July 9 - July 15
Wednesday - Day FourToday is our two-production day in New York City, so we are not going to push it. We spend the morning doing correspondence and stuff like that, and then we take a cab up to Lincoln Center to pick up the tickets for Contact. This is not by design, but today we are seeing both the 1999-2000 winners of the "Best Musical" Tony Award, and the winner of the "Best Play". Contact is the one that won "Best Musical" - not without some controversy, as there is only one verse of live singing and no live music (or original music, for that matter) at all in the production. We also didn't plan to see Contact at first, but both the plays we booked for this time closed before we got to New York, and so after it won the Tony, we decided to see what the hooha was all about. After collecting the tickets, we have about 90 minutes before showtime, so we head across to Columbus Avenue. We eat lunch at a sidewalk cafe, watching the traffic blare past us, and then we wander through the Lincoln Center. All over the city there are cow sculptures, each one a little (or a lot) different. There are supposedly 500 of them, Philip has read somewhere, but we have yet to find a real reason for their presence. There are a couple at the Lincoln Center (there are some at the New York Public Library, several on 5th Avenue, a couple in front of fancy buildings and lurking in parks). Then off we go to the Vivian Beaumont Theater, where Philip first saw Six Degrees of Separation (and where House of Blue Leaves also premiered, though Philip didn't see that) and where we both saw Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. The Vivian Beaumont is sort of an amphitheatre - it is circular, with the audience sitting in a horseshoe around it, steeply raked. Philip and I sat in the loge (i.e. upstairs in plain English), and when we sat down we were joined by a particularly garralous woman and her daughter. The woman insisted on talking to us pretty well nonstop before the show (well, actually, she was talking to ME because PHILIP turned his back on her and became very interested in his programme). She started by complaining about the seat, because she felt it was too high and as there was to be dancing she "wanted to see their feet". (I figured that since they had feet, we would see them eventually - and I wasn't too unhappy with the seat, as I was pretty sure I would be able to see everything (which is a pretty unusual occurrence for me!)) And eventually the show started and we could see their feet fine. Well. If the Tonys had a difficulty catogerizing this production for an award, we could understand why. It is actually a very modern ballet with some dialogue and one sung verse. This is not to say that we had a problem with the production. Quite to the contrary. We both thought it was an excellent piece of theatre, deserving of an award. It had three scenes/movements/stories. The first, the shortest, was about a swing. A literal swing. It was set in the 1700s. The preset, a la Sunday in the Park with George, was a painting called "The Swing", circa 1768, by Jean-Honore Fragonard, of a woman on a swing in some shady glade. When the lights went to black they stayed down longer than expected. When they came up, three dancers had taken up positions in the exact posing of the painting: one man, a servant pushing the swing, a gentleman lying on the ground in a strategic position, and a lady, her skirt billowing, swinging suggestively. The dance took it from there. All this swinging served as foreplay, and the dance itself was very sexual, with the lady getting rid of the gentleman and having fun with the servant, and then an interesting denouement. The second scene takes place in an Italian restaurant, with a husband taking his wife out to dinner. He is a boor and she is totally downtrodden, and has a vivid fantasy life in which she dances with the waiters. Then there is an intermission. The third scene, which takes up the entire second act, is another fantasy which bouces between an apartment building and a pool-hall-where-at-night-they-push-the-tables-aside-and-swing-dance. The main character is a non-dancer, although he is an actor who has won Tonys for his performances in drama and musical theatre. (We saw him last year in Cabaret, for instance, and Philip saw him in The Heidi Chronicles). His performance in this was largely comic. In this dance hall, every now and then, a woman in a yellow dress enters and all the men want to dance with her. And so on. That is the scene from which the whole show takes its name. Anyway, we enjoyed it! We took a long walk back to the apartment, had a rest, and then went out again, this time to see a very serious and intellectual play, Copenhagen, about nuclear fission and the making of the atom bomb. Well, actually, that is the subject matter, but the play is really about three people - the Danish nuclear physicist Niels Bohr, his wife Margrethe, and the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was in charge of the Nazi nuclear research during WWII. It reminded us of Stoppard's Arcadia (which was about history, mathematics and an eighteenth-century country estate) and of Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile (which was about a fictional encounter between Einstein and Picasso on New Year's Eve 1903). Here again were the kinds of ideas discussed in Higher Physics & Further Mathematics, dramatized and put onstage. And believe it or not, it was riveting. Dinner was eaten post-theatre at Philip's favorite Chinese restaurant in New York, Dish of Salt. We enjoyed that, and then strolled back our twelve-odd blocks to Colin's.) Tomorrow, lunch with Philip's friend Kim, and the latest Arthur Miller Broadway play, The Ride Down Mount Morgan, with Patrick Stewart (who began life as a Shakespearean actor, Trekkies). |
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