Marianna Torgovnick

JEFF KOONS IN CHELSEA

Love him or leave him, Jeff Koons is arguably the most successful living American artist http://www.vulture.com/2013/05/age-of-jeff-koons.html.

You can test out your Jeff Koons quotient in NY at the moment at two major galleries:  David Zwirner on W19th—site of the fetching and funny Gazing Ball series in the image above—and the museum-like Gagosian on W24th, which features recent paintings and three gigantic “balloon” sculptures, including a ravishing swan, also in electric blue, forging a theme.  

Fetching and fun? Or foolish and fickle?  (Trying to keep the alliteration going).  You decide.

WEIGHING IN ON GATSBY

The new movie version has a fatal flaw and quite a few smaller ones. But it captures the novel far more than dismal reviews had led me to expect.

    The film’s frame narrative makes Nick Carraway a chronic alcoholic, like Fitzgerald himself, and is wince-worthy. Though the movie starts there, you hope and hope they’ll drop the frame, but back it comes until Nick puts the words “The Great” before his working title, Gatsby. It’s an unusually literal rendition of the narrator’s role. Among other things, the device transfers Gatsby’s hyperbolic vision and wish-projection onto Nick, through whose eyes we see bloated houses, and mad-frantic parties, but also trees and landscapes right out of the land of Oz.

     There are other significant flaws: the party scene at Myrtle’s N.Y. apartment is badly done, the use of African Americans as sexualizing props bothered me, and the film’s dedication to the over-the-top ruins small but lovely details in the original, like the domestic kitchen intimacy Nick observes at the end between Tom and Daisy.

    Other than that—and it’s a lot of “that”—the movie works, not just on its own terms but on Fitzgerald’s. I especially liked how, despite all the 3-D hoopla—and there’s a lot—the film captures the two kisses near the middle of the book where Gatsby steps out of time and Nick steps into the role of author.   

     Now… a caveat here: The Great Gatsby is not my favorite novel or even among my favorite twenty-five novels. Kathryn Schulz wrote a very interesting piece in The New Yorker that’s a little harsh but with which I basically agree. What the film captures is the American fascination with excess that has made Gatsby more than the sum of its parts. Gorgeous language, shallow characters, a pedestrian opposition between the Midwest and New York: like Nick, we look and look until we want to look away. 

Bring Up the Bodies, Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker, The Paris Wife, Hemingway’s Girl now Z, for Zelda, not Zorro:  it’s been a good and even a great year for historical fiction, with several more about Zelda on the way.  Raising the question:  how much fiction is allowed and how much fact?  I find myself believing these books even when I know (and the afterwords tell me) that history is silent or mixed in its account and even (Hemingway’s Girl) when the main characters, except for Hemingway and his family, are entirely invented. So I am posing the question, just the question, for now:  How much fiction and how much fact when rendering famous lives?

Motown the Musical:  Reality Bites

The music in Motown the Musical is fantastic: a thrill in every number, the music of our lives. But the overall experience was downright weird and something I have been pondering ever since. The audience was up for the show before the curtain went up and I was too. The audience felt like it was getting the inside story of Motown and its founder Berry Gordy and I did too. After Act I, I felt convinced that it would be impossible to hear better music and feeling pretty good about the show even though the frame narrative was predictable and the book pretty thin: would Berry Gordy decide to go to the celebration of Motown’s 25th Year or would he stay home, disgruntled?  Suspense, there wasn’t.

Intermission raised the question: when does an audience get so out of control that it’s like calling “Fire” in a crowded movie theater like the one we were sitting in.  A huge mob of people began crowding the part of the theater behind me and shooting pictures (cell phones stayed out for the rest of the show). After 40 minutes, security convinced enough people to sit down so that Act II could begin. What had caused the disturbance? Gordy Berry was in the audience: charismatic even now, his appearance has occasioned near hysteria. For the rest of the show, I wasn’t sure whether I was seeing theater in its purest form or the corruption of the theatrical impulse by something that I decided might be reality TV.

    From the start, the audience had seemed amazed, AMAZED, that the actors playing Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder and the other Motown stars could sing like Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, and the other Motown stars.  More strangely, people around me of various ages and demographics sang along with every song—out loud—and greeted the actors on stage as though they were the original singers. Putting that together with the overreaction to Berry Gordy’s presence, it seemed to me that I was witnessing something unusual in our time:  an utterly un-ironic musical and audience response to a musical, in which audience and illusion almost seamlessly bonded.  

At the finale, back at that 25th reunion (no spoiler alert needed; the program tells you we will end there), a figure rushed from the back of the theater to the stage. People all around me gasped and shouted out:  ”it’s her! she’s really here!”  But, of course, Diana Ross was not rushing to the stage though the actress playing Diana Ross was. Strange.

I could tell from conversations around me that the people in the audience went to the theater often and saw plays as well as musicals.  Yet  something about the material overcame the basic fact of the theatrical experience: there’s an audience; there are playwrights and directors, often present at previews; there are stars, on the stage and sometimes in the audience too. At the worst moments (and Act II has some worst moments as well as some terrific ones), I felt that reality TV had reached a tipping point not just on TV, where it’s been with us for some time, but in the theater too.  Motown, I will always love you. It would be fascinating to know whether the show happens this way at every performance!

THEATER ENTHUSIASM OF THE WEEK 

“All this happiness, merely from a glance… so much happiness”: if the image does not get your attention, the opening lyrics should:  lush, sexy, and not typical of Sondheim, they celebrate the body and physical passion.  This production ultimately does too.  Though Passion is not my favorite Sondheim, the off-off Broadway version at CSC totally works.  Intimate in scale, it’s cunningly staged by John Doyle, who did Sweeney Todd and Company a few years back.  The intimacy makes the transition from lush Clara to austere Fosca more touching.  We see and feel Fosca reading Giorgio correctly while others do not and establishing a primal bond of sympathy.  She asks him to kiss her as he would kiss his sister and urges: “They hear drums, we hear music.” He comes to understand her love and to share it too.  I have been haunted by this beautiful production all week. 

WILL MOTOWN END A BROADWAY DROUGHT?

Complaints about Broadway are almost as old as … Broadway.  But 2012 was an especially thin year.  Once as best musical; Peter and the Starcatcher: thin fare. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf: okay and thick, if awfully familiar.  Off-Broadway continued to perk with Cock, Mies Julie, Roman Tragedies, Donka (these last WAY off Broadway, in Brooklyn) and other thoughtful offerings.  But Broadway?  The Book of Mormon was fun for sure but set the pace for tickets in the $165 range, too rich for most of us. No Broadway-basher, I felt ready to move on down the road, abandoning Broadway since it had abandoned us for the tourist trade. 

    Now here comes Spring 2013.  Still not on Broadway but “off,” the Signature Theater continues to delight and amaze with its David Henry Hwang series and its National Theatre (mini-version) vibe and most of all  its audience-friendly $25 tickets and excellent Gehry designed spaces. Cinderella is quite the delight but almost too much of a crowd pleaser.  It’s innocence charmed but it also qualifies as thin fare. Now here comes Motown: soon, but not a moment too soon.  Passion is off-off, so is Really, Really and The Wild Bride.  We’re rooting for you Broadway.  But you gotta deliver!

“ARE WE STILL LIVING IN 1993”

The question got me thinking. Everyone alive today would be within 20 years of that date, so it has a contemporary feel. And while the date was totally uber meaningful for me—major turning points galore—a case can be made that it was the year that made us what we are today.  Exhibit I (and 2 and 3 and 4, as far as I’m concerned):  the first web browser AOL 2.0—and the internet age was off and running. Who would have guessed where that would lead and how everything I love most would change as a result.  Exhibit 2:  the bombing of the WTC.  We saw the news but what it meant remained opaque for us.  Exhibit 3:  cultural and intellectual life go multicultural and the EU began its thing. And many more. Now. as the image from the show suggests, the New Museum presentation may be lame.  Carl Swenson in NEW YORK MAGAZINE is, however, right on.  Sure, one can quibble that any year can be seen as a, the, the major turning point.  But 1993 has some claims—for me and for us all. 

GOTTA love this show, especially on MLK Day, by noting how adroitly it has finessed last year’s criticism that the Girls live in a very segregated world, given that it’s NY and North Brooklyn. Entirely justified for Season 1. So Season 2, as fans will have noted, not just begins with Hannah having an African American boyfriend but with also with several scenes at a party that casually increase the Girls’ circle of Black friends and acquaintances by many multiples.  

As in all great comedy, the stakes then need to be raised.  It’s a technique as old as Charlie Chaplin, and still endearing. Said boyfriend is pretty fair perfect, except that he’s a Republican. Probing this sad fact, Hannah helpfully points out the nation’s prison stats, at which point boyfriend and romance are over—at least for this episode. On a serious day filled with the uplifting feelings of the Inauguration,  which were real, this is a lighter-hearted moment.