TRIUMPHANT RETURNS
A few hits, and the proverbial Fabulous Invalid that is Broadway stages an
astonishing recovery. It happened last season, thanks in large measure to some
inspired revivals that lent American classics brilliant new spin and sparkle.
Happily, most of the best are running strong, their stars still blazingly on
the job. Despite crinolines and the absence of overt sex, Donna Murphy and Lou
Diamond Phillips reveal in Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and
I a
love story of tigerish intensity. In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to
the Forum, with its merry, wicked Stephen Sondheim score, Nathan Lane,
unfairly faulted for failing to be Zero Mostel, dances on a high wire of
classic comic convention, twirling quirky shtick all his own. The irreplaceable
Zoe Caldwell, who created the role of Maria Callas in Terrence McNally's
ingenious Master
Class,
has passed the torch to Patti LuPone: an Evita
for a Medea, and why not? LuPone's diva credentials are in order. Watch her and
marvel. Now the new season's hopefuls are chomping at the bit. This month all
eyes are on the classy Sigourney Weaver, on furlough from Hollywood for Sex
and Longing, the new comedy by Chris Durang (her Yale classmate). Ronald
Harwood's Taking Sides, which probes the Nazi links of that titan of the
podium Wilhelm Furtwängler, showcases the fine-tuned, sharp intelligence
of Ed Harris. The next link in the chain of great revivals could well be the
Lincoln Center Theater's The Little Foxes, starring the always
enthralling Stockard Channing as Lillian Hellman's cold-blooded, grasping
terror Regina. Watch for her this spring.
--A.B.
Nathan Lane in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
and Patti LuPone in Master Class
Photo: Joan Marcus
UNSETTLING THE AMERICAN WEST
Get out your Gestalt meter. Pina Bausch, Tanztheater Wuppertal's high priestess
of angst, anomie, and hard-bitten glamour, is turning her jaded gaze on the
American West, where she spent a month last winter. Set to American jazz
and pop tunes from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, this new work, called
Nur Du (Only You), is said to be about "the breakdown of the
American dream," and takes place on a stage set with giant redwood trees. (No
surprise to those of us who have taken in her previous mise-en-scènes,
which have included leaves, dirt, carnations, dust clouds, collapsing walls,
and fish tanks, variously populated by her weirdly glamourous troupe.) This is
not the choreographer's first encounter with Americana (from 1958 to 1962 she
studied and performed in New York), but hers is a distinctively Germanic point
of view. Bausch's four-city tour takes her to Berkeley (October 3-5;
510-642-9988), Los Angeles (October 10-12; 310-825-2101), Tempe (October 17;
602-965-3434), and Austin (October 22; 800-687-6010).
--N.D.
A Scene From Nur Du (Only You)
Photo: F. Carbone
A BODY OF WORK
After some thirty-five years of performing and dancing,
Trisha
Brown retains--gorgeously, improbably, wonderfully--both her potent allure and her
rare astringency. Sometimes she has been a hot mind in a cool body, and
sometimes the reverse. Her idiosyncratic movement is some of the slipperiest
stuff ever seen in dance, described by the art critic Klaus Kertess as
"unstable, molecular, and structural." Brown's 1983 masterpiece Set and
Reset was "the culmination of that way of working," she says, and so she
has included it--with the virtuosic Stephen Petronio returning to perform his
original solo--on the first program of her twenty-fifth anniversary season at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the Trisha Brown Company is opening the
Next Wave Festival (October 1-6; 718-636-4100). Also on that bill: her solos
Homemade (1966) and Accumulation (1971), the fabulously fluid
Opal Loop (1980), and none other than
Mikhail Baryshnikov, performing
alongside Brown in a mirror-image duet she calls You can see us (1994).
The meditative score was composed by Brown's longtime collaborator Robert
Rauschenberg. Highlights of the two other programs include a duet with the
master improviser Steve Paxton and a brand-new dance called Twelve Ton
Rose. Later this month the company travels (sans guests) to Dartmouth
College's Moore Theater (October 11-12; 603-646-2422).
--N.D.
Austin Baer is a writer based in New York.
Nancy Dalva is working on a series of essays on Merce Cunningham.
