There was no babysitting last night — Megan was down with a viral sore throat that there was nothing for but to suffer through — but I did make it to the Kitano Bar to hear Chip White Quartet’s second set. At a time when, lately, I’d be getting ready for bed, I was getting dressed instead, and sharply, too, mindful that the Kitano is in a Japanese hotel.

Before the musicians assembled, I saw the “Zildjian” marque on the back of Chip’s largest cymbal, and I remembered watching a clip about the company, which was founded by an Armenian alchemist in Istanbul in 1623, to serve the sultan’s court, and which now, somewhat more prosaically, supplies the greats of rock and pop from a factory in Massachusetts. I’m not a big fan of cymbals (except when Mozart goes for a “Turkish” effect, in which case I giggle like an unreconstructed toddler), but knowing something about the Zildjians — or, better, knowing that I had once upon a time known something about them — focused my attention on how Chip played them. What had hitherto seemed the random banging on the graduated discs now revealed rhythms and patterns that it was a pleasure to follow. Chip’s jazz is not only inspired by the classics (Parker, Gillespie, Rollins, Jackson) but an embodiment of it as well; it’s Chip’s leading from the drums that makes for a bit of difference. I especially liked his more ruminative pieces, “The Other Side of the Rainbow With Sybil” and “Rain.”

The Kitano is a great live jazz room, and I hope to go back at least a few times a year. It’s a cosy little corner of a space, and there’s a no-talking rule that didn’t need to be enforced last night. As the MC put it, “silent” is an anagram of “listen.” The frites are great, too.

***

Jonathan Levine’s 50/50 is a very rare treat: a charming and delightful movie about cancer. It is charming and delightful because the actor playing the young victim of a rare sarcoma, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, projects a persona that it is impossible not to care about. It is also not so much about him as about the people in his world, all of whom have a hard time coming to grips with his very bad luck. In a profound if cinematic way, 50/50 refutes the proposition that we all die alone: facing possible death during a delicate surgery, Adam Lerner (Mr Gordon-Levitt) seems aware that anaesthesia will assure that only he will miss the news of his death. Death is something that happens to all of us, more or less repeatedly, until at last it ceases to happen, along with everything else. At no point does the movie plump for hospital drama; for the most taken up with Adam’s course of chemotherapy, 50/50 underlines cancer’s spooky but debilitating uneventfulness. And, by the way, 50/50 is actually very funny. But do bring a hankie.

There are lots of things that I haven’t done, but one thing that I can check off that list is Swan Lake. I saw the ballet for the first time last night. I had such a perfectly good time that I’m rather glad that it wasn’t a great one. I get to save seeing a great performance of Swan Lake for another time. 

Of course I know the score just about by heart. I’ve seen the ballet on video, not to mention in countless movie clips ranging from Far From Heaven and The Deep End to Poupées russes. (I’ve just ordered a DVD of the Fonteyn-Nureyev performance that I used to own on LaserDisc). More to the point, I’ve seen Darren Aronofsky’s deconstruction/reconstruction, in Black Swan, which I’ll come back to later. But it was Jennifer Homans’s Apollo’s Angels that convinced me that I ought to see the ballet on stage as soon as possible. That meant the end-of-season American Ballet Theatre production. 

Having seen ABT’s Raymonda a few years ago, and read a review or two of ABT productions down through the ages, I knew where to expect last night’s performance to fall short. The sets and, to a lesser extent, the costumes were showy but dramatically inconsequent, bordering on kitsch. (There is a perfectly dreadful maypole in the first act that shows off the company to embarrassing disadvantage. Also: any first-time visitor would be pardoned for inferring from the Queen Mother’s getup that there will be vampires.) And corps de ballet would be a concept with no visual onstage correlative. 

Perversely, the worst corps dancing was that of the swans. I don’t expect the robotics of Busby-Berkeley synchronization, but I believe, as Homans suggests, that the proper execution of the steps ought to produce a pleasing coordination of arms and legs. Nowhere is a lapse on this front more regrettable than in Swan Lake, where the swans are anything but decorative backdrop, willi-style, to the romance of a prince and an enchanted beauty. Times dance critic Alistair Macaulay writes that Odette’s “swan-maiden subjects become chorally wrapped up in this love story, and their involvement makes this ballet like no other. They share her hopes and fears; their destiny hangs on hers.” Indeed, unless the swans are as eloquently tragic as their queen, then the showpieces, such as the danse des cygnets and Odette’s thirty-two fouettés, take on the air of stunts. 

I knew from Macaulay’s review that the final act of Swan Lake would not astonish me. (Tchaikovsky’s amazing send-off, however, did, as it always does, and my eyes were flooded.) I had to ask, though, if a better production than Kevin McKenzie’s would have made much of a difference. Like the singers of the Metropolitan Opera Chorus, the ABT corps seemed comprised of somewhat independent soloists. I’d almost rather do without. What I didn’t expect was the damp sparklessness of Marcelo Gomes’s dancing with Paloma Herrera. Strong and limber in solos, or even when engaged in mime, Mr Gomes demonstrated less than no interest in Ms Herrera, who, for her part, was as excellent as it is possible to be without being quite great. I don’t fault her; the atmosphere was not conducive to greatness. It’s entirely possible that she would have been great, doing exactly as she did, on a less fussy stage. 

The evening was far from disappointing, however, thanks to the svelte pace established by conductor David LaMarche. Notwithstanding the absence of romantic fire onstage, and compensating greatly for the sloppiness of the corps, the orchestra poured forth a current of generous accompaniment that supported the secondary soloists (who, after all, do a great deal of the dancing — the pas de trois in Act I and the national dances in Act III.) Here there was something like real elegance, with a connection among the dancers that corresponded to what could be heard from the pit. 

I haven’t watched The Black Swan lately, but I recall that the choreographer, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), says that a production of Swan Lake has to be great; otherwise, why bother? Indeed, it was my doubt that Swan Lake could be great that led me to avoid it in the days of my ignorant youth. I thought that it must be all fustian and feathers (and whatever complaints I’ve made about ABT’s version, it’s certainly much, much better than that). Black Swan assured me that Swan Lake could be great, and it showed a way of making it great, by working the seam of madness that is implicit from the very beginning of Tchaikovsky’s score.

One girl is enchanted and spends her days as a swan. Another is enchanted and spends her days as a ballerina. Black Swan suggests not only that there isn’t much difference between these fates — thus making Swan Lake a meditation on the art of ballet at its most demanding — but that either enchantment is likely to lead to or require madness, making healthy everyday affections impossible. (There’s probably something unhappy about Prince Siegfried, too, or he would have found satisfaction at his mother’s court. This is Matthew Bourne’s insight.) Is it possible to find happiness in disciplined transcendance? Plumping for an answer one way or the other is a mistake; it’s enough for a work of art to let the tension vibrate. I expect that this is exactly what Black Swan will inspire choreographers to do with Swan Lake. Now that I’ve seen a respectable performance of the old interpretation, I’m ready for the next step. 

What I’d very much like to know is how many New Yorkers bought tickets to one of the Royal Danish Ballet’s six performances here this week because Jennifer Homans’s chapter about August Bournonville, in her magisterial but deliciously readable history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels, inspired them to do so. It can’t have been just me.

Kathleen liked the evening’s offerings very much, although when she told me that the company’s disciplined attention to detail reminded her of the title character in Coppélia (a mechanical doll), I had to quibble. I saw some of the most fluid, “natural” dancing ever. It was as though the members of the RDB spend their lives offstage as well as on- leaping effortlesly into the ether and floating across the room on point.

What’s specatacular about the Royal Danish Ballet is the complete absence of the spectacular. The dancing is very fine, and often intoxicating, but it is never showy. The reason why I think there were other Homans readers in the audience is that it would otherwise be suspicious for New Yorkers so vociferously to applaud understatement. This was a crowd that had a lot more in common with chamber music aficionados than with the opera crowd.

We saw La Sylphide, which I must confess to having confused, inattentively, with Les Sylphides (until Jennifer Homans straightened me out), and Act III of Napoli. or, as it is called in the program, Napoli, Act III. I suppose that the RDB must mount complete performances of August Bournonville’s Napoli ever now and then, out of professional courtesy, but most serious balletomanes will go to their graves without seeing more of this work than its final act, which, like the end of Nutcracker and Act IV of The Sleeping Beauty, is a chain of “characteristic dances” and showpieces without any narrative content. Back in my radio days, when I was first learning about ballet (a subject that I knew absolutely nothing about until I was twenty-three), Napoli, Act III was the cheesiest ballet in the repertoire, just on the basis of its title. First, Naples. Naples as imagined by a Danish ballet master. Stop right there. Second, the truncation — the third act performed “out of context.” That was then. Tonight, I sat through the first half of NA3 with slightly detached interest; the characteristic dances didn’t strike me as characteristic of much more than the Bournonville style. But then somebody clapped a tambourine, and the tarantella got going. What an orgy! I realize that that is not the best word to describe an ensemble that even at its most energetic never stumbled into incoherence. But most energetic is exactly what it was, a pile-up of couplings that amounted, almost, to one too many birthday presents. And then there was the finale!

La Sylphide is the first in a line of more sophisticated ballets, notably Giselle but also including, cousin-German-wise, Swan Lake; and it’s easy to reduce its mild, pantomimed melodrama to “precursor” status. But what I remember about it isn’t elementary, because the principals, Caroline Cavallo and Mads Blangstrup, were great actors as well as gifted dancers. Great actors can sell just about anything, and that’s why Mr Blangstrup’s Scottish bridegroom and Ms Cavallo’s elfin temptress blasted a niche in my memory whereby I will recall this evening. Being gifted dancers, they were able to act with their bodies, without speech. They showed me how an art form that imposes silence on its practitioners can be as eloquent as a Shakespearean monologue 

As I watched Tom Riley play the part of Septimus Hodge in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a play that’s making its Broadway premieire sixteen years after its off-Broadway debut, I tried to remember what Billy Crudup was like in the role the first time round. Making this exercise doubly difficult was the presence of Mr Crudup himself on the stage, now playing the part of Bernard Nightingale. Septimus Hodge belongs to the “early” part of the action, which begins in 1809 and ends a few years later; Bernard Nightingale is our contemporary. The two time frames do not share the stage much until the action in both thickens toward the doubled climax, but every time Mr Crudup burst upon the scene he scattered his earlier persona into atoms. His long hair and sober, late-Eighteenth Century demeanor were replaced by a trim cut, a slim suit jacket, and spruce jeans, but mostly it was the smirk that did it. Septimu Hodge might smile, and his smile might drip condescension; but he doesn’t smirk. Bernard Nightingale is a smirk, even in disaster. (And how could he not be? Bill Nighy created the role, in 1993.) I knew that I had seen Billy Crudup as Hodge, but I couldn’t bring his Hodge back. 

The recurrence of Billy Crudup in Arcadia, playing a different role — that of a somewhat older man — is arguably the most marvelous things about this production, not because the actor does a fine job (which he most certainly does) but because the recurrence itself points to the deeper meaning of the play. Arcadia is generally thought to be an intellectually demanding play (as are most of Mr Stoppard’s), and there are certainly passages of expository discussion that require the complete attention of an educated mind. But these moments are actually as rare as they are in real life, which Arcadia, for all its artistry and illusion, more closely captures than most dramas. Most of the characters are very intelligent people, and they talk about things that interest them with wit and passion. These exchanges are never as decorative as they might seem, because they always refer to the deeper meaning that I mentioned; but they are not what the play is “about,” either. 

Arcadia, as a poetic place, dates to the High Renaissance, when the baggage of the classical past was heavily recycled for modern purposes. A mountainous region of the Peloponnese peninsula lent its name to a mythological earthly paradise of nymphs, shepherds, and fragrant bowers. When Philip Sidney imagined it as a getaway for blasé courtiers, the rough edges were cleaned up, and unpleasant possibilities were wrapped up in the enigmatic phrase, Et in Arcadia ego. In lieu of a leisurely ramble through Erwin Panofsky’s famous essay on the subject of this inscription, which famously appears on one painting by Guercino and on two by Poussin, we will come straight to the point, which is that the earlier Poussin hangs at Chatsworth House, one of the most stately homes in England and home, until recently, of the playwright’s good friend Deborah Devonshire.

While it would be as silly to argue that Arcadia is “about” Chatsworth as it would be to say that the play is “about” the laws of entropy and thermodynamics, the slippages of historiography, or the art of landscaping, I became convinced that the play really is about breathing the very real “Arcadian” atmosphere that obtains at England’s great estates — especially the ones that have been held on to by the same family for centuries. It is about spending hours in rooms and beneath trees with someone who might be the Duchess of Something-or-other, and wondering what it might have been like to sit next to an earlier bearer of that title  in the very same spot, a century or two ago. Or perhaps to play with a boy called Lord Augustus. In Arcadia, there are two such boys, played by the same actor, one of them long buried in his grave, the other immured in something like autism. Above all, Arcadia is an essay in the fruitfulness of death.

The Coverly family, headed by the Lord Croom of the moment, resides at Sidley Park in Derbyshire (the home of Chatworth and also of Mr Darcy’s fictional Pemberley — a region of rough, “Arcadian” terrain). We never meet a Lord Croom, and a fine essay could be composed on the playwright’s elegant elision of several “characters” — most remarkably, Lord Byron, the play’s McGuffin — but we do meet a Lady Croom and a total of five Coverly children. Lady Croom and two young Coverlys appear in the play’s earlier time frame, set, as I’ve said, in the middle of the Napoleonic brouhaha. The principal action here is anything but: Lady Thomasina Coverly, whom we realize is a natural mathematical genius, teases her suave and handsome tutor, Septimus Hodge, while nursing a crush on him. Not much happens in the course of this period badinage, but from background, lusty Lady Croom, the poetaster Ezra Chater, whom Septimus has apparently cuckholded, a stentorian Naval officer, a landscape architect called Richard Noakes, and a portly butler all emerge to distract the tutor. A climax is reached when Septimus recognizes the enormity of Thomasina’s amateur discoveries. Thanks to the second, later time frame, we know what happens next, and this makes the end of Arcadia immensely poignant, but learning about it from characters posited two centuries later has the effect of muting the sorrow. Thus the play itself dabbles in the practice of history, contrasting events with the traces that they leave to the future. 

In the later time frame, three Coverly children are gathered at Sidley Park, Valentine, Chloë, and Gus. Also on hand are Hannah Jarvis, an unorthodox — non-academic — literary historian, and, presently, Bernard Nightgale, an altogether more conventional (and unbearable) opportunist from Sussex. Bernard is on the scent of a sensational scandal involving a duel fought long ago — during the earlier time frame. Hannah is researching “the hermit of Sidley Park,” a creature who eked out a mysterious, raving living in an ornamental structure designed and built by Noakes back in — you guessed it. Dramatic irony has never been put to such self-expressive use: as Bernard and Hannah and Valentine chatter away about what “must” have happened long ago at Sidley Park, we know what did, because we just saw it happen.

The climax here mirrors that of the earlier frame: Hannah hits on the answer to her question, and knows who the hermit was. And we’re as sure in our gut that she’s right as she is, even though none of us can be sure. Something deep has happened in the grand but spare room, giving out onto the park, on which we’ve been flies on the wall for several hours; something equally deep has happened much later: the excavation of the earlier depth. These moments are almost simultaneous, and their theatrical impact is like nothing else. The passage of time — real and dramatic — is canceled and ratified in the same instant. As if in homage to the Arcadian entertainments of the Renaissance, Mr Stoppard ends the play with two couples of nymphs and shepherds dancing a simple, wordless ballet. 

Arcadia calls for a cast of twelve, half of whom really have to be stars. The new production, directed by David Leveaux, burns with brilliant talent. Tom Riley and Billy Crudup, I’ve already mentioned, are superb as Septimus Hodge and Bernard Nightingale. (Mr Crudup may well have a corner on playing characters whom we like to dislike.) Bel Powley’s Thomasina was endearingly brash; I only wish that the makeup that she wore at the end had not brought Ann Miller to mind. I hope that we’ll get to see more of Lia Williams; she puts her own fine stamp on the role of the earthily impatient Hannah. Raul Esparza disappeared so completely into the diffident Val that I didn’t recognize him until the interval, and Margaret Colin, as Lady Croom, demonstrated that she will make a fine Lady Bracknell someday. (“But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence.”) Grace Gummer, the engagingly ingénue daughter of you-know-who, and Noah Robbins held their own as Chloë and Gus Coverly. David Turner was agreeable in the thankless role of Ezra Chater. Byron Jennings, Edward James Hyland, and Glenn Fleshler all sparkled as Noakes, the butler, and the Naval officer, respectively — stock parts that only a playwright of Tom Stoppard’s stature would be permitted to include. Hildegard Bechtler, Donald Holder, and Gregory Gale rose to the challenge of giving Arcadia the sets, lighting, and costumes that a Broadway revival demands; the warm simplicity of their effects invited us all to sojourn for a while in a myth whose power we might have discounted. 

One of my favorite movies from last year was Anton Corbijn’s The American, starring George Clooney and a lot of Italian scenery reminiscent of the Spanish locations used by Sergio Leone in his famous Spaghetti Westerns. Who knew? I thought that The American was an update of the classic European “existentialist” anti-drama of the 1960s, full of brooding silence, unexplained plot points, and disaffected fatalism. It turns out that Corbijn was updating the classic European Western of the 1960s, full of — well, I guess it comes to the same thing. The director tells us, in the running commentary that accompanies the DVD, that he wanted to call the film “Il Americano,” which, he notes, is incorrect Italian — it’s what the American, Jack (George Clooney) calls himself, before a neighbor corrects him (“L’Americano”) All this to highlight the Americanness of an originally British character, drawn from a British novel, Martin Booth’s A Very Private Gentleman.

As you can probably tell, I’ve been on a jag with this film, so it was inevitable that I would listen to the commentary eventually, no matter how bad it was. Corbijn’s commentary isn’t bad, exactly, but it is fairly idle, full of compliments for the actors playing the minor roles and generous lashings of admiration for the big star. One absolutely crucial bit of mystification was cleared up; I’d always thought that it is Pavel (Johan Leysen) who kills Mathilde (Thekla Reuten, shown above). I couldn’t figure out why Pavel did such a thing, but process of elimination ruled out other explanations. What would never have occurred to me, because I’m ignorant about guns, is that Jack sabotages the weapon that Mathilde has commissioned, so that it backfires, killing the shooter instead of the target. Well, it was nice to have that cleared up! But the more Corbijn went on about this and that, the more surprised I was that he had nothing to say about the extraordinary contrast between the film’s two big female roles. Who could be less like Mathilde than Clara (Violante Placido, shown below), the prostitute with whom Jack falls in love?

Indeed, I’m writing this in hopes of banishing Ms Reuten’s image from my mind’s eye, or at least turning down the intensity of her presence. I have never seen an actress radiate  the deadly erotic allure that Puccini’s music imputes to Turandot. She captures everything that is dark and dangerous and “European” about The Amer

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