ABT’s Othello – “Vintage has it all over new”

That’s one of the advertising tags for the current run of Arthur Miller’s masterpiece Death of a Salesman, first performed in 1949, which opened in previews on Friday night at the Winter Garden Theater. It stars Nathan Lane, Laurie Metcalf, Christopher Abbott and Ben Ahlers. It is deeply moving theater and devastating even when one knows well the lines that are coming. There’s no way to steel oneself to be numb to great art. It’ll get to you no matter what. Most everyone in the audience knew that the confrontation between Biff and Willy Loman was coming; it had simmered and sparked throughout the play. But when the moment finally arrived, the audience lost its grip on what little collective composure it still had. Miller’s play is a classic. It is the classic. It’s what we need now.

There is no glitz in Death of a Salesman. Just words. Just words so well-crafted and so well-delivered that it makes one wonder why some of the other productions on Broadway that boast themselves as contemporary even bother to turn on their lights. Attention must be paid  to what is good and what is not.

Up the way at Lincoln Center, American Ballet Theatre opened its season over the weekend in performances of  Othello by Lar Lubovitch with a score by Elliot Goldenthal. First performed in 1997, it offers sterile George Tsypin scenery of plexiglass and an ultra shiny and reflective black floor. The costumes by Ann Hould-Ward are more traditional and Shakespearean than the scenery.  But how does this contemporary dance stack up against the classic treatment of Othello by José Limón in The Moor’s Pavane to Henry Purcell’s music, which like Arthur Miller’s masterpiece, was first performed in 1949? As in Miller’s play, one knows the outcome of this story regardless of the storyteller. It is just as hard to watch the violent strangling of Desdemona that is portrayed downstage in Lubovitch’s dance as it is to watch Limón’s murder of her when it is partially eclipsed by Emilia’s dress held wide by both hands to cover the crime. We see Othello’s arms raise and descend with force but we never see him actually strike Desdemona. 

Like Willy Loman’s Studebaker that didn’t measure up to his previously-owned classic Chevy, Lubovitch’s treatment of Othello doesn’t measure up to Limón’s. Nothing could make that more clear than the choice of music. Let’s face it: Elliot Goldenthal simply is not on the same level as Henry Purcell. Goldenthal’s bombastic alerts to something serious coming up were relentless and exhausting cinema background music. On the other hand, Purcell’s stringed arrangements were the tidy, beautiful coverup for the rage and violence of an honor killing.

The two choreographers’ styles have similarities which is understandable considering they crossed paths when Lubovitch was a student at Juilliard while Limón was there as a teacher. However, Limón’s ideas are sometimes too re-worked in Lubovitch’s dance and look like they were used as a template. When Iago looms over Othello from behind in the pas de deux in Lubovitch’s dance, it looks strangely similar to Limón’s. 

The afternoon cast was comprised of superb dancers and actors. Isaac Hernandez as Othello, Skylar Brandt as Desdemona, James Whiteside as Iago, and Devon Teuscher as Emilia performed the steps exceptionally well, but they could not overcome the deficiencies of the staging. It was physical enough; it just wasn’t interesting enough. And unfortunately, the music hampered the production from start to finish.

It certainly is worth asking why this full length dance was scheduled to take up nearly half of all performance dates of ABT’s inaugural spring season at the Koch Theater. Haglund truly wishes he could muster up more enthusiasm for Lubovitch’s Othello.

Arthur Miller said, “The past is holy.” It is, and attention must be paid to it.