May 20, 2013
TT: In the beginning
When Mrs. T and I went to see Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites at the Metropolitan Opera last week, the program contained a New York City Ballet ad that was illustrated by a still photograph of the finale from George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments, a ballet choreographed in 1946 to a score that Balanchine had commissioned six years earlier from Paul Hindemith. No sooner did my eye fall on the page than my mind filled with memories. I think that The Four Ts (as it is known to dancers and dance buffs) is the greatest of all ballets, and one of the greatest works of art of any kind, in any genre. I've seen it more often than any other ballet, and I've never done so without seeing new things in it.
I love what Jerome Robbins said about the coda of The Four Temperaments: "At the end, where there are those great soaring lifts, I always feel as if I am watching some momentous departure--like interplanetary travellers taking their leave of the world." This is what I wrote about the same moment in All in the Dances, my Balanchine biography: "To me, it is as if I have beheld the working out of a fearsomely complex equation whose triumphant solution causes the universe to explode into being."
If seeing a ballet can change your life, then The Four Temperaments changed mine. In the fall of 1987 I saw a PBS documentary about Balanchine that contained excerpts from several of his ballets, including a lengthy sequence from "Melancholic," the second section of The Four Temperaments. I was so fascinated by it--as I had already been fascinated by what Arlene Croce wrote about Balanchine in her New Yorker dance reviews--that I resolved to see for myself what his works looked like in the theater.
What followed was an instantaneous conversion: I bought a cheap seat for a New York City Ballet performance a few weeks later, and before the year was out, I was hanging out with dance critics and writing about dance for the late, lamented New Dance Review. Who would have thought that seventeen years later, I would write a Balanchine biography? Life is full of unimaginable surprises.
New York City Ballet taped a performance of The Four Temperaments for PBS in 1977, and it has since been released on home video. But Smalltown, U.S.A., was far beyond the reach of public television in 1977, and so I had to wait another decade before discovering Balanchine. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like had I seen The Four Ts on TV when I was eleven years old.
Mr. B, as his dancers called him, has been on my mind ever since I reviewed Richard Nelson's Nikolai and the Others, in which Michael Cerveris, one of my favorite actors, plays the choreographer. I had various problems with the script, but none with Cerveris, and watching him on stage filled me with an overwhelming desire to see Balanchine's choreography in the theater again.
Mrs. T, sad to say, has seen next to no Balanchine--we met after my duties as a drama critic made it difficult for me to attend dance performances--and so I checked the NYCB calendar and saw that the company will be dancing three of the best ones, Concerto Barocco, Stravinsky Violin Concerto, and Stars and Stripes on June 9. We'll be there.
Would that The Four Ts were on the bill, but this program will do quite nicely, especially since Barocco was the first dance that I saw on that fateful night in 1987 when I made Mr. B's acquaintance. It'll be nice to see it again, and nicer still to introduce it to Mrs. T. All pleasures are better when they're shared.
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Choreography by Balanchine, Part One, originally telecast on PBS in 1977. The works performed are Tzigane, an excerpt from Divertimento No. 15, and The Four Temperaments:
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TT: Just because
Donald Wolfit and Hildegarde Knef in a scene from Svengali, the 1954 film version of George Du Maurier's novel, written and directed by Noel Langley:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
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TT: Almanac
"The author should shut his mouth when his work opens its mouth."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Mixed Opinions and Maxims (courtesy of Alex Ross)
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May 17, 2013
TT: "Thus I turn my back"
Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to a Washington show, the Shakespeare Theatre Company's new production of Coriolanus. Here's a excerpt.
* * *
Why has "Coriolanus" never been popular? It's only been mounted once on Broadway--in 1938. The last time that I reviewed a production in this space was eight years ago. Yet connoisseurs need no reminding of the immense stature of Shakespeare's most explicitly political play. T.S. Eliot ranked "Coriolanus" above "Hamlet," calling it "Shakespeare's most assured artistic success." A man I know who used to work for one of America's best-known politicians claims that it's one of only two pieces of literary art that tells the whole truth about politics (the other, he says, is "All the King's Men"). And if you should be lucky enough to see Shakespeare Theatre Company's new production, directed by David Muse and featuring a towering performance by Patrick Page, you'll come away wondering why it doesn't get done regularly by every drama company in America....
Mr. Muse has opted for a modified modern-dress staging ("suits and swords," in his neat phrase) that eschews cheap political point-making. He's gunning for bigger game. He understands that "Coriolanus" is not about any particular politician, or any particular war: Its real subject is pride. Is there room in a democracy for an aristocrat like Coriolanus who refuses to play the popularity game? Or is it his duty to don the hypocrite's mask in order to serve the greater good? Shakespeare leaves it to us to decide, and so does Mr. Muse.
All of which brings us to Mr. Page, who is known on Broadway as a specialist in villainy. In recent seasons he's done the dirty in "Cyrano de Bergerac," "A Man for All Seasons" and "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark," in which he played, of all things, the Green Goblin. But he's no second banana: Mr. Page is one of this country's leading classical actors, and in "Coriolanus" he shows you everything he's got, starting with a resplendent bass voice so well placed that he can fill the theater with a whisper, then make your seat shake. He is, in the very best sense of the word, an old-fashioned actor who has no fear of the grand gesture....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Almanac
"Of all the cants that are canted in this world, though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, the cant of criticism is the most tormenting."
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
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May 16, 2013
TT: In the mirror
Gotham Books sent me the "first-pass pages" of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington yesterday afternoon. Translated into English, that means a two-inch stack of photocopied pages containing the typeset text of Duke, fully designed and copyedited but as yet uncorrected by me. You may have heard these pages referred to as "page proofs," a term that I'm still in the habit of using.
No matter how many books you've seen through the press, you always feel a surge of excitement when you get your first look at a set of your own page proofs. (I actually got weak in the knees when I opened the envelope.) Until that moment, you don't know what the text of your book will look like to the people who read it. Then, in an instant, it becomes real--and fresh.
In my case, I spent so much time painstakingly editing and polishing the manuscript of Duke that it eventually went dead on me: I could still follow the text sentence by sentence, but I lost my ability to hear how it sounded. Now that the book is finally set in type, it's come back to life again.
I stayed up late last night reading the page proofs of Duke, and I liked what I read. Needless to say, it helped that they look so good--Elke Sigal's typographical design is flat-out gorgeous, and I'm no less happy with the illustrations--but I'll admit to being equally pleased with the text, at least for now.
To be sure, I doubt that Ellington himself would have cared for the book. He was far too secretive to appreciate a biography that told the truth about his complicated life. As I wrote in the prologue to Duke:
The rage, the humiliation, the unbridled sensuality: All were kept far from prying eyes. His fans saw only what he wished them to see, and nothing more. So did his colleagues. "I think all the musicians should get together one certain day and get down on their knees and thank Duke," said Miles Davis. Yet to Ellington's own musicians, he was a riddle without an answer, an unknowable man who hid behind a high wall of ornate utterances and flowery compliments that grew higher as he grew older.Still, I like to think that Ellington might at least have appreciated the fact that I took his life and work with the utmost seriousness, and tried to write about them in a way that mirrors, however dimly, the beauty of his music.
Can I make Duke even better? Maybe--but not for long. I have two weeks to make my final corrections to the text. After that, I'm done. It's time.
UPDATE: I started correcting the page proofs this afternoon, and the first thing I saw was a mixed metaphor...on the third page. It's going to be a long day.
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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.
BROADWAY:
• Annie (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Nance (play with music, PG-13, extended through Aug. 11, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, extended through Sept. 1, reviewed here)
• Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (comedy, PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, extended through July 28, original production reviewed here)OFF BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Women of Will (Shakespearean lecture-recital, G/PG-13, closes May 26, reviewed here)CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:
• Pal Joey (musical, PG-13, closing May 26, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:
• Woman in Mind (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY IN WESTPORT, CONN.:
• The Dining Room (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Orphans (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense."
Samuel Johnson, The Idler (June 9, 1759)
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May 15, 2013
TT: Snapshot
"The Cat Concerto," directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, released in 1947:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
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TT: Almanac
"It is meat and drink to me to see a clown."
William Shakespeare, As You Like It
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May 14, 2013
TT: Eyeroller
Yes, I read SkyMall whenever I fly, and on my last flight I ran across this listing for a product described as "The Wordsmith's Manual Typewriter":
This is the manual typewriter that recalls the thoughtful, well-written correspondence of yesteryear. Devoid of technological crutches such as spellcheck and deletion, each of its 44 keys requires a firm, purposeful stroke for a steady click-clacking cadence that encourages the patient, considered sentiment of a wordsmith who thinks before writing. It faithfully reproduces the eclectic printed impressions of its forebears--variable kerning, subtly ghosted letters, and nuanced baseline shifts--imparting unique, personal character to every letter or verse of poetry.So you, too, can now purchase a Retro-Ironic Manual Typewriter for just $199.95!
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TT: Lookback
From 2006:
I had a nightmare in Chicago last weekend, a few hours after seeing a performance of Gore Vidal's The Best Man, in which one of the characters tells an old friend that he's dying. A couple of weeks before that, I'd seen Breaker Morant, a movie that ends with an explicitly gory firing-squad scene, and in between I had occasion to chat with a friend about Dialogues of the Carmelites, the Poulenc opera whose climax is a procession to the guillotine by a group of nuns who have been condemned to death by a revolutionary tribunal. All these experiences somehow became scrambled in my head, and I dreamed that I was watching a long line of nuns who were being led one by one into an adjacent room, where an unseen executioner shot them to death. At some point in the dream, I realized that I was standing in the same line...Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Almanac
"What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills."
George Santayana, The Life of Reason
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May 13, 2013
TT: The persistence of memory
Nowadays I review so many plays and musicals, both in New York and elsewhere, that it's growing more and more difficult for me to find the time to attend live performances of any other kind. Mrs. T, who loves music as much as I do but prefers to hear it in person, frequently expresses wistful regret at this state of affairs, so I decided to take her to the opera--and not just any opera, either, but the Metropolitan Opera's revival of John Dexter's 1977 production of Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites.
Dexter's Dialogues is one of the greatest stage productions of any kind, operatic or otherwise, that I've had the good fortune to see in my entire theatergoing life. Mrs. T saw it once, a quarter-century ago. (This was the performance that she saw.) I've seen it twice, most recently in 2002. When I suggested that we go again, she squealed with delight.
I blush to admit that the last time I went to the Met--or, indeed, to any performance of an opera not written by me--was in 2009, when I saw Puccini's Trittico. One of the stars of that production was Patricia Racette, the soprano who created the role of Leslie Crosbie in The Letter, my first operatic collaboration with Paul Moravec. Pat, as it happens, is also in the Met's revival of Dlalogues. When I saw the opera there in 2002, she played Blanche, a young woman from an aristocratic family who joins a Carmelite convent whose nuns are guillotined at the height of the French Revolution. This time around she played Madame Lidoine, the convent's newly elected prioress.
Pat was born in 1965, nine years after me. I saw her perform for the first time in 1998, when she replaced Renée Fleming (who in turn had replaced Angela Gheorghiu) in Franco Zeffirelli's then-new Met production of La Traviata. I reviewed that performance for the New York Daily News, and flung my hat as far into the air as I could:
Racette is no airheaded coloratura canary, but an outstandingly gifted singing actress who uses her bright, vibrant voice as an instrument of high drama. She caught the hectic desperation just below the surface of the forced gaiety of "Sempre libera," and moved boldly from the black despair of "Addio del passato" to the heart-tearing false hope of the death scene. The wild cheering at evening's end was fully deserved: Rarely has an American soprano made so much of so great an opportunity.While I have a reasonably active imagination, it never occurred to me that night that I would write an opera of my own for Pat eleven years later. Even then I was more than old enough to know that life is full of surprises, but that particular surprise was far beyond my power to conceive.
Now that I have two opera libretti under my belt and a third one in the works, it seemed appropriate to be sitting again in the Metropolitan Opera House, watching Pat assume a new, more mature role in Dialogues. To be sure, it was also sobering--a reminder of my own advancing age--but I don't think it's such a bad thing to be forced on occasion to reflect on such matters. No, I'm not as young as I used to be, but I'm still kicking, and the surprises, at least so far, keep on coming.
As for Dialogues of the Carmelites, I find the Met's production to be as moving today as I did in 1994 and 2002. In 2004 I saw yet another production, this one by the New York City Opera, and blogged about it no less enthusiastically. Nine years later the opera itself means even more to me, if possible, just as Poulenc's music continues to grow closer to my heart. I wrote about him in The Wall Street Journal a few months ago, and what I said then still goes:
Poulenc himself aspired to being nothing more than (as he put it) "an almost great composer." What he ended up being was France's last indisputably major classical composer, a full-fledged master who was capable of effortlessly expressing the full range of human emotion without lapsing into empty grandiloquence. If that doesn't make him great, then the word means nothing.
What I love best about his music is the way in which, like so many other French masters, it says serious things in a seemingly light way. Dialogues is like that. It is, of course, deadly serious, but the score is never heavy in tone, not even at the very end. Here as always, Poulenc says what he has to say with elegance and lucidity, and his grave reflections on a horrific tragedy are all the more touching for it.
It amused me, by the way, to note that the Met performed Götterdämmerung earlier that same day. Whatever you may think of the music of Richard Wagner, I somehow doubt that the words "light," "elegance," or "lucidity" are likely to figure prominently in your thoughts. Wagner is, I know, a greater master than Poulenc, but I don't think that matters in the least. It is Poulenc who speaks most powerfully to me, and I'm glad that it was Poulenc who welcomed Mrs. T and me back to the Met after too long an absence.
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The finale of John Dexter's Metropolitan Opera production of Dialogues of the Carmelites, telecast on PBS in 1987. The role of Blanche is sung by Maria Ewing:
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TT: Just because
The Jimmy Smith Trio plays "The Sermon" in 1964:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
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TT: Almanac
"The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable."
Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
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May 10, 2013
TT: "A solid, serviceable copy"
In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I review an out-of-town show, Westport Country Playhouse's revival of A.R. Gurney's The Dining Room, and an off-Broadway premiere, Richard Nelson's Nikolai and the Others. The first is without flaw, the second variously problematic. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
Nobody directs the plays of A.R. Gurney with deeper comprehension than Mark Lamos. Now that Mr. Lamos is running Connecticut's Westport Country Playhouse, it stands to reason that he should have chosen to kick off its new season with a superior revival of "The Dining Room," Mr. Gurney's most fully realized portrayal of the fast-vanishing world of upper-middle-class privilege into which he was born 82 years ago. I've seen "The Dining Room" done extremely well in recent years, most recently in Keen Company's 2007 Off-Broadway production, but I can't imagine it being done better than this.
First performed Off Broadway in 1981, "The Dining Room" is a piece of virtuoso stagecraft, an extended one-act play in which six actors portray 57 characters, nearly all of whom are WASPs who live or have lived in the same old-fashioned house at various times between the 30's and 70's. We see them in youth and old age, joy and despair, assurance and confusion, but though they are almost always shown to us with a smile, we are never allowed to doubt that time has passed them by--and that it should have done so. It is that iron conviction which charges Mr. Gurney's witty vignettes with the bite that keeps "The Dining Room" from dissolving into soft-centered charm....
Mr. Lamos' ideal cast consists of Heidi Armbruster, Chris Henry Coffey, Keira Naughton, Jake Robards, Charles Socarides and Jennifer Van Dyck. They act together as though they were (dare I say it?) members of the same family....
"Nikolai and the Others," Richard Nelson's new history play, is actually three shows in one:
• A school-of-Chekhov character study of Igor Stravinsky (John Glover), George Balanchine (Michael Cerveris) and the other Russian émigrés who played key roles in postwar American culture.
• A backstage play about the making of "Orpheus," the now-classic dance that Balanchine and Stravinsky created for the New York City Ballet in 1948.
• An anti-anti-Communist docudrama about Nicolas Nabokov (Stephen Kunken), a second-rate émigré composer turned cultural bureaucrat who helped the CIA to secretly funnel money to the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which propagandized on behalf of liberal democracy at home and abroad by sponsoring high-culture projects of various kinds.
That's a lot of plot for one play, especially when it contains 18 characters whose personal relationships are so knotty that they're outlined in the cast list. Tom Stoppard himself might have had trouble shaping it into a dramatically coherent structure, and Mr. Nelson doesn't succeed in stitching "Nikolai and the Others" together very tightly. What works best is his group portrait of the Russian-speaking community, which is sketched with sweetness and sensitivity. The part about "Orpheus," by contrast, is insufficiently developed, while the cold-war subplot is "fictionalized" to the point of caricature, distortion and frequent falsehood....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Sing along with Cicely
In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column I talk about how audiences respond differently to different art forms--and how the unexpected response to the Broadway revival of The Trip to Bountiful enhances the effect of the show. Here's an excerpt.
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Carrie Watts, the character played by Cicely Tyson in the Broadway revival of Horton Foote's "The Trip to Bountiful," is an old woman from a small Texas town who likes to sing hymns to herself. When Ms. Tyson did so at the preview performance that I saw a couple of weeks ago, a fair number of people in the theater sang along with her. It didn't look to me as though she was trying to encourage them, either: They just joined in.
I wondered whether the same thing was happening at other performances. Then I got this e-mail from a friend who had seen the play the preceding week: "Did the audience sing along with the hymns on the night you saw 'Bountiful'? Three women sitting next to me started singing along, softly at first, and by the second hymn a good part of the audience was joyously singing with them. The theatre was everyone's church that night, not just mine. To describe it sounds hokey, but it was anything but." I couldn't agree more, and it reminded me anew that the unpredictability of the audience can be one of the most thrilling aspects of a live performance....
I wonder whether the fact that Michael Wilson's revival of Mr. Foote's play features a mostly black cast might have something to do with the way in which audiences are reacting to it. In my experience, a theater audience that contains a significant number of blacks is prone to be more vocal in its response to a show. When an actor speaks a line that strikes a chord with black theatergoers, many of them will say "Uh-HUH!" or "That's right!" out loud. Black churchgoers, of course, often do the same thing at Sunday-morning services, and I suspect that the amen-like responses of black theatergoers are a not-so-distant echo of that old-time religion....
I'll never forget seeing George Balanchine's "Prodigal Son" performed by Dance Theatre of Harlem for a mostly black audience. At one point in the ballet, the dancers unexpectedly form a human merry-go-round. I'd seen it happen a half-dozen times without incident in the past, but that night the audience let out a huge whoop of delight at the sheer cheekiness of Balanchine's choreography. And did I join in? You bet....
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Read the whole thing here.
An excerpt from George Balanchine's Prodigal Son, performed by Mikhail Baryshnikov, Karin von Aroldingen, and New York City Ballet. The score is by Sergei Prokofiev:
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TT: Almanac
"Authors give away their books like drug barons give free snorts, hoping to start an expensive addiction."
Reginald Hill, Death's Jest-Book (courtesy of Mrs. T)
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May 9, 2013
TT: Long distance, please
Paul Moravec, my operatic collaborator, is currently in residence at the American Academy in Rome. He's writing the score of The King's Man, our third opera, which opens in Louisville in October.
As for me, I've been tearing around America ever since the Broadway season ended--but not this week. Mrs. T, spotting four dark days on my calendar, suggested that we might want to spend them taking a work-free mini-vacation at Ecce Bed and Breakfast, our beloved and indispensable Delaware River retreat. That sounded good to me, so we drove to Ecce on Monday and proceeded to do...nothing. Lots of nothing. We slept late, ate tasty breakfasts, sat in the sun, read in the afternoons, and watched movies at night (among them The Ladykillers, The Man in the White Suit, and Citizen Kane).
All that relaxation notwithstanding, Paul and I did manage to cross paths--in cyberspace. I spent most of yesterday afternoon revising the libretto of The King's Man, then e-mailing new text to Rome for him to set. He e-mailed the music back to me as soon as he finished composing it. At one point we were working in something not far removed from real time.
Was I breaking my solemn promise not to work during our mini-vacation? I think not, and Mrs. T agrees. Revision is pleasurable puttering. Drafting is work--sometimes hard, sometimes less so, but ever and always work. Revising, by contrast, is mostly pure fun, like solving a wonderfully complex puzzle. Writing a first draft sometimes feels like putting together a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces are blank.
So I enjoyed myself yesterday, very much so, not least because I was thoroughly bemused by the fact that I was spending the day in close harness with someone who was halfway around the world from me. (Somehow I doubt that Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal did it that way.) Yet I was glad to wrap up my puttering, shoot a new draft of The King's Man off to Rome, and resume the no less satisfying "job" of listening to the peaceful sound of rain falling on Ecce's sturdy roof.
We're still at Ecce, by the way, and utterly happy to be. You can never spend enough time doing nothing.
* * *
Waylon Jennings sings "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way" at the Grand Ole Opry in 1978:
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