About Last Night

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I report on an on-stage culture clash that I witnessed last week in St. Louis. Here’s an excerpt.

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Culture War II, in which “woke” progressives are now pitting themselves against old-fashioned liberals, came to St. Louis on Friday. The battleground was the Muny, a century-old outdoor theater that produces Broadway musicals every summer, and the casus belli was—unlikely as it may sound—an anti-slavery ballet.

The Muny opened its centennial season last week with a major event, the first revival anywhere of “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” the 1989 revue in which the master of musical-comedy choreography put together an evening’s worth of his celebrated production numbers. None was more memorable than “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” the ballet from “The King and I” in which the enslaved wives of the tyrannical King of Siam turn “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” into an impeccably liberal-minded song-and-dance number that pointedly hints at the resemblance between their degraded condition and that of the black slaves who worked on plantations in the American South….

Laura Jacobs, who reviewed “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” for the Journal, singled out “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” as “the most beautiful of the numbers” in the show. But that’s not how a group of out-of-town American theater artists felt when they saw it on Friday. Jeremy D. Goodwin, who interviewed them afterwards, reported on St. Louis Public Radio’s website that the 15 artists, who were in town for a conference, were offended by what they took to be examples of cultural insensitivity in the production, the most noteworthy of which was the casting of a white actor, Sarah Bowden, as Tuptim, the slave-wife who narrates “The Small House of Uncle Thomas.” “Looking at that work was painful for us,” said Leilani Chan, artistic director of Los Angeles’ TeAda Productions. “We were just shocked.”

How did they respond? One might reasonably have expected them to request a meeting with Mike Isaacson, the Muny’s artistic director and executive producer, to discuss their grievances. But acccording to Mr. Goodwin, the group had already been tipped about the “yellowface” casting (to use the now-common term for casting whites in Asian roles) of Tuptim. Hence they were inclined instead to immediate action, and when “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” got underway, they rose to their feet and started shouting “No yellowface!” and booing in unison before being escorted out of the theater by Muny staffers….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for the Muny’s revival 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:
• The Band’s Visit (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• 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)
• My Fair Lady (musical, G, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Symphonie Fantastique (abstract underwater puppet show, G, extended through Sept. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Angels in America (two-part drama, R, alternating in repertory, closes July 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN PITTSFIELD, MASS.:
• The Royal Family of Broadway (musical, G, closes July 7, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• The Iceman Cometh (drama, PG-13, some shows sold out last week, closes July 1, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Three Tall Women (drama, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:
• Macbeth (Shakespeare, PG-13, remounting of Two River Theater Company production, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING TONIGHT IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• The Will Rogers Follies (musical, G, reviewed here)

“My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do. You may say to a man, ‘Sir, I am your most humble servant.’ You are not his most humble servant. You may say, ‘These are sad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times.’ You don’t mind the times. You tell a man, ‘I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet.’ You don’t care six-pence whether he was wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society: but don’t think foolishly.”

James Boswell, Life of Johnson

Stan Freberg, Daws Butler and June Foray perform “Little Blue Riding Hood,” Freberg’s parody of Jack Webb’s Dragnet, on an unidentified 1953 telecast:

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

“Shop fascinated her, for she knew that most men were interesting only when they were talking it. As long as one hadn’t heard it all that fatal time too often. And behind the technicalities were a man’s own view of them, his thoughts and his unconscious judgements. No man could wholly hide them and not all tried.”

William Haggard, The Unquiet Sleep

From 2003:

As anyone knows who’s been in journalism for more than the past 20 minutes or so, fact checking is an increasingly lost art. Time was when many magazines—if not most—rigorously checked every factual assertion made in every story they published. When I was writing profiles for Mirabella nine years ago, the checkers even required me to give them my interview tapes. But by the time I got to Time, the rigor had loosened considerably. My Time stories about the arts were “self-checked,” a wonderfully Orwellian euphemism meaning that they weren’t checked at all—it was assumed that I knew what I was talking about (though occasionally a copy editor would query me about odd-looking names).

By then, of course, the whole system was unraveling, at Time and everywhere else….

Read the whole thing here.

“Kamich only hoped Bojalian would do his killing in a decent manner. The trouble with all amateurs was that they mostly left a disgusting mess.”

William Haggard, The Old Masters

Johnny Carson sings “Here’s That Rainy Day,” by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen, on an undated episode of The Tonight Show, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar:

Tony Mottola, the guitarist for the Tonight Show orchestra, tells how he taught Carson to play “Here’s That Rainy Day” in an Archive of American Television oral-history interview:

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

“He’d been letting the sea work its timeless therapy, washing away the unconscious frustrations of a man of somewhat austere philosophy who’d been born in a world which he’d never see back. Not that he entirely regretted it for he’d never accepted its values wholeheartedly; he couldn’t with logic bewail a system which twice in its lifetime had turned on itself. In Russell’s private but confirmed opinion it was stupidity reinforced by greed which would destroy mankind and not the devil. Perhaps that was what theologians meant when they still talked on of original sin.”

William Haggard, The Scorpion’s Tail

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the premiere of The Royal Family of Broadway in the Berkshires. Here’s an excerpt.

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Barrington Stage Company, one of the best-known theater companies in the Berkshires, has also become in recent seasons a significant force in regional musical-comedy production. In addition to the 2014 Broadway revival of “On the Town,” which originated there, the company has also mounted Broadway-worthy stagings of “Guys and Dolls” and “The Pirates of Penzance,” and in 2004 it served as the incubator for “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” the best new musical of the past decade and a half. Now William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin, the authors of “Spelling Bee,” have returned to Barrington Stage with “The Royal Family of Broadway,” and it looks like a winner in the making, a musical that is already uproariously entertaining and has the clear potential to evolve into a bulletproof commercial hit.

“The Royal Family of Broadway” is based on the 1927 backstage comedy in which George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber spoofed the eccentricities of Ethel, John and Lionel Barrymore, who once were America’s first theatrical family but are now mostly remembered only by golden-age movie buffs….

Ms. Sheinkin’s book, which derives in part from an earlier, unproduced script by Richard Greenberg, lifts some of its best lines from the play (“Marriage isn’t a career—it’s an incident!”) and leaves the Roaring-Twenties period setting intact but otherwise goes its own merry way with sure-footed skill.

Shapely melody is not Mr. Finn’s strong suit, and his score, in which Great American Songbook-style pastiche is freshened with his own spiky harmonic language, is somewhat uneven in quality. As a result, the middle of the first act, which contains the least musically memorable songs, sags noticeably. Fortunately, all of the pivotal production numbers, especially Tony’s “Too Much Drama in My Life” and “If You Marry an Actress,” a second-act comic waltz for the five leading men, are show-stoppingly effective….

“The Royal Family of Broadway” reunites John Rando and Joshua Bergasse, the director and choreographer of “On the Town,” “Guys and Dolls” and “Pirates,” who work their now-familiar miracles of wit and flair. They’re an ideal musical-comedy leadership team, the very best we have….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for The Royal Family of Broadway: