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Tutto by Walter Ford

A cheetah’s tail is juxtaposed against a backdrop of a canal in Venice — Detail from “Tutto fu ambito e tutto fu tentato”

Tutto is [Ford’s] first body of work to focus on a single individual: the eccentric Milanese heiress Luisa Casati (1881–1957). Depicting the exotic animals that she kept, Ford portrays her years in Venice shortly before World War I.

Known as La Marchesa, Casati was one of Europe’s wealthiest women and is legendary for her extravagant pursuit of aesthetic extremes and social recognition. Startled onlookers describe how she wore snakes as necklaces, walked with a pair of cheetahs in Venice’s piazzas, and attended an opera clad in a headdress of peacock feathers that were stained with the blood of a freshly killed chicken.

Maybe Happy Ending

The show was plenty enjoyable with memorable tunes, but for me it fell a bit short of the lavish praise it’s been receiving. While watching I found myself repeatedly thinking about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and missing that novel’s more interesting explorations of similar topics. The show also slows down through its second half and overexplains its ending.

James (Marcus Choi) reads a book on stage before the show begins

The set design is Ring-esque both in terms of its playfulness and creativity and how it ultimately distracts and inserts itself as an unwanted character. It also results in the most punitive sightlines of any show I’ve seen. If you aren’t center orchestra or mezzanine, you will feel excluded from the show at times. The unnecessarily large proscenium frame and hard right angles of the rooms are the main culprits; I don’t understand why they didn’t cheat the angles outwards towards the wings.

W hole

Cortile di via Fondazza by Giorgio Morandi

This painting shows the view through the window of Morandi’s now-renowned studio in Bologna, a sacred place for his artistic production. Morandi’s growing inclination toward abstraction is evidenced in this 1954 work by its distinct dividing line: the imposing presence of a light-colored wall, which occupies nearly half of the left side of the painting. The wall serves only to animate the right side of the work.

A brilliant constraint and framing.

Oh, Mary!

Have you ever had a great day? The kind of day so great it imbues every single sad or boring or terrible day that came before it with deep meaning because from where you stand on this great day, all those days were secretly leading to this one?

Smithereens

Slung low, charmingly frantic, seaweed everywhere (in a good way).

Balthazar

“22 Hours in Balthazar,” New York Times:

Alvino is flying, his left hand’s fingers imperceptibly rotating the potato between upward strokes of the peeler, blindly flipping the naked spuds over his shoulder into the tub. I pull up my phone’s stopwatch to time him for a minute, treating each potato as a lap: his slowest is 10.7 seconds, his quickest 6.4. Alvino, a shy man from the Dominican Republic, has been doing this same job for 15 years. “Like anything else, it was difficult at first,” he says, but he caught his rhythm after a couple of months. Peralta has been at it for 14 years.

Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing:

My idea of a perfect night is a good play and dinner at Orso.

Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally…:

Restaurants are to people in the eighties what theater was to people in the sixties.

Ephron’s last line here (delivered through two characters) is pitch-perfect irony. You can visit a Parisian brasserie in many cities that are not Paris. Is that theater? No: a play is theater; a french fry is just a potato. But on their best days, restaurants like Balthazar deliver a tiny portion of theater’s magic.