Lobenthal.com

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.

 I’ve always assumed that my family had a distant relation to Abraham Erlanger, the fearsome uber-producer who was at his zenith at the turn of the 20th century. He went into partnership with Marc Klaw; together they joined forces with a number of other big men to form the Syndicate that monopolized theater ownership and thus bookings across the country. If you didn’t play ball with the Syndicate, you played in a tent, the way Sarah Bernhardt was forced to.

Recently a cousin of mine returned the geological file that my father had loaned her, dating back fifty years ago when he began researching the family tree. He’s done so fitfully since then. Reading through the file, I was surprised that we are actually quite closely related. My great-grand grandfather Henry Lobenthal was the brother of Erlanger’s mother Regina. 

My grandfather Joseph, that would be Henry’s grandson, was in vaudeville as a dancer and then a booking agent during the early 1920s. I wonder now, did he get his start in show business by calling upon Erlanger?

It was Klaw & Erlanger who in 1903 built the New Amsterdam theater on West 42nd Street, the Art Nouveau masterpiece designed by architects Herts and Tallent.
That theater has been a place of importance in my life. I was in high school 1975
when I began a campaign to win landmark status for the theater, which was granted in 1979. My first professionally-published writing was a monograph in a special issue of Marquee Magazine, journal of the Theatre Historical Society that was dedicated to the New Amsterdam.

Did I know the closeness of the Erlanger connection back then? I couldn’t have asked my grandfather directly, because while he was alive, he was not totally with-it.
But I wasn’t championing the theater out of familial loyalty! But my interest in the New Amsterdam, in the theaters and theatricality of that era, can’t be separated from my grandparents (my grandmother was dancing in vaudeville when she met my grandfather) participation in that culture.

From the current City Arts, here’s my piece on Paul Taylor’s Esplanade.

From the current Ballet Review, here’s my interview with Tatiana Legat about Yuri Soloviev, which I conducted with Lisa Whitaker, a friend of both Soloviev and Legat.

The issue’s on the stands now.

Also on Wednesday was Martins’ The Magic Flute, in which Tiler Peck demonstrated how far along her dancing has come.  She doesn’t seem any longer to be in thrall to that doctrinaire Balanchine thing of not keeping her heels down, trying to always stay high and a little forward on pointe. It’s a positioning that aids the dancer’s speed, and it was something Balanchine certainly developed, but of course he didn’t want it all the time.  However, like almost all of Balanchine’s concepts about ballet, it’s now sometimes adopted uncritically as almost a tic.

It robbed Peck’s debut two years ago as Swanhilda in Coppelia of a certain degree of power. When you don’t use your descent into the floor, when you scant plié you reduce amplitude: to go up and out you’ve really got to go down sometimes, all the more so when it’s a short dancer like Peck.

At New York City Ballet last Wednesday, Valse Fantaisie was played with hold-on-to-your-hats speed, as was Duo Concertant, which preceded it.  In Duo, Robert Fairchild was able to keep up – barely, while the freneticism of Valse Fantaisie reduced Ashley Bouder to almost marionette-like articulation.  I don’t believe that these ballets’ tempi were this fast when Balanchine created them, and I certainly don’t believe that any tempo has to be hewed to so relentlessly, with so little modulation.

Last March I was happy to participate in a WNYC roundtable concerning arts coverage.  However,the transcript that was published on their web site misquoted me.  I did NOT say “The Times and the Post had dance critics, not any more.”  That of course is not true. The publications I mentioned were Time and Newsweek, and it is true about those magazines. 

I asked WNYC to correct the transcript, but they haven’t; therefore this post.

My interview with baritone Simon Keenlyside in City Arts:
http://cityarts.info/2010/03/10/hamlet-with-haunches/#more-968

I was interviewed by David Belcher of the Times about HER: