Should everyone's voice matter equally, or in some cases, should it matter at all?
Unless you were marooned on an ice floe last week, you know that NBC brought forth its second live broadcast of a musical in as many years.
Last year, the network gave us the problematic but widely watched “The Sound of Music.” This year it was a three-hour production of “Peter Pan.”
This was a semi-revised version of the show created in the early '50s, originally starring Mary Martin, and first broadcast on TV in 1955.
This time around the star was Allison Williams, the 26-year-old actress known to a certain demographic as Marnie Michaels on HBO’s "Girls," and to a different demographic as the daughter of "NBC Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams.
Christopher Walken, known to one and all as the actor who can uniquely make unhinged characters seem weirdly endearing, played Captain Hook.
I don’t want to review the show. Every amateur blogger, online “personality,” media and/or culture “reporter,” and smart-alecky self-impressed Tweeter in North America has already done that.
I will only say that I was amazed -- well, maybe not all that amazed -- that hardly any of the “reviews” of this show mentioned what, to me, was its one glaring and essential problem: the profoundly dull, witless direction/choreography of Rob Ashford. The truth is that Williams was fine, maybe potentially better than fine; Walken was maybe a tad miscast, but could have been deployed much more amusingly; the still-sparkling musical score was undermined by pokey staging of the numbers.
All of the elements, however, could have been easily whipped into a very stylish, contemporary piece of entertainment, if there had only been a Susan Stroman or a Lonny Price, or somebody of that stature doing the whipping.
It's not the snark itself I object to. I understand it's fun and sort of irresistible.
That’s the end of the review I said I wasn’t going to write.
What I really want to say is a word about the instantaneous online snark that is now visited on productions like this one, or indeed any kind of live, usually televised, event.
It’s not the snark itself I object to. I understand it’s fun and sort of irresistible, now that we have the technical means, to comment on shows or events as they’re actually unfolding in real time.
The problem is, that when the dust settles the next morning, even the most ill-informed, gratuitously nasty, intellectually weightless piece of “opinion” now gets reproduced, Googled, quoted, reposted, blurbed, and generally talked about in about the same way as every other piece of opinion, including those examples written by people (not necessarily critics) who actually know what they’re talking about.
In other words, when we search Peter Pan Live Reviews, we generally can’t know whether “Seven Reasons to Hate This Peter Pan” or “Things That Sucked About Peter Pan” are the work of someone who has spent years inside theaters and/or newsrooms thinking about things, or, alternately, whether they are by a 22-year-old unemployed former General Studies major who read somewhere that it’s good to have a blog as a way of getting “your brand” out there. I know – one of the ostensibly liberating things about the Internet is that a handful of self-appointed (actually not, but that’s another story) guardians of public opinion no longer can claim an iron grip on culture and taste. Now we’re all empowered, and we can all weigh in. Our voice matters.
But should everyone’s voice matter equally, or in some cases, should it matter very much, if at all? Various of the online reviewers, some on more or less legit-seeming websites, and in the course of generally snippy critiques, bragged that they did not know this musical at all, didn’t really like musicals anyway, hadn’t heard of Mary Martin, and weren’t real, real familiar with the Peter Pan story or its history.
It’s enough to give honest, thoughtful, well-crafted snark a bad name.
Better Than a Tie With G-Clefs on it
It’s the Christmas season, time to point out some music-themed gift ideas for that hard-to-buy-for classical geek on your list.
Here’s one -- a fat, important book that just came out a few weeks ago:
Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles 1940-1954 (Library of America; 1,200 pages; $45.00)
There are two local resonances here.
One is that the editor of the volume,Tim Page, grew up in Storrs. Tim, of course, went on to become one of the finest music critics of our time, and a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Second, Virgil himself has a special historical bond with our fair state: 80 years ago his cheerfully inscrutable little opera“Four Saints in Three Acts” – music by Thomson, libretto by Gertrude Stein – had its world premiere at the Wadsworth Atheneum. That improbable event, masterminded by the Atheneum’s wizardly impresario Chick Austin, lives on as one of Hartford’s cultural milestones.
Hartford, of course, went on to live a quieter, somewhat less audacious cultural life after Chick left town. Virgil, meanwhile, went on to make more of a mark as a critic than as a composer.
I just acquired this book a couple of days ago, so I can’t offer anything like a real review. Maybe I’ll do one after I’ve worked my way through it, although that could be a while – the volume is 1,200 pages.
On the other hand, since this is mostly a compilation of writings that have been previously published over the years, I’m pretty sure I’ve read most of this material already.
I have, I confess, complicated feelings about Virgil Thomson. I mean, I appreciate the bite and energy of his prose, and the fact that he kind of rescued classical music writing from the Tragically Reverential school.
Still, I seem to be less forgiving than most people that his actual judgments – about certain composers and certainly about individual pieces – were often either suspiciously ungenerous (frequently with respect to his fellow 20th century composers) or, if we can use this word to describe aesthetic opinion, simply wrong. This is a fact that most contemporary critics acknowledge (just last week Alex Ross admitted as much in an otherwise admiring little New Yorker post) but they kind of give Virgil a pass nonetheless.
I’ve never entirely understood this pass. Is it given because he was charming and quotable (which he was), or is something else at work here?
Maybe I’ll gain some insight into this question after I spend some more time with the book.
The HSO Looks at Music Education
The recent alliance between The Bushnell and the Hartford Symphony has many of us – including me – watching with interest to see what concrete changes will be taking place at both organizations. We got one important clue the other day, when the HSO announced it was undertaking a major Needs and Resources study to examine its outreach and/or educational programs. The nationally-known arts consultant Mitchell Korn,who has been involved in various Hartford-area arts initiatives over the years, has been engaged to lead the study and summarize its findings. His fact-finding will conclude on December 18.
If you are a music educator, or a parent, or just an interested citizen who has ideas about how our flagship orchestra can play a role in the lives of our schoolchildren, you are invited to be in touch with Mr. Korn. His email is Mitchell@mitchellkornarts.com.
Steve Metcalf was The Hartford Courant’s fulltime classical music critic and reporter for over 20 years, beginning in 1982. He is currently the curator of the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series at The Hartt School. He can be reached at spmetcalf55@gmail.com.
