THE BALLAD OF JOHN.(Yoko Ono's performances)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 29-AUG-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

For many of the artists and musicians who came of age in a post-Beatles, post-John Lennon late-nineteen-eighties New York, it was Yoko Ono, and not her martyred husband, who had greater cultural resonance. With the release of her retrospective CD collection, "Onobox," in 1992, Ono demonstrated what a forceful, distinctive avant-gardist she was. Stretching the parameters of the traditional Japanese vocal and combining the result with John Cage-influenced experiments in electronic sound, Ono was a tougher, less melodic Meredith Monk: a musical futurist with a learned, albeit improvisatory, approach to the studio--indeed, to the whole concept of being an artist. Small wonder, then, that Lennon, the most intellectual Beatle, upon meeting Ono at an exhibition of her installation work in London, in 1966, was impressed by this woman, who had everything he didn't: a rich and cultivated family, an education, an avant-garde pedigree, and an appealingly limited relationship to the late-twentieth-century culture that Lennon and his bandmates had helped to define.

While the creators of "Lennon" (at the Broadhurst) spend some time on the Ono-Lennon collaborations, the show--or, rather, the revue--focusses, in standard musical-bio fashion, on Liverpool's "working-class hero" as he makes his...

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