Apollo’s Girl

How Enchanted Is This Island?

This is a call to action for those who relish the impossible. It has just been achieved, and then some, in the Met’s HD version of its new Baroque pastiche, The Enchanted Island. And you’ll have to act fast to see it: virtually all the seats in the New York network theaters were sold out, despite snow, sleet, and plunging temperatures. But there are encore screenings coming up in the US on February 8th, and in Canada on March 3rd (1:00pm) and March 26 (6:30). For schedules around the world: http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/liveinhd/LiveinHD.aspx

Even in a season that has seen HD broadcasts of Boris Godunov, Faust, and a few other reinventions of old favorites made new and inspiring by singers acting their hearts out at the very edge of art and endurance, Island pushes the envelope that much further.

”Today is my birthday (his 71st!),” said Placido Domingo at intermission. “For the first time in my life I’m playing a god!” His entrance as Neptune dominating his watery realm is one of many showstoppers. It’s clear he hasn’t had this much fun since he first swaggered onstage in Fanciula, in ankle-length black drover coat, lugging a huge Western saddle, tossed it down on the barroom table and called for his “Meenie.” Wait til you see him now in his beard, scales and crown, wielding a trident!

As for the rest: new lyrics tell the story (itself a challenging pastiche of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream), set to music plucked from the best of the Baroque. Most of it is familiar, but one rare duet (“Men Are Fickle”) – by Hermia and Helena (actually “Amarilli? O dei!” from Handel’s Atalanta) – was ravishing. As the plot spins by, we succumb to a barrage of gorgeous melodies, outright (and hilarious) modern shtick, truly heartbreaking pathos, and some magical, old-fashioned transformations and stage trickery.

But here’s the real point: The levels of performance and production are so high, so intense and brilliant, that they hypnotize. Glittering costumes and makeup are matched, scene by scene, by truly superhuman vocal fireworks from every principal. There are ongoing miracles by Joyce DiDonato, Danielle de Niece, Luca Pisaroni, David Daniels, the quartet of Dream’s spinning lovers (especially the Hermia of Elizabeth DeShong), and the unstoppable Mr. Domingo.  Then there are the concept and lyrics by Jeremy Sans, the stagecraft of Phelim McDermott, Kevin Pollard’s costumes and Julian Crouch’s sets. William Christie conducted. ‘Nuff said!

It may be the 1% who are paying for the Mets’ productions, but it’s the 99% who benefit from the quality of image and sound that define the Met’s HD broadcasts and encores. So, no matter where you live, you can find a city within traveling distance to enjoy the bounty.

If you have any remaining doubts, know that virtually the entire audience at the Ziegfeld, cocooned in winter coats and snowboots, stayed in their seats all the way through the end credits and curtain calls (still in progress as the screen faded to black). And, of course, they just kept applauding as they reluctantly filed out.

Cogito: John Branch

Richard III: To Be or Not to Be

A certain sense of disappointment (as well as the onset of a bad cold) led me to leave BAM’s Harvey Theater at the interval following the longish first part of Richard III ―the final venture in the transatlantic Bridge Project run by BAM, director Sam Mendes, and his Neal Street production company. Of the three parts of this “boy-meets-crown, boy-gets-crown, boy-loses-crown” fable, two had transpired. Kevin Spacey, as Richard, had barely maneuvered his twisted body onto the throne and slipped the crown onto his head before the lights blacked out and the curtain dropped.

Many of the text’s high points and tricky passages were already behind us. Richard’s opening speech came off with great brio, as did his wooing of Lady Anne, in which he wins over a woman whose husband and son he has recently killed. Other fine scenes: the curses upon practically everyone uttered by old Queen Margaret; the murder of Clarence, Richard’s brother, in a scene that’s equal parts macabre, comic, and ironic; and Richard’s seduction of the populace, stage-managed by Buckingham. These had thoroughly won over most of the audience and mostly impressed me on the preview night I attended—the manipulation of the crowd used video and was a perfect delight—and more potential showpieces lay ahead: the prick of Richard’s conscience as he’s visited by the ghosts of all those he has dispatched so far, and the concluding Battle of Bosworth Field.

What seemed amiss, then? Nips and tucks had been made; that was only to be expected. But the costuming made it a little hard to distinguish the supporting players; the production used a spare, vaguely modern design approach, with almost all of the men wearing dark suits and the stage nearly bare most of the time. This show travels light, which is helpful for a world tour but may leave the audience hungry for cues. More important, though, is that the connecting scenes between those showpiece moments sometimes seemed flat, sometimes too brisk, and sometimes both.

One got the sense of events picking up speed and Richard knocking off his obstacles with dispatch; he impressed even himself, as a line reading in his Lady Anne scene revealed. But one also got the sense that details of the drama were being brushed aside. Instead of feeling like the steadily thrilling and chilling rise to power of a brilliant but ruthless man, this big chunk of the play felt sometimes boring—or, to put it more politely (as Ben Brantley of The New York Times did after seeing the show in London last summer), there are longueurs in the show’s brevity. There may even be one gag too many.

Gags? Yes, there are gags. Among the groundlings who nowadays are seated highest, not lowest, in the house, the show was often a riot. What we had at BAM was a Richard III who was a scintillating and multifaceted comic villain surrounded by a Richard III that was lit by flashes but a little less than consistent. Clearly, Richard makes himself the star of his drama, and director Mendes has likewise made this production a star vehicle for Spacey. What disappointed me is that I was left unsure just what kind of play this relatively early work is. Scholars, as far as I know, usually judge it to be a history play but not a tragedy (despite its full title in the First Folio, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third). In the hands of Mendes and Spacey, it’s harder to say what it is, other than a lot of fun.

Find John Branch:

facebook

twitter

google+

goodreads

Cooper’s London

ENCOUNTERS WITH COUNTERTENORS

Sometimes I listen to a CD, it makes no impact, and then I return to it months later and suddenly it’s my record of the year! That’s what happened with a recording by Andreas Scholl called O Solitude! It’s a stunning collection of some of the most interesting arias and songs by Purcell performed by one of today’s leading countertenors. This disc also includes two duets with the brilliant French countertenor Christophe Dumaux. Scholl and Dumaux’s rendering of the duet Sound the Trumpet is simply the best one I’ve heard since Janet Baker and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau performed it together; and it’s fascinating to listen, for example, to Dido’s Lament sung by Scholl. Scholl has one of the most pleasing and mellifluous voices of our time in the countertenor range; he is also, on stage, a terrific actor; and he sings not only with consistent taste but also with wonderful understanding and expression of the texts. The experience has made me listen again to some David Daniels discs as well and to think a bit about the contemporary taste for the countertenor voice.

So what is this countertenor voice, the popularity of which in our time probably goes back to Alfred Deller? Deller, who was the most famous countertenor in the vanguard of the revival of interest in this voice, was a pretty detached singer emotionally with (for me) a slightly eunochoid sound. Today’s countertenors are much more dramatically committed and convincing. It’s as if technique – which was a primary concern in the early days – has now become a “given” and they can get on with serious interpretation. The line of a countertenor lies slightly above the tenor line in range. The name was given to the voices that actually sang across the tenor lines in Mediaeval and even Renaissance music. Countertenors aren’t men who are simply singing falsetto. Countertenors are men who have second-mode phonation or a pure head register beyond the tenor range.  The voice or range is an extension of an existing voice.

It was during the height of the castrato’s period of popularity that the “second-mode” singers who were not castrated started to wane in popularity. And why not? The castrato was a whole new event for music – and its blazes of both glory and madness are brilliantly recounted in a great schlock novel by Ann Rice called Cry to Heaven.  While enjoying a wonderful Hitchcockian thriller plot and lots of semi-pornographic activity set in Baroque Venice, Florence and Rome, you will also learn more than you will ever need to know about castrated singers. Sadly, Ann Rice abandoned her castrati for vampires and witches, which is a real shame.

Countertenors couldn’t go as high as some castrati who could also attain and retain totally the pure soprano range that they’d had as boys. With stronger projection than countertenors because of the development of their barrel-like chests the castrati voices got larger and larger, however sweet and unearthly the sound, and tended to last well into the singers 60s or even 70s, so careers were not only spectacular, but long. These men also grew taller than most people of the time and were heroic-looking on stage in costume. How could a mere countertenor compete with all this?

Though the “second-mode specialists” faded almost entirely there were some contralto tenors still in the choir of the Sistine Chapel, so it remained an option for musicians, interested amateurs and those in the know, and the tradition continued (technically) unbroken down the ages. In England, this second-mode tradition continued in cathedrals and in church music, in academia and in glee clubs. Deller’s pioneering work as a countertenor spread his influence from the mid-1940s; he and his followers basically returned to the mainstream concert and opera stage the presence of the countertenor voice and vocal production in a secular and solo capacity. Countertenor vocal production also remained popular in the USA in folk songs, and in the West. And, of course, there are countertenor-style vocal productions in the 1950s and 1960s in some pop music, which also helped spread the sound of that voice further.

One of the newest countertenors emerging on the scene today is Iestyn Davies. He has just recorded a rather pleasant disc of Cantatas by Nicola Porpora. You might call the music “Handel Lite” but the real justification for this disc, in my opinion, is not the rediscovery of Porpora as much as it’s the discovery of this voice. Davies is becoming well known and successful in the UK and Europe and is going to be making his Met debut this season as Unolfo in Handel’s Rodelinda (with Andreas Scholl singing Bertarido).

Many people cannot stand the countertenor sound; if this kind of vocal production doesn’t appeal to you, then leave it alone. But if it does, then you would have to go very far to hear better performances in this style than those of Andreas Scholl, Christophe Dumaux or Iestyn Davies. Time to give them a try? You’ll hear some stunning vocalizing and some brilliant music. And you might just change your mind.

Purcell, O Solitude  Andreas Scholl, Accademia Bizantina, Stefano Montanari  Decca 478 2262 (UK)
Porpora, Cantatas 7 – 12   Iestyn Davies, Arcangelo, Jonathan Cohen

Charlie Siem strikes again!

I mentioned the violinist Charlie Siem before and here he comes again ― this time with a disc of concertos by Bruch and Wieniawski.  Siem plays both these well-known pieces with a wonderful, rich sound and great charm as well as impeccable technique, and adds to the mix on the CD an interesting “cantabile doloroso” by Ole Bull. Supported stylishly by the LSO under the conductor Andrew Gourlay, this is not only an appealing disc in itself but also a confirmation that in Charlie Siem we are watching the emergence of a new violin star of international calibre and interest.

Bruch, Wieniawski and Ole Bull Concertos, Charlie Siem, violin; London Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Gourley  Warners 2564 66661-2

Apollo’s Girl

Hand to God

Ensemble Studio Theater

Think of some associations with the left hand – it’s emotive, a portal to the unconscious, an icon of sex magic, and sinister. There you have Tyrone – the sock puppet who is, along with his desperate handler and alter ego, Jason (actor Steven Boyer) — the voice of playwright Robert Askins. And what a voice it is! Askins is very angry, and very funny, and has devised cunning ways to use his sock puppets to get even.

Unlike the creators of The Book of Morman who claimed their subject by proximity: “We grew up in Colorado..so Mormanism was right next door,” Askins is the real thing. He covered the sock puppet beat as a child in the Christian Puppet Ministries of Waco, Texas and has things to say on the topic and the fearful conflicts it creates while teaching children about absolute right and wrong.

Director Moritz von Stuelpnagel has added some gleeful comic sauce to Askins’ script and, with a tireless cast of five who take no prisoners, keeps it all working, all the time. The humor is imaginative, raunchy, mostly black and often physical, poised right on the edge of farce. Long-simmering repression gives way to vigorous (and hilarious) carnality. Even the puppets (there are eventually two who get into the act) ratchet up the laughter as they go at it. And if you think that sock puppet sex might not be as compelling as the real thing, think again — and thank puppet designer Marte Johanne Ekhougen.

Everyone on stage is marvelous, but special kudos must go to Steven Boyer, who uses two voices and a lot of complicated puppetry (wires and gestures) to manipulate Tyrone seamlessly throughout the story. It is Tyrone’s opening monologue that gives us clues as to what’s on the table for the evening: “When I have acted badly, in order to stay around the campfire, all I have to do is say….the devil made me do it.”

In The Hand of God, the devil is literally everwhere, especially in the Puppet Ministry and in the barely-controlled libido of its leader, Margery (the unnerving Geneva Carr), her son, Jason, his classmates (Meagan Hill and Bobby Moreno), and even their clueless pastor (Scott Sowers). Things begin to unravel early on, but there’s lots of room for the wool to be rewoven in surprising ways.

As Tyrone asserts at the end of the play, “You just can’t keep the devil down. Which is why somebody invented Jesus…Maybe someday we won’t need a savior. But I doubt it. The thing about a Jesus is you never know where to look. Might just be the place you saw the devil before.”

The Ensemble Studio Theatre has been celebrating collaborative work since 1968. With plays and casts like Hand to God, it’s not hard to see why. EST for tickets, schedules and season.

Cogito: John Branch

 

Zombies: They’re Alive!

Zombies: they don’t amount to much, but they’re surprisingly persistent. Having originated in Africa (like mankind itself), they traveled from there to Haiti and in the early 20th century began their stumbling march across America, eventually to infect Hollywood and our imagination. In the 50s, pop-culture horrors such as the giant ants of Them! and the Japanese-born Godzilla had been associated with the abstract threat of The Bomb, and when George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968, the connection was maintained. For some, however, zombies represented as well, or instead, the equally abstract threat of soulless Communism. In terms of cultural ideas, then, from the beginning they’ve been pretty careless of the company they keep, thriving just as well, or badly, in whatever territory one placed them in, and this, along with their ravaged flesh and sometimes absent body parts, is what I meant by insubstantial. They can’t even find their own nickname, sometimes relying on the “undead” term that had already been adopted by vampires.

They’re a virtual Swiss army knife of plotting. Take them to the mall and they become an emblem of mindless consumerism, as we’ve seen in the two versions of Dawn of the Dead. In the streets of our upscale residential sections, the zombie’s relentless attention stands for over-parenting—or so says one reading of Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive—while across the tracks, those hungry hordes should be seen as an oppressed underclass seeking its share. At the university, zombies have gotten into the philosophy department, somewhat transfigured to be sure: they represent a question about the nature of mind that goes back to Descartes. And in the E-school, computer-science nerds can be heard to speak of zombie process.

The bookstores are no safer. Zombies have begun munching on the classics, with Jane Austen perhaps the earliest victims, in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. To my knowledge, none of Shakespeare’s plays have been zombified with a genuine rewrite in blank verse, but in 1936, Orson Welles leaned that way in his voodoo Macbeth. New fiction isn’t immune either. Colson Whitehead, a 2002 MacArthur Fellow, this fall published a novel called Zone One which dramatizes the human revolt against a near-total zombie takeover.

You can’t hurt the zombies’ feelings, since on most views they don’t have any, so physical comedy comes easily to them. Thus Woody Harrelson in Zombieland can gleefully whack at the things with a shovel. The wit of Shaun of the Dead easily works too (things are getting “a bit bitey,” says a character in that film, as if noting a slight shift in the weather), and satire, which need not be overtly funny at all, isn’t far away. This leads us back to the critique of consumerism in Dawn of the Dead and to the multiple implications of George Romero’s original film: its carnage echoes the Vietnam War, the black hero’s death at the hands of rednecks acknowledges persistent racism, and the zombie girl munching on her father’s severed arm suggests, as one critic saw it, “disillusionment with … [the] patriarchal nuclear family.”

Zombies allow for other potentially serious readings as well. First, like the transi (partly decomposed corpse) of medieval funerary and pictorial art, zombies can show us our destiny in the decay of the flesh. Second, it’s not only in their form that they possess traces of the human animal. Moving but not speaking, their sole drive is usually hunger; apparently unthinking as well as unfeeling, they nonetheless recognize us, though only as a source of food. (I wonder whether any parents have seen their infants that way.) They’re another version of the beast within. And, of course, zombies used to be us.

That’s the theme lurking in a few corners of The Walking Dead, a TV show dramatized with substantial deviations from a series of comics. Sometimes, as in season one’s first episode, the “walkers” (as they’re termed) seem to retain connections with their former life. A little girl, wandering through a maze of abandoned cars, is glimpsed from behind by a sheriff’s deputy as she stoops to pick up a doll; only when she turns do we realize what she has become. A woman who’s one of the walkers approaches a house where our deputy hero is hiding out with another man and his son; we discover she used to be the man’s wife, hence the kid’s mother, and she’s returning—more out of longing than hunger, it seems—to the house where she once had been holed up until she, too was taken. Other episodes remind us of the walkers’ human past in other ways or make something rich from the process by which one of us becomes one of them.

What really sold me on the show’s dramatic gravitas was something else from its premier episode, involving two encounters with a half-demolished creature dragging itself through a spacious, green park. Lacking lower legs and so no longer much of a zombie, barely recognizable as having once been a woman, she’s apparently returned to a site of former pleasures. She proves to be more a thing to pity than to fear, and the second encounter struck me as remarkable, a moment of genuine pathos.

Most of the time, The Walking Dead pursues other concerns. It’s not only the humanity of the walkers that has been lost but also almost everything the other characters have known as normal life. Some of them talk of “when things get back to normal”; others lose all hope or come close to it, feeling the world to have become an alien region where they have no place. The latter is often a recipe for suicide, which in this series has its payoff in more than one outcome. The cities have become uninhabitable. While an individual walker may be recognized for what it once was, in the mass they’re simply ravening beasts, dominating Atlanta—the series takes place in Georgia—and presumably all the other urban centers on the planet.

It’s a smart piece of work to leave the zombies with traces of human individualism and also link them, subtly and admittedly rather vaguely, with the dehumanization long associated in Western thought with metropolises. As in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and many other works, our central characters must leave the cities behind to seek what restoration they can find. But there’s no Forest of Arden, at least not yet. Our hardy band isn’t exactly living on the run, but by the end of season one they had already abandoned more than one hoped-for refuge. Have they found it in season two? Time will tell; readers of the comic will suspect they know, but the series has departed from its source before.

The Walking Dead is currently airing in the United States on the AMC cable channel, Sunday nights at 9 PM Eastern.

Find John Branch: On Facebook / On Twitter / On Google+ / On Goodreads

Cogito: John Branch

Dance

In the Upper Room

Choreography: Twyla Tharp (American Ballet Theater)

Although I originally reviewed In the Upper Room six years ago, it has stayed with me ever since. It will be revived by ABT this season and I anticipate seeing it again, with great pleasure. This is why:

“If the State Department wants to present a compelling image of America to the world, it should commission Twyla Tharp to prepare a touring version of In the Upper Room, which American Ballet Theater has been performing at New York’s City Center lately, and send it out to sweep the globe. Set to a propulsive score by Philip Glass that itself unites traditional and modern instrumentation (i.e., acoustic and electronic), you’re instantly struck by how Tharp has put toe shoes and sneakers on the same stage. But its easy blending of what might once have been called high and low styles—the Old World rhetoric of ballet and the New World vernacular of Tharp’s modern-dance vocabulary, with arm flings and head tosses, sashays and shimmies and sidles—isn’t the only surprise.

Seeing it performed by a ballet company whose repertory includes many of the classics, with their hierarchical structure of principals, soloists, and corps dancers mirroring the stratified social scheme of a czar’s court, you notice also how absolutely democratic this piece is. As an idiom of the theater has it, there are no small parts here, nor are there isolated star turns; Tharp has built her work from solos, duets, trios, and larger ensembles, overlapping or succeeding one another in increasing complexity.

The title and the number of dancers (13) recall the Last Supper, suggesting that In the Upper Room may be some sort of transcendent vision, a sharing of divine wisdom and practice, even a notion of heaven—everything is swathed in clouds of smoke and illuminated in white light, and the dancers magically emerge from nowhere and exit into nothingness. To me, though, this breathless dynamo of a dance is more a vision of America: it’s got sass and speed, an expert use of technology, that melting together of styles, muscularity, joy in exertion, pride in prowess, a bold fashion sense (costumes by Norma Kamali), and above all else an unstoppable energy. But maybe these two visions amount to the same thing. As Susan Sontag remembered someone saying, America is a nation with the soul of a church. And here is one of our greatest testaments. Would that the world could see it.”

ABT: Bard College (November 4—6) bard;  New York City Center (November 8–13) city center.

Cooper’s London

Discovery: Music

The Wonder of Wunders

 Once there was a singer named Wunderlich; and now there is a pianist named Wunder – Ingolf Wunder. In these two cases, certainly, the name describes the talent. Wunder, who is newly 26 as I write this, won the second prize at the Chopin Competition in 2010 and was a clear audience favourite. Everyone but the jury thought he should come first. Which proves you must always watch the second prize winner. (Once upon a time Bryn Terfel came second to Dmitri Hvorostovsky in a singing competition! And just as scandalously, once upon a time in 1980, Ivo Pogarelich came second in the Chopin Competition.)

Wunder manages to combine the cool, poised technical perfection that everyone admires so much these days with a complete mix of both intellectual interest in the music and genuine emotional understanding of it. He clearly has a great affinity for the music of Chopin. Deutsche Grammophon has signed him exclusively and his first disc―a Chopin recital that includes a superb interpretation of the third piano sonata―is everything one could have expected. This young Austrian musician plays very much within the tradition that understands the past musical values and passions of people like Rubinstein or Horowitz but his work is controlled by a powerful intellectual approach—more like the young Brendel, perhaps.

Forget the comparisons; he is the one and only Ingolf Wunder and we can look forward, I predict, to years of growth and development – and moving, enlightening music making. He shows great inwardness and spirituality in the largo of the third sonata, for example, an amazing yearning and poignancy in the finale of that sonata; and superb inwardness and controlled spontaneity in the Polonaise-Fantaisie in A flat major (he won a special prize for the playing of this one at the Chopin Competition). And if you study the photo on the back of the CD it suggests that he can also dance on pianos like Fred Astaire! A wunder indeed?

Ingolf Wunder Chopin Recital DG 477 9634

Cooper’s London

Theatre

The Bride is Wild

Kneehigh, which had such a success with its production of Brief Encounter, is currently touring the UK and going to the Dublin Theatre Festival with a new show, Wild Bride, based on a Hungarian folk tale.

The company’s approach is to do theatre of the most Epic and Brechtian kind; accessibility and entertainment with a sting is its stock-in-trade. Yet again, Emma Rice has adapted and directed a show that is kinetic, exciting, engaging, uplifting and thought-provoking. There is not enough praise possible for the five performers and the musician who inhabit the stage in a stunningly evocative set that can adapt to any location. A Faustian “devil-wants-your-soul” tale with snatches of Snow White and grim versions of other folktales linked with Jungian imagination, the story totally engages you from the first line.

A father unwittingly sells the soul of his virtuous and virginal daughter to the devil; the telling of what happens to her over several years is developed through mime, dance, linguistics, and song. It’s an inventive mix, cheeky and magical. It’s also surprisingly moving, given the abundance of alienation effect throughout. As in every good fairy tale, you relate to the central character and root for her to win out, somehow, in the end. And, of course, she does (after all, it’s a fairy tale); but it’s never easy for her and, even though you know she will triumph, much of the tale is wince-making in its sheer gleeful diabolical nastiness.

This production restores your faith in the power of the stage to feed your imagination. Revolving around three amazing actresses/dancers/musicians playing the Wild Bride at various stages of her development, and a convoluted story that will prime your nightmares for days to come, The Wild Bride is also amazingly coherent; you’re never at a loss for where you are in this fantastical tale. The cast takes on all the various roles each one played with tremendous aplomb and energy. Etta Murfitt deserves praise for her choreography/movement work, and so does everyone else involved in this show.

If you’re lucky, it will be coming soon to a theater near you. Meantime, I’ll tantalize you with a short video of the show: kneehigh video. And then check the Kneehigh website to see if you can get to a performance. And prepare to be delighted, moved, and stirred: kneehigh website

 

Cooper’s London

Autumn Picks in London

 Theatre

There’s still time to catch Greg Doran’s extraordinary recreation of a lost Shakespeare play, Cardenio, at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford (in rep until 6 October) which, along with The City Madam (in rep until 4 October) was my best and most rewarding experience at Stratford this summer. Coming up at the RSC in November is an interesting-looking new play by David Edgar about the creation of the King James Bible called Written on the Heart. Since Doran is directing this as well, and Edgar has a fine track record of new plays for the RSC, I would place a bet on it–as well as on the Measure for Measure that will be directed by Roxana Silbert, definitely a talent to watch grow. Meantime, if you’re in London with children for the holidays or before, the RSC is transferring last year’s Christmas hit at Stratford, the musical of Roald Dahl’s Matilda, from 18 October for a season. It is utterly charming,some of the music is quite memorable; and the nasty headmistress of the school is done as a traditional panto dame.

In London, the hottest ticket is without a doubt the atmospheric and touching production of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie at the Donmar Warehouse, with Ruth Wilson, Jude Law and David Hayman. It’s a compelling look at the play, but tickets are hard to come by and you will probably have to queue on the day you go to get standbys and returns. But it’s worth it! Or pray that it’s transferred to the West End for a longer run? Even if Jude Law were to leave to make a movie, this is such a strong production that there’s no reason to kill it – much better to keep it going with some recasting.

Looking ahead, the Young Vic is reviving its sell-out production of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene briefly for the second half of September. More compellingly, book now for their Hamlet (28 October through 21 January). It will be directed by the hugely talented Ian Rickson and star Michael Sheen as the troubled prince. Meantime, down the street at the Old Vic in the Cut, you can see a promising new production of The Playboy of the Western World. John Crowley directs J. M. Synge’s sometimes provocative and always irreverent masterpiece, with Niamh Cusack, Ruth Negga and Robert Sheehan in the main roles. The National Theatre’s War Horse continues in the West End, trailing its Broadway awards. And The Pitman Painters, an even more interesting play, returns to the West End in October. Meantime, at the National itself you might want to look out for Jonathan Miller’s staging of the St Matthew Passion; then A New Play by Mike Leigh from mid-September; and also Juno and the Paycock coming in mid-November. Add these to the news that the inestimable David Suchet will be playing James Tyrone in a new production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in the West End from April 2012, I am feeling quite Irish this season. To which you can add a play by St. John Ervine called Mixed Marriage, set during the Troubles in Ireland, before partition. This is the first production of the play in London in about 90 years. It will be at the Finsborough Theatre, one of London’s smaller but more adventurous off-West End venues, a place that has recently been exploring neglected masterpieces of the early part of the 20th century. The production is to be directed by Sam Yates.

At the end of September, Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones bring their successful Broadway production of Driving Miss Daisy to Wyndhams Theatre. You might also want to consider taking a look at a new production of The Killing of Sister George with Meera Sayal at the Arts Theatre from 5 – 29 October. And if you have children with you, you should try to see the adaptation of The Railway Children that re-opens on 2 October, runs through Christmas, and is being performed in the former Eurostar Terminal at Waterloo. Those steam engines are the real thing!

Music: High and Low

Many of the musicals remain as before, so there is no need to tell you to check out Les Miserables or Legally Blonde or The Lion King, or even Chicago with a new cast and transferred to the Garrick Theatre from early October. But one that you might not know about is the transfer – from this summer’s festival at the Regent’s Park Theatre – of the George Gershwin pastiche Crazy for You. It’s preposterously cheerful and delightful and will be at the Novello Theatre from 8 October.

Meantime, for music theatre you might also want to try the English National Opera, where Jonathan Miller’s inventive and charming and spot-on production of Donizetti’s Elixir of Love is opening the season. Weinberg’s The Passenger receives a London premiere in a production by David Pountney that is preceded by much praise. But my vote for top spot in the Autumn season is a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin directed by Deborah Warner and, more importantly, conducted by Edward Gardener. Gardener always gets into the musical soul of the piece; you may have seen him conduct closing night of the BBC Proms this year.

Great early-in-the-season excitement at the Royal Opera House is being generated by their production of Puccini’s Trittico directed by Richard Jones, and a revival, with Gheorghiu and Hvorostovsky, of Gounod’s Faust. My top choice for this Autumn, however, is the revival of Graham Vick’s entrancing, wise and moving production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. It’s got a strong cast and Pappano is conducting; in truth, there’s rarely been such an evocative production of this opera, detailed and nuanced and utterly captivating. Mind you, as a person with a taste for bel canto, I am going to try not to miss La Sonnambula either, conducted by the inestimable Daniel Oren.

Apollo’s Girl

The Mill and the Cross: Renaissance Modern (film forum)

If you love winter light pierced by color; if you love ultimate art married to ultimate craftsmanship; if you love Renaissance aesthetics and politics matched by technical wizardry that reveals them anew and, most of all, if you want to see into the obsessive brilliance of Pieter Breughel the Elder matched by fimmaker Lech Majewski, you must not miss The Mill and the Cross.

Breughel painted The Way to Calvary in 1564, its canvas teeming with men and women accompanying Christ on his journey to death and transfiguration. Yet these more than 500 travelers of antiquity are dressed in rich-hued Renaissance costumes representing the Spanish soldiers who occupied Breughel’s Belgium during the Inquisition, the princes of the church, the burghers of Antwerp, and the peasants whose tenuous lives of hardship made the lives of all others possible.

Based on Michael Gibson’s book of the same name, The Mill and the Cross reinvents a biblical event interpreted by a great painter and wrenches us into its reality, focusing first on characters drawn out of the marching crowd, then creating a day for them to interact as they did in Brueghel’s time.

Breughel himself (Rutger Hauer), his friend and patron Nicholas Jonghelinck (Michael York), and the Virgin Mary (Charlotte Rampling) briefly enter and leave the action from time to time, but the film is really about the painting itself and the life within it. It’s a knockout!

While aesthetes will have a field day with the saturated colors and chilly landscapes of northern Europe, film buffs will celebrate Majewski’s achievements: incorporating CG technology and holographic effects, “weaving an enormous digital tapestry composed of layer upon layer of perspective, atmospheric phenomena, and people” shot in Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria and New Zealand. One of the most captivating scenes is the interior of the mill (seen as a tiny and improbable structure atop a distant mountain in the painting), as huge wooden gears, levers, and wheels moan and and shriek, grinding the grain that feeds the procession.  

Where the film succeeds most spectacularly is in allowing the viewer to enter its universe directly. It’s both unsettling and hypnotic at the same time. There’s discomfort with the casual cruelty portrayed on canvas and mirrored on film, and fascination with the sensual images, music, and movement that doesn’t end until the film is over and the viewer relinquishes its life as it transforms back into Brueghel’s canvas.

Majewski has a passion for art, music, sound and words. It has served him well as creator of The Mill and the Cross, as writer of Basquiat, director of stage versions of Carmen and Threepenny Opera, and as director of several films deploying his multi-displinary talents. It is likely that Kino-Lorber will release a DVD of The Mill and the Cross next year but, to be honest, it is best relished on the big screen. Just see it any way you can.