Great Travel News Syndicate

By JIM FUSILLI

On his new album, “Wrecking Ball” (Columbia), out next week, Bruce Springsteen serves up the familiar with renewed vigor and vitality. The muscled-up music bridges Mr. Springsteen past and present with a jarring, authoritative blast under and around his voice. While the early industry buzz has homed in on his lyrics, Mr. Springsteen’s rage and tempered optimism are expressed at least as well by the sound and arrangements he has whipped up with producer Ron Aniello.

Mr. Springsteen says the E Street Band, which has supported him since 1972, will form the core group backing him on his world tour beginning March 18 in Atlanta. “Wrecking Ball,” however, doesn’t feature the E Street Band, which suffered the deaths of original members Clarence Clemons last year and Danny Federici in 2008. Singer-guitarist Patti Scialfa and drummer Max Weinberg are the only surviving E Street Band members on this disc; Mr. Weinberg appears on two cuts, including the title track, which the E Street Band performed with Mr. Springsteen beginning in 2008. Clemons’s most notable contribution is a characteristically brawny solo on “Land of Hope and Dreams.”

But this isn’t the first time Mr. Springsteen has worked with a different cast. Here Messrs. Springsteen and Aniello play most of the guitars and other stringed instruments, keyboards and percussion. Their roaring guitar chords, dense synth lines and acoustic and electronic percussion give the music an appealing thickness. A loose-limbed horn section adds to the clamor on five tracks; soaring gospel voices and chanting singers join in, and the New York Chamber Consort’s strings add a feathery touch. Violinist Soozie Tyrell, a key Springsteen contributor for more than a decade, enriches several country- and gospel-flavored cuts. Instrumental solo duties are turned over to guitarists Tom Morello and Marc Muller, whose pedal-steel work on the folk blues “You’ve Got It” lifts the track. Mr. Aniello, mixer Bob Clearmountain and various engineers help make sense of the music, surrendering none of the clarity heard on Mr. Springsteen’s recent recordings while calling to mind his rock albums with the E Street Band and linking them to his long-standing passion for an Americana mix of folk, country and gospel.

As a lyricist, Mr. Springsteen has long embraced a populist view, and on “Wrecking Ball” the financial community is the enemy elite. “The banker man grows fat / Working man grows thin / It’s all happened before and it’ll happen again,” he sings in the piano ballad “Jack of All Trades” after Curt Ramm’s boozy, baleful trumpet solo. “Gambling man rolls the dice / Working man pays the bill / It’s still fat and easy up on banker’s hill” is a verse in “Shackled and Drawn.” Though the pounding title song is told from the point of view of New Jersey’s Giants Stadium as it was about to be torn down, it can be taken as metaphor for something perfectly functional that’s cast aside when the work is done.

In the opening track, “We Take Care of Our Own,” Mr. Springsteen declares that Americans have been failed by their institutions, but the song isn’t an antigovernment screed. Rather, it is apathy that he opposes. “I been stumbling on good hearts turned to stone,” he sings, then asks, “Where’re the hearts that run over with mercy?” But Mr. Springsteen believes in his countrymen: “Wherever this flag’s flown / We take care of our own.”

It’s a theme that reverberates throughout the album. For all his despair at the state of the world, Mr. Springsteen doesn’t lose faith. In the gospel rock tune “Rocky Ground,” which features processed percussion, a church organ and a rap interlude, he sings, “Jesus said the money changers in this temple will not stand / Find your flock, get them to higher ground.” The album concludes with a rousing “We Are Alive” in which he declares: “Our souls and spirits rise to carry the fire and light the spark to fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart.”

Throughout the album, Mr. Springsteen is in a feisty mood. Anger and hope reside side by side in his words and voice, and his energy is a palpable presence. Occasionally, his criticisms aimed at institutional foes tread into well-worn territory and cliché. But for its urgency, the breadth of the music performed admirably by the ad-hoc group of musicians, and how Mr. Springsteen is determined to inspire brotherhood with what he perceives as traditional American and Christian ideals, “Wrecking Ball” is a triumph.

Mr. Fusilli is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com or follow him on Twitter: @wsjrock.

A version of this article appeared February 28, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Working Man’s Voice.

By ROBERT GRESKOVIC

Erin Baiano

Erin Baiano Alejandro Virelles and Dayron Vera in Barcelona Ballet’s ‘For 4.’

New York

Barcelona Ballet, which began in 2008 as Corella Ballet and was recently renamed for its home city, trumpets itself as “the only classical ballet company in Spain.” Such statements can prompt suspicion and ring with hype, but this one stands on firm ground.

Established as the fervent vision of Spanish-born Ángel Corella, most familiar hereabouts as a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, the 47-dancer Barcelona troupe recently played New York’s City Center. Its triple bill, presented over four days, shone with a winning verve that revealed both the company’s strengths and its weaknesses.

At 36, Mr. Corella remains blessed with handsome features; he has attained international stardom for his scrupulous dancing, at once dynamic and limpid, and for his heartfelt performing. His programming for Barcelona Ballet, where he shares artistic direction with his older sister, the dancer Carmen Corella (who serves as associate director), proved on this occasion to be more well-intentioned than memorable, though its pluses trumped its minuses.

To open the visit, Mr. Corella chose “Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1,” a 1987 ballet by Clark Tippet, then a principal dancer at American Ballet Theater. The three-movement work, led by four couples, is full of youthful ebullience and cheeky charm that sometimes borders on awkwardness. Costumed by Dain Marcus in tutus and toe-shoes for the women, tunics and tights for the men—all in hues and textures reminiscent of anemones—”Bruch” unfolds as a romp that aims to showcase and distinguish individually talented dancers.

To these ends, Mr. Tippet’s athletic and eager choreography originally featured two well-matched solo-strength couples; followed by a more grave, central, stellar couple; and capped by a puckishly energetic, mercurial duo. In the “Bruch” performances I caught, Barcelona’s dancers and dancing soared most happily in the presence of the fleet ensemble of 16, as well as the fourth featured couple, a deft and smiling Momoko Hirata and an arrow-sharp and beaming Alejandro Virelles.

Barcelona Ballet was weakest in fielding couples suited to making the work’s central, almost melancholy duet resonate. Ms. Corella proved more stilted than shimmering in the part; her impressive partner, Dayron Vera, worked effectively as cavalier, but his efforts couldn’t claim the focus his statuesque ballerina lacked. In an alternate cast, María José Sales performed skillfully without bringing much nuance to her dancing, which was sometimes compromised by the hardworking but noticeably insecure efforts of her often panicked-looking partner, Jonatan Diaz.

Christopher Wheeldon choreographed the quartet “For 4″ in 2006 for the male-dancer showcase “Kings of the Dance,” when Mr. Corella was among the “kings” for whom the dance, set to Franz Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” was created. For this Barcelona Ballet engagement, Mr. Corella chose the English-born Aaron Robison to take the role he originated, a directorial decision that proved well founded. Mr. Robison flashed through his solo moments with electrifying daring and accomplishment. Matching him with skill and distinction was Mr. Virelles, who added engaging projection to large-scale dancing.

“Pálpito,” a five-part world premiere choreographed by Ángel Rojas and Carlos Rodríguez, featured Mr. Corella in its cast and was meant to serve as the troupe’s magnum opus. But this program closer served mostly to show the troupe’s Achilles’ heel. A lengthy program note that could have used a more reliable English translation stated: “This piece combines the styles of diverse Spanish dances, a choreographic language requested specifically by Ángel Corella.” Even the translation provided for the ballet’s title could have used some work. Informing us that “pálpito” means “hunch” may be a direct and literal English translation of the title, but it doesn’t tell non-Spanish-speaking audiences much about the suite’s themes or thrust.

From the start, with Mr. Corella costumed in black garb reminiscent of Manet’s “Dead Toreador” and lying inert center stage, Vicente Soler’s costume design was the work’s strong point, making the large cast look as if it stepped out of the stylish and haunting realms of Goya and Velázquez as rethought in couturier workrooms. With references in the program and in the stage action to such classic Hispanic dance forms as “Seguidilla,” “Habanera” and “Tango,” the “Spanish essence” named in the notes mostly got swamped by nightclub-style choreography.

Repeatedly the choreographic scheme presented ensemble forces backing up or framing anonymous, central dancers, as when a lone female dancer launched into a spell of fouetté turns of the kind seen in ballet competitions.

The most pointed solo moments went to Mr. Corella himself, who appeared and reappeared during the 40 minutes of “Pálpito” in various versions of black-and-white Spanish-flavored dress to whip and zip through any number of flying jumps or dizzying turns. His sister was also given some prominence here, none of which amounted to a significant dance statement. Eventually, she even had a moment of unexplained bonding, in the form of a warm embrace, with Mr. Corella.

In “Pálpito,” Barcelona Ballet pinned its country’s rich history of traditional music and dance to the troupe’s championing of classical ballet like so many extraneous bits and pieces. The result failed both dramatically and theatrically. The appealing company of dancers that Mr. Corella has assembled and motivated projects its youthful exuberance and clean schooling effectively. But if he means to shade his seemingly unshakable belief in the power of classical ballet with the character of Spanish dancing, he’ll need more than a hunch—he’ll need a grand plan.

Mr. Greskovic writes about dance for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared April 24, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Angel Corella Barcelona.

By PETER PLAGENS

New Haven, Conn.

‘The Theory of Catastrophe” (2004)—a big overhead view of a freeway pileup painted by Malcolm Morley in a deliberately offhand, close-enough-for-government-work version of Photo Realism—could well be painting’s riposte to the reason the photographer Garry Winogrand gave for photographing something: to see what it would look like photographed. Mr. Morley wanted to see what such a chaotic scene would look like painted. Of course, the obvious objection to this comparison is photography’s supposed machine-made “objectivity”—even in this digital age of Photoshop. Mr. Morley, though, is himself something of a painting machine. That’s a compliment, meant in the same way you might call Rafael Nadal or Roger Federer tennis “machines.”

Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

‘The Theory of Catastrophe’ (2004).

Mr. Morley was born in 1931 in London. His family’s house was blown up by a German bomb during the Blitz; homeless for a time, he led a rough-and-tumble youth. Serving a three-year sentence in the Dickensian-sounding Wormwood Scrubs prison for breaking and entering, the young Mr. Morley read “Lust for Life,” the novel about Vincent van Gogh and, he later told a critic, he figured that being an artist was something he could do. After attending art school in London, he moved to New York in the late 1950s. There he met Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and was set on a course combining Warhol’s wan acceptance of practically any subject that passed in front of his face as suitable for painting with Lichtenstein’s surgical irony toward the paradox of the painted image—is it just a bunch of borrowed colored shapes, or is anything meaningful fully there?

For more than half a century, Mr. Morley has attacked that paradox by painting and painting and painting. He’s taken his brushes and palette on a wild ride from dreary English postwar realism (“Richmond Hill Below the Wick,” 1954) to hard-core Photo Realism (the ocean liner “Cristoforo Colombo,” 1965), varieties of neo-expressionism (“Camels and Goats,” 1980), cliché-embracing pulp-illustration pictures of World War II fighter planes (“Beautiful Explosion,” 2010) and, most recently, veritable installation art (an exterior segment of a pub called “The Spitfire,” 2012). All of this and more is engagingly crammed into the modestly proportioned art gallery of the Yale School of Art, a little minimalist building that’s usually used for graduate-thesis exhibitions. “Malcolm Morley in a Nutshell” was curated by Robert Storr, the school’s director, and it’s an art education all by itself.

An awful lot of expertly improvisational painting moves—oddball compositions, deft brush strokes, snappy colors, risky gimmicks such as miniature 3-D barrels hanging by wires in “Depth Mine with Sharks” (2011)—are in action at a breakneck pace. While a few artists might be better at paint-handling than Mr. Morley, he does keep his colors separate and crisp, and he can make you shiver at the dark, cold wetness of Atlantic Ocean water. A certain visual garrulousness is part of his charm.

But he isn’t perfect—and he probably wouldn’t want to be. A couple of titles (“Aero-naughty-cal Manuever” from 2009, for instance) are too cute. A painting called “Split Level” (2011) is an expedient top-and-bottom reprise of two previous paintings, and one of the pub installations, “Biggles” (2011), is too sentimental for real translation into a work of art, yet too garish to convey genuine affection. “Rat Tat Tat” (2001), a 17-foot-wide triptych depicting cardboard punch-out models of World War I aircraft—and the least successful work in the show—is installed directly above the gallery entrance, as if to encourage you to miss it.

In the end, though, Mr. Morley is great at representation, not just verisimilitude. He paints whatever wows him at the moment, and manages most times to find the superficial essence (a deliberate oxymoron here) of his enthusiastically varied subjects. Mr. Morley’s emphasis on finding his artistic inspiration outside of himself is what keeps his art from succumbing—as so much contemporary work does these days—to overintellectualizing and bottomless self-reference. “The idea,” Mr. Morley has said, “is to have no idea. Get lost. Get lost in the landscape.” By landscape, he means the hurly-burly of the world at large—ships, airplanes, naval battles, exotic animals, pubs and the occasional catastrophe. The exhibition is a kind of tribute to the good, old-fashioned, lusty painter’s life, and—although Mr. Morley is in his ninth decade—an artistic spirit that’s still as young as they come.

Mr. Plagens is a New York-based painter and writer.

A version of this article appeared March 8, 2012, on page D6 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Don’t Stop, Just Paint.

By PIA CATTON

Getty Images

Hansen (right), riden by Ramon Dominguez, wins the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile during the 2011 Breeders’ Cup World Championships.

Owning a racehorse that makes it to the Kentucky Derby can be a thrilling and lucrative experience. But it’s also an accountant’s nightmare.

In pure investment terms, owning a thoroughbred that’s good enough to compete in Saturday’s derby can be a deceptively complex undertaking.

Some horses cost their owners hundreds of thousands at auction while others are “homebreds” that cost nothing more than the value of a stallion’s time. Some arrive at the Derby with more than $1 million in winnings while others have yet to earn much at all. Throw in the sometimes steep costs of travel and training and a horse’s balance sheet can bear little resemblance to its potential. In fact, some of the owners of the 20 horses in this year’s field will have to hit the board to avoid being upside down on their investments as of May 5.

How much does it cost to get a horse to the Kentucky Derby? Pia Catton outlines the true cost on Lunch Break. Photo: AP.

To estimate how much each horse in the Derby has made (or lost) for its current owner, the Journal started with the amount of prize money each horse has earned in races to date and subtracted two figures: The first figure was the horse’s purchase price, which we found in public records or from owners themselves (if the horse was bred by its current owner, the stud fee that horse’s sire commanded at the time was substituted for the purchase price).

The second figure was an estimate of how much the current owners have likely spent on training and other incidentals. These figures were based on a consensus estimate of monthly expenses gathered through interviews with more than 20 owners, trainers and thoroughbred industry experts.

According to our unscientific study, the entrant with the most on the line Saturday is Went the Day Well. When its owners paid $850,000 to buy the horse, they knew what they were doing: They include the syndicate Team Valor, which won the Derby last year with Animal Kingdom. But so far, Went the Day Well has only won a little over $315,000—barely enough to qualify for the Derby field. Even if the horse wins Saturday, it still may need to win more this summer to recoup its investment—or to get a start on its stud career. “I stuck my neck out on this one. I think it’s worth it,” said Team Valor president Barry Irwin.

Union Rags, another betting favorite, is also looking like a financial rose. But it could have been even better. After breeding the horse in Kentucky, owner Phyllis Wyeth sold him as a yearling for $145,000. But after having a dream about the horse, she said she changed course. “I said ‘I don’t care, he’s coming back.’” She bought him back as a 2-year-old for $390,000.

By our estimates, there’s one clear financial winner. Hansen, which is a 10-1 shot in the morning-line odds win the Derby, was bred by its current owner, Kendall Hansen, who paid $7,500 to breed the horse’s sire (Tapit) to a $5,000 mare he owned. “I couldn’t afford real established ones,” he said.

These small upfront costs, coupled with a $1.08 million prize in the 2011 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, put Hansen up about $1.5 million.

—Jim Chairusmi contributed to this article.

Write to Pia Catton at pia.catton@wsj.com

Corrrections & Amplifications

Jonabell Farm is the American arm of Darley, the breeding operation owned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. An earlier version of the chart on the value of Kentucky Derby horses incorrectly stated in a chart that Maktoum owned Kentucky’s Ashford Stud.

By DAVID LITTLEJOHN

San Francisco

American Mavericks

San Francisco Symphony Orchestra

Orchestra Hall, Chicago,
March 21

Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Mich.,
March 22-25

Carnegie Hall, New York,
March 27-30

Michael Tilson Thomas has won a reputation as the world’s leading public spokesman for and salesman of concert-hall music. But all along, he has been an indefatigable champion of American music.

He opened his first San Francisco season, in 1995, with a fanfare commissioned from Lou Harrison and promised that every concert he conducted in 1995-96 would include one work by an American. He then added to the season a six-program celebration of American music—classical and pop—ranging from 18th-century choral songs to a semi-improvised tribute to Henry Cowell that Mr. Tilson Thomas performed with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead. Predictably, Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein won out (they have dominated most of Mr. Tilson Thomas’s American offerings since—along, now, with John Adams) over crankier American composers like John Cage, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Edgard Varèse—even Henry Cowell and Harrison.

These latter, less-popular composers may be regarded as unbranded, fence-jumping, rule-breaking, go-it-alone “mavericks,” which was the label Mr. Tilson Thomas had applied to them all along. In 1997-99, he devoted popular summer concerts exclusively to “American mavericks,” including these and other composers.

By 2000, Mr. Tilson Thomas decided that “American Mavericks” had become a brand with sufficient drawing power to warrant a 12-concert series of its own, eight of which he conducted. At that point Ives and Copland could be shown to have broken enough rules that they could be included too—along with the usual bang-on-a-can suspects.

Now, 12 years later, he’s done it again. Only this time his “mavericks” will take to the trail—to Chicago, Ann Arbor, Mich., and New York.

I heard the three full-symphony concerts in San Francisco. There were also two smaller-scale matinees, showcasing premieres by Ms. Monk and Morton Subotnick, among works by Cowell, David Del Tredici, Lukas Foss, Harry Partch, Mr. Reich and Mr. Riley.

There were three major attractions in this series. The most popular was an appropriately mad staging of pages from Cage’s “Song Books” of 1970, in which three powerful, independent-minded sopranos (Joan La Barbara, Meredith Monk and Jessye Norman) carried the lyrical load. I had never before seen a full-out John Cage stage spectacle (except with Merce Cunningham’s choreograpy), and was tantalized by the very idea of random pages of text, which either provide music or invite performers to create their own, offer specific or vague directions (“perform a repetitive act”), can be shuffled, repeated or dropped, and challenge the performers in a hundred other ways.

It worked. Mr. Tilson Thomas chopped vegetables and put them in a blender; he and others drank the juice. At the same time, Ms. Norman played an old-fashioned typewriter, while in front of them Ms. Monk warbled.

At different times, two pianists, a violinist, a cellist, a trombonist and a bassoonist wandered in, sometimes making music. Three video screens, projecting the performers and other images, opened to reveal gabled closets in which singers sometimes sang and players played. A card (or chess) game was usually in progress. A man at center read and tore up newspapers. Repeated texts from Cage’s favorite authors (sung, spoken or projected) played a big part. In large measure thanks to the three excellent singers (a classic opera diva and two vocal experimentalists), two electronics wizards, and whatever Mr. Tilson Thomas and stage director Yuval Sharon did in rehearsals, it was an eye- and ear-opening delight.

Mr. Adams’s “Absolute Jest” was a commissioned premiere of a concerto for string quartet (the St. Lawrence) and orchestra, the genesis of which was his decision to play with the scherzos of some of Beethoven’s last quartets, as well as ideas from other works by the composer. It started in a great hurry, and continued like a downhill race. The wedding between string quartet and orchestra was masterly. Mr. Adams worked with nonminimalist repetition, introduced brass and percussion doing what they do best, and in the end nearly ran off the tracks. A 23-minute scherzo, perhaps, but also a significant addition to the increasingly impressive Adams canon.

Mason Bates’s “Mass Transmission” (the other commissioned premiere) is a choral transcription of an early radio conversation, conducted by Donato Cabrera. Alongside Mr. Cabrera was organist Paul Jacobs; at the back of the empty orchestra, Mr. Bates sat before his electronica table and laptop, creating the sounds of a variety of percussion instruments and other noises. But in the end it came down to the music he wrote for the large San Francisco Symphony chorus. They sang very well; the score is mellow, rhythmic and listenable—but simply not very interesting.

Among several other fine performances of American modern masters (Ives and Copland, Cowell and Harrison) was Morton Feldman’s captivating “Piano and Orchestra” (1976), in which pianist Emanuel Ax hit a single chord every three or so seconds, and later every 10, while the orchestra breathed out soft, slow pulses. Occasional toots, dings and drum-taps broke in. It was a perfect work, a creation of minimal notes, silence, space and genius, like an Antonioni film.

Mr. Littlejohn writes about West Coast events for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared March 21, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Radicals Ready for the Road.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Floyd Mayweather (left) fights Puerto Rico’s Miguel Cotto .

Floyd Mayweather Jr. found himself in a brawl Saturday night, but the undefeated boxer emerged with a unanimous decision win over Miguel Cotto. “The main thing is that we got the victory,” Mayweather said. In comparison with other boxing greats, Mayweather (43-0) is now three wins behind Joe Calzaghe, who retired with a record of 46-0. Rocky Marciano, hung the gloves up with a ledger of 49-0. Julio Cesar Chavez strung together 87 victories before being forced to settle for a draw. And Sugar Ray Robinson had a 91 bout winning streak.

—Gordon Marino

Manchester City Edges

Closer to Winning Title

Manchester City will almost certainly win its first English Premier League title since 1968 with a victory over Queens Park Rangers next weekend. City is even on points with Manchester United but holds a significant goal differential edge (+8). “We have to be careful as QPR are fighting to stay in the Premier League,” said City’s Yaya Toure (above).

—
Associated Press

Death of a Salesman

Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St.

($46.50-$131.50), 212-239-6200/

800-432-7250, closes June 2

Willy Loman is back on Broadway—for the fifth time. Philip Seymour Hoffman, the star of Mike Nichols’s revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” is following in the well-remembered footsteps of Lee J. Cobb, George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman and Brian Dennehy, and it’s a tribute to his talent that you won’t feel inclined to compare him to any of his predecessors. When he first comes trudging onto the stage, carrying his weather-beaten sample cases as though each one contains half the weight of the world, you feel at once that you’re seeing not a performance but a person, stooped and stunned by the burden of failure. No sooner does he sigh “Oh, boy, oh, boy” than you forget all about the actor and follow Willy down the stony road to the open grave that awaits him at play’s end.

The genius of Mr. Nichols’s unostentatiously right staging of “Death of a Salesman” is that each part of it is in harmony with Mr. Hoffman’s plain, blunt acting. Like his star—and the rest of his perfectly chosen cast—Mr. Nichols has disappeared into the play itself. The result is a production that will be remembered by all who see it as the capstone of a career.

Linda Emond, who plays Willy’s weary but loyal wife, isn’t as famous as Mr. Hoffman, but she’s just as good, maybe even better. Here as in Tony Kushner’s “Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures,” in which she appeared last spring, everything that Ms. Emond does and says is starkly true to life. The only reason why she doesn’t stand out more decisively is that much the same thing could be said of the other members of the cast, in particular Andrew Garfield as Biff Loman and Bill Camp as Charley, Willy’s best friend. To praise one is to disserve the rest: All are as real as a cup of grocery-store coffee served in a chipped mug.

Mr. Nichols has made the wise decision to perform “Death of a Salesman” on an exact reproduction of the gauzily atmospheric set designed by Jo Mielziner for the play’s original 1949 production. It suggests that Willy and his family are living not in Brooklyn but a ghost town. After Miller saw the set for the first time, he added this stage direction to the script: “An air of the dream clings to the place, a dream rising out of reality.” Indeed it does, and the same impression is made by Alex North’s Coplandesque incidental music, also written for the original production and used here to tenderly elegiac effect.

Of the play itself, there’s little to say that hasn’t been said a hundred times before. By turns touching and tin-eared, “Death of a Salesman” is one of those works of art whose crudely compulsive power partly masks its artistic defects, foremost among which is an arrant sentimentality that pretends to be realistic. I know something about salesmen—my father was one—and Miller nailed the gut-twisting fear with which they live in the sad little eulogy that Charley speaks over Willy’s grave: “He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake.” But whenever “Death of a Salesman” swerves off in the direction of what Miller thought was poetry, it becomes clumsy and maudlin, sounding at times as though it had been translated from another language by someone who learned English out of a book.

No matter: Mr. Nichols’s “Death of a Salesman” is so eloquent in its alchemical simplicity as to right many of the play’s flaws and paper over the rest. All of Miller’s most noisily self-conscious lines, from “Attention must be paid” to “Nobody dast blame this man,” are spoken as if human beings might actually have said them out loud once upon a time. That’s what great acting—and great direction—can do.

***

Saint Joan

Bedlam

Access Theater, 380 Broadway

($30), 212-352-3101, closes April 1

If, like the Lomans, you’re strapped for cash, rest assured that you needn’t pay Broadway prices to catch an unforgettable show. Bedlam’s off-off-Broadway version of “Saint Joan,” for instance, is the most exciting George Bernard Shaw revival I’ve ever seen, bar none.

Shaw’s 1923 play, in which he turned the story of Joan of Arc into an incisive portrait of an idealistic tomboy who pits herself against a group of worldly, well-meaning clerics who end up doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, is rarely performed in America. Why? Because it runs for 3½ hours and calls for a pageant-size cast of 24. Enter Eric Tucker, who has reconfigured the script for a woman (Andrus Nichols) and three men (Ted Lewis, Tom O’Keefe and Mr. Tucker himself) who switch from part to part a la “The 39 Steps.” It may sound gimmicky, but Mr. Tucker’s vest-pocket staging, mounted in a house so small that one scene is played in the lobby, fuses Shakespearean speed with Brechtian directness. Stately it isn’t, but thrilling it most definitely is: Ms. Nichols’s acting is so intense that it makes the Access Theater seem 20 times bigger, and her colleagues support her to galvanizing effect.

Warning: You’ll probably spend part of the evening sitting on the floor, so be sure to dress accordingly.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

A version of this article appeared March 15, 2012, on page D11 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Smile, a Shoeshine and a Saint.

One of the scenes that made ‘Titanic’ the sensation it was. Video courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

If Jack Dawson shines up like a new penny, as Molly Brown says of the suddenly tuxedoed young hero of “Titanic,” James Cameron’s 3-D release of the 1997 meta-mega-hit shines up like gold bullion.

Until now, the process of 3-D conversion—adding the illusion of depth after a film has been shot in conventional 2-D—has mainly been a marketing ploy, a way to raise ticket prices in exchange for a less-than-uplifting experience. But Mr. Cameron has raised the process itself to the level of transformation. As a technological tour de force, his 3-D “Titanic” is constantly astonishing and sometimes magical. More than that, though, this version has deepened and enriched a film that was already rich in emotions and remarkable for its depth of detail.

There’s no way to separate the new technical aspects from the movie’s intrinsic pull, and that’s a good thing; if there were, we’d be talking about mere trickery. Jack’s shouting “I’m the king of the world!” from his perch on the prow was endearing 15 years ago; now it’s even more so, thanks to the passage of time—Leonardo DiCaprio looks so touchingly young—as well as to the addition of a virtual dimension. The below-decks dance was joyous when Rose and Jack did it way back when; now there’s a heightened sense of strong bodies leaping and whirling in vividly crowded steerage quarters that signal, more eloquently than before, the vast distance between the Titanic’s social classes.

“I want to cry already,” a young girl sitting next to me at a sneak preview said to her friend when the first archival shots of the ship filled the screen. Cry she did, but will her tears be the first tricklings of a global flood? A huge cohort of kids has grown up without ever seeing “Titanic” on a big screen; this release may come as a revelation.

On the other hand, the intervening years have brought sweeping changes to the movie business, almost all of them in the direction of accelerated pace, fragmented narrative, toxic irony and the mindless impact of explosions, car crashes and the like. It’s possible that some of “Titanic’s” passages before the collision with the iceberg will strike contemporary audiences as too leisurely, and that today’s kids will be impatient, as swoony fans in 1997 were not, with such borderline caricatures as Billy Zane’s despicable Cal (not to mention Kathy Bates’s volcanic Molly), or such sweetly sappy moments as the one in which Jack, surveying the chaos around him, declares earnestly, “This is bad!” It’s even possible that contemporary moviegoers, steeped in the excesses of computer-generated imagery, will find Mr. Cameron’s elegant 3-D conversion insufficiently excessive, since it doesn’t hurl solid objects or anything else in the audience’s face.

I’d like to believe, though, that the conversion’s main value will be to serve—as technology always should—the essential elements of the film’s success, and that those elements are still potent. “Titanic” was, and remains, a pop-cultural prodigy of unabashed romanticism and unsurpassed spectacle that plays out brilliantly between indispensable bookends in which the aged Rose of the present connects us to the radiant Rose of the past.

At the same time, the new technology—or the existing technology that’s been used to new effect by a masterly technician who’s also a formidable artist—may be a game-changer in its own right. The history of resurgent 3-D, an earlier version of which had a brief heyday in the 1950s, turns on two relatively recent releases. One of them, Mr. Cameron’s sensationally successful “Avatar,” showed that 3-D could be great, but established the principle, or so we thought, that the only authentic 3-D was so-called native 3-D—the process of shooting a film from the outset with two cameras and two lenses. The other, a hapless piece of pseudo-mythology called “Clash of the Titans,” was shot in two dimensions, then hastily bumped up by computer finaglings of such crudity as to establish the principle, or so we thought, that 3-D conversions were to be avoided at all box-office costs.

Now Mr. Cameron himself has sent conventional wisdom packing. How he did it is beyond my comprehension, though his secret must have been some alchemy of supercomputers and superb taste. What’s for sure, though, is that conversion stands, beginning this week, as a thoroughly reputable alternative to native 3-D. For some filmmakers, it’s even the preferred way to go. I say that on the basis of an enlightening conversation earlier this week with Barry Sonnenfeld, who was a cinematographer (on “Raising Arizona” and “Big,” among others) before he became a director of such films as “Get Shorty” and “Men in Black.” He’s currently in postproduction on “Men in Black III,” which opens in May, and which he chose to shoot conventionally, then convert to 3-D.

Mr. Sonnenfeld emphasized the matter of choice during a lunchtime show-and-tell that included photographs of a modern 3-D camera—modern in the sense of all the things it can do, but Rube Goldberg-retro in the sense of an enormous, and enormously cumbersome, rig with ancillary gizmos piled atop gizmos like some Watts Tower of digital power. “Before we started ‘Men in Black III,’” he said, “we did tests with native 3-D that were painfully slow. I like to work quickly. Comedy needs momentum, and native 3-D shooting is a momentum killer. It didn’t make sense to choose a system that worked against the tone of the film.”

His case for conversion, as opposed to going native, went beyond convenience into artistic control. Optical issues, together with the 3-D rig’s physical attributes, would have complicated or precluded the use of the 21mm wide-angle lens he favors for the visual energy it conveys. And native 3-D would have kept him from using film, his favored medium, since all current 3-D rigs record in digital video. Converting “MiB3” in postproduction, he explained, gave him greater control of crucial functions like depth—the degree of 3-D-ness, which can’t be changed once shooting starts in a native 3-D scene. I’ll be eager to see the results when “Men in Black III” makes its debut, but “Titanic” already illustrates how these esoteric techniques can translate to art.

So many moments in Mr. Cameron’s film stand out for intensified visual splendor: Kate Winslet’s Rose, emerging from a car at the pier beneath the slowly rotating disc of her violet hat; Titanic’s prow, jutting out from the screen above the first few rows of seats as the doomed vessel heads for the open sea; the industrial symphony of the boiler rooms, all aflame with the power of pounding pistons; undersea cameras threading their way through barnacled labyrinths that have become haunted surrounds; a panoply of spanking new decks and glittering ballrooms that, released from flatness, open out from the screen to bring us on board. And, toward the end, the downward-gazing spectacle of the ship’s upended stern, a vision of horror with multitiered enhancement. In the face of this 3-D conversion, I’m a new convert.

Corrections & Amplifications: Converting 2-D films into 3-D in postproduction gives a filmmaker greater control over functions such as depth. An earlier version of this article suggested incorrectly that control over screen convergence was more extensive in the conversion process than in native 3-D.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com

By JAMES R. HAGERTY

Winni Wintermeyer for The Wall Street Journal

Brian Kane in his San Francisco studio with some of his model chairs. These toylike creations tend to engage his customers far better than computer renderings, he said.

While teaching a design class at California College of the Arts several years ago, Brian Kane noticed that his students often didn’t sit. They instead draped themselves across their chairs or lounges, completely absorbed by their various electronic devices. Sealed off from the world by earphones and entranced by glowing screens, they were as likely to sprawl sideways as to sit up straight. Even in public places, many of them liked to rearrange the furniture and transform those spaces into their own customized zones for working, meeting or socializing.

Mr. Kane is an authority on public furniture design—the chairs, lounges, benches and sofas scattered around dorms, airports, hospitals and other public spaces. He’s won over 80 design awards during his career, including several from the Industrial Designers Society of America. Two of the biggest office furniture makers, Herman Miller and Steelcase, have used his services.

One of Mr. Kane’s biggest hits was a park bench dubbed Hyde Park, created in the early 1990s. Though made of steel, the bench has curved arms and back rests that make it look like an elegant sofa. Mr. Kane said he used a “living-room approach” to defy park-bench conventions. “I believe that if a chair or a bench looks comfortable, it will be sat on,” he said. More than 7,000 of the benches have been sold so far.

As our habits evolve for sitting and sprawling in public, design needs have changed, too. That’s been good for Mr. Kane, 64, who runs a three-person design firm in San Francisco.

One of his recent projects is the Swoop line designed for Herman Miller. Having noted the sprawling behavior of young device users, he created upholstered chairs with arms only on one side. They can be shoved together to form a love seat, or pulled apart for solo perching. The arm rests are curved to enhance the swooping design while discouraging students from setting their Coke cans on the upholstery. There are few seams, reducing the risks of crumbs collecting in crevices. Though the Swoop furniture is designed to let people flop however they like, Mr. Kane deliberately excluded long flat surfaces that would encourage napping.

Herman Miller introduced the Swoop line in late 2010 and said that more than 50 universities have bought it so far. The list prices of Swoop chairs range from $1,050 to $1,800.

In addition to observing chair users in their habitats, Mr. Kane said that he gets ideas from doodling. “For me, it’s just pushing a pencil till something good comes out.”

He prefers Koh-I-Noor 2H lead pencils, with knurled metal grips, which cost about $10 each. Designers can use computers to draw, but Mr. Kane prefers to start with pencil and paper. “That is my favorite part of the process—having a good concept come alive on my drawing board!”

Before presenting a new idea to a manufacturer, Mr. Kane has one of his colleagues create a small model out of alder wood. These toylike creations tend to engage his customers far better than computer renderings, he said.

When he gets stuck during a design, Mr. Kane sometimes clears his head by going for a run. In his studio, a converted laundry-truck garage in San Francisco’s Outer Mission district, he plays edgy, newish rock music, such as the Black Keys and Band of Skulls.

“Having noted the sprawling behavior of device users, he created upholstered chairs with arms only on one side.”

“I like contemporary, exciting music—it energizes me,” Mr. Kane said. Unlike many members of the baby-boom generation, he doesn’t like oldies. “I liked them when they were new,” he said. He likes modern furniture and modern music. He prefers novelty to nostalgia.

As a teenager in Summit, N.J., Mr. Kane got his start by drawing portraits of famous people like Robert Kennedy and John Glenn. Then he mailed the portraits to their subjects, asking them to add their signatures and return the pictures to him. Most complied.

A high school counselor saw the portraits and encouraged Mr. Kane to pursue a creative career. His first choice was architecture, but the counselor didn’t think Mr. Kane was strong enough in science and math and steered him instead toward industrial design. After getting a degree in that field at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, Mr. Kane went to work for a design studio in New York. He found himself working on such items as cheap clock radios, which gave him little scope for creativity.

He quit that job and moved to Italy, where, despite his inability to speak the language, he landed a job at a furniture studio. He had found his calling: “For me, furniture is sculpture. It just happens to be sculpture you sit on.”

In addition to thinking about the public’s unceasing appetite for digital devices, Mr. Kane now must design chairs that won’t crumple under the weight of an increasingly heavy population. “As we have to design for bigger and bigger people, things are going to look like they’re made of two-by-fours,” Mr. Kane said. For legs and other structural elements, steel is often a better bet. The best he can do is to “try to hide a lot of that stuff.”

A version of this article appeared April 28, 2012, on page C11 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Crafting Chairs For How We Sit Now.