Yeah, but did he lose 30 pounds and quit smoking?

February 7, 2007
Ousted Pastor ‘Completely Heterosexual’
By NEELA BANERJEE
Forced by a gay sex scandal to resign as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, the Rev. Ted Haggard now feels that after three weeks of intensive counseling, he is “completely heterosexual,” says an overseer of the megachurch Mr. Haggard once led.
The church official, the Rev. Tim Ralph, said in an interview published yesterday by The Denver Post that Mr. Haggard had also told the board of overseers that his only sexual relationship involving another man had been with Michael Jones, the onetime Denver prostitute who exposed that three-year affair last fall. Mr. Jones said then that he was making it public because Mr. Haggard had acted hypocritically in promoting a constitutional amendment to bar same-sex marriage.
Mr. Haggard, who as a result of the scandal was ousted by the overseers in November as senior pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, broke a three-month silence over the weekend when he contacted members of the church by e-mail to tell them that he was healing.
His three weeks of counseling, in Phoenix, felt like “three years’ worth of analysis and treatment,” but now “Jesus is starting to put me back together,” Mr. Haggard wrote in the e-mail message, which was published in The Colorado Springs Gazette on Monday.
“I have spent so much time in repentance, brokenness, hurt and sorrow for the things I’ve done and the negative impact my actions have had on others,” he said.
Mr. Haggard could not be reached for comment yesterday. Mr. Ralph declined through a spokeswoman to comment, and there was no response to telephone calls and e-mail to another overseer or to a New Life spokesman. But Mr. Ralph told The Denver Post that Mr. Haggard had come out of the counseling convinced of his heterosexuality.
“He is completely heterosexual,” Mr. Ralph told The Post, adding that Mr. Haggard’s homosexual activity had not been “a constant thing.”
Dr. Jack Drescher, a New York psychiatrist who is an expert on issues of gender and sexuality, said that while it was people’s prerogative to identify their sexual orientation as they wanted, the notion of being able to change that orientation was “not consistent with clinical presentations, but totally consistent with theological belief.”
“Some people in the community that Mr. Haggard comes from believe homosexuality is a form of behavior, a sinful form of behavior based on certain things in the Bible, and they don’t believe you can create a healthy identity based on sinful behavior,” Dr. Drescher said. “So they define it as a behavior that can be changed, and there is this thinking that if you control those behaviors enough, heterosexual attractions will follow.”
Mr. Haggard said in his message to New Life members that he and his wife were taking online courses to get master’s degrees in psychology, and Mr. Ralph told The Post that the oversight board had recommended to Mr. Haggard that he take up secular work.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Rolling Stone reports ...

Once again, apparently, the supposedly family friendly Superbowl half time show has damaged young minds. A collection of bloggers and critics are claiming that the shadow cast by Prince and his guitar during “Purple Rain” was unmistakably phallic. No way. Prince is a Jehovah’s Witness now and no longer thinks that way. You people have dirty minds.

Horror remix of When Harry Met Sally

from Boing Boing

Cory Doctorow: This recut trailer for When Harry Met Sally does an admirable job of reimagining the rom-com as a creepy horror film. It's the music that makes it. Link (Thanks, Wendy!) See also: West Side Story becomes trailer for zombie flick Mary Poppins horror movie remix vid - SCARY! Sleepless In Seattle - recut as a horror movie The Shining, if written and directed by Nora Ephron Update: John sez, "I'm the guy who made that when Harry Met Sally Trailer. I've lurked on Boing Boing forever. Thanks for the link today! "I noticed something a little ironic today regarding Viacom, YouTube, and my little video. iFilm, owned by viacom, took the recut, copied it, and uploaded it to their own viral video site, without referring back to the original video embed. Meanwhile VH1, also part of viacom, was nicer about it and embedded the youtube on their best week ever blog. What's funny is that it all happened the same day Viacom takes public their spat with YouTube and orders 100,000 videos to be taken down. A little contradictory, eh?"

... The bad news is that it makes you grow a huge scary skeleton tail ...

This from the Times ...

Fitness

When It’s O.K. to Run Hurt

By GINA KOLATA

Published: January 11, 2007

A Man for All Seasons

He was a hard gainer and a sore loser,

A personal trainer and a distant boozer.

He liked his fruit forward and his coffee black.

“Fresh Air,” too, but not Click and Clack.


-A.C.K.

Quick takes on some books ...

'Crooked Little Heart,' by Anne Lamott. An evocative slice of anxious suburbia through the eyes of a teenage girl tennis prodigy. As always, Lamott gets at the crooked little hearts of the insecure selves behind our boxy strip-mall conformities.

‘Heat.’ New Yorker writer/editor Bill Buford’s fabulously fun, charming, harrowing description of working in Mario Batali’s restaurant kitchen and for various pasta and butcher maestros and divas in Italy. Weaves in, with a light touch, a bit of food history and other scholarship. Guaranteed to whet your appetite for good cooking and writing.

'Killshot,' by Elmore Leonard. Spare and unsparing as always. Deranged criminals force a hunted couple to become the hunters. A bracing, moral mud bath that leaves you invigorated, scared, and unsure of your innocence. In short, vintage Leonard, coming soon to a theater near you (saw a preview--Diane Lane as the heroine, Mickey Rourke as the psychopathic Armand--looks promising).

'Let Me Finish,' by Roger Angell. A charming, forthright memoir, with the New Yorker star writer's attention to gritty detail and personalities without the sepia manual-typewriter-days sighing. Chapters on his stepfather, E.B. White, on car road trips, on martinis, on sailing, and on rough luck ("Hard Lines") are particularly affecting.

‘Redemption.’ I loved Frederick Turner’s first novel, ‘1929,’ a historical narrative about boozy jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke and the Chicago mob. This tale of a down-and-out Storyville, New Orleans ex-runner and cop, crippled by a race-riot sniper and working for a gang leader in the nineteen-teens, has similar stylistic chops and gives a great feel for time and place. But it’s also an unrelenting downer sliding toward an uninspired OK-Corral ending. Its dark spots need bright spots for contrast and don’t get them.

'Saturday,' by Ian McEwan. McEwan's prose is as sharp and refined as the scalpel of the brain surgeon whose London life he describes. Plugs Woolfian tropes into the wired world in which the information highway nonetheless informs us mostly how primitive and vulnerable we are.

'The Catastrophist.' Darkly funny midlife-crisis novel set in academe riffs boldly and often insightfully on Holocaust studies, tenure, reproduction, and other delicate topics.

'The Company.' Robert Littell's sprawling, captivating CIA epic follows a handful of characters, and their families and friends, from WWII into the jihadi threats of the '80s and '90s. The politics are sometimes jingoistic, the writing sometimes clunky, and the book's 900 pages could have benefitted from some more aggressive and careful editing. Nonetheless, the masterful plotting will grab your attention and remind you just how hot the cold war got.

'The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine,' by Rudolph Chelminski. No need to be a foodie to savor this well-informed, carefully written, and psychologically astute portrait of a bipolar French three-star chef, Bernard Loiseau of La Cote d'Or. You'll never look at food--or at any single-minded quest--quite the same way again.

'Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner,' by Dean Karnazes. Legendary endurance runner describes his exploits in straightforward but often astonishing detail. His motivation seems to be largely a mystery even to him, though the death of a beloved sister apparently played a part. You'll cheer for him even as you fear for the future of his knees, shins, arches, and hips.

Quick takes on some films and videos ...

‘Art School Confidential.’ Tries to be hip, but its hip is displaced. Becomes raunchy, predictable, caricatured, and morally suspect instead.

‘Bobby.’ Ambitious and noble effort falls short. Some great names in the cast, but most of them doing weirdly stiff and uninspired work. Docu clips of Bobby Kennedy are most compelling segments.

‘Casino Royale.’ Everything good you’ve heard is true. Bond is back. Faithful to Fleming. Revives the franchise. Daniel Craig’s perfect for the role. Eva Green is fabulous—can simper like a hurt schoolgirl, dazzle in couture outfits by the gaming tables, and bust chops when it counts. Director Martin Campbell’s grounded visuals and savvy pacing are perfect.

'City of God.' A searing, casually and sadistically violent, frenetically paced tale of gang life in a notorious Rio slum. A remarkable film, but think twice about whether you really want to put yourself through it.

‘Click.’ Funny premise—a harried Adam Sandler, as architect and family man, gets hold of a truly universal remote from Christopher Walken at the Way Beyond department of Bed, Bath & Beyond. But it only lives up to a third of its potential.

'Derailed.' For a thriller that self-consciously calls attention, in the beginning, to plot twists, 'Derailed' is awfully predictable. Still, Clive Owen, Jennifer Anniston, and Vincent Cassel as a major baddie all turn in impressive performances, and Mikael Håfström's direction is stylish and gripping. Not for the squeamish.

'Failure to Launch.' A semi-clever premise for a romantic comedy undone by mixing in ostensibly wacky and gross-out comic elements. The film, like its characters, seems hopelessly self-involved and lives up to its title. The quirky grown-goth-girl performance of Zooey Deschanel, as Sarah Jessica Parker's sidekick, is the most fun, original element.

'Fantastic Four.' A fun franchise starter about the Marvel-ous freaks. They're too busy giving each other a hard time to save the planet much, but surely they'll have their chance.

'Firewall.' A headache-inducing thriller with a smart premise but uninspired execution. And can we please stop using children's fatal allergies as bald plot devices?

'Four Minutes.' 2005 ESPN feature pic on Roger Bannister's breaking the four-minute mile is absorbing. But why the heck did they turn his Austrian coach Franz Stampfl into Christopher Plummer as partially paralyzed British war vet, for goodness sake? That's just weird, especially given how careful they were about other period details.

'Get Carter.' 1971 Michael Caine pic doesn't stand up well to time. His aplomb and the cool score don't make up for the gawky plotting or exploitative violence.

‘Infernal Affairs’ (the Hong Kon 2004 original). I read in some iffy zine called Rokovoko that it was supposed to be superior to the Scorcese remake. I beg to differ.

'Little Children.' An ambitious and well acted, but overwrought and often hamfisted hand-wringer about infidelity, narcissism, childish expectations, and infantile compulsions in the suburbs. Annoying narration and overall approach go for ironic, but hit unappealingly smarmy instead.


'Little Miss Sunshine.' OK, so it's contrived and reeks of screenwriter-scrapbook caricatures. But it also made me literally laugh until I cried for the first time since I don't remember when, and I for one can't ask more of a comedy than that.

‘The Long Goodbye.’ Altman’s death and the fawning obits inspiredme to rent this. It reminded me that with the exception of ‘The Company,’ I don’t like Altman, who I always found to be sort of self-indulgent and half-baked, though I know that makes me a philistine, and yes, I recognize how often his techniques are now used—I just like them used in other people’s films better. So sue me.

'Lord of War.' Nicholas Cage is a Ukranian-American arms dealer in Andrew Niccol's ham-fisted but absorbing tour of the death-merchant trade in Eastern Europe and Liberia. The picture's politics manage to be at once smugly liberal and weirdly uncertain, and motivation and missteps by Cage's character and that of his brother, played by Jared Leto, don't quite ring true.

‘Lucky Number Slevin.’ Stylish neo-Tarantino violence that’s very clever except that it makes no sense whatsoever.

‘The Matador.’ Pierce Brosnan as an alcoholic, bisexual international assassin on the skids who befriends Greg Kinnear. It’s likeably unlikeable and will make you squirm and think.

'Nine Lives.' Tangentially related slices of nine women's lives in L.A. Well acted by a great cast, but has an austere, indier-than-thou eat-your-vegetables quality to it that's offputting.

'Red Eye.' Smartly plotted nail-biter with an intelligently endearing Rachel McAdams and crisply creepy Cilllian Murphy.

'Stealth.' A sci-fi-tinged actioner wedding 'Top Gun' with HAL from '2001.' Video-game-like movie argues that war shouldn't be fought like a video game. Go figure. Loopy plot but impressive effects.

‘Stranger Than Fiction.’ Great meta-narrative fun.

‘Talladega Nights.’ Ugh. I fell asleep. Don’t bother.

'The Beat That My Heart Skipped.' An intriguing but melodramatic and rarely convincing French picture about a gangster longing to recapture his youthful dream of becoming a concert pianist.

'The Breakup.' Break what up? Nothing ever has or will come together in this dreary comedy with no chemistry and no laughs. I hope Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn simply exhausted their passion off screen, because their on-screen energy seems shorted out before they even go a-courtin'. It's also sad to see Judy Davis and Vincent D'Onofrio wilting misdirectedly in their silly minor roles.

'The Departed.' Scorsese's fast-paced, gripping, but implausible and not totally coherent version of the Japanese film Infernal Affairs, about cop moles in the Boston mob and vice versa.

'The Family Stone.' Sarah Jessica Parker plays a refreshingly un-Carrie-esque uptight fiancee to Dermot Mulroney, who's also grown into a quietly nuanced actor since his 'Best Friend's Wedding' days. Yes, it's manipulatively woven, but with a professional confidence and a great supporting cast that will make you forgive it.

‘The School of Rock.’ Run, don’t walk, away from this fun idea gone horribly wrong. Richard Linklater directed this? When—while he was asleep?

‘The Sentinel.’ A Secret Service thriller with neat death-threat and hate-mail montage effects, but a snoozey plot and phoned in performance from Michael Douglas.

'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.' How it can be corny and dated but also heartbreaking and fresh, I'm not sure. But it is, and yes, I love the absurdly repetitive score, though I couldn't knock it out of my skull for days.

'The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.' 1993 docu is a skillful appreciation course in her gorgeous work and hideously opportunistic personality, but one place fascism sometimes makes sense is in the editing room, and this pic could have used some cutting. Behind the scenes bits capturing her micromanaging the documentary about her (big suprise there) and chatting with her old cameramen about the good ol' Reich days are very telling. But the coy guise of neutrality belies what we see--an unrepentant Nazi--and we see way too much of her.

'The World's Fastest Indian.' A charming, quirky geriatric extreme-sport film based on the true story of a New Zealander in the '60s intent on getting to Utah to set a speed record for his vintage motorcycle. Anthony Hopkins's most appealing and natural performance in some time.

'Under the Tuscan Sun.' Treacly but scenic story of an American divorcee pulling her life back together in Italy. It tries to play wisely off stereotypes, but often reinforces them instead. Still, one could do worse than staring at Diane Lane's gorgeously smart, vulnerable eyes, Tuscany, and the Amalfi Coast for a couple hours.

'Wondrous Oblivion.' Paul Morrison's moving 2003 film about Jewish and Jamaican immigrant families become neighbors in postwar London took a while to get to the states, but it was worth the wait. The picture's a little schmalzy at times, but the acting's spot on, and the racial and religious tensions echo disturbingly in the post-9/11 era.

‘X-Men 3: The Last Stand.’ A fittingly over-the-top culmination to the franchise (we hope). Proves that Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen were collegial at heart and that when a woman makes you feel like you're walking on air, it could be because she’s messing with gravity and that you’re about to disintegrate. A lesson for us all.

-A.C.K.

FILM: Commitment Problems

The Bridesmaid

You're single, at a wedding, and the magic of romance and fate is in the air, and you spot someone—say, the bridesmaid—and there's something about her and you seem to catch her eye too. During the reception, everyone's a little tipsy, dancing badly, things are winding down, you've got some work to do, you're heading out. You see her sitting alone, looking bored. What the heck, you figure, why not offer her a ride? At worst, you can dish about the wedding. At best, maybe that spark you felt will flame into something more.

But wouldn't you know it? I can get myself home, thanks, she says dismissively. She has kind of a snobby reputation, and now you decide it's probably accurate. A pretty cold fish. You go home. You start up the laptop. You go over some accounts.

And then she shows up at your door. Beautiful. Wet. She couldn't get a taxi and walked there in the rain. You're stunned but try to play it cool. You get her some dry things to change into. But instead, after toweling off, she takes you in her arms and kisses you passionately.

"This is incredible," you say.

And so says Philippe Tardieu (Benoît Magimel), dumbfounded at his amazing good fortune after their love-making. Not at all, counters the young woman, Stéphanie Bellange (Laura Smet), who calls herself Senta after a character in The Flying Dutchman. "You're the one I was waiting for. You're my destiny." Later, when she brings him to her basement apartment in a grand but decrepit home, she says, "Welcome to my realm."

She might as well be speaking for The Bridesmaid's legendary director and co-scripter, Claude Chabrol. For we've been drawn into his realm as surely as Philippe's been lured into Senta's in this understated chiller about obsessive love, taking cues from Hitchcock's Rope and Strangers on a Train but translating them into the contemporary setting of a petit-bourgeois family in a small French town.

It's Philippe's sister Sophie's wedding where he meets Senta, after a leisurely first act in which Philippe, Sophie, and their younger sister, Patricia, are introduced by their single hairdresser mom Christine (the radiant Aurore Clément) to her new beau, Gérard. He turns out to be a lout, and the whole episode only emphasizes Philippe's role as man of the house. His job at a home-improvement contracting company weighs on him too. But he bears up well, except for a weird obsession with a family garden statue of Flora, and an overall tension that telegraphs that his cork's in a little tight.

Then Senta gets under his skin. At first, he's tolerantly amused by her dramatic side. She's an actress who poses for erotic photos to make a little money on the side. She can't take a joke or a criticism or sometimes even a question. She tells some pretty hard-to-swallow tales about her childhood—mom died in giving birth to her, dad hit the road, she was raised in this weird mansion by a stepmom who teaches tango lessons on the ground floor. Yeah, right. Senta tells him about hanging out in Morocco for a couple years smoking hash, working at a strip joint in New York, her stage and film roles. (In an amusing bit, she talks about how her scene with John Malkovich in a film was cut because he said she made him nervous. How odd do you have to be to weird out John Malkovich?)

Philippe takes her apparently overactive imagination in stride. So he chalks it up to bad taste when she suggests that they both murder someone to prove their specialness and mutual devotion. And he assumes they're both playing the same deadpan game when he takes credit for the slaying of a man she thinks is the bum who's been living in a cardboard box outside her home.

Ah, but you're in Chabrol country, right? So never assume. The only thing worse than a woman making up tall tales is one who isn't even when those stories sound too peculiar for this world. And the only thing worse than a lover with a commitment problem is one who has no problem committing to just about anything.

All this plays out devilishly and deliciously. Its suspense is in its ordinariness, the way wickedness embeds itself in the routine worries of the day to day, the way that life's unexpected gothic escapes from the mundane soon become that from which we would escape.

Magimel and Smet have just the right toxically fevered chemistry between them. Both are beautiful and weird in believable ways. And the relative dullness of family and work obligations makes their headlong jump into a hypnotic fervor all the more quietly gripping and plausible.

In feeling too much but also never enough part of this world, we are—all of us—always the bridesmaid and never the bride. The alternative, Chabrol suggests here—the chance to be a principal in our own dramas—is irresistible and very dangerous. For we never know just what genre we're entering.

Sure, it could be romance. Then again, it could be horror.

-A.C.K.

PHOTO: Magimel and Smet as Philippe and Senta

FILM: 'Scissors' Doesn't Cut It

Running With Scissors

If Little Miss Sunshine put the fun back into dysfunctional, as one tagline would have it, the film version of Augusten Burroughs's memoir, Running With Scissors, restores dysfunctionality's funk.

Director Ryan Murphy effectively stuffs us down the rabbit hole of a semi-intellectual and quasi-criminal out-of-control 1970s suburban counterculture, but, despite generally sufficient acting, the story and characterizations are too sketchy to carry the emotional oomph that they should.

Augusten (Joseph Cross) is the son of an alcoholic father, Norman (Alec Baldwin), and a narcissistic, hysterical, and occasionally psychotic poet mother, Deirdre (Annette Bening), who chronically and nonchalantly allows him to skip school. Deirdre comes under the influence of a nefarious psychiatrist, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), who overdrugs and, it's hinted, takes sexual advantage of her, while encouraging her to drive away her husband. Finch takes control of both her finances and her son. Thus Augusten becomes stranded in the Finches' castle of chaos, a horribly unkempt mansion at constant risk of IRS confiscation. Augusten's unwholesome companions there include not just the eccentrically lordly Finch himself, but his almost catatonically depressed wife Agnes (Jill Clayburgh), his God- and father-worshipping older daughter Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow), and his younger daughter Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood), whose idea of entertaining a young visitor is to strap him into gear for electric shock therapy.

Augusten stays loosely in his cherished mother's orbit, even as she essentially disowns him and takes on lesbian lovers. And though his early interactions with Natalie prickle with a sexual charge, he determines that he's gay and gets involved with another pseudo-son of Dr. Finch's, the truly disturbed though intermittently tender Neil Bookman (Joseph Fiennes). As his mother spirals more clinically out of control, and Finch proves an ever-more-reckless father substitute, Augusten realizes that to survive, much less to realize his dreams of becoming a cosmetologist and maybe a writer, he has to escape.

Benning's getting a lot of ink for her performance here, but it's spotty. Her craziness is convincing, in a methody way, but her ball-busting wife and lit-bitch poetry-group scenes are a little over the top. Cox approaches his work gamely enough, but the role of Finch is badly written. We don't get to know enough about him to understand the power he has over people. Nor do we quite get what makes him tick. While money's apparently a factor (we learn that he's a skilled extortionist as well as a quack), and while the pills seem to flow freely, it's not clear that Finch himself ever takes those pills or whether this kind of seedy greed supersedes or merely enables what he thinks of as his work. Authority might be his intoxicant, but even that doesn't quite square since he uses that authority in such a haphazard manner. A scene in which he attributes divine significance to the form of his latest turd suggests some real (religious) psychosis, shared by Hope, but that's not explored to any satisfying and believable degree either.

I was more impressed by Fiennes, whose sad, wild eyes understatedly convey his struggle to control his violence and hallucinations; by Clayburgh, who gives us quick glimpses of the once hopeful, now psychically battered woman within the unwashed shell of a wife and mother; and by Baldwin, whose quiet tension bespeaks the proverbial wits' end.

Joseph Cross is sweetly appealing as Augusten, particularly in his scenes with Natalie and Agnes. But the character remains something of a cipher and a nest of contradictions. A momma's boy whose momma is an indisputable nightmare, he's intellectually curious but unschooled, street-smart but seemingly unaware of the dangers Neil poses for him, calculating but also prey to the swamp of eccentrics and sinister intentions surrounding him. He warns us at the beginning of the film that it doesn't matter where he starts his story because no one will believe it anyway. But we do believe it—we just don't quite get it. How can he be so worldly and clueless at the same time?

One answer might be because he's a child overwhelmed by several forms of awful excess during a head-spinning decade. Filling in a hundred blanks ourselves, perhaps with reference to the source memoir, that might be a conclusion we could firm up. And it's the explanation implied in Murphy's direction, which symbolizes that excess and bewilderment by slow-mo montages set to spaced-out '70s top-40 songs. Those convey a sort of passive, anything-goes mood, but they're no substitute for characterization, and without characterization the film narrative, on its own terms, doesn't cohere.

-A.C.K.

PHOTO: Cross and Annette Bening as Augusten and Deirdre

DANCE: An Impressive Premiere

Elizabeth Gaither and Jonathan Jordan
in "In the Upper Room"








The Washington Ballet
Eisenhower Theater, The Kennedy Center
"In the Night," "oui, non," "In the Upper Room"
Through Oct. 29


By Alexander C. Kafka

A thrilled audience said an unmistakable "oui" to the Washington Ballet's world premiere Wednesday night of artistic director Septime Webre's "oui, non." The clever cabaret odyssey featured not only the talents of the company in great form, but also those of the acclaimed singer-actress Karen Akers, who, as a particularly poised on-stage chanteuse, was a vital part of both the work's visual and musical composition.

In Elizabeth Peyton's evocative set design, upper stage right Akers and her exceptional accompanists—pianist Don Rebic and bassist Jon Nazdin—stirringly rendered eight French cabaret standards associated with the likes of Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel. Opposite them, stage left, is the young, inquisitive, pale face and arms of a reclining young man, painted by Holly Highfill in a sort of Parisian poster style on the backdrop. Depending on the song, the scrim and Clifton Taylor's delicate lighting reveal or re-conceal the rest of the painted young man's body, his red shirt melding with the shade of Aker's elegant strapless gown. Subtle drips of paint on the backdrop image are echoed in the traces of red on the dancers off-white costumes, designed by Vandal.

With the dancers' makeup-paled faces, the effect is at once lovely and slightly foreboding. It is as though they've emerged from the world of the painted young man. The pallid tones, and the faint blood suggestion of the reds mix memorably into the musical palette of romance hard-won, volatile, fleeting, and wistfully recalled. The echo is of tenuous ties, fleeting eras, and mortality.

And just what do we make of this young man in the background anyway, gazing at us almost testingly? Is he voyeur? Are the dancers figures of his imagination? Of his dreams? Might we even take the leap and interpret him as the alter ego of Webre himself?

In couples, trios, or small groups, the dancers treated graciously Webre's seasoned blend of ballet and jazz, which ranges from almost raucously spirited in "Sympathique," in which Brianne Bland is lofted and tossed boyantly and gamely about by Jason Hartley, Jonathan Jordan, and Jared Nelson; to quasi-acrobatic in the "Padam, Padam" trio of those same three men; to the intensely intimate "Ne Me Quitte Pas," exquisitely partnered by Nelson and Elizabeth Gaither. In a smart, sensitive, and strangely apt touch, four dancer couples don't dance at all but simply cluster around Akers, now center stage, for her typically refined but quite straightforward contralto rendering of Brel's "La Chanson Des Vieuxs Amants." It's as if, in the painted poster world of the boite du nuit, word is deed is movement is music, all part and parcel of this peculiar parlor of cuddles and quibbles, ardor, coquetry, and tristesse.

There were some minor rough edges to the ensemble work, as in "Mon Dieu," but, mon dieu, it was nothing to get worked up about and I'd much prefer those rough edges to sacrificing even an ounce of the great gusto with which the dancers approached this challenging and richly textured choreography. Other companies will line up, I suspect, for permission to use this work. And they should. They will regret rien.

Lovers are also the focus of "In the Night," Jerome Robbins' elegant 1970 consideration—to Chopin Nocturnes here superbly performed by Scott Dettra—of the variations and evolutions of romance. We meet three couples, who dance before a starry backdrop. Let us call them, in order of appearance, the Orbits (Gaither and Nelson), who circle each other in sweet, somewhat agitated desire; the more stately Parallels (Erin Mahoney-Du and Runqiao Du), who move that way, often literally and figuratively in step; and the quite tense Centrifugals (Sona Kharatian and Luis Torres), who seem to have a stormier relationship of partings and reunitings, mismeasurings, belittlings, and embellishings. In dapper suits and dresses of browns, rusts, blacks, and grays, the three couples eventually encounter each other and mingle a bit, and it's a revelatory few moments because it's only upon that interaction that they seem to comprehend their coupleness and retreat into their separate intimacies with a new maturity and calm. In all, a cultured, thoughtful, and insightful work, delivered here with fine pace, grace, and emotional conveyance.

Topping off this extraordinary evening was Twyla Tharp's demanding 1986 work "In the Upper Room," the title drawn (I learned from Suzanne Carbonneau's helpful program notes) from Tharp's feeling, on hearing a Mahalia Jackson gospel song, that it seemed "to climb so high it pushed through the roof" like "an empty attic, a place of last resort, where one takes one's treasures and puts them up for very special public view."

The nine-section work is set to a wonderful score by Philip Glass. (I know we called it, controversially, minimalism back then, but now that pop radio consists of former boy- and girl- group members huskily talking dirty to their drum boxes, this music sounds positively lush.) The striking Santo Loquasto-designed set actually is minimalistic, except that it's buffered in a constant and quite thick fog-machine cloud from which the dancers emerge, and into which they disappear, with quick and quiet dispatch. They are costumed in striped suits that simultaneously hint at prison, Vaudeville, and a pajama party. But as Jennifer Tipton's recreated lighting becomes gradually brighter and more distinctly beamed—almost in the style of a Renaissance heavens-and-earth painting—the black and white stripes give way to at first spots, then patches, then whole outfits of bright pink and salmon shades.

The choreography's speed; its idiomatic mix of ballet, modern, circus, majorette, and lindy type movements; the dancers' somewhat manic, jubilant, and other-worldly energies; and the accompanying music, light, and costume colors have a profound and cumulative intoxicating effect. To me, the dancers appear to be some slightly other species freed from whatever prison, immaturity, false maturity, overwork, or other exploitation they've just fled from. Footed in assorted sneakers and ballet slippers, coming and going in a relentless and complicated scheme of shifts, groupings, and movement tropes, it's as if they'd taken Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Barnum & Bailey, and the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders hostage, given them too many espressos, and locked them in a gymnasium until they created a dance they could all sign off on.

The company became these creatures in great spirits and great form, capping with athletic confidence an evening that was, from start to finish, a genuine treat.