He Knew All The Words

One of Richard Avedon‘s most important bodies of work is his celebrity portraiture. Large-format, minimal composition in front of a seamless, black-&-white, these pictures are iconic. I’m convinced I have more than four vinyl albums that feature cover photography by Avedon, but these are all I can lay my hands on tonight. But what a great quartet! Take a look at this—

Broadway’s Fair Julie Andrews

Wow—Julie looks so young and fresh. And a bit saucy with her fingers in her mouth. I love her heavy-gauge mock turtleneck and her kinda messy little-boy hairdo. I was torn about which track from this album to offer here. I was going to put her rendition of A Little Bit in Love from Wonderful Town, but in the end I think she overplays it a bit. Her voice is too pure for Columbus, Ohio, methinks. So here’s a more classic track, I Didn’t Know What Time It Was, by the greatest of songwriting teams, Rodgers and Hart.

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Tony’s Greatest Hits Volume III

Tony’s looking suave here, with his upturned collar and him fiddling with his cuffs. A man’s man. The angle is curious—usually one would avoid a shot where the camera’s aimed upward at the subject. But it works. Not only does it give him some heightened physical stature, it reveals him as the towering figure of popular song he was at that time (make no mistake, he still is). The song from this album was an easy choice—I Wanna Be Around—a song I’ve been obsessing about lately. Oddly, I think this recording is different from the one on the I Wanna Be Around Album (which is the same as on the Ultimate Tony Bennett CD). I know that back in the day sometimes a record company would release a different take on compilations, and some artists even re-recorded tracks for their Greatest Hits comps (John Denver did this in a way I find fairly annoying). Whatever the case here, the arrangement is the same, but I can hear differences in the performance. Either way, it’s freakin’ great.

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Je m’appelle Barbra

Ah, back when she was simply Baaaahbra, with the pageboy haircut and the Egyptian eyeliner eye. Doesn’t Babs look fab here? She’s quiet. Svelte. Monochrome, with combed bangs and casual bangles. She teamed up with Michel Legrand for this album and sang a mixture of old and new songs, all from the French. Here’s a track written by the young Monsieur Legrand, with French lyrics by Eddy Marnay, with the English adaptation by none other than Johnny Mercer. Barbra’s totally controlled on this track, no histrionics, no Broadway hamming nor California excesses—just that perfect perfect voice and real emotion.

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Chér

Cher’s album Chér was released twice, first as this version, Chér, and then again as Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves, based on the success of that title’s single. She too is looking young and fresh, serious, though a bit vampy (a quality which, as we all know, would soon change to campy). Anyway, get a load of those eyelashes! And I pity the poor hair & makeup assistant who had to comb out those perfect long bangs. Everyone knows Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves, and many people know her lesser hit The Way Of Love from this album (the latter is one of my very favorite instances of a cover song which does not update the gender of its pronouns, which thereby creates an ambiguously bisexual context for Mrs. Bono’s heartbreak), but I’m going with an album track here that has some bounce and some grit, I Hate To Sleep Alone. On their Under The Blacklight album, Rilo Kiley perform an original song called Close Call which is obviously influenced by Gypsys, Tramps, & Thieves. So I was not wholly surprised to discover this Cher track which has the same kind of desperate anger that Rilo Kiley has made their own on so many songs. Jenny Lewis should mix a cover of this track into her live performances of Close Call. Anyway, like all of us, Cher hates to sleep alone.

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Bonus!
Rilo Kiley’s Close Call:

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Here’s a wonderful live sketch from Two’s Company, with Bette Davis and Burt Lahr. Really really funny… Reading that Wikipedia article linked above, I just learned that the 1952 Broadway production was choreographed on Miss Davis by none other than Jerome Robbins.

I tend to avoid gay-for-gay’s-sake theater and other cultural endeavors. “Naked Boys Singing” is not really up my alley, so to speak. So it was with some trepidation that I accepted Laura’s invitation to join her and few other gay male friends to see Slipping, a new play by Daniel Talbott. The New York Times review by Andy Webster said the play

might well be titled “Gay Rebel Without a Cause,” packed as it is with adolescent angst and starring a handsome leading man, Seth Numrich. If there is a cause, it’s the hero’s quest to find love and heal wounds left by an earlier affair. That’s as deep as it gets, although there’s plenty of gay wish fulfillment too.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement right in the opening paragraph. But it sounded like it might be at least watchable and it was certainly the right off-off-Broadway price: $20. So off we went, and as with my experience of Burn The Floor, low expectations once again win the day.

Slipping was more than watchable. And it was involving and angsty in good ways, though ultimately only for the mind and not the heart. The actors were all good in their roles, at least when the text would allow them to be more than stereotypes. The focus of the story is on Eli, an 18-year-old fish-out-of-water San Franciscan who’s moved with his mother to Iowa. He’s indeed a rebel without a cause, lost in his own inner turmoil, for which the audience is given no source whatsoever. His father is recently deceased, his mother is distant and selfish, he wallowed in an abusive love relationship with another boy (which we see in flashbacks), he’s struggling to develop a new relationship with someone much more mainstream than himself and his ex, and he smokes, sulks and cuts himself. If we can accept all that as a given, without asking why, then the play works as a character study of the period in life when a boy becomes a man.

Directed by Kirsten Kelly, who uses a light touch to keep such a dark text from overpowering the tiny Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the production never drags, which is usually a good thing, but when you realize that the episodic nature of the text seems at times as if Talbott couldn’t sustain any single scene beyond its first conflict, then you begin to see why Talbott refers to the play in his program note as “this latest draft.” But Talbott does a good job of organizing all these little scenes to produce an overall story arc that does hold together.

Seth Numrich plays Eli just right — expressing all the conflicting adolescent qualities of exterior toughness shielding a fragile (or broken) soul. It’s not Numrich’s fault that the play, despite it’s emotional themes, is never touching, never forcing the emotions through the fourth wall and into the audience’s hearts. So while I could sit and watch this play with interest and even plenty of enjoyment, I never felt moved to more closely identify with the characters. And I never felt moved emotionally at all.

In my early days of New York living — the mid 90s — I was most fortunate to become friends — through other friends — with the choreographer and director Jerome Robbins. I cherish many memories of evenings at the ballet with Jerry (and the big group of us going out for burgers afterward), of dinners at his house, and of escorting him out to his Bridgehampton beach house a few times.

Jerry had a huge collection of vinyl records. After his death, as the estate wrapped up the distribution of his personal items and the left-over household effects, I was invited to sift through the vinyl and take what I liked before the collection was sold as a whole to a used record store. I selected maybe 30 albums, most of which I chose for their relation to Jerry — composers I associated with him because of his ballets, artists I’d discussed with him, that sort of thing. Among my picks were two prized albums. First, a copy of the original Broadway cast of West Side Story, which Jerry had signed, and which I gave to my parents (they had seen the show on Broadway back in the day and they, of course, are responsible for my own love of musical theater). And second, A Party with Better Comden and Adolph Green, Comden & Green’s 1958 recording of their Broadway revue of songs from shows they’d written. Robbins collaborated with Comden & Green on many shows, and this particular album is inscribed to him right on the front: “Dear Jerome, Happy everything. Love, Adolph”. Wow.

A cast recording of a later production of the same show, from 1977, has been issued on CD, but the 1958 recording has yet to be issued on CD or digitally. Here’s one of my favorite songs on it, The Reader’s Digest, in which our party hosts gleefully give us ultra-condensed readings of Gone with the Wind, The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Romeo and Juliet, The Story of Mankind, Les Miserables, War and Peace, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Mein Kampf (!). There’s a charming spoken intro to the song as well.

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I know this isn’t exactly the kind of thing I usually go for, but I saw Burn the Floor last night. I expected to be mildly bored at best and terribly annoyed at worst. Instead, I had a ball. I know. You’re asking yourself “Where has the snob gone?!” Oh I’m sure he’ll be back.

But wow, an entertaining, high-energy night of crazy ballroom dancing, sexy sweaty half-naked bodies, good (for the most part) live music, and enough variety and cheese to make even a misanthrope smile. That’s what Burn the Floor is.

Sure, some of the dancers were not so great, and some of the music did annoy. But the high-octane sexiness of dance partners Kevin Clifton and Giselle Peacock, who were featured over and over throughout the night, went a long to making up for some of the other less-than-perfect dancers. The production also features — through August 15 only — Karina and Maksim of Dancing with the Stars fame. I thought they were great too — but not as great as Clifton and Peacock, who really did seem to burn the floor up with every step. I know nothing about ballroom dancing, and I think the reason I loved those two so much was that they seemed to throw themselves into each step with real musicality, each movement coming from within their bodies, extending outward. That kind of musical authority is something I love in certain classical ballet dancers. But I’ve always wondered if it’s an asset in competitive dance like ballroom — or is it better to stay closer to technique and precision? It must be an asset, I guess, since this whole cast is made up of dancers who’ve competed professionally for years.

The music was as muscular and energetic as those half-clothed sweaty dancers. Two drum kits — each of the size of my apartment — flanked the stage, and the dancers moved in front of them and also between them on a staircase. They were foundation for a live orchestra that seemed to be mostly a wash of synths, a terrific violinist, a sax player, and a funky rhythm section of guitars and bass. Two singers did a great job of singing a wide variety of songs — ripping off everyone from Rosemary Clooney (“Sway”) to Ike & Tina Turner (“Proud Mary”). The whole thing had the kind of excited cut-and-paste effect of a Baz Lurhman film (“Strictly Ballroom” filtered through “Moulin Rouge”).

Well, if the snob can come out for just a minute here, let me say that Penny took me to this show on a pair of tickets that she received with the compliments of the house. That is, free. Would I pay Broadway prices ($120!) for this? Um, no. Would I pay $40? Sure. I mean, we’re not talking about the pure dance of plotless Balanchine ballets here — we’re talking about the dance equivalent of a bon-bon. It’s sweet, exciting, delicious — and gone in two bites….

Youtube preview:
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[mobile]YouTube preview[/mobile]

I just heard the sad news that German choreographer Pina Bausch has passed away. She was 68 years old. I love her theater pieces and her choreography and never missed her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, when they came to New York. I hope the company will continue to perform her works — and tour with them.

I saw her wonderful production of Gluck’s Orfee et Eurydice at Paris Opera in 2005, which was the best combination of dance and opera in a single production that I’ve ever seen. This past December I brought my parents and Patsy to BAM to see her company’s Bamboo Blues — and made three new Bausch fans out of them. Here is BAM’s trailer for that production, followed by a clip from a much earlier production….

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[mobile]BAM’s Bamboo Blues trailer

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