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November 30, 2005

TT: Gone today

Here tomorrow.

Posted November 30, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Tennessee Williams' weekly share in 1945 of the box-office receipts from The Glass Menagerie: $1,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $10,504.82

(Source: Donald Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers)

Posted November 30, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"It makes me very aware of my wasted life as an artist; I should have chucked security and settled for Bohemianism in which my talents might have flowered more originally. Perhaps wife and child and the desire for roots have been a mistake. I should have given an adventurous Lear by now and invented a clown. Ah well. What I have is a dear good wife, a dear good son and a house with views of rolling downs, trees, grass, and open skies. And a pretty good collection of books."

Alec Guinness (diary entry, Jan. 1, 1981)

Posted November 30, 12:01 PM

OGIC: The sea inside

What's that you say? You could really stand to read just one more review of John Banville's Booker-winning novel The Sea? Well, you're in luck. I threw my two cents into that crowded field in last Sunday's Baltimore Sun.

I found the book lovely and absorbing, but its denouement deflating:

It takes a sure hand and an absolutely arresting style to make this sort of highly interior, small-scale fiction compelling. Banville, his sentences strikingly visual and perfectly tuned, is more than equal to the challenge. Moreover, the character in whose mind we spend the whole of this short novel is neither remarkable nor likable. Having made the climb to the middle class, Max is a bit of a snob. He is comically self-absorbed, squeamish and habitually condescending to women. The book doesn't invite us to identify with him, so when his interior monologue hits a nerve, it has to do with the truly universal aspects of human experience - vanity, ambivalence about mortality, awe of the natural world, romantic and sexual infatuation.

In a sense, despite its narrow point of view and mundane subject matter, burrowing psychological fiction like this is more ambitious than fiction with a wider lens. For most of The Sea, Banville succeeds brilliantly at making quite gripping reading out of the dwindling, ordinary life of an ordinary man. The drabness of Max's present existence is offset by the heady, luminous quality of his memories. The day he kissed Chloe Grace "had been sombre and wet and hung with big-bellied clouds when we were going into the picture-house in what had still been afternoon and now at evening was all tawny sunlight and raked shadows, the scrub grass dripping with jewels and a red sail-boat out on the bay turning its prow and setting off toward the horizon's already dusk-blue distances."

Of course, everyone's memories seem splendid and suggestive to them, and for most of the novel it doesn't appear that Banville is making any special claims for the extraordinariness of Max's past, however much the character may be rapt at the ongoing slide show in his head.

At the end of the book, however, we learn that the memories Max has immersed himself in are part of an extraordinary story indeed. Secrets are revealed, and The Sea snaps into focus as a very different book than it had appeared to be, a book with a twist and a scandal at its core. To my mind, it becomes a lesser one: no less intelligent and skillful, but less moving and ambitious than when it was apparently scrutinizing mundane experience.

But still well worth reading. This line, quoted earlier in my review, was one that particularly interested me: "Memory dislikes motion, preferring to hold things still." Although this seems to be intended in part as a reflection of the protagonist's vocation as an art historian--of Bonnard specifically, with his sensual stolen domestic moments--it's close to my experience, too, of very intense memories. They're snapshots, frozen motion. I loved the rich texture of the ordinary in this novel, and wished that Banville had been content to convey that. The mystery unveiled at the end felt distinctly superfluous.

Posted November 30, 9:13 AM

November 29, 2005

TT: I'd rather be right

Joseph Epstein has published a sharply negative reconsideration of the criticism of Edmund Wilson (whom he once admired) in the December issue of Commentary. The essay isn't yet posted on the Web, but it doesn't matter, because I don't want to talk about Wilson. Instead, I'm interested in the following passage:

One of the advantages artists have over critics is that they can be nearly complete damn fools and still produce interesting and important, even lasting, art. Critics are not permitted such large margins of stupidity. It matters that they get things right; their opinions, which is all they chiefly have, are crucial.

These three sentences need a certain amount of unpacking. For starters, they contain a planted axiom--critics aren't artists--which some readers will find controversial. Not me, though I think criticism can be artful, and should be. Nothing is more tiresome than a badly written review of a well-written book. In general, though, it seems to me self-evident that criticism normally derives its meaning and significance from the works of art about which the critic writes. It doesn't stand alone. Great art, by contrast, always stands alone, in the sense that it contains within itself all the information necessary for it to be meaningfully experienced. You'll get more out of All the King's Men if you know who Huey Long was, but you don't have to know anything about him--or Robert Penn Warren--to grasp the point of the novel, or be moved by it, just as you don't have to know anything about Mozart to appreciate the G Minor Symphony.

Having said this, I'm not entirely sure I agree with Epstein when he suggests that the most important thing about criticism is that it "get things right." Of course it's desirable to be right, and I don't see how it's possible to take seriously a critic who's wrong about most things. Nevertheless, I'm uneasy with the notion that "getting things right" is the ultimate test of a critic's worth, just as I'm not entirely willing to go along with the notion that criticism isn't art. George Bernard Shaw and Virgil Thomson, the two greatest music critics of modern times, got all sorts of things wrong, but even at their most willful they never failed to be both interesting and artful. I'd rather read Thomson on, say, Paul Hindemith (whom he completely misunderstood) than Olin Downes on anything, even though Downes was more likely than Thomson to be "right" on any given subject. The trouble with Thomson is that he was violently prejudiced and thus unreliable. The trouble with Downes is that he was boring. Whom would you rather read?

Of course Thomson wasn't just a critic, he was also a composer, and I think that makes a difference, though I'd be hard pressed to say exactly what it is. It's easier to explain in the case of Shaw, who was, like him or not (and I don't), an imaginative writer of high style and memorable personality. These things cannot be separated: a memorable personality is the enabling condition of a great style. We read Shaw's music criticism for what it tells us about music, but it's no less worth reading for what it tells us about Shaw.

This is part of what I was getting at in the last chapter of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken:

He was, of course, something more than a memorable stylist, if something less than a truly wise man. Daniel Aaron speaks of "the great comic writer who as time passes will be remembered less for what he said than how he said it," but the fact remains that his charm is inseparable from his habits of thought. However perverse or excessive his underlying ideas may be, they retain much of their impelling force. One cannot help being impressed by the stubborn way in which Mencken the self-made philosopher grapples, in his unpretentious, take-no-prisoners way, with the permanent things: the limits of art, the rule of law, the meaning of life. The simplicity, one comes to realize, is inseparable from the message. In Mencken, style and content are one, and the resulting alloy is more than merely individual: it is a matchlessly exact expression of the American temper.

That's where the art comes in. If you can write like Mencken or Shaw or Thomson, and if you have a personality as interesting as theirs, you don't have to be "right" in order to be taken seriously as a critic. You are, in fact, an artist--a personal essayist whose subject matter is art.

But what about the rest of us? I can turn a pretty phrase, but I'm not nearly as stylish a writer as Mencken or Shaw or Thomson, or as interesting a personality. Hence I'm obliged to attend more closely to the pedestrian virtues, the first of which is being right. Maybe that's what Epstein meant. Anybody who thinks he's as good as Mencken or Shaw or Thomson, after all, is probably delusional. Of course you might be that good--but you'd better not count on it. I sure don't.

Posted November 29, 12:04 PM

TT: Unsullied

I doubt that many people under the age of forty remember Victor Borge, the comedian-pianist who died in 2000 at the miraculous age of ninety-one. He was a star for a very long time, first on radio, then TV, and Comedy in Music, his 1953 one-man show, ran for 849 consecutive performances on Broadway, a record which so far as I know remains unbroken. From there he went on the road and stayed there, giving sixty-odd concerts in the season before his death. Borge spent his old age basically doing Comedy in Music over and over again, which never seemed to bother anybody. I reviewed it twice for the Kansas City Star in the Seventies, and loved it both times. His Danish-accented delivery was so droll and his timing so devastatingly exact that even the most familiar of his charming classical-music spoofs somehow remained fresh, as you can see by watching any of the various videos of his act.

It's hard to imagine that there was a time when so popular a comedian started out as a serious musician, much less one who became popular by making witty fun of the classics. Such a thing could only have happened in the days when America's middlebrow culture was still intact and at the height of its influence. Back then the mass media, especially TV, went out of their way to introduce ordinary people to classical music and encouraged them to take it seriously--which didn't mean they couldn't laugh at it, too, as Borge proved whenever he sat down to play.

Borge's act resembled a straight piano recital gone wrong. He'd start to play a familiar piece like Clair de lune or the "Moonlight" Sonata, then swerve off in some improbable-sounding direction, never getting around to finishing what he started. Yet he was clearly an accomplished pianist, though few of his latter-day fans had any idea how good he'd been (he studied with Egon Petri, Busoni's greatest pupil). He usually made a point of playing a piece from start to finish toward the end of every concert, and I remember how delighted I was each time I heard him ripple through one of Ignaz Friedman's bittersweet Viennese-waltz arrangements, which he played with a deceptively nonchalant old-world panache that never failed to leave me longing for an encore. Alas, he never obliged, and in later years I found myself wondering whether he'd really been quite so fine as my memory told me.

This story has a happy ending. I saw Borge on an old What's My Line? episode the other day, which inspired me to look him up on the Web. Within a few clicks I'd made my way to a Danish Web site that contained a page of sound clips, the first being an unpublished live recording in which Borge can be heard playing (surprise) a Friedman waltz. Now I know a whole lot more about golden-age piano playing now than I did back in the Seventies. Among other things, I've gotten to know Friedman's own recordings, including his marvelously mercurial performances of three of the same waltz arrangements that Borge liked to play. Could he possibly have been up to the standard set by Friedman? I clicked on the link with some trepidation, only to discover that my youthful ear hadn't played me false: Borge, it turns out, could play with the utmost stylishness and sensitivity whenever it suited him to do so. You'll never hear a more elegant piece of piano playing--not even from Ignaz Friedman himself.

I can't tell you how glad I am to know that. It would have been too sad to find out long after the fact that Victor Borge's playing had been no better than adequate. Life is hard enough without having to suffer purely gratuitous disillusionments. What joy, then, to discover that some things in this world really are as good as they're cracked up to be.

Posted November 29, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Commissioning fee paid to Martha Graham by the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University in 1946 for choreographing Cave of the Heart: $500

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $5,134.32

(Source: Barbara B. Heyman, Samuel Barber)

Posted November 29, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic."

Oscar Wilde, letter to the editor of the Scots Observer (1890)

Posted November 29, 12:01 PM

November 28, 2005

TT: Elsewhere

As you may recall, I took the last few days off, during which I tinkered extensively with the right-hand column (result: four fresh Top Five picks and several new blogs in the "Sites to See" module) and rummaged through my overflowing basketful of accumulated links. Here's a snootful of what a bunch of other interesting people have been writing in recent weeks.

I really should do this more often....

- Ms. Critical Mass takes a cold-eyed look at the effects of the spread of adjunct teaching on academic freedom:

Almost half of all college teachers are entirely unprotected by the vaunted "academic freedom" that is so often touted as the philosophical mainstay of academic life. Add to the number of adjuncts the number of grad students and non-tenured assistant professors who are also teaching college courses in the absence of job security, and you get a picture of an academic world where very, very few people actually have the freedom to speak, write, research, and teach as they see fit (by "see fit" I don't mean to defend those teachers who abuse their positions to proselytize, or who are incompetent in some way; I mean to defend those who might have legitimate reasons for pursuing unorthodox pedagogical methods and scholarly topics, as well as those whose politics might endanger their professional positions, if known). The picture is one of an academic world in which "academic freedom" is the privilege of the tenured few; it is thus not a "freedom" at all, but the special privilege of an increasingly small group of academic elites....

Read and ponder.

- Says Eric Berlin:

I'm no music critic. So I can't write 500 words on why Fiona Apple's song Extraordinary Machine is so wonderful. All I know is, it's unlike anything else I've ever heard--certainly unlike any pop song--and you should go find a way to listen to it right now. That is all.

I could probably write those 500 words, but I won't. I'll just say that I must have listened to "Extraordinary Machine" (the song, not the album) at least a couple of dozen times since Ms. in the wings first drew it to my attention, bless her. It's that different--and that cool.

- Mr. American Scene is in a true-confession mode when it comes to important books he's never read. (Henry IV? Yikes!)

- Are drama critics getting dumber? Is that even possible? Michael Coveney thinks so:

Instead, too many theatre reviews do little more than describe something as "great" or "awful." Even when the writing is stylish, reviews will often lack the knowledge that was taken for granted a generation ago. And increasingly, editors are sending in the critical clowns in the true joke spirit of contemporary journalism....

- Mr. Modern Kicks disagrees with me about Jed Perl's New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century. I loved it, he didn't. While he failed to change my mind, he made me think--without raising his voice. Smart, civilized disagreement...what a concept.

- Anna L. Conti waxes amusing on art gallery postcards:

The image on the postcard always sells. In my experience, this is not an absolute law but it happens more often than not. In the past, I've sometimes poked fun at the people who come in, give the entire show a 30-second glance and then say, "Where's the one on the card?" And boy, are they upset if it's sold already. At some of my shows, I've had people call as soon as they receive the card (before they've seen anything in person) and want to put a hold on the painting they saw on the card. Once, at an opening, I saw two people get into a fight over who was going buy a particular painting (naturally, it was the one on the card.)...

Which reminds me of one of my own corollary propositions to Murphy's Law: Don't even bother looking for a postcard of your favorite painting in a museum.

- The Museum of Modern Art is deaccessioning (i.e., selling off) an important late oil painting by Milton Avery. In case you've been wondering what MoMA doesn't think worth hanging onto, much less hanging, this is what it looks like.

- You like Top Ten lists, big boy? Mr. Modern Art Notes obliges with an annotated list of his ten favorite American cities in which to see art.

- Incidentally, did you know that the FBI's Art Theft Program has a Web site...

- ...or that you can take an online test to see whether you know enough about the United States to become a naturalized U.S. citizen?

- And have you ever wondered why The Complete New Yorker: Eighty Years of the Nation's Greatest Magazine is so damn cumbersome to use, lovely and amazing though it is to have all of The New Yorker on DVD? Go here for the answer.

- Speaking of lawyers (which we were), allow me to remind you yet again bloggers get sued, for all sorts of reasons. Mr. BuzzMachine has a hair-raising list of recent anti-blog litigation. Read it and take cover.

- Finally, here's the scoop on that $100 student laptop you've been reading about. (No, you can't buy one. Sorry.)

Posted November 28, 12:05 PM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- I just added a new piece to the Teachout Museum, an 1892 etching by Edgar Degas called "Dancer Putting on Her Shoe." Degas is one of my favorite artists, and I've long wanted to own a work of art that had something to do with dancing. This particular work isn't rare--the copy I bought is a posthumous impression from the cancelled plate--but the cancellation marks are unobtrusive and the image extraordinarily beautiful, as you can see by going here.

It's also extraordinarily simple, especially by comparison with the increasingly complex pastels of dancers that Degas was producing around the same time. That's one of the things I love about etching as a medium: it encourages the artist to concentrate on essentials. Color is still what I love best about painting, but looking at etchings taught me to understand and appreciate the importance of pure line--and, eventually, to love it as well. Whenever I look at "Dancer Putting on Her Shoe," or my copy of Milton Avery's March at a Table, it makes me want to write more simply, to strip away everything superfluous and be content with what remains.

- In case you were wondering, I very much enjoyed my Thanksgiving dinner at Good Enough to Eat. I'd never eaten out by myself for Thanksgiving, and I feared the prospect of being part of a salon des refusés, but the atmosphere turned out to be cheery and companionable, and the food was delicious. It was fascinating to see who else showed up. I counted more or less the same number of all-male parties and extended families with children, which tells you something about my neighborhood. (I only spotted one other singleton at the two o'clock sitting, though, and I'm not sure what that says.)

Incidentally, the background music consisted of tangos by Astor Piazzolla, which went surprisingly well with cornbread stuffing and roasted Brussels sprouts.

Posted November 28, 12:04 PM

TT: Rerun

November 2003:

In a perfect world, everybody would experience art without first having it explained: no program notes, no wall labels, no interviews with the author, and--above all--no reviews. You'd go simply because you were interested, because you made a habit of going to see new things. Then, after the immediate experience, you'd seek out further information to help you put that experience in perspective (or, as my correspondent remarks, simply for fun). I think it's hugely important to make a serious and sustained effort to come to new works of art this way. But in order to do so, especially when you're talking about Broadway shows, you've got to have (A) a lot of spare time and (B) a lot of spare money. Otherwise, it's essential to call your shots, if only to avoid bankruptcy, and good reviewers can help....

(If it's new to you, read the whole thing here.)

Posted November 28, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Advance paid to Flannery O'Connor by Harcourt, Brace in 1955 for The Violent Bear It Away: $1,250

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $8,588.02

(Source: Library of America, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works)

Posted November 28, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"The Gods are dead, poetry alone is left to us, the last star in the night of chaos."

Edgar Degas (quoted in Jeanne Fevre, Mon oncle Degas)

Posted November 28, 12:01 PM

November 25, 2005

TT: Here be lizards

It's Friday, and I'm a drama critic again! Today's Wall Street Journal contains my reviews of the Broadway revival of Seascape and a Baltimore production of Hay Fever:

Edward Albee is back on Broadway. "Seascape" won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 but flopped at the box office (it ran for only 63 performances). Now Lincoln Center Theater is putting on a revival directed by Mark Lamos and playing for six weeks at the Booth Theatre, Broadway, "The Light in the Piazza" having tied up the company's own Vivian Beaumont Theater for an unexpectedly long run. Though "Seascape" is no masterpiece, it's being performed in a masterly way, and you could do a lot worse than to spend an evening watching Frances Sternhagen and George Grizzard make magic out of it.

Ms. Sternhagen and Mr. Grizzard play Nancy and Charlie, a married couple on the far side of middle age who can't agree on what to do with the rest of their lives (she longs to comb the beaches of the world, he wants to settle down in one place and take it easy). As they sit on an unidentified beach and bicker about their future, they are unexpectedly accosted by Sarah and Leslie (Elizabeth Marvel and Frederick Weller), a pair of giant talking lizards who, feeling a vaguely uneasy sense of "not belonging anymore," have crawled out of the ocean to see how the other half lives....

What do you think of when you think of Baltimore? My list would include H.L. Mencken, crab cakes, Camden Yards, John Waters, "The Wire" and the Matisses at the Baltimore Museum of Art--but not live theater. At least not until last Saturday, when I paid my very first visit to Centerstage and saw a performance of Noël Coward's "Hay Fever" that not only impressed but delighted me....

No link. To read the whole thing (and please do), buy a copy of this morning's paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which is such a megadeal.

Posted November 25, 12:06 PM

TT: Art, American style

Here's a sneak preview of my next "Sightings" column, which will be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal:

What do the music of Aaron Copland, the dances of Paul Taylor, the paintings of Stuart Davis and the novels of Willa Cather have in common? They're all American--and all-American. You can't listen to five bars of "Appalachian Spring," or read a paragraph of "My Ántonia," without catching the tangy scent of American modernism. It's as familiar as the smell of wood smoke on a cold November evening....

Needless to say, there's much, much more where that came from. See for yourself--buy a copy of tomorrow's Journal and look me up.

Posted November 25, 12:05 PM

TT: Briefly noted

- My brother just filed for re-election to the city council of Smalltown, U.S.A. He's running unopposed. I don't know what you think, but I think that's just about as cool as it gets.

- National Review Online asked several of the magazine's longtime contributors, myself included, to recommend books, both new and old, for Christmas gifts. Go here and scroll down to see my suggestions.

Posted November 25, 12:04 PM

TT: Rerun

Thanksgiving 2004:

To be sure, the one thing a new friend can never do for you is say I knew you when, and I find it rather sad that there are so few people in my life who can speak those words. None of my closest friends in Manhattan knew me when: we didn't meet until after I'd figured out who I was and what I wanted to become. On the other hand, the friends of our youth present their own problems. They are part of the train of memories that we all pull behind us, the one that grows longer with each passing day, and for that reason harder to pull....

(If it's new to you, read the whole thing here.)

Posted November 25, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Eugene O'Neill's total earnings in 1922, the year in which The Hairy Ape and Anna Christie were both running on Broadway: $44,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $455,461.84

(Source: Library of America, Eugene O'Neill: Complete Plays)

Posted November 25, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of habit."

W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

Posted November 25, 12:01 PM

November 24, 2005

TT: Thoughts for today

- "There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the Twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution: butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted; meats, too, and eggs, and all the far-brought spices of the world, take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself. When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts."

M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf

- "Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people."

Samuel Johnson, Tour to the Hebrides

- "Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy."

Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America

Posted November 24, 12:01 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels* (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)
- Doubt* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)
- Sweeney Todd* (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, reviewed here)
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
- The Woman in White* (musical, PG, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, closes Dec. 31, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
- Absurd Person Singular (comedy, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)
- Bach in Leipzig (comedy, G, too complicated for any but the brightest children to follow, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)
- Hamlet (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 11, reviewed here)
- See What I Wanna See (musical, R, adult subject matter, explicit sexual situations, strong language, closes Dec. 4, reviewed here)

Posted November 24, 4:35 AM

November 23, 2005

TT: Thanks for the memory

This is my favorite moment from Citizen Kane:

A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.

I'm old enough to have memories like that, isolated flashes of recollection that light up the darkness of the past so intensely that you catch your breath. What's more, I've found that the younger I was when the remembered event occurred, the more exact is my recollection today. Not long ago I ran across a CD reissue of a record I hadn't heard in thirty years, the 1955 J.J. Johnson-Kai Winding performance of Let's Get Away From It All, and I realized as I listened that I remembered the entire arrangement note for note, all the way from the intro to the shout chorus.

Much the same thing happened last night as I watched The Carol Burnett Show: A Reunion on Bravo. I was barely in my teens when I saw the skit in which Tim Conway played a maladroit dentist who injected himself repeatedly with novocaine while attempting to pull one of Harvey Korman's teeth. I only saw it once--maybe twice--but when I viewed it again for the first time in decades, I was astonished to find that my recall of the skit was all but total.

I'm sure this says something about the receptivity of young minds, but I wonder if perhaps it might also tell us something equally important about the nature of art. Here is James Stewart, speaking to a British Film Institute interviewer in 1972:

I'm beginning to believe that, in films, what everyone is striving for is to produce moments--not a performance, not a characterization, not something where you get into the part--you produce moments that create a feeling of believability to what you're doing....

I was making a Western in British Columbia and we were on the Columbia Icefields. It was raining and there was heavy mist around, so we couldn't shoot, so we were all huddled around a fire. Suddenly, out of the mist, came a man, and he was not a young man. He had a beard--it wasn't exactly a beard, he just hadn't shaved for a while--and he was a miner type, he was dressed like a miner. He came closer to us and he said, "Which one of you is Stewart?"

"I am."

He came over and looked at me and said, "Oh, yeah. Yeah. I recognize ya. Well, I heard you was here, and I thought I'd come up and say hello. I've seen a lot of your picture shows, but I think the one I liked best--you were in this room and your girlfriend was in the next room and there were fireflies outside, and you recited a piece of poetry to her. I thought that was a nice thing for you to do."

And I remembered exactly the moment, exactly the film, who was in it, who directed it, and I also realized that that picture had been released twenty years before. That man made a tremendous impression on me. To think that I had been part of creating a moment that this man had liked and had remembered for twenty years. I'll never forget it. That's what I mean by the moment.

I know what he means--now. I've become Mr. Bernstein in Citizen Kane, a middle-aged man with a head full of fireflies, perfectly remembered pinpoints of laughter and sorrow, ecstasy and humiliation, that crowd my consciousness without warning. Would that I also had a few flashes of life-changing insight tucked into my album of mental snapshots, but I guess that's not how memory works. No doubt I, too, will be thinking of Tim Conway when I'm on my deathbed, or the way Van Cliburn played "The Star-Spangled Banner" when I heard him give a recital at the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium in 1978, or the shy smile on the face of a pretty girl I once met by arrangement in a bookstore, not knowing what she looked like until the very moment of our meeting.

I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl, or heard Bach's Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele playing in my head, or recalled the greasy tang of the hamburgers my family used to eat at the SEMO District Fair each fall. A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember, once he passes over the great divide and starts to make his way down the far side of the mountain.

Posted November 23, 12:05 PM

TT: Mr. Jelly Roll, unexpurgated at last

I'm in The Wall Street Journal today with a piece about Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, a newly released box set from Rounder Records:

"When I was down on the Gulf Coast, in nineteen-four, I missed goin' to the St. Louis Exposition to get in a piano contest...."

To the jazz aficionado, those prefatory words, spoken in a careworn Creole accent, are as evocative of a lost world as "You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,' but that ain't no matter." Jelly Roll Morton said them on May 23, 1938, sitting at a grand piano in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress in Washington, sipping whiskey and softly vamping away at a tune of his own composition called "Alabama Bound." Sitting nearby, discreetly manipulating two portable disc recorders, was Alan Lomax, a young musicologist employed by the Library of Congress who had had the brilliant idea of inviting Morton to talk about the origins of jazz.

Now Rounder Records has released Morton's recorded reminiscences in an unabridged form for the first time on an eight-CD set called "Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax." It is to jazz what the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is to American history--only more fun....

No link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of this morning's paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal. It's a steal.

Posted November 23, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Advance paid to William Faulkner by Smith & Cape in 1929 for The Sound and the Fury: $200

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,160.94

(Source: Jay Parini, One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner)

Posted November 23, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"It is now 16 years since my first book was published, & abt 21 years since I started publishing articles in the magazines. Throughout that time there has literally been not one day in which I did not feel that I was idling, that I was behind with the current job, & that my total output was miserably small. Even at the periods when I was working 10 hours a day on a book, or turning out 4 or 5 articles a week, I have never been able to get away from this neurotic feeling, that I was wasting time. I can never get any sense of achievement out of the work that is actually in progress, because it always goes slower than I intend, & in any case I feel that a book or even an article does not exist until it is finished. But as soon as a book is finished, I begin, actually from the next day, worrying that the next one is not begun, & am haunted with the fear that there will never be a next one--that my impulse is exhausted for good & all. If I look back & count up the actual amount that I have written, then I see that my output has been respectable: but this does not reassure me, because it simply gives me the feeling that I once had an industriousness & a fertility which I have now lost."

George Orwell, 1949 notebook entry (courtesy of Rick Brookhiser)

Posted November 23, 12:01 PM

November 22, 2005

TT: Number, please

- Total budget for NBC's original 1955 telecast of Jerome Robbins' musical version of Peter Pan: $700,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $4,809,290.57

(Source: Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik, Watching TV)

Posted November 22, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"As soon as I realized that some lawyers were paid more than others, I knew there was no justice."

Frank Sheed (quoted in Wilfrid Sheed, Frank and Maisie: A Memoir With Parents)

Posted November 22, 12:01 PM

TT: Beating the bushes

Just in case you didn't hear it the first time:

On December 6, I'll be teaming up with litblogger Maud Newton and Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker for a joint performance at Makor, the Upper West Side outpost of the 92nd Street Y. Our subject is "The Art of Online Criticism."

Says the press release:

Cultural critics find themselves in the same predicament as other members of the traditional media who now must play a new game. Hear three influential critics who write both online and for print discuss how the cultural conversation is evolving and what the future holds when everyone's a critic.

Bryan Keefer is the moderator. The show starts at seven p.m. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door.

For more information, or to buy tickets online, go here.

Posted November 22, 7:55 AM

November 21, 2005

TT: Off the road again

As usual, the joint's been jumping since last we met. I took Supermaud to hear Hilary Hahn at Carnegie Hall last Thursday. On Friday I went down to Broadway for the press preview of Edward Albee's Seascape, then hopped a train to Baltimore the next morning to catch a performance of Noël Coward's Hay Fever and visit Tim Page of the Washington Post, Dr. Paul McHugh of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (who has a major new book coming out next month), and Laura Lippman (whose latest mystery was published a few months ago).

Needless to say, that was my idea of a relaxing weekend, and no less needless to say, it wasn't. Yes, I enjoyed every minute of it, but I crammed way too much activity into not nearly enough time, and by the time I returned to the Teachout Museum on Sunday, I was right back where I'd started in the Great Slow-Down-And-Get-A-Life Initiative, i.e., Square One. Nor does it help that I have two Wall Street Journal pieces due before the close of business on Tuesday, arrgh.

The good news is that I have nothing whatsoever to do on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, other than dining chez Good Enough to Eat (the ultimate concession to singletonianism) on Thanksgiving Day. What's more, I mean to keep those seventy-two hours uncluttered by any means necessary, up to and including taking the phone off the hook and pouring molten lead on anyone foolhardy enough to knock on my downstairs door.

For all these reasons, don't be surprised if I don't post too much this week, O.K.? When you're a workaholic, less is more.

P.S. Found in a fortune cookie delivered to my apartment this evening:

YOU ARE RELAXING TENSIONS AND ENJOYING A WONDERFUL TIME RIGHT THIS MOMENT.

Posted November 21, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Fee paid to Bernard Herrmann by RKO in 1940 for scoring Citizen Kane: $10,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $133,070.95

(Source: Steven C. Smith, A Heart at Fire's Center)

Posted November 21, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Bigotry does not mean believing that people who differ from you are wrong, it means assuming that they are either knaves or fools. To think them so is an immediate convenience, since it saves us the trouble of analyzing either their views or our own. ‘Christians are right, pagans are wrong,' says the Song of Roland. If we have to answer the other people and find that we can't, then our bigotry grows more intense. It can turn to hatred: and one can reach the lowest point of all--measuring our loyalty to our own cause by our hatred of theirs."

Frank Sheed, The Church and I

Posted November 21, 12:01 PM

November 18, 2005

OGIC: The talented Mr. Watman

Is anyone writing as sharply and accessibly on fiction right now, with so little fanfare, as Max Watman? When one of his refreshingly direct Fiction Chronicles pops up in the New Criterion, I can't click through fast enough. He covers the most gabbed-about books; he knows exactly what he thinks; and unlike many book critics, he is intensely reader-focused. There's an attention to the visceral experience of reading in his reviews that I greatly appreciate and don't find much of elsewhere, at least not in combination with such sound literary judgment and good writing (when I do, it is more likely to be on a favorite lit blog than in print). Watman seems to place a premium on conveying what it feels like to read a book while one is reading it, with results that are always helpful and frequently revelatory. Here, for example, is the beginning of his take on Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown:

Early in Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown I felt a sense of awe. It wasn't specific. It wasn't tied to a single scene or a particular descriptive. It was as if the entire thing, the rhythm of the book, the pulse of the language was bigger than what I'd been reading. It was a change, there was more here. I felt as if I were a much younger man, or perhaps a child, flushed with the intensity of imagination in literature, cracking open Anna Karenina for the first time and being swept away. For now, we who read constantly find most of our pleasures in smaller ways, rereading a short shelf, or finding relatively small accomplishments in literature we like. Nothing seems comparable to the bedrock of one's literary education, and it is a very rare reading experience that is remotely reminiscent of the Great Books of your private canon.

Rushdie is so sure of himself, such a strong man of letters, that his language can capture that feeling of fullness. I don't think it is only in comparison to the dithering and hedging of our constantly self-effacing, self-deprecating contemporaries that Rushdie's hand feels steady pushing the story forward.

I felt as if I were on my way to something good. And as soon as I felt it, it began to disintegrate.

I read and reviewed that book. I was ultimately easier on it than Watman, partly because, in my experience, the feeling he nicely describes here survived the encroachments of the novel's faults. But the interesting thing is that while I felt just this sense of the novel's force, it never occurred to me to simply describe that. Instead I spent a lot of words trying to pinpoint what was producing it. That's a necessary and usually productive exercise, but it's also nice to find a reviewer simply reporting the impression. It's all too easy to skip over that step in the throes of analysis.

In fact, I've been skipping over it throughout this post, so let me back up, take a hint from Mr. Watman, and simply say: when I read his work, I feel a sense of delight and engagement. There. I feel I've grown as a critic today.

Also covered in Watman's piece are the following titles:

- E.L. Doctorow, The March: "In the wake of poetry will come realism, efforts to re-assert the actuality of the thing, to bring back a focus on the true costs of war. Over time hell can be polished, and then someone comes along to put the hell back in. That's what E. L. Doctorow has attempted in The March....Doctorow's characters are as flat as photographs, and a book made of snapshots is nothing. War is not just a scrapbook of atrocities and bad luck. It is not a series of alarming photographs. War is hell because it happens to people, and unfortunately there are no people in Doctorow's book."

- Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park: "The whole book swirls, surreally, pushing the limits of tolerable confusion while sending up laughably familiar horror story shticks. For a while, it looks as if nothing will be resolved. It works precisely because it is a ghost story, replete with eviscerated livestock, freshly dug graves, and messages written in ash--and because everything, ultimately, is resolved."

- Rick Moody, The Diviners: "Why would anyone even bother to type the words 'imaginary pistachio trees, with their delights'?"

- Benjamin Kunkel, Indecision, in a moment of reviewing the reviewers: "I may be unable to get out of my own postmodern/ironic way, but it seems that everyone has mistaken Kunkel for the character of his own creation. And while that doesn't make his creation any more palatable, it is the best tribute to a first-person novel I can think of."

Posted November 18, 12:05 PM

TT: Half-sister act

Time again for my Friday-morning Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I covered three shows this week--The Woman in White, Bach in Leipzig, and the Classic Stage Company's Hamlet--and my guess is that you're going to be surprised by my reaction to the first of them. I sure was:

Andrew Lloyd Webber, once the infallible cash machine of big-budget musical comedy, lost his touch a decade ago and has been AWOL from Broadway ever since. Now he's back--in both senses--with "The Woman in White," a stage version of Wilkie Collins' 1860 shocker about two half-sisters (Maria Friedman and Jill Paice) who fall into the clutches of a murderous pair of swindling noblemen (Ron Bohmer and Michael Ball). Ms. Friedman, who underwent breast-cancer surgery two weeks ago, returned to the show last Thursday in a front-page display of true grit. No less newsworthy, though, is Mr. Lloyd Webber's own return to form. Not only is "The Woman in White" a solid three-base hit, but for much of its length it proves to be a highly impressive piece of musical theater as well.

Not being a fan of Mr. Lloyd Webber's high-priced brand of kitsch, I confess to having been taken aback by the first act of "The Woman of White," whose witty domestic tone suggests a cross between "Pride and Prejudice" and "Dracula." Far more than merely fluent, it is at once beautifully paced and unabashedly operatic in scale (so much so that the canned sound of the synthesizer-laden, overly loud pit orchestra does the score a great disservice). The second act, alas, is less memorable--Mr. Lloyd Webber's big tunes, here as ever, are too obvious to be distinguished--but it holds together dramatically, and though I came away with an unmistakable sense of missed opportunities, "The Woman in White" is still an exceedingly well-made entertainment that will send you home sated....

If you like super-smart silliness, head downtown to the New York Theatre Workshop and be ready to laugh until your ribs are sore. Comparisons between Itamar Moses' "Bach at Leipzig" and Tom Stoppard's "Travesties" are inevitable--indeed, Mr. Stoppard wrote the preface to the published version of his younger colleague's play--but the good news is that Mr. Moses is up to the challenge. In "Bach in Leipzig" he takes a typically Stoppardian historical situation (seven famous organists auditioning for the same high-profile church job in 18th-century Leipzig) and turns it into a who's-on-first farce full of theatrical trickery and fizzy verbal slapstick....

Michael Cumpsty, lately of "The Constant Wife," is one of those ultra-reliable craftsmen whose name on a program always makes me perk up. Now he's given us something much finer than mere craftsmanship: a Classic Stage Company production of "Hamlet" in which he turns in a thoroughly superior performance of the title role....

No link, as usual. To read the whole thing, of which there's a bit more than usual (the Journal kindly gave me extra space this week), buy a copy of this morning's paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, an incredible and insufficiently appreciated bargain.

Posted November 18, 12:05 PM

TT: Rerun

October 2003:

I don't blame Clint Eastwood a bit for having wanted to be one of the very few directors of importance to have scored one of his own films (has anyone else done it other than Charlie Chaplin?). Even if the results weren't especially impressive, I admire him for trying. And I can't imagine that he purposefully chose the idiom in which he worked--the glossy "symphonic score" beloved of film composers of the Thirties and Forties--in order to make Mystic River seem like an upper-middle-class cultural artifact. My guess is that he scored it that way simply because that's the kind of film music with which he grew up, and with which he's most comfortable.

That the results ended up being wholly inappropriate to the film in question is, of course, another matter...

(If it's new to you, read the whole thing here.)

Posted November 18, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Payment made to Benjamin Britten by the Koussevitzky Foundation in 1939 to support the writing of Peter Grimes: $1,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $13,120.80

(Source: Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography)

Posted November 18, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

When a girl would catch a fine lad,
She'll need one weapon to disarm him:
She must charm him,
And then never take her glance off him.
She won't need a ruffly gown
Nor velvet shoulders to get him.
Once she's met him,
She just has to charm the pants off him.

Some girls have charm for all,
Some girls have charm for few,
But when a girl has charm for none,
There's not very much that she can do.

And so I fear that I may be stuck
In this same dreary situation,
Maiden station,
Passed up by every lad
Unless I find some charm
I didn't know I had.

William Roy, "Charm" (music by Roy)

Posted November 18, 12:01 PM

TT and OGIC: The two of us

In case you're new to this blog, two different people post here: Terry Teachout, who lives in New York City, and Our Girl in Chicago, otherwise known as Laura Demanski, who lives in, er, Chicago.

The headlines on Terry's posts start out with "TT."

The headlines on Our Girl's posts start out with "OGIC."

Enough said. Read on. Enjoy.

Posted November 18, 1:48 AM

OGIC: Friday wild card

As longtime readers know, I'm a big hockey fan, though tonight the sport made mincemeat of my nerves and left me, in the end, sad and wistful. (Thanks for the consolation call, Dad. I have the best dad.)

As longtime readers also know, I occasionally smuggle in hockey content here, though I'm usually decently artful about dressing it up as arts content. Not today. This one's nakedly a sports post, though it does offer links to a number of good writers--on hockey, natch. But beyond the aesthetic attractions of words strung together nicely that include "goon" and "icing," this post is in no way arts-related.

Because the vast majority of sports writing is so banal, good sports writing gives me more pleasure than perhaps any other kind of good writing. There's an element of happy surprise attached to finding something smart and interesting in a desert of hackwork, and there's a luxury as well to great writing about inconsequential things. At least as much as in the arts, I think, the invention of blogging has enhanced the quantity and quality of worthwhile sports writing out there. Something about the combination of the ephemerality of sports and the passion they inspire makes them a subject perfectly suited for blog coverage. For a hockey fan in this country where we're considered quaint curiosities, hockey blogs have become nothing less than a lifeline for me to like-minded souls. And since the end of the lockout and the game's return, it seems to me that the hockey blogging scene has grown especially vibrant and fun. So I share with you a few of the essential stops in my daily hockey blog tour:

- The original: Eric McErlain's Off Wing Opinion is the granddaddy of hockey blogs, and covers notable news from throughout the sports world. Because Eric's one of the best known bloggers in all of sports and has a puck and a red line bannering his site, he does a great service to our sadly neglected (in the U.S.) sport, every single day.

- While not, strictly speaking, a hockey blogger, Colby Cosh earns a place on this list because when he does blog hockey, he does it unbeatably. Colby knows a ton about everything, so his hockey posts tend to be, shall we say, broadly informed and inspired.

- Jeff and Alanah at Vancouver Canucks Op-Ed are booksellers and hockey fans. What more need be said? I will say, too, that they're better than anyone I know at the art of the good-natured insult. This is a formidable skill, and their blog is a delight.

- Dour is one word for Tom Benjamin, who runs the Canucks Corner NHL weblog out of Canucks Corner. Authoritative is another. Smart is another. Half the time you see his name on other blogs, it's attached to the word "cranky," but no one who says so would think of skipping his site.

- This one's new, at least to me, but I'm crazy about Jes Golbez's Hockey Rants. It's endlessly entertaining. I look back on Jes's Halloween gallery of hockey ghouls with particular fondness.

There endeth today's recruiting effort. Enjoy your weekend.

Posted November 18, 1:15 AM

OGIC: All about Anna

Speaking of Anna Karenina, which someone was in the post below, I heard a fantastic talk on Anna's suicide last week and wrote it up very briefly here.

It has been at least fifteen years since I read Tolstoy's novel, and it's not a book I ever close-read. So Gary Saul Morson's observation that Anna, in her last scene, is consciously copying the death of the watchman in her first scene struck me like a jolt of electricity. I always took the rail accident of the first scene as just so much ill boding, which I believe is the standard lazy reading, but Morson exploded it by very simply pointing out that Anna remembers the accident and decides to follow suit: "And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the day she had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do." (I'm quoting from this on-line edition.) That's not foreshadowing, it's the opposite. Rather than being ready-built as a meaningful sign, the watchman's death is only retrospectively endowed with significance by Anna and the decision she makes based on her sudden memory of it.

If ever you have the opportunity to hear Morson speak, you should do so.

Posted November 18, 1:00 AM

November 17, 2005

TT: Kicking back

That'll do it for the day, and for the week as well (except for the regular Friday drama-column teaser and the usual routine daily stuff). I'm going to try practicing what I've been preaching.

Later.

Posted November 17, 12:04 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
- Absurd Person Singular (comedy, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)
- Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels* (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)
- Doubt* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)
- Sweeney Todd* (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, reviewed here)
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, closes Dec. 31, reviewed here)
- See What I Wanna See (musical, R, adult subject matter, explicit sexual situations, strong language, closes Dec. 4, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

Posted November 17, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Combined advance paid to Ernest Hemingway by Scribner's in 1926 for The Sun Also Rises and The Torrents of Spring: $1,500

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $15,849.36

(Source: Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography)

Posted November 17, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure."

Charles Baudelaire, Journal intime

Posted November 17, 12:01 PM

November 16, 2005

TT: Temporary insanity

O.K., it's not that bad, but I don't have quite enough steam left in the boiler to write and post the concluding installment of "All Over the Place" before bedtime. It'll have to wait.

In lieu of same, I've posted four new Top Fives to divert you. Much, much more tomorrow.

First, though, a word from Morpheus....

Posted November 16, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Fee paid to Neil Simon by Paramount in 1965 for film rights to The Odd Couple: $400,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,383,255.82

(Source: Rob Edelman and Audrey Kupferberg, Matthau: A Life)

Posted November 16, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"François Truffaut defined a great movie as a perfect blend of truth and spectacle. Now it's become bifurcated. Studio films are all spectacle and no truth, and independent films are all truth and no spectacle."

Howard Franklin (quoted in Joe Morgenstern, "Hollywood's Gambling Problem," Wall Street Journal, Nov. 12, 2005)

Posted November 16, 12:01 PM

TT: All over the place (cont'd)

As a rule, New York drama critics are admitted only to those Broadway shows to which they're formally invited, which usually means a press preview just prior to opening night. (Sometimes we're asked back later in the run to cover a major cast change.) Because I go to the theater so often, and because tickets cost so much, it's very unusual for me to see a play more than once, whereas I normally see a film at least twice if I really like it. Until last Saturday, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee was the only show I'd paid to see again since I started covering theater for The Wall Street Journal two and a half years ago. Well, not only did I do the same thing for Sweeney Todd, but I ordered my tickets immediately after coming home from the press preview. That's how good I thought it was--and I felt the same way on Saturday. So did Ms. In the Wings, who was all but jumping up and down with excitement when the curtain fell at evening's end. "I could see it again right now!" she said as we filed out of the theater.

I knew just what she meant. John Doyle's revival of Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece is so powerfully individual that you feel as if you're seeing the show anew, no matter how well you think you know it--and I know Sweeney Todd very well indeed, having written about it in detail in A Terry Teachout Reader. I know some people, and even a few critics, have found the production disappointingly modest in scale, but I'm damned if I can see why that should stop them from appreciating the sheer audacity of Doyle's concept, or the overwhelming punch with which his perfect cast brings it to life.

- I finally started revving the engine down on Sunday, having hit all four of my accumulated deadlines and taken all but one of my scheduled out-of-town business trips through the end of 2005. (I'm going to Baltimore on Saturday afternoon to see Centerstage's production of Noël Coward's Hay Fever, but that's strictly a low-pressure overnight jaunt complete with relaxing train ride.) I brunched with a friend's little sister at the Acme Bar and Grill (mmmm, cheese grits) and took her to a New York Theatre Workshop matinee of Bach in Leipzig, then spent the rest of the day blogging, straightening pictures, and trying to unwind, not very successfully. If only my sleep cycle would right itself at once after all that stress! Alas, it'll take at least a week of sensible living, if not two, before I'm sleeping and breathing regularly again.

- I can't remember the last time I took an entire weekday off without leaving the city (or getting sick), but Ms. In the Wings, unlikely as it may sound, had never before paid a proper visit to New York City, so I devoted the whole of Monday to showing her the town, albeit in an idiosyncratic, low-keyed way.

After a leisurely lunch at Café Lalo, we paid a visit to Zabar's to browse among the smoked fish and cheese, then strolled through Central Park, where we rode two kinds of horses. Next was the Guggenheim Museum and two thought-provoking hours' worth of Russian art (about which much more later). From there we caught a cab to Grand Central Station and sipped cocktails at the Campbell Apartment, giggling wildly as we pretended to be haute something-or-other. Last came a long, utterly satisfying dinner at Blue Hill, during which we talked and talked and talked. Once in a while I'd catch myself thinking how nice it was not to be working, or worrying about work, but mostly I just surrendered to the passing moment, reveling in the company of my visitor and wondering why I don't do this sort of thing more often.

And that's my story: a madly hectic week and a half of writing, travel, and art, capped by a perfectly happy Monday in my adopted home town. On Tuesday I went to the gym and did no work of any kind. Instead, I stuck close to home, called my mother, sent out for Vietnamese food, watched The Apartment on TV, and kept reminding myself that it takes more than one day for a middle-aged workaholic to recover from his prolonged and excessive labors.

I'm not there yet, or even close, but at least I'm on my way.

* * *

(Go here for the first installment and here for the second.)

Posted November 16, 9:03 AM

OGIC: Links for misanthropes

I didn't plan it this way, but all the links I've hoarded lately seem to fit that description. They're also all from last week because I am living in the past.

Ross at The American Scene makes the case for an HBO White House drama:

It struck me that there's an opening for a show that gives our nation's capital the real HBO treatment--not the "Steven Soderbergh filming flacks with a handheld camera" approach, I mean, but the Sopranos/Deadwood/Rome approach. Start with the West Wing formula--idealistic, articulate people working in high-pressure jobs while keeping the nation's best interests close to their hearts--and shove it through the looking glass. Send an anti-hero to Washington, and follow him (or her) up the ladder, all the way to the Presidency (if he's a politician) or the Karl Rove role (if he's an operative). Make the characters twisted, depraved, power-hungry, sexually voracious, occasionally violent--and make them appealing, too. Give us Deadwood at the Palm, the Sopranos with their hands on the nuclear football, Rome in the capital of the modern Roman Empire.

Outer Life stars in his own tale of--well, just go read it. I can't possibly do it justice and might well wreck it. Be prepared to laugh at the misfortunes of another, is all I'll say.

At Cathy's World, Cathy Seipp's pal Sandra Tsing Loh chips in a magnificent rant. The object of her righteous ire? PEN USA:

So. . . I was excited about the PEN Awards and marked my calendar. Then at my writer's group meeting yesterday, I asked my friend Samantha Dunn if she was going. She had indeed been honored with a gracious invite to join the table of David Ulin, but snorted a remark along the lines of: "$250? I ain't got it!"

This gave me pause. Then I went to the PEN website, and realized, in good conscience, what was I thinking?  I really cannot go!

In fact, if I had the babysitting I would be standing in front of the Biltmore in a placard literally PROTESTING this event.

Loh is as funny on paper as on the air, plus the sailor in her gets a furlough.

Posted November 16, 3:02 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy."

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Posted November 16, 3:01 AM

November 15, 2005

TT: All over the place (cont'd)

- On Saturday I flew down to Winston-Salem, where Carolina Ballet was giving three performances of Robert Weiss' Swan Lake (it was premiered last season in Raleigh, but I was too busy covering Broadway openings to come see it).

The standard four-act version of Swan Lake, choreographed in 1895 by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, is too large in scale to be performed by medium-smallish companies. Weiss had long taken for granted that it was beyond the reach of Carolina Ballet, which employs only thirty-two dancers, until he ran across a children's-book version of Swan Lake by the Viennese author-illustrator Lisbeth Zwerger in which the story of the ballet is turned into a fairy tale. Reading the book showed him how Swan Lake could be reconceived on an intimate, organically smaller scale. Zwerger gave him permission to use her Schwanensee as the basis for his production, and now Carolina Ballet has its very own two-act Swan Lake, one with just eight swan maidens instead of the usual twenty-four.

Weiss' Swan Lake is forty-five minutes shorter than the Petipa-Ivanov version and has been altered in a variety of other ways, some small and some significant (among other things, it has a happy ending, Tchaikovsky's original intention). Above all, it's been completely rechoreographed in the fast-moving manner of Weiss' other full-evening story ballets. As I explained a couple of years ago in a Washington Post review of his dance version of Carmen:

If you hadn't seen any full-length ballets other than, say, "Giselle," you probably wouldn't notice anything unusual about it, except that there aren't any boring parts--and that's the point.

Having squirmed through far too many three-act kitschfests such as Ben Stevenson's "Dracula" (which the Houston Ballet inflicted on innocent Washingtonians earlier this month), I've lost patience with choreographers who cram the stage with high-priced scenery and costumes, then forget to add steps and serve hot. The emphasis in their faux-romantic pseudo-ballets is placed squarely on pantomime and pageantry, while the dancing, such as it is, must fend for itself. The results invariably end up looking static, the opposite of what a good ballet should be.

Weiss has chosen a different model for "Carmen," as well as the similarly conceived, equally successful "Romeo and Juliet" that Carolina Ballet premiered last year. Both ballets are choreographed in the manner of Balanchine's 1962 adaptation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," in which the plot is propelled, and the characters defined, through movement rather than mime. "I don't like seeing a lot of people standing around on stage doing nothing," Weiss says. Instead, he builds each scene around a carefully organized dance sequence, just as Balanchine did in his great Shakespeare ballet....He uses the standard steps and combinations of neoclassical ballet, but always to make specific narrative points.

As a result, Weiss' Swan Lake, though related to the standard Petipa-Ivanov version, doesn't feel anything like a slimmed-down alternative. It's different not only in scale but also in shape and tone, and to my mind is wholly successful on its own terms. I saw it twice and couldn't have been more impressed. Aside from the obvious artistic merits of Weiss' version, it strikes me that he's found a solution to the Swan Lake problem that other regional companies with similarly limited resources would do well to embrace.

- I took Ms. Pratie Place to the Sunday matinee, about which she blogged at length last week, complete with illustrations. It was a heart-stoppingly beautiful day, so we had brunch at an outdoor café next to the theater in Winston-Salem and chatted about everything under the sun. (We'd been in touch via e-mail for some time, but this was our first meeting.) Ms. Pratie, a folk musician who lives in Chapel Hill and looks a bit like Emmylou Harris, is a peach, spunky and smart and wonderfully receptive, and had I not been planning to fly back to New York that same evening, I would have been more than happy to dine with her after the ballet as well.

- Alas, the weather in New York caught me flat-footed. Late-breaking thunderstorms rendered LaGuardia inoperative, forcing me to spend the night in a grouchy little airport hotel in Greenboro. By then the accumulated stress of the week just past had rendered me inoperative, too, so I dined unmemorably in a nearby sports bar and spent the night sitting up in bed watching TV. (Warning: The Matrix is not suitable for viewing by the severely underslept.)

- The skies finally righted themselves on Monday, and I flew back to New York that morning. No sooner did I unlock the door of the Teachout Museum than I plunged into four hellish days of work, none of which I'd be willing to repeat save at gunpoint. I wrote four tough pieces back to back: two columns for The Wall Street Journal, a review of Marion Rodgers' Mencken: The American Iconoclast for The New Criterion, and an essay for the fiftieth-anniversary issue of National Review. In between deadlines, I chewed up a ton of snail mail, went to previews of Souvenir and Classic Stage Company's Hamlet, and blogged about how I was either too tired or too wired to sleep--I forget which.

- My frenzied activity finally came to a halt on Friday night when I fell into bed and slept as though drugged. The next morning I tidied up the apartment and went out to meet Ms. In the Wings, who was visiting New York for the first time and had put her itinerary in my hands. In case you're wondering, she's just like her blog: fey, funny, and forever saying slightly off-center things that make earthbound types like me feel hopelessly wonkish and unfanciful.

I gave her a tour of the Teachout Museum, after which we went to the Neue Galerie to have a snack in the oh-so-Viennese café and look over the Egon Schiele retrospective (very impressive, but that man was one way sick cookie). Then we strolled back across Central Park, dined at Kitchen 82, and went down to Broadway to catch the new revival of Sweeney Todd, she for the first time, I for the second. All I'd told her in advance was that we'd be seeing something cool, and when the cab pulled up in front of the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, she agreed--not calmly--that I hadn't been exaggerating.

(To be continued)

Posted November 15, 12:04 PM

TT: And damned well about time, too

From DVD Journal:

New from our friends at The Criterion Collection are four titles, all due in February. Jean Renoir's 1938 La Bête Humaine will feature a new transfer of the original, uncut version, along with an introduction from Renoir, a new interview with Peter Bogdanovich, additional archive interviews with Renoir, stills, and a trailer (Feb. 14). Luis Buñuel's controversial 1961 comedy Viridiana will feature an interview with author and journalist Richard Porton, as well as a trailer and an essay by film historian Michael Wood (Feb. 14). Robert Hamer's 1949 Kind Hearts and Coronets starring Alec Guinness updates the previous Anchor Bay DVD release with two BBC programmes on Guinness and the history of Ealing Studios, stills, a trailer, and an essay by critic and historian Philip Kemp (Feb. 28). And finally, Whit Stillman's 1990 Metropolitan will offer a commentary from the director, editor Christopher Tellefsen, and actors Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols, outtakes and deleted scenes, and an essay from film scholar Luc Sante (Feb. 28). Also stay tuned for early 2006, when Orson Welles' 1955 Mr. Arkadin is expected to arrive under the Criterion folio.

My birthday is (ahem) February 6.

Posted November 15, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- William Holden's fee in 1957 (plus ten percent of the profits) for playing in The Bridge on the River Kwai: $300,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,038,819.84

(Source: Piers Paul Read, Alec Guinness)

Posted November 15, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

Time is a very strange thing.
So long as one takes it for granted, it is nothing at all.
But then, all of a sudden, one is aware of nothing else.
It is all about us, it is within us also,
In our faces it is there, trickling,
In the mirror it is there, trickling,
In my sleep it is there, flowing,
And between me and you,
There, too, it flows, soundless, like an hour-glass.
Oh, Quinquin, sometimes I hear it flowing
Irresistibly on.
Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night
And stop all the clocks, all, all of them.
Nevertheless, we are not to shrink from it,
For it, too, is a creature of the Father who created us all.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Rosenkavalier (music by Richard Strauss, trans. W.H. Auden)

Posted November 15, 12:01 PM

November 14, 2005

TT: All over the place

That's the phrase dancers use to describe a performance that is...well, a bit erratic. It's one of my favorite pieces of professional argot, not to mention a pretty good way to sum up the past week and a half. I've been all over the place, seen all sorts of things, written far too many pieces, and hung out with some of my favorite people--including two bloggers whom I was meeting for the first time, even though I already "knew" them well from cyberspace.

Here are some snapshots from the maelstrom:

- It all started two Wednesdays ago when I went to a press preview of Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, a new jukebox musical that I loathed, very much in contrast to the collective opinion of the audience and--as it turned out--most of my colleagues.

No, I didn't care for the music, but that's not the main thing wrong with the show. After all, I don't like the music in Tom Hanks' That Thing You Do, either, but I adored the movie. So what's the problem? I'll start with an e-mail that a smart friend sent to me after reading my review:

my youth in the mid-60s was spent at jones beach with other families who had very little, eating pb&j sandwiches with ears pressed to transistor radios radio counting down the top 20. the four seasons were nyc's stick-ball answer to the beatles and the beach boys and the energy level was very new york back then (63-68-ish). the four seasons compared to the beatles and beach boys was almost race music. it was pure subway. now, with sinatra dead and tony all but a wax museum piece (when was he not), seems valli is perfectly poised to become the patron saint of all things mall....

Jersey Boys tells you all this, but it doesn't show you any of it, because it isn't a play but a string of first-person monologues separated by occasional stretches of stilted dialogue (just like Lennon, which was even worse). That's why it's so dead on stage. Even a one-person show, which in a sense is all in the telling, has to find a way to break free of mere narration--otherwise it never comes to life. There's a reason why we call a show a show.

- On Thursday morning I arose at 4:45 and caught a six a.m. train to Washington for the winter meeting of the National Council on the Arts, which began at nine. I slept all the way down and arrived on time (well, almost).

Our closed sessions are strictly confidential, so I can't tell you anything about what we discussed on Thursday. Instead, I'll fast-forward to the Washington Ballet performance I attended that evening at Kennedy Center, accompanied by my friend Ali. She'd never seen George Balanchine's Serenade, which opened the program. I looked at her when it was over, and I'm fairly sure I saw a tear or two. Then she smiled. "Couldn't we just see that one twice more instead of the other pieces on the program?" she asked. I know how she felt. I remember my first Serenade, which I saw eighteen years ago from the cheap seats of New York's City Center, courtesy of Dance Theatre of Harlem. It had the same effect on me. It has the same effect on everyone.

- The next morning I returned to the Old Post Office to join my fellow council members for a public session. Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, always makes sure that our meetings include some kind of performance--even if it's nothing more than the playing of a suitable record--so we started the day by listening to Louis Armstrong's 1933 recording of Basin Street Blues, thereby paying tribute to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the determination of the survivors to bring art back to New Orleans. It was a lovely, utterly appropriate moment.

Midway through the meeting we paused to make the acquaintance of Wayne Henderson, a guitar maker from a very small town in Virginia (pop. 7, or so he says) who is the subject of Clapton's Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument, a new book by Allen St. John. Henderson, a short, shy, unassuming man, is an NEA National Heritage Fellow. He played "Wildwood Flower" and "Black Mountain Rag" on one of his own handmade guitars, and as I listened, I delighted in the fact that my government had had the wisdom to pay official homage to so deserving an artisan.

At meeting's end Dana noted the death of Shirley Horn, one of last year's NEA Jazz Fellows, who had been buried the day before in Washington. Then we listened in silence to her recording of "If You Love Me." The silence grew thick as an early-morning fog as she sang the last verse:

When at last our life on earth is through,
I will share eternity with you.
If you love me, really love me,
Let it happen, I won't care.

I was thinking about the haircut I'd gotten in New York earlier in the week. The barber tied a dark blue apron around my neck, and it seemed as if all the freshly trimmed hair falling on it was either gray or white. So here it is at last, the distinguished thing, I told myself with an invisible shrug of pretended indifference to the all too visible evidence of the downward slope. Of course there are worse things than being on the verge of your fiftieth birthday--starting, needless to say, with the alternative--but that doesn't make it any cheerier to contemplate, or easier to explain to younger friends still full of great expectations and innocent of grim foreknowledge. In middle age you find yourself saying goodbye to all that, a dream at a time, until one day the winds grow colder/And suddenly you're older....

"The one hundred fifty-sixth meeting of the National Council on the Arts is now adjourned," Dana said softly, and banged his gavel once. A half-hour later I was on a train bound for New York.

- A few hours after that, I was sitting on the aisle at Brooklyn's BAM Harvey Theater, getting ready to watch Propeller perform Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, accompanied by another young friend who was unexpectedly understanding of the night thoughts churning around inside the head of a tired critic with miles to go before he slept.

"Omigod, Terry, you look awful," she said. "Aren't you getting any sleep? Are you going to make it through the week in one piece?"

"Oh, sure. I always do, don't I? I have this, you know," I replied, waving one hand at the stage. "It's what I live off. It's just about the only illusion you get to hang onto. Friends die, marriages end, staircases grow steeper--but we still have that perfect world down there, and we can live in it for a couple of hours at a time. You'd be surprised how much it helps."

All at once I heard Shirley Horn's soft, slow, thick-grained voice in my mind's ear, and sighed. "Ah, Elly, do you have any idea what I'm talking about?"

"Kind of," she said, putting her unlined hand atop mine and giving it a comforting pat.

(To be continued)

Posted November 14, 12:05 PM

TT: Live and in three persons

On December 6, I'll be teaming up with Maud Newton (lovingly known around these parts as Supermaud) and Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker (whom I've never met, weirdly enough) for a joint performance at Makor, the Upper West Side outpost of the 92nd Street Y. Our subject is "The Art of Online Criticism."

Says the press release:

Cultural critics find themselves in the same predicament as other members of the traditional media who now must play a new game. Hear three influential critics who write both online and for print discuss how the cultural conversation is evolving and what the future holds when everyone's a critic.

Bryan Keefer is the moderator. The show starts at seven p.m. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door.

For more information, or to buy tickets online, go here.

Posted November 14, 12:04 PM

TT: Rerun

October 2003:

I'm not saying that all good new art has to be simple, or that I only like simple art. Nor am I saying that all great art is destined in time to be swallowed up and spit out by Madison Avenue. But as I grow older, I find myself increasingly suspicious of the long-term viability of self-consciously "difficult" art. This is part of what I meant when I observed a little earlier today that the first responsibility of art is to give pleasure. Of course it is our reciprocal responsibility to be open to the new. What seems strange now may soon come to seem beautiful--but I very much doubt that a lifetime's puzzling over Finnegans Wake will cause it to seem anything other than pointlessly complex. There's a reason why the greatest artists dissolve into simplicity as they grow older....

(If it's new to you, read the whole thing here.)

Posted November 14, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Alec Guinness' fee in 1976 (plus two percent of the producer's profit) for playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: $150,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $514,978.46

(Source: Piers Paul Read, Alec Guinness)

Posted November 14, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city that we pursue, in vain."

V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men

Posted November 14, 12:01 PM

November 12, 2005

TT: You, too, can be a critic

Today in "Sightings," my Wall Street Journal column about the arts in America, I write about how blogging is affecting arts journalism:

Sometimes the conventional wisdom turns out to be true--only with a twist. Most newspapers, for instance, really are devoting less space to the fine arts, but that's because newspapers themselves are growing smaller and smaller. Relatively speaking, says Columbia University's National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP), American newspapers allocate the same percentage of their space to the arts today that they did five years ago. The problem isn't the slice of the pie but the quality of the filling. Outside of a half-dozen or so major American cities, newspaper arts criticism has always been dismayingly uneven....

How to break these viciously interlocking circles? Since 2004, the NAJP has been running a series of two-week "institutes" for critics and writers from regional newspapers and other publications. I've taught at two of these institutes (the most recent of which took place last month in New York City), and though my students have varied widely in experience, they've worked impressively hard to strengthen their grasp of the art forms they'd been assigned to cover. I expect all of them to go home and do good things.

That's one approach. Another is to start a blog, a Web-based journal that can be read by anyone with a computer and access to the Internet. A couple of hundred bloggers now write about the arts on a fairly regular basis. I've been following their work since I started my own "artblog," "About Last Night," in the summer of 2003, and I believe the same technological revolution that has already transformed political journalism is about to have a similarly galvanizing effect on regional arts journalism....

Read the whole thing here. As was the case with Friday's drama column, the entire Online Journal is free all this week, the idea being that once you've tried it, you'll want to subscribe (which I recommend).

Posted November 12, 12:01 PM

November 11, 2005

TT: On Memorial Day

"During my time as a soldier in the First World War I was a member of a string quartet which served our commanding officer as a means of escape from the miseries of war. He was a great music-lover and a connoisseur and admirer of French art. It was no wonder, then, that his dearest wish was to hear Debussy's String Quartet. We rehearsed the work and played it to him with much feeling at a private concert. Just after we had finished the slow movement the signals officer burst in and reported in great consternation that the news of Debussy's death had just come through on the radio. We did not continue our performance. It was as if the spirit had been removed from our playing. But now we felt for the first time how much more music is than just style, technique, and an expression of personal feeling. Here music transcended all political barriers, national hatred, and the horrors of war. Never before or since have I felt so clearly in which direction music must be made to go."

Paul Hindemith (quoted in Geoffrey Skelton, Paul Hindemith: The Man Behind the Music)

Posted November 11, 12:39 PM

TT: Seasons' bleatings

Time now for my Friday-morning Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, in which I post excerpts from my reviews of two newly opened Broadway shows, Jersey Boys and Souvenir, and a touring production of The Winter's Tale that played Brooklyn last week:

Yet another jukebox musical has come to town, and this time I don't feel like arguing--much. For reasons not obvious to me, "Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons" is not only giving pleasure to paying theatergoers (that part I get) but has also passed muster with certain critics who should know better. Contrary to anything you've read elsewhere, it's nothing more than 32 songs performed on a cheap-looking set by a high-priced lounge band, strung together like dimestore pearls on the most vapid of all-tell-no-show books....

No doubt I'm the wrong person to review this show, seeing as how the hyped-up falsetto yelps of Mr. Valli (convincingly simulated here by John Lloyd Young) give me hi-yie-yives. All I can say is that it would be a lot simpler for everyone involved if they'd just move the whole thing to Newark....

If you know who Florence Foster Jenkins was, you know entirely too much about opera and should enter a 12-step program. Everyone else will need an introduction to the woman about whom "Souvenir" was written, so here goes: Jenkins was a wealthy New Yorker who suffered from the gross delusion that she was a great soprano. In fact, she sounded like a tone-deaf donkey who'd snorted helium, but each year she put up the money to give a recital at the Ritz-Carlton whose tickets were snapped up by opera buffs suffering from the equally gross delusion that it was amusing to watch her act like an idiot in public....

Now Stephen Temperley has turned Jenkins (Judy Kaye) into the butt of a two-person play narrated by Cosme McMoon (Donald Corren), her pianist and vocal coach....

Needless to say, the Tony-winning Ms. Kaye really can sing, which is part of the joke, since it isn't easy to deliberately sing that badly. In fact, Jenkins' singing wasn't nearly as funny as Ms. Kaye's wicked impression of it--but of course you'll have figured out by now that I thought most of "Souvenir" to be the opposite of funny. Call me a prig, but there seems to me something fundamentally nasty about such sadistic spectator sports....

Edward Hall's production of "The Winter's Tale" has come and gone, having played its six scheduled performances at Brooklyn's BAM Harvey Theater. Had it been around even a little longer, I would have tried to see it twice. Propeller, Mr. Hall's all-male company, is my favorite touring theatrical troupe, a gaggle of magicians whose Shakespeare performances, played on the simplest of pack-it-up-and-hit-the-road sets, are briskly fanciful and endlessly imaginative....

Propeller has two more U.S. stops left before it returns to England. "The Winter's Tale" is now playing through Sunday at the Zellerbach Playhouse in Berkeley, Ca., after which it moves to Washington's Kennedy Center, where it will be seen next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. If you happen to be anywhere near either of those two cities and can possibly wangle a ticket, start wangling.

To read the whole thing, go here. The Online Journal is free all this week, the idea being that once you've tried it, you'll want to subscribe (which I recommend).

P.S. "Sightings," my biweekly column about the arts in America, will be appearing in the "Pursuits" section of Saturday morning's Wall Street Journal. Take a look.

Posted November 11, 12:05 PM

TT: Rerun

November 2003:

Ingmar Bergman has fallen from fashion, but I well remember when he was the very model of a Foreign Filmmaker, the man whose movies embodied everything that wasn't Hollywood. Those, of course, were the days when Hollywood wasn't cool: if you wanted to impress your date, you took her to a Bergman. (A little later on, it was O.K. to take her to one of Woody Allen's ersatz-Bergman movies.) Now he belongs to the ages, and I know more than a few self-styled film buffs who've never seen any of his work....

(If it's new to you, read the whole thing here.)

Posted November 11, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Moss Hart's share in 1930 of the average weekly box-office receipts for the original Broadway production of the Kaufman-Hart play Once in a Lifetime: $1,867

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $20,172.38

(Source: Steven Bach, Dazzler)

Posted November 11, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"It is not music's function to express rational necessities."

Artur Schnabel, Music and the Line of Most Resistance

Posted November 11, 12:01 PM

TT: Mission statement

"I was reading your drama column," somebody said to me today, "and I've got to know--who are you, anyway? Where are you coming from?"

It was a serious question, asked seriously, and I thought about it for a moment before answering.

"You know what I am?" I finally said. "I'm a regular-guy aesthete. I like fancy sets, but I like bare stages, too. I like Stephen Sondheim and pretty girls. In fact, there's only two things I never, ever like: pretentiousness and being bored."

I think that sums me up fairly well, don't you?

Posted November 11, 4:48 AM

November 10, 2005

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
- Absurd Person Singular (comedy, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)
- Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)
- Doubt* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)
- Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, reviewed here)
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, closes Dec. 31, reviewed here)
- See What I Wanna See (musical, R, adult subject matter, explicit sexual situations, strong language, closes Dec. 4, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

Posted November 10, 12:04 PM

TT: Number, please

- Total royalties earned in 1934 from combined sales of all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books: $58.34

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $832.76

(Source: Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur)

Posted November 10, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

A police car and a screaming siren--
A pneumatic drill and ripped-up concrete--
A baby wailing and a stray dog howling--
The screech of brakes and lamplights blinking--

that's entertainment.

A smash of glass and the rumble of boots--
An electric train and a ripped-up phone booth--
Paint-splattered walls and the cry of a tomcat--
Lights going out and a kick in the balls--

that's entertainment.

Days of speed and slow time Mondays--
Pissing down with rain on a boring Wednesday--
Watching the news and not eating your tea--
A freezing cold flat and damp on the walls--

that's entertainment.

Waking up at six a.m. on a cool warm morning--
Opening the windows and breathing in petrol--
An amateur band rehearsing in a nearby yard--
Watching the telly and thinking about your holidays--

that's entertainment.

Paul Weller, "That's Entertainment" (music by Weller)

Posted November 10, 12:01 PM

TT: Finish line

Deadline No. 4 is done, and so am I. Totally.

Unless Our Girl decides to poke her head in, don't expect any more posting (outside of the usual routine weekly stuff) until Monday.

See you later.

Posted November 10, 2:08 AM

November 9, 2005

TT: In the pipeline

The first installment of my ex post facto travel diary is well under way, but I got back from a Broadway preview too late to finish writing it, and Deadline No. 2 is already beckoning. Discretion being the better part of valor, I'm going to go to bed instead of staying up too late blogging.

More as it happens....

Posted