vip in the city

Setagaya at last

At the Public Theater tonight for Unconditional, a new production by Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz’s LAByrinth Theater Company. The play, written by Brett C. Leonard and directed by 1992’s OBIE Award winner Mark Wing-Davey, is a study in racial tensions and urban isolation, played out in the overlapping stories of nine New Yorkers. Any synopsis of the complicated relationships would best be conveyed by diagram; the play’s natural comparison would be to the 2004 film Crash… another entry in the “everyone hates everyone else” genre. In Unconditional, though, the tensions are mostly confined to between blacks and whites, with one fiery Latina thrown into the mix — probably the most entertaining of the miserable bunch.

The staging was in the round, with scenes played out amidst sliding panels and in every nook and corner of the stage, which made for interesting, if occasionally obstructed views. It all began with a jolting bang (a Confederate flag burning and a hanging) and ended on a somewhat more hopeful note (a wedding). In between there were all kinds of brutality, and quite a bit of sex and swearing. The sprawling cast and rapid-fire series of vignettes made it difficult to invest much emotion into any of the characters’ plights; as a result, the violence and loss did not resonate as intended. What should have been horribly shocking, felt contrived, or worse: gratuitous.

Variety called the play “clever, attention-getting and not very nice”; The New York Times assessed that “the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts.”

After such depressing fare, we went in for the comfort of ramen noodles. Months ago, we were thwarted in our first attempt to visit much-hyped Ramen Setagaya; this time out, the newness had worn off sufficiently for us to be seated with no wait. (Well, also, it was 10:30PM.)

The narrow glass-enclosed restaurant on First Avenue is the first U.S. location of a popular Japanese ramen chain — just part of a larger Ramenaissance afoot in the city. (See also: newly-opened Ippudo.)

To start, vegetable gyoza. Store bought (beware!), but nicely pan crusted:

Setagaya’s signature ramen is the shio, or salt, ramen. I found the noodles pleasingly firm (there is a row of cooking timers on the kitchen wall to ensure this) and the toppings fresh — grilled-to-order pork slices (which I removed), seaweed, marinated bamboo shoots, julienned green onion, and half a soft-boiled egg, which had just the right custardy consistency. The super-authentic broth is “10 percent meat and 90 percent ingredients such as dried anchovies, clams, scallops, mushrooms, ginger, garlic, and (the secret weapon) Vietnamese salt, all boiled for five to six hours every morning.” It was light, with a complex, distinct seafood flavor which I rather enjoyed; those like my friend who prefer a heartier broth may be better served at Minca. (For what it’s worth, New York magazine likes Setagaya’s ramen the best.)

Oh, and on the way home, I met my first ever Academy Award winning director — riding the 2 at midnight with his son and Academy Award winning wife, no less.  Stars… they’re just like us!

Tags: East Village, plays, ramen, Setagaya

New England Symphonic Ensemble

At Carnegie Hall – not Lincoln Center, ahem! — for the New England Symphonic Ensemble program. It was an all choral line-up tonight, featuring Mozart’s Requiem, K. 626 as the highlight finale.

We had seats in the second tier center box, which was a perfect perch from which to take in the entire stage with its orchestra and hundreds of chorus members from five states. To start things off: George Frideric Handel’s “Sing Unto God” from his Judas Maccabeus, an oratorio written in 1746 — five years after Messiah. And then before the intermission break, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music, which culls its lines from Act V of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:

The man that hath no music in himself,/ Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,/ Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;/ The motions of his spirit are dull as night,/ And his affections darks as Erebus:/ Let no such man be trusted.

One distraction: although the program clearly requested that audience members hold their applause until after the final movement, we would invariably have to pause for the smatterings of claps at every break. Eh, whaddaya gonna do?

For the Requiem in D minor, a new set of choruses took the stage, many clad in navy choir robes. Mozart’s last composition is one of his most widely recognized works, not only for its music (which HYB posited as the only proof of the existence of God), but also for the mysterious circumstances surrounding the Requiem’s commission, the debate over how much of the score is attributable to Mozart, and how much was later composed by his colleague Franz Xaver Süssmayr after Mozart’s death.

My first exposure to the score was in Amadeus. (Years later, though, my high school chorus learned excerpts of it for performance, including the rousing “Dies Irae“. And as I recall, the “Lacrimosa” was one of SS’s all-time favorite pieces of music.) That film went on to win eight Academy Awards, including best picture, and is responsible for cementing in many people’s minds several of the myths surrounding the Requiem (and of Mozart’s life, generally.) Foremost among these is the role of rival composer Antonio Salieri in commissioning the work, and ultimately hastening Mozart’s death.

As I sat listening to the eminently moving music, it occurred to me that Amadeus, which recently played in New York as part of the Milos Forman retrospective at the MoMA, was released in 1984 — which is to say: before most of the members of these high school and college chorus members were even born.

Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” was released the following year, in 1985.

Tags: Carnegie Hall, Chorus, Mozart, Requiem

Boldly going to Macbeth

At the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater tonight for Rupert Goold’s justly celebrated production of Macbeth. The show makes its way to New York City for a (sold-out) five week run from England’s Chichester Festival Theatre and a sold-out West End run that earned Evening Standard Theatre Awards for the director and lead actor Patrick Stewart.

Anticipation has been high for the stateside transfer after the lavish praised heaped upon this production by the usually reticent British critics: The Evening Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh pronounced it the “Macbeth of a lifetime“; The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer called it the “best Macbeth” he had ever seen – this from a man who presumably has seen a lot of Shakespeare.

What could I possibly add to all the rave reviews? Anthony Ward’s stark, grey-washed set generates a fitting level of eerie foreboding throughout as it multi-purposes as war hospital, a kitchen and a morgue. The visual projections on the back walls ranged from documentary footage of Stalin’s marching armies to dark, dripping blood, adding to the unsettling atmosphere. There were so many moments and performances to admire: Kate Fleetwood’s fiercely sexy take on Lady Macbeth… the innovative staging of Act III’s banquet scene: first as viewed through the guilt-crazed eyes of Macbeth, and then replayed after intermission from the perspective of his guests… the “weyard sisters” making their first appearance as preternatural field nurses, rap-chanting their “Double, double toil and trouble” spell amid zapping lights and booms of thunder (well, that may have been a little gimmicky)… the unbearably drawn-out, horror-stricken silence that follows when exiled future king Macduff (Michael Feast) is told the news of his butchered wife and children…

And of course, it hardly needs to be said that Stewart was sublime as Macbeth, making even the simple act of making and eating a sandwich completely menacing. And yet, for all his unchecked ambition and grand, brutal scheming, when he delivers the famous “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” soliloquy in Act V, it is with the world-weariness of a soldier ready to head home.

This production deserves a wide audience, which it may get if speculation of a Broadway transfer proves true. If that happens, I would make but one suggestion: pipe in Alexander Courage’s Star Trek fight theme music during the final Macduff-Macbeth showdown. Hey, it worked brilliantly in The Cable Guy.

Tags: BAM, Brooklyn, Jean Luc Picard, Macbeth, Shakespeare, theatre