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July 25 – Laurie
Anderson’s Homeland, which played at the Rose Theater in the Time Warner Center as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, was a show of all-new material – I guess it’s an album that will be out shortly on
Nonesuch Records, and she’s taking it out on tour.
I've probably seen Laurie
Anderson 20 or so times since 1980, but this was one of the few shows I’ve seen where Laurie left all the visuals at home and just did a music concert,
featuring herself on keyboards and violin, a four-man band and two female singers, with a guest horn player and one duet with
Lou Reed (“The Lost Art of Conversation”). I admire her effort to balance the poetic indirection of the artist with the urgent directness of the town crier – she addresses the war in Iraq and other crimes of the Bush Administration somewhat obliquely and with a certain amount of humor, which worked best in the witty and infectious number “Only an Expert.”
(See video of that song on the Lincoln
Center Festival's Media Lounge page.) Although the music was lovely, the sound mix was pretty muddy, and I could barely make out half of what she was singing, which was very frustrating. And I missed the visuals. Laurie had told me that she used a story in the show that she’d learned from one of my
end-of-year zines (I send her a copy every year), and I was tickled that it turned out to be the last line of the show. I like feeding material to artists I admire, even if I’m only
quoting Molly Ivins
telling the story about Ann Richards, the late great governor of Texas: “The '94 election was a God, gays and guns deal. Annie had told the legislature that if they passed a right-to-carry law, she would veto it. They did, and she did. At the last minute, the NRA launched a big campaign to convince the governor that we Texas women would feel ever so much safer if we could just carry guns in our purses. Said Annie,
'Well, you know that I am not a sexist, but there is not a woman in this state who could find a gun in her
handbag.' "
July 26 – I’m glad I made it a point to see A Catered Affair
before it closed, if only to have in my viewing history the memory of a Broadway musical whose primary virtue is understatement. Unheard of, right? It’s a sweet, small, dry story about a no-nonsense girl from the Bronx, Janey (the superb Leslie Kritzer), who wants to marry her boyfriend without a lot of fuss. Her unromantic parents are willing to concede to her wishes, because they married without a big wedding and they can’t afford it. Except that their son went off to war and died in battle, and his death benefit suddenly arrives in the form of a big check. It’s enough for Janey’s father,
Tom, to buy another share of the cab he drives…or to throw a fancy dinner for the newlyweds, which Janey’s mother,
Aggie, feels compelled to do to make up for all the times she favored her son over her daughter. It could have been mawkish and sentimental, but John Doyle’s direction of
Harvey
Fierstein’s script (based on a movie written by Gore Vidal, based on a Paddy Chayevsky teleplay) keeps it real and genuinely emotional. It’s unfortunate that he had to cast Harvey as Janey’s gay uncle Winston – Harvey
has such an awful singing voice that it’s torture to inflict it on an audience. But it’s a lovely character whose relationship with his sister is very touching – he encourages her to wake up to her dreams and desires and not just let the rest of her life drag by. Oddly, yet believably, the strongest relationship in the play is between the mother and the dead son, whom we never see but who is represented by a folded up flag on the kitchen table. Faith Prince gave a fantastic performance, so understated, so clear, so present, taking the audience through several amazingly long wordless moments.
Her character is strikingly similar to the mother in The
Light in the Piazza. John Bucchino's score is
appropriately small-scale and modest -- he gives Tom Wopat a
"big" number as Janey's father, "I
Stayed," which is dramatically valid but a little
overblown. I took Chris (below), who was visiting from
Tennessee, and over drinks at Thalia
we talked about how much Aggie reminded us of our own mothers.
see previous entry here
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