If you haven’t seen Harmony, the Barry Manilow/Bruce Sussman musical about the Comedian Harmonists — a Weimar-into-Nazi era comic singing group that was a rage throughout Europe and appeared once at Carnegie Hall — take advantage of wide discount offers (see below).
Given this is the slow time of year for Broadway, and Harmony was already having a tough time filling seats, go while you can, and support what isn’t a perfect show (the first act especially needs more space for story- and character-development) but it is an important one. For a show in the works literally for decades, Harmony has a strong relevant contemporary message and a particularly heart-wrenching (and oft-times comic) performance by Chip Zien.
When we saw Harmony the other night we ran into our friend Christine Lavin, who has attended multiple times both when Harmony had its initial NYC run at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and since its transition to Broadway. We bemoaned the number of empty seats and batted around ideas about how Manilow might be able to boost sales by appearing for a week or two. Conductor? (Seen only briefly from the back, but that could be adjusted.) Join the curtain call and sing with the
cast? Take the role of the pianist, leaving the existing pianist to sing for those performances? Talkbacks/Q&A sessions at the end? There is ample precedent for such booster efforts – think Carole King and Beautiful — where the celebrity doesn’t have to overshadow the existing cast but can add an extra enticement for ticket-buying fence-sitters.
In addition to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre box office (243 W. 47th St.), as this is written, TDF has seats for tomorrow 1/6 and most performances 1/13-1/20; it’s been consistently available at the TKTS booths; and there are $18 day-of rush tickets.
There is no more joyous party to be found in New York City right now than the one that instantly engulfs you at the Atlantic Theater’s Buena Vista Social Club.
The show is based, with dramatic license, on the story behind the Ry Cooder-produced album of the same name that was recorded with a band of Cuban musicians in Havana in 1996, and released on Nonesuch the following year. (Exactly how it is that neither Cooder nor the album are referenced in the credits for the show is a mystery I haven’t pursued.) The personal histories of the musicians are the core of the dramatic arc, running from roughly the 1940s through the 1956 Cuban revolution and the mid-’90s.
The band and dancers will blow you out of your seats. And while the songs are in Spanish, the book sets context throughout, leaving the actor/singers to convey the underlying emotions, which they do for each of the powerhouse 15 songs.
The Atlantic Theater Company has sent a number of shows to Broadway — most recently Kimberly Akimbo and The Band’s Visit. Those were really intimate musicals just perfect for the 199-seat Linda Gross Theater where they, like Buena Vista, debuted. From the first number, this show just about bounds out the doors of this small room on W. 20th Street and right up Eighth Ave. If only Roseland were still around…what an ideal venue that would have been for the show, followed by dancing for all!
Magical realism makes coincidental back-to-back appearances at Lincoln Center, where the Metropolitan Opera presents Florencia en el Amazonas and the Mitzi Newhouse theater next door offers the music theater piece Gardens of Anuncia. I’m sure it’s coincidental — I can’t imagine the Met and Lincoln Center Theater could possibly be so coordinated as to have sat down together a few years ago to plot having two offerings where magical realism is a component. Still, it was striking seeing the two just a couple of nights apart.
Everything about opera composer Daniel Catan’s Florencia en el Amazonas is just beautiful. The lush, romantic La Boheme-ish music composed roughly 30 years ago (yes, you’ll wonder what took the Met so long to bring it here from the Houston Grand Opera, where it premiered in 1996); the multi-purpose imaginative costumes which at times double as scenery (you’ll understand when you see it); the Chinese-lantern-ish fish and Gepetto-inspired puppets; and the delightfully eerie sets — the production is, well, beautiful on every level.
The opera is wonderfully sung and well acted. The story, as Riva pointed out, is no more absurd than most operas. Suffice it to say it takes place in the Amazon rainforest in the early 1900s with all of the action on a steamboat. A diva traveling incognito is en route to perform but more importantly to pursue her lover who previously disappeared in the jungle. There are a shipwreck, a dead passenger who returns to life, a manuscript that fell in the water that rains down from the sky, and a mystical character who appears in multiple guises as both human and animal. There you go. You’ve got it.
Sadly, for the Met there were many empty seats on Monday night. Happily for you, ththere are plenty of seats at the upcoming four performances; you may even be able to score $25 Met orchestra rush tickets, which are available starting at noon the day of performance. If you enjoy romantic opera you should go; and if you’ve never gone, as was the case for four young folks we met on the way out, this is a delightful introduction.
Michael John LaChiusa’s Gardens of Anuncia is a charming evening of musical theater, tender and sweet. The action split between Buenos Aires and the U.S. in the 1940s and ‘50s. “Charming” could be a backhanded compliment, and it’s not intended that way at all.
The redoubtable Priscilla Lopez (the original Diana Morales in A Chorus Line, who had a substantive career prior to that landmark role and continues to be active) plays Anuncia, a ballerina-turned-choreographer with a host of Broadway hits to her name. Based on the real-life story of Graciela Daniele, in the play Anuncia is about to collect a Lifetime Achievement award though she is heavy with grief over the loss of one of the key women who raised her, whose ashes are in a box she must bury in order to move forward.
There’s a talking deer and its brother, a magical-looking forest and a younger version of Anuncia played by Kalyn West who is sometimes with her in “real time.” Musically the final 20 minutes are the most directly Sondheim-esque (specifically Sunday In the Park With George). This is hardly blockbuster material, but the show works and makes for a wonderful night in the theater.
TDF members, note: As I write this, there are 18 performances in the month of December listed with tickets at $39. The Newhouse is a small theater, and there are no bad seats.
When most music artists produce boxed sets the collections are typically their own greatest hits, deeper-cut retrospectives, re-mastered reissues, alternate takes, unreleased tracks, and so on. The sets are often elaborately packaged, with book or other items.
Christine Lavin’s “The Seasons Project” reflects her career not so much as the wonderful songwriter and performer she is (see my comments on the house concert Chris did for us in February 2020) but rather as the indefatigable booster of other folk-rooted musicians. As I’ve told her over the years, she’s a great marketer — of others, too modest in some ways to promote herself as vociferously.
Example: With 80 tracks here, only three are hers. Of the 69 soloists and groups included, Chris introduced me to the music of eight of them since we met in the 1980s. I’ve never heard of 27 and while I’m not exposed to as much as I was when writing for newspapers regularly, I’m clearly not listening widely enough. This is a great corrective.
There are four albums here, one loosely themed or simply mood-appropriate for each season. Those familiar with Chris’s work over the long term will recognize “On A Winter’s Night” and “When October Goes,” compilations she curated in the 1990s. They’ve been remastered and each has at least one new track. The all-new spring set is “Coming Alive Again;” summer, also new, is collected on “Last Song For You.”
I’m still going back through and discovering memorable voices, lyrics, and melodies. In five hours of music, I haven’t come across a track that I’d skip next time. Chris’s taste is THAT good and wide-ranging.
As for the packaging, the four “albums” arrive on a handcrafted thumb drive packed in a wood box made by Ukrainian box builder Mykhailo Chaban. The book? It’s a 480-page PDF with Chris’s commentary, bios of all the musicians, lyrics, and photos, on the thumb drive.
The limited edition collection is available only on her website. I hope she has cause to manufacture more. Says Chris, “I created this collection with an eye firmly fixed on the future — expecting 50-100 years from now folklorists will find it useful.” Useful, yes, and inspiring, not just for folklorists, and not just in the future.
Attending a Bob Dylan concert is essentially placing a $200 bet against yourself. He’s not Ella Fitzgerald, who gave a masterful performance every time she stepped out on a stage. With Dylan you never know if you’re going to get an on night, an off night or simply something totally inscrutable. You’re betting on the curiosity factor, though you’re assured nothing less than interesting. Even a dreadful show at one of his extended Beacon Theater runs 15 or so years ago was interesting. His three song set in 1968, performed with The Band at Carnegie Hall as part of the Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert, was transcendent. Many notches above interesting.
This time wasn’t exactly a house concert, yet here was Dylan playing five blocks from our home at Brooklyn’s magnificently restored Kings Theatre. I could walk over. And did.
The quick take: Dylan’s second night at Kings was fascinating. It’s the same 17-song show he’s been performing for two years now (exception: Johnny Mercer’s “That Old Black Magic” has been substituted for “Melancholy Mood”) yet it’s clear from the outset that his supporting musicians have no clue how he’s going to attack any given song.
That’s always been true — read some of Rob Stoner’s Facebook posts about his stint as bassist and band contractor for the Rolling Thunder Revue back in the mid-‘70s and how the musicians had to watch Dylan’s fingers and mouth to get an idea where he was headed. Talk to any long-time fan about how there have been periods where you couldn’t tell what songs he played any given night because he’d twisted them so much.
Now, though, the set list never changes. This group has been playing these songs almost nightly — this was the 64th performance since this year’s leg of the tour began in April, and the tour overall started November 2, 2021 — yet the truism holds: Dylan is going to mine those songs differently every damn time. That’s another aspect of the bet. Sometimes that mining yields gold. Sometimes coal.
What Dylan and his current band delivered in Brooklyn in 2023 was in the Grateful Dead mode, with lulling improvisations for a mostly 20s-30s-early-40s audience. Many people sitting (really standing) near me were swaying in a stoned haze, making tai-chi-like hand motions — a throwback to Dead shows in the ‘70s and ‘80s, only these people weren’t born yet then.
It was all quite reverential. The ovation when Dylan emerged in the shadows (I mean that literally, and in the shadows he stayed) held through the first four or five songs. After that, at least up front, there were brief segments where everyone sat down before rising again, sometimes at seemingly mysterious moments. This is no Springsteen concert, though; it’s not that the music impels you to stand and move. It’s about legend. One woman in the audience said she was from the state of Washington, cat-sitting in Greenpoint for a friend. This was her opportunity to make up for the time 15 years ago (when she was 13) when she didn’t attend a festival in her home state that Dylan was playing because she had no idea who he was…”and now he’s in his 80s. Who knows how many more rounds he’s going to go?” That theme recurred among young and older fan conversations while exiting the theater and walking home.
A man sitting next to me had flown in from Ohio that morning for business. He checked the box office when he got to LaGuardia and like me discovered that eight or 10 house seats had clearly just been released for sale; we were Row G in the center. He had seen the show two years ago in Ohio, shortly after the tour began. How did this compare? “That was more rock and roll-y. This was more jazzy. He’s Dylan.”
I figure I won my bet. So did my Ohio and cat-sitting seat-mates.
On a matinee day especially you have to wonder how many physical therapists are backstage at Broadway’s “Some Like It Hot” to tend to all those tap and swing dancers. We saw a Wednesday night performance and left giddy with delight; standing in Shubert Alley as the cast emerged after the show, they were clearly ready to hightail it home. You couldn’t blame them.
A cavalcade of non-stop 11 o’clock numbers by songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman started from the opener and never let up. Those songs were further enlivened by all those tappers and swingers (plaudits to choreographer/director Casey Nicholaw) outfitted in eye-popping costumes (Gregg Barnes). And the book has been meaningfully updated from the 1959 film by Matthew López and Amber Ruffin, paying all due homage (and copping lines as appropriate), without getting overboard serious. This is a pure fun show, after all.
One complaint: The orchestra is so over-amplified I kept wanting to turn the volume down, and in the course of that blast the singing is consistently drowned out. That said, the cast gives its all throughout.
For those who qualify, as I write this there are eight upcoming performances at TDF.org for significantly reduced price tickets, including this Saturday night. The house was probably less than two-thirds full. Go, and then you, too, will be inclined to help spread the word-of-mouth.
Reading the front page of the NYT this morning I realized that NONE of the news stories had what we were all taught would be a traditional “news lede.” They all kick off like feature stories; the news is often in a third or later paragraph, sometimes merely inferred. I went back to the Friday and Saturday front pages — one story on Friday and two on Saturday have classic news ledes — but most, again, are feature-style news reports. The WSJ uses proper ledes on the front page, except for what are legit features.
I’ve sensed this for a while at the Times, but hadn’t considered that it was a wholesale shift until this morning’s page 1. Is the Times abandoning the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How lede? I have to go back and re-examine the inside stories.
A quick Google search suggests j-schools are still defining ledes as answering those key questions, usually in the first paragraph and typically in one sentence. Just like the old days.
Artist Fred Terna is a Holocaust survivor. It is no surprise that much of his work centers on the trauma of that experience, and of surviving multiple concentration and work camps. A new show at Manhattan’s Czech Center Gallery at the Bohemian National Hall consists mostly of 1980s pieces, plus a few more recent ones.
Titled “Flame Paintings,” it is a stunning, soul-wrenching exhibit curated by his son Daniel Terna, a photographer and artist in his own right. Riva and I are fortunate to number Fred and his family among our close friends. I try to visit Fred’s studio whenever we are at their house, to see what he is working on. Having recently turned 99, he is still climbing the stairs almost daily to his third-floor studio and actively painting.
I know his work. Our daughter wrote his biography. I know his life story. Nonetheless, seeing this selection of works displayed so forcefully, in a stark white hall under the auspices of the Consulate General of the Czech Republic puts these Flame paintings in a very special context, with a resonance for our times that should not be underestimated.
The opening on Tuesday night was crowded; I plan to go back to reflect on each piece and on the cumulative impact of seeing them gathered in this way. I hope you have the opportunity to go as well.
Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt introduced me to 38 characters I recognized instantly. Every person on stage was familiar in their talk, their thoughts, their walk, their actions.
This is Stoppard’s coming-to-terms with the discovery late in life that his mother and he were Jewish. Upon arriving in England from Vienna in the late 1930s his mother changed their names so that no one would know they were Jewish. He — and we — learn the family history and what happened to those they left behind as they escaped. No surprises here — really — but what a telling.
The writing is taut, as are the tableaux of the family in its home in Vienna, the acting, and the direction. Even the set, simple as it is, is spot on. Stunning me for a moment was the character Rosa, who had the precise posture and bearing of three German Jewish sisters (one our beloved family doctor here in NYC who delivered me and remained my doctor into my mid-20s, the others her nurse and office manager).
Go. You will hold your breath for a fleeting two hours and 10 minutes. At the end your muscles will be as taut as that writing. So rewarding.
Leopoldstadt is in previews at the Longacre Theater, formally opens next month, and is scheduled to run through January 29, 2023.
After a full and musically satisfying Friday at the Newport Folk Festival with the family last weekend, the heat got to me Saturday morning while waiting to get back in for Day 2. The medics on-site determined it was dehydration and did a work up in their M*A*S*H tent. (“You’ve seen M*A*S*H, right? You have to have seen M*A*S*H. This looks just like it.” It did, except this one was air conditioned.)
My wife Riva, who was in a second car coming in later in the morning, detoured from the parking lot to the medical tent, where I was admonished to stay away from my staple seltzer and drink a lot of water and Gatorade — the latter of which, in the best of times, I gag on. I was down for the day and headed back to the lovely airbnb our daughter had found in Bristol, RI. I assumed if I drank enough Saturday I’d be good to go at least late in the afternoon for whatever finale Brandi Carlile had planned. It wasn’t even supposed to be that sunny on Sunday.
Well, too fatigued and not wanting to risk being stuck in a car for a couple of hours getting out of the parking lot at the end of the day, I wasn’t there for Joni Mitchell’s now-widely-reported and documented set. I’m delighted that my daughter, son-in-law, son, and his girlfriend got to see and experience a legend, if not at the peak of her career at a peak of grace and dignity and survival.
The videos are all over Youtube and Facebook, and there’s an excellent piece from CBS News with background on how this came together, what Mitchell has recovered since her brain aneurysm in 2015, and a chat with Mitchell after the performance.
But friends, listen to the lyrics. Joni Mitchell is 78 now; she wrote “Circle Game” and “Both Sides Now” around 1966 when she was 22. There isn’t a wasted word, not a cliché. Full verses, stunning choruses. 22. What is it that true artists feel and see and can express so early that the rest of us need a lifetime to maybe fully appreciate?
That depth is true for so much of what Mitchell wrote. It is no doubt what lends her rendition of “Summertime” here, and the smokier jazz-inflected voicings on the 2000 album “Both Sides Now,” on which she performs mostly other people’s standards as well as a couple of her songs that have become standards too, its legitimacy. My how she balances gravitas and lightness.
As for Carlile, I’ve written glowingly about her before. A unique aspect of her genius is her ability to shore up other artists without overshadowing them which, along with her wide net of musicians who respect her, is no doubt why she gets to program these closing nights at Newport. Watch her carefully sitting next to Mitchell in these Newport videos, conducting the band, filling in notes, urging Mitchell on with a gentle touch.
I DID see Joni Mitchell at Newport in 1969 — the last time she appeared there — when she was on the Sunday afternoon New Faces program, with James Taylor and Van Morrison. I also saw her at the Mariposa Folk Festival in Toronto in 1972, when she, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young did simultaneous surprise guest sets on different stages, while Gordon Lightfoot did an impromptu unmiked set from a picnic table bench. And I saw her in concerts and club appearances from Carnegie Hall to the Bottom Line (the latter another unannounced guest set during an Eric Andersen show).
What Joni Mitchell overcame to do this Newport set is impressive. What gifts she shared. Even for someone who wasn’t there.
Oh, the first time I missed Joni Mitchell? My first assignment for The New York Post in 1978 was to review Crosby, Stills & Nash at Madison Square Garden. I’d gotten the assignment about 4:30 that afternoon and immediately called the label’s publicist Stu Ginsburg. Stu said he couldn’t get me a ticket but he could get me a backstage pass and I’d have to stand at the side of the stage. As CSN finished its formal set, all of us in the wings were shuffled off the stage. I went to the Post to write my review. The next morning I got a call from my editor, Steve Cuozzo. “How come you didn’t mention Joni Mitchell singing the encore with them?” Well… Thank you Steve for not holding that against me; I wrote for the Post through 1990.
nightmayer 