Straight Line Crazy

(Bridge Theatre, 26 April 2022)

The don't hate the player, hate the game maxim is not ambitious enough. According to it, the Eichmann, a clog in a vicious system, would be blameless. If a society is designed well, then one has no responsibility but to passionately be. The system will promote you if it needs you and will discard you otherwise and by virtue of being designed well will deliver good outcomes. If a system is faulty, however, then who one passionately is matters for the system's outcome. If a system promotes you regardless of who you are, then you are responsible for who you are and for the outcomes your being engenders.

Robert Moses was an admirable man---in America, which promotes one on the basis of one's ideas. His stubborn refusal to recognise his blind spots would have made him blameworthy in another system.

Ralph Fiennes's character is a good man, single-minded and determined. The genius of Fiennes the actor is to project a character who is bigger than the part that he has been allotted onstage.

Back to the Future: The Musical

 (Adelphi Theatre, 28 April 2022)

The musical’s creators believed in something so much that it has come true, twice: once as a motion picture and once as a musical play.

Back to the Future belongs to the most ambitious genre of theatre, one that shows people that happiness is possible, shows them how, and gives them a taste of this happiness for the duration of the performance.  

The musical is expertly cast. It is hard to imagine a better acting, a better dancing, or a better singing Doc than the understudy (?) Mark Oxtoby. It takes Olly Dobson eight minutes to convince the audience that he indeed is Marty McFly. Years of training and practice, hard work, talent, and good luck are all on show in the rest of the cast, as well.

If mounting a show like this is possible, anything is possible. The Westend ecosystem responsible for the production rivals in complexity modern Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The systems thrive on the mobility of talent, meritocracy, and creative financing.

Punchdrunk's The Burnt City

(One Cartridge Place, 27 April 2022)

The minimal requirement for a production with no words is that its actors be good-looking and its choreography be good. The Burnt City fails to clear this bar—in London, of all places.

The show felt fabricated. The creators chose not to draw on a prototypical world for inspiration and instead attempted to collate a new world from from disparate images conjured by what must have been a committee. The final product did not quite compile. In large open spaces, the feeling was more akin to being at a rock concert, with a clear barrier between the public and the performers, rather than being a witness transplanted to another world. 

In the production in which a dancer’s body is the expressive medium, some actors were dressed in bizarre silicone half-body suits, whose only effect was to conceal and deform the actors’ physique. The show lacked passion, pace, and purpose.

By having exiled the production from the city proper, the creators appear to have also traded the urbanity for suburbanity. After the production, a public street leading away from the venue was blocked---with no credible reason and with questionable legal basis. Surgical masks under plastic masks were required but not supplied, and the plastic masks were unceremoniously confiscated after the production by the characters who made no attempt to inhabit a character. A VIP lounge was available but was not clearly marked, would not serve even a complementary Coke, and was situated away from where a band performed, with the said band, which dabbled in the genre that had no connection to the spirit of the proceedings, leaving right before the public had a chance to settle at their tables and listen.

Surrealism Beyond Borders

(Tate Modern, 25 April 2022)

Surrealism is the (mostly) visual expression of freedom of thought. Surrealism as a political movement asserts that everyone is entitled to this freedom. There is no requirement to be good at being free in order to have the right to be free.

War is inimical to freedom. It is therefore natural that surrealism would flourish at the run-up to, during, and in the aftermath of wars.

A society comprised of rational individuals—those who know what they want, want consistently, and choose accordingly—has little use for freedom. Such a society would be quite happy with a totalitarian system in which the government would give everyone what he would have chosen for himself anyway. Because a totalitarian regime cannot predict how an irrational person would choose, however, the totalitarian regime would necessarily constrain the irrational. The commitment to accommodate the irrational is what gives surrealism its distinctive look.

ZONAMACO

 (Centro Citibanamex, 12 February 2022)

This annual celebration of pretty things is, once again, a success, thanks, once again, to the absence of a curator with an agenda other than to sell tickets and to sell art. 

Big city north of the border galleries stand out as being out of touch, perhaps for two reasons. The first might be that the denizens of these cities do not get around much any more, with New Yorkers at best peddling works in what outsiders would recognise---a New Yorker artist might hope---as the coveted "New York genre." London appears to have been spared this fate of irrelevance.

The second reason for the failure of big northern cities might be their past success. Young people want to create art. But you can't create competitive art while the old people are so objectively good. You can starve and learn until you are 40 and objectively good, or you can bend the reality, and declare bad art good. It seems like the northern cities are in the stage of flirting with the idea that bad art is good. It won't work.

Beautiful things attract beautiful people. Beautiful things make beautiful people. ZONAMACO's attraction is watching people as much as watching art. ZONAMACO is a microcosm of what makes a city tick.

Ja Tevis Nebūtu...

 (Latvijas Nacionālais Teātris, 24 July 2021)

A plaque on a building that was JFK's home in Riga for a couple of days in 1939 attributes to him the poetic observation "Latvians will always reach upwards." True to JFK's prophecy, Raimonds Pauls and Elīna Garanča created new music and reinterpreted old music for the evening, instead of choosing to recycle their old hits. One can ever hope to go far only if one keeps walking. The evening illustrates how come both have gone so far and why they fully deserve the acclaim.

"Apropos of Nothing" by Woody Allen (2020)

Woody Allen's life follows the familiar blueprint for success: Be born with a talent. Be born with a passion. Follow your passion. Show up. Be lucky. Be generous. Do not compromise. Do not care about what other people think.