Zachary Pincus-Roth.com

After Recovering a Famous Nazi-Looted Painting, Randy Schoenberg's Life Became a Movie

Randy Schoenberg in his office. Photo by Steve Anderson for PAW

Published in the Princeton Alumni Weekly [PDF]

THE FIRST TIME he was in Berlin, E. Randol Schoenberg ’88 was a junior at Princeton, spending six months studying math and German. It was 1987, two years before the wall dividing East from West would fall. The Brandenburg Gate was impenetrable, surrounded by guards.

In February of this year, he was back, marveling at the changes. As a student, he had lived in a tiny room in an apartment building; now he was staying at the fancy Hotel Adlon Kempinski, with a view of the open Gate. When Schoenberg had lived in Berlin as a college junior, the city had not yet truly grappled with its history; now, it had both a Jewish Museum and a Holocaust memorial.

Schoenberg had returned to the city for the premiere of the film Woman in Gold, the story of a woman’s quest to regain artistic treasures seized by the Nazis — a battle in which Schoenberg played a central role. In the evening, he would put on his tux and walk down the red carpet. But before that, he took a gloomier path, wandering through the Holocaust memorial, a rolling field of rectangular gray monoliths that looks like a graveyard. For Schoenberg, there was a deeply personal connection: Members of his own family had perished.

Woman in Gold recounts how Maria Altmann’s family fled Vienna after the Nazis marched into the city in 1938, leaving behind valuable paintings by the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt. After the war, the Austrian government kept the paintings and displayed them in a museum for six decades. Schoenberg was Altmann’s attorney, and in 2006 he shocked the art and legal worlds by winning back five Klimts for her and her fellow heirs. One of these, the 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, portraying Altmann’s aunt, would sell for a reported $135 million — at the time, the highest price ever paid for a painting. The other four — three landscapes and another portrait of Adele — would sell for a total of $192.7 million.

The sales made Schoenberg a very rich man, and made the case worth the professional risk. He had given up his steady job at a law firm in part to work on this case, though the only promise of payment was the 40 percent of the paintings’ value at sale he’d get if he were to win.

But Schoenberg also wanted the case to convey a personal message. His great-grandfather died in the death camp at Treblinka. His grandfather, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, had to flee Berlin. Even if Randol had lost the case — as most people expected — it would have been worth it. He wanted to show what had happened to his family, to Altmann’s family, and to all the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe.

“You feel like you’re representing the whole community of people who were kicked out and that are now being welcomed back,” he says of his trip to Berlin. “It’s not always that the people who have been vanquished get to return.”

Two Young Guns Attempt to Bring Meaning to Magic

Published in the Village Voice

What do you picture when you hear the word magician? Maybe David Copperfield. Or a birthday party.

"Magic suffers from the people who do magic," Derek DelGaudio says.

DelGaudio and Helder Guimarães, two of the world's best young card magicians, are trying to change such perceptions with their show Nothing to Hide, which opens October 23 and runs through December 8 at the Signature Center. The duo brings the show to New York from the Geffen Playhouse, one of Los Angeles's most respected theaters, where it became a hit and extended its run several times.

Nothing to Hide features some mind-bending illusions, but its popularity stems mostly from the fact that DelGaudio and Guimarães aim to do something more than fool people: They want to raise magic from a craft to an art, from something nerdy to something cool.

They want to make magic that means something—magic that, like art or poetry, relates to the real world.

COUNTERINTUITIVE COVER STORIES IN THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Published in McSweeney's

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

“Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”

“Is Pinterest Making Us Blind?”

“Is the Kindle Making Us Illiterate?”

“Are Houses Making Us Homeless?”

“Is This Dress Making Us Look Fat?”

“Are Paperweights Making Our Papers Fly Away?”

“Is Mom Making Us Dinner Tonight?”

“Are Inner Tubes Making Us Sink?”

“Is Artisanal Coffee Making Us Douchebags?”

Pretty funny lady

Click here for my interview with Jenna Fischer ("The Office," "Walk Hard") for Metromix.

Objects of Affection

Check out my first article for Metromix, a new network of websites owned by the Tribune Company. Metromix is similar to Citysearch in that its sites are all about things to do in a particular city, but its focus is on arts and entertainment. The article is on Metromix sites nationwide, but for a link to the article at the Los Angeles site, click here.

Note that two films were originally on the list but didn't make it because photos could not be found: "Royal Wedding," the 1951 MGM musical in whcih Fred Astaire dances with a hat rack, and "Le Ballon Rouge," a.k.a. "The Red Balloon," the French short film about a balloon that follows a kid around Paris.

The Lost "High Fidelity" Souvenir Program Essay

I thought I'd post what could become an artifact of theater history: the lost souvenir program essay for the Broadway musical "High Fidelity." The show closes prematurely, after only 18 previews and 14 regular performances, and the souvenir program was never actually printed. I got the job because  I wrote the book about "Avenue Q," which has the same producers as "High Fidelity." Note that this essay is a first draft that did not go through the revision process, so it was not approved by anyone involved with the show.

"High Fidelity" has no castles, chandeliers or helicopters. It has a bed in an apartment and a record store full of musty old albums. And it’s not about kings, phantoms, soldiers or revolutionaries. It's about a guy obsessed with music who gets dumped by his girlfriend.

Though most musicals take place in the past, in far-off lands or in fantasy worlds, "High Fidelity" is set in Brooklyn in 2006. It’s about people like you and me, with everyday problems and everyday obsessions. Their girlfriends and their boyfriends. Their apartments. Their jobs. Making money. Making love. Getting drunk.

The show owes this vision to the novel "High Fidelity," written by Nick Hornby, a master at articulating the angst and absurdities of contemporary life.

The musical is “very much the world that Nick Hornby had created,” says David Lindsay-Abaire, who adapted the novel into the book of the musical. “His prose is so full of irony, and so lacking in sentiment. He undercuts sentiment on every page of that book in a hilarious way.”

“I almost hate to say this but I’m going to: It feels to me like ‘'Seinfeld': The Musical,’” says Walter Bobbie, the director. “'Seinfeld' was a glorious celebration of just ordinary lives being lived.”

In many musicals, a man and a woman see each other and they are instantly in everlasting love. "High Fidelity," on the other hand, acknowledges the complexities of devoting oneself to another person. After Rob, the main character, gets dumped by his girlfriend Laura, he spends the rest of the show trying to win her back and figure out why his romantic relationships always go wrong.

“I’m married happily, but I spent a long time searching for love, and going down the wrong roads and being ridiculous about the whole thing,” says "High Fidelity"’s lyricist, Amanda Green. About Rob and Laura, she adds, “They aren’t effusive and they aren’t lovey-dovey, but I really feel the ache that he has for her and the ache that she has for him.”

“Some of my favorite love songs are the types of songs that don’t necessarily come out and say ‘I love you, you’re everything to me,’” says Tom Kitt, the show’s composer. “They talk about love in a very human way, a way that everybody experiences.”

Many of the songs in "High Fidelity" convey small, subtle feelings that many of us have felt but are rarely expressed. “Ready to Settle” rationalizes the benefits of a rebound one-night-stand. In “It’s No Problem” Rob’s anxiety-ridden friend Dick puzzles over how to tell their friend Barry that Rob and his girlfriend broke up. “I Slept With Someone,” in which Rob proclaims, “I slept with someone who slept with Lyle Lovett,” is a fresh take on celebrity worship.

While writing the songs, Kitt and Green drew on their own personal musical influences, including The Beatles, The Who, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Carole King, Carly Simon, Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, U2, Radiohead, Fountains of Wayne, Stephen Sondheim and, yes, Lyle Lovett. The characters express themselves through songs that evoke artists whose albums could be on their shelves, such as the Indigo Girls in “Ready to Settle,” Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre in the song “Conflict Resolution,” in which Rob fantasizes about beating up Laura’s new boyfriend, and Bruce Springsteen, who appears in Rob’s fantasy and sings with him on “Goodbye and Good Luck.”

“We were like ‘Well, if Rob wants his life to be like a Bruce Springsteen song, what would that song sound like?’” says Kitt.

Though Lindsay-Abaire is also married and lacks Rob’s loafer qualities, he connects to the character though the universal idea of obsession. “He’s obsessed with vinyl, he’s obsessed with these ex-girlfriends — he’s really great at the past and really awful at dealing with the present,” says Lindsay-Abaire. “I have a lot of friends who are slackers and stuck in arrested development, and are refusing to enter adulthood.”

For the book scenes in "High Fidelity," the creators wanted to bring a “theatrical anarchy” to musical comedy, says Bobbie. “We wanted to be able to smash time.” An example is the fantasy sequence in which Rob acts out three different versions of his confrontation with Ian, Laura’s new boyfriend.

"High Fidelity" sets its record shop in an unspecified, run-down area of Brooklyn. To create a sense of place, Lindsay-Abaire drew on his experience growing up in the working class neighborhood of South Boston and moving to the Carroll Gardens area of Brooklyn in 1992, when it was nothing but bodegas, cheap knickknack shops and Italian social clubs.

“I know where he is,” says Lindsay-Abaire of Rob. “I know the people who walk by those windows.”

Anna Louizos’s set design reflects the musical’s rough-around-the-edges quality. The middle of the stage opens up like a toy box and the backdrops shift back and forth like a Rubix Cube, underscoring the unpredictability of the characters’ lives. The set also reflects their gritty surroundings. Many musical sets are sleek abstractions of real life locations, with few props to get in the way. But Bobbie realized that since his characters had massive album collections and hung out in derelict neighborhoods, things had to look a bit messy.

“We had to fill the stage with the detritus of their lives,” says Bobbie.

Though it breaks from tradition in many ways, "High Fidelity" is the latest in a line of musicals about existential urban unease that includes landmark works such as "Avenue Q," "Rent" and "Company." "High Fidelity" also draws inspiration from older musicals about city life that were — when they were written in the mid-20th century — set in the present. These musicals include "Wonderful Town," "On the Town" and "Bells are Ringing," which were co-written, perhaps not coincidentally, by Green’s father, Adolph Green.

Ultimately, "High Fidelity" manages to capture its time and place while also tapping into timeless themes. It’s about Peter Pan growing up. It’s about pursuing true love. It’s about a man learning how to live with a woman and conform to the demands of adulthood without losing the part of him that makes him who he is. In fact, Rob is an apt metaphor for "High Fidelity" as a whole. The show gives you everything you expect in a Broadway musical comedy — funny characters, catchy songs, thrilling staging and a touching love story — while hanging on to the real-life, contemporary quality that makes it unique.

Who Told You You're Allowed to Rain on Her Skit?

I did my first piece for New York Magazine's web site, which was just redesigned. Check it out here.

The Onion

I had a headline in The Onion this past week, the  Jan 17-Jan 23 issue. I didn't write the article, but I thought up the headline. To check it out, click here.