July 16, 2009

Turbulence in Newark airport, all of it unnecessary. Ah, well. Is there a circle of hell for the complicators of others’ lives? An Orthodox Jew sways and prays near one of the gates, in white prayer shawl and phylactery and tefelim. I hope he is praying for everybody to get safely home.

I left New York at just the wrong time (just the right time according to my cabbie): President Obama will be arriving today, and staying in the Marriott, right across the street from my hotel, wherein it was my wont to take my morning coffee. I would have loved to see all that laid on top of the daily frenzy of Times Square. I would have loved to catch a glimpse of the President.

Billy Elliot last night, the big fat musical of the last few seasons. It would be hard to conceive of a performer with more skill and attractiveness and dedication than the kid who played Billy last night. Virtuosity without self-consciousness, the rarest commodity on Broadway. Even as I watched, though, I pondered the wild praise heaped on the production by some whose opinions I respect. The music was undistinguished. In general I thought what I thought about Wicked: that there was a sweet story trying too hard to be Big-Time Broadway Entertainment: Mendelssohns trying to be Beethovens, when Mendelssohn is quite good enough. There was no opportunity for intimacy. Even moments which might have been intimate (just as Billy’s remembrance of his mother) were literal-minded and garishly highlighted, as though the audience might not feel the proper emotion unless beaten down the right path. Unwilling to risk the uncertainties of real emotion, emotions are dealt out to the audience tailored, pre-packaged, insistent, fortissimo. The one moment of really exquisite beauty, Billy’s pas de deux with his grown-up self, couldn’t resist a circus trick, which was both technically impressive and spiritually ruinous. I did enjoy the evening, but would have enjoyed it considerably more were there less of it, less sweaty effort to capture the widest and dumbest possible audience, fewer imaginative moments rendered literal and crass, less whoring to whose concept of theater first drew breath in Disneyworld. I do not mean that last as a criticism of the audience, but of the theater. We are nutritionist who have decided that the easiest path is to serve pecan pie all the time, for every course, at every meal. Of course the diners come to expect pecan pie. They come to the table with “child-like wonder” at the prospect of, again, dining upon sweets. They are told that this is what "wonder" is. Why shouldn’t they believe it? I don’t know where the courage to purify and restore is to come from so long as everything is so costly. I don’t know who will find the vocabulary to tell us how hungry we really are.