March 11, 2014
Lookback: on drawing up best-of lists
From 2004:
In my experience, it's usually not that hard to pick a One Best--absolute excellence is by definition self-evident--but no sooner do you venture below the pinnacle than all sorts of other factors crowd into your viewfinder. When Time asked me to pick the best dance of the 20th century, for instance, I didn't have to think twice before choosing George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments, but I found it much harder to decide on two runners-up, though I finally opted for Paul Taylor's Esplanade and Antony Tudor's Jardin aux Lilas. Up to a point, the problems of choice multiply as the list grows longer, though eventually they subside. I suspect that most serious moviegoers' lists of the 50 greatest films (as opposed to their 50 personal favorites) would overlap substantially, but their Top Ten lists would wander all over the map....Read the whole thing here.
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Almanac: Emerson on political leaders
"Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Power"
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March 10, 2014
Still cooking
Satchmo at the Waldorf continues to run off Broadway at the Westside Theatre. John Douglas Thompson's performance--incredibly--grows deeper and deeper. If you haven't seen it, do, and if you have, tell your friends (or see it again!).
I have a compliment to report: a playwright of note who came to last Tuesday's opening-night performance told me afterward that he thought I'd created "a remarkable cubist portrait" of Louis Armstrong. That's actually a very subtle way of describing the play's multiple perspectives on Armstrong and his career.
Some other pieces of news:
• The New Yorker caught up with us over the weekend, and the results were highly gratifying:
The last strains of the set die out, the door to the dressing room opens, and in walks Louis Armstrong (John Douglas Thompson), carrying his trumpet and making his way, stiffly but urgently, to the oxygen tank next to the sofa. It's 1971, and the giant of twentieth-century American music is in a reflective mood....Teachout, Thompson, and the director, Gordon Edelstein, together create an extraordinarily rich and complex characterization. The show centers on the trumpeter's relationship with his Mob-connected Jewish manager of more than thirty-five years, Joe Glaser. Thompson forcefully inhabits both men--and throws in a chilling Miles Davis--delivering an altogether riveting performance.Read the whole thing here.
• I rejoice to announce that the script of Satchmo at the Waldorf will be published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc., whose other authors include Edward Albee, Christopher Durang, Horton Foote, Brian Friel, Athol Fugard, John Guare, A.R. Gurney, Amy Herzog, David Ives, Warren Leight, Tracy Letts, David Mamet, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Lynn Nottage, and John Patrick Shanley. I am honored beyond words to join their ranks.
The announcement is here.
• John and I took last Thursday afternoon off and drove out to Newark to to do an hour-long interview about Satchmo at the Waldorf on WBGO, the New York area's top jazz radio station. Not only did we talk at length about the show and how it came to be, but Rhonda Hamilton, the host, also played several of our favorite Armstrong records in the course of the broadcast.
Not at all surprisingly, we had a lot of fun, and you can listen to us having it by going here.
• Finally, the TV ad for Satchmo rolled out late last week. Here it is. I'm biased, of course, but I think it's way cool:
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Just because: Wes Montgomery plays Horace Silver
Wes Montgomery rehearses and plays Horace Silver's "Nica's Dream" in 1965:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
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Almanac: Eric Hoffer on political leaders
"The leader personifies the certitude of the creed and the defiance and grandeur of power. He articulates and justifies the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated. He kindles the vision of a breath-taking future so as to justify the sacrifice of a transitory present. He stages a world of make-believe so indispensable for the realization of self-sacrifice and united action."
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
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March 7, 2014
Just the facts, ma'am (and plenty of them)
In today's Wall Street Journal I review two new plays, Robert Schenkkan's All the Way (in which Bryan Cranston plays Lyndon Johnson) and Sarah Ruhl's Stage Kiss. Here's an excerpt.
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Robert Schenkkan's "All the Way" is not LBJ's first stage appearance, but it's the first time that he's made it all the way to Broadway, and the presence of Bryan Cranston in the cast is the sole reason for his arrival there. New plays don't reach Broadway nowadays without a movie or TV star, and Mr. Cranston, lately of "Breaking Bad," is (at least for the moment) the latter. Far more important, he's also a totally assured stage performer who plays Johnson as a gangly, lapel-snatching wheedler in whom self-pity and rage are twisted together too tightly to rip apart. Yes, it's a caricature, and a garish one at that, but Mr. Cranston makes you believe in what you're seeing and hearing.
Not so his hard-working colleagues, most of whom struggle with Mr. Schenkkan's overstuffed pageant-style recounting of how Johnson got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, in which historical events whiz by like floats passing in review and LBJ is the only character who seems at all lifelike. Everybody else talks as if he's onstage, and every speech is so freighted with factual exposition that it's impossible for the supporting players to take wing...
Sarah Ruhl is the stickiest of sentimentalists, but nobody has to tell her that it isn't hip, so she caps her carious sweet tooth with a thick coat of Irony Lite. Result: box-office success. Witness "Stage Kiss," a two-hour exercise in theatrical inside baseball ("I just got the sides because my agent blah blah blah") whose principal characters, identified in the program as "She" (Jessica Hecht) and "He" (Dominic Fumusa), are a pair of actors who used to be a couple, parted on bad terms and are now appearing together in a play that requires them to share a big, juicy kiss. Oh, yes, "She" has since acquired a husband (Daniel Jenkins) and a daughter (Clea Alsip). Making due allowance for the usual postmodern pseudo-twists, everything that happens thereafter is horrifically predictable...
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
A TV commercial for All the Way:
President Johnson talks to Sen. Richard Russell by phone on Nov. 28, 1963, six days after the assassination of John Kennedy. This call was secretly recorded by Johnson:
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Almanac: Picasso on work
"Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm-clock."
Pablo Picasso (quoted by Janet Flanner in The New Yorker, Dec. 9, 1939)
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March 6, 2014
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:
• A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• No Man's Land/Waiting for Godot (drama, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory, closes Mar. 30, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, some 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)
• London Wall (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Apr. 13, reviewed here)
• Middle of the Night (drama, PG-13, closes Mar. 29, reviewed here)CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Outside Mullingar (comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 16, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Hamlet/Saint Joan (drama, G/PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway productions, playing in rotating repertory, original productions reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY IN ORLANDO, FLA.:
• The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Parts I and II (drama, G/PG-13, playing in rotating repertory, reviewed here)Posted at 11:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
Almanac: Thomas Carlyle on work
"Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,--honest work, which you intend getting done."
Thomas Carlyle, speech, Apr. 2, 1866
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March 5, 2014
The morning after
The opening-night performance of the off-Broadway transfer of Satchmo at the Waldorf went sensationally well. John Douglas Thompson gave a letter-perfect performance, and the sold-out crowd at the Westside Theatre yelled its approval at show's end. The producers then threw a fabulous party from which Mrs. T and I returned home in a daze of joy much like the one that overwhelmed me after The Letter opened in Santa Fe five years ago. One thing was different: I now know what it feels like to be blinded by flashbulbs!
Most of the early reviews were very positive. Even those critics who had doubts about the play were hugely enthusiastic about John's acting, as well they should have been. (Here's my favorite line: "To say that Thompson's performance is a tour de force would be an understatement. This is a tour de megaforce.") To be sure, several of my colleagues have yet to go on record, but so far it looks as though we've got a shot at a solid run.
While I'm still a bit dizzy--to put it mildly--life goes on, and so does my day job. I'll be seeing a Broadway preview this afternoon and filing a review for The Wall Street Journal first thing tomorrow morning. Nevertheless, I'm about as happy as it's possible to be.
* * *
Our Girl in Chicago, my co-blogger and best friend, took this snapshot as she, Mrs. T, and I prepared to head down to the theater yesterday afternoon:
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Snapshot: Louis Armstrong in 1970
"Anatomy of a Performance," a documentary about Louis Armstrong filmed at the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
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Almanac: Dr. Johnson on hope
"The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope."
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (Mar. 24, 1749)
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March 4, 2014
The night of nights
Satchmo at the Waldorf opens tonight at New York's Westside Theatre. Nothing remains for me to do but sit back, watch, and hope.
This one's for my mother and father and my beloved Nancy LaMott, whom I wish had lived to see it--and for Mrs. T, who makes all things possible.
In honor of the occasion, I'm posting, as I always do on my opening nights--of which this is, incredibly, the eighth--a well-remembered and much-loved TV theme song from my childhood. May it bring us all broken legs:
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Lookback: on being remaindered
From 2004:
The UPS man brought me a couple of boxes' worth of hardcover copies of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, and I knew that the inevitable moment had come at last: my book has been remaindered. I can't complain, really, since The Skeptic stayed in print for a year and a half, got terrific reviews, and is now available in a handsome-looking trade paperback. Still, you can't help but feel a twinge of dismay when you open the form letter from your publisher advising you that your beloved baby will soon be piled high on the discount tables, there to be sold for humiliatingly low prices. No matter how good a run you had--and I had a better one than I ever dared to hope--the party always ends....Read the whole thing here.
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Almanac: Elbert Hubbard on the optimist
"A neurotic person with gooseflesh and teeth a-chatter, trying hard to be brave."
Elbert Hubbard, Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams
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March 3, 2014
Who knew?
Five years ago I was putting the finishing touches on the copyedited manuscript of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Paul Moravec and I had proofread and signed off on the orchestral score to The Letter a few weeks earlier. I was still having trouble getting used to the fact that an opera I'd helped to write would be professionally produced that summer. I had no idea that I'd write the first draft of a play about the subject of my latest book less than a year later, and I'd have laughed in your face if you'd told me in 2009 that it would be commercially produced off Broadway.
Well, it happened. Satchmo at the Waldorf opens at the Westside Theatre tomorrow night. No matter whether it hits or misses, they can't take that away from me: I wrote a play that made it all the way to New York.
I haven't talked much about it, in this space or elsewhere, but it's not exactly a secret that working drama critics rarely write plays, at least not in this country. One who did, Wolcott Gibbs, wrote a comedy called Season in the Sun that opened on Broadway in 1950, an occurrence sufficiently extraordinary that Life actually ran a feature story the following week called "A Critic Awaits His Critics." It was accompanied by photographs of a sickly-looking Gibbs sitting in a Times Square nightclub on opening night, waiting for the morning papers to come out so that he could see what his colleagues had to say about it. Given his well-known predilection for booze, I suspect he'd prepared himself for the worst.
The first paragraph is worth repeating here:
When word got around in the theater last summer that the most acid of all play critics, The New Yorker's Wolcott Gibbs, was having a play of his own produced, a lot of vengeful actors and playwrights prayed that Gibbs would fall on his face. Last week when Gibbs' play, Season in the Sun, finally opened, a highly expectant swarm of first-nighters, whiffing blood like spectators at a Roman circus, were on hand to watch Gibbs come to grief or glory.As it turned out, he got good reviews, and Season in the Sun ran for 367 performances. But I'm sure that there are plenty of people who'd be glad to see Satchmo at the Waldorf do otherwise. I can't say that I blame them, either. It goes without saying that I sometimes have occasion to write sharply in The Wall Street Journal about shows that I don't enjoy. Nobody likes being written about that way. If it happens to me, I won't like it.
On the other hand, this isn't my first trip in front of the firing squad: Satchmo has already been produced and reviewed in four other cities, and I've also written three opera libretti and half-a-dozen books, some of which, shall we say, got better notices than others. Getting reviewed, favorably or not, is anything but a new experience for this first-time playwright.
For me, the big surprise was that the theater people whom I've met in the course of working on Satchmo have without exception been amazingly generous and welcoming. They all say variations on the same thing: Good for you. You've stepped up to the plate. Now you know how it feels. I wish you the very best of luck. I think they mean it, too.
In any case, the waiting is almost over, and after two weeks of previews, I know that Satchmo at the Waldorf is capable of pleasing New York audiences, all of whom have received it warmly so far. And I know what it feels like to work with John Douglas Thompson, Gordon Edelstein, and the best design and production team on the planet. It's been a wholly blissful experience--one that I never expected to have, and one whose memory I'll treasure for the rest of my life.
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My sister-in-law took this snapshot of Mrs. T and me standing in front of the Westside Theatre yesterday afternoon:
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Just because: Louis Armstrong in 1958
A rare 1958 TV interview with Louis Armstrong:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
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Almanac: Moss Hart on the playwright's profession
"Play-writing, like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession."
Moss Hart, Act One
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February 28, 2014
She gave at the office
In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I review two rare and interesting off-Broadway revivals, Keen Company's Middle of the Night and the Mint Theater's London Wall. Here's an excerpt.
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Paddy Chayefsky doesn't exactly need to be "revived," seeing as how "Network" is even more admired now than when it first came out in 1976. But nowadays most people know him only for that ferociously prophetic satire of broadcast news and for "Marty," the 1953 live-TV drama whose film version snagged a best-picture Oscar and turned him into a Hollywood screenwriter. Few recall that Chayefsky also wrote two stage plays, "Middle of the Night" (1956) and "The Tenth Man" (1959), that both had long runs on Broadway but haven't been seen in New York for years.
Now Keen Company, the Off-Broadway troupe that specializes to consistently fine effect in what its mission statement refers to as "sincere plays," has exhumed "Middle of the Night," the story of a 53-year-old New York widower (Jonathan Hadary) who falls hard for his 23-year-old secretary (Nicole Lowrance). Adapted for the stage by Chayefsky from one of his hour-long "Philco Television Playhouse" scripts, it's a kitchen-sink midlife-crisis drama with a strongly ethnic flavor--Jerry is a down-to-earth Jewish garment manufacturer, Betty a needy, emotionally immature Gentile...
Mr. Hadary and Ms. Lowrance make an affecting couple, and Jonathan Silverstein's pointed staging succeeds in papering over most of the flaws. The result is a cultural period piece that still has the power to touch the heart...
John Van Druten, who used to be big (he wrote five Broadway hits in the '40s and '50s) and is now forgotten, has lately come to the attention of the Mint Theater Company, another first-class Off-Broadway troupe that specializes in "worthy but neglected plays." The Mint has just mounted the U.S. premiere of his "London Wall," a 1931 comedy set in a London law office. Unlike "Middle of the Night," this witty, impeccably crafted tale of a quartet of working women and the benighted men for whom they work has a distinctly contemporary flavor, enough so that you'll come away wondering whether Van Druten might deserve credit for inventing the workplace comedy long before it found favor on TV.
Part of what makes "London Wall" so involving is that Van Druten heightens the play's emotional stakes by homing in on the plight of Blanche Janus (perfectly played by Julia Coffey), the firm's sardonic, wised-up senior secretary, who is 35, a notch or two older than her colleagues, and all too aware of what awaits her should she fail to find a husband: "Well, what else am I to do? Stick here, and go on living at home looking after father? I'm the only one left. And then he'll die, and then what else is there? Rooms, or a boarding house, or a club for women who can't get married? Earning three pounds a week for the rest of my life. No!" Yes, "London Wall" is a romcom with a (mostly) happy ending, but the fact that Blanche is up against it--and knows it--keeps you from getting too cozy...
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
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Must Dudamel speak out?
In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column I offer my thoughts on the continued silence of Gustavo Dudamel and Valery Gergiev regarding human-rights abuses in their native lands. Here's an excerpt.
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Gustavo Dudamel, the 33-year-old Venezuelan conductor who is music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is also a loyal alumnus of El Sistema, Venezuela's much-admired public music-education program. He continues to support El Sistema and to lead concerts by government-funded youth orchestras--and declines to criticize the repressive policies of Nicolás Maduro, the country's autocratic president, which have led to public protests that are being suppressed violently.
"I'm a musician," Mr. Dudamel has explained. "If I were a politician, I would act as a politician for my own interest. But I'm an artist, and an artist should act for everybody....I cannot allow El Sistema to become a casualty of politics. Regardless of political or public pressure, I will continue this work in Venezuela and throughout the world."
If his response has a familiar ring, it's because you've heard similar words from another internationally famous conductor, Russia's Valery Gergiev. Mr. Gergiev, who is a longtime supporter of the thuggish Vladimir Putin regime, is being harshly criticized by colleagues for not speaking out against Mr. Putin's anti-gay policies. His response? "It is wrong to suggest that I have ever supported anti-gay legislation and in all my work I have upheld equal rights for all people. I am an artist and have for over three decades worked with tens of thousands of people and many of them are indeed my friends."
Are either of those slippery statements good enough? And do artists have a responsibility to protest against moral injustice?
Let's start with what ought to be a given: No artist is obliged to create political art, however worthy the cause. To do so is to run the risk of undermining the seriousness of his art by enlisting it in the service of propaganda. On the other hand, every artist is subject to the same moral obligations as his fellow men. Even a genius has no right to shrug off the universal claims of common decency--and it's no secret that great artists as a group have an unfortunate way of doing whatever they think will best serve their own purposes....
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Read the whole thing here.
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