Tabaimo and Maki Morishita | Fruits Borne Out of Rust / 2020

active fruits

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tabaimo and Maki Morishita (director and choreographer) Fruits Borne Out of Rust / REDCAT (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) / the performance I saw with Lita Barrie was on Sunday, February 23, 2020

 

I never, as a critic, enjoy complaining about the difficulties one has in describing the event he has just encountered. I’ve done it only a very few times. But the rather stunningly beautiful Tabaimo and Maki Morishita performance of their Fruits Borne Out of Rust is just such a work. I think part of the problem exists within me, enjoying the sensibility of Japanese culture without entirely being able to completely comprehend it.

     Having just come back from the completely energetic dance performances of Lula Washington and the Contra-Tiempo Urban Latin Dance Theater performances at the Wallis Annenberg theater in Beverly Hills, I was a bit underwhelmed by this quieter and more intellectually conceived work. Both of those previous concerts were so exciting to the audience and performers that you had to just wonder at their exuberance. Combining, Latin American, African, and black American cultural references made me realize just how much of US dance depends on these sources. After all, jazz and Latin American rhythms are at the heart of what is perhaps one of our very greatest of contributions of the popular theater musicals, Leonard Bernstein’s and Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story.

     Just yesterday, in The New York Times Gia Kourlas rightfully called out the abandonment by the rather dour Belgian director Ivo van Hove’s version of the new Broadway representation of the great musical made even greater through its cinematic presentation. The finger-clips, she argued, represented the very visceral and bodily tension of the young people of that period, a kind of beat-like energy that went right down their torsos into their legs. As Kourlas quite brilliantly argues:

 

                     Robbins’s choreography — with its searing blend of tension and

                     freedom — gives “West Side Story” its joy and its horror. It

                     springs the events into action. Arthur Laurents wrote the book, but

                     Robbins’s choreography is the true libretto.

 

Let’s just say that US citizens,  as the name of one of the characters in West Side Story, like “action.”

      Compare that with director Tabaimo’s note about the work I saw the other night:

 

“Rust is the reaction of iron undergoing oxidation in effort to obtain a more stable state of matter.

      From instability, stability is born. Then, when that stability loses its balance, an unstable state is born again…Though it may look as though the cycle is going around and around, it is actually progressing little by little until the fruits of this cycle are born.

       Those fruits will not be still, but rather will create another phase of instability.”

     And indeed, this performance by the excellent dancer Chiharu Mamiya, a classical trained ballet dancer, does gradually represent just those cycles and transformations that Tabaimo and Morishita proclaim.

     Brief—in my mind all too brief—exultations of exciting dance movement alternate in this work with slow-moving, on-the-floor arm and leg gesticulations. These seem more like something, to me, out of Kabuki theater than traditional Western dance. I realize my lack of perception, and my own inability to recognize the theoretical possibilities of dance—which I also truly admire—yet by the performance’s ending I felt disappointed, particularly after the wonderful final Medea-like let-go of Mamiya at the end. Somehow I felt frustrated to not experience Mamiya’s balletic abilities.

     Yet, she was able to convey a great many emotional expressions even laying on the floor, particularly when alternating in a colorful leotard with more active expressions of her skills. But the true genius of this work exist in Tabaimo’s startlingly beautiful video projections—reminding me somewhat of the Barrie Kosky videos for Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

     At various times the dancer in this work is zipped up in the set itself, locked in and out of her own performance, presumably representing her inner transformations from rust to regeneration. It may be a too-literal presentation of the dance performance’s libretto, but, if nothing else, Tabiamo’s visuals are absolutely beautiful and create a kind of marvelous tension between the passivity of the dance with an almost electric imagination of what the dancer will soon become as she literally rips her way into and out of our perception.

     In the end, I came to appreciate this work because it was based on a theory inside the body’s simple ability to explode in its need to express possible motion. Perhaps the citizens of the US need to curtail their more violent expressions and maybe the Japanese need to let themselves—and I say this after reviewing dozens of Japanese films by Kurosawa, Oshima, Teshigahara and numerous others—desire to open themselves up to a livelier expression of love and desire. Rust and oxidation just doesn’t do it for me.

     As my theater companion for the night, Lita Barrie, and I rose to leave the REDCAT Theater, she asked me what I thought about the performance. I didn’t immediately answer since I do not like to have other theater-goers overhear my appreciations and peeves. Each to their own views I would intensely argue. But as we left the theater for the parking lot, I suggested that I found the dance quite “gestural.”

      She laughed: “That’s just what the man next to me whispered as we were about to leave.”

      But “gestural” is not necessarily a negative statement. It’s simply a different tradition from ours, one that I might want to explore more deeply. If the highly expressive Method Acting and melodramatic dramas of US theater define us, perhaps just a gentle movement of the hands, the face, the legs, might be a better way to express our pain and frustrations. Perhaps the cycle of rust to oxidation represents a far longer view of human life. And perhaps the slow movement from one to the other is not so very different from what occurred in West Side Story: the past to the present, when the oxygen of the one redacts the other. The newly acclimated Sharks, after all, destroyed the Jets.

 

Los Angeles, February 26, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2020).

 

George Balanchine (performed by the Mariinsky Ballet) | Jewels / 2019

gems of abstraction

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Balanchine Jewels, performed by the Mariinsky Ballet / Glorya Kafman Dance at the Music Center, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion / the performance I attended with Diana Bing Daves McLaughlin was on October 24, 2019

 

Last night I attended a performance in Los Angeles’ Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of George Balanchine’s iconic, three-part ballet, Jewels, performed by the renowned St. Petersburg, Russian company Mariinsky Ballet along with their own orchestra conducted by the august Alexey Repnikov. This is the same company, if you recall, which gave us Ggalina Ulanova, Alexei Yermolayev, Marina Semenov, Vakhtang Chabukiani, along with, much later, Irina Kolpakova, Natalia Makarova, Alla Osipenko, Irina Gensler, Alla Sizova, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and numerous others.

     Created in 1967 by George Balanchine for the New York City Ballet—who himself began his career in St. Petersburg and worked at the Mariinsky until emigrating in 1924—Jewels is one of Balanchine’s most popular works, with good reason.

      Instead of taking the traditional route of narrative balletic logic, this trilogy, using all of the devices of traditional dance, chose to abstract those movements, along with a somewhat traditional use of great composers’ music, in order to focus on the incredible en pointe movements of the ballerinas, and the remarkable leaps and spins of the male members of the ensemble, not that the female members don’t spin themselves into near toy-like tops throughout. Indeed, in all three of these gem-like dances, the choreographer focuses on the athletic abilities of his corps rather than hiding it behind the romantic stories so much of traditional ballet has relied upon.

      If it’s a simple device to break these rather un-related dances through three lovely “gems,” emeralds, rubies, and diamonds, Balanchine subverted into his terpsichorean text another connecting link, the three major sources of his own dancing experiences.

      Emeralds, the first of the three, refers through its musical scores of Gabriel Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Shylock, to the choreographer’s early experiences with French dance, where, in this case, the “emeralds” dance in light green longer tutus, spinning through the forests, with principals Daria Ionova and Maxim Zyuzin (in the evening in which I saw this), creating such lovely pas de deuxs that you might almost cry for their balletic balance. And then, of course, there are so many “emeralds” spinning nearly out of control, their tutus flying, that you almost begin to perceive the preciousness of the glimmer of the green jewels they represent.

      I loved this piece, but it was in Rubies that, for me, things began to come alive. All in red and white, dancing to Igor Stravinksy’s Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, the stage stuttered and stirred itself alive with the struts and playful, jazz-like stretches of dancers Kimin Kim and Ekateriana Chebykina.

     Here, in a far more Americanized version of life, the brilliant dancers Kim and Cheykina seemed more equally matched than in the traditional holding and lifting positions of the males in relationship to the females that you usually think of in traditional ballet. Drawing on Balanchine’s Russian roots, you oddly enough felt that perhaps the Socialist-Communist notions of equality, combined with the references to his US experiences, broke through the puffery of the French dance tradition. Kim, in particular is a male dancer to watch, with incredibly air-deifying leaps and spins into space that, if not quite matching those of Nureyev or the sometimes quirky positions of the great Baryshnikov, made you realize he is certainly a challenger to that tradition.

     I might have watched the red nuggets of that piece all night; yet, it was the shortest, perhaps simply because of the technical impossibilities put upon these wonderful dancers, and, in some senses, realizing the impossibility of their playful, yet incredible movements—skipping, jumping, spinning, leaping, all in relationship to one another—you had to realize that their legs and breath simply couldn’t hold on forever.

     The last great piece brought back the Mariinsky’s own older traditions in a grand, almost wedding-like gathering of the full cast in Diamonds, accompanied by, who else could it be, that most Romantic of all Russians, Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky, with his Symphony No. 3 in D Major, representing Balanchine’s personal relationship with this very company.

     Many reviewers have described Alina Somova and Vladimir Shklyavo’s dances as one of the most amazing performances of the season. But despite that remarkable duo, to me it appears that this is a corps de ballet performance, as dancers, gradually accumulating—who, arriving out of the wings, so to speak—weave and turn in and outside of one another as if this were a formal dance being performed in court. It is a lovely thing to behold, and we realize that this is the final gem in the ring that Balanchine has created for us.

      This might almost be something out of the famed company’s production of Leonid Lavrovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. And how could one not love the glorious female and male meetings of these so incredible performers. Even when a single dancer falls a bit out of sync with the rest of the perfectly synchronized others, we easily forgive him; after all this is so much better than the Rockettes, who just kick and kick. These dancers give their entire hearts and bodies to the performance and make for such lovely scenes that it appears to be out of some kind of fantasy of what dance can become.

      Diamonds maybe one of the best dances ever performed; it is the final jewel in Balanchine’s great work. Yet I still wanted to go back to that over-enthusiasm of Rubies. Balanchine evidently said “I’m Georgian. I love beauty!” So I might reply, “I’m American (actually of Swiss heritage), let the jazz of US-like rhythms provided by the Russian Stravinsky’s wild strums go forward without the resolve of the other two pieces. Let Kim dance his heart out.

 

Los Angeles, October 25, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2019).

Malpaso Dance Company | Dance performance / 2019

the square and the tower

by Douglas Messerli

 

Malpaso Dance Company (Fernando Sáez, Executive Director, Osnel Delgado (Artistic Director) and Daileidys Carrazana (Associate Director) in production with Joyce Theater Productions at the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts in Beverly Hills / the performance I saw with Thérèse Bachand at the Bram Goldsmith Theater was on March 28, 2019

 

Another of what I have expressed as my endless coincidences occurred last night while attending the Cuban Dance Company’s performance at the Willis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. The first piece of their wonderful concert was a remarkable version of Merce Cunningham’s Fielding Sixes, viewed just a few days shy of that dancer/choreographer’s 100 birthday.

     I’d met some of his former company members, Paul Taylor and Karole Armitage (with whom Howard and I once shared dinner with David Salle), and I knew Cunningham’s lover John Cage. Taylor, in fact, was immediately responsible for my studying for about a year with the Joffrey Dance Company in New York, an experience which I loved. Inexplicably, I’d never been able to actually see any of Cunningham’s dances.

     Fortunately, that was righted last night at the performance, with a reduction of 7 minutes of the 1980, 28-minute performance, with music from Cage’s original Improvisation IV, and with new costumes by David Quinn and different lighting by Manuel Da Silva.

     The original was described by dance critic Anna Kisselgof:

 

“The first thing that strikes the eye in Merce Cunningham's

new ''Fielding Sixes,'' which had its New York premiere

Thursday night at City Center, is Monika Fulleman's fetching

backcloth.

     Charles Atlas's initial beige-lavender lighting draws

attention to a purple treelike shape, and this method of

painterly blotch is duplicated in a green form implying a

flower or a toadstool, while a burst of red erupts at the far

right. Three burlap hangings complete the picture.

     The same free finger-painting atmosphere is reflected

in the activities of the dancers, who start out as a duo, turn

into a trio and then into a quartet. This human paint drips

all over the spatial canvas that Mr. Cunningham knows,

better than anyone, how to fill with a painter's eye.

     In all there are 14 dancers, and Miss Fullemann's costumes

reflect the colors of her set. The men are in shiny purple tights,

some with white tops. The women are in light green,

wearing shorts over tights. This color-coordination would

seem a violation of Mr. Cunningham's method of isolating

the decor from the choreography and sound during the

composition of his work.”

 

     The Malpaso Dance Company’s performance was cut down to 11 minutes (with permission from the Cunningham Foundation), staged by Jamie Scott with costumes—in the case the women sheathed in steely light blue body suits and the males swathed in dark red—by David Quinn. In this version the backdrop was draped entirely in black, which made the lighting by Manuel Da Silva all the more important as it put the entire focus on the dancers (Dunia Acosta, Maria Karla Araujo, Daileidys Carrazana, Osnel Delgado, Beatriz Garcia, Armondo Gomez, Abel Rojo, and Lisbeh Saad) themselves.

      As in the original, the major movements of this piece consisted of high-raised leg extensions along with a spectrum of other movements including lifts and back kicks. Rereading the original (1981) review, it appears that this new production centered far more on uniform patterns than the one danced by Armitage and others. But that, in turn, gave the dance an even greater breathtaking quality, as coming together in units and twos, threes, and other formations, the dancers appeared to be participating in various communal gatherings, paring off only to rejoin larger groups, and stressing the oppositional demands of the personal and those of the larger community.

      The second piece of the evening, Oscaso (2013), choreographed by Osnel Delgado, consisted of a simple duo dancing to the music of three musical scores (Parallel Suns by Autechre, the 2nd track of Kronos Quartet of White Man Sleeps, and Sunlight by Max Richter). The costumes were by Osnel Delgado, one of the dancers as well. Here the male figure, dressed in red pants and a flowered shirt, makes a remarkable contrast with the female dressed only in a loose black miniskirt and dancer’s top.

      Here the dancers twist and turn around and through each other’s arms, often in somewhat awkward gestures that suggest both sexual love, alternated by escape and embracement, recreating a sense of the natural conflicts that embody any relationship. There are also, as in several of the pieces of the evening, moments of comic delight, as the woman drags the male across the floor in evident, if only momentary, dominance.

      Being (Ser) (2018), choreographed by Beatriz Garcia, was one of the strongest dances of the evening. With lighting again by Manual De Silva and the costume design by the choreographer, the dance (translated in English as “to be”) is similar, in parts, to the Delgado piece. With music by the Italian composer Ezio Bosso, however, this is a far more programmatic work, centered around, as dance critic Jerry Hochman described it, the building blocks of being: “independence, conflict, and resolution.”

     A bit like the earlier Cunningham piece, the first of the three movements, begins with tandem movements, which expresses the performer’s simple joyfulness for being individuals who still work within a kind of ménage à trois, who gradually breaking away, move into angry conflicts with each other, particularly regarding their heads, as they fight not only for control over one another but for intellectual dominance, while still regretting their actions.

     In the final movement the dancers come together, almost fearing to lose touch with one another as they come to realize their dependence upon their societal sharing for their very survival, including working against their sometimes-violent instincts. The resolution is a beautiful dance sequence that redeems the pushes and pulls of the past two movements.

     The final piece of the evening was Ohad Naharin’s 1996 large group dance, Tabula Rasa, where once more the larger society challenges the individual relationships. The dancers all seem to be dressed in this number as if they were joining one another on the beach, with denim cut-offs, florid blouses and shirts, etc.

     But even if they might be perceived as celebrating a beach outing, here too there are tensions, as they fall in smaller dancing pairings—one threesome, two males and a female, moving in and out of their relationship by slipping above, under, and through each other’s embracements. In some senses, Naharin’s dance almost summarizes the balletic questions of this company: “can we live together despite our desires to live apart, our need to be ourselves without breaking the important link of the societal whole.” I think, given Cuba’s political concerns, this is a very crucial issue of the island’s life. How does anyone with his or her own personal demands and desires survive in a society that often insists that everyone must work together as a larger artistic and political unit?

     The Malpaso Dance Company does not attempt to directly answer these conflicts, but the art they produce about these issues is so profound that you realize they may be now be one of the most important dance companies on the planet. The issues they raise are crucial for the survival of living on this earth where we must all work together, despite our profound differences, in order to live and make meaning.

 

Los Angeles, March 31, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2019).

Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart | Hello, Dolly! / 2019

dolly will never go away again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerry Herman (music and lyrics), Michael Stewart (book) Hello, Dolly! / in a performance directed by Jerry Zaks / touring company with Betty Buckley in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre / the performance I saw was with Howard Fox on February 3, 2019

 

As a 49th anniversary gift to Howard I bought tickets to the traveling company of Hello, Dolly! with Betty Buckley in the starring role at the grand Hollywood Boulevard theater in Los Angeles, The Hollywood Pantages.

      That theater, to which tourists from around the area and the world flock, kept notifying me that mobile phone entrance was the only possible way to enter the gates of this paradise. We are stubborn troglodytes who refuse to have cellphones (and strangely enough, my young assistant, Pablo, is also cellphone-less), so I had to call the monstrous Ticketmaster several times to make certain that our tickets might be held a will-call, and to reassure me of the fact that we would actually be offered printed tickets. We were, and the process went quite smoothly.

      Although both of us had seen the spritely musical version in Barbra Streisand’s 1969 takedown (almost as if wrestling with all of the other film’s characters to make sure that she remained up- and-center of all scenes), and, as a younger man, I had seen Carol Channing in the role—I believe, but am not certain—in a production in Chicago on national tour, Eve Arden performing the role (also in Chicago, I realize after having googled her career), and Pearl Bailey in Washington, D.C., I felt already pretty “dollied up”, and imagined I didn’t need to see yet another performance, unless we happened to be traveling to New York, at which time I would have loved to have seen Bette Midler or Bernadette Peters in the role.

       But Howard, not even recalling the Bailey event, claimed he’d never seen a stage production, and I felt he should have that opportunity, since, despite Streisand’s remarkable singing, the stage version was what Jerry Herman’s rambunctious musical was all about. Someone like Channing doesn’t just “milk” the audience, she enchants them, making every performance feel like it was a special event just for them. With her deep raspy voice, her amazingly blithe movements through space, and her endless appetite for food, which stands in for her appetite for audience appreciation, she literally hogs the stage, creating a kind of vacuum that even Gower Champion’s lithe male dancers at the Harmonium Gardens couldn’t match. When Channing’s Dolly strolled down the restaurant stairway and went marching across the stage apron you knew she wasn’t just singing to Rudy, Manny, Stanley, and the dozens of others for which she requested an empty knee, but was greeting every single individual in that audience, asking them to allow her to wow her as much as the Harmonium Gardens waiters and Maître-d. She made you love her whether you wanted to or not. And how could you not.

       Like Howard, I remembered little of Bailey’s performance, although given her career, it must have been magnificent. Eve Arden was a good performer who made a credible Dolly which also gave me the shivers of pleasure given my loving memories of the dozens of Our Miss Brooks TV series I had seen as a child.

       Before I proceed to the rest of this review, I should also mention that I had met the composer Jerry Herman and introduced him to a celebrity audience at a party at the famed Gotham Hotel on 46th Street which I hosted for writer Jerry Lawrence, when he performed piano numbers from various of his musicals, including from not only this musical but from Dear World, with the book by Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (events which I’ve reiterated in several volumes of My Year, particularly in My Year 2005) and, a half-year later met Carol Channing briefly at another celebration for Jerry Lawrence’s book, which my press published, in Malibu, the actress with a purse perched across her head, presumably to protect her from the heavy Los Angeles sun. In a recent obituary a commentator described that she had become hair-allergic given the too many times she had died her hair blonde and red. I saw her as a gray-haired beauty, still looking like an elderly version of the Channing I had witnessed on stage.

      I have, accordingly, a rather personal relationship with this musical—although I must admit it’s never been my very favorite of Broadway entertainments.

      My very favorite of its songs, “Put on Your Sunday Clothes,” Howard confirmed, this time seeing it, was his favorite as well, he admitting that tears trickled from his eyes in joy. From mine as well; but then I cry at most great musicals these days.

     The marvelous costumes and settings by Santo Loquasto, the great dancing of the ensemble, and the simple pleasure of seeing all these figures moving off from the confines of Yonkers to the big nearby city, says everything about this work before it even begins to fall into shape. Before we can even imagine it, Dolly Levi, the magician of “I can do anything,” with calling cards to match, has already convinced the constantly bawling Ermegarde (Morgan Kirner), feed and grain-purveyor Horace Vendergelder’s (Lewis J. Stadlen) rebellious daughter to run off to the city and enter a dance contest with her lover Ambrose Kemper (Garett Hawe), while promising Horace an encounter with two lovely women—one, Irene Molloy (Analisa Leaming), a truly beautiful hatseller, and the other a hired schill, Ernestina Money (Jessica Sheridan) in order to convince him that the only true woman for him is Dolly herself (Betty Buckley).

      From the moment they joyously get on that train, along with the younger rebelling workers in Horace’s shop, the romantically-inclined but totally inexperienced Cornelius Hackl and the far younger and utterly innocent yet remarkably athletic Barnaby Tucker (one of the best Broadway dancers I’ve seen for a long while, Jess LeProtto), we know we’re going to have a great adventure:

 

Beneath your parasol, the world is all the smile

That makes you feel brand new down to your toes

Get out your feathers, your patent leathers

Your beads and buckles and bows

For there's no blue Monday in your Sunday clothes.

 

     I chose this song as one of my best Musical Theater numbers in 2018. And I still think it’s one of the better works of Broadway. Once they call “All Aboard, All Aboard,” we might as well be back in Judy Garland’s world of the trolley song of Meet Me in St. Louis, a nostalgic trip into love in a world gone by.

      Dolly, amazing, arranges, seeming quite by accident, for Cornelius and Barnaby to visit Irene and her assistant Minne Fay (Kristen Hahn) at the very moment that she is scheduled to be called upon by Horace, chocolate unshelled peanuts in hand, when the two, espying their employer waiting on a nearby bench, dive into the woman’s hideaway.

      How she has arranged we never quite know, but New York City was apparently a smaller space in those days, when the city was centered on the lower part of Manhattan (14th Street is the center gathering point, it appears, where the parade goes marching by), and before Horace can even imagine it, the little hatseller has become “infested” with males crawling everywhere, within her closets and under her tables, not only strange men but the very “boys” who work for Horace back in Yonkers, who Dolly incredibly portrays as men of great fame and wealth.

      Dolly has won round one, alienating Horace from his would-be lover and his workforce, while pushing the shy young men into the arms of the two willing women and forcing Horace temporarily into the arms of the heavy-weight hoohcie-koochcie dancing Miss Money, whose appearance and even her supposed money-belts distresses the now very-confused Horace.

      We already know the conclusion of this confection’s plot: Dolly will have her way. But the question is, as the Los Angeles Times reviewer Margaret Gray asks, why? Why does the vivacious Dolly even want the rather unattractive, money-pinching Horace.

      Gray’s answer is simply “money,” that Dolly is desperate for financial support from the very moment she appears in Act 1. I really disagree. Yes, money is very important in this work, particularly since most of the play’s figures have none of it (or only 165 and some cents in the case the impoverished Cornelius). The marvelous Dolly only has the memory of it through her loving former husband Ephraim Levi, who apparently acquired his cash in order to, “pardon the expression,” spread it around like manure to make young things grow.

     If as Gray argues this, German-based, Thornton Wilder adaptation, might seem to be centered upon a Cabaret-like accumulation of money, it is, in fact, I argue, just the opposite. Dolly is a true populist, determined to intervene in the capitalist system in order to spread the wealth around—while totally enjoying herself in the process or even gorging herself with the good food money allows. She is completely disinterested in money except for how it can be meddled with, taken out of the purses of the people like the half-millionaire Horace and put properly into the pockets of the poor workers such as Cornelius, Barnaby, Ambrose, and the Rudy, Manny, Stanley-like waiters. She, herself, in the years since her husband’s death, had to live, apparently, hand-to-mouth, creating a thousand personas in order to imagine her place in the world.

      If Dolly is a bigger-than-life creature, a woman whom, finally, Horace, in his marriage proposal will describe as a “wonderful woman,” it is all about her utter ferocity, her refusal to hear anyone deny her identity. And that is why the actress who portrays her must be so very larger than life.

     Channing clearly was. I am sure Midler (who I have not seen in this production), was just such a figure. Buckley is almost there, at times channeling Channing in her low alto rolls of voice. And if there is anyone who is a true stage doyenne, it is Buckley. She rules the stage as she has in many a role. She has generally played sad figures, singing with a high alto, beautifully wailing voice as in her role as Grizabella in Cats or in Sunset Boulevard. And those roles and others have shown us what a truly remarkable musical and theatrically-based artist she is.

     But at 71 (my age precisely, when I can no longer even imagine such a stage performance), she sings now in a lower alto voice, and doesn’t quite have the ability nor apparently the desire to strut out upon the stage the way Dolly must in order to make herself totally believable (or some might some claim, unbelievable). Don’t get me wrong: Buckley is a true star, an artist who I highly admire. Yet she just doesn’t somehow have the pizazz of the Dolly in the script, who apparently can transform everything she sees into something else.

     We love Buckley in a slight memory of her greatness, if not as much in her presence. Yes, she lifts up her dress a bit and even attempts to convince us of her dancing skills. But alas, in both voice and gams she’s simply not the Dolly we need to convince us of the magic the character achieves, bringing the entire Yonkers community into her domain and suddenly forcing even the grumpy Horace of her amazing transformative gifts, let alone allowing the gods to let her former loving husband speak through her new fiancé’s voice.

     Still, I’d go again to this lovely production, and stand up to applause for the lovely songs she belts out. And, of course, to shed tears for the beautiful songs, “Put On Your Sunday Clothes,” “Hello, Dolly!,” and “It Only Takes a Moment.” Love is like that. Over the years, I guess, I have come to love this musical too much to ever be able to totally abandon it. In my mind, “Dolly will never [entirely] go away again.”

 

Los Angeles, January 4, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 4, 2019).