Load In/Load Out: Goodbye To Anna & The City Opera

I like living near BAM. On Sunday afternoon walks, I sometimes pass the Opera House or Harvey Theater when the stage doors are open, giving me a peek backstage during load-in or load-out. I relish any glimpse behind the curtain, at the great wide spaces that remind me of a bare factory floor, a theatrical Vehicle Assembly Building where absolutely anything can be created. Seen from Hanson Place, the backstage of the Opera House is cavernous, and to watch a few dozen stagehands hustle crate after crate off of two or three or four semi-trailers is to be awed by the work that goes into filling that stage. "We've got a budget," says BAM, "and we're going to use it."

There's great promise in a load-in. Watching load-out can be bittersweet, or just plain heartbreaking, as with the day I saw Santo Loquasto's beautiful scenery for The Master Builder  tossed into a dumpster on Ashland, the steeple that figures in the play's climax poking out of a pile of garbage. But that's theater. When a run is finished, it's over—the scenery discarded or repurposed, the space adapted for some other story. It's a cycle of renewal, and even when it's bittersweet, it is a happy thing.

This is different from some of the other bits of entertainment with which I fill my days. When I passed BAM yesterday, I was on my way home from the last Mets game of the season, wallowing in the particular anguish that comes with the close of the regular season. Baseball is a simple pleasure, endlessly available from April through October, but like all seasonal joys, we lose it suddenly and violently. The last day of the regular season is painful in the way that summer's last beach day, trip to the park, or icy mint julep can be. They are simple pleasures, but the close of the season is a reminder that one day we will get our last sunburn, fly our last kite, and watch our last ballgame. Remembering that is no fun at all.

Theater is not a simple pleasure. It is maddening, overpriced, doomed and pretentious. But it also offers something rare—that sense of panic that comes when a good play is ending, as we try to keep our eyes wide open, to take in as much of the scene as possible, knowing that we will never be able to see it again. (I plan to die the same way.) That straining desperation is a form of the sublime, and the sublime is nothing to sneeze at. 

On a sunny afternoon a few weeks ago, I passed the Opera House and saw a truck full of what appeared to be pink Lincoln Logs. "Ooh," I thought. "That must be for Anna Nicole ." I'd been waiting for the well-reviewed British opera to land in New York for over a year, and the sight of all that pink, sturdy-looking wood took my anticipation up another notch. "What could it be?" I wondered. "Does it all fit together to make a pink, uncomfortably ribbed sofa?" (That this was my best guess shows that I don't have much of a nose for set design.)  

When the curtain rose on the performance of Anna  I saw, it turned out that the Lincoln Logs formed the backdrop—a kind of pink log cabin wall meant to establish Anna's humble origins. And though the opera disappointed me bitterly—in the way that simpler pleasures never can—I'm glad I got to experience those months of anticipation, and the thrill I felt at seeing the set stacked up outside. I didn't know what it was, but I knew those logs were the raw ingredients for something magical. That's a cool thing to feel sure of, even when you turn out wrong.

Yesterday, as I tried to hold on to the fading flavor of another season of meaningless baseball, I saw Anna  being dismantled. What had come in with such promise was being taken away in disappointment. The logs had reverted to logs. After just a handful of performances, the show was over, and there could be no promise of rebirth. The Opera House stage will be filled again, but the City Opera is likely on its way out. That it died a shell of itself—staging an abbreviated season of half-baked British opera, begging on Kickstarter and performing far from its original home—does not make this collapse any more sad.

I was musing on the metaphorical death of summer, of baseball, of the pathetic Mets and their pathetic 2013, when I passed a real death on Hanson Place, and saw the body being dragged to the curb. 

Brilliant Play Falls Apart, 75 Years After The Apocalypse

I've been waiting to see Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns: a post electric play  for over a year, ever since it premiered at D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. A few weeks ago, I that dream was fulfilled, in the cozy confines of Playwrights Horizons. The first two acts of the play were brilliant, doing everything I expected and a hell of a lot more, but then...well, I already wrote the review. Why not just read that?

Civilization has collapsed in a nuclear haze, and a gang of survivors huddle around the campfire, trying to keep out the dark by retelling an old Simpsons episode. They cobble it together bit by bit, without the DVD safety net to help them fill in gaps, knowing that whatever they can't remember will be lost to history. The world has gone dark, and no one will ever watch The Simpsonsagain.

This is a melancholy thought, especially for someone who has been watching The Simpsons his entire life. That caustic yellow family first appeared on The Tracey Ullman Show a few months before I was born, and took to primetime when I was two. As a child, my evenings revolved around the 5 p.m. syndicated episode, and the show still has the power to take me back to childhood. It's a security blanket, and if the world ended, it's where I would turn as well.

The Simpsons is an incredibly rich text, stuffed with intricate throwaway gags that make each episode endlessly watchable, and—as Washburn's characters quickly figure out—surprisingly hard to remember in full. Everyone knows The Simpsons,  and that shared understanding is strong enough to support anything Washburn wants to make of it. By the end of the second act of Mr. Burns, she has stripped America's longest-running scripted show down to its essentials, allowing her to build something entirely new out of familiar parts. That the play eventually collapses is not because she asks too much of her source material, but because she doesn't take it far enough.

Now, because it was (quite rightly) cut from the review, let's revel in this for a few seconds. 

Thank god for the Simpsons, and for Anne Washburn. The play, as a whole, doesn't work for me, but it does so in a way that makes it much more fun to talk about. So let's talk! Tweet at me or whatnot and we can discuss a discussion.

"You Didn't Hear? He's in jail for 125 years, on five murders."

There are few things I love more than a nasty dive bar. Beer is the same everywhere, and I prefer to drink it someplace where it's not marked up too much, and the atmosphere is subdued and unpretentious. Like a lot of the finer things New York, the city's dive bars are disappearing. In the last year or so we've lost O'Connor's, Odessa, Blarney Cove and many more whose losses are, I'm sure, just as gut wrenching, but which I myself never frequented. These bars are old growth timber—alcoholic redwoods—and when they fall, they can't be replaced.

I'd read on Fucked In Park Slope  that Jackie's Fifth Amendment, the last dive bar standing in my evermore bank branchified patch of Park Slope, was on its way to joining that list. It's a peculiar bar, and one at which I've never felt entirely at home, mainly because most of its bar stools are permanently occupied by men of 60 and up, as though sometime around 1980 they decided to actively discourage the acquiring of new clientele. It is dark, the back room is musty, and there is usually not much to do there but stand awkwardly and pretend not to be upsetting the average age of the place. But the beer is cheap and comes in pony bottles, and it is a fine place to drink once in a while. Last call was set for September 16, and I planned to go and say my goodbyes, as I did for fair Blarney, but I missed the closing.

And so it was a pleasant surprise, last night around 7 o'clock, to walk up from the G train and find Jackie's still humming along, as though the bar closed but nobody bothered to tell the regulars. I stepped in for a quick beer—in those 7 oz bottles, ever beer is a quick one—and decided to let that serve as my goodbye, if indeed the bar is going. I sat for fifteen minutes, eavesdropped, and overheard some of the craziest dialogue I've heard in years.

To my right, a man bitched about his family's upcoming trip to the theater district:

They got three tickets to the Lion King, and I'm not going to see the Lion King. I like, Broadway shows, I like the Fiddler on the Roof. I never saw the Broadway show, but I saw the movie. And that, that fucking Springtime For Hitler, that I took you to see? I never saw the Broadway show, but I saw the movie. 

Good stuff, I thought, and settled in to soak up his opinions on Broadway theater while I finished my tiny High Life. My attention was quickly picked up, however, by the men to my left, who blew "that fucking Springtime For Hitler" right out of the water.  Two men, a moustachioed 50-something and a rumpled 70 year-old, traded a pair of intense stories with all the emotion I might use to discuss a baseball team I don't care about.

Moustache: A friend of mine, when we were kids I used to play stickball with him. We had a falling out, and lost touch. A few years ago, I was talking to his sister, asked her, how is he? She said, 'You didn't hear? He's in jail for 125 years, on five murders.' He fell in with the wrong people. He killed three prostitutes, didn't rape them but he shot them, a store owner, and a priest.

Old man: A priest?

M: Yep. Just walked into the rectory and shot him. And he's in for 125 years. He'll never get out.

O.M. That's just like my younger son.

M: He'll never get out. Been up for parole three, four times. He'll never get out.

O.M.: That's just like my younger son. He always liked to fuck around with younger girls. And I told him, that's what you want, that's fine, but wait until they're a little older. And he said, but I like it! And I said, you're going to get in trouble. And he was fucking around with this Mexican girl. This was before we moved to Connecticut, and he was fucking around with this Mexican girl. And I told him, I hope she's a great hump.

M: I bet.

O.M.: And then we moved to Connecticut, and he was fucking around with this girl up there. Somehow he ended up getting eight years. All right, that's okay, doesn't matter to me. He does his eight years, gets out, and—

M: And he's fucking around with young girls again.

O.M.: And now, with time served, whatever, he gets twenty years. I remember being in the courtroom, watching him, he came up to his mother, he couldn't even look at me. He said, I'm sorry mom. I'll do my twenty years. He couldn't even look at me. He's got ten years left.

M: How long has he been in?

O.M.: Ten years.

M: And how old is he?

O.M.: 34.

M: So he'll get out, forty, forty five. They let em out a little early.

O.M.: But I'm 70 years old!

M: Oh, so you'll probably be gone by the time he gets out.

O.M.: He'd better hope I'm not.

Thank you, Jackie's, for reminding me that anytime I think New York is boring, it's because I'm hanging out in the wrong places. Walking away I thought, "Jeez, that's straight out of Elmore Leonard." But it's not, actually—it's just straight out of Jackie's, in Park Slope, in 2013. Happily, the bar may be sticking around. 

Leave Anna Alone!

Was it dumb of me to expect nuance from Anna Nicole? The opera, which is currently playing a too-short run at BAM, was well-reviewed when it opened in London last year, and has been eagerly anticipated (by me) for the last few months. Although some were confused by Marc-Anthony Turnage's chosen subject, it made perfect sense to me. Anna Nicole Smith was a beautiful woman—truly—who wanted wealth and destroyed herself in the pursuit of it, becoming fodder for late-night jokes and endless lawsuits. In 2006, she gave birth to a daughter and lost a son within three days, and died six months later. What could be more operatic than that?

The only pitfall would be if Richard Thomas's libretto failed to take Anna seriously. British critiques of American culture don't always play well on this side of the Atlantic, and any sense that the all-British team was making fun of their exceptionally American hero would be sure to turn me off. The Times  promised I would not be disappointed:

The three creators, all British, certainly had fun depicting Smith’s tawdry American life and skewering reality television. But their Anna emerged as an improbable operatic heroine; a restless woman yearning to escape her backwater birthplace, Mexia, Tex.; a striver determined to get ahead and raise a son in any way possible. Isn’t this the American dream?

I don't know what opera they were watching. Anna Nicole gave me a sick feeling from the first scenes, when her family is introduced as a gang of toothless, comic hicks. The Tennessean in me is highly sensitive to this kind of thing, but I'd like to think that the atrociously sung Southern accents would have made any audience member uneasy. That the comedy of the play's first part is built on jokes about Walmart, fried chicken and spousal abuse bother me not as an overproud southerner, but because they're lazy cracks. An opera should do better.

More troubling is the play's treatment of its heroine, who lacks the mad, irresistible ambition that defines most great operatic heroines. Instead, she is unassuming, dimwitted, and powerless. The only moment when the production slows down long enough to take her yearning seriously is in the moments after she's gotten her breast implants—a flimsy plastic-looking prosthetic that made Sarah Joy Miller look like one of the "sexy" mannequins that appear in costume shop windows around Halloween. (NSFW, I guess, if your boss thinks mannequins are erotic.)

From there, Anna Nicole shows no interest in the possibility that Anna might have been playing a part to get what she wanted. Her 89 year-old meal ticket, played by the powerful tenor Robert Brubaker, sings of his love for Anna's "baby voice," which might have been interesting if she hadn't been using a baby voice throughout. As a substitute for depth, Anna has chronic back pain—penance paid for her oversized implants, suggesting that breast augmentation wasn't just her original sin, but the whole of her character. She jumps up and down when given jewelry, she fawns over bodybuilders, she uses an on-stage toilet and walks away from it with toilet paper trailing from her butt. This is not a flattering portrayal.

The fat suit she dons for the plays conclusion, which was more exaggerated than Jenna Maroney's , was the most obvious indication that Thomas and Turnage had missed the point of their heroine's decline. Anna Nicole Smith did gain weight, and lost it and gained it again, but she was never obese. She was tacky and embarrassing the way that any painkiller addict might be if put on television, and the American tabloid media is quick to label any star who's gained weight a whale. That the opera goes along with that depiction told me that they were unable to find any interiority for Anna, and instead went along with the popular narrative of her life and death. Because that was such a hateful narrative, we are given a hateful opera.

In an interview with New York , Turnage said “If I’m really honest, I’m quite uncomfortable with it now. I don’t think we were trying to be cruel. But it’s mocking someone’s real life. I wouldn’t do it again.”

That discomfort shows. Rather than taking their heroine serious from the first scene, Turnage and Thomas let the audience laugh at Anna for the first 90 minutes of the production, and then try to change course just at the end. Unsurprisingly, that half-hearted approach fails. 

At the end of her opera, Anna laments her mistakes. "I was wrong," she sings. "I was weak." It's impossible to imagine Turandot or Carmen or even Madame Butterfly being so apologetic. It wouldn't have taken much imagination to make Anna Nicole Smith's already tragic story larger than life. Anna Nicole , sadly, is much smaller than it.

Where Did He Go? Coney Island, That's Where

The blog has been characteristically quiet the last few weeks, and not because I got married a second time. I've been keeping my head down, trying to finish rewrites on the three plays I mostly-wrote this year so that I can start work on something new. I'll update you on those plays when the rewrites are finished. Not too long on them now, hopefully. 

Theatrically, I had a bit of good news: a one act of mine will be in the Bad Theater Festival  on November 2nd. It's tentatively called "S For Slaughter," but we're thinking about changing the name, since the play has nothing to do with slaughter at all, but does have a teeny bit to do with St. Louis Cardinals great Enos Slaughter. It's misleading, I know. 

What's that, you say? You'd like to read more  about baseball? Well let me indulge you, with this nifty bit of "writing" that I did for our good friends The Classical.

You're right, Marge. Just like the time I could have met Mr. T at the mall. The entire day I kept saying, "I'll go a little later. I'll go a little later." And then when I got there, they told me he'd just left. And when I asked the mall guy if he would ever come back again, he said he didn't know.

Homer Simpson never got to meet Mr. T., and I never got to see Kid Harvey pitch. I'd wanted to as early as April, when he embarrassed Stephen Strasburg's Nationals to giddy chants of "Harvey's better!" from a giddy Citi Field assemblage. But April was a long time ago. Watch highlights from that game and you'll see David Wright, Ruben Tejada and Jordany Valdespin—players who have been felled by injuries, managerial impatience, and savage Seligian wrath.

The Mets of April are long gone, and now Matt Harvey has been sent away with them. I could have seen him beat the Nats in April, the White Sox in May, or the befuddled representatives of the American League in July, but I kept saying, I'll go a little later. I'll go a little later. And now, he's not at the ballpark any more. The Mets themselves, depleted and defeated and desultorily playing out the string in Energy Saver Mode, are barely there in general.

This happens ever summer. The first particularly miserable Citi Field day saps my early season enthusiasm, and then the Mets fall apart around the All Star break, and I decide to steer clear of the stadium until the ridiculous, end-of-season ticket incentives kick in. Suddenly it's September, football is here, and I realize I have only a few more weeks to chug as much baseball as possible, a squirrel gorging on nuts when he reads in the paper that winter is coming.

My plan two weeks ago was for a spectacular doubleheader. After months of waiting, I would go meet Mr. T., who was scheduled to pitch an afternoon game against the Phillies on Thursday, August 29. Afterwards, I would take the 7 to the F and ride it all the way to the end of the line, for sunset, surf and the surging Brooklyn Cyclones. I was just about to buy my tickets when a horrible noise—a straining sound, maybe a tearing sound—resounded through Metslandia. Matt Harvey had (partially) torn his UCL. It was just a little rip, but UCLs are like condoms—any sort of tear is some sort of catastrophe.

There's much more. Read on, and learn of the briny delights of Coney Island! Read, I tell you. Read!

One Review And Two Heartfelt Bits of Sporpswriting

Been lying awake at night wondering what sorts of things I've been writing? Well, for one thing I just finished a rough draft of a heist play about Parisian chefs. (If you want to read it, let me know. It's good!) But as far as writing for money goes, well, I've been doing a bit of that. For instance, this pulse-pounding review of A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About The Death of Walt Disney , which wowed audiences last month at Soho Rep.

We shouldn't be surprised that Walt Disney has something up his sleeve. He is a showman, after all, and a showman always keeps something clever in reserve. So when Walt—moustachioed, imperial and cruel—takes a handkerchief out of his pocket, it's natural that it will turn into three, four, seven or eight more. They tumble out of his sleeve, falling to the floor, but somewhere the trick has gone wrong. The hankies are covered in blood. The showman is beginning to die.

Lucas Hnath's A Public Reading Of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, which opened May 9 at Soho Rep and runs through June 9, is a poetic examination of a famous magician's attempt to execute the greatest trick of all: immortality. It's an audacious gambit, and it's clear from the first scene—and the presence of "Death" in the play's title—that he probably won't pull it off. But watching him try has proven one of the most engaging theatrical experiences of the spring.

Pretty good, eh? I've also been doing a bit of writing for The Classical , the website responsible for coining the word sporps—a wacky neologism that I somehow can't seem to get out of my head. For instance, I wrote this appreciation of Mets fringe player Mike Baxter—a sad-faced local kid who was, tragically, demoted on Sunday.

On a pleasant Friday afternoon last April, Mike Baxter misplayed a fly ball. The Mets were on their way to a 4-0 loss to the Phillies, playing the halfhearted and thunderously mediocre baseball that has been their trademark in 2013, when the fly came Baxter’s way. It was a long run, and could have been highlight-reel worthy had he successfully slid to catch it, but Baxter broke late, arriving just in time for the ball to roll towards his shoes. From right field came the shout: “You’re a piece of shit, Baxter!”

The heckler wore a Yankee hat, but even without that, it would have been obvious he wasn’t there to cheer on the Mets. Met fans love Mike Baxter, with the dull, unconditional affection usually reserved for pets, or a favorite, fading t-shirt with stains and a few expanding holes. It’s a love too rare in stadiums. The Yankee fan, after an inning or two cursing the hangdog right fielder, disappeared to watch the Knick game. But the Met fans did not turn away. In the seventh inning, when it was clear the Mets had no interest in winning that night, two young women serenaded Baxter, hollering, “Hey Mike! You’re gorgeous! We love you, Mike!”

Read mas, if you have a moment. It's probably the best thing I wrote last month, if you don't count my famously engaging grocery lists. Also for The Classical , I did an impression of someone who is qualified to write about soccer, producing this (I think pretty nifty) article about John Isner.

During the last weekend of May, New York got walloped with the first heat wave of summer: three days of humidity and haze dense and unremitting enough to make ordinary men sympathize with David Berkowitz. From the moment I stepped out of the climate controlled sanctuary of my bedroom and into a wall of stale, broiling air, the afternoon was doomed. I slithered onto the sofa, dragging a wheelbarrow of iced coffee behind me, and turned on the French Open. I seldom watch tennis, but it just felt right.

This is an urge I hadn’t had, if I’m being honest, since the last time my apartment did its convection oven impression, during last year’s U.S. Open. When warm weather strikes I find it soothing to watch attractive people grunt, leap, and yell at line judges. This doesn’t seem to need defending, but so rudimentary is my knowledge of the sport that it took me until last year to piece together what a break point is—a mystery I might have solved faster if I weren’t so committed to watching tennis only when hungover, heat-stroked or both.

Because it’s free of the grave mythology that bogs down American team sports, tennis can be easy to like and hard to love. I can get quickly invested in a game of football, basketball, or hockey, even if I don’t care about either team. Just pick a uniform, a city, a player to hate, and bellow until one group of meatheads crushes the other. But in tennis, the focus is too close. Those are real people out there—beautiful, talented, mostly European people. What the hell could they have to do with me?

What the hell, indeed. Find out more!

I'll be out of town for the next couple of weeks, so feel free to drunk a hogshead of whiskey and drunkbernate until I return.

At BAM, John Turturro Stars In An Elegant Car Wreck

A couple of years ago, I interviewed John Turturro about his directing.​ Last week, I repeated the trick, this time talking to him about his acting. If you want to read about it, CLICK HERE NOW.

A sample:​

At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, once a night, John Turturro has been climbing a steeple. To a quiet drumbeat, he goes hand over hand up the side of a tilting house, and when he reaches the top, he does not beat his chest like King Kong.

“I’m just trying to be careful,” he said last week.

His wife and friends watch from below, panicked and exhilarated, and the audience feels the same, joined together for a few minutes in the timeless tension of wondering whether or not a man is going to fall.

This finale of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder, which opened May 19 at BAM and plays there through June 9, is not exactly as Ibsen wrote it. In the original, the master builder of the title, Halvard Solness, climbs his tower off-stage, his progress relayed by those below, with thrilling dialogue like, “He climbs and climbs. He will soon be at the top now.” For this stripped-down production, director Andrei Belgrader puts the tower on stage, and keeps the worst of Ibsen’s dialogue off it. Five years ago, in BAM’sEndgame, Mr. Belgrader and Mr. Turturro were praised for finding unexpected humor in Beckett, and here they have worked a similar miracle: wringing life from one of the dreariest playwrights in the canon. This is a Master Builder for the gut, not the mind.

I Am A Writer And Here Are Things That I Wrote

Did you know I am a professional writer? That's right. I type up words—words just like these—and then I put them in a special, top secret order, and mail them off to companies who pay me for them. Truly, it is a wacky life.​

Lately I have been so busy writing things professionally that I haven't had time to tell you about them on this, my blog. Allow me to catch you up, in reverse chronological order, because we writers are saucy like that.​

First, I reviewed Here Lies Love​ for Howlround​, a wonderful website whose name is hard to say out loud. (It's not quite The Rural Juror​, but it's a toughie.) If you click on that link, you can see a picture of me wearing a cat. I talked about this play a bit after I saw it, and what it was like to dance next to David Byrne, but now you can see my fully-fleshed-out critical whatnots. Here is a sample:

Eight drumbeats thud out, a martial pulse that sounds suspiciously like the famous opening bass line to a Talking Heads classic. Two lovers march towards each other through the crowd, and the audience wonders—“They’re not covering ‘Psycho Killer,’ are they? They wouldn't dare!” And then the lovers kiss, the room explodes in disco, and “Psycho Killer” is a distant memory.

Until that moment, I was wondering if David Byrne was the only reason anyone had come to Here Lies Love, the former Talking Head’s new musical, which plays at the Public Theater through June 2. In the last decade, Byrne has dabbled in conceptual art, producing work like 2008’s Playing the Building, a pleasant-enough art installation in southern Manhattan that probably did not deserve the attention drawn by its creator’s name. In his eagerness to cross genres, Byrne is like a much more talented, much less irritating James Franco. Conceptual art is best left to the professionals, but rock is Byrne's beat, and Here Lies Love is a sparkling reminder of why he became a downtown icon in the first place. His name may get them in the door, but the music will make them stay.

​Pretty good, eh? If you like that, you'll love this article I wrote for the Observer​ about Europa Editions, a scrappy independent publisher whose new line of World Noir makes me so happy I could just sneeze. Seriously, I read almost nothing but crime fiction, and these guys have got the goods.

Detective Fabio Montale is having a rough week. His best friends are dead, he keeps getting beaten up, and his city is descending into, as the title of the novel he stars in suggests,Total Chaos. But he still has time for a little bass. Fennel-stuffed and grilled, maybe, with a lasagna sauce and peppers, “gently fried.” Some friends are coming over for pastis and Lagavulin and gin rummy by the sea, and they expect the copper to cook.

“I was finally calming down,” Montale thinks. “Cooking had that effect on me. My mind could escape the twisted labyrinth of thought and concentrate on smells and tastes. And pleasure.”

The kitchen is an escape for this harried gumshoe, but Total Chaos, part of author Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy, is not mere escapist literature. Mr. Izzo used detective fiction to shine a light on France’s rugged southern port and the corruption that turned his stunning hometown into one of the most dangerous cities in Western Europe. The city loved him for it, and when he died in 2000, Marseilles’s bookstores closed their doors and filled their shop windows with Mr. Izzo’s pioneering novels.

​Pretty heavy stuff? So heavy that maybe you'd like to read something about sports? Or, since this article is on The Classical, perhaps I should say sporps. I write about the proposed Flushing Meadows MLS stadium, and why handing it over to one of English soccer's many billionaires is a totally unfun idea.

This is the dead period in the English Premier League. The title race ended weeks ago, with Manchester United claiming their eleventy-millionth championship in honor of retiring rage-legend Sir Alex Ferguson. At the end, there was nothing left to wonder about but whether or not Wigan Athletic will escape relegation. Coming as it does with the start of spring, this annual tepid period carries a pleasant taste of the English countryside—village greens and quiet pubs and all the other stuff Ray Davies just couldn't get out of his system. But for Manchester City, who will finish second this year, it is a time of seething discontent.

Last May, the blue half of Manchester won its first title since 1966, in five minutes of madness that made the madcap end to the 2011 baseball season look contrived. (Relive it here, accompanied for good or ill by the musical stylings of The Verve.) Manchester City won the FA Cup the year before, and will try for it again this weekend, taking on hard-luck Wigan in a match as well balanced as Goliath vs. David’s asthmatic younger brother. With all their recent success, the placid American fan would expect them to be happy. “You can’t win them all,” we tell them, naively. But if City loses on Saturday, a dapper gent named Roberto Mancini will probably be out of a job. The Premier League is no place for sentiment.

And in a league where a bad season is rewarded with relegation, there is no such thing as rebuilding. (Jeff Fisher, for instance, would not have lasted in England.) Sheikh Mansour, City’s doe-eyed billionaire owner, has dumped nearly half-a-billion pounds into the club, and has no interest in passing a springtime afternoon over a pint of bitter, wistfully crooning, “Wait ‘till next year.” The Premier League system is a mad one, driven by greed unheard of in American sports. So it is maybe or maybe not a good thing that it appears to be on its way to Flushing.

​What's that? You want more? Well I just remembered that I never linked to my Richard Foreman profile on here. Lordy, have I been slacking. It's got a pretty good lede:

One morning last month at the Public Theater, Richard Foreman was having trouble with rage. On a stage crowded with pillows, stuffed animals and string, an actor droned through a monotone monologue. He made it halfway through before Mr. Foreman, the last standard-bearer of the 1970s avant-garde, stopped him in the middle of a line about “incalculable rage.”

“What’s another word for rage?” Mr. Foreman asked the room. “Rage sounds weak.”

“Fury?” suggested the actors. “Ire? Wrath?”

“Maybe it needs another leading word. Not incalculable rage. Black rage?”

The actors offered more suggestions—“blind rage,” “mad rage” “octopus rage”—but their director’s attention had shifted to the lightboard. As the actors waited, he conferred with his staff of 10—some Public employees, some interns—flipping through light cues and eventually casting the theater into darkness. By the time the lights were sorted, and he had settled on “incalculable rage … Rage!” it was time to break for lunch.

On Shakespeare Day, Eulogies From Hamlet & Marlena

It doesn't take much prodding for me to praise Orson Welles. The man was the original studio system martyr—a dynamo whose personality made him irresistible, and also made it impossible for him to get work. He was always fun to watch on screen—I mean, just look at that grin!—​but the man knew how to write, too. I've been thinking about Touch of Evil​ a lot lately. Not the famous opening tracking shot, nor the inexplicably less famous second tracking shot, but the ending, which never fails to give me chills.

​Orson's corrupt sheriff, a sinister fat man whose weight Welles was not more than a decade away from, lies face down, dead in a gully. Marlene Dietrich, the mealy-mouthed fortune teller who was the only person who liked him, watches on, stone faced, and delivers the finest movie eulogy of all time. "He was some kind of man. What does it matter what you say about people?"

The ending's ambivalence ​recalls that of The Third Man​. The monster, both played by Orson Welles, is dead—killed by the only man in the world who loved him. Just in case he's feeling a little bit too good about his crusade, though, the dead man's woman makes sure he knows that he hasn't done anything great. Yeah, you killed the bad guy. But the bad guy was Orson Welles, dammit, and he was the most fun part of this movie!

But it also recalls a couple of Shakespearean eulogies, one of which I was reminded of this morning by Super Theater Twitter Guy Jonathan Mandell.​

"He was a man. Take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again." (Hamlet) Shakespeare, born 439 years ago today.

— Jonathan Mandell (@NewYorkTheater) April 23, 2013

​There are a lot of ways to deliver that line, which Hamlet uses to remember the murdered father whom he is about to kinda-maybe-sorta-think about avenging. Taken with Dietrich's Central European ambivalence, it offers the same, "I don't know—what's the point of mourning the dead?" shrug. If Hamlet is that ambivalent to his father, well, I get why he's not racing to the armory in search of an uncle killing sword.

I saw Julius Caesar​ at BAM a couple of weeks ago. It's a lush production, fuzzy at the start, but furiously clear by the time the murderin' starts. At the end, when the stage is covered with the traditionally Shakespearean corpse-pile, we get this eulogy, over the corpse of Brutus: "His life was gentle, and the elements/So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up/And say to all the world 'This was a man!'"

​I love it. I don't know how these all connect, exactly, and I won't force it. But I do know that if the best you can say for the dead is, "Well...he was a man," perhaps the eulogy business is not for you. The press release for Julius Caesar​ touted it as something revolutionary, but an all-black Shakespearean tragedy set in tropical climate is hardly new. Orson Welles did that with Macbeth​ in 1936, a reminder that while he may have been a few hundred years behind Shakespeare, he was decades ahead of everyone else.

Just for grins, I looked up the Times'​ original review of Welles so-called "voodoo Macbeth.​" It is, how shall we say, really fucking racist. Critic Brooks Atkinson—he of the eponymous theater—tells us that the cast in this "darktown version" of Shakespeare's tragedy "have conjured [a] weird, vari-colored raree-show out of the fine stuffs of the theatre and the ferocity of Negro acting." The costumes are "an idealization of Negro extravagance," and the staging is done "with an eye to the animalism of the setting." But though the play offers "sensuous, black-blooded vitality," it "has missed the sweep and scope of a poetic tragedy." This is my favorite bit (emphasis mine)​:

As Macbeth, Jack Carter is a fine figure of a Negro in tight-fitting trousers that do justice to his anatomy. He has no command of poetry or character.

Oof.​ Just...oof.

There's been quite a lot of chatter lately—and probably for decades—about the death of theater criticism. Asked to eulogize the golden age of New York criticism, I can't give anything more than a Dietrichian shrug. What does it matter what you say about plays?

It Is Fun To Dance Beside David Byrne

When I was in 9th grade, my favorite album (non-ironic) was Stop Making Sense​, and my favorite television show (semi-ironic) was Degrass​i​. Both Talking Heads and Degrassi had guitar players: one of them a bipolar ham, the other a high-minded goofball with suspiciously dancin' feet. Last night, I saw both of these guitar players.

I'm reviewing Here Lies Love​, David Byrne's new musical, for Howlround's​ new NewCrit program. (I realized last night that Howlround is really hard to say—even worse than Rural Juror​. New NewCrit is just as bad.) To that end, I scored a ticket to last night's opening at the Public. I thought the show was still in previews. If I'd realized it was opening night, I would have dressed a little better. If I'd known this was an option, I'd have made like David Byrne, and worn a jumpsuit.

For details on the production, you'll have to wait on my review, which won't run until it's been written. (And it won't be written until after lunch, at the very least.) But I can say that David Byrne likes his new musical, and so do I. He spent the whole show dancing, bobbing his head, and singing along, providing a nice visual for what a relevant sixty year-old rock star looks like. Seeing him in a theater is not much of a novelty. There's a How I Met Your Mother ​bit about how every New Yorker has seen Woody Allen—that's how I feel about Byrne. I've seen him perform, seen him riding his bike, and seen him (for some reason) give a Powerpoint presentation about architecture. Last night, I got to see him have a very good time.​​

At one point during the play, the audience is forced to line dance. I am okay at dancing, but awful at following instructions, and felt very awkward the entire time. So did everyone else, besides David Byrne, who had presumably had time to practice. He danced behind me, having a good time, but not quite as good a time as the elderly Filipino man who was dancing to my right. ​

After the show ended, the audience didn't want to leave. Filing down to the lobby, we found ourselves being given cocktails, and welcomed to an after party for which I felt distinctly under dressed and quite happy to attend. Craig from Degrassi, who spent the entire play looking ashen faced and confused, was gone by this point. I drank four or five piña coladas, and left after an hour or so, when the sugar in the not-very-boozy cocktails started to make my teeth hurt. I had a marvelous time, and so did David Byrne, and it makes me happy to know that we both enjoyed our Sunday evenings for somewhat similar reasons.

An Hour Or So Later...​

​I just realized this post needs some music. Because the above image made me think of it:

Video from Talking Heads "Naked" 1988. Enjoy sound and vision.

Man, I love this song.​