Cats: The Jellicle Ball (4*)

I've always been a dog person, and not just because a cat slaughtered Cratchit, my albino guinea pig, leaving his bloody carcass under a tomato patch in our El Paso backyard.

That's a big reason why I had no interest in seeing Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, until last year when a new production opened downtown that re-imagined it in the context of the ballroom culture, something that Malcolm Mclaren (the same guy who discovered the Sex Pistols!) brought to my attention at the Muller cottage while Cats was still herding 'em in at the Winter Garden.  Now that could be a lot more interesting than my girl Taylor Swift appearing in the 2019's major motion picture debacle!

The show, now transplanted to Broadway from the Perelman Performing Arts Center, opens with a very tall DJ blowing off glitter from the original cast album, with those distinctive yellow eyes peering out from a black background, a color motif that has been smartly updated for the digital age.  But the other early signs weren't as encouraging.  I'd just begun listening to the score for the first time on my walk to the theater.  Not a single melody stuck, I couldn't make heads nor tails of the lyrics and now, watching the energetic company do their thangs while much of the audience snapped production-provided fans with glee, I felt like Clara in the famous Burger King commercial, demanding "where's the beef?," or in this case, narrative. In its absence, I wondered why Junior Labeija seemed to be holding mostly dark court from a box seat, and kept my gay gaze focused on Rum Tum Tugger (Sydney James Harcourt, as hunky as he is multi-talented, a slaying combo for sure). He prowled around the thrust stage, with more than a few thrusts of his own, occasionally interacting with a plethora of young daughters seated with the gay dads in the bleacher seats.  Had I been bamboozled by the hype?

Definitely not, thanks to an electrifying infusion of performer-driven nostalgia that eventually had me on my feet and almost in tears.  Even I could figure out that Old Deuteronomy would occupy the throne hanging from the rafters, once the early ballroom judges (including Rachel Dratch, on brief loan from her much more demanding duties in The Rocky Horror Show and tasked only with occasionally holding up a "MEOW" paddle) vacated the stage.  But as soon as the frail but fierce André De Shields entered, commanding the audience to rise en masse with a hand gesture, the house went nuts in recognition of the Broadway legend, whom I first saw in The Wiz shortly after I graduated from college, before AIDS, and more recently in Hadestown for which he won a Tony.  

There stood a proud Black man, finally getting the kind of respect usually accorded to a beloved monarch, after living with HIV since 1991, and losing two lovers to the plague. "Memory," the show's most famous song and first-act closer, paled in comparison despite the vocal chops of Grizabella ("Temptress" Chastity Moore who ties with Primo Thee Ballerina for having the most evocative cast name).

During intermission, I consulted artificial intelligence about how much longer the show had to go and what the hell was going on.  Gemini, my new best frenemy, indicated more than an hour remained--uh oh--and insisted the book was merely an excuse for the felines imagined by T.S. Eliot to strut their stuff.  The information proved liberating, especially after Gus (Junior Labeija) finally took center stage, Oliver Hardy to De Shields' Stan Laurel if there had been a comedic duos category to judge, looking slightly stunned, if oh-so-pleased, to be on the Great White Way.  

I began to groove on the resonance of the ballroom metaphor (often-homeless LGBT youth are a lot like stray cats left to fend for themselves) as the kitties now strutted their best stuff (choreographed by Omari Wiles & Arturo Lyons) in over-the-top costumes (by Qween Jean) and accessories (that Gucci purse!).  Magical Mister Mistoffeles, (Robert "Silk" Mason) executed superhuman splits in six-inch stilettos and an Eiffel Tower headdress, and Gus's grandchild (Bryson Battle) sweetly personified his unique inheritance as a future haus-builder here, as he did a year earlier in the even more delightful Saturday Church, for which Qween Jean also did the fabulous costumes with significantly less budget. Deuteronomy, forever not neutered, licked his paws before randily tweaking Rum Tum Tuggers' nipples (and Broadway propriety), something perhaps only the leather man of a certain age in full regalia sitting a few rows in front of me also noticed.

There's undoubtedly no better place to cosplay on a Wednesday afternoon than a matinee of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, superbly re-conceived and directed by Zhailon Levingston & Bill Rauch.   The pair made it well worth overcoming 43 years of stubborn reluctance to see a phenomenon that turned Broadway, if not the first "megamusical" itself,  into a tourist destination, now and forever.

André De Shields, curtain call

Tramps Like Us (4*)

For much of my life, I believed that never coming out to my father because of his homophobia prevented me from becoming "whole," but after reading Tramps Like Us I wonder what that even means.  We learn in the first chapter of this gay memoir cum bildungsroman that author Joe Westmoreland's father sexually abused his older sister on a regular basis and started to do the same with his younger one, too. 

I wanted him to do to me what he did with them.  I don't think I would have minded it as much.

That's quite an admission.  It reminded me of something that I learned when I worked at the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, a non-profit organization that once staked its reputation on providing scientific information that could be easily understood by the public, and shifted the onus away from the afflicted.  For example, did you know that more than half of women who seek treatment for addiction have been sexually or physically abused?

I mention this particular stat because our upbringings--specifically his second-hand trauma--help explain the different paths that Westmoreland and I took despite how much we had in common.  We're both members of the same generation and social class who preferred punk and New Wave to disco; even more unusually we both assiduously kept journals, although I was much more likely to write about getting off than getting high.  The similarities kept piling up the more I read about who he hung out or slept with, where they went, what he ate and listened to.  Despite him falling in love with a sympathetic felon, there's not a lot of drama in Tramps Like Us, although the writing flows simply and hypnotically, a kind of poetry of the quotidian.

Both Westmoreland and I moved far away from our hometowns and fell in love with New York City at first sight

Going to a gay bar in Kansas City felt like doing something nasty in your own backyard with your parents inside watching television.

*  *  *  *

But New York wasn’t like that. It was piled on top of itself instead of spread out. You didn’t need a car to get around. From the minute I arrived I was surrounded by the feeling of life everywhere. It was like I had been plopped down in the middle of a giant school of fish and had to swim fast to keep up.

. . . we disliked gay "clones" in the 70s and rebelled against their look

“Castro Clones” were the gays who wore jeans, Lacoste shirts, and hung out primarily in the Castro District. Their uniform style was a revolt from the fashion of San Francisco’s hippy days, which was still predominant. I told Ali [his non-monogamous longtime companion] that I didn’t want a man bad enough to lose my identity. I hated it that everyone had mustaches so I grew sideburns because no one else wore them. The clones wore tight blue jeans so I wore perma-press slacks. They wore tight T-shirts so I wore button-down-collar dress shirts from thrift stores. I waged my own personal war for individualism. I wore my green iridescent sharkskin suit with pants to match almost every day. 

. . . we ended up creating our own families 

It was at that moment, in the middle of my crowded living room, when I realized that everyone at this party had one thing in common. We were all refugees from one kind of torment or another and could never go back home. Home was something in the future that had yet to be created, not someplace in the past. I felt like we might never be rich or famous, but at that one moment, when Donna Summer was playing on the stereo and everyone was dancing and singing along, there was a feeling of success. Of victory. We had all come out of our own separate nightmares to a place where just being ourselves was okay, not dangerous. That was a strange new feeling, reason alone to celebrate. 

. . . and we watched while AIDS killed people to whom we were closest. But Westmoreland ended up an HIV positive, former drug addict with a long-term lover and I didn't.  He also got his memoir published, taking his spot-on title from a lyric in Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run."  

Our differences, however, are more instructive.  If I had titled my memoir after a song, it probably would have been "This Must Be The Place" by Talking Heads, after a peripatetic childhood although to this day, I do love a road trip.

My parents drove to New York City to drop me off at Columbia in 1971; after graduating from high school two years later, Westmoreland fled Kansas City because he couldn't bear his father's and anger and abuse of his sisters.  While I earned a bachelor of arts degree in English, he hitchhiked extensively, living briefly in Miami, New York and New Orleans before finally settling down in San Francisco with a sometime lover but eternal best friend from Kansas City.  I stayed in New York for the remainder of my life pursuing a career that never gave me much personal satisfaction while Westmoreland worked only enough to survive, and dreamed of becoming a filmmaker or writer.  

I can't decide if Westmoreland led a more interesting life or not before he got clean, around the same time that I began forming my family in the Pines, but I do recognize that I ended up on the more bourgeois, conventional trajectory thanks to the support of my parents, as flawed as they may have been in some respects.  It's been said that you're judged by the company you keep, and while alcoholism and serious drug use was not unknown among the young (and then older) professionals that I shared houses with for more than 30 years, successful men with enough money to pay $10,000 a summer for a bed by the end, we certainly weren't tying each other off and mainlining heroin.  There's even a moment when Westmoreland and his tribe, fully cognizant that HIV is blood-borne and fearful, but not certain that they have been infected, share a needle.  WTF?

My father once drove a thousand miles from El Paso to Kansas City and back just to hear me deliver a talk before an audience of 500 people about an advocacy campaign to raise awareness of the dangers of fortified wine consumption among teens.  A friend who read Homosaic, my unpublished memoir, observed that I was in love with him, a comment that I pooh poohed at the time because we all have our own baggage to carry.

Westmoreland's was a lot heavier than mine.

Jerome (3*)

There's a lot to enjoy if you can get past the central premise of Jerome:  an isolated gay couple who met during the Korean War, become a throuple for more than just sex at the height of the AIDS epidemic.  The performances are terrific, the jokes are funny and the sentiments are sweet, if fantastic.  But from my own emotionally wrenching experience, sexual jealousy, not fear of death, seems like the gravest impediment to a relationship outside the heteronormative sphere of things.

In commentary about the show distributed on site, Playwright's Horizons artistic director Adam Greenfield writes "For years [AIDS] felt like an untouchable subject, out of respect for our elders: what right had we to discuss a trauma that we didn't personally live through?"  As one of those elders who survived and saw all the first-wave plays I would respond: "every right, so long as you bring something new to the table."  Playwright John J. Caswell, Jr., doesn't; he and director Dustin Willis rely on melodrama and mechanics to explain away the bad behavior of the hunky but mostly blank younger man in the relationship, something that Tony Kushner did with so much more nuanced angst in Angels in America.

It's a shame.  Because Caswell does explore an issue--end-of-life discussion and behavior--that doesn't require his exhumation of the past although I didn't buy for a second the selflessness of the saintly Con (Stephen Spinella, just as affecting as he was in his dual Tony-winning Angels performances).  His body has been ravaged not by AIDS, but drinking and time.  He's determined to find his own replacement for Doane (Jeorge Bennett Watson), his stoic lover whose color Caswell never addresses (perhaps this "elder" is too literal for race-blind casting, but I kept thinking the dynamics of an interracial, gay couple who moved to an Arizona ghost town in the early 70s would have been much more fertile territory to mine).

The HIV epidemic decimated the men of my generation, including David, my only long term relationship.    His loss was certainly traumatizing even though we were only friends when he died in early 1993 at the age of 39. I remember people saying then that because of AIDS, they knew what it must feel like to be old and to lose your friends, inexorably, one by one.

Well, here I am, more than three decades later, about to go through it all over again, this time facing the certainty of my own mortality and that of my fellow survivors.  Caswell missed an opportunity to put that in his pipe and smoke it, settling instead for unnecessary metaphorical exploitation of a health crisis and saccharine declarations of love based primarily on sexual attraction.

No doubt his response would be "OK Boomer."  He wouldn't be entirely wrong, either.  Those who can, create; those who can't, criticize.

End of an Era

May 1, 2026

God knows I never sacrificed my bedtime to watch "The Late Show" with Stephen Colbert whom CBS is silencing tonight after nearly eleven years. 

No, what makes Colbert's departure significant from my perspective was the occasional online reminder that a straight, conservative (by his own admission) Catholic man raised in South Carolina could make a gay atheist both laugh and respect him. Corporate cowardice, in a perfect storm, has buried an oasis of common decency, leaving the media landscape more befouled than ever by ignorant loudmouths governed only by their preening self-interest.

Telling that CBS couldn't even be bothered to keep the letters of his name lit through the end.

The Director (5+*)

Because it starred Hayley Mills, one of my earliest obsessions, I probably begged my mother to take me to In Search of the Castaways, a 1962 Disney film, while my father was stationed in France. Although I can't remember if we went, the prospect elicited some shocking information about another cast member that Mom no doubt had picked up from the movie magazines she enjoyed perusing at the beauty parlor in El Paso:  "Maurice Chevalier collaborated with the Nazis," she asserted.  Not long after we were re-united in Orleans, Dad took me to a Paris museum which documented the atrocities of the Holocaust. Kindly Maurice was dead to me, thereafter, although he lived another decade.  

Ah, if only life was that simple! Novelist Daniel Kehlmann brilliantly explores being caught in the vise of history through the late career of GW Pabst, the Austrian who directed Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks (Pandora's Box) in his early silent movies.  The book begins in the recent imagined past, when Franz Wilzek, a not-quite-senile nursing home resident who worked for Pabst and eventually became an undistinguished director himself, is invited to appear on a Sunday morning talk show by a young Jewish producer.  His appearance is part of a plan to sabotage the host, the personification of a jolly German, at least on camera. When asked about Molander, his mentor's lost film of the Nazi era, Wilzek insists it was never shot, ruining the interview.  As the confused old man leaves the television studio, the young producer cryptically tells him that his father survived, a revelation that Wilzek doesn't understand, or perhaps pretends not to.  Ultimately, it makes no difference; Kehlmann is primarily interested in how far someone is willing to go to make art, or to salve their conscience.

G.W. Pabst by George Hoyningen-Huene

Each chapter of The Director is written like a scene in a riveting biopic told from various perspectives, including those of Pabst's long-suffering wife, Trude, and their young, sensitive son, Jakob, who matures during Nazi rule.   Kehlmann further embraces multiple genres, including comedy, romance, thriller and horror, and vividly sketches many of the era's famous principals, who also include the stomach-turning, self-tanning Leni Riefenstahl and the much more palatable Marlene Dietrich.

She was eating a cannelloni with a spoon. I found her frightfully German, in the most endearing way. If one had had holes in one’s socks, one felt she might have reached into her mink and pulled out a pair of darning needles. But glamorous, glamorous of course!

We first meet Pabst at a Hollywood party hosted by Fred Zinnemann, which Kehlmann narrates as fluidly as a roving camera.  Trude, delighted to have escaped Europe as the second World War brews, spots Billy Wilder wearing a cowboy hat. Both men will remain in America and thrive; Pabst, who barely speaks English, does not. Based on his reputation, studio executives, who confuse him with Fritz Lang, have given him a movie to direct but he knows it's a turkey. Worse, both Greta and Louise refuse to star in the topical film he's conceived about international passengers on a cruise ship who mistakenly believe war has been declared.  

Also present at the party is a German "nobody" who invites him to return to his former glory making films for the Third Reich.  "Red Pabst" screams his refusal, although the man eventually becomes his handler due to circumstances beyond the director's control.  After his mentally deteriorating mother summons him to their spooky ancestral castle for a final visit, Germany invades Poland and the borders close, marooning Pabst and his family on the wrong side.

The Director becomes even more compelling as its actual theme emerges.  As skillfully as Kehlmann has evoked the Hollywood milieu, he's even better in demonstrating how fascism infects every aspect of society and the moral choices people are confronted with as a result.  At home, a servant who belongs to the local Nazi party literally turns the tables on the Pabst family; at work, where the only films Pabst can direct must be approved by the party; and most chillingly at school, where the impressionable Jakob, a talented artist who successfully confronts a bully, takes away the wrong lesson, at least in this environment.

Jakob realized that killing has something in common with painting—both work best when you forget that things are more than just color and shadow. Both are best done when you think away the inside. 

Nor are book groups or nursing homes immune, but that doesn't entirely mean that fascism, at least among the Nazis, was not without its benefits for a talented director.  In Paracelsus, Pabst manages to get away with biting the hand that feeds him.  Here's what Pabst's handler has to say about reviewers who might once have exposed the obvious meaning behind his film's silent parable.

“Critics? We have no critics! Criticism is a Jewish genre that no one needs. Instead we have art appreciation! Look."  He stopped a tall, bespectacled man and said "May I introduce you? Guido Merwetz.  Once a feared.  Now one of our most subtlest describers."

Despite the catnip Hollywood angle, I resisted picking up this incredibly fine novel, superbly translated by Ross Benjamin, because I thought it might be too highbrow after reading Tyll, an earlier work by Kehlmann about the Thirty Years War.  Instead, The Director accessibly combines formal brilliance, biography, metaphor and fiction to explore human behavior and the pursuit of art under the most extreme circumstances.

I owe an apology to Maurice.

 

Odalisque OD

You know a labor of love when you see it, and "Matisse: The Pursuit of Harmony," now on view at Acquavella counts as two: a French artist's adoration of the fair sex and an émigré family's devotion to re-kindling his flame. I say devotion because none of the painter's works are for sale; the nearly 50 works on view have been borrowed from private collectors (mostly anonymous) or museums. More than a few haven't been seen by the public since they were painted, which explains the lines in front of the East 79th Street gallery.

"Odalisque à la robe rayéeAll" (1937)

Matisse, along with frenemy Pablo Picasso, a decade younger, were both favorites of Gertrude Stein, who attributed the popularity of her early 20th century salons to a desire among Parisians to view his latest work. Unlike Picasso, however, he declined to paint her.

"L'Idole" (1906)

Apparently, neither Ms. Landsberg nor her Brazilian family, who commissioned this striking portrait, which had gone from traditional to radical after multiple sittings, liked the completed work enough to purchase it. 

Mademoiselle Yvonne Landsberg (1914)

When Matisse was "blocked" from expressing himself with a paintbrush, he sculpted. Late in life, after cancer confined him to a wheelchair, he turned to paper cut-outs or decoupage.

"Figure décorative" (1908)

His use of intense color established him as a co-leader of the Fauvists, or "wild beasts" with André Derain.

"L'Artiste et le modèle nu" (1921)

In 1913, Matisse returned from a seven-month sojourn to Morocco with a passion for the odalisque.

"Odalisque couchée aux magnolias" (1923)

"Odalisque au tambourin" (1925-26)

"Odalisque allongée" (1926)

"Odalisques jouant aux dames" (1928)

Matisse, who had contemplated fleeing to Brazil before the Nazis invaded Paris, spent the war years in Nice where he had lived since 1917. Vichy France exploited his decision to stay put for propaganda purposes.

"Elena" (1937)

"L'Odalisque, harmonie bleue" (1937)

"Odalisque en manteau rouge" (1937)

"Vase d'anémones" (1946)

Back to the Acquavellas. They're playing the long game, as they have since patriarch Nicholas arrived in the United States from Naples during the Roaring Twenties and established a gallery specializing in Italian art, including Renaissance masters. His son Bill added post-Impressionists, including Matisse, Cubists and Surrealists in the 60s. Since 1980, works by post-war and contemporary artists, such as Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat have hung in the townhouse gallery Bill purchased from Norton Simon. Simon also sold him the Matisse odalisque that opens this post. A third generation-- a daughter and two sons--now have begun selling art to private collectors and museums, a family business lucrative as it is tasteful.  Nice work if you can get it!

"Jeannette III" (1911)

 

The Fear of 13 (4*)

This injustices-of-incarceration love story, based on a 2015 documentary, begins with a welcome jolt:  a burly guard walks on to the dimly lit stage to announce forcefully the rules of Death Row: no cell phone use during the performance, no late seating, no unwrapping candies.  It gets a laugh even if the audience remains less compliant than the inmates.

The Fear of 13 takes a while to get going with a surprisingly musical cast assuming multiple roles as various members of the criminal justice system, types we've all met before under conditions we'd mostly prefer to ignore whether or not we oppose the death penalty.  Nick Yarris wasn't allowed to speak for years in a Pennsylvania maximum security prison; he's resigned to his fate until Jacki Miles, a naive volunteer who writes poetry, begins her visits. A spark between them ignites early, when Nick makes an allusion to David Copperfield which turns out later to have been a "move"; Jacki gently points out that he's actually referring to A Catcher in the Rye.  Their relationship builds slowly--so slowly that I must have drifted off during the discussion of Nick's vocabulary, absorbed from the thousand books he's read in the prison library--which accounts for the play's title and tragic vibe.

Tessa Thompson seems perfectly cast from the outset--who wouldn't fall in love with a woman as beautiful, smart and kind as she?--but it took a while for Adrien Brody's performance to accumulate power as a man whose only reason to live has been snatched away by mutual, mature consent. During the final 30 minutes, he floods the stage with restrained emotion while unlocking a childhood memory that shows how unlucky he has been from the very beginning. When it rains, it pours.  Only a bias against garrulous movie stars can explain Brody's Tony snub.

Kudos to playwright Lindsey Ferrentino for mining the dramatic potential of David Sington's political advocacy (the ceaseless, casual cruelty of corrections personnel and the capriciousness of judges are especially rich veins); to director David Kromer for building to an unforgettably devastating crescendo; and to Heather Gilbert, who illuminates the play's subsuming darkness with pinpoints of hopeful light.