Wore Sheepskin, Dress to Elude Capture

Guest Blogger Dept.: Les Hendrix wrote for Schenectady’s Daily Gazette for 22 years, retiring in 1997 – not long after filing the doozy of a story below. He went on to work for the NYS Ethics Commission, and died in 2013 at the age of 71. The story below was headlined “Man Caught in Creek Admits Guilt,” and I borrowed its sub-head for this post title. I’m familiar with the Schoharie-Central Bridge area, and, wondering what might of become of this story’s protagonist, offer some more recent follow-ups.

                                                                                       

A CENTRAL BRIDGE MAN who jumped into a creek where police were looking for him pleaded guilty to two felonies Wednesday.

Jameson L. Perrotti, 23, pleaded guilty to four charges in Schoharie County Court and faces a sentence of up to six years in prison. Sentencing was set for April 9.

Assistant District Attorney J. Russell Langwig said Perrotti was apparently in a cocaine-induced state of paranoia on the night of Aug. 28, when he saw a police car pass and thought it was chasing him. Langwig gave this account of what then occurred:

Perrotti started evading the police car that was not chasing him and eventually abandoned his car in the Gallupville area. He stripped off his clothes and fled into the woods.

Then Perrotti broke into a trailer and stole a sheepskin to wear. At another residence, he stole a Ford Escort. Eventually, he ended up asleep in the sheepskin parked in the Escort at the Schoharie park-and-ride lot off I-88, Langwig said.

From Anthony Hope to “Always”

From the Music Vault Dept.: By the time I saw “Sweeney Todd” in its original Broadway run, Cris Groenendaal had taken over the part of Anthony Hope. A dozen years later I shared a stage with him in the Syracuse Opera’s production of “The Merry Widow,” and was delighted to learn from him, a few years after that, that he’d released his first solo album, in collaboration with his wife and frequent performing partner, Sue Anderson. Here’s a review/interview piece I wrote about it.

                                                                                   

CRIS GROENENDAAL'S WICKED SENSE OF HUMOR is in evidence three numbers into his new recording, “Always.” He sings the old chestnut “You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do It)” with an edge of gritty determination, sounding as if he were dragged kicking and screaming into the amorous state. It's a contrast to the sappiness of other vocalists who have recorded the song, and it's very effective.

The album is subtitled “Music for Our Children,” which has a twofold meaning for the singer. “It's made up of music I was singing to my own children, but it also describes songs we're passing along to a new generation.” He's quick to point out that it's not a children's album. “It's not Barney meets Raffi. It's an adult collection of songs, including one by the Beatles, one by Bob Dylan, and showtunes and standards. The concept was that I was either singing them to our son, who was one year old at the time, or singing about children. Some of it has a kind of lullaby feel to it, but it's eclectic in terms of its sense of humor.”

Groenendaal made his Broadway debut in “Sweeney Todd,” and salutes that show with “Not While I'm Around.” He went on to the Broadway casts of two more Sondheim shows, “Sunday in the Park with George” and “Passion,” and was therefore able to observe that he picks his Broadway appearances well: “I only appear in shows that win the Tony or the Pulitzer.”

Water Retention

From the Theatrical Vault Dept.: Unless a play establishes a rollicking Broadway success, even the finest scripts are inclined to slip from mainstream view even as they journey to theaters around the country. “The Memory of Water” dates from 1996, won an Olivier Award four years later, and became the movie “Before You Go” in 2002. Not a bad pedigree!

                                                                                    

TAKE REASONABLY GOOD CARE OF YOURSELF and avoid safes falling from the sky and you’ll win the consolation prize of becoming an orphan. It’s too late to settle your parental issues, but the ghost of your dead mother might at least offer clue to some sources of your unhappiness.

Corinna May and Elizabeth Aspenlieder
Photo by Kevin Sprague

Thus does Mary regard her elegantly dressed mom, Vi, as “The Memory of Water” gently, quietly begins. Mary is a successful doctor dealing with the amnesia of a current patient, but it’s her own memory that reveals itself to be unreliable as she tangles with her two sisters, Teresa and Catherine, through the course of playwright Shelagh Stephenson’s amusing slice-of-life drama.

Shakespeare & Co.’s rollicking production puts it on the small stage of the Elayne P. Bernstein Theater, giving us a slightly claustrophobic sense of inhabiting Patrick Brennan’s simple country-house bedroom in which the action takes place. The sea is close and coming closer, insists the emerald-lit figure of Vi (Annette Miller, nicely edging her I’m-in-charge spirit with denial). Soon it will consume the house.

Geremia’s Railroad

From the Vault Dept.: I wish I’d bothered to note just who it was I shared a table with at Caffe Lena seven years ago, on the night when I attended a performance by guitar wizard Paul Geremia. Seeing him perform that night was a long-awaited follow-up to an after-hours encounter with him that I wrote about here, and well worth the wait.

                                                                                           

IF I WERE INCLINED to doubt the veracity of Paul Geremia’s tale of a private lesson from Howlin’ Wolf – a lesson that took place in Geremia’s condemned Brookline flat, in which the only furniture was a bed, on which he learned a Charley Patton song from Wolf, who’d learned it from Patton himself, the legend-upon-legend stuff piling up – as I say, were I inclined to doubt this, any skepticism was blown away by the discovery that I was sharing a table with a man who’d been babysat by Billie Holiday. The world works this way.

Blues singer-guitarist Geremia made his annual Lena stop last week with six-string, 12-string and harp rack, fighting a nasty head cold but nevertheless so at home on the tiny stage that the occasional head-clearing pause seemed perfectly apposite.

He’s one of a handful of acoustic performers linked by personal contact with the blues and folk traditions of this country’s past, and he’s as likely to be talking about Eddie Lang as about Blind Blake.

And talk he does, giving marvelously informal sketches of the provenance of particular pieces. As when he eased into Skip James’s “Special Rider Blues” (not, he explained, to be confused with Little Brother Montgomery’s “No Special Rider”), describing the southern turpentine camps that were part of a musician’s circuit. Then a lengthy intro on the 12-string, the tune touched with a pentatonic feel and always returning, as the vocal began, to a throbbing minor third.

Culinary Country-Hopping

From the Culinary Vault Dept.: Cookbooks are their own kind of ephemera, easing in and out of print as culinary fads come and go. Here’s a roundup of a few favorites that were current nearly five years ago, and which promised some cook-it-yourself delights that remain delightful.

                                                                                     

A CULINARY VACATION is cheap and satisfying, a participatory event you can do alone or with friends, an excursion that immediately pays off with a tasty meal. Cookbooks are my way into such a journey, and I thank goodness my kitchen has metal cabinets, because they end up covered with magnet-affixed recipe photocopies.

Could there be a more timely book than The Cuban Table (St. Martin’s Press). Ana Sofía Peláez and Ellen Silverman have packed 320 pages with prose and photographs celebrating the island’s culinary history, giving you a sense of being right there on a Havana street ordering croquetas de jamón, which turn out to be not too tough to make. Black-eyed pea fritters (bollitos de carita) is another simple finger-food recipe that makes so much sense, while arroz con pollo a la chorrera (a masterful chicken and rice) uses beer and a bunch of savory accompaniments in a dish that will take a little while to whip up. The narrative alone is superb, then suddenly there’s a toothsome photo of oxtail in caper sauce (rabo alcaparrado), so how could you not dive in? Fifty pages of desserts include inventive fruit preparations, and there’s plenty of info about the basics of technique and ingredients to master this country’s cuisine.

Actors Should Animate

From the Theatrical Vault Dept.: O, witless youth! Here’s the young (or at least substantially younger) me carping about populist entertainment. My stage bias never sounded more keen, yet I'm having trouble making sense of the thing. It’s one of my early pieces for Metroland, from January 1985, when I was signing myself as George Gordon so as not to offend the pernickety editor who ran pieces of mine in the soon-to-fold Albany Knickerbocker News.

                                                                                          

HIGH-TECH ESPIONAGE DRAMAS ARE fond of employing as a deus ex machina such unpredictable elements as the villain’s daughter’s amorous interest in the rugged hero. Unpredictable, that is, to the villain who, with his brilliant logic, has covered all the other angles only to stymied at the end by the “human element.”

This is a somewhat flabby metaphor for what goes on onstage in the most common kind of dull production: the sets can be lavish or imaginative but nevertheless well done; the blocking superb, all sightlines accounted for; costumes and makeup first-rate – but where’s the human element? In this case, some terrific acting?

An actor’s job never has been easy.

He’s always been a “man apart” in the sense that he makes public the agonies of self-discovery through his facility for adopting other people’s personalities. A good stage performance calls for something more, however: the ability to devise a personality that will cooperate with the invented personalities of the rest of the cast.

What to Do While the Family Is Away

Guest Blogger Dept.: Robert Benchley weighs in with sound advice for the temporary summer bachelor. The Detroit Athletic Club, founded in 1887 and still going strong, moved to a clubhouse in 1915 and simultaneously began publishing a monthly magazine, also still going strong. Benchley had an essay in almost every issue of it between 1920 and 1932.

                                                                                         

SOMEWHERE OR OTHER the legend has sprung up that, as soon as the family goes away for the summer, Daddy brushes the hair over his bald spot, ties up his shoes, and goes out on a whirlwind trip through the hellish districts of town. The funny papers are responsible for this, just as they are responsible for the idea that all millionaires are fat and that Negroes are inordinately fond of watermelons.

Robert Benchley by Gluyas Williams

I will not deny that for just about four minutes after the train has left, bearing Mother, Sister, Junior, Ingabog and the mechanical walrus on their way to Anybunkport, Daddy is suffused with a certain queer feeling of being eleven years old and down-town alone for the first time with fifteen cents to spend on anything he wants. The city seems to spread itself out before him just ablaze with lights and his feet rise lightly from the ground as if attached to toy balloons. I do not deny that his first move is to straighten his tie.

But five minutes would be a generous allowance for the duration of this foot-loose elation. As he leaves the station he suddenly becomes aware of the fact that no one else has heard about his being fancy-free. Everyone seems to be going somewhere in a very important manner. A great many people, oddly enough seem to be going home. Ordinarily he would be going home, too. But there would not be much sense in going home now, without—. But come, come, this is no way to feel! Buck up, man! How about a wild oat or two?

Artist of the Portrait

From the Vault Dept.: T.E. Breitenbach’s painting “Proverbidioms” took on a life of its own as it was discovered and studied by countless curious people. The poster was published in 1980; a decade later, I journeyed to Breitenbach’s castle to write the profile below. He has gone on to create more posters, more rooms in his castle, and even a couple of delightful stage musicals, one of which was filmed for PBS.

                                                                            

THERE’S THIS OLD SANTA CLAUS-LIKE GUY named Grumparar who first tipped off artist T. E. Breitenbach to the verifiable existence of the Nu Creatures. Like all of us, Breitenbach knew about them – they’re those fleeting images you see moving on the periphery of your filed of vision, images that vanish when directly confronted.

Photo for Metroland by Michael Ackerman

“I’ve spent the past five years cataloging them,” says Breitenbach, and his studio is filled with their likenesses, collected in groups that each reflect a particular range of emotion. Soon you’ll be able to find the information in a book that describes the creatures, Grumparar and, no doubt, a little bit of Breitenbach. In the meantime, take comfort in knowing that you’re not crazy to spot these things.

“If I have a fight with my wife,” he says, “then one sort of creature appears, the one who represents jealousy or stubbornness or whatever started the argument. When we kiss and make up, this little one who looks like a Latin lover appears instead.”

Sit Down

Celebrating Labor Day as it was meant to be celebrated.

The Manhattan Chorus sings Maurice Sugar's "Sit Down." Recorded in April, 1937, shortly after the successful sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, that helped the United Auto Workers union organize General Motors.

Hilarious

From the Vault Dept.: Speaking of comedy, and going back a mere decade this time, we find Louis C.K. peaking in his ascent to the top tier of American comedians. His terrific cable series “Louie” lay ahead – but so did his undoing. Industry power and sexual pecadillos are bad bedmates. Here’s a piece I wrote in advance of a performance of his in Albany, NY. Now the article seems more of a museum piece than ever.

                                                                                    

LOUIS C.K. TAKES TO THE STAGE as a modern-day everyman who identifies those ingredients that make the seemingly commonplace hilarious. Such as the experience of trying to suppress an intense bathroom need as you hurry home. “And then I see my house,” he says, “and my eyes tell the rest of me, fuck it, man, let go, we’re here.” He widens his eyes, gives a little we’re-in-this-together grin, and adds, “Because my eyes are fuckin’ retarded and they don’t know the difference between the outside and the inside of my house.”

Louis C.K.

The pacing, the build-up, the payoff are all so well done that you forget he’s performing and feel as if you have a personal spokesman articulating your own folly.

“I work on a show during the summer,” he says. “I write on stage, in front of an audience. Here in New York City, there are clubs where I can do ten or fifteen minutes, and the show grows until by August or September I have something.” He’s a keen observer of the minutiae of everyday experiences – does he jot such thoughts in a notebook? “I lose notebooks. And if I write things down like that, my brain says, ‘Oh, it’s in a notebook’ and I forget it. But I record all my shows, so if I spend, say, five days alone with my kids, my brain gets wiped clean and I can go back to those recordings for the material.”

Comedy Gets Serious

From the Vault Dept.: New York’s Capital Region endured a comedy threat 33 years ago – at least, that’s when I wrote this piece about it. Otherwise, the story speaks for itself. But I should note that Janette Barber has gone on to win six Emmy Awards, including those for her work with Rosie O’Donnell; Vinny Montello became known for “Between Brothers,” “Pranks,” and “Loonatics Unleashed.” The clubs mentioned below have long since shuttered.

                                                                                   

“COMICS AND ROCK STARS are the only people today who are talking about anything important,” says comic Janette Barber. “I mean, this country is making such an incredible swing to the right that somebody’s got to say something!”

Original Metroland art by Brian Pearce

She has just finished a high-energy set at Bicycle Annie’s in Colonie and is talking quite seriously about what drives her up on stage looking for laughs. She was all orange and white onstage – white outfit with big padded shoulders, a curly orange mane, bright cheeks. She flashed a big smile as she delivered another killer thrust: “How old are you, honey?” she asked a man in the front row. “Twenty-eight? I’m 33. I always tell my age. They say a man reaches his sexual peak at 18.” This was exhaled in a sweet Katharine Hepburn voice. “Now, a woman doesn’t reach her peak until her mid-30s. Sorry, dear.”

Stand-up comedy has been an entertainment staple for as long as people have failed to laugh for themselves. The concerns that repress laughter – careers, families, ethics – are the comic’s best targets.

Clannish Behavior

From the Vault Dept.: It was a delight to review all manner of entertainment event, and the opportunity to see Margaret MacLeod was not to be missed. Here’s my review of a 1988 edition of “The Gathering of the Clans.”

                                                                                     

BLACKNESS. The eerie drone of bagpipes, then the plangent melody of the chanters. When the lights came up, it wasn't Brigadoon we saw but a row of four pipers in traditional Scottish garb sounding a noble tune.

"The Gathering of the Clans"

“The Gathering of the Clans” took place at Proctor’s Theatre on Friday night, but it was much more than traditional plaid and pipes. A scrim behind the players lifted to reveal an up-to-date rhythm section that gave an extra kick to the polkas and reels that followed.

There were kilts and decorative sporrans, but there were long pants as well. It was a show that moved most professionally but had the relaxed air of a good folk-club act. And it brought together some superb performers who would do well in any song-and-dance setting.

Margaret MacLeod, a versatile and moving singer (who organized the show) welcomed the audience in Gaelic and then in English, and treated us to a wedding song (“Come Along”) that was as good an excuse as any to present an ensemble of fine dancers, six women and two men who stayed aloft by almost invisible bounces on their permanently-pointed toes.

You Are a Dodge

From the Music Vault Dept.: The Schenectady-based Empire State Youth Orchestra is an incubator of amazing talent, and has seen some amazing conductors come through. One of the best was Eiji Oue, who went on to become music director of the Erie Philharmonic, associate conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic, music director of the prestigious Minnesota Orchestra, and principal conductor of the Osaka Philharmonic. Here’s an interview piece I wrote at the start of his brief Capital Region tenure.

                                                                                              

THE LAST MOVEMENT of Beethoven’s Fifth is like the last inning of a good ball game: Tense, exciting. The Empire State Youth Orchestra is rehearsing this movement on a Tuesday in late October in preparation for a concert this Saturday at the Troy Music Hall. It is the first time they have looked at the music. On the podium is their new music director, Eiji Oue.

Eiji Oue

“This is how it should be bowed,” he tells the strings. “Down, down, up. Down, down, up.”
A few players try it. It takes some getting used to.

“Listen,” Oue exclaims. “That’s a really professional bowing, the one that the Boston Symphony uses. And we’re doing it because you can do it. And this is the hardest part of the symphony!”

This heightens the enthusiasm of the young musicians. It is nearing 10 PM, the end of rehearsal, and there are many tired faces in the room. They begin again from the start of the finale. And it sounds especially good. “Elegant, elegant!” the conductor calls out. The kids listen and respond. They obviously want to please their leader.

Where the ending had been ragged before are now some very clean touches. “I just played this piece with a major orchestra in the midwest,” Oue tells the group. “It took them 10 minutes to learn this movement. And you guys have done it in five.”

Tales from the Vienna Would-Bes

DURING THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY, Viennese operetta was always an escape. Spending a recent day with some of its highlights proved to be even more of a trip to a never-never land. Even as the genre struggled to hang on to its identity, musical fashions changed drastically, to a point that prompted the more contentious tastemakers to hoot it out of the halls. This year, the Bard Music Festival devoted itself to the life and work of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, offering a transatlantic survey of works that slyly, and in spite of critical resistence, changed the nature of American music.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold

The initial festival weekend (of two) opened with a survey of the kind of music that would have influenced the young Korngold, including some of the precocious composer’s very early works. He tasted fame early on, on the brink of his teens, and he was likened to Mozart because of the charm and speed of his output. And it didn’t hurt that his father was a noted, if not feared, music critic in early-1900s Vienna. Thus, after an opening-concert overview of the wide range of Korngold’s music throughout his career, the first Saturday program offered chamber and orchestral works from the composer’s early years alongside music by his teachers and friends.

One of the most valuable aspects of this festival is that contextualization, which is enhanced here by the talks given by the many scholars who collaborate on designing the summer’s programming.

The program for Sunday, Aug. 11, comprised three events that were bookended by programs of vocal works: a morning concert titled “Popular Music from Korngold’s Vienna” and the evening’s “Operetta’s America.” Between the two we were treated to “Before the Reich: Korngold and Fellow Conservatives,” and it’s worth noting that the featured composers seemed conservative only insofar as they were being reckoned against the atonality of the Second Viennese School.

Kovacs Land

LISTENING TO ERNIE KOVACS is a reminder that he was a storyteller above all, more grounded, perhaps, than Brother Theodore, but with a more subversive edge than Jean Shepherd. Which made Kovacs ideal for the dying medium of radio, the place where he began. The fact that he discovered television meant that he was able to apply his restless imagination to the black-and-white screen, and therefore transform the industry.

Kovacs fans know all about this, and this year, the centenary of his birth, we’re (as always) delighted to show the less-enlightened where just about everything we prize about all TV comedy originated: the mind of Ernie Kovacs.

We have some more help now in the form of the voice (or, more accurately, the sound) of Ernie Kovacs. It graced an LP issued in 1976, and has been expanded into a CD reissue with a half-dozen bonus tracks.

You get a taste of his lunacy right from the start, as “Tom Swift” puts the adverb-rich boy inventor into perilous captivity – in the tuna-salad slot of an abandoned automat, to be precise. Other sketches lance his favorite target, TV conventions, making fun of commercials, interview shows (“Welcome Transients” features a guest with a compelling story to tell who is unable to remember its key points), sentimental stories, newscasts, and, of course, a generous helping of the poetry of Percy Dovetonsils (“Ode to Stanley’s Pussycat” and “Happy Birthday to a Bookworm,” among others) recited over a shrill wordless background chorus.

Cats as Cats Can

From the Vault Dept.: Sometimes a book showed up on an editor’s desk that was unusual enough (the book, that is, not the desk) to merit outsourcing to a reviewer unfazed by such things. In fact, what they didn’t know was that I was, am, and shall remain a devoted cat person. Sorry, pooches. Myrna Milani continues to write and has added blogging and podcasting to her activities; her website is here.

                                                                                   

DR. MYRNA MILANI, veterinarian and author of “The Body Language and Emotion of Cats,” has added a new element to a busy schedule: endorsement of cat food.

The brand name is Sheba, sold by the Kai Kan company, developed in Europe where the perception of cats is different enough to encourage the necessary research. “The European attitude accepts cats as hunters. An American looks at a cat and sees this gorgeous, graceful creature, ignoring the fact that the animal is by nature a hunter. When we see it stalking a toy, preparing to pounce, we think that's cute.

“So we don’t always understand the elements that contribute to the perception of the cat as a fussy eater. They’re susceptible to several items: sound. motion, odor, texture, and, finally, taste. What do we feed them? Something that doesn’t make noise, is still, has no odor, but has flavor and texture based entirely on what’s economical to produce.”

Not that Dr. Milani recommends an unswerving diet of anything, unless it’s rodent. “Nutritionally, the ideal food for a cat is a mouse. The two have co-evolved with this symbiosis. But nobody has really been able to pinpoint what it is about the mouse that’s so good for the cat. And keep in mind that the mouse in Los Angeles is probably eating different things than the cat in New York, causing subtle fluctuations in the co-evolutionary balance but not changing that essential relationship.”

Someone Is Interviewing the Great Chefs of Albany

From the Food Vault Dept.: Here’s a piece from 1989 that ran in the short-lived Capital Region magazine, a glossy book that died, as did so much else, in the early 1990s. The idea was to create a five-course meal woven through interviews with five superior area chefs. As was usually the case with that magazine’s nutcase editor, what ran wasn’t what I’d written, and it was changed against my wishes. So here’s the draft I prefer. As to the chefs and eateries named below, Jean Morel ran L’Hostellerie Bressane in Hillsdale, NY, from 1971 to 1996; he died in 2004. Susan Lenane died in 2016, and her husband, Bill Bensen, closed the Palmer House a year later. Selma Nemer ran Eartha’s Kitchen for five years, until 1990; she now owns and runs One Roof Holistic Center in Saratoga Springs, as well as being a noted painter. Yono’s has moved a couple of times since it was at Robinson Square, and now occupies a handsome space at Albany’s downtown Hampton Inn, alongside a casual-dining space called dp: an American Brasserie (named for his son, Dominick, who works alongside him). Dale Miller went from The Stone Ends to the Inn at Erlowest to an eponymous place in Albany to Saratoga’s Sperry’s – and now works as a consultant.

                                                                                            

A MAGNIFICENT MEAL puts life’s lesser imperatives in their places. You quiescently float halfway home from the restaurant before you find yourself wondering how the chef accomplished those marvels. It wasn’t just a veal pistache you polished off: it was a Platonic ideal of veal. And chocolate, that child’s delight, became instead an exotic showcase of richness so compelling that in finishing your torte you surely committed a mortal sin.

A great chef owes as much to Robert-Houdin as to Auguste Escoffier because cookery is a form of magic in which a flamboyant (often flaming) result conceals a journeyman’s care and preparation. CAPITAL Region chose the five best chefs in this area and asked them their secrets. They demurred. We persisted; “Surely,” we said, “you can crack open the kitchen door for us?” We invoked a New Year’s spirit; we pleaded. We begged.

Being the best, they acceded. And in doing so provided a dream menu, a five-course meal of a sumptuousness that a person could be tempted to die for. Lucky for us we need only diet.

Setting the Table

AFTER THE DELUGE, IT WAS THE RESTAURANT. When the Mohawk Valley village of Fort Plain was hit by flooding in the summer of 2013 – four years to the day after a similar horror – nearly 90 businesses told the town’s mayor that they couldn’t afford to reopen. Aaron Katovitch had only recently opened his restaurant, The Table at Fort Plain, and he, too, faced a scene of devastation. The restaurant’s basement flooded, wiring was destroyed, and his wine collection was lost, among other damages.

Aaron’s family rallied to his side; they rebuilt the restaurant in a scant four weeks. By the time I made my first visit there, six months later, the attractive eatery was humming with good business and great food.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Five and a half years later, he’s still going strong. He is defying the odds. As much as New York’s Montgomery County likes to promote its villages, Fort Plain is not a tourist destination. If a single restaurant could make it so, then Katovitch’s cooking ought to be enough. 

The menu changes as often as new ingredients demand, and summer is a time when there’s fresh, local produce a-plenty to liven a dish. The chef has set himself a challenging mission: the window for fresh and local opens for a few fleeting months, but when it’s open there’s a considerable bounty.

Comedy of Confinement

From the Vault Dept.: I wrote this review little over a year ago, and I don't remember why. It wasn't published (until now), but it's a nice salute to the work of one of the most original writer-directors at work these days. I'm particularly looking forward to Iannucci's forthcoming film of "David Copperfield" (and you can see Iannucci pay tribute to Dickens here).

                                                                               

THE MOST TELLING MOMENT in Armando Iannucci’s film “The Death of Stalin” occurs as the dictator’s body is laying in state and the people – some of whom have traveled a great distance – throng past the bier. They are shocked and reverential, the uncertainty in their faces and manner an indication of the ideological lockstep in which they’ve been trained to march. Clearly, the cult of Stalin was wildly successful in its oppressive zeal.

We see them herded into this crowded space; previously, we’ve seen the mourners herded onto trains and then massing the city’s streets, many of them shot by overzealous security forces. Confinement becomes a central motif of the movie, whether it be the lonely confinement of a rape victim in prison or the ideological confinement of Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin), who continues to cling to the delusion that his wife was guilty of Stalin-invented charges even after the dictator’s demise.

It is 1953, and Stalin’s Central Committee must name his successor. These men are the supposed loyalists, the ones who endure too many late nights watching John Wayne movies with their leader, but who also deal in fear – both in its administration (Simon Russell Beale, as the loathsome Beria, casually directing family executions) and as its target (Molotov brings a chew toy to a meeting in a car so that his dog will bark over the conversation).

The Chance of a Ghost

THE GHOSTS OF VERSAILLES are there to greet you as you settle into your theater seat. They’re garbed in white; they languish in the gloom behind a scrim of, essentially, many strings. The stage is bathed in blue. The music starts – a plangent peal of woodwinds joined by a chorus of high strings – and more ghostly figures drift from the wings.

Brian Wallin, Emily Mirsch, Joanna Latini,
Kayla Siembieda, and Ben Schaefer
Photo: Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass Festival

The Ghosts of Versailles is the 1991 opera by John Corigliano and William M. Hoffman, inspired by the life and times of the polymath Beaumarchais, the man best known for his plays “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro.” He wrote a third Figaro play, titled “The Guilty Mother,” which becomes an opera-within-an-opera in this metafictional piece.

It’s a piece with a large cast, calling for the considerable resources that the Glimmerglass Festival has been able to lavish upon it – and a spectacular production is the result. “Another evening at the opera,” say a woman in the ghost audience. “I’m so bored,” declares a nearby man, winning a laugh from an audience puzzled at the outset by the keening sounds and haunted stagescape (with varied and thrilling set design by James Noone). The candelabra on the curving walls that dominate center stage suggest Cocteau; although these fixtures are still, the music’s unearthly sounds make the stillness seem animate.