The Huntington Theater's production of "The Corn is Green"

The Huntington Theater's wonderful cast and their performances (Kate Burton, her son Morgan Ritchie, Will LeBow, and all the rest) was not enough to keep me from feeling that this was a dated, tired play. It does have some good moments, the third act finally has a little tension, and there are the performances, especially if you simply want to see Kate Burton.

In its time (I think Emlyn Williams wrote it and first produced it in 1940), I suppose the depiction of the headstrong independent Miss Moffat might have seemed more original. We're to take it on faith that Miss Moffat is brilliant -- there's little evidence of it shown onstage. In the first act, the village boys are unruly childish louts. During the intermission, they become receptive bright-eyed eager-beavers, with Morgan surpassing them all as a natural genius (sort of like Tarzan, growing up in the jungle and learning to read and speak English in time for Jane). What Miss Moffat did to make this happen is unexplained. She is just magic.

The sets are homey and comfortable looking. The occasional background music between acts (Welsh choral music) is pretty but I can't tell if it has anything to do with the play. I guess the biggest reason to see this, aside from Will LeBow's humorous and lovable Squire character (a character he excels in), might be to watch Kate Burton. Except that she's simply playing Kate Burton. In the three or four performances we've seen with Kate Burton, she plays pretty much the same character -- Kate Burton, the center of attention, an actress who gives off a sense of energy and heat.

The New Reportory Theater's "Cabaret" is menacing and satisfying

We liked The New Repertory Theater's Cabaret. It's the third time we've seen the Kander and Ebb play in the last 15 years, and I'd say this was the best production.

How do you write about a play as complex as this? Some of the numbers are rollicking "fun" -- and yet we know about the rise of Hitler and the enormous tragedy to come. The director, Rick Lombardo (who's leaving the New Rep for San Jose at the end of the season) struck a good balance between the fun and the menace. This production brought out the sinister undertone of the play in a coherent way. It all made sense, whereas previous productions I'd seen left me confused -- why are these people enjoying themselves so much? In this production, we sense the desperation of the characters, despite the laughs and the jiggling Kit Kat girls.

Those Kit Kat girls -- they were hilariously dirty, and almost over the top with the sleazy bump and grind numbers. They were explicit and raw. And therefore perfect for the play.

I thought the stage was a bit big for this show -- with so much space, I didn't always feel the claustrophobic, crowded ambience of a cabaret. Aimee Doherty, who was wonderful as Sally Bowles, was reaching a bit in her "Cabaret" song near the end, a little too intent on producing a Lisa Minelli showstopper. And Cliff Bradshaw (nicely played by David Krinnit) puzzles me. If he is, or was, gay, then how can he be in a love affair with Sally? His sexual persona is ambiguous, yet the play depends on their love. That didn't make sense. Finally, John Kuntz was an excellent Emcee.

B.R. Myers's "A Reader's Manifesto": I agree with him, but why do these authors sell?

B.R. Myers wrote A Reader's Manifesto in 2002. The subtitle, An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, pretty much sums it up. The chapter titles themselves are satirical bits of lit-crit-speak: Evocative Prose, Muscular Prose, Edgy Prose, Spare Prose, and so on. It's a fast, entertaining read and -- unlike the lengthy quoted sections he takes from famous current authors -- it's well written. His basic premise is that much of what is praised as great current literary fiction is actually laughably mediocre.

Myers asserts that fiction, and the literary culture that surrounds it, has become pretentiously high brow and and that celebrated writers have come to ignore basic precepts of clear narrative story-telling in order to mystify and scam their readers.

It's easier to produce a gushy incomprehensible word soup than swift, thoughtful prose. Readers have to accept it or risk being considered unsophisticated. Myers pretty well demolishes Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, and David Guterson, using them as examples of what is bad, and yet critically praised.

When Myers quotes from novels, he's devastating. And after he has blasted each writer in turn, he makes the rubble bounce.

Myers: "Sure, Proulx has plenty of long sentences, but they are usually little more than lists:"

Annie Proulx (from a piece of her fiction): "Partridge black, small, a restless traveler across the slope of life, an all-night talker; Mercalia, second wife of Partridge and the color of a brown feather on dark water, a hot intelligence; Quoyle large, white, stumbling along, going nowhere."

I did start to feel sympathy for these writers, they're so thoroughly gutted, and their quoted excerpts so terrible. I've tried to read Annie Proulx, and found her constant stream of disconnected images too much. I've tried reading DeLillo, and felt bored. The others I haven't read.

I'm surprised Myers didn't make more of the academic background of literary fiction. Many contemporary "serious" writers have (or had) academic positions in English and Writing departments (by necessity). I think these writers find it hard not to write for their academic colleagues and their literary agendas -- a writing professor is naturally interested in gaining the esteem of fellow professors and department chairmen, and not necessarily that of readers in Butte, or Buffalo.

I agreed with a lot of what Myers says in this book. And I see the parallels to some of the theater we've seen produced in the last ten years. Yet, I wondered -- how do these writers keep getting published? I know that some people really like Annie Proulx, McCarthy, and the others. Can it really be that it's lit-crit cultural pressure and bullying that's making people buy their books?

Mark Twain's "Adventures of Tom Sawyer" -- this boy never grows up

What got a'hold of me and made me read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)?

I don't know. It was lying there on the discount table at the Barnes and Noble in Brookline, a beautiful hardbound edition, with the Winslow Homer painting, Boys in a Meadow, on the dust cover, and a sticker with $4.95. I had to buy it. The nostalgia? The longing for the pastoral youth that I never had? Maybe. (By the way, that Barnes and Noble is closing down -- yet another book store about to disappear.)

I'm glad I read it. It's always readable. And I remember that I loved, and was surprised by, the novel Huckleberry Finn (it was a great novel). Tom is not a great novel, but I guess it is a kind of warmup for Huckleberry. Many parts are very funny, of course. You can just sense Twain unloading at his favorite targets. The satire is constant, and is still timely. It's worth the time. Here is the town minister:

"He was regarded as a wonderful reader. At church 'sociables' he was always called upon to read poetry; and when he was through, the ladies would lift up their hands and let them fall helplessly in their laps, and 'wall' their eyes, and shake their heads, as much to say, 'Words cannot express it; it is too beautiful, too beautiful for this mortal earth.'

"And now the minister prayed. A good, generous prayer it was, and went into details: it pleaded for the church, and the little children of the church, for the other churches of the village; for the village itself; for the country; for the state; for the state officers; for the United States; for the churches of the United States; for Congress; for the President; for the poor sailors, tossed by stormy seas; for...."

A disappointing thing about the book: despite all he goes through, Tom is the same at the end of the book as he is at the beginning. He's still the very same child, still quick to dream in the very same childish way as when we first meet him. He hasn't grown at all. We like him, of course, but think he should've learned a thing or two.

Tobias Wolff's memoir-novel, "Old School"

I was engrossed with Tobias Wolff's novel Old School (2003). It is written in the form of a memoir recounting the narrator's years at an exclusive prep school somewhere in New England. He is one of a very few Jewish boys in the school. He masks his "Jewishness" for most of his time at the school. He doesn't speak about it to anyone. He desperately wants to be a writer, and much of the novel is about the urgent sense of competition among the boys to write and be rewarded for their writing -- the school mounts writing contests in which the winning boy gets a private meeting with a famous writer visiting the school. We get to see and meet Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Earnest Hemingway. The portraits of the writers are vividly detailed and realistic -- they feel as if they must be based on actual journalism.

The narrator does something unexpected in the climax of the story. It surprised me that a voice and a person that I had come to know and trust would suddenly do something so untrustworthy.

It was great to read about a school where literature is taken so seriously! Writers and writer wannabes are heroes in this school.

It reminded me a little of my all-boys high school, Hutchinson Central Techincial High School, in Buffalo. We were a public school, and not exclusive in terms of wealth; we prided ourselves in being smarter than the other public high schools in the city; in my first year, we wore ties and white shirts to school. Like the claustrophobic world described in Old School, we were all boys, and each day you had to make your place in the locker room scenes and bravado.

The environment and scenes are so realistic, they stand out and I remember them now (a few weeks after reading the book) more than the story itself and the thinking of the characters. The book was stoically old fashioned -- no highfalutin language, no obscure allusions, no scrambled time sequences. Just a real story with realistic characters.

One of Wolff's achievements here is that the language is clear and fluid. It seems to disappear and simply leave you with the story itself.

The Masterwork Chorale's surprisingly modern Petite Messe Solennelle, by Rossini

A belated posting on the Masterwork Chorale's performance of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle, which we attended on November 16, at Sanders. This mass surprised me -- a couple of the early movements sounded almost folklike, you could dance to them. I loved the harmonium. Other movements were operatic. And other movements were more traditionally liturgical and mass-like. It takes you on quite a journey. The entire piece sounded surprisingly modern -- yet Rossini wrote it in 1863.

The conductor, our friend Steve Karidoyanes, seems to be steadily shaping the sound of the Chorale. They seem to have a tighter, and lighter, sound then they did a year ago.

Cambridge community Chorus's Messiah

We enjoyed the Cambridge Community Chorus's performance of Handel's Messiah (an abbreviated version) on Saturday afternoon. Their new director, Jamie Kirsch, seems like a great find for the chorus. He seemed energetic, and the chorus seemed to respond to him. Their sound was clearer than it was when we last heard them, in the spring. The sopranos especially sounded good. The movements sung by the soprano soloist Danielle Munsell Howard stood out for me -- she has a powerful and controlled voice.

And who'd have thought that over a thousand people would come out for the Messiah on a sunny Saturday afternoon!

MIT Gilbert and Sullivan Players "Pirates of Penzance" is a hoot!

We saw MIT's Gilbert and Sullivan Players performance of Pirates of Penzance last Friday night, and really enjoyed it. What a hoot! What a terrific production! And for only $10 a ticket! (We get the MIT community discount, $12 otherwise.) They're still performing through this weekend.

I know Mark Costello, the fellow who plays Frederic, because he sings with me in the bass section of the Brookline Chorus. He was very good. I knew he had a wonderful voice, but was surprised that he could sing tenor this well. And he was very funny, and seemed like a good comic actor (he seems like a natural ham). The student who sang the role of Ruth, Kaila Deiorio-Haggar, had a surprisingly strong voice and comic presence. As did, of course, the soprano Emily Quane in the role of Mabel (she's a conservatory grad, so I expected her to be good). And Lyman Opie in the role of the Major General was excellent (how does he get the words out so fast?).

Lots of funny bits and great touches (the troop of policemen made me laugh out loud every time they took the stage, and the sergeant was very good). This had the feel of a sincerely felt, well-prepared energetic amateur production.

The Huntington's "Rock 'n' Roll": well-crafted, significant, boring

We saw Tom Stoppard's play Rock 'n' Roll at the Huntington on Saturday, December 6. The play is hard to summarize. It follows a handful of people through the decades as they live through, or in relation to, the Czech velvet revolution.

It's dull.

I know, I know, it's well-crafted. The vicious hothouse atmosphere of left-wing academic politics is nicely detailed, at times funny, and sad. Max, the older professor (played by Jack Willis), is a standout character, and he plays an interesting True Believer (that is, a True Believer in Marx). The scenes of student life in Prague and Oxford will seem comically familiar to most people who lived through the 60s and 70s. And the set design (a sky placed as the background, with our perspective from street level looking up) is striking, and I suppose it has some relevance to the play's stories.

But there are long, long scenes of dry trivia, long discussions about arcane philosophical details. The fellow sitting in front of me (he looked like a professor of some sort), turned to me at the intermission and said, "My snoring wasn't bothering you, was it?"

The rock 'n roll reference...I don't get it. The play seems to have little to do with rock 'n roll. There are references to it, there are short music bits during scene changes, but I couldn't make out anything special about rock's influence on events, other than the usual one about rebellion against authority. As so often happens with a long, turgid play, the director blasted loud music in the last seconds of the play (the Rolling Stones in this case), perhaps to make one final desperate attempt at making you think that maybe you HAD seen something exciting after all.

It seems as if Stoppard wrote this play for a pretty narrow academic audience. How many people would understand the historical and political contexts?

Finally, near the end, there's some life, some drama, as the family starts bashing each other in front of us, some connections are revealed, people do unexpected things. But there's so little to get excited about at this point, after nearly three hours.

Does the Huntington think it can build an audience with this type of play?

David McCullough's 1776

The history 1776 was published in 2005. A very readable, even thrilling, account of the first year of the American Revolution. McCullough is such a good narrative writer I almost felt I was reading a page-turning detective novel. Yet, although he doesn't go deeply into the philosophical and social background of that time (he couldn't in a book this length), he writes with a lot of subtlety about the people and events from both the American and the British perspective. The British and their loyalist North American supporters are sympathetically described, and their perspective on the colonies is given what I feel must be a fair reading. King George comes across less a tyrant than an amiable man deeply out of touch with the events in North America. The same could be said about many of his supporters in Parliament. It was interesting to read about the number of British voices that loudly argued against militarily subjugating the colonies.

But the hero and center of the story is George Washington, and his army. Washington lost battle after battle, and was consistently outsmarted by the British for much of 1776. He is described as indecisive, and that surely is how he comes across. Yet, leading an undisciplined army, without an established administration, almost no battlefield intelligence, with unpredictable officers and soldiers, and with no actual personal experience leading a large force, the reader can certainly understand Washington's predicament, and his propensity to delay making a decision.

It is clear that Washington learned from the early battles, and from his mistakes. He got better as the year went on, and Congress somehow maintained its faith in him. (In a modern media age, would the public have tolerated the terrible defeats in New York without firing Washington? I doubt it.)

He comes across as a real patrician, and bit fastidious (writing detailed letters to his estate agent about remodeling the house while preparing to fight a battle in the muck and cold). He also comes across as loyal to his subordinate generals, and reluctant to punish, even when they have personally betrayed him. His most trusted personal aide carried on a correspondence with General Lee that was critical of Washington to the point of denunciation. This during the worst months of 1776. Washington discovered the correspondence by accident. He must have been painfully shocked. Yet, he benignly notified both men that he was simply aware of their correspondence. He took no punitive measures against either man. He did nothing that would harm the war effort. McCullough is practically reverent in his depiction of Washington as a humane and wise general. Perhaps Washington really deserved this depiction.

Another surprising point is how amateur the American army truly was. Men came directly from their farms, mills, and fishing boats. Some of them were made generals. And some of them turned out to be amazingly good generals.

Willa Cather's novel, "My Antonia" -- if Jim is Willa

I always liked the title of this novel, though I never got to reading it until now. Aside from indicating a permanent attachment or possession (as with a married couple or a close relative), the "my" can imply that one can keep and love a version of a person, or a particular cherished image of the person, regardless of what the real person does, or even if the person is far away.

This book was published in 1919. The novel's main character and narrator is Jim Burden, who is sent as a young boy to live with his grandparents on the Nebraska prairie frontier. The time seems to be the 1880s or 1890s, before motor cars and rural electricity. Jim develops an affection for Antonia Shimerda, a Czech girl four years older than he is, who lives with her dirt poor immigrant family on a nearby farm. The book follows their lives and their affectionate (but arms length) relationship into adulthood. Antonia eventually gets pregnant with a local lout, but then marries a kindly older Czech and has a huge happy family with him. Jim moves East, to New York, where he becomes a successful railroad lawyer.

Along the way, the characters and their families endure hardships, romances, rural intrigues, death, small town life, small and large incidents. I read the he first part of the book avidly, and loved the details of pioneer life as seen through Jim's eyes. The harshness of life, the never-ending farm work, the warm bonds with the people around him (even people he didn't necessarily like), and Antonia herself -- all detailed with a nostalgic, dreamlike intensity. He loves Antonia, and she loves him. Yet, there seems to be an undefined distance between them, and a sort of agreement that they will never close the distance. It's mysterious. Once they become adults, and Antonia's age (four years older than him) is no longer such an obstacle, what prevents them from being more than cousinly? It's as if both of them are already married to others. But they're not. The book gets sentimental towards the latter part, and seems a bit long.

I've read that Willa Cather was remarkably open about her own lesbian sexual persona (remarkably open for that time, at least). What if we imagine Jim Burden as a woman -- that the narrator is actually a woman growing up on the prairie, with a powerful desire for Antonia? Then, their forbearance would make more sense. Given the mores of that era, the two of them simply could not express their affection for each other in other than a chaste fashion. Perhaps this is Willa Cather, truly writing about her own Antonia.

The Chorus Pro Musica's performance of Rachmaninoff's Vespers

The Chorus Pro Musica performed Rachmaninoff's Vespers at St. George's church this past Sunday, November 9. Lisa Graham conducted (she is also our conductor in the Brookline Chorus). The Vespers are sung acapella. I immediately enjoyed the beautiful tone of the chorus. They moved so well from the loud to the soft passages, with many tricky layers of music in between.

I loved the poetry of the verses. I've always been moved by the simple hymn, Bless the Lord, O My Soul (Blagoslovi, dushe moya, Ghospoda), and these lines, familiar to me from the Greek service:

Thou art clothed with honor and majesty.
Blessed art Thou, O Lord.
The waters stand upon the mountains.
Marvelous are Thy works, O Lord.
The waters flow between the hills.
Marvelous are Thy works, O Lord.
In wisdom hast Thou made all things.

To me, the verses say that the infinite complexity of nature -- seemingly random in its ends -- from which we humans draw the ability to live our lives, is in fact God's work.

The alto Marion Dry sang with a throaty, solemn sound, her voice vibrating with...fear (fear of God was a common expression throughout). The tenor Charles Blandy sang intensely, and transmitted a kind of purity and innocence, in a voice full of longing for God.