It is fascinating to think that Die Soldaten, a vast, experimental opera by the German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, was written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the same time during which the AMC’s popular hourlong television drama Mad Men is set. Mad Men is about the advertising world in New York just before America’s decorous lid got blown off with rock ‘n’ roll, be-ins, the Vietnam War, and all the rest. Zimmermann’s opera tried to blow the lid off of opera; his goal was “opera as total opera theater! In other words: architecture, sculpture, painting, musical theater, spoken theater, ballet, film, microphone, television, tape and sound techniques, electronic music, concrete music, circus, the musical and all forms of motion theater combined to form the phenomenon of pluralistic opera. In my Soldaten, I have attempted to take decisive steps in this direction.”
Die Soldaten was first performed in 1965 in Cologne, Germany, in a scaled-down production because it was considered “unperformable” the way Zimmermann had … read more
In his new autobiography, Put on a Happy Face, composer Charles Strouse at one point writes, “If you speak of musical failures, to most people, it’s as boring as hearing about ‘the four hours I spent waiting for a plane at the Buffalo airport.’”
Most people—except for musical-theater fans, that is! America is said to be obsessed with success, but Broadway has a singularly obsessive relationship with failure; no wonder one of the most beloved books about theater, Ken Mandelbaum’s Not Since Carrie, is subtitled “Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops.” It’s not surprising, then, that the most interesting parts of Strouse’s books concern his misfires. read more
Sam Buntrock’s staging of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George is nominated for several Tonys and has received a lot of praise, especially for its ingenious use of animated projections. The actors interact with these moving images (a small dog is particularly popular) and the device is not only creative, but it doesn’t feel like an artificial graft—it fits the theme of the show.
The first observation is that the two most inventive musical revivals of the past few years on Broadway (George and John Doyle’s Sweeney Todd) have come from England, which says something about the state of American directing. The second is how startled some critics seemed to be by Buntrock’s use of technology to make the painting so integral to the show come to life; it’s as if they had never seen that type of stuff before. For some reason effects are fine in movies but to many theater fans, technology still feels like a new gimmick. read more
I’ve watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train at least six or seven times, including when it recently aired on Reel 13. With its tight screenplay adapted from the book by Patricia Highsmith (author of the Tom Ripley books), fabulously evil villain played by Robert Walker, pivotal train scenes and tense back-and-forth between Farley Granger’s Forest Hills tennis match and Walker’s evidence-planting trip to the scene of a murder, the film has always been one of my Hitchcock favorites.
Of course, music plays a huge part in Strangers on a Train, as it does in all Hitchcock movies. Many individual Hitchcock films have been studied for their music—particularly the films scored by Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the most famous film-music cue, the shower scene in Psycho—but Jack Sullivan’s detailed guide to music in Hitchcock films, which comes out in paperback on May 20, appears to be the most comprehensive. The book, Hitchcock’s Music, covers all the Hitchcock films, from the early silents to the British films like The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes and the best-known films like Rebecca, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. The book, which won a 2007 ASCAP Deems Taylor Best Book of the Year award in the concert music category, is so detailed that you may feel the need to go watch numerous scenes again, just to listen to the music cues you somehow missed.
Recently I spoke to Jack Sullivan about Alfred Hitchcock’s film music, how the director’s carefully plotted approach to making movies extended to its music, and the post-Hitchcock era of film scoring.
Jennifer Melick: How far back does your interest in Hitchcock’s movies go?
Jack Sullivan: Back to my childhood. I was just old enough to probably sneak out and see Vertigo. Then right after that I saw North by Northwest and Psycho. As a kid, I remember being riveted by the music. read more
Reality check: The Tony Awards aren’t about theater in New York—they are about a certain kind of theater in New York, namely the expensive, mainstream one found on Broadway. Which is fine, but let’s not forget that there’s a lot more to the stage than the Great White Way. For instance, you’d have no way of knowing it by looking at the list of nominees, but one of the most inventive musicals of the season is The Adding Machine, and it is still playing—Off Broadway.
That said, I might as well admit that the Tonys sure are fun! In fact if you follow Broadway, the level of excitment is unbearable—it’s like the World Series, a presidential election and the grand finale of Project Runway rolled into one. read more
The word “ethereal” is perhaps the adjective that comes to mind quickest when describing the voice of Maude Maggart, the 32-year-old who is a fast-rising singer of the Great American Songbook. But however you choose to characterize it, it’s the kind of voice that has critics from the New York Times to Time Out New York struggling to convey its particular beauty in words. From April 1 through May, she performs her latest cabaret show, “Speaking of Dreams,” in the Oak Room at the Algonquin.
Maggart’s renditions of 1920s-era songs like “Love for Sale” or “Love Me or Leave Me” uncannily evoke an earlier time, with their melancholy, yearning high notes, laced with a wispy, fast vibrato that makes her voice recognizable in an instant. She takes many standards at slower tempos—even “Happy Days Are Here Again,” recorded on her 2005 CD Look for the Silver Lining, often taken at march-like clip, is taken leisurely, as if from the wistful perspective of someone already looking back on happy days. Posted after the jump, you can hear her singing “Love Me or Leave Me” with John Boswell on piano from Look For The Silver Lining.
Maggart is the granddaughter of Millicent Greene, who performed in George White’s “Scandals” in the 1920s, and she is the daughter of musical theater performers Brandon Maggart and Diane McAfee. Her little sister is the singer/songwriter Fiona Apple. Just before one of her shows at the Oak Room, I spoke with Maggart about why she loves cabaret, her career, and her family.
On how she got started as a cabaret singer: I first heard Andrea Marcovicci when I was 16. My dad took me to the Gardenia [in California]. My life changed. read more
I’m particularly looking forward to the broadcast of The Magic Flute this week: Mozart’s masterpiece was the first opera I saw, though it wasn’t live but a TV broadcast of the delightful filmed adaptation Ingmar Bergman made in 1975. It is widely acknowledged as one of the most successful filmed operas (and, for that matter, plays) ever, and may well be the perfect gateway film to the perfect gateway opera.
What’s gateway art? Basically, it’s an easy first step into opera, ballet, art film or avant-garde theater, the kind of thing you should start with if you’re either young or older but willing to explore unknown territory. (And don’t think that gateway works are simplistic or artistically inferior. Not only did seeing Bergman’s movie in my early teens start me on a lifetime of loving the arts, but it’s an enduringly charming, poetic, incredibly multilayered masterpiece.) read more
There are quite a few good reasons to see the new revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. One is Brazilian baritone Paulo Szot, a transfuge from the opera world who emits a veritable glow of old-fashioned virility as plantation owner Emile de Becque. Another is hearing Richard Rodgers’s score and Robert Russell Bennett’s orchestrations delivered by a 30-piece orchestra. With producers saving costs by scrimping on musicians nowadays, this size has become very rare in contemporary theater, and so we’ve progressively forgotten how spectacularly lush American musicals can sound.
In the current production of South Pacific, the players are in a pit under the movable stage; during the overture, said stage retracts so the audience can see them. It’s an exhilarating moment, confirmed by the orchestra taking a bow at the end of the overture. read more
If you want proof that the the borders of classical music just keep getting more porous, you need look no further than Three Lost Chords, a one-hour show that has been playing at the offbeat little Zipper Theater on Wednesdays and Sundays since March 23. The Zipper is a tiny space in the garment district big enough for perhaps 75 audience members, who sit in vinyl two-seaters from 1950s-era buses; adjacent to the theater there’s also the funky Zipper Tavern with twinkly lights and shabby-chic furniture like slip-covered loveseats and wooden chests. Not your ordinary opera venue.
This macabre/funny/over-the-top trio of short monologue operas with music by Lance Horne and libretto by Mark Stephen Campbell, directed by David Schweizer, had a run at the Zipper in January and is now back for a brief reprise. The composer—who also plays piano in this one-hour show—studied with Milton Babbitt and David Del Tredici at Juilliard, and he cites some of his influences John Lennon, David Bowie, Fiona Apple, Benjamin Britten, and the Captain & Tennille (!). He also has a band, Lance Horne and the One-Night Stands .
The three singers in the show each portray a character based on short stories: Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist (about the predicament of a man who hates food), Muriel Spark’s The Girl I Left Behind (about a young woman struggling with a strange kind of memory loss), and Edgar Allan Poe’s well-known A Tell-Tale Heart. Nathan Lee Graham, with a resume that is a mix of television and movie roles, Broadway, and classical, portrays Kafka’s hunger artist, while Michael Slattery (Poe’s guilt-plagued murderer) and Caroline Worra (the woman trying to remember what she is missing) are both well established in the classical universe. read more
The opera world is a predominantly civilized place, but like any other subculture we have our own lexicon and, in turn, our brand of pejoratives. One of the worst words in opera is likely Regietheater, which literally translates to “director’s theater.” Often synonymous with the slightly more impolitic “Eurotrash,” Regietheater is often deployed to describe odious, deconstructionist productions and stagings that are thought to be fundamentally at odds with the dramatic impetus and mise en scènes intended by the composer and librettist. Imagine, for instance, a director, given free reign, who feels justified in staging La Bohème in a meat locker, Nozze di Figaro in a Paxil-addled psychiatric hospital or Wagner’s Ring cycle in a strip club. One of the worst examples of Regietheater I’ve seen in some time — and a pop quiz testing your Regietheater readiness — after the jump. read more
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