Large and In Charge

Whales: Giants of the Deep at the American Museum of Natural History

 

            Whales: Giants of the Deep, the new special exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, which runs through next January, is slightly dense but enormously informative on the always entertaining subject of cetaceans so long memorialized in the museum’s Milstein Hall of Ocean Life.  It may, in fact, be the most enduring image of the museum in many young (and older) minds—that of the swooping blue whale, seemingly diving down into the lowered hall beneath the mezzanine, baleful and silent, forever frozen midway to the ocean floor.

            Whales does tackle the blue version of said aquatic mammal, but not exclusively.  In fact, sperm whales take up much of the special exhibition hall on the fourth floor of the illustrious museum.  The exhibition traces the whale’s evolution from a hulking, hairy land creature into the majestic oceanic behemoth it is today, as well as noting the hundreds of whale and dolphin species, describing the labors of marine biologists who tag the more elusive species, and the history of the Maori population of New Zealand in relation to their mammoth neighbors.

            So there is much to see here.  But the museum, as usual, is professional in not allowing its masses of pure information to overwhelm visitors.  The exhibition hall, cool, dry, and dark, is welcoming and sparsely paneled with informative blurbs on whales’ current status (many are beached, for various reasons including climate change) and their history (a copy of Moby Dick and a scrimshaw whale skull are on hand).  However, the clearest example of the museum’s all-out sensibility in terms of these yearly new installations in this case is skeletons.

            Bones, bones, bones—casts and fossils, real and fake—are everywhere in Whales, case in point being the two gargantuan sperm whale skeletons that hang suspended over the exhibit’s second room.  One’s 58 feet from nose to tail, and it shows.  (The other’s slightly smaller, but you’ll learn it’s not her fault, as she apparently had arthritis.)  These kind of touches are what make this museum what it is.  In this exhibition hall’s history, many shows with an emphasis on “big—” 2011’s The World’s Largest Dinosaurs being a prime example—have passed through.  Whales doesn’t exactly seem final enough to be that series’ culmination, but it’s certainly thorough.

            “Thorough” can sometimes seem a tired term for AMNH, their specialty, what makes them unique or brilliant or worth visiting, but not exactly specific enough to warrant a trip to the Upper West Side.  The fact remains, however that “thorough” is not the sole but certainly the primary attraction to any of the many special exhibitions the museum has hosted over the years.  There have been some, such as Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence or Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, both from 2012, that were visually beautiful, but for these two subject allowed more wiggle room for artistic design.  This exhibition, with its not insubstantial contributions by New Zealander museum Te Papa, is more about the pure information of whale evolution and preservation than about the glamour of lighting and curation.  Still, it can be hard not to miss some of the museum’s other offerings.  All the special exhibitions have common aspects, but something about the atmosphere has changed to make this more of a lesson than an experience.

            However, it remains an informative lesson, and an important one.  Since we still know so little about the largest animals ever to exist, and the annual population growth for some species remains as low as 3%, it must be a primary mission of an institution like AMNH to inform us about such an animal’s characteristics as well as its plight.  This the Natural History Museum does as well as ever.

The American Museum of Natural History is located at West 81st Street and Central Park West.  The exhibition runs through January 5, 2014.

            

Fun With Italians and Tranquilizers

            To a certain extent, bedroom farces are all the same.  Ken Ludwig’s 1986 play Lend Me a Tenor has, over the years and productions, proven no exception.  There are the characteristic slamming of doors, mistaken identity, brash women whose attempts at control leave their men dazed and confused, and, naturally, the eccentric foreigner.  Yet in this modern era of theater, when the respective wells of dramatic and comedic originality have long run dry, the question at hand is whether the public is ready to embrace cliche for the good fun that it is.  The raucous laughs at the production I attended at the Paper Mill Playhouse (which runs through March 10th) can establish that the public must be as ready as they will ever be.

            The innuendo-laden play is set in a 1934 Cleveland hotel room (designed, admirably, by Tony-winner John Lee Beatty) temporarily occupied by the Cleveland Opera Company’s general manager, Saunders (Michael Kostroff, though it might as well have been Jon Lovitz) and his nebbishy assistant, Max (David Josefsberg).   Their fury (in Saunders’ case) and hand-wringing (in Max’s) are well placed--opera superstar Tito Morelli (John Treacy Egan) is late for rehearsal for the Opera Company’s special production of Otello.  When the drunken womanizer arrives, protective wife in tow, hilarity (what else?) is bound to ensue.  What follows is a comedy of mistaken identity, blackface, and music, marked by significant intelligence and mild ridiculousness.

            Josefsberg and Egan (who played Max Bialystock in The Producers on Broadway for a stretch) sing well, and their operatic pipes are put to good use in a few of the scenes in which the formulaic, rigid tradition of the opera is lampooned.  Performances are common in this play, and the female leads—vapid, blonde, and whitewashed—go gaga for them.  Opera, apparently, is the ultimate aphrodisiac for a Clevelander, and Max’s would-be fiancée (Jill Paice), who is also Saunders’ daughter, can’t resist Morelli.  His corpulent frame, which she describes, with a sigh of lust, “dripping with sweat,” seems not even an obstacle that must be overcome, but an added benefit in addition to Morelli’s tenor voice, powerful enough (thanks to Egan) to qualify as a title character.  Voice is key in this production, second only to slapstick comedy.  The comic chops of the actors in Tenor are significant, too, and none who see one of the few remaining performances of this usual slam dunk by the Paper Mill will leave disappointed.  The twists and turns of the story, encompassed by Max and Saunders’ desperate attempts to control Morelli, are joyfully funny if not brilliantly witty, and altogether worth seeing.  There is nothing wrong with heavily physical comedy, and Lend Me A Tenor is among the most hilariously physical pieces of stage comedy written in the past thirty years.

            Such does Lend Me A Tenor function, through playful parody and fast-paced entrance and exit.  This has much in common with the way similar farces such as Marc Camoletti’s Boeing-Boeing—which, incidentally, played at Paper Mill last year—treats an uncomfortable situation which must be rectified through trickery and cunning.  In a way, this format may have been invented by comedians like the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges in the golden age of cinema, but the bedroom farce has no golden age, which is part of its appeal.  One written now might share characteristics with one written fifty years ago, but it would be hard to find a viewer who would care.  Comedy is timeless, and the racy farce is an offshoot guaranteed to remain just as prevalent years from now as it was years ago.