It turns out—to no one’s great surprise—that Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato, now a quarter-century old, is as amazing as it ever was. In fact, like many of the best works of art, it seems to have accumulated extra layers of meaning in the course of its long life. Or so it seemed to me as I watched it on Saturday at Lincoln Center, exactly twenty-five years to the day after its first performance. If anything, this grand evening-length performance—a celebration of Milton’s seventeenth-century poetry and Handel’s eighteenth-century music as well as Morris’s abundant choreographic imagination—was richer and more galvanizing than ever.
Part of what I found so moving, this time, was its splendidly persuasive utopianism. How can a work that begins in melancholy and ends in mirth—that starts in autumn, essentially, and concludes in spring—strike us as so beautifully true? I can’t answer this question. I can only say that if this great work comes to your vicinity, you should see it, preferably as often as possible. I attended two of its three recent performances at the White Light Festival, and my only regret is that I didn’t see the third.