Author: Harry Heuser

Born and raised in Germany, educated in New York City (BA, MA, PhD), Harry Heuser is a writer, exhibition curator and lecturer.
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Laddie of Burlesque: David Hyde Pierce Steps Through Curtains

This one seemed strangely familiar. It felt as if I had seen and heard it all before—which is not to say that the déjà vu was an unpleasant sensation. I am referring to Curtains, the final Kander and Ebb collaboration now playing at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre (pictured). Time Out New York called it ”your grandmother’s musical,” which bit of sexist ageism suggests dentures rather than bite. It so happens, I’m with grandma when it comes to a grand night out. At the theatre, that is. I take in musicals to be charmed rather than provoked, to be tickled or wowed rather than indoctrinated. Give me showtunes I can recall and perhaps even attempt to hum (at Marie’s Crisis, say, the Village piano bar where we spent a few hours of merry sing-along on Tony’s night). Besides, I’ve got a mirror for warts ‘n all.

So, Curtains is really my kind of show, if only it weren’t so obviously and deliberately steeped in Broadway musical history as to evoke other and unquestionably superior ones. A backstage murder mystery, Curtains is set in the late 1950s, which is a fine excuse for pastiche, as is its show within a show construction.

Most of its songs are echoes of the period (“Show People” is something you’d expect to be belted out by Ethel Merman), even though the show being rehearsed seems to date back to the 1930s and the sentimental “I Miss the Music” recalls the to me well-nigh intolerable Andrew Lloyd Webber, especially in the earnest interpretation by the to my ears miscast-for-comedy Jason Danieley. That the show is being tinkered with as its cast is being knocked off seems an excuse for the repetition of an inferior number like “In the Same Boat.”

Curtains, of course, offers its own response to captious reviewers “What Kind of Man?”:

What kind of putz
Would squeeze your nuts like that?

Musicals aside, what the show brought to my mind was The Lady of Burlesque (1943) starring Barbara Stanwyck, which I saw earlier this year (for an itemized list of my movie diet, turn right). In that comedy-thriller, a show must go on while a killer is on the loose and an investigation underway. In the case of Curtains, though, it is not the leading lady but the detective who takes center stage and—despite the obvious handicaps of lacking a leading man’s looks or voice, not to mention a convincing Boston accent—takes it in strides at that.

I happen to have been at the Hirschfeld on the day that the show’s male lead, Tony-winning David Hyde Pierce, lifted the curtain on his private life and came out of the closet at last; on stage, he was busy turning a double life into a single one (negotiating his love for musicals with the business of solving crime), and being single into a happy double (by teaming up romantically with one of the suspects). It might be “your grandmother’s musical”; but its leading man is finally breaking with conventions that seemed out-of-date two decades ago.

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Crude Awakening; or, This Ain’t Show Boat

Unlike the previously discussed play Deuce, this one came highly recommended: Tonys darling Spring Awakening (music by Duncan Sheik; book and lyrics by Steven Sater), with which I caught up during the week leading up to Broadway’s annual awards ceremony. It has been touted as the new Show Boat, the spectacle with a story that revolutionized musical theater back in 1927 (and revived on radio as a musical, a straight play, a musical serial, and a number of burlesques). “Old Man River,” take me now! I realize that I am filing a minority report here; but if this is the new face of Broadway, I just got to slap it.

For starters, that new face is partially obscured by hand-held microphones, props that, along with an audience seated onstage and a blackboard listing the tunes, are meant to suggest, in the by now tiresome postmodern mode of self-reflexivity, that what you see and get is only “Make Believe”—an Epic theatrical in the Brechtian vein designed to be stimulating rather than absorbing. Verfremdung, Broadway style, means to play out whatever is left of a story like a rock concert; that is, by playing to the audience rather than interacting with one’s fellow players.

Spring Awakening is not so much an adaptation of Franz Wedekind’s drama of youth, longing, and disillusionment as it is an assortment of clichés about hormonally-induced teenage Sturm and Drang. This high-Rent production (which won’t break even at the box office any time soon) may well appeal to youngsters who don’t know any better or refuse to listen, and to their parents who assume this noisy spectacle to be happening since it has an energetic and gifted cast that emotes in foul language and jumps up and down a lot, as if out to bring in ‘da punk. In its treatment of sexuality beyond the old boy-impregnates-girl-and-both-pay-for-it formula, however, the show betrays its conservative agenda, acknowledging the reality of alternative stirrings only in the form of comic relief.

Choreographed like an old Britney Spears number and outfitted in costumes left over from a touring production of Ah, Wilderness!, Spring Awakening revels in an identity crisis equal to that suffered by an acne-troubled, media-beleaguered high schooler set to pass out at a Goth concert—and it is just about as cheerful and endearing. “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’,” showtune lovers.

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Great Match, Ill Served: Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes in Deuce

Well, I had been given ample warning. About Deuce, I mean, the Terrence McNally play starring American Theater Hall of Famers Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes. Reviewers and friends uniformly panned it. Not content to take their word for it, I set out to see for myself, only to confirm that Deuce truly is an insipid trifle of a play, a plotless, actionless one-acter whose greatest offense is its squandering of talent: two captivating leads let down by a leaden script and reduced to longshots by an extravagant set on the large stage of Broadway’s Music Box theater.

That set—the impersonal space of a tennis stadium filled with electronically simulated spectators (or spectres)—echoes and amplifies the hollowness of the production, but appears to have been designed (by Peter J. Davison) to give audiences certain to tire something to look at or look out for—as if Lansbury and her accomplished co-star weren’t reason enough to head out for the theater. They aren’t, if onlookers cannot zoom in on and get close to these two, as is warranted and promised by the potentially intriguing premise, the opportunity to eavesdrop on a private exchange between two celebrities dragged out of retirement and forcefully reunited for a belated tribute.

Their talk, however ably delivered, is devoid of anything amounting to revelations. They are long-ignored and finally acknowledged tennis legends who (surprise!) happen to be real women with long personal histories and strong opinions—opinions shared in lines so insipid that the playwright felt obliged to spice them up with profanities in hopes of getting spectators to stir, gasp and guffaw at expressions supposedly too vulgar to escape the mouths of our venerable elders.

You know you are faced with a dramatic dud when you open the Playbill to discover that even leading lady Lansbury struggles to give it to you in a nutshell too rotten to contain much good: “The play is about age—about becoming old and not being in the mainstream in the world of tennis today.” Who is the target audience? Martina Navratilova? Then again, it is also a “metaphor for age and the problem that women have with old age.” Like finding good parts, I suppose.

The gimmick of the play (and it is little more than that) is the juxtaposition of the real women behind the legend with the shallowness and vanity of the television sportscasters prattling overhead like a pair of false gods, a vapid chat (reminiscent of the characters created, to far better effect, by Christopher Guest in mockumentaries like Best in Show and For Your Consideration) in contrast to which the play offers next to nothing.

Deuce might be better served on radio, which is the ideal medium for intimate talk and character studies. Radio plays do not suffer from a lack of action or circular construction, from being anecdotal and fragmentary. Radio theater, which does not lose sight of its actors on enormous sets, is well suited to the conveying of an impression (a sense of dread, say) or the imparting of an idea. On the stage that sort of thing or nothingness is a deucedly bad one.

Now, I don’t care whether I’ll ever get to see another play by Mr. McNally (who’s rather more amusing, if similarly trifling Love! Valour! Compassion!, starring Nathan Lane, I saw back in 1995). I do mind, however, that this might have been my last chance to see Ms. Lansbury on the stage. As a swansong, Deuce is tantamount to Trog.

Some fifty years prior to her nonetheless Tony award nominated performance in Deuce, Lansbury played a retired stage actress on radio’s “outstanding theater of thrills,” Suspense,” in a melodrama titled “A Thing of Beauty” (29 May 1947). A woman willing to kill for a good part or to forge an alliance with someone she does not respect, she ends up having, quite literally, lost face. Now, there’s a metaphor!

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The Confidante Game: Trading on That Old Acquaintance

Well, here’s an acquaintance worth making. Old Acquaintance, that is, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of which is currently in previews at the American Airlines Theatre. Judging from the walkers and hearing aids on display at last Tuesday’s performance—not to mention the gas passed noisily in the lobby—I suspect that quite a few of the folks in attendance that evening got to see John Van Druten’s comedy during its original run back in 1940-41, while some of the friends of Dorothy’s we passed in the aisle were most likely on intimate terms with the 1943 film adaptation starring Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, two leading ladies on less than friendly terms.

Whether or not you (think you) are familiar with this story of a longtime rivalry redefined as friendship, the Roundabout production is likely to teach you a lesson or two about the nature of that least clearly defined of social compacts and about Hollywood’s (s)elective affinities with Broadway.

I caught up with Vincent Sherman’s soon-to-be-remade melodrama (and one of its radio versions) only after seeing the play, which made me appreciate the stage version’s maturity all the more. Van Druten, who was involved in the screen adaptation of Old Acquaintance, sure learned how to compromise in order to make it in Tinseltown. That he turned his sparkling comedy into an even larger crowd-pleasing sentimental melodrama is all the more remarkable considering that the English playwright’s first drama, Young Woodley (1925), had initially been banned in Britain for its treatment of sexual awakening. Production code conformity in the case of Old Acquaintance—as in most cases—meant turning mature women with careers as well as sex lives into silly girls or stoic old maids.

The silly girl in the Hollywood version is Miriam Hopkins, whose Millie is so envious of the publicity enjoyed her novelist friend Kit that she, however ill equipped for literary fame, turns to the writing of romances. The old maid is Bette Davis, whose romantically luckless Kit is willing to hand down her much younger lover to Millie’s daughter, Deidre, for which sacrifice she is duly rewarded with a cup of human kindness, shared with a remorseful Millie by the fire that warms them when the heat of passion is no longer in the Hallmark cards.

All this bears little resemblance to Van Druten’s original three-act play, a witty, tightly constructed comedy of manners. As one astute online reviewer of the movie points out, it becomes difficult to understand why Kit and Mollie became such old acquaintances once their careers are pushed into the background. In the stage play, it is Millie who, though a trash novelist herself, enjoys Kit’s respect as a keen and candid editor of Kit’s ponderous, overly analytic storytelling. However different in temperament, Kit and Mollie come across as equals, which explains at once their closeness and their rivalry.

On stage, Old Acquaintance echoes La Rochefoucauld’s maxims that friendship is “nothing but a transaction from which the self always means to gain something” and that in the “misfortunes of our friends we always find something that isn’t displeasing to us.” Concurring with the latter, satirist Jonathan Swift remarked about his relationship with fellow authors:

To all my Foes, dear Fortune, send
Thy Gifts, but never to my Friend:
I tamely can endure the first,
But, this with Envy makes me burst.

In the 2007 Broadway revival, Margaret Colin’s Kit is less pathetic than Davis’s, while Harris’s portrayal of Mollie is more sympathetic than that of Hopkins (who reprised her role, opposite miscast Alexis Smith, in the 29 May 1944 Lux Radio Theatre production). If not nearly as assured and brilliant in her comic timing or line reading as Rosalind Russell, with whom in mind the rights to Old Acquaintance were secured by Warner Brothers, Colin is both real and regal. Davis, who was asked to drop her pajamas to expose her less-than-glamorous legs, is matronly by comparison, suggesting that she sacrificed her juvenile beau to play surrogate mother to her best friend’s daughter.

The marvellous Harriet Harris, in turn, hands Millie back her brains. Whereas Hopkins’s character comes across as an impulsive, overgrown schoolgirl, spiteful and pouting, Harris’s Millie is calculating, smart, and rather dangerous (not unlike her Tony Award winning Mrs. Meers, in Thoroughly Modern Millie and her scheming Felicia Tilman in Desperate Housewives). Not content to see her best friend succeed, Millie intends to succeed her in fame and fortune. Her dramatic outbursts are an expression of her frustration when she realizes that the unmarried and childless Kit is not only a better mother to her daughter, but that she might also have been a better, and more desirable wife to her former husband.

If you prefer expensive theatre seats to cheap Hollywood sentiment, the revival of Old Acquaintance is your ticket.

[At the time of writing this I was as yet unaware that, before becoming a playwright, John Van Druten taught in Aberystwyth, the Welsh town to which I relocated from New York City in 2004.]

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Digest, Please!

Well, it’s a different kind of animal. The kind that digests in the very instance of ingestion. Webjournalism, I mean. It matters little whether or not you write for a living, as long as you write what you are living while you are living it, while you experience or witness what is being stored and storied. My digestive system operates far less efficiently, I’m afraid, which is why I frequently end up with a digest of my day-to-day.

It is not that I regurgitate the past. I very much live in the moment, a skill (or nearsightedness) I developed living the United States, the empire of “now.” And yet, by the time I manage to keep up with them, those moments have lost their momentum. They are memories the writing down of which is the reheating of yesterday’s repasts. Instead of journalizing my journey as it happens, I delay the act of relaying it by sharing recollections edited, according to a Wordsworthian scheme of spontaneity, in motionless and remote tranquility.

This is what I feel compelled to do now—catching up with myself. After all, taking bites out of the Big Apple for a month left me with plenty to digest, even if some of pieces of my intake turned out to be as unpalatable as the Tony Award-winning musical Spring Awakening or as bland as the Terrence McNally’s Deuce, a sentimental exchange starring the ill-served if indefatigable Angela Lansbury.

Only a few days ago I spent an afternoon at Coney Island, walking past Nathan’s (not eating the hot dogs that once got me terribly sick) and riding the old Cyclone—whose twists and curves once caused me to break the bones of my best friend sitting beside me. Today, I am cleaning up after a sick dog that swallowed a bone far too large to be digested, hoping he will be spared an operation, hoping I am going to be spared something akin to “The Odyssey of Runyon Jones” (Norman Corwin’s radio play about a boy determined to retrieve his dead dog from “Curgatory”).

It is retrospection that saves me from exposing myself at my most vulnerable—in the in-between of everyday living. It is life tidied up and tied up neatly. It is loose ends woven into a security blanket. Digest, please!

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Being Out, Staying In

Well, I know. You can’t catch cold getting caught in the rain. At least, that’s what people keep telling me straight to my weather-beaten face. Meanwhile, I got soaked during one of those torrential New York City downpours a few night’s ago and was not up to meeting an old friend for dinner last night, notwithstanding the fact that my days in the city are numbered and I might have to wait another year for another opportunity to see him. I ended up watching television instead; it’s something I rarely do nowadays, especially while vacationing.

Luckily, I was in for a treat at Turner Classic Movies, whose Screened Out series opened last night with “Algie, the Miner” (1912), a one-reeler concerning an effete Easterner getting the Western treatment to prepare him for the challenge of matrimony. Say—and I say this quoting a line from the subsequently presented comedy-thriller The Monster (1925)—have you “dropped in for some pansy seeds” yet?

Hollywood logic has it that those “seeds” may very well yield hardy perennials; in fact, that is the reason for spreading them in the first place. The conversion myth of growing up straight permitted writers and directors to create outré characters that are both likeable and socially acceptable. Judges according to the mores of early-to-mid 20th-century America, the pansy was an aberration that could be shown to suffer for and snap out of its condition of non-conformity by turning straight. In other words, the pansy was a milquetoasts redeemed by hearty helpings of ham and exorcism.

Otherwise, gender transgressive characters were either buffoons or villains, depending on the state of their sexual (in)activity and their willingness to reform. The Monster, you might say, involves a case of rehabilitation in which feeble Johnny Goodlittle (whose very name suggests the both the need for and possibility of redemption) has to prove his manhood not only by trapping a monster, but by demonstrating himself to be far from one.

The buffoon, by comparison, is a sexually unreformed and consequently frustrated male. Exit Smiling (1926), starring the delightful Beatrice Lillie (in a cross-dressing role), features a supporting player whose Hollywood career depended on such roles: Franklin Pangborn, the Queen of Paramount. “This nervous tension will positively slay me!” his irritable stage actor Cecil Lovelace exclaims when his leading lady is late for the show. On the radio, where his queer voice was heard only infrequently, Mr. Pangborn was simply made out to be “Allergic to Love”.

TCM is also sponsoring the multimedia exhibition Celluloid Skyline, currently (25 May to 22 June 2007) on display at New York City’s Grand Central Station (pictured above). I only had a few moments to walk through before catching a train to the Moving Image museum in Queens, my head not being clear enough to say much more on the subject at present.

Come to think of it, I have yet to post my review of the new Broadway musical Curtains starring the Tony nominated and recently de-closeted David Hyde Pierce. Perhaps I need to stay in more; but it sure feels great to be out . . .

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Murder in the Backroom; or, No Place for a Lady

Well, they are still at it. Slamming doors, screaming bloody murder, getting into fisticuffs—all in a perfectly orderly manner, standing upright, their eyes focused on the sheets of paper in their hands. The W-WOW! players, I mean, who meet on the first Saturday of each month, from September to June, to step into the “broadcasting” studio in the (pictured) backroom of the aforementioned Partners & Crime bookstore on Greenwich Avenue in downtown Manhattan. 

Last night, for their final performance before going on summer hiatus, the W-WOW! troupe recreated episodes from Broadway Is My Beat (“Francesca Brown,” originally broadcast on 2 June 1951) and Richard Diamond, Private Detective (“The Carnival Case,” from 16 August 1950). Capably delivering their lines, the two leading men—Steven Viola as Danny Clover in Broadway Is My Beat and Michael H. Johnson as Richard Diamond—were more than amply supported by the four ladies of the fancifully titled Cranston & Spade Theatre Company. Indeed, they were upstaged by them, and that despite the fact that the titular character of the evening’s first offering was dead before the action got under way.

Sheila York brought sex appeal to the role of a carnival gypsy who beckons Diamond into “the inner sanctum,” which gives the leading man a chance to quip: “Haven’t I heard you on the radio?” As a former DJ, the woman who played her sure has experience in broadcasting. And aside from being a competent voice artist, York is also a published novelist who draws inspiration from the medium in which she worked. Her latest thriller, A Good Knife’s Work, takes readers inside the business of radio drama in the 1940s—with a female detective as a guide.

Voice-over artist and teacher Karla Hendrick has a voice most likely to succeed in that business, standing out even in parts no larger than that of a gum-chewing waitress cracking wise with the gumshoe. In charge of musical transcription and accompaniment was Heather Edwards, while DeLisa M. White handled the sound effects, delivering blows and popping balloons according to the cues in the script.

For now, the ladies of W-WOW! are adjuncts to the dramas presented by the players, deliver commercials, play sidekicks, sirens, or servants. Sure, Diamond’s girlfriend Helen knows how to handle a gun (as is demonstrated in one of the script’s sly takes on traditional gender roles); but maybe the company should take on some of the radio thrillers featured in Jack French’s Private Eyelashes and revive that rare breed of crime-solving radio heroines. So, how about it, Messrs. Cranston & Spade?

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"Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow": A Hint from The Fantasticks

Well, “[i]t’s stupid, of course,” and “immensely undignified”; perhaps, “I’ve gone mad.” That is how lovelorn Matt, pining for Luisa, the girl next door, explains his “situation” in The Fantasticks. Earlier this week, I had the good fortune to catch up with the off-Broadway revival of this Mousetrap among the musicals. The current production is staged at the less than enchanting sounding Snapple Theater Center (soon to be renamed after actor Jerry Orbach), a suitably small venue for this intimate play (music by Harvey Schmidt; book and lyrics by Tom Jones, who, nearly fifty years after its conception, still performs in it, night after night, albeit under an assumed name).

I was particularly receptive to the wit and wisdom and whimsy of this literary charmer about love and make-believe, disillusionment and romantic rekindling, to the gentle reminder expressed in “Try to Remember,” the show’s best known tune:

Deep in December it’s nice to remember,
Although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December it’s nice to remember,
Without a hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December it’s nice to remember,
The fire of September that made us mellow.

I had just made up my mind to cancel my flight back home to Wales in order stay in New York City until such time as my one and only would come and fetch me and spend a few days together in the city where we first met. It seems that you can have your Big Apple and eat it, after all.

My appeal to “follow” has not fallen of deaf ears. Like Matt, who’s gone out into the world and left his Luisa behind, I can now look forward to a cheerful reunion and the confidence of we’ll-take-it-from-here. Never mind that I am no longer as agile as former American Idol contestant Anthony Fedorov (who plays Matt) and that my Luisa sings as loudly as he snores and tends to sprout hairs on his back. Still, anyone with a sense of wonder, a penchant for “Metaphor” and a love “[b]etter far than [it]” will not have to stretch or struggle to relate to their story.

“[T]ry to see it,” the Narrator encourages the audience: “Not with your eyes, for they are wise, / But see it with your ears.” It may look “mad” to the world, but my act of folly sure sounds like something to remember once the chill of December comes round. The rest will “follow.”

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Alexander Technique: A Matter of Queer Posture

Well, it’s been a few decades since my first (and only) toga party. Last night, I felt as if I were crashing one. A friend of mine took me to a way-off Broadway production of a play called A Kiss from Alexander (book and lyrics by Stephan de Ghelder; music by Brad Simmons). Billed as a “musical fantasy,” it is essentially a backstage stabbing farce—say, All About Abs—wrapped in romance and sentiment. Its tone is considerably less even than the spray tan on the cast’s collective hide.

Borrowing from the Rita Hayworth vehicle Down to Earth, which it references, this gay Band Wagon rolls along merrily enough, confident in attracting an audience steeped in Hollywood myth, in Broadway lore as well as lingo. “Alexander technique,” for instance, which served as a pun in the play, is a way of learning how to rid the body of tension. Alternative culture has been doing just that by leaning on traditions that produce anxieties, irreverence being the release.

Art not quite sure of its standing tends to be self-conscious. Witnessing the return of Alexander the Great in his mission to sabotage a bawdy, low-fidelity account of his private life (in a production called “Alexander Was Great!”), I was reminded of Norman Corwin’s radio fantasy “A Descent of the Gods.” In it, the god of Trivia recalls how Venus, Mars, and Apollo visited Earth, and how they were embraced and degraded by the media, the least respected and most prominent of which being the one in which poet-journalist Corwin operated.

By now, the god of Trivia has been knocked off his throne by the god of Camp. And while I am not a worshipper of either, it is difficult to deny the force of the latter.

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If Momma Was Buried: The Gypsies of Grey Gardens

Well, I did not sit around for the no doubt excruciatingly drawn out season finale of American Idol, especially not after Tuesday night’s less than scintillating showdown. Instead, I snatched up tickets for Grey Gardens, Broadway’s current musical must-see. Relying on the New York City subway system, I very nearly the opening scenes. A signal problem and the uncertainty of its timely solution convinced me to alight on Fifth Avenue and 59th, giving me a mere twelve minutes to make a dash for it—past the throngs of sailors in town for the 20th annual Fleet Week—all the way to the Walter Kerr Theater, not far from which venue former Idol Fantasia Barrino stares at passers-by from a giant display for The Color Purple.

After assuring those uneasy about the implications of the beads of sweat on my shiny forehead, that I had used Dial, I squeezed into my allotted space, fanning myself with the playbill, just as Grey Gardens opened its gates, rusty and unhinged. What awaited me was the perfect antidote to the excesses of late 20th and early 21st-century Broadway, which is alive but far from well with the sound of Andrew Lloyd Webberish bombast, with the flashy, the vapid, and the utterly pointless (Legally Blonde, the musical, anyone?). The melancholy and darkly funny Gardens defies this trend; neither Christine Ebersole nor Mary Louise Wilson enter the stage in a helicopter, belt out generic power ballads, or give big names a bad one.

Now, there is nothing novel about the play, inspired by the lives of the Camelot-and-went-nowhere Bouviers, aunt and niece of Jacqueline Onassis, who became the subject of a 1975 documentary (which, my paper fan informed me, is now being dramatized for the screen). The titular mansion is filled with echoes of past lives, fictional and otherwise, which is not to say that it is Gardens variety.

The intrigues and conspiracies of eccentric old dears has long been the stuff of dark comedy and melodrama: those Ladies in Retirement come to mind (and was heard on the Lux Radio Theatre, as do Arsenic and Old Lace (adapted for radio’s Screen Guild Theater), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and radio dramas assortment of weird “Sisters” (such as Lurene Tuttle and Rosalind Russell in a Suspense thriller bearing that title). In musical terms, Gardens is Rose missing her turn and turning her socialite daughter into a spinster maid. Edith and daughter Edie are two “Peas” gone to pot.

Above all, Gardens is a character study. To say that it is neither “little old lady land” camp nor Miss Havisham Gothic is not to imply that it misses any opportunity to give us the tour of a house build on ambitions shattered into lost chances, a house out touch with the times even at the best of times, from its Republican heyday during the Roosevelt administration to its decline in the ’60s and ’70s. Gardens is also refreshingly post-Postmodern, which is to say that the show is reflective rather than self-reflexive. So, get out there and smell the faded flowers. Just don’t count on the subway to take you there.