Kinky Boots

Sometimes when I go to a new Broadway musical it is so bad I don’t even know where to start in reviewing it. (This season’s Hands on a Hardbody comes to mind.) So I was thrilled to find just the opposite with Kinky Boots, the Cyndi Lauper-scored adaptation of the 2005 film with its deliciously fun performances, music, choreography, costumes and every other aspect to boot. The audience at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre was bursting with joy and laughter.

This story of Charlie (Stark Sands, left in photo), a small town British shoe manufacturer struggling to keep his family’s factory open, and Lola (Billy Porter, right), a drag queen he meets one night on a London street, was a charming, fact-based movie. I was concerned its simplicity would be overcome by too much Broadway commercialism, but no worries. Under Jerry Mitchell’s direction (and choreography), the new version is a high spirited, old time musical with just enough camp to make it shine for today.

Porter is both riotous and vulnerable as Lola, a cross-dressing nightclub singer disowned by his boxer father because he’s gay. Charlie also has father issues -- his didn’t think Charlie would be able to run the business and had planned to sell the building to a condominium developer, something Charlie finds out after his father dies unexpectedly shortly after the play begins.

Both young men have settled in London, Lola to a showbiz life of escape where “the world looked brighter six inches off the ground,” as she sings in “I’m Not My Father’s Son.” Charlie’s foray to London is less intentional and less committed; he has been coerced by his fiancee, Nicola (Celina Carvajal), who can’t get away fast enough from Northampton, their small midlands factory town.

The two are brought together one night when Lola is harassed by several men and Charlie, thinking she’s a woman, comes to her rescue. In the scuffle, Lola ends up smashing Charlie in the face with her high-heeled boot; it turns out she had been trained as a fighter by her father before being disowned and is quite capable of defending herself. She takes Charlie back to her nightclub dressing room to clean up his face and the two have a bit of a chat before parting.

That basherte encounter proves providential to both. Having learned a bit about a drag queen’s travails, that the largest size of women’s shoes don’t last long under a man’s weight, Charlie heads home to try to deal with the possibility of closing the factory that has been in his family for four generations but whose products are no longer in demand.

Then Charlie has an epiphany. Following the prompting of his sassy assistant, Lauren (Annaleigh Ashford, center), he realizes if he wants to keep the factory open and save the jobs of all the longtime employees, he’s got to create a product geared to a contemporary market, not the one being churned out since the business was founded in 1890. In an ah ha moment he remembers Lola and dares to envision a future in drag. If he can just convince Lola to relocate to the midlands for awhile to help design the new line.

Not an easy task, but once accomplished the two find they have more in common than they would have expected. This is nicely portrayed as “I’m Not My Father’s Son” becomes a duet, with Charlie sharing his sadness at not being the reflection his father wanted to see.

Naturally a story line (book by Harvey Fierstein) like this is expected to spur some splashy dance numbers and Mitchell as choreographer provides them. Porter belts and sashays around that stage, giving it the full diva. And who knew he had such killer showgirl legs? With the help of the Angels’, Lola’s backup singers from her nightclub act -- chorus boys in drag -- the designing of Price and Son’s latest line is an exuberant presentation to shake the foundation of the old company, with Lola and the Angels strutting their stuff and singing “Sex is in the Heel” and, volia, a thigh-high shiny red stiletto boot is now the future of this venerable company. No more wing-tipped men’s business shoes; it’s now “irresistible tubular sex appeal.”

Act One closes with the new product gliding down the assembly line. David Rockwell’s set enhances the festivities, looking more like a fairy tale workplace than an actual industrial site. Factory workers dance their way across those conveyor belts to celebrate and gleefully sing “Everybody Say Yeah.” It’s delightful.

Of course, if you’ve seen much old-style musical theatre, you know the happy ending of Act One will be shaken and tested in Act Two. Lola’s sexuality is challenged not just by the Neanderthal mentality of the factory workers, represented most forcefully by Don (Daniel Stewart Sherman), but finally in a confrontation between Charlie and Lola that threatens the company’s revival. Fierstein’s writing here makes it clear lessons are to be learn, but I didn’t feel preached at. The pace is too quick and the acting too strong.

No good musical comedy is complete without the happy-ever-after love angle. I’m not giving anything away in saying that will be found between Charlie and Lauren, who even though he is engaged to Nicola, sings of her love for him in a heartfelt Act One lament, “The History of Wrong Guys.”

A musical this rollicking wouldn’t be possible without spectacular lighting (Kenneth Posner), hair design (Josh Marquette) and make-up (Randy Houston Mercer).  And last but far from least are the costumes by Gregg Barnes, which are a play land of leather and glitter and COLOR. And that’s just the clothes. Wait until you see those boots prance down the Milan runway at the end as Price and Son takes the fashion world by storm. Charlie and Lola are reconciled, Charlie and Lauren together, and the audience clapping along with the pulsing beat of “Raise You Up/Just Be.” I left the theatre and walked home with the words to that song -- “When you hit the dust, let me lift you up” -- singing in my ear.

Tom Hanks is a "Lucky Guy" on Broadway

Two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks proves his acting talent is just as great onstage as he makes his Broadway debut annoyingly, movingly and always convincingly portraying New York tabloid columnist Mike McAlary in Lucky Guy, Nora Ephron's new play at the Broadhurst Theatre.

Ephron, who died of leukemia last June at 71, was a tabloid reporter (the New York Post) early in her career. She tells the colorful story of McAlary, who died of cancer at 41 on Christmas day in 1998, in flashbacks, starting in 1998 with a gang of McAlary’s former colleagues, “just Irish guys at the bar,” sharing memories. These go back to 1985 and bring McAlary on the scene to relive his tale. Under the direction of George C. Wolfe and with a strong supporting cast, this biographical play captures the gritty feel of the city in that era and the ego and tenacity of the reporters covering it.

“New York City is a tabloid town,” says Hap Hairston (Courtney B. Vance), one of McAlary’s editors, setting the scene. “It was a good time for tabloids.”

Indeed it was. That’s the year I moved to New York and tabloid-ready stories were everywhere -- the crack epidemic was exploding, crime was high and the division between rich and poor was great.

McAlary, with a journalist’s love of a “good story,” is hungry for a spot in New York Newsday’s Manhattan city room, but is stuck covering routine bureaucracy in Queens. Hanks demonstrates his flair for comedy in these scenes, with a determined McAlary pestering Hairston and jumping at the chance to take any crumb of a story the other reporters leave behind at the end of the day. It reminded me of my youth hanging out at The Baltimore Sun, going in on weekends to write and willing to stay all night if they’d let me. I was just as hungry for that life as McAlary.

Why not? As the reporters sum it up at the end, a journalism career means the chance to do something different everyday and to make a difference by getting the truth out there. And the sense of power can be intoxicating, dangerously so as we see with McAlary in Act One as his arrogance overpowers the sense of fun and purpose and he becomes more and more overbearing with his rise from the Queens bureau to the newsroom and then to what for him is the pinnacle of a journalism career -- becoming a New York City columnist. I really didn’t like him, which is a tribute to Hanks’ acting and Ephron's writing.

I liked the second act much better, in terms of the writing and evolution of the character. It picks up where Act One ends, with McAlary’s high speed, drunk driving accident on the FDR Drive. After nearly killing himself, he battles his way through recovery and back to the newsroom, possibly too soon as he makes an extremely poor judgment in a series of columns that leads to a libel suit and harms his reputation inside and outside of the paper.

He holds onto his career, but then metastasized colon cancer strikes and while he hangs on, his fire for the “good story” dies. It is his wife, Alice (an underused Maura Tierney), who gives him the push to respond to a tip that ultimately leads to his Pulitzer Prize shortly before his death. The scene where an emaciated McAlary, guided by Alice, goes back to the newsroom to celebrate is one of the most powerful in the play. Hanks, who is not emaciated by any means, through his bearing and movements portrays a dying man. We are one with McAlary then, all sins forgiven.

I come from a hard news background so I know that world well. I even had several similarities. Like McAlary, I was a police reporter and I know what it’s like to be asking questions at midnight. Try a spell on night cops in Baltimore, attempting to pry information out of a homicide detective before your deadline. That kind of training sets you up to follow any path in a journalism career.

Other connections for me: McAlary studied journalism at Syracuse University; I was a reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard. He was a New York Newsday columnist; I wrote a couple of op-ed pieces for them. One of the reporters teaches journalism at CUNY; I taught journalism at Brooklyn College for two semesters while the department chair was on sabbaticals.

What didn’t ring true to me was the rampant use of profanity in Act One. In all of my years in newsrooms put together I never heard as much as I did in two hours of that play. I have nothing against the F word -- I use it myself liberally around my apartment -- but it’s so excessively used in the play as to be ridiculous. It really cheapens the work. Perhaps if Ephron had lived she would have done a good bit of editing when she heard how gratuitous the swearing sounded.

I did love a quote of hers from “Journalism: A Love Story by Nora Ephron” that is included in the program because it spoke to my heart:

“But for many years I was in love with journalism. [Me too!] I loved the city room. [Me too!] I loved the pack. [Me too!] I loved smoking and drinking scotch and playing dollar poker. [I preferred a glass of wine or two after work with colleagues, minus the cigarettes and poker] I didn’t know much about anything, and I was in a profession where you didn’t have to. I loved the speed. [Me too!] I loved the deadlines. [Yes!] I loved that you wrapped the fish.
“You can’t make this stuff up, I used to say.

“I’d known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would be just an intermission. [Me too!] I’d spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibilities place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I’d be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist.
“And I’d turned out to be right.”

I felt that same way and I thank God over and over again for my journalism career and my life in New York. Lucky Guy provides a fond look back into both worlds.

Hands on a Hardbody

If the radio in the shiny red pickup onstage at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre had been turned on, we could at least have had some good music to listen to during the two-and-a-half-hour drudgery of Hands on a Hardbody, the new Broadway musical inspired by a 1997 documentary about a bunch of down-on-their-luck Texans competing to win a truck. Instead, everything about this show about an endurance contest proves to be an endurance contest of its own.

I had assumed before I went that choreography could be limited -- it is almost nonexistent -- since the 10 people competing to win the truck (the hardbody of the title. Sorry, I know the word conjures a more interesting image.) must keep one hand on it at all times, but I kept hoping Sergio Trujillo, who did the musical staging, would allow them to step away and dance out their pasts in flashbacks or their dreams of the future. But no, they stand by their truck for six hours, then a 15-minute break and it’s back to the contest, waiting to see who will be the last one standing in the hot Texas sun.

OK, so that takes care of the choreography, one of the most important elements of a Broadway musical. That shortcoming could be overcome with good music but, as I’ve indicated, that won’t be found here either. The songs (lyrics by Amanda Green and music by Trey Anastasio and Green) are bland pop/rock when they should be all-out country. As the Dixie Chicks would say, “Let it rip.” Too bad they didn’t write the music. I love their CDs. Or Kristin Chenoweth who wrote a couple of songs for her country CD, Some Lessons Learned, that are true examples of the genre. One would even be appropriate, the hilarious “What Would Dolly Do?”, with its line: “So . . . Take your truck and shove it/ I know how much you love it/ And it’s a good thing ‘cause that’s where you’re moving to.”

I love country music and expected a lively evening of it, evoking a small town in east Texas, but instead got a country-lite version that took away any feeling specifically of Texas. The location (set design by Christine Jones) could have been any tacky dealership in New Jersey or on Long Island. I wish director Neil Pepe had camped it up, playing up Texas’ redneck image for some fun. 

Transforming a documentary into a Broadway musical takes more imagination than this show offers. Could this musical be saved, without good music or rousing choreography? Maybe, if the characters were interesting, which they are not. (Book by Doug Wright, a Pulitzer Prize winner for I Am My Own Wife.) Rather, they’re one-dimensional stereotypes -- a Bible-toting Christian, a troubled veteran -- the most boring people I can recall encountering onstage. Too bad because the cast includes Keith Carradine and Hunter Foster. They deserve better.

 Hardbody premiered at La Jolla Playhouse, where it received good reviews, prompting its move to Broadway. But at least one veteran of the Great White Way might have felt the way I did. After the show I saw Neil Simon trudging up the aisle and he looked as weary as I felt. It was a long night for us all.

Culture Project Will Rename Its Mainstage Theatre, The Lynn Redgrave Theatre

This article by Andrew Gans appears on today's Playbill.com


Culture Project has announced that it will rename its mainstage theatre, currently known as 45 Bleecker Street, the Lynn Redgrave Theatre this June.

A naming ceremony and commemorative gala in honor of the late Ms. Redgrave will be held June 3 at Stage 48 (605 W. 48th St.). Honorary Chairs for the evening are Vanessa Redgrave, Liam Neeson and Ms. Redgrave’s three children, Annabel Clark, Ben Clark and Pema Clark.

“To be entrusted with the preservation of even a small portion of Lynn's legacy is a glorious honor,” said Culture Project founder and artistic director Allan Buchman in a statement. “We hope to infuse her passions in the area of playwriting, education, and the joy of acting into all of our endeavors. Certainly, the Redgrave name in theater exemplifies the highest commitment to the theatrical arts in conjunction with a bold advocacy to human rights and social justice that is the defining purpose of Culture Project.”

Lynn Redgrave appeared in the original run of Culture Project’s The Exonerated as Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs. Culture Project was also instrumental to the development of Ms. Redgrave’s third play, Nightingale, presenting a number of developmental public readings of the play. Ms. Redgrave was last seen on the Culture Project stage in 2007 with her sister Vanessa and brother Corin in A Question of Impeachment, a series of evenings exploring the case for the impeachment of former President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Culture Project is dedicated to "addressing critical human rights issues by shining an artistic spotlight on injustice." For more information visit www.cultureproject.org.

Culture Project is currently presenting Shaheed: The Dream and Death of Benazir Bhutto.

Ann

 Like most people, I first heard of Ann Richards, the late one-term governor of Texas, when she gave the keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta and referred to Republican presidential candidate George H. W. Bush as having been born with a silver foot in his mouth.

It was a hilarious remark from the salty, white-haired politician and yet it isn’t uttered in Ann, the one-woman biographical play written and performed by Holland Taylor. This is unfortunate because the show, now at the Vivian Beaumont Theater under the direction of Benjamin Endsley Klein, is in serious need of humor.

Richards, who died in 2006, was a colorful character, and certainly, as her stage persona tells us, an unlikely person to win the governorship in good-old-boy Texas in 1990, being that she was a woman, a divorced woman, a recovering alcoholic woman and a Democratic woman.

“I was not on anybody’s list of a public servant,” she says, recounting her start in elective office as a county commissioner.

Taylor had been fascinated by Richards for a long time, enough to spend four years researching, interviewing, writing and developing this two-hour piece. It’s clear she did much work and her portrayal seems real, but I just felt I was stuck in the presence of a colossal bore who didn’t know when to shut up.

As I was walking home I thought of Calvin Trillin’s description of the politicians on the Sunday morning talk shows; he referred to them as “sabbath gas bags.” That’s what I felt I was watching, only I couldn’t change the channel or turn off the TV.

This shouldn’t have surprised me. I’ve been a political reporter and a campaign press secretary and know from those experiences that politicians are rarely pleasant company, being as self-involved as most are. It’s much more fun, though, to cover politics and enjoy witnessing the fools those people make of themselves; it’s much harder to work in politics and have to clean up the foolishness.

Ann begins with Richards at a podium giving a commencement address at an imaginary college in Texas (sets by Michael Fagin). From this devise she is able to share her life’s story -- the only child of hardworking, uneducated parents, growing up during the Depression in rural Texas, marriage at 19 to a man she loved who would become a civil rights lawyer, domestic life as a mother of four, her drinking, divorce, getting sober and public life as a politician.

The podium gives way to the governor’s office as we witness her juggling her harried work life -- phone call from Bill Clinton, steering her children’s lives, keeping her unseen staff hopping. (Julie White is heard as her assistant in voiceovers.)

With her white hair (wig design by Paul Huntley) and white suit (costumes by Julie Weiss), it’s easy to imagine her going to a costume party as a tampon, as she delights in telling us she did. That rather vulgar image stuck in my mind. Not much else has.

Talley's Folly

I went back and forth throughout most of the 97-minute revival of Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly -- first I liked it, then I was bored, then I liked it, until the end when my mind was clearly made up. It proved to be an unexpectedly charming love story that sent me out of the Laura Pels Theatre in high spirits.

What had been pleasing me and alternately annoying me was Danny Burstein’s character, Matt Friedman, a Jewish immigrant who likes to talk -- a lot. Burstein is a gifted actor and the reason I went to see the show. The times in the play when I was restless were the ones where I felt I was seeing a variation on the stock character of the neurotic Jew -- talkative, self-involved, wisecracking. But these moments are relieved by the laugh-out-loud funny ones, complete with the masterful physical comedy of Matt trying to navigate on ice skates across the rotting wooden floorboards of the set, and are fully redeemed at the light-filled ending.

Matt, a 42-year-old never-married accountant, has come on July 4, 1944 to a small town near Lebanon, Missouri, to woo back Sally Talley (Sarah Paulson), a 31-year-old never-married nurse’s aide with whom he had a brief fling the summer before. Matt faces not just the hurtle of an angry Sally who hasn’t heard from him in a year, but the anti-Semitic wrath of her Protestant brother who orders him off the property at gunpoint, something we learn about through Matt. The play features only Matt and Sally, which are all we need.

Both actors are perfect from start to finish, handling the humor, the anger and their revealed painful pasts with exquisite timing and emotion. They portray two wounded souls who have given up on any expectation of love. Or at least Sally has. Matt, the pursuer, has to convince Sally they are meant for each other.

Director Michael Wilson keeps the pace fast, but in terms of movement a little too hyper for me. Since it’s a play about how the past affects a relationship, with no particular action, Wilson seems to be trying to make up for it by having Burstein and Paulson walk up and down the boathouse steps and across the stage almost continually. It is distracting and unrealistic. Less movement would have been appreciated because the story proves to be rich enough.

The folly of the title refers to Sally’s ancestor who wanted a gazebo, but his family objected to having one on the estate so he built a boathouse to look like a gazebo. It is here in this now broken-down and neglected spot that the action takes place. (Nice set by Jeff Cowie.)

 Talley’s Folly was first staged Off-Broadway in 1997 before moving to Broadway the following year, earning Lanford Wilson, who was known as the voice of the American outsider, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award nomination for Best Play. It is part of Wilson's "Talley Trilogy," which also includes The Fifth of July and Talley and Son.

The revival is produced by Roundabout Theatre Company. Its run has been extended one week, now until May 12. For tickets and information, call (212) 719-1300 or visit roundabouttheatre.org.

I Want to Hear the Invisible: The Collegiate Chorale Sings Glass and Golijov

 

By Mary Sheeran            

Melody that begins, soars, and resolves has become hard to find. Relentless, driving rhythms pound at us in restaurants and gyms. And in the world of (so-called) contemporary classical music, melody has given way to explorations of tonality and rhythm, of non-western music, and other journeys where, if the word “melodic” should appear, it is usually preceded by the word “unabashedly,” as if one should be abashed.

Minimalism emerged in music (notably by Steve Reich, John Adams, and Philip Glass) almost by necessity, as if composers were trying to find out where they were in all this, a search within a search. Although many feel that minimalist music merely adds to the noise and the driving rhythm, or think it is a boring reduction, it is rather a quest for the essential, or rather, the removal of anything that is not essential. Like moving from a three-story house to a New York apartment and figuring what to keep and what to toss.  Such tossing can hurt and unsettle.

In terms of spirituality (and music belongs in that realm), the process is a much more potent journey – an attempt to eliminate all but the very basics of flesh and spirit to discover a spiritual wholeness and a new way to see. This is one aim of chant, which one might call minimalist, or rather, minimalizing. Philip Glass’s work relies on chant, even if on the surface it seems that he only contributes to the noise of the world. Actually, he is working to get beyond it, and like chant, that can provide a spiritual experience. It means work, though.            

That was evident during a concert at Carnegie Hall last week with the Collegiate Chorale, which, under the capable direction of James Bagwell, presented Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 7 – A Toltec Symphony and Osvaldo Golijov’s Oceana. Both pieces are strong, dramatic, and feature interesting combinations of instruments and voices. Both were inspired by Latin American themes.            

The National Symphony Orchestra commissioned the piece to honor conductor Leonard Slatkin on his 60th birthday. In fact, Slatkin did the inviting, noting mischievously that he was happy to offer the commission to “someone who, at one time, I really hated.” He had earlier found Glass’s music boring.             Glass was inspired early on by the late Indian musician Ravi Shankar’s use of rhythm as structure, and his music is, well, unabashedly rhythmic. It often requires another human layer beyond instrumentality to deepen its dimensions and bring its richness to the forefront. This is best exemplified by Jerome Robbins’ brilliant ballet, Glass Pieces, where Robbins not only brings the music’s rhythm and phrasing to an exciting level, but deepens it with dancers’ soaring arcs and then, when the music becomes profoundly intimate, expands it by bringing in a haunting rhythm with dancers in shadow. Robbins’ choreography brings out the spiritual qualities of Glass’s music that, superficially heard, could irritate the listener (as it obviously had irritated Slatkin at first).            

Glass claims that, for his seventh symphony, he drew on Mesoamerican themes from the Toltec culture, which reached its height between the years 700 and 1100, but is still in some ways alive today. The work is divided into three movements: The Corn, The Sacred Earth, and The Blue Deer (outlining a progression from the gifts of Mother Earth to the doorway to the Spirit and then to the human visions of the spiritual world).

His first movement is richly textured, starts slowly and haltingly, then builds in intensity and texture until the signature Glass rhythm appears. The movement ends quietly, but it has taken us to an expectant place.

As if the orchestra were no longer enough, the second movement brings in another dimension: Glass incorporates a wordless chant (rather words that have no sense) and uses the chorus to add to the urgency of the musical pulse that intensifies it even more. Program notes tell us this was a chant Glass had transcribed from “a 90-year-old Mexican man chanting in the desert, singing to a plant or something.” Glass’s second movement is mesmerizing, but it is the words that are not words, combined with the music, combined with the singers, and combined with whatever level of spiritual maturity listeners can bring to it that make this a beautiful piece and not irritating noise. (You can listen to the second movement here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRK3QS9zoEY)

The third movement begins quietly with more stopping and starting over than one would want to feel after the first two. We westerners, after we’ve explored something, we expect to get somewhere! In fact, we arrive at another place of tension. Glass signals that clearly. If the third movement sounds like movie music in spots, that’s because it is. It’s a reworking of Glass’ music for "Powaggatsi," a Hopi word meaning a life in transition. That film focused on the conflict in underdeveloped countries between tradition and industrialization. The peace of the movement contains an underlying tension, and the journey ends like most: Did you find what you wanted to find or do we have to start out again?

I don’t know exactly how the Toltecs figure into this. One could probably make a case for each of the movements in the Toltec terms outlined in the program notes, but the whole idea could be an affectation, or perhaps it’s a hook Glass uses to illustrate the journey his music must inevitably generate for the listener. Glass’s music cannot exist with just Glass alone. It needs you.

The opening of Golijov’s Oceana led to a place that will not come back, at least, that’s what I wrote in my notes. The harp took center stage, and the work also featured guitars, rainsticks, a small chorus of women, the larger choir, the full orchestra – and oh, yes, a jazz singer. 

Golijov, who draws on a background that combines Argentina, Israel, and the United States, wrote this sprawling piece for the Oregon Bach Festival in 1996.  For it, he selected a poem from Cantos Ceremonial by the Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda of Chile. Golijov called Neruda the Latin American Bach – and the argument goes that both Golijov and Neruda transform passion into geometry. I’m not sure that’s right, about Bach anyway, but it’s an idea. Golijov took a deconstructing poetic text and deconstructed it further, passing sentence fragments, words, syllables, and sounds from chorus, chamber choir, and soloist. This could have led to a dizzying experience, but what holds it together and keeps us from getting lost, is the commanding authority of the jazz soloist, in this case, Bella da Costa. She took all those partials and threaded them together, transforming the geometry back into passion and accomplishing what Neruda (translated here) wrote: “I want to hear the invisible…Give me the secret wine contained in each syllable." Another spiritual search, brought intensively and beautifully, home.

“I want to hear the invisible.” That probably sums up the intent of this concert and these pieces. James Bagwell kept all these disparate elements under control, and the chorus even in its wordless chanting, performed precisely and accurately, not that easy with the ever-changing time signatures. One could have wished for one more short piece to have linked these two, letting the audience sit back a bit, but even without that, it was a most successful evening for the Collegiate Chorale.

The Collegiate Chorale, James Bagwell, Music Director, presenting Symphony No. 7 – A Toltec Symphony by Philip Glass and Oceana by Osvaldo Golijov. With Bella da Costa, Vocalist; Manhattan Girls Chorus; The Collegiate Chorale; and the American Symphony Orchestra. James Bagwell, Conductor. At Carnegie Hall, Feb. 27.

Mary Sheeran is a singer, editor, and the author of the novels Quest of the Sleeping Princess and Who Have the Power. Her CD, Through the Years, is available on CD Baby.