December 6, 2013
TT: The ties that blind
In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I report enthusiastically on two A.R. Gurney productions, the premiere in New York of Family Furniture and a Boston revival of The Cocktail Party. Here's an excerpt.
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To be prolific is to be uneven. A.R. Gurney has written a lot of plays in the past decade, some of them good, others less so, but none quite so fine as the ones that won him a permanent place in the history of American theater. So I rejoice to report that his newest play, "Family Furniture," is exactly that fine--and that its distinguished author is 83 years old. Not since 1995 and "Sylvia" has Mr. Gurney given us so penetrating and disciplined a play.
"Family Furniture" is a exceptionally well-cast, somewhat longish one-act play (long enough that I think it might possibly profit from being performed with an intermission) that starts out at a gallop and moves unswervingly to its stark, sad conclusion. Four of the five characters are members of a family of WASPs from upstate New York that is sitting on a secret, which is that the mother (Carolyn McCormick) appears to be sleeping with one of their neighbors behind the back of her stuffy, seemingly oblivious husband (Peter Scolari). The children (Andrew Keenan-Bolger and Ismenia Mendes) are appalled, while the son's Jewish girlfriend (Molly Nordin) thinks that they ought to force the affair out into the open.
Those are the cards in Mr. Gurney's hand--most of them, anyway--and he plays them with enviable skill, triggering a string of surprises in the second half that up the ante considerably. But "Family Furniture" is not a family melodrama: It's a Terence Rattigan-like tale of strong but largely unspoken emotions, and the penny-plain simplicity of Thomas Kail's production (which is played on a near-bare stage in a 74-seat Off-Broadway house) brings us close enough to the characters to feel each twinge of their collective pain....
In a happy coincidence, the Huntington Theatre Company is mounting a superior revival of "The Cocktail Hour," the 1988 play in which Mr. Gurney cemented the reputation for excellence that he had won in 1982 with "The Dining Room." It's a quasi-autobiographical comedy with a Pirandello-like twist in which an angry young playwright (James Waterston) comes home to Buffalo to inform his horrified family (Maureen Anderman, Pamela J. Gray and Richard Poe) that he has just written a play about them called (naturally) "The Cocktail Hour." The plot is not altogether unlike that of "Family Furniture," but it's played for laughs and ends in what the aggressively genial father, played to perfection by Mr. Poe, calls "an appreciative mood."...
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Is that all there is?
In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column I reflect on the novels of Elmore Leonard and the limitations of pop culture. Here's an excerpt.
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When Elmore Leonard died in August, the papers were full of obituaries that described him as "a novelist who made crime an art." So, at any rate, declared a headline writer for the New York Times. A year earlier, the National Book Foundation had presented Mr. Leonard with its annual medal for "distinguished contribution to American letters," calling him a "great American author," and the Library of America announced that it would be bringing out a three-volume edition of his work in 2014. I didn't want to rain on his cortege, so I didn't say what I thought, which was that he was one of the most overpraised writers of our time. A very good one, mind you--I'm a passionate fan of Mr. Leonard's brisk, funny crime novels--but overpraised all the same.
What's wrong with his books? For one thing, they're repetitious to a fault. I can't count the number of Mr. Leonard's novels that revolve around a divorced man of a certain age who falls hard for a wised-up younger woman. On the other hand, a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger. No matter how many you've eaten, you can usually make room for another one if it's good, and Mr. Leonard wrote a lot of good books, "LaBrava," "Maximum Bob" and "Tishomingo Blues" in particular.
So why grump about his obituaries? Because they exemplify a trend that has gotten out of hand. It used to be that we didn't take popular culture seriously, but now we don't take anything else seriously....
The problem is not that pop culture doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. It's that a culture totally dominated by popular art is by definition limited. Let's go back to Elmore Leonard's novels for a moment. Sure, they're superbly crafted, but they're all pure melodramas whose subject is crime, with a little romance thrown in for seasoning. So, almost without exception, are the TV series that have come of late to be widely regarded as the best that America's storytellers have to offer. From "Hill Street Blues" to "The Sopranos" to "Breaking Bad," these series are all thrillers of one kind or another. To be sure, they use the time-honored conventions of genre fiction to explore many other aspects of American life--but in the end, somebody always gets shot, just as a pop song, no matter how good it may be, is almost always three minutes long....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Almanac
"Even a Saint finds it hard, now and again, to be quite sure why he is doing a thing. It is unlikely that such an one will be completely deluded as to his motive, let alone do something with a consciously wrong motive; but the anguish of life is, that a good man finds he is doing things with mixed motives."
C.C. Martindale, The Vocation of Aloysius Gonzaga
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December 5, 2013
TT: Merry Christmas to Duke!
James Gavin, the biographer of Chet Baker and Lena Horne, reviewed my new Duke Ellington biography in this coming Sunday's New York Times Book Review. Here's some of what he said:
Ellington's newest biographer, Terry Teachout, clearly saw the challenge of writing about the enigmatic legend. In "Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington," he calls Ellington "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."Yet in his cleareyed reassessment of a man regarded in godlike terms, Teachout, the drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, delves behind "the mask of smiling, noncommital urbanity that [Ellington] showed to the world." The facts an stories he relates aren't new, but rarely have they had such a compelling narrative flow or ring of reliability. As in his last book, "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong," Teachout keeps his psychoanalyzing within safe limits; he contextualizes historically without sounding contrived, and honors his subject's musical achievements through just the right amount of close analysis....
Teachout relates even the most dramatic episodes in the Ellington story with a poised impartiality. He doesn't take a novelistic approach, nor does he describe music with the lyrical flights of fancy favored by such authors as Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs. Teachout writes in an earthbound style marked by sound scholarship and easy readability. He particularly shines in his portraits of Ellington's renowned sidemen....
"Duke" humanizes a man whom history has kept on a pedestal.
No link yet, but it's coming.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.
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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, closing Jan. 5, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• Macbeth (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Jan. 12, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, reviewed here)
• No Man's Land/Waiting for Godot (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, playing in rotating repertory through Mar. 2, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)
• Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, extended through Feb. 16, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)OFF BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Commons of Pensacola (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 26, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (musical, PG-13, unsuitable for children, newly extended through Jan. 12, reviewed here)
• Hamlet/Saint Joan (drama, G/PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, performed in rotating repertory, closes Feb. 2, original production reviewed here)
• Juno and the Paycock (drama, G/PG-13, far too dark for children, extended through Jan. 26, reviewed here)CLOSING SOON IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Show Boat (musical, G, remounting of Goodspeed Musicals production, suitable for bright children, closes Dec. 29, original production reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Good Person of Szechwan (play, PG-13, closes Dec. 8, reviewed here)Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"Derision or mockery always involves contempt and so is gravely sinful, so that theologians rightly hold mockery for the worst sin of the tongue we can commit against our neighbor."
St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life
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December 4, 2013
TT: Snapshot
The Dutch National Ballet dances the first movement of George Balanchine's Symphony in C, set to the music of Georges Bizet:
(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
He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.William Blake, "Jerusalem"
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December 3, 2013
TT: Lookback
From 2003:
I've lived in New York for the better part of two decades now, and you'd think I'd have gotten used to it. In a way, I suppose I have, but even now all it takes is a whiff of the unexpected and I catch myself boggling at that which the native New Yorker really does take for granted. As for my visits to Smalltown, U.S.A., they invariably leave me feeling like yesterday's immigrant, marveling at things no small-town boy can ever really dismiss as commonplace, no matter how long he lives in the capital of the world.My cab swept me across the Triborough Bridge and the Upper East Side, past the Guggenheim Museum and through Central Park, straight to the front door of my building. I trotted up the steps, unlocked the door to my apartment, and turned on all the lights. A quick look at the walls assured me that all my prints were present and accounted for: here an Avery, there a Marin, Frankenthaler over the couch, Wolf Kahn over the mantelpiece. I dropped my bags, locked the door, and sighed deeply. Once again I had made the impossible journey from Smalltown to New York, from home to home....
Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Almanac
"There are a good many theatre people whom I suspect of arranging just a shade more than is absolutely necessary to be under constant fire, merely to indulge themselves in a public exhibition of their innate grace under pressure."
Moss Hart, Act One
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December 2, 2013
TT: The private world of Satchmo
This wonderful photo was taken in February of 1971 in the master bathroom of Louis Armstrong's home in Corona, Queens, two weeks before the events portrayed in Satchmo at the Waldorf, my one-man play about Armstrong's last gig. It was originally published in Time, but I saw it for the first time today:
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TT: Just because
Stan Getz plays Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" at Montreux in 1972, accompanied by Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, and Tony Williams:
(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
"I do not mean to suggest that luck per se plays the major part in success, theatrical or otherwise; but I venture to guess that in the grand design of any successful career the element of luck has been a powerful factor. Perhaps luck is too easy a word--too all-inclusive. A sense of timing would be more accurate--or perhaps a quirk of character that enables its fortunate possessor to tread the main path and never swerve from it. Every successful person I have ever known has had it--actor or businessman, writer or politician. It is that instinct or ability to sense and seize the right moment without wavering or playing safe, and without it many gifted people flicker brilliantly and briefly and then fade into oblivion in spite of their undoubted talents."
Moss Hart, Act One
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November 29, 2013
TT: Twice in a lifetime
In today's Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway repertory runs of No Man's Land and Waiting for Godot, plus the premiere of Amanda Peet's first play, The Commons of Pensacola. Here's an excerpt.
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How do you market highbrow theater? Cast British actors, then turn your show into an event. That's how the Ian McKellen-Patrick Stewart production of "Waiting for Godot," first seen on London's West End in 2009, made it to Broadway just four years after Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, John Goodwin and John Glover appeared there in a splendid staging of Samuel Beckett's recherché masterpiece. Mounted on its own at so brief an interval, "Godot" might have been a tough sell, but Messrs. McKellen and Stewart and their producers figured out how to sweeten the pill: They're presenting "Godot" in repertory with Harold Pinter's even less penetrable "No Man's Land." The result? Sold-out houses every night. Snob appeal and artistic seriousness, however, are by no means incompatible, and while neither show is perfect, both are very much worth seeing.
Indeed, "No Man's Land," which was last seen on Broadway in 1994, is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, a revival so creatively acted and sensitively staged by Sean Mathias that you'll be mulling it over for days after you depart the theater....
The first act of "Waiting for Godot," by contrast, is almost entirely unsatisfactory, and the reason why is plain to see. "Godot" is a black comedy about the meaninglessness of life, one whose dramatic rhetoric owes as much to baggy-pants slapstick as it does to existentialism, and it works best when done by comic actors like Mr. Lane (or Bert Lahr, who played the same role in the 1956 Broadway premiere). Neither Mr. McKellen nor Mr. Stewart fills that bill--they come off as Great Actors playing the parts of Great Comedians...
Amanda Peet, a smart, witty actor who found out that it's hard for a woman to land decent roles in Hollywood once she turns 40, decided to buck the odds by branching out and writing a play. Instead of starring in it, though, she talked Sarah Jessica Parker into taking over the role she'd written for herself. The result is "The Commons of Pensacola," in which Ms. Parker plays the fortysomething daughter of a woman (Blythe Danner) with a secret that is both embarrassing and illegal. Like Zoe Kazan, another first-class actor who writes plays on the side, Ms. Peet has a sharp ear for the way real people talk, and except for the last scene, which feels tacked on, "The Commons of Pensacola" is a very soundly made piece of theatrical goods....
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Read the whole thing here.
A 1978 telecast of the original production of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land, starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson and directed by Peter Hall:
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TT: Almanac
"Theater is essentially poetry. Film is essentially documentary, passively recording whatever data flow in front the camera. Is the enemy naturalism, which says if it looks authentic then it is authentic? For me, the very essence of theater is to reveal to the audience the invisible forces that shape and color and carbonate our lives. Write that on the blackboard a thousand times."
John Guare, preface to Landscape of the Body
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November 28, 2013
TT: Happy Thanksgiving from Satchmo
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TT: The horse knows the way
When I pulled out of Kansas City last Thursday morning, I set my GPS--but I didn't need it. I could have driven from downtown Kansas City to Smalltown, U.S.A., in my sleep. To be sure, many years have gone by since I last made that long drive, but no part of it has faded from my memory, and by the time I pulled into 713 Hickory Drive seven hours later, I was sure once again that it never will.
I wrapped up my book tour for Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington with a pair of far-removed appearances, the first at the Kansas City Public Library and the second at the Miami International Book Fair. In between I had two free nights, and I decided to spend them visiting my brother and sister-in-law in Smalltown. I haven't been back there since my mother's funeral, and in the ensuing year and a half David and Kathy moved into her old house--the place where my brother and I grew up--and remodeled it. They did so, as I've said before in this space, with my blessing, for it meant as much to me as it did to them that 713 Hickory should not only stay in the family but remain alive and vital.
Kathy regularly sent me snapshots of the remodeling process, and I felt very much a part of what they were doing. Still, I couldn't help but wonder how it would feel to see the newly transformed house for the first time. Would it seem strange? Would it sting?
I was momentarily startled when I pulled into the driveway and saw that what had once been a carport was now an enclosed garage. For a half-century I'd entered the house not through the front door but through the carport, which led directly to the kitchen. Now it was closed off, and I had no idea what to do. I walked up to the front door and did something I've never done in my whole life: I rang the doorbell. Kathy appeared within seconds.
"Is this the entryway now, madame?" I said with mock grandeur.
"I forgot you wouldn't know how to get in!" she said, laughing. "No, we still come in the back way. There's a keypad by the garage door--I'll show you how it works." And so she did, and from that moment on I knew where I was.
Yes, everything looks different at 713 Hickory now--but nothing has changed, not really. Even my mother still seems present, even though she now rests next to my father in the Garden of Memories Cemetery. Of all the things I said to David and Kathy that weekend, the phrase I repeated most often was She'd love this, you know. She would have, too, not because she wasn't perfectly happy with the house the way it was--she loved it with all her heart--but because she would have been even happier to know that her two sons cared enough about 713 Hickory to want to keep it in the family.
When you have only a day and a half to catch up with two people whom you love, you don't spend much time going anywhere or doing anything out of the ordinary. We dined in on Thursday (Kathy cooked a roast) and went out on Friday (we checked out Smalltown's brand-new steakhouse). We went to Jay's, an old family hangout, for biscuits and gravy on Saturday morning. Kathy drove me around town to visit my parents' grave and see the sights. Otherwise...well, we mostly just sat and talked.
James Agee captured the feel of our conversation in a prose poem about his childhood called "Knoxville: Summer of 1915":
On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. First we were sitting up, then one of us lay down, and then we all lay down, on our stomachs, or on our sides, or on our backs, and they have kept on talking. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near.So, too, did my mother and father last weekend.
After I cleaned my plate at Jay's, I headed up Highway 61 to the St. Louis airport. A few hours later I was ordering room service in a Miami hotel, and the following night I was back home in Connecticut with Mrs. T. On Tuesday morning I drove up to Lenox, Massachusetts, there to take part in the first reading of my second play, Breaking and Entering, which is set in a semi-imaginary town called Apple Creek that is not at all unlike Smalltown, U.S.A.
No matter how far I travel, I never seem to get very far away from Smalltown. Or from 713 Hickory Drive.
* * *
Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915, a musical setting of James Agee's prose poem, performed by Dawn Upshaw, David Zinman, and the Orchestra of St. Luke's:
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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, closing Jan. 5, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• Macbeth (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Jan. 12, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)
• Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, closes Feb. 1, all performances sold out last week, 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)
• Fun Home (musical, PG-13, unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 29, reviewed here)
• Hamlet/Saint Joan (drama, G/PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, performed in rotating repertory, closes Feb. 2, original production reviewed here)
• Juno and the Paycock (drama, G/PG-13, far too dark for children, newly extended through Jan. 26, reviewed here)IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Show Boat (musical, G, remounting of Goodspeed Musicals production, suitable for bright children, closes Dec. 29, original production reviewed here)CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Good Person of Szechwan (play, PG-13, closes Dec. 8, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• The Winslow Boy (drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here)Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"The imagination says listen to me. I am your darkest voice. I am your 4 a.m. voice. I am the voice that wakes you up and says this is what I'm afraid of. Do not listen to me at your peril."
John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation
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November 27, 2013
TT: Snapshot
Fritz Reiner leads the Chicago Symphony in a 1961 telecast of an excerpt from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
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