So, I made a promise about writing on the internet again. This is not my best work, and obviously I shouldn’t be telling you that right at the top, but the idea is to get things going again. I’m thinking two posts a week. Haven’t picked days yet. Stay posted.

On a flight to Portland, watching This Is It on the teeny JetBlue screen. The disclaimer here is that I was never a Michael Jackson fan–I never got an impression of him uncolored by the freakshow of his public image. Last summer, while I was moving out of my apartment in Brooklyn, a girl in high-tops flung open the door of her family’s brownstone and yelled down the block, “The King of Pop is dead!” And that was the first time I’d thought about Michael Jackson for awhile, and what I thought was that it seemed to me the action of a merciful God, not to let this man live on inside a ruined body and life.

And it’s weird in light of that reaction to see that he was still comparatively able so close to his death. It’s weird to see him as anything other than a symbol of some ruinous strangeness. Because the ruinous strangeness is there, but it’s not crowded everything else out. This is not to say that he’s not nuts; he is. “Are we misunderstanding something here?” says the director, and the white-suited star says, “We’re sizzling.” Or: “Just bathe in the moonlight,” he instructs during a session on musical arrangement, “just let it simmer,” and he raises his shoulders and his hands like he’s going to lose it. This might once have sounded like the special language of a specially gifted artist, but now it sounds more like a set of hollow touchstones. He’s struggling: “I’m trying to adjust to inner ears. When you’re raised using your own aural, your own auditory ears.” The people he works with are tiptoeing around him. But he’s creatively engaged. He’s making decisions. And perhaps most importantly, he’s going through the motions. He can still make his body and his voice do those things well enough that you remember how impressive they are.

There’s something remarkable about the way he moves, something about it totally unlike the way the men around him move, all the dancers, every one carefully culled and choreographed. None of the other dancers collapse into themselves the way he does. He’s less hard-hitting than they are in his movements, and I don’t think this is just because he’s near to death. His movement seems to come from a different place in him than it comes from in the other men. Their motion seems to emanate from some essential kinetic core, while his is like an external force rippling through him. Which has sort of always been the thing about him, right? That his movement is sort of magic and inexplicable? (The obvious example here is the Moonwalk.)

Dancing isn’t a display of strength for him, and it’s not a performance of masculinity. It’s not exactly that there’s nothing sexual to the way he moves, or nothing sexy (although he’s unquestionably less sexy, in this degraded state, than he was) but there’s absolutely nothing interactive in the sexuality in his performance. When he touches a female dancer’s pulsing thigh, it might as well be her shoulder. When his movements trace hers, it’s not sexy; there’s nothing vibrating between them. His is a solitary kind of charisma.

This isn’t exactly new–I think of him in the “Thriller” video and there’s absolutely no sexual chemistry between him and the girl, whoever she is. So there’s that as something that’s constant, but there’s also something that’s been lost in comparison to the Michael Jackson of yore. The major difference, I think, is that he no longer seems to be enjoying himself. There’s a loss of a certain buoyancy. He’s less light on his feet than he used to be, of course, and less fluid, but I think the most crucial loss is of this kind of driving energy. It’s hard to tell how much that’s reinterpretation in light of hindsight, or reinterpretation in light of his public image–our sort of inability to trust the intention behind his motion, and thus to read it as authoritative.

More devoted people than I have tried to solve this problem. What I can’t figure out is whether or to what extent the charisma and the crazy are inextricable from one another. And as much as this is falling back on something really uninsightful and cheap, he’s just so interesting. What was it that he meant?

And thus it was that our heroine figured out how to install plugins via FTP her very own self. Henceforth she regains her blogging powers and will require much less tech support.

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