About Last Night

In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I report on plans for the first revival of Jerome Robbins’ Broadway since it closed a quarter-century ago. Here’s an excerpt.

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Most people who go to the theater regularly keep a little list of unforgettable shows. Mine is topped by “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” the 1989 revue in which Broadway’s greatest choreographer restaged an evening’s worth of his production numbers from “Billion Dollar Baby,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “Gypsy,” “High Button Shoes,” “The King and I,” “Peter Pan,” “On the Town” and “West Side Story.” I’m not old enough to have seen the original productions of any of the 15 musicals that Robbins choreographed between 1944 and 1964, when he left Broadway to concentrate on ballet. I figured I’d never get another chance to see their dances staged by the master himself, so I bought a ticket to the first preview. I went back five more times—all on my own dollar….

One of the reasons why I kept going back was that I took for granted that the show was too complicated and expensive an undertaking to be more than a one-shot event. I was right. After a 633-performance Broadway run, it toured 12 cities, closing in Los Angeles in February of 1991. It has never been performed since then. So I was flabbergasted—no gentler word will suffice—when St. Louis’ Muny, America’s largest and oldest outdoor musical theater, announced last week that it would revive “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” in the summer of 2018 as part of its 100th-anniversary season….

Why does the revival of a quarter-century-old musical-comedy revue matter so much? The answer lies in the evanescent nature of choreography. Unlike music, it isn’t written down (though dance steps can be notated after the fact). Unless a concerted attempt is made to preserve a dance, it vanishes into thin air after its last performance—and surprisingly few attempts have been made to document the great Broadway dance numbers….

“Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” actually began life in 1987 as an attempt by Robbins to resurrect some of the dances from his other shows. “I hated the idea that they were just disappearing,” he said. So he invited a group of aging Broadway gypsies to help him reconstruct the “Bathing Beauty Ballet” dance, an homage to silent-movie slapstick comedy, from “High Button Shoes.” The results were so successful that he decided to put together a full-evening retrospective that would give a new generation of theatergoers “a taste of the years I worked on Broadway.” To revive it now is—quite literally—a historic event….

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Read the whole thing here.

A TV commercial for the original 1989 production of Jerome Robbins’ Broadway:

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:
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Prince of Broadway (musical revue, PG-13, some shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Home Place (drama, PG-13, closes Nov. 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Mary Jane (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PHILADELPHIA:
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• A View from the Bridge (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

“Apart from needing money, the only reason to write is to face one’s pathologies.”

Christopher Shinn (interviewed by Jessie Thompson in the Evening Standard, August 10, 2017)

Pablo Casals plays Bach’s First Unaccompanied Cello Suite in 1954 at the Abbaye Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa in Prades, France:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“There was really nothing to be done about Ronnie, at least that I could do. He would go on turning a dollar in one way or another until he ended up in Folsom or a mortuary or a house with a swimming pool on top of a hill. There were thousands like him in my ten-thousand-square-mile beat: boys who had lost their futures, their parents and themselves in the shallow jerry-built streets of the coastal cities; boys with hot-rod bowels, comic-book imaginations, daring that grew up too late for one war, too early for another.”

Ross Macdonald, The Way Some People Die

From 2003:

I suppose I was offering a counsel of perfection when I suggested that reviews should be saved for after the fact. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to at least approximate the ideally receptive state that comes from experiencing art objects stripped of the intervening scrim of words. Above all, try to trust yourself, to feel what you feel, not what you think you ought to feel. Granted, if you don’t like Bonnard or The Four Temperaments or Falstaff or The Great Gatsby (the book, not the opera) or Charlie Parker’s “Embraceable You,” you’re the problem, not the art—but that’s no reason to pretend you feel otherwise, merely to keep trying to see what others see….

Read the whole thing here.

“And people in life hardly seem to be definite enough to appear in print. They are not good or bad enough, or clever or stupid enough, or comic or pitiful enough.”

Ivy Compton-Burnett, interviewed by Margaret Jourdain, 1945 (quoted in Charles Burkhart, The Art of Ivy Compton-Burnett)

Clifford Curzon plays Brahms’ D Minor Capriccio, Op. 116/1, on TV in 1959:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“There can be only one permanent revolution—a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man.

“How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.”

Leo Tolstoy, “Three Methods of Reform” (trans. Aylmer Maude)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two important New York revivals, the Irish Rep’s The Home Place and the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Time and the Conways. Here’s an excerpt.

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Brian Friel’s “The Home Place” was supposed to have been given its U.S. premiere by the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2007. Instead, casting problems caused it to be performed by Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater, after which it soon dropped from sight. Now “The Home Place” has made it to New York at last, and the Irish Repertory Theatre, which has had a long and fruitful association with Mr. Friel and his work, is doing glorious honor to his final play. Directed by Charlotte Moore, whose Irish Rep productions of “Dancing at Lughnasa” and “Molly Sweeney” burn brightly in memory, this is a staging of hushed grace and delicacy, one that I wish Mr. Friel had lived to see.

“The Home Place” is a history play of sorts, though its drama is wholly personal. Set in 1878 in Ballybeg, the not-quite-imaginary Irish village where most of Mr. Friel’s plays take place, it unfolds in the home of Christopher Gore (John Windsor-Cunningham), a gentle-souled Anglo-Irish landlord who has fallen in love both with Ballybeg and with the much younger Margaret (Rachel Pickup), who keeps his house and loves his son (Ed Malone). Both of Christopher’s loves are hopeless, but the first is more tragic, since he can never be a part of the land to which he is so devoted. He is Irish by sympathy and English by blood, and for such cloven creatures there is no true acceptance, least of all at a moment when the resentment of his tenants is coming to a rolling boil….

It hardly seems right to say that Ms. Moore has “directed” this production, for her staging is so unassumingly natural that it feels as though the play is not being acted but is merely happening. Not only is the cast, Ms. Pickup and Mr. Windsor-Cunningham in particular, ideally chosen, but James Noone’s deep-green set is a miracle of evocative realism….

J.B. Priestley’s politically conscious, immaculately well-made plays are having a modest vogue on both sides of the Atlantic, enough so that the Roundabout Theatre Company has revived “Time and the Conways” on Broadway. Largely forgotten save by theater historians, this once-popular 1937 drama tells the tale of a feckless upper-middle-class family whose members are variously incapable of dealing with the difficulties of life in England between the wars.

I hesitate to accuse the Roundabout of cynicism, but the fact that Elizabeth McGovern is the star of this production makes me wonder whether the company regards “Time and the Conways” as anything more than a succulent piece of ever-so-British country-house subscriber bait à la “Downton Abbey.” In truth, it’s a fine play, one whose Ayckbourn-like time-travel premise (the three acts are set in the same room of the same house in 1919, 1937 and, once again, 1919) is no longer innovative but remains dramatically potent. It would have profited from a small-scale off-Broadway production by a troupe like the Mint Theater Company, which knows how to bring this kind of still-viable period piece to blazing life. The Roundabout’s revival, by contrast, rattles ineffectually around the 40-foot-wide stage of the company’s 740-seat American Airlines Theatre….

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The print version of my review of The Home Place is slightly abridged. To read the uncut online version, go here.

To read my review of Time and the Conways, go here.

A featurette about the Irish Repertory Theatre’s production of The Home Place: