About Last Night

My Wall Street Journal review of the Broadway transfer of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy is now on line. Here’s an excerpt.

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Careerwise, Tarell Alvin McCraney is as hot as it gets. Not only did “Moonlight,” whose screenplay was adapted from one of his unpublished stage plays, clean up at the Oscars in 2017, but “Choir Boy,” a gay coming-of-age play that just transferredto Broadway after a highly acclaimed off-Broadway run, received rapturous reviews, has extended its limited run and is expected to be a top Tony contender. But unanimous critical enthusiasm sometimes means there’s less to a show than meets the eye, and having seen “Choir Boy” after the reviews came out, I can’t claim to be altogether surprised that it’s a paper-thin piece of work.

“Choir Boy” tells the story of Pharus (normally played by Jeremy Pope), an “effeminate” student (Mr. McCraney’s word) at an all-black, all-male prep school who is Wrestling With His Sexuality. It’s the kind of play that is its own spoiler alert: No sooner does Mr. McCraney deal the cards than you know how he’ll be playing them for the rest of the evening. We learn a half-minute after the curtain goes up that Pharus, the head of the school’s prestigious choir, is being tormented by a homophobic chorister who calls him a “sissy” and worse—much, much worse—in the middle of a public performance. From then on, everything that happens is so self-evident that further synopsis is superfluous.

It doesn’t help that Mr. McCraney’s characterizations are as lazy as his plot is familiar….

To the extent that “Choir Boy” is worth seeing, it’s mainly because of Trip Cullman’s staging—every dramatic gesture hits its target with preternatural precision—and his marvelous ensemble cast….

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Read the whole thing here.

Fred Astaire is interviewed by Michael Parkinson in 1976. This clip is an excerpt from an episode of Parkinson, originally telecast by the BBC on February 14, 1976:

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

“Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.”

Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living

In my new Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, which I resume this week after a hiatus caused by Mrs. T’s recent illness, I write about the reissue of The Kindness of Strangers, Salka Viertel’s memoir of her life in Europe and Hollywood. Here’s an excerpt.

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If history is a black comedy—a possibility that I find increasingly probable—then one of the chief sources of its humor is the law of unintended consequences. I doubt, for instance, that it ever occurred to Adolf Hitler that his murderous reign would cause a large number of Jewish artists to flee to and settle in the United States, in the process transforming American culture, high and popular alike.

One of the most remarkable of these émigrés was Salka Viertel, an Austrian stage actor who moved to Los Angeles in 1928, opting to stay there permanently after Hitler came to power. “Neither beautiful nor young enough” (in her own crisp words) to be a movie star, Viertel instead set up shop as a screenwriter, making a sizable chunk of money by working on five of Greta Garbo’s films, including “Anna Karenina.” She then used much of it to help other Jewish artists get out of Europe, come to America and restart their lives in the strange land that was studio-era Hollywood.

Garbo urged Viertel to tell her story in print, and in 1969 she published an autobiography called “The Kindness of Strangers” in which she wrote about her life in Europe and America up through 1954 (she died in 1978). Well received by critics, Viertel’s book subsequently slipped through the cracks of renown. Now, though, it has been reprinted by New York Review Books, which specializes in just such off-center titles…

For reasons not obvious to me, this edition has been shorn of the book’s original subtitle, “A Theatrical Life/Vienna-Berlin-Hollywood,” which was at once usefully descriptive and a bit too restrictive. In fact, Viertel’s adventures in Hollywoodland occupy only the second half of “The Kindness of Strangers,” which is in any case far more than just a theatrical memoir. It is also, like Stefan Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday,” a richly detailed, deeply affecting portrait of the lost world of Europe between the two great wars that tore it to pieces.

Even before she moved to the U.S. and launched the now-legendary salon to which the members of Hollywood’s German-speaking colony flocked every Sunday, Salka Viertel was the kind of person who had an uncanny knack for meeting everybody who was anybody….

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Read the whole thing here.

“But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.”

Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living

John Hartford is interviewed by Hugh Hefner, then performs “California Earthquake.” This clip was taped on November 10, 1968, for an episode of Playboy After Dark, Hefner’s syndicated TV series:

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

“Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artifact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of e-mail and the mobile phone, it has largely slipped away.”

Charles Stross, Rule 34

From 2009:

I went to Kansas City to spend a day communing with myself when young, wondering whether I’d know where to look for him. I drove toward what sounded like a familiar address, took what seemed like a familiar exit, and promptly found myself in the middle of a city that looked nothing like the one I remembered. Where was Italian Gardens, the restaurant where I learned to love garlic? Where was the bank in which I’d worked after graduating from college? Both had been razed to the ground and replaced with shiny new buildings of whose existence I knew nothing. It felt as though I had awakened one morning, looked at my hand, and discovered that two of my fingers had vanished in the night….

Read the whole thing here.

Those wearing Tolerance for a label
Call other views intolerable.

Phyllis McGinley, “In Praise of Diversity”

Most of the time I can’t quite grasp the undeniable fact that I’m sixty-two, going on sixty-three. Rarely if ever do I feel that old, and I know I don’t look anything like my age (unless my friends and acquaintances have all joined together in a conspiracy to deceive me).

Maybe I should try harder to do so. Mrs. T and I spend a lot of time watching golden-age Hollywood movies, and one of the things that she likes to point out is the frequency with which characters who are presumably in their fifties look and act at least twenty years older than they really are. I expect the Great Depression had something to do with it—I know that it aged both of my mother’s parents far beyond their years—but so, too, does the fact that many of our latter-day male movie stars look positively adolescent. Whatever the reason, I don’t feel nearly as old as I am. Nevertheless, nobody has to remind me that I’ve turned onto the exit ramp that leads inexorably from late middle age to…well, something else.

You know you’re not young anymore when you find yourself spending more and more time thinking about the deaths of friends and loved ones, and that has happened to me. By now, of course, I’ve grown almost accustomed to their loss (“Man gets used to everything—the beast!”). But there are other signs of the times, less jolting but similarly noteworthy, that also have a way of sneaking up on people of a certain age.

Just the other day, for instance, I learned from a Facebook posting that the old Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Smalltown, U.S.A., a structure that I remember very well, was torn down back in September. Not that many of the current residents of Smalltown thought of it as “the old Holiday Inn,” for it had changed hands at least three times since I moved away, ending its longish life as a Days Inn. It was, however, a Holiday Inn when it was built in 1964, and as such it was for a time the fanciest motel in town. (Only a small-town boy like me can use the phrase “the fanciest motel in town” without a trace of irony.)

For a long time, the Holiday Inn’s restaurant was one of Smalltown’s most highly regarded lunch-and-dinner spots, enough so that when my brother and I decided to throw a surprise party for my parents on their fortieth wedding anniversary, we naturally held it there. Moreover, Sour Mash, the country band with which I played bass back in my high-school days, gigged in the same restaurant once a week. It was the first time in my life that I was ever paid hard cash money for making music, and I have no trouble whatsoever recalling how sinfully proud I was to be able at last to call myself a professional musician.

I wrote about both of these things in the memoir of my childhood and youth that I published in 1991:

Sour Mash used to play dinner music in the restaurant on Wednesday nights. We each got five dollars a night, plus tips and one free trip through the buffet line. (Seconds were extra for the help.) Forty years to the day after my mother and father were married, they showed up at the Holiday Inn for dinner, pulled open an unmarked door and found, to their amazement, a room full of family and friends gathered around a table loaded with punch and homemade hors d’oeuvres. The light fixtures were covered with blue crepe paper and a phonograph in the corner played Artie Shaw’s 1938 recording of “Begin the Beguine.” Standing in the doorway were my brother and his wife, who had spent three months planning the party, and my wife and I, who had flown to St. Louis and slipped into Sikeston the night before. I snapped a picture of my father as he opened the door and saw us standing there. It was the second time in my life that I caught him completely off guard. The first time was the day I told him I was moving to New York.

That was thirty-two years ago. I don’t like to think about how many of the guests at that glorious, never-to-be-forgotten party are dead now. Most of them, I suspect, including my parents, both of whom I think about every day and miss more than I ever thought possible. I suppose I always took it for granted that I would outlive them. Yet strange as it sounds, there was nothing real  about that perfectly logical expectation. In my heart, I must have assumed that they’d always be around, never once stopping to figure the odds against it, much less to imagine exactly how it would feel not to be able to pick up the phone and hear their voices. Yet now they’re dust, just like the old Holiday Inn.

Fortunately, I’m still around, as is my beloved Mrs. T, though we were both having our doubts about her as recently as a couple of weeks ago. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that she got out of the hospital last Thursday and has since been resting comfortably at our Connecticut farmhouse. She’s frail, of course, and will remain so until she gets the pair of new lungs for which we’re waiting and hoping impatiently. But she’s still very much herself, tough and funny and game, and it is the joy of my late middle age—or whatever—to be able to make the waiting easier for her.

No, we’re not young anymore, but…we’re here.

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Julie Wilson and William Roy perform Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here” (from Follies) in an undated film clip: