October 10, 2008
TT: Bowing to a higher authority
This week's Wall Street Journal drama column--which I wrote in the living room of a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Cleveland, Ohio, thank you very much--is about two shows I saw last week on Broadway, A Man for All Seasons and 13. The first is good, the second not. Here's an excerpt.
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In 1961, Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons" opened on Broadway and ran for a year and a half--an impressive run by any standard, and altogether astonishing for an intellectually demanding history play set in the 16th century. Now "A Man for All Seasons" is back on Broadway for the first time in 45 years. Why the long wait? Two words: the movie. Fred Zinnemann's 1966 film version preserves Paul Scofield's famous stage performance St. Thomas More, who got his head chopped off in 1535 for opposing the illegal divorce and remarriage of King Henry VIII and was canonized 400 years later. It's one of the best movies ever made from a play, and it brought home six Oscars, one of them for Scofield and all well deserved. Small wonder that nobody dared to revive the play until now.
Why, then, is the Roundabout Theatre Company bucking such long odds? Because it has an ace in the hole: Frank Langella. He hit the jackpot last year with his eerily evocative interpretation of Richard Nixon in "Frost/Nixon," and is returning to Broadway in an equally meaty role. From disgraced president to martyred saint--how can you lose? Nor does he. Mr. Langella's version of St. Thomas is all his own: urbane, world-weary, more public than that of his great predecessor, which makes it all the more moving when he collapses in fear and desperation midway through the second act, knowing that he may be about to lose his life over a matter of conscience. Better than Scofield? No--but just as good....
The authors of "13" have taken the cynical advice of the authors of "Gypsy": They've got a gimmick. Specifically, their show, which tells the story of a young New Yorker (Graham Phillips) who moves to a small town in Indiana and can't figure out how to fit in with the cool kids, was written for "tweens" and is performed by teenagers. Except for Tom Kitt, the conductor, everyone in the cast and in the onstage rock band that accompanies "13" is well under the age of 20.
I, alas, am a childless drama critic of an all-too-certain age, so I'm not sure that my reactions to "13" will be relevant to its target market (and I use the word "market" very advisedly). On the other hand, I'm an avid fan of teen-oriented films and TV series like "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in which the agonies of adolescence are portrayed with wit and detachment, so it may be worth saying that I found "13" to be banal from start to finish...
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Read the whole thing here.
Here's my wsj.com video review of A Man for All Seasons, which includes footage from the show. Don't be fazed by the introductory commercial--it'll be over in a flash:
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TT: Campaigning with cylinders
A couple of weeks ago Archeophone Records, a tiny but inventive label that specializes in CD reissues of sound recordings made in the early years of the twentieth century, sent me a copy of its latest release, Debate '08: Taft and Bryan Campaign on the Edison Phonograph. It's a collection of the twenty-two cylinder recordings that were made by William Jennings Bryan and William Howard Taft for Thomas Edison's National Phonograph Company as part of their presidential campaigns. (You can hear snippets from the recordings by visiting Archeophone's Web site.) I knew at once that a "Sightings" column for The Wall Street Journal had been dropped into my lap, and in tomorrow's paper you can read the results.
The story of these cylinders is extraordinarily interesting, and is well told in the seventy-nine-page booklet that accompanies Debate '08. But it's even more interesting to listen to the recordings than it is to read about them. How did two nineteenth-century politicians respond to the challenge of a brand-new medium that required them to read their speeches into a horn instead of bellowing them out in front of a large audience without benefit of amplification? To find out, pick up a copy of Saturday's Journal and see what I have to say.
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TT: Almanac
"All live performance is a passing away of time and the body: this dying is the primer, the medium, upon which all theatrical and performative activity is imposed; in its wake nothing, mere memory that fades and dies away as well. It is at the heart of all live performance; in common with the performer the audience is passing away also, decaying, bodies experiencing the curse of time together."
George Hunka, Superfluities Redux, Sept. 25, 2008
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October 9, 2008
CAAF: Who doesn't?
Last week I pointed to a New Republic review of a new collection of the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. The book, Words In Air, won't be out till the end of the month, but until then you can find a nice sampling of the letters in the October issue of Poetry (unfortunately not available online).
I've read much of Bishop's side of the correspondence in One Art but it's even more enjoyable to read her letters alongside Lowell's own volleys and sallies. The letters are little gems, and I'm tempted to type them all in here, but in lieu of copyright larceny I'll give you this sauntering paragraph from one of Lowell's:
Since my last letter it has become autumnal (nice but muggy) and I've read Black Arrow, Weir of Hermiston, The Master of Ballantrae, and Graves' abridgement of David Copperfield. Saw Black Arrow as a movie too -- it's a cumbersome pot-boiler at best, but redone with the plot of a western thriller it is, is -- words fail me. Had a drunken discussion with two Englishmen in which I tried to use the Socratic method, but only discovered that none of us could define "right" or "good." And finished off 23 more poets; God, how I dislike them!Posted at 8:06 AM | permalink | email this entry
CAAF: Morning coffee
• Should Margaret Drabble's next novel feature a boy wizard with magical friends I guess we'll all understand why. (Via Literary Saloon.)
• Not literary but five days later this skit still makes me laugh.
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TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)
• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)
• Equus (drama, R, nudity and adult subject matter, closes Feb. 8, reviewed here)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, closes Oct. 26, reviewed here)CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO
• R.U.R. (serious comedy, PG-13, adult themes, closes Oct. 25, reviewed here)CLOSING SATURDAY IN CAPE MAY, N.J.:
• To the Ladies (comedy, G, closes Oct. 18, reviewed here)Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"I sometimes suspect that New Yorkers do not have a desire to be in theatres, I think they want to go to whatever the certified hit is, of the season. What the Delphic oracle tells them to go and see, sometimes in depressed moments I think, 'Well, they really don't want to be there at all. They're looking for every excuse not to go. The New York Times tells them it's not up to much, "Oh good, we've got a reason for not going."' The English are not like that. They're much more independent about their theatre. They're much more naturally theatrical in their instincts. Theatre is part of their life in a way that it is not part of the average American's life."
Peter Shaffer, interviewed by Mike Wood for the William Inge Theatre Festival, Feb. 27, 1992
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October 8, 2008
OGIC: The eyes have it
My paid workload is at something like an all-time height this week and into next, so consider this just poking my head in. I've been in this boat for a while, leading a narrowed life. But I did carve out some time last weekend for something special: a first-ever viewing of The Godfather on the big screen, and a gorgeous new print at that. In a recent story in Slate, Fred Kaplan walked readers through the heroically painstaking process through which Coppola's masterpiece, and its even greater sequel, were restored to their original glory.
The quality of the picture and sound, and of course the liberation from living-room scale, made the film a new experience. We noticed details that were easy to lose in the background in previous viewings--a tear in Tom Hagen's eye in one scene and numerous details of setting throughout. But Al Pacino's performance is the element that most benefits from the restoration as far as I'm concerned. It's a more subtle and powerful performance than I knew before. And it's all in the eyes.
The transformation of Michael Corleone is tracked as much in his countenance and expression as in his speech, actions, and gestures. Pacino conveys all of this with terrific restraint, building his performance from the eyes out. After the incident outside the hospital, Michael becomes a strikingly more self-contained figure--composed, calculating, and almost shrunken--so that the eyes become his main conduit of expression. They're darting and furtive in the earliest scenes following the blow to Michael's face, the scenes in which the hits on Sollozzo and McCluskey are planned and carried out and Michael is still making rookie mistakes like betraying his surprise when the car gets on a bridge to Jersey. But the eyes themselves eventually come under discipline, too, growing steady and dead well before the final settling of accounts.
The new print is an electrifying experience, and one that really makes you lament what's happened to Pacino. If you knew him only from such latter-day growling and bellowing as his performances in, say, Heat and Any Given Sunday, would you even recognize him here?
I can hardly wait to see Part II.
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TT: Snapshot
Truman Capote talks to a CBC interviewer in 1966 about how he came to write In Cold Blood:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
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TT: Almanac
"People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news."
A.J. Liebling, "A Talkative Something or Other" (The New Yorker, Apr. 7, 1956)
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October 7, 2008
CAAF: Morning coffee
• Richard Eder's view of Ted Hughes is more chilly than my own, but his review of Hughes's collection of letters, just released stateside, is still worth a read.
• A great interview with Kelly Link, whose new collection of short stories Pretty Monsters I got this past weekend and am loving. (Via Gwenda. She also notes that Link's previous collection, Magic for Beginners, is now available for free download.)
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CAAF: Not waving but glassy, choppy, & violent
In the October issue of Poetry, William Logan writes about the responses he received to his review of Hart Crane's Complete Poems and Selected Letters, which ran last year in the New York Times Book Review. As Logan puts it, "I've always loved Hart Crane; but I love him in fractions, delighting in half a dozen of those rhapsodic poems long on style and short on sense but finding the rest mystifying as a Masonic ritual." Perhaps inevitably, some readers took issue with this mixed assessment and wrote in "furious" letters to the editor, leading Logan to conclude, "[r]eviewing Crane, if you don't review him fondly, is like poking a pencil into a hornet's nest."
Little of Logan's experience will surprise anyone who's ever expressed a dissenting opinion as a critic, but it can be enjoyable to have a look at other people's hate mail. And an interesting side issue crops up in the essay about the factual, if not critical, errors that Logan made in his review, all of which fell in the review's first sentence, "Before Hart Crane's leap into the Caribbean that fatal April noon in 1932, he folded his jacket over the ship's rail with impeccable manners. Striking out into the glassy sea, he was seen no more, dying younger than Byron but older than Shelley."
As Crane biographer Paul Mariani pointed out in his own letter to the editor, that sentence contains three errors: Crane was wearing a light topcoat that day, not a jacket, the sea in question wasn't the Caribbean but the Atlantic, and the water wasn't "glassy" but had "sizable waves."
Logan cedes the first two points but notes there's conflicting opinion among Crane's four biographers about what exactly the conditions of the water were that day at noon -- which then leads him to a nice consideration of the role of fact vs. fantasy in the summing up of someone else's life (or is it factual truth vs. truth truth?):
Mariani fails in The Broken Tower to describe the roughness of the ocean (he mentions the "impenetrable waters off which the noon sun gleamed," which doesn't sound choppy or rugged); Philip Horton in Hart Crane claims the "sea was mild"; and Clive Fisher, quoting Guggenheim in Hart Crane: A Life, says the sea was "like a mirror that could be walked on." [In a later version of the review] I changed my "glassy sea" to a "violent wake" (the wake, some think, dragged Crane under). On balance, however, the "glassy sea" seems likely.In his description of Crane's death, Mariani was attracted to the captain's notion that the poet might have been eaten by a shark--"Did he feel something brush his leg, the file-sharp streaking side of concentrated muscle, before the silver flash and teeth pulled him under?" This is sheer moonshine, but a biographer's fantasies--and gruesome fantasies they are--don't mitigate the critic's error of fact. (The biographer then throws some of Crane's purple prose--or rather purple poetry-- back at him: "But this time the calyx of death's bounty gave back neither scattered chapter nor livid hieroglyph." The allusion is to "At Melville's Tomb," but as prose it sounds like a canceled passage by Sir Thomas Browne.) The aggrieved reader's fondest delusion is that a critic's sidelong errors undermine a disagreement about taste; yet don't we prefer Eliot's opinions, despite his habitual misquotation, to the arguments of some bozo supported by quotes correct to the last nicety? That doesn't make the errors less embarrassing.
In the run of things, a small scholarly kerfuffle, but one that's stayed with me, maybe because it's suggestive of the two great difficulties of writing -- how hard it is to enter other people's minds, to see the world and think as your characters or subjects do (we don't know what was in Hart Crane's mind before he leapt, we can't even agree on what the sea looked like in front of him), and then to actually write well & with accuracy about what you find there. For example, it is hard to write well and with particularity about the sea -- whether it is "glassy" or "violent" or "immense" or "wet." Here, for what it's worth, is Herman Melville describing conditions at the outset of Benito Cereno, "The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything grey. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that had cooled and set in the smelter's mould."
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TT: Almanac
"The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."
Frank Lloyd Wright (quoted in The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 4, 1953)
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October 6, 2008
TT: Fortunate son
As I mentioned the other day, Mrs. T and I are spending the week in Cleveland, seeing shows and hitting museums. We are, amazingly enough, quartered in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, about which much more later. Unfortunately--or not--the house in question is Web-unfriendly, so any blogging I do this week beyond the routine and regular almanac entries, weekly video, and theater-related postings will be catch as catch can.
I say "or not" because Mrs. T and I are greatly looking forward to having a bit of time to ourselves. We were married a year ago tomorrow, and we'll be celebrating our first anniversary by seeing Noises Off, the funniest play ever written, at the Cleveland Play House, having what I hope will be a very nice dinner, and reveling in the always-special experience of spending the night with Frank Lloyd Wright. We'd just as soon not invite anyone else over, if you know what I mean.
I make regular mention of Mrs. T on this blog, so I expect you've long since figured out that our marriage has proved to be a rip-roaring success. She wouldn't want me to blather on about it, but since she's asleep in the next room and doesn't know that I'm writing these words, I'll add one thing more: I never expected to be as happy as I am now, and Hilary is the reason why it happened. I met her a bit less than three years ago, a few weeks before I fell victim to the illness that nearly killed me. I had already come to the reluctant and unwelcome conclusion that I would be spending whatever was left of my life flying solo, and by then I was starting to wonder whether that time might be short. Instead I fell in love, got well, got married, wrote a biography and an opera libretto, and discovered that there was much to be said for embarking on my fifth decade.
I am, in short, a very lucky man--but meeting Mrs. T was the best piece of luck I ever had, and I don't expect to top it. Or want to. Or need to.
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Our Girl and CAAF will be taking it from here for the rest of the week. See you next Monday.
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TT: Almanac
"It wasn't until I got to New York that I became a Kansan. Everyone there kept reminding me that they were Jewish or Irish, or whatever, so I kept reminding them that I was midwestern. Before I knew it, I actually began to brag about being from Kansas! I discovered I had something unique, but it was the nature of New York that forced me to claim my past."
William Inge (quoted in Ralph F. Voss, A Life of William Inge)
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October 3, 2008
TT: A noisy Seagull
In today's Wall Street Journal I review the new Broadway production of The Seagull and a very rare revival by Chicago's Strawdog Theatre Company of Karel Capek's R.U.R.. I had fair-to-partly-cloudy feelings about The Seagull, but R.U.R. knocked me out. Here's an excerpt.
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It's been eight years since any play by Anton Chekhov was last seen on Broadway, and 15 since Tony Randall's National Actors Theatre performed "The Seagull" there. So the arrival in town of the Royal Court Theatre's highly praised production of 2007, in which Kristin Scott Thomas ("The English Patient") plays Arkadina, ought to be cause for celebration. Sure enough, Ian Rickson has given us a carefully considered staging, one that makes sense on paper--yet I never managed to warm up to it, or felt myself drawn into Chekhov's world, in which comedy and tragedy are tied together so tightly that you can't tell them apart.
Not until well into the second act did I figure out what was bothering me. Especially in Christopher Hampton's new English-language version, this is a very British "Seagull," but not in the pale, old-fashioned way: I've never seen a production of "The Seagull" that was played so successfully, even relentlessly, for laughs. Up to a point this is as it should be, but Mr. Rickson's staging is over-emphatic and overly detailed, often to the point of outright fussiness. Nobody throws anything away--every moment is made to register--and much of the play's poignancy, at least for me, got lost in the resulting clutter. Compared to the Classic Stage Company's recent Off-Broadway "Seagull," which was as intimate as it was immediate, this production struck me as both too big and (so to speak) too noisy....
The word "robot" was introduced to the world by the Czech playwright Karel Capek in "R.U.R.," a play that was first performed in 1921 and ran for four performances on Broadway in 1942. Now you know all I knew about "R.U.R." when I went to see it in Chicago last week. It is, to be sure, known by name to most people with a serious interest in science fiction or Central European drama, but I'd never seen it on stage, nor has it been professionally performed in this country at any time in my memory. I went partly out of curiosity and partly because I was so impressed by Strawdog Theatre Company's electrifying 2007 production of Brian Friel's "Aristocrats" that I wanted to see if it had been a fluke. I'm happy to report that lightning struck twice: Strawdog's "R.U.R." is a major revival of a play that turns out to be far more than a mere historical curiosity.
"R.U.R." is a tale of modernity run amok, the story of Rossum's Universal Robots, an island factory that manufactures lifelike but soulless artificial humans in vast quantities, then ships them all over Europe to grateful purchasers who use them to do their dirty work. This being science fiction, things inevitably go wrong: Dr. Gall (John Henry Roberts), one of the white-coated scientists in the employ of Rossum's Universal Robots, makes the fatal mistake of building a few hundred robots that can feel emotions, upon which all hell breaks well and truly loose....
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Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Full disclosure
This is the last paragraph of today's Wall Street Journal drama column, in its entirety:
Footnote: Hildegard Bechtler, who designed the sets and costumes for the Royal Court Theatre's production of "The Seagull," is also working on the Santa Fe Opera's 2009 premiere of Paul Moravec's "The Letter," an opera for which I wrote the libretto. For the record, I have never had any contact of any kind with Ms. Bechtler, didn't recommend her to the Santa Fe Opera, and didn't even know that she had designed "The Seagull" until I read the press release for the show a couple of weeks ago.I never expected to have to publish such an author's note in the Journal. Bechtler is based in Europe, not the United States, and the only other time her work (which I admire greatly) has been seen on Broadway was when the National Theatre of Great Britain's production of Anthony Sher's Primo came to New York in the summer of 2005 for a month-long run, long before I knew that she would have anything to do with The Letter.
As soon as I found out that Bechtler had designed The Seagull, I e-mailed my editors at the paper to ask what they wanted me to do. After due consideration they decided that I could write about The Seagull, provided that I said nothing about Bechtler's sets or costumes and disclosed my professional connection to her at the end of the review. Needless to say, I did just that.
I mention all this because I thought you'd like to know how such matters are handled at The Wall Street Journal, and that I take them as seriously as the Journal does.
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TT: Almanac
"My stage successes have provided me with the greatest moments outside myself, my film successes the best moments, professionally, within myself."
Laurence Olivier, On Acting
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October 2, 2008
CAAF: Late morning coffee
• O happy (yet ominously overcast Gothic) day! From Galleycat, news of Donna Tartt's third novel.
• The correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell makes clear how the poets "developed in tandem": Editing, inspiring, cold-mugging one another.
• A tour of entrepreneur Jay Walker's incredible personal library. (Via Gwenda.)
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TT: Wrapping it up
I got a bit ahead of myself when I declared at the beginning of September that I'd just put "one last coat of polish on the manuscript" of my Louis Armstrong biography. In fact I ended up doing another month's worth of work on the book, in part because the jazz critic Dan Morgenstern, who knew Armstrong and was kind enough to read the previous draft, sent me a batch of additional notes on the last few chapters. That gave me an excuse to do some further polishing, in the course of which I unearthed more source material...and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. Of the making of books there is no end, saith the Preacher, and he sure knew what he was talking about.
But all things, even the writing of a primary-source biography, must come to an end, and the writing of this book ended on Tuesday night after Mrs. T, who read the manuscript over the weekend, gave me the last of her editorial suggestions, which I hastened to adopt. I read through the whole book from start to finish, and at long last I heard the click in my mind's ear that told me to lay down my blue pencil. It's finished, I said to myself, and I could feel my body slackening with relief as I said it.
On Wednesday morning I e-mailed Andrea Schulz, my editor at Harcourt, to let her know that I was ready to discuss the placement in the text of the "images" of Armstrong (as they're now known in the book trade) that will be included in the published version. She'd already commented in detail on what turned out to be the antepenultimate draft, so the next thing I did was e-mail her the complete finished manuscript. No fanfare, no fuss: I clicked a few keys and off it went, and that was that.
Andrea had already told me that the sales force at Harcourt was lukewarm about "Rhythm Man" as a title, so I went back to the drawing board. Alas, I was getting nowhere fast when she sent me another e-mail in which she mentioned a description by the trumpeter Rex Stewart of a performance given by Armstrong in the early Thirties:
Louis bounced onto the opposite stage, immaculate in a white suit. Somehow, the way the lights reflected off his trumpet made the instrument look like anything but a horn. It looked as if he were holding a wand of rainbows or a cluster of sunlight."Might there be a title there?" she said. "It has a poetic ring to it."
I riffled through the prologue of the book, in which Andrea had found Stewart's description, and ran across the following passage:
The trumpeter Max Kaminsky told of how "the combination of Louis's dazzling virtuosity and sensational brilliance of tone so overwhelmed me that I felt as if I had stared into the sun's eye." Such imagery came easily to those who heard Armstrong in his halcyon days. The poet Philip Larkin, a part-time jazz critic and lifelong fan, praised him in similar terms, calling him "something inexhaustible and unchanging like the sun."A Cluster of Sunlight: The Life of Louis Armstrong, I thought. Not too shabby.
Mrs. T agreed, as did Dan Morgenstern. I Googled the phrase and found it to be unique to Stewart. It looked nice when I dummied up a new title page, and it still looks nice a month later. So that's the new title of my book, and unlike the last one, I think it's going to stick.
Now I'm finished with research, finished with tinkering, ready to put A Cluster of Sunlight aside. As of now, anything I don't already know about the life and work of Louis Armstrong isn't worth knowing, at least as far as I'm concerned. Much, to be sure, remains to be done before the book goes to press a year from now. I still have to pick the images, write the captions, answer the copyeditor's queries, fill out the publicity questionnaire, sign off on the design, edit the galleys, approve the flap copy, and write a stump speech. But the hard part is really and truly over, and though that fact has yet to soak in, I expect that it'll hit me like a tidal wave at some point in the next week or two.
At which point...what? Post-partum depression, more than likely. Or maybe not. After all, I've still got an opera to finish, not to mention my usual full plate of theater-related work. And the exhilaration that goes along with wrapping up a large-scale project takes a fair amount of time to dissipate.
As I wrote in this space four and a half years ago:
Three months ago, All in the Dances didn't exist. Over the years I'd told dozens of people all about George Balanchine's life and work, but every time I had to start fresh. Now there's an inch-thick pile of paper on my kitchen table with a title page on top, the gateway to a world I made, and even though I'll be reviewing a Broadway play tomorrow morning, then writing my Washington Post column in the afternoon, part of me is still back in that world of shadows.That's why I wanted to tell you now about how it felt--and how it feels. I want to enjoy it just a little while longer before I return to the world of daylight and deadlines.
I feel that way today, and I expect I'll feel the same way tomorrow. This is the longest and most ambitious book I've written, and I think it's worthy of the great and good man who is its subject. In the end, of course, that will be for others to say, not me, but so far they haven't read it. As of this morning, only seven living people have read A Cluster of Sunlight, and I'm one of them. The other six claim to like it as much as I do.
The rest of the world can wait: today I'm content.
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