MOST SIGNIFICANT
The one thing, or rather, the six things, that most changed my arts going habits this year is were the Metropolitan Opera's "Live in HD" movie theater broadcasts. Last year, I wrote in this blog that despite my attempts to enjoy opera, the genre just wasn't doing it for me. The Met's movie theater broadcasts were accessible, well produced and fun - after seeing the first one, I eagerly bought tickets to the rest of them. Then, on my trip to New York in September, I played waiting game to get into the Met's free open house for Lucia di Lammermoor and giggled enthusiastically over opera even more. (Does it seem uncool to have completely fallen for every single one of Peter Gelb's marketing tactics?) The music, the over-the-top theatricality, everything just worked for me this year and I am really enjoying it. Just what I need, another expensive art form for me to blow my money on.DANCE
Hamburg Ballet visited in February, performing two full-evening John Neuemeier ballets: Lady of the Camellias and Death in Venice. They are a great company, and I was very impressed by the dramatic commitment of the dancers. The ballets became much more than pure technical showcases. Neuemeier's ballets gave the dancers a lot of material to work with, and both performances were great to watch. One of my favorite dance performances this year happened out of town: San Francisco Ballet in William Forsythe's Artifact Suite (though this premiered with SFB last season, I didn't get to see it until February). The ballet eschewed pretty tutus and tiaras for severe leotards and harsh lighting, marshalling the entire corps de ballet sans principals for an extended, dreamlike interlude set to Georgi Lygeti piano pieces. It was a visceral thrill that turned conventions of classical ballet and theater on their heads for its 40 minute length. In October, the Orange County Performing Arts Center presented Fall For Dance, four performances and ten dance companys for only $10 at each show. It was a great idea, borrowed from City Center in New York, and the wonderful variety of companies and audiences that came to the theater made the event very worthwhile. In May, Sylvie Guillem & Akram Khan explored their star power through contemporary dance and monologues with Sacred Monsters, on tour at UCLA's Royce Hall.Some honorable mentions: Photographer David Michalek's Slow Dancing on the plaza of the Music Center was a fascinating, slow motion study of famous dancers and it created a little community of viewers every night in downtown Los Angeles. Compania Nacional de Danza 2 from Spain is a training company of young dancers, but they performed a mixed bill of Nacho Duato's work as though they were full fledged professionals. And the brand-new Los Angeles Ballet gave two mixed bills of mostly Balanchine ballets that were very promising. Here's hoping that they will be able to make a lasting ballet company for Los Angeles.
THEATER
I didn't get to see as much theater this year as I would have liked - I was too busy working inside one. Or several. I stuck mostly to the larger theaters for lack of time and energy. But of what I did see, there were a few really great ones. My best experience was with Spring Awakening on Broadway, at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. It was a raw, honest piece of theater, staged with a youthful energy and in-your-face theatricality. Locally, David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face at the Mark Taper Forum as a smart and funny new play, ostensibly about the fallout from Hwang's protests against the "yellow face" casting of Miss Saigon in the 1990s. But it wasn't just an insider's look at the theater industry: it was about what it means to stick to your beliefs, to look at yourself and find yourself fallible and perhaps even wrong - a fascinating, reflective piece. In the department of guilty pleasures, Phantom - The Las Vegas Spectacular was an outrageously lavish visual feast, and I loved every eye-popping minute of it. I know I'm supposed to dislike the show's schmaltzy lyrics and sappy melodrama, but it's an immense guilty pleasure for me, and in Vegas, with the huge chandelier that hurtles into the audience, the real fireworks on stage and the complete opera house for an auditorium, it was theme park heaven. And I had a blast at the long running Los Angeles production of Wicked, largely thanks to the very appealing principals Megan Hilty and Eden Espinosa.Honorable mentions: Neil LaButte's Fat Pig at the Geffen Playhouse, Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin duking it out in Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf at the Ahmanson Theatre, and a giddy revival of On Your Toes at Reprise.
CLASSICAL
The Los Angeles Philharmonic continues to provide consistently excellent performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall, especially under the baton of its music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen. It's not news anymore that the acoustics in Disney Hall let the music shimmer and sparkle, but that fact still never gets old for me. The Metropolitan Opera's movie theater broadcasts I already mentioned, though within them there were some particularly memorable performances: Renee Fleming and Dmitri Hvorostovsky were stunning in Eugene Onegin, and the Bartlett Scherr-directed production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia was raucous fun, especially with Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flores in the lead roles. Live and in-the-flesh, there was Jenufa at LA Opera, with fantastic, powerful performances from Karita Mattila and Eva Urbanova. The Janacek opera was through-composed and also very unusual sounding with its beating xylophone, which I loved. LA Opera also revived a very colorful production of Mozart's Don Giovanni this season. Hungky baritone Erwin Schrott was wonderful as Giovanni - it's amazing to see someone so in control of their vocal technique that they can really have fun and play with it. I was also personally fan of the production's constant visual inventions, one of the most theatrical things that I have seen at LA Opera. Out of town, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had me floored at Ravinia with a wonderful performance of Ravel and French music under the baton of Christoph Eschenbach.THE DISAPPOINTMENTS
LA Opera's much-ballyhooed production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, directed by John Doyle and starring Audra McDonald and Patti Lupone, looked so good on paper. Doyle's work on Sweeney Todd was incredible, but his work here was unimaginative, hampered further by the cardboard acting of the LA Opera chorus and tenor Anthony Dean Griffey (this was all further reconfirmed on the recent PBS broadcast of the production). McDonald and Lupone were the best parts of the production, but they couldn't do all that much on their own. In March, The Joffrey Ballet visited Los Angeles, giving an alarmingly sloppy performance of Apollo and a dead performance of Les Presages on its mixed bill program. It was only partially redeemed by a decent performance of The Green Table, a great ballet in its own right, but by that point in the evening I just wasn't into it anymore. Their program of "rock" ballets the following weekend was strongly danced, but the dances themselves were forgettable. It was nice that American Ballet Theatre stopped by for two weeks in July, but on the second week there was a bland new production of The Sleeping Beauty. Cartoonish and clunky, the production was all the more disappointing because it doesn't live up to ABT's claim as one of the top ballet companies in the country. I saw seven performances in July because I wanted to see all of the company's women (very strong, the most of them), but I came to "deal" with the production to get through the week. All the more disappointing, given that The Royal Ballet also just made a new production, and though that one isn't their best, it's still much better than ABT's.
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