Jay Harvey Upstage

I admired the indecisiveness, or perhaps the passive resistance, of the few audience members who dropped the entire ballot into the basket near the end of "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" at the Center for the Performing Arts' Studio Theatre. Fundamentally, of course, audience involvement ought never to be passive. This show goes further, inviting patrons to vote on their choice of the eponymous hero's killer to answer the perennial question of its genre: Whodunit? Edwin Drood (Cynthia Collins) is the center of attention from a spectrum of acquaintances. But to drop the whole ballot in the basket, oh well: maybe that's an inspired choice, because the frame setting of Rupert Holmes' boisterous musical comedy is an English music-hall troupe desperate to engage with its audience at every juncture. So whodunit in this context is a question whose answer is blowing in the madcap wind. In the Actors Theatre of Indiana production, which opened over the weekend, ...

Spanish conductor Gustavo Gimeno made a good impression with the ISO. Years ago I read a short story about jazz musicians. The features of the story (I believe it was in the old Esquire, which once was of literary interest) are long forgotten, but I remember how hip the main character claimed himself to be by preferring Bartok's "Miraculous Mandarin" to the most often cited classical piece authentically drawing upon jazz: Milhaud's "La Creation du Monde." I don't know if in fact jazz musicians who are musically aware outside their genre have a thing for "The Miraculous Mandarin." But I can see why they might, after enjoying the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra 's performance of the suite Sunday evening at Hilbert Circle Theatre. Compared to Milhaud's masterpiece, "The Miraculous Mandarin" carries no reflection of jazz. But in the shortened suite version of the Hungarian composer's "pantomime of gestures,"...

Fantasy fulfillment: Actor sticks it to the director of "Nothing On" Michael Frayn's "Noises Off" suggests that theater has something in common with the law and sausage: If you love it, you don't want to see how it's made. But that's exactly what the play has you look at, unsparingly and to hilarious effect. The process by which a provincial British troupe cobbles together an antic comedy is itself subject to farcical distortion under Frayn's cracked lens, as Indiana Repertory Theatre demonstrated Friday night. The season-ending production incorporates the company's capabilities at a little-visited end of its theatrical spectrum: fast-paced intricate physical comedy, with every bit of action and dialogue pitched at a feverish level. As in many farces, "Noises Off" at bottom upholds the hoary dignity of "the well-made play." Each of its three acts advances the story, such as it is, and forms a unit that shifts pe...

Philip Glass has expressed his affinity for J.S. Bach in no uncertain terms to Terry Gross on "Fresh Air," and the use of repetitive structures indeed connects both composers over a two-and-a-half-century span. Simone Dinnerstein plays the concerto for Philip Glass. "Circles" subjects both men to the artistic vision of Simone Dinnerstein, already celebrated for her performances of Bach since her 2007 recording of the Goldberg Variations shot to the top of the classical charts. Some critical cavils at her style as being too soft, too neatly rounded, even somewhat salon-ish don't register with me. She is among many pianists to go in a different direction with Bach than Glenn Gould's signature digging in (representative in the Goldbergs of 1955 and 1981). The new release ( Orange Mountain Music ) brings her together with the Boston chamber orchestra A Far Cry , and their rapport is evident not only in Bach's Keyboard Concerto No. 7 in G minor, BWV ...

Philip Roth, circa 1977 A character in my copy of "The Professor of Desire" makes a startling admission to the narrator-protagonist, David Kepesh, early in Philip Roth 's 1977 novel. The vain, glamorous Helen, with whom Kepesh will soon contract a disastrous marriage, is telling her story of having left a rich lover who sought her approval to murder his wife. Helen says, in part: "It terrified me to know he could even have such a thought. Or maybe it was so excruciatingly tempting that that's why I went running." Except in my copy, on page 42, that's not exactly how what Helen says looks in print. The adverb appears this way: "excrutiatingly." We've all encountered typos in books. But this one? No, it was not to be believed. But there it was, in a book published by high-toned Farrar, Straus and freaking Giroux! A pivotal bit of dialogue had suddenly been knocked askew with "excrutiatingly." That is not an alternativ...