John Malkovich in ‘The Music Critic’ @ ATTPAC (tour)
—Wayne Lee Gay
With eagerness, curiosity, and—as a music critic myself—a touch of trepidation, I made my way Saturday night to downtown Dallas and the Majestic Theatre to view ATTPAC’s one-night-only presentation of the touring production The Music Critic. German-Russian violinist Aleksey Igudesman conceived, created, and performs in the this unique theater piece. The star of the show--and the main box office draw--is renowned film and stage actor John Malkovich.
The setup is simple and effective: seated comfortably in front of the largely bare stage, Malkovich narrates incredibly off-the-target evaluations of classical works—written by music critics of the past two hundred years—interspersed with live performances by a standard classical quintet consisting of piano, two violins, viola, and cello.
Malkovich brilliantly creates a quintessential music critic persona, delivering bitterly condescending (and always laughably inaccurate) evaluations of contemporaneous works composed by the gods and saints of the classical repertoire. All the while, the quintet on stage responds with some of the music in question.
The much-beloved Antonín Dvořák is up first. After a gorgeous rendition of a movement from the Bohemian master's Quintet for piano and strings, Malkovich gives us a music critic’s reaction—a scathing attack on Dvorak's "ridiculous" music, a snarky lament that so talented a composer has gone in the wrong direction. A section of one of Beethoven's Sonatas for piano and violin follows, with Malkovich delivering the comments of one of Beethoven's contemporaries, who described the music as "inpenetrably obscure."
Brahms, Debussy, Schumann, and others are hit with the same treatment: passages of beautiful music are performed magnificently by the onstage ensemble, interspersed with the loathing invective of the composer’s contemporaries. In one of the most memorable moments, pianist Hyung-ki Joo floats through a radiant Chopin waltz, as Malkovich first intones contemporaneous critical denunciations and then hilariously continues the diatribe silently, with pained facial expression and arm movements to communicate his bored disapproval of the exquisite music.
Most of the authors of the unkind words are forgotten, with a few exceptions, notably Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Tchaikovsky, and Hugo Wolf, who never quite understood Brahms, and unfortunately wrote their disdain down as evidence. (There was, indeed, a sort of circular firing squad among nineteenth-century composers, whose disagreements, arguments, and sometimes petty jealousies are laughable in retrospect).
The comedy continues as Malkovich steps out of the omnibus historical critic role to play himself, insulting his musicians—who, to raise the comedic temperature, respond by reading a scathing review of one of Malkovich's performances, as well as some of Malkovich's own misguided writing. The epilogue of the 75-minute show brings some old-fashioned musical satire in the tradition of Victor Borge and PDQ Bach, with the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria” morphing into a comical tango routine. In a final good-humored tongue-in-cheek attack on taste and sensibility, Malkovich urges the ensemble to shift Mozart's Rondo alla turca in A minor into a delightfully inappropriate B-flat major, insisting that it's much better that way.
WHEN: October 21, 2023
WHERE: Majestic Theatre, downtown Dallas
WEB: attpac.org
