Two New Books on Indigenous Culture

I. Talking Skin: Indigenous Tattoo Traditions: Humanity Through Skin and Ink

(Princeton University Press.)

“For thousands of years, these communities have etched human experiences into skin, one powerful mark at a time. But sadly, much of that ancient ink is fading fast, along with the knowledge that surrounds it. To me, tattooing isn’t just art; it’s a vital piece of global cultural heritage.”

--Lars Krutak

I’ve always been fascinated with tattoos, ever since I was a kid and used to marvel over my Uncle Johnny’s flamboyantly decorated arms. He was a sailor in the Merchant Marines and often explained to me how every inked image reminded him of some exotic place he had sailed to: “Every picture tells a story, kid, every tattoo sings a song of my travels.” Such a romantic at heart, that Johnny. In the old days, the only folks with tattoos, at least that I knew of, were military guys and members of motorcycle clubs (as they were euphemistically called back then). But that, of course, is merely the popular culture in the West that has celebrated a kind of outlaw status for wearers of the “talking skin.” I don’t have any tattoos myself, never quite worked up the courage to go through that initiation that seemed to lead to an endless road of ink. My Métis wife has some, though, and through her I learned of far older inking cultures for whom the marking of flesh is a significant gesture that embodies a shared communal awareness of place and identity. Indigenous Tattoo Traditions: Humanity Through Skin and Ink Lars Krutak’s new book from Princeton University Press, is both a major contribution to that community of bodily markings which is greatly moving to me as a cultural commentator and a poignant reminder to me of how, in my formative years, I was intrigued by these mobile graphic artifacts, artworks that from my earliest days always felt like a kind of visual music. The songs that indigenous tattoos sing are rooted in a combination of ancestral pride and contemporary swag, and Krutak’s fine tome celebrates their singing in a truly poetic manner worthy of such a noble fusing of art and heritage.

White Christmas and A Christmas Carol: Second-Tier Holiday Cheer

Clyde Alves, Jonalyn Saxer, and the company of White Christmas. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

I loved the stage transcription of Irving Berlin’s 1954 Christmas movie musical White Christmas when it came through Boston in 2006 and again in 2015, so I was looking forward to seeing the Goodspeed Opera House version that opened last week, directed by Hunter Foster. But except for Kelli Barclay’s dance numbers it’s a letdown. The major problem is the acting, which is somehow simultaneously flat and overstated. The book by David Ives and Paul Blake, adapted from the screenplay by Norman Krasna, Norman Panama and Melvin Frank has a fairly complicated plot involving the efforts of Bob Wallace and Phil Davis, a pair of Broadway song and dance men, World War II veterans who fought under a beloved general, to round up their unit in order to pay tribute to him at Christmas when they discover he’s running a ramshackle Vermont inn – and to mount a revue there to put the place in the black. Still, it’s light and casual. The jokes aren’t inspired, but on both tours the clowning had the low-key pleasures of a good old-fashioned TV variety special from the decade of the film. And the characters were all satisfyingly human, so you felt drawn in. At the Goodspeed, the humor feels warmed-over and then juiced up so that you’re doubly aware that what you’re not hearing isn’t fresh. The vaudeville touches make you groan, especially a running gag involving a pair of chorus girls who keep trying to chase Phil (Clyde Alves) down at the worst possible moments, when he’s trying to woo Judy Haynes (Jonalyn Saxer), half of a sister act he and Bob discover in a New York club and end up hiring for the show. And the actors aren’t strong enough to make their characters convincing, including Omar Lopez-Cepero as Bob, Lauren Nicole Chapman as Betty, the other Haynes sister, who falls for him until a misguided rumor makes her think he’s a rat, and Bruce Sabath as General Waverly. (In the movie Bob and Betty were played by Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, Phil and Judy by Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen, and the general by Dean Jagger.)

The Baker’s Wife: No Revelation

Ariana DeBose, Scott Bakula and the company of The Baker's Wife. (Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.)

The Classic Stage Company production of The Baker’s Wife marks the first major appearance of a legendary failed musical that has been making the rounds for nearly half a century and has built up a considerable cult following among musical-theatre aficionados. The source material is a 1938 film classic by the French director Marcel Pagnol, based on a novel by Jean Giono, who co-authored the screenplay with Pagnol. It was optioned for a musical adaptation in the early fifties by Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows, in the golden days following their triumph with Guys and Dolls, and Bert Lahr was named to play the lead, a baker in a small provincial town whose beautiful younger wife runs off with a local peasant, sinking him in despair and prompting his neighbors to band together to track her down so that he’ll continue to produce his magnificent loaves of bread. Zero Mostel was attached to the project for a while, and then Joseph Stein – the author of Fiddler on the Roof – and composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz picked it up in the mid-seventies. With Topol, the star of the movie of Fiddler, in the lead, the show went on a pre-Broadway tour in 1976; in the wake of a stormy relationship with the production he was replaced by Paul Sorvino, Patti LuPone stepped in for the original leading lady, but the out-of-town problems were never solved, Stein and Schwartz left the show, which never made it to Broadway. Having fallen in love with the score, the celebrated English director Trevor Nunn persuaded them to mount it in London in 1990, where it garnered positive reviews but never captured a wide enough audience. Though it won the Olivier Award for Best Musical, it closed after a couple of months. Since then it has played in all the most important musical-theatre venues outside New York – the Goodspeed Opera House in 2002, Paper Mill Playhouse in 2005, and the Menier Chocolate Factory in London in 2024.

On Repression: Fun Home and Bat Boy

Sarah Bockel and Nick Duckart in Fun Home. (Photo: Marc J. Franklin.)

It’s not the Huntington Theatre Company’s fault that the opening night performance of Fun Home occasioned repeated displays of virtue signaling on the part of the audience; that’s what you get these days when you produce a play that wears its liberal heart on its sleeve. (The cheering began with the pre-show announcement, for God’s sake.) But Logan Ellis’s production of the musical, adapted by Lisa Kron from Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel, makes it easy for an audience to declare their allegiance. The show, which premiered at the Public Theatre twelve years ago under Sam Gold’s direction, is already didactic. It’s a memory play narrated by a character based on Bechdel, who grew up in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania in the 1960s and 70s, in a museum-like Victorian house that doubled as the small town’s funeral parlor (hence fun home, the family’s nickname for it), with a father who divided his time between undertaking and teaching high school English. Though Alison’s reminiscences permit her to revisit her eleven-year-old self, they focus on her coming out as an Oberlin freshman and, in the wake of that announcement, her mother Helen’s revelation that Alison’s father Bruce was a closeted gay man with a taste for young, sometimes underage men. Bechdel’s trajectory ends happily: she grows up to become a famous cartoonist. Bruce, on the other hand, ends up a suicide.

Fouettés, Flutters and Fun: The Trocks at 50

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. (Photo: Zoran Jelenic.)

On Sunday, Oct. 19, at the Elgin & Winter Garden Theatres, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo — the Trocks — closed their 50th-anniversary tour in Toronto with an evening in which exacting technique and theatrical excess sharpened one another — and the laughter felt earned. From the first moment, it was clear the Trocks were performing with both intelligence and irreverence.

Vertiginous Vortex: Our Little Gang / The Lives of the Vorticists

Reaktion Books/Univeristy of Chicago Press

“Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did and said, during a certain period.” 

Wyndham Lewis

“Vorticism . . . what does this word mean? I do not know.”

Wyndham Lewis

Even art historians with a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of advanced visual art trends such as Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism are often somewhat at a loss to grasp, let alone to cogently explain, the obscure art and literary movement that arose in the second decade of the 20th century in English avant-garde circles known as Vorticism, mostly by the Vorticists themselves. After the opening salvo of radical thinking that exploded in the new years of that newest of all new centuries, with a shared intellectual bomb contained in both Sigmund Freud’s 1899 theories of the unconscious, and Einstein’s 1905 relativity theory, tradition was turned on its head. Among other recent discoveries that seemed to call into question the sanctity of classical values, the domains of art and literature were also about to begin actively reflecting the dominant prevailing mindset of drastic and hyper-accelerated change.

How To Live and Die at the Canadian Opera Company: Roméo et Juliette and Orfeo ed Euridice in Toronto

Stephen Costello and Kseniia Proshina in Roméo et Juliette. (Photo: Michael Cooper.)

The Canadian Opera Company’s 2025–26 season opens with a stylistically mismatched pairing: Roméo et Juliette, Charles Gounod’s 1867 Shakespeare-inspired opera in director Amy Lane’s over-extravagant Malmö Opera rental, and the revival of Canadian director Robert Carsen’s minimalist 2011 staging of Orfeo ed Euridice, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 1762 rendering of the Greek myth. The two productions run in rotation at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre through to the end of this month.