Lobenthal.com

Having just come from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Winter’s Tale, I can only say that the folly as well as the venality of what our President is apparently doing can only be called Shakesperean.  To all intents and purposes he is not simply capitulating to, he is actively colluding with the Republicans in their long-held determination to dismantle Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  And Obama is thus also colluding in his own political demise, as well as doing untold damage to the country and the Democratic Party.  It’s one for the ages.

Some complimentary, as well as some really vile and objectionable comments on Criticaldance.com about my City Arts piece on the Mariinsky Ballet, written by people who, let’s say, prefer to keep their agendas close to their chests.

I’m accused of plaigirism by “Cygne,” on the grounds that in 2006 Criticaldance.com published an interview by Catherine Pawlick with Svetlana Ivanova, whom I interviewed for the City Arts piece.  Apparently for “Cygne,” plaigirism consists of interviewing someone who has been interviewed before.

And while we’re on the subject of who was first, by any chance did “Cygne” or Pawlick read my writing on Ivanova in Ballet Review in 2005?

When I reviewed the Mariinsky’s 2008 season at City Center for the New York Sun, “Natalia N” made a point of disagreeing on line with virtually every comment I made in print.  And she’s kept on going like that ever since.  Cathexis time!

“Natalia N” now has the audacity to call my favorable review of Alina Somova’s Giselle with the Mariinsky in Washington, D.C. last February an “‘apology.'”  Since, as we all do know, “Natalia N” simply loathes Somova, she was, I guess, meaning to call me an apologist.

Pawlick, moderator of Criticaldance.com’s Mariinsky forum, recently announced that she was planning a book on Yuri Soloviev, about whom I wrote a long profile for Ballet Review in 2003. Ballet Review also recently published my interview with Tatiana Legat, Soloviev’s widow, and the Solovievs’  friend Lisa Whitaker.  When Pawlick interviewed a friend of Soloviev’s recently, she claimed never to have read my BR article on him, despite that fact that she had a piece published in the same issue.

On this Criticaldance discussion, Pawlick says that she talked with Ivanova recently, who said she was perplexed about why I’d asked her if she still wanted to dance Giselle. Ivanova, however, said to me when I inteviewed her last February in Washington, D.C. that she wanted to ask the Mariinsky administration if she could dance the Giselle pas de deux at the Mariinka3 theater, the new philharmonic hall Gergiev opened in 2007, which frequently programs ballet as well.

Furthermore, both Pawlick and “Natalia N” are unprofessional enough to claim that Vasili Scherbakov, about whom I also write,  is out of shape, without addressing the fact that, as I say in my piece, since almost all his solo performances have been taken away, and thus his rehearsals for solo performances, how is he to stay in shape?  Surely these two commentators are well enough versed in ballet to understand this.  

Secondly, I saw his Bluebird at the Kennedy Center in February 2010 and saw with my own eyes that it was better than ever.  His performance was called by “nySusan” on Ballet.co.uk “a wonderful Bluebird–the best I’ve seen in years.”  I’ve also seen his “Fire” in Shuraleh in 2009, which was marvelous. 

Btw, “Natalia N” and Catherine, how was Scherbakov’s James in La Sylphide (substituting for Felip Stepin) at the Mariinsky last December?  Were you there?  Was he not in shape? (He was great when he did it there in 2006.)  Or were you politic enough not to be there, knowing that he isn’t an administration favorite?

Posters like these have been getting away with stuff like this for a long, long time.  They lie, and they defame, and they strategically omit.  They play one game after another.

I could go on — but do I have to?

This Sunday I’ll be in Houston, lecturing on my long interest in Broadway as part of the summer lecture series of the Bayou City Concert Musicals.

I always suspected, reading Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes even as a kid, that Tallulah Bankhead’s performance as Regina Giddens could not have been as unrelievedly diabolic as legend would have it.  The script itself wouldn’t have permitted that.  And after interviewing in 1992 the late Florence Williams, who created the role of Regina’s daughter Alexandra, I had all the information I needed to make that point.  But I wondered what Bankhead really thought, since she described Regina in her 1952 autobiography as “an unmitigated murderess.”

Of course Bankhead didn’t actually write the book; it was put together by her publicist, Richard Maney, working from transcripts of tapings she did, I think frequently on her own at home in Bedford Village, rather than working in a Q & A format with him.  I’ve seen some of the transcripts, which are as wildly free-associative as one would expect from her.  I never saw anything like that remark in the transcripts I looked at, but certainly she must have approved its inclusion in the book.

Bankhead was a courageous woman who was not afraid to buck the tide of public consensus.  But at the same time, a star performer is extraordinary sensitive to public mood.

I felt that if she indeed by the early-1950s had endorsed that concept of Regina it somehow reflected what had grown to be a conventional wisdom, and a flattening one that perhaps conformed to the reactionary mood of the time.  An ambitious woman’s trumping at all costs any obstacles to her success would not have been in sync with the mood of that moment.

Only after my biography was published, however, did I find a clincher proving to me that  that she had, back in 1939 when she was acting the role,  every intention of not  playing Regina one-dimensionally, that she did admire much about Regina, as undoubtedly did Hellman herself.

“Regina is a woman with a masculine brain and born in the wrong period,” Tallulah told a reporter for the Daily News in an interview published April 30, 1939, two-and-a-half months after Little Foxes opened on Broadway.  “If she’d been born in a metropolis, instead of in a small Southern town, if she’d been alive now instead of then, she’d probably have made something of herself—been a judge or a woman of real importance.”

Bankhead compared Regina favorably to another icon of Southern womanhood,  Scarlett O’Hara, a role she’d recently screen-tested for unsuccessfully.  “Scarlett is an unmitigated [obviously a favorite adjective of Bankhead’s, see above] sort of person, but Regina’s honest.  She wouldn’t steal.  She wouldn’t let her daughter marry that boy.  Even when she’s at her worst, you feel that the audience is hoping she’ll come through all right.”

After the Royal Danish Ballet’s opening night last month (their first visit to Manhattan since 1988!!), I was interviewed by Louise With of the Danish newspaper Borsen, who quoted me this way: “On the whole it was very good. And the best part was Napoli in my opinion. The leading couple were amazing. It was technically strong, it was clean and yet expressive. And there was a whole that grew larger than the individual elements.” And I meant it, too!. Seeing them dance Bournonville was a great inspiration for me, a validation of what ballet can be at its best.

Ballet dancers are today so generally overworked and often so palpably under-rehearsed that improvement has to be a matter of perpetual back-and-forward sliding.

So it was good to see that Alexandre Hammoudi’s act1 solo in Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream at ABT last Wednesday night was indeed a noticeable improvement over the previous Saturday’s matinee.  No slithering across the stage in grand pirouette, and a much more accurate vertical axis to everything aerial.  He was nonchalantly big and bravura as Ratmansky surely intends, but not slovenly.

On Wednesday I went to JFK  to meet someone coming in from San Francisco.  Sitting in traffic on the Grand Central, I thought of a story told me by the late Linda Gravenites, who made marvelous clothes in Haight Ashbury in the 1960s, which led to her befriending and moving in with Janis Joplin in her apartment in a Victorian house on Lyon Street.

I met Linda in 1986 when I was doing research for my first book, Radical Rags: Fashions of the Sixties.  Her apartment in Protrero Hill was stocked with evidence of her handiwork and creativity, as was the house I later visited her in Cazadero, in the Redwoods.  She lived there after marrying Sam Lefkowitz.  The last time I saw Linda was in 1990 when she drove from Cazadero to Calistoga to have dinner with my brother, his girlfriend and myself.  We had gone there to enjoy the mud baths.  (Remind me to show you the photos.)  We stayed in touch by phone and via her fantastic home-made Christmas cards, until she died a decade ago.  A memorable person.  I was so pleased that examples of her finery were included in museum shows during her lifetime. 

Anyway, it seems that Joplin was on a plane going from New York to San Francisco during her birthday month of January.  Also in first class was Leontyne Price.  A stewardess knew that it was Joplin’s birthday and bought her a little cake.  Joplin in turn took a slice over to Price.  The great soprano told Joplin how much she loved her rendition of Gershwin’s “Summertime,” which Price liked to program in her recitals.  She had of course sung Bess in a production that toured the world in the mid-1950s.  Joplin was thrilled!

I went twice yesterday to ABT’s mixed-bill program.  Far from Antony Tudor’s best ballet,  his 1967 Shadowplay, which I’ve never seen before, nevertheless was soothing balm, a relief from the busyness of the new ballets by Millepied, Ratmansky and Wheeldon with which it was performed.  Tudor understood the regenerative potency of stillness and set his wild-child protagonist,  originally danced by Anthony Dowell, taxing moments of both complete stasis as well as turns and balances requiring time-suspending control, providing a healthy challenge for both Daniil Simkin and Craig Salstein in yesterday’s performances.

Last Saturday’s matinee of Don Quixote at ABT took me back a bit.  David Hallberg is very tall, so I guess he was the obvious partner for Polina Semionova in her ABT debut.  But he’s perhaps not a strong enough partner to both support a tall, broad-shouldered ballerina like Semionova and dance his own solo material pristinely. There  were partnering glitches in both the first and third acts, and his act 3 solo was ragged. But his manege was a lot better than in Sleeping Beauty last year.

Semionova really seemed as though she had been hitting the global gala circuit a bit too much, to the point where she couldn’t get her working leg exactly where it should have been repeatedly throughout the performance.  She didn’t do anything untoward, but it was a drier and tighter performance than it should have been. Not the dancer she had been at a Youth America Grand Prix gala here in 2008.  Hopefully she isn’t doing too much between now and her ABT Swan Lake on July 2, and hopefully she and Hallberg will have lots of rehearsal time to work out a mutual accommodation by then.

I just watched Lisa Della Casa’s Arabella, filmed live in Munich in 1960.  Here the salient question becomes not whether opera singers in the past could act but instead — can today’s opera singers live up to the acting standard of the past? I’m semi-kidding, but really, just as in Paul Czinner’s cinematic reproduction of the 1954 Salzburg Don Giovanni, where she sings Donna Elvira, Della Casa offers for posterity a total theatrical representation that has not been surpassed and is unlikely ever to be. Beautiful, thin, gifted with an exquisite voice, she was a superb musician and mobile stage inhabitant.

Speaking of the New Amsterdam, when I went to the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 2008 to see a 1920 silent While New York Sleeps, I was astonished to see in the film footage that could only have been filmed in the New Amsterdam roof theater itself or in a compete replica made on a sound stage.  But from the looks of it I believe it was the former.

The roof theater was where Ziegfeld put on his Midnight Frolic revue nightly after the Follies curtain came down in the main theater. And there was an ongoing exchange of acts between the Follies and the Frolic, where cabaret seating was spread over the orchestra floor and balcony.

The Roof theater was delightfully intact in the mid-1970s when I toured it.  It was a gem of a place.  Long after the main theater had become a grind movie theater in the 1930s, the roof theater was still used for rehearsals of Broadway productions.

In the late-1970s it was used as a television studio.  But in 1982 , three years after landmark status was granted, the roof theater was gutted for a Peter Brook production–that never happened.  Fire exits didn’t conform to contemporary code.

The roof theater is a real loss.  Why was it allowed to demolished, AFTER the theater was landmarked?

In While New York Sleeps, we see the stage with stairs to the dance floor.  There are cabaret tables all around.  We are given snippets from what would have been a typical Frolic program, perhaps the actual program that was running when the film was made.

There’s a production number with renowned showgirl Dolores in her famous peacock costume, which fans out at the touch of a control inside her dress.  She walks down stairs on stage with a slight pause at each step: the famous showgirl strut.  Then she walks backwards and releases her fantail.

There’s also a tightrope walker, a woman doing a Spanish dance turn that looks like Ted Shawn’s Serenata Morisca, one of Martha Graham’s numbers during her Denishawn days. A woman in Turkish trousers throws streamers and they throw them at her.  All performers link hands and march to the footlights, in commedia coda style.