Latest

2019

Dance
Shanna Irwin and Jared Brunson In Bach 25.

Bach 25 and Star Dust by Complexions Contemporary Ballet at the Joyce Theater. Closes March 3.

February 25, 2019Mari S. Gold

When the curtain went up on Bach 25, some of the audience gasped as it seemed as though the dancers were nude. Not so—their sculpted, athletic bodies are clad in Christine Darch’s minimal costumes and set off in bronzy lighting by Michael Korsch making them look like living sculpture. The thirty-minute piece passed in an instant as the dancers stretched in thrilling poses, sometimes alone and other moments in twos and threes. This is a very contemporary work with clean line and deep pliés as well as twisting, flickering, arms and hands that lend humor.
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HHA
Haitian refugees in small wood boats sailing into Biscayne Bay, Miami, Florida attempting to immigrate into the United States. They are picked up in the Florida waters by the Coast Guard and taken into detention for processing, where they are considered illegal immigrants. Some of the people will be deported back to Haiti, and others allowed to immigrate. Many boats of desperate refugees attempted to sail to Florida and many died in the effort. Over 40,000 Haitian boat people sought refuge in Florida by 1981.

A Peculiar Paradise: Florida Photographs by Nathan Benn, a Book and an Exhibition at the HistoryMiami Museum, closing Sunday, April 4th, 2019

February 24, 2019Michael Miller

The subject of this interview, Nathan Benn, was very much a creature of the new generation. He was 22 when The National Geographic hired him in 1972 and 31 in 1981, when his editors sent him back to his native Florida to illustrate a feature article about its current condition in a troubled time, when the legal system was strained by drug trafficking and local citizens were challenged by a influx of refugees from the Caribbean. When he set to work, Mr. Benn began to push the Geographic’s envelope, both artistically and journalistically. His occasionally satirical social observations and gritty record of crime and law enforcement activity thrilled one of his editors but appalled another one, who was especially set in the magazine's anodyne values of the Midwest and the 1950’s.
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HHA
George Antheil

A Crop of Recordings XXV: Gliere, Respighi, Lortzing, Antheil, and Wagner

February 21, 2019Steven Kruger

Reinhold Glière was fortunate to thrive under Soviet Communism. A long-limbed bardic style, featuring haunting melodies evoking the Russian ecclesiastical past, ruffled no political feathers. Nor did velvety explorations of Scriabin-influenced chromaticism. He was never purged. But Glière paid a price for fame in the world of democracy and commerce, it would seem. His greatest work, the 1912 Mahler-length Symphony No. 3, “Il’ya Muromets”, was deemed “too long” for the concert hall in America. To ensure its presentation, Leopold Stokowski persuaded the composer to pare it down drastically, and it was in this incomplete condition that the work took root in Philadelphia and in American ears.
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Film
A Scene from Theresa Rebeck's Poor Behavior

Poor Behavior, Written and Directed by Theresa Rebeck at the New Ohio Theater

February 20, 2019Mari S. Gold

Teresa Rebeck, writer of Broadway’s Bernhardt/Hamlet, NBC’s Smash and more, is one talented lady but her film directorial debut, Poor Behavior, left me scratching my head. Set in a Vermont country house, it deals with two couples from New York spending the weekend together. Everyone drinks a lot and fights incessantly, goading one another into increasingly bad behavior. However, not one of the characters is very interesting nor are the barbs they trade particularly clever.
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Music
Conductor Christian Reif. Photo Kristen Loken.

Christian Reif leads the San Francisco Symphony in Strauss, Lutosławski, and Prokofiev, with Johannes Moser, cello.

February 5, 2019Steven Kruger

I'm often struck, when I attend concerts, with how much it matters what we see happening onstage. Ears aren't everything. And sometimes they are not enough. This is doubly true if an audience is presented with the sort of modern music which trades in humor, sly remarks, and attitude, like the Lutosławski Cello Concerto, which received its San Francisco premiere this week nearly fifty years after it was composed. I'm happy to report the concerto was a triumph worth the wait, but its success with our audience was to a large degree determined by the mini-skit taking place onstage. Fortunately, Christian Reif and Johannes Moser are natural comedians, sufficiently so to dispel any notions that Germans are too uptight to be funny! And our close sight lines in Davies Hall, where it is easy to witness a performer's face, surely played a part in what almost amounted to a Saturday Night Live routine.
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Theater
Laurena Allan, Gary Wilmes, Scott Shepherd, Annie McNamara, Kate Scelsa, and Vin Knight. Photo Mark Barton.

What’s Great About Gatsby? Elevator Repair Service performs Fitzgerald’s novel in its entirety, as Gatz.

February 5, 2019Mari S. Gold

Reading a book is a solitary, intimate experience in which the reader sets the pace and imagines the characters as he or she sees them. Listening to a book is another way to appreciate a work, sometimes influenced by the narrator’s voice. Gatz, as created by Elevator Repair Service, uses an unprecedented approach, staging the book as it is read in its entirely. The performance begins when an anonymous office worker sits at a desk in a grungy office and, while waiting for his computer to boot, idly picks up The Great Gatsby and starts reading it aloud. The worker slowly takes on the character of Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic Jazz Age novel, who reads every word of the book including the “he/she saids” for a marathon six hours. Bit by bit, the other office workers assume the rest of the characters although the bulk of the effort falls to the staggeringly good Scott Shepherd.
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