On Beckett: The Bill Irwin Show

Bill Irwin in On Beckett. (Photo: Craig Schwartz)

At the top of On Beckett, the one-man show Bill Irwin brought to Boston last week in the Arts Emerson series at the Emerson Paramount Theatre, the star tips and slightly rumples his bowler, bends his knees, throws his weight onto his ankles, stoops, leans forward and bears down on his left shoulder. All of these adjustments take merely a few seconds, yet he’s transformed utterly, and you think you’re in for a mesmerizing evening that brings together this actor’s clown gifts and his profound understanding of Samuel Beckett, whom he has been studying for half a century and whose work he famously takes tremendous pleasure in performing. I saw Irwin play Vladimir in a revival of Waiting for Godot on Broadway in 2009, opposite Nathan Lane as Estragon, and he was brilliant; the whole cast was. (John Goodman and John Glover played Pozzo and Lucky.) So these preparatory moments, after a somewhat overlong introduction, filled me with happy anticipation.

The White Card: Be White, Baby

Patricia Kalember and Karen Pittman in The White Card. (Photo: Gretjen Helene Photography)

For the production of Claudia Rankine’s play The White Card, about race in contemporary America – a co-production of American Repertory Theater and Arts Emerson – scenic designer Riccardo Hernandez has built a black-box space inside the stage of Boston’s downtown Emerson Paramount Center. Except that it’s a white box, with the audience seated on painful white chairs, tennis-court style, on either side above the narrow cream-colored playing area (with matching furniture). The symbolism is painfully obvious. Moreover, having wriggled back and forth on those goddamn chairs for eighty intermissionless minutes, perhaps I may be permitted to advance the theory that the level of discomfort, too, is deliberate. Could this be director Diane Paulus’s take on Brechtian theatre – keeping the audience alert at what amounts to a droning lecture on white privilege by literally making us squirm?

Moby Dick for Puppets

Photo by Christophe Raynaud deLage.

In a six-day run at Boston’s Paramount Theater under the auspices of Arts Emerson, the Norwegian company Plexus Polaire staged Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in eighty-five brisk minutes with a cast of seven actor-puppeteers and three musicians. But though some of the effects were nifty and imaginative and the production held one’s attention, I’m not entirely sure what I saw. The show, directed by Yngvild Aspeli, is narrated, like the novel, by Ishmael, the only member of the crew who survives Captain Ahab’s single-minded pursuit of the immense sea beast that chewed off his leg in a previous whaling expedition, and it takes care to introduce us to all the members of the crew of the Pequod. But aside from Ishmael only a couple, the harpooner Queequeg (who becomes Ishmael’s closet friend) and the cabin boy Pip, are allowed to make much of an impression, and when the puppets are in close proximity on the shadowy stage it’s difficult to tell them apart. Aspeli – or the company in collaboration (the program doesn’t offer a writing credit) – hasn’t necessarily chosen the excerpts from the book to clarify the plot, so even if you know it pretty well you might have trouble following the story line.

New Maps for a New Land: Frank R. Rossiter's Charles Ives & His America (1975)

“The quest for identity runs through American music like a leitmotif,” writes music critic Veronica Slater. “Long before musical nationalism became an issue in Europe, native-born composers in the New World were trying to speak with a voice recognizably theirs and theirs alone.” Americans, according to Slater, rebelled against the rules in both politics and music for good reason. They were after an indigenous art rooted in their own experience of the new land, not what they inherited from the Old World. The map of that rebellion and quest is aptly provided in Frank Rossiter’s rare and illuminating study of American composer Charles Ives in his book Charles Ives & His America (1975).

The State of Siege: Fascism Dramatized

Members of Troupe du Théâtre de la Ville perform The State of Siege. (Photo: Jean-Louis Fernandez)

It was brave of Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and his Paris-based Troupe du Théâtre de la Ville to take on The State of Siege (L’État de siège), a play by Albert Camus that was roundly panned in its original production in 1948 and has pretty much stayed on the shelf ever since. That Demarcy-Mota and his ensemble of thirteen actors have been able to make so much of the play – the production, which Arts Emerson brought into Boston for four performances, is wonderful – is almost miraculous. Theatre students don’t study the dramatic works of Camus and Sartre these days, but when I was in university in the late sixties and early seventies Sartre’s The Flies and Camus’s Caligula were staples on any modern drama syllabus, along with other now-forgotten mid-century French playwrights like Anouilh, Giraudoux and Cocteau. I remember finding The Flies (a version of The Oresteia) intriguing and I’ve always been curious to see the 1951 movie version, but no one gets excited about the existentialist writers any more, and Camus was never much of a dramatist. (His novel The Stranger, the most famous fictional work he ever penned, holds up.) The State of Siege isn’t even striking as an existential work, though it does bring back the era when French theatre was the playground for intellectuals who delighted in defying the reign of realism. It’s a symbolist drama that begins when a passing comet brings a plague to a seacoast city and fascists take advantage of the fear of the citizens and the resulting chaos to impose a severe, repressive rule of order. This is the second time Camus used the idea of a plague as a premise and a symbol; the previous year he had written his novel The Plague.  (The State of Siege is not an adaptation.)

Chekhov and Baryshnikov: Man in a Case

Man in a Case, featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov (center)

At the end of Chekhov’s short story “About Love,” the narrator Alehin reveals that only in the last moments he spent with the married woman with whom he had fallen in love – when he kissed her for the first time before she traveled away from him forever – did he understand that “when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.” Man in a Case by the Big Dance Theater, which has been traveling around the east coast and played a handful of Boston performances in the Arts Emerson series, dramatizes “About Love” and “The Man in a Case,” two of the Chekhov tales from 1898 that begin as conversations between the veterinarian Ivan Ivanovitch and the schoolmaster Burkin, who are hunting companions. And I think it’s that comment of Alehin’s that links them. The title story focuses on Belikov, a schoolteacher whose cautious disapproval of anything with the mere whiff of impropriety has the effect of making everyone around him feel constrained. Improbably, he becomes enamored of a young woman, but he can’t rise above either his prejudices or his pride. Belikov’s story, which is comic and tragic by turns – the Chekhovian balance – ends when, after he’s scandalized to observe his beloved on a bicycle and gets into an argument with her brother over her, he’s thrown down the stairs and dies as a result of his injuries, or perhaps of some combination of shame and heartbreak. He’s “the man in the case” who has sealed himself off from humanity; he seems to break out of it when he falls in love but he can’t allow that love to alter his nature. It’s quite a strange story (and, like “About Love,” a beautiful one).

Two Classic Texts, Modernized

Tom Hiddleston in Coriolanus (Photo by Johan Persson)

Like Timon of Athens, Shakespeare’s late Roman tragedy Coriolanus is getting more attention these days than it did for years, though, like their title characters, both plays are perhaps too unyielding to make it into anybody’s list of favorite Shakespeares. Ralph Fiennes made an intelligent attempt at filming it in 2011 with himself in the title role, the warrior who wins a major victory for Rome but whose patrician pride prevents him from winning the favor of the fickle (and easily manipulated) citizens; he winds up being exiled, turning his back on Rome and allying himself with the enemy he defeated. (The bankrupt Timon turns his back on Athens when his fair-weather friends won’t lift a finger to help him and goes to live in a cave.) In Josie Rourke’s economically staged production of Coriolanus for London’s Donmar Warehouse – recently transmitted on HD in the NT Live series – the protagonist is played by Tom Hiddleston, and his performance, which grows in depth and stature as the evening wears on, is the best reason to see the show. Toward the end of the second half Coriolanus’s mother Volumnia (Deborah Findlay), who has come with his wife Virgilia (Brigitte Hjort Sørensen) and their little boy (Joe Willis) to beg him to reconsider his abandonment of Rome, makes a long speech to which Coriolanus listens without answering her or even moving from his spot. Findlay, whose performance is so hambone it verges on camp, wails and whines; after a while I stopped paying attention to her and focused entirely on Hiddleston, who conveys the influence of her pleas in the tension of his body and the way his face struggles to remain taut and unmoved while his tears betray him. It’s a small but potent acting lesson in the effectiveness of stillness and understatement.

Didacticism and Virtue at the Shaw Festival

Shawn Wright and Jeff Irving with the cast of Androcles and the Lion at the Shaw Festival. (Photo: David Cooper)

At every performance of the Shaw Festival’s production of Androcles and the Lion, George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 dramatization of the Aesop fable, a member of the audience is picked to play the lion. Other theatregoers who have been handed colored balls before the play begins are invited to throw them onto the stage at will, interrupting the dramatic action and prompting a variety of responses from the actors, who have to tell an anecdote or recite a section of Shaw’s preface to the play or share any thought that pops into their heads. This process is in the service of what Tim Carroll, the Shaw’s new artistic director, calls “two-way theatre,” which is intended to break down the barrier between the actors and the audience. Carroll directed Androcles, but his mission is visible in the productions he didn’t stage, too. In Wilde Tales, the lunchtime show, adapted by Kate Hennig from four Oscar Wilde fairy tales and directed by Christine Brubaker, children from the audience sit along the sides of the Court House stage with signs and other props; their participation is encouraged at certain points in the action. In Alan Bennett’s The Madness of King George, directed by Kevin Bennett (who trained with Carroll during his tenure as associate director at Shakespeare’s Globe in London), the house lights remain on during the performance and the cast interacts with members of the audience – especially those who are sitting right on the stage of the Royal George – just as actors at the Globe play up to those groundlings who have found standing room right below the thrust, within easy reach of the performers. Five of the six plays I saw at the Shaw began with a member of the staff – an assistant stage manager or head dresser or what have you – addressing the audience and providing some tidbits of information about his or her job.

Outlier: Paul Goodman Changed My Life

2011 was an exceptional year for documentaries about outliers: Bill Cunningham New York, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, Magic Trip (about Ken Kesey), Public Speaking (about Fran Leibowitz), The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby. One of the most fascinating is Jonathan Lee’s Paul Goodman Changed My Life, a study of the prolific anarchist Paul Goodman. Goodman has now been largely forgotten but in the early and mid-sixties his 1959 Growing Up Absurd – one of Lee’s many interviewees, the Esalen Institute president Gordon Wheeler, assures us – could be found on the book shelf of every dorm room in every liberal arts college across the country. (By the time I attended one, in 1968, it had vanished: warmly embraced by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Goodman was démodé by the time campus protest turned uglier and more chaotic in the Nixon era.) Growing Up Absurd is part sociology, part philosophy and part politics. Its thesis is that young American men in the Eisenhower years were growing up cognizant of the corrupted state of their institutions – education, government, business, law – and in increasingly hopeless and desperate rebellion against them. It still makes compelling reading, and despite the selectivity of Goodman’s subject matter (he doesn’t address the condition of young women, writing as he does a decade and more before the women’s movement, and out of a peculiarly old-fashioned sensibility about gender politics), the bulk of his observations still seem relevant more than half a century later.

Rewriting History: Edith Wharton’s The Shadow of a Doubt

Author and playwright Edith Wharton 

The discovery of a neglected work by Edith Wharton has understandably made headlines in a number of high-profile publications, in particular The New Yorker. However, the story behind Wharton's play, The Shadow of a Doubt, and its reemergence into the public consciousness is more complicated than the oversimplified narrative of a “lost” play being plucked from oblivion by intrepid scholars, and it points to the messy way in which we build and organize our ostensibly tidy literary and theatrical canons. The Shadow of a Doubt has made the news thanks to the efforts of Dr. Mary Chinery and Dr. Laura Rattray, two scholars from Georgian Court University and the University of Glasgow, respectively, who began discussing the little-known work at a conference and subsequently examined a manuscript at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. They’ve reproduced the manuscript, typos and all, and it’s available to read in The Edith Wharton Review. It’s free at the time of this writing, but will eventually disappear behind a paywall; you can find it here, along with the accompanying article by Drs. Chinery and Rattray. (They also spoke with me on the Theatre History Podcast to explain the play’s significance.)

The Shadow of a Doubt primarily offers a starring vehicle for the actress playing its heroine, Kate Derwent. Kate, a former nurse, has married her late patient’s husband John, who grew close to her during his wife’s final days. Given the circumstances of their meeting, as well as Kate’s lowlier background, it’s not surprising that their union occasions some tension within John’s wider family and social circles. His father-in-law, Lord Osterleigh, is particularly skeptical, his granddaughter Sylvia’s evident affection notwithstanding. (She keeps calling Kate “Mamma,” even though her stepmother, fearful of being seen to supplant Sylvia’s late mother Agnes too completely, encourages the girl to call her by her first name.) The arrival of a disgraced doctor, Carruthers, throws this uneasy situation into turmoil; he’s threatening, in a plot device that’s clearly taken from the well-made-play tradition of Ibsen and his predecessors, to ruin Kate’s reputation by revealing information about how the first Mrs. Derwent met her end.

Falling Flat: NBC’s Rise

Rosie Perez and Josh Radnor in Rise. (Photo: Peter Kramer/NBC)

Towards the end of the third episode of NBC’s new high-school theatre drama Rise, an anxious mother (Stephanie J. Block), desperate for assurance that teacher Lou Mazzuchelli (Josh Radnor) is taking risks with her son’s future for the right reasons, asks him what he believes in. Before Radnor’s character could answer, my wife leaned over to me on the couch and deadpanned, “He believes in the kids.”

Three guesses what Lou says next.

Past and Present Collide in Poetry from the Future: Lorette C. Luzajic’s Pretty Time Machine

“I may lie a lot. But never in my lyrics.” – Courtney Love

Imagine receiving a postcard from a friend who claimed to be writing to you from the year 2120, describing their vacation there through a series of artworks to which they were responding with duende. El duende is the spirit of evocation. It comes from inside as a physical/emotional response to art. It is what gives you chills, makes you smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive. The poet Lorca stated, "The duende's arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm . . . All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present." The works of Lorette Luzajic, like those of Lorca himself, are utterly drenched in duende.

Audra McDonald, Sutton Foster and Those Damn Yankees

Audra McDonald and Shelton Becton (left) in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill. (Photo by Evgenia Eliseeva)

Playing Billie Holiday in 1959, just months before her death, in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, Audra McDonald does an uncanny vocal impersonation of the great jazz singer in her late phase, when heroin had worn her astonishingly pliable buttered-rum contralto down to a nub yet her phrasing hadn’t lost its ability to wipe you out and she could still swing. It’s an impressive stunt – but it’s a stunt, and one that I wish McDonald, who has the finest instrument among today’s musical-theatre stars, hadn’t attempted. I had the same problem when, more than forty years ago, Diana Ross mimicked Holiday’s voice in the movie Lady Sings the Blues. It’s one thing when an actress who isn’t a singer plays a famous vocalist and lip-syncs her songs: in the title role of the TV movie Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows, Judy Davis got so far into the character that when you heard Garland’s singing voice come out of her, the results were spookily convincing. (It’s the best work Davis has ever done, which means, of course, that it’s one of the greatest performances ever put on the screen.) It’s quite another thing when one towering singer buries her own style and picks up another’s. I understand why McDonald chose to go this route: Holiday’s sound is distinctive and famous, like Garland’s. But so is Audra McDonald’s – and, certainly, Diana Ross’.

Actually I wish McDonald had passed on this project altogether. Lanie Robertson’s play (which I reviewed twenty years ago at Providence’s Trinity Repertory Company, when an actress named Rose Weaver took the part) is nothing but a series of monologues strung around fourteen songs – some of them Holiday standards (“What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” “Crazy He Calls Me,” “God Bless the Child,” “Easy Living,” “Strange Fruit,” “Don’t Explain” and “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do”) and some fairly obscure. (The final number, George Cory and Douglas Cross’ “Deep Song,” which I’d never heard Holiday sing until Charlie Haden built a beautiful instrumental around it on his 1992 album Haunted Heart, is a personal favorite.) Holiday, performing in a dive in South Philly because, as a result of her drug conviction, she’s lost her cabaret card in New York, is drunk and high when she staggers onto the stage to accompany a three-piece combo, and in the course of the evening she gets drunker and higher. The set-up is both dramatically hobbled and purely melodramatic and the script is bald; it barely qualifies as a play at all. And McDonald, normally a splendid actress, gives a shrill, maudlin performance interrupted by a couple of moments of authentic power: one when she remembers getting the news of her father’s death and one when she talks bitterly about the humiliation of losing the right to perform professionally in New York, where she’d become famous in the thirties.

Classics Without Inspiration: Quixote Nuevo and An Iliad

Emilio Delgado and Hugo E. Carbajal in Quixote Nuevo at the Huntington Theatre Company. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Octavio Sollis sets Quixote Nuevo, his updated version of Don Quixote, in Texas, substituting a town called La Plancha for Cervantes’ La Mancha. In this version, a co-production of the Huntington Theatre Company, Hartford Stage and Houston’s Alley Theatre – currently playing at the Huntington – the hero, Jose Quijano (Emilio Delgado), is a retired literature professor sinking into dementia who, as Don Quixote, rides around on a bicycle with the skull of a horse hoisted on the handlebars – the horse, when it was alive, was the companion of his lonely childhood – performing heroic deeds in the name of his muse, Dulcinea. His sister Magdalena (Mariela López-Ponce) and his niece Antonia (Sarita Ocon), who have been caring for him, chase after him in the hopes of getting him into assisted living; his other pursuers are his parish priest (Orlando Arriaga) and his therapist (Gisela Chípe). His Sancho Panza is Manny Diaz (Juan Manuel Amador), who drives an ice cream wagon and whose anxious wife (Krystal Hernandez) is also trying to track down the pair of fantastic adventurers.

Silent Heartbreak at the National Ballet Of Canada

Harrison James and Svetlana Lunkina with Artists of the Ballet in Giselle. (Photo:Aleksandar Antonijevic)

Giselle is more than just a ballet; it explores themes of love, betrayal, and redemption that have enchanted audiences for nearly two centuries. Originally choreographed by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot in 1841, this latest production of Sir Peter Wright’s acclaimed interpretation by the National Ballet of Canada, performed at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts on November 20, brought this classic tale to life with remarkable artistry.

Music, Music, Music: The Most Happy Fella, Merrily We Roll Along and Baritones Unbound

Marnie Parris & Bill Nolte in The Most Happy Fella

Six years passed between Frank Loesser’s hugely successful Guys and Dolls and his next Broadway show, The Most Happy Fella, and the two projects couldn’t have been more different. Guys and Dolls was an effort to find a musical-comedy equivalent for the quirky idiom of Damon Runyon’s stories, where gamblers and gangsters are interchangeable (and basically benign), wear fedoras and pin-stripe suits, and speak without contractions. Loesser’s score is lyrical, but it’s comprised mostly of comic numbers – solos (“Adelaide’s Lament”) duets (“Sue Me,” “Marry the Man Today”) the title song, call-and-response numbers  (“Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” and the two Hot Box showgirl tunes), even a counterpoint trio (“Fugue for Tinhorns”). The Most Happy Fella has a lush romantic score, and there’s so much of it that the original cast recording was released in two versions, a single LP of highlights and a complete three-LP set, in the style of opera recordings. Technically the show is an operetta, since it does contain dialogue sections (which were also written by Loesser). And though it may not be up to Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess or Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, the two Broadway musicals that are not only extensive enough but also complex enough musically to qualify as operas, it’s extremely ambitious – and surpassingly beautiful. (In fact, the New York City Opera used to keep it in their repertory.) Loesser based it on a 1924 play by Sidney Howard called They Knew What They Wanted – a hit despite that unwieldy title – that starred Richard Bennett and the legendary stage actress Pauline Lord and was filmed three times over the next decade and a half.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday: Billie’s Blues

Andra Day in The United States vs. Billie Holiday.

What is it about Billie Holiday that brings out the twenty-four-carat fakery in dramatists? The 1972 biopic Lady Sings the Blues was a manufactured pop romance built around the various appeals of Diana Ross, Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor; luckily they were considerable, and Ross, in her dramatic debut, gave such an enchanting performance as Holiday that you could forgive the fatuous screenplay and the sometimes outrageous factual inaccuracies, like turning Holiday’s abusive last husband, the mobster Louis McKay (played by Williams), into a devoted champion who struggles manfully but in vain to keep her off heroin. Lanie Robertson’s play Lady Day at the Emerson Bar & Grill, set a few months before Holiday’s death in 1959, is a series of musical performances linked by melodramatic monologues. (The last time around Audra McDonald played it on Broadway, in 2014, in a display of scenery chewing that I wouldn’t have thought her capable of.) Now we’ve got the glum, self-serious The United States vs. Billie Holiday (available on Hulu) starring the singer Andra Day. The director is Lee Daniels (Precious, The Butler), but to put it kindly he’s not at his best because he’s chained to a screenplay by the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks that’s a real stinker.

What the Constitution Means to Me: Amateur Night

Cassie Beck in What the Constitution Means to Me. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

In my American Drama class, when we turn from the golden age of Broadway drama to more experimental work of the sixties, seventies and eighties, I like to ask my students if they think that something like Ntozake Shange’s “choreopoem” For Colored Girls or Jane Wagner’s one-woman piece for Lily Tomlin, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, or Christopher Durang’s two-hander Laughing Wild, where two wildly dissimilar characters monologue in the first half and interact in a dream in the second, is really a play. The question generally arouses considerable discussion, but it’s essentially disingenuous; obviously I believe these are plays (and fine ones) or I wouldn’t include them in my syllabus. But then there’s Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, currently being presented by Boston’s Huntington Theatre at the Emerson Majestic Theatre, as part of the show’s North American tour. It won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Horton Foote Playwriting Award, was nominated for the Tony and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, yet it isn’t a play at all, in the sense that a play dramatizes something, i.e., adheres to some kind of dramatic structure. Most of it is a screed that details all the ways in which the U.S. Constitution disempowers women. The set-up is that the Schreck character, played originally by the playwright and currently by Cassie Beck, reconstructs the speeches she used to give as a teenager, explicating items in the Constitution in competitions sponsored by the American Legion, in order to amass tuition money for college. Now, in her forties, she riffs on them – personalizing them, drawing on the experiences of her mother, aunt and grandmother and great-grandmother, all victims of domestic abuse. Her stories are horrifying, enraging and inspiring; the way in which Schreck uses them to work up the audience is cruder and more manipulative than the cheapest melodrama. In fact, the main difference between this section (which takes up most of the running time) and cheap melodrama is that even a third-rate writer of melodramas has some skill, however rudimentary. If Schreck is a playwright, I’m a heart surgeon.

Family Legacies: Jeremiah Zagar's In a Dream

Is it just my imagination or have families that are not crazy become as rare as the northern hairy-nosed wombat? Environmentalists believe only about 113 of these marsupials still exist in Australia. Dysfunctional homo sapiens, on the other hand, now number in the billions worldwide. The word ‘dysfunction’ is relative, of course. But when it comes to my relatives, there’s madness aplenty running through our intermingled bloodlines.

So, somehow it did not surprise me to learn that a distant cousin I’ve never met -- Jeremiah Zagar -- made a documentary titled In a Dream that chronicles the meltdown of his nuclear family. My maternal grandmother was a half-sister of his maternal grandfather, ancestors who both died before we were born. In the 20th century, the entire clan left Poland (just a few steps ahead of the Nazis, who would obliterate their Jewish shtetl) and landed in America. Later, my immediate kin remained in New York while his settled in Pennsylvania.

Being the Best: Pop Journalism Comes of Age

Hachette Books, 2022; Hachette Books, 2022.

“How does it feel, to be on your own, a complete unknown, with no direction home . . .” – Bob Dylan

I suppose I’ve always been mystified, in an entertaining way, with our culture’s virtual obsession with the best this and the best that, as if selecting from the taste menu in arts, letters or music actually meant “I’ll have what everyone else is having.”  Maybe it does. Academy Awards, Tony Awards, Nobel Prizes, Grammy Awards, best car, best restaurant, best fashion, best wine, best hotel, and so on forever. Generally, of course, such a designation usually refers to most popular, and nowhere does popularity often equal quality as it does in the rarefied world of pop music. How it could it be otherwise, since the very name says it all? But I’ve never believed that pop meant disposable or frivolous; far from it, since pop, and especially great pop music, is quite often the most accurate gauge of what the French call mentalité, the state of mind of a culture. And pop, at the virtuosic and technically complex level of The Beatles, The Stones, Brian Wilson’s Beach Boys, or The Mamas and the Papas, is obviously an art form demonstrating admirable aesthetics. High-quality pop is invariably a mirror of our reality, regardless of how distorted or clouded by various biases that mirror may be.