaos that was Italy at the end of WWII; it's hard to find a better setting for noir books, when nobody quite knew who was in power and alliances shifted daily.)

Speaking of over-the-top visual pleasures, the Sheila and I caught The Nutcracker last night. We joked beforehand that we could expect a lot of crushed velvet, polished patent leather shoes, tulle and snazzy overcoats, and we were right: The children in the audience looked incredible.

It was a repeat visit for the Sheila but, I admit somewhat reluctantly, my first New York City Ballet Nutcracker. I saw Mark Morris's The Hard Nut a few years ago, which is like seeing Airplane! before Airport 1975. Anyway I was appropriately enchanted, and even teared up a few times—most notably at the entrance of the Snowflakes—overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of it all.

Best stage moments of 2008

After the best singles and before the best albums (we'll have to wait for the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll for that), here are my favorite theater/opera moments of the year, in alphabetical order.

1. Adding Machine. This Expressionistic Chicago import proved that there is still life in the American musical at the end of the ’00s.

2. All My Sons. Simon McBurney's non-naturalistic approach threw off a few people, but I found it mesmerizing. This is what happens when the powers that be on Broadway entrust a play to a director who's capable of reading the material, then of translating it into a specifically theatrical language.

3. Arias with a Twist. This collaboration between Joey Arias and Basil Twist was permeated by the spirit of downtown—and by that I mean the old East Village, before it turned into New York's answer to the French Quarter. Like Adding Machine, albeit with a completely different aesthetic, this show illustrated how much you can achieve with a small budget and a large imagination.

4. Billy Elliot. The best three seconds of the year: When a miner yells out "We're on strike!" to his companions and they all happily shout back "Yay!!!" No wonder Terry Teachout's review in The Wall Street Journal was titled "Karl Marx in a tutu"—and he didn't mean that in a good way. "Feel-good socialist kitsch," Teachout huffed. Ah yes, and that's exactly what Broadway—and the nation at large, I'd venture—wants right now.

5. Blasted. Frankly, the play itself isn't all that (Sarah Kane's youthful nihilism can be overly self-conscious and deliberate) but Sarah Benson's production was as good as it could be, while I can't even fathom how Marin Ireland and Reed Birney did what they did on the stage every night for weeks on end. Incidentally, Ireland has turned into a downtown treasure over the past few years (Far Away and Beebo Brinker come to mind). The EW reviewer listed the show among the year's worst, blaming its lack of humanity. There was plenty of humanity in Blasted, except it was defiled every step of the way; guess that's not what some want at the theater.

6. Gypsy. Saw that one three times. No need to go on about Patti LuPone's performance again, so I'll just say that Laura Benanti's transformation from ugly vaudeville duckling to glamorous burlesque swan remains an erotic highlight.

7. Hair. Oh, how I hate audience participation! Especially when it involves going onstage and haplessly prancing about with the cast. And yet when that happened at the end of this thrilling production at the Delacorte, it could not have felt more à propos.

8. Opening Night. I found myself thinking about Ivo van Hove's adaptation of the Cassavetes movie a lot after seeing it, wondering in particular about some of the staging choices. With its heavy use of a simultaneous videocast, the production rewards multiple viewings, from as many different angles as possible. Alas, it didn't play BAM long enough to allow for a return visit. I hear van Hove directed a stage adaptation of Cries and Whispers in Europe this year. This is a call to BAM, Lincoln Center and St. Ann's Warehouse: please bring it here!

9. Passing Strange. Stew and Heidi Rodewald's little-musical-that-could adapted surprisingly well to the Broadway stage. A much better translation of the rock idiom to musical theater than Spring Awakening.

10. Die Soldaten. If I had to pick a single event this year, it would be this electroshock of a modernist opera, mounted by Lincoln Center Festival at the Armory. Now that we are engulfed in a recession, this divisive, outlandish production—in which the audience sat on huge moving platforms, flanked on the sides by a ginormous 110-member orchestra imported from Germany—feels like the last gasp of the freespending days. (Someone told me it would have cost the same to fly everybody who saw the show in New York to Germany!)

Special mentions…

Boeing-Boeing, for understanding that farce needs to be staged with Swiss-clock precision… Come Back, Little Sheba, for S. Epatha Merkerson's heartwrenching portrayal of a woman stuck not only in a thankless marriage, but in the thankless decade known as the 1950s… Michael Clark Company's OO and O, for their elegant embrace of the punk and classical realms… The Cripple of Inishmaan, for making me get over a longstanding distrust of Irish plays… La Damnation de Faust, for the sight of video trees wilting as the Devil walked in front of them… The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, or The Friends of Dr. Rushower, for its enchanting first act and its wonderful projections, which easily bested the ones in the more high-profile Sunday in the Park with George.

Denis Lavant dances

Denis Lavant has one of the best senses of movement of any contemporary actor I can think of.

From 1986's Mauvais Sang, we have a fantastic travelling shot set to David Bowie's "Modern Love" (starts around 1:30). The film is Lavant's second collaboration with his longtime acolyte, the director maudit Leos Carax.



Here is Lavant at the end of Claire Denis's Beau Travail, her somptuous 1999 adaptation of Billy Budd:



This third sample was shot just a few months ago. It's a kind of postscript to Carax's latest, a short film included in an omnibus titled Tokyo! (The other two segments are by Michel Gondry and Joon-ho Bong.) Lavant plays a cryptic enigma simply called Merde, who talks in an invented language called Merdogon, which sounds a bit like Magma's Kobaïan. I read somewhere the video below was shot in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris.

Underground Paris

Paris in the 1970s is an object of endless fascination for me, particularly the punk, gay and clubbing factions: Le Palace, Bazooka, Mathématiques Modernes, Alain Pacadis, Jenny Bel Air—all names that set off a thousand fantasies for the provincial girl I was. That scene was in its death throes when I landed in the capital in 1982 to attend college, but the agony was still glamorous enough to project a mystical aura. A number of books by and about luminaries of that time have been published in France in the past half-decade, including a collection of Alain Pacadis's writing (he roughly was the Gallic version of Michael Musto), François Jonquet's lovely biography of Jenny Bel Air, and the reissue of NovöVision, Yves Adrien's new-wave cult classic. Music-wise, the compilation Des Jeunes Gens Modernes is absolutely essential.

For a thorough overview, however, check out a site created by a man named Bernard Bacos, who lived in that city—or perhaps I should say he lived that city—and celebrates it at Paris dans les années 70. If you don't read French, I suggest going randomly, as Bacos has unearthed a treasure trove of great photos and provides sound samples of several of the bands. And if you do read French, I guarantee hours of fascinated clicking.

Bacos starts off with the late ’60s and early ’70s, covering the "baba cool" (ie hippie) bands; check out, for instance, the page about the 30 ans d'agitation musical en France box set, complete with streams. (Here, Gilles Deleuze reads a Nietzsche poem, backed by a band called Schizo. An entire era is summoned…) But his coverage of is extensive, each section shooting out into numerous nooks and crannies. The page about Fabrice Emaer's Palace (Paris' answer to Studio 54, and newly reopened) is delicious, for instance, linking out to other classic clubs such as cold-wave temple Les Bains Douches, and the one about the punk art collective Bazooka reminded me of how brutally prescient they were. (Watch this TV doc on Bazooka.)

Bacos is straight so the gay underground doesn't get as much in-depth coverage as the hippie one, but he still has fascinating stuff about the likes of Les Gazolines, a gender-queer group that ran parallel to the radical-leftist FHAR, ie Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire. (See Le Rose et le noir, Frédéric Martel's page-turner about the history of contemporary homosexuality in France.) It would have been hard for Bacos not to deal with Les Gazolines anyway, since its members popped up at Le Palace, wrote for Libération, etc.

One for the road: Taxi Girl's stone-cold classic single "Cherchez le garçon," from 1980. The band released only one album, 1981's sepulchral Seppuku, produced by Stranglers bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel. The lanky guitarist on the right in the video is Mirwais, who would go on to produce Madonna's Music. As for singer Daniel Darc, he of the bee-stung lips, his career was derailed by drugs but he resurfaced in 2004 with the rare superb album that also happens to be a commercial hit, Crève-coeur.

I'm not old, I'm just drawn that way

Last week I briefly mentioned the Roundabout's revival of Pal Joey, and an issue I had with a particular acting choice. I should qualify the statement by saying my qualm involves more than just Stockard's Channing decisions: It starts with Richard Greenberg's tweaking of the book and Joe Mantello's direction, and spreads to Stocks's interpretation of her role.

The main plot line involves the affair between the young, caddish Joey Evans and the older, much wealthier Mrs. Vera Simpson. She picks him up in the nightclub where he sings, has her way with him in her luxury pad, buys him his own boîte in exchange for delicious sexual favors (the show makes it clear that Joey has what it takes to make a woman of the world very happy indeed). This angle was played to the hilt in the Encores! revival of 1995: Patti LuPone's Vera pretty much bought herself a living, breathing sex toy. And when her unseen husband made it known she wasn't quite discreet enough, Vera dumped Joey in a carefree manner that implied that far from heartbroken, she'd soon move on to another stud.

In the current production, Vera clearly has feelings for Joey; when she ends things up, it is with a sadness that suggests this was her last hurrah—not only as a sexual woman, but as a woman, period. Of course the creative team may have thought this made more sense, considering Channing is 64 to LuPone's 46 at the time. But this strikes me as retrograde: There is something liberating—and liberated—about a musical in which a woman's main relationship is purely hedonistic. In other words, she is allowed to have sex with just the right amount of feeling, which in this particular case is very little. Alas now Vera Simpson ends up a sad sack, not a triumphant conqueror.

Total Hollywood crap

Every word, every shot, every sound in Rachel Getting Married—in which Anne Hathaway's Kym gets out of rehab long enough to almost screw up her sister Rachel's wedding—is a fraud. It's hard to think of a more dishonestly manipulative movie this year. Nothing the characters say or do makes sense, because everything they say or do only serves one purpose: to lead to a confrontation or a crisis. Jenny Lumet's hack script throws consistency and psychological realism to the wind just so the actors can get their Oscar moments, while Jonathan Demme still thinks a handheld shakycam is shorthand for raw naturalism, ie authenticity in Hollywoodspeak.

Here's a typical example of the shams the film continually sets up. At one point, several characters including Kym and her dad (Bill Irwin) are gathered around a table, figuring out the sitting arrangements for the wedding. The discussion gets tenser, as it tends to do when Kym is involved; she asks her dad to continue it in private in the kitchen, away from the others. Next thing you know, the entire brood crashes their talk. And next next thing you know, Dad gets challenged by Sidney, his future son-in-law, into a preposterous contest to see who can most efficiently fill the dishwasher. And next next next thing you know, Kym haplessly passes on to Dad a plastic plate belonging to her now-dead little brother, provoking a sorrowful reaction.

Why is the family going to the kitchen after it's been made very clear that Kym and Dad want to have a private conversation? Why is the meek Sidney suddenly Mr. Macho, taunting his father-in-law? Why is the kid's plate still mixed in with the regular plates if it's going to upset the father so much? There's only one reason: to artificially provoke the kind of volatile show-offy situation modern Hollywood mistakes for drama. Rinse, repeat ad nauseam, as Rachel Getting Married staggers from one contrivance to the next.

Perhaps the biggest fraud of all is the reason behind Kym's self-destructiveness: high on percocets when she was 16, she was responsible for the death of the aforementioned younger brother. The death of a child is the kind of unimpeachable backstory Hollywood hacks love because it creates viewer empathy for a character out of thin air. In this case, it's even cheaper than cheap because it isn't even the reason for Kym being the way she is now: the film doesn't address why she was high on percocets to begin with.

As for the wedding itself, you just want to slap everybody involved. So many trite irritants, like, Why does it have an Indian theme when neither of the families seems to have a connection to India? Watching the endless parade of musical guests felt like sitting through an entire year of Joe's Pub programming in 30 minutes. (The one moment that rings true in the movie is when the idiots constantly playing the lute and the violin are asked if they could just stop for a fricking minute.) The film would have been at least bearable if Jonathan Demme had mocked earnestly multi-culti upper-middle-class celebrations. But no.

The end of irony

Two show recommendations for the holidays: Druid Theatre's production of Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan at the Atlantic and Keen Company's production of Beasley's Christmas Party, based on a Booth Tarkington story, at the Acorn.

About Inishmaan, the TONY review isn't out yet so I'll only say that McDonagh's storytelling sense is absolutely crackling, director Garry Hynes continues to impress, and the ensemble on the Atlantic stage (mostly imported from the Galway production) is one of the finest you can see in New York right now. Special mention to Kerry Conlon, whose rambunctious Helen is often hilarious, but also quite poignant in her final scenes.

I tend to enjoy Keen shows for the same reason I enjoy Mint shows: While the big nonprofits are perfectly happy doing Hedda Gabler or The Seagull for the umpteenth time, these two scrappy companies excavate long-forgotten plays and put them up in productions ranging from honorable to topnotch. Beasley's Christmas Party fits the end of the company's mission statement, which reads "Keen Company seeks to create a culture of artists, technicians, administrators and audiences who share a desire to invigorate the theater with productions that connect us through humor, heart and hope." Beasley's has all three elements in spades. It's a small (three actors), compact (70 minutes) show, yet it wonderfully upholds the old tradition of theater as storytelling. The cynic among us would call it quaint; I'd rather call it timeless.

By the way, if you only pay attention to the byline of the Times' chief drama critic, Ben Brantley, you won't know companies such as Mint and Keen are working here, or that the downtown stage is alive and well. His top ten continues to make a preposterous amalgam between New York theater and Broadway, as if one was synonymous with the other. There are only two non-Broadway shows on his list, Blasted and Hair, and the latter is actually scheduled to transfer to Broadway in 2009.

Broadway babes

I'm getting a little excited about Sutton Foster in Shrek the Musical over at the Sunday Arts blog.

And speaking of Broadway dames, the Sheila perfectly executed one of her typically ambitious home-decorating ideas yesterday: She decided to honor two of our favorite belters on our Christmas tree, so she found various photos of Patti LuPone and Leslie Kritzer on the internet, cut them out in medallion shapes and affixed them to our silver baubles. Now our tree is adorned with several of them, in between ornaments of the Rockettes kicking their heels. We are not ashamed of our love for the musical theater here in Park Slope.

The Pop Club returns

Did you miss us? The Pop Club is back for another chat about current singles on the Time Out New York site. This time around, we scrutinize new songs by M.I.A. and A.R. Rahman, Eve and Lady GaGa.

We're at the tail end of a lovely snow storm here in New York. I have the luxury to find it lovely because I'm not stuck in an airport and only have to travel a few blocks south to see The Cripple of Inishmaan at the Atlantic Theater tonight.

A little sucking action

A couple of nights ago, I went down to Sunset Park to attend the NY premiere of G.B. Jones's 13-year-in-the-making epic, The Lollipop Generation, at Light Industry. In more ways than one, it was like watching a home movie made up of vacation footage pieced together: Most of it was shot in Super 8mm and because filming was done over several years, the appearance of some of the actors changes rather visibly. But it also fulfilled the memory-triggering role of a home movie, transporting me back to the heady days of homocore, the queer-punk movement that briefly lit up the fringes in the early to mid-’90s.

I still have my Fifth Column albums, and when the time came to part with my zine collection (there's only so much space in a New York apartment), I couldn't bring myself to part with two masterpieces Jones and her star Jena von Brucker were closely involved with, J.D.s and Double Bill. I still love the way they obsessed over pop culture and rock with self-knowing rage (Double Bill was about how William Conrad is cool and William Burroughs is evil!) and the way they spat out venom at the assimilationist mainstream gay movement. Now that the gays are all rallying behind marriage (to be clear: I want all those rights but I'm perfectly fine if they're gathered under the secular umbrella of "domestic partnership" or something), this feels so…refreshing.

Track listing

Time Out New York has just published its year-end lists and I contributed my top ten favorite songs of 2008. Scroll down the link for my tunes, which you can stream as well. When I have some time (ie, over the weekend), I'll post additional tracks here.

Let down by Liza Minnelli

Liza Minnelli's show at the Palace has been hailed with a storm of overheated praise but two voices have dared to say it's not all that. One is my colleague Adam Feldman in TONY ("Most of the show is not like watching a car crash, as some have feared; it is more like watching traffic") and the other is John Lahr at The New Yorker. Lahr had more wordage at his disposal than Adam and he was able to zero in on some of the aspects that bugged me the most about the evening: Minnelli's egotistical manipulations.

"She is all chutzpah and calculation. Although she has vast amounts of energy and an overwhelming desire to please, she has, strange to say, very little sense of fun. Instead of taking you on a journey with her renditions, she continually brings you back to her, to the legend of her collapse—the divorces, the drinking, the depressions—and to her theatrical pedigree, which includes her godparents, Ira Gershwin and Kay Thompson, who more or less take care of the second act. (…) In one song, written especially for the show, Minnelli promises her audience, “I would never leave you”—a truly terrifying piece of show-biz flimflammery. In fact, what she means to say is the opposite: Please, don’t leave me."

I felt like a Grinch at the Palace considering the Sheila, sitting next to me, was enjoying herself. But there it is: I was bored out of my skull by Liza's frantic neediness, her attempts at being coy (playing her breathlessness and need to rest for a joke when in fact she was breathless and needed to rest) and her often misguided choices—you don't attempt a song as fast and loaded with rhyming puns as Comden & Green's "If You Hadn't (But You Did)" ("If I had not seen you pen sexy letters to Gwen in your own hieroglyph/If you had not left me home when you had two seats for South Pacif") when your diction and breathing aren't up to snuff.

The Sheila remarked that I'm uneasy with older women on stage, which isn't true at all—I'd gladly pay to see Marian Seldes or Angela Lansbury read the phone book. What I'm uneasy with is the misguidedness of Minnelli's show (it's way too big for her current vocal abilities), her constant reminders of where she came from (few outside of the Kennedy family have so shamelessly milked their bloodlines) and the morbid sycophancy of her fans, for whom the fact that Liza isn't keeling over on stage is enough to warrant a standing o. Fine then, I am a Grinch!

Cristina forever

How could I forget? My interview with Boss Hog's Cristina Martinez is in the current issue of Time Out New York. The show itself is on Wednesday and you have tickets, right? Right?

Wild-cat watch

Poor Sheila: She's been hit by a nasty lung infection and this weekend had to miss a pair of shows starring some favorite stage dames—Shrek the Musical with Sutton Foster as Princess Fiona and Pal Joey with Stockard Channing as Vera Simpson.

I won't give my take on them until the Time Out New York reviews hit the stand, but here's one thing: How many critics will use the word "cougar" in their review of Pal Joey? Stockard is 64 and her love interest in the show is played by Matthew Risch, 27. (Risch replaced Christian Hoff, 40, in previews.) One of the reasons I love the theater is that it's a lot more hospitable to women, particularly older women, than film or television, and you frequently see couples in which the woman is older than the man even if it's not in the script; in the case of Pal Joey, however, the age difference is an integral part of the story.

I was lucky to catch the Encores! production of the show in 1995. Vera Simpson was played by Patti LuPone (then 46) and Joey Evans was played by Peter Gallagher (then 39). Clearly the dynamic between Joey and Mrs. Simpson was very different from the one in the current revival—partly because the age gap was lesser, but because of specific acting choices as well. For now I'll just say that the new take on the relationship feels less daring than the 1995 one to me.

Sweet on Hugh

Hugh Jackman is hosting the Oscars! Yay! I hope this means the producers will finally bring back the musical numbers that have been sorely missed in recent years. What better way to celebrate the infamous Snow White Debacle of 1989 than have Hugh let loose in a huge floor show? It would be the 20th anniversary, too. You cannot call yourself a lover of Tinseltown flakery if you haven't seen this magnificent disaster, which I believe was choreographed by Debbie Allen.

Hugh did a fantastic job hosting the Tonys, but then Tony is a lot looser than Oscar when it comes to swishing. "Dancing makes studio executives really, really nervous…" Omigod, I just adore him!!!

Taking it to the web

Staff, artists and fans of a particularly embattled NYC institution have launched a new website, I Am City Opera. Check it out: It's a wonderful grassroots effort tocounter all the bad karma that's been swirling around the place in the past few months—and I freely admit I got a little choked up.

Rating the rating

The best part of A.O. Scott's review of Wendy and Lucy in today's Times isn't technically part of the review. It's the note about the rating tagged at the end, and it reads like this:

“Wendy and Lucy” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has some swearing, a little drug use and a brief implication of violence, but no nudity, sex or murder. The rating seems to reflect, above all, an impulse to protect children from learning that people are lonely and that life can be hard.

Beautiful.

Their Hit Parade

Sunday night I caught a show that reminded me of why I live in New York. Oh I know, there are many good reasons to live here, but once in a while you see something that's so demented, so unpredictable, so plain fun that it just nails you to your seat. And on Sunday, it was the beta-testing of Our Hit Parade, a new revue orchestrated by the brain trust of Kenny Mellman, Bridget Everett and Neal Medlyn at the Zipper, with the goal of making it a monthly event in ’09.

The concept is deadly simple and deadly great: A bunch of downtown performers go through the Top Ten hits of the moment. Actually, they took some liberties because Amy Winehouse's "Valerie" and Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" are a little old by now, and I'm pretty sure Riskay's "Smell Yo Dick" didn't make it to the Top 1,000. But whatevs: the general idea is sound, and the execution was nothing short of awesome.

Let's get the dud—yes, there was only one, which is a pretty amazing batting average by any standard—out of the way first. Jonny "the Gay Pimp" McGovern's rewrite of Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" bombed. Changing the lyrics is cheating, and if you're going to do it anyway, you'd better be funny—and the Gay Pimp just wasn't. Next!

It's hard to beat Everett for sheer audacity. Everytime I think "Oh no she won't," she just does. Is there anything this woman is afraid to do to a song and to an audience? Off went the clothes, because it's so much more comfortable to sing in a bra and thong, especially when you're going on and on about coming home at 5am and sniffing something funky (see ref. to Riskay above). And especially when you're doing it while thrusting your crotch in the face of a guy sitting in the front row. At another point, Everett orchestrated a giveaway in which audience members won CDs by eating candy up from her tongue and then from her self-described cooch.

It's worth mentioning that a few minutes earlier, said candy had been strung together to form a jolly penis pouch for Neal Medlyn, his stage attire for his performance of Miley Cyrus's "Wake Up America." I guess that's what the fearless candy-eaters were smelling, as Riskay would say. Medlyn is so comfortable being nude—or just wearing candy—on stage that he looks weird in a suit.

My shortcomings in the dancing department (even, sadly, chair-dancing) were glaringly obvious during the Varsity Interpretive Dance Squad's genius take on Estelle's "American Boy." They drilled the entire crowd through the interpretive routine we would do during the chorus and while it was pretty basic, I have no muscle memory and could not remember the sequence—being distracted by the VIDS' own moves on stage didn't help either. With my pathetic exception, however, the entire audience rose to the challenge.

Another highlight was Molly Pope's saucy cover of "I Kissed a Girl." The deceivingly demure-looking Pope has real pipes (check out the videos on her site) but she also knows how to interpret a song. She completely reinvented the meaning behind Katy Perry's words without changing them (note to Gay Pimp: that's how it's done), turning an exploitative ditty into a carefree, sexy awakening.

It may have been freezing cold outside, but at the Zipper, we were all basking in the warmth of entertainment magic.

Welcome to the Pop Club

I'd been waiting to do a singles panel for a long time and the time has finally come.

Head over to the TONY blog for the debut of the Pop Club, in which I discuss new tunes with fellow scribes Jimmy Draper and Kurt B. Reighley. That Google Talk thingie sure is fun…

Opening Night at BAM

There's only two performances left of Opening Night at the BAM Harvey, so get rolling: This is a must-see if you like smart theater.

I went because Ivo van Hove is one of my two or three favorite directors at this point, not because I'm a particularly big fan of the source material, John Cassavetes's 1977 movie of the same name. I'd rented it a couple of years ago when going through a Gena Rowlands phase and was bored out of my mind—quite an achievement because on paper the film is right up my alley, ie, it's about a theater actress and a struggling show. I'm starting to think Cassavetes's tic-laden oeuvre may be one of the most overrated in the history of film; he's certainly a director who's created a thousand monsters (his influence on the worst aspects of modern French cinema cannot be understated), though admittedly he can hardly be blamed for that.

Anyway, not having liked the movie, I quite enjoyed this Dutch-language stage version, particularly the ending, which I found incredibly affecting.

Van Hove's main conceptual device is the use of a live video feed, so you watch some of the action on a large screen. When there was a scene between two characters, for instance, you could watch it in HD closeup (and those shots were often formally superb) or you could watch the live actors on stage. Following the advice of my colleague Helen Shaw, I deliberately focused on the stage rather than the screen, though I have to admit it was hard not to lapse—clearly part of a taunting game Van Hove played with the audience. (References to the Wooster Group have been bandied around but they're off-base to me. Just because someone uses video on stage doesn't mean they can be compared to the Wooster Group; the means and intents are very different here.) Opening Night is so formally and conceptually rich that I don't have the time to go into details here; for what it's worth, I highly recommend experiencing it for yourself.

Other than Van Hove's command of the theatrical space, you need to go to BAM to see his troupe. As we know from his collaborations with our own Elizabeth Marvel, the man gets unbelievable performances out of his actors. He makes them go from zero to 60 in a single scene, and in a hybrid style that's halfway between naturalistic and stylized. Special mention to Elsie de Brauw in the Rowlands part. It's always incredibly exciting to discover a true stage animal, an actor with such a vibrant presence that your eyes are on her even when she's not doing or saying anything. Of course it's a discovery for us here since De Brauw is well known in the Netherlands. To think of all the extraordinary stage actors we never get to see in New York…

Lena Philipsson again and again

I realize that not only have I been slacking on the posting front, but I'm doing two (almost) in a row about Lena Philipsson. Deal with it: we're lucky to live in Lena's world.

The news this time is that yesterday the Dilettante's Special Stockholm Correspondent actually saw Lena + Orup (as it is billed), and he even snapped some photos. I'm putting up my favorite: Lena sang "Det gör ont" in a nurse's uniform that somehow involved a micro-skirt (hot pants on the backup singers). Oh I just love her so much!

Apparently there were several costume changes, a karaoke segment involving two Japanese men (genius!), and Lena and Orup even signed CDs afterwards. According to the DSSC, the evening was "a curious mix of power pop, rockabilly, state-of-the-art schlager, acoustic ballads and karaoke. But it worked!"

And where was I while all this fabulousness was unfolding? At a little cutting-edge pageant called White Christmas—or rather Irving Berlin's White Christmas on Broadway. It actually was a pleasant surprise, which sometimes happens when you go in with very low expectations. As far as seasonal shows go, this one is pretty fun. First, you always have Irving Berlin tunes to fall back on. Second, the cast is made up of amiable pros who may lack that extra little something that sets the star apart from the journeyman, but they seemed to have fun—and that goes a long way with me. Third: Susan Mansur, the kind of scenery-chewing comic second banana I adore. Fourth: lots of tapping. Randy Skinner isn't the most creative choreographer, but he sure loves those ensemble numbers with hoofers going at it full force, and I happily respond to them in a Pavlovian manner.

Proposition 8, the Musical

It had to happen: Marc Shaiman, of Hairspray's fame, has put together a three-minute musical about Proposition 8. It's got a starry cast, references to sodomy and shrimp cocktails, and jaunty tunes. I don't ask for much more from musicals.

Lena and Agnes go boating

Lena Philipsson has been among my absolute favorite pop divas since 2004, when she represented Sweden at the Eurovision Song Contest in Istanbul with "It Hurts." I actually prefer the original, "Det gör ont," which she performed during the Swedish elimination round before switching to English. I linked to both versions so you can compare. Visually she stuck to the formula that helped her win Melodifestivalen (fringes, boots and a mike stand) but somehow I like the song better in Swedish. In any case, the key change is killer in both versions.

Lena is a genuine pop queen: She doesn't need cockamamie choreography or huge video screens to hold a room in the palm of her hand—she's all about old-fashioned charisma. And she knows who her true fans are: she performed at Stockholm's Schlagerpride this summer (love the Swedes rapturously singing along to "Der gör ont"). And to think the Sheila and I missed that event by a mere week…

I just got my hands on Lena's new album, Dubbel, a schlagtastic collection of duets with longtime collaborator Orup. The first single was "Nu när du gått," which is pure retro heaven (which it kinda had to be considering it starts just like "This Old Heart of Mine," while "Hals Över Huvud" is a carbon copy of "Chain Reaction"), but the rest of the record is almost as good—and I love that Lena steadfastly sticks with Swedish.

In a different style, Agnes (Carlsson), a former winner of Swedish Idol, has also delivered a winner with Dance Love Pop. The first single, "On and On," is classic Scandi high-paced club pop: nothing revolutionary there, just sterling craftsmanship.

Catherine Opie and the Black Watch

It's busy, busy, busy over at the Sunday Arts blog: Here I go on about Black Watch (spoiler: I liked it but didn't love it) and there we have a bit about Catherine Opie waving her freak flag at the Gugg.

The gaying of Thanksgiving

A few days ago, I was hyperventilatingly anticipating the debut of Rosie O'Donnell's variety show. I ended up not being able to watch it live, but caught up with the finest moments the following day—it was part of our post-feast Thanksgiving TV entertainment, along with last year's Radio City Christmas Spectacular (the year the most excellent Linda Haberman started reshaping the Rockettes in particular and the show in general) and Pee-wee's Playhouse Christmas Special from 1988. (Needless to say, this was a rather gay Thanksgiving. Thanks Brett and David!)

Anyway, Rosie's special was quite the cheesefest. How can she mean so well and do so wrong? It's all fixable though: She basically needs to refrain from putting herself in almost every number. I realize this is hard to fathom for someone like Rosie, endowed with both a prodigious ego and an unfettered enthusiasm for all things Broadway that, while endearing, gives her the misguided desire to be onstage with her idols. I do have to admit that "City Lights," the number I was gushing about before seeing the show, delivered because Rosie did it with Liza herself, and the sight of them desperately selling razzmatazz was chilling. At one point Liza did a bizarre high kick, which we replayed over and over, split between disbelief, hilarity and a certain joy at Liza's manic need to entertain. Still, if this is what we can expect from her upcoming show at the Palace, I'm a little scared.

Thanksgiving is my absolute favorite American holiday because it's just an opportunity to have good food and good times with friends. There's no god, no presents, no pressure. Not having family here, the Sheila and I usually end up with similar strays, who tend to be from foreign lands or gay or both. For us, it's a great time to enjoy our new life in our adoptive country.

Stage frights

The night’s oddity was an ominous electronic remix of “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” throbbing and tinkling as Ms. Brightman, dressed like Little Red Riding Hood, pedaled a (stationary) bicycle through darkness with holographic wolves looming nearby. She was rapping, “Even if you cry you won’t be heard,” and wailing, “It’s just in my mind!”

The review of Sarah Brightman's show at Madison Square Garden makes it sound right up my alley. Why wasn't I there? Why oh why oh why?!? This is the kind of nutso showbiz move I just adore.

At least I will be home tomorrow evening for the premiere of Rosie O'Donnell's new live variety show. I was already feeling warm and fuzzy toward it—I'll watch anything that involves "Broadway dancers, celebrity appearances, musical acts and comedy sketches"—but the news that the program will open with "City Lights" from the Kander & Ebb musical The Act (directed by Martin Scorsese!) makes it unmissable. Yes, they are going to do this:



Okay, now picture it with Rosie instead of Liza. It's going to be a moment for the ages, and it'll be witnessed by all the show-tunes freaks of America. How could this not do well in the ratings? Actually, don't answer that, especially if you work for NBC.

Le Flashdance

Julien Doré, who won Nouvelle Star (ie French Idol) last year is the kind of reality-TV winner we don't really see here in the US—let's just say he mentioned in a post-win interview that his entering the contest was an art project inspired by Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp.

Doré wrote most of the material on his debut album, Ersatz, and he also covers Gainsbourg's "SS in Uruguay" (from Rock Around the Bunker). He walks a very fine line between self-conscious post-modernism and genuine sentiment, as evidenced on the song/video combo of "Figures Imposées": There's a cheesy atmosphere part Flashdance/Fame, part misty David Hamilton, along with a cameo by Catherine Deneuve (looking like she just stepped out from Madame Tussaud's), but the song itself is an appealingly heartfelt grower and I love the 80s synths, which really bring me back.