Dead reckoning
Is it just me, or does this seem like using From the House of the Dead as a club to beat a dead horse?
Chéreau’s production shares a lot of ingredients with Luc Bondy’s embarrassing Tosca: the director’s French inflection, the same set designer, slovenly costumes, a lugubrious air, dingy lighting, and simulated onstage sex. But if Tosca’s vapid avant-garde clichés raised the alarm that the Met’s Peter Gelb might be miring the company in trendiness, From the House of the Dead reassuringly suggests that the same sensibility can also yield a terrific show.
La Cieca’s fan of Justin Davidson’s writing (though not all the time), but I don’t get the point of using a rave review as an excuse for axe-grinding.
Or what do you think, cher public?
Beating a dead horse, maybe a little… but I was thinking the same way today at the matinee of Damnation de Faust*, which is to say evaluating Gelb’s progress in terms of comparing these productions…I think it’s fair game to look at the big picture and say why some are working and others not.
*Lepage’s theatrical effects are truly mesmerizing, by the way! I was very heartened for the Ring! Here were things that sounded very cliche and loathsome on paper (”interactive” video projections, scaffold unit set…) but worked and made terrific theater. It did what could be done for Berlioz’s patchy score. Vargas was really lovely but not big voiced enough to carry to the back of the house. Borodina – errr – no comment. Great acrobats!!
At first I thought that there’s nothing wrong with comparing one high-profile production at the Met to another, especially since Davidson is able to draw so many parallels. But thinking about it more, the comparison is rather pointless. The two works are so different that it should go without saying that similar elements in the stagings will work differently for each work. So, in the end, drawing attention to those similarities doesn’t provide any kind of revelation (which is the aim of such a comparison).
(and not being familiar with the degree to which Davidson had g stagins seems to have
Oops, forgot to erase my dribbles at the bottom of the post.
“the same sensibility can also yield a terrific show”
I’m not even sure what he means by “the same sensibility”? That Chereau & Bondy have the same sensibility?! (Do a “French inflection,” whatever that is, and the other items cited add up to a sensibility?) Or is he referring to Peter Gelb’s sensibility?
Perhaps a bit predictably, I agree. I think for a while here bashing Bondy’s Tosca is just going to be a sort of convenient shorthand that doesn’t actually mean much, like the word “Eurotrash.” Making reference to that awful, awful Tosca has the advantage of sounding less anti-intellectual than ascribing a vaguely defined but categorically offensive aesthetic to an entire continent, but I’m not convinced it’s really much different.
Maury, YOU make an excellent “parallel” about Davison’s parallels. Very nice.
Is bigotry too strong a word to use for this mindless stuff? What can Davidson mean by using “French inflection” pejoratively? “Slovenly costumes?” It sounds like he was expecting Bette Midler’s Las Vegas spectacular.
I have yet to read a single word of a Justin Davidson review that proves to me he is a qualified critic. Once New York eviscerated their critical pool with cutbacks (John Simon, Gael Greene, the always annoying but sometimes accurate Peter Davis) they lost the core of what their magazine used to be. NY Magazine critics now are an embarrassing shadow of themselves. I can barely get through three sentences without gagging at the tepid phrasing and the milquetoast shallowness. I would say that New York doesn’t even register on the critical radar for most artists at this point.