{"id":7184,"date":"2018-04-09T07:15:42","date_gmt":"2018-04-09T11:15:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7184"},"modified":"2018-04-30T06:58:38","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T10:58:38","slug":"bill-murrays-new-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7184","title":{"rendered":"Bill Murray’s “New Worlds”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Otsego

Otsego Lake; photo: Corey Seeman, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

Comedian and actor Bill Murray brought his \u201cNew Worlds\u201d show, created in partnership with master cellist Jan Vogler, to Princeton last week. It\u2019s an unusual, interesting, and often thrilling hour and three-quarters (trailer<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Murray reads excerpts from authors as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and James Thurber, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, accompanied by Vogler, Mira Wang on violin, and Vanessa Perez, piano. Murray sings, too\u2014movingly on \u201cJeanie with the Light Brown Hair\u201d and comically in selections from West Side Story<\/em>. He dances with Wang in a tango by Argentinean composer Astor Piazzola. Throughout, the music is sublime.<\/p>\n

Murray and Vogler have created juxtapositions of text and music that are full of unexpected resonances. When Murray reads a lyrical passage about the beauty of Otsego Lake from The Deerslayer<\/em>, the last of James Fenimore Cooper\u2019s Leatherstocking tales, Vogler plays Schubert. Both Cooper and Schubert loved nature, but that coincidence is amplified by the revelation that Schubert was reading the Leatherstocking tales on his deathbed.<\/p>\n

Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer\u2019s \u201cMoon River\u201d accompanied an excerpt from Huckleberry Finn<\/em> in which Huck and Jim are on the raft, floating down the river at night, anticipating sight of the lights of Cairo, Illinois, where Jim will be free. There\u2019s a startling coordination of images of moon, river, the shore lights that are not Cairo, and \u201ctwo drifters off to see the world\u201d\u2014and, certainly, \u201cmy huckleberry friend.\u201d<\/p>\n

The audience exercises its lungs in George Gershwin\u2019s \u201cIt Ain\u2019t Necessarily So,\u201d sung by Murray to a musical arrangement by, of all the unexpected people,\u00a0 Jascha Heifetz. That irreverent selection is counterbalanced later in the program by a powerfully moving version of Van Morrison\u2019s \u201cWhen Will I Ever Learn to Live in God.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reviewer John von Rhein<\/a> in Murray\u2019s home-town newspaper, the Chicago Tribune<\/em>, says the actor has again reinvented himself \u201cin a rather wonderful new species of performance art few others would have dreamed up or could have brought off so beautifully.\u201d This unique and unforgettable show has many forthcoming dates<\/a> around the country\u2014and the world. See it if you can. And, if you can’t, Amazon will let you stream it.
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Comedian and actor Bill Murray brought his \u201cNew Worlds\u201d show, created in partnership with master cellist Jan Vogler, to Princeton last week. It\u2019s an unusual, interesting, and often thrilling hour and three-quarters (trailer). Murray reads excerpts from authors as diverse … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[682,207,104,147],"tags":[1290,1291,329,73,89,414],"class_list":["post-7184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fine-arts","category-music","category-the-morgue","category-theater","tag-bill-murray","tag-jan-vogler","tag-mccarter-theatre","tag-nature","tag-reading","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1RS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7184"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7187,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7184\/revisions\/7187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}