I just got back from a two-day trip to New York. I went down on the train Wednesday morning and got to Pennsylvania Station around 10:30. I walked up Seventh Avenue to Broadway to Columbus Circle and had a sandwich at Whole Foods. I went to a noontime mass at the Paulist Fathers’ church and then I walked down Broadway to 44th Street to the Shubert Theatre where I saw Noel Coward’s play Blithe Spirit with Angela Lansbury as Madame Arcati, Rupert Everett as Charles, Christine Ebersole as Elvira, and Jayne Atkinson as Ruth. The play, a comedy first performed in London in 1941, is about a novelist, Charles, who is married to his second wife, Ruth, and living in Kent. They invite to dinner a medium, Madame Arcati, and a physician and his wife, so that Madame Arcati can conduct a séance after dinner to enable Charles to gather background material for a novel he is writing. Madame Arcati is unaware of the motivation for the invitiation. In any event, as a result of the séance Charles’ first wife, Elvira, returns from the after-death spirit world. And complications ensue. The play itself is delightful, an especially well written work for the theatre. The focus seemed a little different this time, because Angela Lansbury was apparently considered the star. I can’t say for a certainty but I am inclined to think that there were cuts that diminished slightly some of the other roles. All of the actors were competent, and the play worked, but not so well as it might have. The chemistry between Charles, Ruth, and Elvira was a little lacking. Angela Lansbury was the only performer who made a truly stellar impression. The play was done better last year in Providence by the Trinity Repertory Company by actors who had more chemistry working together, made all the relationships seem believable, delivered the lines more effectively, and more fully realized the work’s comic potential.
I checked into a room at the Chelsea Lodge on West 20th Street off Eighth Avenue, and had a meal at a place called the Eros Café at 190 Seventh Avenue. I was curious to try it, since it is on the ground floor of the apartment building that I lived in from 1976 to 1978. It has sort of a diner menu and says it serves breakfast all day long. I had an omelette with French fries. The fries were pale, and I didn’t especially like the slight taste of whatever oil they had been cooked in, and so I didn’t feel like finishing the meal. The staff seemed friendly and attentive, but I don’t think I’ll go back.
Wednesday night I went to Bellini’s La Sonnambula at the Metropolitan Opera with Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Florez. It has been reported that Natalie Dessay did not want to perform the opera in the Swiss village setting called for by the libretto of this 1831 opera. The production by Mary Zimmerman sets the work in a present-day rehearsal studio where La Sonnambula is being rehearsed. Kind of a tired old idea right off the bat. You really have to be quite the pseudo-sophisticate to think that sounds better than a Swiss village. I don’t object to a change in time and place if the whole thing is done in a way that makes sense. Unfortunately little makes sense in this production. The details have not been thought through, maybe because the powers that be at the Met despise the audience and think they won’t know what’s going on anyhow. People just sit back and hear exotic sounds they don’t understand and watch people move around on stage, so they must think. It is never quite clear to what extent the opera is being rehearsed and to what extent the characters are actually experiencing events in their own lives. A count stops by, and arrangements are made so that he can spend the night sleeping in a bed in the rehearsal space. Would a count, or anyone for that matter, go to New York without staying at a hotel or with friends and just show up at an opera rehearsal place to be offered a place to stay? Would an opera singer’s adoptive mother hang out at the rehearsal space? Some stage mother. Would people in an opera company carry on wildly if a singer fooled around with a visitor? These people do, throwing around pieces of paper for no apparent reason. If a singer were a sleepwalker, wouldn’t she sleepwalk at home and not at the rehearsal space? Et cetera, et cetera. The singing was very good, but a concert performance would have been preferable to this nonsense.
On Thursday morning I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and looked at the Bonnard exhibition and at some of the permanent collection. The Bonnard paintings were interiors and still lifes that the artist painted between 1923 and his death early in 1947. To me he seems like a sort of lesser Matisse, but I’m not really a student of the visual arts. I had lunch, something similar to ravioli with wild mushroom stuffing, at the museum cafeteria. Very pleasant.
In the afternoon I spent some time strolling around Greenwich Village, looking in a few of the shops.
For supper I had a quite tasty ham sandwich, and cheesecake for dessert, at the new restaurant in the lobby of the remodeled Alice Tully Hall. I enjoyed the company of a blogger and a friend of the blogger, both of whom had chicken pot pie.
I then attended a concert performance of the operetta The Firebrand of Florence, with music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and book by Edwin Justus Mayer. In 1945 the operetta had a three-week tryout in Boston and then a run of forty-three performances on Broadway. The story was old-fashioned, even for 1945. The show has only one memorable melody, so it seems to me, and no memorable lyrics. The characters are like cardboard figures, and the plot is trivial. Still, I enjoyed the performance very much. The performers were all competent and they made a good effort, although I wish they hadn’t used microphones and amplified sound. The work has some humor, though corny at times. Nathan Gunn was quite good as Benvenuto Cellini, the firebrand of Florence. Most of the dialogue was omitted, and a narrator set the scenes instead. The remodeling, with darker wooden paneling, has improved the appearance of the interior of Alice Tully Hall, but with the amplified sound I couldn’t form any impression about the acoustics.
Portrait of Benvenuto Cellini 1822 Giclee Print
Vasari, Giorgio
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This morning I took the train back home.
