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.

Long Day's Journeys

Walking Drifting Dragging at the New Museum

 

            A small but personable collection of conceptual artworks created on long, winding travels makes up the New Museum’s short-lived, interesting exhibition Walking Drifting Dragging, which closes February 3^rd.  One New York artist, Ellie Ga, tagged along on a research vessel trawling the depths of the Arctic, propelled only by the currents.  Though her artistic introspection at the loneliness of the frozen wastelands could only be imagined, her work was done when the boat stopped—for what reason, we aren’t sure, as the purpose of the mission is not revealed.  Her bird’s-eye-view charcoal sketches all include the same, near-ovoid body of the ship in white, surrounded by the ice in a chilling gray.  The steps the researchers took when dismounting the boat are traced in a dotted line.  The line always seems to follow a circle around the ship, finding nothing but the hard, never-ending floes that blocked their path in the first place.  Who can say what metaphorical relevance this has?  These of Ga’s works, like the Arctic, are cold and cartographic.

            But on her long walks around the craft, Ga was busy with an entirely different project.  Scattering bright, bluish lanterns in the fissures opening around the ship, she took wide-angle pictures of the rusting boat from far away, so that the now illuminated cracks seemed to point home, or at least the possibility of home.  Ga’s series is called The Fortunetellers, and while it’s true the fissures and dotted lines ingrain the ice like lines on a palm, the true fortune that needs to be told seems to be: Where will the ship drift next?  In such a vein does the exhibit display, nearly without comment, artists’ travels through their odd worlds, and the ways they attempt to chart them where it may seem impossible.

            Other highlights include artist Paulo Nazareth’s 4,618-mile walk from his hometown of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to New York City, mostly barefoot but occasionally in a pair of neon green flip-flops, which are on display.  Nazareth played off cultural stereotypes on his way across the border between Mexico and the United States, holding a cardboard sign that read “I Will Clean Your Bathroom for a Fair Price.”  Exploring the cultural welcomes that awaited him in Latin America and beyond is a different kind of map than Ga’s, but a map nonetheless.

            For these artists are all drawing maps of one kind or another, struggling to denote all sorts of new territory, some more successfully than others.  (Some were actually trying for the less successful approach--Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sonal Jain charted a river in Guwahati, India by asking different local fisherman for their input.  The responses were so dissimilar that on their map, the river branches out in an impossible number of directions and even flows both ways.)  Perhaps that’s why the exhibit (curated by Lauren Cornell) is so stark and simplistic, with the works jutting out like landmasses.  It, too, is a map, but of entirely new lands—those wildly diverging attitudes and ideas of emerging artists.  Artists themselves can be hard to track, hard to define, and sometimes hard to enjoy, but no one could do more on their behalf than the New Museum.

            It would be hard to imagine that anything these artists might do in their respective futures could be more complex or more difficult to execute than the feats they have managed in Walking Drifting Dragging.  The name of the exhibition, with its images of groans of strain, is not far off from what these abstract artists had to go through to present us with their apparently simple final products.  I’m not certain, either, if I would be so interested as to what they might get up to in their strange, underground art world some time in the future.  But here they have presented us with something it took them a great deal of effort to achieve.  We may as well congratulate them.

The Day the South Was Won

Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Richard Rodgers Theatre

 

             In a true sign of the times, the producers, directors, creative types, and even (from beyond the grave) Tennessee Williams himself seem to have ceded the rights to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Scarlett Johansson.  Ms. Johansson plays what can be called the title role in name only, and billboards, advertisements, and marquees are splattered with her voluptuous visage draped in a barely-there slip that is far skimpier than the one she wears on stage—for those of you out there whose reasons for seeing this production don’t extend to the languorous fluidity of Williams’ prose.  The issue with this decision is that, regardless of academic raves on the historical value of this no doubt pivotal play, Maggie the Cat is not exactly the main character.  Therefore, the hype that this play revolves around Ms. Johansson is slightly misplaced.  That is, unless I give Broadway more credit than it deserves, and they are simply taking advantage of the rare Ashkenazi bombshell that is Scarlett Johansson and her rabid, or rather drooling, fans.  Most likely it is the latter.

            It isn’t that Ms. Johansson isn’t good as Maggie.  In fact, she’s great.  She takes to a Southern drawl better than one might expect, and she has a manic energy that follows her around the stage like a small tornado.  Conversely, the production, which has a magnificent set appropriately representing the gild of the Pollitt ranch, relaxes into a Southern drawl of its own, which is a characteristic more of the play than the actors.  Cat is not slow-moving, exactly, it just seems (in an altogether pleasant way) as if the actors are a few mint juleps into a warm evening.  Occasionally, however, they reveal some of the emotion that’s been left boiling underneath, and these moments are where it is revealed, however slowly, that Maggie the Cat is not actually the central cog in these proceedings.  Nor is it Big Daddy Pollitt (Ciarán Hinds), who is second only to Maggie in attention-grabbing antics, if for a less wholesome reason.  It’s actually her frustrated, angry husband, Brick.

            Brick is played by Benjamin Walker, whose most notable Broadway credit is the 2010 emo-rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. While I didn’t see it (for who did?) I can attest that Walker is brilliant in Brick’s role, embodying the simmering anger that the character must slowly bring to light over the course of the play’s three acts.  It is through him that the audience comes to realize that, while the drama and dynamics of the story play out around him, seeming to exclude him, he is actually the most important factor in the story.  There are no star turns here, not even for Ms. Johansson. 

This is the true brilliance of Tennessee Williams—that no matter who plays which part, the characters will stay what they were written to be.  Perhaps the Scarlett Johansson has inserted herself into his world, but even from his current, slightly inopportune position, he pulls the strings.  Is this the mark of a great genius, or just a controlling playwright?  Who’s to say?  But the fact remains that whenever or wherever one might see Cat, the characters will always slowly collapse into their mad power grabs and spiteful hatred.  Maggie will end up unfulfilled but hopeful.  Brick will do his best to keep his hatred for his wife under his belt.  The story is always the same, but it gets more and more relevant and more and more entertaining every day.

Closers

Glengarry Glen Ross at the Schoenfeld Theater

 

            If it was not clear before, it has become abundantly clear now—Al Pacino is Glengarry Glen Ross.  Of course, he is so many other things—the Godfather, Tony Montana, and Scent of a Woman’s Colonel Frank Slade, to name a few—but truly Mamet’s brilliant depiction of a 1980s real estate sales office has become inexorably tied up with his name and face.  In 1992, when the critically acclaimed film version was released, Pacino played Ricky Roma, the hotshot young salesman who inspires a strange combination of jealousy and reverence in his coworkers (played in the film by, among others, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey, and Jack Lemmon).  Today, in the masterful, enticing, and perfectly cast Broadway revival, he plays elderly, washed-up salesman Shelly “The Machine” Levene, in a true sign of the times.  It’s no coincidence that in the film, Roma seemed to be the main character.  A mysterious and indefinable enigma, Roma was the office’s God—vengeful to some, benevolent to others.  Nor is it coincidence that in the revival, Levene becomes the main character.  He’s a kind man, a man whose egotism you can forgive because you are (strangely for a Pacino character) so unequivocally on his side.  Yes, Al Pacino is Glengarry, and he’s back in business.

            That’s not to say Pacino is the only attraction in this cast of brilliant, shining stars.  Bobby Cannavale applies his own high-society, well-groomed take to Ricky Roma, and John C. McGinley puts all his fire to use as the angry, spiteful Dave Moss.  Other highlights include David Harbour as a cruel yet oddly sympathetic John Williamson, and Clybourne Park’s Jeremy Shamos as Roma’s weak-willed mark, James Lingk, but the cast shines as a whole.  Together they perform Mamet in a new and exciting way, as a piece that deserves to be heard rather than “experienced.”  Most Mamet is rapid-fire and could be said to charge at you with the vigor of a rhinoceros, but this production allows you to truly hear the words and feel the emotions of the shockingly talented group at work on stage.  Perhaps, after almost 30 years and six productions, the cast feels that we should truly appreciate the genius at work in the effortless words Mamet wrote.  I happen to agree.

            The story is one of crime, redemption, and soul-crushing failure.  Moving from a Chinese restaurant in the first act to the sales office in the second (both built, averagely, by scenic designer Eugene Lee), Mamet penned the tale of desperate Chicago real estate salesman who would do anything to get a signature on the dotted line—lie, cheat, steal, or fight to get ahead.  The loud, angry, and utterly profane battle is fought in furious tirades directed at whomever the character feels is keeping them from his goal.  (The cast of the film jokingly referred to it as “Death of a Fuckin’ Salesman.”)  Soon enough, it becomes clear who the worst of the bunch is, and how little or how much the rest of them will net in commission along the way.

            In short, Glengarry is an adventure, if a limited one, but a memorable one.  Each line is perfectly formed, as a Shakespeare couplet had he known a few more four-letter words.  Among the great two-act plays in the theater world, and among modern playwrights, there is little to nothing like Glengarry or David Mamet.  And as Mamet moves further and further into the late years of his career, and begins producing only plays like the universally panned The Anarchist, we must savor Glengarry Glen Ross even more each day.

They Look Happy to Meet Us

The Sound of Music at the Paper Mill Playhouse

            The principal feeling upon exiting Paper Mill Playhouse’s new production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s exuberant masterpiece The Sound of Music is relief, but it would be fair to say that it is mixed almost evenly with revelation.

            The Sound of Music is, of course, perfect, and this production is, in kind, perfect.  Most productions of the musical have two faults—one being that the actress portraying the lead, Maria von Trapp the singing governess, is not nor will ever be Dame Julie Andrews.  The other—and this is nearly irrefutable—is that children cannot act.        
            Thankfully, Paper Mill overcomes these constant aesthete’s tribulations with the greatest of ease, casting as Maria the lanky, energetic, and appropriately tomboyish Elena Shaddow, who, while not (sadly) being Dame Julie Andrews, is equipped with an altogether different set of tools, which go excellently to work on the Paper Mill’s mammoth stage.  She can sing, act, and dance without any misguided assumptions about the character or any lighthearted but unnecessary ebullience.  She goes at the part with a satisfied and admirable determination, joyously and with the power and stage presence of a (dare I say it?) Dame Julie Andrews.

            As for the other issue, the von Trapp children (respectively, Chelsea Morgan Stock, Sean McManus, Amanda Harris, Hunter A. Kovacs, Maya Fortgang, Gracie Beardsley, and Greta Clark) can—glory be—act!  Such rapturous magic is at work on the stage that one could break down and weep!  Here is a musical to make you believe in God!—or in such a vein were my thoughts upon their entrance.  So rare is it in musical theater to find a child with actual dynamic ability that these von Trapps are ones to make your hair stand on end.

            And truthfully, I thank whatever power oversees musical providence (or casting agents Tesley and Company—whoever reads this first) that someone is doing The Sound of Music justice, because that is exactly what it deserves.  In the halls of musical history, Rodgers and Hammerstein stand alone, and The Sound of Music stands alone in their works.  It is a musical bordering on the divine.  The libretto, music, and lyrics are all equally sublime (no surprise it later won the Tony for Best Musical and, as a film, the Academy Award for Best Picture).

            It is a constant reminder, however, that nine months after its Broadway premiere, Oscar Hammerstein died of cancer, breaking up a composing duo legendary in the annals of the Jewish-American Broadway mogul.  It is fair to say that when he is mourned, a part of his fans’ dismay is that he and Richard Rodgers would never write another Sound of Music, let alone another Oklahoma! or South Pacific.  When Hammerstein died, the final true testament to his lyrical brilliance in conjunction with Rodgers’ light, lilting, altogether cheery music was this ingenious contribution to American cultural history.  Rodgers wrote other musicals later in his life, with other contributors (Do I Hear a Waltz? with Stephen Sondheim, Rex with Sheldon Harnick), but they were never the same.  They didn’t have the same je ne sais quoi as songs like “Edelweiss,” that could be played over and over again and never become mind-numbing.  The gist of it is that they weren’t perfect.

            But we can get down on our knees with the nuns of Nonnberg Abbey that a theater with as noble a tradition as the Paper Mill Playhouse is performing this magnum opus.  We should all feel lucky that, though today we are void of comparable geniuses, we can enjoy perfection from the past written by those who have long left us behind.