Word of mouth going into Friday night’s world premiere of the new play by Tony Kushner—The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures—was a bit unsettling. “It’s three-and-a-half hours long,” people were saying, as if plays have some sort of built-in pain/misery index that crosses the ethical bounds of torture somewhere around the two-and-a-half-hour mark. Reports of Kushner writing feverishly all day and delivering whole new scenes to the cast two hours before curtain made the greatest living playwright of our time sound more like a procrastinating teenager who can’t get his homework in on time. Then there was Kushner himself, in print and on the radio, humbly lowering everyone’s expectations, asking people—especially critics—to think of it as more of a workshop production than a finished play.

Read more.

Tony Kushner is not known for brevity, but the five short plays being presented at the Guthrie Theater under the banner Tiny Kushner demonstrate that the Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright of the epic Angels in America can go short—and, even at his shortest, he still goes on longer than is technically necessary to get his point across. 

Read more.

By now, a critical consensus has congealed around the Walker Art Center’s latest exhibit, The Quick and the Dead, a show that purports to “reach beyond itself and the limits of our knowledge and experience” to ask “what is alive and dead within the legacy of conceptual art?” Almost everyone who has written about it thus far is in agreement that the show, curated by Peter Eleey, the WAC’s new visual arts curator, is the best exhibit the Walker has pulled off in years—an “intelligent and elusive” show (as ArtForum’s David Velasco described it) that puts the Walker back on the cutting-edge of contemporary art after veering so dangerously close to populism with such pandering people-pleasers as Picasso and American Art, Frida Kahlo, and currently, Live Forever: Elizabeth Payton. Finally, it seems, the WAC has gotten back to what it does best—confounding people with that special brand of weird that can only be found in the world’s finest museums. 

Read more.

I caught pianist Jason Moran’s re-creation of jazz great Thelonious Monk’s legendary 1959 Town Hall concert Saturday night at the Walker’s McGuire auditorium. As expected, it was a great show—and Jason Moran should win some sort of jazz history award for making it happen. Moran put the show together to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Monk’s Town Hall concert, which became one of the most iconic live recordings in jazz history, as well as pay tribute to the man whom Moran credits for getting him interested in the piano in the first place.

This is the sort of event that, if we were a country that really cared about educating our people about America’s musical history, should be mandatory listening in every school in the land. Moran and his eight-piece band didn’t just recreate the music of Monk’s 1959 concert, they did what they could to revive the spirit of the thing by summoning the ghost of Monk and his arranger Hall Overton through recently discovered recordings of the two jazz giants working out the format of the Town Hall concert on tape.

In between bursts of exquisite musicianship, the lights would come down and Monk’s voice could be heard on a scratchy recording, musing about various aspects of the sound he was after—how, for instance, he absolutely did not want a “big-band” sound because it sounded “too stiff” to him. Monk wanted what he called a “free sound” that allowed each musician to have some individuality and made room for the spontaneous combustion he clearly hoped to generate onstage that night—a combustion Moran and his crew captured quite brilliantly in their playing. (Incidentally, as a musician, if you’ve ever played a Monk tune, this is the only style that makes sense because his chord structures feel so elastic that they practically beg to be stretched and pulled. In fact, part of their greatness lies in the fact that they maintain their musical integrity so well and suggest so many possibilities without falling apart in the playing.)

Though the songs in the show fell in the same order as Monk’s original concert, Moran clearly gave his band similar instructions to let the spirit of the music move through them rather than try to nail the thing note for note. The show was more like an entertaining, performance-style lecture, with slides and video filling in bits of Monk’s biography as the show progressed. Moran’s personal connection to the music was also part of the show, as slides with text on them shared how Moran came to admire Monk’s music through his musically inclined parents.

One of the most admired young pianists of his generation, Moran created some exquisite moments by playing along with the music on the recording for a bit, then transitioning into live jams. At one point, Monk can be heard on the recording stomping out a beat with his feet. Moran looped the beat, and the band came in, playing over Monk’s rhythmic stomp and building it into a raucous, muscular escalation of  a Monk favorite, “Little Rootie Tootie.” It’s hard to think of a better way to keep Monk’s music and spirit alive than by integrating him so completely into the fabric of the music. It’s a lesson the folks who attended won’t soon forget.

Last Sunday, I went to the Ritz Theater to talk to composer Chan Poling about his new musical, Venus, which tells the story of a middle-aged woman who gets transformed into a sexy pop-star/supermodel. You can tell it's Sunday because of my hair and because I mentioned that it's SUNDAY—HEY, IT'S SUNDAY, I'M WORKING ON A SUNDAY—about eleven times during the shoot. (Thank you to Kyong Ham, our cameraman and editor, for cutting most of them out.) 

Read more.