September 2, 2010
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.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)
• 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)IN ASHLAND, ORE.:
• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)
• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• Major Barbara (serious comedy, G, too complicated for children, closes Oct. 2, reviewed here)CLOSING SOON IN SAN DIEGO:
• King Lear/The Madness of George III (drama, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 24, reviewed here)CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN:
• Another Part of the Forest (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 18, reviewed here)CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, closes Sept. 12, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• The Taming of the Shrew/Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare, PG-13, reviewed here)CLOSING THIS WEEKEND IN LENOX, MASS.:
• Richard III (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sunday, reviewed here)
• The Taster (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Saturday, reviewed here)
• The Winter's Tale (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sunday, reviewed here)CLOSING SATURDAY IN WESTPORT, CONN.:
• I Do! I Do! (musical, G, reviewed here)Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"In his personal and private shorthand Peter Davis had tagged Patricia Leggatt, and the tag was upper arty. It had amused him to imagine her background, for the Minister's modest flat where he had met her clearly wasn't her natural stamping ground. That would be somewhere in the Cadogans, he had decided, somewhere rich and talkative. The people lived by taking each other's photographs. Not really, of course: they all had private incomes which it was very bad form to mention; they all assumed that you had too. And they talked--how they talked! They talked novels and pictures and plays, and operas you'd never heard of. Not that they knew much about them, for solid knowledge meant work--hard reading and even thought. But they knew what was new.
"What was new was worth chattering about."
William Haggard, The Unquiet Sleep
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
September 1, 2010
TT: Snapshot
The Gary Burton Quartet plays Steve Swallow's "General Mojo's Well Laid Plan" in 1967. The guitarist is Larry Coryell:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"Listening to other opinions was invariably more profitable than antagonizing their owners by pointing out tiresome objections."
William Haggard, The Hard Sell
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
August 31, 2010
TT: Theme song
Dave Dudley sings "Six Days on the Road":
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"He had a logical mind uncomplicated by the intellectual's deference to dialectic for its own sake."
William Haggard, The Arena
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
August 30, 2010
TT: Take to the highway
Mrs. T and I are giving ourselves an eight-day-long vacation, starting this morning. Yes, we're going away, and no, I'm not going to say where. I'm only just starting to get the hang of taking time off after a lifetime of overwork, and one of the things I figured out after our most recent coop-flying experiment is that vacations should not be conducted in public. So we're going to keep ourselves to ourselves this time around. If you should happen to see us tooling town the road, feel free to say hello--but be so kind as not to tell anyone else, O.K.?
In case you're wondering, I filed Friday's Wall Street Journal drama column last week and pre-posted the usual almanac entries and theater-related stuff. Beyond that, though, I intend to have nothing to say about anything, whether here or on Twitter. I need a rest--badly.
Our Girl and CAAF will be taking up the slack this week. I'll return next Tuesday. Have fun while I'm away.
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Just because
James Taylor sings "Country Road":
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"To a surrounded enemy you must leave a way of escape."
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
August 27, 2010
TT: Regina the First
In the first of two reports from Wisconsin's American Players Theatre, I review revivals of Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest and George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara in today's Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
Of Lillian Hellman's eight original plays, only one, "The Little Foxes," is still performed regularly. The others, if not quite forgotten, are much less well known, and it's been decades since any of them was last seen on Broadway. So what have we been missing? To find out, I went to Wisconsin to check out American Players Theatre's production of "Another Part of the Forest," the 1946 play in which Hellman turned back the clock 20 years on the main characters of "The Little Foxes" to show what made them such despicable beasts. Though "Another Part of the Forest" was filmed in 1948 and continues to be revived on occasion--the Peccadillo Theater Company performed it Off-Off-Broadway earlier this summer--I can't recall the last time it received a major staging anywhere in America. I went mostly out of curiosity, but stayed to cheer: "Another Part of the Forest" throws a dramatic punch comparable in weight to "The Little Foxes," and APT is performing it with terrific authority.
In "The Little Foxes," which takes place circa 1900, Regina (played here by Tiffany Scott), the stone-hearted scoundrel whose greed knows no bounds, is without question the star of the show. This time around, though, she yields pride of place to Ben (Marcus Truschinski), her brainy but no less cold brother, and Marcus (Jonathan Smoots), the patriarch of the Hubbard family, a fathomlessly cynical Alabama shopkeeper who turned himself into a millionaire by betraying the Confederate cause, in the process driving his wife (Sarah Day) half-mad with shame and guilt. Not surprisingly, his children are prepared to do anything to feather their own nests, both to one another and to anyone else sufficiently imprudent to try to stop them.
The only real problem with "Another Part of the Forest" is that the younger characters are already pretty much set in their ways when the curtain goes up: Regina and Ben are monsters and Oscar (Eric Parks), their younger brother, is a brainless boob. Since we already know them from "The Little Foxes," "Another Part of the Forest" plays like "The Further Adventures of the Horrible Hubbards" instead of shedding light on the evolution of their mature personalities. That said, the plot is so watertight and the dialogue so full of bristling malice that it's hard to begrudge Hellman her desire to play a second game with so many of the same pieces...
I'm no less pleased--if hardly surprised--to report the success of David Frank's wonderfully transparent production of Shaw's "Major Barbara," in which an arms manufacturer (Mr. Smoots) persuades his peace-loving daughter (Colleen Madden) to give up her position with the Salvation Army and embrace the gospel of high explosives. (Yes, Shaw was being ironic, but anyone who knows anything about him will realize that "Major Barbara" hints, however unconsciously, at his own tendency to worship at the altar of power.)
Mr. Frank, APT's artistic director, is working with a cast so full of company veterans that it verges on being a permanent ensemble--Sarah Day, who plays Lady Undershaft with irresistible relish, has been with APT for a quarter-century--and the enviable stylistic unanimity of this production is doubtless due in part to that fact. Everyone is on the same high-comedy wavelength and all of the acting is easy and unforced....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Sursum corda
Buddy Rich plays "Love for Sale" in 1970:
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"When you got older, did you actually need your parents less or did you just learn how to replace them?"
Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
August 26, 2010
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.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)
• 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)IN ASHLAND, ORE.:
• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)
• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)IN SAN DIEGO:
• King Lear/The Madness of George III (drama, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 24, reviewed here)CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, closes Sept. 12, reviewed here)CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• The Taming of the Shrew/Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 5, reviewed here)CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN LENOX, MASS.:
• Richard III (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sept. 5, reviewed here)
• The Taster (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Sept. 4, reviewed here)
• The Winter's Tale (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sept. 5, reviewed here)CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN WESTPORT, CONN.:
• I Do! I Do! (musical, G, extended through Sept. 4, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY IN PITTSFIELD, MASS.:
• Absurd Person Singular (farce, PG-13, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY IN SANTA CRUZ, CALIF.:
• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)
• Love's Labour's Lost (Shakespeare, PG-13, reviewed here)Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"I get very impatient with people who say 'I go to the theatre to be taken out of myself.' I think, 'There's probably nothing in yourself.' I'm only interested in making sure people are reintroduced to themselves. Great theatre draws your attention to things in real life, to the negligible, the boring and nondescript. A playwright like Chekhov makes that considerable and reintroduces us to the things that we have overlooked."
Jonathan Miller (interviewed in The Independent, Aug. 3, 2010)
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
August 25, 2010
TT: Snapshot
An excerpt from the 1942 film of The Man Who Came to Dinner, directed by William Keighley and adapted (mostly faithfully) by Philip G. Epstein and Julius J. Epstein from the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Monty Woolley, who plays Sheridan Whiteside, created the role on Broadway in 1939:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"To be able to write a play, for performance in a theatre, a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naïve, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool. He must be a chaser of wild geese, as well as of wild ducks. He must be prepared to make a public spectacle of himself. He must be independent and brave, and sure of himself and of the importance of his work; because if he isn't, he will never survive the scorching blasts of derision that will probably greet his first efforts."
Robert E. Sherwood, preface to The Queen's Husband
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
August 24, 2010
TT: Just because
Stephen Hough plays Paderewski's B Flat Nocturne, Op. 14, No. 6:
Posted at 1:25 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"A lost cause may still deserve support, and that support is never wasted."
Kingsley Amis, The King's English (courtesy of Levi Stahl)
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
August 23, 2010
TT: Entry from an unkept diary
• Somebody compared me to a Holocaust denier the other day for having spoken ill of Elie Wiesel. While I wouldn't dream of dignifying such a remark by responding to it, I was struck by its sheer nastiness. It goes without saying that the world has always contained plenty of people who assume that you're a contemptible idiot if you disagree with them about anything. To be sure, I doubt that such creatures are significantly more numerous today than they were a century ago, or even a quarter-century, but I incline to think that they now talk quite a bit louder than they used to--especially when they're sitting alone at their computers.
I hear the gentleman in the second balcony yelling "You're one to talk!" He's got a point: I've written some awfully sharp things in my capacity as a professional critic, and will doubtless continue to do so. But I don't think I've ever cast personal aspersions on the artists whom I've criticized. That seems to me to be supremely inappropriate, even when the aspersions are true--and I do know a fair number of unpleasant things about some of the artists whom I cover in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. The world of art has always had its share of...well, bad actors.
Speaking as a biographer, I believe deeply that it is my responsibility to tell the truth about artists who are no longer living, even when it makes them look bad. Speaking as a critic and commentator, I think the private lives of living artists are their business and no one else's. And lest we forget, the argumentum ad hominem is not in fact an argument at all, though it can be effective when deployed with skill and mercilessness.
Which brings us back, however circuitously, to my own case. I'd like to think that anybody who read a piece (or a posting or tweet) in which I was compared to a Holocaust denier would simply roll his eyes and move on. But I'm old enough to know better. More and more of the American people are choosing to live in closed circles of collective concurrence, and I have no doubt that in certain of those circles, those who read such an attack on me would nod their heads sagely and say something on the order of "Yep, it figures. Probably beats his wife, too."
George Washington once drew up a list of rules of civility. Here is the first one:
1st Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.I'm with the father of our country. To be gratuitously nasty in public discourse is like relieving yourself in a swimming pool. Even if nobody knows you did it, you still made the pool a dirtier place for everybody--yourself included.
* * *
To put things in perspective, here is Death Mills, a film about the Nazi death camps that Billy Wilder--yes, that Billy Wilder--assembled for the U.S. War Department in 1945. It was shown to Germans immediately after the war in order to force them to come to grips with the terrible reality of the Holocaust, about which many German citizens claimed to know nothing:
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand, we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline books. It falls into that long dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong--these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history."
Winston Churchill, speech in the House of Commons, 1935
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
