February 3, 2012

TT: Still angry after all these years

Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Look Back in Anger. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

It's disorienting to watch the film version of John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" fifty-six years after the play on which it was based exploded onto the London stage. The history books assure us that Mr. Osborne swept away the genteel, well-made drawing-room comedies that had long dominated British theater, replacing them with blunt expressions of pent-up rage against the class machine. Yet the first thing you see on screen is an all-white, banjo-powered Dixieland band, for New Orleans-style jazz was the preferred music of England's "angry young men," as Mr. Osborne and his fellow rebels soon came to be known, back in the benighted days before the arrival of John, Paul, George and Ringo.

That's how dated "Look Back in Anger" is, and that's why it's surprising that the Roundabout Theatre Company's new revival, staged with flame-throwing éclat by Sam Gold, should be so theatrically potent. For not only is Mr. Osborne's first play a period piece, but it is an ultra-British period piece, one whose author, not surprisingly, failed to make a lasting impression on American theatergoers. No play of his has been seen on Broadway since 1969. Indeed, "Look Back in Anger" is being mounted at the Laura Pels Theatre rather than in one of the company's Broadway houses, which suggests a certain lack of confidence about its prospects at the box office.

This lack of confidence is understandable, since "Look Back in Anger" is culture-specific and time-bound in a way that presents real problems of understanding to Americans, especially those under 50, who know little of what England was like in 1956. But an effective production can overcome at least some of these problems, and this one is up to the mark, not least because Mr. Gold has fielded a top-of-the-line cast led by Matthew Rhys, who is so exciting as Jimmy Porter, Mr. Osborne's anti-hero and alter ego, that you'll likely be inclined to take his self-lacerating anger for granted rather than trying to puzzle out its source...

I suspect that the first half of "Look Back in Anger" is too deeply rooted in its time and place ever to be fully intelligible to the ordinary American theatergoer. If, on the other hand, you're capable of making sense of such postwar English novels as, say, Kingsley Amis' "Lucky Jim," then you'll have a pretty good idea of what's going on, and Mr. Gold's direction is so passionately precise that it contrives to make most of the rough places plain enough....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

The opening scene of the 1958 film version of Look Back in Anger:

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TT: Agnostics in paradise

In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column, inspired by a scene in the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Look Back in Anger, I consider the seeming paradox of religious art created by skeptics. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Rarely have I seen a spectacle so disheartening as the cheerless, trash-strewn one-room flat that serves as the set for the Roundabout Theatre Company's Off-Broadway revival of John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger." In this production, reviewed elsewhere in today's Journal, the only hint of beauty comes from the radio on which the play's unhappy characters listen to Ralph Vaughan Williams' radiant Fifth Symphony. Small wonder that it should offer them a glimpse of comfort and joy in the midst of their emotional turmoil. Like so much of Vaughan Williams' music, the Fifth Symphony, which was composed during World War II, is deeply spiritual in tone, and it's no surprise to learn that it was based on themes from his operatic version of "The Pilgrim's Progress."

Here's the surprise: Vaughan Williams was a lifelong agnostic.

Now that the boutique atheism of such aggressive secularists as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens has become chic, you might well find yourself wondering why any unbelieving artist would bother to turn his hand to the making of religious art. Indeed, most of the modern novelists who have placed matters of faith at the center of their work have been, like Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis, François Mauriac and Flannery O'Connor, believers of one sort or another. But in every other branch of art, great works of devotional art have been created by skeptics, not a few of whom were fire-breathingly militant about their doubt....

How can such folk take up their tools in the name of God--and why would they want to do so? If you're a person of faith, the answer is obvious: They are guided by divine grace, which theologians assure us can be perceived partially or not at all. But there are other explanations....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Sir Adrian Boult conducts the London Philharmonic in the first movement of Vaughan Williams' Fifth Symphony:

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TT: Nice guy

In addition to being a great artist, Pat Metheny is also a very nice person. If you work in the arts, you'll know that these two things don't always go hand in hand. Because we both grew up in Missouri, I know that Pat's warm smile and unselfconscious sweetness of character, like the spacious, wide-open sound of his music, are deeply rooted in the friendly place where he was born and raised. It is, sad to say, quite possible for an unfriendly person to make beautiful music, but I like to think that the existence of such sour folk is an insult to the natural order of things. If so, then Pat Metheny makes up for Stan Getz or Benny Goodman.

As I recently mentioned in this space, Pat came to Winter Park the other day to spend some time at Rollins College, my academic home away from home, and he and I made two joint appearances during his brief stay. On Wednesday Chuck Archard and I interviewed him in front of an audience, and on Thursday I moderated a question-and-answer session that followed a concert by Pat and Larry Grenadier, the bassist with whom he's spent the past few months barnstorming all over the world.

Pat flew directly from Japan to Florida on Tuesday. The mere fact that he managed to show up for Wednesday's session was thus more than a little bit astonishing. To say that he was exhausted is an understatement--his eyes were completely bloodshot--and I wouldn't have been at all surprised if he'd cut the evening short. Instead he let it run well into overtime, taking innumerable questions from the audience and answering them with the unfailingly courteous aplomb for which he is legendary among journalists.

I doubt you'll be entirely surprised to learn that not all non-verbal artists are at home in the world of words. I've written profiles of one or two well-known musicians who simply couldn't talk at all, thus forcing me to jump through hoops in order to create the illusion that they had something to say. Fortunately, Pat talks as well as he plays, and "interviewing" him is simply a matter of asking an occasional leading question, then scurrying out of the way. Everything he said on Wednesday was quotable, so much so that I'm planning to transform our chat into one of the Saturday Wall Street Journal's "cultural conversations" at some point in the next month or two. I guarantee that it'll be worth reading, and I can assure you that I won't deserve the least bit of credit for its readability.

Midway through the evening, Pat praised my Louis Armstrong biography in a way that made me blush. I knew that he'd liked Pops, but to hear him say so in public was...well, let's just say that I'll treasure the memory as long as I live. As if that weren't enough of a thrill for one evening, Larry Coryell, Pat's illustrious predecessor in the legendary Gary Burton Quartet, happened to be in the audience on Wednesday. I couldn't believe my eyes when he raised his hand to ask Pat a question about harmony. It was as if William Faulkner were quizzing Flannery O'Connor.

Thursday's performance and post-concert colloquy were, if anything, even more exciting, and Larry turned out to be every bit as articulate as Pat. Mrs. T, who'd never heard Pat other than on record, was transported. Midway through "Change of Heart," she leaned over to me and said, "They're not here, are they? They're in the music." So they were--and so were we.

* * *

Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Steve Swallow, and Antonio Sanchez play Metheny's "B & G (Midwestern Night's Dream)":

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TT: The Eames films (V)

This week I'm posting five films made by Charles and Ray Eames. Today's installment, Powers of Ten, was made in 1968:

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TT: Almanac

"Fashion is custom in the guise of departure from custom."

Edward Sapir, Fashion

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February 2, 2012

TT: Closing time

The Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel is no more. I once wrote a tribute to that legendary night spot in which I tried to sum up how I felt about one of the places that used to make New York New York. Here's part of it.

* * *

Eighty well-dressed people sit silently in a darkened, oak-paneled room in the center of Manhattan. Some have plates of food in front of them, others have drinks at their elbows, but nobody is paying much attention to food or drink right now, not even the waiters. Instead, they're all listening to a woman seated on a high stool placed in the bend of a piano, her handsome face lit by a single baby spotlight. Her name is Weslia Whitfield, and she's singing a song everyone here knows by heart: Somewhere over the rainbow/Bluebirds fly/Birds fly over the rainbow/Why then oh why can't I? It takes a lot of nerve, and a lot of talent, to sing a song like that in a room like this. The woman has both, which is why the crowd is so quiet: you could hear a pin drop across the street.

The song ends, and the crowd cheers--decorously (for this is a decorous room), but nonetheless enthusiastically. As the applause swells and the waiters start stalking through the room once more, Weslia Whitfield grins her crinkly-eyed, I'm-having-fun grin and nods her head in acknowledgment of the hubbub. She knows what she just did: she stopped the show in the Oak Room of New York's Algonquin Hotel. For a cabaret singer, life doesn't get much better than this.

One of the first things I did after I moved to New York City was have dinner at the Algonquin with a group of friends, budding writers all. We sat at a round table in the Rose Room and gazed longingly across the room at another round table--the round table, to be exact. We didn't say anything about it, because we didn't have to; we'd all read the same books in high school and college, and dreamed the same dreams. Instead of pointing and gawking, we swapped wisecracks, pretending they were as clever as the ones George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker fired off right over there. I kept thinking of the scene in the movie Laura in which the beautiful Gene Tierney accosts the waspish Clifton Webb at lunchtime: it was filmed here. No doubt everyone else at our table, if not the whole room, was thinking roughly similar thoughts. The Algonquin does that to you....

The Algonquin Hotel is still doing business at the same old stand, 59 W. 44th St., just about halfway between Broadway and Grand Central Station. Needless to say, the Round Table is no longer in operation, and more than a few of its once-renowned members are long forgotten. (When did Franklin P. Adams' name last cross your mind?) But in a city that prides itself on change, the Algonquin prides itself on not changing, and if Noël Coward, Harpo Marx, or William Shawn were to stroll through the front door tomorrow morning, they'd know just where they were. The lobby still has the comfortable air of a slightly down-at-heel men's club--you ring a brass bell to summon a waiter--and Matilda, the current Algonquin cat, still has free run of the place. Fancy it isn't; classy it most decidedly is.

A very large part of what makes the Algonquin so classy is what goes on in the Oak Room at night. During the day, it's a well-lit place to eat lunch, complete with canned music; after dark, it's New York's most prestigious supper club, the place where every singer in America who prefers Cole Porter to MTV Unplugged dreams of working. Back in 1939, Frank Case, who ran the hotel throughout its Round Table days, turned the Oak Room into a nightclub whose regular patrons included the likes of Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo, and Hedy Lamarr. But World War II put an end to cabaret at the Algonquin, and it wasn't until 1981 that the Oak Room again became a venue for American popular song. The singer-pianist Steve Ross, hired on a trial basis, stayed there for four years, and the Algonquin has been presenting cabaret acts ever since....

What makes the Oak Room so special? Obviously, the singers who perform there are the heart of the matter, though the room itself contributes significantly to the effect they make. Cabaret is an intimate art, and the eighty-seat Oak Room, with its amber sconces and red velvet banquettes, is as up close and personal as a love seat at midnight: there is no finer place to listen to songs of passion and despair. "It's nice singing in a room this small," Whitfield says, "because I get feedback from the people. I know what works--and what doesn't work. When they're bored, you can hear them scrunching up their toes in their shoes. You can get that kind of response in a larger room, but it's very slow, and very limited."

But the Oak Room's not-so-secret ingredient, irreproducible at any price, is the fact that it is part and parcel of the Algonquin Hotel. "Lots of famous people slept at the Waldorf," an old Algonquin hand says sniffishly, "but nobody did anything there." Well, plenty of people did things at the Algonquin, and not just the members of the Round Table, either. William Faulkner wrote his Nobel Prize acceptance speech there; the New Yorker was practically invented there. Sinclair Lewis actually offered to buy the place. Everybody who sings in the Oak Room knows it isn't just another club: it's a piece of history. "There are ghosts here," says Weslia Whitfield. "But good ghosts. They want you to do well."

It struck me the other day that America had finally realized Karl Marx's dream of a classless society: nobody here has any class. But in the Oak Room, all the men wear ties and--at least when the music is playing--all the women look like Gene Tierney, cool and chiselled and enigmatic, thinking their private thoughts as Weslia Whitfield lifts her silvery voice in song. Gangsta rap and grunge rock may rule the airwaves, but in this dark, quiet room, Harold Arlen still prospers. Alec Wilder, another great American songwriter (and longtime Algonquin resident), planned at one time to write a book about the Algonquin Hotel called The Elegant Refuge. Though the book never got written, the title was a perfect fit, and still is. For the middle-aged, the Oak Room is a blessed refuge from the squalor of the present; for the young, it is the classroom in which they learn the lost language of elegance. Long may it reign.

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TT: Roll away the stone

I rarely suffer from writer's block, but I've been stymied for weeks and weeks by the opening of the fifth chapter of Mood Indigo, my Duke Ellington biography. I'm sure that the underlying reason for my paralysis was the unusually high level of distraction in my life, but I found it so hard to get going that I actually became near-phobic about it.

Yesterday I finally broke through the ice and wrote the following words:

Hollywood has always had an equivocal relationship with jazz. Once upon a time, the presence of a saxophone on the soundtrack of a Hollywood film was a signpost pointing to unbridled sexuality. Nowadays it indicates world-weary sophistication. But no matter what signals the sound of jazz is meant to send, the making and makers of jazz have usually been romanticized when they are portrayed in movies (just as the music itself is softened). Nor has the American film industry ever been at ease in putting black musicians on the screen in anything other than the most stereotypical of roles--when it allows them to appear at all. The supremely photogenic Louis Armstrong was customarily relegated to such roles, so much so that he once played a character who was referred to on screen as "Uncle Tom." Even though the first feature-length talking picture was called The Jazz Singer, it was not until 1929 that black jazz musicians of importance appeared on the silver screen. Moreover, the films in question were shot in Manhattan, not Hollywood, and they were directed not by an old studio hand but by an avant-garde filmmaker.

And...I'm off!

* * *

Excerpts from Black and Tan, a 1929 short directed by Dudley Murphy and starring Duke Ellington and Fredi Washington:

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TT: The Eames films (IV)

This week I'm posting five films made by Charles and Ray Eames. Today's installment, The Information Machine, was made in 1958:

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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:
• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Sept. 9, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Godspell (musical, G, suitable for children, reviewed here)
• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren't actively prudish, reviewed here)
• Other Desert Cities (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Seminar (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, reviewed here)
• Stick Fly (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (monologue, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, 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)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SAN DIEGO:
• Dividing the Estate (drama, PG-13, remounting of Broadway production, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SANTA MONICA:
• Our Town (drama, G, remounting of off-Broadway production, suitable for mature children, closes Feb. 12, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CORAL GABLES, FLA.:
• The Motherf**ker with the Hat (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

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TT: Almanac

"Sorrow ends not when it seemeth done."

William Shakespeare, Richard II

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February 1, 2012

TT: Man at work (sort of)

This is my desk in Winter Park, Florida:

You will note that I'm taking pictures of it rather than sitting at it.

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TT: In the beginning

This story appeared in the New Orleans Times-Democrat on January 2, 1913. It was reproduced in the Times-Picayune the other day. Here's how I described it in Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong:

The law of unintended consequences was working overtime when Louis pried open his mother's cedar chest, stole a revolver belonging to one of his "stepfathers," loaded it with blanks, and took it along with him on his nightly tour of the red-light district. It was the last day of 1912, and the city was in its customary New Year's Eve hubbub. As Louis and his quartet strolled up Rampart Street, another boy from the neighborhood started "shooting" at them with a cap pistol. Louis promptly pulled his .38 out of his belt and fired back. All at once a policeman came up behind him and wrapped his arms around the boy. "Oh Mister, let me alone!" he cried. "Don't take the pistol! I won't do it no more!" He spent the night in a cell and went before a juvenile-court judge the next morning. What followed, unlike his birth eleven years before, was deemed worthy of coverage by the local papers: "Very few arrests of minors were made Tuesday, and the bookings in the Juvenile Court are not more than the average....The most serious case was that of Louis Armstrong, a twelve-year-old negro, who discharged a revolver at Rampart and Perdido Streets. Being an old offender he was sent to the negro Waif's Home." The old offender was hauled away in a horse-drawn wagon, scared and unsure. All unknowing, he had come to the turning point of his life.

The clip marks the very first time that Louis Armstrong's name appeared in print anywhere. Alas, all I had in hand was a fuzzy photocopy that was too dim to reproduce in Pops. How I wish that I could have included it in my book! Rarely has so great a man made so inauspicious a debut.

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TT: The Eames films (III)

This week I'm posting five films made by Charles and Ray Eames. Today's installment, Toccata for Toy Trains, was made in 1957. The narration is by Charles Eames and the score is by Elmer Bernstein:

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TT: Snapshot

Dame Rebecca West talks to William F. Buckley, Jr., on Firing Line in 1968:

(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

"Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!"

Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

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January 31, 2012

TT: If you happen to be in the neighborhood...

In October I saw Pat Metheny and Larry Grenadier at the Blue Note. It was one of the most exciting musical performances I've heard in my life. Now Pat is en route to Winter Park, Florida, where he'll making two public appearances at Rollins College this week under the auspices of the Winter Park Institute.

It happens that I'm in the middle of my annual stint in Winter Park, so I'm going to lead a public conversation on Wednesday in which Pat talks about his life and work. We'll be joined by the bass guitarist Chuck Archard, who is an artist-in-residence at Rollins. Then Pat and Larry will give a concert at Rollins the following night.

I've known Pat for a number of years--I profiled him for Time back in 2001--and he's one of the most interesting talkers I've had occasion to interview. Here's something he said to me eleven years ago that has stuck in my mind ever since:

Metheny shuns labels for his polystylistic music--particularly fusion, a term he feels has "nothing but negative connotations"--preferring to describe it as jazz, pure and simple. "Jazz is the all-inclusive form," he explains. "There's room for everybody, for anything of true musical substance. Jazz guys like Duke Ellington or Miles Davis have always transformed the elements of the pop culture that surrounds us into something more sophisticated and hipper. It's their job."

I expect he'll have similarly pithy things to say when we get together on Wednesday.

Wednesday's event takes place at Tiedtke Concert Hall and starts at 7:30. For more information, go here.

Thursday's concert takes place at the Alfond Sports Center and starts at 7:30. For more information, go here.

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TT: The Eames films (II)

This week I'm posting five films made by Charles and Ray Eames. Today's installment, Tops, was made in 1969. The score is by Elmer Bernstein:

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TT: Almanac

"Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Quotation and Originality"

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January 30, 2012

TT: Up there on a visit

I don't care for air travel, but long experience has taught me to tolerate it, and on occasion it can be--if only for a few fleeting moments--actively pleasurable. That happened to me when I took off from LaGuardia Airport on Saturday morning, headed for Florida and Mrs. T. It was ten-thirty, the sky was cloudless, and the sun cast a brilliant raking light across the rooftops of New York City. The plane swung north, then south, and all at once I realized that we were going to fly straight down the Hudson River and that my window seat would give me an unobstructed, perfectly lit view of the island below.

We were still low enough that I had no trouble picking out the six-story apartment house where I live, a few blocks south of the Cloisters. I held my breath as the familiar landmarks slipped past me, all shrunken to the size of my thumb: Yankee Stadium, Lincoln Center, Central Park, the Empire State Building, the great gash of Ground Zero. The only thing I couldn't see was the Statue of Liberty, which was a bit too far west to be visible from my window. Having just spent three days rushing from appointment to appointment and show to show, I found it delightful to look down from a great height on the scene of my hectic activity. It felt as though I were being airlifted out of a combat zone.

A few minutes later we were flying over the Jersey Shore, endless and anonymous save for Cape May, the island at its southern tip, whose comma-like shape is unmistakable to anyone who has spent even a day there. I thought of the happy hours that Mrs. T and I had passed on its beaches and in its theaters and restaurants, and hoped that we'd be back soon.

Between Cape May and Orlando I had no idea where I was, so I pulled down the shade and got out my book, William Maxwell's Ancestors. I gratefully immersed myself in its bone-dry ironies and gentle, reminiscent warmth, marveling at the chain of coincidence that had put me in touch with two of the author's friends at the very moment when I started working my way through his oeuvre for the first time in a decade.

Maxwell, like Fauré and Vuillard, is a shy master whose soft-spoken tales of small-town life are not to all tastes. If he's your kind of writer, though, you'll know it the moment you open one of his books for the first time, as Mrs. T did a couple of weeks ago. Within days she was reading passages out loud to me, among them this lovely paragraph from The Folded Leaf:

Accidents, misdirections, overexcitement, heat, crowds, and heartbreaking delays you must expect when you go on a journey, just as you expect to have dreams at night. Whether or not you enjoy yourself at all depends on your state of mind. The man who travels with everything he owns, books, clothes for every season, shoe trees, a dinner jacket, medicines, binoculars, magazines, and telephone numbers--the unwilling traveler--and the man who leaves each place in turn without reluctance, with no desire ever to come back, obviously cannot be making the same journey, even though their tickets are identical....And for the ambitious young man who by a too constant shifting around has lost all of his possessions, including his native accent and the ability to identify himself with a particular kind of sky or the sound, let us say, of windmills creaking; so that in New Mexico his talk reflects Bermuda, and in Bermuda it is again and again of Barbados that he is reminded, but never of Iowa or Wisconsin or Indiana, never of home.

I travel light these days, with no more than a boxful of souvenirs to remind me of the places I've been, and my native accent has faded like a print unwisely hung in direct sunlight. But it never takes much to remind me of Smalltown, U.S.A., my first home, and as I flew over Manhattan, my latest home, I looked down at its towers and parks and squared-off streets with a surge of love that rivaled the ever-enduring love I feel for the place where I grew up. Yes, those streets too often look best at night--or from a great height--but it is the encrustation of memory that makes a home beautiful, and a quarter-century's worth of memories and friendships has caused me to love New York City almost in spite of myself, frustrating and aggravating though it can be.

To be sure, it's a bumpy, awkward kind of love, and I'll always be a small-town boy at heart. Nor would it surprise me in the least if I were to pull up stakes one day and move. But by now I've lived in Manhattan longer than anywhere else, and should I ever move away, I know I'll leave a not-so-small piece of my heart behind.

* * *

Dave Frishberg sings "Do You Miss New York?":

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TT: The Eames films (I)

This week I'm posting five films made by Charles and Ray Eames. Today's installment, House: After Five Years of Living, is a 1955 documentary about the Eames' self-designed California home. The score is by Elmer Bernstein:

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