In Corruption, playwright J.T. Rogers tackles what he considers an early salvo in our ongoing—and, seemingly, losing—war with alternative facts and media manipulation: the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, News Corp, and specifically his now-defunct tabloid News of the World and its editor Rebekah Brooks. 

 

Rogers and director Bartlett Sher have constructed a breathless real-life drama that plays like a nail-biting thriller: even those in the audience who know the outcome are on the edge of their seats as it plays out, since Rogers’ writing and Sher’s staging create a kaleidoscope that alternates between the expansive (media shenanigans and the government’s initially hesitant investigation) and the personal (the effects on ordinary people, especially the family of polarizing politician Tom Watson, who made it his crusade to take down Brooks and Murdoch) in an absorbing 2-1/2 hours.

 

In 2016’s Oslo—which told the complicated story of the attempt to broker a peace deal between Israel and Palestine—Rogers and Sher created the blueprint for making lively theater about recent history. Like Oslo, Corruption at times moves too quickly and tries to cover too much, sometimes skating superficially across issues. Some of the scenes between Watson and his understanding but frustrated wife Siobhan, while dramatically necessary, simply move the play forward without being truly gripping.

 

Far more successful are the dramatizations of behind-the-scenes movements by Brooks and Murdoch—the latter through the unseen Rupert’s CEO son, James, and Tom Crone, the mogul’s legal counsel—as well as the unlikely coupling of Watson’s small office and journalists from The Independent and The Guardian, who hope to collect enough evidence proving the culpability of News Corp (whose upper management’s standard line was that they didn’t know what was going on—and, by the way, we’re not doing it any more) and somehow dent the Murdoch empire’s ubiquity.

 

It’s these scenes—shuttling back and forth among News Corp machinations, Watson and the journalists’ probes (often at great personal risk) and the government’s tardy but welcome inquiry—that are the racing heart of Corruption, as Rogers’ fleet scenes are given an excitingly cinematic sheen by Sher on the small Newhouse stage with major assists from Michael Yeargan’s sets, Donald Holder’s lighting and 59 Productions’ projections. A ring of video screens above the stage displays various news broadcasts’ “breaking news,” also projected onto the rear wall, along with various tweets Watson sends out in a desperate attempt to gain attention for his initially foundering investigation. 

 

There’s an amusing moment when, despondent, Watson realizes he needs some sort of public acknowledgement of his efforts; suddenly, none other than George Michael approvingly retweets his posts and Michael’s “Freedom ’90” rings out, closing the first act with the song’s supermodel-stuffed music video playing on those very screens. 

 

In a play with more than three dozen speaking parts, nearly all of the actors in the excellent ensemble do double, triple, quadruple duty, among whom the very able Dylan Baker, Anthony Cochrane, Eleanor Handley, Robyn Kerr and Michael Siberry stand out. In a tricky role, Saffron Burrows makes Rebekah Brooks formidably sinister without ever turning her into a stock villain. 

 

At the play’s center is Toby Stephens as the fascinatingly flawed Tom Watson, an unlikely whistleblower at the center of a scandal that threatens to destroy previously held norms of democracy and what’s considered the truth. Watson was no stranger to lowdown dirty politics, and Stephens catches every nuance of his abrasive, aggressive personality. 

 

Stephens even gives Rogers’ concluding soapbox dialogue (“We will fight because the truth matters, and we will not allow it to be chopped up and sold for parts. We will fight, as long and hard as it takes, because this is our democracy. And that is worth fighting for. So you stand up. You hear me? Stand up.”) the honest commitment it needs to end Corruption with a bang.

Klaus Mäkelä conducts the Orchestre de Paris. Photo by Fadi Kheir.

 

At Stern Auditorium on the evening of Saturday, March 16th, I had the almost unsurpassable pleasure of attending a magnificent concert—presentedas a part of Carnegie Hall’s current festival, “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice”—featuring the superb musicians of the Orchestre de Paris, amazingly led by its energetic, almost impossibly dashing Music Director and Conductor, Klaus Mäkelä.

 

The program began marvelously with an outstanding performance of the complete score of Igor Stravinsky’s fabulous ballet, The Firebird, informatively described by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as follows:

 

The ballet is based on the Russian legend of the Firebird, a powerful good spirit whose feathers supposedly convey beauty and protection upon the earth. Other characters from Russian lore are also included: the heroic Prince Ivan Tsarevich and the evil sorcerer Kashchei, from whom Ivan must rescue the princess he loves. It is only through the intervention of the Firebird, whose life he spares early in the ballet, that Ivan is able to destroy Kashchei and his followers and marry the princess. The folk origins of the story inspired Stravinsky to borrow a few folk melodies in his score. Yet most of the ballet, especially the fluttering dance of the Firebird and the memorable wedding march at the ballet’s conclusion, was his own creation.

 

The brilliant Introduction and the opening episode, “Kashchei’s Enchanted Garden,” are hushed, unsettling and enigmatic, not unlike the “night music” in the scores of Béla Bartók. The entrance of the Firebird has a highly animated—even whirling—and unearthly, if playful, quality; the music becomes more hurried as the Prince proceeds to capture the Firebird, and more plaintive and fraught as it begs to be released. The “Emergence of the Thirteen Enchanted Princesses” is especially beguiling but the score becomes almost frantic as they play their game with the golden apples. As Prince Ivan appears, the music becomes serious and then exquisite in the more Impressionistic “The Princesses’ Khorovod.” At “Daybreak,” the score becomes turbulent, as Kashchei’s Monster-Guardians attack and capture the Prince, and then uncanny and suspenseful with “The Entrance of Kashchei the Immortal.” After the Firebird reappears, one of the most exciting sections is the dazzling “Infernal Dance of Kashchei and His Subjects under the Firebird’s Magic Spell”—which seems to be a precursor to the soundscape ofThe Rite of Spring—immediately preceding the magnificent “Lullaby,” which is probably the most astonishingly lovely episode in the entire ballet and was used as the score for Lewis Klahr’s incomparable film, Altair from 1995. The music becomes quieter as Kashchei awakens and then dies, which ushers in the enchanting Second Tableau that concludes the work triumphantly.

 

The second half of the event was equally exhilarating: a superlative rendition of the complete score of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which Britannica says “is considered one of the first examples of Modernism in music and is noted for its brutality, its barbaric rhythms, and its dissonance.” It notes that:

 

The piece was commissioned by the noted impresario of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev, who earlier had produced the young composer’sThe Firebird(1910) andPetrushka(1911). Stravinsky developed the story of The Rite of Spring, originally to be called The Great Sacrifice, with the aid of artist and mystic Nicholas Roerich, whose name appears with the composer’s on the title page of the earliest publications of the score. The production was choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, and its sets and costumes were designed by Roerich.

 

Like Stravinsky’s earlier works for the Ballet Russes, The Rite of Spring was inspired by Russian culture, but, unlike them, it challenged the audience with its chaotic percussive momentum.

 

And adds:

 

In the mid-20th century, Stravinsky revised the orchestration for concert performance, and that version of the score remains the version that is most commonly performed. In 1987, however, the ballet as it was first conceived and performed, with original set and costumes and Nijinsky’s choreography (which had been seen for only seven performances before it was superseded by new choreography from Léonide Massine), was painstakingly reconstructed and re-created by the Joffrey Ballet. The centenary of the ballet’s premiere prompted other ballet companies, notably the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg, to also revive the work in its original form.

 

The eccentric “Introduction” to the First Part: Adoration of the Earth is haunting but the score quickly becomes rhythmically spellbinding with the ensuing “The Augurs of Spring: Dances of the Young Girls.” More turbulent is “The Ritual of Abduction” which leads to the solemn, portentous “Spring Rounds” and the tumultuous “Ritual of the Rival Tribes.” The intensity builds with the “Procession of the Sage” through the “Dance of the Earth” that closes the First Part.

 

After the mysterious “Introduction” to the Second Part: The Sacrifice, the episode that follows, “The Mystic Circles of the Young Girls,” has a more meditative character. The “Glorification of the Chosen One” is impassioned while the sense of foreboding increases especially in the propulsive “Ritual Action of the Ancestors,” climaxing with the stunning “Sacrificial Dance” that concludes the work.

 

The artists, who have commercially recorded both scores, were enthusiastically applauded.

At Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, on the night of Saturday, March 9th, I had the incomparable pleasure of attending a magnificent concert presented by the outstanding musicians of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, brilliantly led by its Chief Conductor, Lahav Shani.

 

The evening began marvelously with a superb reading of Arvo Pärt’s stunning, meditative Swansong, a visionary work that concludes quietly. In an excellent program note, Jack Sullivan provides some useful background about it:

 

Composed in 2013, it was the result of a commission of the Mozart Week Festival in Salzburg—where Pärt was the festival composer in 2014—and was premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Marc Minkowski. It is an orchestral version of Littlemore Tractus from 2000, which was composed for choir and organ to celebrate the 200th anniversary of cardinal John Henry Newman’s birth. That work is based on a fragment of Newman’s sermon “Wisdom and Innocence,” which contains a prayer for “a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.”

 

The fabulous soloist, Daniil Trifonov, then entered the stage for a sterling performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s wonderful 1777 Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major, K. 271, the “Jeunehomme.” The initial, appropriately cheerful and energetic Allegro movement has some slower, dance-like sections and features some sparkling piano writing. The Andantino that follows—a characteristically beautiful slow movement with an inward orientation—is seemingly almost religious in inspiration and evocative of the Baroque style at times—with some majestic passages—while the finale, a Rondo marked Presto, is propulsive and playful but contains a contrastingly reflective, almost melancholy, minuet. Enthusiastic applause was rewarded with an amazing encore played by the pianist: the Bill Evans arrangement of the classic song of 1952, "When I Fall in Love,” composed by Victor Young with lyrics by Edward Heyman, and famously recorded by Nat King Cole among many others.

 

Truly awesome, however, was the second half of the event, consisting of a stupendous realization of selections from Sergei Prokofiev’s glorious score for the ballet, Romeo and Juliet, some of the greatest music ever written. The enthralling march, “Montagues and Capulets” that opened the set has a lovely central interlude. “Juliet as a Young Girl,” the next selection, is effervescent and the ensuing “A Scene” is jocular. The ebullient “Dance” preceded the rhythmic “Masks” and the romantic “Balcony Scene.” After this was the exciting and dramatic “Death of Tybalt,” which also has comic elements. The charming “Dance of the Maids from the Antilles” is succeeded by the mesmerizing “Romeo and Juliet Before Parting” with its ominous inflections. The concluding “Romeo at Juliet’s Grave” is simply astounding. An ardent ovation elicited another delightful encore: the same composer’s March, Op. 99.