« October 2006 | Main | December 2006 »

November 30, 2006

TT: In the mood

I set my iBook on shuffle play the other night and sat down at the kitchen table to fill up my seven-day pillbox. (Don't let anybody tell you that the life of a Manhattan drama critic isn't exciting!) As Aimee Mann started singing "Deathly," I glanced at the clock, saw that it was eleven, and suddenly found myself remembering a conversation I had thirty-odd years ago with a long-lost college friend. She was a slightly older married woman who had long, ash-blonde hair, thin legs, and a bone-dry sense of humor, all of which I found irresistibly (and unrequitedly) appealing. Those were the days when I was hosting a late-night jazz show on the campus radio station, and my friend remarked that she liked it when I played "eleven o'clock music."

"What's eleven o'clock music?" I asked innocently.

"Oh, you know," she said. "Music to...you know. That's when my husband and I like to do it."

This offhand remark promptly triggered a near-incapacitating spasm of jealousy, which doubtless explains why it burned itself into my memory, surfacing without warning half a lifetime later. My friend, as it happens, looked more than a little bit like Aimee Mann, a coincidence that now causes me to smile wryly. Where are you now, dear Lynda? Do you still like to do it at eleven o'clock--and if so, do you still do so to the accompaniment of the coolly bittersweet records I made a point of playing on the radio every Wednesday between eleven p.m. and midnight?

Love-hungry bachelors of the Fifties and early Sixties were notorious for using jazz and romantic ballads to grease the skids. Frank Sinatra, I'm told, was their artist of choice, though I've also been assured by a number of senior citizens in a position to know that Getz/Gilberto was similarly effective. Blake Edwards notwithstanding, I've never met anyone who did it to Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet or Ravel's Boléro, at least not more than once.

As for me, I've never been one to play music in intimate situations. Perhaps because I am, or used to be, a musician, I find it distracting, though not so much so that I won't happily accommodate a companion who feels otherwise. I once dated a woman who found it difficult to get in the mood without a soundtrack, and so I spent a pleasant afternoon creating an iTunes playlist specifically designed to warm her up. Now that the statute of limitations has expired, I can confess that I played an ignoble private joke on her by slipping in a couple of songs recorded by a woman with whom I'd previously been in love (also unrequitedly--I'm good at that).

I suppose it says something significant about me that while music is one of the most important things in my life--perhaps the most important thing--I don't find it sexy, and never have. Musicians, yes, if they're women: I've been attracted to more than a few of them over the years, and the snippet of dialogue from High Fidelity that I posted as an almanac entry a couple of years ago is in my case not without autobiographical overtones:

BARRY: I want to date a musician.

ROB: I want to live with a musician. She could write songs at home, ask me what I thought of them, and maybe even include one of our private jokes in the liner notes.

BARRY: Maybe a little picture of me in the liner notes.

DICK: Just in the background somewhere.

But even though I've long been drawn to women who make music, it's not their music that draws me, at least not directly. I've no idea why I make this odd distinction, and I'm not sure what it means, either, since I've never been attracted to a woman who made bad music--yet there it is.

For me, music exists in a realm infinitely removed from physical sensuality. It is, as the theologians say, "wholly other," and it seems to me altogether appropriate that it was in a book about a religious conversion, Karl Stern's The Pillar of Fire, that I ran across one of the few descriptions of music that seems to me at all valid:

"To talk about music" is a miserable paradox, and contains in four words an admission of incongruity. I remember the embarrassed feeling I had when I read Kierkegaard's somber theological speculations on Mozart and Don Giovanni. Is Don Giovanni not just a "charming" opera which has a place on the repertoire somewhere with Carmen and The Barber of Seville? Or is it something entirely different, opening up the fathomless abyss of human existence? There is a hierarchy of values, the validity of which cannot be proved by what one calls ordinary means. In this respect, as in others, the Good and the Beautiful are intimately related. To me Mozart's quartets and Bach's Well-tempered Clavichord are in essence much more closely akin to Saint Thomas' Summa than to Wagner's Götterdämmerung, although the latter is music and the Summa is not.

Be that as it may, I have nothing but respect for those fortunate souls who find music sexually arousing. More power to them, I say, though as I say it I can't help but think of a story that Mr. Rifftides likes to tell about his old friend Paul Desmond, the celebrated alto saxophonist of the Dave Brubeck Quartet and a man who by all accounts knew his way around a bedroom, though he wasn't one to kiss and tell:

Once when he and I were dining, a corpulent, polyestered, middle-aged couple planted themselves next to us and announced to Paul that they recognized him from an album cover and just wanted him to know that his music sure was good to make love by. Desmond took a long look at the flabby woman in her beehive hairdo and caked makeup, and the man with his paunch and cigar stub, and said, "Glad to be of help."

Posted November 30, 12:00 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

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

BROADWAY:
- A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
- 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, closes Dec. 31)

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)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here, closes Dec. 9)

CLOSING SOON:
- Heartbreak House (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Dec. 17)

Posted November 30, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"If we apply to authors themselves for an account of their state, it will appear very little to deserve envy; for they have in all ages been addicted to complaint."

Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer, March 2, 1754 (courtesy of Pratie Place)

Posted November 30, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs."

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

Posted November 30, 12:00 PM

November 29, 2006

TT: The rule of three (plus one)

Robert Altman, Anita O'Day, and Betty Comden: it was a rocky Thanksgiving for lovers of American art.

About Altman's death I have nothing much to say, for I respected his films far more than I liked them, and only wrote about one of them, Gosford Park. Our Girl (with whom I saw Gosford Park five years ago) thinks otherwise, and I'm hoping she'll get around to explaining why at some point.

I felt much the same way about O'Day, whose hard-swinging, ever-ingenious jazz singing I admired greatly without ever warming to it. I saw her in person twice, once in her prime and once long afterward, blogging about the second occasion without identifying her:

I recently saw a public performance by a very old artist. No names or details--it wouldn't serve any purpose--but it was a disastrous, pitiful self-parody of ruined greatness, the kind that leaves a dark and permanent stain of humiliation in the memory. It shouldn't have happened. It shouldn't have been allowed to happen. Yet it did...

I still recall that performance with retrospective horror, and since then have been exceedingly careful about going to see performers whose time has come and gone.

My memories of Betty Comden are sunnier, not only because I was an unabashed fan of her work but also because I was lucky enough to interview Comden and Adolph Green, her late friend and lifelong colleague, for a 1999 New York Times profile:

Sixty-one years after they began working together, it is almost possible to take Ms. Comden and Mr. Green for granted, because they are so much a part of the theatrical air we breathe. Their hit shows, which include ''On the Town,'' ''Wonderful Town,'' ''Peter Pan,'' ''Bells Are Ringing'' and ''On the Twentieth Century,'' have yielded a bumper crop of standards; whenever you sing ''New York, New York, a helluva town'' or ''The party's over, it's time to call it a day'' in the shower, their words are on your lips. In addition, they wrote the scripts for ''Singin' in the Rain'' and ''The Band Wagon,'' by common consent the two finest film musicals to come out of Hollywood since World War II. No less remarkable is the roster of superstars with whom they have worked, including--just for starters--Fred Astaire, Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, Gene Kelly, Mary Martin, Andre Previn, Jerome Robbins and Frank Sinatra....

One unintended consequence of the drying up of musical comedy as a living idiom has been the welcome opportunity to revisit the best shows of the 40's and 50's. My guess is that the joint reputation of Betty Comden and Adolph Green has only just begun to benefit from that continuing revaluation. But even if their musicals should fail to survive the test of time, I am certain that the elegantly turned, emotionally true lyrics they wrote for such individual songs as ''Lucky to Be Me,'' ''Lonely Town,'' ''Just in Time,'' ''The Party's Over'' and ''Make Someone Happy'' will continue to be sung so long as human beings stubbornly insist on falling in and out of love. To listen as Tony Bennett and Bill Evans turn ''Some Other Time'' into a piercingly rueful monologue about missed chances (''This day was just a token/Too many words are still unspoken'') is to realize, once and for all, that the life's work of the longest-lived writing team in the history of the American theater is far more than just a barrel of laughs.

I made no secret of the fact that I admired Comden and Green without reservation when I visited them at her Upper West Side apartment six years ago, and they in turn made it known to me that they liked what I later wrote about them in the Times. I wouldn't change a word of it today.

Back then "Some Other Time" was my favorite song, and though in recent years I've come to love another song from On the Town even more, I have no doubt that there can be no more fitting tribute to Betty Comden than to recall the words she and Adolph Green wrote for the most piercingly beautiful of wartime ballads:

Twenty-four hours can go so fast,
You look around, the day has passed.
When you're in love
Time is precious stuff;
Even a lifetime isn't enough.

Where has the time all gone to?
Haven't done half the things we want to.
Oh, well, we'll catch up
Some other time.
This day was just a token,
Too many words are still unspoken,
Oh, well, we'll catch up
Some other time.

Just when the fun is starting,
Come's the time for parting,
But let's be glad for what we've had
And what's to come.
There's so much more embracing
Still to be done, but time is racing.
Oh, well, we'll catch up
Some other time.

The world is poorer for her passing.

Posted November 29, 12:00 PM

TT: Mailbox

A friend writes, apropos of yesterday's posting about (among other things) Gone With the Wind:

It's not my favorite movie either, but I was force-fed it at a very early age because it was one of my mother's all-time favorites. She first took me to see it on the big screen when I was nine--it was still being shown every now and then in movie houses back then and we went any time it was in town or nearby. Didn't think much of the movie at the time--the hospital scene was a little much--but it was cool to witness it on the big screen, complete with intermission. Later I read the book, which I preferred, as it was the perfect summer trash read.

My mom lived in the movie houses when she was a teenager, watched old movies on television whenever she could and would wax rhapsodic about her favorites. She saw Vivien Leigh in person once, when she was married to Laurence Olivier, and said she looked exactly like Snow White. I became more of a Clark Gable fan myself and always enjoy watching his Rhett. Think I saw it last summer when it was on television and I was on painkillers from surgery. It's still hard to sit through, even under sedation.

Or when seated on a rowing machine.

Posted November 29, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"All of life is a choice of genre."

Eve Tushnet, EveTushnet.com

Posted November 29, 12:00 PM

November 28, 2006

TT: Misery is...

...having the new Richard Stark novel on your nightstand and being too busy to start reading it.

Posted November 28, 12:11 PM

TT: Multimedia extravaganza

I may be busy, but that hasn't stopped me from going to the gym every day I'm in town. With the first anniversary of my near-death experience just around the bend, I'm disinclined to get lazy, so even on mornings when I'd rather curl up on the couch and look at the Teachout Museum, I pull on my sweats, plug in my iPod, and hit the road.

Sunday morning was especially difficult--I'd seen a show the night before and had two more coming up later that day--but I bit the bullet anyway, in part because I was actively looking forward to spending an hour with the latest version of the Terry Teachout Workout Tape:

- Bill Monroe, "New Muleskinner Blues"
- Donald Fagen, "Security Joan"
- Horace Silver, "Opus de Funk"
- Duke Ellington, "Never No Lament"
- Abba, "S.O.S." (a guilty pleasure, I suppose, but it's still one of the best-made pop singles of the Seventies)
- Gene Krupa, "Leave Us Leap" (composed by Eddie Finckel, whose son David is the cellist of the Emerson String Quartet)
- Lionel Hampton, "Haven't Named It Yet" (on which Big Sid Catlett's drumming can be heard with exceptional clarity)
- Pentangle, "Sally Go Round the Roses"
- Benny Goodman, "Ridin' High" (the thrilling live version recorded off the air in 1937, which inexplicably got left off my recent list of music that makes me happy)
- Johnny Winter And, "Rock 'n Roll, Hoochie Koo" (an old high-school favorite, recently downloaded from iTunes)
- Dave's True Story, "Sequined Mermaid Dress" (the song that first turned me on to DTS)
- Flatt & Scruggs, "Six White Horses"
- Miles Davis, "Seven Steps to Heaven"

Not only did all these songs give me great pleasure, but for once there was something on the TV monitors at the gym that I didn't mind seeing: the burning-of-Atlanta sequence from Gone With the Wind. I last saw that grossly overrated movie in 2004, and once again found it wanting:

The only other costume piece I can think of that uses Technicolor as vividly is John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Clark Gable and Hattie McDaniel are excellent, Max Steiner's score is wonderful in its old-fashioned way, and the siege and burning of Atlanta are fully as effective--and unexpectedly unsentimental--as I remember them. But Vivien Leigh's two-keyed performance as Scarlett is wearying, while the script scissors out most of the novel's ambiguities, such as they are....

I haven't changed my mind, but I can report that Gone With the Wind is a good deal more tolerable with the sound off. I especially appreciated the irony of seeing Rhett and Scarlett galloping toward Tara to the accompaniment of Miles Davis, whose opinion of Gone With the Wind is unrecorded but must surely have been unprintable in the extreme. To be sure, I didn't get to hear Clark Gable's deliciously growly voice or Max Steiner's lush score, but I was also spared Vivien Leigh's flibbertigibbet accent (they really should have dubbed her) and the pitiful minstrel-show antics of Butterfly "I Don't Know Nuthin' 'Bout Birthin' Babies!" McQueen.

I looked up McQueen's Wikipedia entry after coming home from the gym, and found it edifying:

By 1947 she had grown tired of the ethnic stereotypes she was required to play and ended her film career.

By 1950 she had played another racially-stereotyped role for two years on the television series Beulah, which reunited her with her Gone with the Wind co-star Hattie McDaniel.

Her acting roles after this were very few, and she devoted herself to other pursuits including study, and received a bachelor's degree in political science in 1975. She had one more role of some substance in the 1986 film The Mosquito Coast.

McQueen lived in Aiken, South Carolina, and died in Augusta, Georgia, as a result of burns received when a kerosene heater she was attempting to light exploded and burst into flames. A lifelong atheist, she donated her body to medical science and remembered the Freedom From Religion Foundation in her will.

I like that last detail.

Posted November 28, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art."

Oscar Wilde, Pall Mall Gazette, Feb. 8, 1886

Posted November 28, 12:00 PM

TT: From boom to bust

On Saturday I devoted my "Sightings" column in The Wall Street Journal to a cold-eyed consideration of the desperate state of dance in America:

Thirty-two million Americans tuned in the other night to see Emmitt Smith, formerly of the Dallas Cowboys, win the Cheesetastic Disco Ball Trophy on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars." The network claims that the latest episodes of its primetime ballroom-dancing competition were the most widely viewed programs of the current TV season. That's an impressive statistic no matter how you slice it, but it's noteworthy for another, grimmer reason: If you want to see dance on TV, "Dancing With the Stars" is pretty much all there is.

Things were different in the '60s and '70s, when Edward Villella would fly through the air on "The Ed Sullivan Show" one week and swap one-liners with Tony Randall on "The Odd Couple" the next. Those were the days of the "dance boom," the heady interlude when America was dance-crazy. Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Jerome Robbins, Broadway's hottest musical-comedy director, made popular ballets like "Dances at a Gathering" on the side. Even George Balanchine was a celebrity, thanks in part to "Dance in America," the PBS series that introduced a generation of TV viewers to ballet and modern dance.

Back then, dance was the most glamorous of the lively arts. Now it's the one most in danger of slipping through the cultural cracks. New episodes of "Dance in America" are as rare as funny sitcoms. Mr. Baryshnikov was the last classical dancer to become famous, and he stopped appearing in ballet years ago. As for Balanchine, how many Americans under the age of 40 even know the name of the greatest choreographer of the 20th century, much less that he was as significant an artist as Pablo Picasso or Igor Stravinsky?...

Now the Journal has posted a free link to this column, which has been stirring up talk. To read the whole thing, go here.

Posted November 28, 9:38 AM

November 27, 2006

TT: Off-road vehicle

After what seemed like an endless string of trips to everywhere imaginable, I find myself in New York City once more, a homecoming that reminds me of G.K. Chesterton's remark that "going right round the world is the shortest way to where you are already." I don't expect to see the inside of another airplane until I go home for the holidays, and that suits me fine.

When Harry Truman returned home to Missouri after a seven-year stint in the White House, a reporter asked him what he planned to do first. "Take the grips [i.e., suitcases] up to the attic," he replied. Like Truman, I tossed my trusty rolling tote in the closet on Saturday afternoon, but then I headed straight back out the door. As I mentioned last week, I knew I'd have to fling myself into a marathon of plays and performances the moment I hit the city limits, and the only thing that made it possible for me to face that prospect with reasonable equanimity was the probable quality of the shows I'd be seeing.

On Saturday, for example, Maccers and I caught a preview of Voyage, the first installment of the American premiere of The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard's trilogy of plays about the nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals who catapulted their country out of one tyranny and into another. The coming of The Coast of Utopia to the Vivian Beaumont Theater is by definition a major event, not only because we see so little of Stoppard's work on Broadway (it's been five-and-a-half years since a new Stoppard play was last performed there) but because this production is crawling with familiar faces (Billy Crudup, Jennifer Ehle, Ethan Hawke, Amy Irving, Brían F. O'Byrne, Martha Plimpton).

Alas, The Coast of Utopia, as Mr. Playgoer points out, is a fearfully expensive pleasure:

I've just found my actual tickets stubs from the original Royal National Theatre premiere of Utopia, almost exactly 4 years ago. I flew to London that November for basically a weekend to see all three plays in one day....

Sure, I spent some money flying over there, but note the prices of my three tickets to the trilogy: Voyage (11am matinee) £13; Shipwreck (3:15 matinee) £19; Salvage (7:30pm) £14. Total: £46. The exchange rate then was basically 2-to-1, so let's call that $90. A pretty awesome deal for what were pretty decent seats. (Shipwreck was the splurge.) And that was not a student rate or any special discount.

At Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont, $90 will just about cover a $65 seat in the balcony. To one of the plays. And only the last two rows of the balcony. The overwhelming majority of seats are $100. So to see all three--which really is essential to appreciating any one of them--will run you anywhere between (not including fees) $235 for sucky seats and $300. Per person....

By the way, my cheap-deal airfare to London 4 years ago? About $250. So in other words, for just a little more than the price of three downtstairs seats at the Beaumont, I got the same show and a trip abroad.

I know well how lucky I am to get free tickets to the shows I see (though it hasn't felt like much of a boon in recent weeks!). Still, I rarely have occasion to think in specific terms about how much civilians pay to go to the theater in New York, and Mr. Playgoer's bluntly informative posting, which has provoked some interesting reactions in the blogosphere, filled me with dismay. Tom Stoppard, after all, is widely regarded as one of the half-dozen most important playwrights in the world, and for that reason alone any New Yorker who cares about art will want to see all three installments of The Coast of Utopia--but how many of them can afford to do so?

Similarly bleak thoughts ran through my head on Sunday afternoon as I settled into my $101.25 aisle seat to watch the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's Company, staged by John Doyle in the style of his small-scale production of Sweeney Todd, about which I said extravagant things last year in The Wall Street Journal. That time I took Ms. in the wings, who was in New York on a visit, and this time I took Ms. Litwit, a Sondheim buff of near-fanatical intensity who just moved from Chicago to New York and will doubtless be posting her own reactions to Company in due course. (To find out what I thought of it, come back on Friday.) I also gave her a tour of the Teachout Museum before we headed down to the theater district, and I gather she liked what she saw.

Sunday was a two-show day for me, but the second show wasn't on Broadway or anywhere near it: I went to hear the Maria Schneider Orchestra at the Jazz Standard, my favorite New York nightclub. Maria and her band performed some of the music from Sky Blue, the album they'll be recording in January. If you know their work, you won't be surprised to hear that the results were utterly beautiful.

I wasn't the least bit surprised, since I've known Maria for years and have written about her music on many occasions, most accessibly in my liner notes for her second album, Coming About:

Coming About is no ordinary big-band record. You won't hear any blues in D flat, or standard-issue flagwavers with a shout chorus tacked on at the end. The centerpiece, "Scenes from Childhood," is a suite in three movements that begins with the angry howl of air-raid sirens (simulated on a theremin by baritone saxophonist Scott Robinson) and ends, half an hour later, with iridescent clouds of sound that shimmer into silence. It is one of the most ambitious jazz compositions heard on record in years, and it makes perfect sense when you look at Maria's resumé: she studied composition with Bob Brookmeyer, and spent three years as Gil Evans' musical assistant. From Brookmeyer, she learned how to create large-scale musical structures that add up to more than just a string of solos; from Evans, she learned how to blend instrumental colors with a Ravel-like precision and clarity.

Working with these two masters of big-band writing inspired Maria to develop a completely original sound of her own. "I think my music has a strong element of fantasy in it," she says, explaining that the inspirations for her compositions are as likely as not to be visual: dreams, paintings, memories. "If I don't have a dramatic plane to put myself on," she adds, "I'm at a complete loss for coming up with notes. Actually, I think of my pieces as little personalities. They're like my kids. After I finish a piece, it takes a while for me to forget the struggle of composing it. Then, all of a sudden, it becomes something separate from me, and the band takes control of it, and shapes and develops it, and it has its own life."

One of the new pieces I heard on Sunday was in a similar vein: "The Pretty Road," a musical reminiscence of Maria's small-town childhood in which a Coplandesque opening section gives way to an astonishing episode of Messiaen-like onomatopoeia in which she evokes the mysterious sound of bird calls on a starry Minnesota night. I can't think of another jazz composer capable of writing a piece remotely like "The Pretty Road," though I'm increasingly disinclined to use the word "jazz" to describe Maria's unabashedly polystylistic music. As I said in Time magazine a few years ago, "To call Schneider the most important woman in jazz is missing the point in two ways. She is a major composer--period."

Now I'm back home again, girding my loins for the coming week's work: I'll be writing two pieces and seeing five more shows and a classical concert between now and next Sunday night. The good news is that I'm looking forward to all these events, especially the concert, a Sunday matinee at which Richard Stoltzman and the Amelia Piano Trio will be playing Paul Moravec's Pulitzer Prize-winning Tempest Fantasy. (If you're interested, go here for more details.)

I plan to blog in between shows and deadlines--I haven't spent nearly enough time with "About Last Night" in recent weeks--so watch this space to find out how things are going.

See you tomorrow.

P.S. Even when I'm at my busiest, I try to roll over the Top Five and "Out of the Past" picks fairly frequently. You'll find some new ones in the right-hand column.

UPDATE: To read Ms. Litwit's thoughts on Company, go here.

Posted November 27, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The desk calendar was turned to a date weeks ago, evidence of her indifference. As for copybook maxims there was one printed on the calendar, 'Thursday the 12th. Darkness Comes Before Daylight.' She could not help smiling, leafing through the pad for further philosophic gems, but why smile when the Platitude was the staff of life, the solace for heartbreak, the answer to 'Why' even though the oracle spoke in the priest's own hollow voice. Underneath the woes of the world ran the firm roots of the platitudes, the calendar slogans, the song cues, a safety net to catch the heart after its vain quest for private solutions."

Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King

Posted November 27, 12:00 PM

November 24, 2006

TT: Hairdressers of the world, unite!

Enough already with the leftovers--it's time for the Friday Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I render summary judgment on two off-Broadway shows in today's paper, Paul Rudnick's Regrets Only and a revival of Suddenly Last Summer:

Paul Rudnick reminds me of Nuke LaLoosh, the rookie pitcher in "Bull Durham" who had a million-dollar arm and a five-cent head. If it's jokes you want, Mr. Rudnick's your man, and most of them are funny to boot. For a stand-up comedian, that'd be more than enough--but Mr. Rudnick is a playwright, and "Regrets Only," his latest effort, proves yet again that it takes more than punchlines to make a play....

Hank Hadley (George Grizzard), a ruggedly handsome fashion designer who just happens to be gay, is incensed when the husband (David Rasche) of his best friend (Christine Baranski) agrees to help President Bush draft a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage. Thanks to Mr. Rudnick's jokes and the precision-tooled acting of his cast, "Regrets Only" stays afloat until intermission, at which point things get really, really stupid: Hank talks all the gays in Manhattan into going on strike, meaning that Broadway shuts down and nobody can get a hairdo. Curtain? Not quite, alas, for we have to sit through a semi-serious closing scene in which Mr. Rudnick whacks us over the head with his moral, which is that Gays Are People, Too.

I wonder whether it occurred to Mr. Rudnick that the second act of "Regrets Only," in which gays are portrayed as playwrights, actors, hairdressers, caterers, florists, and travel agents, is itself a mortifyingly quaint piece of stereotyping....

Tennessee Williams is widely thought to be a great playwright--but not by me. Yes, he wrote one indisputably great play, "The Glass Menagerie," and I can also see why so many people like "A Streetcar Named Desire" so much more than I do. Most of the rest of his vast output, however, strikes me as overblown and underbelievable, with "Suddenly Last Summer" locking up the booby prize for sheer absurdity. I've no idea how Williams' reputation for seriousness survived its 1958 premiere, much less why the Roundabout Theatre Company has gone to the trouble of reviving what is surely the most unintentionally silly play ever written by a well-known author....

No free link. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today's Journal and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section. Alternatively, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you on-the-spot access to my review, plus plenty of other good stuff. (If you're already a subscriber, the review is here.)

Posted November 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Ballet? Never heard of it

In my next "Sightings" column, to be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I cast a cold eye on the desperate state of dance in America. Just a quarter-century ago, ballet and modern dance were vital, exciting, and (above all) popular. Now they're at a frighteningly low ebb. What happened--and what can be done to pump up the volume?

To find out, pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal, where you'll find my column in the "Pursuits" section.

Posted November 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"You know, the Philistines have long since discarded the rack and stake as a means of suppressing the opinions they feared: they've discovered a much more deadly weapon of destruction--the wisecrack."

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

Posted November 24, 12:00 PM

November 23, 2006

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

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

BROADWAY:
- A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
- 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)
- Jay Johnson: The Two and Only (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, 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, closes Dec. 31)

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)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
- Heartbreak House* (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Dec. 17)
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here, closes Dec. 9)

Posted November 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay 'in kind' somewhere else in life."

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, North to the Orient

Posted November 23, 12:00 PM

November 22, 2006

TT: Here I go again

I'm off to Connecticut for a four-day Thanksgiving marathon, returning to New York on Saturday afternoon to embark on a week-long playgoing marathon. It's all a bit too much, especially since I filed two Wall Street Journal columns yesterday. I wish I had the steam to post more extensively, but right now it's all I can do to pack my bag. Expect the usual theater-related postings on Thursday and Friday, but otherwise I plan to lay low until next Monday. Apologies.

In the meantime, let me leave you with some pieces worth reading:

- Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post went to Atlanta to look at the High Museum's Morris Louis retrospective and filed this first-rate report about the declining fortunes of a once-fashionable abstractionist who is now criminally underrated. I wasn't greatly impressed with the High Museum when I visited Atlanta last July, but Gopnik's piece made me want to jump on the next southbound plane.

- Speaking of museums, Eric Gibson of The Wall Street Journal has written a tough and trenchant column on the latest round of deaccessioning. Here's the nut:

Just last week the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., announced that it was selling more than 200 objects from its collection to raise $15 million for the purchase of modern and contemporary art. "Deaccessioning," as the practice is known, used to be the tool of last resort for acquiring new art. But lately it's become the tool of first resort, with museums strip-mining their collections just to build a war chest....

What's so disturbing about collection rentals and sales is that they violate the reason that museums are treated differently from businesses. Because of their transcendent importance, museum objects occupy a position outside the pressures of the marketplace. Yet more and more museums are treating these objects as financial assets that they can tap at any time.

What he said.

- Out of the Mouths of Babes Dept.: Joan Didion, who has written a stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking that will open on Broadway later this season, recently talked to an interviewer about the difference between screenwriting and playwriting:

Once in a while there were things in screenwriting that taught me things for fiction. But there's nothing in screenwriting that teaches you anything for the theater. I'm not sure I've ever fully appreciated before how different a form theater is....Something I've always known and said and thought about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.

What she said.

That'll have to hold you for now--I need to go to bed immediately. See you around.

P.S. Check out the new Top Fives.

P.P.S. Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted November 22, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose."

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

Posted November 22, 12:00 PM

November 21, 2006

TT: Almanac

"We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us."

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

Posted November 21, 12:00 PM

November 20, 2006

TT: Out of the way

I paid a visit last Thursday to a Frank Lloyd Wright house located in the suburbs of St. Louis. Known to specialists as the Kraus House, this two-bedroom, 1,900-square-foot home, completed in 1956, was painstakingly restored and opened to the public a couple of years ago. Most of Wright's best-known houses are based on square or rectangular grids, but this one is an exception, a sly, witty study in triangles and parallelograms that fit together in unexpected, sometimes startling ways. It's one of the few surviving Wright houses that contains all of the furnishings and fabrics that were custom-designed by the architect for the original owner. Of the smaller Wright houses I've visited, including the two I stayed in last year, it's the one I like best--so far.

From St. Louis I drove south to Smalltown, U.S.A., where I spent a long weekend hanging out with my family. The Web has become so graphics-intensive that it's now difficult to view most newspaper sites and art-related blogs and newspaper sites without a high-speed connection, so instead of treading water in the frenzied present, I've been lazing around in the fondly remembered past. Among other things, my mother dug up a receipt for the Wurlitzer spinet piano that my father bought for me in 1970, the instrument on which I learned to play. Back then it cost $679.50, the equivalent of $3,423.26 in 2005 dollars. I'm glad I didn't know then how much they paid for it, but my mother assures me that they got their money's worth, and all things considered, I'm inclined to agree.

It's quiet in Smalltown, so much so that half-audible, half-remembered sounds are constantly catching my ear:

- The hollow, rattly clunk of the back door of my mother's house. (Nobody ever comes in through the front door.)

- The rumble of the furnace fan each time it starts up.

- The faint ticking and buzzing of the electric clock in my bedroom.

- The lonely, distant wail of the freight-train whistle that blows at bedtime.

One alien sound that I brought along with me is the ghostly whistle emitted by the modem of my iBook as it "shakes hands" with the dialup line via which I log onto the Web. "Are you playing music back there?" my mother asked when she heard it yesterday morning.

The only work of art I've consumed since arriving in Smalltown (not counting my brother's home-smoked pork loin) is Lonesome Dove, the four-part 1989 TV movie based on Larry McMurtry's Western novel. An expansive, elegiac tribute to the hard men of the American frontier, it's every bit as good as I'd heard, and Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones are, if anything, better still. I've also been rereading Dawn Powell's The Locusts Have No King and drafting a column for Saturday's Wall Street Journal. Otherwise, I've been taking it fairly easy, and plan to keep on doing so after I return to New York on Monday evening. It's Thanksgiving week, and even a drama critic deserves some time off.

Starting on Saturday, I'll be spending the next nine days seeing High Fidelity, David Hare's The Vertical Hour, Tom Stoppard's Voyage, the New York premiere of David Mamet's adaptation of The Voysey Inheritance, revivals of Company, Two Trains Running, and Jean Anouilh's adaptation of Antigone, and performances by the Amelia Piano Trio and the Maria Schneider Orchestra. Gulp!

Details to come, but first I have to drive back to St. Louis and catch a plane to New York. Don't expect to hear from me again until Wednesday. In the meantime, go buy a turkey.

P.S. This is where I took my family to eat on Sunday. It was fabulous.

Posted November 20, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"We had now arrived at the museum and our attention was directed to the pictures. Once more I was impressed by Elliott's knowledge and taste. He shepherded me around the rooms as though I were a group of tourists, and no professor of art could have discoursed more instructively than he did. Making up my mind to come again by myself when I could wander at will and have a good time, I submitted; after a while he looked at his watch.

"'Let us go,' he said. 'I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists. We will finish another day.'

"I thanked him warmly when we separated. I went my way perhaps a wiser but certainly a peevish man."

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

Posted November 20, 12:00 PM

TT: From the sublime...

I walked through Chicago's Midway Airport last Thursday to the sounds of the King Cole Trio's 1944 recording of Cole Porter's What Is This Thing Called Love? It's a masterpiece, one of the most perfect jazz piano recordings ever made, and hearing it in an airport instead of Muzak was a little miracle of serendipity.

Now I'm back in Midway Airport, en route from St. Louis to New York. The airport management put up Christmas decorations over the weekend, and they're playing Kenny G's recording of "The First Noel."

Sigh.

Posted November 20, 2:40 AM

November 17, 2006

TT: A spoonful of vinegar

Time once again for the Friday Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. It's another three-play week, and for the first time in a month, all three shows, Mary Poppins, the revival of Les Misérables, and The Little Dog Laughed, are on Broadway:

Let's cut to the chase: The special effects in "Mary Poppins," Broadway's new Disney musical, are wondrous to behold. Not only does P.L. Travers' practically perfect nanny bring down the house by flying all the way from the stage to the balcony, umbrella clasped firmly in hand, but Bert, her jolly sidekick, strolls up one side of the proscenium arch and down the other, pausing at the top to do a feet-in-air tap dance. As for Mary's bottomless carpetbag, from which she extracts, among many other improbable things, a full-length coat rack, all I can say is pretty much what the four- and seven-year-olds sitting next to me said: "Ooh! Aah!" I only wish I'd felt that way about the rest of the show. It's spectacular, and not even slightly boring, but anyone familiar with Walt Disney's 1964 film version of "Mary Poppins" is likely to come away asking what happened to the charm....

What struck me most forcibly about "Les Miz" is that its appeal is essentially operatic. Not only does it contain no spoken dialogue--every word is sung--but Messrs. Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, the authors, have crammed it full of surefire devices shamelessly pilfered from 19th-century opera. High notes, rousing choruses, a coincidence-crowded Victor Hugo plot, even a drinking song: All are present in profusion. The only thing missing is music. In its place, Mr. Schönberg force-feeds us three hours' worth of chattery non-melodies that sound as if they'd been written by a woodpecker on a xylophone....

A friend of mine who saw a preview of Douglas Carter Beane's "The Little Dog Laughed," which has moved to Broadway after a sold-out 10-week Off-Broadway run, described it as "a gay sitcom." Yes and no. The plot, in which a deeply closeted movie star (Tom Everett Scott) gets caught in bed with a hustler (Johnny Galecki) by his brassy agent (Julie White), is more like bad Kaufman and Hart with full frontal nudity. On the other hand, one aspect of "The Little Dog Laughed" reminded me of "Sex and the City," which is that Mr. Beane's women talk like campy gay men....

No free link. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today's Journal and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section. Better yet, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instantaneous access to my review, plus loads of other interesting stuff. (If you're already a subscriber, the review is here.)

Posted November 17, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration."

Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit

Posted November 17, 12:00 PM

November 16, 2006

TT: Back to the airport

By the time most of you read these words, I'll be in the general vicinity of Smalltown, U.S.A. I'm paying a long-overdue visit to my family, stopping off in St. Louis to visit yet another Frank Lloyd Wright house. I'll be returning to New York on Monday. Tomorrow's theater-related postings will appear on schedule, but I might take Monday off--there's no telling. In any case, there'll always be something for you to read at "About Last Night."

Later.

Posted November 16, 12:00 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

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

BROADWAY:
- A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
- 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)
- Heartbreak House* (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Dec. 17)
- Jay Johnson: The Two and Only (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, 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, closes Dec. 31)

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)
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here, closes Dec. 9)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

Posted November 16, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it."

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

Posted November 16, 12:00 PM

November 15, 2006

TT: Kid stuff

Ms. Kate's Book Blog has made up a meme and tagged the world. I'm game:

1. How old were you when you learned to read and who taught you? I taught myself to read at the age of three. Somewhere in the family archives is a snapshot taken by my father that shows me lying on my stomach in the living room of the first house I can remember, reading the Daily Smalltown Standard.

2. Did you own any books as a child? If so, what's the first one that you remember owning? If not, do you recall any of the first titles that you borrowed from the library? I "owned" dozens of books, some of them confiscated from my parents' shelves and others bought with my allowance. A few can still be found on the shelves of my old bedroom, including a complete set of Reader's Digest Best Loved Books for Young Readers, a long-forgotten series of volumes to which my parents wisely subscribed on my behalf. It was the Best Loved Books series that introduced me to Beat to Quarters, Call of the Wild, Jane Eyre, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the Sherlock Holmes stories, among many other good things. They were, to be sure, abridged versions, but what did I know? In addition, I went through a brief but intense period of youthful interest in comic books. My favorites were Batman, The Flash, and The Green Lantern. (I didn't discover Spider-Man until much later.) I also owned several Peanuts paperbacks.

3. What's the first book that you bought with your own money? Alas, I can't remember--I was buying books from early childhood onward, and they piled up fast. The first book I clearly remember owning, though, was The Complete Sherlock Holmes, which my Uncle Jim gave to me as a Christmas present forty years ago. It traveled with me all the way from Smalltown to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where it disintegrated at long last, having given me half a lifetime (I hope!) of loyal service.

4. Were you a re-reader as a child? If so, which book did you re-read most often? I re-read all my favorite books regularly, but I especially liked Little Men, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and The Scarlet Pimpernel. I saw the 1935 film version of The Scarlet Pimpernel for the first time in January, and found it satisfyingly faithful to my fond memories of the Baroness Orczy's book.

5. What's the first adult book that captured your interest and how old were you when you read it? I started dipping into my parents' Reader's Digest condensed books at an inappropriately early age--I can't have been more than ten. Again, I read so many of them that I don't recall which came first, but the one I remember most vividly is Advise and Consent, Allen Drury's 1959 Washington novel, which I still revisit from time to time, always with pleasure. I was also hugely impressed by Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, and so it tickled me no end to be able to review the Broadway revival of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial a few months ago, even though the production wasn't any good.

6. Are there children's books that you passed by as a child that you have learned to love as an adult? Which ones? Except for the Dr. Seuss books, I didn't read any of the well-known modern children's books as a boy. Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, and several of the Little House books were read out loud to me in elementary school, though, and I loved them all. I read them for myself a few years ago and enjoyed them even more. I read and liked the first three or four Harry Potter books not long after they came out, but lost interest after the first Harry Potter film was released. Snobbery, I guess.

Posted November 15, 12:48 PM

TT: Almanac

"In a way he was the most abstract person I've ever met. That sounds wrong, it sounds as if I meant he was a philosopher or absent-minded. 'Plastically sensual,' which sounds like God knows what, would be closer. What I mean is, when he went to see a film he was so busy looking at the chiaroscuro he never saw the actors, and when he went to my theatre, he came out talking about my elbows."

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

Posted November 15, 12:00 PM

TT: The old-fashioned way

The media, not surprisingly, took comparatively little note of the recent death of Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, who was 98. (The New York Times eked out a nice obit last Monday, but it's now safely ensconced behind the paper's pay-to-play firewall.) For those who don't recognize her name, she was the co-author of Cheaper by the Dozen, the perennially popular memoir of life with Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the once-celebrated efficiency experts of the Twenties whose work is now mostly remembered by specialists. It was turned into a charming film in 1950, then "remade" to appalling effect a couple of years ago (nothing survived but the title).

Has the story of the Gilbreth family lost its charm for latter-day youngsters? I wonder. I read Cheaper by the Dozen repeatedly as a boy, marveling each time at the utterly mysterious and romantic prospect of living in a giant-sized family (I have just one brother). Somehow I doubt it seems as romantic to today's children as it did back in the Sixties. I looked up Cheaper by the Dozen on amazon.com the other day and found, among other things, this "kid's review" of the book:

I did not like Cheaper by the Dozen because it did not grab my attention at all. I do not like reading about the life of a large family where the father ties to teach the kids everything, or showing off in front of a bunch of people. I also do not believe anything of this story is realistic. Do you think someone now of days can handle 12 kids? I do not think so. Now of days things are more expensive, so think how wealthy someone has to be to maintain a house, work, and still have time to spend with each child and buy things you need in the household. And do you think the dad has time, with work to teach each child all the different things. I think you would like this book if you are interested in stories about everyday life with a big family and the parents tutoring 12 kids and go on vacations. Or if you want to know what life was like back then and have 12 kids. Still how can they fit 14 people in a car, 9 kids in the back, 1 in the front, the mother in the passenger side with 2 babies in her lap, and the father driving the car? I was thinking how 2 adults keep 12 screaming kids under control. If you like the movie Cheaper by the Dozen with Steve Martin you might like this book even though they are really different, even the last names are different. I really did not like this book but if you want to read it go right a head.

That made me smile, though it also made me sad. Above all, though, it made me want to reread both Cheaper by the Dozen and its equally touching sequel, Belles on Their Toes. Perhaps I'll poke my nose into them again once I get my upcoming spasm of Thanksgiving-related travel (about which more later) out of the way.

P.S. You can view several of the actual Gilbreth motion-study films whose making is described in Cheaper by the Dozen by going here.

Posted November 15, 11:11 AM

November 14, 2006

TT: Enough already

I did so much on my week off that now I need a day off!

See you tomorrow.

Posted November 14, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"It's difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really have lived; that I never really will live--exist or whatever--in the sense that other people do. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else's life surrounded by plate-glass. I mean I'd like to break through it just once and actually touch one."

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

Posted November 14, 12:00 PM

November 13, 2006

TT: Still alive and well

Here's what I saw, heard, read, and did during my week off from "About Last Night":

- I saw four shows: Mary Poppins, The Little Dog Laughed, and the revivals of Les Miz and Suddenly Last Summer.

- I added a new piece to the Teachout Museum, a 1936 print by Louis Lozowick, a precisionist who specialized in lithography. A sharp-eyed art collector who shares my passion for prewar American modernism had suggested that I look into Lozowick, and I liked his style so much that I decided to bid on a copy of Storm Over Manhattan when it came up for auction last week. Now it hangs in my living room, directly beneath Alex Katz's Late July II. They look beautiful together.

- I decided to check out the ambient music of Aphex Twin, about which I've been hearing interesting things. Two of the cuts I downloaded from iTunes, "Alberto Balsalm" and "Windowlicker," are now in heavy rotation on my iPod. (When I told my trainer that I was listening to Aphex Twin, he looked at me as if I'd suddenly grown a horn and said, "You're listening to techno?")

- I read Gordon Forbes' Goodbye to Some, a World War II novel suggested to me by a reader, and the galleys of Howard Pollack's nine-hundred-page George Gershwin biography, which comes out next month. I also reread Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, one of Our Girl's favorite novels.

- I knocked off two Wall Street Journal columns, revised the first five chapters of Hotter than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong, and wrote the outline of an opera libretto. (Yes, that's a teaser--I'll tell you more later if it pans out.)

- On Tuesday I took the train to Washington, D.C., where I spent three days in conference with the National Council on the Arts.

- The NCA plays a part in the selection process for National Medal of Arts nominees, so on Wednesday I dined with this year's medalists, among them William Bolcom, Cyd Charisse, the members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and Ralph Stanley. In addition, I met Mrs. William Bolcom, better known as Joan Morris, whose singing of American popular songs I've admired extravagantly for at least a quarter-century. Most of the two dozen albums she's recorded with her husband at the piano are now out of print, but you can still get this one without difficulty.

I sat next to Cyd Charisse at dinner. She was wearing pants, so I can't say whether her legs are as perfect now as they were a half-century ago, but I can assure you that she's as nice as can be and that she remembers Fred Astaire with great fondness. She wanted to know if I'd seen any good musicals lately, so I told her about the Broadway revival of A Chorus Line, and had the pleasure of reminding her that one of the characters in the show mentions her by name:

From seeing all those movie musicals, I used to dance around on the street, and I'd get caught all the time. God, it was embarrassing. I was always being Cyd Charisse. Always.

- On Thursday I had breakfast with a friend about whose wedding I blogged two years ago, then went to the White House to attend a reception for the recipients of the 2006 National Medals of Arts and Humanities, who met with President Bush in the Oval Office. The rest of us made do with the First Lady, who looked cool and composed in a simple greenish-beige suit. A sextet of military musicians played Debussy and Mozart (very prettily, too) as the crowd of gogglers jostled for position.

The whole first floor of the White House was open, so I skipped the buffet and gave myself a fat-free art tour instead. The reception rooms are elegant, serene, and immaculately kept, and the windows are so thick that you can't hear any sounds from outside. The walls are covered with paintings, most of them presidential portraits of widely varying distinction. Two are first-class, Rembrandt Peale's Thomas Jefferson and a museum-quality 1903 portrait of Theodore Roosevelt by John Singer Sargent that hangs in a corner of the East Room. Another Sargent, The Mosquito Net, is in the Green Room. (Alas, Childe Hassam's Avenue in the Rain, the best painting in the White House's permanent collection, is not hung in a public area.)

I was much taken with Aaron Shikler's glamorously introspective paintings of John and Jackie Kennedy, by far the best of the postwar portraits. The booby prize, by contrast, goes to this cartoonish study of Lyndon Johnson by Elizabeth Shoumatoff, who is best known for the fact that she was painting Franklin Roosevelt at Warm Springs one spring morning in 1945 when a cerebral hemorrhage struck him dead. Also in the room was Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, FDR's mistress. I bet the White House guards don't tell that to visitors!

A year ago I was dying. I like this better.

Posted November 13, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"It's amazing how right you can sometimes be about a person you don't know; it's only the people you do know who confuse you."

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

Posted November 13, 12:00 PM

November 10, 2006

TT: Dirty laundry

It's time for the Friday Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, which is a bit jaundiced this week. I reviewed three shows--the New York premiere of The Clean House, the Broadway transfer of Grey Gardens, and a Seattle production of Steve Martin's The Underpants--and didn't like any of 'em:

Sarah Ruhl is officially trendy. Not only did the 32-year-old playwright just win a MacArthur "genius grant," but she's making a high-profile New York debut: "The Clean House," which has been staged at the Yale Repertory Theatre and numerous other top regional houses and was a Pulitzer finalist last year, has now come to town in a glossy production starring Blair Brown and Jill Clayburgh. As if that weren't enough buzz for one human being to generate, Ms. Ruhl says she's working on a new play about the history of...the vibrator.

If I sound skeptical about Ms. Ruhl, there's a reason. It's possible to be both trendy and talented, and I suppose it might be possible to write a good play about vibrators, too. I can even think of a few genuine geniuses who've won MacArthurs. But when all these suspicious-looking items turned up on the same resume, the red light on my Faux-O-Meter started blinking, which is why I wasn't surprised when "The Clean House" failed to live up to its own hype. It's clever--too clever by at least half--but scrape away the postmodern trickery and it's nothing more than a soap opera for pseudointellectuals....

"Grey Gardens," the cultiest show of the 2005-06 season, has transferred to Broadway, and though it's been tweaked and tightened, I don't like it any better now than when it opened Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons back in March.

In case you missed it the first time around, "Grey Gardens" is a musical version of the 1975 cinéma-vérité film documentary about Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter "Little" Edie, two impoverished but spunky high-society ladies who spent their declining years holed up in a decaying Long Island summer house. The cast is exemplary, especially Christine Ebersole, and the direction of Michael Greif and Jeff Calhoun is very fine, but the show itself doesn't add up to much....

When not making movies, Steve Martin writes plays. "The Underpants," his adaptation of "Die Hose," a six-character, one-set farce written in 1911 by the German playwright Carl Sternheim, was produced Off Broadway in 2002 and has since been making the regional rounds. I caught up with "The Underpants" in Seattle, where ACT Theatre is giving it a noisy production whose hard-working actors do their best to obscure the fact that Mr. Martin is no farceur....

No free link. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today's morning's Journal and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section. Alternatively, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to the complete text of my review, plus lots of other good stuff. (If you're already a subscriber, the review is here.)

Posted November 10, 12:00 PM

TT: Settling old scores

In my next "Sightings" column, to be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I discuss Keeping Score, PBS' new Michael Tilson Thomas-San Francisco Symphony TV series about classical music. It's wonderful--but nobody is going to watch it. Why not? To find out, pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal, where you'll find my column in the "Pursuits" section.

Posted November 10, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Sometimes I think nobody ever really gets to understand anybody else. Which is a horrible thought. At least, to me it is. We're locked up inside our own bodies for life. Solitary confinement for life. We scream inside ourselves, but nobody seems to hear. We're born alone, we try to communicate with other people all our lives, and fail mostly, and then we die alone. It's crazy."

Buddy Rich (quoted in John Minahan, The Torment of Buddy Rich)

Posted November 10, 12:00 PM

November 9, 2006

OGIC: The rest of the quote, and then some

Regarding yesterday's quiz, the quote continues like this:

...Who among novelists ever more instantly recognized the absurd when she saw it in human behavior, then polished it off to more devastating effect, than this young daughter of a Hampshire rectory, who as she finished the chapters enjoyed reading them to her family, to whom she also devoted her life?

So yes, as many of you guessed (and some tracked down via Amazon's Search Inside), the subject is Jane Austen. The author was trickier, but a couple of readers knew: it's Eudora Welty, from her 1969 essay "The Radiance of Jane Austen." Most interestingly, one correspondent guessed that Welty was the subject of the passage! Showing, perhaps, that whatever we're writing about, we're also writing about ourselves.

I urge upon you the entire essay, which leads off this collection. I love Welty's canny use of Austen's biography in this passage:

Reading those chapters aloud to her own lively, vocative family, on whose shrewd intuition, practiced estimation of conduct, and seasoned judgment of character she relied almost as well as on her own, Jane Austen must have enjoyed absolute confidence in an understanding reception of her work. The novels still have a bloom of shared pleasure. And the felicity they have for us must partly lie in the confidence they take for granted between the author and her readers--at the moment, ourselves.

Just one more taste:

Think of today's fiction in the light of hers. Does some of it appear garrulous and insistent and out-of-joint, and nearly all of it slow? Does now and then a novel come along that's so long, arch, and laborious, so ponderous in literary conceits and so terrifying in symbols, that it might have been written (in his bachelor days) by Mr. Elton as a conundrum, or, in some prolonged spell of elevation, by Mr. Collins in a bid for self-advancement? Yes, but this is understandable. For many of our writers who are now as young as Jane Austen was when she wrote her novels, and as young as she still was when she died, at forty-one, ours is the century of unreason, the stamp of our behavior is violence or isolation; non-meaning is looked upon with some solemnity; and for the purpose of writing novels, most human behavior is looked at through the frame, or the knothole, of alienation. The life Jane Austen write about was indeed a different one from ours, but the difference was not as great as that between the frames through which it is viewed. Jane Austen's frame was that of belonging to her world. She could step through it, in and out of it as easily and unselfconsciously as she stepped through the doorway of the rectory and into the garden to pick strawberries. She was perfectly at home in what she knew, as well as knowledgeable of precisely where she was on earth; she even believed she knew why she was here.

The beginning of that makes me laugh: Just put the pen down, Mr. Collins, and nobody will get hurt. And makes me wonder just who deserves the Mr. Collins Award for Recent Long, Arch, and Laborious Fiction. The rest is a nice refinement of the notion that the past is a foreign country, with the point about different frames driven straight home by the paragraph's last line--an understatement in good aim, one might call it.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in about the quiz! The stream of mail really enlivened my workaday day.

Posted November 09, 12:25 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

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

BROADWAY:
- A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
- 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)
- Heartbreak House (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Dec. 17)
- Jay Johnson: The Two and Only (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, 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, closes Dec. 31)

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)
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here, closes Dec. 9)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

Posted November 09, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison

Posted November 09, 12:00 PM

November 8, 2006

TT: Almanac

"There was something dangerous and remorseless in her optimism."

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

Posted November 08, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Rivette everywhere

This week the Museum of the Moving Image in New York begins a Jacques Rivette retrospective. The bloggers at The House Next Door have been doing a fantastic job over the last week or so of prefacing the series with a cascade of links to stories, interviews, and critical considerations of the French director, whose 1974 movie Céline and Julie Go Boating--very loosely based on two Henry James novellas--is one of my personal landmark films and simply a joy to watch (Céline and Julie will be shown at MOMI this Saturday at 6:00 and Sunday at 4:30).

Another devotee of this film is David Thomson, who, in the New Biographical Dictionary of Film, declares:

It is a generous reconciliation with literature through fiction, and whereas Kane was the first picture to suggest that the world of the imagination was as powerful as reality, Céline and Julie is the first film in which everything is invented.

Today Keith Uhlich at The House Next Door links to a newer piece of writing by Thomson on Rivette, an essay that appeared in the Guardian last April. This is a glorious little piece of work; in it Thomson hits on a handful of really vivid and lucid ways of identifying what's distinctive about Rivette's filmmaking and its relation to film's affiliated art forms, especially literature. This piece should hold up to a reading by anyone interested in film or literature, whether they've seen a frame of Rivette's stuff or not. Try it:

It is just that Rivette thinks the cinema runs the risk of turning vulgar and foolish if it starts to stress the visual over everything else. The visual is a given; it is the norm; it is the world, or its engine--and Rivette, without reservation, loves that world even when it frightens him. I doubt he has ever composed a shot without seeking both grace and an austere absence of all those signs that say: "Here is grace." Just look at Céline and Julie Go Boating, which, apart from anything else, is one of the most inspiring films about the way Paris looks in the summer, and about the illusion that we can catch its fragrance. (You can find the same compositional severity, the fierce effort to restrain beauty, in Bresson and Buñuel.)

So it is not that you can put your eyes away with Rivette. But you may need to rediscover them if they have become habituated to shock cuts, fancy camera angles and special effects. What is special for Rivette is cinematography, so revolutionary that it needs no editorialising.

The next key to his world is the passion for characters and stories, and the concomitant belief that once you start filming anyone then, gradually, storyline and character will seep up, like moisture in the ground. We cannot look at a shot of a person without asking: "Who is that?" We cannot take in a following shot--of a sea-shire, say--without assuming, "Ah, that person is at the sea, or going there? Or what?" We allow for mystery, but we cannot do without meaning. Above all, the characters will become actors, and they and their stories, as they build, become increasingly tests on our belief.

Rivette estimates that story is like weather. It is always there, but we don't always notice it: thus a dull day may turn sinister late in the afternoon, and the girl you met in the park may seem to be less a chance acquaintance than a figure in a story that now contains you.

This captures beautifully how the narrative style feels in Céline and Julie: the film is rife with moments that feel like possible stories in the making, but that suspend you in uncertainty for a time--a waiting period that proves not only surprisingly tolerable but positively engaging and productive. In the last half of the movie, this suspense finally has an enormous payoff in the form of a gripping story (straight out of James), which the movie lets you really savor by replaying it again and again, revealing more pieces in each iteration.

But even beyond these local observations about Rivette and movies, I think, Thomson gets at something more basic here about our appetite for stories, so insatiable it approaches a will to find them and draw them out--"like moisture in the ground," indeed. The essay ends:

So there we are--what are Rivette's films about? Women, the light, place, and the way a story begins to slink from a woman's feet across the space and through the light--just like one of the cats Rivette is always ready to show us, watching the story as if it were a mouse. He has remained loyal to a belief not much in fashion now--that the movies are the natural extension of theatre, literature and the study of story. The human condition, he has no doubt, is that of audiences always surprised when they have to become actors.

Posted November 08, 6:08 AM

OGIC: Pop goes the quiz

Little lit quiz to ponder over your coffee this morning. Whose work is the subject of the following quotation?

Each novel is a formidable engine of strategy. It is made to be--a marvel of designing and workmanship, capable of spontaneous motion at the lightest touch and of travel at delicately controlled but rapid speed toward its precise destination. It could kill us all, had s/he wished it to; it fires at us, all along the way, using understatements in good aim. Let us be thankful it is trained not on our hearts but on our illusions and our vanities.

For bonus points and to really knock my socks off, name the critic too. Now, as far as I can tell this quiz is not self-checking via Google. But there may be tricks of the trade I'm not taking into account. If you want me to check your work, drop a line to ogic@artsjournal.com, or just sit tight and I'll post the answers on Thursday.

The blogging forecast predicts continued fluff and diversions through the end of the week. It's just that kind of week around here.

Posted November 08, 1:32 AM

November 7, 2006

TT: Almanac

"It has always been hard for me to think of extraordinarily handsome people ever being very intimate with one another."

Gordon Forbes, Goodbye to Some

Posted November 07, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"I have come to the resolution never to write for the sake of writing, or making a poem, but from running over with any little knowledge and experience which many years of reflection may perhaps give me--otherwise I will be dumb. What Imagination I have I shall enjoy, and greatly, for I have experienced the satisfaction of having great conceptions without the toil of sonnetteering. I will not spoil my love of gloom by writing an ode to darkness; and with respect to my livelihood I will not write for it, for I will not mix with that most vulgar of all crowds the literary. Such things I ratify by looking upon myself, and trying myself at lifting mental weights, as it were. I am three and twenty with little knowledge and middling intellect. It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages, but that is nothing."

John Keats, letter to B.R. Haydon, March 8, 1819

Posted November 07, 3:41 AM

November 6, 2006

TT: Almanac

"In a rain forest in Borneo the realities are so different. The popular cause is simply life and the reigning prejudice is death. Words are dust and without them we shall probably all find out what kind of men we are."

Gordon Forbes, Goodbye to Some

Posted November 06, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Monday update

So the Rachel Ries show Friday night was a lot of fun, though far shorter than I would have liked. There were highlights: despite forgetting to bring along her banjo, Ries soldiered on and performed on guitar one of my favorite of her songs, a simple but brilliant little song-poem about falling in love with a place. That place would be Valentine, NE, which sits on the Nebraska map like a trap--like an engraved invitation for someone to write a bad earnest or bad ironic song about it. Thank goodness, then, that in this case a greatly gifted songwriter took the bait. To wit:

Valentine, NE

Hey I found my home last night
On my way through Valentine.
Nebraska said, hey how you been,
Cause you've been gone for so long.
Hey how you been my sweet valentine?

Well, I've been in the concrete palace
Singing for rocks and dimes.
Wondering just how long I'd last
Living in the city on fire.
Hey how you been my sweet Valentine?

There's a man down Chicago way
Thinking I'll be home by suppertime.
But he's no prairie, ain't got no sky.
So goodbye my old valentine.

Hey I found my home last night
On my way through Valentine.
Nebraska said, hey how you been,
you've been gone for so long.
Hey how you been my sweet Valentine?

I love that the personification of the place in the first verse ("Nebraska said, hey how you been") is mirrored in the third verse by the (unflattering) comparison of a person to a place. I love that she leaves this metaphor deliberately rough, likening apples to oranges without apology. And the understated way she juxtaposes valentine with Valentine in trading the man for the place.

But this song is better heard than read. You can listen to some of it at Amazon.

Posted November 06, 2:42 AM

November 3, 2006

TT: Time out

I'm burned out--too much travel, too much writing, too many shows. On Tuesday I leave for Washington, D.C., to spend three days in conference with the other members of the National Council on the Arts, and once I get back I'll be seeing four plays in a row.

All this suggests that it's time for a break from blogging. I'll post the daily almanac entry, Thursday's theater guide, and Friday's Wall Street Journal drama column and "Sightings" teasers, but otherwise I'm taking next week off. Our Girl will post if she feels like it. If not, not.

Later.

Posted November 03, 12:00 PM

TT: How wonderful a sound can be

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column, I report on two of the shows I saw last weekend in Portland and Seattle, Portland Center Stage's West Side Story and Intiman Theatre's Native Son:

Even for a solidly established regional company like Portland Center Stage, "West Side Story" is a stretch, and I expected to see an ambitious but not wholly successful production about which I'd have felt honor-bound to write a tactful, encouraging review. Well, guess what? This "West Side Story" needs no apologies of any kind. Among other things, it's the best-sung revival of a musical that I've ever seen, whether on or off Broadway.

Strong words, I know, but all the leads have splendid voices and compelling personalities, especially Carey Brown, who sings well enough to remind me of Kristin Chenoweth....

Intiman Theatre has done itself proud with "Native Son," Kent Gash's new dramatic adaptation of Richard Wright's still-shocking 1940 novel about a young black man from Chicago who lays belated claim to his ravaged manhood through the act of murder. Few great novels have been put on stage without losing their souls along the way, but Mr. Gash, who doubles as director of this production, has wisely stuck close to Wright's original text, cunningly shaping it into a Brecht-like chronicle play whose occasional moments of narrative stiffness do nothing to diminish its slashing intensity....

No free link. To read the whole thing, go out and buy a copy of today's morning's Journal, then turn to the "Weekend Journal" section. Better yet, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you on-the-spot access to the complete text of my review, plus a plethora of other good pieces. (If you're already a subscriber, the review is here.)

Posted November 03, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Flies, bees and buttterflies flew in through the open window. The flies and bees settled on some spilled sugar. A butterfly hovered over a slice of bread. It didn't eat, but seemed to savor the odor. To Herman these were not parasites to be driven away; he saw in each of these creatures the manifestations of the eternal will to live, experience, comprehend. As the fly's antennae stretched out toward the food, it rubbed its hind legs together. The wings of the butterfly reminded Herman of a prayer shawl. The bee hummed and buzzed and flew out again. A small ant crawled about. It had survived the cold night and was creeping across the table--but where to? It paused at a crumb, then continued on, zigzagging back and forth. It had separated itself from the anthill and now had to make out on its own."

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies, a Love Story

Posted November 03, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Ask a smart question...

Matt Zoller Seitz asks, "When did you first realize that movies were directed?" and describes his own enlightenment while seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark here. A great question and a fascinating answer.

Posted November 03, 11:08 AM

November 2, 2006

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal or on "About Last Night" when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

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

BROADWAY:
- A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
- 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)
- Heartbreak House* (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, extended through Dec. 17)
- Jay Johnson: The Two and Only (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, 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, closes Dec. 31)

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)
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here, closes Dec. 9)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

Posted November 02, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Political thinking has become so distorted and corrupted during this long, long half century that one has to begin by tearing it out, roots and all, from one's soil to prepare the ground for a healthy and humane politics that fosters the virtu of the free citizen."

Aleksander Wat, My Century (trans. Richard Lourie)

Posted November 02, 12:00 PM

November 1, 2006

TT: Almanac

"Many of our intellectual civilization's problems, our intellectual problems, arise because people do not read aloud. An enormous percentage of literature would simply vanish if the authors had to read their works aloud, only aloud. They would be ashamed; the falsehood would be obvious. When people read only with their eyes, all the falsehood can enter imperceptibly even the most critical eye. The mouth is for speaking the truth or lies, whereas the eyes are really esthetic. The eyes see whether something is beautiful or ugly, useful or useless."

Aleksander Wat, My Century (trans. Richard Lourie)

Posted November 01, 12:00 PM

TT: Pit stop

(1) I updated the Top Five and "Teachout in Commentary" modules in between deadlines today. Check out the right-hand column and you'll find lots of interesting new stuff.

(2) I agree with everything Our Girl says immediately below about Rachel Ries. She is the real deal.

Now, back to work!

Posted November 01, 3:44 AM

OGIC: Close quarters

The other day Peter Suderman wrote here about the rare thrill of seeing pop music giant Beck perform in a tiny DC club.

For those of you outside the music nerd sphere, it's the musical the equivalent of going to a local sports bar and watching a game with President Bush. It's like having Conan O'Brian do a show from your living room. It's like meeting up with Quentin Tarantino to watch Death Wish on a 27" TV.

And it's exactly how live rock music should be seen.

For all the trippy, awesome excess of stadium and large venue rock shows, I've never been all that impressed with them. You drop a wad of cash to listen to overprocessed, might-as-well-be-CD music while standing a quarter-mile away in a crowd of zillions. Live music isn't just about hanging out and hearing music-you can do that at a bar with a DJ any night of the week. It's about getting a sense of the musician, about being close to them, watching how they interact with both the crowd and with their music.

Having been in active avoidance of stadium shows since college, I couldn't agree more. And it just so happens that I recently had an experience along the lines of Peter's that I've been meaning to write about it; his post is the perfect occasion to finally do so.

If you've been paying attention to our Top Five in the right-hand column of this page, you may remember my recent blurb on the album of a Chicago singer-songwriter, Rachel Ries. My friend David and I happened upon Ries last year when she opened for Erin McKeown at Schuba's. Knowing nothing about Ries at the time, and running low batting averages when it came to unknown opening acts, we prudently approached her set with low expectations. The fact that she came out hoarse and apologetic--she was getting over a cold--didn't do very much to heighten them. But the moment she started singing, we were both taken.

There's a rawly emotional, yearning quality to Ries's voice that made her slight hoarseness on this occasion a plus, adding another dimension of vulnerability. The stripping away of a layer of polish, somewhat like the intimacy of the setting in which Peter saw Beck, served to make us feel closer to the artist. And it lent itself particularly well to the kind of music Ries makes. When I wrote about her album "For You Only" for the Top Five, I may have come off as confused because I wanted to give short shrift to neither the emotional immediacy of her singing nor its artfulness. It's the former that's most striking and affecting, but the latter, certainly, that's responsible for these effects. The vulnerability attaches to both the songs about joy (in which sweetness and erotic charge are so enmeshed as to become practically synonymous) and the songs about pain (in which, refreshingly, the narrators are as likely to be the stories' villains as their protagonists).

This September David and I went out to Oak Park to see Ries perform as half of a two-person show held in the living room of this local music blogger and his family. It was the most intimate musical performance I'd ever attended, and especially powerful because I'd finally acquired Ries's CD only a few weeks earlier and had spent those few weeks playing it on a continual loop--washing dishes, working out, driving, getting ready for work in the morning. I'm like that with new musical crushes; I want that music burned into my brain and typically don't rest, or listen to anything else, until it's effectively recorded there. By the time of the Oak Park concert, I was still high on discovery and knew half the tracks backward and forward.

So this autumnal September evening in the suburbs was a rare delight: not only did I get to cap my three-week captivation with Ries's songs and singing by witnessing her live performance, but she was playing only a few yards away from where I sat comfortably couched, glass of wine in hand, surrounded by amiable strangers. Ries was sharing the stage with her friend and frequent collaborator Anais Mitchell, to whom this show was my happy introduction, the pair taking turns performing. Between sets I even chatted with (perhaps gushed to) Rachel, who received all my praise with exemplary grace. During the second set she even played my request, the brilliant and brutal song "Unkind," which is like a short story whittled down to its essential contours but still suggesting a world of texture and detail.

For those of you in Chicago, Rachel Ries performs this Friday night at the California Clipper--not quite someone's living room, but intimate enough to promise another memorable show. Her email announcement paints the bar as a kind of home away from home for her:

This Friday I can be found at my favoritest bar of all time, the California Clipper. As I can often & on any given night be found there, it's nearly business as usual. However, I've never played their stage so therein lies a vast difference: on Friday I'll be dressed up and singing into a mic as opposed to dressed scrappy and humming at the bar whilst losing at Scrabble.

So come out Friday night and have your socks charmed off (by songs like "You Only") and the hairs on the back of your neck stood on end (by songs like "Unkind"). I'll be the rapt one in the burnt orange velvet scarf--be sure to say hello.

Posted November 01, 1:41 AM