Criticultura em Portugal

After some years in which Spike Lee's realism-comedies were about the only mainstream films by black directors, there has been a recent bounty of such films, all with thoughtful, individual takes: Precious  (2009), Straight Outta Compton (2015), and now work by two young (37 year old) directors: Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation  and Barry Jenkins' Moonlight . In very different ways, these films join Toni Morrisons's novel Beloved  as helping me to have a window into our persistent troubles with race in this country, and the seeming futility of solutions offered by both the political right and left. The Birth of a Nation's excellent title gives a hint of Parker's intent--he sees Nat Turner's failed 1831 slave rebellion as a metaphorical beginning of an American black consciousness, just as D.W. Griffith saw the Klan as the driver of a new Christian white triumphant South in 1915. Much more than the safer Twelve Years a Slave , this new film immerses you

When Wagner's  Tristan und Isolde  premiered in 1865, it pioneered the daring idea that an opera could have a minimal plot and still be compelling. It was followed by similar works in Debussy's P é llea s et M é lisande (1902), Messiaen's St. Francis of Assisi  (1983), and now the compelling L'amour de loin (Love from Afar) by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. These works have a number of things in common. All tell an unconventional love story: Tritsan and Isolde meet as opponents but are swept up by a love potion; P é lleas and  M é lisande  veer between sibling-like and romantic love as part of a love triange; St. Francis is in love with God; and Jaufr é  and Cl é mence,  the two lovers of   L'amour de loin are separated by the sea (i.e. love from afar) and barely meet in life before the troubadour Jaufre dies, having fallen sick on his sea voyage to find her.  All have the "female" protagonist end in some hybrid of love and death: Isolde's a musica

Have you ever been to Chuck-E-Cheese? In these circles of hell, there are so many hyperkinetic kids, loud music playing from different corners, and flashing lights that the adult brain either overloads or involutes. This is what parts of the new Broadway musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812  are like. Combine that with mediocre music poorly aligned with a trivial subplot from War and Peace  and you have a bad night at the theater. Natasha  is based on a silly subplot from Tolstoy's novel, trivially involving several young people meeting, trying to elope, being thwarted by elders, etc. There are doubtless reasons why the novel is a landmark, but this episode is not one of them. There is much direct quoting from Tolstoy, but the resultant lyrics are pedestrian, matching the overall plot. Perhaps seeking to amplify the sacred text, the composer made the whole thing through-sung, i.e. no spoken dialogue except for rare special effects. This overuse of recitative made

Sweet Charity joltingly begins with the star being pushed into a Central Park pond, then having her purse lifted by her departing boyfriend. This show, which struggles to deal with the then-emerging womens' liberation movement, premiered on Broadway in 1966 featuring mega-star Gwen Verdon and was later filmed in 1969 with Shirley MacLaine. It is closely based on the Fellini 1958 film Nights of Cabiria,  a spin on the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold story, which tells the tale of a prostitute who longs for real committed love, is betrayed by men, yet still keeps her eternal hope. The Sweet Charity  revival I saw off-Broadway this week features the youthful, innocent Sutton Foster (TV's  Younger, Broadway muscials) as Charity Hope Valentine. That this production sought something other than the typical star vehicle was evident from Ms. Foster's program listing as part of an alphabetical cast roster, not up in lights as the featured player. Overall the production had difficulty on

Wednesday night in Carnegie Hall I heard the Amsterdam Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (RCO) conducted by Semyon Bychkov in a program of the contemporary composition Theatrum bestiarum  by German composer Detlev Glanert and the Gustav Mahler Fifth Symphony. The combination of peerless orchestra, inspired conductor, and first rate music made this a memorable concert. The RCO has performed since 1888, under only seven music directors. The most recent, Daniele Gatti, was appointed in 2016, so is not yet performing with them full time, ergo the guest conductor for this tour. They have a nice balance of young-old, men-women in the orchestra, with several Russians in first chair wind positions. The sound, like Berlin and Vienna, is rich, foundational on the bass sonority, and fills the hall with balanced sound unlike most orchestras. The range of dynamics is wonderful, and the piano dynamics sound as rich as the fortes. What set this orchestra apart from other Carnegie Hall all star touring

If you were a talented American director, the Hollywood of the 1980's must have felt adrift. The gritty realism that marked 1970's classics like Taxi Driver , Deliverance , Raging Bull , and Midnight Cowboy  fell prey to more escapist fare that elided with the feel-good Reagan era--epics like Gandhi,  sci fi like Raiders of the Lost Ark, soap operas like Ordinary People  and  Terms of Endearment . All of these were well crafted, but did not exactly challenge one's world view. In 1985 Paul Schrader directed Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters . Based on a the notorious life and 1970 suicide of the famed Japanese author Yukio Mishima, it won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival, but was never released in Japan. The film was completely unknown to me, and I think it is a fascinating, engaging, neglected masterpiece, well worth seeing on DVD or here on YouTube (if you play it on the computer, try to project on a bigger screen...the cinematography deserves it). Schrader wa

There have been a number of recent productions in NYC with teen themes and protagonists. Several have been excellent, including The Sensuality Play  and Mercury Fur .   Wilderness , a new play by Seth Bockley and Anne Hamburger produced by En Garde Arts at the Abrons Arts Center in Chinatown, failed to deliver in last night's performance. The evening began awkwardly. It was the evening after the Trump victory, and the theater director came gloomily forward to say that this day was "interesting" and inviting us to a talk back about the play with a clinical psychologist. I wonder if she was more worried about the general mental health of post-election Manhattanites? In any case, we faced a stage with backpacks and assorted basic camping gear scattered about. What followed was a play about troubled teens who are "kidnapped" with the consent of their parents and are taken to the southwestern wilderness to learn basic survival skills and presumably resilience, non-ad

The Belgian theater/opera director Ivo van Hove is hot right now in the theater world. The director of the innovative Toneelgroep (Theater-Group) Amsterdam, he now directs productions worldwide, tackling both new and iconic plays. In the last couple of years in NYC I saw both his riveting A View from the Bridge  and more jumbled The Crucible  ( see review ). Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music I saw his four hour Kings of War , an intense, provocative, and masterful compression and rewrite of five Shakespeare history plays ( Henry V, Henry VI parts 1-3, and Richard III, with a bit of Henry IV Part 2 thrown in to boot). This is a big year for history plays in NYC that resonate with the current presidential election, and here a Belgian director has, with his outsider's keen eye, provided a great one. The title Kings of War  is a little misleading. While all these kings ruled England during times of war, this adaptation focuses less on battle scenes and strategy than on the

Disgraced , the Pulitzer prize-winning play by Ayad Akhtar, has been having quite a run. It is apparently the most-produced play in the US since its 2012 debut in Chicago and New York. I caught up with it in beautifully autumnal Princeton Friday, in a McCarter Theatre Center production shared with the Guthrie in Minneapolis and with the Milwaukee Rep. While I saw and admired the forceful tackling of what is now a worldwide issue (assimilation vs. maintenance of cultural distinctiveness vs. racism), I think the play has structural problems that undercut the message. Disgraced  is essentially a four character play, two couples that come together for a doomed dinner party, a la Albee's  Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Like that play, simmering personal and interpersonal issues come to a violent cathartic head at the end of the play. The central character is Amir (portrayed effectively by Mabound Ebrahimzadeh), an American born of Pakistani muslim immigrants, who is part of an el

On Monday night I saw Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde  at the the Metropolitan Opera. It was perhaps the fourth time I have seen it live, and I have listened to it countless times. Once again the live performance exerted a very unique affect on me, one that I do not experience in other operas or in just listening to it at home on recordings. While this production had its ups and downs, there is something about a live performance of Tristan  that suspends time for me in a most peculiar and intoxicating way. I first experienced this in the 1980's at the San Francisco Opera, when I went into my first live experience at 6 pm, emerged at 11:30, yet experienced it as if about one hour had passed. I wondered then: how does Wagner achieve this time warp? The Met production Monday featured Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton as the ill fated pair. Both sang well, without the overwhelming vocal heft of the great past singers like Flagstad, Melchoir, and Nilsson, but with great sensitivi

I just returned from four days in Paris, my first trip there in over twenty five years. This grand city is more immune to change than any other large metropolis, largely due to the exclusion of most highrise buildings from outside the traditional city walls area. So where New York is a city in constant flux, Paris is not. I had a couple of musical experiences there. Opera: Antonio Salieri Les Horaces (1786) at the Royal Opera, Versailles Seeing a classical opera in a hall where Louis XVI would have seen similar fare in 1786, just before the revolution, was intriguing. The first violins fiddled while Rome burned, if you will. The small opera house is dazzling in architecture and ornamentation, but converts music listening to an activity of elite privilege (well, I guess it still is at the Met in NYC!). Salieri (1750-1826) was born about the same time as Mozart, but outlived him by 35 years. He was perhaps the most renowned composer of his time, the favorite of courts from Italy to

Two concerts this week showed me how far advanced has become the use of electronic instruments in traditional classical/orchestral music. The Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela opened the Carnegie Hall series under conductor Gustavo Dudamel (also conductor of the LA Philharmonic). Dudamel has rapidly advanced in the conductor hierarchy, e.g. conducting the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics in prestigious events. This orchestra is young, oddly male-dominated, and unique in being largely composed of graduates of El Sistema, an ambitious decades-old program to train Venezuelan children from poor economic backgrounds to play instruments. Dudamel himself arose from this program. However, given the current turmoil and social implosion/explosion in Venezuela, Dudamel is now accused of being disconnected to political reality, with a laser-like (myopic?) focus only on music (see this interesting but snippily odd NY Times review of the first of three Carnegie Hall concerts, which devotes only o

Satan and Mother Teresa are sitting on a park bench in Central Park. Joggers in dayglo synthetic fabrics pass in the background.  Theresa warmly greets Satan: Teresa: I've been to the zoo! Satan: How lovely, Theresa. Say hi to the marmosets. I've been sitting here catching up on "the great late 20th century novels", and was stoked to finally read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian . What a masterpiece! Teresa ( blanching) : Isn't that Western novel just a nonstop gore-fest without a single redeemable character? Who could possibly like that? Satan: Me, for one! The violence is cleansing, purging the towering western landscape of the flawed humans and hapless bison, leaving only the stunning, desolate landscape of the Sonoran and Mojave deserts. Its an even darker version than those 1960-70's Clint Eastwood Westerns like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and High Plains Drifter. None of these have traditional western white hat heroes either, and pretty m