Call Me by Your Name: Veneer of Romance

Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name.

In Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, an American grad student in his mid-twenties named Oliver (Armie Hammer) spends six weeks in northern Italy during the summer months in residence as a research assistant to an archeologist (Michael Stuhlbarg) and has a love affair with Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), his host’s seventeen-year-old son. Neither of the young men identifies himself as gay – the first object of Oliver’s amorous attentions is Chiara (Victoire Du Bois), a neighbor of the Perlmans, and before Elio cements his relationship with Oliver he loses his virginity to Chiara’s daughter Marzia (Esther Garrel). Guadagnino and the screenwriter, James Ivory (adapting a novel by André Aciman), present their romance as a perfect confluence of physical and emotional energies at an ideal time in both their lives – especially Elio’s, since it’s his coming-of-age story – and in an ideal setting, a beautiful old villa in a picturesque town set against the magnificent landscape of Lombardy. (Sayombhu Mukdeeprom photographed.) Elio is a great-looking kid with an air of social and intellectual privilege; he’s fluent in English, French and Italian – his mother (Amira Casar) is Italian – his family has lived all over, he’s an accomplished pianist, and he has a comfortable, bantering relationship with the teenagers of the other summer people in the town. He walks around shirtless in shorts or swim trunks, smoking; he might be the image of the adolescent on holiday, snug in his own skin. But he holds back. He spends more time alone, reading or transcribing music, than he does with the other kids, and when they go to a club he’s the last on the dance floor. We see him eyeballing Oliver, who’s physically expressive – in sports, at a dance, or just lying on the edge of the pool reading – and it’s clear that he both envies the older man and is somewhat resentful of how easily he fits in. Their bedrooms are next door to each other – he has to give up his own room to this American visitor – and the day Oliver shows up, he’s so jet-lagged that he plops himself down on his bed, falls asleep instantly and opts to skip dinner, and Elio is put off by his refusal to act the role of the guest who does what’s expected of him. He thinks that Oliver’s impulsiveness and his manner are arrogant – and the fact that both his parents take to Oliver immediately and aren’t remotely bothered by his style doesn’t help. But Oliver reaches out to him in a friendly way, and Elio loses his skepticism – which is, of course, just a resistance to his own attraction to Oliver.

Chaos to the Core: The Zapple Diaries by Barry Miles

Beatles's manager Allen Klein, John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1969

The title is long but The Zapple Diaries: The Rise and Fall of the Last Beatles Label, the story of The Beatles’s failed business endeavor by Barry Miles, is a fascinating first-hand account. Miles was a personal friend of Paul McCartney when he opened the Indica Bookshop in London that featured art installations and poetry books by the leading avant-garde artists of the day. (One of those artists was Yoko Ono.) He started the bookstore in 1965 with Peter Asher, brother of Jane Asher, McCartney’s girlfriend at the time. Miles reflects on those early days with a kind of pragmatic fondness, “There is no question that without Paul McCartney’s support Indica Books would have gone under several years before it did . . . in 1970.” He says that the Beatle’s involvement was “kept quiet.” But the seeds for starting a new business to record new poets were planted and McCartney was particularly enthusiastic about supporting the Miles/Asher partnership in this manner. While Asher kept the store going, The Beatles hired Miles when they formed Zapple, an imprint of Apple, in 1968. Zapple was created to release “more experimental material” such as spoken word recordings and his job was to approach and record American poets for the new label. His book is about that gig, the artists he recorded and the office politics of The Beatles’ risky new business.

Inventory Management, Vol V: Pure Refinement

Klansmen get chummy with a Nazi grunt in the alternate United States of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.

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Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a direct sequel to Wolfenstein: The New Order, picking up directly where that game left off in the alternate 1960s where William “B.J.” Blazkowicz (Brian Bloom) and his band of underground resistance friends fight back against the victorious Nazi Reich, which, as of New Colossus, has successfully colonized the United States. The idea of the “Land of the Free” not being quite so free isn’t new – Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is probably the most famous example of this alt-history idea – but boy, oh boy, does it ever feel like a loaded concept in 2017. And that doesn’t escape the notice of developer MachineGames and publisher Bethesda Softworks, who used this public sentiment to their advantage with marketing material that asked people to “Make America Nazi-Free Again.” There’s never been a better time for a game like New Colossus to come out, because its outlandish conceit has never felt closer to reality.

Coal into Diamond: The Inspiring Story of Gospel Funk

The incredible Sister Rosetta Tharpe, consummate gospel singer and secret inventor of rock 'n roll, soul and visionary funk music, circa 1940.

“I feel like there is an angel inside of me that I am constantly shocking.” – Jean Cocteau

“When I’m on stage, I’m trying to do one thing: bring people joy. Just like church does. People don’t go to church to find trouble, they go there to lose it.”– James Brown

The word "gospel," of course, literally means good news. But the really good news is that gospel music morphed into the blues, blues morphed into soul, soul morphed into funk, and funk eventually morphed into both rap and hip hop. There will inevitably be another mutation in this wild musical evolutionary chain, but who knows what exotic shape it might take, especially considering the weird fact that hip hop has already become part of mainstream white pop music?

When blues music went on a blind date with gospel music and had too much rhythm and blues to think, that unlikely marriage of heaven and hell gave birth to something called soul. In some ways the parents of both these sacred and profane styles didn’t want their kids going out together, let alone settling down and starting a dance-mad family that would shake up the musical world forever. Thus we entered the fray that would become the saga of gospel funk, and saw its incredible climb to the stellar soul heights after its humble beginnings in the hot holy Southern church pews of America where fervent worship was the only spiritual dish on the community menu.

Out Of The Past: Nothing Personal at the Pace Gallery

Allen Ginsberg, poet, New York City, December 30, 1963 by Richard Avedon.

. . . to grasp again, with fearful hope, the unwilling, unloving human hand.

– James Baldwin, “Nothing Personal” (1964)

To live in a time when so much of the American worst has returned to squat like some demented, incontinent rooster on the White House lawn is to feel locked in a past more horrible for being resurrected in a new century. Jim Crow, voter suppression, the “Southern strategy” gone national: we’re past the body snatchers, and on to zombie politics. It seems clear enough, then, why the Richard Avedon Foundation has chosen now to reintroduce us to Nothing Personal. This large-format volume combining Avedon’s photographs with James Baldwin’s titular essay was published in 1964, at the violent height of what many were calling America’s new civil war. Its organizing observations were of the Civil Rights Movement, long before that historic reckoning had been assigned capital letters; more generally, it was a polemical outcry against dehumanization and alienation, with movie stars, pop stars, writers, socialites, and Louisiana asylum inmates among its subjects. Other themes, writ small or large, were the spatial dynamics of individuals, couples, and groups; the lonesome cause of the intellectuals, several of whom gave Avedon worried looks from within chiaroscuro lighting; and the naked human body.

Follies at the National: Challenges and Triumphs

Photo by Johan Persson.

The National Theatre has loaded a ton of money into Dominic Cooke’s revival of Stephen Sondheim-James Goldman Follies, the NT Live transcription of which is still doing the rounds. The ensemble numbers thirty-seven, not quite up to the cast of fifty that opened the musical on Broadway in I971 but substantial. Vicki Mortimer’s gargantuan set, its perspective shifting constantly as the Olivier Theatre revolve spins, evokes the dilapidated grandeur of the theatre that housed Dimitri Weissman’s Follies annually between the World Wars and is now scheduled (in 1971) to be converted into an office building. Paule Constable’s eerie lighting accentuates the ghostliness of the proceedings, as the Weissman girls reunite for a one-night-only reunion and we see their younger selves shadowing them as they recreate old production numbers and – in the case of the four principals, Phyllis and Ben Stone (Janie Dee and Philip Quast) and Sally and Buddy Plummer (Imelda Staunton and Peter Forbes), fragments from their early-forties lives, when showgirls Phyllis and Sally shared a flat and law-school classmates Ben and Buddy courted them while Ben and Sally carried on a clandestine love affair. (Zizi Strallen, Alex Young, Adam Rhys-Charles and Fred Haig play, respectively, the younger versions of Phyllis, Sally, Ben and Buddy.) Mortimer’s costumes work fine, too, with a couple of odd, glaring exceptions. Dee’s sack-like party gown is one. The other is Staunton’s, which is green and so leaves the audience puzzled at her insistence, in “Too Many Mornings,” that she should have worn green because she wore green the last time she saw Ben, the man whom she’s fantasized into the love of her life she’s never gotten over.

All in the Direction: Once on This Island on Broadway

Alex Newell as Asaka and Hailey Kilgore as Ti Moune in Once on This Island. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

A play isn’t just words on a page: a lot depends on how a particular production of a given work succeeds or fails in bringing it to life onstage. That’s one of the fundamental lessons I’m charged with getting across to my students in my introductory theatre courses, and it’s been reinforced for me by the Broadway revival of Once on This Island, which opens this week at Circle in the Square. It’s a textbook example of how a talented director and cast can elevate mediocre material. I’m doubly glad I saw it, because this is probably as good a production of this show as will ever exist, so I don’t think I’ll ever feel the need to see another revival.

The Vocabulary of Bullets: The Punisher

Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle in The Punisher, on Netflix.

Country, I was a soldier to you.
I did what you asked me to.
It was wrong, and you knew.

Country, now I'm just a stranger to you.
A number, a name; it's true.
Throw me away when you're through.

– "I Wish It Was True" by The White Buffalo/Jake Smith

Now, that’s more like it. After two long years, we finally get a Marvel/Netflix series worthy of the promise demonstrated by the first season of Daredevil and the audacious Jessica Jones. (The last 18 months have given us an uneven sophomore season of Daredevil, the missteps at the end of the otherwise impressive Luke Cage, the terminally sluggish Iron Fist and the fun, action-packed, but ultimately forgettable Defenders team-up miniseries in August.) Frank Castle – a.k.a. The Punisher, played again by Jon Bernthal – was the best thing by far in Daredevil’s second season, and now he is back in The Punisher. If you (like me) lost faith in Netflix’s small urban corner of the MCU sometime during your viewing of Iron Fist (I abandoned the show in the middle of its 8th episode and have never looked back), this first season of The Punisher is likely to bring you back to the fold. Though bloodier by far than any other Netflix/Marvel outing, Punisher offers its most character-driven story since Jones, and its most relevant since Luke Cage.

Books into Misbegotten Movies: Wonderstruck and Murder on the Orient Express

Jaden Michael, Oakes Fegley and Julianne Moore in Wonderstruck.

Todd Haynes got the 1950s in Carol, but he doesn’t even come close to getting the 1920s in Wonderstruck, his movie of Brian Selznick’s children’s book, which Selznick himself adapted. The gimmick in the novel is that it cross-cuts – as anyone who has read The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007) knows, Selznick is an overtly cinematic writer – between 1977 and 1927. In the 1977 scenes, a boy from rural Minnesota named Ben, who has recently lost his mother and has been taken in by his aunt and uncle, runs away to seek the man he believes is his father in New York City, following a clue he discovered among his mother’s things. In the 1927 scenes, a girl named Rose runs away from her overprotective father, first to find her famous stage- and movie-star mother Lillian Mayhew and then, when that doesn’t work out very well, her older brother Walter, who works at the Museum of Natural History. Rose was born deaf; Ben was born deaf in one ear, but he’s struck by lightning that takes away the hearing in his other one. That’s a hint of, or perhaps a metaphor for, the greater connection they turn out to share when the two stories come together.

Podcast: Interview with Elizabeth Waterston (1987)

Author Lucy Maud Montgomery, born on November 30, 1874.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1987, I sat down with Canadian editor, critic and biographer Elizabeth Hillman Waterston.

On this day in 1874, Lucy Maud Montgomery was born. Montgomery is best known as the author of Anne of Green Gables (1908) and a series of related novels and short stories, including Chronicles of Avonlea. Among Waterston's vast and varied writing are several books devoted to the life and work of L.M. Montgomery, including five volumes (and two complete collections) of Montgomery's journals, which she co-edited with Mary Henley Rubio. When Waterston and I spoke in 1987, The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. II. had just been published by Oxford University Press.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Elizabeth Waterston. as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1987.

Injustice for All: Justice League

Ezra Miller, Ben Affleck, and Gal Gadot in Justice League.

If awards were given out for excellence in setting the cinematic bar as low as possible, like some kind of bizarro-world Hollywood limbo contest, then Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice would have run away with all of them. Everything was in Justice League’s favour to succeed where its predecessor failed. This was it! This one was for all the marbles. The marketing was proud to show us a confident new direction for the DC Extended Universe that would diverge from the dour, mirthless tone of its previous films, offering a new way forward with colour and levity and likeable characters, which was totally their idea in the first place and not at all based on the success of those other crappy comic book movies. The news of the recent tragedy in director Zack Snyder’s personal life, horrible as it was, came with a silver lining for diehard fans in the form of replacement director Joss Whedon, who was sure to steer the ship into warmer waters by injecting the film with his trademark self-deprecating humour and wry character work. The stage was set for a proper course correction, and the opportunity was ripe to subvert the expectations of everyone in the audience with a working brain.

That Justice League – in which newcomers Cyborg (Ray Fisher), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), and The Flash (Ezra Miller) join the established trinity of Batman (Ben Affleck), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), and the recently “deceased” Superman (Henry Cavill) – does manage to subvert expectations, but in the wrong direction, is a whole new kind of disappointing. I thought I was spent; I didn’t realize there was still enough gas left in the emotional tank for this movie to burn through in a single flatulent spurt of acceleration that ended with me wrapped around a telephone pole. I thought it would be impossible to be disappointed by Justice League. I was an idiot, apparently.

Nostalgia Is What It Used To Be: My Dear Departed Past by Dave Frishberg

Dave Frishberg's autobiography My Dear Departed Past was published by Backbeat Books earlier this year.

I was about twenty pages into Dave Frishberg’s autobiography when the Hoagy Carmichael song “Stardust” lurched into my head. Specifically, the lines from the opening verse, “Love is now the stardust of yesterday / The music of the years gone by." Perhaps it was simpatico because Frishberg’s favourite book was The Stardust Road, written by Carmichael in 1946. That autobiography, by one of America’s best songwriters, made “a big impression” on Frishberg, whose particular songwriting style comes out of Tin Pan Alley, although he doesn’t admit that in My Dear Departed Past (Backbeat Books). But his book does reveal his influences in a nostalgic way.

Brigadoon: Love and Loss

Robert Fairchild in Brigadoon at New York's City Center. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The 1947 musical fantasy Brigadoon was the fourth collaboration between Alan Jay Lerner (book and lyrics) and Frederick Loewe (music), but it was the one that put them on the musical-theatre map. It ran for nearly two years and became a staple of regional and community theatres; there were three revivals on Broadway within a decade and a half of the end of its original run. Now it’s revived only rarely, having somehow acquired the reputation of being syrupy and old-fashioned, like a Rudolf Friml or Sigmund Romberg operetta from the twenties. That’s inaccurate. I think it’s a beauty, and that the score is one of the glories of the golden age of Broadway musicals. The 1954 movie adaptation – directed, with a surprising lack of conviction, by Vincente Minnelli, and starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse – didn’t get at the show’s charm; nor did a 1966 TV version with Robert Goulet and Sally Ann Howes, though it did have the great dancer Edward Villella repeating his performance from the 1963 New York City Center production in the principal dance role, Harry Beaton. But anyone lucky enough to catch one of the performances of the staged concert of Brigadoon, once again at City Center, between November 15 and 19 got a taste of what made – and makes – the musical so special. Christopher Wheeldon, the deservedly lauded director-choreographer of the 2015 An American in Paris, staged the show exquisitely with no set except for a bridge, some simple projections, and a motif of hickory branches that he used in the choreography and, in one dialogue scene, to stand in for the arms of chairs. Though obviously a far more modest presentation than his work for An American in Paris, this Brigadoon was so evocative and imaginative that I’m tempted to say that it was just about as good. The music director was Rob Berman, conducting the Encores! orchestra. Visually, musically and emotionally it was a thrilling evening of musical theatre.

The Grammar of Refuge: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone

Author Jenny Erpenbeck.

“It is accounted a sin to turn any man away from your door.”

– Tacitus, quoted by a character in Go, Went, Gone.

As I write, German politics is on the cusp of a political crisis. Angela Merkel has provided a beacon of stability and pragmatism, if not vision and eloquence, for the last dozen years in governing the economic powerhouse of the European Community. Earlier this autumn, her centrist Christian Democrats lost sixty-five seats in the Reichstag while the extreme-far-right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), gained ninety-four seats – with thirteen percent of the vote – primarily in the former GDR. The AfD, which chillingly speaks about the Volk that evokes a dark period in German history, capitalized on voter fear of immigrants after Merkel allowed over one million migrants in 2015-16 to enter Germany, even though the people who voted for AfD were relatively untouched by the flow of refugees. Merkel’s inability so far to forge a coalition that sidelines the AfD may result in Germans heading back to the polls – perhaps giving that xenophobic, anti-Islam party more seats.

In this dispiriting time, a tonic that I would offer is the originally fresh novels of Jenny Erpenbeck, The Visitation, End of Days and the latest in her loose trilogy, the extraordinary and timely Go, Went, Gone (New Directions, 2017, translated by Susan Bernofsky). Erpenbeck, who was born and grew up in the former East Berlin, is attuned to the turbulence of German history in the twentieth century. The Visitation narrates that history through the lives of the successive inhabitants of a grand house by a lake who end up being dislodged because the changing political environment renders their continued presence dangerously precarious. The novel is reminiscent of Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room. End of Days is a cleverly constructed novel that spans a century from Galicia at the turn of the twentieth century to the united Federal Republic of Germany that is perhaps refracted through the long life of one woman. I say “perhaps” because Erpenbeck repeatedly kills her off then revives her, the first time just after her birth by slightly changing the circumstances that led to her death, later as a desperate teenager who commits suicide, then as a middle-aged victim of a Stalinist purge.

Solitary Woman: Listening to Sinéad O’Connor

(Photo: Donal Moloney/Courtesy of the artist, via NPR)

These are dangerous days
To say what you feel is to lay your own grave

— Sinéad O’Connor,
“Black Boys on Mopeds”

I’ve seldom experienced so profound a silence as the one heard on the night of October 3, 1992, just after Sinéad O’Connor, appearing as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II. It was her second spot of the show; there was no band around her, only candles burning on a stool. She began a song which many recognized and many didn’t as Bob Marley’s “War,” itself a Haile Selassie speech set to music. The performance, while gripping, was also strident and dull. The song went on, first crawling then flying then crawling, as fiery and ponderous as a dragon. The drama, if it was that, lay in the way the singer’s eyes seemed to both ice over and flare up as she neared the climax. She knew what she was going to do.

Surrender Not The Future: ProArteDanza at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre

ProArteDanza performing Future Perfect Continuous. (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)

 Dance might not be able to save the planet from ecological catastrophe. But it can illuminate some of the anxieties surrounding the future of the planet, exposing the human vulnerabilities hiding in the shadows of emotionless science. To recycle or not to recycle, that is not the only question – nor is it the sole response to a world melting before our eyes. In Future Perfect Continuous, a new hybrid work of spoken dance which opened ProArteDanza’s 2017 season at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre at the beginning of November, choreographer Matjash Mrozewski grapples with climate change and environmental degradation, presenting them as large and inchoate themes affecting us all but in multifarious ways.

The former National Ballet of Canada dancer collaborated with award-winning playwright Anna Chatterton on the text spoken by ProArteDanza’s distinctive performers as they move. The spoken collage of rumination, argument and expressions of hope and fear makes palpable the ambiguities that have made global warming something of an existential quagmire for the 21st century. The ensemble of 12 dancers, doubling as actors, are not eco-warriors but more eco-worriers who struggle with the very real role humans play in putting the earth at risk. They push the right buttons, giving the audience plenty to think about. Fake news, or an inconvenient truth? The fact of the matter is that no one is certain, a central dilemma of the piece. “I don’t want to know. I already know” is an utterance shared by several players. No one can say climate change isn’t confusing.

Inventory Management Vol IV – Boys with Toys: The Battlefront II Debacle

Star Wars Battlefront II was released by EA on November 17.

The past week in gaming was inundated with news about Star Wars Battlefront II, but stories about the game itself were in short supply. Instead, headlines were focused on the game’s internal economy, specifically the “loot boxes” that many modern games use to generate a revenue stream beyond the initial purchase price for the game disc. Battlefront publisher EA was in the crosshairs yet again for what the public has long considered predatory, consumer-hostile practices, but something was different this time. The “conversation” online – though I’m loath to ennoble the childish vitriol hurled at publisher and developer alike by calling it that – had reached a fever pitch. It felt like a dam had burst, despite the fact that we’d collectively chosen to ignore the spurts of water leaking through.

The Camel Wore a Nightie: Appreciating the Artful Music of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart

Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart).

“Musical structure? I think it’s really a laugh. Frankly, I don’t see what you need all those sandbags for, just to keep your river in place . . . ”

– Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart)

Back when I was still living in Toronto, before moving to Vancouver, when we could still see more of each other, my good friend Kevin Courrier and I used to enjoy arguing about drastically different kinds of music and films. Though we also shared many favourites of the same genres, and though our arguments were only pretend in nature, we often enjoyed disputing the merits of films that told human stories in a narrative way viewers could relate to their own lives (his preference) versus films that were cold, antiseptic visual experiments of a photographic and philosophical nature (my preference).

Being a fine film critic, of course, he did embrace many highly demanding and experimental cinematic achievements, as long as they privileged the art (the tale) over the artist (the teller), whereas I was always more accepting of the morbidly self-indulgent and self-absorbed (even solipsistic) filmmakers who eschewed the audience altogether in favour of their own personal visions. I remember with great delight one disagreement about the way in which visual artist/directors such as Tarkovsky or Angelopolous, or Greenaway, say, would appear to set up their camera and simply walk away, allowing us to stare at a tree for what felt like a small eternity. I saw movies as a form of painting with film.

I recall once driving him crazy with the admittedly silly claim that, as far as I was concerned, it was perfectly okay for a clearly self-obsessed director such as Werner Herzog to cause the deaths of a few extras on the mountain while filming Fitzcarraldo (with fellow loony Kinksi) as long as it resulted in that amazing finished artifact. It was a remark delivered only half tongue-in-cheek but it proved very effective (to roil and rile up a close friend) at the time I intoned nit. I’ll admit that I’ve since softened my icy solipsistic tone and my apparent allegiance to works of art that are hyper-subjective and massively obsessive.

Bongo Fury by Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, 1974.

Courrier, who along with his late friend David Churchill was one of the founders of Critics At Large, and I, perhaps best known as an art critic, also loved to pretend to clash over which side of the Frank Zappa canon should be taken more or most seriously. I would often elaborate a stern disdain for what I facetiously termed his “comedy music,” the satirical jibes at pop culture that he delivered so incisively, and I maintained a preference for his “serious music,” either the serious rock with less banter, or the serious neo-classical with no lyrics at all. So in a way, the same clash of friendly sentiments can also be identified in a collision of drastically acquired tastes such as Zappa and his frequently bonkers collaborator Don Van Vliet.

Arthur Lee He Sees Everything Like This: Forever Changes At 50

Love at the time of Forever Changes: (left to right) John Echols, Bryan MacLean, Ken Forssi, Arthur Lee, and Michael Stuart. (Photo: Ronnie Haran)

Love’s Forever Changes (sometimes written as Love Forever Changes – inaccurate, but a nice idea) is as confounding an artifact today as it was, judging from contemporary testimony, 50 years ago. Emerging in November 1967 from the febrile mind of leader and chief singer-songwriter Arthur Lee, it had no real antecedents, not even in that strange and fruitful year. The group’s previous albums, Love (1966) and Da Capo (1967), were full of acid and wit, refining the song structures of proto-punk and the mental derangements of what would, much later, be called “psych.” Forever Changes, by startling contrast, was predicated on orchestral flourishes, rococo melody, and a worldview more pixilated than psychedelic, more desperate than nihilistic. And though reviewers lauded the record at once for its prettiness, it was simply too strange to be seen as much more than an artsy boutique for window-shopping along rock’s main thoroughfare – which at that time led to such surefire world-beaters as Electric Flag and The Incredible String Band.

Tartuffe: Tripping over Molière

Melissa Miller and Brett Gelman in Huntington Theatre's Tartuffe. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

I can’t think of a great playwright who stymies directors with the frequency of Molière. (That may not be true in France; my experience of Molière productions is limited to Canada, the U.S. and England.) His satirical high comedies are vibrant and hilarious on the page, but on stage they tend to fall into two categories: lethal academic readings in which the actors seem straitjacketed by their seventeenth-century costumes and – far more common over the last several decades – showy high-concept editions, heavy on farce, that push relentlessly for laughs. Peter DuBois’s Tartuffe at the Huntington Theatre is an example of the second, with one exception: I can’t figure out what the hell the concept is supposed to be, and there’s no director’s note in the program to provide assistance. The quote from DuBois in the press material, “Boston is going to see 2017 alive on stage within the framework of a 17th century farce, and the result will be satirical, smart, and a gut-buster,” doesn’t help. And what’s the significance of the lipstick-smeared pig on the poster? The setting is contemporary, though Tartuffe himself (played by Brett Gelman), the pious hypocrite whose hold over the aristocrat Orgon (Frank Wood) his beleaguered family is struggling to loosen, has been dressed by Anita Yavich as a cross between a Medieval monk and an imam. 2017 is represented not satirically but superficially, through a series of recognizable accoutrements, the most emphatic of which is a smart phone that Orgon’s son Damis (Matthew Bretschneider) uses to take selfies, and the substitution of a soldier in camouflage gear (Omar Robinso) for a messenger from the king to enact the happy ending. If DuBois has some idea in mind about how the play reflects our world, he hasn’t worked it out. The opening is a series of blackout sketches that mostly frame the two men in various comic-strip interactions that are clearly meant to be hilarious but are merely puzzling. The physical comedy is frantic and the actors have been coached to sprint through their lines, which at least has the effect of bringing the show in at two hours and ten minutes, including intermission – though, as habitual theatregoers know to our sorrow, time is relative, and it’s a long two hours. (I started checking my watch after forty-five minutes.)