By Sedgwick Clark\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
With the concert season winding down and the threat of a closing notice on Thursday, I caught up with 33 Variations<\/a><\/em> on Monday night. Just imagine!\u00a0 Playwright Mois\u00e9s Kaufman’s theme is the redemptive quality of music. On Broadway!\u00a0<\/p>\n An American musicologist (Jane Fonda) is obsessed with Beethoven’s monumental “Diabelli” Variations: How, she wonders, could he possibly have been interested in, and written 33 sublime variations on, his publisher Diabelli’s simple-minded waltz. So she sets off for Bonn to study Beethoven’s own sketches. Interwoven into this fictional dramatization is that the musicologist has Lou Gehrig’s disease. A further complication is that her daughter, whom she has never respected, insists on coming to Bonn to take care of her and prove her worth to both her dying mother and herself.\u00a0<\/p>\n The many friends who recommended the show and those with whom I attended it were serious classical-music lovers, but most of the audience undoubtedly came to see Fonda in her first\u00a0Broadway appearance in 46 years\u2014which, for the record was perfectly respectable, as was that of the entire cast. Pianist Diane Walsh ably performed the musical excerpts live. As I exited the theater, I couldn’t help wondering how much of the standing ovation was for Beethoven.<\/p>\n New Yorkers have two days to see 33 Variations<\/a><\/em> before it exits Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre on Thursday, the 21st<\/sup>.\u00a0<\/p>\n