Lyceum Theatre - 145 W 45th St.

The ultimate in self-referential theater: a musical which is its own "the making of..." documentary. Full of obscure musical theater references, judging from the number of times the audience burst into laughter by the sheer mentioning of a name - which I obviously had never heard before.

4 People on stage, including the writer and composer, playing themselves, a bare set with 4 chairs, a guy with an electric piano (who is also allowed to talk, side-stepping usual theater union restrictions) certainly make for the most spartan musical production on Broadway I have ever heard of. The premise of the show is how Musical geeks Jeff and Hunter want to write a new original musical for a competition in 3 weeks and in lack of a better idea simply start documenting the process of developing the yet unnamed musical - a process which goes beyond the festival, an off-broadway run in 2006 to the broadway appearance right now.

Some of the strongest moments of the productions are its credible honesty at providing glimpses into the soul of struggling artist and what would drive presumably sane people to embark on such a wild stubbornly persistent chase after their dream.

Mike Daisey @ Joe's Pub - Public Theater 250 Lafayette St.

A monolog/solo performance at the intimate cafe performance space in the public theater building. Part auto-biography, part rant on the state of theater in the american provinces, the evening is witty and thought provoking. Mike Daisey describes the current state of regional theater as a network of buildings and institutions which put on production with a tailorist mentality of industrial planing, instead of looking at theater as the people who create the experience on stage. We may all speculate about the reasons, but it seems clear that theater audiences are shrinking and getting demographically older. Wether that is an unavoidable and irreversible phenomenon with wider cultural roots remains to be seen.

Zankel Hall @ Carnegie Hall

An evening of baroque chamber-music from Vivaldi to Bach at the smaller new Zakel Hall concert space underneath Carnegie Hall.

VIVALDI Concerto for Strings and Continuo in G Minor, RV 152
MARCELLO Oboe Concerto in D Minor (with ornaments by J. S. Bach)
GRAUN Concerto for Viola da Gamba, Strings, and Basso Continuo in A Minor
P. H. ERLEBACH Overture No. 5 in F Major
BACH Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra in D Minor, BWV 1052

45 Bleeker

Three short plays by Ethan Coen, best know for edgy movies and winning 3 oscars in one night. His Off-Broadway stage debut was produced by the Atlantic Theater with a stellar cast, but we somehow missed it (was fully sold out anyway...) but is now coming back for another run at the 45 Bleeker Theater. The three pays are basically light sketches about heavy topics, like death or god - treated an irreverent way typical to comedy. Funny and entertaining, but not earth shattering and without all the celebrity and talent associated without the production, would probably have gone without being much noticed.

Atlantic Theater

Something dark is festering under the surface of everyday domestic life in some unnamed, faceless British suburb. Plenty of cryptic metaphors and symbolism hint at relationships which aren't what they seem to be at the surface between an estranged couple and their friendly neighbor (in more ways than one).

Comedians on a week-night tend to be a whiny bunch, complaining all the time how bad the audience is while they are struggling through their new material. But with a friend visiting in town all the way from Seattle we couldn't be picky about the day. Besides to other weeknight performances this wasn't even that bad and there were enough people in the audience to fill a small bus.

Carnegie Hall

Tonight's program included excerpts from Remeo et Juliette by Hector Berlioz, Preulde and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner as well as La mer by Claude Debussy.

Atlantic Theatre 336 W 20th St

A piece of scientific history reenactment theater - with some level of dramatic license to bring together events and people which didn't happen at the same time or didn't meet in person. At the core of the story is the fact that both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had discovered the theory of natural selection through competition for limited resources as the explanation for the evolution or transmutation of species.

The story begins when Wallace writes do Darwin with a request for help in getting a paper published in England outlining the core of a theory Darwin himself had been working on for 20 years but never dared to publish. Even though Darwin and Wallace came to the same conclusion on a fundamental mechanism which seems to drive the earths biosphere, but the conclusions they draw from it for the personal lives seem to be fairly different.

Masterwork Chorus @ Carnegie Hall

A traditional christmas performance at Carnegie hall provided the backdrop for a family visit to NY with a stroll along 5th avenue and visit to the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and dinner at one of our favorite neighborhood restaurants.

Metropolitan Opera - Lincoln Center (Bway/64th St.)

After a few week-ends of packing and moving stuff into storage to get ready for closing next week, we think we need a break and some time for ourselves. As a last minute decision, we catch this last performance of Mozart's "Die Zauberflöte" at the Met. A strange thing of an operate - or rather not an Opera by the standards of the time, but a "Singspiel" written not for the court, but the popular theater in the form of a kind of magical fairy tale complete with heroic heroes, flashy villains and comic relief characters. Somewhat unexpectedly worked into this formula is a recruiting pitch for the Freemasons in particular or in general any advocacy of enlightenment, where the light of reason should triumph over the darkness of irrational superstition. With its richness and contrasts, the magic flute has the kind of "multi-level accessibility" to be enjoyed by children and opera snobs alike. An it must be particularly fun for the production designers - which in the case of this production at the met have outdone themselves. The rich set reminds of a rotating version of the time-warner center but the real eye-candy are the various elments of puppetry, from the giant serpent, to flying birds to the stunning costume of the Queen of the Night.

National Theatre of Greece @ City Center 131 W 55th St (6th & 7th ave)

It all seemed a bit Greek to me - maybe because it was. Even without understanding a word the performance was captivating to the point that the audience was ready to lynch the idiot whose cellphone went off twice during the climactic scene of the play, with an obnoxious loud and cheery melody for polyphonic cellphone ringer. After watching bloodlust and revenge fantasies on stage for over an hour, the guy can consider himself lucky of having gotten away with his life!

Too bad that the English "subtitles" projected on a screen next to the stage were blurry at best when the lights were dim and completely washed out when the lights were high. Presumably a large part of the audience did understand the modern Greek translation, but for those who didn't more exposure to the text itself would have been appreciated - even though the basic plot-line can be summed up in a few paragraphs and is rather common knowledge.

Spiegeltent, Pier 17, south-street seaport

For the second year , the Spiegeltent is back with two adult cabaret/circus spectacles. The basic premise of La Vie is that we are all dead (the tile "La Mort" supposedly didn't pass the focus-group tests) and in some kind of cosmic waiting room, subject to a whacked out bureaucracy. As cases are being called up for review from the files, this present the framework for performances, usually related somehow to the live or death of the character. One of the most eerily memorable performance is by a contortionist & acrobat with wild hair and a maniacal laugh for an arial number using tied-up bed-sheets (5 stories worth, for an escape from the 10th floor of the psychiatric hospital... we are all dead, remember!).

This also marks our 2-month wedding anniversary , the first one having fallen victim to market turmoils and resulting performance problems which resulted in the (perceived) need to work over the week-end.

Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola/Jazz at Lincoln Center - Bway & 60th st.

The smallest of the 3 new performance spaces of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which as one might easily gather from the name, is in the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle. The drinks are strong and food is cajun, but overall this is a long way from the (once-) smoky downtown or Harlem jazz clubs. The interior space of the club is very slick, cool, state of the art and like anything at the Time Warner center oozes an air of money.

In particular the view out of the glass front over central park and the city-skyline in the light of the full-moon might seriously distract from the performance, but the 6 musicians on stage (Eric Alexander, tenor saxophone; Steve Davis, trombone; Jim Rotondi, trumpet; David Hazeltine, piano; John Webber, bass; Joe Farnsworth, drums) manage easily to use the setting to their advantage and create an unforgettable mood.

FringeNYC - SoHo Playhouse - 15 Vandam St.

The inevitable charm of the bourgeoisie... 2 starving artists stage a multi-year protest in front of the offices of the evil Sunshine Foundation for the Arts, who corrupts the arts by funding - in their eyes - only mediocre artists. Much of their artistic self-esteem is based on the fact that none of their countless proposals has ever been accepted. Their downfall begins the day one of their proposals is accepted and they receive financial carte-blanche (in the form of a Sapphire Amex) to realize all their artistic inspiration, just to notice that really don't have any left - or worse, maybe never really had any to begin with.

Overall a very funny and well executed production - a company to hopefully see more of.

Rififi - 332 E11th St (1st & 2nd)

Only weeks away from getting married, my future wife was starting to get concerned about my lack of a bachelor party. Since our first choice on Saturday night was cancelled, we head over to the east-village for a fix of neo-burlesque. Once the show finally gets on its way, the ambiance heats up with a broad range of imaginative performances, from a sword-swallower with existential issues, a fan-dancer who isn't many things, including a natural blonde to a very convincing furniture sales-lady.

Bernard B Jacobs Theatre - 242 W 45th St.

Another re-enactment drama based on historic events. Like last year's acclaimed London import, the History Boys, this production is somewhat cinematic in style, uses video background projection to help set the context and is also followed up shortly be a movie version. So much for the superficial similarities...

The story shows the background behind a famous television interview between British TV personality David Frost and Richard Nixon shortly after his resignation. It is seen by both sides as a a high stakes competition, a kind of boxing match over 4 rounds, which only one side can win and where losing means the end of a career in the limelight.

These events mark about the beginning of Television's role as the court of public opinion and about the end where a US president would be able to hold his own in an extended debate and argument - or at least where his advisors would let him be subjected to such a thing as since then, the management of the media has become a field of expertise among political consultants and where nobody would consider it wise to take such high stakes and chances any more.

St. Ann's Warehouse - 38 Water St. DUMBO, Brooklyn

A workshop festival for experimental puppet theater. With small cameras becoming more readily available, audio-visual effects are becoming increasingly popular, i.e. the screen projection is actually framing the puppet stage, which may be set up loosely somewhere else. the other noticeable element was the loose definition of puppet theater, including often more life actors than puppets.

Booth Theatre 222 W. 45th St

Vanessa Redgrave in a solo performance as the writer Joan Didion - in a play based on her memoir. It deals in an intellectualized form with the study of grief and coping with life-changing events - in this case the sudden death of Joan Didions husband while their daughter is in the hospital with a mysterious life-threatening illness.

Carnegie Hall

Chamber music for piano and strings in various configurations, concluded the sunday matinee subscription series for this season. If not for that, we probably would not have left the house, since the weather was rather uninviting. The program included a piano quintet by Mozart (K. 493), a piano trio by contemporary composer Leon Kirchner and the Schubert quintet in A major ("Forellenquintett").

Brooks Atkinson Theatre - 256 W47th Street

Probably the best play this year on Broadway, in a limited time appearance from the Old Vic theater in London, where Kevin Spacey is now artistic director. The core cast for the 3 main characters, Eve Best as Josie, Colm Meaney as her father and Kevin Spacey as Jim Tyrone each could carry a production with their performance but instead seeing them play off each other creates a gut-wrenching theater experience on a whole different level.

"Moon for the Misbegotten" is in a way the sequel to "Long Day's Journey into Night", the terrifying saga of the Tyrone family - a thinly veiled portrait of the O'Neills. It brings a lighter, more humorous and hopeful tone and at least some characters who despite all their misery and problems seem fit for life. After the journey into the night, this is a journey into the day, a new dawn, a shimmer of hope and redemption, if at all possible, through the love of a woman. We meet Jamie/Jim/James Tyrone Jr. again, towards the end of his life, haunted by far too many daemons to be saved for more than one night at a time and is simply hoping to some morning not to wake up again. (In real life, Eugene O'Neill's older brother Jamie died in his sleep, at age 45 from complications of alcoholism, only months after the date this play is set).

Carnegie Hall 154 W57th St.

There is hardly anything more cliche in classical music than Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons", which seems to come standard with any phone system these days - nice to hear the difference once in a while in a top performance. And with the boyish looks of a young Tom Cruise, Joshua Bell has all the makings of a baroque star, admired by teenage girls and their grandmothers alike - Franz Liszt meets the backstreet boys - even without his way of combining technical virtuosity with and emotional intensity and depth which seems almost unlikely.

Ontological Theater at St. Marks Church - 2nd Ave & 10th st.

The latest multimedia/Theater spectacle by Richard Foreman, the godfather of the downtown theater avant-garde. Still the only theater where the spotlights are pointed at the audience and the stage looks like the basement of a compulsive collector. The interaction between the video shot in Lisbon and the cast on stage created a new kind of synthesis and added a twist to the signature stile of a Richard Foreman production with its dividers and web of threads spun across a chaotic/opulent set filled with frantic actors and disembodied voices. Surprisingly coherent in its incoherence one can only suspect that it must have been good stuff which they were smoking...

Actor's Playhouse, 100 7th Avenue S. (Bleeker & Christopher St)

Gutenberg! the musical! is a musical about the Holocaust, since every musical has to have a serious theme. I fact the show isn't really a musical, its about two guys who wrote a musical and their dream to see it produced on Broadway, with turntables, moving sets, singing and dancing chorus lines. For now they are pitching their script to a number of fictitious broadway producers in the audience, playing all the characters, wearing different hats at different time of the production (literally). Story is set in mediaeval time in a small German town with residents particularly obsessed about their illiteracy. While one main character, "Gutenberg", is trying to invent the printing press to change that, the particularly evil monk "Monk" is trying to stop him for the sake of retaining the power of the church, while the stories love interest "Helvetica" is getting mixed up in the middle of it.

With broadway itself being these days full of self-conscious, ironic mock-musicals which poke fun at the genre itself, the idea of a satire on the bombastic productions and the predictable pathos of the grand, epic, serous broadway musical isn't exactly new any more. Maybe soon we will see the satire on the satirical musical? Yet idea of projecting a musical as a kind of cabaret theater (2 actors and a pianist on a small stage), as a story within the story gives this production some added freshness and authenticity.

Longacre Theatre, 220 W48th St (Bway - 8th ave)

A new play by Eric Bogosian starring Liev Schreiber in the role of the self-centered host of a late-night call-in radio show, who dishes out offense and insult to all the psychos, loners and insomniacs who happen to call into his show. The role is an excellent showcase for Liev Schreiber who can shine with a differentiated and commanding voice in this performance.

Blue Note 131 W3rd Str.

Amazingly complex and cohesive sound for a trio where Piano, bass and drums kind of melt into one. Seriously smooth and groovy despite its rhythmic and melodic complexity - making it all look effortless and easy is the true mark of a master.

Cherry Lane Theater - 38 Commerce St.

A look at what is going on underneath the surface, in the NYC subway in particular. In an empty subway car Lula, a white seductress offers Clay, a somewhat overly prim and proper young black man an apple. During the ensuing dialog, which rotates around and clay and his persona, what he is, what he isn't what he represents, his "type" she continues to taunt, provoke and pushing his buttons. After he had burst out into a violent monolog she unexpectedly kills him with a knife, while other passengers - so far as passive bystanders carry out his dying body. The play then loops and retakes where it started - evocative of the absurdist social metaphors of Ionesco. According to the playwright, the title refers to the legend of the flying dutchman, cursed to roam the 7 seas forever - with a few minor escape clauses. The play was written in the 60ies, during the height of the civil rights struggle and an ongoing quest for a distinct African American identity. While many things have changed since, the fervor of political activism surrounding race relations has died down. This doesn't mean that a black man can't easily die in the streets reaching for his wallet even today.

The relation between white and black in this country is quite a special, different from the relations between any other ethnic or social classifications. It has remained specially tense and prone to dangers and misunderstandings, even created out of ignorant well meaning. We can only hope that one day black and white can get off their very special cursed subway train and join the rest of the world trying to become more Chinese...

Blue Note - 131 W. 3rd st.

The late show with trumpeter Chris Botti sided by quartet of piano, guitar, bass and drums. Musical execution at the highest level, but a bit to smooth and "poppy" for my taste.

Harley Granville-Barker/Adapted by David Mamet - Atlantic theater

This short-form adaptation for the attention-span challenged focuses squarely on the question of business ethics and the group dynamics which can help to explain how for example, something like Enron can happen so easily. Shortly before his fathers death, the young junior partner in a seemingly very posh victorian era British private asset management firm discovers that something is very rotten with the various accounts entrusted to the firm. It turns out his father (and possibly his grandfather before) had in their financial wizardry run some kind of an underground hedge-fund with the entrusted capital, investing it in higher yield assets, pocketing the yield spread - and loosing about half of the principal over time in bets gone wrong. His father seems, as many financial wizards, the moral compass to see much wrong in his actions. After all nobody has come to any damage yet, he has always managed to raise enough liquid capital to cover any pay-outs necessary and after all hist clients did not explicitly tell them NOT to sell off their low-yield conservative holdings and re-invest them into riskier ones. Besides, if it works, what can't be wrong with it and even if he is 50% down right now, he can always win it back...

After his fathers death, the new principal of the firm finds himself in a particular dilemma. He is appalled by his fathers lack of professional ethics, but finds little support in his family, who have gotten used to the good family name and the lavish lifestyle, to blow the scandal open and bring the firm into bankruptcy. The other nagging question is that since as long as the house of cards can be maintained, nobody will come to any real damage - but in the event of a bankruptcy, while wealthy clients would remain with more than they'll ever need, poorer ones would end up starving in the street. With this rationalization, he continues dong what his father had been doing - minus taking a cut out of the return, but rather trying to balance out some of the smaller accounts, which he considers necessary for their owners - ironically committing his own crime by not letting the bankruptcy court handle the distribution of remaining assets and thus discriminating among creditors. Clearly not enjoying himself in the process, he takes no effort to cover his tracks or find amicable arrangements with people who are trying to blackmail him - somehow reminiscent of the comedy sketches at Enron company parties, where the creative accountants seem to have been only too aware that sooner or later, they would be led out in hand-cuffs, and still they kept going.

On of the problems with financial ethics is that money these days is nothing more than a believe in its existence anyway. The financial system is a house of cards by design and the rules of what distinguishes a reasonably solid house of cards from a irresponsibly shaky one can be hard to discern even for specialists. Besides, whoever brings it down is the one who causes the real damage, since as long as it keeps standing, we may as well not know the difference.

Carnegie Hall

Part three of a 3 part concert cycle of Violin Sonatas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart . Coinciding with this "world-tour" by long-time collaborators Anne-Sophie Mutter and Lambert Orkis is also a new CD recoding of the same body of works.

Black moon theater company/Teatro Latea Clemente Soto Velez - 107 Suffolk St.

A stage adaptation of of Kafka's the trial with an intentional link to current events. While most of the staging is close to the text and the staging is in a kind of period or retro visual style, with allusion to 1930ies German expressionist film - including projection of black and white images and film sequences onto a transparent screen separating the stage. The expressionist angle actually works quite well helping to heighten the sense of surrealism and emotional anguish which is presumably the core of the story. The attempts to politicize the story using documentary footage around 9/11 is rather less successful. It works best where the connection to current events is more subtle and indirect, connecting to the universality of the story in its portrayal of the deep psychological trauma and anxiety that the characters are exposed to - alienation, a strong desired to blend in a please a society perceived as hostile, judgmental and unpredictably irrational.

London Symphony Orchestra - Lincoln Center

One of the most famous, used and abused pieces of classical music performed by a first-rate orchestra. Everybody thinks to know it, but seeing it performed live it appears more diverse and complex. The sweeping chorus of the 4th movement could as well be a tongue-in cheek Ode to Capitalism and the bonus seasons on Wall-street: "... be embraced, you millions!"...

by Tina Howe @ Atlantic Theater

First play of the season at the Atlantic Theater main-stage on 20th street. Pretty absurd in general and with formal references to Ionescu's Bald Soprano in particular (a pice with which the playwright is intimately familiar, having done the new translation also shown at the Atlantic Theater a while ago). Beyond the absurdity, he pleasures/issues/regrets associated with having and not having children are clearly a recurring theme - with parenthood being the invisible elephant looming about in the room. Speaking of looming, the role of "little baby Nicky", the 4 year old son of the couple hosting the dinner party, is played by the most massive member of the cast, creating a disturbingly funny distortion in our perception and adds a layer of symbolism to the weight and maybe disproportionate role and importance "little Nicky" takes on in his parents live and their quasi absent relationship with each other, as they take turns talking to the wall.

Fringe Festival

A cool concept and strong execution make for a great theater experience. Stage adapation of the classic silent movie Pandora's Box back to the stage. Like an expressionist silent movie come to live, including the exagerated black&white makeup and heightened expressions to convey emotions, the wild live of the roaring twenties, the dramatic stories, the projected scene titles and the live piano accompaniment. Very sensual and sexy...

Small Appliance Puppet Theater - NYC Fringe Festival

Getting into a Fringe festival performance is getting harder by the year. Thinking that a quiet Monday night shouldn't be a problem is dead wrong again. I only get in because the 4 people ahead in line are in pairs and there is only one ticket left. Fringe festival definitely isn't as fringy and spontaneous as it used to be - how long before it becomes the Disney New York International Fringe Festival?

A musical political satire for small kitchen appliances starring an electric can opener as George W Bush and his whole kitchen cabinet. My personal favorite was a nasty looking citrus juicer as Donald Rumsfeld bickering like beavis and butt-head. The food processor as Dick Cheney has the most memorable, dark solo performance in "It's not easy being mean" - set to an organ score that evokes Phantom of the Opera and other B horror movies... Overall the satire isn't as biting as it could be in particular since sadly enough much has been surpassed by reality - for those in this administration who are concerned about their legacy, they can only hope that history will be at least as kind...

Majestic Theater - 247 W44th st.

Not exactly my choice of entertainment, but what doesn't one do for visiting relatives... ;-) The gold standard of Broadway musicals although a tad melodramatic with its sweeping grandiose score and staging. But at least the Phantom's own opera - one of the 3 humorous opera parodies embedded in the musical is a bit edgier. Better than I remembered it from the first time I saw it long time ago.

147 Bleeker St. (Thompson/LaGuardia)

After a stroll through Greenwich Village and listening to some jam-sessions in Washington Square park, we end up at the Bitter End just in time for the set of some unknown band from the garden-state. They rocked nonetheless!

Spiegeltent @ Pier 17 (South Street Seaport)

A nostalgic wink to vaudeville and pre-war Berlin Cabaret with a location to match: an original traveling theater from the 1920ies which is set up for the season behind the old fish-market underneath the Brooklyn bridge. The outdoor bar and beergarden around the tent is already worth a visit for itself on a nice evening. The program is wacky and spectacular - an adult kind of circus...

Atlantic Theater Stage 2 - 330W 16th St

Third and final evening of the Atlantic Theaters 20th anniversary series of of 20 original short plays ranging again from a mix of theater-geek introspective via just plain silly or to political, to musings about the human condition. In retrospect, the 2nd evening might have left the strongest impression overall, but the theatrical quality of all the productions was consistently high, which makes the Atlantic Theater quite a gem among what is left of the off-Broadway scene, with its standing production company dedicated to presenting weighty plays and difficult plays the way they might have been intended by the playwright.

Atlantic Theater Stage 2 - 330 W16th st.

2nd installment of the 20th anniversary series of 10 minute one act plays. Again a rich selection of short plays in very different styles. If I would be watching more TV, I would notice that some of the actors are apparently quite well know from their TV career.

Atlantic Theater Stage 2 - 330 W 16th st

20 plays of 10min each by 20 of previously produced playwrights in the 20 year history of the Atlantic Theater. At the occasion also inaugurating the new 2nd theater space deep in the dungeons of the Port Autority inland terminal building - the one that is built such that you can run into small trucks up on the 11th floor. The lengthy ride in the special elevator from the theater lobby to the performance space reminds of the entry into a coal mine or a nuclear missile silo and leaves a slightly claustrophobic idea of being locked in who knows how deep underground (supposedly 7 stories) with quite a crowd - did anybody say fire-code?

The shorts, all quite different in style ranged from amusing to disturbing and are presented with the usual dedication to serious theater that we have come to like and expect from the Atlantic Theater's company.