Time to Move On, but First, a Fond Look Back

2001: Of all the things I did in December, the one that best summed up the spirit of this wounded city was a midweek visit I paid to the Village Vanguard, New York's oldest jazz club, down whose narrow stairs I stepped gingerly one night to hear the Bill Charlap Trio. Imagine my astonishment when my eyes adjusted to the dimness and I spotted Tony Bennett sitting in the corner -- and imagine my delight when he sauntered up to the tiny bandstand and sang "Time After Time" and "The Lady Is a Tramp." Yes, we're battered and bruised and living with the worst kind of uncertainty, yet there we were, drinking up our minimums and goggling at a living legend, after which we all rushed home to call up our envious friends and tell them what they'd missed.

* * *

2002: Man cannot live by champagne alone -- he also needs the music of Emmanuel Chabrier, which is the aesthetic equivalent of a chilled split of Dom Perignon. If that sounds good to you, it's not too late to catch New York City Opera's divinely silly production of Chabrier's "L'Etoile," an operetta full of surreal happenings and sparkling tunes.

Mark Lamos's dizzy staging is as slapsticky as a Chaplin short, and Robert Orth, the star of the evening, not only mugs like a trouper but also does a cartwheel and a split, an event almost certainly unique in the annals of opera.

* * *

2003: As for the world premiere of Maria Schneider's "Bulerias, Soleas y Rumbas" at Alice Tully Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center has never done anything more important than commissioning this piece. It's no secret that Schneider is the foremost big-band composer of her generation, but this powerful large-scale work, in which she blends jazz and flamenco with the skill of an alchemist, is so good that I hesitate to limit its significance by calling it big-band music, or even jazz. It is as tightly woven and emotionally compelling as a symphony.

* * *

2003: I'd been looking forward to Lincoln Center's revival of Basil Twist's "Symphonie Fantastique" ever since it was announced last year, but when my friends asked me exactly what it was, I hemmed and hawed and finally said, "Well, uh . . . it's an abstract puppet show in a thousand-gallon water tank, set to a recording of Berlioz's 'Symphonie Fantastique.' " Sounds crazy, no? And to tell the truth, "Symphonie Fantastique" is a little crazy -- a loony masterpiece that defies any sort of easy characterization, save to say that it is one of the half-dozen most entrancing theatrical experiences I've encountered since I started writing this column. Sure, all you see are strange objects swishing and swirling behind a colorfully lit wall of glass, but the images conjured up by Twist and his crack team of puppeteers are so inscrutably gorgeous (think of a cross between George Balanchine, Paul Klee and Chuck Jones) that they will stick in your mind like a wild but happy daydream.

* * *

2004: For me, the major thrill of the month came when Propeller, Edward Hall's London-based, all-male acting company, brought his production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" to the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAM Harvey Theater. Hall has a ritzy theatrical pedigree (his father is Sir Peter Hall), but his joyously informal approach to Shakespeare is all his own, and I can't remember when I saw a "Midsummer Night's Dream" half so good as this version, flung across the simplest of sets with imagination to burn. The female roles are done in deliberately crude drag, the actors supply their own incidental music (and sound effects) by singing in chorus and playing cheap harmonicas, and the results are both absurdly funny and -- when appropriate -- heart-catchingly affecting.

* * *

2004: Never mind the damn election. The most important art exhibit in Second City -- maybe even in all of America -- is the Giorgio Morandi show on display at Lucas Schoormans Gallery through Dec. 4. . . . The effect of this show is wildly disproportionate to its minuscule size: six oil paintings and two works on paper, all of them still lifes and none in any obvious way imposing. Yet as you look at how the greatest Italian artist of the 20th century painstakingly arranged and rearranged a dozen bottles, bowls and boxes on a table and painted them over and over again, you find yourself whisked out of the grinding noise of everyday urban life and spirited away to a place of intense stillness. It's as if a soft-spoken man had slipped discreetly into a small room open to the public, whispering life-changing confidences to the fortunate few who visit him there.

* * *

2005: The kind of surprise I like best is when something I'm already enjoying turns out to be even better than I'd first thought. That's what happened when I saw Austin Pendleton's "Orson's Shadow," now playing off-Broadway in an open-ended run at the Barrow Street Theatre.

At first I thought it was nothing more (or less) than a coruscatingly brilliant entertainment, a tour de force in which five actors portraying Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Kenneth Tynan and Joan Plowright are put onstage and turned loose like a fleet of bumper cars, sending blue sparks flying across the stage as they smash into one another. I was half right: "Orson's Shadow" is brilliant, all right, but it's far more than mere entertainment.