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May 31, 2007

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:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Frost/Nixon * (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• LoveMusik * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• 110 in the Shade (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here, extended through July 29)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:
• A Moon for the Misbegotten * (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes June 10)

Posted May 31, 12:00 AM

TT: New leaves

Yesterday's new piece of music was Elliott Carter's Second String Quartet, composed in 1959 and recorded for RCA by the Juilliard String Quartet in 1960.

Posted May 31, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him."

H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

Posted May 31, 12:00 AM

CD

Posted May 31, 12:00 AM

May 30, 2007

DANCE

Posted May 30, 1:19 PM

BOOK

Posted May 30, 1:18 PM

PLAY

Posted May 30, 12:13 PM

CONCERT

Posted May 30, 12:13 PM

TT: You have to be there

Back when I was in college, I went out a couple of times with a Seventh Day Adventist who took me one Sunday to a church supper. As we strolled into the meeting hall, she whispered nervously, "Some of us are vegetarians, and you're going to see some strange stuff here." Most of the food I saw on the long trestle table turned out to be no stranger than the covered dishes you'd run across at any other small-town potluck dinner, though I boggled at the meat substitutes. Some were as innocuous as soya-link sausage, but others were homemade all-vegetable preparations cunningly crafted to make you think you were eating something tasty and sinful, when in fact it was neither.

Hollywood movies are like that. As far back as 1974, the famously dyspeptic John Simon, who revels in cursing the darkness, was pointing out that American films "do not (cannot? dare not?) cope with serious, contemporary, middle-class, adult problems....What is virtually nonexistent is serious filmmaking about the urban bourgeoisie and its ordinary problems of existence and co-existence--not something about beautiful young women dying of mysterious diseases, to say nothing of demonically possessed teenagers."

Simon got it on the nose: in Hollywood, ordinary middle-class life is a state to be escaped, not examined. The only thing missing from his pithy indictment was the reason why. Today, the answer is plain to see: even more so than in 1974, American movies, like Trix, are for kids. The business of Hollywood is business, and since teenagers go to the movies far more often than their parents, they are the audience for whom those movies are made. Grownups stay home and watch workplace sitcoms; teenagers go to the mall and watch films in which none of the characters is married or has a real job. That is the world they know, and they expect to see it on the screen.

One thing that most teenagers neither know nor expect to see in movies is death, the ultimate reality of life. I'm not talking about the ersatz mass murders that are the subject matter of your average Hollywood shoot-'em-up, but the real wrong thing itself, the knowledge of which is not normally accessible to young people, least of all by going to the local multiplex. Truth sometimes finds its way into the movies--accidents happen--but when it comes to death, Hollywood is incapable of honesty, and the bigger the budget, the balder the lies. Movie stars live forever or die nobly, uttering memorable last words and expiring with a smile; you never see the catheter, or smell the pus. Even the appalling simplicity of violent death is beyond the imaginative grasp of most directors. It always seemed to me perfectly appropriate that when Janet Leigh took her last shower in Psycho, the blood running down the drain was really chocolate syrup.

I used to think that filmmakers lied about death in order to avoid upsetting the public, but now I think they're more afraid of upsetting themselves. Wrinkled faces can be lifted, troublesome mistresses traded in for newer models, but there is no arguing with the inescapable reality of one's own demise. Better, then, simply to ignore it--except that the baby boomers who run Hollywood can no longer pretend that old age is for other people. Most of them, like me, are old enough to have buried a parent or a friend, and after such knowledge there can be no forgetting.

It happens that I've never seen anyone die. I came late to my father's deathbed, and one of my best friends died shortly after I left her bedside for the last time, but that's as close as I've come, not counting pets. It wouldn't be exactly right to say that I'm curious to know what I've missed, but my guess is that most of us who have yet to enter death's terrible presence wonder what it's like to look upon a fellow human being as his life draws to a close. This, I suspect, is the reason why so many people take a morbid interest in last words and suicide notes, and why Hollywood has put so many spectacularly euphemistic death scenes on film.

Except for postmodern war movies, the only commercial films I know that seek to show death in all its hideousness are the ones that contain execution scenes. In both cases the motive for honesty is ideological: it's taken for granted in Hollywood that war and capital punishment are bad for children and other living things. No doubt some part of the reason why the cellphone video of the real-life execution of Saddam Hussein was so widely viewed was the fact that it was real, though I wonder how real it seemed to those of its viewers who were more accustomed to the surreality of imitation death.

I watched the Hussein video, but it didn't tell me what I wanted to know, and a recent viewing of The Bridge, the 2006 documentary that shows two dozen people jumping to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge, brought me no closer to the heart of the mystery. In the case of The Bridge, the distance was both literally and figuratively physical, for the jumpers were photographed from a great distance through telephoto lenses, and their plunges are commingled with prettified film-school footage of the bridge and interviews with friends and relations of the desperately unhappy, mostly mad men and women who died on camera.

The only person who pulled aside the curtain was a Golden Gate jumper who beat the odds and survived, later telling his unseen interlocutor that as soon as he jumped, he knew he'd made a mistake. This statement is consistent with research indicating that more than ninety percent of people who have attempted to kill themselves by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge but were stopped by police or passers-by "are still alive or have died from natural causes."

Watching The Bridge, of course, reminds us in the most vivid way possible that there are two kinds of people who kill themselves, those who do it quickly and without fuss and those who agonize at length before plunging into the darkness, thus making them easier to stop. All of which tells us what the wise man already knows, which is that statistics are ever and always to be juggled with the utmost caution. Behind every death is a story, and in stories, as Flannery O'Connor reminds us, we find the only truths worth knowing:

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

Alas, no one can tell us the end of our own story. We must live it, and once we have done so, we can no longer pass it on to anyone else. Even art, which tells us so many valuable things, sheds no light on that climactic puzzle, though it is interesting to know that Richard Strauss remarked on his deathbed that dying was "just like I composed it in Death and Transfiguration." Maybe--but somehow I doubt it. All we can really know is what Robert Browning told us: Young, all lay in dispute;/I shall know, being old. If not sooner.

Posted May 30, 12:00 AM

TT: New leaves

Yesterday's new piece of music was Emil Waldteufel's Sur la plage, Op. 144, recorded for HMV by Constant Lambert and the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1950.

(Lambert listened to a test pressing of this recording the night before he died.)

Posted May 30, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Whether or not his newspaper and a set of senses reduced to five are the main sources of the so-called 'real life' of the so- called average man, one thing is fortunately certain: namely, that the average man himself is but a piece of fiction, a tissue of statistics."

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote

Posted May 30, 12:00 AM

May 29, 2007

TT: Out and about (3)

• I spent most of last week gadding about Connecticut and Massachusetts. On Tuesday I went to New Haven to see Long Wharf Theatre's new production of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, which I reviewed enthusiastically in last Friday's Wall Street Journal.

I also paid a visit to the Yale University Art Gallery, one of America's most celebrated teaching museums, which is housed in a 1953 building designed by Louis Kahn. It was Yale's first modern building, and I gather that the locals didn't much care for it, for the curators started tinkering with the interior almost as soon as it opened, and it was only recently that the building was renovated and restored to something closely approaching its original design. Not having seen it prior to last week, I can't say whether the renovation was an improvement, but I was definitely impressed by the restored building, which struck me as a near-ideal place in which to display and view paintings.

Unlike most college museums, the Yale Art Gallery has a permanent collection comparable in quality to the remarkable building in which it is housed. (Go here and here to see some of the highlights.) Even if you don't have any other reasons to go to New Haven, it's worth a visit all by itself.

• In a nice coincidence, a reader writes apropos of last week's posting about Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House and Frank Lloyd Wright's Muirhead Farmhouse:

Architecture is an applied art--i.e., it must actually work at the same time that it is beautiful or evokes emotions of awe or wonder or whatever. Obviously, this applies to architecture that aspires to be more than merely functional--not to a Wal-Mart, which is unconcerned with anything but function. If you eliminate attempts to be anything other than functional, it's much easier.

But isn't the Farnsworth House "easy" in a similar way, by eliminating any attempt to be functional?

Someone like Louis Kahn, who was intensely concerned with solving the problems of a site or a program, and did so with beautiful, elegant forms, seems to be much the greater architect than Mies.

A couple of days later, I heard from a second reader who came after me from a diametrically opposed direction:

You said: "The problem with the Farnsworth House--and with all minimalist architecture--is that it is cruelly unforgiving of the ordinary clutter of everyday life."

This house was built as an escape from the clutter of daily living, a place to clear the mind of the complexities and chaos of life, to focus on other aspects of existence. For me, the minimalist simplicity and serene sense of order is what makes it a successful retreat, a refreshing change. The clutter is left behind at home in the city. I think most of us do aspire to be able to escape from our own messy environment occasionally.

The second owner, Lord Peter Palumbo, filled the tiny 1,400-square-foot house with hundreds of small objects and collectibles. It still looked great, and served as his retreat from the stresses of his busy life for 30 years.

These statements appear at first glance to be incompatible--but might they both be true?

I agree wholeheartedly with my second correspondent that the Farnsworth House provides an unrivaled opportunity to escape from the hum, buzz, and clutter of everyday life. I'm not so sure, however, that Mies would have been inclined to allow for much clutter in any home he designed, be it a weekend retreat or a full-time residence. Like so many modern architects, he created buildings that impose an exterior vision of life on their owners. This, of course, is what art does--but as my first correspondent rightly points out, architecture is an applied art that exists not merely for its own sake, but for the sake of those who use it as well.

One of the things I find most interesting about Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian houses is the way in which they integrate form and function instead of allowing one to predominate over the other. Yes, they shape the lives of their occupants--everyone who has written about the experience of living in a Wright house admits as much--but as Ada Louise Huxtable pointed out in her brief life of Wright,

Wright's houses never insisted that their occupants reshape themselves to conform to an abstract architectural ideal....His houses are positively gemütlich compared with the enforced antisepsis that has reached a challenging astringency as the architectural avant-garde strives for a reductive perfection.

I think this is at once rather too hard on Mies and the least bit too easy on Wright, but it does point to an aspect of the Farnsworth House that certain of its more fervent admirers are apt to overlook. It also begs an interesting pair of questions. Are buildings meant to be lived in, or lived up to--and need these alternatives be mutually exclusive?

I'm just asking.

• Over the weekend I drove up to Boston to see two very different plays, the Huntington Theater Company's production of Noël Coward's Present Laughter and American Repertory Theatre's production of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land. I'll be reviewing both shows in Friday's Wall Street Journal.

Non-compensated endorsement: the next time you spend the night in Cambridge, I strongly suggest that you stay at the Charles Hotel and dine at Legal Sea Foods.

• Yesterday I returned to New York, where I have four pieces to write and a string of shows to see. Tonight I'm going to the Metropolitan Opera House to watch American Ballet Theatre dance Frederick Ashton's The Dream and George Balanchine's Symphonie Concertante, neither of which I've seen for a number of years. On Thursday I'm seeing a preview of Crazy Mary, A.R. Gurney's new play, and over the weekend I plan to catch three installments of Alan Ayckbourn's Intimate Exchanges. Next Monday it's Neil LaBute's In a Dark Dark House. A week from today I hit the road again, this time to spend a few days visiting my family in Smalltown, U.S.A.

More as it happens.

Posted May 29, 12:00 AM

TT: New leaves

I cheated yesterday! Instead of listening to a new piece of music, I opted for a popular piece that I haven't heard for well over a decade, Claude Debussy's G Minor String Quartet, recorded for Deutsche Grammophon by the Melos String Quartet.

Posted May 29, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space."

Philip Johnson, Writings

Posted May 29, 12:00 AM

May 28, 2007

TV

Posted May 28, 5:36 PM

TT: A day to remember (except that I didn't)

Because I work most weekends and travel so much, I often lose track of holidays, and I'd forgotten that this was Memorial Day until I returned to New York earlier today, turned on the TV, and saw that Turner Classic Movies was showing back-to-back war movies. Please forgive my unintentional silence, which I wouldn't want anyone to construe as making mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep.

If you've never worn a uniform, I suggest that you consider going to see Stephen Lang's Beyond Glory, a one-man show now in previews at the Laura Pels Theatre, the Roundabout Theatre Company's off-Broadway house. I reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal when it played at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 2005:

Adapted by Mr. Lang from the book by Larry Smith, it consists of eight first-person monologues by recipients of the Medal of Honor, given for "gallantry and intrepidity...above and beyond the call of duty." You can't get much more military than that. But Mr. Lang's one-man play is no simple-minded piece of flag-waving. It is an unsparingly direct portrait of men at war, pushed into narrow corners and faced with hard choices. It is also one of the richest, most complex pieces of acting I've seen in my theatergoing life....

For more information, go here.

Posted May 28, 5:09 PM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

• Movies look real. This is the source of their power: they seem to show us life as it is and people as they are. To be sure, a movie does not have to be real to seem real. Good genre films, for instance, take unreal situations and fill them with convincing emotional content. You probably don't know any detectives or cowboys, but you know people like Robert Mitchum and Randolph Scott, and so you accept the conventional premises of films like Out of the Past and Ride Lonesome in much the same way that you accept the self-evident absurdities of Swan Lake or Il Trovatore. But when a movie is situated in a precisely observed modern-day setting, you natually expect believable things to happen there, and when they don't, you roll your eyes and get giggly.

Though the metaphor embodied in its nickname is long dead, everyone in the world understands that a "movie" consists of "moving pictures," and it is in the nature of a picture--a photograph--that we take for granted its unfaked reality. A century ago, our great-grandparents were scared out of their wits when one of the villains in The Great Train Robbery pointed his gun at the audience and fired it. Nowadays we're more sophisticated than that, but most of us still cling to the belief that a film is in some attenuated but still meaningful sense a record of something that actually happened, if only on a soundstage.

Will our children feel this way about film? I doubt it. For one thing, most of the big-ticket movies to which they flock make use of digitally generated special effects, many of which are more or less invisible to the naked eye but a growing number of which are intended to be seen as fake. Indeed, postmodern filmmakers are more inclined to brag about their use of such effects than to cover it up. At the same time, younger photo editors at mass-circulation magazines are increasingly open to using digital technology to "enhance" still photographs, and even though old-fashioned newsmen continue to treat such manipulation as inappropriate, even unethical, I can't imagine that this informal prohibition will last much longer.

Remember the sign in T.H. White's The Once and Future King? "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Or, as one of Dostoyevsky's characters put it, "Man grows used to everything--the scoundrel!"

• Speaking of movies, a reader writes:

Is there any classic Hollywood comedy from the golden age with a great or even near-great musical score? In fact, is there any Hollywood comedy from any age with such a score? In discussing this with some of my fellow film "connoisseurs," none of us could think of one.

Neither can I. To be sure, I can think of any number of fine film comedies whose well-crafted scores contribute greatly to their total effect, but in none of them is the music truly distinguished in its own right.

I was so surprised to come up empty-handed that I decided to go at the problem from the other end by drawing up a list of my ten favorite Hollywood film scores: Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven, Leonard Bernstein's On the Waterfront, Aaron Copland's The Heiress, Hugo Friedhofer's The Best Years of Our Lives, Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo, Jerry Goldsmith's Chinatown, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Adventures of Robin Hood, Alex North's A Streetcar Named Desire, David Raksin's Laura, and Miklós Rózsa's Brute Force. Not one of these films is a comedy.

What, if anything, does this interesting fact tell us about the nature and function of dramatic music? I'm not sure. No doubt it's relevant that most great operas are tragedies--but it's also true that the two greatest operas ever written, The Marriage of Figaro and Falstaff, are both comedies.

I wish I could shed light on this apparent paradox, but for the moment I'm clueless.

UPDATE: Alex Ross speculates on the aforementioned conundrum, and offers a list of his own film-score favorites.

Meanwhle, Lisa Hirsch points out a composer I should definitely have mentioned. I'll see you and raise you one, Lisa: how about Scott Bradley?

Mr. My Stupid Dog has some additional relevant thoughts.

From Chicago, Mr. Deceptively Simple chimes in.

Once more with feeling: Mr. Soho the Dog. (I seem to have started a meme!)

Posted May 28, 12:00 AM

TT: New leaves

Last Friday's new piece of music was Constant Lambert's Piano Sonata, completed in 1929 and recorded for Continuum by John McCabe in 1991.

Posted May 28, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish."

Federico García Lorca, Poet in New York

Posted May 28, 12:00 AM

May 25, 2007

TT: Less abundant lives

I'll be in and out of New York for much of the summer, and today's Wall Street Journal drama column reflects my peregrinations. I went to New Haven to review Long Wharf Theatre's Uncle Vanya after having seen the Irish Repertory Theatre revival of Gaslight in New York. I also paid my first visit to the Olney Theatre Center, a Maryland company that's currently performing Georges Feydeau's 13 Rue de l'Amour:

At the moment, the least frequently revived of Anton Chekhov's four major plays seems to be "Uncle Vanya." Long Wharf Theatre's new version is the first important American production to have come to my attention since I started writing this column four years ago. Fortunately, it was worth the wait: Gordon Edelstein, the company's artistic director, has given "Uncle Vanya" an exceptionally fine staging. Well cast, well designed, well lit and well translated, this lovely production conveys Chekhov's special flavor with unostentatious grace....

"Uncle Vanya" has been translated and adapted many times, most recently by Brian Friel and David Mamet. Unfazed by precedent, Mr. Edelstein has done it over again in an attractively casual style that sits well on the tongue. Vanya's searing last-act confession is a particularly choice example of Mr. Edelstein's approach: "I dread each day. I want a different life. I want to wake up on a bright and beautiful morning and begin a new life, with my past gone like smoke." His similarly plain-spoken staging keeps the play's comic and tragic elements in perfect equipoise. The laughs come right on schedule--but so does the heartbreak....

Patrick Hamilton wrote plays and novels about very creepy people, most of which are better remembered as movies. "Gaslight," the tale of a thoroughly nasty Victorian husband who tries to drive his terrified wife insane, opened on Broadway in 1941, ran for 1,295 performances and was then sold to Hollywood. Alas, George Cukor's 1944 film version, which starred Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, was so successful that Hamilton's original play is now rarely performed save by amateurs and small regional companies. I didn't see the Pearl Theatre Company's 1999 Off Broadway revival, so I made a point of catching the Irish Repertory Theatre's new production, which is, as usual with that superlative troupe, a knockout....

Now that so many affluent city dwellers are decamping for the suburbs and exurbs, who will keep them amused? The Olney Theatre Center, located more or less midway between Baltimore and Washington, is an ancient summer-stock house (it started life in 1938 as a roller rink) that used to be somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Then a suburb grew up around it, and the company retrofitted itself as a sprawlingly attractive three-stage complex that presents an ambitious year-round schedule of straight plays and musicals....

No free link. You can always buy a copy of today's Journal at your neighborhood newsstand and look me up, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my drama column and other art-related stories. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted May 25, 12:00 AM

TT: Puff piece

In this week's "Sightings" column, published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I examine the decision of the Chicago City Council to ban public smoking in the Windy City, and its subsequent refusal to exempt actors appearing in plays whose scripts call for their characters to smoke. What effect will this ban have on theater in Chicago--and on the city's artistic reputation elsewhere in America?

For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal and turn to the "Pursuits" section.

Posted May 25, 12:00 AM

TT: New leaves

Yesterday's new piece of music was Frank Bridge's Piano Sonata, completed in 1924 and recorded for Continuum by Peter Jacobs in 1990.

Posted May 25, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."

G.K. Chesterton, "On Running After One's Hat"

Posted May 25, 12:00 AM

May 24, 2007

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:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Frost/Nixon * (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• LoveMusik * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• 110 in the Shade (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here, extended through July 29)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
• A Moon for the Misbegotten * (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes June 10)

Posted May 24, 12:00 AM

TT: New leaves

Yesterday's new piece of music was Bedrich Smetana's Memories of Bohemia in the Form of Polkas, Opp. 12 and 13, composed in 1859 and 1860 and recorded for Teldec by András Schiff in 1998.

Posted May 24, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike."

Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

Posted May 24, 12:00 AM

May 23, 2007

TT: In retreat

After Fallingwater, Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, built in 1951, is probably the best-known modern house in America, if not the world. At first glance the two buildings appear to have nothing in common save their self-evident modernity. Yet Mies' half-visible glass house and Frank Lloyd Wright's massive cantilevered concrete slabs turn out to be not altogether dissimilar in both purpose and effect.

I visited Fallingwater for the first time in 2003 and later blogged about the experience, trying to imagine what it might feel like to live there. I was impressed but skeptical:

I think it would be a profoundly soul-satisfying experience to live in Fallingwater--if you were rich enough to afford a staff of servants and young enough to negotiate the stairs....Fallingwater is one of the most extraordinary buildings in the world, fully deserving of its singular reputation. I've never seen a more beautiful house in my life. But I wouldn't be altogether surprised if in the very long run, Wright's Usonian houses prove to have been a more significant contribution to Western culture.

The Farnsworth House is at least as beautiful as Fallingwater, and in judging its success as a residence, one must keep firmly in mind the specific purpose for which it was built. Edith Farnsworth, a successful Chicago doctor, was a spinster who used the house not as a full-time home but as a weekend retreat. (Fallingwater was also designed for the weekend use of a wealthy family.) This explains the lack of shelf and storage space, as well as Mies' failure to provide for the presence of non-intimate overnight guests. Dr. Farnsworth went there to commune with nature, and I can't think of a better place to do so. The glass walls pull your gaze irresistibly outward to the surrounding meadow, and the house itself seems to dissolve into the clearing in which it was built.

The problem with the Farnsworth House--and with all minimalist architecture--is that it is cruelly unforgiving of the ordinary clutter of everyday life. As one art historian admiringly put it:

All of the paraphernalia of traditional living--rooms, walls, doors, interior trim, loose furniture, pictures on walls, even personal possessions--have been virtually abolished in a puritanical vision of simplified, transcendental existence.

I'm an unusually neat person and so could imagine living in the Farnsworth House, but I suspect that most people would find it unbearably oppressive, just as Edith Farnsworth herself came to loathe the lack of privacy that inevitably goes with spending weekends living in a world-famous glass house. She ruefully admitted that it made her uncomfortable to see even as much as a single coathanger out of place. That's no way to live.

Wright is no less often accused of having emphasized beauty at the expense of comfort, and that accusation carries a certain amount of weight when it comes to Fallingwater. Not so, however, the one-story Usonian ranch houses of his later years, which were specifically designed to be occupied by middle-class families without servants. I've stayed in three Usonians, and without exception I found them both heart-stoppingly beautiful and wonderfully comfortable.

Muirhead Farmhouse, where I spent last Monday night, is a 3,200-square-foot farmhouse built in 1953 that has remained in the Muirhead family and is now being run as a bed-and-breakfast by the current owners, Mike and Sarah Petersdorf, who have done an impeccable job of repairing the ravages wrought by a half-century of hard use. Mike and Sarah are gracious hosts who love their home and delight in showing it off to their guests. They also serve tasty breakfasts! The house is a half-hour northwest of O'Hare Airport, a bit too far from downtown Chicago to commute easily, but if you have time to spend a night away from the city, I guarantee that you'll be glad you stayed there. Overnight guests sleep in the master bedroom, which is separate from the wing where the family lives--it even has its own small patio. The décor is both attractive and appropriate, the surrounding farmland unpretentiously lovely, while the house itself is a particularly harmonious example of Wright's late style. (Look at the slide show on the first page of the Muirhead Farmhouse Web site and you'll see what I mean.)

It is, I suspect, no accident that so many modernist buildings have either been torn down or are at risk of demolition. Most of them are respected but not loved, and even a truly great building like the Farnsworth House inspires an austere, even chilly kind of awe in most of its visitors, myself most definitely included. Wright's houses are different. Some, to be sure, are more problematic than others, but those who are fortunate enough to live in Usonian houses know better than anyone else how lovable they can be. "When I'd come back from a day on campus, teaching and attending meetings, the house always had an immediate calming effect," says James Dennis, the current owner of Jacobs House, the first Usonian house.

As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal in after staying at the Schwartz House:

Just as an old-master painting never looks better than when it hangs in the home of a private collector who gazes at it lovingly each day, so are Frank Lloyd Wright's houses meant to be experienced, not merely visited. Wright himself said that the Schwartz House was "a house designed for utility and fecund living....in which there is no predominating feature, but in which the entire is so coordinated as to achieve a thing of beauty." Now more than ever, I know what he meant.

UPDATE: Last week I published a list of five Wright houses currently available for short-term rental. A sixth one, the Duncan House, opens next month.

Time's 1938 cover story on Wright is here.

Posted May 23, 12:00 AM

TT: New leaves

Yesterday's new piece of music was David Diamond's Elegy in Memory of Maurice Ravel, composed in 1937 for an ensemble of brass, percussion, and two harps and recorded for Delos by Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony in 1993.

Posted May 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"It is perhaps the unique capacity of art that its most monumental achievements manage to embrace and resolve polarities which, in other areas of life--including philosophy--seem hopelessly unbridgeable: positive and void, the boundary between subjective and objective worlds. Where such resolution fails, or is not even attempted, art degenerates into decoration, on one hand, or illustration--the vast gap between object and idea that plagues so much contemporary art. Where it succeeds, we approach perhaps as near as we can come to grasping the way of things."

Thomas Albright, On Art and Artists

Posted May 23, 12:00 AM

May 22, 2007

TT: About OGIC

Our Girl in Chicago, my dear friend and co-blogger, has been experiencing some technical difficulties that have kept her out of cyberspace for the past few weeks. Now a death in the family has forced her to leave town unexpectedly. She e-mailed me this morning, asking me to let you know that she'll be back and blogging as soon as possible.

Posted May 22, 4:54 PM

TT: Out and about (2)

Here's more of what I've been up to since returning from Chicago last week:

• On Saturday morning I took the Acela Express to Washington, D.C., where I visited the new Smithsonian American Art Museum. I hadn't been to SAAM since it closed several years ago for remodeling. Mr. Modern Art Notes catalogued the museum's shortcomings when it reopened last July, and he got it right on the nose: SAAM's permanent collection is handsomely installed but embarrassingly spotty, though it houses more than enough first-class canvases to make it worth a visit. (Some of my favorites are George Inness' Niagara, John Singer Sargent's Pomegranates, Majorca, Stuart Davis' Memo, Edward Hopper's Cape Cod Morning, Hans Hofmann's Fermented Soil, and Joan Mitchell's Marlin.) In addition, SAAM has two must-see exhibitions on display this summer, "Saul Steinberg: Illuminations" (up through June 24) and "Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry" (up through July 8). You should definitely stop by if you're in town--but don't expect any revelations.

• From there I made my way to the Kennedy Center, where Eve Tushnet and I saw Washington National Opera's new production of Leos Janacek's Jenufa (I'm scouting singers for The Letter). It was, as Carl Van Vechten said of the premiere of Four Saints in Three Acts, a knockout and a wow.

Patricia Racette, who sings the title role, is an artist I've admired ever since I reviewed her first Metropolitan Opera Traviata for the New York Daily News a decade ago:

Heads up, opera buffs: there's a new star in town. Patricia Racette was faced with the unenviable task of replacing the much-loved Renee Fleming as Violetta, the doomed courtesan, in Franco Zeffirelli's expensive new production of La Traviata, which opened Monday at the Metropolitan Opera House. A lesser singer might have clutched under the pressure. Instead, Racette swung for the fences--and smashed the ball out of the park.

Racette is no airheaded coloratura canary, but an outstandingly gifted singing actress who uses her bright, vibrant voice as an instrument of high drama. She caught the hectic desperation just below the surface of the forced gaiety of "Sempre libera," and moved boldly from the black despair of "Addio del passato" to the heart-tearing false hope of the death scene. The wild cheering at evening's end was fully deserved: rarely has an American soprano made so much of so great an opportunity.

If anything, Racette is even better now--I could easily imagine her doing a non-singing stage role--and Jenufa, a bracingly astringent piece of Central European verismo, gives her no shortage of opportunities to show her stuff. The production? Three words: Hookers. Spandex. Motorcycles. But Racette and her supporting cast soared above the Eurotrashy décor, giving a performance I expect to remember for a very long time to come.

Jenufa closes on Thursday. You'd better go.

• I saw two plays on Sunday, one of them in the company of Ms. Asymmetrical Information. The first was Olney Theatre Center's production of Georges Feydeau's 13 Rue de l'Amour, the second Studio Theatre's revival of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. (I'm doing Stoppard plays this summer.) Watch my Wall Street Journal drama column for details--I'll be reviewing 13 Rue de l'Amour on Friday and R & G a couple of weeks after that.

• Today I'm en route to New Haven to review a new English-language adaptation of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at Long Wharf Theater. Later in the week I'll be driving up to Boston to see Noël Coward's Present Laughter and Harold Pinter's No Man's Land in Boston. Insofar as possible, I'll blog in the interstices of my travels.

Tomorrow I report on my recent visits to Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House and Frank Lloyd Wright's Muirhead Farmhouse.

Later.

Posted May 22, 12:00 AM

TT: New leaves

Yesterday's new piece of music was Edgard Varèse's Poème èlectronique, a piece of musique concrète created by Varèse on four-track magnetic tape and played through the more than four hundred loudspeakers installed inside the Philips Pavilion designed by Le Corbusier and Yannis Xenakis for the 1958 Brussels World Fair. The original master tape was digitally remastered, mixed down to two tracks, and transferred to CD in 1998. (To look at the "score" of Poème èlectronique, go here and scroll down.)

Posted May 22, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The road to Heaven-on-earth passes through Hell and never re-emerges. This is the great lesson of the 20th century. All Utopian thought is deeply flawed, rooted in the Arcadian prepossession of the Western imagination, always sailing to Cythera and breaking up on the shoals. But the issue is even larger than this. The human mind is shadowed by mortality and wishes only to escape its condition, sometimes through the medium of love, sometimes through the promise of faith, most often through one or another form of forgetfulness--drugs, entertainment, even war. We kill because we have to die."

David Solway, interview, FrontPageMagazine.com, May 9, 2007 (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted May 22, 12:00 AM

May 21, 2007

TT: Out and about (1)

Here's part of what I've been up to since returning from Chicago last week:

• On Thursday Apollinaire Scherr and I paid a visit to New York City Ballet, where we saw an all-Tchaikovsky program consisting of two masterpieces (George Balanchine's Mozartiana and Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, also known as Ballet Imperial) and an agreeable second-tier work (Jerome Robbins' Piano Pieces). The dancing was only just good enough--I hear that the company put in so much time rehearsing Peter Martins' new Romeo and Juliet ballet that the rest of the spring repertory was more or less ignored--and the orchestra sounded frightful. To be sure, one can never waste time looking at Ballet Imperial, or talking to Apollinaire about dance, but beyond that it was an unmemorable evening.

• On Friday I watched Alain Resnais' film version of Alan Ayckbourn's Private Fears in Public Places, a play about which I raved in The Wall Street Journal when it was first performed in America in the summer of 2005:

Mr. Ayckbourn's entry in the "Brits Off Broadway" festival currently underway at 59E59 Theaters is a more or less typical piece of Ayckbournian plot-juggling in which the lives of six lonely Londoners are made to intersect in a variety of unpredictable ways, some funny and others desperately sad. I can't come any closer to describing the effect of "Private Fears in Public Places" than to say that it suggests Terence Rattigan revised by David Ives. Written in 54 crisp scenes (some of them wordless) and acted on a small stage divided into five playing areas, it moves with whirligig speed, glittering craftsmanship and an exhilarating dash of craziness, and when it's over you won't quite know how you feel, other than thoroughly entertained....

I can see how a superficial viewer might mistake it for a piece of commercial work. Don't be deceived by the shiny surface of "Private Fears in Public Places," though: it's as serious as a broken heart.

Resnais' film--whose French title, as it happens, is Coeurs--follows Ayckbourn's play very closely, a fact that escaped the attention of most of its reviewers. (It's surprising how few film critics are familiar with the literary sources of the films about which they write.) I don't speak French and so can't tell you how faithfully the dialogue has been translated, but the scene-by-scene structure of the film is more or less identical to that of the play. The big difference between the two is that Coeurs, unlike Private Fears, isn't funny, and apparently wasn't meant to be.

The most distinctive thing about Ayckbourn's plays, as I observed in my Wall Street Journal review of the Manhattan Theatre Club's 2005 revival of Absurd Person Singular, is the unsettling way in which they mix laughter and sorrow:

Ayckbourn is not infrequently mistaken for a commercial playwright. In fact, he's a kind of poet, a craftsman of genius (he even wrote a book called "The Crafty Art of Playmaking") whose riotously funny studies of the English middle class are streaked with melancholy and regret. In "Absurd Person Singular," set in the kitchens of three different homes on three consecutive Christmases, you can see his method at its purest. Each act depicts a different phase in the lives of three newly acquainted married couples whose relationships are in flux. At the beginning of the evening, Jane and Sidney are trying desperately to impress their new friends, and at the end they've become the top dogs. In between is two hours' worth of furious farce arising from the varied sorrows of the six characters. In the zaniest scene, Eva tries repeatedly but unsuccessfully to kill herself. You can't help but laugh at her increasingly preposterous attempts--but you don't forget for a moment that she's not kidding.

Not so Coeurs. Perhaps it might seem funnier to a French-speaking viewer, but somehow I doubt it: Mark Snow's score is unabashedly bittersweet, and the overall tone of the film is elegiac to a fault. It is, however, wholly convincing on its own dark terms, and I strongly recommend that you seek it out. (It's currently playing on IFC's on-demand channel in New York and will be released on DVD later this summer.)

• I also watched a kinescope of the original 1953 telecast of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty. Videotape was still in the cradle back in the Fifties, and all three networks ran weekly drama anthology series broadcast live from New York. Most of the scripts were mediocre and are rightly forgotten, but a few of the better teleplays of the period, among them N. Richard Nash's The Rainmaker, Rod Serling's Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight, Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful, Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men, and Gore Vidal's Visit to a Small Planet, were later adapted for Broadway and/or Hollywood and thus are still remembered.

Marty was filmed in 1955. It was the first low-budget indie flick to take Hollywood by surprise, winning the best-picture Oscar and grossing $5 million (it cost $340,000 to make). Alas, the film version, which starred Ernest Borgnine, wasn't very good. Borgnine's acting is likable but ordinary, while Chayefsky's screenplay, to which he added a half-hour's worth of additional scenes in order to make it long enough for theatrical release, is flabby. The original hour-long TV version, by contrast, is lean, direct, and characterful, and Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand, who play a pair of painfully plain New Yorkers looking for love, are so natural and unaffected that they scarcely seem to be acting at all. It's easy to see why Marty, though it only aired once on network TV, made a deep and long-lasting impression on all who saw it.

If you go in for trivia, by the way, you probably already know that a half-century after appearing in the best-remembered live TV drama of the Fifties, Marchand made a similarly powerful impression on postmodern viewers when she played Tony Soprano's mother. I have decidedly mixed feelings about the so-called Golden Age of Television, but some of it was and is worth celebrating, and it's nice to know that one of its most talented actors lived long enough to do equally unforgettable work in the true Golden Age of series TV.

To be continued....

Posted May 21, 12:00 AM

TT: New leaves

I'm listening to unfamiliar music again after a travel-related hiatus. On Friday I listened to Frank Martin's Ballade for Piano and Orchestra, composed in 1939 and recorded for Chandos by Roderick Elms, Matthias Bamert and the London Philharmonic in 1994.

Posted May 21, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"My appetite for power, and for money, was undeniable, as was the craving for glory (to give that beautiful and impassioned name to what is merely our itch to hear ourselves spoken of)."

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

Posted May 21, 12:00 AM

May 18, 2007

DANCE

Posted May 18, 9:04 AM

CD

Posted May 18, 12:59 AM

TT: Tough nut, sweet meat

My summer playgoing began last week with a visit to Chicago, where I saw performances by Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the Court Theatre, and the House Theatre of Chicago. All are reviewed in this morning's Wall Street Journal:

Shakespeare never wrote a tougher play than "Troilus and Cressida." Is it a comedy or a tragedy--or both? It all depends on how you direct it. When Barbara Gaines, the founder and artistic director of Chicago Shakespeare Theater, first produced this knotty tale of love and death in the Trojan War, she emphasized the romance. Now she's wrapping up her company's 20th anniversary season with an opulently violent "Troilus" staged with breathtaking speed and concentration and climaxing in the best battle scene I've ever seen on a stage.

This is a wartime "Troilus" with a hard political edge--the main set piece is a blood-soaked obelisk reminiscent of the Washington Monument--but Ms. Gaines has taken care not to wear her opinions on her sleeve. Instead, she lets Shakespeare do the talking: "And appetite, an universal wolf,/So doubly seconded with will and power,/Must make perforce an universal prey,/And last eat up himself." You're more than welcome to draw parallels with the war in Iraq if you wish, but it's no less acceptable to approach Ms. Gaines' "Troilus" as a broader parable of man's monstrosity to man....

The phenomenal success of Lincoln Center Theater's production of Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia" has made regional theater directors Stoppard-conscious. I plan to spend the next couple of months reporting on a string of American revivals of his plays, and I'm happy to say that the first show on my list, the Court Theatre's blithe and incisive mounting of "Arcadia," is an extraordinarily fine piece of work....

In addition to well-established companies like Chicago Shakespeare and the Court, the Windy City has no shortage of small troupes whose productions are comparable in quality to the best that Off Off Broadway has to offer. I sang the praises of Remy Bumppo Theater Company in this space last September, and this time around a theater-savvy local steered me to the House Theatre of Chicago, a gaggle of twentysomethings who put on shows in a converted garage across the street from a North Side viaduct. (The lobby contains a bar and a pool table!)

You can't get much farther off the beaten path than that, but Ben Lobpries' "Hope Springs Infernal" is more than worth the extra mileage....

No link, so do the usual: either buy the paper or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my drama column and other art-related stories. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted May 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The art of the theater--notoriously an 'impure' art--seems to be as close to the art of politics as it is to poetry, painting or music. The theater artist, whether actor or playwright, depends on the interest and support of an audience, just as the politician depends upon his constituency. The politician cannot practice his art at all without a grant from his constituency; and so he must first of all woo it. And the theater artist cannot practice his art without real people assembled before a real stage; a theater without an audience is a contradiction in terms. That is why both politics and the theater are necessarily so close to the public mood and the public mind of their times."

Francis Fergusson, The Human Image in Dramatic Literature

Posted May 18, 12:00 AM

May 17, 2007

DVD

Posted May 17, 10:18 AM

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:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Frost/Nixon * (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• LoveMusik * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• A Moon for the Misbegotten * (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes June 10)
• 110 in the Shade (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here, extended through July 29)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
• Biography (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

Posted May 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius."

George Steiner, Language and Silence

Posted May 17, 12:00 AM

May 16, 2007

TT: Almanac

"Modern kids are raised with the understanding that people don't spontaneously burst into song at crucial moments in their lives. And isn't that a horrible thing, to remove such evidence of grace on earth from their belief system? Of course there are people who start tap-dancing at unexpected moments, or improvise a tune while plucking lyrics from the air. They're called children, and if you spend any time with them, you'll witness life as a musical forty times an hour."

Ty Burr, The Best Old Movies for Families

Posted May 16, 12:00 AM

May 15, 2007

TT: In transit

I'm traveling.

Later.

Posted May 15, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Like every man under a single dominating passion, he grew in suspicion and in fear."

Melville Davisson Post, "The Hidden Law"

Posted May 15, 12:00 AM

SHORT BUT SWEET

Posted May 15, 12:00 AM

May 14, 2007

TT: The land of content

I'm sitting on the patio of the master bedroom of Frank Lloyd Wright's Muirhead Farmhouse, watching the sun set and listening to the wind in the trees. I cannot imagine being in a more beautiful place at a more beautiful time.

Now I'll shut my iBook off for the night and return to the moment....

Posted May 14, 8:46 PM

TT: Do as I do

I'm in Chicagoland, immersing myself in local theater, architecture, and cuisine. On Saturday I attended the opening-night performance of the Court Theatre's production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, visited Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House for the first time, and lunched at Hot Doug's, where I ate a haute dog called the Edward Vrdolyak that consisted of smoked crayfish and pork sausage, cajun tartar sauce, smoked gouda cheese, and crispy fried onions, all crammed into a bun. How's that for a day's work?

This afternoon I'll be driving out to Frank Lloyd Wright's Muirhead Farmhouse to spend the night. I expect to have much to say about this experience later in the week. In the meantime, permit me to point out that Muirhead Farmhouse is one of five Wright houses available for short-term rental. These are the others:

• Haynes House, Fort Wayne, Indiana

• Penfield House, Willoughby, Ohio

• Seth Peterson Cottage, Mirror Lake, Wisconsin

• Schwartz House, Two Rivers, Wisconsin

In addition, the first Usonian house, the Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, is available for monthly rental.

I spent the night in two of these houses in 2005, then wrote about them in The Wall Street Journal:

While all 35 of the Wright houses open to the public are worth visiting, no tour can possibly have more than a fraction of the impact of spending the night in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright--and you can do just that....I visited the four-bedroom Schwartz House in Two Rivers and the studio-sized Seth Peterson Cottage in Lake Delton, the latter not far from Taliesin, Wright's estate and headquarters, where visitors can see his theories of domestic architecture and décor writ large.

To turn the key of a Wright house is to step into a parallel universe. The huge windows, the open, uncluttered floor plans, the straightforward use of such simple materials as wood, brick, concrete and rough-textured masonry: All create the illusion of a vast interior space in close harmony with its natural surroundings. Instead of walls, subtly varied ceiling heights denote the different living areas surrounding the massive fireplace that is the linchpin of every Wright house. This unoppressive openness--both from area to area and between indoors and out--is what makes even a small house like the 880-square-foot Peterson Cottage, which was boarded up for two decades before being rehabilitated in 1992, seem so much larger than it really is.

If you know of any additional Wright houses (or other historically significant modern homes) that are being operated as bed-and-breakfasts or can be rented on a short-term basis, please drop me an e-mail so that I can pass the word.

Now if you'll excuse me, it's time to head for the hills!

P.S. I listened to Fred Hersch's new CD in the car last night, but otherwise my experiment in musical self-therapy is temporarily suspended while I'm on the road. I'll resume regular listening activities on my return to Manhattan.

Posted May 14, 12:00 AM

TT: Short but sweet

The Wall Street Journal has posted a free link to my latest "Sightings" column:

Orion Books, one of England's top publishing houses, has just brought out the first six titles in a series of abridged versions of such classic novels as "Anna Karenina," "Moby-Dick" and "Vanity Fair." The covers of these paperbacks, which have been shortened by as much as 40%, bill their contents as "Compact Editions." "'David Copperfield' in Half the Time," as one entry promises. Malcolm Edwards, the series' publisher, told a Times of London reporter that "many regular readers think of the classics as long, slow and, to be frank, boring."

Not surprisingly, Orion has been taking a beating from British highbrows. "It's completely ridiculous--a daft idea," one London bookseller told the Times. "How can you edit the classics?" Daft it may be, but no less a literary light than Somerset Maugham once undertook to prepare abridged versions of the 10 best novels ever written. His choices, which included "The Brothers Karamazov," "Pride and Prejudice" and "War and Peace," were unexceptionable. What kicked up a row was Maugham's cheeky claim that "the wise reader will get the greatest enjoyment out of reading them if he learns the useful art of skipping....There is nothing reprehensible in cutting."

I haven't seen any of Orion's Compact Editions--they'll be published in the U.S. starting in August--but I'm not inclined to be snippy about them, because it happens that I grew up reading abridged novels, an experience that did me no harm whatsoever....

To read the whole thing, go here.

Posted May 14, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"One of the first essentials of creative art is the habit of imagining the most familiar things as vividly as the most surprising."

Donald Francis Tovey, program note for William Walton's Viola Concerto

Posted May 14, 12:00 AM

May 12, 2007

CD

Posted May 12, 5:42 PM

May 11, 2007

FILM FESTIVAL

Posted May 11, 9:56 AM

TT: And she can sing, too

It's all Broadway, all the time in today's Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I wrap up the 2006-07 season with reviews of 110 in the Shade, Deuce, and Radio Golf:

This has been a big season for Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. First they revived "The Fantasticks," their best-known musical, in a splendid Off Broadway production directed by Mr. Jones that opened last August and is still going strong. Now the Roundabout Theatre Company has brought "110 in the Shade" back to Broadway for the first time since it closed in 1964--and it turns out to be every bit as good as "The Fantasticks." Not only is Lonny Price's staging letter-perfect, but Audra McDonald, who hasn't appeared in a Broadway musical since 1999, is giving the performance of a lifetime as Lizzie Curry, a plain-Jane gal from Texas who is haunted by the prospect of permanent spinsterhood until a fast-talking con man named Starbuck (Steve Kazee) blows into town and awakens her inner babe....

Ms. McDonald gives the most fully realized performance I've seen in a musical this season, not excluding Donna Murphy in "LoveMusik" and Raúl Esparza in "Company." It goes without saying that she has the best voice on Broadway, but like Kristin Chenoweth, she doesn't have to sing a note to grab your attention. Ms. McDonald is an actor who sings, not a singer who acts...

Rejoice greatly, stargazers: Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes have returned to Broadway to share a stage in Terrence McNally's "Deuce." Would that this tale of two retired tennis pros were something other than an ordinary celebrity vehicle, but great acting can ennoble the tritest of scripts, and Mr. McNally's leading ladies deliver the goods with postage to spare....

August Wilson is back in town--posthumously. "Radio Golf," the tenth and last installment in Wilson's "Pittsburgh cycle" of plays about black life in 20th-century America, opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2005, seven months before the playwright's death. It has since been performed by a half-dozen other regional companies. Now it's arrived on Broadway in a road-honed production directed by Kenny Leon, designed by David Gallo and performed by five first-class actors, three of whom have been with the show since its premiere....

Good drama doesn't always tell the truth--it doesn't have to. Great drama, on the other hand, turns a spotlight on the world and forces the viewer to acknowledge the most painful and fundamental facts about human nature. Many of August Wilson's plays do that, but in "Radio Golf" he settled for the lazy half-answers of the ideologue. While that doesn't diminish in the least the genuine greatness of a play like "Fences," I wish he'd gone out on a higher, truer note.

No free link, so get thee to a newsstand, from whence cometh help. Alternatively, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you one-click access to the drama column, plus lots of other arty stuff. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Next week, Chicago!

Posted May 11, 12:00 AM

TT: Short is good

You may have heard about Orion Books' Compact Editions, a new series of condensed classics that went on sale in England this week and will be coming to the United States in August. Not surprisingly, British eggheads are sneering at the thought that anyone would dare to publish abridged versions of David Copperfield or Moby-Dick--but should they? That's the subject of my next "Sightings" column, which appears in Saturday's Wall Street Journal.

Pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal and turn to the "Pursuits" section to see what I have to say. (I promise to be concise!)

Posted May 11, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"We went to Mannheim and attended a shivaree--otherwise an opera--the one called 'Lohengrin.' The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief."

Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad

Posted May 11, 12:00 AM

May 10, 2007

TT: Airborne

I depart this morning for Chicago, where I'll be hanging out with Our Girl, eating at Hot Doug's, the world's greatest hot dog emporium, visiting Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House for the very first time, spending a night in yet another Frank Lloyd Wright house, and seeing three plays (see next Friday's Wall Street Journal for details).

It's a busier-than-usual schedule, and I don't know whether it'll leave any room for blogging, but if it does, you'll hear from me--or her. Either way, I'll be back in New York early next week and back at my desk shortly thereafter.

Posted May 10, 12:00 AM

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:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Frost/Nixon (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• LoveMusik (musical, PG-13, adult themes, reviewed here)
• A Moon for the Misbegotten* (drama, PG-13, adult situations, reviewed here, closes June 10)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
• Biography (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 20)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
• Salvage (The Coast of Utopia, part 3)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Saturday)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here, closes Saturday)

Posted May 10, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible."

W.H. Auden (quoted in Time, Dec. 29, 1961)

Posted May 10, 12:00 AM

May 9, 2007

TT: Lend me your ears (and eyes)

I'm writing an opera.

To be exact, Santa Fe Opera, one of America's most admired opera companies, has commissioned me to write the libretto for a musical version of Somerset Maugham's "The Letter," a 1924 short story that Maugham turned into a play three years later. The score will be by my friend and neighbor Paul Moravec, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2004 and was recently appointed artist-in-residence at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. The commission was announced at a press conference held in Santa Fe earlier this hour.

"The Letter" has been filmed twice, the second time by William Wyler in 1940. If you don't know the plot in any of its various manifestations, take it from me, it's the stuff operas are made of. Lust, betrayal, murder, blackmail...what's not to like? I feel like singing already. Paul and I are shaping it into a very tight structure (ninety minutes, no intermission) that we hope will have the feel of a film noir and the punch of a verismo opera. Think Tosca or Carmen directed by Jacques Tourneur and you'll get the idea.

As for Paul's music, allow me to quote from my liner notes for the Trio Solisti's recording of two of his best pieces, Mood Swings and the Pulitzer-winning Tempest Fantasy:

Despite the considerable, at times formidable complexity of these tough-minded works, which are anything but "easy" in the way they translate experience and emotion into the realm of sound, their complexities are never gratuitous. To put it another way, they make sense. Their harmonies are lucid and logical, their melodies indelibly noble. They are, literally, eloquent, the painstakingly wrought, powerfully moving utterances of an artist who believes with all his heart in the possibility of beauty. I know no other music written today that moves me more.

The premiere of The Letter is set for the summer of 2009, but the production is already starting to take shape. Am I excited? You'd better believe it. Nervous, too, since this is the first time I've ever written anything for the stage (I tried to write a play a few years ago, but it wasn't any good). Fortunately, Paul is such a splendid composer and Maugham so solid a theatrical craftsman that I think The Letter has an excellent chance of hitting the bull's-eye. At any rate, it'll be interesting to see what it feels like to take a curtain call!

Much, much more to come....

UPDATE: From the Santa Fe Opera press release:

Paul Moravec, the Pulitzer-Prize winning composer, has been commissioned to write an opera for The Santa Fe Opera to be premiered in the 2009 season. Announcement of the commission was made today in Santa Fe by General Director Richard Gaddes. The commission is the first of two planned by the company.

Mr. Moravec has chosen the play entitled The Letter written in 1927 by W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). Considered a Maugham masterpiece, The Letter is set in the Far East, and tells the story of an adulterous affair that leads to murder, blackmail, and revenge. It was made into a film in 1940 starring Bette Davis which has become a classic. Terry Teachout, the eminent critic and writer, is the librettist.

In making the announcement Gaddes commented: "When I first heard music by Paul Moravec I was immediately captivated. The great thing about him is that he's found a musical language all on his own that is both pleasing to the ear and at the same time very contemporary. It is ground breaking and we are excited that this important American composer has agreed to write for The Santa Fe Opera. While Paul has written for voice, this is his first opera."

Henceforth I shall be known as His Eminence! (You need not kiss the ring, though.)

Posted May 09, 1:30 PM

TT: Teaser No. 2

Remember to come back at 1:30 this afternoon for a big fat honking announcement.

(Did I mention that it's big?)

Posted May 09, 12:00 AM

TT: New leaves

Yesterday's new piece of music was Miklós Rózsa's Piano Sonata in A Minor, Op. 20, composed in 1948 and recorded for Capitol by Leonard Pennario (remember him?) in 1956.

Posted May 09, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I love Italian opera--it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate."

D.H. Lawrence, letter, April 1, 1911

Posted May 09, 12:00 AM

May 8, 2007

TT: A proposition for stagebloggers

Those of you who visited the New York Drama Critics' Circle's new Web site to read about this year's awards may have noticed that its members are all connected in some way or other with the print media. This fact has not gone unnoticed in our shop. It's been discussed, and will continue to be discussed. I can't tell you anything more specific than that, but I can say that there is a sharp division of opinion among our membership about whether or not we ought to admit exclusively Web-based writers to our ranks.

Regardless of what we decide, it strikes me that somebody out there in the 'sphere ought to consider starting a similar group of Web-based drama critics and commentators that would give its own theater awards each year, just like the NYDCC and the Outer Critics Circle.

The number of serious and committed stagebloggers reached a critical mass (so to speak) this season, and I now spend at least as much time keeping up with what they write as I do reading the reviews of my print-media brethren. I have no organizational skills, but as one of the few drama critics in New York with a foot firmly planted in both camps, I'd be glad to do what I could to help get such an organization started.

How about it, stagebloggers? Is anyone interested?

UPDATE: Mr. Superfluities is game.

So is Mr. Parabasis.

Posted May 08, 11:04 AM

TT: High-voltage teaser

Watch this space at 1:30 Wednesday afternoon for a major announcement--and I do mean major.

(Curious? You should be.)

Posted May 08, 12:00 AM

TT: Enough and its discontents

Ms. Asymmetrical Information asked this question the other day:

As longtime readers know, I'm slowly reconstituting the music collection that was lost when I moved west. Veeeeeeeeerrry slooooooooowly. Currently, I've got about 1100 songs, which is fine, but not enough for me to achieve that sense of security that comes from knowing that you'll have something you want to listen to every single time you fire up your iPod.

I posed the question to a friend over IM this morning: how many is enough? His answer: "all of them." That can't be right; it's very rare that I think to myself that there is one, and only one, album in the world I want to listen to right now. You have to be able to achieve a sort of musical statistical universe well short of every song that has ever been written.

But how many is enough? 1,100 is, as I can personally attest, well short of enough; every time I open iTunes there is something missing. So how far am I from achieving my goal of musical nirvana? 3,000? 5,000? More? I'm not asking when I'll stop needing new music; presumably, there will always be room in the inn. But when will I stop feeling that empty, yearning sensation every time I open a music player?

As of today I have 3,202 songs on my iPod, which is about all it will hold. From time to time I knock off a few old songs to make room for new ones, but for the most part I find that three thousand songs is enough, by which I mean that whenever I fire up my iPod, I never have any trouble finding something I want to hear.

My office, on the other hand, contains seven custom-built wooden CD shelves holding three thousand discs. In the past year or two, I've let days go by at a time without listening to any of them, and I'm sure there are at least a hundred (if not more) to which I've never listened, just as there is a not-inconsiderable number of books on my shelves that I've never read.

The sad truth is that I now spend more time reading and listening for professional reasons than I do for pleasure. As one of the characters in The Long Goodbye remarks to Philip Marlowe, "I make lots of dough. I got to make lots of dough to juice the guys I got to juice in order to make lots of dough to juice the guys I got to juice." That's not a bad description of my aesthetic life: I spend too much time having experiences in order to write about them and not enough having them purely for their own sake. This isn't to say that I never enjoy myself--I very much enjoyed the afternoon I spent reading Donald Westlake's new novel, for instance--but it strikes me that my priorities have gotten slightly out of whack.

I'm making this embarrassing confession for a reason, which is that I'm going to try to do something about it. I mentioned last Friday that I'd listened to Leos Janacek's Concertino the day before. That wasn't a random observation: I decided that morning to spend a part of each day listening to something I've never heard.

Last Friday I listened to Darius Milhaud's Protée, and the next day I went to a press preview of the Broadway revival of 110 in the Shade, a musical whose score was new to me. On Sunday I chose Dmitri Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto, and yesterday it was Jaco Pastorius' 1976 recording of Miles Davis' Donna Lee.

Except for 110 in the Shade, I don't plan to write about any of these listening experiences, at least not at first. All I'm going to do is post them on this blog, day by day, and see what effect they have on me over time.

The older you get, the easier it is to become a comfort-seeking creature of habit. I don't want my aesthetic arteries to harden, nor do I want to start taking for granted the miracle that is music. To put it another way, I don't ever want to have enough CDs. Hence this experiment in musical self-therapy. My hope is that it will freshen my ears--and enliven my soul.

Posted May 08, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

It shines with a miraculous light
Revealing to the eye the cutting of facets.
It alone speaks to me
When others are too scared to come near.
When the last friend turned his back
It was with me in my grave
As if a thunderstorm sang
Or all the flowers spoke.

Anna Akhamatova, "Music" (trans. Grigori Gerenstein)

Posted May 08, 12:00 AM

May 7, 2007

TT: Judgment rendered

I just got back from the meeting at which the New York Drama Critics' Circle votes on its annual awards. Here they are:

• Best play: The Coast of Utopia

• Best American play: Radio Golf

• Best musical: Spring Awakening

We also voted to give a special citation to the Broadway revival of Journey's End.

To read more about the NYDCC and this year's awards, go here.

UPDATE: Here's Playbill's story about this year's awards.

Posted May 07, 6:32 PM

GALLERY

Posted May 07, 12:46 AM

TT: Bigger than life

I was going to write at length about Mark Morris' Metropolitan Opera production of Orfeo ed Euridice, but Tobi Tobias and Tony Tommasini have already said most of what I wanted to say, and I'm sure that my blogfriend Apollinaire Scherr (with whom I attended last week's opening night) will say the rest of it when her review appears in Newsday. Read what they wrote and you'll get a good sense of what Morris' melding of opera and modern dance looked and sounded like. The only thing I want to add is that I found it enthralling but not especially moving, and I think I know why.

It strikes me that this Orfeo is best understood as an ingenious attempt to solve an insoluble problem: how do you make sense of a small-scale opera in a large-scale opera house? As I wrote about the Met in a 1995 essay published in Commentary:

The present-day Metropolitan Opera House, which opened in 1966 as part of Lincoln Center, has 3,788 seats and a 54-foot-square stage opening. Because of the size of the stage and the depth of the hall, every one of the Met's productions is by definition "spectacular." The only variable is the style.

A spectacular production of a three-singer opera is a contradiction in terms, and I felt that contradiction operating throughout Orfeo, the same way I do whenever I see an opera at the Met that calls for anything remotely approaching dramatic intimacy. Even nineteenth-century story ballets have a way of getting lost in the Met, whose mammoth proscenium arch swallows up dance instead of setting it off. Modern dance, whose vectors point down, not up, has an even harder time registering in so fundamentally hostile an environment. To be sure, Morris and his designers did a brilliant job of filling the space, and their Orfeo is an absorbing visual experience--but I never got close enough to it, emotionally speaking, to feel anything but admiration.

Now that I've spent four years on the aisle as a theater critic, attending two or three performances each week in houses that rarely hold more than a thousand or so people, I find the monstrous scale of the Met to be even more problematic than I did when I was a working critic of music and dance. No doubt that's one of the reasons why I no longer go there very often. For me, opera is drama or it's nothing. Its purely musical values can be experienced just as well at home. Yes, I've seen some Met productions that made dramatic sense. John Dexter's Dialogues of the Carmelites, Mark Lamos' Wozzeck, and Elijah Moshinsky's Queen of Spades all rank high on my list of unforgettable nights at the theater. But they're exceptions to a rule that I find increasingly antipathetical.

As for Mark Morris' Orfeo, it's...well, spectacular. Which is fine in its way: I like a super-sensational spectacle as much as the next guy. I only wish this one had been accompanied by a more suitable soundtrack.

UPDATE: Apollinaire's review is here.

Posted May 07, 12:00 AM

TT: Elsewhere

It's been way too long since I trolled the Web for cool stuff, so here goes:

• The inimitable Mr. Think Denk nails House in one:

I propose that House is really "about" irony and sarcasm; it asks the question...what is the acceptable level of emotion in the modern world?

• Eddie Muller, author of a smart and funny book about film noir, offers a list of "25 noir films that will stand the test of time." Go here to read it. I agree, mostly.

• I'd been wondering what became of Miranda July, the writer-director-star of Me and You and Everyone We Know, one of my favorite indie movies of the past few years. Well, here's the answer--and it's got me very excited.

• Something I wrote not long ago inspired this lovely reflection on the nature of music:

This is one of the bittersweet things about our art: a beautiful moment is gone as soon as it appears, living only in our memory of it, no matter how heated that memory is. This creates a special kind of conflict in the directionally-oriented structures of Western music. The music tells us we're going forward towards something, but our minds may get stuck in particular moments that have already passed....

Read the whole thing, please, and after you do, consider this fugitive observation by Samuel Langford, the greatest music critic you've (probably) never heard of:

Everything passing is but a symbol, says the wise Goethe, and music, in one sense the most swiftly passing and intangible of all mortal things, is in another the essence of the imperishable.

Yes.

• My favorite blogger has been on a roll lately. Here's an especially good example:

I feel like I "put up" with music when I eat out, although I'm surprisingly capable of tuning it out when I dine solo. But dining not-solo is another matter. Maybe the best soundtrack to a superlative dining experience is nothing more than conversation--and I'm not fussy about the topic; it could be a brilliant counterpoint about the food and wine, your laundry, and that sensational young pianist who just performed with the symphony. But music? It distracts...from the food and wine (if that's what I want to pay attention to) and from the conversation (if that's what I want to pay attention to) and makes me wonder: does this dining experience merit the challenge of this aural distraction?...

Yes, yes, a gazillion times yes.

• Here are two inimitable voices from the past: Kurt Weill singing excerpts from two of his songs...

• ...and Vladimir Nabokov reading an excerpt from Lolita. (Scroll down for the link.)

• On a lighter but no less serious note, here's the only surviving film of Clifford Brown in performance. It's from a kinescope of a 1956 TV show hosted by--believe it or not--Soupy Sales.

• Speaking of jazz, a blogger-author recently posted the complete text of one of Donald Barthelme's wittiest and most knowing short stories, King of Jazz. It's brief and brilliant, and I commend it to your attention.

• This video has been bouncing around cyberspace in recent days. It's John Cage's 1960 appearance on I've Got a Secret, one of the most popular prime-time TV game shows of my childhood, and nothing I could possibly say about it comes anywhere near the experience of viewing it. Please do so at once...

• ...and after you're through, spend a couple of minutes looking at this excerpt from a 1964 TV broadcast of Septet, one of the very few Merce Cunningham dances accompanied not by the avant-garde soundscapes of Cage or David Tudor but by a bonafide piece of honest-to-God music, Erik Satie's Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear.

As I wrote in an essay on Cunningham reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader:

To see it is to see the Merce that might have been--a conventional Cunningham. Though the body language of Septet is as idiosyncratic as anything the Cunningham company dances today, the tone of the dance is startlingly "normal." It isn't just that Septet derives its structure (and counts) from a piece of music...It's the style, the cheery atmosphere of accessibility, that startles.

Ponder at will.

• Here's the best Wikipedia entry I've read so far this year...

• ...and here's the most poignant news story I've read in I don't know how long.

• Finally, here's a great game for the literary-minded. I got a passing score--barely.

Posted May 07, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"It is something to belong to the same race of beings as Beethoven."

Samuel Langford, Musical Criticisms

Posted May 07, 12:00 AM

May 4, 2007

TT: In case you're wondering...

...why I haven't been answering my e-mail lately, it's not just the spring rush. My mother was in a serious car accident a couple of weeks ago, and I've been a bit distracted as a result.

The good news is that (A) she's fine and (B) I'm starting to catch up. You should be hearing from me fairly soon. Meanwhile, hang in there!

Posted May 04, 12:51 PM

TT: Smells like tween spirit

The pre-Tony rush is on, and so I've reviewed three Broadway openings in this morning's Wall Street Journal drama column, Legally Blonde, LoveMusik, and Coram Boy:

Sure things are rare on Broadway, but absolutely everyone in the business is predicting an endless run for "Legally Blonde: The Musical," the stage version of Reese Witherspoon's 2001 screen comedy about a pink-clad, puppy-toting Malibu sorority girl who follows Mr. Wrong to Harvard Law School, where she finds true love and becomes a successful criminal lawyer. Who am I to disagree? I know a megahit when I see one, and "Legally Blonde" has cash written all over it. What's more, it's fairly inoffensive as commercial commodities go, so if your tweenage daughter begs you to take her--and she will--give in gracefully. You won't be bored....

Tune? You want tunes? Go see "LoveMusik," a jukebox musical about the open marriage of Kurt Weill (Michael Cerveris) and Lotte Lenya (Donna Murphy). Weill was one of the greatest theater composers of the 20th century, and "LoveMusik" contains two dozen of his best songs, some familiar ("Speak Low") and some not ("I Don't Love You"). You won't hear better music on Broadway--or anywhere else, for that matter....

As for Ms. Murphy's eerily exact impersonation of Lenya, it's a tour de force comparable in quality to Philip Seymour Hoffman's Truman Capote. Not only does she get all the surface details right, but she inhabits them so completely that you forget she's pretending to be someone else--and not even Lenya herself sang "Surabaya Johnny" so well....

If you've been hungering for a three-hour-long dose of pretentious silliness, I give you "Coram Boy," a creepily mawkish tale of two 18th-century orphans that plays like a cross between "Oliver Twist" and "Pride and Prejudice" rewritten by Thomas Harris and accompanied by the music of Handel....

No free link this week. I therefore invite you to go buy a Journal (it's for sale!), or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the drama column, plus lots of additional art-related coverage. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

P.S. For an alternate view of LoveMusik, go here.

Posted May 04, 12:00 AM

TT: What I did yesterday

• Read A.D. Nuttall's Shakespeare the Thinker and wrote a six-hundred-word notice for my Contentions book column.

• Lunched at Good Enough to Eat, whose waitresses are as nice as pie.

• Came home to find eight parcels from publicists, one of which contained six gorgeous-looking finished copies of New York Review Books' new edition of Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, featuring an introduction by me. (It'll be out June 5--order now!)

• Listened to Leos Janacek's Concertino, a weird and wonderfully prickly 1925 piece for piano, two violins, viola, clarinet, horn, and bassoon.

• Walked across Central Park (first time this year!) to Knoedler & Company, where I saw and reveled in a newly opened show of watercolors by Milton Avery.

• Took a pre-theater nap.

• Went to a Broadway press preview of Terrence McNally's Deuce.

Posted May 04, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"There is no more pitiful human illusion than that you can catch up on lost reading in old age. Old age is the busiest of them all. Things you used to do effortlessly take you forever, provided you can do them at all."

S.N. Behrman, People in a Diary

Posted May 04, 12:00 AM

May 3, 2007

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:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Frost/Nixon (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• A Moon for the Misbegotten* (drama, PG-13, adult situations, reviewed here, closes June 10)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
• Biography (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 20)

CLOSING SOON:
• Salvage (The Coast of Utopia, part 3)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 13)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 12)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here, closes May 12)

Posted May 03, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"'I can remember,' John said, 'when "burger" only meant one thing, and the only word you ever had to stick in front of it was "cheese."'

"'You're showing your age, John.'

"'Yeah? That's good. Usually I show twice my age.'"

Donald E. Westlake, What's So Funny?

Posted May 03, 12:00 AM

May 2, 2007

TT: In abeyance

I just got back from the opening night of Mark Morris' Metropolitan Opera production of Orfeo ed Euridice. (Celebrity sighting: I sat behind Ned Rorem.) I'm still sorting out my complicated thoughts about the staging and don't expect to be blogging about it until Monday, but I can definitely say that it ranks with The Coast of Utopia as the most important and consequential theatrical spectacle of the current season.

The provisional bottom line: you need to see it, and you only have three more chances, this Saturday afternoon and next Wednesday evening and Saturday afternoon. Go here for more information.

More anon....

Posted May 02, 11:28 PM

TT: Third time lucky?

Mark Morris' Metropolitan Opera staging of Orfeo ed Euridice, which opens tonight, is his third crack at Gluck's best-remembered opera. I reviewed the second one in the New York Daily News in 1996, at a time when I was still in the process of getting on Morris' wavelength:

Mark Morris' staging of Gluck's "Orfeo ed Euridice," which opened Thursday at the BAM Opera House, is not your usual operatic production--if only because nearly half the people in the cast are dancers.

Morris' "Orfeo" puts the Mark Morris Dance Group together on stage with countertenor Michael Chance, sopranos Dana Hanchard and Christine Brandes, and Boston's Handel & Haydn Chorus for a performance in which song and dance are blended into a single dramatic entity. Opera buffs with open minds will find this "Orfeo" imaginative and challenging; balletomanes who love Morris' choreography will be in seventh heaven throughout. But does it really add up to a satisfying whole? I'm not so sure....

The members of the chorus, dressed in evening clothes, are placed on risers at opposite sides of the stage; the dancers, dressed in tunics, swirl around the soloists, illustrating and commenting on their plight. In the first act, the results were too busy--the presence of the chorus consistently pulled the eye away from the dancers--but no such problems marred the second act, for which Morris' choreography was straightforward, fluid and entirely convincing. And his direction of the ascent from Hades was marvelous in its simplicity: he made Hanchard and Chance look as graceful as a ballerina and her cavalier.

But Morris' treatment of Christine Brandes was jolting: he dressed her in a campy pair of wings and made her act like a bratty little boy. It was as if he'd painted an exquisite canvas, then punched a hole in it with his fist. And the last-act ballet--in which Morris, not for the first time, goes head to head with George Balanchine, who used the same music to unforgettable effect in "Chaconne"--looked raw and unfinished....

In the end, I found this "Orfeo" disappointing, full though it is of good things. It is only the greatly talented who can be greatly disappointing, and Morris is as talented as they come: I admire him more than any other choreographer of his generation. But he has too often proved unwilling to express powerful emotions in a fully committed way--his handling of Amor is a case in point--and for all his astonishing gifts, I once again came away from a Mark Morris premiere shaking my head and muttering to myself, "Get serious!"

Would I have felt the same way about it had I seen it again recently? Maybe, and maybe not. It's no secret that I've changed my mind about some of my early opinions of Morris' work, just as I think Morris himself has grown more emotionally forthright since then. On the other hand, I don't like cutesy-pie camp any more now than I did in 1996--though I've also come to see that Morris' use of camp is more expressively complicated than I originally thought.

In any case, tonight's Orfeo is an altogether different kettle of fish, and I'm very eager indeed to see how Morris cooks it. Even when I don't like what he does, I still think he's the greatest choreographer of his generation, and I'd rather see his failures than most people's successes.

Posted May 02, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The whole study and culture of criticism, as I see it, is to gain entrance to vastly different worlds of the imagination, and to learn how to behave oneself while there; then to be gifted enough in expression to be able to give a vivacious account of what one has felt and thought while in those different worlds, whether one has 'liked' them or not."

Neville Cardus, Autobiography

Posted May 02, 12:00 AM

May 1, 2007

TT: Words to the wise

• Mark Morris makes his Metropolitan Opera directing debut tomorrow night with a production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice starring David Daniels, Maija Kovalevska, and Heidi Grant Murphy. James Levine conducts. Only four performances will be given this season, on Wednesday and Saturday afternoon and on May 9 and 12 (the May 12 performance is a matinee). I'll be there.

To read an interview with Morris and his design team, go here.

For more information, go here.

• "Magical Means: Milton Avery and Watercolor," a show of forty works on paper, goes up Thursday at Knoedler & Company and will be on view through Aug. 10. The gallery is at 19 E. 70th Street. I haven't seen the catalogue yet, but I'll be very surprised if this exhibition doesn't turn out to be...well, magical.

For more information, go here.

• The Fred Hersch Trio will be performing at the Village Vanguard next Tuesday-Sunday in support of its newly released CD, Night and the Music. The Vanguard is at 178 Seventh Avenue South (like you didn't know!). Two shows nightly, at nine and eleven p.m.

I've had a lot of good things to say about Fred over the years, of which this quote, from a New York Times profile, is representative:

Hersch...improvises with the sharp conceptual clarity of a classical composer; instead of merely skimming atop the familiar chord changes of standard songs, he forges them into rigorously structured, wholly personal re-creations. "I like to play orchestrally--juggling several balls, having lots of layers of stuff going on," he says. Yet even at its most complex, his playing never sounds premeditated: it is as though each song is being spontaneously composed, on the spot and in the moment.

For more information, go here.

Posted May 01, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Every journalist is haunted by the spectre of Himself Repeated."

Neville Cardus, Autobiography

Posted May 01, 12:00 AM