Sometimes being OTBKB is so easy. Eating a bagel with whitefish spread in the dining room listening to WNYC, I hear our local award-winning reporter Andrea Bernstein’s story on Weekend Edition about turning the Brooklyn House of Detention into a mall.

But what kind of mall? A food center, an upscale shopping mall,  a public space for weddings? All sorts of ideas are being considered.  And they’ve no intention of getting rid of the jail, there The jail will still be occupied upstairs. Feel like doing some shopping at the prison. Getting married in jail. Why not. It’s New York, full of lots of strange juxtapositions.

In another NPR segment, Elvis Mitchell, weighs in on the recent flurry of concert films, including Dave Chapelle’s Block Party, which is getting raves like this one from Entertainment Weekly:

Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is perhaps the first concert movie since Stop Making Sense to give you a blissful buzz. The buzz comes from the music, which has a loose, burning joy that’s rare to behold in a live rap performance, and also from Chappelle’s wicked prankster’s glee, which spreads through the movie like a happy virus.  —Entertainment Weekly

Now playing at BAM, here’s the blurb on their web site:

Did you miss Dave Chappelle’s once-in-a-lifetime Bed-Stuy block party in 2004? Never fear, this new documentary by Michel Gondry (music-video wiz and director of the 2004 smash Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) will take you there. After signing a $50 million contract with Comedy Central, Dave Chappelle celebrated his success by bringing together some of the most well respected artists in hip-hop for an unpublicized free concert on a regular street corner in Bed-Stuy. Chappelle and Gondry combine the footage of the concert with thoughtful interviews and asides that give the viewer a look at the daily lives of Bed-Stuy residents. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party features performances by Kanye West, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Common, Dead Prez, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, the Roots, Cody ChesnuTT, Big Daddy Kane, and—reunited for their first performance in over seven years—the Fugees.

Speaking of BAM, boy does New York TIme’s writer Charles Isherwood have it in for Cate Blanchett. He really attacks her performance in BAM’s sold-out production of Hedda Gabler.

Narsty. Narsty. 

In the beginning of his essay, he applauds Blanchett for "using her level of fame to bring her artistic clout to worthy projects." But then he goes in for the kill and grills her for a crowd-pleasing celebrity performance. He even accuses her of pandering to the audience and bringing out ill-conceived humor and quirky histrionics.

"She and her colleagues seem determined to infuse the play with quirky histionics, as if to let the tex speak sensibly for itself for a minute would risk hurling us all into a state of catatonia. The pfocution brings to mind a brood of sqawking chickens fussing about in the barnyard.

Isherwood, perhaps correctly, assumes that Blanchett was the animating force behind the production—which he claims would not be the centerpiece of BAM’s season without her. He also mentions that Andrew Upton, who adapted Ibsen’s work for the stage, is Blanchett’s husband. 

I found the tone of Isherwood’s essay to be unnecessarily nasty. I have not seen the play, but I doubt BAM thought, as Isherwood says, that they had to dumb the play down in order to coddle their audience. The BAM audience is an adventurous one and they have sat through many a long, difficult production as part of the Next Wave festival in the seats of the opera house.

Ms. Blanchett and Ms. Nevin may reason that audiences coming to see a movie star in a complicated play need to be coddled and cajoled into having a reasonably good tim. They are determined to give us a good one. But shouldn’t their first respobsibility be to what Ibsen wanted.

Okay. This is when I thought that Isherwood was WAY OFF THE MARK. Has Isherwood even looked at a list of the kinds of productions BAM is famous for. Think of all the experimental works of theater, music and performance that have graced the stage of the opera house, as part of the Next Wave Festival:  Einstein on the Beach. Still/Here, Karole Armitage, Laurie Anderson, Eiko and Koma, Pina Bausch, Mark Morris, and on and on and on.

A purist, like Isherwood, will always object to an experimental treatment of a masterwork. But in staging a new interpretation of a great play, a director will often  shed new light on its meanings and subtle shadings that sometimes even the author was unaware of. To say that this is being done just to coddle an audience is insulting the artists involved with this production.