Enough of Levi for now

I finished Primo Levi's "If not now, when?". The book is a fictional recreation of a band of Jewish partisans in their agonized wanderings through Europe in the last two years of WW II. I couldn't put it down. It kept me from going to sleep many nights. An irritating flaw in the book is how Levi too frequently turned the characters into representatives of whole peoples or movements. Some of their speeches and conversations are almost propagandistic. They don't sound real. It's as if Levi inserts himself to explain some historical or ideological background info. But you forgive him -- he's taken us on a hell of a ride.

As much as I love Levi, I have to take break from him.

The film "In Search of Mozart"

This film by Phil Grabsky is at the Museum of Fine Arts. It's a documentary outlining Mozart's life, with interspersed commentary from European music historians, instrumentalists, singers, and conductors. Here is a link to the MFA film info. It's playing again at the MFA on August 2. And you can get to the film's web site here.

I liked the film very much. Enjoyed learning about Mozart's financial and practical struggles to establish himself, the friction with his father, his boldness. Grabsky matches the synchronous music compositions to the events described by the narrator and the interviewees. Completely absorbing.

One problem for such films that Grabsky didn't completely resolve is that we're sometimes overwhelmed by information. There's Mozart's music, of course, which is in the background or foreground (as we watch and hear an orchestra or an opera in performance) almost all the time. There are the interviewed learned scholars and musicians describing their insights. There is the narrator. There is footage of letters, Baroque buildings in Salzburg and Vienna, street scenes, of modern performers acting, singing, playing -- everything that's visual. But the audience can only attend to so much at once. Some elements are just out of our focus. I think Grabsky does well, but I did find a few places -- such as where we watch and hear and orchestra, with closeups on soloists -- where we get taken by the music and can hardly hear the narrator telling us something important.

"Are we in...Salzburg now? Or Vienna? Was that his father who said that nasty to him?"

Ken Burns, in his documentaries, does such a great job of keeping us focused on these cinematic elements so that we absorb them, and he keeps them from conflicting with each other, so that we see and hear the details and nuances.

All those scholarly European music historians -- like, what's with their teeth? Maybe they're true, those jokes about how Europeans rarely go to dentists.

The New Rep Theater's "Side by Side by Sondheim"

We saw the New Repertory Theater's production of "Side by Side by Sondheim" at the Arsenal Center with a group of friends.

We all loved the show. To paraphrase the narrator, each song was like a small several act drama. Usually, the drama (or comedy, or tragedy) was about a marriage breaking up, a marriage forming, a marriage not meant to be, or a relationship that once was.

I liked Leigh Barrett, as usual. Her singing is always powerful, and her face and gestures are mobile. She surprises you. When she takes on a character in an instant, you feel her empathy and understanding for the character. Her song, "The Boy From...." was a scream. And sad at the same time, of course, since you know this girl's hopes for a man will always be skewed, and only a miracle will put the right man who returns her love in front of her. There are moments when Barrett just sends a chill through you.

Maryann Zschau sang "Send in the Clowns" well. But I liked Leigh Barrett's version from a couple of years ago, when she performed in "A Little Night Music" for the Lyric Stage. More understated. Schau sometimes let the tear and choke in her voice get to be a little too much.

Which was not the case when Schau did the funny "Can That Boy Fox Trot." She was a riot. She's got a wonderful, sexy voice, with a kind of smoker's tenor rasp.

I read that Brendan McNab was an 11th hour addition, that something happened to the actor originally signed for the show. He was terrific. Maybe not as strong a singer as the other two, but a wonderful showman. His "Could I Leave You" was from the heart.

I agreed with Louise Kennedy's remarks in the Boston Globe that some of the narrator's remarks and the boy-girl repartee onstage was cloying and silly. The jokes seemed labored, and the actors seemed pained to have to haul themselves through. It detracted from the sophisticated irony that imbues Sondheim's work. (Kennedy's full review is here.)

We all remarked on how "real" the actors seemed -- not over-pretty and right from the acting workshop. They all had mileage. And how else could it be for these Sondheim songs?

The movie, "Ratatouille"

We loved it. Would like to see it again, there's so much detail. Of course, it's full of feel-good politically correct moments, but I didn't care. You suppress some of your critical energy when you see animation like this, where the impossible happens, where rats talk and take on detailed human features.

That scene where Linguini tells all to Horst and the rest of the kitchen staff, telling them that it's a rat that has been guiding them all along, begging them all to stay for that important night with a restaurant full of customers -- they turn their noses up and march out of the kitchen. They abandon Linguine and Colette. How could they? The rats race in to the rescue and take over the kitchen. They're more noble than the humans.

More about "The Reawakening," by Primo Levi

I wondered how Primo Levi managed in that rough company. He a bookish, thin young man of about 23 (yet, a survivor of Auschwitz), surrounded by hundreds of Italian ex-POWs, herded about by the Russians. It was rough company.

The movie house scene, in which a traveling movie troupe stops at the transit camp and shows a 30s Hollywood adventure film is a scream. The Russian soldiers comically mobbing the barn that served as the cinema, smashing through the doors and carrying the splinters as weapons to use on each other, the wild assaults on the screen by the shouting men. And all through it, there is Levi's love for the Russians. Even the rude, heedless ones, he loves them all.

And the scene I most recall: stopping at a village where a crowd of exhausted, starving and thirsty captured German soldiers lay huddled together in the dust. Perhaps they'd been left there for days. They begged the Italians for water, but the Italians had none to share with them. What happened to those men?