For the first time in my political life, I have had the chance to back not a compromise and not a lesser evil, but a candidate whom I support not with the desire to stave off disaster but with the hope (truly there is no better word, and I know because I have tried to find one in order to avoid sounding like a campaign poster) of something extraordinary that might result. My generation has come of intellectual and moral age in a time that has felt to many of us hopeless and surreal, like some terrible dadaist performance art, and to all of us, I think, cynical. And only because so many people have burst collectively into tears and into song have we now realized how numb we have been, and how ready we are to take this seriously, earnestly, how willing we are to change our lives if changing our lives can change the world.

President-elect Obama, you have spoken of a call to service. That call has not previously been issued in my lifetime. No one has asked us to change our lives, no one has urged us to be better than we are. But when you call, I think my generation will answer. We will work and teach and fight, we will give our time and our energy and our resources to the service of our country, which you have reminded us is ours and needs us. We will try to have civil conversations with people with whom we passionately disagree, and to take care of our friends and neighbors when they are sick and sad, and to learn humbly about others and ourselves. We will try not to lapse into believing that the arc of history is beyond our reach and that our good conduct is unnecessary. When you call us to, we will hope, and we will work.

My reviews of New York Musical Theater Festival shows are up at CurtainUp:

The Hatpin
Villa Diodati: A Mary Shelley Phantasia
Jason & Ben

Watching Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in Bryant Park two or three summers ago, sweltering with friends before the oversize screen, and when the camera came creeping in on Paul Newman’s giant face, his enormous eyes light and luminous in black-and-white, the whole crowd, thousands of people, stopped clattering and whispering and drew breath in unison.

In addition to being a busybody, one Countess Luann de Lesseps, apparently on television, is clearly kind of semantically scrambled. From Page Six:

“Men like women to be females,” de Lesseps advised, “to not be like workaholics, as that comes off as being uptight in the bedroom and control freaks.”

Awesome. The use of “females” in reference to, you know, female humans always strikes me as kind of strange and clinical. It also, of course, elides the difference between the biological and the social, which de Lesseps abuses here to hilarious effect.

Our conversation, which had degenerated into a cross-cultural comparison of methods for cooking udders among the English, Romans, Mexicans, and Yemenite Jews (who on top of everything else need to make them kosher), ceased as soon as we began to share the true Valencian paella. The rice lining the bottom of the pan was browned and crusty; the meat was tender and deeply flavored. Everything was imbued with the smoke of vines and fruitwood and the aroma of rosemary, and the Phaseoli lunati were, well, incomparable.

Max Lake, an Australian doctor turned wine maker, broke out a case of his best Australian red, and when no more than half of it had been drunk, one of the British writers among us revealed that, at the age of sixteen on a vacation in the south of Spain, she had been courted by El Cordobes, the greatest bullfighter who ever lived.

This is the end of a brief (four pages) essay, “Rosemary and Moon Beans,” anthologized in Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything. It is extra-special great because of the leap between the two paragraphs–they’re very good on their own (Steingarten, like my other favorite food writer, Ruth Reichl, is both lyrical and witty), but juxtaposed, they mimic and convey the mysticism of good food, especially good foreign food, crafted in foreign ways, which seems to make real the possibility of living very differently. In the interstice created by the food, the conversation, like the writing style, changes: it becomes quieter, more intimate. Because this is the end of the essay, the strangeness and possibility linger the way an aroma might in the air, or a taste in the mouth.

My review of the Hypothetical Theater Company’s “There or Here” is up at CurtainUp. Short version? I did not care for the play.

Why didn’t anyone tell me sooner that Jersey Boys is so good? I guess it did pick up its fair share of Tonys in ‘06 (including Best Musical), but I have a distinct bias against jukebox musicals, especially after having to sit through the execrable The Times They Are A-Changin’, and always dismissed the show as just another example of a genre I wouldn’t mind seeing chased out of town. So I went to Sunday’s Actors’ Fund benefit pretty reluctantly, but I’m really glad I did.

There’s something incredibly genuine about this show’s exuberance–possibly because it comes from the music itself, and not from whipping the book into a frenzy. The book scenes in Jersey Boys are actually pretty laid-back: one might even, every now and then, call them subtle. They do give notably short shrift to the female characters, but sort of in the same way that Martin Scorsese movies do, which is with a sense that the issues on the table are men’s issues. This is really a show about music, but second to that, it’s a show about men: much is made of how different the guys of the Four Seasons were, and how they came together because they (kind of) got along and because music was their shot to make it out of the Old Neighborhood–how they did it, as American men have done from time immemorial, to give their kids a better shot than they’d had and ended up living with strangers when they were home at all. Because the show works with a time-tested prefab score, it neatly sidesteps the maudlin, forgettable music that’s been bringing down new musicals left and right. Jersey Boys makes the disjunction between the music and the book an advantage by letting the book scenes run as a subtextual undercurrent through the continuous thread of the performances, which comes to seem, to the Four Seasons and their audience both, as the realest thing going (what’s realer to an audience than being performed to directly?). It’s a neat merging of form and function that helps to inculcate the audience into the mindset of the characters.

I saw understudy Cory Grant (Cory, not Cary) as Valli, and he struggled mightily with the Jersey accent (I tend to think that accents are overvalued, but you just can’t get past an obtrusive accent-attempt) and lost–the second act was a wee bit less enjoyable than the first because it rested so heavily on his shoulders, and he just wasn’t great in book scenes (not just because of the accent). The second act dips a little also because it spends more time than the first on that jukebox-musical technique of drafting kinda-relevant songs into the service of the plot, rather than just performing them, as it largely did in the first act. There’s a clever hedging technique of making the songs performances with plot resonance, as in “Beggin’” and “Let’s Hang On (To What We’ve Got),” but “Fallen Angel” is a big misstep: a lesser song appropriated into a sappy, unnecessary number. Still, this show works with its source material way better than any other jukebox musical I’ve ever seen (note: I’ve never felt the need to see Mamma Mia!). Other than Grant, the cast is very solid–the casting director deserves a medal for doing a tough job well–and it’s nice to see a musical with so many original cast members staying on this long. I was particularly taken by J. Robert Spencer (as Nick Massi), whose lanky lightness makes the Ed Sullivan-approved dancing fresh and compelling, but all three regular Seasons are fun to watch, and nicely differentiated, and a couple of supporting actors give satisfyingly plummy performances.

Perhaps the thing by which I was really so taken is the fact that these characters mostly aren’t fleshed out with a lot of talking–they’re fleshed out with the songs they sing and the way they sing them, their wildly divergent dance styles as they rattle through the same moves in unison. It’s just very enjoyable to watch, and you don’t feel like you’re being beaten around the head with character development, the way you do in many a musical. It’s lovely. Jersey Boys is very devoted to the ideal of entertaining an audience, and it’s nice to see that interpreted as a job to be done carefully and well, rather than just a lazy willingness to distract from a hollow core with the old razzle-dazzle.

While a great many theater critics seem able to forgive a musical anything because of its “joy,” my blackened little heart just can’t–and for that reason, I appreciated the unexpected subtlety of Jersey Boys. I could have done without the random pop-art scenes that descend from the flies periodically, but that’s small-potatoes quibbling, and the screens were also used for really effective archival video footage. But given how many of the musicals I’ve seen in recent years have been badly done from soup to nuts–badly conceived, written, produced, cast, designed, staged–the fact that the various members of the Jersey Boys team have identified their jobs and done them thoroughly comes to seem a blessing, and a nice complement to the themes of workmanlike artistry that are the show’s center. It’s a nice, compact package, and I’d see it again tomorrow.

P.S. It doesn’t have a plot, really, beyond the usual “what goes up must come down.” For unknown reasons, I didn’t mind so much, but if plotlessness is your pet peeve…look elsewhere.

I’m seeing six plays in seven days this week (yesterday was my day off), doing reviews of the Fringe Festival for CurtainUp. The Fringe reviews are here, and my first contribution is here. Writing that little paragraph led me to realize that above a certain threshold of competence with the English language, everyone’s writing sounds basically the same within the constraints of a short-form review.

Regular posting to resume next week, probably kicking off with The Emperor’s Children.

Update:
Review of The Alice Complex
Review of Becoming Britney
Review of Gargoyle Garden
Review of Salt Lake: A New Ballet
Review of That Dorothy Parker

I saw The Dark Knight nearly two weeks ago, and it’s taken me that long to figure out what I think of it and why. In a nutshell, what I think of it is this: the first chunk (not quite half) of the movie is completely brilliant; the rest is a very, very good action movie. The problem is that after the first part, the very-very-good-action-movie part doesn’t quite satisfy.

The movie’s first sequence is a great little microcosm of why its beginning is so profoundly unsettling. Bank robbery. Gang of thieves in Joker masks—bright, plasticky, like masks of previous Jokers sold to children for Halloween. The small fry go down like dominos, or a kind of brutal daisy chain, until only one is left: this one is real. Beneath his mask is another one, a dirty cartoon of smeared greasepaint. He wedges a grenade into the bank manager’s mouth. There is a long string around the pin, and his departure (in a broken-down school bus) pulls it free. It lands on the bank-floor marble with a tinkle. Close on the doomed man. Time elapses in very small increments, and as it does, you sit in the audience hoping that you will not have to watch the man’s head explode. More milliseconds, during which you grow more and more sure of what is coming and more and more sure you do not want to see it. More milliseconds. You realize it has been too long. The grenade hisses smoke, then sputters out. The screen holds the man’s face. This is not better than seeing the man’s head explode. It might be worse.

These long shots, in which you become increasingly convinced of the inevitability of something terrible (and terrible to watch) happening, are both characteristic of the first part of The Dark Knight and an enormous departure from the visual and intellectual conventions of the superhero genre. Also convention-defying is the nondescriptness of the setting, which has been stripped of the CGI Gothic grime it sported in Batman Begins. The city’s Chicago, as it happens, but those of us with a less than encyclopedic knowledge of its skyline and streets can forget that fact entirely. For the movie’s purposes, it’s Anycity, full of glass-and-steel office towers, penthouses for millionaires, people going to work, pervasive corruption, slightly shabby rowhouses, and the constant threat of chaos and violence–this works quite effectively to eliminate the sheen of stylization that can (sometimes) blunt the edge of scary movie images. The movie’s most important break with genre convention, though, is the Joker. He is inexplicable, almost autocthonic: he tells a different story of how came to be the way he is each time, and it feels like a weapon as potent as the array of knives he carries around with him. The somewhat florid script says, “Some men just want to see the world burn,” but that doesn’t quite capture the Joker, whose carefully-curated destructions form the core of the scariness of the first part of the movie.

It’s irritating to say, as David Denby and many inferior critics have done, that Heath Ledger “looked into the abyss” to play this role. I do think, though, that despite the fact that Ledger’s profoundly freaky performance makes him all but unrecognizable, the audience’s meta-awareness of the young actor’s early overdose death works to ground the movie in the reality of human suffering. People can suffer this much. It can hurt this bad. Death is real, and can materialize, like Batman or the Joker, from nowhere in the blink of an eye, and disappear again without explanation. The first part of the movie is a paean to the human capacity for pain, and watching it is like being beaten up. Every death—every single one, every petty criminal, every civilian—is devastating to watch, every threat is credible and scary. It’s a big achievement that the movie can make more of a single-digit number of casualties than most movies of this kind can do with the decimation of entire populations: after the grainy, jumpy, uncomfortably-but-subtly-evocative-of-Al-Qaida footage of the Joker toying with a Batman wannabe, there is a reference to the number of dead people, and it is, in action-movie terms, shockingly low to be responsible for the nuclear-winter mood on the screen and in the theater, and tells one something about how high The Dark Knight’s stakes are.

And then somewhere–I can’t put my finger on quite where, but perhaps at the point of the not-quite-sufficiently-contextualized death of a major character, or possibly as the plot fractures into many individually spinning pieces–the movie settles down into being a really good action movie. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a really good action movie for the back three-fifths or whatever, full of tension and speed. It gets the adrenaline pumping, but after the first chunk, it’s hard to find a really good action movie satisfying. We have been promised the poetry of despair. The pace becomes manic. The cutting accelerates to top speed (the kind where the car begins to shake). There were several sequences I stopped trying to follow–I just leaned back a little and let their flashing and noise and explosions work ambiently. The underground triple chase, for example. These are action-movie sequences, and they run on action-movie tropes, including the reintroduction of cannon fodder: the people whose sole job it is to die. That was a big deal for me, and really changed my reaction to the movie in midstream. You can’t sustain the incredibly minute focus of the first part, its elegiac attention to fear and suffering, while cop cars are exploding anonymously in the foreground: full of bodies, bursting into flame, flying at the screen, then gone.

Much is packed into the latter section of the movie, many quick cuts and action sequences, several new set pieces (mixed results: the hospital explosion sequence was arresting, but the prisoner’s-dilemma ferry setup felt forced and toothless), and a whole new plot thread. It seems to end in about three places, and some things that should be harrowing are merely exhausting. Two-Face’s face isn’t scary enough–it’s too easy to look at, too plastic and inhuman. It’s a nice reminder that even kind of gross things can be comforting if they are, like this face, kind of gross in a familiar way. But after the movie’s first terrifying, exhilarating surge, this comfort is cold comfort. Then again, if the end had come after the first hour, or if that tone had been sustained throughout, I might be having nightmares about this movie for the duration of my mortal life. So maybe it’s for the best.

…is that all authors google themselves. Hi, Sarah Manguso! I liked your book a great deal! I am sorry I read it in the bookstore! Alas, Keith Gessen, I have not read yours yet, but would be happy to accept any review copies you might like to provide in gestures of in-Brooklyn-they-saved-and-schemed solidarity.

Seriously, I think the reason that no one (read: me, and maybe other people) expects published authors to google themselves and their book titles (which, when you think about it, of course they do, and it’s not even pathetic. If you said something you cared about to the public at large, wouldn’t you want to know what they were saying in response?) is that we all still kind of think that the internet is fake, a hallucination you dream up alone in your house, while books are real, solid and money-costing and conversation-starting.