Ranting Details

Picture of the Day: 11/24/09

Lazy Post of the Day: My Nightly Routine

I mean, I guess this is impressive.  But I was totally doing it last week in my apartment.  Then my bitch of a downstairs neighbor reported me to the super and I had to stop. 

Picture of the Day: 11/19/09

Picture of the Day: 11/17/09

(I took a trip to the Brooklyn Museum this afternoon.)

Back to Before

From the moment the curtain rises on the new Broadway revival of  "Ragtime,” it’s clear that things in turn-of-the-century America are bleak.  An enormous 40-person company lines the beautiful, but cold, set—three-tiered scaffolding which may or may not be on loan from last season’s “Next to Normal,”—and stares out into the darkness.  Each member is visible, relegated to a particular level according to which social class they are in: New Rochelle’s stifled elite, the fresh-to-America immigrants, or the rambunctious Harlem musicians.  Unfortunately this tableau is one of the clearest moments the audience gets in this uneven revival of a truly great show, which opened at the Neil Simon Theater tonight. 

Those lucky enough to have seen the original production (which made Broadway stars out of Brian Stokes Mitchell, Audra McDonald, and Marin Mazzie) will immediately note the absence of the scenic grandeur that inhabited the Ford Center for the Performing Arts ten years ago.  But, as a director like John Doyle proved with his revival of “Sweeney Todd,” it is often by stripping down the enormity of an original production that one finds subtleties in the emotional structure of a work.  Here, director and choreographer Marcia Milgrom Dodge tries to do this, but ultimately fails, unable to balance the energy and tone of her actors with the bareness of what surrounds them. 

The proceedings start off well-enough in the opening number, which immediately displays the brilliance of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s Tony Award-winning score, where directness is essential due to the fact that so much information must be conveyed in so little time.  Cast members address the audience in order to get bulky exposition out of the way before entering into a more traditional musical theater format, where they are allowed to sing songs with nary a hint of the self-referential gimmickry that has overtaken musical theater in the past decade. 

Dodge, like original director Frank Galati, wisely establishes a sense of propulsion to the staging where the classes weave around one another, overlapping in emotion if not in physical contact, much like the melting pot that was New York in the early 1900s.  While this is essential to conveying the tension of the times (special note goes to the subtle gestural differences in each class’s choreography), there is also a fine line between maintaining this energy and over-staging the show; a line that Dodge doesn’t walk confidently. 

Therefore, it is the show’s structure, where each character adds to the whole much like part of Henry Ford’s assembly line, that quickly steals the spotlight as the first act progresses.  But this structure also has a potentially frustrating flaw if not directed with finesse, in that the overwhelming amount of characters and plot development leave little time for us to connect to each storyline.  We jump from class to class with each new song, which, when viewed in succession, can make for a string of vignettes instead of an unfolding storyline. 

Central themes become apparent in each of these moments, as each class strives for both the chance to escape their confinement and to find security in the shifting world.  Characters begin coming together when Mother (Christianne Noll) and the immigrant Tateh (Robert Petkoff) convene on a train platform and the stark differences in appearance, one in rags with a child roped to his waist and the other holding a parasol and touching her child with pristine gloves, can’t stop them from forming a connection.  Mother also is responsible for finding a young African American child buried in her lawn, which we quickly discover belongs to Sarah (Stephanie Umoh), who has fled from Coalhouse (Quentin Earl Darrington), a piano man from Harlem who plays ragtime music while dreaming of a better world. 

The complexity of the interweaving storylines is matched, in the material at least, by emotional complexity, which is as absent from this revival as the use of scenery.  No performance is more frustrating than Stephanie Umoh’s stilted delivery of Sarah, a role for which Audra McDonald won a Tony during the original run. During “Your Daddy’s Son,” a tsunami of a song that should crash into the audience as such, Dodge directs her to run around the bare stage in an attempt to fill the space.  Instead Umoh—like Noll with “Back to Before” and Darrington with “Make Them Hear You”—is left to flail around before finally singing straight at the audience in a seeming attempt for something to play off of; with McDonald you saw the battle happening within, here it’s merely with the actress’s surroundings.  The problem again comes back to the disconnect between the performers and the design, the first amped up and the second scaled down from the original, to the point where even the sure-fire “Wheels of a Dream” falls flat.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to enjoy in the evening.  The first-rate score is reason enough to get to the theater, and, on a whole, it’s sung beautifully, just not as memorably as by the voices that originated the material.  Noll, here used as more of an occasional comedian than Mazzie in the original, has soaring moments vocally and manages to become the emotional core of the production despite every attempt on Darrington and Umoh’s part to do so.  But the material weighing in Mother’s favor lessens the impact of Sarah and Coalhouse, who have the evening’s most devastating turn of events.  

It should be noted that the audience around me responded enthusiastically to every element of the show.  Perhaps they weren’t able to see the original; or perhaps I need to accept that, as the lyric suggests, we can never go back to before, despite the intense desire to transport some of the original’s magic into this ultimately disappointing revival. 

Picture of the Day: 11/14/09

(Just a normal night in my apartment...)

America's Next Top Model

Shot headshots for this kid the other day, and from the moment he stepped in front of the camera he delivered on every shot.  I've never been one to advocate putting children in any entertainment industry, but I basically demanded that his mom get him to an agent and up on the walls of Gap Kids as quickly as possible. 

 

 

 

Picture of the Day: 11/12/09

Gillian (of summer graveyard picture fame) just moved to town.  Aside from getting to spend time with one of my best friends, this also means that I get to eat the delicious food that she cooks.  I am lucky.

Unleashed

They put me on a leash.  My parents put me on a fucking blue and yellow velcro leash.  I guess I can’t blame them for being overly cautious when we moved from Manhattan, a collection of cubicles masquerading as apartments, to Los Angeles, where the cubicles moved on highways, and, according to all the videos my teachers showed me in preschool, contained only lecherous men waiting to give me candy should I ever stray too far from our picket fence. 

The leashing was a one-off experiment during a trip to the mall, which resulted in the formation of my first memory and long debates with my father about the legitimacy of said memory in the following years.  Even though my parents quickly removed, and forever put away, the contraption, I realize that for much of my life I’ve kept myself tethered to an even more confining leash—afraid to trust my abilities and step away from the comfort of what’s known. 

It doesn’t help that I was, from a young age, immersed in the classical ballet world where the mentality is often like that of a dog; someone yanks your neck in order to get you to stay in line, or pulls your leg an inch higher while you nod and comply. (Not to mention the myriad of costumes I wore that may as well have been from the dog Halloween section at Target.) The ballet world, unlike many other dance forms, is perhaps the most mysterious of all leashes.  It wasn’t until after I stopped dancing, and began talking with a lot of other performers who, for whatever reason, had also parted ways with the profession, that I began to analyze the largely uncreative nature of the classical ballet world today.  Ballet parades itself as an art form, but over the past years, in my opinion, it has aligned itself more with a sport that allows for moments of artistic interpretation, largely among the upper ranks of companies.  It’s a world where self-expression is only allowed within the parameters of the owner’s rules and one where everyone’s waiting to get a pat on the head for sitting when commanded. This leash was welded around my brain and, as the past several years have proven, would take more than a quick pull of Velcro to remove.

When I began writing and taking photos, publishing them to my blog or on Facebook, I became aware of how stifled my creativity had been as a member of the corps de ballet.  Fortunately I had several platforms to let me test out my new interests in a relatively low-pressure forum where the people who lambasted my efforts were as anonymous as those who championed them; I didn’t have to put a face to the critique, and I could imagine the praise was coming from people like David Sedaris or David Lachapelle. 

But reality reminded me I wasn’t one of the David’s.  I am Matthew Murphy, and I have a new reputation to build.  At the beginning of my time as a writer and photographer I was able to parlay the clout of American Ballet Theatre into the worlds in which I was entering, but the goal was, and remains to be, that my work will stand alone without the prestige of ABT doing the talking for me.  That, however, meant that I would need to start speaking up. 

One afternoon, while sitting in a theater with a fellow photographer from The Times, she turned to me and insisted I remove my dancer leash.  I was waiting to be told what to do, she said; waiting for work to fall into my lap and for a ballet master to pull out a VHS tape and instruct me to execute the steps the way they had always been done.  She very plainly informed me this wasn’t going to happen.  I needed to take control. 

I felt the only way to break my mentality was to get a brain transplant; but with no income I realized this wasn’t a possibility.  For months I tried to wrap my head around the idea of owning myself.  I took the leash off, but the collar remained, waiting for someone to hook on a new leash and walk me down the block. 

It took another person, a man whose career I respect immensely and who has guided it every step of the way, to gently remove my collar once and for all about a month ago.  Shortly after, I went to Los Angeles for a vacation and began mapping out a plan for my career, one where I’m not waiting for someone to put food in my bowl, but searching it out on my own.  Driving around L.A. I was reminded of my time in the mall attached to my parents when I was three-years-old.  They were smart to remove the leash when they did, unfortunately it took me about twenty years to realize it wasn’t still attached.  Now I’m finally ready to run. 

Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, "Touch" Me

I photographed Avi Scher's new piece, "Touch," at the Manhattan Movement Arts Center over the weekend.  It's been great to watch this young choreographer's work develop through my lens over the past year, and this piece--danced by New York City Ballet's Russell Janzen, Antonio Carmena, and Ashley Bouder--was an excellent, diverse addition to his expanding repertory.