In August 2013, two years after our family traded the Upper West Side of Manhattan for Hawaii's Valley Isle, the Maui Academy of Performing Arts put on Les Misérables, a mammoth project involving 58 actors, an offstage chorus of 17, and a 26-piece live orchestra. The director was David C. Johnston, a mainland-born and -trained Svengali who fetched up on Maui in 1992 and never looked back, forging community players of varying talent along with the occasional seasoned pro into quality ensembles. Ranging from Macbeth to Damn Yankees, Johnston seldom failed to blow skeptical or cautiously managed expectations to something like smithereens. But was the Maui Les Miz"better than Broadway!," as patronizing home-town cheerleaders kept insisting?
Please.
More conveniently located, that's for sure. Tickets didn't cost the earth. Parking was free. In the polish of the production team and the players' infectious conviction, the time-tested crowdpleaser sprang to life anew. Wasn't that enough? When I rolled my eyes at the home-team hype, a friend who established his show-biz cred in his native Buenos Aires before striking out for Tinseltown gave that sly, old-world, above-the-fray smile of his. "There's a 10 on Broadway," he said, "and a 10 on Maui."
Jump cut to the arts blog Unanswered Question of June 22, with Joe Horowitz's review—no rave by any means—of a new Tannhäuser at the Zurich Opera House. The heading? "Better than the Met." Behind the verbal echo lies a quite different attitude. But again, I roll my eyes.
Mind you, Joe (better known in print as Joseph) is an authority to reckon with. A classical-music critic on staff at The New York Times back when the paper fielded a whole slate of them, he saw the art he loved losing ground nationwide and decided to find out how and where we had gone wrong. Quitting the paper, he began churning out what is now a whole bookshelf of conceptually original, prodigiously researched studies, among them such landmarks as Understanding Toscanini, Wagner Nights, andthe doorstop Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall. He has his forgotten superheroes (Anton Seidl). He has his black hats feted as white hats in their time (Arturo Toscanini). Historic personalities have become such an obsession with him that he has taking to writing novels about them.
What scholar in his field can touch Joe for encyclopedic knowledge or stylistic brio? None. Programming festivals and lecturing with adventurous regional orchestras and conservatories, he has also proved himself the most enterprising and imaginative advocate underdog American composers have ever known. But mainstream institutions and their audiences pay no heed. Joe is bitter about that and says so, often.
He has an axe or two to grind about the Metropolitan Opera, as well. As everyone knows, these are not the best of times for that institution, partially for reasons within the management's control, partially not. When Joe criticizes, as is his critic's right, he religiously cites chapter and verse. But to blast the Met again to overpraise an evening he didn't in truth even like all that much in lavishly subsidized foreign jewel box? It's a cheap shot, and it's lazy.