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June 29, 2007

DANCE

Pilobolus Dance Theatre (Joyce Theatre, 175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St., July 16-Aug. 11). Half modern dance, half gymnastics, frequently amusing, often enthralling, always watchable. Three different programs this summer, including three new dances and revivals of such favorites as "Day Two" (the company's wildly sexy signature piece), "Pseudopodia," and "Walklyndon" (TT).

Posted June 29, 10:24 AM

TT: A touch of ambrosia

In this week's Wall Street Journal I report on two Shakespeare productions, one in New York and one in Washington, plus a rare revival of John Van Druten's Old Acquaintance:

The best show in town this month is in Central Park. The Public Theater's outdoor version of "Romeo and Juliet" is contemporary in flavor, visually striking, crisply staged and emotionally direct--everything, in short, that a Shakespeare in the Park production should be, right down to the no-holds-barred swordplay. It also marks the arrival of a new star in the theatrical sky: Lauren Ambrose, lately of "Six Feet Under," who made a strong Broadway debut in last year's revival of "Awake and Sing" and now confirms that she is an extravagantly gifted stage actress whose potential appears to be unlimited....

Unlike the Public's "Romeo and Juliet," the Shakespeare Theatre Company's modern-dress "Hamlet" is sabotaged by its youth-friendly, obtrusively clever high concept: It's all about teen angst. Director Michael Kahn gives us a pouty blond Prince of Denmark (Jeffrey Carlson) who whines his way from scene to scene, brandishing a bottle of pills (Prozac, no doubt) as he lurches into his soliloquy on suicide. Earlier we see him reading A. Alvarez's "The Savage God: A Study of Suicide," a directorial touch that deserves some sort of prize for pretentiousness....

John Van Druten is one of the forgotten men of American theater. Twenty of his plays opened on Broadway between 1925 and 1952, but until now none of them has been revived there, not even such long-running hits as "The Voice of the Turtle" or "I Remember Mama." Now the Roundabout Theatre Company has exhumed "Old Acquaintance," a 1940 comedy that was bought by Hollywood three years later and turned into an unmemorable vehicle for Bette Davis. I went to see it mainly out of curiosity--but stayed to cheer. Far from being a musty old relic, "Old Acquaintance" is a fabulously well-made play that has lost nothing of its freshness and bite....

No free link. You know what to do. Buy today's paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to my column and the rest of the Journal's arts coverage. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted June 29, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved."

José Ortega y Gasset, "In Search of Goethe from Within"

Posted June 29, 12:00 AM

June 28, 2007

TT: One little word

To all the people who thought they read this post: I said you couldn't pay me to see most of them. What makes you think you know which ones I had in mind?

Posted June 28, 11:24 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

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

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

BROADWAY:
• 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)
• 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)
• 110 in the Shade * (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here, extended through July 29)
• 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:
• Beyond Glory (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here, closes July 7)

Posted June 28, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Summer afternoon--summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."

Henry James (quoted in Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance)

Posted June 28, 12:00 AM

June 27, 2007

TT: Lacunae

I was very briefly diverted by the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best American movies, but I couldn't stay interested long enough to write a full-fledged posting. It's a safe, middlebrow-earnest big-money canon, even by the standards of Hollywood, though I was no less struck by how many first-rate popular films went unmentioned and, presumably, unregretted. (Where, for instance, is Roman Holiday? Or To Have and Have Not? Or Who Framed Roger Rabbit?)

I haven't seen 26 of the films:

4. "Raging Bull," 1980
7. "Lawrence of Arabia," 1962
8. "Schindler's List," 1993
11. "City Lights," 1931
30. "Apocalypse Now," 1979
33. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," 1975
41. "King Kong," 1933
43. "Midnight Cowboy," 1969
49. "Intolerance," 1916
50. "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," 2001
53. "The Deer Hunter," 1978
57. "Rocky," 1976
59. "Nashville," 1975 (I couldn't get past the songs)
62. "American Graffiti," 1973
66. "Raiders of the Lost Ark," 1981
67. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", 1966 (no, but I saw the play!)
70. "A Clockwork Orange," 1971
78. "Modern Times," 1936
81. "Spartacus," 1960
82. "Sunrise," 1927
86. "Platoon," 1986
91. "Sophie's Choice," 1982
95. "The Last Picture Show," 1971 (I started it but lost interest)
96. "Do the Right Thing," 1989
97. "Blade Runner," 1982
99. "Toy Story," 1995

The only one that I truly regret never having seen is Raging Bull, though I can't imagine anyone seriously regarding it as the fourth greatest American film ever made. As for the others, you couldn't pay me to see most of them.

For the record, here are my ten favorite films on the list:

1. "Citizen Kane"
5. "Singin' in the Rain"
9. "Vertigo"
12. "The Searchers"
16. "Sunset Blvd."
21. "Chinatown"
28. "All About Eve"
29. "Double Indemnity"
55. "North by Northwest"
61. "Sullivan's Travels"

Posted June 27, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Professor at the Breakfast-Table

Posted June 27, 12:00 AM

June 26, 2007

TT: Touched by a meme

Mr. Parabasis has tagged me:

• Name your area of expertise/interest. That's a tough one. Some would argue that I have no area of expertise! On reflection, though, I'd have to say that it's criticism in general (though there was a time when I would have said music).

• How did you become interested in it? The first critics to whose work I paid serious attention were the ones who were reviewing records for Stereo Review and High Fidelity (both defunct, alas) back in the early Seventies. The first full-fledged Big Name in criticism whom I read closely and attentively was Edmund Wilson, whose Classics and Commercials and The Bit Between My Teeth made a lasting impression on me a couple of years after that.

• How did you learn how to do it? At first by imitating Wilson, and I also learned a lot from Whitney Balliett and Virgil Thomson a little later on.

Mainly, though, I learned by doing. I started covering classical music and jazz for the Kansas City Star in 1977, when I was still an undergraduate. Writing short reviews on tight deadlines for a big-city newspaper is a good way--maybe the best way--for a young critic to learn the basics of his trade.

• Who has been your biggest influence? Fairfield Porter, I hope!

Some other critics who've left their marks on me are Edwin Denby, Otis Ferguson, Clement Greenberg, Randall Jarrell, H.L. Mencken, and George Orwell.

• What would you teach people about it? I've taught numerous classes and seminars in criticism, and I always give my students the following pieces of advice:

Always treat artists with respect. Most of them know how to do something you can't do.

Don't be afraid to be wrong.

Don't be afraid to be enthusiastic!

I tag Our Girl, Carrie, Chloe, Heather, and Maud.

Posted June 26, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

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

Oscar Wilde, letter to the Scots Observer (Aug. 16, 1890)

Posted June 26, 12:00 AM

June 25, 2007

TT: Sorry about that

I decided a little while ago to see whether our spam filter was working properly, and found four legitimate pieces of e-mail floating among 809 pieces of commercial kudzu that turned up in this mailbox in the past week. All four of those correspondents have since heard from me.

Apologetic memo to anyone who's written to me in recent weeks without receiving a reply: I've turned down the filter one notch to see how much junk mail will henceforth slip through. Please try again!

Posted June 25, 9:21 PM

TT: Sunrise, sunset

Kyra Nichols, the prima ballerina assoluta of New York City Ballet, hung up her toe shoes last Friday. She danced with the company for thirty-three years, all the way back to the fast-receding days of George Balanchine. Except for Darci Kistler, she is the last NYCB dancer to have worked with Balanchine, the greatest choreographer of the twentieth century.

I've been watching Nichols from afar ever since I started looking at ballet in 1987. Throughout that time she has been my touchstone of excellence. I saw Suzanne Farrell dance a few times prior to her retirement in 1989, but her performing career was essentially over by then, whereas Nichols was only just reaching the peak of her powers. As I wrote in All in the Dances, my Balanchine biography, it was Nichols "who first showed me exactly how beautiful George Balanchine's dances can be." At a time when the company was struggling to find its way in the painful wake of Balanchine's death, she continued to dance with a simplicity, clarity, and perfection of style unrivaled by any of her colleagues, and she kept on doing it until the curtain fell on Friday night.

I was lucky enough to see Farrell's last performance, and will never forget the endless curtain calls and the shower of white roses with which her fans bid her farewell. Back then I was going to the New York State Theater once or twice a week, and was totally wrapped up in the life of the company. Now I spend most of my evenings sitting on other aisles. Still, I knew I had to be there, just as I'd been there eighteen years before, when the ballerina who has meant more to me than any other vanished forever into the wings.

In 1989 I was writing editorials for the New York Daily News, and my editor gave me a couple of inches at the end of the column to pay tribute to Farrell on the occasion of her retirement. I quoted from Cymbeline: Nobly he yokes/A smiling with a sigh, as if the sigh/Was that it was, for not being such a smile;/The smile mocking the sigh, that it would fly/From so divine a temple. Sir Edward Elgar wrote the words "smiling with a sigh" over a piercingly nostalgic passage in his Introduction and Allegro, and that was the feeling I sought to evoke by quoting the same words.

I felt the same way on Friday, only more so, since Nichols, unlike Farrell, played a pivotal role in my life-changing discovery of the genius of Balanchine. For this reason I was especially glad that the all-Balanchine program, chosen by Nichols herself, opened with Serenade, the 1934 ballet in which Balanchine first unfolded his vision of dance before American audiences. To quote again from All in the Dances:

It is, above all, a dance about dance, about the beauty of pure movement. Though the soloists each have their moments of glory, what one remembers above all is the unceasing sweep of the corps, swirling atop Tchaikovsky's music like a flock of doves. It's as if the soul of a nineteenth-century story ballet had somehow been lifted out of its rigid framework of plot and décor and given a life of its own. Breathtakingly specific "scenes" emerge from the constant swirl of movement like episodes in a dream. A ballerina lies prone at center stage, surrounded by five ranks of women who lift and lower their arms in ritual fashion. What does it mean? No one knows, nor did Balanchine ever explain the "little apotheosis" of the elegy, in which a woman whose lover (if he is her lover) has been taken away by an angel (if she is an angel) is solemnly lifted into the air by a group of blue-clad boys and carried in a procession whose apparent destination is a bright light that might be heaven (or fame, or love). One can make up any number of "plots" for Serenade, all equally plausible-sounding and none of which explains its impenetable mysteries.

Next came Robert Schumann's "Davidsbündlertänze," made just three years before the choreographer's death, a darkly expressionistic parable of love, madness, and loss about which I wrote in the late, lamented The New Dance Review in 1992. It was the first time I had written about Balanchine's work, and the first time I tried to put into words the effect that Nichols' dancing had on me:

Perhaps not surprisingly, Nichols' classicism is taking on a touch of drama as she grows older; her emotional palette is growing steadily richer and more diverse. When she danced Karin von Aroldingen's role in Robert Schumann's "Davidsbündlertänze" this winter, Nichols' face was a taut mask of anguish, her gaze that of a woman haunted by foreknowledge of tragedy to come. At the final curtain, as Adam Lüders slipped off into the encroaching darkness, it was impossible to look away from her strong white back, bent by the hand of fate....It is as if she has suddenly come to feel that there is something at stake in her dancing, something beyond even the resplendent glory of a fully achieved classicism.

Nichols is forty-eight, and in recent seasons her dancing has started to show the inexorable effects of age. Never, to be sure, in an obvious or embarrassing way: it was lessened but not diminished. Even so, you could tell that she was older, and that her career was drawing toward its close. In last Friday's Davidsbündlertänze, though, the years fell miraculously away, and she danced like a much younger woman, the same woman at whom I so clearly remember marveling in the late Eighties and early Nineties. It was as though she had decided on the spot to give us all that was left in her.

Then came the finale of Vienna Waltzes, the same ballet with which Farrell took her leave of NYCB, and after it a standing ovation that went on for twelve minutes. Twenty years of memories washed over me, and I wept unashamedly, though not for Nichols, who is by all accounts a likable, level-headed woman and will doubtless be perfectly content to teach ballet at Princeton and raise her children. "I've had such a wonderful career," she told an interviewer last week, "and I'm leaving at a good time....I danced a lot, I think I've danced well, and I was starting to love being with my family more."

I wept, rather, for lost time, for the quickness with which the present becomes the past, the very evanescence that is the essence of dance itself. Paintings can be hung on your wall, music heard on your stereo, but dance exists only in the moment and in the imperfect memories of those who make and see it. It is notoriously unfilmable (though the 1993 film of Balanchine's version of The Nutcracker, in which Nichols dances the role of Dewdrop, offers a vivid and representative glimpse of what she looked like in her prime). Balanchine himself used to say that ballets were like flowers: "Dancing disintegrates. Like a garden. Lots of roses come up, and in the evening they're gone. Next day, the sun comes up. It's life. I'm connected to what is part of life."

So he was--but so, too, are we. In the first intermission Apollinaire Scherr introduced me to Ms. Swan Lake Samba Girl, an enthusiastic young blogger who recently fell in love with Balanchine's choreography. Nichols' last Serenade was her first, and the visible excitement with which she responded to what she'd just seen reminded me of what I wrote in the last chapter of All in the Dances:

"You know, these are my ballets," Balanchine told Rosemary Dunleavy, New York City Ballet's ballet mistress. "In the years to come they will be rehearsed by other people. They will be danced by other people. But no matter what, they are still my ballets." Of all the self-contradictory things he said about his work, that one seems to me closest to the truth....I have taken countless friends to see their first Balanchine ballets, in New York and elsewhere, and watched them weep at the sight of blurry, infirm performances far removed from the way such works look when lovingly set by first-string répétiteurs on meticulously rehearsed companies. That's as it should be: Balanchine's best ballets are sturdy enough to make their effect in any kind of performance. Whether the dancing is good or bad, accurate or approximate, they are still his ballets, and always will be.

Of course it was hard to part with Kyra Nichols, a great artist whose art I have been blessed to behold for the past twenty years. I will miss her terribly. But it consoles me to have seen at first hand the proof of Balanchine's wise words: each night the roses die, and each morning the sun comes up again. Even when we are no longer there to see it for ourselves, there will always be someone else seeing it for the first time, and marveling anew at its fierce brightness and transforming warmth.

UPDATE: To see photos of Nichols' farewell performance taken from the wings of the New York State Theater, go here.

Posted June 25, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"It is a curious thing, he thought, that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste. Nanny told me of a Heaven that was full of angels playing harps; the Communists tell me of an earth full of leisured and contented factory hands."

Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags (courtesy of Dr. Weevil)

Posted June 25, 12:00 AM

June 24, 2007

BOOK

Andrew Ferguson, Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America (Atlantic Monthly Press, $24). This is not a biography of Abraham Lincoln, much less a scholarly monograph, but a kind of intellectual travel book, an account of the author's visits to Lincoln-related sites and events across America, in the course of which he meets a wildly diverse assortment of Lincoln-lovers and Abe-haters, most of them eccentric in degrees varying from mildly aberrant to near-pathological. Everything he sees and everyone he encounters along the way is described with an engaging combination of dry, sly wit and what can only be described as empathy (TT).

Posted June 24, 6:36 PM

PLAY

Beyond Glory (Laura Pels Theatre, 111 W. 46, through Aug. 19). Stephen Lang's fire-eating portrayal of eight recipients of the Medal of Honor has finally made it to New York two years after I saw it at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. "Mr. Lang's one-man play is no simple-minded piece of flag-waving," I wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2005. "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." All still true. This one is an absolute must (TT).

Posted June 24, 6:33 PM

June 22, 2007

TT: Southern fried gothic

Today's Wall Street Journal drama column contains the first fruit of my recent travels, a rave review of a rare revival of Tobacco Road by Triad Stage, a company based in Greensboro, N.C. I also review the New York premiere of Stephen Lang's Beyond Glory and a production of Pirates! (an updated version of The Pirates of Penzance) at Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J.:

Why did "Tobacco Road" disappear from American stages? Now that I've finally seen it, I haven't a clue, for it turns out to be an immensely powerful piece of theatrical goods. Needless to say, some of the impact of the original 1932 production must have derived from the fact that few New York playgoers then knew anything whatsoever about the poverty-wracked corner of America that Erskine Caldwell and Jack Kirkland portrayed so frankly. But "Tobacco Road," unlike "Inherit the Wind," is not a sniggeringly condescending travelogue about life in the hookworm-and-incest belt of the Deep South. It combines humor and horror to strikingly modern effect, and its unattractive characters are portrayed with an unsentimental sympathy that fills the viewer with pity....

It took long enough, but "Beyond Glory," Stephen Lang's fire-eating portrayal of eight recipients of the Medal of Honor, has finally opened Off Broadway two years after I saw it at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. "Mr. Lang's one-man play is no simple-minded piece of flag-waving," I wrote in this space in 2005. "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." I went back to see it again last week, and I stand by every word of my original review....

Purists who believe that "Pirates" is perfect as is should note that Arthur Sullivan's elegantly Mendelssohnian score has been rewritten by John McDaniel in the manner of a Broadway musical, W.S. Gilbert's witty libretto has been rewritten by Nell Benjamin (lately of "Legally Blonde") in the manner of a Three Stooges short, and Gordon Greenberg's staging is loud, frenetic and nudgingly naughty. At first I bristled, but then I gave in, went with the flow and ended up having a fine time, in part because of the ever-gratifying presence of Farah Alvin, one of New York's very best musical-comedy singers, whose voice, as always, is brilliant and true....

No free link. Pick up a copy of this morning's Journal to read the complete review, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to my column and all the rest of the Journal's extensive arts coverage. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted June 22, 12:00 AM

TT: What young audiences want

In this week's "Sightings" column, published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I report on Goldstar Events, a California-based discount ticket service that uses innovative new Web-based technology to sell half-price fine-arts tickets to under-40 buyers who don't normally make a habit of going to the opera, the ballet, or the theater.

What's Goldstar's secret--and what lessons can it teach to cash-strapped performing groups and presenters? To find out, pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal and turn to the "Pursuits" section.

Posted June 22, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Irene sporadically reviewed novels and poetry, and although she wasn't professionally affiliated with any particular magazine or publication, her reviews tended to cluster in The Village Voice and The New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review, an impressive résumé that might have suggested her opinion was valuable and worth cultivating, an implication belied by her unqualified championing of purple-prosy memoirish semiliterate 'novels' by minority, lesbian, or otherwise disadvantaged women, and her ecstatic spasms of devotion for 'feminist' poets like my mother, whom she had recently dubbed, without a trace of irony, 'Walt Whitman with a womb' in The Voice.

"My mother, to her own discredit, had seen nothing to question in this praise, not a whiff of hyperbole or fatuity. The day it came out, I had been at her apartment, and had cringed through her side of the ensuing telephone conversation with Irene. 'Such high praise,' she'd said breathily, 'coming from such a brilliant critic. I'm actually weeping, Irene!' Her friendship with Irene itself betrayed this same lack of discrimination, a selective gullibility and glibness I had always found deplorable in her; she was so easily taken in by some things and some people, including herself."

Kate Christensen, Jeremy Thrane

Posted June 22, 12:00 AM

June 21, 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)
• 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)
• 110 in the Shade * (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here, extended through July 29)
• 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:
• LoveMusik * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:
• Crazy Mary (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes June 26)

CLOSING SOON:
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here, closes July 7)

Posted June 21, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Poor Sebastian. Whether I liked it or not, he and I were the same kind, sensitive plants who felt everything very strongly, our lily-white hands clasped to our frail chests, earnestly importuning: 'Lord, I do fear/Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year/My soul is all but out of me. Let fall/No burning leaf--prithee, let no bird call.' My old neighbor Dina Sandusky was another such teabag who hadn't steeped quite long enough in the pot. So was Felicia and so, come to think of it, were all the people I tended to attract, except Ted. In a science fiction movie, our species would have been depicted as gelatinous quivering forms with two giant rubber eyeballs on springs, gaping mouths with oversized taste buds, extruded bundles of nerve endings, our primary functions gustatory, aesthetic, contemplative, and emotional. What good were we? Maybe we served as processing plants for the psychic by-products of commerce, politics, advertising, technology, the excess emotions of Type-A super-achievers with no time to deal with such useless things themselves; their raw passions and inchoate yearnings left them and found us, blew across our inner landscapes, strummed the aeolian harps of our rib cages, caused seismic tremors in our brain pans."

Kate Christensen, Jeremy Thrane

Posted June 21, 12:00 AM

June 20, 2007

CD

Noël Coward at Las Vegas (DRG). In 1955 Noël Coward, who was past his playwriting prime, retrofitted himself as a cabaret singer, hired Peter Matz to arrange an evening's worth of his best show tunes, took himself to the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, and promptly became the hottest act in town. This live album, which documents his stage show, is a priceless document of Coward the singer-songwriter at the peak of his performing powers. The highlights include a high-speed version of "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" tossed off with dizzying nonchalance and a gleefully naughty rewrite of Cole Porter's "Let's Do It" whose updated lyrics are even more outrageous than the original: "Tennessee Williams, self-taught, does it/Kinsey with a deafening report does it/Let's do it, let's fall in love." That such arch japes went over big a half-century ago says a great deal about America then and now (TT).

Posted June 20, 4:42 PM

BOOK

Kate Christensen, Jeremy Thrane (Anchor, $13 paper). Sexual ventriloquism is the trickiest of literary stunts, and Kate Christensen didn't pull it off with complete success in her second novel, narrated by a 35-year-old kept man who gets dumped by his rich lover, a deeply closeted movie star. But even if you don't quite buy the eponymous Thrane as a believably gay man, you'll still find yourself disarmed and enthralled by the sharply observant wit of this smart yet heartfelt chronicle of life in Manhattan's fast lane. Christensen's fourth novel, The Great Man, will be published in August. I'm soooo there (TT).

Posted June 20, 4:42 PM

TT: Among the clouds

Nostalgia is incommunicable. Try as we might, we cannot share it with those who stand outside the magic circle of common memories. So I can't tell you what it really felt like for me to drive through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on Monday morning, or to walk along the main street of Gatlinburg, the Tennessee resort town where my family spent several of its summer vacations some forty-odd years ago. Even if you'd been with me, you wouldn't have seen what I saw from the Sky Lift whose swinging yellow chairs look down on the town, or smelled what I smelled when I walked into the Ole Smoky Candy Kitchen in search of chocolate taffy logs. What I saw and smelled was, of course, myself when young, and you didn't know me then, back in the days when I was a nearsighted nine-year-old brat with close-cropped hair who wasn't any good at sports and spent all his spare time reading.

I went to the Smokies to see a show, and I had perfectly good reasons for seeing it, but I can't deny that one of the secondary reasons why I happened to choose that particular show was that it was being performed in Cherokee, the North Carolina town at the other end of the road that runs through the Smoky Mountains to Gatlinburg. It's a twisty, ear-popping trip full of hairpin turns and scenic overlooks, and I savored every mile of it--but did I see what was there, or what I remembered? I don't know for sure, since I remembered most of what I saw, or thought I did.

The only thing that took me by surprise was the suddenness with which the deep green stillness of the mountains gives way to the crowded bustle of Gatlinburg. Remember the moment in Who Framed Roger Rabbit when Bob Hoskins pops out of the tunnel that leads to Toontown? That's exactly what it felt like. All at once I was surrounded by corn dogs and miniature-golf courses and seedy motels whose neon signs say either YES or NO (the word "vacancy" is taken for granted in Gatlinburg). Some of those motels are older than I am, though most of them came along later, as did most of the stores that line the street that runs through the center of town. The Sky Lift and the Ole Smoky Candy Kitchen are the only remaining places that I'm absolutely sure I visited as a child, and they haven't changed a bit.

My brother, who brings his family to Gatlinburg every summer or two, suggested that I dine at Pancake Pantry. He knows all about food, so I took his advice, lunching on eight-inch-long pigs-in-a-blanket and ambrosially greasy-crisp hash browns that reeked of onions. "You want sweet tea with that, honey?" my waitress asked. Nobody in New York ever asks if I want sweet tea with my meal, or calls me honey. The truth is that I don't like sweet tea. In Manhattan I always ask for lime with my unsweetened iced tea, and once in a while I get it. But in Gatlinburg I knew the proper answer to the waitress' question, and unhesitatingly gave it: "Sure would, ma'am. Thank you!"

One must not tarry long in the precincts of one's youth. I paid my check, rode the Sky Lift, sent a garish picture postcard to a blogfriend in San Francisco, ordered a pound of taffy logs to be shipped to my brother, and hit the road. This time the explosion took place in reverse: no sooner did I drive into the park than the color and noise of Gatlinburg fell away from me like a now-useless second skin.

I wasn't quite done with childhood, though. I made one more stop on the way back to Cherokee, pulling off the main park road and heading up the side of Clingmans Dome, the highest peak in the Great Smokies, driving through low-lying clouds to a parking lot that is six thousand feet above sea level. At the far end of the lot is a trailhead that leads to a concrete observation tower located at the summit. The half-mile climb to the tower is steep enough, and the air thin enough, that guidebooks warn visitors with a history of heart trouble to proceed with care. That's me in spades, and perhaps I should have turned around and left, but I had something to prove, so I got out of the car and started walking--carefully. Ten minutes later a thunderstorm rolled over Clingmans Dome and soaked me to the skin. I cursed myself for not having brought an umbrella, but it never occurred to me to turn back. I was committed.

In due course I made it to the observation tower, breathing heavily but not wheezing, and joined the knot of soggy hikers huddled together under the concrete canopy.

"That was some walk, huh?" one of them said to me.

"I was ten years old the last time I did it," I replied. "It's a lot longer now!"

It was a lot shorter as I slogged back down the trail, cold, wet, exhausted, and about as happy as it's possible for a human being to be. Not bad for a fifty-one-year-old man who had to call an ambulance for himself a year and a half ago, I said to myself, and laughed out loud. "We shall never be again as we were," Henry James assured us in The Wings of the Dove. You know what? The old boy was wrong--at least for the space of a few joyous minutes in the middle of a rainy June day.

The next morning I breakfasted on chicken-fried steak and grits, checked out of my Holiday Inn, and drove to Mingo Falls, about which my brother had told me on my last visit to Smalltown, U.S.A. The trailhead is unmarked, so you have to know where you're going in order to get there, and you have to be in reasonably good shape to reach the falls, since the trail consists of a five-minute walk up a near-vertical flight of wooden stairs. It's worth it, though, because once you reach the end of the trail, you pass over a footbridge that leads to a 150-foot waterfall of the utmost splendor and complexity. I wish I could paint this, I thought as I looked upon it for the first time, knowing perfectly well that no painter, however gifted, could possibly do justice to the clamorous, ever-changing spectacle of a mountain waterfall in full flow.

In the presence of such natural beauties, most men are reduced to clichés, and the one that flashed through my mind as I gazed at Mingo Falls was no less true for being obvious: I may never pass this way again. I don't know when I'll return to the Smokies, if ever, and should I be lucky enough to do so, it may be that the climb to the falls will have become more than my aging body can safely manage. So it was with great reluctance that I finally started back down the trail, knowing that I'd seen something I'd never forget and grateful that I'd taken the time and trouble to see it.

From there it was downhill all the way--in more ways than one. I spent the better part of Tuesday afternoon sitting on a runway in Charlotte, sipping lukewarm water and doing my best not to let the vagaries of postmodern air travel gnaw too deeply into the remembered pleasures of the past few days. It wasn't very hard, for I had nowhere to go but home, no one to see, no connections to make, no special reason to be doing anything in particular. Unable to rush back to my everyday life (which I dearly love), I sat back in my seat, closed my eyes, and let myself spend a few more minutes eavesdropping on the whispers of friendly ghosts.

Posted June 20, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

When I am sad and weary,
When I think all hope has gone,
When I walk along High Holborn
I think of you with nothing on.

Adrian Mitchell, "Celia Celia"

Posted June 20, 12:00 AM

June 19, 2007

CD

110 in the Shade (PS Classics). The original-cast recording of the Roundabout Theatre Company's small-scale revival of the 1963 Tom Jones-Harvey Schmidt musical version of The Rainmaker, starring Audra McDonald as a plain Jane from rural Texas who longs for love. McDonald's performance is every bit as sensational as you've heard, but the show itself is the real star: the score is by turns wistful, sprightly and warmly lyrical. If you've never heard it and can't get to Studio 54 before it closes on July 29, this CD will give you a good idea of what you've been missing all these years (TT).

Posted June 19, 11:40 PM

TT: Next stop, home

I'm traveling today. See you tomorrow!

Posted June 19, 7:33 AM

TT: Almanac

He served his God so faithfully and well
That now he sees him face to face, in hell.

Hilaire Belloc, "On a Puritan"

Posted June 19, 12:00 AM

June 18, 2007

TT: One for the road

Writers spend much of their lives alone at a desk, and some of them take to it more easily than others. I'm a reasonably gregarious soul, but decades of silent, solitary labor have created in me a need for privacy that sits awkwardly alongside the conditions of my everyday life. Not only do I make my home on the Upper West Side of New York, a city known the world over for its ceaseless hum and buzz of cultural possibility, but most nights I can be found in a crowded theater, accompanied by a friend and surrounded by colleagues. Mind you, I wouldn't have it any other way. Rarely does a day go by without my marveling at my good fortune. Still, there are times when it gets to be too much of a muchness--too much art, too many people, too much buzz--and all at once I find myself wishing I was anywhere but here.

Fortunately, my job provides an antidote to its own poison, for I cover regional theater in addition to reviewing plays on and off Broadway, and from time to time I make a point of arranging things so that my professional travels take me farther than usual from the better-beaten paths. Last Thursday, for instance, I flew to Washington, D.C., changed planes at Dulles for North Carolina, and ended up in Greensboro, a smallish city where I'd never been. The official reason for my presence there was to review Triad Stage's revival of Tobacco Road, which hasn't been performed anywhere in America for the past quarter-century, but my secondary purpose in going to Greensboro was to get away from it all.

I didn't travel much in the Eighties and Nineties--the mere act of moving to New York from the Midwest seemed for a time to have satisfied all my travel-related needs--but now I revel in it. I love planning complicated itineraries, packing my small wheeled bag, changing planes and renting cars and checking into hotels. Most of all, though, I love the delicious moment when I pull the plug on my iBook, turn off my cell phone, and head out the door, happily aware that for the next few hours, nobody in the world will know exactly where I am.

I'm sure the pleasure I derive from these temporary periods of inaccessibility has something to do with the fact that I work for a newspaper, meaning that I must live by the clock and calendar, hitting regular deadlines and checking in with my editors at more or less regular intervals. To be completely out of touch with them, even for the length of a single day, is a dish that never grows stale.

I spent most of last Thursday and Friday with the plug pulled. I picked up a rental car at the Greensboro airport, drove to my downtown hotel, and walked from there to 223 South Elm, a restaurant across the street from the theater, where I ate an exceptionally good dinner (crabcakes and collard greens, mmmmm) while listening to a local trumpeter and guitarist play "Ask Me Now" and "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" very well indeed. On the way to the restaurant, I strolled by a plaque honoring the inventor of Vicks VapoRub and looked with wonder at the old Woolworth store where, forty-seven years ago, four black students seated themselves at the whites-only lunch counter, asked to be served, and changed the world. At intermission I ran into a classmate whom I hadn't seen in thirty years--the South is a small place--but otherwise I kept to myself.

The next morning I checked my e-mail and drove to Raleigh, where I had breakfast with Robert Weiss of Carolina Ballet. Then I spent five ecstatic hours heading east on Highway 64 with the windows rolled down and the radio turned up. Somewhere along the way I pulled off the road to eat at a cheerful little place called the Country Sunrise Grill and B-B-Q, operating on the assumption that it ought to be easy to find good barbecue, hushpuppies, and cole slaw in a town called Tarboro (pop. 11,138). I was right.

At afternoon's end I crossed the long bridge that leads from the mainland to Roanoke Island, where the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site commemorates the 115 English colonists who sailed to America in 1587, made camp on the island, and were never seen again. I went there to review The Lost Colony, Paul Green's 1937 outdoor drama about the colonists, and--just as important--to be utterly alone. I spent the night at Tranquil House Inn, a pleasant, well-kept place overlooking the waterfront, and after the show I sat on the balcony, gazed at the boats below me and the black, starry sky overhead, and felt myself unwind.

On Saturday, alas, I spent nine grisly hours making what was supposed to have been a six-hour-long drive from Roanoke Island to Washington, D.C., where I met Ms. Asymmetrical Information at the Shakespeare Theatre for a performance of Hamlet, having hit town too late to join her for dinner. (Traffic can really hang you up the most.) The next day, though, I went straight back to North Carolina, flying down to Asheville on a puddle-jumper to dine with Ms. Tingle Alley and her husband, after which I drove over to Cherokee, the tiny town on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park where I spent the night. My planes were on time, my dinner companions delightful, my meal amazing. If anyone in Asheville ever invites you to dine at Salsa's Mexican-Caribbean Restaurant, say yes instantly.

Today I plan to wander idly in Gatlinburg, the Tennessee tourist town where I summered as a child, and take in another outdoor drama, Unto These Hills. Tomorrow I return to Manhattan to write two pieces, see three shows, read my mail, and do my laundry. By then I'll doubtless want to be home again and back in touch. For the moment, though, I'm still glad to be far from Manhattan, living out of an overstuffed carry-on bag and enjoying the uncomplicated pleasures of being on the road.

Posted June 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

You write with ease, to shew your breeding;
But easy writing's vile hard reading.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, "Clio's Protest"

Posted June 18, 12:00 AM

June 15, 2007

TT: They've got possibilities

This week's Wall Street Journal drama column is an off-Broadway affair. I review Alan Ayckbourn's Intimate Exchanges and Neil LaBute's In a Dark Dark House:

Alan Ayckbourn is a major artist disguised as a commercial playwright. In this country he is widely regarded as the English Neil Simon, an ultra-reliable purveyor of well-made comedies for suburbanites, and only a handful of his 70-odd plays have been produced on or near Broadway. But those who were lucky enough to see "Private Fears in Public Places" at the 2005 Brits Off Broadway festival, or the film that Alain Resnais made out of it last year, know that Mr. Ayckbourn's "comedies" of middle-class life are deadly serious and, more often than not, darkly melancholy. Would that more of them were produced in New York! Fortunately, Brits Off Broadway is now bringing us the American premiere of "Intimate Exchanges," a cycle of eight head-bangingly funny plays that leaves no possible doubt of Mr. Ayckbourn's seriousness--or his ingenuity.

All eight plays draw on the same cast of 10 characters, all of whom are played by two actors (Bill Champion and Claudia Elmhirst). All of the plays start the same way, with a woman strolling into her garden on a sunny June day and trying to decide whether or not to smoke a cigarette. The best possible explanation of what happens next is Mr. Ayckbourn's own, supplied in a letter he wrote to his agent in 1982: "Mathematically it works that after about five seconds after curtain up, we go into a choice of first scenes. These two first scenes lead in turn to a choice of four second scenes. These again lead to the interval and a choice of eight third scenes which start the second act. Finally, these eight scenes themselves divide for a series of 10-15 minute last scenes of which there are 16 in all."

What sounds impossibly complicated on paper turns out to be perfectly transparent on stage. The six main characters are a trio of suburban couples (two married, one not) who have reached turning points in their increasingly unsatisfying lives. Mr. Ayckbourn sends them down a series of divergent plot paths that lead to 16 different endings, some happy and others not....

How long do you get to be promising? Neil LaBute has been writing a play a year since 2000, and "In a Dark Dark House," the latest of his dramatic studies of men behaving badly, is no better or worse than most of its predecessors, with which it shares a now-familiar catalogue of virtues and vices....

No free link. Pick up a copy of today's Journal to read the whole thing, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my column and all the rest of the Journal's extensive arts coverage. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted June 15, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life."

Elizabeth Asquith Bibesco, Balloons

Posted June 15, 12:00 AM

June 14, 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)
• 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:
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here, closes July 7)
• Crazy Mary (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, extended through June 26)

Posted June 14, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

She said to me about American compositions: "There is a picture that one sees, a picture with an old man, and a man, and a little boy--they have drums and he a piccolo, and they are all ragged. I do not know its name."

I said, "It's called 'The Spirit of '76.'"

"The part that I like least in your American compositions is the part where these people come into the piece. Why should a piano concerto, or a ballet, or a description of how dawn comes over your American prairies, need always a little march with a piccolo?"

I said, "It's put into the piece to show that it's an American piece." Irene replied, "Ah, no doubt. It is like that little sign Made in America that one sees on objects--without it, perhaps, the piece could not be exported."

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

Posted June 14, 12:00 AM

June 13, 2007

TT: Will write for money

That's what I've been doing all day in between packing my bags. Tonight I'll be in New Jersey. (See next Friday's Wall Street Journal for details.) Tomorrow morning I cast off and set sail for Greensboro, North Carolina, followed by points north, east, and west, not in that order. Along the way I'll be seeing four shows, dining with Ms. Asymmetrical Information and Ms. Tingle Alley, and listening to new CDs in my rental car. And blogging. Maybe.

More from the road....

Posted June 13, 12:31 PM

TT: Almanac

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

Elmore Leonard, "Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing"

Posted June 13, 12:00 AM

June 12, 2007

TT: Well, sort of

I am, in theory, back in New York. The flies in the ointment number four:

(1) I spent twelve hours on the road yesterday and so am not entirely myself this morning.

(2) Neither is my iBook. The wonder-working women of Ms Mac are on their way over to my apartment at this very moment to pour Drano into its ports and make it happy again.

(3) Just in case the problem is more serious than it seems, I have to try to finish writing this week's Wall Street Journal drama column before they get here.

(4) I depart for North Carolina and Washington, D.C., on Thursday. Between now and then, I need to see two shows and do all the stuff I left undone last week in Smalltown, U.S.A.

For all these reasons, I can't promise that I'll be doing a whole lot of blogging between now and my departure. If that changes, though, you'll be the first to know....

Posted June 12, 8:20 AM

TT: Almanac

"One time, years ago, the veteran Baltimore newspaperman, H.L. Mencken, was checking copy coming in from the night editor and sighing at the rising number of errors he was noticing, errors of fact but also of syntax, and even some idioms that didn't sound quite right. He shook his head and said, as much to himself as to the editor at his side: 'The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.'"

Alistair Cooke, "Memories of the Great and the Good" (courtesy of George Will)

Posted June 12, 12:00 AM

June 11, 2007

TT: Almanac

"Beauty consists of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, by turns or all together, the era, its fashion, its morals, its passions."

Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

Posted June 11, 12:00 AM

June 8, 2007

TT: The lady vanishes

In this week's Wall Street Journal drama column, I report from New York on the premiere of A.R. Gurney's latest play, Crazy Mary, then look back to the last of the shows I saw during my recent swing through the Northeast, the Studio Theatre's revival of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in Washington, D.C.:

Comparisons between playwrights and novelists are almost always misleading, but I'd say it's more or less accurate to think of A.R. Gurney as the John P. Marquand of American drama. Like Marquand, Mr. Gurney writes about WASPs and their discontents, and his ruefully funny studies of a ruling class in decline are too often dismissed as trivial by critics who take no interest in the inner lives of the insufficiently underprivileged. Also like Marquand, he is prolific to a fault, and his work is as unevenly inspired as it is unfailingly professional. I've reviewed several of his plays in this space, always with pleasure--I like his best work very much--but rarely with outright enthusiasm. Thus I'm glad to report that "Crazy Mary," Mr. Gurney's new portrait of life among the white-bread set, is a highly impressive piece of work, a serious comedy that succeeds in wringing honest laughs out of an awkward subject.

The Mary in question is a middle-aged manic depressive (Kristine Nielsen) who has spent the past three decades stashed away in a high-priced Boston sanitarium to which her late father consigned her after she made the fatal mistake of sleeping with the gardener. In addition to being crazy, Mary is loaded--she inherited all her father's money--and when Lydia (Sigourney Weaver), Mary's second cousin once removed, becomes her legal guardian after a death in the family...well, you figure it out, if you can. Every twist in the plot of "Crazy Mary" took me by surprise, and none of them disappointed me in the slightest....

I'm spending the first part of the summer checking out regional productions of the plays of Tom Stoppard, whose "The Coast of Utopia" took New York by storm this past season. My most recent trip was to the Studio Theatre, which is putting on "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" as its contribution to "Shakespeare in Washington," the city-wide, season-long celebration of the Bard currently underway in the nation's capital. I've been hearing good things about the Studio Theatre for the past couple of years, and this revival confirmed them all. It's the best "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" I've ever seen on stage....

No free link. Pick up a copy of today's Journal to read my column, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to the and the rest of the Journal's arts coverage. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted June 08, 12:00 AM

TT: Handicapping the Tonys

No self-respecting New York-based drama critic can fail to take note of the annual Tony Awards, and in this week's "Sightings" column, published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I make a few predictions about who's likely to win what--and reflect on what, if anything, those likely victories will tell us about the current state of American theater.

To learn more, pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal and turn to the "Pursuits" section.

Posted June 08, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"In reading exam papers written by misled students, of both sexes, about this or that author, I have often come across such phrases--probably recollections from more tender years of schooling--as 'his style is simple' or 'his style is clear and simple' or 'his style is beautiful and simple' or 'his style is quite beautiful and simple.' But remember that 'simplicity' is buncombe. No major writer is simple. The Saturday Evening Post is simple. Journalese is simple. Upton Lewis is simple. Mom is simple. Digests are simple. Damnation is simple. But Tolstoys and Melvilles are not simple."

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (courtesy of The Rat)

Posted June 08, 12:00 AM

June 7, 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 SUNDAY:
• A Moon for the Misbegotten * (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes June 10)

Posted June 07, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Before I left home seven years ago I used to walk endlessly at night along the streets, tormented because there was a barrier between me and the steady solemn magnificence of those skies whose brilliance beat the thin little town into the soil. I saw them, but I was alien to them. This barrier is the urgent necessity of doing the next thing, of getting on with the business of living; whatever it is that drives us on. But on that first night there was no barrier, nothing; and I was effortlessly and at once in immediate intimacy with the soil and its creatures."

Doris Lessing, Going Home

Posted June 07, 12:00 AM

June 6, 2007

TT: Almanac

"Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much debris of cast-off and everyday clothing."

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Little Foxes

Posted June 06, 12:00 AM

June 5, 2007

OGIC: Notes on personnel

Terry reports that his computer has blown a gasket and his access to email for the next week will be intermittent if at all. Please plan accordingly.

For my part, I am slouching back toward blogging and will resume being part of the scenery around here presently.

Posted June 05, 6:31 PM

TT: Liftoff

I depart this morning for a long-overdue visit to Smalltown, U.S.A., where I plan to hang out with my family and do as little as possible.

I don't plan to blog from home. I'm overblogged, which feels not unlike being overcaffeinated. Except for the daily almanac entry and the usual weekly theater-related posts, you won't be hearing from me again until next Tuesday.

Later.

Posted June 05, 3:00 AM

TT: Between covers

Today is the publication date of New York Review Books' new paperback edition of Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, which features an introduction by me. I showed it to Maud Newton shortly after she wrote it, and she asked if she could post it on her blog, to which I assented happily. To read what I wrote about Dundy and her wonderful book, go here.

Kate Bolick recently interviewed Dundy for the Boston Globe. Go here to see what they had to say.

Posted June 05, 3:00 AM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

• In America, only pretty young women become movie stars. Middle-aged male actors who are unattractive--or at least Bogart-ugly--can and do play romantic leads, but no actress who is much short of beautiful or much older than thirty has much chance of seeing her name above the title of a big-budget movie, save as part of a package deal. This harsh reality is, of course, a flagrant and fundamental contradiction of all that the members of the film industry hold most politically dear. I sometimes wonder whether one of the reasons why Hollywood is so liberal might be that its male inhabitants are secretly ashamed of the sexual double standard by which they live. They will sign any petition, contribute lavishly to any sympathetic-sounding candidate, perform any act of political penance--anything, in fact, but sleep with an ordinary-looking woman of a certain age, much less cast her as the love interest in a major motion picture.

• Speaking of double standards, I've been reading The Land Where the Blues Began, a memoir by Alan Lomax, the white musicologist who spent a half-century touring the Deep South making field recordings of black blues singers. Lomax truly loved the blues, but there was more to it than that, as he acknowledged in his book:

I strolled along, wrapped in my envelope of Anglo-Saxon shyness and superiority. We had grabbed off everything, I thought, we owned it all--money, land, factories, shiny cars, nice houses--yet these people, confined to their shacks and their slums, really possessed America; they alone, of the pioneers who cleared the land, had learned how to enjoy themselves in this big, lonesome continent; they were the only full-blown Americans.

Somehow I doubt it ever occurred to Lomax--who was, as it happens, a Communist fellow traveler--that his self-flagellating praise of the joys of working-class black life was at bottom every bit as condescending as the happy-darkies stereotypes he held in such deserved contempt.

Posted June 05, 12:00 AM

TT: New leaves

Yesterday's new piece of music was Darius Milhaud's First Symphony, Op. 43, subtitled "Printemps." It was composed in 1918 and recorded for Koch Schwann in 1990 by Karl Anton Rickenbacher and Capella Cracoviensis.

("Printemps" is the first of Milhaud's six three-movement "little symphonies," each of which is roughly five minutes long.)

Posted June 05, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I have a talent for silence and brevity. I can keep silent when it seems best to do so, and when I speak I can, and do usually, quit when I am done. This talent, or these two talents, I have cultivated. Silence and concise, brief speaking have got me some laurels, and, I suspect, lost me some. No odds. Do what is natural to you, and you are sure to get all the recognition you are entitled to."

Rutherford B. Hayes, diary entry, Nov. 20, 1872

Posted June 05, 12:00 AM

June 4, 2007

TT: Elsewhere

• I've been meaning to link to this post by Chloe Veltman for some time now:

A group of six theatre people in San Francisco--Rob Avila (theatre critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian), Mark Jackson (director and co-founder of Art Street Theatre), Beth Wilmurt (actor, singer and co-founder of Art Street Theatre), John Wilkins (co-founder of Last Planet Theatre), Kimball Wilkins (ditto) and myself--had been mulling over how to get people within the community to talk to one another more. We wanted to inject a bit of fun and much-needed glamor into the local arts scene and make people reconnect with the reasons behind why they do their work and what it means in terms of the world at large.

So we decided to hold a Theatre Salon. We invited around 40 performing arts people including directors, actors, producers, critics etc to a gathering at Last Planet Theatre. John and Kimball spearheaded an amazing feast. Somehow we managed to cook a five-course, sit-down meal for everyone as well as coordinate entertainment....

It'll be interesting to see how these developing relationships with the people I write about as a critic affect my writing. I think that it can only nourish it for I always get a better understanding of the culture from talking to people about their work. I do not subscribe to the New York Times philosophy of criticism that says critics need to keep their distance from artists in order to remain objective. There is no such thing as objectivity. I have always been able to write honestly about artists I know. The reason this is possible is because I wouldn't be interested in hanging out with and getting to know anyone whose work was mediocre or who didn't have the intelligence to understand that my words as a critic--both positive and negative--essentially come from a place of love and respect. I believe this state of affairs makes it possible for me to both write honestly and engagingly about theatre.

I agree on all counts--and I wish I'd been there.

• Four years ago I posted the following reminiscence:

Back when I was a wee thing, one or two light years ago, an extremely smart smartass who edited the "Goings On About Town" section of The New Yorker got tired of writing new capsule summaries of The Fantasticks, which by that time had been running off Broadway since shortly before the birth of Christ. Much the same problem had manifested itself years before: Robert Benchley, who used to be The New Yorker's drama critic, got equally tired of writing capsule summaries of Abie's Irish Rose, the Fantasticks of the Thirties, and started coming up with cute one-liners like "No worse than a bad cold." Forty years later, Mr. Anonymous Smartass approached the problem differently. In place of summaries, he serialized Ulysses...one sentence at a time.

None of my readers remembered this, and I began to wonder whether I'd dreamed it. Now Ms. Emdashes has confirmed my vague recollection. Scroll down and read all about it.

• Speaking of magazines, the entire run of Time is now available on the Web in freely searchable form. To go hunting in the stacks, Google the phrase "Time magazine," followed by whatever you want to look up. It's positively astonishing what the editors of Time considered publishable once upon a time, as you'll discover by going here and here. (If you've never heard of the man mentioned in the second story, go here and sample his wares.)

• Courtesy of Ms. Asymmetrical Information, you can now see Salvador Dali's appearance as the mystery guest on What's My Line? by going here.

• This you've got to see. (Who on earth put it together?)

• Still more video: go here to watch Jim Hall, the greatest living jazz guitarist, playing "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You" in 1964...

• ...and here to watch Bud Powell playing "Get Happy" in 1959. (That's Kenny Clarke on drums.)

• Not quite for pianists only: this site contains PDF files of transcribed sheet-music versions of all of Vladimir Horowitz's piano arrangements, none of which he ever published. The transcribers took them down note for note from Horowitz's recordings. No, you can't play them, not unless you have eleven or twelve fingers, but they sure are interesting to see.

• Here's a newly posted audio snippet of the speaking voice of G.K. Chesterton.

To hear Chesterton read one of his poems, go here.

• Courtesy of Maud, here's another audio file of the speaking voice of an eminent Edwardian, W. Somerset Maugham. It comes from the soundtrack of Quartet, which was broadcast last week by Turner Classic Movies.

(Incidentally, if you know the URL of a similar online audio file of Max Beerbohm, please drop me an e-mail at once!)

• Finally, DVD Journal has a "Missing in Action" list of films that have yet to be released on DVD (or were available at one time but subsequently withdrawn). Readers are invited to submit their picks, and I did so. Can you guess which one is mine?

Posted June 04, 12:00 AM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

• The other day I assured a twentysomething friend of mine that once upon a time, art museums sought to raise the public to their level, rather than lowering themselves to the public's level. She looked pityingly at me and said, "How can you be so naïve? Everything's all about money."

• We are never so funny to others as when we are least funny to ourselves. This seeming paradox is the piston that drives the engine of comedy. In the greatest of all comedies--the Shakespearean tales of romantic reconciliation and their operatic counterparts, Verdi's Falstaff and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte--a pompous man's thick carapace of earnestness is penetrated by humiliation. All at once, the unwitting butt of the joke realizes that he, too, partakes of the human condition, and is thereby made whole. It is in these transformative moments that the moral force of comedy is most evident, for it reminds us that we are not gods, merely men.

That's one way to be funny. Another is to show us serious people who not only don't realize how funny they are but never acquire any insight into their condition, wrapped as they are in their own bulletproof dignity. This sheer obliviousness is what makes them funny to us, but it also tempts us to feel superior to them, and that is a dangerous business, an invitation to vanity.

It is also the reason why women as a group tend to squirm at pure farce, which is a peculiarly hopeless kind of comedy, one in which the dignified boob learns nothing from his elaborately prepared Calvary of embarrassment. Instead, he is utterly vanquished by the other characters--and by the audience. Most men naturally think in such triumphalist terms, but my impression is that most women don't. They want the victim (if he is a man) to learn from his misfortune, and be the better for it.

• Is there a more purely carefree record than Billie Holiday's Miss Brown to You? The emotions that musicians express through their art are radically ambiguous and almost never readily reduced to verbal paraphrase, but if Holiday, Cozy Cole, Roy Eldridge, Benny Goodman, John Kirby, John Trueheart, Ben Webster, and Teddy Wilson weren't having the time of their lives when they cut that 78 side in 1935, then I'm deaf. Just listen to the way Holiday sings "Don't you all git too familiar!" and see if it doesn't make you smile.

• Wallace Stevens once wrote a poem called "Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself." That's how I like my movies. I don't like sequels, remakes, homages, paraphrases, or ironic commentaries, least of all when they exude the stale smell of postmodernism, which is to art what theme parks are to county fairs.

Posted June 04, 12:00 AM

TT: New leaves

Last Friday's new piece of music was Anton Webern's Drei kleine Stücke, Op. 11, composed in 1914 and recorded for Sony by Gregor Piatigorsky and Charles Rosen.

(When Webern said "little," he meant little!)

Posted June 04, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"All biography is fiction, but fiction that has to fit the documented facts."

Donald Raysfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life

Posted June 04, 12:00 AM

June 1, 2007

TT: Coward in Beantown

More from the road: I review 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 in this week's Wall Street Journal theater column. The first is a somewhat mixed but basically good bag, the second a 100% winner:

Noël Coward never wrote a funnier play than "Present Laughter." So why does everybody do "Private Lives" instead? Because "Present Laughter" requires a cast of 11, an extremely fancy set, and an actor of the highest possible candlepower to play the showy star part that Coward wrote for himself. Only three other men have played Garry Essendine, the author's alter ego, on Broadway: Frank Langella, George C. Scott and Clifton Webb. Now Victor Garber is trying his hand at the role in a new production directed by Nicholas Martin for the Huntington Theatre Company, and Variety says that it "could have a future commercial life, depending on the availability of its star."

That means Broadway, where few straight plays can hope to be revived without the added luster of a Hollywood name. Mr. Garber, an old Broadway hand who spent the past five years playing opposite Jennifer Garner on ABC's "Alias," definitely fills the bill--but can he also fill the size-100 shoes of his predecessors? I'm not so sure, nor am I convinced that this production is quite ready for prime time.

The best thing about any production of "Present Laughter" is, of course, the play itself, a three-act farce that purports to show us the backstage life of an aging but still irresistible matinée idol. Garry Essendine resembles Coward in every way but one, which is that he (usually) prefers girls. Otherwise he is, as Coward acknowledged in later life, a self-portrait of the artist as monstre sacre...

Mr. Garber looks more like an exasperated uncle than a matinée idol, and for all the wit and precision of his performance, he isn't glamorous enough to be the Garry Essendine of anyone's dreams....

Across the river in Cambridge, the American Repertory Theatre is presenting the latest in a long and distinguished series of Harold Pinter revivals directed by David Wheeler. "No Man's Land" has been seen twice on Broadway, with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson and with Christopher Plummer and Jason Robards, and it is the highest possible tribute to Max Wright and Paul Benedict that their eloquent acting doesn't make you long to step into the Wayback Machine and set the controls for 1976 or 1994....

No free link. Get thee to a newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to my drama column and the rest of the Journal's arts coverage. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted June 01, 12:00 AM

TT: To the point

Says the Little Professor:

Generally speaking, it is easier to write an article of the appropriate length than it is to edit an article of, oh, 11000+ words down to something resembling a not altogether inappropriate length.

This is--to put it mildly--my experience exactly. So much so, in fact, that it was one of the major points I tried to get across in the classes in journalistic criticism that I taught a few years ago at Rutgers/Newark. Having spent a good deal of my life writing short pieces on serious subjects for newspapers and magazines, I've learned from experience to write organically short--that is, to write a five-hundred-word draft of a five-hundred-word piece instead of writing a thousand-word draft and cutting it in half. Not only does this reduce waste motion, but the finished product is almost always better. When you write a long piece and chop it down to size, it tends to read...well, choppily.

So why do inexperienced authors write long? I suspect it's because they assume that they'll get only one chance to impress the editor, which causes them to empty their bag of tricks every time they write a piece. (This reminds me of another of my critical commandments: Don't tell everything you know.) Flashiness is a sin of youth. The older and more self-assured a writer is, the more likely he is to appreciate the virtues of simplicity and economy.

I don't know whether it's possible to teach this lesson to young writers. The older I get, the more I wonder whether anything can be taught to anyone. Still, I did my best to get it across to my students, and I like to think that at least some of them were paying attention.

Posted June 01, 12:00 AM

TT: New leaves

Yesterday's new piece of music was Igor Stravinsky's Variations: Aldous Huxley In Memoriam, composed in 1965 and recorded for RCA by Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony in 1996.

Posted June 01, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment."

D.H. Lawrence, letter, Jan. 22, 1925

Posted June 01, 12:00 AM