About Last Night: September 2006 Archives

TT: S & G

I recently posted about Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh's wonderful film about the making of The Mikado. Watching it for the first time in a number of years reminded me of how much I love the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan--and how rare it is for them to receive first-class, fully professional productions in this country.

Earlier this summer I saw the Utah Shakespearean Festival's production of H.M.S. Pinafore. I was impressed by the festival, but didn't care much for its Pinafore, which got all the things wrong that are usually gotten wrong whenever an American theater company tries its hand at Gilbert and Sullivan. As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal:

Music is often the weak link of regional companies located well away from major metropolitan areas. Such was the case with "H.M.S. Pinafore," a Broadway-style version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that was staged in an overly jokey way by Brad Carroll, adequately but unmemorably sung, and accompanied by an "orchestra" consisting of three synthesizers and six non-electrified instrumentalists. The results sounded predictably cheesy, and the production as a whole wasn't strong enough to surmount its weak musical values.

One of the reasons why G & S (as they're known to buffs) are so enduringly popular is because their works are technically simple enough to be performed by amateurs. Alas, such performances tend to be...well, amateurish. Among the many instructive things about Topsy-Turvy is the exceptionally high musical quality of the singing and orchestral playing heard on the soundtrack. Contrary to the impression left by the 1980 Kevin Kline-Linda Ronstadt Broadway production of The Pirates of Penzance and the 1983 film based on it, the G & S operettas are not musical comedies avant la lettre. Yes, Arthur Sullivan had a sense of humor, but he was still a classical composer through and through, and much (if not all) of his music must be sung by classically trained vocalists in order to make its full expressive effect. It is also gorgeously orchestrated, and cries out to be played with the same elegance and euphony you'd expect to hear in a professional performance of a piece by Mendelssohn--or Mozart, for that matter.

Does this mean that Pirates, Pinafore and The Mikado are really operas in disguise? Back in the Fifties, Sir Malcolm Sargent recorded them for EMI in studio performances featuring English opera-house singers and accompanied by the Glyndebourne Festival Chorus and the Pro Arte Orchestra. (Sir Charles Mackerras did much the same thing forty years later in his G & S recordings for Telarc.) The results were fascinating and often quite lovely to hear, but lacked the stage-savvy sparkle of the very best 78-era recordings of the D'Oyly Carte Company, for which the G & S operettas were originally written.

It's the same kind of tradeoff you typically encounter in performances of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, which is a brilliant but somewhat unstable cross between a Broadway musical and an operetta. As I wrote in the Journal apropos of Chicago Shakespeare's 2003 revival of A Little Night Music:

Even though two of the roles were originally written for non-singers (Glynis Johns and Hermione Gingold), the rest of the score places heavy demands on musically unsure performers. Not only does it sound better when sung by classically trained voices, but Jonathan Tunick's luminous orchestrations require a fair-sized band of competent players in order to sound as good as they can.

Does all this make "A Little Night Music" a bona fide opera? Not exactly. Unlike "Sweeney Todd," it's more a book show with extended musical scenes than an opera with spoken dialogue, and few opera singers are sufficiently secure actors to bring off the starring roles. (I'd give anything to see it done with Bryn Terfel and Anne Sofie von Otter.) New York City Opera, which revived its large-scale production of "A Little Night Music" last season, tried to split the difference by casting Jeremy Irons, Judith Stevenson, and Claire Bloom, but Mr. Irons' near-complete inability to carry a tune proved a near-insurmountable problem, though the 44-piece orchestra, directed by Paul Gemignani, emitted properly lush sounds.

Chicago Shakespeare Theater, by contrast, has taken what might be called the off-Broadway approach. In Gary Griffin's production, "A Little Night Music" is sung by actors, played on an all-but-bare thrust stage in a smallish house, and accompanied by a fourteen-piece orchestra. Lush it isn't, but the gain in intimacy almost completely offsets the musical losses....

Note, however, that I said "almost." Chicago Shakespeare's A Little Night Music, like last year's Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, was a brilliant stage production, but if I'd "seen" it with my eyes closed, I doubt I would have thought nearly so much of it. In the end, the point of Sondheim's shows is their scores. The same thing is true of the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan--and, for that matter, the operas of Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini. At the same time, though, no musical-theater work can remain alive in repertory without an effective libretto, and there are any number of operas and musicals with comparatively undistinguished scores that continue to be performed solely because they "work" on stage.

So which part of the G & S operettas is more important, the words or the music? My Solomonic answer is that the musical numbers--which are, of course, by Gilbert and Sullivan--are vastly more important than Gilbert's facetious libretti. As for the songs themselves, I'd say that Sullivan is primarily responsible for making them memorable, but that Gilbert's words were primarily responsible for inspiring Sullivan to write such memorable music. (Except for "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and "The Lost Chord," he didn't write a single piece of music without Gilbert that continues to be performed today.)

As I've said many times, theater is an empirical art whose practitioners make their own rules, and any critic who isn't prepared to dump his preconceptions at a moment's notice is in the wrong business. Nevertheless, I hope I live long enough to see a performance of The Mikado that is beautifully sung, elegantly played, and imaginatively staged--though I'll settle for two out of three, and if necessary even one.

In the meantime, we'll always have Topsy-Turvy.

ELSEWHERE: By far the best short book about Gilbert and Sullivan is Leslie Baily's profusely illustrated Gilbert and Sullivan: Their Lives and Times.

To order a three-CD set containing superior transfers of the 1926 and 1936 D'Oyly Carte recordings of The Mikado, go here.

TT: Elsewhere

Hither and yon:

- Mr. Think Denk eats a hot dog, and rhapsodizes thereon:

"Yes, I confess, to my eternal chagrin I am indeed a chip man." I couldn't really believe this sentence fell out of my mouth. If you haven't traveled on Amtrak recently, you are in for a surprise; pursuant to some distant policy, the Acela workers are now aggressively pushing product. I came up, ordered a hot dog and a soda, and in those pregnant, magical moments while the dog steamed in a mysteriously recessed industrial microwave, the man behind the counter proposed a bag of chips. "Nothing could be better than a cold soda," he said, his eyes seeming to mist, "a hot dog, and some chips." I was swept up (as so often) in his faux emotion; I paused, teetered, acquiesced. He smiled toothily. "Yeah, I thought you were a chip man, just from the look of you," he said, and I had to admit the obvious. And that's when I said the ridiculous sentence....

Keep reading--he gets from the hot dog to the Chopin G Minor Ballade in two steps.

- Mr. Anecdotal Evidence nails it:

Everyone, I suppose, complains about the quality of book reviewing and literary journalism in the United States. Much of it is badly written, snotty, theory-driven, pretentious, tin-eared, politically motivated, aesthetically unmotivated, pop culture-obsessed, or just plain dull. Friends boost the books of friends. Antagonists exact vendettas. These things, given human nature, have always been true and most likely will remain so....

Yup.

- So does the Little Professor:

Am I the only person developing severe allergies to fiction about Emotionally Dysfunctional Adults Failing to Make Their Way in a Shallow and Commercialized World? Because it appears to me that this theme (which has been with us for quite some time, and is perhaps wearing out its welcome) tends to generate aggravatingly slick tales.

- And so does Ms. twang twang twang:

Passionate simplicity is at the heart of great art, whether you are playing, painting or writing about it, and the amateur's enthusiasm is a type of simple passion, lovely and to be highly prized. But in fact, the professionals have everything the amateur has: devotion (we adored once too), frustration, and the combination of the two that is also called love. Both groups tread the same path towards perfection or mastery, but the professional is further along it, and as any travel story will tell you, a journey is harder in the middle, or at the end, than at the beginning. You are more tired. Hopefully you are buoyed up by what you have seen along the way, but that depends on how lucky you are.

Love begins simply; you fall in it. What happens to it after that is moulded by time, experience, battered by good and rotten chance. Couples get divorced; professionals give up; amateurs give up too, all the time, even though they love music. It is too hard. Other loves endure, grow along the path, human, alive; and like humanity itself are at once and always astoundingly powerful, and heartbreakingly vulnerable. That is the argument for sticking with it all: at the end is a great love. Or great art.

On the other hand, perhaps it is better to stay amateur, a little na�ve, not risking too much or travelling too far. Maybe music is too beautiful to risk losing it all together, hurtling too close to the sun....

I really, really wish I'd written that.

- The adorable Ms. Maccers is soooo funny:

Becoming ever more pretentious is a privilege of the spinster and I find myself these days preferring music to be sung in French....

(It's even funnier if you actually know her.)

- Finally, I don't often occasion to commend the New York Times for its astuteness, but whoever had the bright idea of inviting Mr. Superfluities to write the paper's fall theater preview deserves a raise.

TT: For serious Chesterton buffs only

Readers interested in the works of G.K. Chesterton will remember that he owned a toy theater about which he wrote on many occasions. The Catholic Lending Library of Hartford is deaccessioning fifteen drawings made by Chesterton (who was also a talented artist) for use in this theater.

Here's the catalogue listing from the Allinson Gallery:

Gilbert Keith Chesterton. 1874-1936.
Original Drawings for his Children's Theatre.

Figures in ink and watercolor. Some cut out with tabs on the back to enable the figures to be moved in a theatre. This is an exceptionally rare group of drawings, possibly unique. $10,000 the group.

Letter to Father Kelly from Dorothy E. Collins dated August 3, 1944 stating that the works are by Chesterton and that she is sending them to Father Kelly for The Catholic Lending Library of Hartford, CT.

1. The Knight and the Jester (title on the back). 12 x 14 1/8.
2. The Hero (title on the back). 12 x 8 1/2.
3. Counsellor (title on the back). 13 1/4 x 9 1/2.
4. Journalist (title on the back). 13 1/4 x 9 1/4.
5. [Male Figure in Long Stockings and a Long Pointed Cap Holding a Book]. 13 1/4 x 9 1/2.
6. King's Physician (title on the back). 13 1/8 x 9 1/4.
7. Chinaman (title on the back). 13 5/8 x 9 3/4.
8. [Four Figures -- four panels]. 15 5/8 x 25.
9. Procession (title on the back). 12 x 15.
10. Devils. Drawn on paper, not cardboard. 13 3/4 x 17 3/4.
11. [Viking]. 9 1/8 x 3 5/8.
12. [Knights on Horseback]. 6 3/8 x 12 1/8.
13. [The Wood Cutter]. 12 3/4 x 6 1/8.
14. [Soldier, Courtier, Man with a Moustache].
15. Walter Tittle.

If you know anything about Chesterton, you won't need me to tell you that this collection of drawings is an extraordinary rarity that will be of the highest possible interest to collectors and scholars.

I have nothing to do with this sale, but I purchased an etching from the Allinson Gallery a couple of years ago and was completely satisfied with the transaction.

To contact the gallery, go here.

TT: Almanac

"'It's just that there is nothing to discuss.'

"'From your point of view,' Wolfe conceded, 'there probably isn't. And naturally, for you, as a consequence of the peculiar constitution of the human ego, your point of view is paramount. But your ego is bound to be jostled by other egos, and efforts to counteract the jostling by ignoring it have rarely succeeded. It is frequently advisable, and sometimes necessary, to give a little ground.'"

Rex Stout, Before Midnight

September 15, 2006

TT: Shakespeare, straight up

This week my Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to an account of my recent visit to the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, where I saw Othello, As You Like It, and Macbeth:

In theater, seeing is believing, and the best way to learn about 17th-century theatrical performance practices is to watch a Shakespeare play acted on a modern re-creation of an Elizabethan-style stage. The most famous of these is the replica of Shakespeare's own open-air Globe Theatre that was built on the banks of London's Thames River in 1997. The U.S. is home to a half-dozen such houses, including the indoor theater at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and the open-air theaters that I saw earlier this year at the Oregon Shakespeare and Utah Shakespearean Festivals. Most of the American replicas, however, are variously modernized structures that incorporate such anachronistic devices as theatrical lighting. If you want to see the real thing--and to see it used in a convincing way--the place to go is Staunton, home of the American Shakespeare Center, whose performances are given in a dazzlingly exact re-creation of the Blackfriars Playhouse, originally built in London in 1596....

To pass through the lobby doors into the 300-seat auditorium is like jumping into Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine and setting the controls for 1600, with some allowances made for fire safety. Actors and audience are lit by the same electric chandeliers--there are no spotlights--and if you're fortunate enough to hold a ticket for one of the 12 "Lord's Chairs" placed on either side of the stage, you'll be close enough to the players to reach out and touch them.

All this would be of purely historical interest were it not for the high quality of the ASC's fast-moving productions, which are authentic (no sets, no scene breaks) but not antiquarian. The company consists of 11 mostly young men and women who perform in a cheerfully eclectic mishmash of period and modern dress. They speak their soliloquies and asides straight to the audience, and the uncomplicated stagings give the impression that you're seeing the play itself, naked and self-sufficient....

No free link, but you can read the whole thing by buying today's Journal or--better yet--going here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review. (If you're already a subscriber, you'll find it here.)

ELSEWHERE: To read what Mr. My Stupid Dog wrote about the same performance of Othello I attended, go here.

TT: The Met goes digital

In my next "Sightings" column, to be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I take a second look at last week's much-discussed announcement by the Metropolitan Opera:

Following extensive, groundbreaking negotiations with its three largest unions, the Metropolitan Opera announced plans today that will revolutionize the live electronic distribution of its productions. In an historic first for any major performing arts institution in this country or abroad, this season the Met will use advanced distribution platforms and state-of-the-art technology to attract new audiences and reach millions of opera fans around the world. Beginning on December 30, the Met will transmit six of its performances live in high definition into movie theaters in the United States, Canada, and Europe that have been equipped with high-definition projection systems and satellite dishes. In addition, over 100 live performances will be broadcast either over the internet or on digital radio....

Naturally, the movie-house broadcasts got the headlines--but the real news was buried in the fine print. The Met, it turns out, is on the verge of making a major move into the brave new world of online, on-demand music. To learn what Peter Gelb has up his sleeve, pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal, where you'll find my column in the "Pursuits" section.

TT: Incoming

I'm either reading or about to start reading these books:

- Simon Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans

- Peter Carey, Theft: A Love Story

- Robert Hughes, Things I Didn't Know: A Memoir

- John Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life

- Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer

- Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

- Michael Streissguth, Johnny Cash: The Biography

- Aleksander Wat, My Century

- Michael Webb, Modernism Reborn: Mid-Century American Houses

UPDATE: A friend writes:

Nine out of ten of your book titles include a colon.

I'm soooo not going there....

TT: Almanac

"You're television incarnate, Diana: indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy."

Paddy Chayefsky, screenplay for Network

September 14, 2006

TT: The new media in one lesson

I often have occasion to write or speak about the new media and their effects on our culture, and I find myself repeating the same basic concepts over and over, sometimes fluently and sometimes fumblingly. For this reason, it occurred to me today to distill them into a soundbite:

The common culture is dead, and the middle class is busier than ever before. Consumers under forty--and, increasingly, under fifty--want what they want when they want it.

As a result, the old-fashioned mass-media model of top-down, one-size-fits-all journalism and entertainment is becoming obsolete. One-way broadcasting is out. Two-way narrowcasting is in.

That means online, on-demand media content transmitted directly to portable devices via user-friendly interactive interfaces that simultaneously maximize and simplify consumer choice and participation.

If you're not already doing this, or figuring out how to do it, you're asking for trouble.

I think that covers everything, don't you?

Posted September 14, 12:19 PM

TT: Waiting for Teachout

If you read my Wall Street Journal drama column, you know that in addition to Broadway and major off-Broadway openings, I review theatrical performances throughout the United States. I'm the only drama critic in America who does so on a regular basis, and it's made me a passionate believer in the significance of regional theater. As I wrote in my "Sightings" column back in June:

When a museum in Los Angeles or Philadelphia puts on a major exhibition, nobody in the world of art assumes it to be second-rate merely because it doesn't travel to the Metropolitan Museum. The same thing ought to be true of a theatrical production. That's why the time has come for American playgoers--and, no less important, arts editors--to start treating regional theater not as a minor-league branch of Broadway but as an artistically significant entity in and of itself. Take it from a critic who now spends much of his time living out of a suitcase: If you don't know what's hot in "the stix," you don't know the first thing about theater in 21st-century America.

How do I decide which out-of-town companies to visit and what shows to see--and how might you go about persuading me to see your company?

When I first started attending theatrical performances outside New York, it was on an ad hoc basis not too far removed from throwing darts at a map. I started with Chicago because it's where Our Girl lives, followed by Washington, D.C., to which I routinely travel three times each year to attend meetings of the National Council for the Arts. Every time I saw a show I liked, I looked up the director's bio, made a note of the other companies with which he'd worked, checked out their Web sites, and put them on my list. I did the same thing with actors who impressed me.

Once the Journal decided to cover regional theater in earnest, I became more systematic in my information-gathering process. I started with the members of the League of Resident Theatres, the thirty-one winners to date of the Tony Award for regional theater, and the various companies and summer festivals participating in the NEA's Shakespeare in American Communities project. I combined these overlapping rosters into a single list, then visited and bookmarked the Web sites of all the companies on it, later adding dozens of others that I discovered by combing through the online database of the American Theater Web.

How did I winnow the resulting list to a manageable size? Here are the standards I used:

- No amateurs, please. I only review professional companies. I'm also more likely to review Equity productions, but that's not a hard-and-fast rule, especially if I'm already coming to your city to see another show.

In addition, I don't review dinner theater, and it's unusual (but not unprecedented) for me to visit children's theaters or companies that produce only musicals.

- Web sites matter--a lot. More often than not, your site will be my introduction to your company. You don't have to cram it full of cutesy-pie bells and whistles, but the smarter the design, the greater the chance that I'll give it a second glance.

Two words to the wise:

(1) Sound bites = death.

(2) If you can't spell, hire a proofreader.

For more tips on what I look for in a theatrical Web site, go here.

- You must produce a minimum of three shows each season... This doesn't apply to summer festivals, but it's comparatively rare for me to cover a festival that doesn't produce at least three shows a year.

- ...and most of them have to be serious. I promise not to put you on my drop-dead list for milking the occasional cash cow, but if you specialize in such regional-theater staples as Tuesdays With Morrie, the collected works of Larry Shue, and anything with the word "magnolias" in the title, I won't go out of my way to come calling on you, either.

I'm looking for an imaginative, wide-ranging mix of revivals of major plays--including comedies--and newer works by living playwrights and songwriters whom I admire. Some names on the latter list: Alan Ayckbourn, Nilo Cruz, Horton Foote, Amy Freed, Brian Friel, Adam Guettel, A.R. Gurney, David Ives, Michael John LaChiusa, Warren Leight, Kenneth Lonergan, Lisa Loomer, David Mamet, Martin McDonagh, Itamar Moses, Lynn Nottage, Austin Pendleton, Harold Pinter, Oren Safdie, John Patrick Shanley, Stephen Sondheim, and Tom Stoppard.

I also have a select list of older plays I'd like to see that haven't been revived in New York lately (or ever). If you're doing The Beauty Part, The Cocktail Party, The Entertainer, Hotel Paradiso, Man and Superman, Present Laughter, Rhinoceros, Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Visit, What the Butler Saw, or anything by Jean Anouilh or Terence Rattigan, drop me a line.

- Been there, done that. As a rule, I don't cover new or newish plays I've previously reviewed in New York, especially if I panned them. The chances of my coming to town specifically to see your production of Bad Dates or Rabbit Hole are well below zero--though I might drop by if I'm going to be in the area for some other reason.

- April is the cruellest month. Many Broadway shows open between the middle of March and the middle of May, in time to qualify for that year's Tony nominations. During that period, I have neither time nor space to review out-of-town openings, no matter how enticing they may sound. On the other hand, I'm usually looking for interesting shows to review in late December, January, the first half of February, the second half of May, June, and September.

- I group my shots. It isn't cost-effective for me to fly halfway across the country to review a single show. Whenever possible, I like to take in three different productions during a four- or five-day trip. (Bear in mind, though, that they don't all have to be in the same city. In October, for instance, I'll be seeing two shows in Seattle and one in Portland, Oregon.) If you're the publicist of the Podunk Repertory Company and you want me to review your revival of The Glass Menagerie, your best bet is to point out that TheaterPodunk just happens to be doing Our Town that very same weekend. Otherwise, I'll probably go to San Francisco instead.

Remember, too, that I write about all the arts, and on occasion I can be lured to your show by the additional prospect of seeing an important non-theatrical cultural event during my stay.

- Send me no paper. I prefer to receive press releases via e-mail, and I don't want to receive routine Joe-Blow-is-now-our-assistant-stage-manager announcements via any means whatsoever.

- It pays to advertise--if you do it right. I'm flying to Chicago next week to see two shows. One of them is being put on by a company of which I'd never heard prior to January, when I picked up a copy of its well-written, stylish-looking flier in the lobby of Chicago's Court Theatre, one of my favorite regional companies. I went to their Web site, liked what I saw, and decided to pay them a visit. Sometimes it's as simple as that.

As of today, I'm watching the Web sites of 146 theater companies in the continental United States. So far I've visited thirty-three of them. Keep these simple rules in mind and you, too, could move from column A to column B.

Posted September 14, 12:00 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week. (Note the rare absence of asterisks!)

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, 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 Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
- Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
- Seven Guitars (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Oct. 7)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

Posted September 14, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts."

Harold Macmillan, speech, Aug. 16, 1950

Posted September 14, 12:00 PM

September 13, 2006

TT: The past recaptured

Says Lileks:

Outside. Gazebo, waterfall, crickets. Late at night. No planes. At this time of night you can hear the whine of the highway in the distance. I wonder if it's one of those sounds no one ever heard before the car was invented, just as the sound of the internal combustion engine was probably unique when the first one was fired up. All these sounds, waiting to be born....

It's remarkable how fast we forget sounds, and how quickly we recall them--when I was digitizing old VHS tapes, I realized I'd forgotten the series of labored sounds that preceded a show. The thick clunk of the tape dropping in the slot, the perfunctory whine of the tape queuing up, the pained inhalation of the motors as they rolled the spindles. It was the sound of Brave Modernity in 1984, and a tiresome reminder of old technology twenty years later....

You could take any scholar of the Twenties back in time, put him on Twenty-Third street at eleven p.m., and he'd pick out the vehicles, the buildings, the mode of dress, and most of the slang; if he heard a song waft from an apartment above, he might know what it was. If he picked up a newspaper, he might know a tenth of the names on the front page. But none of the names in the back, I'd guess. And then someone would walk past and mention a bar he'd never heard. Down the street there would be a sound--barrels rolling down a staircase? Lumber unloading? If you go an inch beyond the stratum of things we know, the mysteries are as quotidian and innumerable, and lost. The past is the unrecovered country.

I think if you actually found yourself in a silent movie theater in 1926, your first impression wouldn't be the architecture or the clothing or the candy or the conversation; it would be the way things smelled. No one knows what the Twenties smell like.

This wonderful posting reminded me of one of the things that sets film apart from live theater: it has an unparalleled capacity to recreate the past. It's the closest thing to a time machine that we have.

I thought about this the other night while watching one of my favorite movies, Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. Here's part of what I wrote after Our Girl and I saw it for the first time in a Chicago theater six years ago:

Contrary to whatever you may have heard or read, Topsy-Turvy is not simply, or even primarily, a backstage movie about the partnership of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan and the making of The Mikado. It is, rather, a scrapbook of Victorian life, a miraculously evocative attempt to suggest the tone and texture of what it felt like to live in London in 1885.

This latter emphasis explains why so many smart filmgoers of my acquaintance have disliked Topsy-Turvy: it is not plot-driven. We know, after all, that librettist and composer will finally overcome their differences and that The Mikado will be a hit, so instead of trying to trump up false suspense, Leigh ambles from vignette to vignette, interested not in the plot but the scenery. We stroll into the office of Richard D'Oyly Carte, and notice with surprise that he has a telephone on his desk; we accompany Sullivan to a Paris bordello, and gaze with wonder upon the elaborate decor. We dine in Victorian restaurants, sit in Victorian living rooms, peer into Victorian rehearsal halls, go backstage at the Savoy Theater and watch a prop man shake a piece of sheet metal to simulate the sound of thunder. Detail is piled on imaginatively recreated detail, and at film's end you feel that you have entered a lost world, peopled with real people who behave in plausible ways....

Theater can do wonderful and irreplaceable things--but not that.

ELSEWHERE: To read an exceptionally fine Salon interview with Mike Leigh about the making of Topsy-Turvy, go here.

Posted September 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I think some young people want a deeper experience. Some people just wanna be hit over the head and, you know, if then they [get] hit hard enough maybe they'll feel something. You know? But some people want to get inside of something and discover, maybe, more richness. And I think it will always be the same; they're not going to be the great percentage of the people. A great percentage of the people don't want a challenge. They want something to be done to them--they don't want to participate. But there'll always be maybe 15% maybe, 15%, that desire something more, and they'll search it out--and maybe that's where art is, I think."

Bill Evans, interview, 1980 (courtesy of The Bill Evans Web Pages)

Posted September 13, 12:00 PM

September 12, 2006

TT: Overheard (in both directions)

- Heard at the gym today:

TRAINER So, I had my birthday party at this bar downtown where they have half-naked girls who breathe fire--and they hustle you!

CLIENT (shaking his head) That's entertainment.

- I mentioned the other day that Mr. My Stupid Dog and I recently went to see Othello together at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia. Since then he's posted a two-part account of our evening, which includes this description of me:

His face suggests that he is open, frank and pleasant, but not altogether easy to peg. The bearing suggests a little of Felix Ungar, a little of Oscar Madison, frequently both at once. You wouldn't take him for a Missourian right away (although he has written extensively about his small-town upbringing), but you wouldn't think him a native New Yorker either: There is something about him that always seems betwixt and between, though never in a disquieting or uncomfortable manner. His Southern accent can fade in and out as the situation dictates....

I don't know how I look to other people, but that's definitely what I see in the mirror. Could it be that I know myself? Or am I just good at playing myself?

Posted September 12, 12:21 PM

TT: Repent at leisure

When the White House asked if I'd be willing to sit on the National Council for the Arts, one of the things that briefly gave me pause was the length of my paper trail. The FBI investigated me prior to the announcement of my nomination, and they wanted to know whether I'd ever done, said, or written anything that might embarrass the president. What made this question funny--sort of--is that I've been a professional writer since 1977, during which time I've been more or less closely associated with four different newspapers and God only knows how many magazines. (Let's not even think about the blog.) No doubt I wrote something that might embarrass the president. What's more surprising is that I've written so few things that in retrospect embarrass me.

It's not that I haven't changed my mind about anything since 1977. I have, many times, and when I do I try to be as open and honest about it as possible. I was having lunch with one of my Wall Street Journal editors just the other day, and he mentioned that he'd especially liked this passage from last week's drama column:

I got off on the wrong foot with August Wilson. I wasn't living in New York when he was in his prime, and "Gem of the Ocean," the first of his plays that I saw on Broadway, struck me as self-consciously poetic to the point of flatulence. It wasn't until the Court Theatre's revival of "Fences" in Chicago this past January that I finally understood what all the fuss was about....

My editor said he liked it when the critics who wrote for him didn't pretend to omniscience. I feel the same way, and even more so when it comes to fits of outright stupidity. One of mine was a 1995 Daily News review of the Lincoln Center premiere of Mark Morris' L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato in which I called it "impressive in its seriousness, stunning in its inventiveness--and, ultimately, disappointing in its emotional flatness." This was a willfully wrongheaded judgment that I have since publicly retracted, with parsley.

It thus occurs to me that I really ought to say something in this space regarding the only piece reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader about which I've had second thoughts--of a sort. In 2001 I published an essay in the Sunday New York Times called "The Myth of Classic TV" (they called it something else, but I restored my original title when I put it in the Teachout Reader). In it I wrote:

As it happens, only thirteen episodes of The Sopranos are aired each season, and the series is expected to have a fairly limited run. More typical is St. Elsewhere, which ran for 137 consecutive episodes, each of which grew organically out of its predecessors. Such long-running series can only be experienced serially, which for all practical purposes means during their original runs; once they cease to air each week in regular time slots, they cease to be readily available as total artistic experiences, and thus can no longer acquire new viewers, or be re-experienced by old ones. This is why there is no such thing as a "classic" TV series: we never see any series enough times to know whether its overall quality justifies the multiple viewings which are the hallmark of classic status. (Needless to say, I'm not talking about those fanatical cultists who have seen each episode of Star Trek a hundred times and can recite the dialogue from memory. To them, my heartfelt advice is: get a life.)

Some think The Sopranos will break this iron rule of ephemerality. I understand that a great many videocassettes of the first thirteen episodes have been sold, presumably to latecomers who weren't subscribing to HBO in 1999 and wanted to find out what they'd missed. But if you aren't already watching The Sopranos, you're probably not going to start now, unless you're prepared to sit through reruns of 26 additional episodes between now and next March, when the fourth season begins. Nor are even rabid fans likely to watch The Sopranos from beginning to end more than once. Who has the time?

Since I wrote those words, the DVD has replaced the videocassette, innumerable TV series of the past have been released either in their entirety or in large chunks, and the most popular of these box sets rank among the hottest items on the home-video market. Nevertheless, I persisted until very recently in thinking that the success of TV series on home video was a fad, and that such box sets would end up gathering dust on the shelves of countless collectors, not unlike the innumerable copies of Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization that found their way into the homes of members of the Book-of-the-Month Club a generation ago.

I now know I was wrong, not least because other bloggers, among them Our Girl, have told me so. What I don't understand is why I was wrong. More than most critics of my generation, I've been conscious of and sensitive to the effects of technology on culture. (That's why this blog exists.) Along with "The Myth of Classic TV," the Teachout Reader contains "Life After Records," a lengthy essay in which I sum up several years' worth of thinking on the subject of how the new media will affect the recording industry. So far as I know, I was the first mainstream music critic to predict the coming of downloadable music, and as any number of my artist friends will testify, I was among the first to tell them to launch Web sites, start blogs, check out ArtistShare and satellite radio, and look into iTunes and podcasting. Whatever the opposite of a Luddite is, that's me.

So why did I fail to foresee the explosion of interest in TV series on video? I don't have an easy answer to that one, but I suspect I made the biggest mistake a cultural critic can make, which is to confuse himself with the public at large.

I stopped watching series TV midway through the run of The Sopranos, in large part because I was spending so many of my nights on the town, first as an all-purpose critic-boulevardier for the Washington Post and later as the Journal's regular drama critic. On occasion I'd take a short-lived interest in a new show, but I was never willing to make the commitment of time necessary to keep up with any series on a week-to-week basis, and when full-season DVD collections came along, I was no more inclined to spend thirteen-hour chunks of my life working my way through them.

The only times I immerse myself in series TV are when I visit Our Girl in Chicago and spend a rainy Sunday immersing myself in her latest TV-related enthusiasm, whatever it may be. Over the years the two of us have gorged ourselves on day-long marathon viewings of Freaks and Geeks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, and House, all of which I took seriously and enjoyed hugely. Alas, I was never able to stick with any of them for more than a few weeks after returning to New York. I had too many other things to do.

I still think I'm "right" about series TV, but to be right, as Franz Kline said to Frank O'Hara, is "the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in." The fact is that lots of smart people feel otherwise. Just last week, for instance, Our Girl linked to a very smart posting by Peter Suderman in which he took issue with a recent essay Mark Steyn wrote for The Atlantic. Steyn claimed in his piece that I was right about classic TV:

Indeed, the more "classic" your show, the more ephemeral it is. Getting into Ovid or Gregorian chant is a piece of cake next to getting into thirtysomething fifteen years on. Conceivably, one might find oneself in a motel room unable to sleep at four in the morning and surfing the channels come across St. Elsewhere. But they made 137 episodes of multiple complex interrelated plotlines all looping back to Episode 1: if you've never seen it before and you stumble on Episode 43, who the hell are all these people and what are they on about?

To which Suderman replied:

Steyn is certainly correct to say that shows like Homicide don't lend themselves to the trivialities of syndicated kitsch. The bland background hum required for good afternoon cable and late-night channel surfing isn't really a good mix with the drawn-out ambiguities and complexities of these shows. And if cable reruns were all we had, then that would be that.

But television, especially of the HBO variety, is becoming more novel-like, and DVD box sets are allowing us to approach these shows in a way that preserves--even enhances--their novel-like aspects. Binge-watching these shows in commercial free, multi-episode gulps is a perfect way to experience the "multiple complex interrelated plotlines" that Steyn sees as a flaw in regular broadcast viewing. The rise of the DVD medium means that a show like Homicide, which, as with an excellent novel, provides both an accurate portrayal of a place in time and a gripping narrative populated by scads of well-crafted characters, is no longer consigned to the wastelands of syndication.

So...who's right? In the very long run, I suspect I am. No matter how "novel-like" Homicide may seem to be, there's simply too much of it to embrace in the all-absorbing way we embrace a novel.

To return once more to my original essay:

Hill Street Blues was the first TV drama I ever went out of my way to see, and were there world enough and time, I might even consider watching the first few dozen episodes again. But while I still remember how much I liked Hill Street Blues, I can't recall much else about it--only a few isolated moments from two or three episodes--whereas I could easily rattle off fairly complete synopses of, say, Citizen Kane or A Midsummer Night's Dream, or whistle the exposition to the first movement of Mozart's G Minor Symphony. To qualify as a classic, a work of art must first of all be good enough to make you want to get to know it at least that well. Will any TV series ever be good enough to fill that exalted bill?

I don't think so--but for the moment, I'd say I'm outvoted.

ELSEWHERE: I wrote a piece about Freaks and Geeks for the Sunday New York Times in 2001. It's not in the Teachout Reader, but you can read it by going here.

UPDATE: Peter Suderman replies--and very interestingly, too.

Posted September 12, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Music gazes at its listener with empty eyes, and the more deeply one immerses oneself in it, the more incomprehensible its ultimate purpose becomes, until one learns that the answer, if such is possible, does not lie in contemplation, but in interpretation. In other words, the only person who can solve the riddle of music is the one who plays it correctly, as something whole."

Theodor Adorno, The Relationship of Philosophy and Music (courtesy of Think Denk)

Posted September 12, 12:00 PM

September 11, 2006

TT: 9/11/01

For some relevant memories, go here and here.

Posted September 11, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

- "Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of his own negative potential--with his sense of what he is capable of."

Joseph Brodsky, "On Grief and Reason"

- "Tragedy is like strong acid--it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth."

D.H. Lawrence, letter to James T. Boulton (April 1, 1911)

- "Now, the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine."

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Presumption"

- "The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their forgetfulness."

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

- May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly we walk through this April's day"

Posted September 11, 12:00 PM

September 8, 2006

TT: Really the blues

I reviewed two shows in this morning's Wall Street Journal, one in town (Seven Guitars) and one elsewhere (Pippin). Here's the gist:

August Wilson was on the outs with Broadway at the time of his death last October. "Gem of the Ocean," the ninth installment of his ten-play cycle about the black experience in America, barely made it to the Great White Way, and "Radio Golf," the last play in the cycle, has yet to be seen there (though it's already received several regional productions). So it's good news indeed that the Signature Theater Company, the Off Broadway troupe that devotes each of its seasons to the work of one American playwright, is featuring him this year--and that "Seven Guitars," the first of three plays by Wilson to be produced there this season, has been given a revival of the utmost splendor and compulsion. Now that "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" and "Faith Healer" have closed their doors, I'd go so far as to call it the best play in town....

Needless to say, it was written with black playgoers very much in mind, but for all the ethnic specificity of his chronicles of ghetto life, Wilson never lost sight of the artist's obligation to communicate to the widest possible audience. As he told the Paris Review in 1999, "You create the work to add to the artistic storehouse of the world, to exalt and celebrate a common humanity." I can't think of a better way to sum up "Seven Guitars": Like all great art, it shows you yourself, no matter who you are....

Youngsters unaware that Stephen Schwartz wrote anything before "Wicked" should take note of the lively production of "Pippin" now playing at the Goodspeed Opera House, the century-old 398-seat auditorium on the Connecticut River whose musical-comedy revivals are universally admired by well-traveled connoisseurs....

To be sure, "Pippin" is a wan period piece with a watered-down rock score and wince-making lyrics that stink of 1972 ("Every man has his daydreams/Every man has his goals/People like the way dreams have/Of sticking to the soul"). But the ham-fisted stop-the-war sermonizing of the first act will soothe the parched souls of the gray-ponytail set, and Gabriel Barre and Beowulf Boritt, the director and designer, have miraculously contrived to shoehorn the show's complicated events onto the Goodspeed's tiny stage with plenty of room to spare....

No free link. As usual, you can read the whole thing by (A) buying the paper or (B) going here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to the complete text of my review. (If you're already a subscriber, you'll find it here.)

Posted September 08, 12:00 PM

TT: Stop, look, and listen

Two months ago I added a new module to "Sites to See," our blogroll. As I wrote in June:

In the past year YouTube has evolved from a curiosity into a major online resource. If you're interested in seeing rare film and video clips by a fast-growing number of great performers of the past, you'll find them there--but only if you have the patience to sift through the innumerable postings of nitwits who think the world is waiting with bated breath to see their homemade music videos.

From time to time I've passed on links to interesting videos that I've found on other blogs, but it never occurred to me to try making this blog a one-stop portal to the wonders of YouTube--until now. Take a look at the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column and you'll find that it ends with a brand-new roll of selected culture- and history-oriented video links, most (but not all) of them to YouTube. So far as I know, this is the first such list to appear anywhere on the Web.

If you haven't checked it out yet, I strongly suggest you do so now. Last night I spent a couple of hours revising, updating, and expanding our list of video links. (All newly posted videos are marked with an asterisk.) It is, if I do say so myself, a spectacularly rich catalogue of on-demand online video treasure--and the audio-only links are pretty amazing, too.

As always, I encourage you to send me the URLs of any choice culture-related links that you run across in the course of your own YouTube explorations.

Have fun!

Posted September 08, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

Nothing with gods, nothing with fate;
Weighty affairs will just have to wait!

Stephen Sondheim, "Comedy Tonight"

Posted September 08, 12:00 PM

September 7, 2006

TT: What are you doing on Sunday night?

If you have no plans for this Sunday night--and maybe even if you do--I strongly recommend that you attend the all-star jazz concert that Dan Levinson and Randy Sandke have put together to benefit Dick Sudhalter, about whose plight I recently blogged. The bill includes (among others) Harry Allen, Dan Barrett, Eddie Bert, Bill Crow, Jim Ferguson, Dave Frishberg, Wycliffe Gordon, Marty Grosz, Becky Kilgore, Bill Kirchner, Steve Kuhn, Dan Levinson, Marian McPartland, Joe Muranyi, David Ostwald, Nicki Parrott, Bucky Pizzarelli, Scott Robinson, Randy Sandke, Daryl Sherman, and the Loren Schoenberg Big Band.

The concert will take place at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in New York. The address is 619 Lexington Avenue at 54th Street and the music starts at seven o'clock sharp. Admission is $40, plus whatever else you care to chip in.

I'll be there. You come, too.

TT: Calling an audible

Are there any songs that you really, really like in spite of their lyrics, whether in whole or part? Here's my list:

- Swing Out Sister, "Breakout"
- Joan Armatrading, "Call Me Names"
- Tori Amos, "Crucify"
- Joni Mitchell, "Black Crow"
- Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry"
- Rosanne Cash, "I Want a Cure"
- The Police, "King of Pain"
- Billy Strayhorn, "Lush Life"

Incidentally, it only works one way for me: if I don't like the music of a song, it doesn't matter how good the words are. I suspect the same thing is true for most people, which says something interesting about the nature of songwriting.

TT: So you want to see a show?

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

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- The Drowsy Chaperone* (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, 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 Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"Wisdom is truth that consoles. There is truth without wisdom, as we know from the many mad scientists who are running loose in our world. And there is consolation without truth, as we know from the history of religion. Whatever its defects, my life has enabled me to find comfort in uncomfortable truths."

Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)