Word: berg
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...baseball player, Moe Berg belonged in the sock drawer of fame. He began his professional career in 1923 as the third baseman for the Brooklyn Robins and ended it 17 years later as the third-string catcher for the Boston Red Sox. He spent most of his playing days schmoozing and reading in dugouts and bullpens. His lifetime batting average was .243, he had only six home runs, and he was error-prone. If Berg ever stole a base, his latest biography, The Catcher Was a Spy (Pantheon; 453 pages; $24), does not mention...
What the spirited and diligent writer Nicholas Dawidoff does document, with fresh research, some 200 interviews and unqualified affection, is that the oddball legend of Moe Berg is based mainly on his refusal to take full cuts at his many opportunities. He was a Princeton honors graduate who would have had a longer and more successful career in the classroom than on the diamond; a lawyer trained at Columbia who never established a practice; a linguist with a reluctance to converse in any of the dozen languages he had studied; and a darkly handsome ladies' man who was nevertheless something...
That control extends to everything from hiring singers to choosing a * balanced program that encompasses not only classics and premieres but also thorny modernist works such as Alban Berg's Wozzeck, which last week got a stunning new production that typifies the Krainik style. Krainik had originally planned the project as a co-production with the Chatelet Theatre Musical de Paris, to be conducted in Paris and Chicago by Daniel Barenboim. Following the French performance, Krainik decided that the lighting design was unsuited to the Lyric's stage. "It would have cost us an extra $600,000 just...
...perfect the world one schmaltz herringat a time," Green-berg wryly surmised
...Marilyn: An Untold Story, concentrates on Norma Jean's notorious love life, tracing her downward spiral to a drug- induced death in 1962. Soprano Kathryn Gamberoni gives a breakthrough performance as Monroe: after this, companies should be lining up to offer her femmes fatales from Bellini's Norma to Berg's Lulu. The opera, however, is as much of a mess as Marilyn was. Rosten's lines (Marilyn to her half-sister: "How's your little dog Lollie, the one with six toes?") are frequently ludicrous, especially when sung to Laderman's plodding, semitonal noodlings. And the decision to make...